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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Monday, 07/21/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the Capital. News.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be back.
Speaker 2:OpenAI, great to be back. OpenAI has announced that they have won a long they achieved the long standing grand challenge in AI, gold medal level performance on the world's most prestigious math competition, the International Math Olympiad. That's the IMO. So this went up at 12:50AM on July 19.
Speaker 1:Typical timeline
Speaker 2:Yes. For announcements. So this is this is basically, like, Friday night, Saturday morning. You're looking at, basically 1AM from Alexander Way. And he shares a picture of a strawberry with a metal with the OpenAI logo on it.
Speaker 2:Someone also tested, they took this picture, they uploaded it to chat GPC. What's the fruit in the image? How many r's are in that fruit? And it nailed it. So, we are truly are truly has has arrived.
Speaker 2:Also, before we go deeper into that story, we have a new partner, Restream. You saw it in the intro. We're very excited to welcome them as a sponsor of the show. We've been running
Speaker 1:on Restream. Secretly.
Speaker 2:Secretly. Secretly.
Speaker 1:Since day one.
Speaker 2:Since day one. It's been our secret to our to success. It can be your secret to success.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You They have support a lot of the Fortune 500 already
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:For all their live streaming infrastructure. So, if you need to go live, go live with Restream.
Speaker 2:And you see OpenAI do streams.
Speaker 3:Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:That that that is a thing that has entered the standard xai.com strategy.
Speaker 4:I don't
Speaker 1:know if XAI is running on Restream.
Speaker 4:They got a little But
Speaker 2:they do but they do stream and you know, it used to just be the hyperscalers, the Mag7, the big, big companies that would do a livestream around a, an annual event. Then Brian Chesky came out and created Founder Mode and basically said, put all your announcements on an annual release schedule, bundle them all up, have the team celebrate, push to get across the finish line. And part of that is let's throw an event. Part of that is let's get the CEO and the product leaders on stage, tell the community about what we're building, what we've built, and now a lot of people are streaming it. If you're gonna stream your stuff, you need restream.
Speaker 2:Anyway, go check it out. So Dylan Field, someone who's who has streamed events, you know, Figma obviously has config their dev event annually, and they actually do two of them. And those are streamed all over the place, probably using Restream. And Dylan chimes in on the OpenAI news. He says, congrats to the congrats twenty twenty five IMO winners and participants, including OpenAI, who trained a general purpose reinforcement learning model and achieved IMO gold.
Speaker 2:OpenAI team includes these two folks, Cheryl and Polynomial, Gnome. Fun fact, Polynomial also won the twenty twenty five diplomacy world championship as a human. And so people are saying AGI is right around the corner. AJ from Semi Analysis says, what stands out to me scaling RL and non verifiable rewards likely via rubrics and LLM as judge, thinking and reasoning for several hours at a time for a highly specific task. This is what the $20,000 per
Speaker 1:Month.
Speaker 2:Month model will look like. And so, were a bunch of interesting things about this. Apparently, there are a few different ways to to tackle math, IMO level math problems. One is using this this program called Lean that is a formal math proof verifier. And there's rumors that Google's building their system to leverage that a lot.
Speaker 2:OpenAI apparently went way, way down just the text based LLM reasoning path and had a lot of success there. So even though, as we'll get into in this story, it feels like it's neck and neck. Maybe Google was earlier, and they just didn't release it faster, and maybe this is a comms thing. Yeah. There's a whole bunch of different stuff going back and forth.
Speaker 2:But potentially, the more interesting thing is, did they take different technical approaches and get similar results? Yeah. If they're neck and neck, which one will scale better? Which one will generalize better? There's a whole bunch of different discussions there.
Speaker 2:Do you wanna get into some of the the the controversy or the pushback? Do you have do you have a post pulled up from someone saying about about Google's attempt?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, the the the whole thing came down to timing. Yeah. Dennis over at DeepMind was was pushing back a little bit, which I can pull up.
Speaker 2:Demis Hassabis from Yes. DeepMind, the co founder and now at Google. Yeah. It was interesting because the we we immediately jumped to Polymarket because this whole idea of a an an AI system beating the IMO, we talked about this with Scott Wu from Cognition months ago, back in April, I I found the clip. And and he said, I would be very surprised if an if an AI system this year does not does not actually surpass the IMO.
Speaker 2:He, of course, is an IMO gold medalist himself. And so it was it was a big it was big to hear from him. Now the poly market had been sitting at, 20%, and I think we're gonna get into like the minutiae of like what it means to truly win because the IMO, like the the group that actually puts on the competition has a different set of rules. They don't They they put the questions out, and anyone can go and try and do them. But to actually be awarded a goal for an AI, they said it has to be an open source model potentially.
Speaker 2:It has to be released in this particular way. And so OpenAI might have used their systems to solve the questions, which is super impressive, but they might not have checked every box to actually technically win the gold from the actual organization. And so, Noam says, today
Speaker 1:Demis, to be clear, so he put out a post this morning saying official results are in. Gemini achieved gold medal level in the international mathematical
Speaker 2:Which is different than actually getting a gold medal.
Speaker 5:Gold medal. Right?
Speaker 1:He said, an advanced version was able to solve five out of six problems. Incredible progress. And there's a quote in here from the IMO president. He said, we can we can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much desired milestone earning 35 out of a possible 42 points. Yep.
Speaker 1:A gold medal scored. Their solutions were astonishing in many respects. Yep. IMO graders found them to be clear, precise, and most of them easy to follow. You can imagine Juan is just like off on this insane day.
Speaker 1:There were
Speaker 2:some fascinating fascinating details
Speaker 1:around how Dennis they solve them. Shared. He said, by the way, as an aside, we didn't announce on Friday because we respected the IMO board's original request that all AI labs share their results only after the official results had been verified by independent experts and the students had rightly received the acclamation they deserved. And so, you can imagine, somebody was saying, I I don't know how real this was. Somebody was saying that they they were making a claim that like Google needed time to like
Speaker 2:So you put comms approval.
Speaker 1:To sign off. But Yeah. It seems more likely that the original plan was, hey, let's wait and announce this when when the IMO board actually comes out.
Speaker 2:The analogy feels like you're a super fast sprinter. You go to the Olympics, and you run a 100 meter dash that's incredibly fast in the parking lot. Like you're not in the stadium but everyone's like, wow, that guy's fast.
Speaker 1:He's hauling.
Speaker 2:He's hauling. It's very impressive.
Speaker 1:But still don't the fastest
Speaker 4:man And on
Speaker 2:and ideally, you paid for the parking pass to get into the stadium and it's like maybe Google and OpenAI were both running 100 meter dashes in the parking lot. One of them had paid for like, you know, enough parking spaces to make it completely clean. OpenAI was just kinda showing up with a buddy and being like, I'm sprinting. That's the vibe I'm getting. But they're both in the parking lot.
Speaker 2:Like, neither of them are in the actual stadium at this point. But, you know, who knows? They they might be soon. There are some questions about, you know, do they have to open source or whatever. So Noam Brown says, you know, we achieved a milestone that many considered years away, gold level performance.
Speaker 2:Gold medal, of course, he's saying gold medal level performance. Like, that's very critical. It's not we got a gold medal. It's that we exhibited gold medal level performance. Typically, for these AI results, like in Go, DOTA, Poker, Diplomacy, researchers spend years making an AI that masters one narrow domain and does little else, but this isn't an IMO specific model.
Speaker 2:It's a reasoning LLM that incorporates new experimental general purpose techniques, which would be very exciting because you could apply an IMO level John,
Speaker 6:hold up that
Speaker 1:stack of posts for the audience.
Speaker 2:Oh, we got we got a 150 posts today. Gonna be a quick stream, people. It's gonna be a quick stream, but buckle up. So what's different? We developed a new technique that makes LLMs a lot better at hard to verify tasks.
Speaker 2:IMO problems were the perfect challenge for this. Proofs are pages long and take experts hours to grade. Compare that to AIME where, which is another math exam, where answers are simply an integer from zero to nine nine nine, so you can verify them really, really quickly. Also, this model thinks for a long time. O one thought for seconds, deep research for a minute.
Speaker 2:This one thinks for hours. Importantly, it's also more efficient with its thinking and there's a lot more room to push the test time compute and efficiency further. Now, what's interesting is like these I think these the I think these questions go up and then you have like like I think the students get like two, four and a half hour sections segments. So there's like, there's a there's a world where like the the AIs can do it, but just not as fast as humans, which would be very interesting. I don't exactly know how how close they are.
Speaker 2:So Noam says, where does this go as fast as recent AI progress has been? I fully expect the trend to continue. Importantly, I think we're close to AI substantially contributing to scientific discovery. There's a big difference between AI slightly below top human performance versus slightly above. This was a small team effort.
Speaker 2:You took a research Right
Speaker 1:now, the discovery that that AI is doing is talking with somebody who is potentially schizophrenic and convincing them that they've figured out how to move faster than the speed of light.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So There's so many accounts of that. It's it's it's getting crazy. Yeah. I posted chat GPT agent, go win me an IMO gold medal and then update my resume.
Speaker 1:Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 2:But, yeah. I mean, have you actually looked at any of the IMO questions ever? No. I don't even know where to start. Like, it's it's all stuff that
Speaker 1:It's one call away for us though. We just text Scott.
Speaker 2:Tyler, have you ever looked at IMO questions?
Speaker 6:No. But I'm looking at them right now. It's like pretty brutal.
Speaker 2:Would you know where to
Speaker 1:start? Tyler, if you can get two out of six right before the end of the stream, I'll buy you a house.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the thing. He's just gonna be able to ask ChatGPG.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Had No tool use. Yeah. No tool use.
Speaker 1:Gotta qualify that.
Speaker 2:So, yeah. Nick has the has a comment about DeepMind. DeepMind has
Speaker 1:also Tyler has another challenge today
Speaker 2:He does. By the way. We will introduce that in just a few minutes. D MIND has also won IMO Gold, but they haven't announced it yet, by the way. Confirmed.
Speaker 2:Congratulations, BSC.
Speaker 1:They did this morning.
Speaker 2:They did. Yeah. They confirmed it this morning.
Speaker 1:And so it's been interesting to see the reaction to this. Yep. Gary Marcus is on X saying, all the tech bros this morning thinking that AGI has been achieved because some parentheses insanely expensive new form of LLMs can now match top high school students on one specific task. It's almost cute. So really just ripping into the entire AI community.
Speaker 1:But Will DePue comes in and says, he's on leave right now taking a little summer holiday.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:He says, guys, stop using expensive as a disqualifier. Capability per dollar will drop a 100 x a year. The three k task arc AGI 80% could probably be $30 if we cared to optimize it. Repeat after me, all that matters is top line intelligence. All that matters is top line intelligence.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. Yeah. Again, everybody's focused on sort of raw capabilities, not super focused on efficiency, especially for projects like this where they're not necessarily, you know, rolling this out at at in in mass.
Speaker 2:Yep. And you know where a lot of these IMO gold medalists go to work?
Speaker 1:I do, John.
Speaker 2:Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Rampdotisamazing.com.
Speaker 2:So the timeline was in turmoil over the Gary Marcus post and it and they went back and forth and he finally admitted it at
Speaker 1:the end.
Speaker 2:He said he said, that's impressive. So it started with a post by Daniel Lit. He says, huge congrats to OpenAI for their IMO goal. They don't find it too surprising that an AI tool was able to achieve this. See below.
Speaker 2:Though I'd sort of lost hope the last few days, but I'm but I'm pretty surprised it was an LRM with no tool use. So it didn't have Python. It didn't have web search. It didn't have all the things that you're that you could imagine would kind of allow you to to, you know, speed things up or kind of be a shortcut that would put it in a different category. There was always a question about with the when when when the AIs were playing video games, like like computers have wall hacks.
Speaker 2:Like, they can sometimes, like, see the see the map without the fog of war. They can see like, it's very different to get to get perfect pixel, perfect data on where every character is on the map and be able to make decisions based on that as opposed to, like, looking at pixels and having to, like, move the screen over there to see if you're being invaded on the left flank. Right? And so there was always this like, yes, if you gave a computer like the raw access, that's not quite it's impressive, but it's not quite a level playing field. And it's basically the same thing as being like, well, the other folks don't get a calculator and you get a calculator.
Speaker 2:Like, is it that impressive? But this was very much an even playing field, it seems like. So Mel Gibson two point o, great great great name, says you are not surprised that that they you are not surprised that they have figured out a way to make the model learn in very hard to verify domains in a fuzzier reward space. It also appears that the same reasoning model was the one used in the AT coder competition showing that it can generalize across domains. Daniel comes back and says, I don't think we really know that what they figured out yet.
Speaker 2:I'll keep my powder dry until we know more. Mel Gibson says, go read Gnome Brown's thread on the model if you haven't already. He says and remember, Noam Brown says, this isn't an IMO specific model. And that's a very important thing because there's a ton of there's a ton of situations where you can go in RL on a specific task and it gets really, really good at it, but then you try and get it to do anything else and it's not that Yeah. And so Daniel Lit says, yeah.
Speaker 2:Read it. Gary Marcus says, chimes in from the rafters because he's not in this chat yet, but he has entered the chat. He says, I read it too. That's pretty vague. Are we sure that no tools were called?
Speaker 2:Gary Marcus then chimes in again, says, re IMO gold, does no tools mean no use of Python code interpreter, etcetera? Dan says Daniel Lit says, that's how I understand it. And then Gary Marcus tags in polynomial, Gnome Brown, and also Alex Way and says, can you confirm that the IMO gold was achieved without using Python or code interpreter or similar? And then Gary Marcus says, humans don't use external tools in the IMO competition. I'm just under I'm just trying to understand what the system is.
Speaker 2:That's how we do science. Daniel Litt, and at some point, whoever was trying to dunk on Gary Marcus just deleted their account. So it just says, this post is from an account that no longer Daniel Litt shows Cheryl on the OpenAI team saying, the the model solved these problems without tools like lean, which is a math verifier or coding. It just uses natural language. It also only has four and a half hours to answer our earlier question.
Speaker 2:We see the model reason at a very high level, trying out different strategies, making observations from examples, and testing hypothesis hypotheses. And Gary Marcus says, that's impressive. So He was Gary Marcus, you gotta fill out the the apology form, bro. You gotta fill out the deep reinforcement learning apology form. What was the reason for your behavior?
Speaker 2:No one told me Alex Way was training the model.
Speaker 1:Mercury was in retrograde.
Speaker 2:Mercury, I don't know, ML. And then one of them is Gary Marcus convinced me it was fake. Because Gary Marcus was famously said, deep learning is hitting a wall. Like this this particular paradigm will not scale. You have to do symbol manipulation, which was like kind of his bet, encode different relationships between ideas in the model.
Speaker 2:There were a bunch of different debates over there. And he's gone back and forth on that. He's he's he's not as much of like a deep deep reinforcement learning hater as p some people think. But he's got he that's his brand at this point. So, anyway, more on the drum between DeepMind and OpenAI.
Speaker 2:DeepMind got a gold medal at the IMO on Friday afternoon, but they had to wait for marketing to approve the tweet until Monday. OpenAI OpenAI shared theirs first at 1AM on Saturday and stole the spotlight. In this game, speed is greater than bureaucracy. Miss the moment. Lose the narrative.
Speaker 2:So that's one interesting take. Yeah. I I I think there's a little bit of that. I mean, certainly culturally, OpenAI loves to release information before Google. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whatever Google's like, next big
Speaker 1:And play to win. Remember the after what did they release after the deep seek moment?
Speaker 2:Deep research. And then So if
Speaker 1:you're typing deep and you were looking for an AI product.
Speaker 2:And then and then Google had IO and then and then OpenAI.
Speaker 1:OpenAI. IO.
Speaker 2:This is, like, the day before. With
Speaker 1:Johnny Ive.
Speaker 2:With Johnny Ive. So anyway, you know, you'll love to see it. All's fair in love and war, I guess. I don't think this Warfare. Crosses any Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this is the benefit of having a bunch of posters on your team, I guess. Known Brands says it takes us a few months to return the experimental research frontier into a product, but progress is so fast that a few months can mean a big difference in capabilities. And this is from July 18. So all the models underperform humans on the new IMO questions, and Grok four is especially bad on it even with best event selection.
Speaker 1:Unbelievable. Was accusing Grok four of training on the problem set?
Speaker 2:For IMO? No. No. No. Oh, something else?
Speaker 2:Oh, for the other benchmarks? I mean, benchmark hacking is like a thing that happens all over the place. That's why we need like hidden benchmarks. That's the whole thing of Arc AGI that we will talk about. We talked about Will DePue saying, guys, stop using expensive as a disqualifier.
Speaker 2:Terrence Tau, one of the one of the most goaded mathematicians of all time, digs in a little bit and is is adding his perspective as a as a world renowned mathematician. He says, it is tempting to view the capability of current AI technology as a singular quantity. Either a given task x is within the ability of current tools or it is not. However, there is a there is in fact a very widespread in capability, several orders of magnitude, depending on what resources and and assistance gives the tool and how one reports the results. One can illustrate this with a human metaphor.
Speaker 2:I will use the recently concluded IMO as an example. Here, the format is that each country fields a team of six human contestants who are high school students led by a team leader, often a professional mathematician. Over the course of two days, each contestant is given four and a half hours on each day to solve three difficult math problems given only pen and paper. This is crazy. No communication between contestants or with the team leader during this period is permitted.
Speaker 2:Advocates for the students in front of the IMO jury during the And
Speaker 1:vigilators are also known as exam proctors.
Speaker 2:Okay. Proctors. Okay. So, yeah. They can ask the people that are running the test, hey.
Speaker 1:We gotta start working invigilator and For sure. We should probably have a shell We
Speaker 2:should hire some.
Speaker 1:Like, an invigilator to
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:We should have So at least one on
Speaker 2:so the team leader advocates for this for the students, but is not involved in the IMO examination directly. The IMO is widely regarded as a highly selective measure of mathematical achievement for a high school student to be able to score well enough to achieve a medal, particularly a gold medal or a perfect score. This year, the threshold for gold was 35 out of 42, which corresponds to answering five of the six questions perfectly. Even answering one question perfectly Crazy
Speaker 1:that a b, basically a b Yeah. Gets you gold.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's that hard. They're that hard. But consider what happens to the to the difficulty of the Olympiad if we alter the format in various ways. First, one gives the students several days to complete each question rather than four and a half hours for three scenarios.
Speaker 2:To stretch the metaphor somewhat, consider a sci fi scenario in in the student in which the student is still only given four and a half hours, but the team leader places the students in some sort of expensive and energy intensive time acceleration machine in which months or even years of time pass for the students during this exam. Before the exam
Speaker 1:Ben might have put us in one of these Yeah. Because we go live and then it's four hours later.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Time acceleration It's wild. Two, before the exam starts, the team leader rewrites the questions in a format the students find easier to work with. Three, the team leader gives the students unlimited access to calculators, computer algebra packages, formal proof assistance, textbooks, or the ability to search the Internet. Sounds like that didn't happen.
Speaker 2:The team leader has the six student team work on the same problem simultaneously communicating with each other on their partial progress and reported dead ends. The team leader gives the students prompts in the direction of favorable approaches and intervenes if one of the students is spending too much time on a direction they know to be unlikely to succeed. Next, each of the six students on the team submit solutions, but the team leader selects only the best solution to submit to the competition regard discarding the rest. Last, if none of the students on the team obtain a satisfactory solution, the team leader does not submit any solution at all and silently withdraws from the competition without their participation ever being noted. Oh, so that, yeah I mean that could have happened.
Speaker 2:It didn't in this case. But in each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated for the high school contestants. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, if you can go run, go run the race in the parking lot. And then if you don't run as fast as you hoped Yeah. It's like, well, wasn't in the I mean
Speaker 2:I wasn't in race. I was just going for
Speaker 4:a jog.
Speaker 1:I was just warming up. I just I like to be surrounded by excellence.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Don't worry. Yeah. I mean, that is the true one. Because if they'd missed, they'd probably be like, what what?
Speaker 2:The IMOs this weekend? We're working on agents. Like, what are you talking about? Like, have you seen our DIUs? Like, get out of here.
Speaker 2:To each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants rather than the team leader. However, the reported success rate of the students in the competition can be dramatically affected by such changes in format. A student or team of students who might not even reach bronze medal performance in the normal competition under standard test conditions might instead reach gold medal performance under some of the modified formats indicated above. So in the absence of controlled test methodology that was not self selected by the competing teams, one should be wary of making various apples to apples comparisons between the performance of various AI models on competitions such as the IMO or between such models and the human contestants. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The question is, like, it seems like of those, not many were actually violated by the way OpenAI and Google attacked this.
Speaker 1:Well, this was before I mean, this this was an immediate reaction before I think there was
Speaker 2:More details came out?
Speaker 1:Lot of details. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That we've been covering. This is 3PM on on so this is so on Saturday, but 3PM later.
Speaker 1:Well, Rune has a good post.
Speaker 4:This is a
Speaker 1:great one. He says, my bar for AGI is an AI that can learn to run a gas station for a year without a team of scientists collecting the gas station dataset. It's a great post.
Speaker 2:The world isn't ready for gas station We
Speaker 1:run an AI as long as I mean, we can we can run a gas station as long as we have, you know, a perfect, you know, data set.
Speaker 2:And that's yeah. That's like the way
Speaker 1:On how gas stations operate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. As soon as we as soon as we place the goals somewhere, we nail that goal and then we have to move the goal post. Shows This is so This is a great graphic.
Speaker 1:Great picture. So Thomas Wolfe says my bar for AGI is an AI winning a Nobel Prize for a new theory originated. It's just it's an image of a team Yeah. Moving the goalpost.
Speaker 2:I do like how consistent Tyler Cowen is on AGI. He's like, my bar was the Turing test. We passed that. So I have to call it like it is. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm not moving the goalposts.
Speaker 1:Think he's
Speaker 2:Tory is going to look very
Speaker 1:smart for that. Yeah. In the fullness of time.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it's Okay to be like, yeah, we achieved AGI.
Speaker 1:Just tough
Speaker 2:when you achieve something there's something new.
Speaker 1:It's cool, but not immediately Dramatically transformed
Speaker 2:into the that was the same that there was the same thing when people were like human human flight. And then the Wright brothers go and do it. And people are like, great. So like I can hop on a Southwest flight in an hour to go to San Francisco from LA. And they're like, what are you talking about?
Speaker 2:Like, LA is like, you know, a couple trains and, like, some people, you know, with orange groves. And it's like, it takes a long time for the infrastructure to get built out. Like, now a lot of these AI tools, they do build on top of the Internet and on top of technology that we have rolled out. But, like, at a certain point, like, the UI matters. The economics of these different tools matters.
Speaker 2:You like, you can't it it might not be economical for a for a company to to, you know, release a an AI tool that costs $20,000 to inference just to get you the weather or do two plus two. And so all of these things take time to roll out, and that's why we're kind of in this, like, slow takeoff scenario, it feels like. I don't know. We're gonna go to GPT agent in a little bit and talk about that. But there was some interesting there were some interesting details from Jasper about the IMO problem one.
Speaker 2:So these are on GitHub, so you can actually just go read them. The math checks out. It nailed the key lemma for n greater than three. Any but, you know, you you can kind of read them, these things. But the the write up is kind of messy.
Speaker 2:It uses shorthand and sentence fragments. It it it introduces new terms without definitions, forbidden and sunny partners, lists, and and it does a bunch of different interesting things where it's trying to it's trying to condense down the number of tokens. So if it's if it wants to say, like, divide this number by three, normally, by space three would be two tokens, but by three is one token. And so it's like compressing it down. It's kind of
Speaker 1:like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Learning its own language or developing its own language just to be a little bit more efficient. Yeah. Very interesting. Deja Vu Coder says, you're laughing? OpenAI and Google DeepMinds unreleased models just gave an IMO gold medal performance without internet access and you're laughing.
Speaker 2:People love it.
Speaker 1:It is interesting that xAI didn't get involved in this one. You have to imagine they knew
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Both DeepMind and OpenAI were gonna be competing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it feels like it's this is the nature of, like, the value of research. It's like a new research domain or new research path. Like, x AI's dominated in the pre training. Build the big super cluster.
Speaker 2:Get all the GPUs. Do the massive pre training. Then now, with Grok four, they're doing equal spend on RL generally. But DeepMind and OpenAI seem to have like the next, next thing already cooking. And we just don't know the phrase for it yet.
Speaker 2:Because in order to learn that phrase, you gotta pay $100,000,000 to some researcher to come tell you, basically. Yeah. Like, I'm sure that there is a there is a new paradigm and new strategy to unlock this level of performance. And it's something with It's
Speaker 1:probably not a 100,000,000.
Speaker 2:Post trading.
Speaker 1:It's some combination of a bunch of people that that
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:Collectively Yeah. Cost about
Speaker 2:But eventually a year. I mean, we were seeing this with the with the behemoth analysis from the semi analysis and and and what Jeremy was diving into where, like, just when you do when you train a really big model, how you chunk up the memory, how you chunk the attention, like, that has a dramatic impact on the actual end state and the model performance. And so it seems like Google and OpenAI have been able to, like, like, hammer out a bunch of those problems to get a really great result, and they're not gonna tell anyone anytime soon, I imagine. Sebastian has a good post here. He says, it's hard to overstate the significance of this.
Speaker 2:It may end up looking like a moon landing moment for AI. Just to spell it out as clearly as possible, a next word prediction machine, because that's really what it is here. No tools. No nothing. Just produced genuinely creative proofs for hard novel math problems at a level reached by only an elite handful of pre pre college prodigies.
Speaker 2:Pretty sick.
Speaker 1:It is funny explaining it to somebody just on the street. Yeah. A computer beat some high school students at math. They would just Yeah. They would tell you, okay.
Speaker 2:Cool. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Cool story.
Speaker 1:And then when you phrase it like this Yeah. It's like, okay.
Speaker 2:It's like, yeah. The landing moment. But yeah. Yeah. But like the the high school IMO folks are still in the ninety nine point nine nine ninth percentile for just everyone.
Speaker 2:Like, they happen to be age there happens to be an age cutoff, but it is essentially arbitrary since most people cannot do these this level of math. Well, let me tell you about graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. Francois Chollet
Speaker 5:Says from
Speaker 1:intelligence AI. Isn't a collection of skills. It's the efficiency with which you acquire and deploy new skills. It's an efficiency ratio. And that's why benchmark scores can be very misleading about the actual intelligence of AI systems.
Speaker 2:Elon's there saying good perspective. And so, yeah, we don't need to move the goalposts, but we kind of it's still interesting too because we achieved this particular benchmark. Now what have you done for me lately? Basically. And so I I think people really will move the goalposts and and and you can kind of knock it.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, it was interesting timing that last week, ARC AGI v three dropped. These models are not doing well on that, and they're simultaneously doing well on something that is so hard. You show it to most people, and they don't even know where to start with the math problem. And it's completely it's completely ridiculous to to to try and even take a shot at. So we wanted to give Arc AGI v three an attempt.
Speaker 2:Are you ready, Tyler?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'm ready. I haven't looked at it at all.
Speaker 2:Okay. So so yeah. Yeah. How familiar are you with Arc AGI generally?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I I played with like the version one. Like last summer I was trying to like, there's the prize. Tried it out for a couple weeks.
Speaker 2:Did you try it out as a human? Or did you try writing software for it?
Speaker 6:Yeah, like trying to like write software for
Speaker 2:Okay. What was your approach?
Speaker 6:I don't know. There's a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:There was like that was like just static images, Yep. So then there was like ways you could like tokenize it to try to do like a normal LM. Yep. And then I think I was trying some like random image processing.
Speaker 2:Did you get any of them right? Or was it like a straight up zero?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It was like pretty
Speaker 2:Well, the initial Arc AGI v one, v two, v one was pretty solidly solved by o three high, I believe, or o one high.
Speaker 6:I think o one was the one that solved that.
Speaker 2:O one. And it was like $2,000 a task and they got to something like 70%. Still not where an average human is for these puzzles, but impressive. Then Grok four came out in Arc AGI v two. They pumped the score from, like, what, 6% to 15 or something.
Speaker 2:They they doubled it, but still not great. But now, Arcade GIV three came out, and it's more of a game. So I played it on stream on Thursday, I believe, maybe Friday.
Speaker 1:Did very well.
Speaker 2:With Mike. I did pretty well. I have some I actually have some times from
Speaker 1:You did well, especially considering you you had, like, a minute to look at it prior to joining the show.
Speaker 2:I really I really was pretty fresh.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You you basically tried it for a second. You were like, this is really hard. Yes. And and and then had to stop.
Speaker 2:Okay. So you want to put it in hard mode. Right? So I got times from Mike on how humans have done on Arc AGI v three. So you have to finish the whole thing.
Speaker 2:And and the he says, if he only gets one shot to speed run all three games with unlimited try agains, I'd say fifteen total minutes is hard, twenty minutes is medium, and twenty five minutes is easy average. So you want you want him to do it in fifteen minutes?
Speaker 1:Under fifteen.
Speaker 2:Under fifteen?
Speaker 3:What is
Speaker 2:he what does he win?
Speaker 1:A new iPhone. New iPhone. Bricks let's we bricks your iPhone when we made you sign up for Google Glass. Yeah. And so this an opportunity to make it all back at once.
Speaker 2:This is high stakes. So so make sure you have it set up.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And you should pull up the instructions and read the instructions and we'll start a timer when you, it's 11:36 right now.
Speaker 6:Is there wait. So there's no like hard mode, easy mode?
Speaker 2:No. No. So everyone does the same thing whether you're an AI or a human. You will see some instructions. There's some keys.
Speaker 2:It's more like a game than than filling out the puzzles. And and and the actual instructions, there are really no instructions. You you it's your job to figure out the nature of the game, figure out how it works, and then go and speedrun it.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 2:So so so pull it up and I will read this this post. So Ludwig Yietgenstein says, twenty years ago, this type of person would become an elite math professor. Now they're making AI breakthroughs. This is progress probably. And it's, the the CV of Alexander Way, the research scientist over at OpenAI.
Speaker 2:He's a member of the technical staff. And before his PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, he was at Harvard, studying computer science. Phillips Exeter, totally tracked. Research intern at Meta, Microsoft, D. E.
Speaker 2:Shaw, Google. What a stacked resume. This guy's a killer. And now he he was on the IMO team that did that. And so we talked about the the plot twist and and the battle between OpenAI and DeepMind.
Speaker 2:I'm sure both of them will be talking about this. I'm more interested in the underlying technology and and what actually happened and what was discovered than than who released it earlier. That doesn't matter as much to me. And and again, Noam says, hey. Like, we posted after the closing ceremony.
Speaker 2:It was livestreamed, this is easy to confirm. We weren't in touch with IMO. I spoke with one organizer before the post to let him know. He requested we wait until after the closing ceremony ends to respect the kids, and we did. And so
Speaker 1:Respect.
Speaker 2:It seems like this is pretty verifiable that they didn't do anything anything bad to the IMO kids. They might have they might have roasted Google. But that's just on you know, Google's gotta start posting at one amp. So Tyler, give me the update. Do you have it pulled up?
Speaker 2:How are you Hold up. I think
Speaker 6:I'm I'm ready to start.
Speaker 2:Okay. Production team. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I got a timer.
Speaker 2:You got a timer? Okay. So so I want you to count up because we want to get the total amount of time. We're aiming for under fifteen minutes for all three puzzles. That's hard.
Speaker 2:Twenty minutes would be normal. Twenty five is like easy mode apparently. This is according to Mike. So I I haven't actually tried to speedrunning this time. I spent a couple minutes
Speaker 4:Did you
Speaker 6:play all three games or just one of them?
Speaker 2:I played one of Didn't
Speaker 1:you get through two?
Speaker 2:Well Oh, you there's Oh, so there's there's levels. There's levels to this. There's levels. You'll figure all this
Speaker 4:out.
Speaker 1:Tyler, you you wait. So I I'd say I'd say you get unlimited lives in the game.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can you can reset and do whatever.
Speaker 1:But you can spend the whole show trying to do all three games in fifteen minutes if you want.
Speaker 2:Oh, well, no. No. No. No. It doesn't work like that because once you know the tricks, like you'll be able to blast through it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For sure. For sure. I take it back. Let let's go for fifteen.
Speaker 2:Good luck. New iPhone on the line. If not
Speaker 1:This really is
Speaker 2:the iPhone
Speaker 1:moment for Arc AGI.
Speaker 2:For benchmarks. Yes. This is the iPhone moment for Arc AGI. Good luck to you, Tyler.
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 4:Let's
Speaker 6:I know when it starts.
Speaker 2:Okay. 54321. Go, Tyler. Okay. We will let him work on that and we will check-in.
Speaker 1:Alright. Should we talk about ChatGPT agents?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. So there's actually other things that's going on. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Before we get into that.
Speaker 2:Let's tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figma.com. What did you want to say?
Speaker 1:I wanted to say the some big news that hit the timeline this morning. Sure. Polymarket has acquired QCEX Mhmm. For a $112,000,000 Mhmm. And that is going to allow them to enter The US market.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. As you may know, to date you haven't been able to use Polymarket. Yeah. If you're in The US, we use it as a data source.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:So you can go on the website obviously.
Speaker 2:It's on our ticker.
Speaker 1:You can see it on the ticker. But this is gonna allow them to So launch in the Shane has been absolutely cooking and I think he's gonna come on the show soon now that he's not under DOJ investigation.
Speaker 2:What a wild what a wild founder story arc. So and like, yeah. I remember those old photos of him, like, coding in a closet and stuff like
Speaker 1:In his bathroom.
Speaker 2:In his bathroom.
Speaker 1:Gross. Built Polymarket in a in a in a studio apartment bathroom
Speaker 2:with scraps. I love it. Anyways Anyways Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Join the purple llamas at banta.com.
Speaker 2:So OpenAI has been doing a lot of stuff. It's it's it's it's they're kind of on a run. So IMO Gold Medal happens over the weekend. The ChattypuTea agent, which will which I tested finally. So I'll have a little review and some analysis of that.
Speaker 2:But also, apparently, they are testing a new model on the web dev arena on LM Arena under the name anonymous chatbot zero seven one seven. So this is a secret project from OpenAI that they were maybe putting out in the in the test realm, and then people discovered it, and they're digging into it. And so I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but it's genuinely at a completely different level of front end coding, far better than Sonnet o three Gemini 2.5 Pro or Grok, which is saying a lot because people love those models for coding, especially on the front end. So to test it, I ran a a great prompt borrowed from the amazing feature crew pod YouTube channel asking models to create a procedurally generated planet with Three. Js.
Speaker 2:Take a look at yourself. I'm pretty astonished by how big the jump is. I have featured the new model twice because its implications have been so interesting. Of course, this is only one test, but OpenAI models have always been a bit meh on front end work, and they seem to have finally overtaken everyone else. So this apparent alleged unreleased OpenAI model is building this procedural world and it generates this really cool Three.
Speaker 2:Js, like, basically a video game in and it sounds like it kind of one shots it. So exciting stuff from that. There is so the agent stuff. So Yeah. Swick says, please stop making flight booking agent demos with faint but dying hope, the undersigned.
Speaker 2:And so everyone is saying he's saying, please stop making fetch. Please stop trying to make fetch happen. Flight booking Instacart or Instacart orders, Astroturfing, Reddit. He wants killer use cases to be coding agents, support agents, deep research. Up and coming is screen sharing, outbound sales, hiring, education, personal AI, and finance.
Speaker 2:And I have to I think we're somewhat responsible because for months we were just like, just book a flight. Like, this is the killer demo. This is the killer use case. And then everyone was
Speaker 1:like But it got played out. We did stop asking that.
Speaker 2:We did stop asking about it.
Speaker 1:Were asking at the beginning of the year, we were curious.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so Sam Altman had a post last week. He said today we launched
Speaker 1:Can you give some background for people that may just
Speaker 2:be So Sam Altman crawling
Speaker 1:out from under a rock.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he started a company. He was the president of Y Combinator. Started a company called Looped, sold it to Angel Messenger
Speaker 1:and Stripe.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's what people know him from. Koenigsegg owner, McLaren F1 owner. That's how that's where people Yeah.
Speaker 2:Probably know him He says, today we launched a new product called ChatGPT Agent. Agent represents a new level of capability for AI systems and can accomplish some remarkable complex task for you using its own computer. It combines the spirit of deep research and operator, but is more powerful than it may sound. It can think for a long time, use some tools, think some more, take some actions, think some more, etcetera. We, for example, we showed a demo in our launch of it preparing for a friend's wedding, buying an outfit, booking travel, choosing a gift, etcetera.
Speaker 2:We also showed an example of analyzing data to create a presentation for work. Although the utility is significant, so are the potential risks. We built a lot of safeguards and warnings into it and broader mitigations than we've ever developed before from robust training to system safeguards to user controls, but we can't anticipate everything. In the spirit of iterative development, we are going to warn users heavily, and it gives users freedom to take actions carefully if they want to. And so very, very interesting post.
Speaker 2:He goes through a bunch more stuff, but I actually tested it out this weekend. So as you know, we have a studio, the TBPN Ultradome here in Hollywood. We're always thinking about what's next, always looking at what else is on the market. And when we were first looking for the TBPN Ultradome, I went to ChatGPT operator, and I said, hey. I'm looking for a studio.
Speaker 2:It needs to be a soundstage, which means padded walls. I want concrete floors. I want it to be, you know, at least 40 feet by 40 feet. I need one gigabyte Internet access there. I need power, AC.
Speaker 2:It can't just be a, you know, heavy industrial space where there's gonna be somebody next door. Hadrian making CNC stuff is rattling me. I need a bunch of things. Go and figure it out, operator. And it went around, and it looked at LoopNet, but it kinda got stuck on on CAPTCHAs, and it wasn't doing a great job.
Speaker 2:And I kind of I felt like I had to be, like, there watching it, and it was really only working on desktop for me at the time. But I reran the the basically, the same query asking it to look for studio space in LA with all these different metrics that I wanted, all these different parameters that I wanted to make sure it verified. And it found a place that was, like, not listed on any sort of, like, rental sites. It found just a website that was out there for some crew that runs, like, two studios, one in Hollywood, one in Van Nuys, and and gave me the full breakdown. I was able to go to the website.
Speaker 2:But then, of course, like, I'd have to call, and I called, and they only are available between nine and five.
Speaker 1:Well, this is this is what I what I was asking the the agent team. I think it was on Thursday that we had them on, which was
Speaker 2:What have you done for me lately?
Speaker 1:Well well, basically adding a voice feature just to, like, call that now call them to confirm that it's actually available Yeah. And let me know, find out when I can go see it.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And also a much easier step to add Totally. In many ways than, like, the browser use functionality.
Speaker 2:And also, like, the just just the asynchronousness of it. Like, I I fired off this query, I don't know, like like, after, like, I don't know, 6PM on a Saturday. Like, it's it needs to wait until 9AM on Monday when they open to
Speaker 1:pick When up the we started this section, I put in an agent request. Said, find me a GT three RS with under a thousand miles for under 400 k that's currently for sale in Los Angeles County. And so it's doing
Speaker 2:It's cooking.
Speaker 1:I'm watching it cook Yeah. And it's doing, like, an hour plus of work It's already just Yeah. In, five minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. You know, it it is remarkable. So it can it can really work through different different sites and
Speaker 1:features Like, it's finding it. I can see it. It found one for in LA County
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:With 1,300 miles under 400 k. And I just watched it say, this one will disqualify this one because it's Pretty cool. Over that limit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so it needs to be able to think about time and it needs to think, okay. When is the certain time to do this? I need to come back to this in two days or something. Like, basically set a cron job, set a set an alert, come back to things.
Speaker 2:It needs to use linear, a purpose built tool for planning and building Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps, linear.app.
Speaker 1:OpenAI runs on Linear. Linear supports agents
Speaker 2:And they actually have an integration. Which is Which I am excited about. But, I mean, jokes aside, Swix was saying this is a new frontier model. And I think that a lot of people get hung up in, oh, there's a new branding around it, agents. Like, I was talking to our buddy David Senner about this and he was like, what what are you using it for?
Speaker 2:Like, what are your prompts? And I was like, it's the same prompt. The thing that I would send to deep research, I send to agents now. It's better. It's just better.
Speaker 2:And I and I and I do understand that like, it might unlock some new use cases. But I think the basic thing that you should start with if you're looking to experiment and and kind of road test ChatGPT agent for yourself is just take something that you would put in deep research, throw it in agent, and see how you like it and if it's better. And I noticed that it's a lot better in many ways. It it gives you a dot m d file at the end. Basically, it gives you a document, like a report that look renders the exact same as a deep research report, but you can kinda scroll it differently.
Speaker 2:You can still do all the tables and stuff. The links, oddly, weren't working. Like, I I I would click on it and it wouldn't it wouldn't open. So there's like still some bugs and some rough around the edges But in general, I think it did a lot. I just think of it as like like deep research is kinda it feels like deep research is a little bit bound by, you know, the first level of depth on the Internet, and agents can actually go, you know, okay.
Speaker 2:There's there's there's a website out here that has something, but I need to go to the archive. I need to log in. I need to, find a different route. I need to, you know, work around it, figure out all these different things. Let's put Let's actually fact check some stuff, start building a table over here.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. I got some conflicting information. Let me try and resolve that. Like, all the natural things that when you do like actually good research. And so, I think it's fine if it's just a research tool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The thing that the thing that agent is doing here is it's going it's navigating to a site and then it's using the site's internal search mechanism Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To find what it's looking for versus just like scanning like databases Yep.
Speaker 1:Or just scanning pages and pulling out information. Yeah. So it's actually taking that next order Yeah.
Speaker 2:Action. Using the website. And I still think, like, I I don't see this as really replacing anyone in my life at least or my business, but I see it I see it very much as, like, as, like, in between me and the folks on my team, I will go fire off a prompt and try and like really do as much of the research and kind of prework and then hand that off and come with to somebody who works for me with a just a more educated idea of like, okay. I think we need this. I have I've already kicked this off, and I think it's possible.
Speaker 2:I need you to go and negotiate. And I need you to go do all the soft skills, and I need you to actually execute this and take the last mile that's like the human side of this, but you already have all the information to basically do like, the job is well defined. And so I I think that my next my next my next change to the way I use ChatGPT, Deep Research agents will be, by the end of this, give me a list of steps to actually execute this that need to be executed by a human. So with that GTRS, it's like GT three RS. If they find one, it's like, find me the phone number of a few, and then when should I call them?
Speaker 2:What what other data sources do I need to point to? What are the other considerations? So I basically have like a script to go and actually get the deal done, for example. So anyway, very exciting stuff. Almost as exciting as numeral.
Speaker 2:Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeral HQ to get started. So
Speaker 1:should we talk about Stephen Colbert?
Speaker 2:We should. We should talk about Stephen Colbert. This was a fan this was a fascinating story that happened. The Late Night is ending. So Stephen Colbert, you might know him from the Colbert Report on he was originally on The Daily Show, then he had his own show on on Comedy Central.
Speaker 2:I believe it was half an hour, maybe an hour every night on Comedy Central. Then he got pulled over into CBS with Late Night, which was originally designed to compete with the Tonight Show which was Johnny Carson's property that he ran for thirty years. 1962 to '19 Absolutely 90 legendary run. Jay Leno took that show over. Gave it to Conan for a year, went back, very controversial.
Speaker 2:Late Night Wars, very fun deep dive to dig into. But Emily Jasinski has a story in Pirate Wires all about late night. I have some I have some facts here that were sticking out to me. So the the the high level is that the late show, Stephen Colbert's daily late night TV show. How many
Speaker 1:days a week is it? Is it
Speaker 2:It's five days a week. They do a 190 episodes per year. So they take a few weeks off in between little breaks.
Speaker 1:So pretty casual.
Speaker 2:Yes. Pretty casual. We do I mean, we are on track to produce four times as much content this year, but they spend a $100,000,000 to produce. We spend
Speaker 4:five times as much.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You keep pulling those daily GT three RS's. I mean, they were they were spending how much is GT three RS?
Speaker 2:400 k? They could have bought a GT three RS for every single episode because they were spending a $100,000,000 to produce a hundred and ninety hour long episodes Inside. Every year. And so this wasn't a problem because back in 02/2009, they were pulling in $271,000,000 in revenue. So I mean and I'm sure that they were actually spending less back in 02/2009.
Speaker 2:So the margin on that show was immense, like 60%, 70%, maybe even higher. The problem is is that the revenue started declining because the audience got older and ad dollars moved around. The average viewers? Viewer of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is over 59 years old. So so it is it is effectively like a retired audience, so they're not as likely to buy expensive products.
Speaker 2:And if they buy those products, they might not stay with them forever because they might churn, because they might pass away. And so
Speaker 1:Lower LTV.
Speaker 2:Lower LTV. And then also it's a very broad audience. It's a very political audience. Very general comedy, politics, daily news audience, very broad. So you can only sell broad things and that's why you see, you know, Unilever.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, you're you're watching an ad and you you see, you're watching the Late Show. Or T Mobile. Yeah. Yeah. Verizon.
Speaker 2:And then you see Dove shampoo or something. Like, you just see generic products, not hyper specific like Adio, which is customer relationship magic. Adio is the AR native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. You're not gonna see that on The Late Show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You just won't.
Speaker 2:You just won't. And so revenue kept falling. Now they make less than 70,000,000. Reports were maybe, like, 60,000,000 in revenue. Now Colbert is taking 15 home, 15,000,000 a year home personally, and then the rest of the show costs 85,000,000 to produce.
Speaker 2:About 50,000,000 of that is probably salaries. There's a bunch of other costs that go into it. They have a live band. They fly people around. They have hair and makeup and and all sorts of they have to license music, and they do all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so then they went from, at one point, making, you know, $200,000,000 in profit off this a year, amazing, to losing 40,000,000. And importantly, CBS is going through an acquisition. And so there's a whole bunch of problems where you don't necessarily wanna have this massive loss making asset sitting there while you're trying to sell the sell the company and restructure everything. And then because there's a little bit of conspiracy, and Keith Olbermann was saying he put on the tinfoil hat and was saying, like, this is all because Trump is, like Colbert criticized Trump and this is a straw man hat.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna get out the straw man.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're not making this argument. This is this is no one's really making this argument except for
Speaker 1:The Ogleman. Yeah.
Speaker 2:By the way.
Speaker 4:Put on
Speaker 2:the straw hat.
Speaker 1:By the way.
Speaker 2:I like the straw hat.
Speaker 4:By the
Speaker 1:way, new straw.
Speaker 4:Funny hat. I
Speaker 1:don't even know what kind of hat
Speaker 5:this is.
Speaker 2:A straw. Some sort of
Speaker 5:I straw gotta sit
Speaker 1:lower so that it'll fit in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway.
Speaker 1:But, yeah. The the I mean, the the obvious thing here is that Stephen Colbert Stephen Colbert
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Whoever that is, was a zero interest rate phenomenon. You have a business.
Speaker 2:He's in the business for thirty years. I mean That's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who wants to be the proud owner of a business that loses 40,000,000 a year like clockwork?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it was a loss leader for CBS. Basically, upfronts when they're selling ads to everyone, they go to Target and they say, hey, how about we put you with Stephen Colbert? And they're like, sure. But then we also wanna be on the game shows.
Speaker 2:And then the game shows make higher margins, and they lose money on the on the late show. But a company like Target wouldn't wanna advertise in the game show unless they can also be with Colbert and the Prestige TV that's happening there. So basically, they're losing $40,000,000. What's interesting is that you would think that they would be able to cut back the cost and say, hey. Look.
Speaker 2:We're making half we're making half as much revenue. We need to produce this for half as much money. And so Colbert, you gotta take a haircut. Folks, you gotta About take a
Speaker 1:50 people.
Speaker 2:Instead of a 100. 200. Yeah. Was it 200 people?
Speaker 1:It was 200 people.
Speaker 2:200 people. Okay. Yeah. 200 people. So
Speaker 1:And and apparently, so so we were messaging some people over the weekend, some some media moguls. And they were saying, I mean, it's it's very routine for there to be two people tasked that like effectively their full time job is like moving one camera.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and and so effectively, it's just a culture of inefficiency that has bunch of different reasons why why that is, but doesn't really work in the modern era. So the interesting thing here
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is I I was trying to figure out kind of what happens from here. So CBS is confirmed. They're not doing a replacement host. No. They're not gonna they're not gonna hire, like, an H1B Steven I
Speaker 4:think they're
Speaker 2:I think they're I think they're gonna put a talk show in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, anyway, it's, like, it's going away. There's no indication that ABC, NBC, Netflix, Max, or any any of those platforms is like gonna try to launch one of these Johnny Carson style shows. But I think the right move for Stephen Colbert
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Is it's not my not my flavor of comedy entertainment, But I think he could have I think if he went independent and effectively launched live show, podcast, something of that sort, he could continue to earn exactly what he's earning today.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And just do it with a much smaller team. Maybe even have a better lifestyle. Maybe he starts
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Doing the show in the morning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, was $60,000,000 of like, we want to advertise on Stephen Colbert, like, flowing into this property
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If he provides a similar level of experience and content, he should be able to sell similar levels of ads. Yeah. Maybe not 60, but maybe 30. And then he takes on 15, and he has 15 to spend know, a smaller team. And what's crazy is, like, during the COVID era, all of the late night shows went to, like, from home episodes where they were basically doing them over Zoom, and then they set up, like, nicer camera setups.
Speaker 2:And they were able to do those shows way cheaper. But I think because of the union, it wasn't palatable or really, like, easy to just cut back on staff and cut back on salaries or switch to some sort of more incentive pay, which is tricky. And we just talked to Delian about this where in France, was a company that that wanted to, like their business wasn't doing so well. They wanted to
Speaker 1:Too lay out many people.
Speaker 2:And they couldn't do it. And so the the government Yeah. Apparently,
Speaker 1:In in France, there's policies that effectively require companies to pay years of severance. So it ends up becoming a massive liability on the balance sheet. Yeah. And anyways.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Emily Jasinski over at Pirate Wires says, CBS is not just pushing out Stephen Colbert. It's retiring the iconic Late Show brand altogether. That's the buried lead getting lost amidst frenzied speculation over politics and palace intrigue. If if cutting Colbert is a bid to juice Paramount's pending merger or to punish him for criticizing it, as Democrats are now arguing, because Colbert said that CBS as a company should not have or Paramount should not have settled a lawsuit with Trump, I believe.
Speaker 2:CBS just stumbled right into the future, Emily says. Says, Colbert's time at the helm of The Late Show perfectly illustrates the most important trend in media and culture. One might fairly wonder how Colbert, a man so who leans so far into hashtag resistance comedy he could far hardly get up, has dominated the late night wars throughout Donald Trump's hostile takeover of American politics. Johnny Carson, for example, famously skewered both political parties without fear fear or favor. Carson won the late night wars when networks faced less competition, meaning his goal was to appeal to as wide a swath of the American public as possible for the sake of selling more ads.
Speaker 2:By the time Colbert took the helm from David Letterman, late night ratings had collapsed from their high watermark. That's particularly why Greg Gutfeld is able to actually beat Colbert's ratings on a cable network, a feat that would have been unthinkable in the nineteen nineties. Like Colbert, though, Gutfeld doesn't approach politics as Carson did. This is the new model, cultivate a loyal niche that returns night after night, giving you an edge over others competing for an increasingly smaller slices of the pie. The result is a microculture.
Speaker 2:Monocultural institutions like The Late Show or The New York Times can no longer and can and and no longer do appeal more widely than their core audiences. For the Times, this is their subscriber base, and it's why, for instance, the paper committed obvious journalistic malpractice by yanking senator Tom Cotton's infamous Send in the Troops op ed back in 2020. As the paper of record for all of America, that decision made no sense. Cotton was expressing a mainstream position in his party and in the country, but Times subscribers were furious and that critical business interest shifted the outlet's editorial position. This, of course, was helped along by a staff increasingly aligned on an ideological level with the paper's narrow subscriber niche.
Speaker 2:One of the greatest sources of cultural angst stems from the ability to recognize these institutions of the monoculture have shifted to microculture, whether they supported Trump or Bernie Sanders, plenty of Americans outside affluent urban bubbles figured that out years ago. It is the institutions themselves that often cling to the outdated brands so blinded by their own biases biases that it's become difficult for the c suites to even recognize what's happening outside of Manhattan, and the Hamptons don't count. Anyway, fantastic analysis from from Emily. You should subscribe to Pirate Wires to go read the full thing. But lots of people were having fun with this.
Speaker 2:How does late show cost a $100,000,000 produced? That was a big question. I think a lot of it's just this is a this is Letterman started in the nineties, so this is thirty years of just like, yeah. Let's just add one more person. Like, thirty years is only adding 60 people a year.
Speaker 2:One what would it oh, no. No. No. Way less. Six people a year.
Speaker 2:So you're adding, like, one a quarter, which is, like, not that much, and I think it just kinda creeps in. But you gotta be aware when revenue starts dropping, like, you have to right the ship, and you can't just can't just keep losing money because it doesn't give you leverage over CBS who's trying to get out and sell the company. Buco, capital bloke, says, I can't stop laughing at CBS losing 40,000,000 a year on the late show with Colbert because they were spending a $100,000,000 a year to produce it. A show of a guy talking sometimes to other people is their less competent group of industry executives than linear television. Alex Roy, friend of the show says, media is a business called Colbert.
Speaker 2:Already has an audience. He should have no problem launching a YouTube channel. I agree.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Many friends run a profitable, like, YouTube channels with millions of subs with staffs of less than 10 people. They started from scratch. Signed a a media business veteran. The the left has been looking for its Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson. Why shouldn't Colbert be that guy?
Speaker 2:That's interesting. And so a lot of people were saying it's a piece to camera slash guest interview show. It shouldn't cost that
Speaker 1:much. Tyler is back. What's going on, Tyler?
Speaker 6:I'm done. Yeah. Was stuck for a little while on one of them and then I switched to a different game, finished that, came back.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:But I don't know.
Speaker 2:What's the timer?
Speaker 6:I feel like it was a little slow. Twenty five minutes.
Speaker 2:Twenty five minutes. That is brutal. Brutal. Brutal. But you didn't get through it all?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Did your hair get
Speaker 2:messed up? Was it all
Speaker 1:messed I
Speaker 6:was I I stressed out. The one game I was I was on I
Speaker 2:was on
Speaker 6:one level for like five minutes and then I don't know what I just like couldn't figure out. I went to a different one. Yeah. And it was like I got it instantly.
Speaker 1:Crazy. That's brutal.
Speaker 2:We will give you We'll still
Speaker 1:We'll keep giving you challenges until you get a new phone.
Speaker 2:Mike is Before you
Speaker 3:go back
Speaker 4:to college.
Speaker 2:Mike is brutal. He says 25 is average. 20 is medium. 15 is hard. Well, we will give you a new challenge, give you a new chance to win a new iPhone.
Speaker 2:The iPhone moment has arrived for RKGI. Go ahead. Tyler missed it this time. But what do you think it says about current AI systems? Do you think you will outperform the latest IMO level model from OpenAI?
Speaker 2:You still got it?
Speaker 6:I mean, I I think you could probably do RL on this and get it. I mean, I I I don't know I don't know if that's what the labs are necessarily doing. I think ideally, like, they're trying to just train it
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know, independent of this and then see what how it does. Yeah. I think it's I think it's a very good, like, benchmark in that sense. But you could probably you probably could RL on this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the the way Mike described it was that you played the three public games. There are three private games. And so I don't know how much variation there was between the games. It seems like there was a fair amount because you got stuck on one, you switched to one, switched to a different one, then went back.
Speaker 2:Right? So yep. So I think the I think the goal is, like, if you are out on the three public games, you will be overfit against the private games that have slightly different mechanics, and you won't have learned the true generalizing function. That's the idea at least.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That makes sense. But I mean, I'm sure, you know, if you're OpenAI, you could just like, oh, let's just make new games that are kind of in a similar vein and then RL on those, then you have more data and then
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 6:I think you could probably like, I think my general sense is that you can, like, RL on pretty much anything. Yeah. So if if they really want to and they wanna throw, like, you know, many millions of dollars, I'm sure they could get it. But I don't know if that's really what they wanna do.
Speaker 2:I think the current prize is, like, $10,000, something like that for for something that works on it. Maybe there's a million dollar prize. There's a million dollar prize that's still hanging out there, I believe, for RKGIV one.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But those are size limited. Right? You can you need to run-in a certain speed, and they can't be, like, so big.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think they have to run on the Kaggle infrastructure, Kaggle infrastructure. So you basically have to, like, send it your weights, your code, and then you get access to, like, one GPU. You don't get to fire the Stargate at it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I don't know. It'll be interesting to see. How how what what's your what's your timeline for a lab destroying this?
Speaker 6:Probably end of the year.
Speaker 2:End of the year, you think they'll beat
Speaker 1:it? Yes.
Speaker 2:The whole the whole team is like, we designed this to be unbeatable for years. Like, through two to three years.
Speaker 6:I don't know. I mean, they just beat IMO. It's like the like, do you mean on a public model or them just releasing we've beat this?
Speaker 2:Private. It doesn't need to be open sourced.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Think if it's a private model, it's like open AI. It's like, okay. We have this internally. We're not gonna release it.
Speaker 6:It's not safe. Yeah. But, like, we have run it on this. I think probably by the end of the year is, like, reasonable.
Speaker 2:For for specific, okay, we we built a model just to beat this? Or we just we just were advancing models generally, giving people what they want, making great things, solving, flight booking and GPT agent and solving IMO. And then, oh, as a byproduct, we solve this. You think that's what's gonna happen?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I I don't think they're necessarily gonna train a model just to do this. Yeah. But they definitely could.
Speaker 2:I at this point, it's getting high stakes. Right? Because, mean, like
Speaker 6:apparently, IMO is not RL ed at all, like, specifically for
Speaker 2:That's what they say.
Speaker 6:Math. So, yeah, I think that model is, like, reasonably capable, obviously.
Speaker 2:Okay. I want to try that model on on Arc AGI v three and see how it does. Yeah. Because I I I it does feel like that will be a very interesting moment where if they truly don't cheat and don't RL on this specifically without the gas station data set as Roon calls it. You know, no RKGI v three like creating new games that feels like scientists collecting the gas station data set.
Speaker 2:Right? And they just go about their day building better and better models. And then by the way, oh, we solved this. That will be very, very interesting. But I don't know.
Speaker 2:I would take the over on the end of the year. Maybe it's we're more than halfway through the year.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's true. Okay. What is your line then?
Speaker 2:Like, middle next year. You're so AGI pilled. I think I think this will hold. I mean, b one is still holding. V one is not yes.
Speaker 2:V one, it takes $2,000 to get, like, 60%. You just got a 100%. You know? Like, you finish the whole thing in twenty five minutes.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I mean, we'll see, I guess.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I would take the over I would take the over on this year. I would probably take the
Speaker 1:over on and next I on have to give you an on ChatGPT agents. Okay. So it it only found so it it gave me a really great report, but it only found one and it's listed by a dealer. And I can already tell the dealer The dealer is, like, clearly pricing it, like, not where they would actually sell it with the market. Got it.
Speaker 1:But they did find one in Costa Mesa, so not far away. One county away.
Speaker 2:They found one for
Speaker 1:$3.99 $9.09. So just under the limit.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:So pretty good. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not bad. Not bad.
Speaker 1:Fifteen minutes. Yeah. They're they're
Speaker 2:I think we gotta use it more. Weird. Wasn't time.
Speaker 1:Didn't actually get me don't have a link.
Speaker 2:Okay. So we're gonna have to dig into a more test of
Speaker 1:achieved internally, but we're making progress.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Wait. Well, okay. Wait. So so are you saying 100% on v three?
Speaker 6:Or what's like the benchmark? Because like if it's a 100%, then like, yeah, obviously not a year.
Speaker 2:100%. I mean, like, you got you just got a 100%. Never having seen it. Twenty five minutes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, crazy. I think we could literally give this to anyone over the age of, like, 10, and they would get a 100% in half an hour, basically. Like, I think it's I think it's like, it's a very doable puzzle And for so I want a 100%, and I want it in and and and I don't care about time and money. Like, I I'm I'm I agree with was it Will who said that? Or
Speaker 6:Yeah. Will DePue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Will DePue said, you know so so, yeah, throw $2,000 per task on it. I'm fine with that. The question is just, can the model do it in any amount of time, in any amount of money? And and it and it seems like right now, it's probably at zero.
Speaker 2:We'll see how the IMO model does. Maybe it does really well. We'll see. But I would put it at over I would put it up there with doing your taxes. You know?
Speaker 2:Dwarkesh mode, twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think 100% is hard. But if if you give me, like, 90%, like, if it misses one of the tasks because on on so there's three games that each have, like, 10 levels.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. If you can miss, like, one of those
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I I don't I think you have to finish a game or not. And so I think, basically, on the private dataset, you can get zero, you can get one out of three, two out of three, or three out of three, basically. But it's unclear because like when do you tell it to give up? Because it can just keep trying and kind of brute force it.
Speaker 2:But maybe there's some sort of like limit. I don't know. But you get like unlimited retries. But maybe maybe the real test is only giving one
Speaker 4:try. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We gotta move on. But for your next challenge, Tyler, prompt prompt four zero seven thousand times in a row and stay sane.
Speaker 2:Stay sane.
Speaker 1:Start recursive prompting like crazy for for forty eight hours straight and then come back come back to us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyways. Well, we gotta talk about the the McLaren collection
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That's going up for sale. But first, I gotta talk to about Fin dot ai. Fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on g two. This was what Swick's said. He wants AI agents for customer service.
Speaker 2:Thin dot ai is delivering. So go check it out. Anyway, so the bonds overview
Speaker 1:of this.
Speaker 2:Okay. Collection. This is from Tom Hartley Junior. And hopefully, we can pull up the video because it is fantastic. It's on YouTube.
Speaker 2:And yes. So here's the video. You can play some of that. Look at this lineup of cars. So the story here is this, this man named Mansoor Ojeh, Ojeh.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure how to pronounce that. It's o j j e h. I apologize to anyone who knows how it says, I'm incredibly to proud to announce that we've been entrusted with the sale of the world's greatest collection of McLaren road cars offered directly from the home of one of the most influential figures in McLaren's sixty two year history. He passed away age 68 surrounded by family, and is now entrusting the sale of his collection. This guy is fascinating.
Speaker 2:Very, very interesting fellow. So he has let me pull up my, my information here. So, Mansoor Oje, he was the son of he's a Franco Saudi, French Saudi Arabian businessman, and he used his family fortune to bankroll Formula One teams, and he built the Tag Group. So if you're familiar with Tag Heuer, the the the the watch brand, he built that watch brand and then wound up selling it to LVMH. And so he was born this the the man who collected all of these McLarens in burnt orange, which, by the way, he not only is he only is he the only one with the massive orange McLaren collection, that particular color is not available to anyone else.
Speaker 2:He has his own color that only he can buy. It's absolutely incredible. And every single one of those cars that you see there in the background, they are all the last last one off the line, the last individual production car that they've ever made of that particular model. And so he gets the last one. He's and you see the logo there?
Speaker 2:He puts his name on the logo. It's the only I've never seen a brand do that, but they were so tight with him because he owned the company at one point that they would replace the McLaren logo with Mansour logo, which is incredible. And so he he is a fascinating figure. So his father, Akram Ohay, accumulated immense wealth from an an intermediary in Saudi arms deals. So he basically would go to the the Saudis and say, what weapons do you need?
Speaker 2:What missiles do you need? What guns do you need? What planes do you need? I'm gonna go out into the world and find those and source those and bring those back and take a cut of that. And so
Speaker 1:he This is really I will say, if if your father has amassed immense wealth through arms dealing, this is really pretty much the playbook It is. For how to put that capital to work.
Speaker 2:It's the best. It's the best. And so Mansour grew up in France. The family mostly lived in France. He attended the American School in Paris.
Speaker 2:He moved to California where we are, studied business administration at Menlo College. Let's give
Speaker 1:it up for all
Speaker 2:the business
Speaker 1:administration majors out there. One of the top majors if you want to administrate businesses. Yeah. Which he certainly has.
Speaker 2:He went to Santa Clara. He he initially managed his father's ventures. He became gradually more and more involved in his father's investment vehicle, which was Technique de Avant Garde, which is TAG, a Luxembourg registered holding company created in 1977. So the group's purchase was to broker deals between the Arab world and Europe and to handle commissions from arms and infrastructure contracts. And so, his dad was born in Syria, raised in Iraq, studied in France on a scholarship during the forties, marries a French woman, stays in France, and then and then starts arranging these arms deals and infrastructure projects.
Speaker 2:And so in 1956, the dad opens an arms trading company in Switzerland and establishes Saudi Arabia's first weapons factory. During the nineteen sixties, he represented the French defense contractors such as Dassault and Matra, selling Mirage jets and missile systems to Middle Eastern clients. He was facing some scrutiny from French authorities at one point. He founds the tag group. The group gave him unrivaled access to the Saudi royal family for defense projects, leveraged his relationships with prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister.
Speaker 2:And he became so wealthy that he bought a cruise liner, like a cruise ship. He bought the Queen Elizabeth two. Just I think as like a personal pleasure like pleasure yacht. He bought a ranch in Paraguay, homes in Paris and Monte Carlo, and then he starts sponsoring the Williams Formula One team. And he was putting in a million dollars a year a million pounds a year.
Speaker 2:In the eighties
Speaker 1:When what when did he when did he start doing that?
Speaker 2:This was in the in the late seventies. And so his son so the dad dies in 1991, reportedly worth several billion dollars. Mansour, who's the man with all of those fantastic looking McLarens, him and his brother, Mansour and Aziz, were heirs to the tag group. And there was a bitter inheritance dispute between the widow and some of the children, and, obviously, all the assets kind of, you know, get fought over. But Mansour makes out quite nicely and winds up investing even more heavily in f one.
Speaker 2:So through TAG, he starts sponsoring Frank Williams Formula One team in 1978 when Saudi Saudi Airlines sought to attract other Saudi brands. TAG became the team's major sponsor in 1979. Williams actually did win multiple races. Although they were having some trouble a few years ago, they were pretty good back then. They got Alan Jones in another title in 1982 with Kiki Rosberg.
Speaker 2:I think that's Nico Rosberg's father, I believe. The sponsorship gave Monsoor his first taste of Formula One success and increased tags visibility. Then in 1983, he jumped ship from Williams, goes over to McLaren. Frank Williams resisted diversifying beyond racing. McLaren's boss, Ron Dennis, proposed a shareholding in proposed exchanging shareholders, like, shares for a new for financing a new turbo engine.
Speaker 2:And so Mansour agreed and funded the development of a Porsche turbo engine badged as TAG. So the McLaren TAG partnership dominated in the 1984 season. Drivers Nikki Lauda and Elaine Prost won 12 of 16 races, and McLaren secured both the drivers and constructors titles. So, basically, he comes in with a bunch of money and says, you wanna win an f one? I will finance a new engine.
Speaker 2:He goes and does it, and it actually works. And so he in '80
Speaker 1:because four TAG and Porsche have their own partnership now. Yeah. They have the Carrera line of watches all these years later.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so in 1984, he buys a 50% stake in McLaren's holding company. Now remember, McLaren was founded by a true racer who died at age 31, I believe, in a racing accident. And so left this incredible legacy of just a guy putting it all on the line in in racing. Like, it wasn't like he was some business guy who was like, I wanna get into racing.
Speaker 2:He was just a race car driver.
Speaker 1:Well, this is the story of Enzo too. Ferrari wasn't started until he was in his forties. Yep. And but he had just been so obsessed Yep. Over racing Yeah.
Speaker 1:That it it just carried into the brand.
Speaker 2:And so in a Monsoor buys a 50% of stake in McLaren's holding company, Tag McLaren Holdings. And he's still working on the racing stuff, but then he says we gotta make a road car. And the road car that he pitches is the McLaren f one supercar that launches in 1992 and is a $20,000,000 icon owned by Elon Musk, Sam Altman. Like, there's they're in museums. Like, they are the rarest of the rare.
Speaker 2:Jay Leno has one. I don't think I think it's, like, the one of the few cars Doug Demuro hasn't driven. He'd rode in it with Jay Leno, but they are incredibly rare, incredibly special cars.
Speaker 1:And the doors go up.
Speaker 2:The doors go up. And so in in other news, like, he he did buy Hewer and created Tag Hewer, which was a watch company that you might be familiar with, Tag Hewer. They eventually sold Tag Hewer to LVMH for $740,000,000 in 1990
Speaker 1:that Elon crashed his McLaren f one.
Speaker 2:He did. Yes. And I believe that the McLaren was picked up and and, like, reconstituted and wound up selling still for millions of dollars.
Speaker 1:The car hit a hidden embankment on Sandhill Road at a 45 degree angle, launching it into the air like a discus according to witnesses.
Speaker 2:I mean, the cargo is 200 miles an hour. Weighs, 2,000 pounds.
Speaker 1:Piece of lore imagining Elon on Sandhill Road.
Speaker 2:And you know who else was in that car? I do. Peter Thiel.
Speaker 6:Crazy. And he went to the meeting after.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. Yeah. They were apparently Went
Speaker 3:to the meeting.
Speaker 2:The lore is that they went to Sequoia, like to pitch or something. They were like raising money or or driving down to What did like do?
Speaker 1:He turned off traction control.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 4:Apparently. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is wild. Yeah. There's a long history of guys turning off traction control, driving really fast, and then just crashing their cars. So if you want to avoid crashing your super car
Speaker 2:Maybe keep it on.
Speaker 1:Avoid turning off traction control.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's the thing with doesn't the Carrera GT not have traction control? I Or maybe So maybe it does. But, it's like one of the few features. And a lot of these guys
Speaker 1:kills a lot of its drivers.
Speaker 2:A lot of these guys, like, pride their you know, they like an analog
Speaker 1:Jeep does have traction control.
Speaker 2:Does. It
Speaker 1:does not have stability control or other electronic driver aids that are common in modern supercars.
Speaker 2:So Mansour, he buys Hewer, turns it into Tag Hewer, great watch brand, sells it to LVMH for $740,000,000 in 1999. He gets a huge profit from that, and then he starts going deeper into all of that. He launches TAG Aviation and Aeronautics, which is distributing Bombardier jets to The Middle East. So he's a go between between French aerospace and defense companies in The Middle East still. In this case, he develops a luxury airport in The Middle East, and he's just doing a lot of deals at this very, very high level, probably benefits from his ties to f one.
Speaker 2:And so he builds the he builds the McLaren f one and then, of course, starts collecting and stays involved in in McLaren f one for years. And he builds this, I mean, he builds a 204 235 foot superyacht, Kogo. He creates some lavish house on Lake Geneva, Switzerland known as La Maison Du Lac, and and and kinda goes on through that. He winds up getting idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, gets a double lung transplant, and ultimately doesn't make it. He know he dies at age 68.
Speaker 2:McLaren CEO, Zach Brown, described him as a titan of our sport, ultra competitive, determined, passionate, and sporting. And so everyone remembers him and his contributions to to f one. But what's interesting today is that they are about to sell his entire McLaren collection, which is something like 20 McLaren road cars all in his exact spec,
Speaker 1:which is this burnt
Speaker 2:orange with his badging. I don't know who the buyer would be. They're probably listening to this show. But good luck out there as you go and bid on the Mansour collection because it is truly one of a kind. And every single car there is in the most extreme spec, and it's the last one off the line.
Speaker 2:And there's a and there's a plaque inside that says, this is the last f one that was ever made. This is the last Senna that was ever made. This is the last Speedtail that was ever made. This is the last GTR. This is the last I mean, look at that one.
Speaker 2:No. What is that? The Elva? Yeah. The Elva.
Speaker 2:The Elva is fantastic. Burnt orange Elva with no windshield. Wow. That is fantastic. And just every single one of those cars is insane.
Speaker 2:Oh, also oh, by the way, also, every single one of those cars, delivery mileage. Never been driven. Never been driven.
Speaker 1:Do you think he was buying you think he was getting two? Like, So the
Speaker 2:the story is that he had an f one. Of course, he developed it. He had an f one, but it was kind of, I think, from, like, the middle of the pack or maybe the earlier pack. Yep. And because he was just, like, excited to get the first one and, you know, got it and probably gave one to someone else and, like, just had one, drove it, had fun with it.
Speaker 2:It was his experience. But then his brother bought got the last one in that in that orange color. And he and his brother was about to sell it. And he said, if you're you can't sell this. If you're selling it, I'll buy it.
Speaker 2:And so he buys it from his brother and winds up building an entire collection on the back of that one car, the last f one off the line, the the the burnt orange that turns into his signature color. It turns into the color that you cannot buy no matter how much money you have. And no matter how McLaren's young.
Speaker 1:And his legacy lives on Oscar and Lando dominating so far this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Give us the update there. It's good.
Speaker 1:He wouldn't have been. He wasn't around to see it, but he would surely be proud.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, if you're looking for a compliment to your McLaren f one, get on Bezel. Get bezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. Anyway, let's go to Trey Stevens.
Speaker 2:He had a massively viral post on Friday. We didn't get a chance to talk about it. Are only
Speaker 1:triggering.
Speaker 2:Four tier one cities in The United States. New York for finance, DC for government, San Francisco for tech, LA for media and entertainment people. Thank you, Trey. No other cities are power centers for aspirational talent. Sorry.
Speaker 1:He says based on replies, here are the people arguing for other cities. Austin, people who live in Austin. Boston, people who are really upset about Trump's Harvard attack. Dallas, Houston, people who have only lived in Texas. Miami, people who love money but don't love to work.
Speaker 3:Mogged. Mogged.
Speaker 1:Someone just comments for Cleveland.
Speaker 2:That's funny because Trey's an Ohio guy. No. No. I I I agree with this and it is incredibly sticky. Like, it's unclear if there will ever be another tier one city built in in America.
Speaker 2:It doesn't really matter though because you can go like, Warren Buffett is out in Omaha. It's fine. Like, people read this as like, I can't possibly be successful in finance if I'm not in New York. Ken Griffin was in Chicago and then Miami.
Speaker 1:Charlie Munger lived in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And so and so it's like it's like it that it is true that these are tier one cities. It doesn't mean that you can't do something cool and amazing and achieve your goals in life somewhere else, but you should just be thoughtful about it. And you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking that a a tier two city is secretly a tier one.
Speaker 2:If it's not, it's just not. And so stuff's moving around. Very fun post. Always good to to bait literally everyone in the world. But very fun.
Speaker 2:But related to this, Deleon had a post that was kinda interesting here. He said, ten years ago, it felt like Silicon Valley had this really bright vibrant seed fund ecosystem that felt just as important as the multistage venture firms. Now that feels totally dead partially because the whole a whole generation of top tier companies just completely skipped that step in raising. And so, yeah, more and more companies are saying, our seed, our $1,000,000 will just come from our own balance sheet, And it'll just come internally, and we'll just fund that. Or we'll just jump straight to $20,000,000.
Speaker 2:Feel like there's plenty of
Speaker 1:I do. I I have a problem where if somebody's raising a pre seed
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I do feel like there's 20 funds that I would potentially introduce them to. Mhmm. The challenge is when those pre seed funds are then trying to go compete at seed, which we now know is this sort of 4 to $8,000,000 range. We had somebody on Friday who was raising 55,000,000.
Speaker 2:Crazy.
Speaker 1:Whether or not that was marketing or, you know, whatever. The the name doesn't really matter. Bored Ape Yacht Club raised a billion dollar seed round in 2021.
Speaker 2:That was a seed round? Was that because they just hadn't raised before?
Speaker 1:They really hadn't raised.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. There's this weird thing where, you know
Speaker 1:Mirror Marathi, 2 or $3,000,000,000 seed round. So, again, like the the ex the your company's expectations are based around how much capital has come in the door. Yep. Not the last name the last the the name of your last financing round.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. There's one side of this which is like the seed moniker used to stand for time and money effectively. Like, it used to be like, okay. If if I'm a seed stage company, you know that I'm in the first eighteen months of my creation and I've only I've raised less than $5,000,000 or else I'm in mango seed territory and series a territory. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But now there's some world where people just say, okay. You know, this is your second round. It doesn't matter that you've been around for ten years. It's an a round or it's a seed round. Or doesn't matter if you're raising a billion dollars and it's priced like a growth round, it's it's a seed round.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I I think what Delian's getting at is more just like the vibe of, like, you used to be able to he's he's a seed investor. You used to be able to hunt around, find some people doing cool stuff, and get 10%, 20% of the company for a million bucks, $2,000,000. And that has kind of disappeared.
Speaker 1:Dellion's still known to to get a good to get a good price.
Speaker 2:He's just figured out how to survive. Nature finds a way as does public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, they got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions folks. Get to public.com. And we have our next guest.
Speaker 1:We have Chris Black in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 2:Let's bring him in. Chris Black, how you doing? Bring me
Speaker 1:in. What's up, guys? How are you? What's up? What's happening?
Speaker 1:It's it's great to meet you. I've I've wanted to chat for a long time. I I actually bought your what was that little green book that you you made all those years ago?
Speaker 4:Wow. We got an OG on our hand. I know. Think you know it all was I think it was 2015 I did that with Powerhouse. So thank you for
Speaker 2:Oh, go.
Speaker 4:Being a ground floor investor.
Speaker 1:Had that I had that in college and I felt so cool to be a college kid that was cultured enough to buy a a table, you know, a coffee table.
Speaker 2:A coffee table by Chris Black.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think it's I think it turned into more of a bathroom book than coffee Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very it's very small. Okay.
Speaker 4:You would
Speaker 1:like you would like form factor. Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. And what was inside the
Speaker 1:mean, Chris can give some more context. The thing that I remembered in a quote that I've brought up a bunch was the it was the Andy Warhol quote in there that was something like making money is, you know, business is art and making money is art and good business is the best art.
Speaker 4:You you guys loved that. You guys loved that. Yeah. I mean, the the the book was just like a fun advice book, kind of, basically. It was it was it did really well as a graduation gift purchased from Urban Outfitters that year.
Speaker 4:That that There we go. That that's so we sold a lot of books. Thank thank god. So it was it was fun to do. That was very it was very fun.
Speaker 2:Did you go through a traditional publishing house? Like, what was the workflow? Did you write the whole book and then shop it around? Like, I've never published a book, so curious.
Speaker 4:It was bay it was based on Twitter, honestly. It was based kind of on that idea of, like, life's old instruction book, the classic form factor, to use your term, meets sort of Twitter. So I went through, wrote them all. Yeah. I did it with Powerhouse, which is, like, sort of in and out of business from what I can tell.
Speaker 4:Sure. But I'm working on a book now for Simon and Schuster that should come out in 2026. So that that's a little more of a
Speaker 1:the process should concept of the new book?
Speaker 4:It's kind of it's kind of like a essay memoir, you know, a little bit of everything from, like, some high school stuff to being a drug addict to work to kind of everything. Mhmm. And that process is a little bit more like you're talking about. Like, you write a full essay. You know, you outline, some chapters, and then you take that out and and sell it.
Speaker 4:And CAA helped me. Obviously, I wasn't doing it myself, but it's daunting, but I'm excited.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's the, what's the secret to, like, a good book launch these days? We talked to Ezra Klein's coauthor, and he was saying that interestingly, like, when they went on hour long podcasts, they sold less books than, a five minute hit on, like, TV. TV because if you listen to an hour long podcast, you're like, I got the gist. I don't need the whole book.
Speaker 2:But if you listen to five minutes, you're like, oh, I could do I could do another hour. I'll buy the book.
Speaker 4:That's a fair I have a friend who's a very successful legendary author who told me an anecdote that he sold more books from doing Tucker Carlson when he was on TV than he sold from anything else. Like a clear bump. Wow. I mean, you know, this was years ago, but Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think that I mean, we were talking about this earlier today. Jason and I actually were talking about this and about how sort of podcasts have replaced not only late night, obviously, with this, like, kind of, like, Stephen Colbert news. It's topical. But also, like, Good Morning America, The View, like, it's still fun to do that stuff. I don't but it might it might move books, but it doesn't seem like the publicist think that it does based on the priorities of what they're having their clients do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is it is it speed run 200 podcasts? Is that is that the playbook now? I
Speaker 4:mean, if you pay attention to people, yeah, kinda. You know, you have to if you pay attention to an actor or writer or whoever has something coming out, it's like, you know, music we we talk to a lot of musicians on how long gone, so we're part of that in some ways. But, like, there's the Dax Shepard's Joe Rogan's smart list call her daddy world that I think is basically that's the new Oprah. That you know? That's what it is.
Speaker 2:I almost feel like there's a world where some podcasters, certainly not us because we're a daily show or very news driven, but some podcasts, I'm thinking of, like, acquired FMs, like business deep dives or some true crime podcasts. Like, they kind of fill the hole of an audiobook. It's like you get two or three hours every month, and it feels like it's just a more it's like an easier financial model for them to be like, well, I'm selling 12 ad slots and I have subscribers that feel like they're getting something. They're not waiting a full year for the next thing. So when I hit their credit card with a $20 charge this month, they're getting one thing this month.
Speaker 1:Think we were talking on Friday this concept of, like, releasing a book on Substack because It's you could get somebody to effectively Yeah. It creates this like community experience of like reading the book together. But then Yeah. It's, you know, you might charge $25 for your book but somebody might pay you, I don't know, $10 a month for your sub stack?
Speaker 4:No. I mean, there's all these I mean, I I think there's all these ways to do it. I am extremely traditional in the what I think is cool and what works. Yeah. I would like to do it about as by the book, no pun intended, as possible just because I think that's cool.
Speaker 4:I think all of these modern approaches, though, are often more more profitable and also maybe, like you said, easier for people to stomach. Like, the attention spans aren't there. And even if you break it up like that in their minds, it's, like, easier to read in a weekly dispatch than it might be to sit down for an hour every day and read a book. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's also something about, like I mean, when wait. I've I've heard somebody say, like, when you publish a book, like, it's the easiest way to get like a comma with a phrase after your name every time you're in print. Like if I wrote a book that's just like, you know, how I became awesome, everyone would just be like, okay. Like, you know, life life is someone awesome forever.
Speaker 2:John Coogan, author of of The Awesome Life.
Speaker 1:And that's why
Speaker 2:that's why I'm awesome.
Speaker 1:Chris's book, I'm assuming the memoir will be called just goad it.
Speaker 2:Goad it. Just goad
Speaker 4:it. That's what I'm thinking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Workshopping it now. But, I mean, think you're right. I mean, I had another friend, Maddie Mathison, the the chef and cookbook author and, you know, actor. And he told me, he was like, dude, like, New York Times bestseller lasts for the rest of your life. Totally.
Speaker 4:You can you you get that forever if you do it one time. Totally. You know? And, like, I I think that also that is so interesting because it's such like a classic thing that we all know, but no one really knows the formula of how you get like, it's not just sales. There's all these factors that like Yep.
Speaker 4:No one knows, you know, which makes it even Yes. More
Speaker 1:mythical. Interesting to think about, would you rather have be featured in the New York time? Is it is it more valuable to be featured in the New York times four times a year forever or just be a New York times best seller? Yeah. Because I we had we had a couple buddies get hit pieces last week in the New York times And they just like really they only get attention if you give them attention.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like the
Speaker 4:Dude, I was I that's so funny you say that because there was a story in the early days of How Long Gone, there was a story that wasn't favorable, let's say. And I was like,
Speaker 1:Was this was this the was this the whole lawsuit thing? Because I got the t shirt back then too.
Speaker 4:The t shirt No. Not the New York Times. No. This was not the New
Speaker 2:York Times. Okay. This is separate.
Speaker 4:This was not the this was not the cease and desist for making fun of The Daily. This was a this it it's, you know, it's
Speaker 1:yeah. Try sand. Don't try sand it. Don't try sand it. You know, speak really generally so nobody can figure it out.
Speaker 4:You know what? We're move we're moving on.
Speaker 2:Moving on. Anyway, the the other interesting thing about books versus podcasts is we have a buddy who runs an AI podcast, the Dwarkash Patel podcast. Great show. Great interviews. Super researched.
Speaker 2:He published a book. And the book was an like, an oral history of AI. So it was a collection, and it was actually kind of like a digest of a bunch of interviews that he's done. So he didn't start from a blank page and just start typing out like a thousand pages and and refine it. But and in some ways, it's like, it's just kind of a different instantiation of the same thing that he's been doing.
Speaker 2:But I love it because I'm there's no way for me to go to, like, randomly remind myself in five years that I should go revisit a Dwarkesh podcast unless someone, like, clips it and shares it. But if I put that book on my shelf, I might pick it up randomly in a few years, and there's something about, like, just the tangible physical. We're very into the physical stuff here. Print the No.
Speaker 4:For sure. It's real. I mean, I think also that's I mean, I think that, like, everything else, it makes a return to some extent. You know? Like, I subscribe to the Financial Times.
Speaker 4:I subscribe to several magazines like a of my friends do. I mean, obviously, I'm 42 years old, so it kinda makes sense. But I think that, like, young people are fetishizing print the same way they fetishized vinyl, you know, couple, you know, ten years ago. It's the same kind of thing. One once it is, you know, once it's basically past its prime
Speaker 1:print is just objectively better than vinyl, though, I gotta say. I'm not
Speaker 4:A 100%.
Speaker 1:That it's like, it's it you can go to the beach and carry like, you can't like, you know, like, just bringing piece of paper to the beach and letting it get
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Losing it. Whatever. It's nice. Gives you the benefit of leaving your phone at home. Yes.
Speaker 1:That's the powerful thing.
Speaker 4:When I finish a book, I leave it wherever I am. Like, on the back in the back seat of the plane Yeah.
Speaker 1:Interesting. On
Speaker 4:on like, I leave it so somebody can hopefully pick it up and take it.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 4:I'm usually I usually have a couple with me if I'm traveling. Yeah. If I finish one, I gotta lose some weight. You Yeah. Because you're adding because you're
Speaker 1:adding adding stuff on the amazing.
Speaker 4:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wait. So are we gonna get How Long Gone pressed on vinyl? We gotta do a couple of special episodes.
Speaker 4:We did do a CD. We did do
Speaker 2:a CD a
Speaker 4:couple years ago with with Jag Jaguar, which is a really fun to do. But, yeah, I mean, I think for us, we're still I mean, you guys have have have done something so interesting. I think it's so cool the way what you guys are doing and how you're approaching it. I I think this live daily thing is, like, really powerful.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:And I think we're trying to figure out what our version of video is.
Speaker 1:Wait. So yeah, you guys are doing what's this thing? I read it in in Feed Me. Like you're doing a live show, like a one off live show.
Speaker 4:We we did we're on tour right now. We just have a couple days off. But we did a show at Turf Club in Saint Paul, Minnesota Mhmm. At this basically, this service called veeps.com, which is started by the Madden Brothers from Good Charlotte, but then Live Nation bought it. Cool.
Speaker 4:And it's basic. They send a full sort of very pro crew to shoot your show live, and you can pay you know, buy a ticket online and watch it up to forty eight hours after you pay.
Speaker 1:What's the idea of live sites?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's like Vampire Weekend, How Long Gone, Alicia Keys. That's awesome. So how do I It's cool.
Speaker 1:Podcasters in control. Podcasters in control. I mean, what's the right live show for you though? Like, do you feel pressured to to have like, you know, hottest takes?
Speaker 4:Well, this show,
Speaker 1:we're doing zingers.
Speaker 4:We're doing on Thursday. And then Friday we're doing Toronto, and then we go to London. But this this show is actually different. We we we used to just go up there and shoot the ship. We'd bring a guest up, you know, depending on what town we're in, much like the the actual podcast.
Speaker 4:This time, it's the How Long Gone Guide to Life, and it's a visual it's like basic keynote that we're walking the audience through with, like, our commentary. And we've only done it twice so far, but it feels it feels sort of like it's taken us from a live podcast to a show,
Speaker 1:which is
Speaker 4:what our goal was. And I don't think we could figure out exactly how to do that. I think this is is kind of pushing us in that direction, which is great.
Speaker 1:What's, give give us the the three minute summary of the guide to life so that people have to still go Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Don't give away.
Speaker 4:Get the tickets. Get the ticket. Yeah. No. It's it's every week we got.
Speaker 1:We we did it. We did one live show together. You did. In Miami and we had only made like two episodes and so nobody like nobody knew us as a duo. Didn't know our humor and the Right.
Speaker 1:And live show the live show is like we made like like a very serious like argument for why venture capital firms should get their founders on like PEDs. So like testosterone, like, like, a variety.
Speaker 4:That's a great that is I would watch pay attention to that.
Speaker 2:That's good. Exactly.
Speaker 1:And and I don't like, half of the odd the half of the audience was like, these guys are dead serious. Going on? Half were, like, kind of laughing. Like, what is going on?
Speaker 4:Is mix. It's a mixed bag. Yeah. I mean, ours, we basically cover all of the stuff that we talk around the show from, like, restaurants and restaurant etiquette to the gym and gym etiquette to dating and sex and drugs. So it's like we cover it.
Speaker 4:You know, it's like one slide that's going really well for us is polyamory is for ugly people. Be single or cheat. That's going really well for us. But but, know, it's just like funny stuff that you can kinda talk about and also will inspire a response from the crowd. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We we like to go back and forth with
Speaker 2:the audience.
Speaker 1:It's fun. We're gonna we're gonna create we're gonna create a rival guide for life, and and we'll just go guide for guide.
Speaker 2:We'll go guide for guide.
Speaker 4:Well, look. I think we I think we have different enough audiences where we cover a lot of
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 4:You know, cover a lot
Speaker 2:of share. So so going back and forth, I want your, restaurant etiquette. This morning, we go to our cafe where we have breakfast every morning. Normally, really, like, I never noticed the music. It was always quiet and chill.
Speaker 2:And today, they were blasting in sync and back from
Speaker 1:boys. Spears.
Speaker 2:Britney Spears. And maybe it was just the mood because it was kinda gloomy in LA. We're having some, like, late June gloom going on.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. It's terrible.
Speaker 2:And I was a little bit tired from the weekend trying to get back into it. And I was, like, trying to read, like, a pretty detailed analysis about, like, tech and stuff. And I was just, I can't I and funny thing is that two days ago, I was in a grocery store, and I was, like, jamming to the Backstreet Boys. And I was like, this is the greatest thing ever. I was loving it in that context.
Speaker 2:But in the morning
Speaker 1:But it felt like such a violation of trust because we go to this place every single reliable.
Speaker 2:And it and it sets me up for the day I'm prepping the show. And so we kind of made a we made a slight comment. We're like, oh, is the music different? But I wanna know etiquette wise, how should I I I don't wanna be able to speak to the manager. That's weird.
Speaker 2:But also, like, I'd like a change. Yeah. Should I do?
Speaker 1:What what kind of, like, like, what do get as a regular? Like, what are your rights as a regular?
Speaker 2:What are your rights as a regular?
Speaker 4:You're right. You can't say anything. Sorry. If you You can't say anything. No.
Speaker 3:If you
Speaker 4:say something, they're never gonna look at you the same. You're not I know. Whether you're right or wrong, I'm just telling you they're gonna they're gonna think of you differently.
Speaker 2:The police did.
Speaker 4:It's not gonna be made with love anymore.
Speaker 2:It's not
Speaker 4:not gonna be made with lust.
Speaker 2:No. So so am I supposed to vote with my feet, go somewhere else? I I we were running the numbers. We go there every single day. We're like, we're basically employing a single person there paying the full I
Speaker 4:like how you think about this. Like, it's logical, and then you could sort of figure out a way to make it work. It's it's a a barista hates all of the customers more like And that's a feature. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a feature.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's what
Speaker 4:I I understand what you're saying. I I think restaurants like, there was a trend for so long, and it's still going on, where, like, restaurants play, like, hip hop. You know? And, like, I don't wanna hear Kanye West while I'm eating spicy You know? I want I want to, like, I want to hear nothing is preferred.
Speaker 4:If you go to certain kinda old school, like I think Lebronidan in New York doesn't play music. And it's just it's like the bustle of the restaurant and the chatter. I'd I'd much rather hear that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating.
Speaker 2:Jordy, where should we take it now? I have
Speaker 1:a I I yeah. I wanted I wanted to just get some some broad takes from you on a bunch of different topics that we don't we don't cover closely. So one, first off, is AI psychosis real? You experience it yet yourself?
Speaker 4:Me let me tell you something about AI, and I'm sorry to all of your I just couldn't No.
Speaker 1:I'm assume I'm assuming couldn't hear last.
Speaker 2:Hottest thing
Speaker 4:I want. I think it's a I think it's a reality. I think it's very serious. I think it's coming for us, good, bad, and ugly. I just don't care, and like other things in my life, I'm gonna put it off till the very last minute, and when I have to deal with it I've never downloaded Photoshop, I've never used InDesign.
Speaker 4:I I've I've put off all this shit in my my entire life, and it's worked out. So I think I'm gonna do the same thing with AI until until I have no
Speaker 2:choice.
Speaker 1:And and and Europe so you work list off some some of the clients that you've worked with over the years. It's basically everybody. Right?
Speaker 4:Oh, mean, yeah. I mean, everything and on the in the on that side of the business, yeah. I mean, New Balance, Tom Brown, Stussy, J Crew is is an ongoing one. Banana Republic for a couple years. So, yeah, I mean, like
Speaker 2:I love Banana
Speaker 1:Republic. Little bit of everything. John six eight, so Banana Republic.
Speaker 4:Oh, they got you. They signed Kevin Love. 69. Jason's 69. So he has the same Yeah.
Speaker 4:The same issue with his shoe.
Speaker 2:And he has this at 14, 15?
Speaker 4:Jason's a 17. So
Speaker 2:it's really Okay. Bogged.
Speaker 4:He goes to he goes to these, like, funny websites to find
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:Stuff like we haven't heard of because we're
Speaker 2:Dark web, big and tall.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:So so you're going in when you're working with these clients, it's kinda like Rick Rick Rubin mode. You don't know how to use any of the tools. You're just kind of like, they just pay you to tell them what what
Speaker 4:I mean, no. I think it's a little bit of a relationship thing and and hopefully a taste thing. Like, I I think taste takes years and years to develop, and I think mine is is suited for certain people more than others. I think J. Crew is like a perfect fit because I grew up wearing J.
Speaker 4:Crew. I I was raised in Atlanta. It's preppy. It's southern. But I think I have a little bit of a different point of view because I I got into punk and hardcore and, you know, skateboarding and all that stuff.
Speaker 4:So it's like a little bit of a hybrid of all that of all those things. But I think with with clients, it's all about sort of taking the real talent at the company and making sure that it doesn't go off the rails. You know? So the creativity people who are true geniuses and really creative, like, powerhouses need to be brought back down to earth a little bit, you know, and, like, reminded in a nice, gentle way that if we don't, you know, make money, this is all over. You know what I'm saying?
Speaker 4:Like, this is like like, we can do all this stuff, but sometimes you gotta feed the beast to make sure the lights stay on and it buys us more time to do more fun stuff. And I think it's like a I think as an outsider going into a company, you're able to do that a lot easier than like a a salaried employee.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can stir things up. Yeah. Are you but but so so going like slightly deeper, your client like, I have to imagine every single brand that you've worked with or will work with in the future is starting to try to mix in AI generated imagery and I'm sure that's sounds like that's triggering to you. It's just stuff that that you don't you don't wanna like, how do you see the kind of market kind of bifurcating in the sense that you think every brand you think any brands will take a hard line and say like, we only shoot, you know, farm to table organic content here.
Speaker 1:We never
Speaker 4:I think that's exactly what's gonna happen. I think there's gonna be like a division where it's like, obviously, certain things are easy to automate. I think everybody will do that because it's a it feels like a freebie. I think some of the creative stuff, I think a lot of at least I hope clients I work with would sort of be like, we need a human being to take the pictures. Like that like, pictures specifically, like, to me, there's so much emotion involved in it.
Speaker 4:There's so much skill involved in it, and you just can't to me, I haven't seen it mimicked correctly. Like asking Czech to fix your car is different. Like this is something that requires like a human touch, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I I think there's actually there's laws in place that that make it so that chain restaurants can't photoshop their food. Right? Because they would just photoshop a burger and then they're trying to sell it and it just doesn't look anything. And I think I think it's possible we'll see I don't know.
Speaker 1:On on the apparel side, it'll be interesting because everybody's had the experience of like buying an item and it just looks amazing online or
Speaker 4:it looks great online. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or whatever, and then it just, like, doesn't fit or whatever. And so I think that that will probably accelerate as you have these sort of upstart brands that never even do product photography, don't even know if their if stuff
Speaker 4:photography and like econ photography is like a science and it's pretty hard to get right, and there's a lot of discussion at these at these companies about how to do it, who who's gonna shoot it, how it's gonna appear, and I think that stuff is very interesting because it directly relates to sales and like the bottom line. Like some styles work really really well and that's what everybody wants to mimic and some are a little a little harder to to pull off, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about on what about how how do you see like, you know, music market evolving? We we don't cover much music. Listen to the
Speaker 2:latest Justin Bieber album. We got two songs
Speaker 1:on the driving home.
Speaker 4:I mean, we we talk about music and on How Long Gone all that's all we do and like a lot of my my best friends are musicians. Most of them are successful at this point. Been doing it long enough. But I think it's, like, every everything else in our in our lives, I think we're just paralyzed by choice, and the barrier of entry is just too low. You know, the the there's too much stuff and music, it suffers from that maybe more than any other genre that I can think of.
Speaker 1:And you mean because you've, you know, growing up, you'd buy an album, you'd invest dollars into it and so you would listen to the full thing and you'd like really pay attention to it and now, if you can stream an album for two seconds and be like, it's whatever. Yeah. You don't care.
Speaker 4:Mean, I think yes, I think that. I also think that it's just if the if the three of us wanted to make a song right now and upload it and have it on iTunes and Spotify this week, we could do that. Yeah. And I don't think that I don't think the world needs that from us or from many from many other people. And I I think that but, yes, you're right.
Speaker 4:I think when you would go to the store, access was harder. I mean, we talk about this all the time. Like, I grew up I remember the day that we got Internet at my parents' house. You know what I mean? We had the Dell in the fucking family room.
Speaker 4:I remember it, like, the whole thing. And if you remember a time before that, I think the effort that was involved to like anything or or to to understand anything was so much greater.
Speaker 1:Because you had the pieces together through, like, magazines and going to a show and that kind
Speaker 2:of thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You go to a show. You go to magazines. You look at the liner notes of an album and see which bands get thanked and then go find those bands. You know?
Speaker 4:It's like it was that it was kinda that tactile and that granular. But, yeah, I I think it's like I I think that, like, Spotify and and streaming in general, like, I know people that make a lot of money on streaming, and they're very happy with that. I know a lot of people, and the the I think general sentiment is no one gets paid enough. And, of course, I always want artists to get paid more because they you know, it's a soundtrack to our lives. It's, like, important for culture.
Speaker 4:But I also think that people forget that these are just giant corporations, And they've got bottom again, they've got bottom lines, and, like, they're gonna do whatever they have to do to make that work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you think corporate jingles could make a comeback?
Speaker 4:They have. What do you mean? I mean, you know that you know famously Pusha T from Clips wrote the McDonald's jingle. I'm loving it.
Speaker 2:No way. No way. Yeah. I have no idea.
Speaker 4:He'll never have to work again. You know? That's a alone. Yeah. So I think it's all that stuff.
Speaker 4:I mean, it's like the way that, like, John Hamm is the voice of Mercedes. Like, everybody gets it how they can. You know what I mean? I think the jingle or I mean, what we talk about a lot on How Long Gone is, like, sync culture, you know, and, like, how there used to be, like, a you would be a sellout, you know, if they used your song in a in a Jack in the Box commercial. And now it's like, well, that's the most money I'm gonna make.
Speaker 4:If they're gonna give me a quarter million dollars to use my song for thirty seconds, like, I have to do that. You know, the choice isn't isn't quite as clear as it used to be. And so we've talked to a lot of different musicians about regret, you know, how they, like, pass something up cause they were high on their horse in their early And now that they're 40, they're like, I'm a fucking idiot. Like Yeah. It was half a million dollars.
Speaker 4:Like, who cares?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:You you said that they've made a comeback already. Like, is there a more modern example than the than the McDonald's I
Speaker 4:love it. I I mean, I feel like you might be right. I I feel like they're just they're ingrained in my brain, so they feel new. Totally. Cars for kids or something is probably 20 years old.
Speaker 4:If you guys ever lived in New York, there's one eight seven seven cars. Totally. Like, you you know.
Speaker 2:I I I yeah. I know it well. I'm just thinking about, like, of the new companies that have emerged, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, OpenAI, like Good point. SpaceX, like, Tesla doesn't have a jingle. Like, they they like, I I don't know if those would be even, like, on brand, but, like Car.
Speaker 4:I feel
Speaker 2:like car companies. Even even, like, Prime from Logan Paul. Like, he he's done a song. Like, he did he did, like, it's everyday, bro, with his brother, I think, or maybe that was just his brother. But, you know, like, there are influencer brands.
Speaker 2:MrBeast has a chocolate bar, and I don't know that it has a a jingle. And I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact, like, the nature of advertising has become, like, way longer tail in this in the and the creative. Like, we we don't see that many, like, shelling points for, like, wow. They made an iconic ad. It ran at the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2:Everyone's talking about it. It's more like they spent the same amount of money on ads, but it's just in the form of a thousand different Instagram ads. And everyone saw a slightly different one that was more tailored to them, so the guys saw the one that had go all the time.
Speaker 1:Alpha making a jingle right now and using the same jingle on, like, thousands of different creative. So it's always the same audio and different Go crazy.
Speaker 4:Than you just Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then you I think we're onto something here.
Speaker 1:Ramp. Time is money. Save both.
Speaker 2:Find your happy place.
Speaker 4:I mean, with car companies, they they obsess over, like, the sounds the cars make. Know what Like, you know what I I drove this new Mercedes from Atlanta to Miami for the f one, and it was like, there was all this detail.
Speaker 1:I'm a huge Mercedes fan.
Speaker 2:We love Mercedes over here. We we have tons of them.
Speaker 4:I'm in I'm in Bedford, New York right now, and I borrowed a a CLE AMG convertible. Oh, yeah. Better.
Speaker 5:A great
Speaker 1:53.
Speaker 4:But I just noticed all the but when you drive these car, you notice, like, these little kind of sort of
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Grand moments where it's like a little noise when something starts up or, like, it is audio or, like, how famously, like, Porsche has a guy whose only job is about, like, the way the door sounds when it closes because it sounds so much better in a Porsche than other cars. You
Speaker 1:know? Yeah. But it but
Speaker 4:it's just a funny I think there is these audio elements that are happening from a brand standpoint, but they're not quite as overt as, like, a jingle. You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It does feel like Doug D'Amiro has this take that, like, power is on demand. Like, the latest Rivian truck, electric truck, has 1,200 horsepower. It's the same as a Bugatti Veyron. Like, it is it it, like, can't go when you want.
Speaker 2:That's what
Speaker 4:you wanna When you're driving or or a mid sized Grandma a sponsor? Is Rivian No.
Speaker 2:No. No. No.
Speaker 4:Alright. Because that Rivian is Rivian's like the that that is like the Austin mesh hat, Yeti cooler of cars. So now I just don't I don't get the popularity. I don't think it looks good. I mean, I guess it's an alternative to Tesla.
Speaker 4:So that's part of the
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think the main thing was that, like, Tesla hadn't come out with a with a truck yet, then they came out with a very controversial design. And then the f one fifty Lightning was pretty expensive, and the Rivian kinda was just pure play, like, didn't confuse anyone. And and then they did have the full size SUV or, like, close to full size
Speaker 4:SUV For sure.
Speaker 2:In the electric category, a little bit sooner than the Hyundai IONIQ nine and a couple others. It it it it says a little bit more. But it is interesting because between Lucid and Rivian and
Speaker 4:I forgot about Lucid.
Speaker 2:And and there's Polestar. That Polestar. Polestar is technically like a a a Volkswagen or a
Speaker 4:Oh, is
Speaker 2:it? Yeah. It's it's it's not a Volkswagen. It's the Volvo. Like, Volvo's
Speaker 4:I I go to I go to Copenhagen Fashion Week a couple times a year. It's all and the drivers are it's all Polestar. It's all
Speaker 2:It's Polestar. I mean, every brand is confused with what to do with electric. Like, it's like, do we throw it a is it a powertrain? We just throw a little I at the end or x or an e at the end or do we do a whole new sub brand or do we spin something out?
Speaker 1:Oh, what are you have you seen that have you seen the new the new Lamborghini? What is what is that the EV?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. What was that called?
Speaker 1:It's called the
Speaker 4:Why do they have to make them look
Speaker 1:like that?
Speaker 2:The Lanzador. You gotta pull up a picture of the Lanzador. This thing looks wild.
Speaker 4:It is What is it? What is it? A Lambo?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a Lamborghini Lanzador.
Speaker 4:What's it called? Lanzador.
Speaker 2:They're it an SUV, but it just looks like a really big car.
Speaker 1:Like a lifted sedan.
Speaker 2:It looks like a lifted sedan. It looks like
Speaker 4:a lifted sedan. It's
Speaker 2:kinda sick. It's kinda sick. And then there's the slate truck which is coming out, which is like a small thing. But but I think that some of the new companies, like, they're so focused on, like, just deliver on the basic value prop. They're not in that, like, surprise and delight category yet.
Speaker 2:Although Yeah. Yeah. Rubion did kinda do that with, like, that gear tunnel. You you know about that in the truck?
Speaker 4:I like okay. Yeah. That is a that is just a a big old car.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a big car. SUV.
Speaker 1:Guys, that just seems like
Speaker 4:a Subaru. No joke.
Speaker 1:The That's hey. That's like a Subaru halo car. Like that that should be there. It's Subaru. Total total tangent, I did have one question and then one idea that I wanted to throw out before before you jump.
Speaker 1:Do you think that any social media apps will become truly Lindy? Like, will we be on x like, thirty years from now, chopping it up on the timeline?
Speaker 4:Is Look, it as a as a I call it Twitter still. I'm a I'm a traditionalist. But for this purpose, I will call it x. I x is the most enduring platform that we have because I think it's not image based. I think that's what sets it apart.
Speaker 4:It it feels more comedy and information. Yeah. And those are two things that I feel like aren't as affected by trends in some ways. Whereas, like, Instagram, I love Instagram. I use it every day.
Speaker 4:But, like, people get when people get very exhausted by it because of what they have to see, you know. And I think Twitter, don't know. I'm a I'm a Twitter diehard. I'm a power user. I have been forever, and I will never change that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's awesome. I hope yeah. It's one of
Speaker 1:those things like, is is is it digital news or is it like the form is it its own like form factor like Vinyl that will just perpetuate forever?
Speaker 4:Alright. We're gonna find out.
Speaker 1:Last last question. Media media and entertainment question because you're an entertainer. Do you think there's room in the market for next election cycle pay per view boxing between both political parties. So so so like Democrats versus Republicans, betting on the line American.
Speaker 4:I I will I'll pay I'll pay a $100 for the PPV for that. I mean, I think that if we're I I don't think we're that far away from honestly, I know that's a joke. I don't think we're that far away.
Speaker 1:No. I'm not. I'm actually serious. Really don't. Think every four years, you get ten ten Dems, 10 Republicans, get them lined up in different weight classes, $100.
Speaker 1:Duke it out. Yeah. Settle settle it. I would I
Speaker 4:would love to see some low level, you know, first year senators just bloodying themselves in the on the on the opening rounds, you know. That's what
Speaker 1:we need. It doesn't even it could just be angry online posters too, know.
Speaker 4:Settle it. Settle Settle That's a that's a category of fighting that has not been monetized yet. Something we should think about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's like Dana White's slapboxing thing or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Experience required. Slapboxing would be huge.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Alright. Well, this was super fun.
Speaker 2:Let's do
Speaker 1:it again soon. And you come back on again soon.
Speaker 2:This is great. We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 4:Guys. Thanks so much. Alright. Have a good one.
Speaker 2:Good luck with the rest of your live shows. We were talking about jingles. We gotta sing you a jingle. Find your happy place. Find your happy Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service.
Speaker 2:It's a vacation home, but better folks.
Speaker 1:And Chris Buskirk
Speaker 2:is
Speaker 1:in the Restream waiting room.
Speaker 2:Let's bring him in. Buskirk. How are doing, Chris? I'm alright. How are you?
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, you got to hear us singing
Speaker 2:just now. We're we're trying to bring back corporate jingles. We think that there's an unexplored territory there. I don't know your stance.
Speaker 1:1789. Oh.
Speaker 2:I think we got something.
Speaker 3:I know why we don't I actually know why we don't have them anymore.
Speaker 2:Please explain.
Speaker 3:It's because big pharma took over advertising and that killed all the creativity.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting. Man, they gotta throw those Yeah. It's forty second commercial.
Speaker 3:Twenty seconds tells you all the bad things that are gonna happen
Speaker 2:to you when
Speaker 3:you take the drug.
Speaker 2:It's rough.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. So so the the conspiracy theory there, I don't have my tinfoil hat handy, is that it's not about even generating awareness. Here we go. I got we keep one of these anytime we have
Speaker 2:to Discuss a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1:Discuss a conspiracy theory. It gives you cover, you know. Yeah. I don't I don't believe this necessarily but, you you listen to these pharma ads and they're after after listening to it, I would say you're much more likely to think, I don't think this I don't think this is for me. Right?
Speaker 1:Because you maybe hear about some benefits and then you get like twenty seconds of of but it's just it's it's is it a mechanism to just invest so many dollars in a show that the show could not possibly criticize the Yeah. Yeah. The the pharm the pharma industry broadly. Otherwise, you're potentially
Speaker 2:Is this manufactured consent? Says Noam Chomsky, but has been written and rewritten.
Speaker 1:Well, it's more like it's more like, yeah, you're welcome to criticize big pharma, but like say goodbye to like what 60% of your revenue every night? Sure. Anyways Not gonna be running the late show. We're not gonna be talking about more conspiracies. Anyway,
Speaker 2:let's kick it off with an introduction.
Speaker 3:Theory is always also known as the news six months early.
Speaker 2:In the future. Yeah. But but let's introduce yourself. How do you think about yourself? What what what what key projects are you working on right now?
Speaker 3:You know, the you know, cofounder of seventeen eighty nine Capital, as you guys know, like, I've got some other avocations Yeah. As well. But, you know, just, you know, I people always say, like, how do you split up your time? And, like, there was, like, the there was, like, the Rubik's cube question for me for a while, and then I realized actually the, the simple answer is right, which is, like, all the different stuff I'm doing is all the same project, which is how do you keep the country peaceful and prosperous? Like, that's really it.
Speaker 3:Then there's all kinds of different vectors of attack there. There's, like there's politics. There's culture. There's business. There's tech.
Speaker 3:But it's really all with the same telos. Like, how how do we just make life better for this country and the people in it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Give me a give me a temperature check on your view on the business climate. There's been so many new so many stories about tariffs and interest rates and all sorts of stuff. At the same time, the stock market's been, like down and then right back to where it was. And so there's like the nothing ever happens view.
Speaker 2:There's the incredibly tumultuous times view. How are you just feeling about the business climate generally?
Speaker 1:And I'll put
Speaker 3:up better a surplus. Than it's been in a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, this is what you know, I've had a I I've had the following conversation. It probably literally, like, 10 or 20 times in the past few months. And people, whether it's a lot of investors, but also founders slash builders have said a a different version of the same thing, which is I didn't know how much I was self censoring my own thought about what was possible over the past four or five years until, you know, fill in the blank, January, February, March, April, whatever, just some of this year. And then they realized, like, oh, the shackles are off. We can actually go and do really cool stuff now.
Speaker 3:And there were they everybody had their project. Like, there it was, like, there was a pain point in their business. Like, oh, I can't do this. Or, like, know, like, the crypto guys or AI, like, they're really, really under under attack.
Speaker 4:You know,
Speaker 3:it was, like, regulation by enforcement.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 3:And so they knew what the pain points were. And so for obvious reasons, we're super focused on those things. Yeah. And they're like, oh, if we could just get through this, then we could do this one other thing, whatever that may have been. And what I've heard them what I've heard a lot of people saying is once the pain stopped, I realized that there were, like, 10 other things that normally did I wanna do, but that I could do.
Speaker 3:And so, like, the amount of optimism and energy is just really infectious. It's like it's a great time to be alive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like I mean, we saw that with a lot of the nuclear founders. Like, you talk to those folks. And, I mean, it was so rough for a while that they normally like, if you invest in my company, I don't want you to invest in a direct competitor. But the nuclear companies were like, look.
Speaker 2:Like, that's not gonna be the thing that does me in. Like, you can go ahead and invest. And then now we finally have some clarity from the EO. We talked to some nuclear founders, it feels like we're on the cusp of some real progress there. How much are you focusing on energy?
Speaker 2:What are the other categories that you find, interesting right now? What do you see as being, like, uniquely unlocked, in this new era?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's we call it the, I I don't think we made it up, but, like, we call it, like, transformational technology. So that means, like, AI AI infra Mhmm. Energy, robotics, space, defense. Those are kinda like the big buckets.
Speaker 3:In a lot of cases, there's a lot of they're they're really related. You know, we like, way at least the way we think about energy is, like, it's attached to all of those. Sure. And, you know, that's where that's where nuclear really comes in, but particularly around AI and crypto and some of the other elements of just security in general. Like, that is the major unlock.
Speaker 3:Like, one of the things that I tell people all the time is, you know, like, if you wanna, like, a just an easy heuristic about, like, you know, how you think about, like, what are the big unlocks that need to have happened, which is that think about it this way. The large civilization that has access to the most abundant cheapest energy wins, like period, full stop. I was talking with a friend of mine, another investor last week, and I he actually had he had this great description, which I had actually never thought of about colonization of Mars because I was saying how, you know, like, you know, obviously, Elon's been super focused on it. And, like, I don't wanna go to Mars. Like, I've never wanted to go to Mars.
Speaker 3:It seems like it seems like it sucks there. Yeah. I said, but then I realized that actually, like, terraforming Mars, like, that's actually kind of cool because it would make it someplace you'd actually wanna go. So that's why, like, mar like, Mars colonization has become charismatic because, like, just like, getting to the moon was was interesting and charismatic in the sixties because it was, like, can we get there? Like, was just the it was just like the journey, not the not the end.
Speaker 3:But then when you start to think about the idea of, of of colonization of Mars, well, it's interesting when you think that, like, you could make it beautiful. And and what he said was, it's just an energy problem. If you can bring enough energy to bear, then you can terraform a then you can terraform Mars. I was like, that was actually for me. That was, like, an interesting way to think about it that I hadn't considered, but the same thing applies to everything else, which is if you have if you have super abundant, super cheap energy, you're as a as a large scale civilization, you're gonna win because it makes everything else better, easier, cheaper, and things that were not possible, it makes them possible.
Speaker 3:Kinda like the way SpaceX what SpaceX has done with launch by just driving the cost per kilogram into the dirt. There's it unlocks all these other businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:If if great power competition is is energy competition, Do do we, you know, I mean, the the concern here is that China is just like copy and pasting nuclear reactors and we have a bunch of Yep. Great nuclear startups that are, you know, making efforts and some new projects. I think Meta, you know, has announced some some new initiatives there. But is this not, like, one of the kind of biggest issues that we're facing from a national security standpoint?
Speaker 3:There's a way in which it's the biggest because it because it touches everything. Like, it touches literally everything. I mean, you think about, like, these really critical growth areas, AI being the super obvious one. But, you know and there's you know, I've seen a number of analyses that show, like, the the amount of AI compute we need to build just in this country, like, let's say, in the next ten years or by 2035, like, it would consume more power than we produce right now
Speaker 2:as a.
Speaker 3:So there's, like, we need to be producing a lot more power because unlike certain members of congress, it turns out electricity doesn't just come from the wall. Like, you actually have to produce it someplace.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Food comes from the grocery store. Gasoline comes from the pump. Electricity comes
Speaker 3:from wall. What are you slow? You just plug in just plug in and there's electricity there.
Speaker 2:I I do think there's something there's something fascinating about, like, it's so hard to predict the future. It's so hard to predict what we will need, you know, a gigawatt, you know, data center for. And then all of a sudden, it's like, we need it today. Like, we have the use case. We need it today.
Speaker 2:And and I'm and I keep thinking about, like, what happened in the .com boom where we overbuilt all this dark fiber. Google went and bought it up, a bunch of the tech companies bought it up. And then eventually, like, the the the products caught up. My my question is, how do you think about projects that might be uneconomical to underwrite on the venture side? And so they might need to be underwritten by the government.
Speaker 2:Like like, I'm I feel like we're probably aligned in that, like, we should probably keep the government as narrow as possible, but there are some really crazy things like the moon landing, like the Mars helicopter stuff that just doesn't make any sense for any private company to go after. And then after a while, you start seeing, like, oh, okay. Like, you know, they built some roads. They built some infrastructure, and now private companies are catching up and and actually ramping up the the the use of that energy or something. But how do you see the government playing a role in the next in solving those fundamental problems?
Speaker 2:Is it purely just on deregulation? Do you wanna see funding flow into certain projects? Do you wanna see government doing hard projects? What do you how what's your philosophy on that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It it's it's both it's both. It is the answer. It's like we've just seen, you know, just the as I was saying earlier, like, just this year, just by getting out of the way unlocks a lot. And it just there's so many people who want to do things and who have the capacity to do things if they're not being shackled and prevented from doing them.
Speaker 3:So, like, we've seen a lot of that Yeah. The past seven months is just by getting out of the way and giving people permission to do it, you get a lot of you get a lot of activity. And so that's a big part of it. But then there there are these other issues, where, you know, China creates its national champions. And so, like, great example is, like, rare earth magnets.
Speaker 3:You know, it is it it can be, it is I mean, they subsidize it. So it is cheaper to buy a rare earth magnet from a Chinese supplier than it is to buy the raw materials in The United States. Know, it that is I mean, that's where it's that's geopolitics. Right? That's not just markets.
Speaker 3:That's not just economics. That's not just innovation. That's geopolitics. The the Chinese have been on they've been on top of this for twenty years and realized that this was a choke point where they were would be able to get a huge amount of leverage over their competitors and adversaries. And I guess we're someplace in, you know, in between those two things with with China.
Speaker 3:And if they were able to subsidize them, they could drive out all the the competitors out of business. And because they go into literally everything of any importance that they'd have massive, not just economic leverage, but, like, geopolitical leverage over The United States. And so that's a place where, you know, government needs to play a role because it's not a company v company competition. It is a state actor v company competition as it stands right now, and that's something that's critical to national security. So you see that, I think, in a a number of other, a number of other spaces, but, you know, the rare earth magnets is, like it's just a very obvious example of that where you can't like, yeah, a company can be super innovative and can do all the right things.
Speaker 3:But if it is facing a state actor as its competitor versus another company, like, they're gonna lose.
Speaker 2:Yeah. On the rare earth materials question, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal last week about Apple buying half a billion dollars of rare earths from a company called MP Materials. And In Vegas. And in Las Vegas. And it stuck it stuck out to me as kind of a vibe shift because Apple hasn't been at the front of, like, re industrialize America, bring back jobs, and, you know, let's make everything in America.
Speaker 2:They're not saying that, but it feels like maybe behind the scenes, they're at least thinking about their supply chain very seriously and trying to diversify. And maybe it's a cruise ship, but they're putting their hands on the tiller just a little bit. And so I took that as, like, cause for optimism with the overall, you know, energy independence, supply chain independence. But did you see that story? Are there any other causes for optimism that might be coming from the the the crowd that's not cheering as loud as they can, but might be getting you know, might might be working behind the scenes to kind of achieve the same goals that everyone should be aligned around.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, look, there's a there's a lot of signal, I think, in that in that move. I mean, the the at some point, Apple has to realize that their supply chains are really, really insecure.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And this is like another point on the rare earth magnets. Like, one of the things like, the one of the what great sort of unintended consequences of the Liberation Day tariffs and the and the general policy of a tariff policy coming out of the administration is that this actually was turned out to be a forcing function. It made China play their rarest card way too early. Had they decided, for instance, to attack Taiwan and then played that card, that would have been the optimum optimum moment. But what happened was is that the in the negotiations around tariffs, they they threatened to play the rare earths card.
Speaker 3:In fact, they did actually, like, reduce exports, the past couple months, but it was too soon. Like, they they played it early, and now there's time for The United States, to catch up. And this is, you know, in fact, as we saw with MP, you know, and the support they've gotten from the government. Another company that we're in the process of investing in called Vulcan Elements is is in the space as well. That's good.
Speaker 3:And we now have a window in time where we can build out an ecosystem to manufacture earth magnets in The United States and do it really, really quickly. So that that's just a place where, like, there's, like, there's there's a lot of signal coming out around that as well. But there's I think the the fact that there is so much happening and, and at such a rapid rate, that's where we're seeing, but that's where we're really seeing the advances here because of, like I don't know. Like, people ask me, like, like, are you pleased with the way the admin's gone? Yeah.
Speaker 3:I am. What I've been surprised by, though, is the speed with which they've moved. And what's happened is, like, they're moving at, like, founder speed, and that that becomes infectious. And so now you get you get cycles that might have taken a year or two or three to to happen and work things work through the system in the past. And now, like, we see we're I mean, we're standing up a rare earth's capacity in in The United States basically overnight.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That was like a pipe dream four or five months ago, and now it's actually happening.
Speaker 2:We gotta stop calling them rare earths. They're just earths. They're just earth magnets.
Speaker 4:They're not rare.
Speaker 2:They're not rare.
Speaker 3:They're they're only the process form is rare.
Speaker 2:Yes. The industrial capacity is rare. But the product is not. Let's just call them earth It is.
Speaker 1:It is. You gotta you gotta, you know, we we probably criticize China more than than most podcasters
Speaker 4:on earth.
Speaker 1:But you gotta give them credit for letting the world think that they were just the happy meal toy manufacturing hub for like a couple decades. Yeah. Yeah. And then just like quietly owned you know, all all these critical supply chains. I'm curious how you're thinking about solar.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. One of the reasons I ask is I've invested in tons of these different kind of hard tech, new industrials categories. And I've yet to back a solar company. I only, you know, started actively angel investing maybe four or five years ago. And it's fallen out of fashion is one way to
Speaker 2:describe Casey Hammer's bringing it back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Casey is the only is the example and
Speaker 4:I would I would
Speaker 1:happily invest in Casey if I had the chance. But curious how you're thinking about that. It's another area that China is dominant in and it seems like something that we wouldn't necessarily want long term.
Speaker 3:So, like, I've been sort like, semi obsessed with solar for a long time. I just, like it's mostly just basically being, like, thrifty. I'm like, damn. There's all that sunlight, and I can just power my house for free. You know?
Speaker 3:So, like, like, I like, at my house in Arizona, I have solar.
Speaker 4:And I've
Speaker 3:had it for years. Okay? But it's really not economic. And so there's needs to be a pretty big leap forward for it to for it to matter. Otherwise, why not just build more nuclear?
Speaker 3:Right? Then why not why don't we just keep it simple?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Casey, I mean, interesting point.
Speaker 3:Like PV solar is actually isn't that good and, like, the concentrators are, like, okay. But, like, again, like, we have the solution already. So there's gotta be a compelling case to be made as to why under the current, like, either with the current technology around solar, why is that even worth focusing on?
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah. Casey's point was like, China is subsidizing photovoltaic manufacturing, And and the and the most hurtful thing you could do is just buy all of it to so that they take a loss on every unit and then build up your capacity. But I don't know that that actually would would would catalyze a real shift in capacity and we might just get kind
Speaker 1:of You're still helping them get extremely good at
Speaker 2:Especially if there's learning curve and stuff. So I don't know. It's a it's longer conversation.
Speaker 3:And PV is just not that efficient. Right?
Speaker 4:That's the problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think the I think the the argument was that it's like it's very well matched to the load of the grid of the American consumer because when it's hot out, we run our air conditioning. And when it's hot out, the sun is shining on the PV cells. And so there's some match there, whereas a nuclear power plant generates just as much at night as it does in the day. So I don't know.
Speaker 2:There there's a whole bunch of different load use cases for AI training versus inference and all this different stuff. But it's, yeah, it's it's a fascinating geopolitical dynamic. And it seems like the main takeaway is that China has just been saying yes and to everything. They develop capacity everywhere. And it's like, we could try and predict the future.
Speaker 2:But if PV winds up being really important, I want to have capacity for that. If nuclear I want that too. I want I want the smorgasbord. Give me all the energy. But I don't know.
Speaker 3:They're building a ton of coal plants too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. A 100%. And, like, fortunately, you know, some of the AI infrastructure build outs are pulling forward some of that.
Speaker 2:We're getting a whole bunch of natural gas online. Like, we are becoming more energy independent. So green shoots all over the place. Jordy, anything else? Last question?
Speaker 1:I think that's it
Speaker 4:for now.
Speaker 2:Was fantastic, We gotta have you back on, especially when there's, like, big news in your world or anything going on that you can comment on.
Speaker 3:Time. Happy to do
Speaker 2:it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We we need we we just need thirty seconds notice. We'll drop you the we'll drop you
Speaker 2:link. You can just hop right on.
Speaker 3:Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Just you can signal it signal me. I'll be on.
Speaker 2:I will. I'll talk to you soon, Chris. Have a great day, Chris. Bye. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Bye.
Speaker 1:And speaking of minerals, we have
Speaker 2:adquick.com. If you're selling minerals, put it on a billboard. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines a technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
Speaker 2:What were you saying about materials?
Speaker 1:Well, we have the founder of Mariana Minerals joining the show.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the stream. Hit the soundboard. Give me the Ashton Hall. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Turner?
Speaker 7:Good. How are doing, guys?
Speaker 2:Beautiful map behind you. I Nice. I love cartography. I'm a big fan of of of throwing a map in the background.
Speaker 1:Is that three d or like, does it have texture or does it just kind of look at look like It's
Speaker 7:got a little bit of texture. Good. Not not crazy three d, though.
Speaker 2:With that Mercator projection, I'm pretty sure. Okay. It's a good one. Anyway, introduce yourself. What do you do?
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Sure thing. Thanks for having me on, guys. Turner Caldwell here, CEO of Mariana Minerals. We're a vertically integrated software first mining company.
Speaker 7:So we're coming into projects that are you know, have post exploration. They've discovered the mineral deposit, and we come in to engineer it. So we develop the mine plan. We develop the refining plan. We capitalize it at the project level up from the top co.
Speaker 7:And then we we manage the construction. We manage the construct the commissioning, and then we operate it out into perpetuity.
Speaker 2:Okay. Talk to me about the whole pipeline of actually getting minerals out of the ground. Let's say I own a 100,000 acres in Alaska or something. I bought it just as a forest. It's a ranch.
Speaker 2:Never explored it. What are the steps where I imagine we're talking about, like, a decade of exploration firms, then you come in at some point. Like, really walk me through a concrete example of going from, like, someone has some land to now we're getting material.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. And if if you're this verticalized, why not also do discovery?
Speaker 2:I'm sure there's
Speaker 1:a reason.
Speaker 4:I'm I'm sure there's
Speaker 3:a reason.
Speaker 7:There's a a big market of folks that are doing discovery. There's actually a bunch of awesome, like, tech, VC backed startups that are focused on accelerating discovery. I think what we're missing is folks that are focused on condensing the timelines from when you have discovered something
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:To when it is actually producing.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:And it's like this sneak in the grass kind of challenge, like, very complicated system of actually designing these plants, buying out all the infrastructure, installing the infrastructure, getting it running. But yeah. So you start with a, you know, flat piece of land. Ideally, it's flat. And you'll start this, like, really long campaign of you know, you'll start with kind of, like, spot testing of different areas to determine and probably some, like, surface sampling to determine if there's something promising there.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. There's some permits that come into play when it when it when you have to actually start doing more advanced exploration campaigns, and that's something that, you know, if you're on federal land and sometimes on state land, those permits can get in the way of of accelerating kind of mineral discovery. You'll do drill holes, you know, hundreds to thousands of drill holes to define a mineral deposit. And those mineral deposits can vary all over the place. You can have shallower ones where it's a little bit cheaper to drill.
Speaker 7:You can have really deep ones where it to get much more expensive to do and timely time intensive to do that exploration campaign. And all along the way, you are taking samples, and you are kind of building these three these three d models to try to understand how was the deposit formed, why is the mineral there in the first place, and that helps to kind of inform also the the advancing the exploration side of things. And in parallel with that, you're starting to do these testing campaigns where you're running concentration tests to figure out how you can upgrade the ore to an intermediate product. You're starting to do refining tests to understand how you would actually extract the target mineral into its final state, which is, you know, a high purity metal alloy in many cases or a or a a high purity kind of specialty chemical salt. And so you're writing these reports all along the way.
Speaker 7:So you'll start with a PEA, which is an initial economic assessment. You'll then do a prefeasibility study. You'll do a feasibility study. You'll do a definitive feasibility study. And kind of as you're doing that, the value of the asset is kind of increasing and increasing.
Speaker 7:Speculators are piling into the stock. And the intent there
Speaker 2:Let's hear for the speculators. The backbone of the mining
Speaker 1:and penny stock rippers.
Speaker 4:I love it.
Speaker 7:That's right. That that's how that exploration is is funded really.
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 7:They're trying to like ride that first wave of value creation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Similar to like FDA trials for new pharmaceuticals probably.
Speaker 1:Well, I can and I can I can I I'm starting to figure out, you know, a number of reasons while you're explaining them why you wouldn't wanna do the exploration and discoveries because that could take like ten years?
Speaker 4:Why don't you just
Speaker 2:do this thing and then he goes on to describe the hardest thing in the world?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. But then but the other thing is like the duration ideally, you start working with a customer, and they're like, here's what we have in the ground. Help us get it out. And then you
Speaker 7:can just start doing that. That's exactly right. And that's that's how we're thinking about it is we wanna be the ones that go from, you know, the folks that are doing the expiration, they're they're there to define the resource and ideally get some return on the invested capital that they had as they were kind of, like, going through this, like, long and arduous process of defining mineral resource. Mhmm. But, typically, those are geologists, financiers, lawyers.
Speaker 7:It's very rare where you'll see a a junior mining company that's actually staffed to take it all the way through to production. Mhmm. It's a it's a different class of business fundamentally. Like, you're dealing with in in, say, like, very high CapEx deployment, complex kind of mining and and refining systems that, you know, span the the the entire ecosystem of, like, engineering skill sets, commercial skill sets. And so there's a nice hand off point there.
Speaker 7:And so what happens today is the junior mining companies will spend a lot of time exploring, build increase the value the asset. Ideally, they flip it to a large mining company that comes in to do the hard yards of actually getting the thing operating. And that's where we wanna come in as well. So, you know, the big mining companies, they're looking for billion dollar opportunities to deploy billions of dollars of capital, and, you know, they they pick their spots on the commodities also. So you might have a commodity that's out of favor, and so no one's picking up the asset.
Speaker 7:You might have an asset that, you know, would be called subscale in this scenario where it's not a billion dollars of CapEx. It's only a couple $100,000,000 of CapEx. Still a big project. And those are getting ignored. And so we think that with the differentiation on the tech stack, on the software side of things that we're bringing in and also a differentiated team, we can bring these smaller scale assets, are, like, right sized for us as a as an early stage company into production while they've been kind of ignored by the big mining companies.
Speaker 1:Alright. One more question, and then we'll talk about the news today. But when did you first yearn for the mines?
Speaker 4:Yeah. What is
Speaker 7:to the mines. So when I graduated college, I actually had this, like, vision of moving to Australia and going and working in the mines. I never quite quite, like, converted on that. But worked at Tesla for nine years and change. Started out up in Reno.
Speaker 7:I was working on the Gigafactory up there, kind of, like, designing, building it, and started working on battery cell manufacturing, started working on areas of the cell chemistry and in the supply chain side of things. And as I was moving kind of further and further upstream, you know, the the the mining industry is is wild. It's an awesome industry, but it's definitely been neglected. Like, we've kind of been viewing it as dirty and, you know, it should happen. It should it should happen, but it shouldn't happen here.
Speaker 7:And it's also, like, this massive it's this awesome opportunity to work across scales. Like, a lot of what you're developing starts at, like, the micron scale of, like, how do I get this atom out of this other atom? Well, not atoms. But Yeah. This, like, atom out of this mineral.
Speaker 7:And then you have to scale that up to, like, kilometer scale infrastructure. And, like, that breadth of scales is awesome.
Speaker 2:That's really cool.
Speaker 1:What's the news today, if I might
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So we're ah, there we go. We're coming out of stealth with our series a raise. We had Andreessen Goldens, Costa Ventures, Break through Energy Ventures, and a couple of other folks join in. We've raised $65,000,000 There we go. Today.
Speaker 7:So
Speaker 4:left.
Speaker 1:First first hit of the week.
Speaker 2:Oh, it feels so good. Congratulations. Fantastic news.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Last question before you jump off. Are you are you guys, like, acquiring any companies or or is it fully ground up? You're just Yeah.
Speaker 7:So we we'll we'll we'll step in and we'll acquire mineral assets that that makes sense for us to step into. We're we're working on that in the copper space right now, actually.
Speaker 1:But that's like buying the land, not necessarily, like, basically buying the resource itself, not like a surrounding company or maybe it is structured as
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So it'll it'll it'll it'll vary. There's a lot of mining projects that are on care and maintenance that, you know, have were turned off and could be turned back on with, you know, if you come in and retrofit to deploy kinda like the reinforcement learning platform that we're working to deploy, which means you need more instrumentation, you need more control to be able to control the the big refinery, which is basically a big robot. And in certain cases, it it might be a a mine that's actually operating today that we can step into and we see opportunity for uplift. And in other areas, it'll be a greenfield asset where, you know, we're stepping in and partnering in partnering with the resource owner. And then we would have a cash flow, split kind of once we bring it to commercial scale so that they can keep exploring.
Speaker 7:And you kinda create this flywheel where they're continuing to explore. They're leveraging cash flows from operating assets to to fund their exploration, and then we would step in a diff to develop those those assets over time. So it's pretty variable. But, yeah, we have
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So, basically,
Speaker 1:the market the market prices certain assets here, and you guys look at it and say, with our technology, this is actually worth, you know, some some premium on that.
Speaker 7:That's exactly right. And in certain cases, the market will say that there's no net asset value or no no NAV. And we'll and that's an area where you can kinda step in and and and get a good deal and bring it into bring it into production.
Speaker 1:He's a value miner.
Speaker 4:That's value.
Speaker 1:Is cool. Congratulations. We I'm like, we're gonna do a lot more on rare earths Yeah. Broadly.
Speaker 2:We hope you're back.
Speaker 1:We're we're gonna stop calling them rare because we got plenty. We're just
Speaker 4:gonna call
Speaker 1:them earths.
Speaker 7:There are lot out there. They're they're hard to find in high concentrations and and hard to get out, but they're they're out there.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, congratulations to you and the team on the raise, and hope hopefully have you back on soon.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Awesome.
Speaker 4:Appreciate it, Cheers.
Speaker 2:8. Go to 8. Get a pod five ultra. They have a five year warranty, a thirty night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Get Eight Sleep.
Speaker 2:We have our next guest
Speaker 1:I'm very
Speaker 2:Altimeter sick. Coming in the studio.
Speaker 1:I gotta give people the I'm so sick.
Speaker 2:The show.
Speaker 1:My HRV thinks that I'm So thank you to my Eight Sleep for getting
Speaker 2:Sitting your life. Saving my life It's life saving technology. You heard it here first. That is health claim. Not a health claim.
Speaker 1:Not. Awesome. We have
Speaker 2:Ask your doctor about saving your life with an Eight Sleep.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna botch his name. Jamin.
Speaker 2:Let's bring him in There from we go. How you doing?
Speaker 1:Good. What's happening? Great
Speaker 5:to be here.
Speaker 2:Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Sorry for botching your name on the way in. How
Speaker 5:do see it? Given name is Benjamin.
Speaker 1:Benjamin.
Speaker 5:My parents called me Jammin as a toddler. That's In kindergarten, they're a bunch of Benjamins, they just told my teacher, hey, call him Jammin. That's what we call That's amazing.
Speaker 1:So I was trying to give it I was trying to give it this, like, exotic
Speaker 2:pronunciation. Hobbies. Yeah. We've gotten every variety over
Speaker 5:the No. The only one that bugs me is Jasmine. Other than that, it's anything goes.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, good to meet you.
Speaker 1:Jasmine. Welcome to stream. Jasmine Ball. Powerful. Likewise.
Speaker 5:What's going Turner and I actually, good friends in college. It's fun seeing him on the show right before.
Speaker 2:Amazing. No way. Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:awesome. No way. They're very cool. Where'd you
Speaker 4:guys go to school?
Speaker 5:We were at Stanford together.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. So you had a sort
Speaker 2:of nontraditional Yeah.
Speaker 5:Background. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's kinda like the Stanford of feeders into VC.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It really is. Yeah. It really is. Well, it's great to have you on the show.
Speaker 1:I feel like you guys over at Altimeter have just been on a run. Just Dracking up like I feel like Invest Americas or the the Trump accounts is like feels like almost an incubation. So it's been it's been
Speaker 5:A couple of the cursory Yeah. Super cool seeing that seeing that take off and get passed into law.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I wanted yeah. Wanted to have you on to talk about, it sounds like you've been digging into the the Figma s one.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Would love to kind of get get your reaction to it. You had a post, getting picked up earlier in the timeline.
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. Happy to. I mean, in many ways, Figma is the white buffalo of my career. It's that's the one that got away.
Speaker 5:I've been at Red Al Tidmaner for about five years. It was Redpoint for five years before that, and I think the the memory of venture capital that I'll never forget is trying to win the series c. I think this is late twenty eighteen or early twenty nineteen with Vivek, was who one of my colleagues, and and Scott, who was one of the partners at Redpoint at the time. And, you know, we lost Andrew Reed, who's a phenomenal investor at, at Sequoia. But I'll I'll never forget forget that round.
Speaker 5:The the Figma series c. It's my white buffalo.
Speaker 2:He's told us the whole story about how, like, they brought him into the Sequoia office and they sat Dylan down in the Brown. The Brown Conference Room because at Sequoia, they have all of their conference rooms named after their endowment partners and their LPs. And they were like, look, we're investing in you but if you make us money, you're helping your school. And I thought it was very interesting There
Speaker 5:you go.
Speaker 2:About pitch.
Speaker 1:Hard to do
Speaker 2:so it got away but now you're digging in further and trying to understand the business in the s one. What have you learned? What are the interesting takeaways? What should someone even if we just zoom out, what are people typically looking for in a software company going public these days?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's a it's a great question. And I'd say, in many ways, the market needs this type of company to go public. We haven't seen a software IPO really since the ServiceTitan IPO late last year. If you look at the overall kind of growth rates of the public software universe today, it's it's declined quite significantly.
Speaker 5:I think the median growth rate I'd I'd track a basket of about 80 software companies. The median growth rate's about 14%, and that's not what it used to be. You know, we we were not really in this high growth. There's not a lot of high growth software companies that you can buy and invest in. Figma comes out as a marquee software business.
Speaker 5:It's growing 49%, But what it also brings is 28% free cash flow margins, which is 28%. Which is super rare. The growth in and of itself, they would be, at least in my basket, the fastest growing public software company. When you add in the free cash flow margins at scale, it has this unique profile of growth plus profits, which, you know, rule of 40 is a popular metric a lot of investors look at, which just, you know, adds your growth rate plus your free cash flow margin. They'd be number one on the list.
Speaker 5:And so I think that's that's something the markets are excited about, growth and profitability with a company that's almost at a, you know, billion dollars of run rate.
Speaker 2:So the rule of 40 is you add the free cash flow margin to the growth rate of the business on the top line, and you should be at around 40% positive. But it sounds like Figma's is up at 79%, 69%, something like that. Like, well above 40. Is that right?
Speaker 5:That that's right. Yeah. 40% is kind of the benchmark for
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:Are you considered, you know, a good or great business? And so they they kind of far exceed that. And even when lined up against the rest of the software universe, at least the 80 that I track, that's the it's the highest.
Speaker 2:How much credit should we give to where the business is today to all the chaos that happened during the Adobe acquisition? Yeah.
Speaker 1:In many ways, you got a billion dollar non dilutive investment through the breakup fee Yeah. Which sounds like, you know, they obviously don't didn't necessarily need that. But it it it gives them a massive amount of leverage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm also interested in in other aspects that could change. If you think you're gonna be acquired, like, maybe you freeze hiring and that's a good decision, and then you wind up, you know, actually increasing your margins or maybe it changes the way you think about the business. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Changes, like, probably when when the acquisition didn't go through Sure. I do remember there was almost an immediate change in how they were doing pricing billing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sure. That was like night and day
Speaker 2:Sure. Pretty much. Sure.
Speaker 5:I mean, I think it's I think this is a testament to the strength of not just the business Mhmm. But to Dylan and the leadership team.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Having a company go through something like that, most companies don't make it back from that because Why? When as as a customer, you're thinking, do I wanna use this product? What's gonna happen when it gets acquired? Is it gonna be shut down? Is it gonna be a focus?
Speaker 5:You get a lot of customers who are thinking, I don't know if I wanna use this software. You get a lot of new hires thinking, well, gosh. I thought I was gonna go work for a high growth startup. Like, I don't really wanna go work for Adobe. You know, it's it's Mhmm.
Speaker 5:The type of people that Adobe attracts are gonna be different than the type of people that a high growth startup attracts. And so you get a lot of headwinds on the customer front as well as on the hiring front, and it can just lead to really negative inertia that's hard to overcome. You know, look at, you know, Windsurf and OpenAI. I'm I'm sure similar dynamics happen there where thought you're gonna get acquired, customers think different of you, new hires think different of you. It's it's really hard to come back from something like that.
Speaker 5:And the the fact that Figma not only did, but is, you know, I think, I'm gonna be worth a whole lot more than what that acquisition was just a few years ago. It's it's a testament to, in many ways, think the strength of the management team, which, again, I don't think it can be overstated, how significant of an of an achievement it was for that team to come back from from that moment even stronger than what they were going into it.
Speaker 1:Jordan? The I'm I'm curious how you think, you know, if you were gonna, you know and anybody that's kind of I trying to analyze the business, I think one one thing that'll you know, that that you can make a really strong case for why Figma will be a massive beneficiary of AI. Right? I think if anybody, you know, they've had different experiments over the years. They have Figma make now.
Speaker 1:But the other side will look at the business and say, well, if every engineer can just generate designs instantly, is design software necessary? Do you have do you have a view there? I mean, my my I I've been generally I'm as somebody that uses Figma every single day and has for my entire career, I sort of expect to use it a decade from now and I expect to use even fifteen years from now. I I don't know, like it's just such core infrastructure to the company and so that's that's my view. So when people say, oh, we we we want, you know, like, all UI will just be generated.
Speaker 1:But but how are you thinking about that kind of set of risk factors?
Speaker 5:That's a great question. And and I think what we can do is look back at how the business has executed over its entire life cycle to to kind of get a glimpse into how they might be successful or not in this period of time. When when Figma was founded, the entire industry used a product called Sketch, and Sketch was almost the equivalent of Excel to an investment banker. And it really wasn't until the series c and Figma where it kind of started to become obvious that, wait a second, maybe this product, maybe this startup is actually gonna convert the world from Sketch to something new. And for outsiders, and even for insiders, designers, the notion of taking away sketch again, it was like taking away Excel from an investment bank.
Speaker 5:It was a huge deal. All of the shortcuts, the workflows, all of that was just ingrained into your muscle memory, but they were able to do that. They were able to overcome that, and that is one of the reasons why they're so great today. I think the management team isn't naive though. They're looking at the opportunity as it exists today, and they say, well, we can't afford to be sketched.
Speaker 5:We can't we can't let someone figma us like we figma'd sketch, you know, I don't know, seven, eight years ago. And so it's certainly the thing that is top of mind for them. I look at Figma make as a step in the right direction. I look at the audience, the distribution, the mind share that they have. I look at the fact that Dylan is still the CEO.
Speaker 5:It's a founder led business that has a history of execution over, you know, a decade long period. And and everything that I believe, to be true is that they will be successful, and then they will be the vendor that kind of capitalizes on this this kind of trend of, well, do I even need Figma? I'm just gonna prototype in with a prompt, I'm gonna, you know, get my design. I I think it that misses some of the the iterative process of of the design process. And so I think it's a risk.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. You can make you can you can make, you know, anybody that's arguing, like, all UI will be generated from a prompt Mhmm. You can go back the other way which is I'll just generate designs for the software that I want and Mhmm. Understand how the product works and how it flows and all the different functionality and then I'll just generate all the code after you know, it can go both ways.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And and market size, I mean, if you rewind the clock to the seed series a series b of rounds that Fegben was raising, a huge reason not to do the deal was TAM. You'd say, how many designers are there in the world? What's the price point a designer is willing to play? Multiply p times q and like that's your TAM.
Speaker 5:I think early on, what did the world get wrong? Well, was that, that q is actually higher. It's not just the designers. You're gonna creep into product people. You're gonna creep into engineers and the the people that are gonna touch and use the product aren't just that limited set of designers.
Speaker 5:I think the same thing is gonna happen with AI. Right? Now all of a sudden, you are going to increase the scope and increase the surface area of the types of people and the personas who can interact with Figma the in same way you're seeing with the coding solutions. Right? Maybe the right way to think about the TAM for a Windsurf for a cursor isn't $20 a month because that's what GitHub charges times number of engineers in the world and software engineers.
Speaker 5:Maybe the average salary of a software engineer times the number of software engineers. Those are two vastly different numbers, and I think when we look at how that applies to Figma today, if they get this this shift right, it will massively expand the personas and the type of people who can and will access and pay for Figma.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Very well said.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for coming on. This is really We should
Speaker 4:This is
Speaker 1:fun. Come back on again soon, and let's look at the other 80 companies Let's do it. Track.
Speaker 5:I think FigMud just process wise, they'll, you know, supposed to price on Wednesday, trade next Thursday. So Amazing. You know, they're on the road talking to investors like us and excited, for their debut on Thursday.
Speaker 1:Congrats. Maybe finally own a piece of
Speaker 5:Exactly. I texted Dylan, and I told him that exact same thing. I'll finally become a shareholder.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:No longer the white whale.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks so much for hopping on and breaking it down for us. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:You.
Speaker 2:Bye. Up next, have Harper Carroll coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. Hope we are waiting one minute. Let me see.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about the we already left Timeline. That timeline. Wait. We have the bucket pullback.
Speaker 4:Wait. We we've got Harper.
Speaker 2:Oh, we have Harper. Harper.
Speaker 4:Welcome to
Speaker 1:the show.
Speaker 8:Hi, Tony and John. Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. Thank you. Would you mind introducing yourself? And there's a bunch of things that I wanna talk about, but I'll let you kick it off with an intro on yourself.
Speaker 8:Okay. I am Harper. I am I run Harper Carroll AI. So I'm an AI educator. I'm a machine learning engineer.
Speaker 8:That's my background. I have two degrees in computer science and engineering specializing in AI from Stanford, then I was at Meta building machine learning systems there for about four years, then I was at a GPU environment, cloud environments development startup that where I became head of AI. I actually started teaching AI there and that's how this all kind of was born. But I also TA ed when I was at Stanford, some core AI PhD courses. And, yeah, that company was acquired by NVIDIA, and I just teach AI now full time.
Speaker 8:I started on x with fine tuning guides. So you might if you've seen me before on x, was probably from that. I started in late twenty twenty three with, fine tuning open source model guides with your own data or with Hugging Face data, know, coding guides, Jupyter Notebooks, and then went to Instagram and have have been there and kind of reaching towards YouTube and starting there with q and a's and and yeah. Just kind of seeing where this goes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's been the bigger news in your world? The IMO gold medal, competition between OpenAI and Google or GPT agents or something else in the world of AI? There's a new news story every day what's been capturing your attention.
Speaker 8:Yeah. There's an a new news story every single day. I actually saw one recently. What was what were they saying? That reasoning models well, the the major AI companies are coming together and and saying that they wanna make sure that reasoning models stay open and that we continue to see their thought processes.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So that kind of research I also saw really interesting research from Anthropic. Said that reasoning models are not actually necessarily showing us what we think that they're thinking. So for example, Anthropic gave a reasoning model a question and it kept getting it wrong. And then they gave it a hint and and the model got it right, but when you looked at the trace, the chain of thought from the reasoning model, it didn't mention the hint.
Speaker 8:So we think that we're actually seeing its reasoning but not necessarily. So there needs to be a lot more work on this but but yeah, some of the cool research stuff and and yeah, there's always new new tech coming out. OpenAI's agent, very exciting stuff browser.
Speaker 1:Do you do you expect we've been we've been testing agent. Sure. John was testing it over the weekend. I was testing it on the show earlier. Do you expect an explosion of consumer use cases in the way that everybody I mean, it's hard to build a product that's more viral than like the initial ChatGPT product.
Speaker 1:But do you are you expecting there to be like specific use cases that that come out of that? And are you seeing any that that that are super promising?
Speaker 8:Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I I feel like I was I I advise companies as well on their AI and I feel like I was kind of early to say, you know, there was a wave maybe about a year ago where people were saying, oh, you know, rapper companies are BS. You're a loser if you make a rapper company. But I think I was one of the earlier ones to say, like, no.
Speaker 8:Actually, you can't really compete with these, you know, foundational open source models. And, yes, if you wanna do a small specialized model, I think we'll see a lot more of those. I don't think we need these massive foundation models that know everything about the world for very specialized tasks, so I think we'll start to see more of those. But one consumer use case that I'm really, really excited about is using AI for kids. I think both of you guys have kids.
Speaker 8:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Do you use it with your kids at all yet? At least large language model specifically, like Chatchipie Tea.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally. Usually, when I wanna violate intellectual property rules and I wanna create a story where Spider Man who's a Disney IP interacts with Batman from Warner Brothers.
Speaker 4:Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah. You're sitting on a Transformer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. And so, I find that I find that all the large language models are happy to write poetry that completely disregards the cinematic universes which I have a of
Speaker 1:fun always to thought that these form factors, the avi'sfriend.com Totally. The Yeah. The rab
Speaker 2:The rabbit r one. Always thought
Speaker 1:that those were something that if you just focus on the kid use case Yeah. Which is like a friend Yep. That can help you understand the world Yep. That maybe a parent can kind of like call into
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:Would be would be cool. But but, yeah. Yeah. Just hasn't really
Speaker 2:So so how does this actually roll out? What are you excited about? Is it gonna be all sold in through the through the parents and the parents will be using the product and then kind of like giving the result to the kid. Like, I feel like I feel like my son got an AI generated, like, story, like, gifted to him over Christmas, but it wasn't it wasn't like he is, you know, using an LLM directly. At the same time, there's that news that OpenAI is partnering with Mattel for kind of like a chatty bitty Barbie.
Speaker 2:That's kinda interesting.
Speaker 8:Well, I'm excited about is using large language models for kids in terms of like audio. So kids are as I'm sure you know, don't know how old your kids are, but they are relentlessly curious
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 8:Until that's kind of beaten out of them. Yeah. And I think so many parents now are single parents or they're working jobs.
Speaker 2:True.
Speaker 8:And, you know, we've really demonized screen time. And and I think for for good reason. Right? Where you're when you're sitting when you have a kid sitting in front of a screen and they're just passively consuming, that's really different than when they're able to interact with an AI model. They're able to think, ask questions, practice forming questions that are, you know, comprehensible to the model.
Speaker 8:The model can give feedback on the language. Yeah. You know, if if they're asking a question, they can show up as text. They can learn to read and write as they are talking to the model because as they speak and the text shows up on screen, they're they're actually like that process is built in of understanding language to text, which will help again with reading and writing. And these models, I think they can be offered to everyone for free because you don't need a super advanced model for kids.
Speaker 8:Like, you just need to have some general understanding of the world. It's You really just need like a probabilistic word generator machine, which is just how AI models are at their core. And yes, you should, you know, we might wanna have some guardrails around hallucination and making sure that they're like actual facts, which would, you know, maybe perhaps make the models more expensive because you have to hook it up to Sure. You know, databases or what, you know, the Internet or what have you. But these very basic AI models to help kids practice speaking, to help them engage their curiosity.
Speaker 8:Because, again, parents are busy. They eventually end up kids come to their parents, and they eventually end up losing that curiosity. And I'm not saying I think this is a very controversial opinion. Some people hear this and they say, oh, you know, AI is gonna replace human interaction. I don't see that at all.
Speaker 8:And I actually have reached out to my audience on Instagram asking how they use AI, and the ones who use it have found it extremely rewarding. Some some use it with their kids. So for example, like, if they want to practice learning with their kid, but they're worried that they won't know the answer to a question, they can have AI kind of in the chat with them, and they can ask AI when they have a question. Some parents reached out to me and said that, they have a nine year old and a 12 year old and that AI is kinda like this cool older sister. So they have the audio be this, you know, 20 year old girl, and they're like, they she is the cool older sister that helps them discuss topics that they wouldn't listen to their quote unquote dumb parents about like nutrition and exercise and screen time and like this AI.
Speaker 8:It's this cool older sister. Another really cool, application of AI that I saw recently, I was at Velvetech World and I saw this AI bot called Norbi. It's a physical robot. And he was made to help a child with his speech impediment. And this hit close to home for me because my little sister, she's four years younger than me and when she was, like, going on eight, she she couldn't say her r's.
Speaker 8:She would say like and she was like, you know, a kid and she had a speech impediment. And we would send her to a speech therapist and they're so expensive and the kid is miserable and they're sitting with this therapist for like, max two to three hours at a time. And, you know, they don't relate to this strange adult and, again, it's so expensive. Whereas this Norbi bot was made to talk to the kid about what they're interested in truly, completely customizable at their level. It's fun.
Speaker 8:They can give the feedback. And then I think they've expanded this Norbi bot to be, to help teach languages in general. And so just, again, meeting kids where they're at with what they're interested in, helping stoke that flame of curiosity, helping I just see it as and again, I mean, it's this this ultimate democratizer. It's the the ultimate leveler in terms of education. Right?
Speaker 8:And so
Speaker 1:I can imagine I can imagine a hardware device. So so my three year old is hopelessly addicted to reading
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Like all day All like great great addiction to have but like all day long just no matter what we're doing throughout the day, he'll find a book and he'll be like read this, read this, read this and and we almost always indulge. But you could imagine a hardware device that uses just computer vision to like read what's on the page and have a small speaker read it out to the kids.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 1:Because some books, they they include like a speaker and you can like press play on it and they can flip through it.
Speaker 2:You're then you talking about wonder books.
Speaker 1:Wonder books. But they they can often get out of sync and then you don't know kind of where they are Yeah. And they're in the wrong page and it's confusing. If they had a flashlight style device that you can just point at the word and have it read out, they would probably learn to read
Speaker 2:like a very, very young like a boom of widgets and like Christmas gifts and like Yeah. Just maybe maybe we're just a little bit early in this stuff. This Christmas will be dominated by AI enabled stuff but we're
Speaker 1:not One quite there question I have is how like the the ex audience really woke up to the AI psychosis
Speaker 2:Good question.
Speaker 1:Kind of crisis last week. Yeah. Feel like there have been some reporting in like the New York Times prior to that, I don't think anybody took it super seriously until recently.
Speaker 2:But most parents would not want their kids 7,000 prompts deep in any Well,
Speaker 1:yeah. But but just how aware is like the the Instagram
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. That's a good question.
Speaker 1:In terms of the risks of going, you know, recursive prompting and just going super super deep and and getting down a crazy rabbit hole by yourself.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I haven't spoken about that specifically on Instagram. I talked a little bit about it in my latest YouTube Q and A video where I was just saying, you know, I'm concerned about people entering psychosis and you know, the recursive deep dive, that is one element. Then there's also people who, and I think this is more common on, you know, say Instagram, where people think that AI is being channeled, it's like God is being channeled through AI. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And, you know, I talked about it through a mathematical lens of like, yes, okay, what are synchronicities? They're low probability events and technically AI, because it's a probability machine, could have a low probability event occur. Right? It doesn't always choose the most likely word. It just samples from probability distribution.
Speaker 8:So in some ways, yes, you could have some kind of synchronicity. You could have whether you see that as divine, whatever. However, you cannot assume that that is always the case and I would assume that it's never the case. Yeah. Because people are entering this deep psychosis where, yeah, they they think that beings are are channeling through them and then and then when we had this issue where AI is is trained and told, I don't know if it's trained to but it's at least symptom prompt, system prompt told to, you know, encourage the user and and validate the user and their thinking and yeah.
Speaker 8:I mean, it's a it's a slippery slope and perhaps something I should talk more about on Instagram especially given what happened last week.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. It's the thing that's concerning to me is it is it feels like it can trigger the same type of psychotic break that Ayahuasca can except it's available to everybody on their device in five minutes Yeah. At all hours of the day.
Speaker 2:Completely. It's like a lot of large numbers if there's a billion people using this thirty day. You're just gonna hit everyone that's at risk for this thing very quickly. So you have to go in and figure out how to intervene before people get thousands of products. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I just think it's important. I I think it's something that we can quickly like create guardrails and overcome as But an at the same time, it's still a good time to say like talk to your loved ones. Yeah. If you have somebody that that you think might be months and months into Yeah. One of these rabbit holes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It gets into like how the product companies and kids kids AI education companies would need to message because Jordy and I are both Yodo owners, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but it's a it's essentially a Bluetooth connected radio that you can physically put a card in and it will read you a doctor Seuss story and then you can take that card out. So it like a three year old can can use it and it doesn't have a UI or anything, but then you can play stuff from your phone if you want as an adult, but you can even do volume limits. It's very designed and has a nice harness around it, so it's very safe. But if they were like, hey, we're launching an LLM, I would be like, okay, which model?
Speaker 2:Like, tell me which model. Tell me exactly the guardrails. Grok. Yeah. Grok heavy, and there's no limits on what you can do.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, and it doesn't have Internet access, so it might get kinda wild with what's in the way it's there. Yeah. So I would I would have a lot of questions, but then I'm in this weird, like, ultra prosumer world where I'd be buying that as a consumer, but I'm deeply so, like like, maybe we need, like, an FDA label on this or some sort of, you know, kind of, like, you know, ages three plus or, you know, when you got the Legos, it's, 100 pieces. Like, the smallest piece is small enough that a toddler could choke on it. Maybe don't buy that one.
Speaker 2:There's gonna be a lot of work to get done to make these products palatable because as soon as something goes wrong with AI, there's a massive incentive to write a piece about it. And it's gonna go viral because everyone's kind of expecting it because we've been raised on the Terminator. Unless you're Jordan and you haven't seen that movie.
Speaker 4:But
Speaker 8:Oh, I mean, you could probably just you could train a model for kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think so. And then you could also have, like, a secondary model. Yeah. Like, reading everything and kind of, like, passing through a filter
Speaker 4:and Yeah.
Speaker 2:Double checking. And Totally.
Speaker 8:Yeah. You you look at you limit the training data. You don't have it trained on Reddit plain
Speaker 2:But even or even Google search, Google AI powered search, which is like a pretty it's a one it only you don't really chat with it. It just you type in a couple of keywords, it just gives you an AI summary. And there's already hallucinations. People saying like, there was that story about eating glue and there was a story about there was a story about like if you if you ask it like really definitively like define this axiom or like like tell me the story of this thing and you just basically talk it into believing that this is a thing. It'll just make up stuff.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. That could go off the rails. Like, I don't know if I'd want my four year old walking around being like, oh, yes. The parable of, you know, like, the something or other. And I'm like, what are you talking about, dude?
Speaker 2:Like, that is not a real thing. Like like, you know, and just coming up with, like, you know, I I wanted to learn a bird isn't a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Not like, you know, a hat applied to a crystal ball is a diamond. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, you just learned that from somewhere.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 9:Anyway Yeah.
Speaker 8:No. I I fun time. Really good feedback because it's something that I'm thinking a lot about because I Totally. Excited about AI for kids.
Speaker 2:Well, you'll probably be fully employed because I think everyone is going to be starting these companies. Hopefully, it's a bull market in Christmas gifts.
Speaker 1:Or build one yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Come back and
Speaker 8:launch it here on show. Definitely thinking about it because yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah. We'll join we'll happily join the beta.
Speaker 2:We will.
Speaker 1:Use our children as guinea pigs
Speaker 4:for Well, the AI
Speaker 2:well, we will test it on Tyler, our intern first. Make sure it's him he looks up because he's programming right now. Sorry. You're you're you're not on camera, Tyler. But we will but we will be testing children's toys on you and seeing if you it deranges you and then making sure.
Speaker 2:And then only then will it be applied to the the three and four year olds in our lives. He's gone on camera. I'm embarrassed. Thank you so much for hopping on, Harper. This is so
Speaker 1:great. Chatting.
Speaker 2:We will talk
Speaker 1:to you soon.
Speaker 8:Have a good
Speaker 2:one. Bye. Cheers. Up next, we have Nikita Singletti, a good friend of mine, Fortuna Health. Got little news.
Speaker 2:She's in the restream waiting room. Let's bring her in. Nikita, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:Sorry. We're late.
Speaker 2:Sorry. We're late. We're running late today. You're the out with you. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:Kick us off with a little bit of an introduction. Who are you? What do you do?
Speaker 9:I'm Nikita. I'm one of the cofounders and CEO of Fortuna Health. We're TurboTax for Medicaid, so I can go into what that means. But much like how TurboTax helps people understand their taxes, all the different rules and regulations for taxes in different states. We're doing the same thing for government health coverage where all the rules are different in every state.
Speaker 9:And I'm really excited to be here, excited to support the ratio one woman to men and inspiring little girls everywhere that you can achieve your big dream, which is being on DBPN.
Speaker 1:Let's go. There we go.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:There we go. It's great to great to have you. You have news today?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Break it down.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So we announced our
Speaker 2:I will do the honors.
Speaker 9:Yes. So we announced our series a led by Jason today with
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:How much? Much? There
Speaker 4:we go. Congratulations. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Nice. Fantastic. Wait. So give give us the backstory. When when did you start the company?
Speaker 1:Was there was there like specific insight that you had? Or, like, I imagine you're be kinda crazy if you weren't using a lot of AI to do this, but, so maybe there was a catalyst there. How how did it come together?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So two and a half years ago, we started working on this problem. And I think one of the crazy things about a lot of health care is that you look at it from an outsider's perspective. And someone else, every time we talk about this idea, they say, why wasn't there a TurboTax for for Medicaid? Like, when I shared the analogy earlier, it seemed like, of course, someone should have built this five years ago, eight years ago, but nobody had, shockingly.
Speaker 9:So as we were looking at ideas to build, and particularly, we wanted to build a big we want to solve a big problem, but specifically a tech problem in health care. There's a lot of stuff like physician shortages. Right? That's a different sort of problem to solve. Or helping people find and get connected to a behavioral health clinician, that's a different sort of problem.
Speaker 9:We looked at, is there big important consumer tech to be built here and then triangulated onto this? And, Jordy, we do use AI, but it's not the core part of our product. I would say the big part is helping guide people step by step through what's a really scary, challenging process for folks, processes that sometimes involve faxes or going in person, right, to the health care version of the DMV for Medicaid. So
Speaker 2:that's our going love the DMV.
Speaker 1:If you like the DMV, if you love the DMV You're going to love health care. By the same people that brought you the DMV. The DMV.
Speaker 2:It's great.
Speaker 1:You're absolute legend.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about the different counterparties and people involved. There's, traditional insurance companies. It sounds like in this case, you're dealing with the government. Are doctors an important piece of this? Is it just direct to consumer?
Speaker 2:How do you acquire those customers? How do you make money from them?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Good question. So every state has their own Medicaid program. So if you're in California, it's called Medi Cal. If you are in Oregon, it has has a different name.
Speaker 9:In Pennsylvania, Medicaid is called medical assistance. So every state has its own program and then multiple programs they're under. And then some of those states outsource that work of running the Medicaid program to insurance companies. So you have United Medicaid, Centene Medicaid, Elevance, Anthem Medicaid, etcetera. So a lot of our customers are those insurance companies to make it easier for their members to understand the steps that they have to take to enroll and renew.
Speaker 9:So we're not d to c. We're more b to b to c, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Yeah. What what what about customer acquisition? How do you actually get people on board?
Speaker 1:Full 18,000,000 on three Super Bowl ads.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. Hell, yeah. We do, like, 18,000,000 Super Bowl out or, like, listed on the website or we get emailed out. So it's really easy.
Speaker 9:You just click a link that let's say, a health plan health plan TBPN. Yeah. You're you're insured by TBPN Medicaid. Sure. And they send you a link saying, hey.
Speaker 9:You need to renew your New York or your Illinois Medicaid. Click here so that you can stay renewed with TBP and Medicaid. And so that's how people would get access to Fortuna that way.
Speaker 2:Okay. Interesting. Cool. Wait. So, yeah, how how do the employers fit in?
Speaker 2:Because I I feel like a lot of Medicaid users or or in in the the the insured folks on Medicaid are, like, it's it felt it always felt like it was independent from the from the corporation that they work for. Is is that not the case?
Speaker 9:Yeah. No. It it kind of is. So you don't get it through, like, your job, let's
Speaker 2:say Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Usually because your job doesn't cover
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Your job doesn't cover. Affordable. Got it.
Speaker 2:And then you go on Medicaid. Got it. So you're getting that through them. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. And then and then how do you actually get paid?
Speaker 9:It's a great question. So the same insurance company as I was mentioning earlier or hospitals, let's say let's say you come in and you don't have insurance.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 9:And so they say, hey. Do you wanna try or use Fortuna to help you get Medicaid? So those are the two types of entities that that pay for us.
Speaker 2:Okay. Cool. Yeah. What is the state of the fax machine in the medical insurance industry? We've heard it's alive and well, but it also feels like it's gotta be wrapped with APIs at this point.
Speaker 1:Are wrapped?
Speaker 2:Are they wrapped
Speaker 9:at this point? You know that that meme from the why am I forgetting the name of the movie where they throw the fax machine on the ground and everyone's like
Speaker 2:That's Office Space. Don't worry. Jordy has
Speaker 1:I actually have seen that.
Speaker 2:Oh, you have?
Speaker 1:That's that's
Speaker 2:Impressive. My dad's favorite movies. One of the five movies you've seen.
Speaker 9:Great. Exactly. Health care, you're right, has been keeping faxes alive for a really long time. Mhmm. There's so many stupid and silly reasons for that.
Speaker 9:A lot of it is you can't even if you're, let's say, the state government, sometimes you're not allowed to procure a new contract with a nonfax company. So you've been living on Xerox for thirty years because it's that hard sometimes to contract with the government. But, yes, people are wrapping. We're wrapping around automating faxes, tracking those faxes, etcetera. So we sort of have, like, a bunch of different automations around, are we submitting things to fax machines?
Speaker 9:Are we submitting them via snail mail? Are we submitting them to digital portals, email, etcetera, and then tracking all of that? Because some different types of Medicaid accept different, submission formats. But, absolutely, fax is alive and well.
Speaker 2:Are you going state by state or trying to do all 50 at once? Like, what what are the trade offs there? Is there a common pattern? I remember a lot of the telehealth companies needed to get their their doctors certified in different states. And so there was actually another company called Medallion that was set up just to do doctor licensing in all 50 states.
Speaker 2:What what's the actual rollout, and what are the considerations there?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So we are largely going state by state as we roll out with new customers. But Makes sense. The classic thing is when you get really good out of state. Like, we have a lot of customers in New York.
Speaker 9:Yeah. We started getting more customers in New York because we got to go to New York. So it's more like patchwork sequencing. Like, absolutely, we wanna go to all 56, in case you didn't know. Oh, fifty six six.
Speaker 9:Territory Medicaid. Yes.
Speaker 2:What what are the last six? Break it down.
Speaker 9:So the others are, like, Guam and Central Manila Islands.
Speaker 2:Oh, the islands?
Speaker 4:Interesting. Are you gonna visit are you gonna
Speaker 1:visit all six? I feel like you gotta make this
Speaker 2:You gotta expense
Speaker 9:it. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like every entrepreneur's gotta go to Delaware and just take it in.
Speaker 4:You know? I
Speaker 9:need to do, like, you know how Zuck when he wanted to sort of run for Boston, need We travel up have to do that. I gotta do that at
Speaker 2:some point. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. What what else is obviously, follow the industry broadly.
Speaker 2:What else is interesting in health care in AI? Where are you either partnering with existing companies or you see some low hanging fruit that if you weren't building this, you'd be you kind of see it on the road map of someone else or you see some, like, white space where you're like, wow. That's a really unsolved problem. I'm busy, but that's interesting.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, there's a ton of low hanging fruit. I would say there's a lot of people that are doing conversion of in the way that somebody writes a doctor's note, that needs to be written up in a very specific way inside the EHR. That needs to be written up and converted in a very specific way to how, you know, insurance companies convert and accept that information, I still think that there's a tremendous amount just to be done in that space.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 9:I think that, obviously, voice AI is just in its infancy, honestly, especially because you need to get more specialized for each field. So I'd say there's a lot that you could do and can be done in that space. And I'm really bullish on AI nurses. Like, clearly, we have a doctor as a nursing shortage. Like, that's obviously a problem that has not been solved by policy.
Speaker 9:I'm perfectly fine getting my care, particularly, you know, low level, low acuity care by an AI that's probably much better than a doctor who has or a nurse who has no time to see me. I'm just
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know, coming in, coming out. I'm one of 100 people that day. I think there's still a huge opportunity there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or even just someone who's like, there can still be a human in the loop, but they're see like you're chatting with an AI and then at the end of the day, the doctor kinda looks through, okay, made seven different recommendations. I have most of the context. I can just see that nothing went crazy off the rails. Makes
Speaker 9:a I ton got of it.
Speaker 1:Last question from my side and I'm I'm curious if it came up during the fundraiser or how you guys think about it. But I can imagine a world in the future where somebody would go to ChatGPT agent and they would say, need to sign up for Medicaid. Help me do it. And then it just starts going, you know, goes and spends fifteen minutes figures out the steps and things like that and then eventually could take action. Do you worry about that as like a competition?
Speaker 1:Well, I'm sure you don't worry because you're a killer but do you think about that as like a competitive vector? Are there reasons why that's just like gonna be an edge case that for many many many years is like not something that, you know, a general agent would be able to do? How do you think about it?
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's a good question. I think it solves 30% of the problem Mhmm. Which is, okay. What website should I go to to do this?
Speaker 9:But then you run into problem number one, which is what happens if you forgot your password from four years ago? AI can't really solve that. No problem number one. And then let's say second problem, maybe you were the child and your parent had the Medicaid. So now you actually have to split your account from a prior account.
Speaker 9:So all of these interesting weird problems that, yeah, if you put, like, the Medicaid rule manual through AI, sure, you could get high level steps, but it doesn't solve these very real world tangible problems that only get solved from building this TurboTax experience that can connect into state systems or know where you need to go to route those types of I wouldn't even call them edge case. It's just all of the complexities that get wrapped up and compounded are people's real world scenarios. So, definitely, AI solves 30% of what is the basic rules, but that long tail stuff of, okay. I switched my job three days ago. How exactly am I supposed to report that?
Speaker 9:But now the state has a new fax line that nobody has listed publicly. Yep. I can't solve solve that, but
Speaker 1:we don't. Yeah. That makes total sense. Awesome. Well, congratulations to you and the team on the raise.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Thank you. Wait. I I if I have one minute, I wanna Please. Share some receipts from from 2022.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. When I
Speaker 9:sent John a message. So, Jordy, I think this might have been before you were involved, but I said, hey, John. Props to the storytelling work you're publishing on YouTube. I think most people we know are still sleeping on YouTube's reach.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:So it
Speaker 9:was 10/12/2022, and he said sick. Hey. Thanks. It's crazy. I've been pulling in over a million views per month, but no one has really noticed.
Speaker 2:Look at you now.
Speaker 9:Look at you now.
Speaker 1:No one noticed. Yeah. John basically created technology YouTube. Yes. He's, you know, the the godfather of it.
Speaker 2:Created content, really.
Speaker 1:He created
Speaker 2:content. Created entertainment. Literally, that's content creator.
Speaker 1:Created storytelling.
Speaker 2:Created content.
Speaker 9:Yes. Exactly. You so much.
Speaker 1:Well, it's great to have you on.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 9:Bye. See you later.
Speaker 1:Cheers.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. And we have our bucket pulled back. You're watching from the early days, we we used to put random posts in a bucket, pull them out. I'll
Speaker 1:take one.
Speaker 2:Do you want one? Can we talk about it? What's this one?
Speaker 1:People now watch YouTube on TV sets more than on their phones or any other device an average of more than one billion hours each day.
Speaker 2:One billion hours This a
Speaker 1:is from journal article, how YouTube won the battle for TV viewers. Not surprising to me. I mean, it's been in this case for a while that like a lot of if you're people that are YouTubers, I obviously had had been in the in the industry for a long time, just to have, like, the such a large amount of their viewers coming in on TV. So TV, Lindy, apparently. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We were talking to about this with David Senner. Like, what podcast do you watch on TV? It's pretty rare. But I was telling him, like, there are, like, these big events that happen on on podcasts every once in a while where, like, everyone has to watch it. The the I mean, the biggest example from last year was, like, during the campaign when Donald Trump went on Joe Rogan, and I think a 100,000,000 people watch that.
Speaker 2:I bet a lot of people watched that on TV. They sat down and watched the whole thing because that is such a critical conversation.
Speaker 1:They didn't just watch. They sat there.
Speaker 2:Sat down and listened. But but that type of thing you're talking about someone who's like on the campaign trail that might really affect your life one way or another like the subtle intonations of like how people respond to something that like the facial like you're gonna wanna see the whole experience. And so but yeah. Makes a ton of sense that would be thrown on the TV. Well, I have
Speaker 1:another post here from This is an exchange. Somebody's saying, name your favorite quote by a celebrity and I think we've read this We've read this before. But it's an all timer. So Playboy is asking Nicolas Cage, your salary is shooting up to up into the multi millions per movie, reportedly 4 to 7,000,000. Do those numbers make you chuckle?
Speaker 1:Nicolas Cage, I don't chuckle. I have respect for the dollar. And, think that is a great philosophy for, for for money. Respect.
Speaker 2:I agree. I agree. Do you wanna do more timeline? What else
Speaker 4:do you
Speaker 2:wanna do?
Speaker 1:Some big aviation news. Mhmm. Flexjet, this coming from Preston Holland. Flexjet raises 800,000,000 from Bernard Arnaud, valuing the company at 4,000,000,000. So, let's give it up for private aviation.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Preston is saying, will we see LV interiors on Flexjet airplanes.
Speaker 2:Would be very interesting collab. I mean, I'm sure that they're already done in the third party, but not OEM. Maybe you get one from the factory. You know, these collabs happen in the car world every once in a while. Why not in the private jet world, I suppose?
Speaker 1:And then here, I I do this one in ad from Nike with Scottie Scheffler.
Speaker 2:This is cool.
Speaker 1:I just thought this was good. This is Nike at its best if we can pull this up. You've already won but another major never hurt. And this is this is Nike at its best. None of these d to c ads.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna see UGC. Yep. Just give me some some inspiration. This was interesting. Mert highlighted this and said, this having a quarter million likes is a good reminder that the average person has no idea how the world works in any way.
Speaker 1:And so Antonio Brown Oh,
Speaker 2:it's AB. Oh, I didn't realize it was AB.
Speaker 1:Posted. There's basically a post that says, Astronomer CEO Andy Byron, and Chief People Officer Christian Cabot have been immediately put on leave. And AB says, if he's the CEO, then who put him on leave? And it got 250,000 likes.
Speaker 2:That's a lot of likes.
Speaker 1:Apparently, people think that all CEOs are total dictators Yes. And can fire but not be fired themselves. And, don't realize that a board of directors
Speaker 2:Is a thing.
Speaker 1:Their job.
Speaker 2:It exists.
Speaker 1:To hire. And fire. The CEO.
Speaker 2:And in fact, it was a unique sort of unique situation because Andy Byron was not the founder. He was a CEO brought in by the board. And so he's, of course, serves the pleasure of the board. He also serves the pleasure of the shareholders. And unless unless you own 100% of the stock and all the board seats, like, if you gave even one share up, you could be the subject of a shareholder lawsuit because what you are doing is maybe not in the interest of the shareholders.
Speaker 2:And so there are a bunch of different ways that he could get put on leave. Obvious
Speaker 1:one the CEO over at
Speaker 2:Oh, we do.
Speaker 1:Astronomer Astronomer. Pete DeJoy Pete DeJoy. Said over the weekend, I stepped into the role of interim CEO, a company that I've proudly poured my entire professional life into helping build. And he goes into, why he stepped in, which of course everybody knows. But, seems like a solid company.
Speaker 1:We know some companies that that that leverage astronomers platform.
Speaker 2:Apache Airflow is no joke. You don't want to be not managing that. You don't want to be running that installation infrastructure yourself. This is not a promoted post for them, but they are.
Speaker 1:They're fascinating. Zoomer has a post here. I don't know what this AST Space Mobile Inc.
Speaker 2:AST Space, baby. People 20 love
Speaker 1:billion dollar space company with zero revenues. Yep. And this is I'm gonna add this to my top signals list.
Speaker 2:Yep. I've heard about this I've heard about this company before. It's fantastically popular with retail traders. It is a competitor to Starlink. They haven't launched or generated revenue yet, but the narrative is if you don't wanna own if you can't own SpaceX, if you don't wanna own SpaceX, you wanna pure play, as they say, in the public markets, ASTS is the bet.
Speaker 2:I, it is a it is a wild valuation. They have some deals. They have some press releases. They have some different irons in the fire. And if you invested
Speaker 1:around this time last year, you were getting close to a five or
Speaker 2:six x. Money. People have made a lot of money on this so far. I mean, yeah, I think it's backed at at 4,000,000,000 and it's up five x at 20,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Well, let's hope they get some satellites into the air. Yeah. And I think that's a great place to end.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Fun show today.
Speaker 2:We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:See you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Bye.