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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 Today is Tuesday, 08/05/2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 2:Jordan, just lost my voice. I'm actually seeing stars.
Speaker 1:You're seeing stars. People said people said the intro could be louder. Yeah. They're like, that's the main feedback.
Speaker 2:I took it there. I took it there.
Speaker 1:Good job. Anyway, let's kick it off with this post from Buco Capital Bloke. Apparently, Variety has reported that Roku launches Howdy, a low cost, no ads streamer, but it doesn't wanna compete with Netflix.
Speaker 2:Calling it a streamer is funny.
Speaker 1:You wouldn't sell Streamer. That's I have great platform. Is it just short for sleep streaming platform?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. I work at a stream a small streamer, American streamer called Netflix.
Speaker 1:Is that is that does Netflix count as a streamer? I don't
Speaker 2:think it's a streaming service.
Speaker 1:I guess a streaming service because it streams the content to you. Yeah. Well, anyway, Buco Capo bloke shares a hilarious post from the banger, R.
Speaker 2:Vork boxer.
Speaker 1:Vork boxer says, have you seen the new show? It's on tube. It's on tubu. It's literally on Heebie. It's on Poo Dee with ads.
Speaker 1:It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on we know. Dude, it's on Gumpy. It's a FIBO original.
Speaker 2:It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. You can log on to Poob right now. Go to Poob dive into it.
Speaker 2:You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.
Speaker 1:Where do they get these names? Where do they get these names? It it it's like it's like the pharmaceutical industry how they have like every drug kinda sounds like vaguely like a familiar world with goofy and Ozempic. Like they sound like real words, but like, the domains are available. Like, it is one of the most wild things anyway.
Speaker 2:Anyway It's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should go check out Howdy and you should check out ramp.ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:And, we have our first story. So we talked about this a little bit yesterday. Take him, author of the Nvidia Way, and a huge fan of Jensen Huang and Nvidia, says, here's what I would do if I were CEO of Apple. Quadruple the RAM and iPhones to 32 gigs, have the max model at 64 gigs. Memory is oxygen for local on device AI.
Speaker 1:More equals smarter, more powerful. Take the margin hit. Memory isn't even that expensive. Then this is where we get controversial. This is what we were debating yesterday.
Speaker 1:Number two is buy Mistral or Anthropic and invest a $100,000,000,000 compute annually annually. That is I didn't realize so buying Mistral or Anthropic, that's a $100,000,000,000 out the door day one. Then you're spending a $100,000,000,000 a year to build a multi gigawatt data center. Wonder Take who him. Would
Speaker 2:Great writer. Yes. The more you spend time with this post, the more you can imagine a world where he takes Apple, you know, out of the mag seven. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He says build multi gigawatt data centers and enter the Frontier AI model race in a big way. Would be fantastic for NVIDIA. I mean, Take Him seems like he's he's he's really full full tilt on NVIDIA to 10,000,000,000,000 right now. Anyway, Apple has the capital. Apple knows the AI computing shift is existential.
Speaker 1:Where's the bold action and urgency? So there's a lot to agree with here. We debated it. The one thing we didn't debate is that you re restream is the best streaming platform, one live stream, 30 destinations, multi stream to reach for your audience wherever they are. Go to restream to sign up.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what were you
Speaker 2:saying? Is AI seem is seemingly important. But what is the existential threat that we get? Just play this out. New computing platform.
Speaker 2:Yep. Eyewear that's integrated with AI. We haven't seen anybody launch a hardware device or even plan to launch a hardware device yet that's not an additional device
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Outside of your app.
Speaker 1:We are both on MacBook Pros or MacBook Airs.
Speaker 2:Using iPhones.
Speaker 1:We we have iPhones. They were they were additive. Yep. And then other people went further and they added an iPad to their life.
Speaker 2:Or they added a watch to their life. Even the most bold hardware founder Yep. In the world is saying, I'm gonna replace your iPhone.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:He's just saying, gonna give you a friend.
Speaker 1:I I mean, I do think that there is some like, if there was ever a crack in the foundation of Apple's monopoly on high end smartphones, it's now. Because not like, you're not gonna get me to switch with slightly different design or slightly different shape or it's folding. Like, those phones have come to market. No one has meaningfully shifted. But a but a phone that was designed from the ground up around AI and really, really optimized for ChatGPT and really, really, like, AI first at the core, just everything is infused.
Speaker 1:Sure. Like, maybe there's a chance there versus anything else that came out. Like, was always like like, five g was never a differentiator. Apple was never behind on that. They were never behind on on display resolution.
Speaker 1:Like, they had the the retina screen immediately. Yeah. But you could imagine a situation where if Apple was three years behind on retina screens, people would be like, well, yeah. Like, I want the one that's sharper screen or something. And Apple's been behind on a lot of things by a year or two, and the and that's what leads the Android fans to always say, like, Android's had this for two years or that's why I have Android because I like the cutting edge.
Speaker 1:Because you're actually you actually kind of are in many ways more on the cutting edge when you're in the Android ecosystem, but you just don't have all the integration that comes
Speaker 2:Android owners love to tell you
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:The specs of their new device. They love to go spec for spec.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Exactly. But the question is is should Apple actually go so hard to play catch up? And so, Apple beat earnings mean last Yeah.
Speaker 2:Going hard could look like buying perplexity. People have made the case My voice is still shot from that. People have people have made that case but it still feels insane when you look at the history, Apple's M and A history. Yeah. And and often they're happy to to acquire talent.
Speaker 2:Yep. But they don't do it at the the VCs. Historically, they're not doing it as sort of unicorn valuations. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The like, going hard could look like spending a $100,000,000,000 or it could look like just figuring out what their next Google deal looks like. Because Apple has this insane deal with Google where Google is the default search engine on Safari and they make, what, $10,000,000,000 I
Speaker 2:think it's 20
Speaker 1:profit something. Yeah. 20,000,000,000 in profit every year off of that deal. It's like a fantastic deal. And people are worried that it might go away.
Speaker 1:So I there's something in this but there's something in here. But, you know, you could imagine a situation where Apple is getting a massive payday from a foundation model lab to route iPhone customers to that model. And we haven't seen that dynamic play out. There's this question of, will One Apple
Speaker 2:scenario is is there's a world where a foundation model gets the Siri button and Google keeps the default search.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:And Apple suddenly is getting another Yeah. Like a 100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, Ben Thompson's written about this. We've talked to a lot of folks about this. Like, there's this weird world where ChatGPT is so dominant that they might like, they could swap out the foundation model for a different model and most people wouldn't know. They'd be like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:I use ChatGPT. And they'd be like, what model? Four o or or o three or Gemini or Llama? And they'd be like, I don't know. I don't care.
Speaker 1:It just gives me the answers. And so you could imagine a world where where Apple is pumping users into into monetized, you know, LLM queries and getting a huge check from that. Maybe that's the most elegant solution here to, like, get back in the AI race or capture the value
Speaker 2:of your how much OpenAI already pays Apple just through the App Store?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Because if you if you subscribe to OpenAI in the App Store, they probably take 30% of that. And if they're making a billion a year and maybe a third of that is from iPhone subscriptions, in app purchases, like, you're looking at, like, a $100,000,000 a month.
Speaker 1:Is that, like are we in the right territory? That seems like extremely high.
Speaker 2:I know. I'm gonna look in the look in the App Store right now and see if actually push in app subscriptions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I don't know. I I'm pretty sure I subscribed on web long before downloading the app, and then I transferred the app in. And and ChatGPT might like, the the the team might push you out into a web view.
Speaker 1:Like, you can do that now. It's getting easier every year because of the antitrust stuff, and it certainly makes, you know, economic it's economically rational, especially if you're gonna get somebody to upgrade to $200
Speaker 2:changes a month. To your subscription
Speaker 1:inside this application. So so the answer is zero. Right now, I I think $0 are changing hands between Apple and OpenAI either way, but that could change. And and maybe that's the end. But, you know, on the on the question of should Apple make a huge acquisition, Tim Cook actually addressed it in the earnings call.
Speaker 1:He said something like, we've acquired around seven companies this year, and that's companies from all walks of life, not all AI oriented. We're very open to M and A that accelerates our road map. We're not stuck on a certain size of company, although the ones that we've acquired M thus far this year are small in nature. And he said, like, we're acquiring one every few weeks, which is not quite seven per year. I mean, I guess that's like one a month, but a few weeks, sure.
Speaker 1:So he's doing deals, but he's not looking at anything massive. And I think that actually makes sense. My question was, if you were the CEO of Apple and you had a $100,000,000,000 burning a hole in your pocket, what are the other things that you could do with that money? Formula one team. You could buy every team and the division and every track and the and all the sponsorships.
Speaker 2:I made a post about this jokingly.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. It's so much money. It's so much money.
Speaker 2:I made a post about this jokingly earlier this year. I still think it'd be cool Yeah. For Apple to be an f one in the way that Red Bull
Speaker 1:is I think that'd great. At
Speaker 2:the team.
Speaker 1:No. No. I agree. Yeah. I think that'd be great.
Speaker 1:The one thing culturally is, like, Apple's brand is is very premium and very high end and I don't know if
Speaker 2:they could handle a
Speaker 1:few losing This was the early bear case for Apple TV. I was talking to someone, a very successful Hollywood producer, and he was saying that the nature of the of Hollywood is like venture capital. Like, it is a Hootz driven business. If you don't accept that you're gonna have massive flops and egg on your face and embarrassing moments, you will not make it. And just like any venture capitalist who is like, I only want to make investments where they won't blow up, you're not gonna make it.
Speaker 1:Right? Like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mark Andreessen had a had a there was a clip from a episode he did recently talking about how he lose sleep over the companies you don't invest in
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Not the ones you invest in and don't work.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so so you have to be risk on. You have to be risk on in Hollywood as you do in venture. And so the the question was like, can Apple deal with spending 50 or a $100,000,000 on some show that completely flops and everyone's like, this is a disaster.
Speaker 1:And they've navigated really well. I think that they have had some flops, but they've kind of tucked those behind the scenes. Whereas Netflix has started to get more kind of, you know, people talk trash about what was that? Red Red Notice or they they did some massive movie with The Rock that kind of flopped. They've done a few of these big movies that haven't done that well.
Speaker 1:And and it's sort of like, oh, you know, they're they're they're not, you know, God's gift to, you know, producing. Yeah. But it doesn't matter because overall Netflix is doing very well, And all it takes is like one squid game to like carry the whole quarter basically. Just like in venture. Or like one, you know, you sign the friends deal and then or the office and people are watching that like twenty years later.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So
Speaker 2:And Yeah. Apparently, so f one has surpassed half a billion dollars in box office earnings of last I mean, it's a So fantastic that's an example of a home run. But it's not like they're doing that once a quarter by any means.
Speaker 1:Oh, and John Exley's in the chat. Shout out to John Exley. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to connect with him at our party in New York, but he did attend. You got to chat with him. A lot of the team got to chat with him.
Speaker 1:So thank you for all you do, John. We really appreciate you. The entire team is giving you a General. Round of Because General of the channel. You've done a ton of a ton of work for us and we really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Anyway, if you had a $100,000,000,000 burning your burning burning a hole in your pocket at Apple, what would you do? I have a bunch of crazy ideas.
Speaker 2:Go through your list.
Speaker 1:So most people would just say, hey, you're gonna benefit from AI because you are the window into all technology and it doesn't matter if it's generative video or or text. Like, people will be consuming it on devices. You sell devices. You'll be fine. Just like search did not destroy Apple.
Speaker 1:It actually made Apple stronger because people search on their iPhones. So most people would just say, hey. Return it to the shareholders. Apple's already done that. They've returned over a trillion dollars to shareholders in the past ten years.
Speaker 1:Those are kind of rough numbers, but it's basically that, which is an insane amount of money to return to shareholders. But Samsung is worth 330,000,000,000. They could buy the entire company, lever it up with two thirds debt, and they would just own both sides of the smartphone market then. Probably extremely anti competitive. I think Lena Khan would have a conniption fit.
Speaker 1:But funny concept. Funny concept. The other other the other idea is massively expand the retail footprint. So Apple right now, I was surprised by this. How many retail stores do you think they they have worldwide?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Like 599 or 601?
Speaker 1:Did you look Did I tell you that That we was toxic. This morning. It's 535. So it's not that many. It's mostly in the tier one cities.
Speaker 1:There's usually only like one in every city. They don't really they don't take the Starbucks strategy where they put them across the street from each other. Yeah. But for a $100,000,000,000, they absolutely could. A $100,000,000,000 is enough to open 6,000 new Apple stores.
Speaker 1:So they would be 6,600. So they would be up around 7,000 stores which for reference is as many Subways as there are and as many CVSs as they are and as many seven elevens as there are in America. And so everywhere you see a subway, you can see an Apple store. And I feel like this would be a big upgrade for America. I feel like if you just walked around every American city where tier one, tier two, tier three city, you just see a beautiful sheet of glass and it's an Apple store on every corner in America.
Speaker 2:The most impressive. Acquire every firearms, store in the country and turn them into Apple stores.
Speaker 1:They could do a take private of Figma. Think bigger. Build faster. Figma bill helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free
Speaker 2:at figma. Buzzing from Thursday.
Speaker 1:It was a fantastic day.
Speaker 2:Absolutely fantastic. Exhausted.
Speaker 1:But we're back
Speaker 2:in Anybody that is tuning in to the show for the first time today is gonna be hearing our ideas for Apple and just thinking, these are some of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Yes. But they're definitely fun.
Speaker 1:Okay. So speaking of glass from the Apple stores, they could buy Corning, which makes Gorilla Glass. It's a $55,000,000,000 company. Then with the money left over, they could buy InterDigital, which owns all the patents on five g and six g. So they could basically patent troll everyone else in the industry.
Speaker 2:Just get extremely anticompetitive.
Speaker 1:They could also with the money that is left over we're still in the first, like, let's vertically integrate this company mode. They could also buy 10 rare earth or cobalt mines. So they own the supply chain there. And then they could also build four battery gigafactories and lock up the sapphire crystal supply chain that's used on the on the the iPhone camera. So they could just completely own their entire supply chain for a 100,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:And and that's just one year. One year. And then they, you know, the proposal was do this every year.
Speaker 2:The other thing that was interesting about Tay Kim's post is if you if you listen to the earnings call, Tim Cook and the team were very clear that they don't even want to finance like data center development themselves. Yep. They're still working with these sort of like third party lenders to like capitalize them. And so again, Tim Cook is the king of efficiency.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He knows his business and he's Should
Speaker 2:we get into some of that?
Speaker 1:No. I have one more.
Speaker 2:One more.
Speaker 1:So OpenAI, Aqua hired Johnny Ive. They're coming out with something that's competitive. It's gonna be some some sleepless nights at Apple when that thing drops. Right? It's gonna be stressful because, like, maybe maybe maybe it doesn't go super well, but, like, you know, it's a serious threat.
Speaker 1:OpenAI is a serious company. They have a lot of customers, and they got Johnny Ive, your former GOAT designer ready to drop, you know And a bunch of
Speaker 2:former Apple employees. Tons of
Speaker 1:Amazing, amazing team over in hardware at OpenAI. So the question is like, how do you fire back with your Apple and you have a 100,000,000,000 to spend? Here's what you do. The cogs on an iPhone are less because they have a margin. So you take that $100,000,000,000, you buy 200,000,000 iPhones and you send a brand new iPhone to 200,000,000 Americans.
Speaker 1:And you're just like, oh, how much are you charging? Johnny Ive and OpenAI? Well, ours is free this year. We're doing a free iPhone for the entire year.
Speaker 2:Should just do something like that where it's like your eleventh iPhone in a row Is
Speaker 1:free.
Speaker 2:Is free.
Speaker 1:They'd probably have 200,000,000 people with free iPhones. And they're just like, yeah. We're actually we wanna keep you in this ecosystem. We like our services revenue. We're excited
Speaker 2:to be a platform.
Speaker 1:We're excited. We're just giving it back. We're just giving it back. Can you imagine? I think that would also be extremely anticompetitive.
Speaker 1:I I don't even know if there's a regulatory framework to stop that from happening. But, I mean, price competition is a real thing. And, like, if you if you discover that your competitor is undercapitalized and can't can't win a capital war, you could potentially cut cut cut prices so dramatically that it's like, yeah. The the other phone's, like, cool, but, this one's free. I guess I'm just staying in the in the blue bubble world.
Speaker 2:Tim Cook next earnings call. Alright. We're gonna buy all of the minds we depend
Speaker 1:on Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we're gonna make the iPhone free. Free. Stock just eats Like, 80%.
Speaker 1:He's like, I'm petty. I'm petty. And you know what, Johnny? I'm gonna let you win.
Speaker 2:I would rather die than let you win.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I would destroy myself. Yeah. I've been reading a lot about cutting your nose to spite your face. And I'm I'm pretty into it.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty into the strategy. Anyway, let me tell you about 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 Talk
Speaker 2:to the purple llamas. Vanta.com.
Speaker 1:Anyway, so Ben Thompson's been noodling on on Apple and AI strategy. He had a rough go because he I think he took some time off or shifted he shifted his posting schedule right when all the earnings dropped and there was all this crazy stuff going on. So he he's just writing about Apple earnings now, but he has he still has some some good takeaway saying, you know, even if they do even if Apple does swoop in and buy Mistral, for example, the overall point holds. Apple isn't going to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, MetaX, and Google on pursuing AI superintelligence. Like, five extremely well funded, extremely serious teams.
Speaker 1:They're gonna Apple's gonna go their own way, centered on their devices and their direct relationship with their customers at least as long as Cook is in charge. And anyone that's saying that Cook needs to step aside, think is is in for a world of hurt because he's been on a generational run and he's solving the most important problem for that company which is not the application layer in artificial intelligence. It's the supply chain and keeping the keeping the flows flow of iPhones.
Speaker 2:Making Coming. And selling phones.
Speaker 1:Making put the phones in the boxes. Tim, he's doing it. He's doing it. He's really he's really he's really underrated. He's been CEO longer than Steve Jobs was.
Speaker 1:No. He's the hope one this tenured CEO of Apple in history.
Speaker 2:He better be bringing some of these AI researcher comp packages in as as comps when he gets in front of the comp committee Yeah. At Apple.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Say, hey. That that is true. He should definitely be getting a bump. If he does have researchers I mean, has he has AI researchers.
Speaker 1:They are improving different functionality. I feel like maybe I'm hallucinating this, but it feels like the text to speech engine has gotten better on my phone. I listened to a semi analysis article with the default Apple Safari text to speech and it was very listenable. So I think we're getting better there. Regardless, like, he's gotta get his AI researchers Graphite so they can embrace code review for the age of AI.
Speaker 1:Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So anyway, Hunter SPX is shocked at Alex Karp's comments on the Palantir earnings call. Karp said, the growth rate of our business has accelerated radically after years of investment on our part and derision by some. The skeptics are admittedly fewer now having having been defanged and bent into a kind of submission, yet we see no reason to pause, to relent here. So good.
Speaker 1:Citrini says, you can't accuse the guy of not having flair. These are so good.
Speaker 2:Palantir ticked up over 400,000,000,000 up almost 10% in the last five days.
Speaker 1:Let's go. So Congratulations to everyone over at Palantir. Congratulations to Eliana who's been on the show, friend of the show. He says he's actually in tears after Carr went on CNBC and said, just tell the haters, read them and weep. Love it.
Speaker 1:We covered this yesterday a little bit, but I wanted to go one step deeper. I
Speaker 2:friend of the show Marcus Milione was posting earlier a bunch of sell orders that he had for Palantir earlier this year and he was feeling He was weeping. Disappointed with himself.
Speaker 1:He weeping. So Palantir Technologies boosted its full year outlook after posting higher profit and revenue for the second quarter driven by continuing demand for its artificial intelligence projects. The Denver company which sells AI software to manage and analyze large amounts of data. Everyone says, what does Palantir do? Sell software.
Speaker 1:It now expects revenue to be between 4,140,000,000.00 and 4,150,000,000.00. Like, what a narrow band for the year. They they know what's coming. Up from the prior outlook of 3,890,000,000.00 and 3,900,000,000.0. So the interesting thing here is that they where is it here?
Speaker 1:I missed it. So revenue from U. S. Commercial customers rose 93% to 306,000,000. So Karp's been talking about this for a while.
Speaker 1:Just look at us. Like you say that we're just a government contractor. Look at our look at our commercial side of the business. Like, we're doing very well there. Companies are buying
Speaker 2:talking to when they they casually mentioned that they got, like, a a 9 figure contract in Japan randomly? On the on the corporate side? Yeah. On the corporate side.
Speaker 1:I don't know. We've talked to a lot of Palantir people, but it's all over the place. I mean, everyone from like Airbus, like, if you wanna know like what Palantir does, just just the the Airbus example is like the best because it's just like, you're making planes. There's a ton of different parts that go in that plane. You need to see the lead time, the durability, the testing of all those.
Speaker 1:You need not just a database of what you have in stock. Okay? We need more seat belts to get this plane out the door. We need more engines. We need more, you know, doors or whatever.
Speaker 1:Like, you gotta buy all these different things probably from TransDigm or something. Some some PE backed small manufacturer makes the subcomponents. You gotta buy all those components, put them all together, and then ship the ship the the final plane out. Well, you don't just need a database of what everything's in. You need to know how these things interact, and that's why Palantir always says, like, ontology.
Speaker 1:It's it's layered on top of the database. And so there's been a bunch of database companies that have grown a ton, Snowflake and and Snowflake and and Palantir were kinda duking it out, and now they're kind of partners and friendly. You put all your data together into a data lake and put Palantir on top of it. And so it's driving it it it's all good news for for Carp. Two CEOs top $1,000,000,000 in raises.
Speaker 1:Palantir CEO Alex Karp's 2020 equity award has soared in value to 14,700,000,000.0 as the company's stock grows. That was when the company first went public, and he got a bunch of stock. And it's grown and grown
Speaker 2:and grown as the share price has appreciated. So Poor snowflake. Stock chart looks very different.
Speaker 1:Well, what's the market cap right now?
Speaker 2:68,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Oh, not bad.
Speaker 2:Still up 30%
Speaker 1:year to date. Little side project incubation for the folks over at Sutter Hill. It is the latest ultra exclusive achievement for executives of big US companies. The billion dollar year two bosses made it last year holding stock based pay that's swelled in value by at least 10 figures in a single year. That'll buy a lot of cost cross country skis and a lot of Aquanauts.
Speaker 1:Alex Carr clocked more
Speaker 2:than billion dollars. You could effectively corner the entire
Speaker 1:You buy all the Aquanauts. Aquanauts. You could buy them all.
Speaker 2:All of them.
Speaker 1:100%. Take all of I've actually done this before. I've asked you at GPT, like, find me the the market cap of all the supercars. So you take the average selling price of the f 40. It doesn't work this way because once you start buying them up, get more valuable.
Speaker 1:But but if you take, like, an f 40 is like a couple million bucks, but there's only a few thousand of them. You add that up. That's like $5,000,000,000 market cap. One of the biggest market caps, if you use this kind of rough terminology, is fire trucks because they're a million dollars each and there's like a million of them in The United States. Now they're all like slightly different brands, it's not quite the same comp.
Speaker 1:F one fifties also, huge market cap. Tons
Speaker 2:of Can you look into getting a fire truck for for our road shows?
Speaker 1:I don't think there's enough space inside.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's actually true.
Speaker 1:Maybe you want something else. More like that. But you could you could load up cables in all the different sides. Like, you know, we pull out the hoses and just a massive HD HDMI cable. I think that's the move.
Speaker 1:So Hock Tan grew grew his pay grew by 1,150,000,000.00 at chipmaker Broadcom. So Broadcom did very well. Only two other S and P 500 CEOs have hit that mark in recent years according to data from a public company data provider. Cryptocurrencies exchange Coinbase Global, Brian Armstrong, in 2021 at 2,100,000,000.0, and naturally, Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, can boast billion dollar gains in three years, including a record 43,000,000,000 in 2020. Though all are part of a pay package that the Delaware court declared invalid on Sunday, Tesla granted Musk a new interim stock award that tentatively valued that was tentatively valued at 23,700,000,000.0 with the promise of more this fall.
Speaker 1:It's barely scraping by.
Speaker 2:Scraping by. The other note on Palantir, think this was reported on Friday, they have a new US army contract worth up to $10,000,000,000. So this is consolidating a handful of contracts
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They have into a single deal.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And yeah. So pretty pretty significant. That that's over, I believe, the next decade.
Speaker 1:So Palantir classic twenty year overnight success. Overnight success. Some interesting history and kind of strategy of how they got here. So we talked about this before, but you remember the famous story about Alex Karp talking to his employees early in the in the in the journey of the of the company. He said, when you're traveling for business, I want you to book a five star hotel when you're in town visiting a potential client.
Speaker 1:And Gary Tan was commenting on this. Other employees were saying like, this we're a startup. We're burning money. This is kind of a crazy thing. What's the rationale here?
Speaker 1:And and Carpe had a very contrarian take. He said that when you're doing business, you're going to meet a Fortune 500 company that you're gonna be consulting with or rolling out or selling them Palantir, selling them software. You're gonna be a forward deployed engineer. They will ask you, oh, you're in town. Where are you staying?
Speaker 1:Just it's just a natural thing that comes up during introductions. Oh, you're in town. You're in you're in Dallas visiting us at our HQ. We're evaluating Palantir as a potential solution provider. Where are you staying?
Speaker 1:And if you say the Holiday Inn, they will assume that you're selling Holiday Inn level software, Holiday Inn quality software. But if you say I'm staying at the Four Seasons, they will assume that you are selling Four Seasons level software. And so Palantir had this culture of Carp has joked about like steak dinners being like not the correct way to sell the product and the product actually has to be very good. But clearly from an early from from early on, Palantir
Speaker 2:focused Positioning. On
Speaker 1:brand positioning and just taking travel and entertainment very seriously because there's gonna be a lot of forward deployed engineers that are on the road a lot. You want their life to be, you know, manageable so they can go and show up and perform, and they're not and they're not, like, gassed and exhausted from an economy flight and then a and then a tough bet.
Speaker 2:Holiday Inn.
Speaker 1:So this was wrecking their financials though. Like, when they went out and they went The public
Speaker 2:narrative was that they were a consulting company masquerading as a software company.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And looking at the earnings yesterday and their margin profile, this is very clearly not a consulting business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So when they went public, you can look up the the the market cap when when they kinda went out early. But I believe that they were languishing in the low tens of billions. Might have even dipped down to 5,000,000,000 at some point, 7,000,000,000 market cap. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The stock was not There
Speaker 2:periods very well. You bought a single share at the open Yep. Could have paid $9.20. Yep. And years and years later, you would have been flat
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:On that entire period. Yeah. It was so they went out 10/02/2020. And if you look on May 12, they they they ticked over that initial price. So not a lot of people were writing it off for a long time.
Speaker 2:And it and it's still it didn't it didn't it wasn't like a fast IPO by any means. Right? This was like took them what? Fifteen ish years to get
Speaker 1:out? Yeah. So 2020, 2021, they were in like the 40,000,000,000, 35,000,000,000. I think they probably dipped lower at a very at varying points in time. But it wasn't it it the the stock was not ripping.
Speaker 1:And it was kind of in this it was languishing. The consulting meme was was going strong. And that was because they were spending a ton on travel and and entertainment. But what's interesting is what happened during COVID. So during COVID, they couldn't travel as much and companies didn't want forward deployed engineers coming into their offices.
Speaker 1:They didn't like, airlines were shut down for a long time. Everyone was working remotely. So they switched to a remote first, you know, forward deployed engineer strategy. And so by default, during an implementation of Palantir, you would just hop on a Zoom call or hop on a Teams call or whatever. And so their travel and entertainment budget, like, cratered.
Speaker 1:And that was really, really good for their bottom line. And then they were able to just kind of, like, hold the line. And they didn't and sure, they added it back slowly, but it kind of revealed that this actually does have software margins. This actually is more of an enterprise SaaS company than a consulting business. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it allowed them to grow very, very significantly. And so, they've they've been on an absolute tear. And congratulations to everyone over at Palantir.
Speaker 2:Well, while we're talking about earnings
Speaker 1:Let's talk about linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, product roadmaps.
Speaker 2:That's right. Building. When you got up Ben and the production team are gonna pull up a post from Let's do highlighting something from Reddit's q two earnings call. If we can pull this up Yeah. And play this video.
Speaker 1:Oh, this video. That's fine. Okay. Let's see.
Speaker 2:Let's play a video here. Let's see. This is the hardest thing.
Speaker 4:That's why Reddit is the number one most cited domain for AI across all models per data collected by ProFound. That's why Reddit is the number one
Speaker 2:most Anyway, so I wanted to highlight this because all model. We just partnered with ProFound. Yes. The company that I invested in earlier this year. James, CEO has been on the show.
Speaker 2:ProFound allows companies to understand and improve the way they show up in LLMs. Yep. So today, companies are using LLMs. Everyone's using LLMs to research products, make business decisions.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so if you're running a any type of business whether it's consumer or enterprise focused, you gotta actually figure out where you stand in these rankings, how people are perceiving your products through the models. And ProFound lets you do all of that observability. I think the best way the best comp for it is kind of like SEO optimization. There's bunch of different dynamics here. But ProFound is the clear leader and we're super excited to partner with them.
Speaker 1:Let's hit the gong.
Speaker 2:Hit the gong for ProFound.
Speaker 1:ProFound and a new TBPN sponsor. Welcome to the lineup. Welcome to the livery. Welcome to the next drop of merch. Welcome, ProFound.
Speaker 1:We're happy to have you on the team.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:In other AI related news, OpenAI has announced an open source model. They said they'd never do it. Everyone's saying
Speaker 2:It was in the name closed was in the name. How could
Speaker 1:you have doubt it? Closed AI. Closed AI. They're not open AI. They're closed AI.
Speaker 1:Everyone thought they were so clever. They said they couldn't possibly open source a model. And they did.
Speaker 2:They did.
Speaker 1:They did it. First thing first.
Speaker 2:First open model in years. Right? They used to have
Speaker 1:that. Was GPT one open source? Like when when was the last time that So we're gonna talk to Tyler about this.
Speaker 5:Oh, one of the same.
Speaker 1:The studio today. Was still open source.
Speaker 2:Source.
Speaker 1:And then they decided to close source something. It's tough that I I treat you like things that I could Google and I know that you just have to search it or chat GPT it. But good luck. Get me the information on the the history of OpenAI's open source models. In the meantime, I will read this post from Sam Altman.
Speaker 1:GPT OSS, all lowercase. He's still in lowercase mode. Although he he uppercases the other sentences. Mhmm. But he he he threw in.
Speaker 1:He likes lower case.
Speaker 2:Sending you messages, John?
Speaker 1:I'm seeing it. I'm seeing coded messages in here. GPTOSS is a big deal. It's a state of the art open weights reasoning model with strong realworldperformance,com comparable to o four mini that you can run locally on your own computer or phone with the smaller size. We believe this is the best and most usable open model in the world.
Speaker 1:We're excited to make this model the resilient the result of billions of dollars of research available to the world to get AI into the hands of the most people possible. Hit that soundboard again. I wanna keep it going. We believe far more good than bad will come from it. For example, GPTOSS one twenty b performs about as well as o three on challenging health issues.
Speaker 1:We've worked hard to mitigate the most serious safety issues, especially around biosecurity. GPTOSS model performed comparably to our frontier models on on internal safety benchmarks. We believe in individual empowerment. Let's hear it for individual empowerment people.
Speaker 2:I feel empowered the way that you're reading this, John.
Speaker 1:Although we believe most people wanna want to use a conventional service, a convenient service like ChatGPT, people should be able to directly control and modify their own AI when they need to, and the privacy benefits are obvious. As part of this, we are quite hopeful that this release will enable new kinds of research and the creation of new kinds of products. We expect a meaningful uptick in the rate of innovation in our field and for many more people to do important work than we're able to before. OpenAI's mission into is to ensure AGI that it benefits all of humanity. To that end, we're excited.
Speaker 1:I think I cut this screenshot off. We're excited for the world to be building on an open AI stack created in The United States based on democratic values available for I didn't screenshot the rest of that. But oh, here it is. Available for free to all and for wide benefit. So I I imagine that that was the voice that's in
Speaker 6:his head.
Speaker 1:Intended. As the author intended. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Well, DePue has more notes here. Context. So less than one year between o one announced which was September 2024 and we have an o three level model open That's runnable on consumer hardware.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:good. Wild progress. You were highlighting earlier Sam initially had a poll
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Saying like, you know, should we should we what what do you want? Do you want an o three level model or do you want something that you can run
Speaker 1:He did both.
Speaker 2:He did both.
Speaker 1:He did both. Wow. Four d chest. Yeah. So we were reading that.
Speaker 1:So, it it was what? Like, six months ago or something that post that you that that you shared?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think so.
Speaker 1:So I asked I asked Tyler to to dig this poll up. Sam Altman shared a post that, it was a poll on axe saying, what do you want? Do you want an o one level model, reasoning model, a frontier model, open source, or do you want something you can run on your phone? And it was and it was neck and neck, and people were clicking on the phone model. They were like, we want the phone model.
Speaker 1:And then Dylan Patel quoted it and said, oh, you idiots. Don't vote for the phone model. You can just still Let's get truly frontier model. Let's get a frontier model. And so so Dylan Patel was very much like like, you guys don't know what you want.
Speaker 1:Like like, the phone models are available. That that will be easy. The hard thing, we gotta twist OpenAI's arm to open source the reasoning model, the o three level model. And Sam Altman just said, you wanted this or this? It was a false dichotomy.
Speaker 1:You get both.
Speaker 2:You get both.
Speaker 1:You get both.
Speaker 2:Yassine says, all caps, I'm so sorry for doubting you, Sam Altman. I'm so sorry for saying that you were the antichrist. I didn't realize I didn't realize your plans were measured in centuries. I hope you forgive me for everything. I'm so glad you kept control of OpenAI.
Speaker 2:I am so sorry. Please forgive me.
Speaker 1:That's remarkable. Never talk down on the future first ballot hall of famer, apparently, the future leader of open source AI. Will be very interesting to see how Meta responds. Will they stay in the open source game? Also, just how important is open source?
Speaker 1:Is this a Linux scale opportunity? Is this an Android scale opportunity? Like, is this, you know, is this GitLab to GitHub? Like, what what what's actually the long term play? Certainly cool.
Speaker 1:Great for the community. We're gonna see fun experiments. We're gonna see interesting things done with this. I think do we wanna talk about some of the ideas that we had for building on top of this open source model fine tuning. I can just run through some.
Speaker 1:I know there's one you didn't wanna you didn't wanna share because you thought it was too too too good, too much alpha. But what was it? What was I talking to you about, Tyler? What were our ideas? We had one that was Well,
Speaker 2:initially we weren't sure there was gonna be reasoning.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 5:So we were gonna add fake reasoning.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it was gonna be a model that gaslights you into thinking it's reasoning when in fact it's not reasoning. So we were So just if you pull
Speaker 2:up if you if you look at the actual like you know, reasoning
Speaker 1:Reasoning change.
Speaker 2:UI. Yeah. It's just UI. Yeah. It's not like no actual reasoning.
Speaker 2:It's like
Speaker 1:So you
Speaker 2:asked the question. Time delay. It's a time delay.
Speaker 1:Then It's a delay. And then while it's
Speaker 2:thinking really hard.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Let me think about that.
Speaker 2:What a super smart person think
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right now.
Speaker 1:So we we
Speaker 5:can actually still kind of do that because it's not a multimodal model.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:But we could like, you know, we could just some kind of like totally blank encoder or something for the image.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:And then it's like, this is an interesting image. Let me think about what's in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One of the best images I've ever seen. A lot of people are saying this this is one of the greatest images. Thank you for sharing this PNG and or JPEG with me. It just knows nothing about the image.
Speaker 1:It's great. I I I'm seeing that this image large in file size. It's purely metadata based analysis. Yeah. Doesn't know anything about what's going on.
Speaker 1:I was like wow. This is a tough question. I'm gonna have to generate a lot of internal reasoning tokens to answer this. Test time inferences really is magical, isn't it? Anyway, back to thinking.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm reasoning about this now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Other the other other obvious opportunity, you know, people have been frustrated with sycophancy
Speaker 1:Yes. The models
Speaker 2:and models being
Speaker 1:Well, not me. I've been frustrated with the lack of sycophancy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You want more. Yes. You want more.
Speaker 1:I want more.
Speaker 2:You want the model to gas you up. But, you know, fine tuning it to go, you know, over the top. Somebody could release the Glazinator 3,000.
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 2:that's Which just tells the user, you don't just think you're goaded. You are goaded. I know this. You know this.
Speaker 1:It's like, I'm asking you to solve IMO question six. Why are you talking about whether or not I'm goated? It's like, it it just tells you like, you got this one.
Speaker 2:The here is interesting. Mean, everybody's everybody's been banging the table saying, where is the American open source AI Yep. Or LLM leader. It was reported yesterday by the misinformation that Reflection, Reflection, the misinformation reported that Reflection, one year old startup, we've had the CEO on before he's in talks to raise 1,000,000,000 to develop open source models to compete Deepsea, Meta, and Mistral.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:And yeah, all of the, you know, the the the Chinese open source models have been on a tear. Quen released, Quen Coder recently.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People are into Quen. Or a
Speaker 2:new version of it that is getting good results. So it's important work.
Speaker 5:Have a lot to one in thing that's kind of related to The US China Yeah. Like race is like, so when DeepSeek first came out everyone was like up in arms because they said like it's it was less than $5,000,000 to train. Right? Yep. So in the in the model card for for these models they actually reveal like the GPU hours it took Sure.
Speaker 5:Which then you can like figure out how much it probably cost costed to, you know, train.
Speaker 1:Give me the number and tell me if I need to ring the gong for that.
Speaker 5:So so for the big model, it was probably around like 4,000,000. Oh. So just yes. But but the the small model was like 500 k probably a little less. But that's like 10 x better.
Speaker 5:The model is way better than Deepsea Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. So should I ring the gong?
Speaker 5:I mean I think it's
Speaker 1:I I wanted I wanted to hear 400,000,000 at least. I was expecting
Speaker 5:$9,400,000,000.
Speaker 1:Nine ditch. They got a billion of revenue coming in every month.
Speaker 5:But it's cool that
Speaker 1:it's Spend ten days of revenue on the open source model. I know I know it is very cool. So so we're ringing the gong for for the elegance of the training run.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Efficiency. Efficiency. Great.
Speaker 1:Is everyone in OpenAI
Speaker 2:on efficiency and cost saving time and money.
Speaker 1:Putting money back in the hands of shareholders and not in the hands of open source developers, I suppose. But, yeah. I mean, do do you think that is this is this like a pre training scaling wall narrative? Like like, would you as someone who is a potential consumer of an open source model, model, like, do you want a $400,000,000 open source model? Would that necessarily be better?
Speaker 1:Because it seems like they were able to distill it pretty well, get it to the frontier, not, you know, burn a ton of money on on training. Also, the question is, like, if they're this is probably distilled from their other models that are much bigger. So, like, you there is no world where you could just spend $4,000,000 and get this level model without also have done having done the GPT four run, the GPT 4.5 run, etcetera. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Maybe. It's also just like even if they didn't distill it, they just have the knowledge of like how they did it
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 5:Which is like Yep. Arguably more valuable. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So like the think in terms of like open source, it's either you wanna go like super super cheap and super small
Speaker 1:Yep. As they
Speaker 5:kind of did here. Yep. Or you go super big like almost like the llama like the the behemoth. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Mhmm. I think it would have been really cool to see that like literally like state of the art, you know, level model.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You could also try and ask Claude, hey, build me a fit frontier open source model. Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're gonna have someone from Claude on soon. This is funny because, wait, you said 500 k for the small model?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Probably less.
Speaker 1:So that's the same amount of money that they're putting up for this challenge, the red teaming challenge. Have you seen this? So to encourage researchers, developers, and enthusiasts, that's me, from from around the world to help identify novel safety issues, This challenge has a $500 $500,000 prize fund that will be awarded based on review from a panel of expert judges from OpenAI and other leading labs. At the end of this challenge, we will publish a report and open source an evaluation data set based on the validated findings so that the wider community can immediately benefit. So if you can hack this thing, if you can get it to teach you how to develop a nuclear bomb or take over the world, you might have 500 k in your pocket.
Speaker 1:Not bad. Go get some of that. That's a seed seed seed round Well in '22 2012.
Speaker 2:Massive day for the labs, Anthropics Look that. Announced a state of the art coding model, Clada Opus 4.1, which one ups four o. We are having somebody on the show from Anthropic later today, Alex Albert Cool. To break all that down. So I'll wait there.
Speaker 2:And then Google also announced Genie three, a new frontier model, a new frontier for world models.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tyler, take us through Genie three. What is it? Where are we in the deployment of this particular technology?
Speaker 2:Let me give a little bit more context on Genie. So given a text prompt, Genie three can generate dynamic worlds that you can navigate in real time at 24 frames per second retaining consistency for a few minutes at a resolution of 720 p. So
Speaker 1:I gotta be up at 60 frames a second if I'm pulling in no scope. 24 True. This isn't this isn't a 24 movie. This isn't a this isn't cinema. This is video gaming.
Speaker 1:Get it up at a 120 frames. I gotta be on a 144 hertz monitor.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Google, DeepMind Yep. As soon as John can three sixty no no scope at 60
Speaker 1:You got a customer but for now
Speaker 2:You got a customer but you gotta keep pushing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Break it down. What is this and and and where did it come from? Why is this important?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I I thought this was really cool. I mean Yeah.
Speaker 4:You were into it.
Speaker 5:We we've seen kind of like worse versions of this. It's not like a completely new paradigm Yep. Of like basically, you know, real time video that you can control.
Speaker 1:Yep. Oliver Cameron came on the show. Yep. Yep. He was at Cruise self driving.
Speaker 1:I interviewed him years ago. He came on the show and he demoed this and the production team was kinda freaking out because it was like this very trippy like wandering around this like kind of Elder Scrolls landscape. Yeah. We've seen
Speaker 5:same thing with I remember playing Minecraft.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Minecraft. People have figured out how do etched. Has a Minecraft demo too that runs very quickly on some of their hardware.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But it's just like I mean, if you watch the videos, it's like incredible. Like, it looks I think it looks by far better than
Speaker 1:Way better. Yeah. Okay. So we we we we we're now in, like, where, like, video generation was really, really crazy. And then v o three came out and it was, oh, it's good.
Speaker 1:And same thing with, like, mid journey.
Speaker 5:It's definitely getting to the point where, like, you could use this for training as like a RL thing. Right? Because this is like kind of I mean, this is how you like justify spending a huge amount on
Speaker 8:this stuff.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. Because then you can use that as like training data
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:Right for agents or whatever, you know, robotics.
Speaker 1:Synthetic data generation Yeah. For robots. Okay. That makes sense. What else?
Speaker 1:I mean, there is, like, the long term of, like, you know, people do just enjoy watching AI generated videos. People get joy out of looking through Studio Ghibli's for a few days. So, like, there is value just in the inherent product aside from training. So you could imagine that this becomes like
Speaker 2:Let's pull up
Speaker 1:some of
Speaker 2:the examples and have them in the timeline.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's pull these up and and and try and, like, flip through those. But how far are we from, like, the actual game mechanics when we played Oliver Cameron's one?
Speaker 1:I I remember being able to move around with the arrow keys. That was cool. Next thing I wanted to do is I wanted to jump everywhere because that's, like, the default mechanic. I mean, anyone who's played any game like with a jump button, you're jumping the entire time. You're bunny hopping.
Speaker 1:Like, this is not something you just wander around in. And so does it have a jump button? Do you know?
Speaker 5:I don't think it does right now.
Speaker 1:Wow. We're so far. We're so early.
Speaker 5:But but you can I mean it's cool because you I I actually don't remember this exact one you're talking But you can prompt like all sorts of stuff? Right? So in the examples that we can probably pull up
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:You can see them prompt in like, okay a dragon flies in and they're in some like random yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let yeah. Let's take a look at this here. Okay. So it's a bunch of this looks like an after effects.
Speaker 9:Each one of these is an interactive environment generated by Genie three. That's cool. A new frontier for world models. Mhmm. With Genie three, you can use natural language to generate a variety of
Speaker 2:worlds Did they make this demo
Speaker 9:explore them interactively. All
Speaker 7:with a single
Speaker 1:text Oh, it's I wanted to take the horse off the off the off the ski jump. So we're looking through a helicopter.
Speaker 9:Let's see
Speaker 1:what it's like to It's for sure photo real. Like, this is this is good enough.
Speaker 9:Genie three has real time interactivity, meaning that the environment reacts to your movements and actions. You're not walking through prebuilt simulation. Everything you see here is being generated live Cool. As you explore it.
Speaker 2:And g three has world memory.
Speaker 1:Press space bar.
Speaker 2:Find virus. This one.
Speaker 1:Stake in Hey. 360. We get we just got a three sixty.
Speaker 9:World memory even carries over into your actions.
Speaker 1:This is that's AI? That's wild.
Speaker 9:When I'm painting on this wall, my actions persist.
Speaker 1:Woah. Okay. That's pretty good.
Speaker 9:I can look away.
Speaker 1:That's way less hallucinatory.
Speaker 2:But when I look back, the actions I
Speaker 9:took are still there.
Speaker 1:So it remembers that. Oh, that's big. Yeah. That's huge. We haven't seen that.
Speaker 1:Because when we were when we were walking around in the other world, we would like turn around and they would just be like a cave and then you do a three sixty and then all of a sudden it's like It's really different. Yeah. It's like a church or something.
Speaker 2:Jets, horses.
Speaker 1:I love There's a dragon. That dragon looks pretty good.
Speaker 9:You can use Genie to explore
Speaker 1:real world cities and movement. I wonder how expensive this is. Will probably be extremely gating. I'll have to tag Logan to get access.
Speaker 9:And even other characters. We're excited
Speaker 2:to Oh, there we go. That's a job. That's real
Speaker 1:oh, okay. It's really cool.
Speaker 9:And entertainment. Yeah. And that's just the beginning. Yeah. Worlds can help with embodied research, training robotic agents before working in the real world.
Speaker 1:Okay. Give me a top down simulation of World War one disaster preparedness parts of iron
Speaker 9:and emergency training. Now
Speaker 1:models Give me a spreadsheet. I wanna play Stellaris or Agriculture. EVE Online. Manufacturer. You think about some
Speaker 2:of the use cases here.
Speaker 1:Spreadsheets and space.
Speaker 2:Some of the use cases here.
Speaker 9:Genie three's world simulation
Speaker 2:Are insane. Yep. Around Alright. We can pause it now. You can imagine a world in the future where you give genie some images of you like with family growing up when you were five.
Speaker 2:And you could just like be like have a third like you could just like Very trippy. Generate like a synthetic memory.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like this is where we're headed where people are gonna be having to kind of simultaneously hold their real memories in these sort of like simulated
Speaker 1:It's like I put on my VR headset. It's just like Christmas and now I'm super VR sick and I'm throwing up everywhere just like when I was a four year old and I ate too much candy on Christmas. It's very realistic.
Speaker 5:I think this would be really cool for for Llama to do or to for Meta to do, like, some kind of similar thing that you can run on the
Speaker 1:Yeah. VR. What do you think the training data set for this is? Do you think this is YouTube gated? Because it
Speaker 5:might It's gotta be YouTube and it's also probably just like video games. I mean, you can see so if you look at the old this is Genie three.
Speaker 1:If you
Speaker 5:look at the the first papers, it's very clearly like, okay, that looks exactly like, you know, GTA five.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 7:In in
Speaker 5:the first one Yeah. It's like some kind of very simple like two d game that you can tell like, okay, that's a video game that they either built or found somewhere that they trained on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the pulling from the different video games would be cool. I wonder if you run into IP because you're basically, like, distilling GTA into a model. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Probably not okay, but you blend them all together, you create something new that's probably transformative and and fair use. But I I I keep wondering. I I was running the numbers, and I think YouTube has, like, 20 exabytes of data, which is 20,000,000 gigabytes or something or 20,000,000 terabytes or something like that. It's like Wow. It's so much that you can't exfiltrate it.
Speaker 1:You can't put it in a suitcase of hard drives. Like, it is it is just the storage is like a data center of its own, like, as opposed to, like, the common crawl, like, the all the web text is like it's like you can put it in a server rack. Like, it's not that much data. And same thing with, like, some of those image datasets. And I always wonder, like, does Google have, a permanent advantage here, or will we see the other labs catch up on this pretty quickly?
Speaker 1:Like, OpenAI seem to have catch caught up pretty quickly in in image generation. Midjourney is doing great there. But a lot of the images are out on the open web whereas a lot of videos are locked in YouTube and like if you can't get access to if scale really matters there, Google has like a serious serious
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean they have Sora which is like it's kind of very slow. Like, the architecture is definitely different than what you've seen some
Speaker 1:from Google. About the speed of Sora. I care about the the fidelity. So so Sora latest Sora feels like v o two, and v o three feels like a full step. I've said I put the same prompt in both, and Sora is, like, way more hallucinatory.
Speaker 1:Like, it's way crazier. V o three still hallucinates and does, like, crazy things where, like, you'll be watching a car drive forward, then all of a sudden it flips around. It looks like the car is driving backwards. Like, it gets confused, but just the visual fidelity is really, really high. Done that in real life.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Flip flip the car around.
Speaker 1:Anyway, get on Numeral HQ, sales tax, autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance, numeralhq.com. Anyway, do you
Speaker 2:We have a post here from close Clouseau. Clouseau Investments.
Speaker 7:How do
Speaker 1:you not know how to pronounce Clouseau? Do know Inspector Clouseau?
Speaker 2:No. Oh, lore. Is he French?
Speaker 1:It's Actually, I'm gonna blank and I'm gonna look really embarrassing now because I was trying to model
Speaker 2:fictional movie. Character.
Speaker 1:Picture character. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the Pink Panther series.
Speaker 1:Pink Panther. That's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Movie? Is that a movie?
Speaker 1:It has been adapted into a movie. It was originally I think an animated show.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. So not
Speaker 1:not You don't know the Pink Panther theme song? The guy's coming back. The thing is real.
Speaker 2:Clouseau Investments says, I haven't done it yet, I really want a short Uber. In New York City, there's a taxi app called Empower which charges drivers a flat fee in exchange. Takes zero percent of the ride cost. All of it goes to the driver. If you're in NYC, I encourage you to try it.
Speaker 2:I've been using it for two weeks now and every ride is 30% cheaper than Lyft and 40% cheaper than Uber. LGA to Manhattan is around $25, sometimes 50 to 75 depending on Uber or Lyft. I think Uber should be in the cash generation phase but they somehow flush the 25 to $30 they make. They ride doing literally nothing down the drain. Bold statement.
Speaker 2:There will always be a market for Uber because some people value their time at a thousand an hour. But for most people like me, two minutes instead of wanting to save $30 is worth it.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:still do not understand what the engineers at Uber, PayPal, etcetera do because it seems like the marginal improvements they make are not worth their cost. Anyways, maybe I can sell a call on Uber or something because despite Uber and Lyft using lobbyists and dirty tricks to try to stifle competition. Eventually, instead of pocketing $30 from a $65 ride and giving the cab driver 35, Someone someone like Empower will catch on and charge 40 and give it all to the drive. Give it all to the drive All to the The driver and Uber.
Speaker 1:Anyways. Typo. What went up?
Speaker 2:At the
Speaker 1:end there.
Speaker 2:I think the interesting thing here is like I can easily see something like Empower working in New York City.
Speaker 1:Yep. Can't imagine it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. High density environments where there's a lot of taxi cabs. Yep. I just think in in the I've never seen a taxi cab 10 square miles around my house Yep. Once.
Speaker 1:And the question is, like, even if the model works, if they're not taking a cut, then they don't have money to invest in onboarding both sides of the two two sided marketplace. And so the question of, like, why did Uber and Lyft burn so much money? Well, it's because they were running insane amounts of ads Yeah. Convincing everyone to be an Uber and Lyft driver.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so they created they brought all this liquidity to the market. And and New York City has had had has had a few of these, competitors. There was another one for a while.
Speaker 2:There was one that was owned by the taxi There's been a few. Some of the major
Speaker 1:And, yeah. I mean, it's very clear that, like, certain markets are gonna have, you know, different ways to slice it. You you go to some markets and I mean, when we were in we were I think we were in New York City. Right? And Uber had clearly lost some fight with JFK because it was like, oh, if you wanna take an Uber, just, like, get in a taxi cab, drive 10 miles, and that's the Uber pickup zone.
Speaker 1:And it's like, what? Like, the Uber used to just come directly to the exit and act like a normal person.
Speaker 2:But now thing with LAX.
Speaker 1:Yeah. LAX is
Speaker 2:LAX. To call it black.
Speaker 1:Which I guess makes sense because it was really congested and it was kinda crazy. And it was it was like actually probably net worse for everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I the I think the bigger point here is just what what is why is the company not generating obscene amounts of cash when when their when their margins feel like they they should they
Speaker 1:should be able
Speaker 2:to produce. We're gonna be having David Risher from Lyft. Yeah. The CEO of Lyft on, I think, this week post earnings. Bunch of questions for him around autonomous vehicles, and we can maybe bring up this post as well.
Speaker 1:We'll see. Yeah. See the rebuttal. Well, let's say about Fin 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.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Go to fin.ai to get started.
Speaker 2:Tay Kim has a great post here from Jeffries. Apparently, this looks like it was in some
Speaker 1:Isn't this hilarious?
Speaker 2:From Jeffries.
Speaker 1:This is hilarious. Like, memes are I've seen memes in VC decks like, oh, we're doing a quarterly update on the market and somebody throws a meme in there. The Jefferies is a very serious investment bank and they're throwing an AI generated image and the says source a lot. You see the source? Source Copilot.
Speaker 1:You know what that means?
Speaker 2:So they made it?
Speaker 1:The AI image generation they used is from Microsoft Copilot. Everyone thinks, oh, everyone uses Chattypete not Jeffries. They use Copilot because this is an Excel shop.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:right. Hands off the hands off the mouse when you're prompting in Copilot to be a Jefferies associate generating this. But it's a funny meme because Azure and GCP are dancing. Meanwhile AWS is a sad puppy in the corner. You know, we talked about this with AWS like sort of lagging, not having a strong, you know, horse in the AI race.
Speaker 1:Google obviously has a fantastic foundation model lab. Azure obviously, is the OpenAI bet and is growing like crazy through the AWS Of course, Amazon has Business.
Speaker 2:Has Anthropic.
Speaker 1:They do. Yep.
Speaker 2:And the work they're doing with TPU there.
Speaker 1:Somebody was saying that like Trainium is is underperforming or people don't like Trainium as much. They prefer just give me a ton of a ton of NVIDIA GPUs. But, know, who knows? Never count out the GOAT, the man who invented the cloud, the cloud cowboy, Andy Jassy.
Speaker 2:The man himself.
Speaker 1:I mean, truly in the age of like AWS being the most important driver for Amazon as a whole like the perfect person to run the business is Andy Jassy. Right? Because he created it. So Yep. They're in a
Speaker 2:pretty good spot. We have a post here from Joe Wisenthal, flying first class on my flight out of New York City. I was a little bit surprised here. Expected him. I expected Joe to be flying private.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He says everyone in the front is solo, quiet and isolated. I look back to the rest of the plane. People are joyously traveling with friends and family, sharing humor and adventure.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was just an interesting observation.
Speaker 1:Mean I understand why people in in the front are solo, quiet and isolated because first class flights have become extremely draconian.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They really have.
Speaker 1:Terrible. We we should share our experience. So, we we flew a mixture of first class and and economy to New York City with with our lovely team and crew and Jordy were Jordy and I were up in first class and we're served. We were flying should we name?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're gonna name him. We're gonna name him. We're flying
Speaker 1:We were flying Jet Blue Mint.
Speaker 2:Which historically, I've had great experiences with mint over the years.
Speaker 1:David Sedra was singing their praises, said it was the best first class experience he's ever enjoyed said and it was fantastic but we
Speaker 2:had At quite times it's been fantastic but
Speaker 1:With this quite was different experience.
Speaker 2:This was devastating.
Speaker 1:Let's let's run through our problems. So the seat was comfortable. Lay flat. It was great. You didn't think it was comfortable?
Speaker 2:I thought it was great. The fall off is real. Everything about the experience has degraded over the last You couple of
Speaker 1:know the worst thing about the lay flat seats? This is such a knee problem but they're clearly designed. They're like they're like 99.9% of people will be able to lay down completely flat here. And the seat is six foot six. So I'm two inches short.
Speaker 1:And so I have to like
Speaker 2:Curl up in a little ball.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Like a child.
Speaker 2:Yes. Well, it gets worse.
Speaker 1:It gets worse.
Speaker 2:Because
Speaker 1:that was just the beginning of our nightmare.
Speaker 2:I ordered steak.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And I wasn't hungry.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So, of course, as soon as the flight attendant left, I got up and I walked the steak dinner back and I gave it to Michael and Scott. Yeah. And then I went back to my seat. Yeah. And I was just relaxing.
Speaker 2:And the flight attendant came up to me in a little bit later and said, would you like dessert? Yeah. We're serving gelato, I think it was. And I said, I would love gelato. Thank you.
Speaker 2:And the flight attendant went back to the front. I ran to the back and I started handing the gelato to Michael and hand jumped into frame and grabbed the gelato.
Speaker 1:Grabbed the gelato.
Speaker 2:Grabbed the gelato out of my hands
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And said, you cannot do that. Yep. And of course, there's a rule that says you can't pass food between cabins. I was just shocked because I
Speaker 1:was shocked. Sense. Once I take possession. Possession's nine tenths of law. Once I take possession of the stake, it's mine to do what I want with.
Speaker 1:I think I should be able to distribute the steak evenly amongst the entire first class cabin. I should be able to auction it off. It's mine. I should be able to resell it on a secondary market. Whatever I wanna do with Yeah.
Speaker 1:That
Speaker 2:I should be a stock expert.
Speaker 1:You you gave it to me. Yes. Yeah. Yes. This is what we're gonna do.
Speaker 1:We're gonna start we're gonna vibe code an app that allows you to sell first class meals to economy customers and it runs on the JetBlue WiFi.
Speaker 2:Okay. So credit to the flight attendant.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I It could be annoying if I'm distributing the the the plates and the and the things like that around the plane. It's annoying. Yeah. Maybe maybe it's it's it's frustrating to the other other other clientele. Sure.
Speaker 2:But I I was more on your side. So anyways, I brought the gelato back to back to the front. I gave it to you. You ate it. You enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was great.
Speaker 2:But then after that we looked we we did a quick deep dive on JetBlue and I got very concerned because JetBlue
Speaker 1:Nothing more shocking than
Speaker 2:So so the real shocker tube
Speaker 1:at 30,000 feet and realizing you're flying a penny stock.
Speaker 2:Basically. So JetBlue is now trading at
Speaker 1:What's the ratio between between just like
Speaker 2:I was just gonna say their market
Speaker 1:their market bigger than complexity? Because I feel like complexity is like pretty
Speaker 2:solid business. Than than perplexity.
Speaker 1:They're less than one tenth perplexity. Yes. Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Yes. Okay. And their entire market cap is less than Miramaradi seed round. Wow. And so usually, if I was gonna get in a tube, a metal tube Yeah.
Speaker 2:And fly thousands of miles
Speaker 1:I would trust Mira for sure.
Speaker 2:I would, you know, I'm starting to think, you know, optimize for market cap a little bit more on the provider. But Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. Joanna, CEO, welcome welcome to come on anytime
Speaker 1:Get down to the TV panel, gentlemen. Defend your first class policies. I was talking to the flight attendant and I said, I'd like to speak to the manager. I'd like to debate the manager because I don't think I'd like to debate the manager. Don't you don't wanna speak to the manager.
Speaker 1:You wanna debate the manager because they have rules. They're gonna pull out some rule book. I wanna go a level deeper. I wanna go from first principles. Why do those rules exist?
Speaker 2:I was thinking I was thinking you know that that company Pipe Dream? Yep. They make tubes underground that you can transport goods. Yep. I was thinking if you could create some type of advanced straw that you could run from first class put it Yes.
Speaker 2:Run it on the side and then run it back like telescopically Yes. Like back to your boys in the back. Yeah. Yeah. And then just feed them and use like high pressure air to to feed them little bites of steak Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:And so you could do this Yes. You could do this without anyone, potentially anyone knowing about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Passing back scraps to your boys is like the it's so American. I was I was deeply offended. And then it got worse because the flight attendant kept bringing different trays of snacks. And I remember when they brought the one tray of snacks.
Speaker 1:Like, do you want any of these? This was after the after the steak debacle. And, and we started taking them and we're clearly taking more and more than we need. We're like, yeah. Just give us the entire tray.
Speaker 7:And I and I asked
Speaker 2:I asked specifically. I was like, can I bring these back to my friends? And she said, technically, yes. These For the whole cabin.
Speaker 1:These snacks are But then cabin wine.
Speaker 2:Less than ten minutes later
Speaker 1:They brought different nuts.
Speaker 2:Yes. That were that looked very nice.
Speaker 1:Yes. And those you could You bring them back. The nuts back.
Speaker 3:And But
Speaker 1:you can pass the chips back.
Speaker 2:Anyways, very very frustrating. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was it was brutal. It was brutal. Anyway, we had some fun.
Speaker 2:Ben Ben definitely said at one point, you know, we're flying with like 10 people. Shouldn't we just shouldn't we just charter a jet?
Speaker 1:And he made a good point. Yeah. Well, you will have to get on Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 1:You can get started for free at Adio.
Speaker 2:Kevin Kwok has a screenshot from LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:This is amazing.
Speaker 2:He braved LinkedIn to bring us this. He says, this is the funniest LinkedIn title from now on. People should only use LinkedIn like this. It's great. And Peter Sellis.
Speaker 2:Sellis over at Discord in the title of his LinkedIn it says, I have full purchasing authority over Discord's extremely large and lucrative cloud contracts and I am presently leading their renegotiation. Basically, putting up a billboard.
Speaker 1:Just getting exactly what you want. I want to talk to the most senior person possible at every hyperscaler. Take me seriously. Great.
Speaker 2:His username on LinkedIn is disgruntled.
Speaker 1:Disgruntled. Peter Sellers?
Speaker 2:And his title if you go to the experience section is personality hire.
Speaker 1:Personality hire. Guy's good since you
Speaker 2:Prior to this, he was vice president president of product at Snap.
Speaker 1:So Very cool.
Speaker 2:Good stuff.
Speaker 1:University of Chicago.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Come on the show, Peter.
Speaker 1:Do a live Or Hoffman's connected to him. Orin's been on the show a couple times.
Speaker 2:Should do a live auction Yeah. With the hyperscalers.
Speaker 1:And you should get on public.cominvesting for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading groups ordering order. Trusted by millions. Is Discord out yet? No.
Speaker 1:They're they're they're about to go public. Right? That seems I to be the I haven't been following too close, but He found like He moved. I I I yeah. I know.
Speaker 1:Deleon was saying like it was it was the wrong move. But regardless, love Jason and what he's built. Fantastic. One of the coolest founder stories Went to a a college for like video game design, I believe. Started an app, sold that, and then was building a video game.
Speaker 1:Built a League of Legends for your phone, like a MOBA, and took that to TechCrunch Disrupt and was demoing it. Was just like super into the gaming world. Eventually got lucky with Discord and found the correct product market fit, scaled the the It to building games Put the KPIs in the orbit.
Speaker 2:Building games to building dominant messaging platforms pipeline Undefeated. Undefeated. Slack, Discord. Paracletes in the chat says, what kind of country is this? We can't even pass back little stakes to our boys.
Speaker 1:I know. I agree.
Speaker 2:Paracletes. You, Paracletes. To same way.
Speaker 1:Good to have you here. Good to have you. Let's talk about Scott Wu. There was a report about Cognition. He is replying or kind of sub tweeting the the coverage.
Speaker 1:Basically, 30 out of the 200 people that were acquired from Windsurf got laid off and then the rest got a buyout offer. If you're not interested in staying on the boat, you were on a go ship, now you're on the Titanic. No. Not the Titanic. You're on the you're on the
Speaker 2:Carnival. Carnival cruise for
Speaker 1:cracked IMO. Cruises. It's a it's a destroyer. Yeah. On battleship.
Speaker 1:You're on a battleship. And everyone's gotta be pulling in the same direction. Yeah. Everyone's gotta be hoisting the sails on this galleon. And so Scott Wu says, people have asked about our culture and recent employee communications.
Speaker 1:Cognition has an extremely performance culture. And we're upfront about it. This is Scott Wu's. This is my Scott Wu impression. We we are routinely at the office through the weekend and do some of our best work late into the night.
Speaker 1:Many of us literally live where we work. That's true. They have a house in in Silicon Valley somewhere, and they a bunch of them live there. We know that people who joined Windsurf didn't expect to join Cognition, and we're proud of how we work. We understand it's not for everyone.
Speaker 1:We gave our team the opportunity to decide. We offered for all employees who joined via acquisition to opt into our culture with full clarity on what that entails. We know that we will lose some strong talent in doing this, but we truly believe the level of intensity this moment demands from us is unprecedented. While not everyone is looking for a culture like ours, everyone deserves respect and appreciation for their work. Regardless of their decision.
Speaker 1:We accelerated and cashed out all four years of equity for everyone at Windsurf, even for the eighty five percent of employees who didn't hit their one year cliff. And for those who opt out, we're providing an additional nine months of pay on top of this. This is a good guy, Scott. He's just doing everything right. He's he's setting the bar high.
Speaker 1:He's letting people know, hey, we take this really seriously. We just don't want there to be a culture clash. Look.
Speaker 2:Yes. We took care of you. You got if you if you just went from almost acquisition from OpenAI Yeah. Ended up on the ghost ship through the Google
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Deal, ended up at Cognition, got all your got got the full upside from the deal Yeah. Even if you had invested. And then now you're at Cognition and realize, I don't wanna work as hard as everyone else here. Yeah. And you get the opportunity.
Speaker 2:You get nine months of pay to just walk away. Yeah. That person is there's there's gonna be some people in that group that are
Speaker 1:Totally. I mean, it it it's not it's not like the norm, but there are definitely people who are like, I was actually excited to rest and vest. I was I was actually excited to hit the ping pong table. You know? I wanted to just be on the beanbag chair for a while, and I wanted to kinda cruise and and have, like, a normal nine to five.
Speaker 1:Like, there are people who who, like, that's what they maybe they maybe they maybe they're this was their third start up. They already got some liquidity. They're doing great, and they have a family, and they're you know, they they wanna be a little bit more flexible, take more time off. And, like, that's the beauty of, you know, the American labor market is you can kinda choose and pick your own adventure. But the know, Scott wants to create a cohesive team, a cohesive culture.
Speaker 1:He doesn't want this idea. It's very tough when when half the team is staying up really late grinding and they love it. And then the other half is like, I'm dipping out early. It's I'm just It's awkward for everyone. It's just awkward for everyone.
Speaker 1:So he's just saying, hey, like, you're welcome to stay on the team, but you gotta buy in or you gotta bounce and go, you know, take your take your liquidity from the accelerated investing you got. Take the nine months of extra pay and go find something that actually brings you joy. Go do your life's work. So I think this is well managed. It seems like the comms leaked prior to this.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Don't know. Would it have been better if he posted this beforehand and just kind of own the narrative? Maybe that would be the move because you kinda know that people will frame this poorly and so you get out and say, hey. I'm going founder mode.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm I'm offering this buyout offer. Because there are plenty of companies that have done these buyout offers before. I'm I believe that there's one major company, I forget which one, that has a standing offer at $24.07 every single day. Like, doesn't matter if you just joined. I mean, of course, you can't just like join and leave immediately Yeah.
Speaker 1:And get the buyout offer. But basically, like, you if you hit a cliff and they're like, we'll re up you, we'll keep you incentivized, we're gonna keep paying you. But like, the buyout offer is always there for you to take some cash, go figure out what's next, find a better fit because we just don't want people who are just, like, hanging on to this job because they are, like, just hesitant about going somewhere else when they should just figure figure out the next thing. Yep. Anyway, you don't wanna be losing sleep.
Speaker 1:Get a pod five ultra. Go to 8sleep.com. Buy new warranty, thirty anniversary trial, free returns, free shipping. I got a great night sleep. I slept for eight hours last night, and I think it's showing.
Speaker 2:Didn't you say eight and a half?
Speaker 1:Something like that.
Speaker 2:You put up some crazy numbers. I got a 95 last month. I've been down in the dumps. Had a 45 Sunday night. You're you're
Speaker 1:you're you're back in the
Speaker 2:four hours.
Speaker 1:The energy's coming through. You can feel it in the intro. Your Yeah. Sleep is great. Sleep
Speaker 2:You can tell my correlated sleep
Speaker 1:with your voice. Yeah. The the more sleep you get, the more hoarse you will get from screaming into the microphone.
Speaker 2:You can tell my sleep score by the by the intro.
Speaker 1:Yes. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Skooks says after they put GLP ones in the water, being obese will be back in vogue. A sign of indomitable vitality and enormous wealth.
Speaker 1:This is not obese. This man is not obese. He is prosperous prosperous and prosperity should be celebrated. Yep.
Speaker 2:Love the cane too.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a it's a wild
Speaker 2:build Our to next move bringing back canes.
Speaker 1:Canes. Smart canes. It's gonna happen. Lot of battery life in a cane. Plenty of room for a ton of batteries.
Speaker 1:Lot that you can do with a cane on device inference GPT OSS. Run it on the cane. On the Run cane.
Speaker 2:That's really the ultimate status symbol on
Speaker 1:that NVIDIA make a narrow forty ninety, like a GPU that could be could be put in? Maybe we just need to string together a bunch
Speaker 2:into of be cane.
Speaker 1:Of iPhone chips. I really I really think building a smart cane might be a challenge. I I don't know if you can I mean, I guess the chip in the iPhone is probably small enough to fit in the cane, but you'd have to fig it might be it might have a thick part to the cane?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. You could make a very wide cane. Right? Almost like an elephant's, you know, leg.
Speaker 1:That seems like not the vision I'm going for with the cane. I want I want an aesthetic cane. I want a cane that that it doesn't jump out of anyone.
Speaker 2:Doubt. Well
Speaker 1:Doesn't doesn't jump out of anyone.
Speaker 2:We'll put Tyler on it. Tyler, just
Speaker 1:just
Speaker 2:try
Speaker 1:to Yeah.
Speaker 6:Build this end the
Speaker 1:using open source LLMs, please. Thank you. And then when you launch the cane, buy a buy a billboard for it on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 1:Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Let's go to billboards is
Speaker 2:taken one
Speaker 1:of our billboards
Speaker 2:is taken down. Taken down. After after a good run, we
Speaker 1:By by a state actor, do we think?
Speaker 2:Probably. Probably. Some type of, yeah, nation state Yeah. Hacker group. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:Or was Zach it a false flag? You'll never know.
Speaker 2:Zach Zach run for
Speaker 1:a month after.
Speaker 2:Noticed that that it had been taken down. I was very disappointed. So working on getting more up, Zach, here on it.
Speaker 1:Maybe maybe SF next time. Maybe I don't know where else we should go. Probably Saint Tropez, if that makes sense for a billboard. Abilene. Abilene would be good.
Speaker 1:Abilene would actually be great. Abilene would be the way. Audience of one. Just want I just want Chase and Sam to see it basically.
Speaker 2:Like Audience of two. There's also a lot of people in Abilene that are just getting
Speaker 1:The billboard in Abilene should just say it shouldn't even say listen to TBPN. It should say, come on TBPN. Call in to TBPN.
Speaker 2:Call us.
Speaker 1:Sam, call in to TBPN. We'd love to chat with you. If we put that up, I think we I think we get him. Okay. He'll he'll, of course, come on the show.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Data Center USA.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Sagar and Jetty says, can't help but love every iteration of the moon Swatch.
Speaker 1:Yes. What do you think?
Speaker 2:It's collaboration between Omega and Swatch.
Speaker 1:Is that the same company? Does Swatch Group own Omega? Omega? I always listen to the James Bond pronunciation, the Daniel Craig. He says Omega.
Speaker 1:Omega.
Speaker 2:Does Swatch Group own? Anyway, looks nice.
Speaker 1:History of the moon Swatch. The Moon Watch was it was Omega.
Speaker 2:It was worn by Omega, the astronauts. Same company.
Speaker 1:Makes the
Speaker 2:same company.
Speaker 1:Swatch Group. Same company. Yep. Very big, very big company. So if you're not familiar with the Moon Watch, there was a there was a knockout drag out fight.
Speaker 1:It was like the AI talent wars all over again in the nineteen sixties to decide which company would send the watch to the moon on the wrist of the astronauts. Everyone expected it to be Rolex. Omega won the contract. The Omega Moonwatch went to went to space, went to the moon, and came back. And now it's a celebrated timepiece.
Speaker 1:The the the ones that went to the moon are obviously in museums, and the the the models from that year traded at a very high premium. But they but they issue new Moon watches regularly and the Moon Swatch is something that's a little bit more I think affordable, certainly more rugged and has nice has a nice fabric strap.
Speaker 2:So We'll release Saturday, August 9 priced at $400.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. And if you're looking for your own watch, go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. You can get an Omega.
Speaker 1:You can get something worn by Marc Andreessen. He's an Omega guy. Little little little bit of an Yeah. We clocked that. We clocked that early.
Speaker 2:Came out with an interview.
Speaker 1:We were expecting What's on
Speaker 2:the wrist?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were expecting a Graf Diamonds hallucination, maybe four of them ideally. But, know, he went with the budget option.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But we'll get him. He's coming on the show, I believe tomorrow, and we will pitch him on picking up a couple Graf Diamonds hallucinations with the pennies in his couch cushions.
Speaker 2:He's got a lot of real estate.
Speaker 5:Everybody's got a lot of real estate.
Speaker 2:Lot of people I don't know what what's up with people just wearing one watch, especially allocators Exactly. Caliber. Yeah. Right? Why stop at one?
Speaker 1:I I you've seen a couple of people that wear a watch and then the whoop band or a watch and then an Apple Watch or something. But why not why not four Daytonas?
Speaker 2:Anyway Something there.
Speaker 1:Congratulations to Joe Weisenthal again on the absolute run. Odd Lots is the number one business podcast in the world and the number six podcast in the world after cold blooded from ABC News and Crime Junkie and the j the Joe Rogan experience is sitting at number three. Mick Unplugged Leadership Because Growth, which I'm not familiar with, is number four. And The Daily from The New York Times is at five.
Speaker 2:To be clear, this is not because we our our episodes of Odd Lots released yesterday. It is because they got a profile, a a glowing profile in The New York Times on Sunday.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:They're on a generational run. We love to see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and Joe said the business category of the Apple charts is very funny. It is funny because of Money Rehab, Andy Frisella, Real AF, like a lot of like, I think Jocko Willink is in the business category, and it's very different than the Odd Lots stuff. Like, Odd Lots is like, let's talk to an expert on the grain market. Like, let's see what's going on.
Speaker 1:One of these is not like curve. Yeah. And it's very much listened to by by hedge fund folks and capital allocators. And a lot of these other, podcasts are listened to more by lifestyle entrepreneurs and and small business folks. And they and obviously, that's a much larger audience, much larger addressable audience, but it's good to see Odd Lots on an absolute tear.
Speaker 1:And Joe says, okay. Gonna stop with self congratulation, but fun to be number one for what will be a brief moment. Surreal week. Also, one last thing. If anyone knows how I can parlay my fifteen minutes into throwing out the first pitch at a cyclone game.
Speaker 1:I have no idea what the cyclones is. Is that some sort of is that sports of some sort? It's some I've never heard of this.
Speaker 2:High a affiliate, the Brooklyn cyclones.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:High a affiliate of the New York Mets.
Speaker 1:This is so this is baseball? Yep. And that's the one with you throw the ball and
Speaker 2:then like you hit it with the a feeder team?
Speaker 1:Is the one where you throw the ball and you hit it with the bat. And there's like gloves too? Great. Well, good luck to Joe throwing out the first pitch. That would be great to see.
Speaker 1:Good content.
Speaker 2:Nikita says, things that will cause a user to churn. One, friends leave. Two, product stops growing and becomes culturally irrelevant. 998 feed has a bug where it flashes. 999 bookmarks are not searchable.
Speaker 2:You have to imagine Nikita's DMs are are potentially gnarlier than than Elon's at the moment of thousands of his mutuals and friends messaging him every possible bug in the app. I know we would do the same to Jacoby before he left.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I was just talking about this. Like, we don't use the bookmarks feature. We use the shared groups feature to kinda track posts that we wanna share on the show. And I was like, oh, I wish I could search across all of these. But I was like, I'm literally the only person that wants that.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm the only I'm the only person whose entire job and career depends on this one niche feature. And so it's not even worth requesting. I'll just figure out a workaround, hopefully scrape it out of there and then make that searchable or something. Because I can I can work on a workaround? But, yeah.
Speaker 1:Fortunately, friends have not left and x continues to be culturally relevant. It's where news breaks. And we saw that on full display with the Soham Parikh saga. The entire thing played out on X. Started with a post, wound up with everyone else chiming in on various posts, kinda ended with like us interviewing him live on a stream on X.
Speaker 1:It was very cool all within the X ecosystem. You know stuff stuff still happens elsewhere but in terms of like where the tech conversation is happening it's entirely it's entirely accident. There's there's no there's no even close second. Now, I I do think it's interesting to see. I want to get better at understanding like what what is the current thing on Instagram today and where what is the real community that is formed on various other platforms that are adjacent because I know some people that have grown accounts and and when I was big on YouTube and really focused on YouTube, I would notice things like we were talking to Sameer yesterday about like different metas that develop and different themes and you you sometimes these break containment but a lot of times it's just just a story that that happens within the YouTube ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Somebody posts a video and then there's a reaction to that video. Yeah. There's a whole cycle of news that happens within the
Speaker 2:x still feels, you know, if you're generally interested in tech Yeah. It feels like a shared experience.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Whereas if you're interested in tech and you're on Instagram Yep. It doesn't feel like you're you have any feed that feels at all similar to even another friend that's like loosely interested in tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm trying to think on YouTube, the big the big discourse is always it's always about YouTube. Like, Colin Samir really are at the center of the of the discourse on YouTube. Creator industrial complex. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that on YouTube, you have to have a YouTube account and you have to publish a YouTube video to have a voice whatsoever. Yeah. Like, can show up on X and type out 280 characters, go viral and be the main character, be the current thing, start a conversation, engage with that conversation. But the bar on YouTube for having a voice like the comment section just doesn't rise to the same level as like a reaction video. And so when when like when mister beast is embroiled in controversy, there will be other YouTubers.
Speaker 1:Like there was this the mister beastification of YouTube. This idea that mister beast had created this meta and then other YouTubers were copying it, and it was all this, like, yelling at the camera and fast paced editing and lots of, like, in your face, high saturation graphics popping up, all this different stuff going on. And and that entire that entire news cycle played out on YouTube and it was because there were commentary channels and cultural analysis channels that that replied essentially. But instead of it being like a quote tweet dunk, like, the the equivalent is like responding viral video. Another viral video responding to the analysis.
Speaker 1:So someone put out so mister Beast was on a tear and then other people were copying it, then somebody put out the mister Beastification of YouTube which went viral. And then other people would respond to the mister beastification is overstated, or it's not that big of a deal, or it's it's even worse than you thought. And so people will take the conversation in different ways, but it moves much slower because if you're like, yeah, wanna do a reaction video. Okay. See you in a week.
Speaker 1:Right? Yep. Anyway, find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service.
Speaker 1:It's a vacation home, but better. Is that gong new? This gong is relatively new, a couple months since our new studio. We do have another new gong over there that we haven't that we haven't actually showed anyone. We haven't hit And an we when we got a completely new gong for the Figma IPO and we had Dylan Field hit it on the day of his IPO.
Speaker 1:It's a game hit. It's a game hit IPO gong. It will be retired. It will hang in the rafters of the TBP and UltraDome. And eventually this eventually this dome will be filled with gongs from historic
Speaker 2:Hits.
Speaker 1:Technology moments. And we're gonna give the Computer History Museum a run for their money. They might have Commodore 64 or whatever. They have the they have the original like touring machine. It's like this it's this computer that you crank.
Speaker 1:It's like the craziest thing and it can do calculations. It's like it's it's literally no electronics and it's a computer. It's like it's all just like basically marbles flowing around not really. Dream rig. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Dream rig. Imagine posting on that. But we're gonna give them a run for our money with our Gong collection. Anyway Eleven what's up with?
Speaker 2:Labs has a
Speaker 1:Big new launch news.
Speaker 2:Can we pull this video up sometime?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna I wanna listen to the Eleven Labs music
Speaker 2:They're saying Eleven Music is here created with leading labels, publishers, and artists. It lets you craft studio quality tracks with control over genre, style and language using just text. Built on licensed catalogs, every song you create is cleared for commercial use. That is pretty insane. I had an eye opening moment
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Probably two years ago at this point. Mhmm. One of I enjoy the music of the rapper Gunna. Sure. That a somebody made an entire out a Gunna album that was entirely AI generated.
Speaker 1:Was it good?
Speaker 2:And it was solid.
Speaker 1:It was solid.
Speaker 2:It wasn't necessarily I I I listened through it a couple times. You could, if you paid it, if you were not paying attention to it, it sounded just like a regular Gunna song album.
Speaker 1:Did any of those was it on Spotify?
Speaker 2:I think they published on Spotify but I
Speaker 1:Did any of those songs migrate over into a playlist?
Speaker 2:For me, you're Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. That's right. Don't like, it's in your liked feed or it's in your it's in your Spotify.
Speaker 2:Spotify is in an interesting place here because you're one way to piss off artists Oh, yeah. Is allow people to generate AI versions of the same artist Yeah. And the artists are losing revenue. Yeah. I knew a team, a friend that was working on on basically Spotify for just AI generated content.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They pivoted because they didn't feel like they wanted to withstand decades of lawsuits. Yeah. But it sounds like has found a solution here. Yeah. Let's play this video.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's play the video. Let's see what they have to they have to say. Hopefully, we don't get copyrights right. I I think we should not because this is the first time this music has existed.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we got some orchestral music. It's pretty epic. I told the founder to make us a WWE theme song, a really aggressive over the over the top track for us. This is this is not quite our vibe, but it's nice.
Speaker 1:It's nice. Okay. This definitely past the uncanny valley. Like, this could just be a real song, and I wouldn't know.
Speaker 2:This is it.
Speaker 1:I'm digging it. Digging it. Okay. Let's see. Did they do any of Ghana?
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. You got some fast paced.
Speaker 2:Little elevator coated, but Yeah. I'm getting into it. What
Speaker 1:else we got? Their customers must just love, like, falling asleep. Reggae. Okay. This is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Give me some heavy metal.
Speaker 10:It's pretty sick. I like this one.
Speaker 1:This is epic. I want this song. I I'm so mad. Oh, this is gonna hit. It's hit.
Speaker 1:That's great. Get me that track. I want I I want Get
Speaker 2:me that track. This is a good time to talk about last week the Panama playlist Yeah. Came out. John and I were featured in
Speaker 1:the Doxed.
Speaker 2:We were targeted by the Panama playlist. Targeted. If you go to panamaplaylist.com, they basically scraped a bunch of people's Spotify's without them knowing and then published their playlist. I was wondering, I was looking at this playlist and I I didn't immediately have a memory of it. It was The playlist was called No Cap.
Speaker 2:And I was like, why would I name a a playlist that? And it took me a second to come back to me. It's because I was collecting songs, rap songs with obscure references to venture capital and investing.
Speaker 1:As one does.
Speaker 2:As one does. And so, if you look at the first song, God did.
Speaker 1:Clearly for a party round drop that never happened?
Speaker 2:Never have never happened. But, first song God Did, DJ Khaled or or one of the other rappers on the track says, I'm at the cap table. What the splits is, not that cap table. Boy, we live this. And, then you have Okay Okay, Kanye West, price went up, Angel Investor.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:anyways, bunch of other random random references but it's all making sense now. What else we got, John?
Speaker 1:We got GPT five news on Polymarket. GPT five released by August 10 is now sitting at 92%. It was sitting at 75% yesterday. Earlier this week, 80%. And so that's the by the end of the week, there is a 92% chance that GPT five is released.
Speaker 1:And it it has mooned recently. Just back in August 3, it was sitting at thirty one percent chance. So it has just in two days gone from thirty one percent to over ninety two percent. So people are definitely expecting GPT five to be released in the next five days, which should be exciting. I'm sure there'll be lots of coverage less to talk about and we will want to hop on with as many as many legends, as many as many Metis list AI researchers as possible to get the to get the deep dive.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. In other news, flying private is the new wealth yardstick. I know our audience is gonna wanna know about this. We talked about Joesenthal. Is
Speaker 2:this news?
Speaker 1:This is news.
Speaker 2:Is this new news?
Speaker 1:This This
Speaker 2:is Yeah. People hearing about this for the first time?
Speaker 1:But I love this because do you know Max tuning? He started a gummy candy business, sour candy business. He sold it to Hershey for $75,000,000. I just love the name. Max Tuning with two x's.
Speaker 1:It's like a great name. So he was a YouTuber. He started a sour candy business, Sour Strips, and just grew it and grew it and grew it and wound up selling it for 75,000,000 and did very well. But the first thing he did before buying a Rolex or a dream home was a private jet for his wife and six friends to veil on a desolate Falcon 900. They skipped security lines, zipped straight to the runway, and seated themselves in leather recliners with gold accents in the wood paneled cabin.
Speaker 1:The price tag for this adventure, $100,000 worth every penny. Go tuning's Goldendoodle, dude. This guy is phenomenal with the names.
Speaker 2:Naming artists.
Speaker 1:Love it. Sprawled at their feet. The joke is I had to get a private plane so I could bring my dog, the 35 year old said. I didn't really care what the price was. The ultra wealthy have always enjoyed flying private.
Speaker 1:That club is growing as soaring stocks and crypto prices meant more millionaires and billionaires who now have a range of choices to book a seat on a jet. And you know the best part? He can give the stake to his dog if he wants because he's flying private, baby. He doesn't have to deal with the draconian rules of JetBlue mint. Flying private has become the ultimate luxury splurge for many wealthy individuals, surpassing Ferraris, Hermes, Birkin bags, topping $14,000, or even waterfront Hampton homes
Speaker 2:all the above.
Speaker 1:Which we recently learned are very interestingly priced where property in the Hamptons is somewhat reasonable, you know, $510,000,000 might get you in the game. But renting a house in the Hamptons for a single month during the high season, $250,000. Right? Something like that? That's what
Speaker 2:we're Very, expensive. And and the the rental rates are are so extreme because you really only wanna be there.
Speaker 1:You only wanna be there during the of the hot season. Yeah. When Emily Sundberg will be out there. For many of those aspiring to join the ranks of the truly rich, having private jet money is the new goal dividing the 1% from the point 1%. The pandemic unleashed a burst of demand and providers say popular culture has turbocharged enthusiasm and envy for the fly private lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Social media has given me switch
Speaker 2:says his friend flies their dog private solo.
Speaker 1:Well, we talked about on the show earlier, a dog that flies private alone because the owner signed a contract to do the interior design for the private jet. And as part of the deal, their dog gets to fly private. And we were laughing one
Speaker 2:of the worst deals.
Speaker 1:Like, what if you want to get to, you know, New York to Miami and the dog wants to get to LA and you have to do a layover at Van Nuys to get to Miami because the dog has to fly private. But the younger people are getting a glimpse into the lives of jet setters whether it is a model flying with friends to a bachelorette party in Los Cabos, Mexico or a hedge fund manager hopping a plane for a birthday in Saint Bart's. Realistic expectations are in or in order. It's my dream to fly private, said a user on a Reddit forum for so called Henry's which refers to high earners not rich yet. I think that's everyone on our team.
Speaker 1:Adding that he earns about $300,000, is married, and has a kid in daycare. Definitely closer to broke than flying private. Another user responded, mugged. Mugged. Yet, the
Speaker 2:number The Henry term emerged during the d to c boom.
Speaker 1:I never heard of that before.
Speaker 2:That that whole era where a lot of d to c brands were kind of looking at their customers as people that weren't necessarily going head to toe Laura Piana but they would Flex. Maybe buy flex up and and get you know, an item or two or or buy some away luggage that whole thing.
Speaker 1:Buying a Clydesdale, not a thoroughbred. That type of money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker 1:I mean, rain, the I I I did a deep dive on like the horse market recently and the as one does in the spread between the cheapest horse and the most expensive horse is staggering.
Speaker 4:There's right.
Speaker 1:You can spend millions or you can spend just a couple thousand dollars. So no excuse not to have a horse. One horsepower. What's my
Speaker 2:much power
Speaker 1:do you need?
Speaker 2:At least.
Speaker 1:The US added more than a thousand millionaires every day last year on average according to UBS. The billionaire club grew more than 50% between 2015 and 2024. Private jet hours flown touched a high in 2022 and then have stayed elevated since according to data. Travelers can now use apps to snag individual seats on private jets or pay for flights by the hour. Others charter flights paying for just the occasional trip from New York to Miami while there are rare business moguls whom who might spring for the entire jet.
Speaker 1:Some jet providers accept payment in crypto. Shrimp, cocktails, and facials. Ken Ricci, a pilot and chairman of Flexjet, a private company, said the frugal wealthy, high earners who don't typically splurge, started spending big on travel during the pandemic because of health concerns. Many of them have found it tough to go back to flying commercially. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because of the JetBlue rules, we know this. And years of economic growth have helped ease the stigma around conspicuous consumption that set in after the financial crisis. It's in vogue to be wealthy, he said. Sometimes we love the rich, sometimes we hate the rich. It isn't just avoiding the security line or the hoi polloi.
Speaker 1:Flying private means trading Biscoff cookies, which were also given to us on the JetBlue flight Been denied. For freshly baked ones and packing lunch with such items as shrimp cocktail and filet mignon from menus spanning a dozen pages. Chef Nobu Matsuhisha Hisa crafted a menu for VistaJet that includes miso salmon. Some cabin hosts are trained to give travelers facials 40,000 feet above the ground with doctor Barbara Sturm's line of luxury skincare. Very nice.
Speaker 1:Anyway, fly private. Stop making excuses.
Speaker 2:We had a breaking news A breaking news. Actually.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I made us a song on Oh. Lippin Labs.
Speaker 1:Okay. Breaking news. Yeah. Yeah. Can we play it on the stream?
Speaker 5:I think so.
Speaker 1:Up. Let's hear the song
Speaker 2:from WWE style. And code where pitches rain and valuations grow. Brace for the venture showdown.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Wired for disruption. Seed rounds come rap? This is not
Speaker 2:how WWE works. I don't really know what
Speaker 1:you're I'm not into this now. Go do some research. Go do some research.
Speaker 2:Shut down.
Speaker 1:Shut down.
Speaker 2:Shut down.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. The whole point of the WWE intro is that is that it it it has no words. It's it's purely instrumental.
Speaker 1:So so so look up look up some WWE intros because it's meant for the announcers to speak over it. And so I'm sure you can just prompt it and say no words. But also, like, the words are gonna be the hardest thing to get right because it's it's like telling jokes. It's it's it's creative writing. It's very, very difficult for the models to get that right.
Speaker 1:Obviously, amazing work by eleven Labs. Very convincing, but gotta do some work on prompting. This one's
Speaker 2:Yeah. Go back to it. I don't I don't want it. I don't want any of that cringe, like, rap.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and and, yeah, and and and the and the abstract, like, chatty pity compression of, of the concepts that we talk about.
Speaker 2:Good effort good effort,
Speaker 1:And Let's impressive that it was able to be turned around so quickly. This isn't something that cooks over and
Speaker 2:Before we before we go into the next story Yeah. Funny story from earlier this year. We were flying back from a trip Yeah. And our and we're joining a buddy Yep. A friend of the show on their jet.
Speaker 2:Yep. And the morning of it was a super early flight. We didn't text him to remind him that we were coming. And so we got to the we got to the the terminal, got on the golf cart, we're driving out to to the plane and just watched it take off.
Speaker 1:No. We didn't watch it take off. Was taxiing.
Speaker 2:It was ta well, we watched It taking off. We watched it taxiing.
Speaker 1:I thought it No. No. No. No. It didn't it didn't leave the ground.
Speaker 2:Oh, we got out of view from it. So I thought it left the ground.
Speaker 1:No. No. It didn't leave the ground. No.
Speaker 2:You're saying it was but it was running down the runway.
Speaker 1:It it was on the runway taxing.
Speaker 2:It was
Speaker 1:It was not it was not active in time. Turned around. I don't know. But either way, they turned the plane around for us. It was the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me.
Speaker 2:We felt really bad.
Speaker 1:If I if I ever go on We are done. The best. What's the nicest thing everyone's done for you? Turn around the PJ for sure.
Speaker 2:That's up there.
Speaker 1:It was it was mortifying. It was, it was a low point, but then the rest play was fantastic.
Speaker 2:It was fantastic.
Speaker 1:Great time. Learned a lot. It was fantastic.
Speaker 2:We are forever
Speaker 1:in there. Yes. Anyway, in other news, the New York Post is launching the California Post. Wow. The New York Post goes to Hollywood.
Speaker 1:Plans to launch plans launch of the California Post daily newspaper. New York Post, you probably know them from their hilarious and wild front page what do you call them? Just like headlines. They write really great great headlines with, like, these hilarious puns. And so they are going to come to California and launch a daily newspaper, which of course will probably be instantiated on the web very seriously.
Speaker 1:But they call it the new venture. They're bringing the signature high brow low mix high high low brow mix of content that the New York Post is famous for alongside fearless common sense journalism, celebrity entertainment news, World Class Sports Reporting, and Legendary Covers.
Speaker 2:Gotta get People We gotta start getting the California Post.
Speaker 1:The Covered. Yeah. I'm very excited for this.
Speaker 2:Do you know who
Speaker 1:The New York New York Post. I don't. Who?
Speaker 2:He happens to be a founding father Really? In this country, Alexander Hamilton.
Speaker 1:Wait. What? Yes. You're kidding me.
Speaker 2:Yes. I thought New York Post was founded in eighteen o one by Alexander Hamilton No founding father That's amazing. George Washington appointed as the nation's nation's first secretary of the treasury.
Speaker 1:Wow. What a story. Insane. We we we have our next guest, but in other media news, Barry Weiss is apparently looking to sell the free press for $250,000,000. I'm gonna hold off on ringing the gong until it's confirmed.
Speaker 1:We're all rumors. The rumors actually come from the New York Post, but this would be a fantastic outcome for a new media company that's only something like four years old. Barry Weiss left the New York Times opinion page. There was a huge dust up that's that happened in, 2022, and she's reportedly met with Skydance Media CEO David Ellison, at the high powered Allen and Company summer camp for billionaires. And l and David Ellison is the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, And he's apparently reportedly interested in buying the free press as Skydance continues We,
Speaker 2:I think, originally covered this briefly
Speaker 1:We talked about when they were
Speaker 2:meeting at Allen and Company's event earlier this month or, I guess, earlier in July. Yes. This screams like talent acquisition as much as it does.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Barry Barry is a Traditional acquisition. And she, yeah, is a she she does she leads the podcast interviews and brings great guests on and she writes. But then they also high they also have gotten a bunch of great people on the team. Tyler Cowen has a column at the free press.
Speaker 1:Like like that was the that was the thing that got me to subscribe. Yeah. Because I love Tyler. And I was like, I wanna see what he has to say. And I don't wanna like, it's paywalled, so I have to pay.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so she's been very good at at at, like, hoovering up talent, building this thing, and and they publish a ton when you go to the the the free press. You just see tons of articles, all sorts of stuff. Just today, I was looking at the free press's homepage. They have a a basically an op ed written by Palmer Lucky.
Speaker 1:Like, they got Palmer to write about his thoughts in the free press. And I thought there was just Crazy. That that's the example of, like, great great written written works up. Congratulations to everyone will
Speaker 2:be to help make CBS relevant again even if she was continuing to run the press. Anyway. Anyways, without further ado, have Alex Albert.
Speaker 1:Alex, welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for joining on short notice. Great to meet you. Great to have you.
Speaker 2:How are you doing?
Speaker 3:Great to meet you guys. Here. And John Fantastic. Hoping you hold on to that, that mallet so we can get a Gong ring in.
Speaker 1:Give us some news. What you got? We went from
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's four o. It's oh, go ahead.
Speaker 1:No. No. You go for it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I was gonna say it's an exciting day. We dropped Claude Opus 4.1.
Speaker 2:Just Let's go. Tip deck.
Speaker 3:Three hours ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You gotta give us a number. How many parameters? How much money do you spend on the thing?
Speaker 3:Can give you a sweep bench score.
Speaker 1:Okay. Here we Give me a sweep bench score. How about what is it?
Speaker 2:Point five sweep
Speaker 1:Let's go. There we go. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. It's been a very, very exciting week. We're shipping like crazy.
Speaker 3:A lot of stuff happening.
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Don't know how you guys are even keeping up over here.
Speaker 1:It's insane. It's It's, yeah. I mean, we've been talking about streaming for seven hours a day. We'll we'll get there eventually. Fortunately, three hours is, like, just enough to barely cover scratch the surface of what's going on in tech.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about where this fits into the rest of the landscape. There's a ton of stuff going on in open in in in Anthropix world, from clogged code, different consumer models, open there's so many different projects. How does this fit in?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So this is our best model yet for just general capabilities and intelligence. Really, really is pushing the frontier on all sorts of agentic reasoning coding tasks. Back in May, we kind of hinted at the launch of Cloud four that we wanna get on a more continual release schedule Yep. For their upcoming models.
Speaker 3:And this is kind of our first step towards that vision of now being able to ship models faster and faster to our customers and end users.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One one of the narratives that's kind of stuck around with Claude for a long time is this idea of, like, the vibes just being really good. And Mhmm. Yeah. It does great on the benchmarks, but it's just, like, fun to talk to.
Speaker 1:People like the way it talks. But, at the same time, Anthropic's been fantastically successful in the business context. Is there an important overlap there? Like, you hearing from business customers that the vibes being good is driving Yeah. Bottom line results.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. More so how much do developers care about vibes versus just raw
Speaker 1:It seems like developers are the only ones that can tell that the vibes are good. But I but I but I'm always interested in like, how does that actually translate to like my bottom line if I'm an enterprise SaaS company and I need to use an anthropic API for something? Am I I happy with the vibes or is that just kinda like a nice to have on top?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it the the vibes are
Speaker 1:kind of there's you can
Speaker 3:measure vibes in a lot of different areas. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 5:So if you're
Speaker 3:a developer, you're measuring vibes in in the coding domain and how long of a task can these models complete? Can you just let it go off agentically and work on your files? If you're creating an application in your enterprise that has end users and you're having those end users actually interact with the model, you want those personality vibes to be pretty stellar. Otherwise, you're just gonna give a bad experience to your customer. I think Claude has, like, a really wide range of things there.
Speaker 3:And, of course, we're known for kind of that natural feeling personality, and we've done a lot of character work there. We've got some really great researchers on the team that focus on that. But then on the other side of the spectrum for the developers, for those folks that are building agents Mhmm. That's where we really get into that that other type of vibe, which is, you know, how how long of a task horizon can these models operate on.
Speaker 1:Is there a good benchmark for for task horizon yet? We've heard baby AGI, fifteen minute AGI, twenty minute AGI. We've seen a lot of people, like, string these things together in but, like, in terms of, like, most consumer interactions, think the where where most people hit the interface of an LLM, they feel like like twenty minutes is the kind of the upper bound of what the average AI user is experiencing. Do you can you tell talk to me about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I I do think LLMs right now have somewhat of, like, a jagged intelligence frontier where in some tasks, of course, they spike more than others. For me, personally, when I'm trying to assess that capability in a model, there's a couple places I look. One is especially coding benchmarks. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:These are really, really important because often, it's the model trying to complete a PR end to end. So it needs to take a lot of actions. It needs to call a lot of tools and modify a lot of files. So things like Suitebench are actually, like, good proxies in some degree
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:To measuring that. There's also third party institutions that are doing this research right now. So one is is called METER, model evaluation threat research. Yeah. And they have that really nice
Speaker 1:sounds awesome.
Speaker 3:That really nice line goes up graph of, like, plotting out the models and how long of a task they can do compared to a human developer.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:And Claude has always been, pushing the frontier on that, and I'm assuming, once they hit 4.1 up there, it'll be be up into the right as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, we've seen, like, the in terms of the spiky intelligence, like, Arc AGI is, like, the main thing that people point to is, like, a weird valley of capability because it seems like it should be obvious and and easy to do, and yet it reveals something about the models. Are there any are there any places in the coding world that are more specific where we're underperforming either just because we haven't focused on it? I'm thinking about, like like, I imagine that most models are better at Python than Fortran. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but is that is that an outdated take? Is Fortran now just kind of, like, solved because somebody had just got all the training data together and RL on Fortran, and now we're good?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I definitely think there's still probably if you were to, like, take SweetBench, for example, and you translate it into every coding language Yeah. I'm sure Python and and JavaScript, TypeScript would be
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 3:Ahead of the other languages. But we are seeing, especially with the Cloud four models, that they're able to handle a lot more of those, like, older languages or the languages that don't really appear as much in in the training data to a much better degree, and that's through a combination of of things from RL to just general architecture improvements. So we're we're kinda covering the bases with the models, but, yeah, it definitely started in one way and now it's expanding out.
Speaker 2:What what have reactions been to 4.1? I'm assuming a a variety of people got access to it, you know, prerelease. What what are the areas that people are kinda most excited about?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Again, it's it's kind of those coding and agentic tasks have been really the star of the show here. What I think is interesting about that is that coding is kind of the proxy for allowing everything else. So if you think about how a model actually interacts with things on a computer, everything can be done through coding operations. So when we say coding, it's almost like a little disingenuous to just, like, narrow it to that domain.
Speaker 3:But some of our early customers that were playing around with 4.1, Windsurf being a great example in one of their benchmarks, they showed that from Opus four to 4.1, showed roughly the same performance jump from Sonnet 3.7 to Sonnet four. And this was like a real world junior developer task eval. So something that I definitely would pay attention to.
Speaker 1:How are things going on the rate limit side? I've heard that, like, capacity is generally constrained for everyone, everywhere, all the time because we don't have enough data centers. Obviously, people are working on that, but, like, I I guess, like, broad update on, like, how things are going. But then more specifically, like, when you're talking to companies that are building on top of anthropic APIs, are there specific strategies that you recommend to just embrace the realities of the modern AI era and capacity constraints?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, the rate situation is something we're just continuing to iterate on. And, of course, we have, like, very, very smart people. They're much smarter than I thinking about this problem in terms of building out compute and also working on making our inferences overall more efficient. Generally, we wanna provide the best experience we can to our customers.
Speaker 3:So whether this is on the Cloud Code or through the API, there's various things that we do, whether it's, like, through our applied AI team helping our our enterprise customers with, like, their specific deployments or on Cloud Code, making sure that our rate limit system is fair and actually allows for people to utilize it as much as they can without rewarding people that might be, like, abusing the system and kind of detrimenting the other users. So it's really about, like, kind of monitoring and keeping consistent so we ensure, like, great experiences for everyone that's trying to use Cloud.
Speaker 2:What about pricing? Is there a step up in in, like, costs associated with four one versus four o? What what does that look like?
Speaker 3:Pricing is the exact same. We really do intend for this model to just be like a drop in replacement for
Speaker 11:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Opus four. So if you're using Opus four, you should just be able to to cleanly kinda switch over the model string, and you're good to go.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What are some of the weird use cases that you've seen for Claude Code? I've talked to some people that are like
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're like they because coding is kind of like an abstraction over like everything that a computer can you can do, they're coming to Claude Code with tasks that don't that feel more like just general like personal assistant agent stuff but then it
Speaker 3:just writes a
Speaker 1:bunch of code. Are is is that real? Is that is that something that it's more just like when what you know you know when people do those like beautiful artworks in Excel where they like Yeah. Just color every single cell as like pixels and it's like Yes. Seth, you're not you're kind of abusing the tool here but it's still impressive or or is that actually like, you know, a glimpse into the future?
Speaker 3:I think that is a glimpse into the future. There there was a a tweet I posted a few days ago kind of asking the community for, hey, what's all the best non coding use cases you're using Cloud Code for? And it got hundreds of replies. And really, the answers kind of were super wide ranging. Everything from, like, managing your own personal knowledge base, second brain on your computer, you know, maybe you have a ton of notes and text files to some folks are actually using it now for, like, video production.
Speaker 3:We have we have a guy on our team that uses Cloud Code and uses, like, an open source library to create animations and things for, like, all our product launches
Speaker 1:Oh, that's very cool.
Speaker 3:Which is just absolutely amazing. I didn't even know that was possible. But it is kinda hinting at this thing that it's like, well, you can control code, you can really control anything that happens on a computer. Yeah. So now we're moving into this, like, operating system abstraction almost.
Speaker 3:And I think that's really the direction you're gonna start to see Cloud Code heading in.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Anything else, Jordy? Any any I'm I'm curious to get an update on it seems like a lot of the companies that we talked to, you know, we were talking with Dylan Field the day of the IPO and he was talking about updates they're making with with m MCP. What's going on, in that realm? Any updates while you're here on that front or or interesting use cases?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, MCP has been absolutely just ripping lately. The community is awesome, and it's, like, really got to this point now where it's almost its own, like, self sustaining thing, where there's, like, meetups and gatherings that are being hosted completely outside of of, like, our facilitating. And, thankfully, we get to participate in them, and that's just, like, been super cool to see. I think MCP is gonna be a large part of, like, making sure this kind of agentic future goes well.
Speaker 3:So if you can spin up easy integrations and connections to any service or any product or any internal application, all of a sudden, you kind of unhovel Claude to some degree, and you give it access to that knowledge that it needs to actually go out and do those correct operations. So very excited about the team there and yeah, hopefully, a lot more good stuff coming on the way there soon as well.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Very cool. Well, congratulations to the whole team on the launch. It's a massive day, week, and love to have you back on soon. I'm sure they'll I'm sure 4 dot two will be right around the corner.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Lot more coming soon. Yeah. Stay tuned, Have
Speaker 2:a good one. Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 1:Bye. Up next, we have Scott Kapoor from formerly Andreessen Horowitz. He was in the OPM business, the other people's money business. Now, he's the director of OPM for the US government, the office of personnel management. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:Scott, we are excited to talk to you. How are you doing?
Speaker 12:I'm doing great. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:We're doing fantastic.
Speaker 2:It's great to have you on the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you. We're we're in a very funny era where more folks from Silicon Valley have moved over to the government and every time they do, I have to have them explain to me like I'm in the VC world what they do. I think I learned about the OPM that, like, the entire office was a new term to me just a few years ago. Explain the Explain the government.
Speaker 2:Of personnel management to
Speaker 7:me like
Speaker 12:You mean to tell me that you guys don't know what OPM is? That is really disappointing. I'm I'm shocked to
Speaker 1:hear that. I probably learned about it about a year ago.
Speaker 2:Explain it like I'm a venture capitalist that's about to write a thread Yes. Explaining it like I've always known about Exactly.
Speaker 1:And I'm
Speaker 2:an expert in it.
Speaker 12:Yeah. My my wife asked me the same thing when I got appointed to the job, so I'm not surprised to hear that. Hey. So really quickly, what it is is we are the talent management organization for the government. So in simple in our corporate VC terms, we would be the HR department basically for the company.
Speaker 12:Sure. So our job is, like, make sure we have the best talent, make sure we have actual things like performance management standards, which by the way, don't have, which we're working on, make sure we have the ability to, you know, kind of understand the employee base through technology, which we don't have currently. So but basically, think of us in very simple terms as we would be the HR department inside, you know, any other, you know, traditional VC backed company.
Speaker 1:And and does this cut across all the other departments or are you, like, where where the boundaries of
Speaker 12:your So it's it's a hybrid is actually what it is. So basically, so like there's some stuff that we have exclusive province on. So like, I'll just give you a simple example. Like, president puts out a hiring and executive order saying, we want merit hiring to be the standard in government, which you and I can we can talk about that forever if you want. But, basically so he says, look.
Speaker 12:I direct OPM to figure out, like, what are the standards that we need to do cross government to make merit hiring a reality. So we will go put out a bunch of, you know, regulations and research it and say, great. Okay. Now this is the law of the land for all the other agencies. This is what we expect you to do.
Speaker 12:And, you know, OPM will not formally approve and issue offer letters and stuff like that unless you guys do that. So that's what we do. And then but there are HR departments, obviously, in the different agencies. And, you know, so think of it as like, you know, in a company, you might have, like, centralized HR, but then you have, like, business partner HR that might sit in the sales organization or other stuff like that. And they may be kind of, you know, do things that are domain specific.
Speaker 12:But all the big things about, like, how do we recruit people? How do we train them? How do we actually manage them, you know, performance wise? We will provide guidance for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And sorry, Jordy. Yeah. Was just gonna
Speaker 2:say, like, getting into it, what are Yeah. What what are your priorities for Yep. Ninety days, 180 of the year? I'm sure there's you you've like, even any any you know, I'm I'm assuming you're trying to bring in best practices that
Speaker 1:you It's simple. Want to Fix the government. Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. It's easy.
Speaker 12:Just ask
Speaker 3:model to
Speaker 2:do it.
Speaker 12:We're gonna make we're gonna make some mistakes which is okay. That's part of the problem by the way which is like we've been living in this environment where like you literally cannot make a mistake and so Yeah. Nobody actually tries So, yeah, really simply, there's three big things we're trying to do. One is create a high performance culture in the talent. So in other words, like, we my simple goal is, look, we want, like, the best and brightest people to take government jobs.
Speaker 12:But as you guys know, look, a players wanna be around a players. They wanna be in a in an environment where they're held accountable, where when people do well, they actually get rewarded. We have a very, like, tenure based, and conservative risk management based system here in the government, which is, like, you get power and you get promotion by having more people in your organization and a bigger budget and the longer you spend time in government. So we've gotta just flip that on its head and say, look. We're gonna award things like innovation.
Speaker 12:We're gonna reward I've been using the term measured risk taking because, look, we can't go just like literally throw stuff against the wall and see what works like we do in Silicon Valley. Yeah. But anyways, that's thing number one. So like goal is how do like all the smartest people in the country feel like coming to work for the government actually is great for them. They learn stuff and they'll they'll go get they'll get paid for that in the private sector.
Speaker 12:Number two is we've got to make operational efficiency like a core tenant of government. So, again, I know this sounds crazy coming from, you know, the world that I know you and I came from. But today, basically, there's no incentive for efficiency. So, again, you need to, like, bake it into people's performance plans and say, like, your job every day is, are you doing a great service on the behalf of the American people? And are you constantly, like, turning the crank to figure out how do we use technology?
Speaker 12:How do we, you know, use AI to do stuff? How do we, like, reorg to do things? Again, because
Speaker 2:of Spend less money?
Speaker 12:Spend less money. Right. Today, again, right, I mean, it's the exact opposite incentive, which is more money means more people, means more power. Right? And so, like, everything we have to do is, yes, spend less money to deliver a better service.
Speaker 12:And so we got a ton of like technology initiatives that we can talk about there. And then the final thing we want to focus on is we've got to make like we've got to anticipate what living in an AI first world looks like for government. And we got to not be flat footed and realize that we have none of the talent we need and we don't even know what the jobs are. So this is, I think, a huge opportunity, quite frankly, where I think we should work with the private sector and say, great. You guys understand what AI is going do.
Speaker 12:Let's figure out ways where we can have information sharing, even like, quite frankly, swap employees back and forth. But find ways so that we don't wake up five years from now and realize there's all these new jobs that are being changed and or augmented by AI and the government is not like, you know, figuring out how to actually get that talent into the government.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You mentioned spending less money. I want to know about the potential of spending more money. Is there is is there a world where we remove salary caps on government employees? Like, you've seen this in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1:There's not like, you know, obviously, founders are very driven, but they have uncapped economic upside. Like, the venture capitalists have uncapped economic upside in so many ways. The AI researchers that are getting poached, like, it is just money ball at the end of the day for a lot of sectors of the economy. Is there a reason why the government is fundamentally structurally different? Or do you think that we just need to make a better pitch for civil service?
Speaker 12:Yeah. I I think it's a little bit of both. So okay. So look, we're never gonna solve we're never gonna solve, like, the ultimate, like, uncapped upside pay gap between the public and private sector. Yeah.
Speaker 12:And look, that's just, you know, politically that would never work. You know, we're not gonna, you know, like, you know, we're not gonna have a Zuckerberg equivalent of, like, paying engineers a billion dollars a year. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:But we can do two things. One is we can change the compensation structure so that, yes, like, a players actually get rewarded. So I'll give you a very simple example here. Mhmm. Everybody gets ranked one through five at the end of the year in their performance evaluations in government.
Speaker 12:Five's the highest, one's the lowest. 70% of the people get ranked a four or five, okay, which means, like, they're awesome. They're doing outstanding work. 0.2 of the people will get ranked a one or a two. Now, again, mind you, this is across a population of 2,400,000 people where, at a minimum, you might expect a normal distribution, but, like, there's just no way that 70% of the people are above average.
Speaker 12:Right? Unless you're in, you know, Lake Wobbegong, basically. So we gotta solve that problem. And then if you solve that, then the incentive structure can follow it. Right?
Speaker 12:Because, again, a typical government employee gets 0.5% of cash bonus at the end of the year. That's because, again, there are too many people highly ranked. And the delta between low and high is, like, you know, 50% or something. Right? What I'd like to do is say, you ought to have many fewer people ranked to four or five and let's give those people like most of the bonus pool, for example.
Speaker 12:So we can't solve all the problems, but like we can solve that. And then your your other point's a really good one, is we gotta change the So, again, I'll give you a story here. When I first came in, one of my one of the employees here said, the pitch that we use for government is job stability, basically. Like that's the And I was like, I'm sorry to say, but like, unfortunately, I think somebody's been lying to you because, like, there's no job in the world where we can guarantee job stability for people, even in the government. To me, the pitch has gotta be you can see things at a scale and solve really hard complex problems.
Speaker 12:And, like, you can, you know, do a public service as well. But we've gotta get people excited about, like, you know, you know, putting people on the moon or all the things that, you know, guys like Elon do. You know, it's the whole, like, founder story of, like, what's the mission of the organization? The mission of the organization cannot be we provide job stability. So, we've got to, like, tell that story.
Speaker 12:We got go tell it on college campuses, and we got to go, like, show it. And look, people don't have to commit their life to being in government, but if you could come here for two years and work on really hard, really cool problems, and you could actually advance in the organization because you're not tenure limited, but you actually are skills you know, you know, you're awesome at skills, we should be able to promote you faster. Like, there's no reason why we can't compete for really smart people in that environment. And then again, go take that skill set and go work for, you know, Elon or go work for Zuckerberg and get paid a billion dollars a year after that. Like, you can do both things.
Speaker 12:So we gotta sell the story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was talking to a friend who had some experience in China, and he said that the the main difference that he noticed was that the really, really top performers over there just kinda got sucked into government work. And he was kinda framing it as like, it wasn't exactly optional for them. And I know that that's not on the table here. We love freedom and choice and
Speaker 12:Yeah. We kinda decide a long toe that we actually like, democracy is actually a good thing. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course. But I I guess my question is like is like, should I I know that like when the when the administration changes over, I mean, happens every four years now, eight years most. There's there's a push to bring in new folks and there is some recruiting that goes on and and there's like Whisper Networks of who's really talented, and let's make the pitch to them that maybe now is the time to go and and and serve your country. And a lot of people do swing at that pitch, and they and and they take it, some of them do very well with that.
Speaker 1:But should it be more aggressive? Should have should recruiting be be 10 times bigger in terms of just every talented founder, engineer, venture capitalist, anyone who's high agency, high intelligence, high EQ is at least hearing the pitch for where they would fit in in the US government. Because I think a lot of people I know a lot people that got calls. I know a lot of people who are talented and didn't get calls, and I'm wondering if we should have reached them with something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it felt like at the beginning of this year and and maybe end of last year was just recruit Doge was just dominating recruiting. Yep.
Speaker 12:And fantastic recruiting engine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I didn't I didn't see that. I didn't hear, like, oh, I have a a a fintech founder who, you know, they they were great, but they got kinda clobbered, and now, like, the IRS is calling them.
Speaker 1:Like, I didn't hear that story that often, for example.
Speaker 12:Yeah. So yeah. So let me try to just unpack that a little bit because first of all, you're absolutely right. We should a 100% do that. So there's there's a problem we have today which we which we are working on fixing, which is today, believe it or not, you can actually there are weird hiring procedures in the federal government which makes it very hard in some cases literally to hire people based on their skill skill assessment.
Speaker 12:So let me give you a great example. So people have gotten really good at we put a job description up on this thing called USA Jobs, which is basically the the website. And people essentially tailor their resume to exactly the words that are in that job description. Mhmm. And the filtering process puts them at the top of the list, but it's all self assessed stuff.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:We act we literally, like, you could hire an IT network administrator in the government today and not have a technical person interview that person to see do they know, like, what, like, you know, HTTPS means basically.
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And the good news is we just part of it is because, like, people are worried about, okay, is it are those tests discriminatory? We actually just had a good legal ruling the other day that clears the path for this. But believe it or not, literally, like, we do not have skills based assessment for many jobs in the government. So the the way to so, like, it's just really hard. It's really hard for those people to come in.
Speaker 12:We but you're absolutely right, which is, look, the real solutions problem is we gotta do both. We gotta fix that piece and then we have to literally go tell the story. Like, I don't think this is the solution. We're not gonna do TV commercials like, you know, the Army and Navy and, know, we need a few good men basically. But we need something like that.
Speaker 12:We gotta go tell the story. And you're absolutely right, which is I I would bet there are I don't know. I bet there's thousands of data scientist jobs open across the government today. You as an employee, if you're interested in that, you should just be able to apply once and we should then send your resume to all thousand of those jobs. Like, we don't even do that today, basically.
Speaker 12:Yeah. So like, you literally have to go find out where those thousand jobs are. So there's all this stuff that, again, it's not they're not bad people. It's just that the system has not been set up for that goal. The system has been really set up to say, let's really be conservative.
Speaker 12:Let's really be kind of, you know, careful on these things. And we just we have to change that paradigm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like we're fishing with a really large net. You You know, you put up a big ad. We need a few good men and whoever gets caught in the net comes into the organization and we need to get some harpoons out and go find the really like laser focused people for the perfect
Speaker 2:job Military, that we'll you know, it's been interesting. I I I think things have changed but there was a period where military recruiting to my knowledge was was really really tough and that's still with a lot of a lot of people that do end up joining having been marketed to and and and and kind of exposed to army, navy, marine corps, air force since they were kids. Yeah. Right? But nobody's getting nobody Most most Americans wouldn't know they think OPM if anything is other people's money Exactly.
Speaker 2:Like you're saying. Exactly. And they wouldn't know it. And so how do you how do you get somebody like even open to the idea, you know, lot of kids today in high school, college, they know they wanna work in tech. Nobody is going through those periods of life knowing they wanna work in a specific organization or or very little.
Speaker 2:On on
Speaker 12:the You're tech absolutely right. Look. Yeah. We got look. We gotta just like have a presence on college campuses Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And be there just like Goldman Sachs is and just like Facebook is. And we gotta go tell our story.
Speaker 5:Like, you
Speaker 12:know Yep. You guys know this, but I used to work for a head of sales at one of my companies. And his famous thing was, you know, show it, sell it, hide it, keep it, basically. Right? And right now, we are hiding it, basically.
Speaker 12:And people find us because they are looking for stability as opposed to us finding people who are looking for, like, an actual real interesting challenge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's an interesting time, you know, apparently CS grads are struggling to find roles. Exactly. You see the variety of reasons for that. You know, we just had someone on from Claude.
Speaker 2:Claude code performs really well now. Maybe it's performing at the level of a junior engineer. But the the opportunities in government where you don't need to be, you're not out there competing Yep. You know, with other foundation model
Speaker 1:or Luke Fairtoire. Like, he is a programmer. It from that massive Bloomberg article, it didn't seem like 90% of what he was doing was programming. It seemed like, yeah, he was able to scrape some data together and do some analysis to know how to make a decision. But a lot of it was just sending emails, having phone calls, having meetings.
Speaker 2:But Luke's also an example of somebody who's truly elite in this in this category. And I'm talking about, like, the next, like, 10,000
Speaker 1:grad and you can program, that gives you a superpower that then you can also just be effective to be rigorous and first principle thinker in a meeting where you're just trying to decide how much money should we spend on this thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And if you you
Speaker 12:know what? By the way, did you see the quote from the, unnamed government source in that article about why they didn't like why they didn't want Luke? They're like, he's not qualified he didn't go to college and he didn't have five years experience. Right? And that's that is exactly the problem.
Speaker 12:Right? All of our criteria for evaluating people are based upon credentialing. They're based upon tenure. And this is where merit based hiring matters so much. Like, to me, if you're Luke, I don't care.
Speaker 12:If you're 18 years old and you can actually function at the level of somebody who, like, you know, knows programming at the at a high level
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Let's pay you at that level. Let's hire you at that level. And and, okay, like, if you need some help around the edges to, like, you know, make sure you can sit in meetings, you know, with your shoes on, that's great. We can teach you that, basically.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But we can't
Speaker 12:we can't exclude people from the process because they don't have, like, you know, a sheepskin that says, you know, they went to Stanford for four years. I mean, that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. How is your AI strategy forming when people hear AI in government as citizens? They get scared. That sounds scary.
Speaker 2:If they hear If you're working in the government and you hear AI, you're probably thinking, I don't wanna lose my my job. But but, clearly, it should be able to be, you know, beneficial.
Speaker 1:The big thing just feels like get every government employee access to an LLM. Because before any of the job displacement, any of the cyberpunk terminators, like, let them search the knowledge quickly. Like, please. Anyway, what is your take?
Speaker 12:Yeah. No. You're exactly right. So today, on my government computer, if I wanna do something on an LM, I have to, like, go to my personal computer to do it. Right?
Speaker 1:It's not crazy.
Speaker 2:Oh, look. And how many government jobs are email jobs? Yeah. It's like Right.
Speaker 12:Look, the privacy issues are real and we gotta be
Speaker 1:But, talking to
Speaker 12:like, there's but there's but so much of what the government does is already in the public domain. So let me give you a very simple example. So Yeah. One of the things my team does, as I mentioned, is we develop, like, rules and regulations for, you know, let's say, how how you should do merit hiring in the government. Okay?
Speaker 12:Yeah. And the way the process works, which I won't bore you with, but basically, like, we put out a rule and then we have to invite public comment on it, and literally people submit comments. So we're doing a rule right now where we got 40,000 public comments on this rule. Okay? Some a group of people in my team literally read all 40,000 of those comments and they write a written response to them and do it, you know, the old fashioned way.
Speaker 12:Now, I'm not gonna say like, let's just have let's just get rid of all the people and have AI do that. But there's no question in my mind that we can get a 10 to 15% easy efficiency advantage if we actually had a very simple LLM that we could train on totally public data. I'm not talking about private data. All that regulation stuff is public.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 12:You know, help people manage that process. But, like, we have so we have to start with that. So, like, what I what I'm doing here in in OPM is I'm actually gonna have somebody come in from the outside and, like, do the full landscape of, like, what's happening in customer support what's happening in, you know, HR organizations and, like, what are all the use cases out there? And then what I'm doing is just telling my team, look, now your job is to go back and find, like, what are the small wins we can make on little use cases. And, again, I'm not asking you to, like, you know, get rid of a 100% of your people, but, like, you need 10 more heads and or and you need to find some place to get 10% more productivity.
Speaker 12:We ought to be able to do that within our current budget without actually having to, you know, add headcount. So we just gotta start with little baby stuff that doesn't scare people, get them educated. You're exactly right. Everybody should have, you know, an LLM on their desktop. And then we can tackle the hard problems, which is okay.
Speaker 12:Are we gonna put confidential government data in them? Do we need them air gapped and all that crazy stuff? But like, we don't even need to do that now. We just need to like educate people and then come up with use cases that are based on like literally public data with human authentication. Is
Speaker 2:the Yeah. Does the federal workforce have a like an aging problem? You know, we'll Yes. We'll talk with CEOs on this show or investor that say, know, the majority of factory owner operators in the country are gonna retire within the next five to ten years. Right?
Speaker 2:That becomes concerning because there's a lot of just, general know how and process that could just kind of get lost or evaporated. Is that a challenge that you're facing in terms of, you know, people that have been in the government for thirty plus years and are and are getting to the point where where they're ready to retire?
Speaker 12:Yeah. If you look at the demographics of the government, I don't know the exact number, but there's no question. Like, the government is is very skewed towards people who are kind of later in their career. And, I think this is a problem that we've had, which is we haven't figured out a way to actually get people in at earlier stages in their career because we've got all these impediments that I talked about that make it hard for you if you're a recent Stanford grad or whatever to be able to get a job here. So, yes, we have to solve that problem.
Speaker 12:Look. I mean, sure, there's gonna be knowledge that walks out the door. Look. I'm more worried about the long term thing, which is, can't do we have a steady pipeline of really smart people who will come here? And then then we can solve that aging problem by just, you know, over time kind of changing the demographics.
Speaker 12:But, yeah, like, I don't think I'm not worried, like, there's a cliff here where, you know, 10 from now, all the experienced people will walk out the door. But I do think we have to have, like, a demographic and a and a set of hiring practices that allows us to actually kind of, you know, build a funnel from the very bottom of of folks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It'd be cool. I remember maybe in 2012, like Teach for America was really popular and obviously that was like nongovernmental but like aligned with this idea of like a a tour of rough service and there was code for America and, you know, it's like cut out the middleman and just go straight for America. Like, work for the government.
Speaker 12:I love that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Know, it'd
Speaker 1:be great culturally. If somebody so, yeah. Because now, like, feel like if you did four years just in civil service and then you jump into Silicon Valley, it's kind of like a weird track but like it shouldn't be. It should be completely normalized.
Speaker 12:Yeah. A long time ago, right, there and this is not the perfect analogy but there used to be something called like the Civilian Conservation Corps which was Yeah. Exactly that. Right? It was like people people came right out of school.
Speaker 12:They did some heavy labor for a while, and then they went to the private sector. So, yeah, like we ought to do this. So like what I would love to do is I would love a program where we say, you know what? Take all the smartest people, have them come here for two years. By the way, if we can do this, let's forgive your let's forgive some student debt as part of that.
Speaker 12:Right? So like, let's actually have a real trade off, which is you do public service and we'll give you some financial compensation. And oh, by the way, I wanna work with the private sector and say, you know what? We're gonna get a private sector employer to guarantee you a job when you finish your two years here. And they might even give you full credit for those two years so you come in as a third year in that.
Speaker 12:And like just work on that stuff. Right? So, you know, that's what we need to do. And and look, I've been using this term that's terrible that my kids joke at which is make government cool again, which is Magaka, if you pronounce it out
Speaker 2:loud. Magaka.
Speaker 12:My my my marketing team who's sitting here next to me off camera
Speaker 1:Yeah. Don't doesn't run off the tongue.
Speaker 12:That's really, yeah. It's not it's not only not the greatest acronym. But like, that's what we have to do. Like, we have to make civil service like super exciting. And the good news is like, we've got no shortage of like moonshots now.
Speaker 12:Right? So like Yeah. AI. Right? Like, how do we transform the government with AI?
Speaker 12:That's a great moonshot. Let's go do that. But we need like a, you know, Apollo mission like moonshot, which I think the president has given people with AI. And we gotta go tell that story. And, you know, if we can do that, then I think like we're in a totally different situation.
Speaker 2:Are you gonna be visiting college campuses for career fairs at all? Are you are you gonna be pounding the pavement?
Speaker 12:I would love to. Look. You all know this having been in the valley. Look. Yeah.
Speaker 12:If you're in the valley, 99% of your job is recruiting, basically. Like that is like probably the most important thing that any manager does. And yeah, like I don't think any of us is beneath that. We gotta go sell. So yeah, I'd love to go to campuses.
Speaker 12:I'd also look, I I wanna we've been talking about campuses. I also wanna be clear though, one of the priorities that the person has, which I totally agree with is we shouldn't use credentialing as a shortcut for this stuff. So look Yeah. I don't care if you went to college or not. If you have the skills to do this job, like, we gotta go find you too.
Speaker 12:Look, college at college campuses are nice aggregation points and make it more efficient. But like, we need to go find anybody who has a, you know, technical degree or not a technical degree or a trade degree or anybody who's just really smart and capable and go find those people. And we hire them not because they, you know, have a, you know, a diploma, but because they actually can contribute to the workforce.
Speaker 1:Or even, like, experience with a startup. Like they've been there for a couple years, they've vested, they run to the next thing, go do a tour in the government. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Last question. Have you had any pleasant surprises since starting your job? Anything that you're like, oh, that's actually run pretty well?
Speaker 12:Yeah. Know, look, I'll be so to be totally honest, look, there are my pleasant surprise which is I don't think it surprises. Look, there are very good people here who are who are really care about what they're doing. So Mhmm. Look, you know, everybody in the government here, there is a serious element of public service and they all take it very seriously and believe it and believe it and it's like, noteworthy.
Speaker 12:It the what I what I really think is, look, I think the system has failed them, which is, look, as as leaders and managers, we have created a system where, you know, we've told them do not ever make a mistake. Do not ever risk innovating because we don't, you know, look, guys know the valley. Right? In the valley, we always talk about, look, we're looking for uncapped upside on stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Get fired for not taking the risk.
Speaker 12:That's exactly right. There is no value today in in maximizing for uncapped upside if that means you also take an extra 5% of downside risk. And, again, like, I wanna be totally clear. We can't be cavalier. You know, we're dealing with people's, you know, social security or we're dealing with national security.
Speaker 12:So we can't just, you know, literally throw caution to the wind. But we can accept that there are some things where we may not get them a 100% right, and then we'll fix them when we do. And we have to have a culture to do that. So that to me has been, again, the very positive upside surprise, which is and and which I hope will prove true, which is if we can change the incentive system, I think you have really good people who will do what the incentive system insents them to do, basically. But right now, we just we have an incentive system that, in my mind at least, kind of encourages behavior that just is not, you know, efficiency maximizing, is not innovation maximizing, and, you know, is just outdated, I think, a world where, you know, we know technology and the needs of the government are gonna change very rapidly.
Speaker 1:We need to be an innovation maxing. Let's do it. I love it. Yes. Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 2:Thank you for serving our country and and rallying so many smart people to join you.
Speaker 1:Thanks breaking down for us. This is very helpful. Thank you so much.
Speaker 12:I appreciate your time. You take care. Bye.
Speaker 8:Cheers.
Speaker 1:Bye. We need a Luke Ferretoire for the CIA. We need to send Luke Ferretoire to North Korea, infiltrate Pyongyang, get behind enemy lines, and turn it into a capitalist utopia. Make South Korea look like a complete blackout by comparison using that map of the North Korea is dark and South Korea is super bright. More lights in Pyongyang than all of South Korea combined.
Speaker 1:Luke Ferretour on the front line so we'll it done.
Speaker 2:This is breaking in real time. Okay. So John actually hit up Peter Salas over at Discord.
Speaker 1:Over
Speaker 2:here. HR apparently just threw a note on Peter Sellas just posted guys at TBPN WTF. John actually, I think I'm in trouble. HR just threw this on my calendar. Oh, no.
Speaker 2:It's Peter and HR discuss TBPN issue.
Speaker 1:Wait. Is this real? But
Speaker 2:very good stuff.
Speaker 1:I love it. That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 2:Peter, come on the show. We're gonna do a we're gonna figure out your cloud Yeah. Your cloud
Speaker 1:We'll get you sorted
Speaker 2:out. We're gonna have people live Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We should have three we should be Shark Tank. He's the shark. We have three hyperscaler cloud SDRs come on and pitch.
Speaker 1:Okay. This is what we can bring to you. This is what we're asking. We're asking for we we got a 100,000 It's an
Speaker 2:auction for who can deliver the lowest price.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, we have our next guest the temple of technology. We have Kyle from Contrary. How are doing, Kyle?
Speaker 1:Good to see What's going on? Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 8:How's going, guys?
Speaker 1:What's new in your world? It down for us.
Speaker 8:Well, we're just we're just launching our latest deep dive from Contra Research.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 8:So for folks who don't know, Contra Research is our private markets research database we launched a couple years ago. Mhmm. Contra is a venture fund but our focus is on talent and on research. So finding the best ideas, best people, bringing them together. And so Contra Research has published research on 500 different companies.
Speaker 8:I think we've got most of your sponsors on the list.
Speaker 1:So we're
Speaker 8:getting we're working our way down. But we just published our latest deep dive on building an American TSMC. So TLBR is the piece is the idea that we're completely dependent on Taiwan for 90 plus percent of of advanced semiconductors and it's probably the dumbest bottleneck that we could possibly be in. And it feels like we're basically just hoping that it doesn't become a problem when it could become the most significant geopolitical flash point and effectively lead to World War three. And so it feels like there is something we should do about it.
Speaker 8:And and so we kind of go through the options of do we build it from scratch? Do we borrow it from TSMC?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Do we try and buy it from from some willing sellers?
Speaker 1:It seems, consensus that Intel is not the American TSMC. Is TSMC the American TSMC? Is Samsung the American progress from both of those companies. Elon doing a big deal with Samsung. TSMC obviously seeing great results out in Arizona.
Speaker 1:What's your take on just porting or expanding the current set of fab companies that are doing quite well?
Speaker 8:Our biggest takeaway from doing the research is that a little bit that the ASMC is more of a mindset than a specific company. It's an ecosystem that we have to build a lot of different aspects of this. Yeah. There's a ton of startups that are building a lot of advanced stuff in chip design and and using AI in that. TSMC is pouring a 165,000,000,000 into The US more so.
Speaker 8:So there's a ton of things that we can take advantage of. The biggest limitation is that when you try and build a lot of this stuff from scratch, you just don't get there quickly enough for it to make a difference. Right? There's a bunch of stuff like the folks at Andoril
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:And they have this idea sort of internally of of China 2027 where it's this idea of, you know, if if China's gonna invade Taiwan, it's probably gonna happen over the next, you know, call it four or five years. Xi has talked about 2027 specifically. So it this is an urgency thing. This is not a long term bet. And so the question is, how do we get to scale where if if China was to take Taiwan tomorrow, is there something that we could do to have some capacity here?
Speaker 8:The unfortunate reality is that the startup ecosystem, as great as it is and as much as it can benefit us in the long run, it's not going to get there quick enough. As much benefit as we get from TSMC partnering a lot of the results they're having in in in Arizona, there's a huge cultural blowback in Taiwan because they have this silicon shield where they think of our dependence on them as their protection from China. And so, yes, TSMC wants to pour a bunch of resources here, but whether we get those sort of leading edge nodes that allow us to compete for things like AGI and to really compete with China, that is a much longer battle. And so despite the fact that Intel is is struggling, is is basically sending up emergency flares that you guys talked about on the show. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Basically, in their last quarterly earnings, they talked about, you know, we're going to do our best and if we don't get material customers, it may not be economical for us to continue to compete in leading edge nodes, which is going to be a huge hit for The US to stay competitive. And so our thesis in the piece is that we we basically have to take Intel as our only hope of getting to scale quickly enough. Intel's not gonna do it on their own. There's a bunch of stuff that we have to do to make that possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what's the biggest request from TSMC or Taiwan? Like, should we be pulling the, hey. We'll invest alongside you. We'll subsidize.
Speaker 1:We'll give you tax cuts to build the second, the third, the fourth fab in America, or should we be more focused on let's commit more defense resources, more government spending to Taiwan to create, you know, an American shield that's independent of the silicon shield or maybe both?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, there's definitely when you talk to all of the major defense companies, Palmer Lucchia has a great line where he talks about turning Taiwan into a prickly porcupine
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:That people don't want to step on. That is absolutely priority number one to make them to give them all the capabilities that they need and the folks at Andoroll are on the ground in Taiwan all the time.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:So that's a huge component of of sharpening the partnership. I also think that you need to emphasize that American companies need to be the government needs to incentivize American companies to be purchasing American made semiconductors as much as possible. So as you reshor more of this stuff to whether it's TSMC efforts, whether we literally, you know, nationalize Intel and take it and take the foundry business private. Right? Like Dylan Patel, who you guys have had on the show and is an absolute rock star.
Speaker 8:He has made it abundantly clear that the survival of Intel foundry is critical to America's economic and technological dominance. And so we have to take that seriously as well. And there's a bunch of incentives that we can build in terms of making, you know, getting people access to semiconductors that are made by Intel in The US, by TSMC in The US. We have to incentivize people to be using our own ecosystem so that we get the reps we need to get as as far away from dependence on Taiwan as possible.
Speaker 2:Do you think that Lip Bu Tan is the right leader for this transition for Intel? It seems like they need to, with broader support, reinvent themselves and yet hearing Lip Buutan on earnings calls and and just talking through, it just feels like cut after cut.
Speaker 1:He's good at firing people, but is he really good at firing?
Speaker 2:I haven't been I haven't been inspired by he's definitely not carp on the mic. He's not inspiring people. So I'm curious
Speaker 1:has like 1,000 employees and I'm pretty sure Libbutan has like a 100,000 employees or something. Yeah. They But yeah.
Speaker 8:So Intel has more employees than TSMC and Nvidia combined. Yeah. So he's got he's got plenty of people that he can fire. The the biggest thing that is compelling about Intel is that they are already in this process of cultural change. Right?
Speaker 8:You look at that I mean, it's back to 2005 was the first time they had a CEO who wasn't an engineer by trade. And basically, they went through fifteen years of financialization. Like, it was literally the Jack Welch playbook of just dumping money into stock buybacks and and robbing r and d for for decades. He you know, those CEOs were the ones that put them on the on the path sort of stumbling, losing their lead. So, like, even even with Gelsinger, like, that transition is already in its way.
Speaker 8:Like, putting engineer they talk about bringing the nerds back. And that transition is already in its way, which is important. I think the cultural leadership that you should be paying more attention to is the leadership level at Intel Intel Foundry specifically. Yeah.
Speaker 1:When you
Speaker 8:think about Intel's two core businesses, you have Intel products, Intel Foundry. Intel Foundry has had four different leaders over the last three years. Like, some of them lasting no more than two months. Right? And what was compelling, this idea that, like, you you can you can have this sort of within a division leader who can be really inspirational.
Speaker 8:I think the folks at Waymo, they have a co CEO setup, but it's their former head of policy and then their former CTO. You have the technology of the the policy. Like that's a great duo for sort of Waymo setup. Something at Intel Foundry that could be similar could be really compelling. The thing that's the biggest concern for me is that the first person they had, once they started breaking out Intel Foundry into a separate p and l, the first CEO that they the first leader of the of Intel Foundry that they had, they called him the president of Intel Foundry.
Speaker 8:He he reported directly to Gelsinger. Four leaders later, it's now this person is the general manager of Intel Foundry. They're also the chief global supply chain officer and the chief technology officer of Intel's core business. Meanwhile, like Intel products has its own dedicated CEO with the title of CEO. Think I the biggest problem is not necessarily even Lip Buuton, but it's more about are we actually acknowledging that that Intel Foundry needs to be a growth engine that you can invest in to be able to build back dominance and that's absolutely not how they treat it.
Speaker 2:Was I feel like earlier this year, there was a rumor that Elon was kicking the tires on Intel. Is was how how real was that? Did he kick the tire and It was the Pat O'Leary.
Speaker 8:Was the PJ tracking. That was Yeah. How they
Speaker 2:But it but it
Speaker 1:They were
Speaker 2:all of the PJ together. But the PJ tracking felt like a bit silly because everybody was in Mar A Lodge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everyone was there.
Speaker 8:That's right. You can you could spend probably a lot of compelling narratives based on all of the people who were there at the same time. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And in terms of like what is actually sort of official, the two things that you know for sure are there was talks that that TSMC was going to acquire Intel's foundry business. Their board flatly denied that, that that wasn't true at all. Then there was talks that they might invest heavily and run a joint venture where they take over operations of Intel's foundry business even if they're not buying it outright. And what's funny is that they did not deny that outright. They refused to comment.
Speaker 8:And so the general census of folks is
Speaker 2:Yeah. That that was a conversation that was
Speaker 1:That makes sense. How much of the, the race for American semiconductors is driven by the question of, like, founder mode? Just that abstract question of, you know, do we need Elon in the seat leading? He said he was gonna be walking the floor at Samsung. Obviously, like, the founder mode pattern has seemed to work in so many stuck kind of stagnating worlds like rocketry, electric cars, or Elon's gotten in and kinda jarred things loose.
Speaker 1:But but is that is that something that we that we should be looking out for or optimizing for?
Speaker 8:A 100%. I mean, when you contrast Lip Bu versus Jensen, it's like night and day difference. Right? You do not have visionary leaders in chip manufacturing in The US because we don't do it anymore. Like, it's not a fundamental part of who we do, of what we do.
Speaker 8:There's not a core DNA there. And so do you need somebody who is that visionary leader? Absolutely. And does Intel have any of that DNA? No.
Speaker 8:And so when you think about what needs to change, I I think our thesis and takeaway after doing six months of research and drilling into all of this stuff is that you cannot ignore the entire ecosystem and that leader that that visionary leader role is absolutely critical. And they that's that that is an unanswered question. Like, we don't have that. Like, we don't have an you know, somebody retweeted our our our post today and said, we just need an Elon Musk like, you know, Herculean act of God to be able to make this possible And like
Speaker 2:Don't we help?
Speaker 8:The takeaway is accurate. The how to do that is much more difficult.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It can't be manufactured. But, I mean, green shoots all over the place, lots of cause for optimism. But
Speaker 2:So hope hopefully, the piece starts a conversation, can be a catalyst for change. What are you hoping to see out of, like, the immediately next quarter for Intel to get on the right track?
Speaker 8:The biggest opportunity is for Intel to stop treating Intel Foundry like it is an ugly stepchild. Like it is this like embarrassing accident that they happen to have and they're trying to distract people over this other thing or dress it up like it's this fancy thing. And the biggest problem is, this goes back to this is a great conversation I've heard a couple of folks have. They talk about the I think it was Bucco Bucco Capital talking about, like, the the greatest thing that Elon Musk has built independent even even thinking at the Tesla, SpaceX, everything, it is the investor base Tesla is the is gotta be the most incredible investor base any public company has ever had to let him do what he's doing and to have the vision and everything. Intel is is just smattered with what Palmer would call Wall Street weenies.
Speaker 8:Is everybody just thinking about it is, how can we optimize this thing as effectively as possible? And it's like, that is not how you build the future nor is it how you build American dominance. And so really, you need that investor based turnover and it feels like that comes from narrative, where if you're telling the story of Intel Foundry, we can get a visionary leader, we can have this opportunity, they're already at scale. They have a lot of the technology. They've they have sort of caught back up.
Speaker 8:And in in many ways, they're still failing operationally pretty miserably. And so the opportunity is like, tell that story and get an investor base that is stoked to be investing in the ASMC.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for joining. It's a pleasure catching up. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good
Speaker 2:Thanks for coming on, Kyle. Great work.
Speaker 1:And speaking of Andoril, our next guest works for Andoril.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:And she's the general manager of Andoril RMS, and we're excited to talk to her about the new Rocket Motor facility. But we'll let her break it down for us. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? We have one minute while we keep clapping, John.
Speaker 1:Just keep clapping. Just keep Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? What's happening?
Speaker 11:Oh, it's a really good day. Just, just commenced or finished a ribbon cutting Okay. With our new facility in Coastal Mississippi with, chairman Wicker about ten minutes ago. So, it's a good day so far.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Tell us more about this facility. What are you making? How big is the facility?
Speaker 2:How big
Speaker 1:were the scissors? How big were the scissors?
Speaker 11:You know, the the scissors were not as big as I was expecting. Okay. I mean, they're they're big, but they weren't like the the comically big. No. We just finished the, a full rate production facility for kind of what the twenty twenties can do for, automated robotic full rate production of solid rocket motors.
Speaker 11:We have a 450 acre facility in Coastal Mississippi, about nine buildings. Mhmm. And, when we moved in here, it was a mothballed facility in 2020, and we we saw the good bones it had and the ability of of what it could do. So we we took one of the buildings, the far south end of the campus, nearly quadrupled the footprint, got world class engineers, specifically from the automotive industry, to really look at what solid rocket motor production could look like in the twenty twenties with robotics, automation, and really putting, you know, robotics everywhere where there's a safety critical or a quality critical component.
Speaker 1:Speaking of robotics, what's behind you?
Speaker 11:That is one of two robots that are involved in the casting assembly. So we we go through a mixing of solid rocket propellant, and then you have to cast it where you you're essentially filling a mold like you were solid rocket motors is a lot like making a cake. You you mix together dry ingredients, wet ingredients, and then you pour them in a mold, and you cure in an oven. And so this is, the robots that's used for the casting process.
Speaker 1:Can you give us a a view into the shape of the company? I know, Adranos was the rocket motor company that was acquired, but it sounds like you've hired a lot of people. How big is the organization now?
Speaker 11:So, you you are right. We started as Adranos. I was one of the two cofounders of Adranos back in 2015, with my, cofounder Chris Stoker, And we grew that into about a 40 person company at the time of acquisition by Andrew who was previous to that had been one of our customers. So a little bit of a vertical vertical integration play.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:We have since grown that organization to just about 200 people today
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 11:For Andro Rocket Motor Systems. I sit as the, vice president and general manager of that business line.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:What did you see back in 2015 when you started the original company that that kind of caused you to take on the mission? It felt like broadly Silicon Valley started kind of being aware of rocket motor, like, supply chain challenges. I wanna say, like, in 2022, but you clearly saw it way way ahead.
Speaker 11:Yes. This is all very much before all of the, I guess, need that has risen for solder rocket motor, production enhancements. Really back in 2015, I had developed a brand new formulation, called Aletek that can bring more performance to the, the industry. I saw a need commercialize it and naively thought that I would be able to to progress it to a spot where the two kind of incumbent providers of solid rocket motors would fight over themselves to get access to the IP. But what I quickly realized is the desirement for them to innovate and get these new propellants was was not there.
Speaker 11:And the only way I would ever be able to see, full adoption and utilization of that product was customer, if I was the solid rocket motor provider. And a a big piece of my PhD at Purdue was looking at innovative ways to, process energetic materials, new ways of mixing, new ways of doing things. I So was able to leverage those learns, those lessons along with taking what a state of the art for kind of automation and and different manufacturing processes, put them all together to, create what my vision was for what slotted rock and water production could look like in the twenty twenties.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 11:And we we really were kind of ahead of, you know, all of the other suppliers that have that have joined into that market.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, thank you so much for calling in on such a busy day. Congratulations on the massive launch and good luck with the next phase. I'm sure you're gonna be making a lot of products very soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And hopefully copy. I don't I don't know. The last question I had is this is the idea for this new facility to be a model that you would copy and paste to to scale production, or is this gonna be able to kind of take take you guys all the way?
Speaker 11:No. That that that's exactly the the purpose of what we are wanting this facility to do. It's it's really looking at a manufacturing line that is agnostic to what goes through it. So we can do anything from a small, two inch diameter motor to something that that's really big up to 32 inches in diameter. And we are agnostic in the manufacturing process.
Speaker 11:But really focusing on kind of the one piece flow out of manufacturing practices, we can take this, this facility and copy paste it elsewhere. On our 450 acres, I could fit another two full rate production facilities. Each one if you look at a mid scale tactical motor, like, say, nine inches diameter, we can do about 6,000 of those a year out of one facility. So if I place another two of those here, you know, that's just a a linear increase in production without having to have a brand new giant explosives campus. Then, alternatively, I can take this small footprint agile manufacturing process and place it strategically, for integration purposes with our different customers, both domestically and abroad.
Speaker 11:And, we are on the record looking at, you know, multiple places for that, including Australia through the, the new guided weapons enhanced ordinance program.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining. The update. Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 11:Alright. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Bye. Up next, we have Sean Henry from Stord. We ran into him in New York City. Got a chance to sit down
Speaker 2:and have hotel.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're staying at the same hotel we just had. Well, we had breakfast. He just sat there and listened to us. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He was walking by. He was busy. We said, hey. Sit down.
Speaker 1:Sit down. We got him talking about
Speaker 2:supply chain
Speaker 1:Terrorists, logistics. De minimis de minimis exemption. We will welcome him to the stream. How are doing?
Speaker 4:Great to be here. Thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 1:Good to see you. It's great
Speaker 2:to see you last week.
Speaker 1:Where where where where where did you land? Where where are you now?
Speaker 4:Back home in Atlanta. No longer having fun in New York having some breakfast with you guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very nice. And, business is good overall.
Speaker 4:Crushing breakfast, I should add, I guess. It was
Speaker 1:We're it was great company.
Speaker 2:We were crushing breakfast. It didn't feel like you were crashing because we you you were you were probably It was a busy day for us. It was busy day for everyone. You were probably even busier and and we we we requested that you hang with us. It was fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, shared some insights on on all the different things happening in your world.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, give me the update on, on tariffs, the de minimis exemption, where things how we kind of got here, and then where we are now, and then we'll get into where we're going next.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Absolutely. So I guess background, there's two types of core tariffs. One is the general commercial. Something's coming into a US port, and you're charging a tariff based on the commercial value of the goods at that time.
Speaker 4:And that's largely what was rolled out at Liberation Day a few months back was all of these tariffs, particularly around large imports. But there's a separate category that had a big action last week, which is de minimis exemption, which is really started in the early nineteen hundreds mostly for international travelers. They'd hey. I wanna send a package back to my family. Well, there's these rules created that as long as that package is under $800 and in these categories, you don't pay any tariffs.
Speaker 4:Well, what's happened the last few decades is if I wanna store my inventory locally in The US, meaning bring it through a port, hold it in The US, now ship it locally. If I'm, say, let's paying $2 for warehousing, $7 for delivery, and $5 for the tariff to get it in, I'm paying $14 to ship that locally. But if I never bring it into The US, if I just keep it in China, keep it in Europe, put it in Mexico, Canada, and instead, I'm maybe paying $1 for local warehousing and labor, a more expensive package like $910 internationally, but I never pay the tariff, I'm not comparing $14 to ship my unit through The US versus maybe $10 to ship it from international. That's a big difference on your average product. And so Trump and the administration had formally said that they will they've been waging more on this since even before election day, but they formally said it was gonna go away in 2027.
Speaker 4:So since the start of the year, brands thought they had maybe two years to get ready for this. And all of a sudden, last week, you saw announced on Wednesday that it's going away on August 29. And so now brands are rapidly trying to move inventory into The US.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, is it apocryphal to say that this all, like, TEMU and Sheehan, like, kind of started this trend, or did they just merely capitalize on it? Were there other other companies that kind of found this? It's not necessarily a loophole. It's more just like an opportunity that if you exploit it to the max, you can scale a multibillion dollar business.
Speaker 2:Using it. Nobody exploited it to the same degree.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wouldn't call other player. Chien and Tmall just like, you know, the tourist example. It's like they're they're shipping billions of dollars through this platform. But what are are are they the are they the the the the the real progenators of the idea?
Speaker 4:They've definitely exploited it at a greater scale than anyone else.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:But what's crazy is that if you look at the top 100, let's say, Shopify businesses, over 50 of those, roughly was the estimate, are tripping out of Mexico into The US. So this is very prevalent across brands of all sizes, particularly very large in the apparel category. And just some quick numbers. Last year alone, there was an estimated $64,000,000,000 of commerce that entered The US through the de minimis exemption, which is roughly 10,000,000,000 of missed tariffs and roughly 4 to 5,000,000,000 of missed US logistics infrastructure revenue. And so broadly speaking, logistics US oriented companies like ourselves are very excited by this because it's very hard to compete with Chinese and Mexican and other labor, real estate, and no tariff versus local fast shipping.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, what I mean, this sounds like a huge tailwind for your business, but, what are your customers actually coming to you with question wise? It sounds like, there's a very quick shift on the horizon around the de minimis exemption. They're coming to you and saying, hey. I need to move all my inventory from Mexico or China or Taiwan or Vietnam into Atlanta or somewhere else as soon as possible. Is that is that basically what's happening?
Speaker 4:Exactly. Because well, what I think it's important to note that when you look at tariffs, a lot of people apply it linearly. Okay. A ten, twenty, 30% tariff, product cost is gonna go up ten, twenty, 30%. That's on the commercial value of the individual unit, and so much of the cost is both margin for the brand, advertising, local US logistics.
Speaker 4:And so these tariffs don't translate one to one for how it's gonna impact the consumer. But at the same time, we're not necessarily talking to the brands as much about changing manufacturing origin to get away from those tariffs because the impact can often be absorbed for these mid market brands who have real profits, real growth. What we're talking about is back to that math I gave of if you were spending, $10 to ship it internationally avoiding a tariff, but you're doing a one to two week shipment, so a slow delivery, but cheaper. And it was you could do two, three day delivery in The US, but maybe $14 all in with the tariffs. Well, all of a sudden, if you're now spending or I I said 11 at first with the tariffs or Yeah.
Speaker 4:Or in The US. All of sudden, now if you're gonna jump all the way to 14, it doesn't make sense to pay more and deliver in two to three weeks cheaper. But now all of a sudden, there's this massive influx of volume where all these brands are saying, how fast can you get me live in The US? I'm in Mexico. I'm in Canada.
Speaker 4:I'm in Europe. And the problem is with outdated technology, most logistics businesses are gonna tell them four to six months and or with the influx of volume, a lot of capacity is becoming challenged again like we saw all the way back in 2020 and 2021 with such shortages of warehouse capacity. It's not that there's not leases on the market. It's that ready to go warehousing capacity with all the infrastructure, technology, and labor. That capacity is rapidly getting gobbled up.
Speaker 4:And so we actually had a a case study on our website, from exactly what's going on where True Classic Tee is a great example.
Speaker 1:A
Speaker 4:massive, many $100,000,000, T shirt retailer wearing one right now. Nice. Earlier this year, they were stuck in Mexico, and the Mexican president first signed away their exemption, which was, hey. If you first bring it into Mexico, and it's here for less than a hundred eighty days because we know you're gonna ship it into The US, you also never pay our tariffs. But please pay our labor, our real estate, etcetera.
Speaker 4:Well, they first signed that away. There's since been a pause put on it, but we already migrated customers. Take someone like TrueClassic. They were often told we can get you live in The US in six months. That's insane cost that they're gonna face for those six months relatively.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We got
Speaker 4:them live in eighteen days from meeting us to go live, and that's all because we're really the the cloud in comparison.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Last question for me. How solid are we I mean, when we went into, when we went into Liberation Day, a lot of it was just uncertainty from the business community. How how confident, whether or not it's good or bad for your business? How confident are we that we will be at least on the same course for whether it's good or bad for the next few years, for the next twelve months?
Speaker 1:Like, how much confidence do people have that these set this set of rules that are in place right now will stick?
Speaker 4:Personally, I think the confidence is going up. I think this is one of the last exemptions people were curious about. And while there are still a few negotiations going on with specific countries, the kind of broad general tariff, the reciprocal tariff, and even key countries have already been set. And, frankly, I tend to believe the administration is liking the results. So far, we've taken in over a 150,000,000,000 of incremental revenue since liberation day just via tariffs alone.
Speaker 4:Was a GDP positive or sorry, kind of balanced budget, positive month as a result of these tariffs and more.
Speaker 1:Crazy.
Speaker 4:And so I don't think we're gonna change course and go backwards. And I think some of the logic is while it may drive a slight increase in cost on the the front end, you have to wonder what it's gonna do on the back end when there is more production in The US, more middle and lower class jobs that have been competing with Mexico, China, and these other countries' labor on logistics, and ultimately, if they're able to use tariffs to impact other taxation on citizens, leaves me thinking the administration is gonna stay course on this.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Awesome. Well, congratulations on the growth, and it seems like a lot of these, decisions are going your way. So, happy to have you on the on Team America building infrastructure and everything that we need to, bring products to market in The United States. So thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 2:Great to see you, Sean.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 8:good rest of
Speaker 1:your day.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 1:Up next we have Andy from two cents. We've highlighted his posts many many times in the show. Excited to meet him and chat about the the business and his his day job outside of posting because he's built a very very fun social network where
Speaker 2:I'm excited to talk to
Speaker 1:username is your net worth. Andy, welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Speaker 10:Great to be here.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me. Are you in a secure location? You've probably upset a lot of people with what you've built
Speaker 2:but I Why? It's opt in.
Speaker 1:It's opt in. But just feels like something people would push back on. Right? You you've gotten pushed back for that. Right?
Speaker 10:To a degree, people have been a lot more positive about it than I thought they would be actually.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 10:I think what happened is I tapped into a latent anxiety that everyone actually had, and it seems sort of like people are like, thank god someone's doing this so that I don't have to worry about it anymore.
Speaker 1:So is it is it anonymous? It's just your network?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Explain the product for people that haven't seen it. I think a lot of people have probably seen it without realizing it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They've maybe seen screenshots of like polls or comments or things like that, which I think are fascinating. But but yeah, explain it for the audience.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So we're building an anonymous social network where your usernames are net worth. The main idea is to provide a verified place to have financial conversations that are difficult to have in person or with other people around you because of the inherent private nature of finance. And so we're collecting net worth information from bank accounts, brokerages, crypto wallets, and then later, we're also gonna do real estate and all kinds of other financial assets. And we're trying to calculate this one big number that we can assign to everyone and allow you to speak from your position, basically.
Speaker 2:What what are some of the key learnings, insights? I mean, I think I think the polling function where people can users can ask a question and then see, like, you know, let's say it's a yes or no answer. You can see how much net worth is, like, backing up the results. And so I feel like it it exposes, okay, what what what does like, what side is wealth on on this specific issue? But I'm sure you've had a bunch of other interesting learnings.
Speaker 10:It I think probably the most interesting thing is when I set out to build this, I thought it would be inherently a place for financial discussion where people would talk about tax strategies and ARBs and alpha and stuff like that. And it's really become more of a general place to hang out. And what I figured out is actually every conversation is a financial conversation. Your net worth and the experiences that have led you to that number sort of dictate the way that you are going to look at other things as well. And even if you're talking about something that's kind of boring or weird, that number is still relevant in that conversation even if you don't bring it up every time you talk to someone.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:I feel like there's a lot of anonymous social networks that have gotten, like, problems with, like, bullying and stuff and just, like, toxic communities because of the anonymity. Have you run into any problems? Are you fighting it in any particular ways? Or do you think it, like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do people ever come on there and try to eat the rich?
Speaker 1:Just net worth negative $2,000.
Speaker 10:We are actually in an incredible position as a social network because our moderation strategy is to just ban your bank account. And so if you break the rules on the platform, we can just block out the accounts that you've connected with.
Speaker 2:That's so interesting because normally on, like, Reddit, you could have somebody that's angry, and then they could just create they could be getting banned and just recreate accounts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like how
Speaker 2:would you create
Speaker 1:new account with a huge have to set up a new bank account, transfer all your money over there. Like, that takes a long time.
Speaker 10:And if you do that enough times, eventually, you will, make other people angry who will ask you why you're making so many bank accounts. And we don't even have to worry about it.
Speaker 1:That's very funny.
Speaker 2:That's wild.
Speaker 1:How's growth been? What's the news? How's are you monetizing yet? I can imagine Yeah.
Speaker 2:Can see.
Speaker 1:Ways to monetize. I can
Speaker 2:see, you know, to you you have interesting data that other social media companies need to kind of piece together Yep. Through behavior and things like that. Like I I imagine the big social networks try to build a profile to understand like what is this person's purchasing power? You guys get it. You're the users you know, providing it.
Speaker 2:But how are you how are you thinking about monetization?
Speaker 10:I think there's a couple of big strategies that we can try to go after. Referrals is something that I've looked out for a while. If you look at a public company like NerdWallet, a lot of their revenue is coming from referrals to loans and mortgages and credit cards. And from our position, if we have a bird's eye view into your finances, we're actually pretty well equipped to show you products that would benefit you financially. So we're not just selling you something, but we're also trying to sell you something that makes sense with the type of portfolio that you currently hold.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like And Hey. We noticed you're not using leverage. Did you know Right. You know that you could lever up massively?
Speaker 1:Refer you to Harry Winston, rare jewels of the world, discover the sunflower collection or maybe John
Speaker 2:Ray, what are you
Speaker 1:reading today? I'm reading How to Spend It. It's the it's the wealthy section of the Financial Times that comes on the weekend. Refer you to Vacheron Constantin, the quest. Vacheron Constantin celebrates seeking excellence for two hundred and seventy years.
Speaker 1:Two hundred and seventy years of doing better if possible.
Speaker 4:What were you doing? What were you doing before this?
Speaker 1:These are gonna be great referrals. You gotta call you gotta contact the the ad salesperson at HTSI. They got the graph diamonds ad in there. This is gonna sell like hotcakes when you go when you start monetizing.
Speaker 10:That's the broad plan. That is the broad plan.
Speaker 1:Do
Speaker 10:it. Before this, I was doing basically a bunch of different side project apps. 2¢ started as a side project.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:And I was just trying to figure out something that could ship out the door three or four times a month or or a year and see if anything would get traction. And so the early growth on 2¢ has been really amazing. It's probably the most popular thing I've ever built and almost entirely organic. So it has come from Twitter on the timeline, from other posters wanting to sign up and be on it. I've actually gotten a lot of comparisons to this earlier app, Poster.
Speaker 10:Oh, yeah. Popular a couple years I
Speaker 2:I invested in Poster. Really? Yeah. Yeah. It was a wild it was a wild place.
Speaker 1:Last
Speaker 2:contrary. But but it's it's so you know, people are it's interesting. A lot of people will use 2¢ that have never had an alt or an anonymous like account. And I think it becomes extremely freeing for them
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:To feel like they can have conversations online without being tied back to their LinkedIn, you know.
Speaker 1:To their
Speaker 2:family. And I and I do think, yeah, I just think you've tapped into something super interesting because money is so is just at the core of everyone's life, whether they want it to be or not. And giving people a place where they can talk about it freely. Of course, there's still gonna be judgment. Like, of course, there's gonna be people on the app that are gonna think a certain way about someone's financial situation or or, you know, what they're saying or or how they're spending their money.
Speaker 2:But it does I feel like the next I I feel like it'd be funny to build out I'm curious, would you ever build out like a feed of like the users kind of like if they obviously opted into it, just like purchasing. I feel like I feel like a lot of people would would be very fascinated in that. In a in a different way than like Venmo used to do it, which I was like, why is Venmo a social network? You know? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's like, I don't want like, I don't want people to know what what I did, you know, whatever. But
Speaker 10:Yeah. This is on the road map. We would love to have a feature where you can opt in your transactions, your recent transactions, and then almost quote tweet them. And say, like, I I bought this $18 shawarma at this bodega. It sucked.
Speaker 10:Here's a picture of it. And it kinda proves that you did that. Right? Like, you're not just saying it. And same thing for brokerage movements.
Speaker 10:If you sell a bunch of Apple stock or whatever, you can write your due diligence and then also prove that you actually made that sale. So you're not just saying you did it. We're proving it through financial history that it happened. And, obviously, that's gonna be entirely opt in. You can choose to show things or not show things, but it it'll be the only social network where you can have these types of conversations where you can prove that you're actually moving your money or making these transactions that you're claiming that you are.
Speaker 2:Very
Speaker 1:cool. Speaking of money, have you raised any money?
Speaker 10:We have. We have raised $3,000,000 from Dragonfly and starting
Speaker 1:line. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:And was that just announced today? I didn't see it
Speaker 10:anywhere. Yesterday.
Speaker 1:The official Two Cents account on Two Cents increased by 3,000,000. Right. And so you saw it.
Speaker 10:We are our spot on the leaderboard has jumped up a couple places, which I'm very happy about.
Speaker 1:There we go. That's great.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. What's what's the what's the number one spot on the leaderboard
Speaker 1:right now? Oh, yeah. Who's the richest? Richest?
Speaker 10:Right now, we have well, so I don't know because it's anonymous. Yeah. But they are at 26,000,000.
Speaker 1:26,000,000.
Speaker 10:Verified liquid. Wow.
Speaker 2:Which is crazy. Verified in liquid.
Speaker 1:That's pretty crazy.
Speaker 2:Might be an AI researcher.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe.
Speaker 2:Gotta get gotta get MSL Eight on
Speaker 1:million $3.03 3 every month. You're like, oh, okay.
Speaker 7:I even
Speaker 1:know who this is. Got a $100,000,000 contract. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Great to meet you, and have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Congrats on the round. Congrats on the round.
Speaker 10:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Bye. Cheers, Andy.
Speaker 1:Up next, we have Gabe from Harvey AI. Very excited to talk to him about legal AI and the impact of open source. I wanna know if anything changed this week for his business. We will bring in Gabe from Harvey AI, the legal. Hello.
Speaker 1:Welcome. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 7:Good. How are you guys?
Speaker 1:We're great. Great background.
Speaker 2:Great background.
Speaker 1:About to say.
Speaker 2:Is that mahogany?
Speaker 1:Yes. That's nice. The official wood of business and law.
Speaker 7:Yes. Mahogany, some books, gotta look professional.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. What what's the latest give us the update. I have a bunch of questions that'll go all over the place, but give us the update in your world.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So last week hit three year anniversary, have kinda scaled up to 350 people, 500 customers, just hit a 100,000,000 revenue.
Speaker 1:Lots of coffee.
Speaker 2:There we go. Love hitting love hitting the gong for revenue.
Speaker 1:You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:We hit the gong a lot for a $100,000,000 rounds, but it feels better when it's real customer demand.
Speaker 1:We have this silly soundboard where we play the over an overnight success, sound. But Overnight success. Yeah. That one. And usually it's because some founder's been grinding for, like, ten, twenty years, and then they finally hit breakout success.
Speaker 1:But, like, Harvey is kind of an overnight success. What actually set you up for this? Obviously, you were in a unique position to actually go after this opportunity. This wasn't just something that you just lucked into, obviously. So give me a little bit of the prehistory.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I I actually I started doing AI research in, like, 2012 and
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Tried to do some other startups. And so I think there was a lot of this experience of trying to build these companies Yeah. Without this technology. And I think I was at Meta on the large language model team right before Harvey, and my roommate, who is now my cofounder, Winston, was an associate at a law firm.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I was showing him kind of the g p three models, and he was showing me his kind of the legal work he was doing. And I think it was pretty obvious these models were gonna get much better, and that seemed like a great application. And then I do think there was, like, some factor of luck of, you know, raising from OpenAI, how good g p d four was, and then kinda really focusing on Big Law.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you add all that in, then we can do the overnight success. Exactly. Because it's like easy. If you want to just grow really quickly, just spend a decade researching a fundamental technology that will change the world.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what yeah. So so much to go into here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, one one thing I wanna know, you you, at this point, I'm sure are talking to or have closed all, you know, pretty much all the top law firms in The United States. I'm sure the reaction internally at all the different firms, I'm sure there's some excitement, I'm sure there's clearly excitement, otherwise they wouldn't be, you know, signing up and becoming customers. But I posted something last week, I was in New York and I spoke with I was speaking with a lawyer randomly and he was telling me about their AI adoption internally. And he said, this was his point of view, he said, adopting too much AI will hurt our bottom line.
Speaker 2:And I posted that note yesterday, and it sparked a big conversation. The obvious response is that you don't pay great law firms and lawyers for the execution. You pay them for the overall product and the sort of like guidance and advice Strategy and and strategy and and all these other things. It's not just like the raw, like, generation of documents or reviewing contracts and things like that. So how are Give us the overview of how different firms are reacting and leveraging AI.
Speaker 2:And then I wanna hear how you think law firms, might need to, like, reinvent themselves and, like, kind of even adopt new business models and approaches and things like that over time.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So it's definitely, like, a wide range, both law firms, but also kind of individual partners within law firms. And so we have, you know, firms that are still in the let's test this out. Let's see what to do with this. And then firms that are we have already co built software products or models with them, and they are we are revenue sharing and selling that to their customers.
Speaker 7:So there is kind of the full range. And, yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I think my guess is long term where this is going is I think your point is exactly right. Like, I actually think if you look at partners' billables, they're actually undervalued, where it's like if you wanna do a massive public merger, that partner is worth much more than 3,000 an hour, but it kinda gets subsidized by all these associate hours. And so I think there'll be some changing of, you know, how you charge for these.
Speaker 7:But so far, I think we're still kind of early days in that conversation, and it's much more how do you, you get adoption, how do you start upskilling lawyers to use this technology. But do you have a
Speaker 5:lot of Yeah.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing, I think, we obviously have a bunch of founders that watch the show. And I think it's interesting to look at invoices you get from your law firm and and just like look line by line where was I getting like real value and legal advice and strategy and all these things that are extremely high leverage. And where was I paying to like recreate a variation of this document or fix a punctuation error and things like that. Obviously, you can't see exactly but I did it is easy to imagine in the future where in the same way that you have a 100 x engineer today that's using Cognition, Devon, and Windsurf, or Claude Code, or whatever variety of cursor, etcetera, where they can be ultra high leverage because they effectively have an army of people working under them agentically. I think you'll see that in it's hard not to imagine that happening in in law where you have this, like, incredible individual player who's able to, like, produce potentially an order of magnitude more work in the very near future.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And one thing we're also starting to think about is, like, it's always interesting to ask, why do you have this billable model structure in the first place? And I think one big problem is pricing legal work. And so, like, the reason you have this model is, like, these projects are so complex that it's actually impossible to do fixed fee without, you know, this technology where it's just how much does it cost to do this merger. It's like you're gonna have all these things that come up.
Speaker 7:But I think as these models get better, the same way it's hard to predict, like, how long will it take to fix this bug. But now with these models, you can kind of look at a code base and say, oh, actually, I can tell you, you know, some good error bands. I think there's things like that you can start exploring that make more of these new business models interesting.
Speaker 2:Have seen have you seen lawyers in big law spinning out and and building firms from the ground up to try to disrupt themselves and create new models? I mean, we've seen we've had the founder of Crosby on, which is like they're building a firm themselves and, like, focusing on like a few specific types of of contracts initially. And I could imagine it's kind of hard if you have a a law firm with thousands and thousands of lawyers. It's hard to like totally change the business model where if three people spin off and they come to you at Harvey and say, like, we wanna leverage this ground up, build a firm around this. Are are you seeing that at all?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And one of the fastest growing I think they might be Amlot 200 firms now is actually partner only. And so I think this model is I think that the challenge is it just depends on the type of legal work you're doing, but this is also traditionally, like not traditionally. In the past couple years, what firms like PwC have also been doing of how do you bundle this legal work and provide alternative ways. So I think some of this work is is getting unbundled and with different models, you can kinda tackle different parts of the legal work.
Speaker 2:How much how much do you guys care about models getting more intelligent versus just delivering on the current capabilities?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think for us, the big challenge we definitely still have is, like, the models aren't good enough to do the very complex legal work. And so I think for us, you know, Sam has the quote of, like, try to build some company that, like, as the models get better, your company gets better. Yeah. And I think we are very much in that position where it's like I think as amazing as these models are, and I think lawyers get a lot of value, we still have so many use cases where it's just like the models can't draft these very complex, like, merger agreements and things like that.
Speaker 7:They can't look at these massive re case law research corpuses or discovery corpuses or data rooms and, like, really understand them. And so I think there's a bunch of room both for the foundation models to get better, but also we're starting to think about, like, can you, you know, custom build these reasoning models given this kind of specific data you have? So I think there's huge room for improvement for
Speaker 2:the models. What about what about the back office? There's a lot of costs that go into law firms that are that are nonlegal work, billing, you know, all all that. Is that something is that a focus at all for you? Is that something you think about?
Speaker 2:Or is there just enough work to be done on the client
Speaker 1:do, like, a legal billing product too?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I think that's something we've thought about of, you know, partnering with the folks doing that in the future. We've had law firms ask, can you, you know, help us automate parts of how we do billing? We have a bunch of firms that just buy Harvey seats to do some of this back office work again. And then there's clients that have asked about, you know, can you help us build spend management, things like that.
Speaker 7:But I think right now, the focus is still kind of building the product for for lawyers, for law firms.
Speaker 1:We have a question from the chat. Is the company named after Harvey Spector, the fictional lawyer from Suits or Harvey Dent, the Batman villain who I think also had a law degree?
Speaker 7:Harvey Spector.
Speaker 1:Harvey Spector. There we go.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:It's a great it's a great character. I wanna talk about costs, obviously. Tons of revenue coming in the door. Also, we're seeing this weird phenomenon. Maybe it's not that weird, but, like, with test time inference reasoning, you wanna put, you know, GBT what what what was the ARC AGI?
Speaker 1:They were putting 2,000 of inference behind every task just to crack that puzzle. If I'm, you know, coming to you and I want, you know, to really make sure that the AI is checking its work fully, I probably wanna put a ton of tokens behind that. What does the cost structure look like? How does that evolve over time? What is what are the relevant changes that could happen and changes in the landscape?
Speaker 1:We saw the open source model come out from OpenAI. At the same time, even if you're running even if you switch to open source today, you still have to pay for energy and GPUs and stuff. So what yeah. How does the cost side of the business evolve over the next couple of years?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think our bet kind of from early on has been focused much more on, like, capabilities. These models are going to get cheaper. As you scale, get economies of scale, you can kinda solve these problems. I would say right now, our cost structure is similar to, you know, if you're using, like, a ChatGPT where, you know, like, as amortized over the task, you have some tasks that are low compute, some that are a lot.
Speaker 7:Yep. I think Babel is actually one of the very unique domains where you have these tasks where I wanna draft a motion, and, typically, this is gonna cost $250,000. I wanna do document review, and this can cost a million dollars. And so you have these specific problems where you can actually just run models over every single document or just a ton of compute at this. And so we're starting to kind of explore, like, what do those different models look like if you're doing tasks like that.
Speaker 7:But yeah.
Speaker 1:Lessons from Atrium, lessons from ClearSpire, lessons from binding a actual law firm to a technology company. Seems like it hasn't. Not doing that certainly hasn't hurt you, but Yep. Did you know
Speaker 2:that you wanted to
Speaker 1:do this?
Speaker 2:I'm sure you had a lot of investors that said, why you why don't you sell the work instead of the software? Exactly.
Speaker 7:Yep. We we actually we actually had the opposite. Like, when Winston and I started the company, we talked to the founders of Atrium and, like, 30 of the folks that worked at Atrium. And, actually, Jason Kwan, who at the time was the GC of OpenAI, was at Y Combinator when they did Atrium, and Sam was as well. And so we kind of, like, mentioned that, and they were like, you guys should focus on building tech business.
Speaker 7:And for us, it seems like the scalable play here is, like, we don't wanna build a professional service firm ourselves. We wanna enable every law firm, every professional service firm to kind of become the next generation of firm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It makes so much sense. Microsoft Excel, their team didn't build an investment bank, and yet it's used by every investment bank and it's
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And and that will continue for a long time. Anyway, I think we have to jump to the next guest. Jordan, thank for coming on. Thank you so much for coming on. This is really fun.
Speaker 2:Incredible. Congratulations
Speaker 1:on all the growth. Huge. Thank you. We'll talk
Speaker 2:to you soon.
Speaker 1:Bye. And up next, we have another massive
Speaker 2:Get the
Speaker 1:gong ready. Moment. Let's bring in Kareem from Clay. We'll get the update from him. Welcome to the stream, Kareem.
Speaker 1:Clay AI, how you doing? Hello.
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 1:How you doing? Give us the latest. Give us the update. What's new in your world? What do you do?
Speaker 1:Break it down for us.
Speaker 6:I can give you all those things. Excited to be here.
Speaker 2:It's nice to have you.
Speaker 6:Yep. Well, today we announced that we raised a 100,000,000 from Alphabet's capital g. Congratulations. Thank you. And a $3,100,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 6:We're Wow.
Speaker 1:Three jet blues. That's crazy. Amazing. We've talking on jet
Speaker 10:blues a little bit today.
Speaker 2:But that is fantastic. Congrats. Classic overnight success. You started the company like few months ago?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It looks like eight years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so give us give us like the journey how you got here because I think like you guys have been a massive beneficiary of of LLMs from what I know over the last few years, but it was not a it was not an
Speaker 3:Overnight success.
Speaker 6:I will call it a spiral. Yeah. Mean, we started the company with the idea of how do we give the power of programming to an order of magnitude more people.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And I was saying it took me some time to reformulate that to how do we give that to what we call go to market engineers. So it's like half of the company can't code but has all of these ideas of how to grow the company. And Clay basically gives them the power to program revenue instead of just program software.
Speaker 1:Let's make that a lot more concrete. Yeah. There's been this cool wave of designers going from zero x engineers to one x engineers, and that's had a lot of, a lot of benefits in organizations. But what does that actually look like concretely on a go to market team? Is that just generating emails faster, managing a CRM?
Speaker 1:Like, what what are we actually talking about in terms of detail?
Speaker 6:The actually, like, most important part is who should you reach out to? That's actually, like, I would say 60% of kind of like there there's two ways to grow your company. Either you find new customers or you expand existing ones. If we just talk about finding new customers, 60% of that is finding the right person. Right?
Speaker 6:And then kind of, like, reaching them at the right time is another 20%. So what we do is listen. Let me give you an example. One of our customers, they have a ton of people just going on Google Maps, looking at all the different locations that they sell to, finding warehouses, and then manually counting the number of parking spots that that warehouse has because that's a good indicator if they're a good customer. And so we can use Google Maps API and LLMs to do that counting for them.
Speaker 1:Oh, that makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So really, most of it is about, like, account selection and finding the right people. And then the second part is, you know, did they just raise a round of funding like us? Was there some kind of new news story that did they just hire a few people in a department that you're selling to? And it's very specific to what your company does in their product.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:Is this every I've I've asked this question on the on the show before, but it feels pretty common that, you know, some random private equity firm will just be spamming people on the Internet trying to buy their companies. Oftentimes, there's probably good targeting. Oftentimes, there's there's bad targeting. How close are we to just like eliminating those those emails that are just kind of those out
Speaker 10:that Spray
Speaker 2:the and Spray and pray outreach. When when is Spray and pray era gonna gonna end?
Speaker 1:I hope now.
Speaker 6:I mean, I think that that's kind of like one of our top goals is if you actually I think you could think of it as what if you actually put in the effort and the thoughtfulness into figuring out who actually wants your product? One, you reduce spam, and two, you actually increase, like, your own productivity. It's just that that's hard to do at scale. And the best companies like Ramp, like, there's a lot of companies who figured out how to do that internally. What Clay is doing is giving that to every company.
Speaker 6:And, really, what that means is that businesses can find each other faster and more accurately. So I think it should end up benefiting everyone.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Anything else?
Speaker 2:$100,000,000, where how are you gonna spend
Speaker 1:it? Hopefully,
Speaker 6:we don't spend it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Always a good play.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think that one of the key, like, really exciting things about clay is that we have this huge community Mhmm. That has emerged around us. So there's clay agencies, so people who implement clay.
Speaker 7:Oh, that
Speaker 1:makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 6:There's, like, 60 clubs in 29 countries where people meet up to talk about different techniques. Because if you think about it Yeah. In sales, like, you're always figuring out how to be creative, how to be unique. Yeah. And clay is a tool that lets you do that.
Speaker 6:I almost think of it like Ableton is for music or like you said, Figma is for designers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Clay is for go to market teams.
Speaker 2:For doing deals. Interesting.
Speaker 6:Exactly. So we wanna use that money to support that community. So we're having a conference actually, Sculpt, in, September in San Francisco. So we need to we're gonna do more events like that. And then there's a lot of investment into the product.
Speaker 6:We're just touching the surface of what we can build.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are are is there any functionality to share workflows or create some sort of marketplace for workflows? Like, you know, yes, there are agencies on top of Shopify that do design, but then there are also templates. And so you gave some examples of, you know, new funding announcement in my category. That seems like something that I could be able to just pull off the shelf and not even not even build from scratch within clay.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Totally. I I feel like you you should really join our team. This is exactly Where
Speaker 1:are going? I'm leaking a road map.
Speaker 12:Making that.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So
Speaker 1:we'll leave it there.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We'll leave it there.
Speaker 1:Well, good luck. Awesome. Very exciting time and congratulations on the massive round.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I appreciate it.
Speaker 6:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Cheers, team. Bye. Good stuff. Well, John, I gotta get on with London, and I'm sure you gotta get on with Taipei.
Speaker 1:I do have to get
Speaker 2:on with Why don't we end it there? Yes. Thank you for tuning in to the show today.
Speaker 1:Thanks to everyone in the chat. I agree. The deeper the V neck, the more funding you get.
Speaker 2:That's right. Good strategy.
Speaker 1:It's a good good I didn't say it, but I think it's true. $100,000,000 deal, really deep v, looking good. I I you know, the round is down. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was funny because we I clearly, you could see the bottom of the v neck if we had shown the full screen, but we had a ticker. And so the ticker made it look like you don't know where that thing ends. It could just keep going forever. But Palmer Lucky has made
Speaker 2:It's actually a vest.
Speaker 1:Palmer Lucky has made the Hawaiian t shirt iconic. Maybe Kareem makes the the the deep v iconic at clay. You're good energy.
Speaker 2:Do it.
Speaker 1:I I I I
Speaker 2:was I
Speaker 1:was into it. Anyway
Speaker 2:Awesome, folks.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave us some reviews. Leave us some reviews. Send us some notes.
Speaker 1:Send us some reply to some threads. Whatever you wanna do. Whatever you wanna Get in touch. We'll talk to great evening. Bye.
Speaker 1:See you
Speaker 2:soon.