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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, 06/13/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. We're covering lots of stuff, taking you all over the world.
Speaker 1:We are going to touch on what's going on in Iran. You know we're not a political show, but, obviously, this has taken over the timeline. And we do want to understand a little bit about what's going on. So we're gonna have our good friend Josh Steinman jump on, get us up to speed. We're gonna run through a few posts before we bring him in.
Speaker 1:First one, apparently, there's a G Wagon angle here. Have you heard this? Of course. Faraz Khan, friend of the show, says, I love my G Wagons. The Mercedes Benz G Wagon, g class, exists largely because of Iran, specifically due to the influence and initiative of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran in the early nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it was it was built for him.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. That's right.
Speaker 3:Built for
Speaker 2:the Shah. Yeah. So Purpose built and became so popular that it became a global icon and arguably top five car
Speaker 1:Fantastic car.
Speaker 2:Of all time.
Speaker 1:So hopefully, we can move past the geopolitical conflict and get back to what matters, building cool cars together in a global community.
Speaker 2:They probably have some insane vintage G Wagons
Speaker 1:Probably.
Speaker 2:The ground.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, none of them were destroyed.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Well, it's absolute chaos in the timeline. Walter Bloomberg has a quote from Trump to the Wall Street We'll see if this is a real quote. I don't know. Attack would be great for the market because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. The the market was not responding to that right now.
Speaker 2:Michael Burry is
Speaker 1:Is confused. And Shane Copeland does have the market. You should be tracking polymarket. The odds of an Israeli military strike against Iran were were surging yesterday before the market started selling off. So Polymarket was once again ahead.
Speaker 1:And so Shane says, you knew this was coming if you were checking Polymarket. That's why we're proud to partner with Polymarket because they bring you the news before it happens. That's right.
Speaker 3:Well, we will
Speaker 2:do it over. Yeah. There was some interesting activity. People were looking on Pizza index. That too.
Speaker 2:But, you know, people were looking on Polychain, apparently a wallet on a few different occasions during Israeli Strikes. Strikes. Like, you know, twelve hours before when people were creating accounts potentially to trade against this stuff. So anyways, they're doing a service for other people to understand the world a little
Speaker 1:bit better. But we're going to try and understand what's going on. So let's bring in Josh Steinman, the founder of Galvanic, to break it down for Thanks so much for taking the time and hopping on. How are you doing?
Speaker 4:Doing great. Doing great.
Speaker 1:Explain to us first off, let's start with what's going on right now. There's a lot of posts. It's really hard to make sense of of all what's AI slop. There's some really striking images. I saw one crazy photo of what appeared to be a drone that went directly into a single bedroom.
Speaker 1:Very, very precise. How precise are these targets? What's actually going on? What's the scale of this? Is this World War three?
Speaker 1:And then I wanna get a little bit of history from you.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So first of all, I think precision targeting is not, like, a new thing. Mhmm. I mean, even as far back as, like, the, the first Gulf War, there were reports that American cruise missiles were able to target, you know, very specific locations. Like, you know, the the thing that got leaked to the media was like, oh, we can we can hit a bedroom window with a cruise missile.
Speaker 4:And I can't speak to whether or not that's accurate, but, you know, that's over thirty years ago. So you can just think, like, things have gotten a lot better. I think the big takeaway right here is we're seeing actual, like, next generation asymmetric capabilities being deployed, and and they're being deployed in a way in which we're literally seeing them. Obviously, the footage is getting leaked. There's all these reports of, like, Iranian missiles failing at launch.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So you have, like, possible next generation cyber weapons being deployed. Maybe it's RFEW. You don't know. Yeah. But this is, like, really stuff that's happening.
Speaker 4:I mean, they built drone bases supposedly inside Iran, which is wild. Although, obviously, we just saw the Ukrainians do the same thing
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Against the Russians.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I heard some report that I think a 100 suicide drones left from Iran. None of them made it to Israel. And so, some defense technology was clearly employed there to stop that, or maybe it's just shoddy manufacturing. Who knows?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Look. The point that I'd make here is, like, you just have to hand it to the president of The United States because from his perspective, this is all just a negotiation. Mhmm. Like, this guy's the GOAT.
Speaker 4:You know? And he's just like, hey. We're still open for negotiation.
Speaker 5:Like Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We're gonna kill half your leadership, and, like, we'll see you at the table in three days.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, this
Speaker 2:is So, yeah, what did you what did you think about the, you know, people were sharing around sixty one days ago? I guess he he gave, like, a sixty minute kind of deadline or sorry, sixty day deadline.
Speaker 1:We're on day 61.
Speaker 2:Day 61. This happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Did you were you reading into that at all? Were you expecting it?
Speaker 4:I wasn't personally expecting it, but it does make sense. Now the question of whether or not that was directed or agreed upon or just sort of like a shelling point, Like, the Israelis looked at that date, they're like, okay. If we do it on this date, it'll seem coherent. You don't know. I think probably one of the few people who will know on the planet is the president.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. But it is nice because, I mean, the president is very open about what he wants. And I think, you know, for the past twenty years, our foreign policy leaders, whether it's the president or secretary of state, they sort of had this, like, very amateurish attitude to foreign policy. Like, oh, we're just gonna play nice with everybody. And Trump is just like, no.
Speaker 4:We don't want you to have a nuclear weapon. We're a 100% fine with all of these other things. We're negotiating on this. And, like, yeah, there are gonna be consequences, and you're literally gonna see them right now.
Speaker 1:K. Give me a little bit of the history.
Speaker 2:Is it is it be before we get into the history, is it too early? People on the timeline are are calling it the one day war. They're taking victory laps.
Speaker 1:And then there's the other side, which is it's World War three. I was seeing that a lot last night. Which one is it?
Speaker 2:It just feels a little too early for people to be claiming victory given we don't know the consequences. We've also had a pretty porous border for for years, so I think there should be concern, you know, even at home around
Speaker 4:Yeah. Sun Tzu and Clausewitz both write about how politics and war are essentially extensions of the same of the same thing. Right? How do you get other nations to do what you want them to do or to come to a negotiated, you know, agreement, etcetera? So I think you know, I don't know.
Speaker 4:I'm not even sure the degree to which, if at all, The United States is involved. What I would say is it seems like Iranian air defense systems are essentially zeroed out.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So the war will go on as long as the Israelis want it to go on. Mhmm. And so at that point, then you create this, like, you know, interesting triangulation relationship where the president is still offering what remains of the Iranian leadership an olive branch. It is up to them to take it. If they don't, you know, they have to know that the Israelis essentially have the capability and intention and and the willingness to essentially just do whatever they want, including high level leadership targets.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And I think you have to imagine if you're the Iranians that, you know, you're asking what else do they have in the toolbox.
Speaker 1:Give me a little bit of the history. I think most of us are familiar with the meme of, like, this is a picture of Iran before the revolution. Very modern. We used to be allies. Iran used to be a massive, I think, third largest GDP in the world.
Speaker 4:Used to be an ally of Israel, by the way. You know? Yeah. Just talk about, like, weird turnabouts. Crazy.
Speaker 1:So walk me through kind of the story of, like, how we got to this point.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, obviously, there there's a lot here, and I would encourage people to do their own research. Lots of great books, and I'm by no means, an expert's expert, although I have been working was working in this area for, at this point, almost two decades.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, there was a revolution, in, in Iran to push back against, leaders that The United States and The UK supported and wanted to remain in power.
Speaker 1:And the main flip there was they went from essentially a capitalist democracy to a communist theocracy, more or less.
Speaker 4:I mean, you know, the the Shah of Iran is was essentially and, you know, he he's still here, you could say. I think he lives in Los Angeles. Mhmm. So more of a I'd say more of a, like, capitalist monarchy, although, you know, you'd have to go into the full details of how the government was architected. So
Speaker 1:He was very compatible with Americans.
Speaker 2:It's interesting that he he landed in the land of the g wagon.
Speaker 1:The is it a coincidence?
Speaker 2:The car that not a coincidence at all, I would imagine.
Speaker 1:He brought it on the
Speaker 5:case. Okay.
Speaker 4:So, you know, there there was pushback. There were elections. Mhmm. There was a lot of, you know, foment. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:The government essentially fell, and then there was sort of a second revolution that happened shortly thereafter, where the hardline Shia Islamic theocrats came to power. So the the first, you know, the the the first sort of situation happens where there's this, you know, not failed election, but election where the government is not reified, I guess, you could say. I'm just trying to, like, compress all all those
Speaker 2:down
Speaker 4:so that we have, you know, a lot of unrest, and then the Islamic, revolution comes to power,
Speaker 1:in Hostage crisis, obviously.
Speaker 4:A lot of things happened. For folks that don't know, you could check out how, yes, they took Americans hostage that were at the embassy, during this revolution that was in 1979. Again, a lot of dense history here.
Speaker 1:400 Yeah. Uh-huh. Like, it was a long hostage crisis. Four hundred days.
Speaker 6:Like, that's that's really long.
Speaker 4:And many and it happened alongside the, the presidential election campaign. For Jimmy Carter. He lost. Reagan won. Famously, the, the Iranians didn't let the hostages go.
Speaker 4:At the same time, there was a failed hostage rescue attempt that has very interesting history
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Into the architecture of the US Department of Defense. US Special Operations Command comes out of that failure, known as Desert one. So, yeah, a lot of history there. I think for folks that are not really tuned in on this, the thing that I would say is, you know, the Iranians were very active in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Their explosively formed penetrators killed hundreds of Americans. Their individual operatives who were both Iranian nationals and Iraqi nationals, also directly responsible for the deaths of a ton of folks.
Speaker 1:This caused some small money for a long time re leading the Quds force in, in Iraq. Right?
Speaker 4:Yep. So a a lot of that. And so, you know, there's there's a lot of bad blood. And so I'm not saying that, you know, oh, we should go to war with Iran. I actually think let the Israelis handle it.
Speaker 4:I'd prefer we close the border. But at the same time, like, they're not good guys. You know? They've been killing Americans for a very long time in a bunch of different places. And I think you've had a lot of US, senior leaders, whether it's president Obama or others, try and find ways to build bridges to that government and essentially been rebuffed and then, you know, doubled down on.
Speaker 4:So it's just like, you know, no heroes.
Speaker 1:Last question for me. Yesterday, the Internet went down. Yeah. Cloudflare, Google, you know, the the the tinfoil hat crowd is saying maybe their link happened. I mean, Cloudflare said this is not we we weren't attacked.
Speaker 1:We would say if we were attacked because Yeah. It would it would be a get out of jail free card. Like, it seemed like it was an issue with their key value store. What's your take?
Speaker 4:I don't know. Obviously, you always wanna wait until more facts come out.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The timing didn't
Speaker 2:seem like you were Give us the hottest take. No kidding.
Speaker 4:Sorry, but things sometimes happen, boys. So Yeah. C'est la vie.
Speaker 2:We set up Do you think we'll ever do you think we'll ever have clarity on on the outage yesterday? It was
Speaker 1:I think Cloudflare did a pretty good job explaining, but I don't know.
Speaker 4:Look. Here's what I would say for folks that wanna look to the future. Like Mhmm. What's the Iranian response gonna be? They absolutely have you know, how many foreign sabotage teams are operating on US soil?
Speaker 4:They they absolutely have assets here in The United States. Mhmm. Those assets absolutely have access to asymmetric capabilities. Those could be drones. It could be, like, hit squads, etcetera.
Speaker 4:And I think that you'll be able to gauge the temperature by whether or not those assets start to get activated and start to then go after things here in The United States, especially because the president has been clear. Like, maybe he was aware of what was gonna happen, but there was no official, you know, logistical US support for the Israeli operation. Like, they did that themselves. You know, maybe there was some sort of, like, sure. Do whatever you want, you know, permission from The United States, but you have a statement from Marco Rubio.
Speaker 4:And so I would just say, like, stay tuned. The asymmetric tools that were used against the Iranians are not, you know, unique to them. These are things that are out in the wild right now. So I'm certainly gonna be paying a lot of attention to that. And for TBPN viewers, I say that's where I'd, you know, be looking.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for monitoring the situation Yes. On behalf of, on behalf of us.
Speaker 1:There's no better place to monitor the situation than from the TVPN UltraDome, especially what you were doing
Speaker 4:in TVPN is my From the fortress.
Speaker 2:We're constantly monitoring the situation.
Speaker 1:That's that's what the show is all about. Thank you so much for hopping on, Josh.
Speaker 5:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Josh.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Enjoy your weekend. Well, in some good news, Chime went public twelve years ago. Kristen Green writes they had a simple the founders had a simple conviction. Americans deserve better from their banks.
Speaker 1:Chime went public with 8,600,000 members, 121,000,000,000 in annual volume, and an average of 54 transactions per member per month. So congratulations to the Chime team. They rang the bell.
Speaker 2:Absolutely fantastic. Congratulations to Kiersten Green on being their first institutional backer. Outcome. Congratulations. How are they trading?
Speaker 2:That's the big question.
Speaker 1:Oh, it went way up. It did very well. The the company climbed 37% in debut after $864,000,000 IPO. Very good news. We can go into the whole story.
Speaker 1:I'd love to know a little bit more about the backstory. I'd love to
Speaker 2:see how long priced at $18.4
Speaker 7:That's great.
Speaker 2:Originally, or that's kind of how where they debuted. Then and now it's trading at $11 It's down a little bit. But still, that that's in the range that Sure. That I think a lot of analysts were anticipating, how they felt it would be fairly valued.
Speaker 1:Well, if you love fintech, you gotta get on 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. And we have, Ramp has, Anderol as a customer.
Speaker 1:We have a fun activity today in the studio. We have Tyler Cosgrove, our intern over there. He will be assembling
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:A Fury drone made out of Legos that was very nicely, courteously, sent to us from the Andoril team. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:Good. I'm very excited.
Speaker 1:What are doing for us? What's plan?
Speaker 3:The the Fury Andoril drone. It's a group five autonomous air vehicle.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I think it's it's, I think, one twenty four scale. So the real thing is, I believe, 20 feet long, which is like around half length of a F-sixteen.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Okay. But yeah, there's how many pieces are
Speaker 2:in here? When's the last time you put together a LEGO set?
Speaker 3:I was probably 12. Okay. So
Speaker 1:Okay. It's been like
Speaker 2:eight years. So a few years ago.
Speaker 3:I'm feeling pretty good. I I don't know who has the current record on on the, you know, the speed run of this.
Speaker 1:Yes. I I think you can set the world record. Think can set it.
Speaker 3:It might be like Palmer's kids, but I believe they're pretty young. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They are.
Speaker 3:So I think I should have some
Speaker 6:smoke them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're gonna smoke them.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we're going for a world record. We're not doing any percent here. We're doing 100%. We're we're doing glitchless.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna see any any cheats employed over there. Yeah. We're gonna be tracking the timer. Production team's gonna start a timer. I don't know if we're gonna be able put it on the screen, but we will be tracking him.
Speaker 1:So on your marks, get set.
Speaker 2:Do we wait. Wait. Wait. Do we wanna do we ever wanna have any, like, consequences, like fantasy football style
Speaker 1:or consequences? I have something for you. I think it's in my car. I have if you can do it under how how long do you think it's gonna take him?
Speaker 2:I mean, I I think if you can do it, the reward should be under under
Speaker 1:Thirty minutes? Twenty minutes? Twenty minutes?
Speaker 2:That's pretty Under thirty.
Speaker 1:So if you can do it under thirty, I have an Andoral t shirt, and it's shareholder worn. It's a shareholder worn Andoril jersey. Wow.
Speaker 2:That's powerful. Yeah. Jersey.
Speaker 1:Worn by the shirt.
Speaker 2:I bet we
Speaker 5:could get it signed. We could
Speaker 1:get it signed.
Speaker 2:By Luke Metro.
Speaker 1:So, it's extra large. I don't know if it'll fit you, but you will win an Andoril T shirt if you can do it in under thirty minutes. On your marks, get set, go start your engines. Send it. Send it.
Speaker 1:He's he's gonna be working on that while the show goes on. We're gonna be bringing you the news, break it down. It looks pretty complicated. 600
Speaker 2:pieces. We will see
Speaker 1:how he does. Okay. We will be checking in with him over the next half hour, over the next hour, letting you know how it goes. Anyway, let's read through some of this Chime. Let's tell you about Figma first.
Speaker 1:Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
Speaker 2:If golden retrievers could design software, they would use Figma.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. The official design tool. Chime Financial rose 37% in its trading debut after pricing its shares above the marketed range to raise to raise $864,000,000 in the year's sixth biggest US IPO. That's great. The fintech firm shares opened at $43 after selling for 27 in the IPO, and they've been kind of trading around since then.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're sitting at $34 a share at this point.
Speaker 1:Down So still up from percent today. Still up from 27, which
Speaker 2:is great.
Speaker 1:Accounting for employee stock options and restricted stock units, Chime has a fully diluted value of about 15,800,000,000.0 based on filings with the US SEC. That fully diluted value is a sharp drop from the $25,000,000,000 valuation in a twenty twenty twenty one funding round at the peak of the tech tech boom. And so we've seen a lot of these companies that had higher marks during the zero interest rate era, but, of course, interest rates have gone up. That affects the value of future cash flows. It affects the value of tech companies in particular, but it's still important to get out, get liquidity even if it's not at the high mark.
Speaker 1:Your LPs, you can distribute. They can choose what to do with it. Maybe they hold because we've seen a lot of companies that go out at below the previous peak, but then they grind up because they have a lot to
Speaker 2:build up.
Speaker 1:And this isn't a situation where it's a company that's sneaking out at a 4,000,000,000 Yeah. You know, SPAC or something. This is a true IPO in the tens of billions still. Seems pretty solid.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there are still so many private neobanks that this is a very important sort of reality check on the market to understand how the market, you know, the post SERP era is really going to value these. There was another one that got out, I think that was called Dave. I'm actually curious to see how Oh, I
Speaker 1:know Dave. I know the founder.
Speaker 2:You know the founder? We've had Dave is grinded up. At one point, they were
Speaker 1:So we had one of the founders on the show. He's working on that new Chrome no, was from Honey. Honey. Honey worked with another guy
Speaker 2:So at Dave. Two years ago, John
Speaker 1:Named John Walling.
Speaker 2:Dave was valued at $5 a share. Yes. Today, it is valued at $200 a share.
Speaker 1:Wow. Wait. What's the what's
Speaker 2:the market So the market cap today is 2,780,000,000.00. So it it traded down. It was basically Wait.
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Sorry.
Speaker 1:Say the market cap again. It was like a really rough roller coaster because it, like, at one point, was worth a ton, and then it was worth nothing, and then it was back up
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's still down 33% from its IPO.
Speaker 1:But it's in a solid place to actually build back up. So Yeah. Wow. What a roller coaster.
Speaker 2:What a ride. And you had to been very, I mean, very, very different businesses, ultimately, if you were a Chime investor, watching Dave in the public markets You
Speaker 5:had wait.
Speaker 2:Was not very fun. So the CEO of Chime said, We don't focus on short term fluctuation in the stock, even if it goes up today. I'm sure there's gonna be other days that won't be as great. Yep. Fact check, true.
Speaker 2:We remain focused on the long term.
Speaker 1:So the investors in Chime that are making money off this, DST Global, we know some folks over there, Crosslink Capital, Access Industries, General General Atlantic, Menlo Ventures, Cathay Innovation, iconic, and it sounds like Kirsten Green as well Yep. Over at four reps. Led
Speaker 2:the seed round of Chime.
Speaker 1:Sean Carolin, a Menlo Ventures partner and Chime board member said he's relieved there was a reprieve in the markets following the tariff induced volatility in April. That IPO window closed. We grabbed it back open, the IPO window. I was thinking it would be very interesting to see a president run on a platform of just keeping the IPO window open permanently, mandating that it's open.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Legally? We should you know, normally, I'm I'm sort of against Maybe
Speaker 1:an amendment?
Speaker 2:Big government, you know, intervening Yeah. With with the market. But in this case, I think it's sort of mandating that the IPO window should
Speaker 5:Is always open. Always be open.
Speaker 1:It should always be open.
Speaker 2:Really on something here, John. You've you've always been very presidential, but
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:But I I like
Speaker 1:where you're winning platform. It'd be bipartisan,
Speaker 2:I think. It's sort of like the opposite of the the freeze the rent guy
Speaker 1:Yes. Over in New York. Yes. Freeze the IPO window open. Freeze it open.
Speaker 1:Freeze it open. All capital markets were like, holy cow. What does this mean? Carolyn said, noting that Chime delayed its IPO. The company's strong debut Thursday indicates how that now the markets are healthy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Since so a lot of people are very happy about that. They've never taken their eye off the mission.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm surprised.
Speaker 1:They've attempted to chase the new shiny object.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very good.
Speaker 1:What are you surprised by?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, I was gonna say, you know, we'll see if Chime, depending on what happens in Iran, market might see that positively if Chime could enter, you know, bring neo banking
Speaker 1:To Iran. Iran. That'd be amazing.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:Well, I'm surprised by how At
Speaker 2:Iconic Yeah. Says, they've never taken their eye off the mission. They were never tempted to chase the shiny new object. And, yeah, they've seemed to be just
Speaker 1:Look at this murderer's robe of IPO underwriters. You got Morgan Stanley. You got Goldman Sachs. You got JPMorgan, and 11 other banks worked on the offering. Let's hear it for
Speaker 2:investment banking. Banks.
Speaker 1:They don't get enough credit, you know, investment banks. They just they just work tirelessly. If the stock pops Wear the ticker tick parades for for the analysts that stayed up all night
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Working on this IPO. Anyway, Chime's marketing includes a deal with the NBA's Dallas Mavericks for its logo to appear on the team's jerseys. Pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Pretty cool. It's
Speaker 1:great. Anyway, let's tell you about Vanta. Vanta automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, moving on.
Speaker 1:Big news. All a whole bunch of tech leaders are now officially in the army. So
Speaker 2:The reserves.
Speaker 1:Reserves. Palantir Shamsankar joined the army reserves today. He broke it down in the free press. Also, Boz from Meta jumped in, honored to accept a direct commission as a lieutenant colonel in the US army reserve as part of the newly formed detachment two zero one, the Army's executive innovation corps, together with Shyam Sankar, Kevin Wheel, and Bob McGrew. Our primary role will be to serve as technical experts advising the Army's modernization efforts.
Speaker 1:We talked to the secretary of the Army. They're very dedicated to bringing in technology and modernizing the entire fighting force. Very exciting. And it's awesome that these tech leaders and executives can get in there and and start having an impact. So very, very accepting very exciting.
Speaker 1:Ba says, I have accepted this commission in a personal capacity because I am deeply invested in helping advance American technological innovation. NerdSnipe, anyone care to venture a guess on why we called our detachment two zero one? 201, that's got to be an HTTP thing. Right? HTTP
Speaker 2:20 It's person two zero one is a personnel file in the Intel community.
Speaker 1:Oh. I think it's I I think it's HTTP reference. So HTTP two zero one
Speaker 2:created
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:mean, would be two things.
Speaker 1:Status code indicates that the that the HTTP request has resulted in the creation of a new resource. I don't know. That's my guess. Let me
Speaker 6:know what you
Speaker 2:need HTTP status codes 2 zero one means created according to at poker chess man.
Speaker 1:That sounds yeah. That that that sounds like what what it would be.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:Well, out with four o fours, in with two o ones. Congratulations to everyone involved. Bob McGrew says, this evening, I will become officer in the army US Army Reserve as part of detachment two zero one, the Army's executive innovation corps. I'm proud to have the opportunity to serve. Shamsankar also says, our mission is to help the army transform for future missions and adopt bleeding edge tech.
Speaker 1:America wins when we when we unite the dynamism of American innovation with the military's vital mission. This was our what this this was the key to our triumphs in the twentieth century. It can help us win again. Shyam came on the show. He told us about the dollar a year, man.
Speaker 1:You remember this? Yeah. Yeah. Talking about executives in business who could not they could not be pay they had to be paid a salary. They couldn't work for free.
Speaker 1:Right? Forces. Yeah. To to help with the war effort during World War two. And some of them worked incredibly hard pivoting manufacturing lines to making cars, now you're making jeeps and tanks.
Speaker 1:And they worked really hard, they made a dollar a year because they legally had to make money.
Speaker 2:You gotta make something. Yeah. This is good. We live in an unstable world. We want our brightest technologists to be allies and a part of our defense efforts.
Speaker 1:Maybe we should get the get the army on linear. It's a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, product roadmaps, get linear for agents, you know. I don't think that
Speaker 2:was their original intention, but it would anywhere you're building software, you should be using Mhmm. Linear.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I should really join the army reserve and just be pitching SaaS products the entire time. Just just, Ford deployed BDR.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do a great job. I don't really know that much about implementing this stuff, but I can sell it. Yeah. I'm just like, hey.
Speaker 1:We're trying to have a meeting about, you know, modernization.
Speaker 2:Not now, John.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, well, sales tax on numeral? What about that?
Speaker 2:If you put it on autopilot.
Speaker 1:Anyway, congrats to Polymarket. They're putting up massive numbers in terms of visits in May.
Speaker 2:Yes. They pulled data from Similarweb in May. Yes. Robinhood is sitting at 37,100,000 hits. Coinbase at 34.7.
Speaker 2:Polymarket in thirds. I think they're just pulling all the, you know, finance.
Speaker 1:Finance and, like, kind of new like, these all lean, like, newer startup investing markets. But Kraken at $7,000,000 PumpFund at $5,000,000 I would have assumed PumpFund would be massive. But I mean, 5,000,000 is nothing to shake.
Speaker 2:Think crypto still niche. Still niche. Prize paid at $3,000,000
Speaker 1:CallSheet one.
Speaker 2:I see this you know, the reason that we were originally excited to partner with Polymarket is that it's an alternative to traditional news.
Speaker 1:It's a
Speaker 2:way to understand the headlines of the future today, or at least get odds against them. And so I think this signals that a lot of people are just going to polymarket to understand the world. So congratulations to the whole team.
Speaker 1:Yep. This was an interesting post by a friend of the show, Casey Hanmer. I had no idea. It's a little bit dark, but he's talking about the ISS's structural integrity quoting post from Christian Davenport who says the Axiom four mission is postponed indefinitely while NASA and Roscomos investigate a leak on the Russian side of the International Space Station. And so Casey says, the ISS's structural integrity is far more marginal than is being publicly discussed.
Speaker 1:We are having multiple and increasingly frequent leaks from heavily fatigued node segments in the Russian section.
Speaker 2:John. Yes. This screams like the plot of a sci fi movie.
Speaker 1:It really does.
Speaker 2:Leaks coming from the Russian section.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. Yikes. When aluminum gets flexed, it fatigues and gets harder, increasing its tendency to crack. Cracks concentrate forces at their tips and spread over time. Multiple cracks have been discovered.
Speaker 1:There is no factor of safety associated with this failure mode. None of the structural pressure vessels are meant to crack. We are not even single fault tolerant on the structural integrity of the station. We could wake up tomorrow and find that with zero warning, it has failed catastrophically. Whether that means a leak slow enough to close some hatches, get the crew out, or at least into safer parts of the station, it's a roll of the dice.
Speaker 1:It could also depressurize in less than a minute. And Elon Musk says there are potentially serious concerns about the long term safety of this of the International Space Station. Some parts of it are simply getting too old, and, obviously, that risk grows over time. Even though SpaceX earns billions of dollars from transporting astronauts and cargo to the ISS, I nonetheless would like to go on record recommending that it be deorbited within two years. Striking.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. We gotta put up a new one. We gotta put up 10 of these. Like, I know that they don't have that much economic value, but like this is what I Space yachts, John. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. We need we need dozens more ISS opportunities. Know that it's so expensive. I think I think it's one of the most expensive man made objects ever built. Although, maybe Stargate will will will beat it out.
Speaker 1:I I seem to remember the ISS being costing a total of a $100,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:The thing with Stargate is it's a project that's happening across states. Yes. So it's hard to say that it's the most
Speaker 1:Oh, much like the ISS's different modules put together? Oh. Oh. Kind of similar. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Can fit the ISS in a in a large enough warehouse.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Fit Star
Speaker 1:Stargate is a series of We have to have we have to have a human a human rated space station. It's just we have to have a space station. It's just so I would like
Speaker 2:to see an Elon mega project building a
Speaker 1:space There's that website. There's that website. How many humans are in space? Have you seen this? Humans are in space right now.
Speaker 1:Who is inspace.com? There are 13 humans in space right now. Who is in space? The ISS crew 10 launched 03/14/2025. There's four people there.
Speaker 1:There's the Soyuz.
Speaker 2:There's crazy people there.
Speaker 1:Johnny Kim's up there. You know? Wait. No way. You know Johnny Kim.
Speaker 1:Right? No. Oh, Johnny Kim is a legend. So Johnny Kim yeah. This is the guy who's been Go.
Speaker 1:Who did everything. He's He's done acting. Yes. So he was a Navy SEAL. He's a doctor, and he's also an astronaut.
Speaker 1:And the whole meme is like, his parents are finally are finally like Proud of
Speaker 2:it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's like I'm sure they
Speaker 2:still incredible. Still want more.
Speaker 1:Is is the best. We should get him on the show from space and
Speaker 2:up there for 66 people over there.
Speaker 1:Days. And then and then Tiangong Space Station, the Chinese space station, has three astronauts on it and then another three from a different from a different mission. And so there's six over there, and then there's seven on on the on the ISS. And so we got 13. Day.
Speaker 1:We need more. We need I'd like need to be bringing this exponentially.
Speaker 2:I want hundreds like Kai Sinat live streaming Yes. Totally. I'm sure they get a
Speaker 1:little It's content problem. They gotta be marketing. Everyone's like, oh, you're running some scientific experiment. When are we gonna do the paper? That's boring.
Speaker 2:No. They're like, thank you for the $5 Exactly. John Kugen.
Speaker 1:Thank you. $5
Speaker 2:They're like doing impressions.
Speaker 1:Stuff like that. If you donate $100 they'll squeeze the washcloth and show how the water, you know, sticks around. Check out Tyler. Let's see how he's doing. How are doing Just Tyler?
Speaker 1:Update.
Speaker 3:Pieces are black and the table's black, so it's it's quite hard to see.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:I I don't know how far I am,
Speaker 1:right now. Good luck.
Speaker 3:What time I'm at. But
Speaker 1:Is it fifteen minutes? Okay. I can do it. I can it. Okay.
Speaker 1:Keep going. Keep going. He's working. He's working. Anyway, let's, we are we're we're releasing recap videos now.
Speaker 1:Roughly a one hour recap video of everything that happened on TBPN this entire week. We know we put out a lot of content for you. This week, we'll be recapping WWDC. Apple released Liquid Glass. It was a little bit controversial.
Speaker 1:We talked to people that were very optimistic about the new design direction.
Speaker 2:People settled down in their
Speaker 1:I think they eventually settled down.
Speaker 2:Themselves. Alright. This thing might be pretty nice looking. Yep. It's probably it will get pretty good.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And we'll all move on. And they'll
Speaker 2:probably transition well to Totally. VR and
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Platforms. Yeah. It also it also tied really well to Apple's kind of retreat. Ben Thompson wrote about this.
Speaker 1:Apple is, turning over the reins to developers to develop some new AI applications, so we're very optimistic about that. We also had, we had our intern, Tyler Cosgrove. He's making Legos right now. But on Monday, we had him assemble the first American iPhone from scratch. And by scratch, I mean, seven pieces that he had to kinda glue together, but he did it.
Speaker 2:It was way more than seven.
Speaker 1:Maybe 12. But it was fantastic. We have, we had Andrew Huberman on the show. That was fantastic.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:We got to talk to him about what's going on with NIH budgeting. The proposal is that research funding will drop by 40%. We tried to dig into what is what what what pieces of the research budget should we keep, how what is the dynamic between, the different types of research that are funded? And he really broke it down for us on the back of his four hour interview with, doctor Jay Bhattacharya, who Yeah. Is the current NIH director.
Speaker 1:That was a very fun interview. We also went to Y Combinator demo day twenty twenty five. We were live from San Francisco. We talked to dozens of teams, dozens of founders. We talked to high school dropouts, college dropouts, tons of AI agents.
Speaker 1:About 90% of the new YC class is AI driven, but we had a bunch of interesting conversations. We also talked to some venture capitalists there, and we shot a lot
Speaker 2:of the hard tech founders.
Speaker 1:We did not see many of them. There were a few, but we but we mostly
Speaker 2:They were there.
Speaker 1:AI deep dives.
Speaker 2:They were among us.
Speaker 1:And then and then we also discussed the Meta and scale acquisition or investment. Meta is investing, something like $15,000,000,000. The deal actually just closed today. And so we had commentary from a number of founders and and pundits and journalists and also venture capitalists talking about the nature of that deal and how it came together. And so we hope you enjoy this year this week's recap, and it gives you a it gives you a good overview.
Speaker 2:We're one away from being seven days a week.
Speaker 1:Yes. We're very close. We also have a great show for you today. We're we're we're having we already had Josh on the show, but we have One X is coming on to talk about humanoid robots. Yep.
Speaker 1:We got Emily Sundberg coming on, the fantastic writer of the newsletter Feed Me. We have John Doyle from Cape building a new cellular network. There's a lot to talk about there. And then we have someone from the Rand Corporation coming on, which should be very fun. And so we will go back to the timeline, back to what people are talking about in the news.
Speaker 1:More updates on what's going on in New York. Zoran Mamdani is surging, continues to surge in the polls, and seems to be doing very well in the debates, but is not popular on tech Twitter because, he says capitalism is theft. The quote is taxation isn't theft. Capitalism is. Soran Mamdani could soon be mayor of the finance capital of the world.
Speaker 1:Incredible. It is a it is a very odd choice for a city that is known for capitalism and finance. Enhance. Finance.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. We'll we will see how this one evolves. It is already a case study in marketing.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:Signal called this out earlier this week that he's just laser focused on a few key lines. And it is resonating with some.
Speaker 1:Yes. Certainly
Speaker 2:not our corner or our audience of capital enthusiasts.
Speaker 1:Well, you're a capital enthusiast, head over to public.cominvesting for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Let's go to Pavel. Pavel says Pavel Asperuhov says, traditional company structure is falling apart. Pretty much every organization should be structured in three parts.
Speaker 1:People who sell things, people who do things, people who automate things. Everything else is just fat. Very interesting. Sellers, doers, automators. That's kind of How would you to yeah.
Speaker 2:I would I think this is I mean, great insight ultimately resonates, but people who make things, that people who sell things, people who make things, people who automate things Yeah. People do things. Do things is just just doing things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That is interesting that there's not yeah. Yeah. The the the the doing things part of this is is the most vague, but maybe that's management and strategy and and deciding what to do in the organization.
Speaker 1:But I do like the reframing as
Speaker 2:make things. Some people sell things. Yes. I I
Speaker 1:I Yeah. Yeah. Maybe maybe making things is is better. But, again, the automation thing seems like an interesting twist on a traditional engineering organization. As the role of the software engineer changes, it becomes more about automating any type of business process.
Speaker 1:And I think the role of the software engineer is is definitely growing in scope. It's not it's vibe coding an internal tool using cursor, retool, or all the different softwares that are available. It's also buying off the shelf or bringing in off the shelf software to automate processes. And the the leverage of the software engineer leads to just massive automation across the entire company. The selling things is very is very interesting because even though that is automated in in some ways, it it it it increasingly relies on
Speaker 2:What's automated about a steak dinner?
Speaker 1:Exactly. On in per interpersonal relationships and communication. And so that that has definitely, you know, carved itself out as a unique, a unique function within the modern organization. But, yes, I I think the people who do things is could be build, could be make things, but could also be, define the strategy and and and build the company. But if you wanna automate things, put your sales tax on autopilot with numeralhq.com.
Speaker 1:Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
Speaker 2:Just get on there.
Speaker 1:And if you're one of those people that
Speaker 2:sells Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if you're one of those people that sells things, get on Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 2:It is the backbone of our high velocity
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:Guest program.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:Get on there.
Speaker 1:Chamath had a hilarious post that I really enjoyed. He says, well, this is probably one of the funnier things I've done, but my friend and sommelier and I got a California liquor license and started a wine collective. With our license, it allows us to buy wine directly from vintners, get wholesale pricing, buy and house entire collections of wine. We did we didn't do this just for us, but created it to allow our friends to participate as well. At some point, we may open it up to the world as lar at large.
Speaker 1:If you love wine, want access to the best wines, avoid retail markups, this may be a fit. The team charges for shipping and handling, but otherwise pass through the raw cost to our members. Right now, we're saving 15 to 40% per bottle depending on the winery slash vintage. We call it drink with me. We also create quarterly capsules of the best wines Josh and I have drank and allow members to buy in quantity.
Speaker 1:The first box is below. So he it seems like he's, like, on the cusp of launching, like, a d to c wine company.
Speaker 2:But I mean, this is a wine membership wine club. There's thousands of these. People love them. I think it makes sense for Tremoth's creator evolution.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's smartass. Terms of his brand.
Speaker 2:Always drinking wine all in Always drinking fantastic wine. All in alone and just casually dropping a little note about Drink With Me or whatever wine he's drinking makes drive this to 10,000
Speaker 1:plus you know, I completely agree. The creator market fit here is is fantastic. Powerful. Very fun. And if you if you zoom in, it says, drink with me.
Speaker 1:A curated wine collective by Chamath Palihapatia and sommelier Joshua Plaque. Looks great, and congrats. I mean, he he enjoy he has a passion for wine. He's expressing it in in a business. You love to see it.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's
Speaker 1:great. We talked a little bit about this, but we didn't get back into this. Scott Belsky came on the show this week, talked about the data wars, and there's new inform and there's new reporting from the information. Salesforce is blocking enterprise AI rivals like Glean from using Slack data for their applications. This was a big issue back in, like, 2012 with this idea that that you had all this data in Facebook.
Speaker 1:You had all this data in Google. You had all this data with Apple, and you could not even though every one of those companies would tell you, it's not our data. It's your data. You can take it with you. It's yours.
Speaker 1:You own your data. People would say, okay. That's great. Google, I'd like to give all of my data to Facebook because I want better I want better ads on Facebook. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And Facebook, I wanna give all my data to Google so that when I go in my Gmail, I can search my friends list. And both companies would be like, oh, no. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:No. We would No. No. We don't trust the other company. It's your data.
Speaker 1:You can export it through this, like, CSV ZIP file that you have to download every time. But we're not just gonna let an API link these two services. Absolutely not. Because the walled garden must be maintained. Yes.
Speaker 1:And, you know, it's like, oh, oh, oh It's a beautiful garden.
Speaker 2:You have to appreciate
Speaker 1:the beauty of again. It's my data, then then then I can, you know, integrate my iMessage with my Android friends. Like, oh, no. No. You couldn't possibly do that.
Speaker 1:And and and, I mean, these big tech companies, they have they have reasonable arguments for it, but it but it always has been funny. And now it's more important than ever. And so Scott says, anticipated and referred to this as the impending data wars in previous editions of implications. That's his newsletter that you should go subscribe to, but didn't expect it to start this quickly. Data grab and protectionism underway, especially by those that don't own their own graphs or sophisticated permissioning layers.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, there's this big question. OpenAI is is launching deep research. It integrates with, Gmail and Google Docs. That's gonna be fantastic. If they cut that off entirely, and they get cut off, like, that might be something that actually drives enterprise adoption of Google's Gemini deep research project.
Speaker 1:Right? Because if we have a whole bunch of documents in Google Drive and we want someone to be able to run a deep research report around all of our internal documentation, which obviously they would wanna do, and Google successfully cuts off OpenAI, like, you're just going to have to go there or else it's gonna be a hassle of, like, okay. I guess download all of our PDFs from Google Drive and then feed them into ChatGPT one at a time. Like, no one's gonna do that. The friction is gonna be so high even if you can download your data.
Speaker 1:Like, it it needs to be there over an API. And so Salesforce has taken the first the first shot in the data wars, and we'll be tracking it here on the show.
Speaker 2:Shots fired.
Speaker 1:For the next for the next forever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, this was a very timely call out from Scott on the show.
Speaker 1:Yes. It was. Well, if you're losing sleep over the data wars, you gotta get on Eight Sleep. Go to Eight Sleep dot com slash TBPN. Get an Eight Sleep.
Speaker 1:How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? I'm on a generational run. Put up huge numbers last night. I think I got you beat this whole week across. I I think it's I think it's tied up.
Speaker 1:Monday, 91. Tuesday, 86. Wednesday, was on the road. Doesn't count. Thursday, '91.
Speaker 1:Friday, '95. Let's hear it for me.
Speaker 2:I got completely mugged except tying
Speaker 1:the issue. Not working. I was expecting some clapping, but the soundboard must be broken. Oh, there we go. There you go.
Speaker 1:That's for you, John. That's my favorite.
Speaker 2:Hey. 95. Happy for you. I'm happy for you. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You just throw up an excuse.
Speaker 2:I'm sure
Speaker 1:you have a good Yeah. It's fine. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let let me hear it. Let me hear the excuse.
Speaker 2:It actually was funny. I I I woke up a little late this morning because my son crawled into bed and basically pushed me so far off
Speaker 1:the edge of the bed that
Speaker 2:the Eight Sleep alarm, the vibration alarm
Speaker 1:Was waking him up. He
Speaker 2:didn't even wake up.
Speaker 1:Was just
Speaker 2:sleeping like a rock, but I was just feeling it very faintly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. My son hops in the bed after I leave and and I use the warm up alarm from eight sleep, which is fantastic. It it really makes me
Speaker 5:easy to
Speaker 1:get out of bed.
Speaker 2:It's crazy.
Speaker 1:But he loves it because he's like, oh, it's so warm and cozy. And then he just gets like he gets he sleeps like an extra two hours because he likes it really warm. Yeah. And so he enjoys my my post alarm side of the bed. Enjoys that.
Speaker 2:Very sweet.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's go back to the Army's newest recruits, tech executives from Meta, OpenAI, and more. The Wall Street Journal was covering it. Executives from Meta, Palantir, and OpenAI are joining a new army innovation corps, bringing tech upgrades to the military. The tech reservists will serve a hundred and twenty hours a year, so two hours a little over two hours a week as lieutenant colonels advising on AI and commercial tech acquisition. Very exciting.
Speaker 1:And so the I I like this from from Boz, Andrew Bosworth over at Meta. He says, it's possible I watched too much Top Gun. He's 43, standing more than six foot two.
Speaker 2:Happens to the best of
Speaker 5:us.
Speaker 1:It does. You can never watch too much Top Gun. Come on, boss. It's an amazing movie. He was told he was too tall to realize his youthful ambitions of flying an f 16 fighter jet.
Speaker 2:Did that happen to you too?
Speaker 1:It was never even in the conversation. I remember I remember seeing a movie in like, about the Vietnam War when I was, like, 13, and it was very obvious that I was never gonna make it in in the military. But there was someone from my high school, and I do have a family member who's fly in f sixteens. And it seems like it's a it's a it's a wonderful program and still is incredible.
Speaker 2:You really have to be a very specific specimen to be a pilot. Yeah. I I I I did flight lessons as a kid, and I was in the civil the civil Mhmm. What's it called? Civil Air Patrol.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And they I was really worried as a kid. Wanted to be a pilot and I was worried that my eyesight would degrade because you can't you can't have glasses. You can't have, LASIK or anything like that. You just gotta have perfect eyesight.
Speaker 2:You gotta be very specific height. And, anyways.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Bosworth went on to say, there's a lot of patriotism that has been under the covers that I think is coming to light in the valley. I completely agree. They will be, sworn in as uniformed officers in a public ceremony on Friday, the day before the army's 200 birthday. Happy birthday to the army.
Speaker 1:Happy birthday. Less than a decade ago, even working on technology that might be used in defense, never mind suiting up for service, was anathema in Silicon Valley. The new reserve program reflects how the relationship between the Pentagon and the tech industry has deepened. Meta and OpenAI adjusted their policies to work more with the military last year, although Meta is not technically a defense contractor right now. They are a supplier to a defense contractor with their annual partnership.
Speaker 1:Little bit of confusion there. That story went out and was so fast. A lot of people didn't understand. They're not, they're they're not of an official military contractor at this point. Although, I would love if they were.
Speaker 1:Palantir has been involved in national security work for two decades. It has an AI and data project with the army worth potentially more than $1,000,000,000. For the army, the deepening ties can prepare for for wars of the future. They are expected to be waged in part with, with ground boot ground robots and drones and rely on networks of sensors and artificial intelligence to coordinate it all.
Speaker 2:I mean, looking at the conflict from yesterday in Iran Yep. That feels like, in many ways, the future of warfare.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Zero troops deployed. Yep. And, you know, absolute devastation.
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of war of robots, we're gonna have the founder of One X on the show in just five minutes. But in the meantime, let me tell you about Adquik. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquik combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
Speaker 1:Go to adquik.com. Anyway, Shamsankar took to the free press to write a little bit of a I guess this is an op ed or a little article about his experience. He says, I am the CTO of Palantir. Today, I joined the army. He says, my father grew up in a mud hut in India.
Speaker 1:America gave him and me a life. Now technologists like me need to give back. Oh, this is heartwarming. Fantastic article.
Speaker 2:Does he have a Gigachad filter on here?
Speaker 1:Love I
Speaker 2:love the
Speaker 1:the best
Speaker 2:best bit. Is this is your new bit. If you need a bit going into the weekend Yes. If you see a picture of your of your Of your absolute boy. Absolute boy, and they don't, and and they clearly, you know, just a casual filter, accuse them of using a GigaJet I mean, it's I mean
Speaker 1:He looks like he's in shape. Yeah. Let's let's leave it at that without without bringing out the Glazinator 3,000. Later today glaze. Triple glaze.
Speaker 1:Receiving their commissions on my side will be some of the most impressive minds in the world of technology. Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI, Andrew Bosworth, Boz, the chief technology officer at Meta, and Bob McGrew, formerly the chief research officer at OpenAI and engineering director at Palantir. None of these none of these men need to pad their resumes. None of them have free time between fatherhood demanding day jobs and a dozen other demands. Are they all dads?
Speaker 1:Let's hear it for fatherhood. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Let's go. I mean, we got 50% of this group on the show already.
Speaker 1:We got it. We gotta finish it out. We were close with Boz. We almost overlapped at some event. We're gonna we're gonna make it happen.
Speaker 1:We almost caught him at Figma config. We're gonna get him on the show. Let's let's make it happen. A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for so many tech heavyweights to openly align with the US military. Equally, it would have been out of character for the military to enlist the support of the nation's business elite, much less create a special core that they could deploy their technical talents in service of the government, but a sea change has taken place.
Speaker 1:Wars in Europe and Middle East and above all the threat of war in The Pacific have focused, the national mind and initiated a scramble for mobilization. Exploding pagers in long distance drone strikes from shipping containers prove the technology has once again changed the battlefield. Our military has to change with it. The Army's Executive Innovation Corps, under the direction of the Army's chief of staff, general Randy George, who has been on the show, is part of a larger efforts effort by our military to transform the way it prepares for and fights wars in the twenty first century. Marrying the nation's most innovative private companies with our, with our most important military missions is a is fundamental to that effort.
Speaker 1:That cooperation relies on re reviving a sense of duty in in an American elite that has been has become disconnected from our nation and its tradition of service. Let's check-in with our intern and his tradition of service. How is it going, Tyler?
Speaker 2:Servicing Let's Lego.
Speaker 1:He's 75% of the way
Speaker 3:This is much harder than I thought. Well past thirty
Speaker 1:minutes. Well past thirty minutes. Okay. Well So gotta start thinking of
Speaker 2:the punishment.
Speaker 1:The punishment. You don't get
Speaker 2:You don't get a prize for. Well, let's get a I actually I have I have a really I have a really good one.
Speaker 1:What is it?
Speaker 2:I have a really good
Speaker 1:one. I know what you're thinking of.
Speaker 2:It's actually a bit no. You don't. You actually don't. Oh, okay. Because I was going to give this to you as a a I would the the thing that I'm imagining would be a gag gift for you.
Speaker 2:Okay. But now it's going I'm gonna sort of
Speaker 1:Flip it around.
Speaker 2:Convert it into a punishment for Tyler.
Speaker 1:Are you gonna drop it right now? What
Speaker 2:is it? It's on the way here. It's on the way here. It's It was in the car. And Ben's gonna drop it here in
Speaker 1:the next
Speaker 2:few minutes. So we might have to wait till after the next guest, but you can look forward to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We didn't tell you, but if you'd been able to get it done in ten minutes, we would have gotten you a fantastic new watch on Bezel. We we we we had our finger hovering over the petite foot Nautilus, but that's kinda out of the window.
Speaker 2:Would you have worked faster, Tyler,
Speaker 5:if you
Speaker 2:knew that?
Speaker 1:Knew that there was a a
Speaker 3:Nautilus on You should have told me.
Speaker 1:On the board. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. It'll have to be next time. But in the meantime, if you're listening, can go to getbezel.com.
Speaker 2:We should treat this LEGO set as sort of something that he can kind of iterate against. You don't just do a Rubik's cube once. Like, do it once. You try to do it faster, Break it down. And so I think we should give Tyler another crack at the Nautilus.
Speaker 2:Now he's dialed in. He should be able to do it a lot faster. So Yeah. Dylan, why don't you bring bring this up for a second?
Speaker 1:Okay. This is this is the potential punishment. What are we doing here, Jordy? Hi. Okay.
Speaker 2:I was gonna give this to you, John, because you're a horse sized human. These are the Apple Dex, apple flavored electrolytes for horses.
Speaker 1:You replay the horse
Speaker 2:It's from it's from Horse Health Products.
Speaker 1:Horse Health Products. It's a
Speaker 2:forty day supply for classes for all classes of horses.
Speaker 1:Show it show it to the single.
Speaker 2:And and I'm just gonna I'm gonna go out Tyler, your punishment is you have to finish this before your internship ends this summer. It's totally safe
Speaker 1:for humans. It is. You're horse maxing.
Speaker 2:Forty day supply for a regular horse.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Let's see how long it takes you.
Speaker 2:You gotta see how long you get through it. Anyway, so you you have this waiting for you after the show. And and we could do something if you can finish the next one, the next iteration if you do it in thirty minutes, maybe maybe you don't have to have it. But you might try to discover that you actually love it. So we'll see.
Speaker 1:Okay. Tyler's still working on that. We'll check-in with him. He does have two hours. We have another hour of guests coming into the studio.
Speaker 1:We have one ex coming up next, talking about humanoid robots. But
Speaker 2:and it's I'm excited for this. They've had a they've had a massive week.
Speaker 1:And I have a ton of questions about about humanoid robots. The biggest question is is is data that SIM to real gap? There was a there was something percolating in my mind related to the Alex Wang acquisition, the Scale AI acquisition at Meta. Because robotics data is so difficult to get, maybe Scale AI would play in that market. We'll see where that develops.
Speaker 1:But in the meantime, let's bring in the founder of One X and start talking to him about humanoid robots. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:There he is. What's happening? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5:Doing good. Doing good. Thanks for having me. Excited.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Yeah. Give us some context on on your background on 1x and Neo, and then we'll just get into a bunch of different questions. I was about to tell John Neo was actually blessed by Lil B, the base god
Speaker 1:I saw that.
Speaker 2:While ago, much like Timothy Chalamet was before the generational run. So it's very possible that that Neo is is on a similar run itself.
Speaker 1:I'm very excited.
Speaker 2:So anyways, great to have you on, Burnt, and, yeah, give us give us some color.
Speaker 5:Awesome. No. And I think, let's see. I can get Woah.
Speaker 2:Woah. Hey, Neo.
Speaker 5:Over here. Wow. Wow. Okay.
Speaker 2:That's convenient.
Speaker 5:Think that has to be something too. Right? It's it's been going pretty well lately lately, so we have been blessed.
Speaker 1:Okay. You've clearly made one. How many how many have you made of these things?
Speaker 5:It's about a 100.
Speaker 1:A 100. Wow. Okay.
Speaker 5:Different versions, though. Right? They're not still all operational. Like, we're
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:Very quickly cycling through hardware revisions to ensure we actually get to the launch by end of year. So we do quickly deprecate them as new ones come out.
Speaker 1:Sure. What what does launch mean? You wanna be able to sell these to companies? This is business to business, business to consumer. I've seen them on streams.
Speaker 1:They seem like kinda just like companions. It's less industrial, but what what's your thesis for the early adopter here?
Speaker 5:Let me just jump in straight into it. So, like, who am I? Who's the company? What are we doing? Why are we doing this?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I'm well, I'm Bert. I'm the founder, CEO. Companies from a robotics background. Been on this journey all my life.
Speaker 5:Picked apart all of my mom's kitchen appliances, so they had motors when I was a kid. Always liked building stuff programming. Started one x ten years ago, and, like, the mission stayed pretty constant. We wanna create an abundance of artificial labor. And we're doing this through creating these intelligent machines that can live and learn among us.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And the last part is so important. I think what's really differentiates Onex from the rest of the pack here is the focus on making robots that are safe among people Mhmm. And that are very affordable. But first principles engineering, how do you make something that's, like, super lightweight, doesn't need very special raw materials, doesn't need, like, that high tolerances in manufacturing, make something that's, like, closer to a refrigerator than a car, but still as capable as a human.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And when I say getting this out the door, what I mean is literally, like, getting it into your homes. Right? So we're going through in home testing among employees now. I have one in my house in Redwood.
Speaker 5:It's amazing to get to finally live with the product. And it's gonna be some customers having them quite soon, but, like, under NDA early testing. And then if we play our cards right, it should be in the main market by end of year. That's the goal.
Speaker 2:Wow. Moving quick. How has the company evolved since ten years ago? Humanoids have always been in people's minds to some degree. They haven't been in the headlines as much as they've been, let's say, in the last couple years.
Speaker 2:But kind of walk us through maybe those different stages, how your vision evolved, and and then I have a bunch of other questions.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, it's the kind of product that we all know will happen. Right? I mean, we've known it for, like, I don't know, last fifty years. Like, at some point, this will happen.
Speaker 5:And the impact is tremendous. Right? So I think what's really changed the last couple of years is, to be very blunt, that it works. Mhmm. Alright.
Speaker 5:For the for for the first eight years, it was kind of a grind, and it's a kind of a problem that's really worth just, like, doubling down on, like, grinding and pushing on until it works. And I don't think the impact of this type of technology can be exaggerated. Right? It's we're we're years, not decades now
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Away. It's it's very hard to, like, put a put a specific date, but we're years, not decades away from robots building robots. Mhmm. Robots building out our data centers, our energy infrastructure, our chip manufacturing, like, our mining. In general, like, this is kinda hard takeoff moment, right, where we can actually get to an upon abundance of artificial labor.
Speaker 5:And it doesn't really even matter if it's, like, physical or digital. Right? Because once you have this engine running, you will just, in general, like, have extremely intelligent agents, whether they're in the digital or physical space and kinda will redefine what it means to be human. Like, what do we value in humans? Like, how do we see our own worth?
Speaker 5:And I'm just really freaking lucky to be a liar, right, to be part of that. It's been my dream all my life. And
Speaker 2:Yeah. The timing's amazing. Timing's amazing. What about getting getting into more specifics with Neo? Do you have any sort of specific early use cases that you're focused on in all of this sort of sort of marketing that I've seen so far.
Speaker 2:It hasn't seemed focused on certain use cases like manufacturing or certainly not mining or things like that. It feels like you're maybe more, you know, focused on the on the home. Is that is that correct? Am I off?
Speaker 5:No. No. No. It's it's it's correct. But it's really important there to point out that, like, if you take a step back.
Speaker 5:Right? It's like we're years, not decades away from actual abundance of artificial labor. So as a company, the only thing that makes sense there is to get there as quickly as possible. It's all we care about. What's the shortest path?
Speaker 5:So we're not a consumer company. We're shortest path to artificial labor. And it just happens to be that the shortest path is through consumer because you need to live and learn among people. Like, if it's one thing that's incredibly clear in AI, it is that the diversity or, like, the variance in your dataset basically equals your intelligence.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Right? That's that's where intelligence emerges from. And in a factory, there just isn't enough diversity. Think about it. Like, if you're if you're in a factory all your life moving something from a to b, and that's all you're doing, then, like, you could ask, like, okay.
Speaker 5:How much do you actually learn? Right? And we actually have the answer. You learn about we need, like, twenty to thirty hours of data from that, and then we don't learn anything more.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 5:So, like, that that's just, like, that's not where to deploy robots. We wanna deploy robots there, but we have to deploy them first where we actually get the data that gets you through a true truly intelligent machine that doesn't just repeat emotion. It understands deeply the task it's doing. And this brings you into, like, something interesting that you said in your intro here, which is companionship. Right?
Speaker 5:Because everything we do is social. Like, work is social. Like, whenever you do something, usually, it's because if someone wants something. And, usually, someone's next to you or even, like, communication, the social complex of objects, like, hey. Is this cup on the table?
Speaker 5:Someone using it? Is it yours? Like, is it is it half full, half empty? Is it dirty? Like, there's liquid in it.
Speaker 5:But if it's coffee and it's cold, it's probably, like, not in use anymore. It's actually dirty. Like, everything has this, like, social context, and this is what creates this incredible variance and diversity in the home. Not only is every home different, but, like, everything happening in the home is different every day, and everything has a social context. So I think we're seeing pretty strong proof now that, like, a lot of model intelligence comes from this diversity, and we really wanna double down on that.
Speaker 5:And then the other part is I think it's just gonna be incredible to live with these companions in our life that can not only give us back time in our everyday life with, like, household chores, but actually be a trusted friend. Right? And we're talking to our phones with chatbots and being like, these are our new companions, but it's not the right interface. Right? The right interface is something that you can really deeply connect with, and it gets you away from a screen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Bicentennial Man, a movie I know you haven't seen, but is a fantastic story of a humanoid robot that stays with the family for two hundred years and and evolves and changes. And it Robin Williams. A beautiful movie. I wanna talk to you about kind of the progression of the software.
Speaker 1:Teleoperation, super valuable in a bunch of different ways. Simulation, we're seeing lots of promising data. There's the SIM to real gap. There's deterministic algorithms for walk cycles. There's end to end systems.
Speaker 1:What is your view on the path that we need to go down to get to something that's truly generalizable so that you can put a humanoid robot in a completely novel situation? Just talk to it and say, hey. Clean up this table, and it will remove all of these cans one at a time. It knows exactly how to do it, and it's never actually been trained on that specific task, but it can generalize just like any other human can.
Speaker 5:I think I well, there's two interesting answers. The first one is, no one knows how to solve that yet. And then the second answer is we actually know really well how to solve that, which which is it's gonna be some big transformer, and you just need enough high quality data.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:So we kinda know, like, it's an engineering problem at this point because even though we don't know the exact solution, we know what we need. Right? We just need an enormous amount of relevant data. And this data is very different. All models that you see today, they're trained on what I call, like, only observations.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. If you think about the Internet, whether it's video or pictures or text or whatever, it's static. Right? So you're like Yep. Given that I saw or read this, what's the next thing?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:What what you're actually missing and where, in my opinion, like, lot of, like, our ability to reason comes from is that you have some hypothesis about what's gonna happen. Like, you have your own mental model of, like, this conversation. Yep. So when you're saying something, if I'm training just on what you're saying, that's not the same as if I'm training on what you were thinking and planning and then what you said and then what the result of that was, which was, like, how I reacted to that. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And robots actually allow you to do this. Right? Because you have what the robot is thinking and what it was planning to do, what it actually did, and what it resulted in.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And this data is what is needed to get to this. And that's what we're gathering at scale.
Speaker 1:There's no like in Yeah. There's no real, like, massive dataset like the web that you can just scrape. Folks are using teleoperation to generate data. There's simulation data. Like, what are the richest sources of data for you?
Speaker 1:What do you see as being, like, the real trove that you're gonna be doubling down on over the next few years?
Speaker 5:I think it's all of them, but they're all just like a crutch. It's like you're bootstrapping your way to where robots are learning in the real world. Yeah. And this is really the direction we're moving in because Mhmm. Teleoperation does not scale.
Speaker 5:Right? Yeah. It's super valuable, and we need it, but it doesn't scale. Simulated data, very useful for simple things like walking.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:But for, like, peeling a shrimp or whatever. Right? It's like, it's not nearly detailed enough. Like, it doesn't work. So you just what you need is to use the Internet data, some teleoperation simulation, synthetic data, all of these things to get to where your model is able to sometimes succeed.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So when you say get me a Coke in the fridge, maybe there's a 50% chance that a robot comes back with a Coke. Yeah. Maybe it gets stuck somewhere on the way it didn't manage to do so. But once this happens, then you can basically just tell it, hey. Good job.
Speaker 5:Or, like, hey. We're just supposed to get my Coke if it's just, I don't know, staring out the window instead. And that's the data loop that scales. Right?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And that's what we're deploying. So when we're saying, like, getting this into your home, what we mean is almost more like adopt a neo to help us teach it. Sure. It's not gonna do everything in your home day one. We're not there yet.
Speaker 5:But we're able to deliver a product that is really fun, very engaging, somewhat helpful, and really the ability to be part of this generational journey from the beginning. Right? That's the product. And that's how we gather that data. And this comes back to how we design robots that are safe.
Speaker 5:Because if you want the robots to actually be learning in the real world, they need to be safe not just with respect to you, but with respect to itself and your environment. Right? You don't want your kitchen to look like a robot had been ravaging around there when it's done. You want your kitchen to look nice just like it did before your robot went there, even though the robot failed a few times Yeah.
Speaker 2:Opening the the is you don't have the luxury of of hallucinations long term. Like, if the robot is unloading the dishwasher and puts a bunch of knives in in the wrong cupboard, you know, that that's like that's not safe. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 2:have, you know, kids at home and, you know, so it's like the the bar for acceptable is just is very high.
Speaker 1:I wanna ask about the supply chain. Dylan Patel was on the show saying that no matter what happens with humanoid robotics, all the parts are gonna be made in China. I there were some actuator startups, in the comments saying, like, that's not true. We're gonna build it here. We're gonna fix the supply chain.
Speaker 1:What's your view on the short, medium, and long term of the robotic supply chain?
Speaker 5:And you know how to ask the hard questions. Let's, let's start by saying, to us, this has been all about how do you don't, like, overconstrain the system too early. Right? So humanoid robots don't exist at scale yet. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So, like, if we were making a car, if my new startup was a car, I would clearly utilize the existing supply chain.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 5:What we've done is we've made everything ourselves. I know I say literally here, like, I mean, we're undergoing some patenting process for a new type of die casting of aluminum at the same time that we're launching AI models. So we're, like, definition of vertically integrator, including all the manufacturing technology. That puts us in a position where we can actually kind of manufacture anywhere. It just depends on access to raw materials, power, and general, like, tariffs and everything else.
Speaker 5:We are actually building a factory in The US right now. There are challenges because, like, sourcing simple things in quotes, like copper, aluminum, steel, these kind of things. Yeah. In The US, for example, it's a lot more expensive than in China. Sure.
Speaker 5:Logistically, it's also kinda like a nightmare because you don't have kinda like the economic zones with, like, basically, your metal refineries. It's next to your forge.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And there so there's, like, pros and cons, but I think there's a path. I think what's the most important here to realize is that when people talk about, like, things need to be built in China, we're not necessarily talking only about this. We're talking about actual access to knowledge about how to do manufacturing. Mhmm. And I think that that is the thing that takes the longest to kinda onshore.
Speaker 5:Right? So, sure, there are things that needs to happen with rare earths. There's things that need to happen with all these things. But I think the main thing to really work on also is just making sure that people understand how incredibly exciting manufacturing is and make sure that our new generation actually really wants to work on the hard problems in manufacturing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, we talked to the the the author of Apple in China, and he really reframed the conversation about Apple's impact in China, not just as being a buyer, but actually being an educator in China and and and sending over massive teams of manufacturing designers to to create an to create a supply chain that didn't even exist, but was enabled by the scale of the population and the economic zones and everything you everything you articulated. So, yeah, I'm I'm optimistic that in a new boom, you could potentially set up trade deals such that, you know, if your business is scaling, you would have the choice to to create a new generation of of manufacturing engineers in America or anywhere else that might be advantageous. But this has been fantastic. We we I'd love to have you back and go way deeper.
Speaker 1:Jordy, the last question.
Speaker 2:All the new launches this week. Excited to follow you and and and the whole team's work. It's it's been awesome to see.
Speaker 5:So I think it was great talking to you guys, and stay tuned. There's actually more coming.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Wow. There's more coming in a few couple
Speaker 5:of days.
Speaker 2:And we'll we'll we'll pull up another chair for Neo whenever you're ready. We'll adopt. We'll happy happy to
Speaker 1:adopt one. One. Yeah. Bring us another energy drink. Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Brent. Bye. Have a one.
Speaker 6:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:Next up, we have John Doyle from Cape coming in the studio talking to us about wireless networking cellular technology. Very excited to talk to him, especially with the backdrop of what happened in Ukraine two weeks ago. Anyway, welcome to the studio, John. Good to have you here. How are you doing?
Speaker 7:Hey, guys. Happy to be here. I'm doing great.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of introduction of yourself and the company maybe to get us started?
Speaker 7:Yeah. You bet. I, I'm John Doyle, founder and CEO of Cape.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:It is America's privacy first mobile network.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Two sentences on my background because it explains how I came to start this company. I started my career in the army special forces. I was a communications sergeant on a fifth special forces group. Went to Palantir. I was there for nine years.
Speaker 7:And at Palantir, I started in technical roles. I wound up running the national security business for five years. Mhmm. And that's where I learned about this whole, you know, PhD field of study worth of vulnerabilities that exist on the global cellular network. Interesting.
Speaker 7:I'm really passionate about solving them. And so I started Cape in 2022, to get after that problem.
Speaker 1:What is the biggest, like, concrete risk to the cellular network? Is it is it like
Speaker 2:Well, I would just start at a at a higher level. Is it how unsecured Yeah. Is the average cellular network?
Speaker 7:Completely. You know, we saw if you remember during the the last campaign, the story came out about JD Vance's phone calls being listened to.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? And and it that kinda came and went as as these stories do. But it it snowballed into the story about Salt Typhoon, which the headline of that story is China has just explicitly and completely infiltrated all the major telcos in The United States
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 7:Which is pretty bad. But even before you get there, there are all these there are really features that are baked into the protocols that run the network. They're there for good reason. But in the hands of malicious actors, some really bad effects can be drawn out of them. And so, you know, we can get deep in the technical weeds if you want to, but, basically, the whole thing is blown.
Speaker 7:And it's problematic because we are entirely reliant and kind of fundamentally reliant on the cellular network.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what's a bigger risk right now? Espionage or sabotage?
Speaker 7:That's a really good question. I'm gonna say espionage Mhmm. Because it is being like, it's absolutely happening right now. The the Vance story is a perfect example of that,
Speaker 1:right, Lee?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And just listening to the future vice president's phone calls. Although the sabotage question is interesting, I know you guys wanna talk about or have been talking about spider web a bunch and then Yeah. And the drone attacks. One of the really interesting features of that story, of course, our perspective is the fact that the drones were piloted on using cellular connect commercial cellular connection
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 7:Which is really interesting to us, you know, in a bunch of ways. But importantly, and it came out a bunch in the reporting, when people start to think about countermeasures and, you know, how would we how would we guard against these attacks in the future, One option that gets taken off the the table almost immediately is turning off the cellular network. Yep. Right? Because it it has, like, disastrous consequences.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because what if someone needs to call 911 and they can't? Something like that. You're you're gonna wind up hurting people.
Speaker 7:Impacts. So even when there's an AT and T outage. Yeah. Yeah. Stuff grind.
Speaker 7:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we saw it yesterday with just, like, Cloudflare outage, and it was very disruptive. Talk to me about how you actually go about building a new network. Are you able to solve the problems that you're trying to solve just by picking back piggybacking on the existing physical hardware, or is this a crazy CapEx problem that you're we're gonna see you raising a trillion dollars in debt and stuff.
Speaker 1:You could probably do that based on your background. But I'm always interested to know where you think, like, the right problem to solve is.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's a great question, and we didn't know the answer to it when we started the company. Mhmm. Thankfully, it turns out you don't need to build the towers. You don't need to own the the antennas or the spectrum.
Speaker 5:Got it.
Speaker 7:Our approach is we own all the software that runs the network. So we control application billing, caller ID messaging.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:We have all of the important stuff. And we've done pretty extensive red teaming and testing, especially with government partners, and proven out that if you own all the software, you can actually make a lot of progress against the problem.
Speaker 1:Very cool. So when I see one of those cell phone towers, that might not be a Verizon tower specifically. Specifically. That might be owned by a different company that then is, like, leasing or running software Yeah. For Verizon and AT and T within the same kind of, like you could think about it almost like a multi tenant data center.
Speaker 1:Is that the right mental model when I see a cell phone tower?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And that's a great it's a really good observation, and it turns out to be true.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:The carriers you know, the carriers what the carriers own is spectrum. Right? Sure. What Verizon owns is an amazing amount of spectrum that's super expensive, and they administer it. Yeah.
Speaker 7:They don't you're right. They don't even own the towers most of the time. And, like, American Tower or some other company built
Speaker 1:the
Speaker 7:tower, puts the radio on there, or the carriers will sign an agreement with Nokia or Ericsson to put the antennas up there.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:The carriers don't actually run the radios. They outsource that to Nokia and Ericsson. And so it hasn't they they have sort of assumed the system integrator role. And I think my personal opinion is that that has serious security implications that has led to some of the, the problem that we find ourselves in.
Speaker 1:Sure. Can you get me up to speed on five g? I remember the drama around Huawei, and they had built five g towers that we were not going to buy. I also heard someone mention offhand that America doesn't really have five g. We have, like, fake five g or something.
Speaker 1:Is there like, I
Speaker 2:I Is marketing?
Speaker 1:Is yeah. Is it marketing? Oh, you're like, don't talk about it.
Speaker 7:Right. Yeah. Okay. So there's two things there. First, you're, like, you're you're teeing up one of my favorite history lessons, which is twenty twenty years or so ago, twenty three years ago.
Speaker 7:China made the strategic decision to capture as much footprint on the global cellular network as possible. Mhmm. And the way that they achieve that was by pumping billions of dollars of subsidy into Huawei. Mhmm. So Huawei could run around the world and sell antennas and also core software, the software that runs the network Mhmm.
Speaker 7:At a, you know, half or less of the price of any of their competitors. Mhmm. And so they became really attractive, and everyone went out and bought Huawei gear. And the result was that China now owns, still, not in The US so much anymore, but around the world, you know, huge percentage of the footprint on the network.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:At almost exactly the same time, The US and it's not obviously a different kind of government, so it wasn't like a centrally made decision. But US telecom started outsourcing and offshoring all of the technical aspects of running the business. So Mhmm. You know, the course offer now is built by Nokia or Ericsson, which are in Europe, and very little of that capacity exists within The United States. So while China is making all these really deep and recurring investments in the infrastructure, The US is really kind of divesting and just becoming the system integrator spectrum managers.
Speaker 7:I mean, that's how we find ourselves in this imbalance now. And then when people talk about the race for five g and how is The US positioned with respect to China, I think it's a little bit of a misnomer to say it's five g because they're not talking about when when five g first started to to get buzzy. The use cases were always like a heart surgeon in Boston is gonna be doing surgery in Africa, right, because of the low low latency protocols. And that stuff is cool, but that's not like how we're behind China. How we're really behind China just in how much footprint do we own, how much access, how much control do we have over the network.
Speaker 7:And that's actually agnostic of which generation or it's independent of what generation we're on. The other so and then are we really on five g is such a good question. There's, like
Speaker 1:I think about it mostly from a bandwidth perspective. Like, I I be I became able to stream HD video at, like, retina resolution, and I really don't have a daily use case that goes beyond that in terms of bandwidth needs. Right? And so as long as but but every once in a while, I notice if I'm about to take off on a plane and I know I wanna download a movie right before, the difference between fast for downloading, like, a full gig in two minutes and and twenty minutes is material. And so that's where I would think five g would help, but I've also heard about, like, streaming video games, obviously, four k stuff.
Speaker 1:But I I I I don't feel the pain that much that I'm not, you know, I'm not a single issue voter on the topic, but I am I am curious.
Speaker 7:You're like I mean, that observation is a threat to the entire, like, telecom. So it's like like, three g to four g was way better. Right?
Speaker 1:Oh, total. It was it was night and day. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Better and more secure. And four g to five g was arguably better, although not entirely because, like, five g connection drains the battery on your phone a lot faster.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 7:There there's some trade offs there where LTE times that four g is actually, like, a better option in some in some but beyond that, like, the hurry up and download a movie use case
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:There's kinda nothing left. And so there's a big, you know, shrug in the industry. There could people are kinda waving their hands at AI.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah.
Speaker 7:Well, you were gonna do AI and that'll, you know, that'll change everything. Yeah. But I I don't know that that that that comes into it.
Speaker 1:Everything's an s curve. It's all sigmoid. We saw band mobile bandwidth growing exponentially. Everyone was like, you're gonna be able to download 10 exabytes in two seconds. And in fact, it was a sigmoid function like it always is.
Speaker 7:I think, again, you're like, think you've used nail use cases. Like, as long as I can stream Netflix at maximum resolution, I'm done. Like, that's that's the maximum.
Speaker 2:Who the the core customer that you're going after? Is it people in important positions, you know, politicians, CEOs, etcetera? It's just JD Vance. The Just JD Vance.
Speaker 1:It's just one massive client. $1,000,000,000 contract. He's gonna
Speaker 8:a billion
Speaker 2:dollar ARR contract. Yeah. But I think but when I when I think about the broad consumer market Totally. People say they want privacy, but in
Speaker 1:in A lot of people just want Yeah. $20 instead of $30. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I mean, both of those both those consumers exist in the market. There are a
Speaker 1:lot of people.
Speaker 7:Mint Mobile perfected the, like, how cheap can you offer a cell plan. Right? Yep. And, like and they nailed this. $20 a month turns out to be the the answer.
Speaker 7:Right?
Speaker 1:Ryan Reynolds. Undefeated. I love the man.
Speaker 7:When you have unlimited free marketing
Speaker 1:from Ryan
Speaker 7:Reynolds, we're need you. So okay. So yeah. So who are, like, who are we trying to solve problems for? I mean, I like my my background is in special operations.
Speaker 7:I am deeply passionate about the fact that cellular phones have been a part of the battlefield for as long as we've had cellular phones, and they are increasingly not decreasingly so over time. We saw this in Ukraine. Like, everyone the entire Ukraine war is fought on the mobile network Yeah. Communications aspects of it. And I'm deeply passionate about building technology that keeps people doing that work safe.
Speaker 7:Right? I think that's, like, a really important mission, and I love it. And that is where we started when we're thinking about the product and starting to, like, build early versions and build early features. That was the market. But we always had in mind, and I in in my early life, I was a special operation soldier.
Speaker 7:My later life, I'm a parent. And, like and I even in my sort of relatively mundane parental, you know, mid forties existence, I I have worries about how reliant I am on my cell phone and the trade offs I'm making and things like SIM swaps, if you know what SIM swaps are. That's a huge item. And you need you have to build technical solutions to problems like that. And I have that also like a general sense of indignation that if I wanna be a a subscriber to any traditional telco, I give away all of my personal information.
Speaker 7:And then they lose it like clockwork four to five times a year.
Speaker 1:They really do. They're giving it away.
Speaker 7:Sooner now. Like, it's it doesn't have to be that way, and it shouldn't be that way.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for your service both in the military and as a father. It's very important. We gotta get you Ryan Gosling. I think I think, you you know, Ryan Reynolds from the mid mobile. Get you Ryan Gosling.
Speaker 1:There's something there. There's something there. Is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Well, now you're you're chief mobile correspondent now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do you have anything else, or should we let him go?
Speaker 2:No. This was great.
Speaker 5:I mean,
Speaker 2:yeah, seriously. We we I think I think there's gonna be I'm sure there'll be more stories this year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We'd love you to have you back on.
Speaker 2:Some some deeper insight.
Speaker 1:But we'll let you get back to it. Important work. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers, We'll talk to you soon. Let's quickly tell you about Wander.
Speaker 1:Find
Speaker 2:your happy place. Find your happy place.
Speaker 1:Book a Wander within I
Speaker 2:love that when I point.
Speaker 1:Hotel double amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning. Shot. Four seven. Yeah. It's so good.
Speaker 1:There we go. Top tier cleaning, twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Yesterday, I got a little spicy on the timeline. I said vacation.
Speaker 1:I said traveling is overrated. I wasn't talking about vacation.
Speaker 2:What are you writing
Speaker 1:from? Vacations. I love getting to wander in my hometown in something I can drive to. Load up the entire family. Load up the dogs.
Speaker 1:Drive out to a wander. Hit hit Marijuana. Travel.
Speaker 2:Marijuana's in travel.
Speaker 1:What are you running from? To go outside the country to enjoy a beautiful wander. Although, if traveling is your ticket, go and go.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a beauty wander.
Speaker 1:It is All over The US. Let's check-in with our intern, Tyler Cosgrove. Let's see if can it.
Speaker 3:I I'm I'm very close.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:But this has been kind of disappointment. I'm extremely slow right now.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 3:I I thought I've been done thirty
Speaker 1:minutes ago. Aching? Are your fingers breaking?
Speaker 3:I'm sweating.
Speaker 1:Oh, sweating. Okay. Well, you're an hour and a half in.
Speaker 2:If you're sweating a lot, you should try these Apple Decks, Apple Player Course electrolytes. I didn't tell Let's get him a let's get him a cup, please.
Speaker 1:Cup. Get him some electrolytes. Make sure he's hydrated. I didn't tell Tyler this, but I took a picture of the Lego kit, and I asked Chad GPT, how long will this take? It said between two and four hours.
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 1:he was like, can do it in thirty. And I was like, okay. Good luck. Anyway, we have our next guest in the studio, Emily Sundberg, the writer of the fantastic Feed Me The
Speaker 2:Daily Newsletter about the spirit of enterprise.
Speaker 1:Really? Isn't that incredible? It's called.
Speaker 2:It's called. That's How are doing, everyone? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 9:I'm so glad to I'm I'm happy to be here. Everyone. All two of you.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Well, all of us. We have our intern here.
Speaker 5:We have
Speaker 2:our intern here working on
Speaker 9:a way
Speaker 1:like this.
Speaker 2:You know, Emily being a guest, I've gotten more random texts about it. People being like, oh, you should ask her this. Oh,
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:People have Hot talking are paying attention.
Speaker 1:Is that a
Speaker 9:Google Exciting. That's scary.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Well, what what is your shirt? Let let let me see. Did you stand up?
Speaker 9:I was at I was at Apple. I was at WWDC on on Monday.
Speaker 1:You were you were reporting on what the really old folks are thinking about Apple. Right? Is that is that what they said?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I saw a backlash.
Speaker 9:They the people over at Puck said that
Speaker 1:That's what
Speaker 9:it was. That Apple should have invited younger people
Speaker 1:Wow. To remember it.
Speaker 9:Wow. Well, may already be a little little too old.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Before you got in, is it true that Tim Cook begged for a selfie?
Speaker 9:Oh, yeah. We saw that. Yeah. Totally. No.
Speaker 9:That was that was really fun. That was cool. I didn't expect that to happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What was your reaction? It it feels like a lot of the liquid glass hate has blown over by now. People You
Speaker 9:know, yeah. I think, like, sitting there in real time reading Twitter and seeing people's reactions, it seems like people weren't excited and wanted more Apple intelligence updates. But that night, I went to have you guys ever been to WWDC?
Speaker 1:No. Never.
Speaker 9:I went to one of those, like, ancillary engineer and developer barbecues, like, an hour away in an Airbnb with, like, 30 guys who who build apps, and they were all really excited. So I think they're the people who it's for, and they're the people who are going to ultimately be using these updates, and they seemed thrilled about it.
Speaker 2:So it's developer conference, and they actually announced a lot of exciting things around developers.
Speaker 1:Yep. And it also seemed like they ceded some territory in the AI world that could potentially enable more AI apps to be owned by independent developers, which is a huge huge boon for the ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Did you get to press Tim Cook on the Photos app at all?
Speaker 5:Are you
Speaker 2:a Photos app enjoyer?
Speaker 9:I had about fourteen seconds with him. Okay. And Will was before me. So it was like,
Speaker 2:it Not a lot of time. Yeah. Next year. Next year.
Speaker 9:Next year.
Speaker 1:Next year.
Speaker 2:I I have a bunch of other random random questions to go through.
Speaker 1:Please. Jordan, put
Speaker 2:it in. What I wanna ask about the state of Substack, but before we get into that, what is the state of the New York City election Mhmm. As mayor? We've been kind of covering it. Our corner of the Internet is not super excited about the potential of a of a socialist mayor Well, people what's actually happening on the ground.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Our our friends about that LA.
Speaker 9:That Photoshop beard job.
Speaker 1:That felt more just like like a printing error, honestly, to me. It didn't seem like they did a ton of preprocessing.
Speaker 9:Ink dripping down longer?
Speaker 1:I didn't see it as longer. I saw it more as just, like, when you reduce the resolution so much, like, like, the the the the the gaps between the hairs kinda blur altogether, and it makes the beard look thicker. I wasn't I wasn't fully, like, someone went in
Speaker 9:there photoshopped. With the mare stuff.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, explain that.
Speaker 9:Oh, I don't I don't wanna talk.
Speaker 2:I'm just being scared.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. I don't wanna
Speaker 2:move the needle. You don't wanna jinx it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Your in your single endorsement could
Speaker 1:actually Could just fine shift
Speaker 2:election. Decided and then
Speaker 9:you'd I interviewed four of them. I interviewed Cuomo. I interviewed Zoran, Lander, and Stringer Mhmm. For the newsletter last week. It was really fun.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool. Cool. What's next question?
Speaker 5:Let's move
Speaker 2:on to politics. I wanna talk about Substack Yeah. How you're seeing it evolve. It feels like it just continues to have a moment. You're dominating the platform, at least that's what it looks like.
Speaker 2:We're not super active there, but what are what is the state of things?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I've been on I've been writing on Substack for for five years now. So I definitely had a I think I had a little bit of first mover advantage there. Like, I I know the platform so well, and I think even just understanding the tools and, like, what works well, the heat map of my own audience has been super helpful for me. And for anybody listening to this who doesn't know, like, I write a newsletter every single day.
Speaker 9:So the opportunities for people just to discover me are are a lot higher. But I think that's something that's interesting about Substack is that just because you have a large following somewhere else doesn't mean it's necessarily going to carry over to a newsletter. Like Yeah. The inbox seems like such precious real estate to people, and who they who subscribers allow into that feels a little bit more intentional. So it's not like you're gonna just follow a thousand people like you do on Instagram.
Speaker 6:So you
Speaker 9:have to be really fucking good to make it. And then you have to sorry. Can I curse on this?
Speaker 1:We don't curse. You can.
Speaker 2:But but you're welcome
Speaker 9:to I'm gonna not.
Speaker 2:You if you yeah.
Speaker 9:You have to be really excellent at at content and something that I do. I have one of the more active chats on Substack, like, across the whole platform. And I'm in conversation with my readers constantly daily. Mhmm. And that's a lot of work as well.
Speaker 9:So the state of things on Substack, I would say it's getting pretty competitive. You're seeing a lot of people jump over there and maybe try to make it but aren't necessarily making money yet. They also don't have an advertising integration like Beehive or even Twitter or YouTube do. So if you're gonna sell ads, you're you're on your own for that, or you have to get an agency. Yeah, what specifically do you want to know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I'm curious I'm like, specifically, like, how much some of the new social features are driving growth? Is that, like, a primary driver at this point? Or would you do you still think you'd be Which features?
Speaker 9:Audio and video?
Speaker 2:Well, like, all of the new social features, you know, I I just see, like
Speaker 1:It's really a lot of people growing based on, like, recommendations in like, like, cross promotions or collabs.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. So so for me, like
Speaker 9:So yeah. I was I was in DC a few months ago, and I met with somebody who who's invests in this space. And he was asking me, like, why don't you consider, like, doing your own thing off platform and and building away from them? And there's a few I used to think about that a lot more, and I used to do that math a lot more. And I showed him my analytics on my dashboard because you can see how many people are discovering you from, within the app and within their ecosystem.
Speaker 9:And he was like, they have you. Like, you can't leave. You're you're stuck there. And it's not a bad gig. Like, they take 10% of what I make, which I think is totally fair considering how
Speaker 1:They're probably driving more than 10% of growth. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:They're probably driving consistently 10% growth. And so that's totally the the math's out just fine.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When I when I when I think about Substack, I think of peak Substack for me was, like, pre 2020, like, that that era. When I think about when I was, like, reading multiple Substacks a day Yep. And now Feed Me is the actually only newsletter that breaks into the important tab of my And then, you know, there's a bunch of other substacks that are just kind of lost in the mix. Just been trying to get a read on it.
Speaker 2:But if you are gonna be dependent on a social platform or any type of media platform, Substack is
Speaker 1:a great It's friendliest one. Take your newsletter. Your Chris, yeah. Take your Stripe account if you ever need to. Great.
Speaker 2:You've changed last month my
Speaker 9:subscriber list. I get to sell my own ads,
Speaker 2:which is going quite And
Speaker 9:when things break, they fix them. So
Speaker 2:That's great. That's great. Talk about you had a fairly viral post. The tech guy in a hoodie stereotype is dead.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. You were
Speaker 2:at WWDC and seeing a bunch of different different labels and brands being worn. Does that surprise you? Does it not surprise you? What was your reaction broadly?
Speaker 5:There's a right of importance
Speaker 9:as a whole well, Will Welch was there. So clearly, there's something Will Welch is the editor of GQ. There's something happening, you know, just with his spirit in the in the air at the
Speaker 2:People always think of iOS developers as being, you know, at the foremost of fashion. So you should always be there if you're running
Speaker 9:big deal. Yeah. I think I assumed more of them to look like the guys who work at the Apple store at my mall on Long Island or something. And it was impressive. Like, I mean, like, guys looked good.
Speaker 9:I wouldn't say capital s suiting, but, like, fits. There were a lot of cool sneakers. I think that a few years ago, it would have been more New Balance. I think that, like, the Steve worshipers are sort of aging out a little bit. Now there's these younger guys who probably are seeing that moment as, like, one of their big trips of the year and probably wanted to break out some fun outfits.
Speaker 9:Saw a lot of good sneakers.
Speaker 1:Saw a
Speaker 9:lot of big watches. Saw, like, a Nautilus on a guy.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:There we go. Was he did he have an Apple Watch on the other wrist, or
Speaker 9:was he just fully committed?
Speaker 5:A lot
Speaker 9:of Apple watches also. But a lot of nice watches. Very cool. Which, like, I don't know. A lot of people don't wear nice watches in their cities anymore.
Speaker 9:So
Speaker 2:Well, you can't in New York because it will be taken from you very quickly.
Speaker 9:Right. Exactly. But it's safe space
Speaker 7:on Apple Pay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. At the at the donut.
Speaker 2:Do you ever get tempted to angel invest? I'm sure you get asked constantly.
Speaker 9:Do I get tempted to angel invest? I get asked, but that's not something that tempts me. No.
Speaker 2:Why not?
Speaker 9:I my business is kind of my main focus right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's good. That's good. That's good.
Speaker 1:Are we are we post peak celeb brand?
Speaker 9:Are we post peak celeb brand?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are we on the
Speaker 9:down slope? I think I think I think so. Yeah. I think so.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So brands. Like, what do
Speaker 1:you think the interaction between celebrities and consumers think everybody knows
Speaker 9:the formula too well now, which is that the celebrity isn't actually going into the office every day, and, like, that illusion has broken. Right? Sure. So you can wear the suit on the stage at the conference and do the Forbes thing, but people are sort of understanding that they're not the operators, and they're just sort of, like, a paid person to have their name on a brand. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And I think the other thing happens all the time where, like, the founder becomes a celebrity after they start the company
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:Which is more interesting to me than, like, a famous person hiring a bunch of people to do their work for them and and getting paid for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think we move back to so I I I think of the celeb corporation collaboration eras as, like, you used to just pay a celebrity to appear in your Super Bowl ad, and it would be like a million dollars in cash. Then we got to the point all the way on the other side of the spectrum where celebrities were commanding thirty, forty, 50% equity grants in businesses that were built entirely around their brands. To your point, people are catching on that that means that, yeah, they have a huge economic stakes they're gonna be talking about all the time, but they're not really driving the product forward in any meaningful way. We could go back to just pay for a celebrity appearance in an ad, or we could move forward into something like what I've seen Saquon Barkley doing where he is essentially just angel investing in these companies.
Speaker 1:And, yes, he'll appear in the ads, but he's not saying he's building the company. Yeah. He's very transparent about that. He will partner with them, but he's equity aligned, but just like any other investor. And so I'm wondering if there will be a boom in that in that kind of paradigm or that model, or if we'll just go back to, you know, companies and startups just being more comfortable writing a 400,000 check for a celebrity to appear in an ad.
Speaker 1:It's cash, and you know what it is.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I don't I don't see the latter, like, being becoming a big thing. I I just feel like it's such a specific kind of company that has that kind of marketing budget, and it's also really risky to invest in celebrities and influencers now because people are so volatile. Mhmm. I've definitely seen more of the angel investor in in, like, hot girl Instagram bios.
Speaker 2:Like
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 9:It's a status symbol. Angel investor. Interesting. And I think it's like a flex. You know?
Speaker 9:It's like, I'm I'm I'm also a businesswoman. Yeah. So I think that's already happening. Like, there's, like, a soft boom of that of of people getting the opportunity to do that and basically only having one canned cocktail in their in their house and not because they're necessarily getting paid, but because they quietly invested or not so quietly invested, and they're able to sort of flex a portfolio of investing. And that's, like, something they do besides whatever other things they do.
Speaker 9:But there was that Alex Earl poppy deal last year where Yeah. She was she was drinking it a lot. And I guess her dad, who sounds like a pretty savvy business guy, negotiated for her to get equity in the brand. So that's sort of like a prime example of that where she wasn't talking around talking going around saying that she was an angel investor, but I guess she was.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, yeah, and Poppy had had a stacked cap table of various personalities, celebrities, athletes, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Mostly credit equity founders, growth equity firms. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But yes. Give us a temp check on wellness right now. Are we past peak wellness? In in many ways, people are doing more wellness y things, but at the same time, being unwell feels popular.
Speaker 9:I did, a a chat with my readers the other day about alcohol consumption.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And people are all over the map with that. There are people who are like, I'm 35. I haven't had a drink in ten years. I'm perfectly happy. Life is great.
Speaker 9:And then there's definitely a decent cohort of oh, somebody said that people are who have been sober for years are kind of, like, strategically or strategically drinking now, which was interesting to me.
Speaker 1:We strategically drink. We drink Doncaring.
Speaker 9:The king of wellness right now is GLP ones. That's sort of the most exciting thing happening.
Speaker 1:Is that getting wrapped in different brands right now to appeal to different, cohorts or
Speaker 9:Yeah. I just think it's changing people's chemical composition and changing the way that they think and work out and eat and socialize, and that's very interesting to me with that. What Do you
Speaker 2:think that brands Yeah. Do you think that brands are already being, you know, that the initial concern was that, you know, fast food brands were cooked because people just were gonna eat less. Yep. But then there's a downstream effect if if New York girlies are microdosing GLP-1s, and then maybe they're like, I'm not going to go to Pilates today because, you know, I'm already, you know, happy with what I look, know, or Are you hearing any about any kind of like downstream businesses post GLP I
Speaker 9:don't think the Pilates industrial complex is affected. They're sort of the new weed store to me. They're everywhere, the Pilates It's like people are buying these cheap made in China reformer machines, setting them up, and just, like, running crazy Pilates businesses. So I don't think that's gonna be affected anytime soon. Because even if you got really thin, you still wanna be shredded.
Speaker 1:Shredded. Worse.
Speaker 2:Gotta be shredded.
Speaker 9:But also with, like, fast food, I'm pretty sure people on GLP ones are still eating it. They're just not eating a lot of it.
Speaker 2:Like, rest of that
Speaker 9:throwing it There
Speaker 2:was a celebrity that said the other day that he was just eating eating through it. He was just basically Powering through it? He said he was powering through. It was
Speaker 9:like think that when he me toast. I'm, like, convinced that my hunger would over overpower it.
Speaker 1:But That's amazing. What what about other downstream effects from GLP ones? I was talking to somebody who was like, they wanted to start a protein water company because they felt like with the GLP one boom, people would be eating less. They needed to supplement. Aside from the brands that have just wrapped GLP one in different landing pages, Are there other kind of winners from the GLP one boom that you've seen adjacent
Speaker 9:Somebody told me the other day that, like, all these protein foods are not healing foods, and it it changed the way that I think about people eating all this protein. Any other trickle down things?
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I'm sure there will be some sort of therapy blowback, like people needing more therapy, women being anxious.
Speaker 1:Yes. What's the state of MAHA right now? Are people building new businesses around that? Or are they mostly just old line businesses that are beneficiaries of MAHA?
Speaker 9:You guys follow Ballerina Farm?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:I have never been Washington.
Speaker 9:Store wherever she lives in the Midwest.
Speaker 1:She feels very MAHA aligned.
Speaker 9:Yeah. They like raw milk. They like farm stuff. Yeah. She's an interesting business person, though.
Speaker 1:Love breaking through in New York? It feels like a lot of the a lot of the actual products that are MAHA aligned feel very New York aligned, and yet the politics of the products are could not be more disparate?
Speaker 9:You're right. It's so political. It's like Right. There was a store in New York that was selling raw milk out of one fridge. It was like one of these.
Speaker 1:And it probably wasn't a right wing store. Right?
Speaker 9:I mean, I I how I don't know.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, like, but he didn't present as like, oh, yes.
Speaker 2:It wasn't an American flag. Right?
Speaker 9:He presented
Speaker 5:as, like,
Speaker 9:rich women who
Speaker 2:are Exactly.
Speaker 1:Exactly. $20
Speaker 9:smoothies.
Speaker 1:So, like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fall
Speaker 9:all over the place on the spectrum, honestly. Yeah. Maybe. But I don't think they sell it anymore because that's bad for business if
Speaker 7:enough
Speaker 1:people call you out on Oh.
Speaker 9:Even there's this guy at the farmer's market, this Amish guy who used to sell raw milk, and he's not there anymore. And I don't know where he went.
Speaker 2:Big big milk took him out.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Someone did.
Speaker 2:Brutal. Where where do you get what what's the the the most significant part of your scoop machine? Mhmm. Is readers giving you tips? Is it walking around New York?
Speaker 2:Is it a is it a combination? One of your readers, asked me to ask you that. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:I'm sure people of course, they wanna know where that is. I have some really good readers.
Speaker 2:That's the IP. That's the IP.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I I have some really good readers who are super loyal with sending me scoops. And they could send them to New York Magazine or The New York Times or or Puck or Semaphore or whatever, and they send them to me. And I'm super grateful for that, and, we have a good thing going. I also have an anonymous tip line, which is I think people get a little confused about what falls
Speaker 2:on What
Speaker 4:qualifies. I'm
Speaker 1:trying to
Speaker 2:like PR pitches, insane gossip.
Speaker 9:PR pitches aren't the bad the bad stuff is like a politician walking out of a 3PM screening of baby girl alone. Like, I don't that's, like, let them
Speaker 2:know. News.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's pretty funny, though.
Speaker 9:And then I go out a lot. Like, I I go out four or five times a week. I go to parties. I go to dinners. I meet people.
Speaker 9:I meet readers. Yeah. So I it's like my life I feel sort of like a machine right now, but it's working really well, so I can't get
Speaker 1:Keep boiling the machine then. Well, congratulations on building
Speaker 2:fantastic Do, do copycats bother you? I'm sure you've had hundreds of people by now be like, I'm gonna make feed me for x y z or feed me for that or just like blatant. Do they do they get under your skin?
Speaker 9:They used to, but data is a very calming force in my life right now and especially in my business. Especially in my business, and the numbers calm calm me down.
Speaker 2:Numbers don't lie.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:There we go. We're hitting the size gongs.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations on everything, and thanks for stopping by.
Speaker 2:Thanks for coming on. You're always You're We'd
Speaker 1:to be back and talk more.
Speaker 2:Cheers.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon. Up next, we have Leonard Haim, calling in from the RAN Corporation. We're gonna talk about, AI models. We're talking about
Speaker 2:We got crazy crazy range today.
Speaker 1:Crazy range today. It's a it's a whirlwind tour. Wait. Let's check on Tyler.
Speaker 5:How's the Tyler,
Speaker 2:how are doing?
Speaker 3:I'm done. He's done.
Speaker 1:So The fury has been assembled.
Speaker 3:I think my final time was somewhere around hour fifteen. So Okay. Double
Speaker 1:hour nineteen. Hour nineteen.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I mean, pretty shameful performer.
Speaker 1:I think it looks good.
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, send send the electrolytes my way.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:I'll start a
Speaker 2:channel now. I think Dylan grabbed a cup and some water if Yeah. That makes guys wanna grab it. Let's get some electrolytes going up in here.
Speaker 3:Very beautiful model.
Speaker 1:It looks great. Yeah. It's really cool. Very cool. I'm glad we have that in the studio now.
Speaker 1:Well, enjoy your horse electrolytes. Hope you have a rest a good rest of the stream. We will hop on with our next
Speaker 2:back in with for a for a taste taste review.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But when we finish this next interview. Anyway, welcome to the studio, Leonard.
Speaker 1:How are you doing today? Let's bring in Leonard and chat about artificial intelligence and geopolitics. How are you doing?
Speaker 6:Hey. Good to see you. I'm doing great. How are you guys?
Speaker 1:We're great. Would you mind, kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and what you do day to day?
Speaker 6:Sure. Yeah. Leonard Heim calling in from Washington DC. I'm a what do I call myself? Researcher working on AI policy, AI governance, background electric engineering.
Speaker 6:I think part of my mission is to to bridge the technical world and the policy world, and that's what I've been doing before before AI was cool, the last four or five years, actually. Yeah. And now AI is cool, and since then, I've been ever busy.
Speaker 1:It is extremely cool. It's driving the news cycle
Speaker 2:Eventually, the coolest
Speaker 1:single day. Yeah. Pretty much the coolest technology. Do a little level setting for us. What is the dominant story?
Speaker 1:How is the race between The US and China shaping up on the AI front? What are the interesting threads to pull on? What are the most important companies to be tracking right now?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, that's a tough question. Where to start? I think it's, like, still the deep sea trauma. It's, like, still still there, still dominant.
Speaker 6:Right? I think that was, like this initial story in The US is, like, so far ahead. There is no Chinese model being closed, then deep sea came out and definitely had a big impact in DC, but I guess also in a broader world as we saw in the stock market. And I think it's pretty dominant here still in DC, you know. Like in DC, you always talk about things which Silicon Valley did half a year ago or even a year ago.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So that's still part of the dominant discussion. And then export controls, I guess, is also a big topic right now. Right? You've got The US China trade talks going on right now.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Where they're negotiating beyond export controls which impact AI, but export controls famously had an impact big impact on AI in China.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's talk about DeepSeek. One of the narratives that came out of the DeepSeek story was, all the American labs are completely cooked. And then we got Jevan's Paradox and NVIDIA popped back up, and and and all the labs seem to be making tons of money. OpenAI crossed $10,000,000,000 in revenue run rate, and things do seem to be going well.
Speaker 1:But what what what are the wrong lessons from DeepSeek? What are people getting wrong about the DeepSeek story? How relevant is DeepSeek? We're still hearing about it as being important geopolitically in some of these jump ball nations that aren't quite allies, aren't quite, rivals, and they might be interested in building a an open source stack on top of Huawei Ascend, DeepSeek, Manus, that type of stack. What what what are the the wrong lessons that people are learning from the DeepSeek story?
Speaker 6:I think DeepSeek made such a big noise because we're just lacking a good reference class. They just came out pretty impressive model. It was openly available, and we had a paper attached to it. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 6:And then it came out also saying it cost us 6,000,000. Yeah. Does anyone of us know how much it cost OpenAI or, like, Anthropic or any of these other companies what to do? We don't. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I
Speaker 6:think this just really made headline news. We, like, sometimes get, like, Sam Altman going on stage saying I think at some point he said it costed them a 100,000,000 to do g b d four.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:But 100,000,000 what? Just a training compute? Is it is it just like buying the the hardware? Probably not. Is it paying the staff engineers?
Speaker 1:Definitely not.
Speaker 6:So like the reference class is like pretty important here.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:But then it costed them a 100,000,000 what? Like, that's not two years ago, even more. Yeah. And now deep $66,000,000. So I think people just like we're lacking.
Speaker 6:It's like, well, this sounds impressive, but like they had just no reference class of what's actually going on within the companies. Mhmm. And I think a couple of weeks later, Anthropix CEO Dario put out a blog post saying like, actually, we can train to the same efficiency. I think this was, like, for people monitoring the market, not surprising. We just, like, know the trend lines.
Speaker 6:I mean, know it gets, like, vastly cheaper every single goddamn day to train such a system. So to that, like, somewhat surprising, but, like, you look at this, you don't have a reference class and then it just looks really impressing. Right?
Speaker 1:I I I think a lot of the a lot of the more technical analysts in the AI world, were excited to see the open source results, excited to hear about FPA training, for example. Talk to Dylan Patel. He was telling us, oh, well, OpenAI was doing FPA training years ago. They just didn't tell anyone because it was kind of, like, their edge, I guess. But all the labs had kind of figured that stuff out.
Speaker 1:They just hadn't told everyone exactly how they did. Deep Sea came out there and told everyone and sounded like they really had jumped ahead. Instead, it seemed like they just jumped to the frontier, had not fully advanced beyond the frontier necessarily, but then done in an open source way. What was the read on the strategy to open source? It felt like there was a very deliberate like, that launch, if it had been closed source, $20 a month, you know, very difficult to access, rate limited, lots of safety harness around it, that we would have been telling a very different story about Deepsake if they had said, oh, this is this cost a trillion dollars.
Speaker 1:It took us forever. Instead, it seemed like there were, like, a number of superlative and viral hooks that really captured the American news
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Media and drove a big cycle. How much of that was intentional versus how much of that was just, like, a like, a random byproduct?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think as you're saying, there were just, like, so many checkboxes that ticked. Yep. It was didn't during the first week of time. Yep.
Speaker 6:It was an open release model. Wait. Right? It was surprisingly so cheap. It's coming out of China.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Oh, and it was, like, the first public reasoning model.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:So it's just,
Speaker 6:like, all of the things happening at the same time. So, like, wherever you're coming from, DC excited because it's out of China, but we thought we fixed it if did export controls. Right? Yeah. Silicon Valley, oh, it's an open source model.
Speaker 6:Right? And everybody looking at, like, actually, how does this reasoning work? Yeah. Because OpenAI did it before, but it didn't tell us. Right?
Speaker 6:So, again, just ticking all of these boxes. How much of this was deliberate? I don't think this is, a state coordinated effort that they said, like, this is how we're gonna do it. I think DeepSeq had, like, a pretty open commitment to, like, releasing models publicly before. Right?
Speaker 6:So they were just been following that. It just it was just like, to some degree, if there's a marketing strategy behind it, they did it right. I just expect most of the things are just like how the tech works.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 6:And they were early on in reasoning. They were, like, one of the first companies doing it publicly.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And then it just made a ton of noise. And then
Speaker 1:even though ChatGPT had a reasoning model available, it was only available at a premium tier. So for a lot of AI consumers, I think their first interaction with a reasoning model was DeepSeek or the DeepSeek app Yeah. Which was just a very interesting kind of, like, go to market strategy, essentially.
Speaker 6:And also seeing the chain of thought. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, the reasoning, which we didn't see before. Right?
Speaker 2:And even the cost
Speaker 6:thing. Changed a ton.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even the costing, a lot of a lot of financial folks. You I mean, you mentioned that Silicon Valley was excited about open source. Washington was, you know, interested in the story because of the China angle, but also the financi ers. The Nvidia investors were interested in the financial impact of this.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it was fascinating.
Speaker 6:Wrong. Right? Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 6:My dick.
Speaker 1:How much of the existence of deep sea do you ascribe to China's positioning around high frequency trading?
Speaker 6:Oh, that's interesting one. I mean, like, DeepSeek sits in the the hedge fund. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:And they were initially buying 10,000 a 1 hundreds or 5,000 a 1 hundreds in 02/2022, I think, before the export controls. Yes. And tons of GPUs always still go to hedge funds because they well, we don't exactly know what they're doing, but they definitely like accelerating
Speaker 5:computing For
Speaker 1:sure.
Speaker 6:And partially machine yeah. Machine learning, bunch of other stuff. Are they all training that language models? Probably not. Nope.
Speaker 6:And I think then one theory I've heard, I'm not sure how true it is, there was like the the like the crackdown in China on the tech sector, right, including high frequency trading hedge funds and more. Mhmm. This made them then pivot to a young. It's like, well, if we can't trade on the market anymore, what should we do with all of these GPUs or turns out AI is this new hot cool thing? And then I think the other thing which is important here, when you have these hedge funds, they do, like, really low level optimizations, like writing on kernels.
Speaker 6:They just they don't do, like, just high level PyTorch. They go down there and try to get, like, every single point of utilization out of the models, out of the hardware, and this helped them. Right? You know? Like, DeepSeg has pretty correct engineers.
Speaker 6:I think this was, like, pretty obvious once we saw, like, the code. Mhmm. And this then helped them to then train a pretty pretty decent good model.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about LAMA. The LAMA four launch was a little rocky. Obviously, there was allegations of some benchmark I mean, just over optimization. It seems like a lot of the the the big frontier labs or the independent labs kinda just don't even care about benchmarks anymore. It's all about big model smell and and just the actual performance of the products.
Speaker 1:At the same time, I've been really interested in this narrative of llama as a very important American export as a counter to the Huawei ascend deep seek Manus stack that other other countries might be comping. Because, yes, they might be interested in doing a deal with Stargate and building some and buying a whole bunch of NVIDIA chips, but what are they gonna put on top of Are they going to maybe they don't wanna go all the way with OpenAI or Anthropic. Llama seems like an interesting, wedge there. How important is that? What what is your reaction to the the MetaLlama strategy and how they're being perceived in Washington right now?
Speaker 6:I would be curious on your guys' takes on this. I'm, like, still unsure how I feel about this. I mean, let's just start with deep seek. I think it's an interesting moment in time when all of the leading US models are just behind closed doors and the best open models coming out of China. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I'm worried about it because this model is partially biased and it lies about the CCP. It has some Chinese propaganda in it. Yep. Right? Why is this bad?
Speaker 6:Imagine you're like some developer in another country, you wanna build a new education app, you're using this model and then, you know, you teach your kids Chinese propaganda. I think that's great. Right? I think it's even worse if you think about sleeper agents. Yep.
Speaker 6:People know about this paper from Anthropic. Right? Yep. You can basically have, like, sleep agents sitting in this model. When you talk about a certain topic, it starts giving you code with vulnerabilities, but it's gonna apply to anything else and it's, like, really hard to look for it because you don't know what to look for.
Speaker 6:Right? So it is worrying. I don't think that's the case of DeepSeek right now, but going forward in the future, the case is just like if you use an open model, you don't really know what's in there, what's hiding in there. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:This goes for all companies, but I think we got more reason to mistrust certain other companies than, for example, Meta.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It kinda makes me think that it it it kinda makes me think that Anthropic might have a real business on their hands with AI safety. Obviously, they they they branded it all around, you know, oh, like, you know, we wanna prevent AGI doom and fast ACOPs. But if you just think about, like, hey. We're gonna launch this model in our organization, and we wanna make sure that the code that it writes doesn't have random vulnerabilities, that feels like a a very important, like, AI safety product almost to to to evaluate these models, test them, and essentially root out sleeper agents.
Speaker 1:And so I've I've all of a sudden flipped to, like, very excited about the work that Anthropic's doing on that front. Jordy, do you have any questions?
Speaker 2:Think this could
Speaker 6:be, like, a real benefit to them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 6:Totally. And and that's, like, that's kinda how it started. Yeah. Reinforcement learning from human feedback gave Chachi with the rise. It was like some people trying to make the models more useful but also less harmful, and turns out they turn out to be a bunch more useful.
Speaker 6:And I guess, like, we will see more about this going forward and particularly for code or even if government wants to adopt these models. Yep. Right? It's just better be goddamn sure.
Speaker 2:My question was around news from the last twenty four hours, basically. Mhmm. And specifically, people talk about the application of of AI in warfare, but it's always in this sort of, like, very generalized high level of, like, oh, using AI, and I can easily imagine, you know, simulation scenarios, data collection processing, all that stuff, like kind of going up to the point of a conflict, and then autonomous, you know, drones and things like that. But what what are the ways in which you've understood AI to be used in in an actual, like, conflict scenario?
Speaker 6:Sure. I mean I mean, look, I don't do narrow AI or drones to some extent. I expect there's, like, a bunch of just, like, computer vision applications and more. But if you look at, like, Frontier, like, if you look at large language models, I think one big application is just intelligence.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Right? Literally, my job on a day to day basis is, like, open source intelligence. I wanna know what's going on around the world. Nobody's telling me, well, except DeepSeek. They sometimes publish a paper.
Speaker 6:But, like, I don't know what The US companies are doing. I don't know what's going on in China and the semiconductor industry. So just a bunch of data I feed into my LLMs and ask them what's going on. Right? And for intelligence operations, it's the same.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We saw in the last twenty four hours pretty targeted attacks. Yep. Israel is famously known for pretty good intelligence operations. Sure.
Speaker 6:And I think they exactly knew who they were hitting Yep. Based on these types of operations. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And if you just have, like, a nice backdoor on a smartphone and you just, like, feed all of the chat transcript in an LLM, it can make sense out of this. Right?
Speaker 1:And you can
Speaker 6:do it at a larger, way bigger scale to identify the targets and also identify patterns, which, again, might be harder for humans to do. At least you can, like, oh, to them, like, well, no. Like, augment humans.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, they used to do that with, like, keyword search. Okay. Like, let's we have a ton of data. Who's talking about bombs?
Speaker 1:Who's talking about Yeah. Attacks? And Yeah. People would use code words, and LLMs are really good at deciphering that type of stuff. Fascinating.
Speaker 1:Give us the state of the union on export controls for AI chips. What is what's expected on the horizon? How has the landscape changed over the last, you know, couple months at least?
Speaker 6:Great. I mean, when buying left the office, there was, like, two two big rules coming out. The one rule was, I think many people are tracking, the foundry due diligence rule. Mhmm. It was a big hiccup where Huawei produced a bunch of chips over TSMC in Taiwan, which they were not supposed to.
Speaker 6:Yep. They did it by a shell company. 3,000,000 chips, that's quite a lot. That's way more than they produce. That's what they got their hands on.
Speaker 6:And government reacted with a new rule, basically telling TSMC, like, goddamn, you gotta be do better due diligence and, like, check who your customer is and make sure they don't end up with Huawei. Yeah. Because they broke two rules. No chips for Huawei at all and please, big AI chips for any entity in China. Right?
Speaker 6:Wow. So this was a big move. That's still the case. I applaud that. I think that was a pretty sensible move to just make sure they can't, again, get their access to that many chips.
Speaker 6:And the other one was the diffusion framework, which I guess you probably discussed at some point before. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, broader control to some degree in all of the world deciding, to some degree dealing with the Gulf States, dealing dealing with a bunch of in between countries where people were worried about chip smuggling, but also data centers being built there. Malaysia is being such a country where a bunch of data centers being built there. Really interesting reporting today where I think the Wall Street Journal reported people were, like, going back and forth on an airplane with hard drives to train models over Malaysia.
Speaker 1:I see. I thought we were gonna read that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wild.
Speaker 6:Which again speaks to the efforts they're going to to get access to AI chips and how creative they get. And also from my point of view, I'm just getting surprised every single time of, how creative they get to get access to AI chips. That's what they did. Yeah. But this one is not being enforced right now.
Speaker 6:It's not officially revoked yet. Still waiting for it officially to be gone. But at least commerce, Latnek, and Kessler put out a statement saying they're not enforcing it. They will come up with replacement rule. And this replacement rule, they needs to deal with well, yeah, basically, all the countries except the clearly competitors, China, Russia, North Korea, they're all controlled.
Speaker 6:They will continue being controlled. But what about all the other countries, like the Gulf States, like countries with a bunch of smuggling going on? And, yeah, me as somebody from outside the government is waiting to see, more moves there.
Speaker 1:Yep. I have one last question. Good, Jordy. Yeah. Today, a bunch of technologists joined the army reserve in the newly formed detachment two zero one executive innovation corpse.
Speaker 1:Can you tell me a little bit about how you're seeing technologists and the tech community plug in in DC? What is needed there? What do you wanna see on the horizon? This seems like a step in the right direction, but it feels like a job's not finished moment.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think that's the right audience. Like, a call to all the techies to come to DC. Yep. The pay is not better here.
Speaker 6:It's also pretty damn hard. We're living on a swamp here. But I think there's a strong case for impact.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:So as a techie, I think, like, when I talk to, like, young undergrads, oh, in DC, like, I just did, a bachelor's in machine learning. What do I know? It's, like, it's plausible you're the smartest person in the room in many times in DC, which is way harder than in San Francisco. People don't know policy. Sometimes can be a benefit to be, like, bit, like, a bit ignorant about, like, how the game is being played.
Speaker 6:Just like, look, here just here's just a math.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Just fresh
Speaker 6:works out.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 6:So, like, I love techies coming to government just, like, crunching numbers. I think they should sometimes be less opinionated. Just like, look, here are the numbers. We crunch them. Could suggest this, could suggest that.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. But just, like, grounding it, like, in analysis and, an objective things. When I think about China and AI chips, I can crunch the numbers on how fast the chips are, how many they're producing, and in contrast, how fast American chips are and how many we're producing. Right? And this is just a good analysis to be run.
Speaker 6:How does then impact the broader scheme of the AI ecosystem and who's winning the AI race and what? It's a different question, but we can then take it from there. Right? So if I see stuff like this, be it in, again, in the military, but also just generally in government, particularly anything around export controls, anything around just understanding of what the hell is going on, Just like having somebody explain like, hey, DeepSeek, this is a reasoning model.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:What is everybody talked about distillation, like, really just explaining the basics is like, yeah, things people should do. And I think people with a CS, like an undergrad degree in computer science, they can do it. And I would love to have them there. Yeah. Hiring, by
Speaker 9:the way.
Speaker 6:So if anybody's listening, please join me. Apply.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Yeah. In general, I think it's good that we don't just have, you know, these sort of high profile technologists only joining Doge. There's other things that are important in the government besides just, you know, taking a sledgehammer or scalpel to different Totally. Different parts of the government.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 6:And also, it's government getting stuff wrong. I think the most famous example is the initial export controls 2022 were trying to control AI chips. Yeah. And they used two parameters, technical parameters, which probably 99% of TC won't understand. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Total processing performance, how many flops it got Yep. And then also the interconnect band with how fast it can talk to our chips. Yep. And they messed something up there that NVIDIA could basically design a new chip sitting right at the threshold while still having high flops Yep. Which is basically as good as the other chips, that's what DeepSeq used.
Speaker 6:And then it took them a damn year to fix it.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And I can confidently say they knew a month later they should do better there. And that's just the thing where, like, techies and you didn't need to be the smartest person. I've never trained to read a big model. You can just tell by the specs, like, guys, something something is off here. And
Speaker 1:Or even just make us makes difference. Even just asking, like, you know, one of the foundation model labs, like OpenAI. I'm sure they could tell you, like, hey. Like, do not restrict these three parameters. And and it just seems like there was not enough
Speaker 6:If they would answer. NVIDIA doesn't answer these questions, but I think Yeah.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA wouldn't, but, I mean, you could imagine that plenty of the labs that will compete with Chinese labs would love to answer that question. Yep. Yeah. Because they have a huge incentive not to be out competed by DeepSeek. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep. And so you gotta but maybe they're talking their own book too much. Yeah. There's always dynamics. But at least having a technologist in the room would be beneficial.
Speaker 1:Anyway, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for hopping on. We'd love to have back. For listening. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Enjoy the rest of Have
Speaker 1:a great weekend.
Speaker 6:Cheers. You too, guys. Bye.
Speaker 1:Closing out the news for the week
Speaker 2:We have let's take it over to are the horse electrolytes?
Speaker 3:Okay. So I haven't tried it yet. Scoop. I think so it says a scoop. One scoop is for light exercise.
Speaker 3:Okay. So for, I think, probably a medium sized horse, I assume. Okay. So it's I'm looking at the ingredients. It's there's an incredible amount.
Speaker 3:It's like all salt.
Speaker 1:It's all salt.
Speaker 2:Of course. Of course.
Speaker 1:We have to at least chat GPT that you're not like taking a deadly dose of salt right now.
Speaker 3:I think it's probably fine.
Speaker 1:Probably fine. We'll go with probably fine. That's the horse mentality.
Speaker 3:It smells smells good.
Speaker 2:Does it have like a lemon lime taste to it? Is it apple?
Speaker 1:Oh. It's strong.
Speaker 3:It's like I'm drinking salt water.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Amazing. I think you might have to water it. Lemon.
Speaker 1:There's lemon in
Speaker 5:there.
Speaker 3:There's some there's definitely some flavor. I mean, says apple flavor.
Speaker 2:I'm not
Speaker 3:really getting any apple notes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Okay. Well, congratulations. You did it in under an hour and a half.
Speaker 2:You did it well. You have a whole summer to finish the whole bucket.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wait. What was the final time? An hour and fifteen minutes?
Speaker 3:I think hour nineteen. Nineteen.
Speaker 1:Hour nineteen. That's still way faster than ChatGPT clocked it. I I took a picture of that of that Andoril LEGO set build time. I said, how long do you think it will take to put together this pretty simple 619 piece LEGO set? So the beginner would take three to four hours, an intermediate builder, two to three hours, and an experienced LEGO fan, one point five to two hours.
Speaker 1:You did it better than they did. So I think you were only wrong in your own you overestimated yourself. Yourself. But you Which you should always do. The average LEGO builder.
Speaker 1:So congrats for that. Okay. Enjoy the horse electronics.
Speaker 3:I'm sweating a lot. I think this will help me, you know, bring me back to
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You're you're sweating out the electrolytes. You need to refresh. This makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:This is great.
Speaker 2:Everybody in tech is always talking about going to the horse doctor, but never talking about getting horse electrolytes over the counter.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. The horse electrolytes
Speaker 2:are key. That's what you wanna be thinking.
Speaker 1:Well, the scale the scale deal has officially closed. Meta's paying 14,300,000,000.0 to buy 49% of scale, the industry's leading data dealer. Alex Wang wrote a wrote a note to scale employees. He said, when I founded scale in 2016, it was amidst some of the early AI breakthroughs. DeepMind had just released AlphaGo, and Google had just released TensorFlow.
Speaker 1:It was it was still incredibly early. It was clear even then that data was the lifeblood of AI systems, and that was the inspiration behind starting Scale. Since then, the journey has been extra We've grown to over 1,500 people, become a trusted partner for model builders, enterprises, and governments building and deploying the smartest AI tools and applications. Scale is now one of the most impactful companies in the world. He he closes by saying today's investment also allows us to give back in recognition of your hard work and dedication to Scale over the past several years.
Speaker 1:The proceeds from Meta's investment will be distributed to those of you who are shareholders, invested equity holders, while maintaining the opportunity to continue participating in our future growth as ongoing equity holders. The exceptional team here has been key to our success, so I'm thrilled to be able to return the favor with this meaningful liquidity distribution. So congratulations to Let's
Speaker 2:give it up. Hit the gong for liquidity events, John. Lee Marie, Eric Tornburg.
Speaker 1:Lots of winners. Lots of winners. Lots of friends of the show. Ben Thompson broke it down in a piece talking about Meta and Scale AI. The most obvious explanation for the structure is that Meta wants to avoid the sort of antitrust scrutiny that would attend to an acquisition.
Speaker 1:This explanation applies broadly. Big tech generally and Meta specifically are under massive scrutiny in terms of acquisitions, including Meta going to trial for acquisitions made over a decade ago, and narrowly, Scale AI is a supplier for not just Meta, but also Meta's competitors. The problem is that it's it it is is is that just Meta isn't acquiring Scale AI doesn't mean the deal can't be scrutinized. Indeed, section seven of the Clayton Act is explicit about covering only partial acquisitions. So the FTC can still review this, but it'll probably be a little bit easier, and so that's what they're gunning for.
Speaker 1:These guidelines were reaffirmed by the Trump administration earlier this year, so a lot of people were expecting it to be complete game on. Anyone can acquire anything. That hasn't been the case. We heard about this on the campaign trail. A lot of folks in the Trump administration were signaling that Lina Khan made some good points, and they were not going to completely reverse course even if they were going to replace her.
Speaker 1:Even beyond that, says Ben Thompson, however and and perhaps this makes the regulator's point. It seems likely that this will kill scale scale AI's business with the big labs in particular who would be concerned about their data ending up in the hands of Meta, which is to say that this is a deal that would destroy the enterprise value of that Meta is theoretically investing in. And so that will be something that will be debated in these merger guidelines when the FTC ultimately reviews it, but it's looking pretty good because they close pretty quickly. As it is, many of the labs, particularly OpenAI, have been bringing in more of their data work in house, which helped contribute to Scale AI missing revenue targets last year from the information they reported this. Mean, they still put up amazing numbers.
Speaker 1:And so, obviously, a lot of stuff was working, but you could imagine that some of the labs were starting to bring these if they if they really are believers in, hey. We gotta own our data collection and data processing forever. Let's build that function in house, and I think they started to do that or at least partner with other competitors in the space. And so Ben Thompson continues to write about Meta's reset. In fact, the more pertinent angle to discuss this deal is probably Llama.
Speaker 1:Llama four was widely viewed as a disappointing model, and a big portion of the original Llama team has since left Meta. And and Ben Thompson thought that Mark Zuckerberg's media tour about AI seemed a bit forced and unfocused and had heard through the grapevine that Zuckerberg was considering a wholesale reset of the company's AI efforts, with the biggest priority being the search for a new AI chief to take firmer control over the company effort. In that, that, in the end, may be the Occam's razor explanation for the deal. This is a very expensive Aqua hire Alexander Wang, Scale AI's cofounder and CEO, with the price softened a bit by virtue of paying Scale AI for work that Meta was going to have the company do anyway.
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 1:Wang isn't a researcher, but he's an executive and leader who is familiar with the space, and Meta needs leadership in addition to talent.
Speaker 2:He's a deals guy.
Speaker 1:He's a deals guy. He's going
Speaker 2:to Meta and continue to be deal making, which will be, I think, a great asset to Meta overall.
Speaker 1:And so Ben Thompson closes with a little bit on sustaining versus disruptive innovation. The other reason to believe Meta versus Google comes down to the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovations, the late professor Clayton Christensen described the difference, and we're familiar with that. So the question of whether generative AI is sustaining or disruptive innovation for Google remains uncertain two years after, Ben Thompson raised the question. Obviously, Google has tremendous AI capabilities both in terms of infrastructure and research, and generative AI is a sustaining innovation for its display advertising business and its cloud business. At the same time, the long term questions around search monetization remain as pertinent as ever.
Speaker 1:And this is the question I wanna debate with Ben when he comes on the show. There is this there there's this idea. So it came out earlier that Sundar Pichai had not read The Innovator's Dilemma, and people were saying, oh, like, he should have because this is the this is the classic example of Google being disrupted by a new technology, generative AI. Ben Thompson said, it doesn't matter. The whole point of disruptive innovation is that it's structural, and therefore, it doesn't matter if you've read the book.
Speaker 1:There's nothing you can do about it. That's kind of the point of disruptive innovation. You're being disrupted.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But my question is, what if Google had chatbots before ChatGPT? What if they had launched the Gemini app first and been the first to market and gained all of that, like, memetic attention?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, the disruptive innovation framework would say that Google would be in a tough spot because they wouldn't be able to monetize Gemini as quickly as they were losing volume in search. And so Yeah. Search revenues would decline faster than they could make it back up on the new model. And so what we're seeing right now is JatGPT is growing their 10,000,000,000 in revenue, but I don't think we're seeing a falloff in search. It seems additive.
Speaker 1:And so the weirdest thing is that is that if you ran back the simulation and you did put Google in a position like, let's just say Google owned 100% of ChatGPT. Like, the the the combined enterprise value would not be the stock would not be in the trash as they disrupted themselves. And so there's this interesting question of, like, there's this fear that your earnings will drop as you pivot away from search based display advertising, search advertising to a subscription chatbot model. But I don't know if that's actually playing out because the overall market, the combined revenues of Google and OpenAI seem to be not declining. Like, we're not in this nadir.
Speaker 1:We're not in this in in this trough of, like, disruption necessarily.
Speaker 2:Meta Meta and Facebook had the luxury of, you know, acquiring Instagram, starting to monetize Instagram, still being able to grow Facebook
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At that time.
Speaker 1:I mean, maybe there's a little bit in deceleration. I remember when when when Meta was was, like, in the process of somewhat being disrupted by TikTok, they launched Reels, and there was questions about Reels monetization because if people spend more time on Reels than than the normal Instagram feed and there aren't as many ads in Reels as there are in the feed, well, then even though the user time might be going up, your revenue might be going down. And so that was a fear. That was something that was weighing on the stock. Ultimately, it was not borne out.
Speaker 1:But I don't I I'm just not seeing the data, but I wanna dig into it more. I wanna talk to Ben about it because there's clearly I I I I think I'm wrong, but for different for reasons I'm unaware of. And so I'm I'm I've been digging into that. So Ben goes on to write Meta, however, does not have a search business to potentially disrupt and a whole host of ways to leverage generative AI across this business. This is what I was talking about with Joe Wiesenthal talking about even if Meta doesn't get, like, a banger AI first consumer product out into the market, they just have so many AI generative AI workloads, whether that's sorting ads, generating ads, internal profanity filtering, you know, all their different content moderation.
Speaker 1:Think it's also,
Speaker 2:I think it's easy to see how Meta will benefit from more, in ten years from now, more content will be produced, which means better, the more good content will be produced, even if it looks like AI slop right now. And when you think about the business holistically and Meta as effectively an entertainment company, will people want more and more entertainment?
Speaker 1:This is what Ben Thompson was writing about. He said Meta strategy is to commoditize your compliments. You you you you you a generative AI is a compliment to Meta's platforms. And so, yes, if people are using generative AI to generate slop, that's still fine as long as people are enjoying it. But, ultimately, people will use it as a different tool for video editing and sound generation and drop out the background noise and replace my background with a with a cinematic, you know, vista or something like that.
Speaker 1:So so for Zuckerberg and company, Ben Thompson thinks AI is absolutely a sustaining technology, which is why it ultimately makes sense to spend whatever is necessary to get the company moving in the right direction. It's also worth noting that Meta doesn't really have any alternatives other than continuing to invest. Google is a competitor for advertising the most financially compelling use case today. OpenAI is a competitor for consumer attention. Meta's most important scarce resource.
Speaker 1:I suppose Anthropic would be a potential partner, but per the point above, that seems like the ultimate culture culture clash. If anything, the most compatible partners for Meta would be Microsoft and Apple, but the former is obviously tied up with OpenAI. And the latter, well, never say never forever, but definitely never for now. Great ending to Ben Thompson's update.
Speaker 2:That's right. Well, we have a video that we can pull up that was that hit the timeline earlier this Please, let's review it. I was able to confront PT.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think we should play
Speaker 1:on the street. Let's play it.
Speaker 2:Let's see. Him on the street.
Speaker 8:Here's the deal. Is it true that competition is for losers? Sir, is it true that you encourage young people to drop out of university?
Speaker 1:The background
Speaker 8:is is it true that your funds have double digit GP commits? Sir, how can you say you're contrarian when everyone is contrarian? Mister Thiel, is it possible for there to be too much venture capital?
Speaker 2:Never.
Speaker 8:Mister Thiel, have you been a victim of other VCs gaming the Midas list?
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 8:Sir, why do you refuse to pick a favorite Renee Gerard book? Mister Teal, what do you have to say to people that think they're a lottery ticket?
Speaker 2:It's a beer one.
Speaker 8:Mister Teal, must all venture returns be power law distributed? Sir, why do you think why questions are overdetermined?
Speaker 2:Oh, man. Well, really asking the pressing important questions, the questions that, you know, he clearly doesn't wanna answer. Yep. But I'm sure over time, you know, we'll we'll we'll have him on the show, and we'll try to we'll try to pull some of those those answers out.
Speaker 1:Lots of fun. I mean, the last story we should cover before we drop off, Chinese AI companies dodge US chip curbs by flying suitcases of hard drives abroad. Leonard on the show mentioned this. Engineers are carrying data to countries where NVIDIA chips are available, frustrating Washington's aims. No one really anticipated this, but, apparently, Chinese engineers are transporting hard drives with AI training data to Malaysia.
Speaker 1:So they they they they take all their training data. They load it onto a bunch of hard drives, throw those in suitcases, fly to Malaysia, and then do the training run there and then take the weights back. And so that's like, the chips aren't even moving. Like, the whole idea of of exporting chips is is now irrelevant if you can do the run locally in a different country. So this this AI diffusion story is going to become so much more complex.
Speaker 1:Like, it's just gonna be so complicated forever because there's gonna be shell companies. And if people are willing to do this, anything's on the table. The next deep sea run is gonna be it's gonna be a movie. It's gonna be
Speaker 2:a movie.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we will be following it here. We hope you have a fantastic weekend, and we will see you on Monday.
Speaker 2:I cannot wait, John.
Speaker 1:Cannot wait for Monday.
Speaker 2:Be back at this table.
Speaker 1:Two more sleeps.
Speaker 2:Two more sleeps.
Speaker 1:Two more sleeps. Is three? We're not going live on on Sunday.
Speaker 2:We might. We might.
Speaker 1:We might. If there's if there's emergency, we might go live. You never know. But until then,
Speaker 2:enjoy tuning in, folks.
Speaker 1:Rest of your weekend.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your Friday, and we'll see Monday.
Speaker 1:We'll see you Monday.