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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 TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Friday, 11/07/2025. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital capital. Time is money to say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp.com, baby.
Speaker 2:The timeline is in turmoil over
Speaker 1:Again?
Speaker 2:Sam Altman again. What were we calling it? Backstop gate? Backstop gate continues unabated.
Speaker 1:John, timelines and turmoil Turmoil. Over Sam Altman?
Speaker 2:Oh, every single day the first time. Every single day this week and last week, it is nonstop OpenAI. What will happen? Is is is it over? Is it the end of the global economy, or will we, you know, live to fight another day?
Speaker 2:The main the main point of debate is, is over, you know, Sarah Fryer's comments that she used the word backstop. She backtracked on her backstop comment and said, I wasn't asking for a backstop of OpenAI equity. I was advocating for this American manufacturing plan. Then Simfer Satoshi is going pretty hard. He says here's an OpenAI document submitted one week ago where they advocate for including data center spend within the American manufacturing umbrella.
Speaker 2:They specifically advocate for federal loan guarantees, and Simpras Satoshi says Sam lied to everyone.
Speaker 1:Okay. Read the specifics.
Speaker 2:Yes. The specifics are AI server production and AI data centers. Broadening coverage of the AMIC, which is the American Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit, will lower the effective cost of capital, derisk early investment, and unlock private capital to help alleviate bottlenecks and accelerate the AI build in The United States. Counter the PRC by derisking US manufacturing expansion. To provide manufacturers with certainty in capital, they need to scale production quickly.
Speaker 2:The federal government should also deploy grants, cost sharing agreements, loans, or loan guarantees to expand industrial base capacity and resilience. Okay. So
Speaker 1:loan guarantees. So so what's happening here is OpenAI a week ago, and everyone can go and and read this Yes. Letter, which is publicly available on their website, is was making the recommendation that the government should effectively treat data centers or AI Yes. Or token factories, put them in
Speaker 2:the
Speaker 1:manufacturing bucket, which would qualify them for similar incentives that traditional manufacturing Yeah. Defense tech, etcetera.
Speaker 2:I don't have a problem with asking the government for a handout. I think that that's actually, like, best practice. It's actually in your shareholders' responsibility. Like, you have a fiduciary duty to ask the government for as much help as possible. I think that everyone should go to the go to the government right now.
Speaker 2:Hey. If you're if I'm paying 50% tax, how about we take that down to 20%? How about we take it down into 0%? Like, you have every incentive to ask your your person in congress and your senator, the people in Washington to do everything they can to support your mission. This has worked out in the past with Elon and Tesla.
Speaker 2:It didn't work out in the case of Solyndra. But, like, the game on the field is if there are taxpayer dollars that are moving around the board, you wanna get those into
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:that are aligned with you.
Speaker 1:And so thing that people are taking issue with
Speaker 2:Yes. Is that
Speaker 1:in the opening of his message yesterday, he said, we do not want we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centers.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And that seems to conflict with the message, the letter that they wrote a week ago that is still up on their website.
Speaker 2:Yes. So if it's if it's, what is it? With loan guarantees to expand industrial based capacity.
Speaker 1:The X Chat is taking the initiative. Just sent the admin a safe to sign. Uncap send uncapped uncapped note.
Speaker 2:You literally can do this now. There's a sovereign wealth fund. Like, the like, it sounds crazy, but, like, they're ripping checks. Like, this is the new economy. And, you know, you can, you can you can be upset about it, but you also have to understand, like, what is the game on the field?
Speaker 2:You can always advocate for, like, we should change the game. Like, we shouldn't be doing this. Like, I would prefer a more of a free market economy. But in the world where we're not in a free market economy, you want to have your company win. Right?
Speaker 2:That's just rational. That's just actually playing the game on the field. Now it is weird optics to talk about the game on the field. That's something most people don't like doing, and that's very odd. Because when you say, oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:This is a one hand washes the other situation, or, oh, yeah. This is, this is a situation where, you know, a backstop will allow us to be more aggressive. That feels like the banker to saying, oh, yeah. I knew that the government was gonna bail us out in o eight, so I was intentionally underwriting loans that where it was somebody's fifth house, and I knew that they couldn't pay it. I wasn't asking about their job.
Speaker 2:I wasn't asking about their income. I wasn't asking about their assets. And so they I I pushed it way further, and I made a lot of money, and I got out at the top. That's what's really upsetting to Americans because the bailout comes in. The backstop comes in.
Speaker 2:Yes. It makes sense to rationally do the backstop in that moment, but if some people get out early and then other people get cooked Yeah. That's a really bad optics. That's really, really bad optics.
Speaker 1:And which is why I kind of expect a lot more of the narrative and to shift towards subsidizing and incentivizing and bringing new energy on talking
Speaker 2:about that
Speaker 1:yesterday. Directly benefits the labs Yep. And and anybody building a data center. But it also feels very much in America's, interest broadly. Right?
Speaker 1:And it benefits. It it theoretically would benefit the average American too.
Speaker 2:We were listening to Ben Thompson this morning. It wasn't on Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multistream, reach your audience, wherever they are. We were listening to the Strathecari RSS feed. Hopefully, Ben goes live at some point and restream. That'd be awesome.
Speaker 1:By the way, I think the chat has discovered that, yes, this is a turbo puffer. This is a one of two. I sent another one to To Simon? Simon.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's
Speaker 1:maybe a puffer. But you can see
Speaker 2:It looks great. Got Especially with the green background, the color grade, the production team is on point today. Let's let's hear for the production team. So so, yes, I I I agree with you on the on the energy front. I think Ben Thompson, his point today
Speaker 1:And fabs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And fabs too. Yeah. His point today was like was like, OpenAI needs to be crystal clear about the position that they're in, which is that they are the hottest company in the world. There is unlimited demand for their shares.
Speaker 2:They could be a public company. They could go raise more private capital. They need to be on the opposite end of the risk curve from the stuff that's like, no one really wants to invest in an American fab that might lose money for a decade. Like like, there is truly much less appetite for, yeah, let's go and build a nuclear power plant that might take a decade, and who knows? Like, when you think about the things that make money in the short term, it's SaaS.
Speaker 2:Right? AI is for SaaS. Like, just go and transform the legacy business with some AI sprinkled on top and just start printing money. Like, this is what works.
Speaker 1:You know, people's concern Yeah. For government backed data center lending
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is that you're lending against chips, which have a really fast depreciation schedule.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:We don't know.
Speaker 2:Right? Was some pushback. I I made the comment, hey. Maybe that these things don't depreciate as fast. There was some there was some pushback in the comments.
Speaker 2:I think everyone kind of agrees that these things depreciate quickly. And so energy infrastructure is the place.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and if you look at right now, its core weaves, corporate default swaps are now sitting around 500 basis points, jumped up dramatically. And so this is a this is one of the leading neo clouds.
Speaker 2:Five five hundred basis points? 55%? Yeah. They they jumped 5%?
Speaker 1:Or or they're Jumped. They jumped from, like, I think, like, two to five.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to
Speaker 2:find Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. Somewhere in the stack.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But sorry.
Speaker 2:I I don't mean to, like, ask particular stats, but, clearly, like, people are are worried about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so so Yeah. And and again, this is for a leading Neo Cloud. Right? We we semi analysis ClusterMax.
Speaker 1:The updated version came out yesterday. They're only In the platinum. Neo Cloud in the platinum platinum tier. And people are worried about them. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep. Potentially, you know, having some bankruptcy risk. And so if you start doing, you know, basically government guaranteed data center lending Yep. You could get in a situation where there's a bunch of new data centers that come online that really don't have a clear pathway to ROI. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, it just incentivizes the entire stack to just get, you know, really exuberant. Right? And again, going back to Sarah Fryer's interview on Wednesday, she was, she felt the market was not exuberant enough. I think a lot of people disagree with that. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's a lot of, there's been a lot of insanity, this year, silliness. Maybe we don't need more, but we will see. The other news that was, interesting out of today, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Polt, says Fannie and Freddie eyeing stakes in tech firms. Bill Polt, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are looking at ways to take equity stakes in technology companies.
Speaker 1:We have some of the biggest technology and public companies offering equity to Fannie and Freddie in exchange for Fannie and Freddie partnering with them in our business. Polt said Friday during an interview at a housing conference, we're looking at taking stakes in companies that are willing to give it to us because of how much power Fannie and Freddie have over the whole ecosystem. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:This this Wall Street Journal event is just so many articles came out of this. The Wall Street Journal did a fantastic job bringing a ton of people together. This is where that Sarah Fryer quote came from. It's also where the Core Weave CEO was on stage. You were mentioning Core Weave earlier.
Speaker 2:And the Core Weave CEO the headline in the Wall Street Journal is Core Weave CEO plays down concerns about AI spending bubble, and the quote is from Michael. If you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, the world will find ways to finance an enormous amount of business. And he went on and said, if the economy doubles in size, it's not a lot of money to build all those data centers. And so there's a lot of folks to, you know, addressing bubble concerns right now. He says, it's very hard for me to worry about a bubble as one of the narratives when you have buyers of infrastructure that are changing the the economics of their company, they are building the future.
Speaker 2:And so if you are, if if if the products are are, you know, effective in in in growing the economy, then all of the investment is worth it. There's a fascinating mansion story we should get to that's actually related to this. Good. So there is a before we do, let me tell you about Privy. Wallet infrastructure for every bank.
Speaker 2:Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple AVI. You get a whole new soundboard? What's going on with the soundboard?
Speaker 1:I did.
Speaker 4:Thank
Speaker 2:you. Wait. Really? Like, did they swap them all out?
Speaker 1:Michael. Do you
Speaker 2:still have the horse?
Speaker 1:I still got all the classics.
Speaker 2:You got all the classics.
Speaker 1:Working with some new material.
Speaker 2:Working with some new material. I like the sheesh. Can we get the vine boom on there? Is that on there? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:The boom. The thud. That's a big one. Anyway, Casa Encantada is a nineteen thirties estate in Los Angeles. It's one of the most important homes in the twentieth of the century.
Speaker 2:In 2023, it was also briefly the most expensive home for sale in The United States with an ambitious act asking price of $2,250,000,000. What? This is in Bel Air. So it's a Bel Air property. It's was sold in the foreclosure auction after the death of its longtime owner, financier, Gary Winick.
Speaker 2:So it's an 8.5 acre property. He bought it in 2000 for $94,000,000. He bought it in the year 2000.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Do you know who this guy is? Gary Winnick.
Speaker 1:He had something to do with the the last bub.
Speaker 2:He did have something to do with the last bub. It's one of the craziest stories. So,
Speaker 1:Is it,
Speaker 2:To satisfy the debt which is now grown blah blah blah blah blah. So so basically, like, it's a 40,000 square foot house, built in the nineteen thirties, counts hotelier, Conrad Hilton, and Dole Food billionaire David Murdoch among its former owners. It's located right next to the Bel Air Country Club golf course. It has a it's seven bedrooms, has a swimming pool, tennis court. It's awesome.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Gary is perhaps best known as the founder of Global Crossing, which built fiber optic cable a fiber optic cable network across the world. The company made him a billionaire, but it imploded
Speaker 1:Did they have a little bit of dark did they have a little bit of dark fiber?
Speaker 2:Little bit of dark fiber. Mhmm. Imploded in the early two thousands under the weight of massive debt. Casa, Encantada, Gary's primary home went on the market in June 2023, five months before his death. Now it's asking 190,000,000.
Speaker 2:And they kinda move on from there. But, is there ever lesson.
Speaker 1:Was he was somewhat of an, of a of a global businessman. He was, the headquarters were in Bermuda. You know this? I didn't know that. I wonder why.
Speaker 1:I wonder why.
Speaker 2:I mean, it it it might literally because it it it insulates the assets in America. Like that like that is one thing that you can do if you don't want to have to give up your lovely home post bankruptcy. You want to be able to get liquidity before the bubble pops. That's the lesson here. Sell sell the shares before the top.
Speaker 2:Buy low, sell high. That's the that's the phrase that we that we live by here. Was there anything else, Tyler, that came out of your deep research report on Gary Winnick? Did you get a chance to
Speaker 3:I mean, so let's see.
Speaker 2:How do you tell us
Speaker 3:about He also started Pacific Capital Group in 1985.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:That was kind of the precursor.
Speaker 2:So he was set up to to actually marshal all the debt to do the big Yeah. Infrastructure.
Speaker 3:He had been a global businessman for a while before.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for global businessmen.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up. Let's give it up. Yeah. What We're wild wild
Speaker 1:hyper hyper local businessmen. We we like to do our business right here in the Ultra Dome. But We do. Gotta gotta give it up for them.
Speaker 2:Also in the mansion section, which we should continue on. But first, let me tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your rag vogue with your personal AI engineering team. You have a new neighbor, Jordy. You have new So Tom Petty apparently lived in your neighborhood in Malibu, California.
Speaker 2:The late free fallen rocker had a personal
Speaker 1:music Some deep lore.
Speaker 2:Please.
Speaker 1:I saw Tom Petty. Yes. I believe it was the first ever who headlined the first ever outside lands? Was it first or second?
Speaker 2:He was living in Malibu in a $11,200,000 house, 8,744 square feet, seven bedrooms, has a music studio. The buyer is Steven Slade Thien, a psychoanalyst and author according to people with knowledge of the deal. Tian didn't respond for a request for comment. I wonder if he if he'd wanna, you know, get beer sometime, hang out, maybe go surfing, go for a walk on the beach. We should reach out to him for
Speaker 1:comment Okay. On So the I was at the first ever Outside Lands.
Speaker 2:Really? That How old are you? I thought I thought you were It
Speaker 1:was it was my basically, the first ever, like, major concert experience.
Speaker 2:I didn't realize that's
Speaker 1:so unique. Tom Petty headlined Cool. On Saturday. This was in August 2008. And that was my first time smelling cannabis.
Speaker 1:And I kept I was there with my my, my friend and his parents, and I kept asking, like, his friend's parents, what is that stinky smell? It's so stinky. Every we can't get away
Speaker 2:from Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, very very memorable.
Speaker 2:Very memorable. That's amazing. Do you know where this is? 2.6 acres above Escondido Beach. Is that close to you?
Speaker 1:Escondido Beach.
Speaker 2:Good area.
Speaker 1:It's a a few minutes away. But It's
Speaker 2:a gated property.
Speaker 1:Escondido Beach is the most underrated beach It was Petty's home
Speaker 2:in Malden. Decades before his death in 2017. Lead singer of the Heartbreakers purchased the property for about 3,750,000.00 in 1998. Penny turned his guesthouse into his personal music studio with soundproof rooms for recording music and, said Levi Freeman, who's putting up there's a one bedroom guest guest suite. Seems like a very nice star.
Speaker 2:He was from Florida. He shunned the spotlight off stage. He's a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, best known for songs like American Girl and I Won't Back Down. What a what what a lovely little house. Well, that's always fun.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we should move on to our top story. Should we should we do you wanna go through the Elon the Elon pay package thing a little bit? I had two questions for you on that, and then we can go into our mag seven review. Is that is that sound good?
Speaker 1:Let's just let's do it.
Speaker 2:Okay. First, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. I I I really enjoy this graphic package we got.
Speaker 2:This is great. So Elon's trillion dollar pay package is done. It's signed. It's approved. I'm sure it will be contested in the courts.
Speaker 2:It's always contested in the courts. But, The Wall Street Journal has a very nice little breakdown of how it works. They have a nice little infographic here I can share. And it kinda shows
Speaker 1:This This is is what technology podcasting is Pull that up. It's a holding hold that up. Yeah. Pull that newspaper.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, basically, Elon could get 1,000,000,000,000 in Tesla stock if he hits all these different tranches. And so it's actually not that many shares.
Speaker 2:So he he he's worth half a trillion now, but he also owns 414,000,000 Tesla shares outright, got another award in 2018 of 300,000,000 shares, and this next award is 424,000,000 across 12 trench tranches. So it's not like they're giving him four twice as much as he already has. They're just kind of giving him a little like like, basically, what he already had, they're giving him the same amount again. And there's a bunch of things that he has to do. He has to get the market cap really, really high, and then there's also these, like, qualitative operational goals, or I guess they're quantitative.
Speaker 2:But, 50,000,000,000 in EBITDA, 20,000,000 cars delivered, 1,000,000 robots sold, 1,000,000 robotaxis in operation, 10,000,000 full self driving subscription. Now some of those are obviously more gameable than others. What's the definition of a robot? If he comes out with a really cheap robot and he sells a bunch of those because it's more of a toy, does that really fulfill the goal? Or, like, what's the what's the, you know, million robotaxis in operation?
Speaker 2:What's the definition of a robotaxis?
Speaker 1:Qualifies.
Speaker 2:If it's, like
Speaker 1:Tesla that is enabled for
Speaker 2:And now you turn on FSD, and my friend rides in it for one
Speaker 1:Is there anything for actual rides?
Speaker 2:There's the there's 10,000,000 full self driving subscriptions. Yeah. And so some of some of these are more gameable than others, but the market cap really isn't.
Speaker 1:How many full self self driving subscriptions are there today? They
Speaker 2:I saw I I looked that up. It's somewhere between, like, one and three million right now. So he has to he definitely has to, like, triple the size at least. Robotaxis obviously goes from, like, zero to 1,000,000 because there's barely any on the on the road. He hasn't sold any robots, so a million would be entirely new robots.
Speaker 2:He's obviously delivering a lot of cars. And on the EBITDA front, 50,000,000,000 in EBITDA. Company did, like, 13 last year, so that's that's a huge increase in EBITDA. I mean, 50,000,000,000 in EBITDA is a lot of money, but he's you know, it's not it's not 20 x where he is right now, and neither is the market cap. Like, he's he only has to take the market cap to 8,500,000,000,000.0, and Tesla's already worth a trillion.
Speaker 2:So it's it's it's within, you know, striking distance. The mar the market cap is now around 1,500,000,000,000.0, actually. So my two questions were, one, like, it's gonna be weird to live in the world of the trillionaire. Like, well but we are getting close. Like, that's going to happen, not just within our lifetime, like, definitely within the next decade.
Speaker 2:This sets him up to be the first one, but it's gonna happen. And I I wonder how that's gonna reshape our our culture, like the world in America. Because when I had this I had this I had this realization that when billionaires became so prevalent and prominent, there was a lot of heat that was taken off the millionaire. Like, you're just like a guy yeah. I I have an h Billionaires have
Speaker 1:a heat shield.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Like, yeah. I'm a millionaire.
Speaker 2:I have a boat. I go to Bass Pro Shops, but I I'm not getting protested because I have a million dollars in my house and boat
Speaker 1:and And isn't it like
Speaker 2:practice or
Speaker 1:one out of 10 Americans is a
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So the millionaire became more accessible, and the billionaire became the thing that the society, scapegoats for all the problems.
Speaker 1:Approximately 9.4 to 9.5% of American adults are millionaires.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And but, my question was, what do you like like, what happens to the billionaire when trillionaires come in? Because, you know, like, Bernie Sanders and the whole there's a whole crew that say, like, billionaires shouldn't exist. Every billionaire is a policy failure. Well, like, what happens when you have to say, like, well, like, trillionaires are the real policy failure, but billionaires are also the policy's failure.
Speaker 2:And millionaires were, like, kind of okay with, but it's not great. It's like it becomes much more complicated. But at the same time, it it definitely like, if Elon is the only trillionaire, it's gonna be really, really easy to target him and be like, he's bad. He's a trillionaire.
Speaker 1:Had any more targeted?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Yeah. Maybe he maxed it out already. But I thought that was interesting. And then the flip side was, what does this mean for other companies?
Speaker 2:What does it mean for Sam Altman at OpenAI? Can he run a similar playbook? It's clear that he had a ton of soft power during the OpenAI coup. Could he go to the OpenAI for profit board and say, hey. If if OpenAI IPOs at 2,000,000,000,000, I want 20%.
Speaker 2:If OpenAI moons to 10,000,000,000,000, I want 50%. Like, how extreme can Sam get? We we know that Sam runs a bit of an Elon playbook. They were in business together. They cofounded OpenAI together.
Speaker 2:So clearly, learn from each other. I wonder what what Sam Altman can do similarly. And then I also wonder what what will happen at the garden variety unicorn. If you're just the CEO of a $5,000,000,000 company and you're just kinda hanging out there and you say, like, yeah. I I had 30% of the company when I started.
Speaker 2:I've been diluted down to five or 10, but I like this company, and I wanna get it up. Like, what if what if I say, hey. Could could it could that could I go to the board and say, okay. We're at 5,000,000,000 now. If I get us to 50, will you double my equity position?
Speaker 2:And how would shareholders treat that? How would Sequoia treat that or Founders Fund or Kleiner or a sixteen z? Like, how would the growth stage venture companies, the the the venture capital firms feel about that? So I don't know. Any reaction to that stuff?
Speaker 1:I think there's a sentiment. Like, there's you know, any any venture backed founder is, like, gonna be hyperconscious of dilution. Right? There's a sense that it's, like, one way. Yes.
Speaker 1:Right? It just goes down and down and down and down. And I think the right way for founders to think about that is, like, okay, you're not actually like, no one's taking your shares Yeah. Unless you decide to sell them.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Your job is just to make the share price go up Yep. And there's gonna be more shares issued over time. Yeah. But if you just make the share price go up Yeah. Forever, it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2:And you can also
Speaker 1:buy back. Yeah. You can also, you know, you know, get You
Speaker 2:can buy back like Drew Houston?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can also sell all the best shares. Right?
Speaker 2:And then give more share create new shares if you wanna get your percentage ownership way down. Yeah. Like, if you wanna go to zero More like a If you wanna bail.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah. We we we need to do we need to do, an analysis of the most diluted CEOs in the public markets. Yeah. Because if you look at some of the IPOs from the last ten years, like, some of the guys that are still hanging around running these companies have have sold out
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, sold down so much of and this is what makes Larry so admirable. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? Because just buy back, buy back, buy back. And and and he's the second richest person, 300,000,000,000. It's remarkable.
Speaker 1:By the way, I think Oracle is, like, fully round tripped now from Yeah.
Speaker 2:It happens. Well, what about the so so yeah. I mean, the the question is, like, on what time scale do you think this happens? Like, Jordy, do you think we'd actually hear the story of somebody, a CEO, founder, maybe past their vesting cliff, maybe one of their cofounders has left? Because I I think about that a lot where it's like, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There were, like, there were, like, two or three people. They were basically equal. They did their full, like, four year earn out, but then there's clearly one that's, like, still there grinding for the next decade. Like, they kinda do deserve more.
Speaker 2:It's not that crazy. And, yes, there is the just the stock buyback don't sell. But is there a world where someone like Drew Houston goes to the board and just says, like, I think I can five x this, and I want the pay package to do it, and I'm gonna be in the office nonstop. And I'm gonna go I think that happens.
Speaker 1:I think that happens all the time.
Speaker 2:A trillion on 8.5 is is serious dilution for the rest of the shareholders. But if I'm holding at 1,500,000,000,000 and I'm like, you're gonna take me to 8,500,000,000,000.0? Like Yeah. I'm totally in for 10% dilution. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're gonna five x my shares. Like, I'm in. But what's interesting is that we just haven't seen other CEOs pull that from the Elon playbook and say, I'm doing it too.
Speaker 1:This is why I was it was it Kimball or someone else Yeah. Saying, like, very almost no other CEOs would take a deal like this because it's so ambitious. Yep. And so I think it's I think it's healthy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No.
Speaker 1:I think people are gonna people are offended by the headline number.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So I I mean, obviously, I'm I'm I'm very pro this. I think we're all pro this.
Speaker 2:That's not the that's not the discussion. The the question is, like, how widespread does this become? Does it become memetic? Is it like every c because there's a lot of people that are just like, oh, Elon did it this way. I wanna do it that way.
Speaker 2:You know? And I'm wondering how much it actually spreads. Anyway, we'll have to keep monitoring it. We'll also have to tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2:Vanta helps you get compliant fast, and we don't stop there. Our AI and automation powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. What else is in the timeline? There's so much in the timeline. Should we do our, our mega cycle review?
Speaker 1:Let's do it. We got the laser pointer.
Speaker 2:We got the laser pointer. Our our good friend Tyler Cosgrove has put together a slide deck for us that tries to help map the mag seven. Really, I call it the TPPN top 10. The top 10
Speaker 3:Well, technically nine.
Speaker 2:There's nine?
Speaker 3:Well, none of the no. There are 10.
Speaker 2:There's 10.
Speaker 3:There's 10.
Speaker 2:Why are you
Speaker 3:We'll see well, one of them maybe is shouldn't be there.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:There's actually 10 because it's the mag seven
Speaker 3:plus Oracle. I forgot Oracle.
Speaker 2:Yes. You did. Okay. So so it is it is the TPPN top 10. The 10 most important companies in AI loosely Yeah.
Speaker 2:The mag seven plus a few bonus ones. And we're gonna try
Speaker 1:and Watch your take head, Tom.
Speaker 2:Through. And look, you're
Speaker 1:you're You hoof. Horse. You're You gotta
Speaker 3:hoof, man. Alright.
Speaker 2:Let me go on the side. We're we're gonna try and go through the various companies and rank them based on how AGI pilled they are and how much they need AGI. Is
Speaker 3:that right? Yeah. Basically. So so let let's pull up the the actual scales. There's two axes.
Speaker 2:Let's go to the next slide.
Speaker 3:So so, basically, on the horizontal, we have how AGI pilled they are.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:So I feel like that's fairly self explanatory. You kind of believe that AI will become something like it it can produce the the median economic output of a person.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes. And then
Speaker 2:And and there's a few different ways to understand if somebody believes in AGI. It could be the rhetoric of the CEO or the founder.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:It could be the actions of the company. Yeah. Yeah. Like, they're
Speaker 1:just Speak louder than
Speaker 2:words. And is is there anything else that could that could lead someone to to show that they believe in AGI? I guess it's mostly just the actions and the and and the words. Right?
Speaker 3:I mean, those are the main things that you can kind of do a person. Okay.
Speaker 4:So you
Speaker 2:can do things. We will we be judging them by both their actions and their words.
Speaker 3:Yep. So so then on the vertical axis, we have how much they need AGI. Okay. So I think this is maybe a little harder. I so I wanna qualify this.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I mean, this doesn't necessarily believe that you have this kind of sentient, you know, AI that's as good as a person. Yeah. But I I think it more so in this context just means that AI will continue to become more and more economically valuable.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Where you can kind of sustain, you know, building more and more data centers. You can do more and more CapEx. You know?
Speaker 2:There's Yeah. There's a little bit of, like, how much will this company be transformed if the AI wave plays out well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. AI doesn't play play out well. How chopped are they? How cooked are they?
Speaker 3:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a great framework. Yes. And then also, yeah, if we if we flash forward, nothing really changes. Total plateau, total decline in in token generation or something. Is is the business just continuing business as usual?
Speaker 2:So who are we
Speaker 3:starting with? Let's start, with Sam Altman.
Speaker 2:Okay. Sam Altman. Where is he on
Speaker 3:the So Sam Altman, I I think this is a pretty reasonable spot. Sure. He believes in AGI. Right? He he runs kind of the biggest AI company.
Speaker 3:Also needs AGI. Mhmm. Because if you imagine that, you know, if the models stagnate, right, they they have a lot of CapEx they need to fulfill. Yep. If models stagnate, like, what are they gonna do?
Speaker 3:Maybe they can maybe the margins somehow work out, but you're probably not in a good spot if if models get worse or if people start using AI less, if But you're saying all he's also not, you know, in the top top corner.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Right? And I I think this is you can justify this through a lot of open AI's actions. You see stuff like Sora. You see maybe the erotica. This is not very
Speaker 2:Who's who's
Speaker 3:running the
Speaker 1:laser pointer? I'm running the laser pointer. Okay. I'm I'm You want
Speaker 2:him you want him here?
Speaker 1:I'd maybe put him down here.
Speaker 2:Okay. Explain that. Explain I
Speaker 1:think that more and more, at least in the short term, OpenAI looks like a hyperscaler. They're kind of a junior hyperscaler. And I think their actions are more think that OpenAI, a lot of people want to say that they're bearish on on OpenAI Yes. Current levels. Sure.
Speaker 1:But ultimately, when you look at how their business is evolving
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:They seem to me like they'd be fine if the models plateaued.
Speaker 2:Yes. But yeah. I I I I feel like the I feel like the mood on the timeline was much more slide Sam to the left doesn't believe in AGI. There was that post about, like, if if if OpenAI really believed in AGI, they wouldn't be doing Sora or they wouldn't be doing the erotica thing. Like, all of those were very much, like, needs it, but it but kind of accepts that it's not coming and so stop believing it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think in response to Jordy, I think
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because it's not like this the vertical axis is also just about, like, if it's gonna continue to be economically bought you know, economically useful. Mhmm. So if people just stop using AI in general or or, like, people if the kind of, you know, revenue stops accelerating or any of this stuff, I think OpenAI will be in a bad spot regardless of the models, like, actually getting much better.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Like, if they Yeah. Just make the models much more efficient to run, you could say that's not very, like, AGI pilling because the models aren't getting a lot better. Yeah. But that's still, like
Speaker 1:But I'm just saying like if there was no more progress at all Yeah. Like we never got a new model from any of the labs, I think that OpenAI would add ads, they would add commerce, they would increase Yeah.
Speaker 2:So they might be without AGI.
Speaker 1:They would make agents a lot better.
Speaker 2:But but, I mean, the 1,400,000,000,000.0
Speaker 1:enterprise, they're they're
Speaker 2:The 1,400,000,000,000.0 in commitments. Like, is hard to justify if it's just the business today just growing like it's growing cause it's just like it's good. No no crazy breakthroughs. Like, just like, really
Speaker 1:But they're they're they're
Speaker 2:gonna play out the bull case.
Speaker 1:They're playing they're playing
Speaker 2:This is crazy. You're laying out the bull case saying, oh, if they just add ads, they're gonna be able to hit the 1,400,000,000,000.0. No problem.
Speaker 1:That's not saying I'm not saying they they can pull back on a lot of these commitments.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:They don't like Okay. Okay. Don't I don't think these are like gonna end up being like real Yeah. Liabilities Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Business is just cooked. Okay. They can't hit them. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:So I'm just saying, like, I think there's a shot they have. They could you know, when when they talk about having success in consumer electronics
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Right, which is something you talked about yesterday. Like, they don't need like, I I I think they can probably build a really cool device. Sure. Maybe it could be competitive with, you know, if if there's if it if it can be at all competitive with an iPhone
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Like, that they could be fine without AGI. Okay. Both. They're also getting into Let's let's
Speaker 2:get some other people on so the we can see where
Speaker 3:people Yeah. I think it's useful to be relative because
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:These are not quantitative numbers. Yeah. So, next we have Dario.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Woah. So Dario is up here. So I I think Dario is kind of when when you listen to what Dario is saying, he is, you know, he's extremely AGI pilled. Yes. Right?
Speaker 3:He he this is kind of the reason why he's he's so anti China. Yeah. Right? Because he sees it as an actual race. This is going to nuclear weapons.
Speaker 3:It is a national, you know, security. Totally. It's a problem if trying to get there first.
Speaker 2:Wait. What is that new sound queue? So I
Speaker 1:don't think Tyler has sound effects.
Speaker 2:What is it? UAV online. UAV online. Okay. I like that.
Speaker 2:We got this is the UAV. We should give this UAV aesthetics for sure. This is good. Okay. Continue.
Speaker 3:And but there's also a sense that he needs AGI. Yeah. Yeah. Because if if AI stops becoming if it stops growing as fast Yeah. And you imagine that things kind of settle where they are now
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:OpenAI is definitely in the lead. Sure. So you you need a lot of continued growth for for Anthropic to keep, kind of making sense economically, I think.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Sure. Who else is on here?
Speaker 3:So I think next is, Larry. Larry Larry's in kind of an interesting spot here. So this is kind of a weird place to be where you don't believe in AGI but you need it.
Speaker 2:Okay. How did you wind up there?
Speaker 1:So I I I think You're probably wondering how I ended up in this quarter.
Speaker 2:Record scratch, freeze frame.
Speaker 3:So so I I think this is how you factor in. Kind of the personal rhetoric and then there's the actions of his company.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:So when you listen to to Larry speak, he doesn't seem the type that is believes in some kind of super intelligent
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:God that is gonna come, that's gonna, you know, birth this new thing Yeah. Humanity will will rise. But then you look at Oracle.
Speaker 2:Has anyone found his last wrong username? Is he on there really? I
Speaker 3:I don't think, you know, I don't think Larry is reading Gwen. Okay. Got But then He's a vast you're old. And they are, you know, they they need AI to work.
Speaker 1:Okay. Right? They are bring
Speaker 3:up a little too much. Yeah. Or maybe not enough depending on how AGI filled you are, but AGI filled.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:It's it's kind of hard to square, but Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is bold bet. This is
Speaker 3:Yeah. This is Okay. This is a unique spot, I think.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 3:This is a unique spot.
Speaker 2:He's he's he's off the grid. Okay.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So who's next?
Speaker 3:So let's see. Who's next? Who who did I okay. Okay. This is a a fairly reasonable spot.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Obviously, there's, you know, there's some sense where he is slightly AGI pilled Yeah. Or maybe more than slightly believes in the power
Speaker 2:of the technology.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, he's very early on OpenAI. Yeah. He he thinks that AI in general will become very useful, but maybe it won't become, you know, super intelligent. Maybe it's not gonna replace every person.
Speaker 3:It's just a useful tool. It's the next
Speaker 2:quote I always go back to is him saying, like, my definition of AGI is just greater economic growth. So show me the economic numbers, and that will be it's like it's a it's a very practical
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Definition. I think people see him as very reasonable. He's not getting over skis.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I like him in the center of grid somewhere. That that seems like a real
Speaker 3:He's also, you know, if if AI doesn't work out Yeah. I think Microsoft is in
Speaker 2:a very good gonna stick around.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, they're they're not crazy over investing in OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Yep. They have a nice get on. Yeah. They'll write some code.
Speaker 3:If OpenAI works out, he'll do very well. Sure. If they don't work out, I think he's all set.
Speaker 2:He's
Speaker 3:hedged. He's doing quite well.
Speaker 2:He's hedged. Yeah. The man's hedged.
Speaker 1:He's happy to be a leaser.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That yeah. That's a good quote too. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You wouldn't be leasing if you were super AGI pilled. Right? You're hoovering up everything. You keep it all for yourself.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Think let's have you talk about that with, I think it's Jensen next.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yes. Jensen.
Speaker 3:So Jensen
Speaker 2:He doesn't believe in AGI. He's the whole reason why we're here. Explain that.
Speaker 3:So, yeah. This is maybe my personal take. Please. If Jensen was very IGI pilled
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:I mean, he is the the kind of he he's the rock on which this all is built on. Yes. He has the chips. Yes. He has
Speaker 2:the If
Speaker 3:he was IGI pilled, he would not be giving out those chips. He would keep all to himself and he would be training his own model.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:So that's why I think he's he's more on the Yes. Doesn't believe in AGI's side.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 3:if there's any kind of downturn in the AI
Speaker 1:Sam, Could you like, potentially closer in this direction too? Because he's talking about getting into the Yes. Like compute Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The models progressing so quickly, wouldn't you wanna just hold on to all all that
Speaker 3:compute yourself? This would also be interesting to see over time. Like, Sam has definitely shifted, leftwards Yes.
Speaker 1:Over time. He's moving.
Speaker 3:He's moving. Basically, this summer, you've seen a lot of the actions of OpenAI. They seem less and less AGI built.
Speaker 2:Pretty much everyone has been, like, moving the AGI timelines outward, which is in which you could transform into no longer believing in a b AGI. It's more just like the timelines have gotten longer this year, broadly. Pretty much everyone. Yes. To our catch up, they did this timelines.
Speaker 3:There was a new blog post yesterday. It was basically AI twenty twenty seven. There was new one. It was AI, 2032. So it's basically
Speaker 2:very similar. Team?
Speaker 3:Different team, but the the team of AI twenty twenty seven was promoting it.
Speaker 2:Did yeah. AI AI twenty seven twenty twenty seven should be like it was actually AI thirty twenty seven.
Speaker 1:Oh, must must have Oh, typo.
Speaker 2:Ty We're we're AI thirty twenty seven.
Speaker 1:We couldn't get that domain.
Speaker 2:We were just off five thousand years. Continue.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But there's definitely the sense where if if AI there's a downturn
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Jensen, the stock is gonna go down.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But it's not gonna go down as far as as Larry. Right? Because they're they're still not on it. They don't have insane
Speaker 2:financial advice.
Speaker 3:Yes. It is. You know, they don't have, you know, completely unreasonable CapEx.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They're not levered up Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. That I know of.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Their z score is through the roof.
Speaker 3:They're all in z score is
Speaker 2:through roof. They're looking pretty safe. Yes.
Speaker 3:Okay. Let let's see the next one. I believe okay. Sundar. Sundar.
Speaker 2:He believes in AGI more than Satya, you think.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, I I think you can see this in kind of earlier in some sense than Satya, right, with with DeepMind.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think AI has played a fairly big part in the Google story very recently. Yeah. They've always I think, basically for the past ten years, they've been trying to get into AI. Maybe their actions didn't actually do much, but, you know, were the transformer paper.
Speaker 1:AI. Like, they're actually applying
Speaker 2:They built self driving cars. Yes. And and Core Google search is just an AI product. It's just an index on information. They're organizing the
Speaker 3:Also, I mean, compared to Satya, I mean, Gemini is a frontier model. Totally. Gemini three is supposed to be this incredible model. Everyone's very excited. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Satya is not Microsoft is not training their own base model yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and also, like, it's it like, there is a little bit of, like, if you really believe in AGI, the actions that we see are you, like, squirming and being like, I gotta get in. I I it doesn't matter if I'm 1% behind or 10% behind or 80% behind. I gotta get in, and I think we know someone who's doing math.
Speaker 1:Gabe in the chat says, is this AGI or AG one from athletic greens? Like, needs needs AG one.
Speaker 2:Needs AG one.
Speaker 1:Kind without AG one. Believes in AG one. Now, we're the only podcast that is not partnered with AG one.
Speaker 2:But we do like green. Green is our hero color. Yeah. Let's go to the next person.
Speaker 3:Okay. But also before Yes. Then Okay. I I think Sundar is also definitely below this line because, you know, Google has been doing very well. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:AI was At at first, I mean, people thought of AI as like, oh, this is gonna this is gonna destroy Google. This is bad for Google. So if AI doesn't work, then Google is just in the spot they were before, which is doing very well. If AI does work, then, I mean, Gemini is Mhmm. One of the best models.
Speaker 3:They'll do very well too.
Speaker 2:Speaking of Gemini, Google AI Studio created an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires them up for you. Get started at a i.studio/build. Yeah. Go continue.
Speaker 3:Okay. So I I think yeah. Next is Zuck. Yes. So so Zuck is also kind of in an interesting spot.
Speaker 3:Yes. I think I think Zuck is actually someone who has shifted rightward.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 3:you've seen this base I mean,
Speaker 1:He's for a while been
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so for a while, was doing open source Yeah. Which, in some sense, it's very AGI pulling because, you know, you're building it, you're training a model. Right? It's like you're you're moving the the frontier forward.
Speaker 3:Yep. But it's also it's open source, which you can kind of think of as being you're trying to commoditize everything. Yeah. You don't think that there's gonna be some super intelligence that will take all the value that you need to hold onto. You can kind of give it out.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And now he's kind of moved towards Yeah. Closed source. We're gonna get the best people. We're gonna train the best model.
Speaker 2:It felt like Zuck was sort of like, oh, yeah. AI. Like, it's this cool thing. I'm gonna check the box. I got my team.
Speaker 2:We did this fun little side project. It's this, open source model. We kinda found our own, like, little lane, but we're not, like, competing in the big cosmic battle between OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, like,
Speaker 1:we're Do do do you think that was just a counter position to way to win like, try to win the AI warp? Go say, hey. We're just gonna try to commodify Yeah. This market
Speaker 2:Good. Commoditize your approach. Yeah. Commoditizing your Yeah. Easy, good strategy.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That makes sense. And then maybe you could say that, oh, once the Chinese have have been getting better, he can kind of step out of that position.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:And he's moved towards close source.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But now it feels like he's way way going way harder on the AGI vision, paying up for it, investing so much money in it. Yeah. You know, it's like
Speaker 1:And depending on how much he invests
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You could see him neat pushing up.
Speaker 2:It's true. Yeah. It's true. Yeah. He's also But right now but right now, the business is just insane.
Speaker 2:It's so phenomenal that even if he winds up spending all this money and, you know, they don't even get a frontier model and, like, the all the all the the researchers are like, yeah. We didn't discover anything, and we're just gone. Like, the business is fine because it's such a behemoth. So Yeah. That's why he's going
Speaker 3:without the NGI. After earnings, they took a fairly big hit. Yep. So maybe he should be a little bit higher. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But maybe maybe a little bit. Broadly is still Yeah. A very safe play if if AI doesn't work out.
Speaker 2:And it was the same thing during the metaverse. It was like, he believed in the metaverse. He invested in the metaverse, but he never needed the metaverse. And so after the stock sold off like crazy, it went right back up because everyone realized But
Speaker 1:he's also raising debt off the balance sheet, which would kind of could push him up into this zone. Right? If he if he's like, you know, if you're worried about Oh. Why why why don't you just carry it yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't
Speaker 1:you carry it yourself? Yeah. What do you what do you you believe in AGI? Yeah. Just just let it ride.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's right. Okay. Who else are we missing?
Speaker 3:Okay. So I We have
Speaker 2:most of the max seven now.
Speaker 3:Is is Jassy? Oh, Elon. Elon. Elon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Elon.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 3:Elon, I mean, he's been AGI pilled, I think, for a very long time.
Speaker 2:Super AGI pill. I agree with that.
Speaker 3:Opening AI cofounder. Even before that, he I think he was fairly big in the in the safety space.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 3:You see him even on on Joe Rogan, he was talking about safety.
Speaker 2:He still believes it. He hasn't backed off.
Speaker 3:And AI safety is important because it's gonna become super intelligent. It's gonna take over the world totally. Yeah. Even this was part of
Speaker 1:the dialogue around the new comp package wanting the the voting power to be able to be part of securing his robot army.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think robots are are very underrepresented on this board.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 3:And Elon is kind of the the main player in that space right now.
Speaker 1:Yes. So he talked yesterday about about, humanoids being sort of an infinite money glitch. And I feel like you kind of need AGI in order to kind of unlock the the infinite money, glitch.
Speaker 2:Yes. But at the same time, very strong core business. The cars don't need AGI. The rockets don't need AGI. Starlink doesn't need AGI.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so he's so he's not entirely indexed on it in the way the foundation labs are. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a significant part of the Tesla market cap that is basically betting on robots. Totally. But there's also a big part of it that's just
Speaker 2:But that's why he's in the he's in the middle of the needs are fine without. It's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:He is betting on it.
Speaker 2:He's next
Speaker 1:AI. AI.
Speaker 2:Everything on it.
Speaker 1:Is needs
Speaker 2:Yeah. Needs But that's just one piece of the
Speaker 1:AGI more than SpaceX. SpaceX.
Speaker 3:Yeah. SpaceX is very seems very uncorrelated with the AI.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 3:Totally. Unless you have the data science. He's happy to
Speaker 1:be a telecom baron.
Speaker 2:He's happy to yeah. He's happy to be the new Verizon. Yeah. Who else
Speaker 3:I believe now is Okay. Andy Jassy.
Speaker 2:Jassy. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So he is I I think broadly does not believe in AGI, although he, you know, fairly major stake in Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anthropic Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Which maybe is very ejaculating, but but they have not
Speaker 1:He's hedging with Anthropic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I I think that's basically what you can say. He doesn't seem at all worried about kind of the core business. AWS seems to be Yeah.
Speaker 2:Moved by isn't Google building their position in Anthropic? I saw some headline about that. Yeah. That was wild. Imagine.
Speaker 2:Like, Sundar, such a beast. Sundar and Sacha, really, both of them. They just have huge stakes.
Speaker 3:Broadly, Andy Jassy seems very quantitative. He's focused on the numbers Sure. Realistic. He's not making these, you know, grandiose statements about the future of Yeah. Of intelligence or what humanity is gonna be like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When you look at the AWS earnings, it feels like they invest when the demand shows up, and they build data centers when there is demand. And they they are not in the business of of doing, you know, a ten year hypothetical sci fi forecast based on breakthrough.
Speaker 1:So Ben Thompson on the recent Sharp Tech, we were listening to it on the way in. He was talking about how, Amazon has repeatedly said, hey. We're supply constrained.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:We have a lot more demand than we can fulfill with this new deal with OpenAI, the $38,000,000,000, which only got announced Monday, which again feels like forever ago at
Speaker 6:this
Speaker 1:But Ben was kind of hypothesizing that they kind of let OpenAI jump the line because that $38,000,000,000 deal was starting effectively immediately
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Versus some of the other like, Larry's deal with OpenAI was announced. This, like, massive backlog is is revenue that cannot be generated in a meaningful way today because they have to build the data centers that can actually deliver the compute.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean and, you Amazon has been building data centers. They're building data centers. Basically They built all the data centers for Anthropic.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But it still seems very kind of restrained. It's not overly ambitious. Anthropic has had issues with capacity, and it's probably because Andy Jassy doesn't wanna get over his skis. Doesn't wanna build too much. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I think that's why he's kind of on the left side. And also, I mean, if you think AI doesn't work and we're gonna kind of be in this, you know, the same spot of web two point o, you need you need AWS. You need your EC two server. Yep. I think he's very well positioned there.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And then I think the last one is Tim Cook.
Speaker 2:Tim Cook. Wow. Let's go. Let's hear for Tim Cook. Crime criminally underpaid, but has done a fantastic job not getting over his skis.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I this one, think, is Good
Speaker 2:contention.
Speaker 3:Fairly self explanatory. He I mean, he seems
Speaker 2:He doesn't believe in AGI. He doesn't believe in LLMs. He doesn't believe in chatbots apparently. Can't
Speaker 1:I don't know. The new the new Gemini deal Okay. Signaling
Speaker 2:As of two years ago, Apple was like, yeah. We're we're not we're not doing that stuff.
Speaker 1:What's under discussed and my takeaway from the our conversation with Mark Gurman Yeah. And Apple's ambitions around their new LLM experience with Gemini is that I think that there's very real scenario where Apple like wants to compete for the same user base as OpenAI. They want that like transaction based revenue, that commerce revenue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I just I do I disagree on this point, but
Speaker 1:I'm not I'm not saying that I'm putting their odds at, like, winning that market at over, like Yeah. 10%. But I think that they would be right to realize that it's potentially an opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is it a billion dollars a year that they're paying Google for
Speaker 3:I believe that's the number. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That feels really low, doesn't it? I I I don't know. It just feels super low to me and it among all the different deals that are going on. When I think about, like when I just think about, like, the value of AI on the iPhone and and you're like, $1,000,000,000. Like, when I when I think about, like, what is the value that we're that the market broadly is putting on, like, AI for the enterprise At the same time
Speaker 1:for whatever. When Sundar on the Google earnings call was talking about their top, I think, 10 customers and how many, like, trillions of tokens they were using. Yeah. But it really was netting out to, like, a $150,000,000 of, like, actual revenue. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. And so this is a this will be their biggest customer for Gemini
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:On day one.
Speaker 2:Until one of our listeners gets on.
Speaker 1:Of course. Hopefully.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I I think, I mean, even with the with the Gemini news, Apple still seems very kind of reactive to AI. Yeah. They're not kind of seeing, oh, this future where AI is gonna do everything and moving there right now. Yeah.
Speaker 3:They're they're kind of seeing where the demand is, seeing where the users are, and then moving, which I think is very Yeah. Kind of, you know, classically, you know, that's how business work. It's not very Yeah. G I pilling.
Speaker 2:Also, on on that point of $1,000,000,000, like, I have no idea how can they possibly know the amount of inference that's gonna happen in Siri plus Gemini over a year period. Like, there's just no way to predict that. Or can they? Like, I I feel like if the integration's good, there will be a ton of queries. It will it'll
Speaker 1:I didn't read the 1,000,000,000 headline. Okay. Chad can correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't read the 1,000,000,000 headline. I felt like that was a technology license, not necessarily inference.
Speaker 2:And then there might be consumption on top of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Or or maybe or maybe yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they're licensing Gemini, and then they pay per query for, like, the energy and the cap x.
Speaker 1:The done on device?
Speaker 2:For sure. Yeah. Because Gemini, Gemma has like baked down models that could be smaller. So that's possible.
Speaker 1:Chad says, where's Tyler on the chart? Feels like Tyler is an AGI pill anymore.
Speaker 2:Let's figure out.
Speaker 3:I actually am on the chart here.
Speaker 2:Let's go to Tyler.
Speaker 3:I am Hey. I Yeah. I I think I'm very AGI pilled. Right? I'm ready for the Dyson sphere.
Speaker 3:Yes. I think it's, you know, only a matter of years, handful.
Speaker 2:Only a matter of years.
Speaker 3:It's it's a couple of thousand hundred thousand days away.
Speaker 2:You need to you need to publish a 100,000 AGI twenty days 20 '6.
Speaker 3:AGI twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2:AGI 20
Speaker 3:We still have month left.
Speaker 2:We still have a month left. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We got
Speaker 2:a AGI on Christmas or this Christmas. It's coming this Christmas.
Speaker 1:Yes. This holiday season.
Speaker 2:But why do you need AGI?
Speaker 3:I I also need AGI.
Speaker 2:Why do you need AGI?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, look, if you look at the current jobs data Yes. For, like, college age students
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Or first
Speaker 3:grad, it's looking pretty bad.
Speaker 2:It's bad.
Speaker 3:So I think you kind of need AGI to really boost the economy. If if AI does not work, the macro economy
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is looking not good.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:So I feel pretty bad about my job outlook
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Without AGI.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure. Even though you're already employed. That's hilarious.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for taking us through.
Speaker 1:Chat wanna know where would you put Lisa
Speaker 2:Sue? AMD.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Lisa Sue, I I think she's broadly been quite reactive, actually. She you've really only seen AMD start You
Speaker 1:don't get credit for being reactive is what you're saying.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You you you I think it's really only over the past year maybe that she's been making any kind of deals. Right? You saw George Hotts maybe a year or two ago basically trashing AMD chips for how bad they were in
Speaker 1:But maybe she's she's given so much of the company away. Maybe she thinks that shares won't have very much value in the future. She's like, happy to just give away 10% of the company.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I I think I would, if I had to pick somewhere, I would say that she is, she's honestly getting a little close to Larry in that AMD, it's very much in like an AI play still, They're a chip company, obviously. But you don't get the you don't get the feeling that she's a true believer.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. That tracks.
Speaker 2:Okay. The That tracks. New Siri I'm I'm reading through some of Mark Gurman's reporting. Speaking of Apple and AI, the new Siri is planned for March, give or take, as has been the case for months. Apple has been saying for nine months it's coming in 2026.
Speaker 2:Apple simply reiterated on that. And then on the actual deal, it's a $1,000,000,000 deal for a 1,200,000,000,000 parameter artificial intelligence model developed by Google to help power its and overhaul the, Siri AI voice assistant. The two companies are finalizing an agreement that would see Apple pay roughly 1,000,000,000 annually for access to Google's technology with the Google model handling Siri's summarizer and planner functions. Apple intends to use the Google model as an interim solution until its own models are powerful enough and is working on a 1,000,000,000,000 parameter cloud based model that it hopes to have ready for consumer applications as soon as next year. That is that is interesting.
Speaker 2:I feel like they're gonna have to pay a lot more to actually run all the queries, generate all the tokens. But I'm sure we'll find out more as Google reports earnings and Apple reports earnings. Before we get to that, let me tell you about graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What else is in the news today?
Speaker 2:We have we are
Speaker 1:We have some breaking news.
Speaker 2:Through the timeline. What's the breaking news?
Speaker 1:TJ Parker has finally found a new car No way. That he likes. Huge. Guess what it is. Guess.
Speaker 2:This was the problem with your Ford Raptor. It wasn't the r.
Speaker 1:It wasn't the r. You only had 600
Speaker 2:horsepower instead of eight.
Speaker 1:That was the main problem. I also needed to park it in Park it in cities. Oh, yeah. Which is just absolutely brutal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What are the specs on the on the on the Raptor R again? It's a it's a pretty wild how much how much horsepower?
Speaker 1:Raptor R Zero to sixty and three point nine
Speaker 2:three to 720 horsepower. 5.2 liter supercharged V eight. Fantastic. It's kind of the Julius dot AI of trucks.
Speaker 1:It really is.
Speaker 2:AI data analyst. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, get insights in seconds. No coding required. I'm trying to go through the timeline. We got Will Menidas talking about some other stuff.
Speaker 1:Let's pull up this post from Pegasus since it's relevant to, the overview we just did. One. Pegasus says Altman today. Of course, he's talking about yesterday. We're looking at selling compute, but we need as much as possible.
Speaker 1:Zach, last week, we could sell compute. Are we in a compute shortage or not? Because both are saying they're buying as much of it as they can and thinking about selling it.
Speaker 2:That's very interesting. Yeah. I mean, the the the the supply and demand dynamics, I I I like that that story about Jensen where, like, he understands the dynamic here, but there's still you get kinda crushed if there's a sell off in terms of demand. Like, you just have to go back and study what was what was going on during the crypto boom for NVIDIA. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:During the crypto boom for NVIDIA, it was like buy as many as possible. Just ramp, ramp, ramp. And then they literally had a glut.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. And and I can
Speaker 2:Completely had a glut, they took huge write
Speaker 4:offs because
Speaker 1:they were making so much money. Here, if you're a large tech company and you have the ability to and the the financing capital to buy a lot of GPUs Mhmm. You're you're it's not the worst idea to buy as much as you can so that you have preferred access to it and then resell some if you have more than you need. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:But yeah, the question is
Speaker 2:Historically, that has not have been how things have been done. Like, I I I understand the the the the pitch there, but, I mean, we just talked to David Bazooki from, from Roblox, and he was saying that, look. We had our we had our own on prem, but then we had we had spikes of demand. And so we went to the hyperscalers for that because they can load balance across while people are playing Roblox here, and then maybe they watch some Netflix over there, and then they are storing, you know, all sorts of different data. And there's different workloads that happen at different times.
Speaker 2:And so, traditionally, the the, like, the hyperscalers have been able to serve service, like, multiple users across them. Jumping straight to, selling compute, I think that the timelines are a little bit funky on this one. It seems it seems it seems odd. It seems rushed. It seems rushed, especially when your when your core product is growing so quickly.
Speaker 2:Like, Google Cloud Platform was released, what, seven years after Google launched. Same thing with AWS. Same thing with Azure. Like, these were very mature businesses, very stable businesses with cash flow that were able to justify the investment. It was not something that was done as part in the growth phase as much.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Speaking of other wild, wild, you know, new business lines, Elon apparently confirmed that Tesla is going to build a semiconductor fab.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I've been advocating this for this for a long time. I'd love to hear, what Elon had to say. But first, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. When we Let's play Elon.
Speaker 2:Case What do we got here? Let's play Elon
Speaker 1:our suppliers. Mhmm. It's still not enough. So I think we may have to do a Tesla TerraFab.
Speaker 2:Woah. Great name. That is a bombshell.
Speaker 1:It's like Giga, but way bigger.
Speaker 2:Terabyte. Terabyte
Speaker 1:is feeling I good right can't see any other way to get to the volume of chips that that we're looking for. So I think we're probably gonna have to build a gigantic chip app.
Speaker 2:Morris, jang, and t s n c is like, no. Actually, I'm fine. I will I will supply you. Samsung is like, I'm good. I will do
Speaker 1:it. Pull up this other pull up this other video of Optimus. Even when we
Speaker 2:It is crazy.
Speaker 1:Because there were some new moves of Optimus getting getting jiggy. Let's see. It is at the bottom of Tyler app. Look at this. Let's see.
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 2:Okay. So this was this was shown in contrast to the first Optimus, which was just a guy in a suit. That was so funny.
Speaker 1:This thing this thing has motion.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not bad. It feel this feels like getting to getting pretty close to unitary level, definitely at that level. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Imagine you're working late at the office one night, and this thing just walks out onto the floor and starts looking at you and doing these moves.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Weird. It's so it's so weird how these new projects, like, they seem a lot I understand why a lot of people look at this with skepticism. But at the same time, like, it just doesn't seem that complicated to just manufacture that thing and ship it. Like like, they do it at at, you know, in China.
Speaker 2:They do it all over the place. This doesn't seem that insane. And at the same time, like, Apple couldn't ship a car. So, like, these new projects, like, they do kind of
Speaker 1:Elon ships some cars, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I I I meant it more as, like, as, like, if you're doing one thing, it can sometimes be hard to branch out to the other thing.
Speaker 1:I remember a few weeks ago I don't know. There was a headline around, Tesla ordering, like, 600,000,000 worth of actuators.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, it seems like they're going into some sort of production. Yeah. I wonder what who they're gonna
Speaker 1:sell 600,000,000 for, like, test just for testing.
Speaker 2:It's just the the the car analogy is so tricky because it's like, most people that bought Teslas already had cars. Right? And so it's just like a one for one slot swap. Who are you replacing with this? You know?
Speaker 2:It's tricky. What do you think?
Speaker 3:Well, with this, you can replace, like, a an exotic dancer.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's true. I don't know if many people have that an exotic dancer in their life who they're ready to who they're ready to replace. It seems I I don't know. It'll just be very interesting to see where these things actually diffuse.
Speaker 2:Like, because if you sell them if you sell them for one price to consumers to do their laundry, but they work in an industrial capacity, like, people will just buy them and use them for that. But when we talk to people who are in industrial environments, they're like, I definitely don't want a humanoid robot for that. I'd rather just, like, a big massive robotic arm that's, like, bolted to the ground and can actually lift, like, 10,000 pounds as opposed to one that can only lift, like, 50 pounds. I don't know. Ryan says they're gonna sell them to the police.
Speaker 2:We'll see. Maybe. They certainly would be, I don't know, backup
Speaker 1:I think they would be pretty effective deterrence.
Speaker 2:Right? Maybe. I like Vittorio having some fun on the timeline, going viral, getting community noted. Vittorio said, Elon Musk now has $1,000,000,000,000 in his bank account. That's a thousand times $1,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:He could give every single human on Earth 1,000,000,000 and still be left with 992,000,000,000. Let that sink in. People love this funny math whenever it drops. What else is going on? The the humanoid.
Speaker 2:Yes. China has a similar humanoid robotic project, although it's way, way scarier because it went full Terminator mode on this. Of course, this one is hooked up to to power. But
Speaker 3:Yes. So this video was in response to earlier this week Yeah. There was a I think it was unitary, like, presentation, and they brought out this new Sure. Robot. And it was walking with such, like Swagger?
Speaker 3:Natural gait. Yeah. Basically, that that people thought it was actually just a person and
Speaker 2:so And it was
Speaker 3:not. And so they replied with with it Wow. Fully stripped down.
Speaker 2:That is remarkable. Yo. Oh, because they put it they put it, they put, like, the suit on the robot?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was like a neo. Oh. Kinda like the one x robot.
Speaker 2:We're getting we're getting spooky spooky territory. This is pretty crazy. Oh, wow. Yeah. It does look human.
Speaker 2:It does look human. I'm looking at the other video. Sorry. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Search every byte.
Speaker 2:Service vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage.
Speaker 1:These logos, John? Cheaper. You see these new logos?
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. Stacked. Stacked. Absolutely stacked. They're kicking.
Speaker 2:Chris Backey says, in the last ten months, three very talented friends have joined separate hot early stage startups in senior roles and quit after realizing that the company's actual revenue was significantly less than what the founder had told them during the interview process and and shared online. Few things to clarify clarify. I'm not joking. In two of three in two of the three cases, it would be hard to tell that you were joining a bad actor company on the surface. Solid investors.
Speaker 2:Founders worked at unicorn companies. The third was maybe more obvious. The only ones who really lose here are the employees. The investors have 200 portcos and can afford some losses, and our industry doesn't really pursue founders over fraud slash misleading information up to a certain point. Four, if you're thinking about joining an early stage startup, ask to see their Stripe and or signed contracts before you join.
Speaker 2:Not bad advice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Again, this is going back to spring. Right? That just felt like there was this like, every founder was feeling this insane pressure to show, like, one to 10,000,000 of of of, like, a 1 to 10,000,000 ramp that was just insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and the weird dynamic is that, like, as that pressure ramps up, you just get more and more incentive to fake it with, community adjusted ARR and contracts that don't actually stick in, all sorts of different, twists on something that's like, is it actually cash? Is it actually people coming in? Are they on long contracts? The quality of revenue has been maybe degrading, but also just maybe in just just, you know, it's just been easier to game than ever.
Speaker 2:There's been more incentive to game it than ever. So stay safe out there, folks.
Speaker 1:Kazakh Stan has signed an MOU Let's go. To buy up to 2,000,000,000 of advanced chips from Nvidia. Let's hit the gong for Kazakhstan. Warm it up. Warm it up.
Speaker 1:Warm it up. Boom. Great hit. Great hit for our friends in Kazakhstan. Good to see them getting into the game.
Speaker 2:Does does Borat take place in Kazakhstan? Isn't that is that the whole thing? Maybe they should do Borat three about data centers.
Speaker 4:Love that.
Speaker 2:He he he goes to a
Speaker 1:data center. Sacha Berra Cohen at data centers would be on the air.
Speaker 2:His role all to bring AI to Kazakhstan?
Speaker 1:Sacha Berra Cohen doing a doc like a
Speaker 2:Like, yeah. Like On on AI in general? Incredible. It'd be amazing.
Speaker 1:So I can use it to do better web search? So I can use it as an auto complete?
Speaker 2:You're not doing the Borat voice, brother. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1:do the Borat voice.
Speaker 2:I will do the profound voice. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Go get a demo. The Kobe SE letter says breaking NVIDIA's losses accelerate to negative 5% of the day, now down 16% since Monday's high.
Speaker 2:That marks a drop of $8,800,000,000,000 since Monday. Wow. That is a wild sell off. Didn't Tyler quote this and say, is this bullish or something like that?
Speaker 3:No. That was on the the DoorDash. They went down 20%.
Speaker 2:Everyone's down 10 or 20%.
Speaker 1:We need to Whether you meet whether you beat or miss, you're going down.
Speaker 2:Wait. Is this true, Raghav? Ari Emanuel said he's working with Elon to bring optimist to the UFC? That would be incredible.
Speaker 1:Please don't be fake news.
Speaker 2:Please don't be fake news. We need robots in the UFC. I mean, Rogan and Palmer Luckey were talking about it on on their podcast, and it certainly seems like a hilarious and wild thing. Even just as a as an exhibition match before the real UFC, get an optimist. Though, here's a question.
Speaker 2:Would Elon want a human to thrash on optimist? Is that good for his brand, or would he want optimist to win? And if optimist wins, then is that actually entertaining? I don't know.
Speaker 1:I think putting optimist up against the best MMA fighters in the world
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is fine.
Speaker 2:It's impossible, though. Right? Because if you just kick middle, you'll just break your foot. And if you punch
Speaker 1:the middle Ari they this was Ari Emanuel at the All In Summit. Yeah. It was released, I guess, one day ago. Oh, interesting. Talking about wanting
Speaker 2:Wait. Wait. What a weird what a wait. What a crazy, crazy timing. That's so that
Speaker 1:that's so interesting. I saw what he's creating. The man's a genius. I wanna do a UFC fight with his robots.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Heisenberg is sharing
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sharing a little bit of red here. Microsoft down 10% in the last eight days. NVIDIA, 12% in the last four days. Mhmm. Alantir at 16%, down 16%.
Speaker 1:Meta down 18%. Losses have accelerated. Compound two four eight was sharing yesterday. He's like, when I clipped this, I didn't expect to crash the markets globally. But he certainly, that clip seems to have played a a part in this little sell off.
Speaker 2:Always take a victory lap for for being well, for having world historic consequences. I I actually think that that particular clip was, like, less than 5% of the total views on that clip because there were other people that clipped it and it got
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 2:You just went everywhere. But always claim victory. That's the lesson.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, Catherine Boyle from Andreessen Horowitz joining us. She's in the restroom waiting room. Welcome to the TV channel. Catherine, how are you doing?
Speaker 7:It's great to be here. Good to see you guys.
Speaker 2:If I could play the night vision goggle sound. You already got new soundboard today.
Speaker 3:I felt a little tactical.
Speaker 1:I felt a little tactical.
Speaker 5:It's great to see
Speaker 2:you. Great. Good to see you. Should the Department of War get a soundboard during these speeches? I heard I heard Hagstaff was given a big speech.
Speaker 2:Is it are are they sticking mostly to, to the the the the cheers and the clapping, or are we doing firing off muskets? Are we firing off cannons? Is there pageantry? Is pageantry alive in the department of
Speaker 5:war speech?
Speaker 7:They bring the pageantry back to the department of war. That is that is important. You guys you guys should definitely have your own sound for them.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 7:You guys are getting the the first look at a a major speech.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 7:So it is it is just ending right now. Okay. I I just hopped off the livestream, and I can tell you my my phone is blowing up with just how many people are enthusiastic, not only in the venture community, but just across Washington about what has been said in the speech. And it's going to have dramatic repercussions for defense tech and for Silicon Valley and the broader defense innovation base. So it's it's it's extraordinary speech.
Speaker 7:You'll be hearing a lot more about it if you're getting the first look.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Incredible. Take us through it.
Speaker 7:And and and and it is it is it is definitely, I'd say, you know, for the last, say, ten years or so, we've been talking about defense reform.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Why it is so important for for increasing competition for startups. And what is amazing about this speech is that it's not just lip service to, yes, of course, we need competition. Basically, what you've been hearing in Washington for the last ten years. It goes line by line. Heck, Seth actually made a very, very funny comment.
Speaker 7:He said, if you're watching this on Fox News, your eyes are glazing over Mhmm. Because this is the most boring thing you've ever heard.
Speaker 2:But for everyone in the
Speaker 7:room, from the the Andrals, the Palantirs, the SpaceXs of the world, all the way down to the little guys to the primes, it was like it was like Christmas come early. Mhmm. Right? Because it's it it really is changing the way that acquisitions are going to happen inside the department in ways that are so meaningful, not only for Silicon Valley companies, but for private equity backed companies and and for the primes. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:He basically told the primes in the very beginning, you have to be investing more in research and development. The companies that have been getting the large programs cannot just continue as as as business used to be done. He actually quoted Donald Rumsfeld. Didn't tell us he was quoting Donald Rumsfeld for the first five minutes and basically went line by line through a speech that he gave on 09/10/2001
Speaker 2:Woah.
Speaker 7:About how important it is to change the defense acquisition process. And he said, you probably don't recognize this, but the speech I am giving now is actually Rumsfeld's.
Speaker 2:Wait. September 10? Yes. Yes. The day before just happened to be
Speaker 7:Happened to be the day before where he said we have
Speaker 2:to change the
Speaker 7:acquisition process.
Speaker 2:That is a crazy coincidence.
Speaker 7:It very very crazy coincidence. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it
Speaker 7:shows you just how long this has been going on.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 7:So I'm I'm I'm happy. I have my notes here because I was taking
Speaker 2:Good place. Notes I love it.
Speaker 7:Throughout that throughout the speech.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Let's go line by line.
Speaker 7:To let startups know what what's going to be changing.
Speaker 2:Yes,
Speaker 7:please. But the the first thing that I think is really important for for all of the startups in Silicon Valley is that he mentioned and called out the importance of commercial first technology. Mhmm. So this is going to shock people who are not in the defense world that right now, if you need to build a product specifically for the Department of Defense, the vast majority of contracts that are given out are not given out with a purview of what exists already in the marketplace that we can buy. Yes.
Speaker 7:People you know, it's a requirements process, a very long three hundred day and, you know, requirements process actually that that he called out that requires the different program offices to say what they need, to write it down, and then to find people who will build explicitly for those requirements.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:They're doing away with the old requirements process and saying this is not what we're going to do anymore. We are going to focus on commercial first technologies. Even if there is a technology out there that is only 85% of what we need, we will we will buy it. Mhmm. Or or that that is that is the goal, and then we will turn it into what we need to for actually for the warfighter.
Speaker 2:This is cots versus gots for the DOD, DOW were nerds, like, commercial off the shelf versus government off the shelf. Yes. This is what Anderol and all the defense tech community has been beating the drum on for basically a decade now, and it feels like it's finally getting echoed back from the administration. Is that correct?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yes. And there was there was a lot the the administration and the EO that was that was out a couple months ago said that they wanted commercial first technology. Now you're hearing it straight from the secretary's mouth. There's always dust ups about this on Capitol Hill with with, you know, various parties arguing over whether we need more studies or whether we should just do this.
Speaker 7:It looks like now that this is a real change that's about to happen
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And it's going to be transformative for for all of the startup community. What it really says is that the best products will win.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who are who are the losers here?
Speaker 7:Well, I think I mean, the the major loser from this speech is the primes. Mean, he did he said, I don't wanna pick on anyone. I'm not gonna call out companies. Yeah. But you have to be investing in research and technology.
Speaker 7:Like, you have to be the the the fact that these that the primes only spend 2% on on research and development and and are are focused on, you know, constantly kind of maintaining the status quo, that is not going to happen on his watch. And so I think it was a
Speaker 1:2% of R and D.
Speaker 7:And and and haven't historically been been acquiring venture backed companies. So this is also the problem where they're they're they're really just on a much slower timeline than is needed by by the department. And and I'd say that the the takeaway from the speech, and I think the sound bite you'll be hearing more and more about is that the new process is really going to be used to enable speed and volume. Mhmm. And one of the things that I think, you know, a number of companies have been talking about for a long time is that by taking more risk in the acquisition process, you take less risk on the battlefield.
Speaker 7:And he actually echoed that. He said, we wanna take more risk. We wanna have we wanna reward the people inside of the department who are take making risky decisions or supposedly risky decisions because they're acquiring new technologies or or from companies that are that are not Raytheon and and and the the kind of big guys. Right? But what what they what they ultimately said is, like, they want those the the people who are going to be making this acquisition decisions to be taking on the risk because it takes less it it will affect the risk of the warfighter.
Speaker 7:Right? It will make things safer for the warfighter. So it's it's basically linking this entire process, bringing it back to to what needs to be done before war start and before products get into
Speaker 4:the end of
Speaker 1:the like a a top down directive, and then who are the players that need to actually put this into like, who are the kinda key players that need to put this into practice?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So, I mean, like, the the the main thing that I this is definitely a message sent to congress because there's there's currently, know, two different bills going through on congress that are actually pretty aligned in in in most of the things that they're saying. There's a few callouts where I think you'll you'll see sort of, some some sort of back and forth between the house and the senate. But but this is definitely a call to them. Like, this is happening on on sec the secretary's watch.
Speaker 7:This is something that he cares deeply about. This is something that the administration cares about. And so it definitely is a huge push. Not just a not just a major signal, but they sort of outlined this is how we're going to change things inside the department. One of the biggest things that they do is is they created this sort of portfolio based approach of how they're going to be allocating capital to companies now.
Speaker 7:And this is always shocking when I explain to people that that this is this is revolutionary because you'd say in a in a normal company, you're given a budget. And if the vendor you choose is you know, fails, you'll go to another vendor, and you'll use that capital in order to to buy whatever product you need. That is not how the department works. And so with this new portfolio based approach, they're basically saying we're gonna give the what what's known as the PAEs, the the portfolio acquisition executives, the right to say, okay. If this if this one product that we acquired sixty days ago isn't working on the battlefield, we can use the rest of the money and reprogram it for a product that is working.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And right now, that is that is not possible inside the Department of Defense. Right now, you have to write a whole another list of requirements and ways that you would build a new product in theory that can take years to actually build. And by the time it's built, it it it isn't meeting the requirements or the needs of the warfighter. So the fact that they're even changing the budgeting process and that they have an explicit call out of how they're going to do that, that will show up in this year's NDAA once it's passed, and and it will be the way that things are done from now on.
Speaker 2:A couple
Speaker 7:of things that
Speaker 2:go I saw extraordinary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So this means that if a contract is allocated to a certain company and there's they start underperforming in real time, the the person who's in charge of of allocating that budget can basically say, hey. This other this other startup, like, we're we're gonna, like, rotate this budget over here because
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:They're actually gonna deliver on this. I I've heard Super some push for super Yeah. We've some horse horse stories, and even opportunities where some of the bigger primes have just been have just held on to contracts forever. They're kind of, like, barely delivering. They're kind of, like, trying to deliver and start ups coming in and saying, like, hey.
Speaker 1:We'll actually take this over. And sometimes those deals can can happen, but, this seems like it'll be a lot more effective.
Speaker 2:Any new categories that are opening up generally? I mean, in we we we we you know, we've heard this week about, like, data centers in space. So if you're tracking, like, data centers or space, like, that's a story. But I remember secretary of the army was talking about, modularity of weaponry, taking apart a drone, fixing it. I feel like the whole idea of drones or autonomous submarines, these are new categories that sort of opened up.
Speaker 2:There have been a number of competitors. But at the thematic, like, within defense technology level, are there any categories that you think this new administration is maybe more excited about than ever before?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So, I mean, you you mentioned modularity and what the secretary of the army is talking about. I mean, this is this was actually called out in in secretary Hagsef's speech where he said, part of the reason why we need these p a PAEs and and what were formerly called PEOs, but PAEs, these portfolio based approaches Mhmm. Is because right now, if you wanna take something apart and put it back together, you have to build an entirely different system to acquire those parts. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And you have to go through a requirements process. So if you're building modular based approaches that update in real time, and he actually said, like, we want it to be more like software. We wanna do software and updates in real time and not have to go through a requirements based approach. You you need to to be to be thinking about things in terms of modularity. So I think there's there's a lot of different even just changing the way the budgeting works, it opens up a lot of different techno technologies that were that were, you know, not able to to participate in the acquisition system because they didn't wanna go through the the requirements process, or they knew they wouldn't meet the requirements that are being put out by the Department of War.
Speaker 7:So it is it is going to radically change, I think, not only the types of products you're seeing in the hands of the warfighter, but just how quickly they get there.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Makes a lot of sense. Switching gears a little bit. Sam Altman suggested on Wednesday this idea of, like my my interpretation of it was kind of like a GoCo model for, AI factories. Without commenting on on that specifically, can you give us the history of GoCo's when and how they work well and what kind of some of the challenges have been.
Speaker 7:Well, what what I actually didn't see what can you give me a little more context on what what Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sam said? Yeah. So I'll read exactly what he said. So this was in response to clarifying the the sort of backstop gate. He said so anyways, he he basically said, obvious one, we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centers.
Speaker 1:Then like later in the post, he said, what we do think might make sense is governments building and owning their own AI infrastructure and then the upside of that should flow to the government as well. We can imagine a world where governments decide to off take a lot of computing power and get to decide how to use it and it may make sense to provide lower cost of capital to do so. Building a strategic national reserve of computing power makes a lot of sense, but this should be for the government's benefit, not the benefit of private companies. And Sure. Just in some of the, like some of the ideas around this just reminded me of of how Go Co's have have worked in in defense tech where the government is basically saying, like, we we have we're willing to commit resources and land to Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like a certain initiative, and then you can have the private market potentially pay a role. And I have no idea how how this would how this would look like in the AI context, but I just want I I just thought it'd be helpful to understand, like, how these sort of, like, public private partnerships have worked in the past, specifically in defense.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Well, no. I can I can talk to one that was actually discussed today? So the secretary of the army was on Squawk Box this morning talking about specifically if we are giving the land and security for for massive data centers, could the army have its own data centers and and be one of the largest providers and actually off take that compute? So I do think that there are are ongoing conversations.
Speaker 7:Candidly, I haven't seen, you know, massive conversations about how it's going to be in app enacted by the Department of War, but I thought it was very interesting that the secretary of the army was basically saying that, you know, this is something that they would be very interested in, that they know that they are going to need their own compute, and that if there is sort of a trade off of we provide the land and the security, there should be an understanding that that that compute then goes to to the army. So I I don't know that they fully fleshed out the details Yeah. Of of those sorts of things, but I do think there's a lot of conversations about this. And, you know, it's it's good to hear that that Sam is also talking about that in in certain ways. But I do think for the Department of War, they know that it's top of mind, and I think they're being a lot more experimental, which again comes back to if you have a system of of requirements that that is far more sort of open, I'd say, to experimentation or working with new companies that can do that.
Speaker 7:It does give the the, you know, secretaries of the army or the navy a lot more authority to make those decisions on kind of the the actual things like compute or energy that they need.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you think about the the flow between, like, entrepreneurial ideas, like problems that are identified in the private sector? Somebody starts a company. Like, with Andoril is, like, the flipped model, this idea that r and d should maybe live outside of the taxpayer dime, be funded by venture capitalists. That company gets built.
Speaker 2:Eventually, those ideas are percolating into DC, and then the the world updates. America updates. We change the way we work. Things get better, but Anderol benefits, and people are pointing the finger, you know, like, hey. You you you're the one that advocated for this.
Speaker 2:And I feel like that's kind of where Sam's caught right now, where OpenAI is advocating for things that I think are good for America but also might benefit OpenAI. And so he has to do this delicate dance of, like, well, I was independent on this one, but this one does benefit me, etcetera, etcetera. It's, like, such a communications challenge. Do you think it's Yeah. Do you like, do you have any best practices for, like, how to not get over your skis on that?
Speaker 7:Well, I think it's I think, as you said, it's sort of a typical Washington story where in in order for things to change, you you do have to sort of, you know, kind of Washington's a meme town. This is Silicon Valley is a meme town. Like, you have to be able to tell your story why it's so important. I would argue that that Andrew was was exceptional at at really telling the story of why you need attritable systems, why you need modular systems. Basically, the the kind of, you know, the the kind of frameworks that we're using today inside the Department of War came from those memes being established.
Speaker 7:But, yes, if you're if you're successful inside of of Washington, you're going to tick off a lot of different people.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 7:And you're going to to certainly upset sort of the the bureaucratic class. And what was very interesting too about this this speech Yeah. Is that the secretary actually called out the bureaucratic class and said, like, this is not a problem with people that we have. This is not a problem with innovation or technology. It is the bureaucracy that is stopping us from making great decisions.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I think, like, that that is something that is that is, you know, always been the problem with DC. And I think, you know, the the the most important thing that companies can always do is just continue saying what they believe, going to Washington, building those relationships. And I think if anything over the last ten years, this defense defense acquisition reform, which everyone said was impossible Yeah. Is now actually at our fingertips and going to happen because it makes sense. The argument has been made.
Speaker 7:It's been made in dozens of different ways across many administrations, and everyone's in agreement on it now. So for founders that that feel like, oh gosh. Like, look look at these great companies that are getting backlash because they they've, you know, kind of spread their own gospel and now they're being attacked for it. Like, that's actually, I think, a sign of progress. Yeah.
Speaker 7:If you're being attacked for what you're what you're advocating in Washington, that's usually a good thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Final question. What is your most up to date guidance for your portfolio companies around the shutdown?
Speaker 7:Yeah. No. So, I mean, it it definitely is having an impact. Right? Like, the the companies that were expecting contracts to come in or re reprogramming dollars, like, they're not going to necessarily see it on the timelines that they thought maybe, you know, maybe a quarter ago.
Speaker 7:That said, I I do think that a lot of these provisions that are happening right now, are are so transformative that in the long run, like, kind the of if we look back on what happened in in the year 2025, it will have been a very, very good year for startups. Maybe maybe their their numbers will lag by a quarter just because, okay, like, the funds can't be delivered depending on how long the shutdown goes down. It's having a greater impact actually on the citizen. Right? Like, I mean, what's happening with air traffic control, what's happening, you know, across, you know, civic benefits.
Speaker 7:Like, that that is something that I think we're now all feeling the pain of or or people who are dependent on those benefits are certainly feeling the pain of or people who are traveling or or planning to travel for upcoming Thanksgiving are certainly gonna feel the pain of the shutdown. But it's certainly having an impact on companies, and I think most companies are still working exceptionally hard on the things that they can work hard on now even if the even if the contracts can't get signed or the press releases can't be put out or or the dollars aren't coming in yet. Yeah. But I think when we look back this year the story of this year will actually be the defense acquisition reform and and what's happening for these companies in the long term versus sort of the short term stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Short term pain, long term gain. Yeah. Absolutely. Awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for taking notes and giving us a full breakdown.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much. Yes.
Speaker 1:Always great to keep
Speaker 2:you going. Talk to you soon. Cheers. A good one. Let me tell you about Linear.
Speaker 2:Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps, and start building. And we have our next guest, Mikey Schulman from Suno in the restroom waiting room. Welcome to the TPP and Ultradome. How are doing?
Speaker 7:It's great to be here.
Speaker 6:I'm doing great. How are you guys?
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Fantastic to have you. I'm
Speaker 2:I'm very excited about this. I have a million questions, and I and I know that we're just gonna go super deep into all the details of user behavior. But kick us off with just a general high level inner introduction on you and the company, and then we'll go from there.
Speaker 6:Cool. Yeah. It's great to be here. I don't know. I'm not so interesting.
Speaker 6:The company's much more interesting. The way I like to think of it is we are delivering the best, most valuable digital musical experiences, to the whole world. And right now, the things that are available to the end user are not always amazing. They're not always differentiated. And I think that's just like a failure of imagination that you can do so much more with music and you can enjoy it so much more.
Speaker 6:So that's how I think about us. What was the
Speaker 1:first song that you ever made?
Speaker 6:Ever made? Yeah. I've been playing piano since I'm four. I played in a lot of bands in high school and in college. I play every day.
Speaker 6:So, I don't actually know the answer to that, but it's probably like chopsticks or something.
Speaker 2:Are you a foundation model Chopsticks company
Speaker 1:is a classic.
Speaker 2:Or an application layer company or both? Look.
Speaker 6:The the answer is both. You know, all the technologies are ours. These didn't exist. But I think about and may maybe this will color the conversation. And, certainly, you know, when you guys were discussing us last week or two weeks ago Okay.
Speaker 6:All that matters here is the product. All that matters is that we deliver an experience to a user that makes them feel a certain way. And so at the end of the day, like, that like, if there were a way to do what we're doing without AI, like, we would probably do that. There just isn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it in in Wait. So so there is a way we normally you don't even treat models and you use someone else's models, but as long as you have the best application, like, that's where the value accrues.
Speaker 6:I think so. Like, at the end of
Speaker 2:day story.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Users don't care. And I I think probably at some point, maybe there's like a last model we officially release Yeah. And and the rest is just like amazing product updates.
Speaker 2:No. No. I I completely agree with That makes sense, George.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. What walk us through we we normally don't talk about the history of companies too much during interviews, but because you're I mean, this is the first time on the show, like, I'd love to kind of understand the different inflection points for at for the business. I mean, you guys just grown tremendously over the last, over the last year. So walk yeah.
Speaker 1:Walk us through kind of the the history of Suno and then kind of the history of even AI music and how those two things track.
Speaker 6:Sure. We launched this product a little over two years ago. I think it was in September. And it was kind of barely passable back then. It was a a Discord bot.
Speaker 6:It's actually something I got wrong completely. Thankfully, I have good cofounders, who disabuse me of my bad ideas.
Speaker 1:And was that like a mid was that a mid journey? Were you inspired by mid journey? Yep.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. It was working for mid journey. Why not for you? It working
Speaker 6:so well for mid journey. Yeah. And I thought we'd be on Discord forever. And then it was, like, around Thanksgiving, we released of that year, we released, like, a really thin web app. It didn't even have the full functionality of the Discord bot.
Speaker 6:And five days for 90% of the traffic to move over to the web. It's like September, there's market signal that I got something wrong. They're just, like, very, very strong. And I think slowly but surely, you know, we keep releasing new products, new models. The product gets more engaging.
Speaker 6:The music gets more impactful. And slowly but surely, I I would say the cartoon you should have is it becomes more and more appealing to a larger and larger group of people every time you make the product better. And so it's basically been a lot of iteration. Yes. There are inflection points.
Speaker 6:Everything consumer is, like, a little bit lumpy, but that's that's the history of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What did what did the early cohort of users look like? How are they using the product? Where like, why were they I'm assuming they were you know, you had I'm sure you had a cult kind of cult following kind of early. What what did that early cohort look like?
Speaker 1:And and and is it that much different than than today? Or is it just scaled up?
Speaker 6:It's very different today. So the early cohort, I would describe as like very tech forward and music curious. And it's like, here's this new thing. You kind of have to suspend disbelief. You need to be really forgiving because the music actually isn't all
Speaker 5:that good.
Speaker 6:And as you make the product better, you you grow out from there. And now, it's like people who love music who are, like, a little bit tech curious. And actually, at this point, you don't even need to be all that tech curious. There's, a fairly easy to use experience on both web and mobile that you can just kinda dive into. And so I think the the early users are indeed like you know, if you were on Discord let me put it this way.
Speaker 6:If you were on Discord, like, you are a very different kind of user than the type of person who might find out Download a web app. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so and so today, I think, like, part of the part of the debate that we were having, and and you can, deliver some some truth around this, is, what, like, what are kind of the key cohorts that are using and loving Suno? Everyone by now has probably seen, you know, viral short form videos where people are combining two different songs and and some of the reach on on these assets is insane. You'll see, you know, somebody combining, like, rap artists like Future with jazz music and and, you know, getting, you know, hundreds or tens of millions or, you know, potentially even more views on this type of content. But then we've also heard of stories of professional musicians using this to like accelerate their workflows.
Speaker 1:And then we've now heard stories of people that are just using creating music just for personal consumption. And so what what are are the different kind of cohorts look like? And what what are you guys what kind of user are you guys most focused on?
Speaker 6:So the professional content creator, be they professional music creator or other content creator, this is like mid single digit percentage of our user base. And the vast majority of people are people who love music, but aren't making music for any other purpose. That's just we call it creative entertainment. This is just like a new behavior. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so I think trying to apply too much of what you know from other things, be it consumer social platforms or video games, it's always you always just have to take everything with a grain of salt. Yeah. But most people, they come and they find that music making is incredibly enjoyable. And if you have studied an instrument and made music with your friends, like, probably already know this, and you just don't believe that it can be done digitally. And then you kinda find the product and you realize, oh my god, this can be done digitally.
Speaker 6:I'm gonna enjoy the hell out of making music. I usually try to cartoonize our our average user as people who would say, I love music. I love to sing. You don't love it when I sing. That's kind of that's kind of our
Speaker 5:sweet spot.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. That's interesting. And and and that tracks on, like, actual monetization. It's not like those are the free users and then the all the revenue comes from professional people or, like, API. Like, it it actually matches roughly what you described.
Speaker 6:That that's right. And so fascinating. I you know, you guys mentioned, a couple weeks ago Yeah. The Chris Dixon thing, the like Yeah. Come for the tool, stay for the network.
Speaker 6:I think about it a little differently for us. I I kinda think of it for us as like, come for the gimmick and stay for the joy. And this is like the party trick of making that song that even if it's not, you know, your favorite artist, you know, which you largely can't platform, but it's, you know, make the country song about Debbie being late. That's the party trick. But there's something that is behind the party that you get pulled into, and all of a sudden you are a music maker and you're enjoying it.
Speaker 6:And so I actually I I don't think it's bad that, you know, there's like this this this song that is meant to be consumed once that you're never gonna consume again that, like, you laugh for four seconds with your friend. I think we don't want you said, I almost just need to know the prompt, and then I don't need to know the rest of the song. Like, I don't actually think that's bad because there's this amazing experience that it gets backed up with that people spend hours a day on.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. And I I when I think about some of the most fun moments of my childhood, it was my dad writing and playing a song for guitar and singing it one time and never singing it again. And I still, like, just remember the moments and the and the joy of that. And so, like, the concept of, like, ephemeral songs that can be created for a moment that historically, you would have needed, you know, studio time.
Speaker 1:You would have needed to spend all this time, like, writing the song, you know, producing all this stuff, and now it can be done in an instant. I I think it really is it really is Yeah. Totally magical.
Speaker 2:Where where I think
Speaker 6:this is similar to this. Like, there's ephemeral pictures on your phone. Right? And you're never gonna look at them again unless Apple tells you to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where where where are the rough edges or where where are the edges that you wanna be, like, careful around? I feel like, with ChatGPT, no one was really expecting the whole, like, getting one shotted and, like, psychosis and, like, delusions of grandeur. Like, that came out of nowhere in my opinion. And And then all of a sudden, it was, like, an issue, and they had to work on it. And, of course, there's, like, guardrails that they can put up.
Speaker 2:Mid journey, I think a lot of people use that as art therapy. I haven't seen that many people or heard that many anecdotes about people, like, going crazy because of mid journey, but they're still, like if you're doing image generation, you don't wanna generate adult content, for example. Do you have an idea of, like, the shape of the battle that you're gonna be waging against, like, the the the like, the risks that you wanna, like, fight off?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Look. I think for us, they're actually just fairly lower stakes than those other ones. Like, our AI turning anyone into paper clips and not that I think that that's a real thing anyway. And I I like you said, I don't think we're we're we're inducing psychosis in anyone.
Speaker 6:You know, this is a tricky question. Music, the the the content has kind of always been filthy in in the best music. Oh, sure. I don't really want us to be the arbiter of that. So we have like some some content moderation that's like pretty, I would say, pretty forgiving.
Speaker 6:And and currently, that's actually that's it. And then lots of copyright moderation, of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was, I was raised on Little John and the East Side Boys, and, it was it was indeed filthy. Yeah. And and, yes, it it would not be your place to necessarily filter that. I would imagine that you, at some point, have to do some sort of, like, KYC age verification or or even something that's just like parental controls, that type of stuff.
Speaker 2:That that certainly makes sense. I I have a follow-up question.
Speaker 1:Go go for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I there was an article in the in the journal yesterday about how Instagram had used PG 13 as a heuristic for the type of content that they would show to teenagers on Instagram. And the MPAA actually pushed back against that, and I was very upset about that because I feel like we need shared language for how we describe what is acceptable on new tech platforms. So, like, I want you to be able to put the label of, like, explicit content. Remember that explicit content on every album?
Speaker 2:It became so iconic. It was actually cool, which maybe had a bad effect. But if you put that if you put that black and white flag with the explicit on there, I know exactly what I'm getting, and I know that I'm gonna keep that out of my out of the hands of my kids for a number of years. And I would hate for I would hate to be in a situation where you couldn't use that, and you had to come up with some new jargon for your policy. I love just building on the shoulders of giants, but have you thought about adapting any of those terminologies or just making your moderation language match what people already know?
Speaker 2:Is that relevant to you?
Speaker 6:Not as much as it is on other platforms.
Speaker 3:I mean
Speaker 6:but it is. You know, I feel like we should not be the arbiters of a lot of these things and, you know, quite quite frankly maybe like you don't want us to be the arbiters of these things and that there should be other guidelines set by other things. And so like, yes, if you're dealing with children, you're gonna have different rules about the songs that you can make and that you cannot make. And actually, right now, parents making songs with their kids is actually mega use case. It's probably half of my usage, which is a lot.
Speaker 6:I I use the product a lot. And so it's like, right now, this is actually not the biggest focus for us. Like, what we have like works pretty well. There are always going to be edge cases. There are edge cases in moderation on every single platform literally, you know, ever.
Speaker 6:And Of course. We kinda just do them as they come.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What are your conversations like with people in the music industry? There were there was some news earlier this week around the first, like, AI artist signed a record deal. I don't know if it was actually the first, but that's how it was being reported. How are the conversations with are going with your users that are, like, true pro users that are using SunO to either, like, you know, experiment with, like, a bunch of different variations of songs, get new ideas, make entire songs themselves?
Speaker 1:What are those conversations like?
Speaker 6:You know, I think there's been a huge shift in the last six months. I would say, like, now, I really don't meet a lot of professionals who don't use Sunu at least a little bit. Like, songwriters use us a ton. We run a lot of camps as it's cliche, but a creative companion or a creative copilot for helping craft the right songs, you know, verse by verse or getting ideas. Basically, every producer I know uses Suno.
Speaker 6:This it was recently put to me just in an incredibly pithy way of, we've become the Ozempic of the music industry. Everybody's on it, nobody wants to talk about it. And while that might be frustrating for us that in the interim nobody wants to talk about it, in the long run, that's actually great. You know, in the
Speaker 3:long run, the
Speaker 6:fact that everybody is using it and loves it is fantastic. And so it's this weird dynamic, I think, where one on one people are quite pro even though, like, the industry as a whole may have different feelings about it.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. Yeah. I wonder I wonder how this, like like, the creative the creative element of this, like, really throws me because, on on the one hand, I see if if I'm thinking about Suno in the creative realm is, you know, cursor for your for your DAW, your your your workstation, your your Fruity Loops or your Pro Tools or your Ableton, and you're generating samples and actually working through that. I feel like that is something that, yes, would get to a 100% penetration. But on the flip side, like, we've had the ability to generate blog posts and text for years now at human touring test level.
Speaker 2:And and yet, like, we're I it does not feel like we're close to just, oh, yeah. Just put in a prompt, write a good blog post, and it comes out, and it's good. Like, you still need that that spark, that inspiration. And then most people, I I feel like, are still not they're they're you they're still in the copilot era for sure. And I feel like that that that's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 6:I think there's a big difference, though, here,
Speaker 2:which
Speaker 6:is that there's a few big differences. But for me, you know, hearing you say that, I I it makes me think a lot of you're thinking of us largely as a tool. Sure. And it's because a lot of AI products are tools. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And the point is not to just turn this blog post out. Actually, the point is to have enjoyed the process of it. I happen not to really enjoy the process of writing so much. Maybe maybe you guys are different. But like, for us Yeah.
Speaker 6:The way people use Suno, it's like you're coming. Yes. There is some song at the end of it that you listen to and the fruits of your labor are enjoyable, but the journey of doing it is actually why you're there. And so the actual tool analogy doesn't really work there. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Of, like, I don't just write in the prompt and it comes out perfect. That's not even the point here.
Speaker 2:Yes. So I I I think what I'm I think where I'm getting is that, the actual market for AI audio is going to bifurcate in my opinion, and there will be people just like there are there are people right now that use LLMs to just chat and just have an AI therapist or they have a friend or they just ask ChatGPT four o for, you know, hey. What should I do at work about this? They're they're just having a conversation. And then out of text generation, out of LLMs, we also got just the ability to do code completion.
Speaker 2:And so we got, you know, Windsurf and Cursor and Codex. And, you know, we got these, like, coding agents, and then we also got, like, AI therapists. And these are two wildly different things from the same underlying technology. And I feel like the like, I would I would I would just be shocked if you don't see both emerge over time. I mean, maybe the different company comes in and takes one more seriously than you because of the market's really big.
Speaker 2:But I would I would imagine that you wind up servicing both to some degree. No?
Speaker 6:For sure. I mean, we already service both. But I, you know, I almost think this as, in the coding example Yeah. You might vibe code something Yeah. And that's just a few prompts.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Or you might actually need fine grained control over the music is generally what I'm looking for and I enjoyed the process of getting there. But maybe that's the end of it. And if this is going to be a song that is everlasting and intended to top the charts, I need that fine grained control and I need a different paradigm and a different set of workflows tools for doing it. And so, there may even be the under the same underlying model that powers both of those things and it's a different end user application.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how do you think, like, video creation is distinctly different than, like, music creation? Because I think, you know, on our side watching the Sora launch, Sora was like a cool creative tool that had this novel, like, feature that was the Cameo feature. But then immediately, those outputs just want wanted to go live elsewhere. Right?
Speaker 1:They wanted to go where these big audiences were. And I feel like with Suno, the difference is, like, you can create music and you wanna save stuff and it's actually can be very enjoyable to just listen to the content. Is that is that just a like, do you think that will do you think that will always be kind of, the dynamic? Or do you think eventually, like, video models will catch up to the point where, like, people are generating videos and then just, like, consuming them a lot? Because I haven't again, like, I think a lot of the the output of something like Asura has been, like, very ephemeral.
Speaker 1:It gets maybe shared in a group chat or gets shared on another social media platform, but people are not like revisiting the content.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think look, very fast moving space. And so, you know, this is just one guy's opinion today. I think there's basically two big differences. One is the joy in making the music.
Speaker 6:And I think people mostly enjoy consuming the SORA outputs and the the experience of making it is is less interesting. And then the other thing about video in general, but especially AI video is it really tends to short form. And actually the beauty of music is that it really is meant to grab you for minutes at a time and not seconds at a time. And it makes for a completely different consumptive experience. And so and I think that's actually a lot of what's broken in music consumption today is there's so much pressure to put on a song and then put, you know, through headphones and then put your phone in your pocket and not even really pay attention to it.
Speaker 6:But I I think a lot more is possible where I do have somebody's attention for three minutes, four minutes, and you can actually tell the story through music in a way that, like, a thirty second video really does not. And so maybe AI video will get there. Maybe it will get there in a year. Maybe it'll get there in five years. But, like, today, that's what I see as the the two big differences.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. How do you think the music streaming platforms will navigate AI music?
Speaker 6:I think they look. They they already are. There's AI music on these platforms. Spotify has announced that they'll start doing AI music. And so I I I very strongly suspect that in, like, five years, this is not a conversation that's being had because I already know that there's little bits of our music everywhere in in Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You know, mega smashes. And the same way you don't think about like, was this song digitally produced or was it produced on a giant console in a studio somewhere and that's maybe something that people thought for five years, you know, thirty years ago. My very strong suspicion or just like auto tune where now every song has auto tune in it even if you can't hear it. My very strong suspicion is that that is where everything ends up. And the reason is it is better for consumers.
Speaker 6:It would really be bad for consumers and therefore bad for the size of the ecosystem if these things kind of bifurcate.
Speaker 1:Yep. That makes a lot of sense. It's like asking, I don't even think anyone ever asked the question, how will social media apps handle Photoshop? Photoshop was Yeah. Photoshop outputs were just immediately the tool existed prior to social media.
Speaker 1:So it just proliferated immediately.
Speaker 2:I I mean, speaking of Photoshop, Photoshop has had to grapple with the existence of generative images, through partnerships, through rolling their own. How important is it to you to play in the market of, like, the enterprise audio workflows, do deals, partnerships? Because what we saw in the text in the in at least in code, at least, every coding platform or and there were a whole bunch of new ones. Like, there there's been a real battle for the IDE, and I'm wondering if there's, like, a battle coming for the the the the top end of the music production workflow.
Speaker 6:I think there there probably will be a battle, but it will be not nearly the bloodbath that it will be in other domains. And it's just because the average piece of music today is produced in 800 different tools. And so and everybody has all of the tools. And so I actually don't think it's entirely reasonable to think that there will be one tool that uses up all of your screen time. And, like, that's gonna be the thing that you produce 99% of your music in if you are a true professional.
Speaker 6:And so, you know, there, the the end goal is the perfect song and and a little bit less the journey of how you got there.
Speaker 1:Yep. Interesting.
Speaker 6:Code, it's like Versus Code is just open all the time. Yep. And I don't wanna have another editor. And if you, like, talk to people who develop iOS, they're pissed off because they have two editors. Yep.
Speaker 6:But it's not nearly the same 800 different tools that it is in music.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. That makes a ton
Speaker 4:of sense.
Speaker 5:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:This is super interesting. Thank you for, coming on to to, to break it down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This was awesome. Thanks so much. I'm gonna My pleasure.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna use Suno, to try to make, bedtime with the the the my three and a half year old a little bit easier later tonight. So I'll report back.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm
Speaker 1:excited What to what are the bet what are what are some of your favorite prompts that you use with your kid or kids?
Speaker 6:You know, lot of them are songs. I have a a one year old and four year old. It's, like, still too early for the one year old. A lot of them are songs about him in fantastical situations. Like, my most favorite one is just like last winter after the the Zamboni driver at the local ice rink let him, like, ride in the Zamboni.
Speaker 6:Because it was, like, like, a whole album of songs about him riding in a Zamboni doing all sorts of crazy stuff. And, yeah, they're, like, very special and personal, and I do go back to those. And and gosh. Yeah. I I think this is wonderful.
Speaker 6:Sometimes we joke if we were a kids app, we'd have five times the revenue that we do. You know, it's just like kids is, like, the most straightforward way to get me to part with my money. I'm sure you're the same one.
Speaker 1:Totally totally agree. Suno Kids, maybe. The iPad the iPad app. Yeah. Something like next year.
Speaker 2:Awesome.
Speaker 6:No. Not actually.
Speaker 2:But who knows?
Speaker 1:So great to meet you, Mikey. Thank you
Speaker 2:for coming
Speaker 6:on, and congrats on all the progress. Guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Let me tell you about numeral.com.
Speaker 2:Sales tax and autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Speaking of kids
Speaker 1:So nice to drop the HQ.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Drop the HQ.
Speaker 1:RIP to numeral HQ.
Speaker 2:Speaking of kids, I want your review of this way to decide how to buy a house. So in New York City in 2023, this real estate agent worked with a couple who wanted to purchase purchase an apartment on the Upper West Side Of Manhattan, but they wanted their Pokemon obsessed six year old son to have a say. How? By playing Pokemon in each neighborhood before his parents would commit to a purchase. We spent an afternoon covering four neighborhoods as the child played the game and caught Pokemon characters.
Speaker 2:It turns out that Central Park West was a hotspot for Pokemon GO characters that day, and we toured a two bedroom co op that was listed for about $2,000,000. The child ended up catching a Snorlax as soon as we stepped inside Central Park. A Snorlax is a blue green character that looks like a bear and is apparently extremely rare to find because it spends the majority of its life asleep. The child is screaming, jumping up and down. He was so excited to find it.
Speaker 2:Although my clients looked at seven other apartments that day, no other area came close in terms of Pokemon action, so they knew that apartment was the one. They wrote up an offer that same day for the full asking price. What's your review? Is that a good way? Is that cute and adorable to bring your kids in?
Speaker 2:Cute. Or is it weird?
Speaker 1:It potentially could lead to total heartbreak, you know, if the kid's just like, yeah. This is the the It's
Speaker 2:actually a dry spot now.
Speaker 1:This is a Pokemon hotspot, and then they're then the then the Pokemon dry up. But we begin after moving in.
Speaker 2:Good take.
Speaker 1:And they're like, what are we doing here? I know we just moved in here, but we gotta I I
Speaker 2:We gotta leave. Road.
Speaker 1:We gotta get closer to the Pokemon.
Speaker 2:We gotta we mom and dad, we gotta book a wander. We gotta find our happy place, find our Pokemon hunting spot. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dream beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I I think, I think I like the idea of bringing the kid, the six year old, into the into the house purchase process, but, let's leave the phones at home, and let's develop a taste for, let's become snobs. How about that six year old? Become a snob and say, no. I I couldn't live anywhere, but
Speaker 1:I don't like the cafe on
Speaker 2:the East Side because I have strong opinions about this. Get into the lore. What happened on this street? That's what the six year old should
Speaker 1:do. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm fine to delegate to the six year old, but not to Niantic, the company behind Pokemon GO. Anyway, our next guest is waiting for us in the restream waiting room. We have Ahmad from Mercury. How you doing? Good to see you.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Great to see you.
Speaker 4:Hey. Good to be back. How are you doing? Great.
Speaker 1:It's been a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's been a while.
Speaker 1:Little bit.
Speaker 2:Great to
Speaker 1:be back.
Speaker 2:Give us an update on what's going on in your world, and then I wanna just talk about all the crazy stuff that's happening in tech, honestly.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Let's go for it. We just announced, today on on Fortune term sheet that we had three years of profitability. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 3:Woah. Woah.
Speaker 4:I'm excited about it. Alright.
Speaker 1:You're hitting all the sound effects.
Speaker 2:Founder mode.
Speaker 1:That is Nice. That is wild.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Full founder mode. Yeah. So it's been a
Speaker 2:One weird trick. VCs hate this. VCs hate this. One weird trick. Area man discovers profitability.
Speaker 2:Congratulations.
Speaker 4:It's actually really funny. You know, I love my VCs, but there's definitely every every board meeting, they're like, okay. You know, how can we spend this money a little bit faster? So it's true. I was actually talking to some CEOs just like last this week.
Speaker 4:And, yeah, most of the time, like, spending more money doesn't mean you grow faster. Mhmm. And that's kinda like what I was, you know, trying to celebrate with this milestone that like it's yeah. You we're building software companies there, at least we are, not everyone. Yep.
Speaker 4:I got picture. Spend money to grow.
Speaker 2:I got I got a picture. You're in a strong financial position. You should put out a press release that says, we don't need a backstop. We don't need a government backstop. We are we are profitable.
Speaker 5:I didn't know there was a
Speaker 4:backstop available to me. Well, you
Speaker 1:know, it was ready to use I was ready to when when those comments started floating Wednesday, I was ready to use the analogy of, like, what would happen if there was a government backstop Yeah. On venture backed corporate cards?
Speaker 2:Wait. I mean, I mean, truly, you are you are a bank, and you and you've obviously lived through you lived through the financial crisis.
Speaker 1:Can't say he's a bank.
Speaker 2:No. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:But We're not a banking.
Speaker 2:We're not a fair partner with banks. Partner, but but you're obviously intimately familiar with the financial system. Do you have any do you have any unique lessons or stories that you tell from the financial crisis, warning signs that you pull from even just like movies or books or something that you keep going back to as like, you know, we wanna stay sharp on this?
Speaker 4:You know, I think like building trust in what Mercury does has always been. It's actually probably the hardest thing we do, right, because, you know, we're asking a lot from people. We are storing all their money for their business and, you know, it's like I had this conversation when we first launched Mercury with someone who'd raised $10,000,000 and he was like, this is more money than I've ever seen in my whole life. I'm not gonna put give it to a start up banking service. And now we have customers that have more than a 100,000,000 with Mercury.
Speaker 4:So like building that trust is always so important. Yeah. You know, obviously, I know which financial crisis you're you're referring
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but I I do wanna talk
Speaker 4:about SUV as well. Like the SUV crisis.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Of course. You
Speaker 4:know? What what what
Speaker 2:were what were the biggest lessons from the SUV crisis?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing for us was it can't just be all talk. Right? Like, if I yeah. And I was talking to founders saying like, hey.
Speaker 4:You should trust Mercury. And they'd be like, oh, man. Like, SVB is a 40 year old company and they just like, you know,
Speaker 2:are
Speaker 4:dying. Why should we trust Mercury? And then, you know, what we did and what we've continued to kind of invest in is to make it so it's not just about trusting Mercury. It's about like having products that that deliver like trust.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, we have like accelerated FDIC insurance, which is, you know, I guess on the website we publish 5,000,000, but it's actually most accounts get way more than 5,000,000.
Speaker 2:So Sure.
Speaker 4:Almost all the deposits that sit at Mercury are FDIC insured. Yeah. And that was the big thing. I think SVB was at 80 ish percent uninsured deposits. And
Speaker 1:that because just for anybody that's not super familiar, that's because they had standard 2 and a quarter million dollar of FDIC insurance, but almost every account had well beyond that because Yeah. Exactly. They business starters, especially
Speaker 4:especially VC backed businesses, you know.
Speaker 2:And also in a zero interest rate environment in a zero interest rate you're like, I'm just gonna keep it in the checking account. I raised a $5,000,000 seat. I'll just literally keep it in the checking account because, like, what's the point if I move it to some other vehicle? I'm gonna earn point 5% or point 1%. Now it's now it's a different environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was it always a plan to get profitable, stay profitable as fast as sort of reasonably possible? I think, like
Speaker 2:Or did that happen? You have SVB.
Speaker 1:If people are trusting you as, a financial platform institution, it it's not exactly comforting to know that you're burning money Exactly. And your financial institution
Speaker 4:the other, you know, the other thing that was part of SVB was, you know, like, people just had so little time to move all of their banking operations, and it's just like there's so much reliant on a bank account for a business. And It was such a funny moment.
Speaker 2:My I was I was with SVB. It collapsed, and I was like, I need to go someplace less risky. I'm going to First Republic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then that collapsed too. I was
Speaker 4:like lot
Speaker 2:people. But that's that feels like an even old I don't know if which one's actually older. I think First Republic was older, but it was this odd thing
Speaker 4:because a little bit I believe.
Speaker 2:Total total refutation of the Linde principle. It was like, actually go to Mercury. Yeah. Yeah. Would've been better.
Speaker 2:I'm
Speaker 1:sorry. I was
Speaker 4:gonna say, I think one of the parts of that was like, up yeah. You rely so much of operations and it's even more extreme for Mercury customers because, you know, we do more than banking, so we do people's credit cards and invoicing and, you know, we've been building more and more features and our customers are reliant on a broader set of features. So Mhmm. You know, I think part of like being profitable and sustaining profitability is being you know, making that promise to our customers that this is like something that's gonna stick around. So if they use us, it's not like, you know, one day we don't raise a funding round or or, you know, whatever.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. It makes sense.
Speaker 4:Crash or something and Yeah. People have to like worry about that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's definitely like a core part of that kinda having that trusted service.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where where are you guys getting the most leverage from AI?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Good question. The biggest thing we've done is like back office stuff. There's just a to run a fintech especially kinda on the banking side, there's just a ton of people that have to do a lot of back office things and, you know, that's like you have to upload a formation document and someone has to review it and, you know, there's all of these things are very ripe for AI to just, you know, smooth smooth it out either like automate a 100% or automate a 80% so that like a human can just review the read the answers.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Lots of stuff on compliance risk back office is is being our biggest investment. We've got lots of you know, I'm not I guess a lot of what we do at Mercury is like not kind of follow fads or whatever. So we have we've done a bunch of things that are user facing, but, know, we try to add like little bits of value here and there. So, yeah, we have a chatbot so you can ask your questions and that's been actually actually, it's sold like 40% of tickets.
Speaker 4:Customer questions are just like, you know, hey, when's yeah. How long does it take for a while to settle in?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:That you know, those kinds of questions. So and that's just a better customer experience and, you know, we think about how
Speaker 2:do And that's we and that's 40% over the baseline of like, because most most most customer support systems, like, if you email in, it would just previously do, like, a fuzzy database search to be like Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it seems like you're asking about this FAQ. You got a 40% lift on top of that because you were already out doing best practices, I imagine. Something like that.
Speaker 4:Yes. It's a bit more complicated because we still have that email system when people email it in. Yeah. Yeah. So this did replace, like, the suggested topics in, the live messaging
Speaker 2:Okay. System.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, I don't know exactly
Speaker 2:What about on the
Speaker 5:cost side?
Speaker 4:The suggested answers was way way less because people don't like read read those specific things. Like, they just want an answer, and then we'll move on.
Speaker 2:What about on the cost side? We were talking to Ivan Notion. He said that his inference bill was actually having an effect on his gross margins. You've remained profitable. But if I'm looking deeper in your financials, will I see an uptick in inference bills based on actually, is that something that you're actually trying to manage as you stay profitable, or has it been low enough that it just, Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think it's not it's You know?
Speaker 1:Wildly different, I think, using it in back back office context where you're sort of processing forms and PDFs and things like that versus Ivan where people are like, I'm gonna generate, you know, trillions of tokens because I'm just making long documents and Totally.
Speaker 4:On the back office side, it's mostly been a cost saving. Right? Like, you're you're kind of giving leverage to humans and Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like Or you're moving off of like a mechanical turk or scale or something like that
Speaker 4:Yeah. Whatever workload it is. And yeah. On the user facing side, it's you know, I think a big difference for us is, you know, we have 200,000 plus customers, but it's not that many customers. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, a lot of, like, consumer services have millions of customers. Like, each of our customers is obviously, like Yeah. Much more valuable.
Speaker 2:And also, you you probably don't have, like, a ton of d a d a I mean, you probably have a lot of DAUs, but you it it it's not the app that people open when they wake up. Yeah. You know? I mean, it's a great
Speaker 4:It's it's much more utility than productivity.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, people are actually kinda You need
Speaker 4:to do something. That's why you
Speaker 2:do it. Exactly. And so and so the inference is just gonna be so much lower than if Instagram is all of a sudden being like, we're gonna run an LLM query on every on every, you know, photo that gets uploaded. It's like, okay. Well, that's a huge amount of inference.
Speaker 1:What
Speaker 4:Yeah. And we're doing more and more, though, so, you know, potentially, you know, when you're churning through all these transactions, it'll go up. I don't expect for us we also make way more on a per customer basis than
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Actually, I don't know about Notion, but then like most prosumer consumer
Speaker 2:Sure. Type
Speaker 4:Sure. I think it would net out that it would be a smallish percentage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes a sense.
Speaker 1:What are you what are you seeing across your angel portfolio? Like, you've been you've been investing Yeah. Yeah. Like like
Speaker 4:I I guess for context, I've I've done about 350 investments in the last ten years. I don't know if I need to go for that. And I just actually announced earlier this year my I have, like, a formal angel fund now. It was a 26,000,000 kinda angel fund. I mean, I'm still mostly investing in the same way.
Speaker 4:I mostly invest because it's just fun to talk to founders, I guess the same reason you guys run this podcast is, like, interesting to talk to founders and learn learn new ideas. Yeah. It's all it's very AI focused right now as you can imagine. You know, what's I think AI is kind of fun to invest in because, like, every six months what you're investing in, like, changes a lot. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, for a while, it was kind of dev tools in AI, and now that I feel like that's done. So most of what I see right now is kinda deeper vertical kind of b to b applications of AI.
Speaker 2:Do you think AI gives people the permission to invest in more unique categories? Because, basically, like, there there used to be, like, a whole set of categories that were just kind of, like, small businesses or industrials or some niche or some weird niche thing, and they would just be kind of off limits because it'd be like, oh, no. No. No. Like, the real money is made in in fintech.
Speaker 2:The real money is made in maybe maybe the edtech, but that one's difficult. Or ad tech or marketing, martech. You know, it's like there were these easy themes. But with AI, you can go and and actually put together a pitch around something that's maybe more or less untouched by tech and actually generate a deck.
Speaker 4:It's definitely like a, you know, this extension of the software is eating the world Yeah. Kind of vibe that Mark Andreessen talks about. Right?
Speaker 2:It's eating a little bit more of the world on
Speaker 4:the edges. Like ten ten ish years ago, it was all, like, social and mobile. Right? Like that's where everything was. And then we started doing like even Mercury is like ten years ago was probably off limits to like try to make something that went after the banking market.
Speaker 4:And I remember when I started in 2017, it was like, you know, it sounded weird. Right? Like, was it was it was not something that was done. Mhmm. I think the thing that AI does is, like, open up labor.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, in robotics, it opens up physical labor. And then in the case of kind of the white collar workers, it opens up like human kind of intellectual labor. And that is like a whole set of categories. You know, people generally VCs hate services firms, right?
Speaker 4:Like it's like they'll be like, oh, that's like a services firm. But now like services firms are cool. You're like, oh yeah, it's human. It's human as AI plus human services firms are like the the thing that a lot of people are investing in, ideally trying to get to like fully human only. So fully AI only.
Speaker 4:But, yeah, it's definitely, like, opened up a lot of industries that wouldn't have been interesting from a That's awesome. Investment perspective.
Speaker 1:Do you do you think people have been overly bearish on on SaaS? It's, you know, notable that OpenAI uses everything from Salesforce to Slack to Qualtrics. And I imagine you use a lot of on on your business, I don't think anybody's out there saying, you know, I'm gonna vibe code a bank, you know. Even if they could even if you could somehow build that on like a banking as a service platform, it's like the the the level, you know, the amount of work you need to do to maintain a vibe coded bank on top of,
Speaker 3:you know, it just doesn't make
Speaker 4:I mean, I think there will be a wave of disruption that will happen in SaaS, but I don't think the answer will be everyone's just making their own end to end like sales force. Like, that just that sounds ridiculous to me. Do I mean, I hope someone builds a much better Salesforce, but it'll still yeah. And maybe their pricing won't be like per seat and it'll be like per sale or whatever. But I think the category will exist.
Speaker 4:The shape of the category will change. The business model will change. I don't think the answer is everyone's building their own Salesforce. Like, that just that just sounds inefficient. Like, it just sounds ridiculous to me.
Speaker 4:But there will be like I think actually, like, the incremental new applications people build will actually make will just be more applications. Right? Like, if the number of vendors you had was like 10 and like you're paying a lot, like maybe you'll have another 90 internal apps that like people just made for like small use cases. So like the amount of software people will use will go up I think because of vibe coding and the ease of coding. But I don't think that, like, these big categories are gonna just disappear because, like, people cannot make it themselves.
Speaker 1:And do you think do you think companies will go multiproduct sooner? And are you seeing that across the portfolio if, like, the engineering actual engineering hours are less to go from, you know, one product to a second to a third that that will just encourage, you know, more companies
Speaker 4:trying to be, like, industry specific. I mean, I think a big story about fintech in the last couple of years has been, like, every fintech going multiproduct. Right? I think it's partly because, you know, when we started in 2019, like, no one was building like a better newer bank. So that's, you know, that's all it took.
Speaker 4:Like, our first product was a bank account and it was like really good. Now to compete against Mercury, you would have to have, you know, bill pay and credit cards and invoicing because like that's just what people look for like they look for more of a bundle product. So I think it depends where you're competing and to some extent it gets a little easier because you can just make products quicker. But making like amazing products isn't is never easy. Right?
Speaker 4:Like I think you just like like the quality and craft and all of that like do matter and, yeah, we try to invest a lot. Like when we make a new product, it's never easy. It's like it takes a lot to make an amazing product. But when you're like very new to a category and like almost everything in AI is like very new, you can build more quicker and then like kind of refine it over time. But it's a good question.
Speaker 4:I think a lot of the ways people will end up competing with incumbents, right, like I've heard a ton of like I I don't know why we're picking on Salesforce, but I've heard a lot of like, how do we beat Salesforce kind of strategies? And a lot of them are like, oh, actually, we're gonna bundle like AI SDR and some you know, x and y and like we're gonna make it like a much more fully featured kind of version of like Salesforce. So I think like when you compete against, you know, incumbents like doing a bundle strategy sometimes is, a better strategy. So, we'll see that play out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very cool. Well, congratulations to the whole team.
Speaker 2:Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Three year milestone. Yeah. Looking forward to the fourth, the fifth, sixth, and hopefully, hundreds of years of Mercury profitability. You gotta get past the the SVB mark Yeah. Become the the longest longest standing institution.
Speaker 4:Funny. Were they were started like a year before I was born, so I have this, like, exact mental motto.
Speaker 2:Like, they
Speaker 4:were started forty forty two years ago.
Speaker 5:That's amazing.
Speaker 4:Maybe maybe I'll stop thinking about that Yeah.
Speaker 2:When they're Actually.
Speaker 4:Gonna further down.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks so much.
Speaker 4:But, yeah, I really appreciate, you having me on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Well, congrats to the whole team.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Cheers. Bye. Bye. You heard about the importance of AI agents for customer service.
Speaker 2:You gotta head over to fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive big
Speaker 1:house, World number one champion.
Speaker 2:Ranking on g two. And he was also mentioning better CRMs. Why why not try out Adio? Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 2:Brett Adcock fired back at the hype around one x presumably, Figure CEO, Brett Atkox, says his, quote, major competitors are using teleoperation, human operators, in their videos and calls it deceiving. Does will he call out one x by name? Will he call out Elon by name? Will he call out unit three by name? Let's find out by watching this clip.
Speaker 2:His analogy, it's like if a self driving car pulled up and we found out there was some guy Tennessee.
Speaker 8:A demonstration of a robot doing something that's, like, not teleoped or, like, coded. And what you're seeing now in the world is, like, I would say most major competitor to us at this point are putting out most of their content and updates teleoped from a human. And I think it's, like, perhaps some of the most deceiving things I've ever seen. It's like, if I was driving a self driving car if a self driving car pulled up next to us and we found out there was some guy from Tennessee driving it, we'd both be like, that's, that's not what I thought this would look like. What you wanna see is
Speaker 2:So the funny thing is that Tyler, why are you laughing at that? Well,
Speaker 3:that's like exactly how self driving cars work right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Teleop is actually maybe critical to the development of full self driving cars and, maybe used by all the top companies all the time. Yes. I mean, it is odd that, like
Speaker 1:I thought that I thought it I thought it was I think it's like a key it's it's the key enabler for one x to actually get robots in homes and getting them to a point where they can do valuable work. Yeah. Right? And they're gonna be taking a loss on they're gonna be taking a loss on that. They're charging, like, $2 an hour, but that's gonna be, you know, a a flywheel for them to to get more and more training data.
Speaker 2:Oh, the founder of OneX actually replied. He, I think, Dar is the founder. Right?
Speaker 1:No. He's Dar's
Speaker 2:Oh, he's he's the founder. Oh, but he's just the loudest voice on Yes. Axe, so I I give him all the credit. He's one the He created one axe. It would be nothing without him.
Speaker 2:Anyway, he says, so basically Waymo, there were two operators to every car when Waymo started. It is interesting that, yeah, Waymo has never that I know of, they've never really, like, published data on how many operators they have per car. I think that that would actually give people a lot of reassurance around, like, okay. These cars are driving around. Are there people overwatching them?
Speaker 2:And then you just get to a point where you say, okay. Yeah. There's there's 10,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And then next year, there's 8,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And eventually, there's 5,000 operators for 5,000 cars.
Speaker 2:And then eventually, there's 1,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And eventually, there's one operator for 5,000 cars. But it's just a slow process of getting people up to speed on the on the new technology, and it just gives people, confidence at every turn, much like the confidence that I feel when I go to sleep on my eighth sleep. How'd you feel? How'd you sleep last night, Jordy?
Speaker 2:88 from me. Seven hours, thirty eight minutes. I wanna hear if that soundboard still has my favorite song on it.
Speaker 1:Boom. You got an 88? I'll give it
Speaker 2:to you. Wait. Do we tie?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I got an 83.
Speaker 2:Oh, 83. Okay.
Speaker 1:Rough one. Rough one.
Speaker 2:Well, we have breaking news from the pope. He chimed in on the AI bubble. It's some bub talk from the from the papacy. A papal bull.
Speaker 1:Is that a pop signal?
Speaker 2:On the bub talk. No. No.
Speaker 1:Where does that
Speaker 2:It's not on the bub. It's not on the bubble. It's not on the bubble. It is about it is on the it is from the pope, though, who I should be following. Why am I not following the pope?
Speaker 2:Technological innovation can be a form of, participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The church therefore calls all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work, to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life. I like that. Good line.
Speaker 2:Liquidity thinks it's AI generated slop. Very bearish. No. Yes. He used one em dash.
Speaker 2:Like, the em dash is not a telltale sign. You can just use one if you're just hammering on the keyboard. Or you can just write a note, and then in the edit, someone can use an em dash. I don't know. Is the pope one shotted?
Speaker 2:We'll never know. I think this is fine. I think this is a nice little call to action. What what what do you think, Tyler? You put this in here.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, are you guys doing if if the pope comes out and says, like, I don't I actually don't care about AI margins. What are you doing?
Speaker 2:I would be extremely bullish on that. What I'm worried about is the pope coming out and being like, actually, like, I've discovered some novel physics. I've been chatting I've been talking to Gronk, and I've been talking to Chad GPT for just, like, thousands of hours in
Speaker 3:the don't think about the recursiveness in the Bible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Yeah. Recursiveness in the Bible. Actually, it's crazy.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm the pope of the Catholic church, but I've been getting into polytheism recently. I went down a rabbit hole, and I think there might be more than one god. I think there's multiple gods.
Speaker 1:AB in the chat says, gotta get the pope on Vanta. Toe totally agree.
Speaker 2:100%.
Speaker 1:I I think it would be the the it'd be interesting if the pope started coming out and said, we're exploring taking equity stakes in technology companies like, Fannie Mae and and Freddie Mac. Yeah. Well We'll see if
Speaker 2:we bezel because your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The pope already has the the drop top six wheel g wagon.
Speaker 2:Is it six wheels?
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:No way. I always thought it was a rules no. It is a g wagon, but there's I feel like he has a wild set of cars. It's No.
Speaker 1:It's not it's not six wheels. No. It's not six wheels.
Speaker 2:Six wheels would be so But it
Speaker 1:is a one of one, and they made it. They made an EV.
Speaker 2:I love it. Speaking of EVs, the Ford f one fifty Lightning is potentially going out of production.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:It it it is it is close to failing. The Wall Street Journal has a story on the front page talking about where is this? If I could pull that up, the Ford f one, Ford ways ending electric f one fifty truck. Executives at Ford Motor are in active discussions, active talks.
Speaker 1:They're in talks. Talks.
Speaker 2:About scrapping the electric version of the f one fifty. People familiar with the matter said, which would make the unprofitable truck The US's first major EV casualty. Maybe this is do you think this is all triggered by, TJ Parker?
Speaker 1:Possible.
Speaker 2:World famous venture capitalist and founder himself. He he bought a Ford, but he didn't buy an electric one. He bought a RAVR. Why they should make why don't they make the electric one like the Raptor r? They should
Speaker 1:with an internal combustion engine?
Speaker 2:Exactly. I feel like if they want people to buy the electric version of the truck, they should give it, like, an exhaust and an engine and
Speaker 1:gas. Real engine note.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Real engine note.
Speaker 1:When I had my Raptor, I And it's more cylinders. For people anytime I was on a call in the car Yeah. People would assume that I was driving a sports car because there's so
Speaker 2:much Oh, it's insane.
Speaker 1:Noise in the cabin. It was ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the Raptor r has how many cylinders does it have? Is it an eight a v eight? It is. Right?
Speaker 1:I thought it was
Speaker 2:a So so it has it has eight cylinders. The the f one fifty Lightning had zero cylinders.
Speaker 1:That could be why it's not selling very well.
Speaker 2:The the Ford Raptor r had 5.2 liters in its engine. The f one fifty Lightning had a zero liter engine because it didn't have one. So it makes sense why this, has been struggling, and we will we'll see what they wind up doing.
Speaker 1:We gotta change the subject because all this Raptor talks got me thinking about getting one again and
Speaker 2:Pull the trigger. Well, if you think it's bullish or bearish that Ford is pulling the Raptor no. They're going they're doubling down on the Raptor. They're pulling the lightning. Get over to public.cominvesting for those that take it seriously, multi asset investing, industry leading yields.
Speaker 2:They're trusted by millions. Quadrillion. What else is going on in the markets?
Speaker 1:Euro Lewis Nada says, my inbox is full of people breathlessly trying to interpret this, and it is Yes. One year look at spy
Speaker 2:It's over.
Speaker 1:Slight dip.
Speaker 2:You can interpret this in two seconds. It's over. It's just completely over. The bubble popped. Now it's ready to start rebuilding.
Speaker 1:It was a good run.
Speaker 2:We can go up from here because the bubble has popped. You're welcome. Yep. It was rough. We got through it.
Speaker 2:We are now
Speaker 1:It's almost a weekend.
Speaker 2:We are now past the trough of disillusionment. We're in the plateau of productivity.
Speaker 1:It's good.
Speaker 2:That's what I see.
Speaker 1:It's good. It's good. And and pretty soon, oh, the stocks have already stopped trading. Yeah. So we're safe now.
Speaker 2:We're safe. You can't hurt us anymore.
Speaker 1:The economy can't hurt you on the weekend.
Speaker 2:There's there's so there's so many more charts. It's really chart talk time. Consumer sentiment almost back to its record low. People are not happy with consumer sentiment right now.
Speaker 1:See this too. Which one? Bank of America. Yes. Just, as of yesterday, fully recovered 19 from global financial crisis.
Speaker 1:Wow. Took nineteen
Speaker 2:years. To the day, and then it's like back in another crisis. Can you imagine? Uh-huh. It's like, no.
Speaker 2:We just dug our way out of the hole. No. Fantastic, famously backstopped by none other than Warren Buffett.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's been interesting to follow I mean, Berkshire Hathaway is green this week.
Speaker 2:He's got so much cash. He has
Speaker 1:so much He's
Speaker 2:building cash pile.
Speaker 1:So it's $1,070,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Least AGI pilled person in the world. Cash pills.
Speaker 1:Imagine if imagine if Berkshire Hathaway just comes in and and just acquires, like, percent of OpenAI.
Speaker 2:He likes those authentic greenbacks. AG what's what's the I for? Authentic greenback incentives. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Year. Daniel Eath says is commenting. So NVIDIA put out something Yes. On on Wednesday. So as I've long said, China is nanoseconds behind America and AI.
Speaker 1:It's it's vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Daniel says, this is an insane statement. America is more than nanoseconds ahead of China and AI. The actual gap is months, and it would be larger too if NVIDIA stopped the flow of advanced GPUs to China.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So putting him in the truth zone. There's some more information on the Snap
Speaker 2:Snapchat
Speaker 1:deal. Deal. Snap gets 400,000,000, which is greater than Perplexity's total revenue.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Snap gives nothing except access to
Speaker 2:Wait. Wait. Woah. It's more? What?
Speaker 2:They're they're they're paying more than the revenue? How how do we how does that work?
Speaker 1:Perplexity is taking VC dollars
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Giving them to Snap for distribution. There's also a there's also an
Speaker 2:equity flapping?
Speaker 1:All the Snap holders
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Are
Speaker 2:Louis, sorry. Look. This is extremely confusing. Let's read this. The deal looks incredibly in Snap's favor.
Speaker 2:Snap gets $400,000,000 greater than Perplexity total revenue. Now Signal is saying this is most likely 399,000,000 of Perplexity equity to Snap, not cash. So there is a question about how much of it is cash, versus so, yeah, the the the raise VC dollars, give it to Snap is one theory, but it is possible that they're just giving $400,000,000 of equity, like a stock grant.
Speaker 1:I think it I think it's a it's some split. Yeah. I don't know if they they published it.
Speaker 2:But sing so, like like, Signal's thesis is that it's it's 399,000,000 of equity and, like, 1,000,000 of cash. And and so it's basically just like like, we want distribution in Snap, and we're willing to give you equity to pay for it because 400,000,000 on 20,000,000,000 is 2% of the company. Right? Something like that?
Speaker 1:Yep. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:2% of the company. Snap gives nothing except access to an unloved AI chat. Perplexity gets indirect access to zero income teens. Sasha is not a fan of this deal. Spiegel, Negotiation Masterclass.
Speaker 1:Go back to the conversation we were having, I think Saturday. Yep. We were, we had a couple hour drive, and we were basically doing a podcast with no no mics. But I was saying I was surprised that Snapchat has not figured out a way to just monetize all the capital that a lot of these consumer AI companies have given their massive, massive user base.
Speaker 2:Well well, I think it's because it's because the the numbers are, like, all flipped around. Like like, Snap is is, I think, like, way more mature on all the business metrics and yet worth half perplexity. Right? Like, look at the look at the difference in terms of, like, business metrics, DAUs, paid fees.
Speaker 1:Flexity not want will not want people comping it to snap in their next financing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's odd. I don't know. It's it's it's it's some sort of, like, you know, dance to actually integrate these two things. Tane, says Snap will be integrating Perplexity directly into Snapchat's chat interface.
Speaker 2:Perplexity will play will pay Snap $400,000,000 over a year in a mix of cash and stock as part of the deal and gets access to Snap's 900,000,000 monthly active users.
Speaker 1:AV in the chat. Snapchat's gonna accidentally build AGI just trying to make the dog filter blink realistically.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 1:Do you think Tyler's at a pathway to to AGI?
Speaker 3:Well, I I mean, look, Spiegel I mean, Spiegel might be back.
Speaker 2:You think so?
Speaker 3:I mean, look, we know someone who was previously
Speaker 2:What do you think he
Speaker 3:actually snap.
Speaker 2:What do you think he actually gets? What do you think he actually gets? I I I have a lot of trouble understanding what perplexity is because it's it's it's somewhat of an application layer company, but a lot of the APIs, a lot of the foundation model products, like, do deep research. Some of them have news hooks already. So if my choice like like, Apple could have gone to Perplexity.
Speaker 2:They went to Gemini. Like, does Gemini give you search results the way Perplexity like, Perplexity's initial pitch was it's a LLM, but there's no cutoff and we'll search the web for you. I feel like most of the LLMs just do that out of the box now. And so, like, what are you getting when you partner with Perplexity over something else? What's the differentiator?
Speaker 1:You're getting cash. That's why I think You're getting paid. No. Think a lot of this deal had to have been cash because I think if I'm Evan Spiegel and I'm looking at, like, Perplexity's revenue and user base relative to his own Yes. And you're not Okay.
Speaker 2:So help me understand this math. If I'm if I'm Apple, how many how many DAUs does Apple have? Is it it's like the same size as Snapchat. Right? In terms of, like, actual iPhone users, it's gotta be a billion.
Speaker 2:Right? There's like a billion iPhone users or something like that?
Speaker 1:I think it's more.
Speaker 3:Like, 1.5.
Speaker 2:Okay. So and then Snapchat has, like, 400. Oh, wait. No. Snapchat is almost a billion, MAUs, but DAUs is, like, 400.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, 170.
Speaker 2:Okay. So let's say that let's say that Snapchat is roughly 40% as many users as Apple. So it's 40% to Apple's, you know, billion plus, 1,500,000,000. Apple is paying Google 1,000,000,000. Snapchat could potentially go and pay Google for access to Gemini 40% as much.
Speaker 2:Right? Because they're 40% the size. So they could pay 400,000,000 and get the exact same quality of of AI product that Apple is vending, you'd think, because Apple says, hey, or Google goes to Apple and says, hey. You wanna service a billion users? That'll be $1,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Oh, you wanna service 400,000,000 users? That'll be $400,000,000 because it's billion because it's basically a dollar a user.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Google's basically charging a dollar a user, but perplexity is in the opposite scenario where they're paying for the right as opposed to the other way around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is the flip. Definition of perplexity is inability to deal with or understand something complicated or unaccountable.
Speaker 2:It's perplexing.
Speaker 1:I it is perplexing. To confusion, bewilderment, puzzlement.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, this was a little bit of my of my question with Mark Gurman. He was like, no. No. No.
Speaker 2:And he kept shutting down, and I think he has a strong opinion, and he he might wind up being right. But his, my take was was when when a platform, when an aggregator partners the Foundation Model Lab, which direction should the money flow? And he was like, obviously, it should flow from the application layer to the foundation model app. So, obviously, Apple should pay Google because Google is inventing a technology and then selling that technology
Speaker 1:to Apple. I think I think it again, it would have looked a lot different. It would have been flipped if Apple was just if Gemini was becoming the default assistant within Apple
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Which they would never probably allow. Right?
Speaker 2:Well, they would if they're getting paid.
Speaker 1:Potentially, if they were getting paid $20,000,000,000. Exactly. Right?
Speaker 2:Which is like how I think this plays out, actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which is
Speaker 2:I think somebody. Maybe it's OpenAI, but I think somebody will be paying Apple for the right to funnel those LLM queries wherever they want and take the cut just like what happens in search. Yeah. But that's a hot take, and I and I I Yep. I respect people that don't agree with me.
Speaker 1:In other news, Deutsche Bank is exploring ways to hedge its exposure to AI to data centers. It's looking at options including shorting a basket of AI related stocks and buying default protection via synthetic risk transfers. So they're hedge management.
Speaker 2:They bet so they bet big on data center financing. The scale of the expend expenditure on AI infrastructure has prompted concerns that a bubble is forming with some likening the enthusiasm to that which preceded the .com crash. Skeptics have pointed out that billions of dollars have been deployed in an untested industry with assets that quickly depreciate in value due to rapid change in technology.
Speaker 1:StreamYimby in the comments says, if there's one thing Deutsche Bank is really good at, it's being very exposed.
Speaker 2:So in recent months, Deutsche Bank has provided debt financing to Swedish group Eco Data Center as well as the Canadian company, Five c, who together raised more than 1,000,000,000 to fuel their expansion. The investment bank does not break down how much money it has lent to the sector, but it's estimated to be in the billions of dollars. Hedging exposure to the industry could prove difficult because betting against a basket of AI related stocks in a booming market will be expensive. While, meanwhile, SRT transactions require a diversified pool of loans to earn a rating and investors to likely hire, demand higher premiums. Hyperscalers pursuit of superintelligence has fuel demands for infrastructure that will help them build it.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is everyone from the, from the haunted mansion proprietor. Like, everyone is getting in on the action. Like, a few years ago, like, the like, it was, like, if you have anything that's related to AI, like, go go go, raise money, grow it, spin it, flip it, turn it around, pivot it, whatever you wanna do. Europe is expecting a wave of deal making consolidation in digital infrastructure. And the cost estimate from the Financial Times on the total AI build out, $6,000,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Pretty wild times. Business Insider has a scoop here that Google is looking to invest in Anthropic at a
Speaker 1:Early discussions.
Speaker 2:$150,000,000,000 valuation. It's interesting. Anthropic seems, what, one quarter the revenue of OpenAI, and yet from a vibe perspective, from a from a public attention, from a PR crisis perspective, Anthropic used to be in trouble every other week because Dario would be out there being like, paper clip we're gonna paper clip everyone. You know, we're gonna get rid of everyone's job, and it was, like, really aggressive. Right?
Speaker 2:And so, like like, they had to back stuff up. They had to back stuff. They had to backstop their comms a couple times. But it's been great. And Dario's looked great for the last six months, and he's just been beating the drum on, hey.
Speaker 2:There's a there's geopolitical considerations here with China. But overall, we're we're building, and we're happy to be an API. We're happy to be we're we're happy to help businesses. Yeah. Generate code.
Speaker 1:And Running running the experiment of, like, highly focused lab Yeah. Versus highly not distracted, but We'll see. Taking a lot of shots on goal with OpenAI.
Speaker 2:We could we could be looking back on this in a couple of years and being like, man, they really missed erotica. They really missed Slab. Consumer electronics. They missed consumer electronic. It's possible.
Speaker 2:But on the flip side, it does seem like they've built a, you know, a bit of an elegant business, and it seems to align well with, Google's strategy.
Speaker 1:And every hyperscaler wants a piece of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, similar to how, Microsoft has access to OpenAI models on Azure, you know, Google, bringing in Thropic in through an increased investment. Also, I I just wonder, is it hard to do a deal at $3.50 b these days in the venture community? Like, there was already that reporting that Dario had to go all over the world to scrap together the last round. And I'm wondering if there's a world where you if you're trying
Speaker 1:to They're they're using
Speaker 2:billion dollars, you should just go to the hyperscalers.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. They're using every possible capital source. Yeah. We've seen some of these SPVs that have, like, you know, 0% carry, 10% management fee Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Upfront. So Well tapping everything.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising means easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Jordy, where'd wanna go next?
Speaker 1:I think we should bring on Our next guest. Next guest, our first and only in person
Speaker 2:guest Castro. Day. He's here live in the TVP and UltraDome, and we will bring
Speaker 1:Muscle man himself.
Speaker 2:He is the author of Muscle man and the novelist. Wait. Your your your was that your first novel? Did you write a novel called The Novelist? Yes.
Speaker 2:What inspired that? That's it's kind of like it's recursive.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, I I wanted to say, first of all, thanks for having
Speaker 2:me. Of course.
Speaker 5:Of course. You know, I yeah. I And shouts out to Norman Plays in the chat. Someone just Oh, they said, I'm here for Jordan Castro.
Speaker 2:Oh, let's go.
Speaker 1:Shout out Norman. Go. Shout out to But,
Speaker 5:yeah. I I write novels, but I also you guys had the Pope up talking about the Pope. I I work with this guy Luke Burgess Okay. With this thing called the Cluny Institute. Oh, no way.
Speaker 5:And one of the things I've noticed, it's sort of we sort of do stuff at the intersection of like what we say Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So sort of bringing religious wisdom into the tech conversation. But so I've been like I'm not really related to tech, but I've been like at all these different like talks and so on about tech and whatever. And I noticed that when people normally talk about AI, they sound like AI. They immediately just sound like AI. And when you guys were doing your AI quadrant thing, I was like, you they sound like people.
Speaker 2:Interesting. And I
Speaker 5:know I was like, I'm
Speaker 1:like Let's give it up for people. Yeah. Yeah. Let's give it for So, God.
Speaker 5:That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And I was like, why do I like TBPN?
Speaker 5:You know? Because I shouldn't like I mean, you know, I I shouldn't
Speaker 4:like it or whatever. Yeah. And I like, well,
Speaker 5:because you guys, like, talk like people and you talk about people. You know what I'm saying? And so much of the conversation about tech
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was a it was very deliberate to put the faces of the people there, not the logos of the companies.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And I noticed that they weren't particularly flattering Photos? Photos. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, interesting. We didn't make them out of GigaChats?
Speaker 2:We we lot of times, we'll give them we will literally make the muscle map. We have fun with that. Yeah. Yeah. For that, that decision was actually more just about, like, how do you actually fit them all in?
Speaker 2:Like, if if you make him the muscle man, then you have to make it smaller. You can't see the face facial features. Yeah. No. I mean, some of those photos are, like, their hero photo that, like, their comms department clearly, like, put on the Wikipedia page or something.
Speaker 5:Don't know. Hey, man. That's
Speaker 2:Or like their corporate photo. Yeah. You don't always get to pick what photo is becomes you on the Internet. But sometimes
Speaker 5:Trust me. I know. When people get mad at me on Twitter, I've been publishing since I was like 60.
Speaker 2:Oh, do they go find a stupid photo of you? Of me like in high school
Speaker 5:wearing like a pink button up and they post it and they, you know, call me
Speaker 2:That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I've I've I've I've some silly photos from from of of old that I'm sure will resurface when people wanna dunk on me.
Speaker 2:What break this post down for me, actually. Like, what what was your read on this? So technological innovation can can
Speaker 1:You think used AI for it?
Speaker 2:Do you think you did?
Speaker 5:Well, I think the worst actually, the the worst thing about AI Yeah. Is that people are saying you can't use Em dashes. I agree. I love the Em dash.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. So I don't love the em dash. Like, it's not that I hate it. I'm just indifferent to it.
Speaker 2:I didn't I don't even know where it is on the keyboard. And so, like
Speaker 5:It's You
Speaker 2:do minus sign minus sign and then space, I think,
Speaker 1:to generate You can actually I think you should double tap. Double tap space.
Speaker 6:Shift option dash.
Speaker 1:So, like Isn't it just double tap space? And I
Speaker 2:go here.
Speaker 5:You double tap it, but sometimes it
Speaker 2:Be like, this is the story, and then I wanna do an m dash and then space.
Speaker 5:Shift, and you can hit it.
Speaker 1:Oh, you can hit an absolute human m dash. Shift is an underscore. That's right.
Speaker 2:Shift is an underscore. That's an underscore, dude. Look. Underscore. Underscore.
Speaker 5:Maybe it's just something that I know how to do Test.
Speaker 2:Underscore. Test. How do you do that? There you go.
Speaker 5:Maybe I maybe
Speaker 1:I just run it double double dash space.
Speaker 2:No. No. So so so I completely agree with you. So I I wrote I write, like, a little, you know, 300 word, 400 word, like, summary of my current thinking on whatever's in the news every day. I just write it right in Google Docs here.
Speaker 2:I don't use any AI. I hand it off to Brandon on our team. He edits it. I don't think he uses any AI. Sometimes he would put Emdashes in, and if we put in even one Emdash, all the comments would be, Emdash, m a I a I.
Speaker 2:What was the problem? And it's just like, okay. Like, now I just can't use the m dash because, like, like, the the masses will go crazy.
Speaker 5:I refuse to let them take that from me.
Speaker 2:You're fighting the good fight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You think you can win?
Speaker 2:I think that it's just I lost it. I was and and Brandon was like, really? Like, and there were places I'll I'll show you. Sometimes I will literally just write, like, like, a minus sign, not an em dash. I'll just be like, you know, close a quote.
Speaker 2:I will deliberately break the rules that I know I'm not supposed like, even when you when you when you put something in quotes, you put, like, the period inside the quotes or whatever. Yep. I will just break all those rules because it just makes it clearer that I'm not swapping it up. I don't know.
Speaker 5:I think you're accepting accepting the frame of the haters.
Speaker 2:I think so. I think I I I think it might be. I think you're right. I think you're right.
Speaker 5:Also, shouts out Brandon. I don't I didn't hear any claps for Brandon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's get some claps going
Speaker 6:for Brandon.
Speaker 5:We call him in the in the he's in a we call
Speaker 2:him new haircut.
Speaker 5:He got a new haircut.
Speaker 2:We need a we need a trading card for Brandon's new
Speaker 1:haircut. Sleeper muscle man too.
Speaker 2:He's a muscle man.
Speaker 5:I know why, but I've got I got I is it fair to say I got you into it? What?
Speaker 2:You're wait. You you're the reason? He's the reason you got Jack.
Speaker 5:Is that fair to say or is that
Speaker 2:He's the reason that you're absolutely shredded and diced. He's the reason you're walking around at 2% body fat? Okay. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 5:Brandon content.
Speaker 2:That's why that's why you can bench three plates? You can just wrap it out because of him? Four. Okay. Four.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Woah. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 5:Look. Crazy.
Speaker 2:It's good. Wait. So yeah. Actually, tell me the story of the the Muscle Man book. Like, how how like, what inspired it?
Speaker 2:What was the thesis?
Speaker 5:It's a novel about an English professor who hates being an English professor and loves lifting weights. Sick. And part of it was that
Speaker 1:And this is a real person or
Speaker 5:No. It's a it's a fictional character.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But like, you know, part of it was that I When I was growing up, I basically grew up online. Mhmm. And, you know, it's sort of a classic story, but it was like I was totally anxious, you know, like I would be at school, then I would get on the screen, and, you know, I would just post and sort of lurk and be sort of weird and creepy in front of the computer, you know. And then, when I started lifting, my anxiety and depression just like completely went away.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You know? And and and I was like, damn, like, you know, was my dad right my whole life? You know, are all those sort of jacked guys who are like annoying and saying that, you know, you gotta start lifting. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Were they just all totally right? Basically, I
Speaker 1:was The other thing that that tracks with my personal experience, I used to have trouble falling asleep at night.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That too. Exactly. I
Speaker 1:started lifting daily or six days a week. It just went away entirely. And Yeah. The lesson is people that struggle to fall asleep, at least in some cases, are just not exerting themselves enough to be just physically tired enough to, like, fall asleep. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Started lifting. Soon enough, it's like, okay, you basically close your eyes, you're knocked out in like five minutes.
Speaker 5:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so I wanted to just kind of like And then I tried to find novels or even books about lifting that I thought were like compelling at all and I couldn't find any.
Speaker 5:So I started sort of trying to write something like that. It's also like a satire about higher education. There's like a lot of rants and stuff about the universities and stuff.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 5:cool. So so, yeah.
Speaker 2:Talk about the reception.
Speaker 5:The reception's been sort of idiotic.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:You know, the the the the the media as we all
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for idiotic.
Speaker 2:Let's give it
Speaker 5:up for the idiotic media. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, it's it's it's
Speaker 2:the idiotic media and we have a horn going on.
Speaker 1:We are
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, you know You have
Speaker 2:a horse wearing a hat in the back.
Speaker 1:Consider Idiotic We're not journalists, but I definitely consider us to be part of the idiotic media.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, that's now you're using it in a good way. You're reclaiming it, you know what I mean? But most of them are idiotic in a bad way. The reception has been like, here's a novel to like explain the manosphere.
Speaker 5:The manosphere. And here's like a novel about men. And I feel like, you know, back in the day, like, there's this great the literary the writer Norman Mailer has this debate with these feminists, like, back in the seventies, and he keeps calling them lady critics. Mhmm. This is very hilarious debate.
Speaker 5:And I feel like in a weird way, they're doing the same thing to me, but they're calling me like man novelist.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:You know what I mean? Where it's like this is a novel about a man. Sure. So like it has to be about masculinity or something Yeah. Like Everyone wants to know what's going on with young men.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And it's this kind of fake discourse.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw Chris Williamson on Tucker the other day. Yeah. It it felt very much. I mean, honestly, like I feel like Chris has done a fantastic job of actually sort of explaining like what's going on with young men.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like it is an interesting question.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a whole bunch of and I feel like every media outlet has their own way of interrogating this whether it's Harper's or Vanity Fair or Yeah. Wired. Like, everyone's telling stories and writing profiles about interesting people and young men. And I don't know. It seems like it was somewhat worthwhile discussion to have if they're if it can inform interventions even in even just in your own life or with your own kids.
Speaker 2:It seems like there's some some value to the discourse. But did you have any intention of actually sparking that debate or, like, actually like like was was one of your thesis like I need to put this book out so that more people lift weights at young ages?
Speaker 5:No. But I did write an essay for Harper Sure. That was just basically a straightforward pro lifting essay. Okay. And so that had more of that
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure. In mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that the my takeaway from going, I was very anti gym growing up because I was a skateboarder and a Yeah.
Speaker 1:Me too. Right. Exactly. Skater, surfer, like the idea of, going inside, being indoors, lifting stuff up and putting it down just for the whatever the whatever the reason was. It wasn't appealing to me as a kid because I was, well, I could just go to the beach and surf and, like, be out in nature.
Speaker 1:And so I had a generally negative sentiment around the gym. And I was also like super scrawny growing up. Yeah. I've got like long arms. I'm I I I was like in high school probably like a hundred and forty pounds.
Speaker 1:Getting Like under like one plate on bench was like
Speaker 2:Big.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna die at first. Totally. I never really got into it. I wasn't I didn't play football or anything like that. And then I got really into it in college and it was the biggest unlock for like mental health.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like I prior to prior to that, I was like a, you know, teenager. I was like teenagers, I think, are just naturally kind of like moody and figuring out who they are and how they fit into the world and all that stuff. And then I found lifting and like a lot of that stuff just like went away entirely because I had a purpose. I would even if that purpose was like so simple and just like going I woke up, I was gonna eat well, and I was gonna go to the gym, I was gonna lift as heavy as I could and go on with my day.
Speaker 1:And it just it it ended up being like, it it was like a drug almost immediately because I was like, I want the feeling of how I feel after I lift. Mhmm. It was it was incredibly addictive in a very positive way. So I did that. And then and then about a, probably a year or so, went from like a hundred and by that point, it was like a hundred and fifty pounds to like one ninety in like a very short period of time.
Speaker 1:Like, basically spending was this was from freshman year to sophomore year. And I was spending, like, so much of my energy just focused on lifting. Yeah. And I ultimately reached a point where I was like, okay. At some point, this is actually not the most productive use of my time.
Speaker 1:I And was fortunate enough to, at that point, to kind of, like, discover, like, work and things that I was passionate about and and ways that I could use my energy that was more interesting to me. And so I think, like, the debate to have around lifting is, like, I think, like, basically, everyone should be, like, picking up heavy stuff and putting it down, like, at least a little bit. Right? You don't need to go to the extreme. The the advice that I find myself maybe giving, like, you know, people that were in my shoes is, like, figure out the point where you maybe actually wanna dial it back a little bit because it's possible and probably healthy to go way too much to the extreme where you're spending, like, like I was, like, all my time and energy, like, just lifting because I didn't have anything better to do besides, like, you know, work and and school.
Speaker 1:And then, at some point, I actually needed to dial it back and actually apply that energy in other places, but I got the benefit of, like, that period of just, like, obsessiveness that I still carry with me.
Speaker 5:Yeah. 100%. I mean, that was sort of actually what the novel is exploring, you know. Because when I first found it, like you said, it's like, is this the answer? Is this the ultimate answer?
Speaker 5:You know what I mean? Yeah. And it it it really is. I mean, that's a part of the issue that I take with, like, the optimizers, you know, like, I mean, I know you guys had Huberman on or Brian Yeah. Johnson Yeah.
Speaker 5:Where you sort of become, like, perversely obsessed with health or with lifting or something like that. You sort of tinker, you know, you think of the the person the human person as some sort of, like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, mix of neurons and chemicals and stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting. Like, even between Brian Johnson and Huberman, I see a huge wide gap. This is a big gap. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's put them in the same bucket.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:How do you contrast your philosophy?
Speaker 5:I think you need to be injury maxing. I think you need to be horsing heavyweight.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Okay.
Speaker 5:And I think it's like a spiritual endeavor. I like I think you need to almost I think you need to get crushed under
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:A a body breaking weight a few Okay. And And
Speaker 2:and and, yeah, it's more of a it's more of a spiritual process than an analytical process.
Speaker 5:Yeah. 100%. Okay. It's it's it's Eric Bugenhagen, who's like my favorite Mhmm. Like lifter on YouTube Yeah.
Speaker 5:Always talks about how it's a mind set. Yeah. And he has these things where like he'll just fail insane amounts of weight Yeah. Multiple times and then just like work himself into this kind of like crazy mental state and then lift it, you know?
Speaker 2:What do think about the other YouTubers? What do you think about Sam Soulek?
Speaker 5:Oh, love Sam Soulek.
Speaker 2:What do think about the trend twins?
Speaker 5:I love the trend twins. I love yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:For sure. For sure. Sam Sulik also, Sam Sulik is weirdly emo. Yeah. Like, he will you know, his vlogs actually, there's this weird thing where so my my I don't know why I'm talking about this now, but my brother died like a year and a half ago.
Speaker 5:And after the funeral, one of my buddies threw on a Sam Sulik video. And I don't That was inspirational. Yeah. It was incredibly inspirational. But I noticed, was like, Sam Sulik's videos are sort of emo where he's like driving by himself.
Speaker 5:Yeah. He's like talking to the camera. He's taking unnecessary around the parking lot just
Speaker 1:I I I I've maybe watched like twenty minutes of Sam Sula. I appreciate like the content Yeah. Like that, the the world that he's built. But because specifically, I remember being in that mindset of like, I was kind of like, again, I remember I was like 19. I was in school.
Speaker 1:I wasn't that happy. I like living in Santa Barbara, which was like paradise. But like mentally, I was chasing that like, need to I'd be like, that those scenes where you're like driving, I'd be driving to the gym at like 5AM.
Speaker 5:See, can relate with everything you're saying. Like, down to the specifics. Like, started lifting too, like, sort of like, I was in Yeah. School, just moved, didn't really have friends. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Would like go to the gym at 11:00, you know. Yeah. Would be there early
Speaker 1:early mornings or late Mhmm. And then getting like food afterwards and like honestly that era for me like future, the the rap artist was like absolutely peaking.
Speaker 5:What year was this monster? For me Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so I became We we might be the same.
Speaker 1:Became a man.
Speaker 5:What's your is your full name Jordan?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. Brother. Make it make sense. Make it make sense.
Speaker 2:Make it make sense. What's going on here?
Speaker 1:But but yeah. So I would I would drive I I I just remember like at the time, I was driving a a a Prius with like 200,000 miles on it and I'd just be like driving to the gym just blasting future, drinking protein shakes and that's like when I think I became a man. Yeah. Like
Speaker 2:Incredible thing
Speaker 6:about that.
Speaker 1:And so I want I wanna I I think it's super important. Yeah. And like when I hear when I hear that a young person is getting into going to the gym, I'm like, great. Totally. Like, you're gonna become you're gonna find yourself through that.
Speaker 1:And my only thing is, like, I think at some point you have to evolve beyond that and take the learnings and that Yeah. Like that mentality that you get from going to the gym and apply it to other other ways. I think like the big takeaway that I learned early on was like, early on I was obsessed with like, how many how many sets am I doing? How many reps am I doing? How am I, how am I, you know, just approaching different lifts?
Speaker 1:How many different exercises should I be doing in a lift? And I very quickly realized that there was like two fact there was maybe three factors. It was like, was I sleeping a lot? Yep. Was I eating a lot?
Speaker 1:And was I like hyper consistent and doing a lot of volume? And those are the same lessons that I've brought into my real life outside of the gym. It's like, am I sleeping a lot? Am I like nourishing myself? Am I getting the right amount of calories?
Speaker 1:Am I getting, you know, getting the right amount of just like the right kinds of food? And then am I being consistent in the work? Mhmm. And so, we apply that every day. We come in and do the show.
Speaker 5:When you also go to the gym, I mean, I don't I don't know. Behind the scenes look, the whole squad was at the gym this morning, which
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 5:is a great thing that you guys do. Yeah. A
Speaker 2:lot of people that were on that chart, a lot of the tech elite are deeply unpopular people. Mhmm. I think Elon was polling as less popular than Donald Trump. So not just controversial, but actually just unpopular across the board. A lot of tech CEOs, lot of tech people are just unpopular in America.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Obviously, we love them here, but we're weirdos about that. But my question is, like, when I think about who's really popular, I think Tom Cruise, I think George Clooney, I think people that are in shape. Is there something you know, we we we do this jokey, like, gigachatification of these people. Is there something where you like like, it would actually be in their best interest for the tech elite to get a lot Look
Speaker 1:at Bezos. Look at Zuck.
Speaker 5:I was gonna say, like, that, you know, I I used to think Zuck was a full creep. Yeah. He was like a beady eyed sort of bug. He would like you could when when when Zuck would look in the camera, you could almost like hear him blinking. You know what I'm saying?
Speaker 5:It was it was it was and then he got jacked Yeah.
Speaker 2:And threw
Speaker 5:on a chain. I was like, this guy's not so bad after all. You know what I mean? Yeah. So maybe so maybe they would all benefit from PR
Speaker 1:PR teams hate this one simple trick.
Speaker 2:Well, PR teams should love it.
Speaker 3:No. They should
Speaker 2:love They maybe aren't awake to it for some reason.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Look, if
Speaker 1:you're on a if
Speaker 5:you're on a billionaire's PR team
Speaker 2:Step one.
Speaker 5:Step one.
Speaker 1:Hire a trainer.
Speaker 2:Trend? Yes. Bring the trend twins in.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Bring the trend twins in. Yep. Get jacked.
Speaker 5:Get jacked. And then the public opinion.
Speaker 1:Why do you think health is so political?
Speaker 5:Oh, man. I I did an event two nights ago here someone asked the same question. And this guy in the audience stood up and he he because I I actually don't know. I mean, one reason is that I think that when you're jacked and you're strong and you're, you know, or you're competent, it acts as a judge, actually. Because if you're like, you know, fat and you're lazy, then you feel just sort of implicitly judged.
Speaker 5:The other thing is that going to the gym and getting jacked implies a certain value system. You know, there's there's like, you know, you lift one forty five, you know, that's less than two twenty five.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:And if you're in the gym, you're trying to get stronger Mhmm. The implication is that it's better to lift two twenty five. Yes. Yes. And so, like, a lot of people who are like dogmatically committed to a certain kind of like egalitarianism Egalitarianism.
Speaker 5:Don't like that. Yeah. But the guy at the event stood up. This guy, he looked just like Joe Rogan. His name's Anthony, actually.
Speaker 5:Shouts out Anthony. But he he was like He said that he said that that generally speaking, the left tries to impose their ideas onto nature. Mhmm. And the right starts with nature and discerns their ideas from there. And so there's something just sort of fundamentally different about that.
Speaker 5:I think lifting sort of falls into the latter camp.
Speaker 2:I have a question.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Yeah. I'm always I'm always surprised at how much like there seems to be more controversies within in between like various people even that consider themselves all to be pursuing their ideals of health. It's like everybody like kinda picks a lane in a category.
Speaker 2:Well, and there's also So
Speaker 1:then it's like they're fighting over, like, green powders. What green powder should you take? Oh, my green powder is better than your green powder.
Speaker 2:Let's get it. Universal. Like, it Yeah. It I I feel like it's it's hard to make a political issue out of something that doesn't affect everyone because you just keep bumping into people. And if your whole thing is, you know, corporate cards or something or like, you know, the the manufacturing supply chain for large gongs, it's like, there's just a lot of gongs there.
Speaker 2:Lot of those. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. You even have the you got you I noticed in the bathroom that the picture of the jacked guy Yeah. The shirtless guy hitting the gong. Think these guys love
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's like it's hard to get everyone animated about that. It's a niche interest. Whereas like health care, how much money you have, your job, your health, your food, like, these things are universal so anyone can, anyone can relate to them and I can give you a take and you can bounce off it immediately instead of being like, no, that's I don't really know anything about that.
Speaker 2:Right? That doesn't really
Speaker 5:me Yep. Ever. Yeah. But there's also there is so much. More people die in this this is actually I don't actually, I don't know if this is true, but you see this talking point all the time.
Speaker 5:More people die in this country from like obesity Yeah. And from starvation. You know, there is this total cope around around being unhealthy and people people don't like the idea that there's actually something you can do about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like everyone everyone can be obese or not.
Speaker 2:Like, not everyone can have a, like, a large corporation that goes bankrupt under their stewardship. Like, so it's just less relevant to them because, like, they might not be the CEO of a company that's going bankrupt or something. Pickleball. There's a I couldn't find it in here, but there's a in the mansion section online, there is a house that is up for sale right now that has a pickleball court outside and a pickleball court inside. What's your take on pickleball?
Speaker 5:Dude, it's fun. I hate to say it, but it's fun.
Speaker 2:Guilty pleasure?
Speaker 5:I mean, I played it one time with a friend. Yeah. And I was like, man, this is Yeah. I probably said some
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Words. Fine. And and then we played it, and I was like, this is awesome. Yeah. So I don't I don't I Playing inside or outside?
Speaker 5:Outside. Outside. I mean, two courts is a little bit you know, I don't know if you love something.
Speaker 2:Zoom out for me. Build the the the ultimate mansion for for athletics. Are you going all in on one particular athletic endeavor? Are you making sure that there's a pool and a basketball court, a tennis court? What's important to have around the mansion?
Speaker 5:For me, definitely a basketball court.
Speaker 2:A basketball court.
Speaker 5:And then, like, a gym in a garage with no AC.
Speaker 2:No AC. And And what's in that gym? Are we doing rogue racks? Are we doing
Speaker 5:Rogue racks are good. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Free weights?
Speaker 1:What is it about what's the archetype that can make a home gym really work? Do you have to be like like spiritual? Like every time I've just been in a like only like during COVID Mhmm. I bought a bunch of weights working out of my garage.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 1:And I just got so small.
Speaker 2:Hard to be motivated.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I got that's a skill issue, bro.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry. I think No. No. I think I'm so I'm implying it's a skill issue because I would be going in there and I was at home, I could get an email and I'd be like, okay.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna run-in and Yeah. Respond to this email on my computer because it's easier. If I was taking a more monk like approach
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I'd probably have been getting even more jacked because there's no distractions. Right? It's just, like, more focused.
Speaker 5:Well, during COVID, I mean, we ordered a bunch of weights, me and my lifting buddy, like, right when like, right at the tail end because everything sold out, like, super fast.
Speaker 2:So we had But you still had a buddy. That helps.
Speaker 5:Had a buddy. Yeah. And and we we ended up getting these, like, dinky, probably, like, 25 pound barbells Okay. With these, like, shitty weights or whatever. But I would just go in I had a shed at the at the house.
Speaker 5:I would, go in the shed and throw on music. It was actually the first time that I was lifting where I understood the power of, like, shrieking and screaming while you lift.
Speaker 1:Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You can Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well
Speaker 1:A modern man does not shriek and scream.
Speaker 2:What what's in the supplement stack? What's Lindy? What's interesting? What what are you staying away from? Are you beta alanine?
Speaker 2:Are you using creatine, protein supplementation, mass gainers? What do you like?
Speaker 5:I don't I'm feeling reactionary against the optimizers and I wanna just say nothing. I mean, I creatine for sure. Protein's fine. But I think you could basically Just eat. Eat.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Raw milk. I do I do like raw milk. I drink a lot of raw. Recently, I gained I went from like one sixty five to two hundred pounds over the course of like three months.
Speaker 5:And so, I was drinking like a gallon of raw milk a day, a tub of Greek yogurt a day. So Yeah. That's great. The raw eggs, I do think like drinking 12 raw eggs makes you feel amazing.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:But that's kind of
Speaker 1:the I through a phase where it'd be like five eggs mixed into raw milk Mhmm. Just raw.
Speaker 2:Were you bodybuilding.com guy back in the day?
Speaker 1:That was a long that was a long I was like, I wasn't even like a phase. I was just that was just me for a long time. I I realized like, I don't have to scramble the eggs. I can just put them in a jar and just drink it. I would I I didn't like the taste.
Speaker 1:I would kind of almost throw up sometimes, but it was just so effective.
Speaker 2:I mean, Derek from Our Plays More Dates talks about just drinking the full carton of liquid egg whites.
Speaker 5:He does. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Was a good era. There was a period where I was watching his videos. Like, when I was first getting lifting watching like
Speaker 2:That is great.
Speaker 5:Remember being like, I can't believe I'm watching an hour and a half video.
Speaker 2:It's something. But it's so meditative.
Speaker 4:It's Well, it's
Speaker 5:like what you're saying at at at at breakfast. It's just amazing to watch anyone who loves what they do
Speaker 2:Master of craft.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Exactly. Makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You would have appreciated. We we gave a a talk last year when we had done like a few episodes of the podcast and then we we gave a talk at Hereticon of like the case for like founders getting on like PEDs. Because you have like, when you think about, like, pro athletes are, like, spending all their time trying to be healthy, sleeping well, working out, and being as strong and as physically fit as possible. And they legally or cannot take PEDs. Although, if you ask them, like, if you could take PEDs, if it was legal, would you do them?
Speaker 1:They'd be like, yeah, absolutely. I wanna go to the next level. Meanwhile, in the business world, you have people that are not sleeping that well. They can't train that much. They're not that healthy.
Speaker 1:They have, kind of not that great hormone profiles. In a perfect world, they just start sleeping well and training and eating well and getting on track. But for a lot of people, if you're CEO, busy CEO, you're scaling your company, you don't have, like, you you some of these people, like, can't prioritize it or they don't for whatever reason. And, like, I genuinely think if they just got on PEDs, they might build they might build the build the, you know, of course, under under doctor supervision, but they might actually, get motivated in order to build some of those healthier habits. But at the very least, a lot more energy and bring that intensity.
Speaker 1:What do you what do you what's your take on on PEDs?
Speaker 5:I don't do them because I haven't had kids yet. They do seem probably good. I don't know. Have you done them? What I actually although, I I don't actually, one of my buddies from from from Cleveland was having a hard time on I won't I won't say his name.
Speaker 5:Was having a hard time on the dating apps. Mhmm. And he was like, no one's responding, you know, whatever, like, and he started blasting gear because he thought it would help him get girls. And I was Dude, yes, what? Immediately.
Speaker 5:Woah.
Speaker 2:And I
Speaker 5:was like, but he didn't even get jacked in the it was like, it was literally immediate.
Speaker 3:And I was
Speaker 1:like Was it a mindset?
Speaker 5:I think it might have been a mindset.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Because
Speaker 2:he's like, I got I I have I've solved the problem. Yeah. It was problem so I can bring the confidence.
Speaker 5:It worked for him like the next day.
Speaker 1:I I find Dating find Dating perform class thing. What's that?
Speaker 2:I find creatine genuinely very
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Take creatine.
Speaker 2:I also find caffeine extremely performance enhancing in the gym. Yeah. If you like can the Celsius phenomenon I think is very real. Like two hundred milligrams of caffeine getting actually very fired up before a workout genuinely helps you stay focused during this whip lift, push your push your
Speaker 1:the beta alanine for for the workplace, you know. Imagine you gotta do
Speaker 5:some emails. Is that the tingling? Yeah.
Speaker 1:You start tingling. You're like, I gotta get through these emails.
Speaker 5:I mean, I will say that the yeah, for sure. I I guess the supplement sack is like drinking enough caffeine to kill a small child.
Speaker 2:It it's really good.
Speaker 5:Not that I'm gonna kill a small child, but that would if they drink, it'd kill them. These mates are really good, though. Are guys sponsored
Speaker 1:by these guys?
Speaker 2:We're not,
Speaker 1:but we're brand.
Speaker 2:That's Andrew Huberman's brand.
Speaker 5:Damn. Sorry, man. Hey. Look. Look.
Speaker 5:Look. I love your product. If you, you know
Speaker 2:I'm talking trash, but I know you're reminder.
Speaker 5:They're good. I don't consider
Speaker 1:Andrew's philosophy, like, about
Speaker 2:disagreeing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But yeah. I I I think it's more about like understanding understanding yourself and the various inputs Yeah. So that you can then make calculated decisions. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. I I still I know how important sleep is. There's plenty of nights we we were traveling on Tuesday, didn't get a lot of sleep, made made a call to try to get some more sleep. But ultimately, think it's just about My my view is like, as much as possible, try to understand how the body works. But at the same time, you need to remember that the the the real edge is like having like a like a a fiery like spirit.
Speaker 1:Like, and just Yeah. Be like that that is like that's the thing that you wanna cultivate. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. There's that there yeah. I mean, I I yeah. And maybe part of the the the my feeling about it is that the one time I tweeted something negative about Andrew Huberman, I got, like, ratioed into oblivion. You know, people calling me gay and it
Speaker 1:gets like 5,000 likes,
Speaker 2:you know
Speaker 5:what I'm just so so, yeah, they came they came after me hard. But you're probably you're probably you're probably right, you know.
Speaker 1:I don't know. But then But the
Speaker 5:the counter argument to that is like that Makes
Speaker 2:delicious yerba mate.
Speaker 5:Well, yeah. He makes delicious Mettina Yerba Mate. He makes a great product. And actually in my first novel, there's a long passage about how Yerba Mate is great.
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, In the novelist. But guess the counterpoint to the to the sleep thing that you're saying is that there's that for a while when like the
Speaker 6:Tate brothers were just all over the field Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:There was that one of Tristan being like, you know, I'll I'll go to sleep at 6AM and wake up at 05:59AM and, you know, one minute before 6AM, and I don't need any sleep. And, like, that that's the kind that's sort of counterargument.
Speaker 2:That's what you wanna do?
Speaker 5:Mean, it's just one minute? Is that what you're
Speaker 3:It's a it's it's an admirable vibe.
Speaker 2:It's the attitude. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. I always get it.
Speaker 2:I always I always do beef with Brian Johnson about this because I'm just like, don't you think that if you just have, like, great will and a life's purpose, you can live forever even if you're super unhealthy? And I always say, like, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett who, like, eat McDonald's and drink Coca Cola all day long and, like, live to ninety nine and a hundred and just, you know, they don't look jacked. They don't really do any biohacking, but they
Speaker 3:sleep I think one thing that we
Speaker 1:probably should I think we probably agree on is, like, I don't think you should let health trackers, like, decide your mood Totally. Or decide like how you're gonna approach Oh, totally. Totally. I wake up some days No. I sleep on an Eight Sleep.
Speaker 1:I have like a
Speaker 2:No. The tracker is a
Speaker 1:going to the gym.
Speaker 2:It's not telling you what to do.
Speaker 1:Well, and it's and it's just yeah. It's just a it's a it's a little friendly
Speaker 2:It's not tracking me. I'm tracking it.
Speaker 1:You're tracking it.
Speaker 2:I'm tracking it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But then there are also studies that are like, you know, the people that live the longest have like, you know, they have like a good relationship. Yeah. They have some sort of spiritual life
Speaker 2:Yeah. That stuff is very unquantified right now in the quantified self movement and it needs to be more included, I think,
Speaker 5:for sure. That's why I don't think you can really like quantify that stuff. People are really uncomfortable Yeah. Things you can't quantify.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 5:But I think probably, yeah, good relationship Yeah. Some sort of spiritual life Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:General health Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know,
Speaker 5:eating the things that like you're because also different people, different, you know, diets work better for different peoples and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway What's your actual routine?
Speaker 2:You're a split? What was it? Are you in bro split? Push pull legs?
Speaker 5:Manosphere split? The manosphere split. Just crushing fentanyl. I'm beating the manosphere, Alex. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Exactly. Lately, I was doing Mad Cow, I think it's called. Was just three days a week and it was literally just
Speaker 2:Go crazy.
Speaker 5:It was it was just power lifting. So it was like squat, bench, dead lift, barbell rows, three days a week, five by fives, three days a week.
Speaker 2:So you do all of those every day? No. No. All of those three days or you rotate through them?
Speaker 5:You you rotate through them three days a week Okay. Or benching twice a week, you're Okay. Overhead press 2. And you're adding you're adding five pounds a week. Okay.
Speaker 5:So it was like And that was when I was doing the the the spirit
Speaker 2:Five by fives.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:I like the five by five.
Speaker 5:That's a
Speaker 2:good that's a good
Speaker 5:So I was doing that recently. I I do like I I mean, the thing that got
Speaker 1:It's funny. I I The the thing that maybe we're just holding back a little bit of our progress is like we want to work out every day. And there's actually like studies that show if you just take more rest days, you can put on You can you can just like start Size up.
Speaker 5:But the problem with that program is like I also like lifting every day. Yeah. So it was like
Speaker 1:a problem.
Speaker 5:Like, I I was like, it was actually not the most enjoyable thing. I do like, as much as I'm like opposed to it in theory, I do like Jeff Nippert's programs. Oh, yeah. Power building program.
Speaker 2:I like him a lot.
Speaker 5:Yeah. They're they're Yeah. Very Yeah. So the Power building one and Power building three
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Are I think my favorite programs I've done.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just like the way he like structures his like lessons and stuff.
Speaker 5:Well, he's also natural, which is like
Speaker 4:a big deal.
Speaker 5:You know what I mean? A lot of people who make these programs aren't natural, so it won't work for guys that aren't
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're like, do 10,000 reps of this.
Speaker 5:The rich piano eight hour arm work.
Speaker 1:I'm on enough trend to kill a horse.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks so much for chatting about it.
Speaker 1:What's your you have your next book in the works?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Kind of, but I don't I don't wanna talk about it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's gonna be a thriller.
Speaker 2:Can you share the prompt? What's the prompt? No.
Speaker 5:No. I can't. Because I think the the
Speaker 1:the vlog Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 2:No. No.
Speaker 5:I'm not I'm not I'm not gonna
Speaker 2:do it.
Speaker 5:Thanks for
Speaker 2:having me out. Make sure
Speaker 5:Muscle man is the current one you guys can buy.
Speaker 2:What what about the biggest fish you've ever caught?
Speaker 5:Dude, I just did. I never
Speaker 2:You've never been fishing? No. No. Not once.
Speaker 5:No. I mean, not even a little has. No, dude. Was too hung. I was too much lucky as a skier.
Speaker 2:You've never shot a fish in a barrel? Nothing.
Speaker 1:Nope. Nothing. Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll have to change that soon.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:The outfit looks like you could maybe transport
Speaker 1:I agree. On I agree.
Speaker 2:Fishing boat
Speaker 5:and fish. It's funny. That's funny because I I wore this the other day for an event and my buddy was I told him my friend that I was coming on the show and he was like, you're actually kind of dressed like he thought the vest was somehow TBP. Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 5:Also, Brandon Content over there has the same has the same vest. He told me about
Speaker 2:Very good.
Speaker 5:He told me that he has its own.
Speaker 2:He's looking he's looking sharp. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify.
Speaker 1:And if you're listening to this and you haven't lifted today, Hit the gym. Go for it. Get in the gym.
Speaker 2:Visit the Church of Iron.
Speaker 1:That's right. Have a great weekend, everyone. We love you. Goodbye. See you Monday.