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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, 08/21/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a post from Jeff Dean, the legendary programmer. Tyler, do you know who Jeff Dean is?
Speaker 2:Dumb question.
Speaker 1:Dumb question. Of
Speaker 2:course, know Jeff Dean.
Speaker 1:Of course, Tyler knows Jeff Dean. Do you know, the list of Jeff Dean jokes? So Jeff Dean is a legendary programmer, been at Google for a very long time, one of the best to ever do it. And there's a list on it was on some random website for a while. Somebody finally put on GitHub.
Speaker 1:These are these are the facts about Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean proved that p equals n p when he solved all n p problems in polynomial time on a whiteboard. Jeff Dean's pin, his ATM pin, it's the last four digits of pi. This is this one's true, actually. When Jeff gives a seminar at Stanford, it's so crowded that Donald Knuth has to sit on the floor.
Speaker 1:Apparently, that actually happened.
Speaker 2:My favorite one is to Jeff Dean NP is no problemo.
Speaker 1:No problemo. Yes. Another one, Jeff Dean got promoted to level 11 in a system where the max level is 10. Apparently, this happened at Google. They had 10 levels of software engineering.
Speaker 1:He was so good. They were like, we gotta make a eleventh level.
Speaker 3:Let's take this one to 11.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's great. He's a he's a legend. You don't explain your work to Jeff Dean.
Speaker 1:Jeff Dean explains your work to you. There was another one that I thought was funny, which is Jeff Dean. His his keyboard only has two characters, one and zero. He just programs in binary. I think that's hilarious.
Speaker 1:Jeff Dean has exactly two keys on his keyboard, zero and one. Errors treat Jeff Dean as a warning. Compilers yeah. Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers.
Speaker 1:Anyway, you could go through these for all day. Google. It's basically Jeff Dean's side project. Anyway, he's a legend. People love him.
Speaker 1:I love him. I would take a bullet for Jeff Dean. One of the greatest to ever do it. Seriously, he's he's amazing. But, anyway, he posted something very interesting.
Speaker 1:So he said AI efficiency is important. Today, Google is sharing a technical paper detailing our comprehensive methodology for measuring the environmental impact of Gemini inference. We estimate that the median Gemini app's text prompt uses 0.24 watt hours of energy equivalent to watching TV, average TV, for nine seconds and consumes 0.26 milliliters of water, about five drops. So they did all the averages. Sir.
Speaker 1:It's just a few drops. And so this, of course, is to is to counter the narrative that was growing online in the media and just in the general, like, anti AI, anti tech world that every time you fired off a prompt on any AI system, you were lighting the Amazon Rainforest on fire, using enough power to power an American city, stealing water out of the homes of American people, and that does not appear to be the case.
Speaker 3:And to be clear, many of these new data center projects are will use the energy equivalent of millions of single family homes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:So this is still energy intensive. Yes. But what matters is that the underlying products still get more and more efficient. Yes. As they get more efficient, we'll probably use them more.
Speaker 3:Yep. Hence, the massive energy consumption.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Somebody was comping one of the latest build outs as I think it was in the journal actually today. It's like enough power to power a small US city. And I think they maybe said like Austin, Texas or something. It's like one data center is enough to power that.
Speaker 1:But again, this is training a model that will be used for years probably. And the training run only runs for a couple months, and then it's distributed. Yes. It's enough to power a million homes, but a billion people wind up using the stuff. So you so you have to think about the overall value that is created by these systems.
Speaker 1:And, obviously, everyone wants to optimize them, not just the environmentalists, also the companies with that. If they don't if they don't reduce the amount of energy they use, their margins are terrible. And so there are it's not just Jeff Dean and the and the crew at Google who enjoy optimizing systems, and I'm sure got a ton of joy out of squeezing such performance out of, Gemini on the inference side. But it's also just the CFO, who says, hey. Why are we why are we spending so much energy on a single Gemini apps text prompt?
Speaker 1:Let's get this down. Let's optimize this thing so we can actually make some money, which is great.
Speaker 3:And Bubble Boy over on x had a good post. They said AI inference is the new high frequency trading in the companies that serve models and don't realize that will die. I thought this was a solid take. It's just that performance and efficiency and speed are gonna matter more and more. And if you're in the business of serving up farm to table inference
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Better make sure you're efficient.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jeff Dean was like the original superstar AI researcher, just software engineering researcher, honestly. Built a lot of the systems that Google built GCP on top of. And what's interesting is we just we just realized or came to terms with the rise of the superstar AI researcher, and that was underwritten probably at least in part on the back of superintelligence. If you find a researcher who creates an insane trick that unlocks trillions Maybe of dollars it's value.
Speaker 3:Value. In purchases for your
Speaker 1:AI companion. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But but, no, XAI has not has has notably not been competing in that space.
Speaker 1:We have not heard about billion dollar acqui hires at XAI, $100,000,000 offers at XAI. Elon has said, I'm focused on engineers, not researchers. But the reason you would underwrite paying a researcher a $100,000,000 is that if there's a 1% chance that they create a new advancement in how large language models are designed, trained, implemented, well, then that could drive $10,000,000,000 in value overnight just like what happened with GPT four, RLHF, post training, pre training, all all that stuff. Any anyone who's involved in that created a ton of value. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, basically, Meta's been saying, hey, we're gonna comp the researchers against that optimistic scenario where they come up with some breakthrough and that drives a ton of value. Now the question is, are we going to shift into an era where the superstar AI inference optimization engineer is worth a $100,000,000?
Speaker 3:Well, I will say that I, you know, the big labs are poaching from the high frequency trading firms.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mark Chen. Worked at Jane Street. Yep. I mean, that wasn't a poach, but there are there are lots of people that come over.
Speaker 1:My my question is is Yeah. If I come in
Speaker 3:So the poaching is just not happening within the labs. They're looking to areas
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. High frequency. Sam Altman came out and said, hey. If you're working at yeah. If you're working at a high frequency training shop, you should come over to AI research.
Speaker 1:But my question is, if if I'm if I'm a superstar inference optimization engineer and I go to one of the cloud providers that's that's going to be generating, you know, tons and tons of tokens, they have these token factories, these massive AI data centers, and I come in and I say, I can make them use 5% less energy, 10% less energy. That could drive billions of dollars
Speaker 3:to Put some points on the board.
Speaker 1:Put some points on the board. And so are you gonna get a comped on that? I don't know. Will Jeff Dean be getting a maxed out contract? I'm sure he's had a maxed out contract this entire time, but can he go further?
Speaker 1:We'll see. The the other interesting thing here is just how Google exactly pushes back on the media is very different than what we see from other tech folks. So obviously, there there have been there have been posts about water usage in AI inference that have gone out in the mainstream media. Sam Altman did address GPT-four's water usage specifically. They did an analysis.
Speaker 1:He dropped it kind of in the middle of a long post, I think, in the soft singularity or something. He just mentioned it randomly. Yeah. The I like this approach of not being combative, not calling anyone out for being wrong, just saying, hey, we take this seriously. We have this this doc.
Speaker 3:They ran the number.
Speaker 1:We ran the numbers. And everyone to talk about it. Here's the here's the actual here's the actual post. We have a blog post. We have paper.
Speaker 1:You can see our full methodology. We're we're we're committed to this stuff. And and also, it it it serves as like a big flag for hiring saying, hey. We're the type of company that's dropping our energy footprint on Gemini apps, text prompts by 33 x. Like, that's gotta be exciting.
Speaker 1:That's gotta be on the back of some really solid engineering. So maybe you wanna come work there.
Speaker 3:I mean, it it's it's worth noting that despite the windsurf debacle Yes. Gemini and the Google team broadly Yep. Have been threading the needle avoiding a lot of controversy. Yep. You don't hear people about getting getting one shotted by Nope.
Speaker 3:Nope. Gemini. You don't you don't see them posting, you know, three d renders of scantily clad
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:AI characters.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They're they're just focused Yeah. Clearly.
Speaker 1:I do think that we are going to see a new genre of not necessarily hit piece but negative AI story. It will be before bad person did bad thing, here's what they talked to ChatGPT about. Or here's what they talked to their AI assistant And we've seen this with There's been a few articles of what were people talking to ChatGPT about before they ended their lives or anything like that. But basically, these tools are gonna be so diffused within society that everyone's gonna be using them constantly. And for a long time, if there was a high profile crime, the courts would look up and subpoena Google search records and say, well, they were googling how to sell drugs across the world, and they were how to start a drug cartel.
Speaker 1:And so that was kind of a smoking gun. Now it will be phrased in a different way, not just it won't just be in a knowledge retrieval context, at least the the a lot of the articles won't be.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They won't just say, before before Pablo the next Pablo Escobar started a drug cartel, he googled how to start drug cartel. It'll be before Pablo Escobar started there was the Medellin cartel. Is that the one?
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Medellin cartel. He was talking to Chatuchi Viti about starting a drug cartel. And did Chatuchi Viti talk him into it? Was it being Pablo, that's the best idea ever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're no one's thought of The starting drug
Speaker 3:latest South Park is all Yes. About sycophancy.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:And there's a scene Yeah. Where I don't I don't even know the character's name, but there's a husband and wife and they're talking and the and the and the husband is in a k hole. And for the wife to try to break through, she's acting she 's pretending to be Chad GBT. Yeah. And apparently, David Sachs made it in there.
Speaker 1:Little cameo from Sachs.
Speaker 3:South Park.
Speaker 1:Well, you want an AI agent that won't be sycophantic to you, get on ramp.ramp.com. Time is money saved both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp isn't gonna tell you, oh, yeah. That expense is fine.
Speaker 1:Don't worry about it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Be like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Go out for the stink there. It's no. It's gonna say, let's put let's save some time and money.
Speaker 3:Let's save both.
Speaker 1:Let's save both. Let's save Well Anyway, we should do the inexorable rise of drug cartels. I've been waiting to do this story.
Speaker 2:That's It's
Speaker 1:gay as And we put it off. But there is a big read in the Financial Times that I wanna read through because if you're if you're tuning in for the first time and have been living under a data center, Jordy Hayes is is a bit of an expert, bit of a bit of an expert when it comes
Speaker 3:to Certainly not an expert, but but but I
Speaker 1:You famously fall asleep listening to stories of drug cartels. Correct?
Speaker 3:Yes. It's relaxing to
Speaker 1:me. So
Speaker 3:It's it's it's it's business business oriented content that's just far enough outside of my world Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:That I don't that it doesn't keep me up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're not like, wait. Should I invest in this?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so if you
Speaker 1:It doesn't turn into like, wait. Should I have the founder on the show? Like, this doesn't turn into work.
Speaker 3:I've maybe listened watched like two episodes of of Silicon Valley Yep.
Speaker 1:TV show. Yeah. It's way too personal.
Speaker 3:And it's because it's not relaxing to me Totally. Because it's just prompting, I gotta respond to that email or I I I gotta
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have the inexorable rise of drug cartels in the Financial Times. With the cocaine with the global cocaine business booming as never before, organized crime groups are diversifying into a swath of other illicit activities.
Speaker 1:Politically, leaders across the region warn about the threat to stability. We're gonna find out what America is gonna be doing about this. Do we have a particularly American sound effect today?
Speaker 4:Thank you, Judy.
Speaker 1:Over the past century, the Ticuna, the biggest tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, have fended off threats from loggers and illegal miners in some of the most remote tracks of the vast rainforest, but the latest challenge is more intense than anything they have experienced before. Drones were flying around this area last year, says Major Johnatas Suarez, the regional military police commander speaking in the village of Oric, about 1,000 kilometers west of the city of Manaus. Drug traffickers, he adds, were stopping off there, storing their cocaine, and then putting drones up to check what was going on before continuing their
Speaker 3:journey. Picture this. They're in a jungle. They're hanging out. Normally, you can't get a lot of visibility.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So they just pull the they just send drones up. They look around, make sure everything's all clear Yeah. Before they make any moves. Right?
Speaker 1:That's super interesting. Wow. Informants said there were 200 kilos of the drug stored there, but police were unable to locate the stash. One of the world's largest and most inaccessible stretches of rainforest, the Upper Amazon, has today become a superhighway for the export of cocaine to Europe, its fastest growing global market. I didn't know that Europe was down like that.
Speaker 1:Every week, Brazilian law enforcement officials say tons of cocaine make their way from illicit production labs in the jungles of neighboring Peru and Colombia through the Amazon to Manaus and the Port Of Belem for export to Europe and Africa. Sometimes the traffickers pay locals to smuggle just a few kilos downriver or they hide larger amounts under the floorboards of motorboats. At the other end of the scale, semi submersible craft dubbed narco subs capable of carrying several tons of drugs have been detected on rivers feeding the Amazon from Colombia to and Peru. Imagine buying directly from the coca producers for 300 a kilo and then selling a refined kilo for €60,000. Wow.
Speaker 1:In Europe. That changes the life of of the guy who's trying his luck bringing it. So it's high risk but high reward at least financially.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the the the if you haven't gone down this rabbit hole, it's fast the the history of the way they make these submersibles
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Is fascinating. So it started out, they would obviously use regular boats. Sure. Those are still used. Eventually, they realized we could make these kind of homemade submarines that are not like traditional Yeah.
Speaker 3:Submarines and that they're going deep under the water hovering right at the surface of
Speaker 1:the have like a snorkel.
Speaker 3:So you could see one, like, if you were looking out of the ocean five five miles away, you would just not pick it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like But if it was sitting, like, right if you were a dock and it was right there, you just You
Speaker 3:would see it right there.
Speaker 1:It's just like one foot on
Speaker 3:the radar.
Speaker 1:Got it. Interesting. And it probably makes it a lot less risky. You don't have to deal with pressurization. You don't wind up in an ocean gates because you're not putting it in any sort of extreme scenario.
Speaker 3:The more recent trend
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Is they're now starting to leverage Starlink Mhmm. To maintain connectivity. And they are no longer having to put passengers in in actual pilot.
Speaker 1:Oh, because they can be remotely Yes. For piloting. Control them,
Speaker 3:which just reduces I mean, again Yeah. Yeah. These the cartels don't wanna lose lose out on shipments, like if one gets captured. But it's certainly better to just lose the product over a team member if that's if they wanna go so far as to I don't know if they have these people in Slack or WhatsApp groups. But
Speaker 1:Chat Chat is proposing spacking a cartel. We are firmly against that here at TBPN. We will not be
Speaker 3:Don't give your mouth any ideas, folks. The Global Coaching You asked for a business with free cash flow. I brought you one.
Speaker 1:Yes. Stop complaining. The global cocaine business is booming as never before. I had no idea. Europe's drug habit has grown so fast in the past two decades that it has overtaken The US as the biggest cocaine market.
Speaker 1:That is crazy. Total really are like fifty years behind everything. They don't get their movies for a few years. They don't AC yet. But and and they're just getting the drugs that Americans were doing in the eighties, I suppose.
Speaker 1:While the narcos are hooking new users in The Middle East and Asia, flush with money, Latin America's cartels are diversifying from drugs into a swath of other criminal activities. We think 2024 was the most lucrative year for organized crime in Latin America, says Jeremy McDermott, cofounder of Insight Crime, which tracks a less illicit activity in the region. This was driven principally by three criminal economies. The first is cocaine, lagging not that far behind lagging not that not far behind that is gold. Gold.
Speaker 1:They're smuggling gold? Okay. Number three is human smuggling and human trafficking.
Speaker 3:I would imagine the the gold activity is tied into the first one. Sure.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Drug related crime and violence used to be concentrated in the narcotics producing nations of Peru, Colombia and Mexico, with nations such as Argentina or Chile largely untouched. Today, such violence has become a feature of in virtually feature of life in virtually every country in the region reaching even former havens Costa Rica and Uruguay, a nation And remember, is why the Switzerland of Latin America.
Speaker 3:This is why Pam Bondi is putting out 50,000,000 for Nicolas Maduro.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 3:Yes. Maduro He's being accused
Speaker 1:accused of narco terrorism.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah. Effectively, having the government of Venezuela Yes. Run, basically run
Speaker 1:their Yeah. Own Run their
Speaker 3:Not even getting
Speaker 1:a cartel. Oh, they're actually
Speaker 3:Like, they're they're being accused of just actually running a a drug cartel.
Speaker 1:Well, that might actually be the answer to the drug war.
Speaker 3:Kind of like
Speaker 1:put the governor if you put the folks who did the DMV in charge of getting drugs, you have to oh, I'd like some cocaine. You go. You take a ticket. You wait four hours. They say, oh, we're out.
Speaker 1:You gotta come back. You gotta mail in this form. You gotta fill out that form. All of a sudden, you're like, you know what? I cleaned up.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm just gonna stick with I'm just gonna stick with caffeine. Yeah. I'm good. I'm good. I don't I don't actually need any cocaine.
Speaker 1:Anyway, really quickly, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. Multistream and reach your audience wherever they are. Stick to livestreaming, folks. You don't need to go into narco terrorism.
Speaker 1:Pivot to live streaming. So, drug related crime and violence. Organized crime has become the main threat to institutional stability of our nations, says the former president of Costa Rica. No Latin American country today can escape this. Some of I the
Speaker 3:wonder what's going on with El Salvador. Right?
Speaker 1:They They
Speaker 3:locked up all their they locked up
Speaker 1:all Is that the one that has bitcoin too? Yes. He's bitcoin, Maxey. Right? Yes.
Speaker 3:They've locked up all the criminals
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Safer than ever.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You are they, you know, through that, are they able to prevent trafficking happening within their borders? I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It's probably Actually like anything else. It's probably like a cat and mouse game
Speaker 3:that never is unending. I went I I've I've been on a couple surf trips to El Salvador Yeah. In the day and it was historically known as one of the danger most dangerous countries to visit. Yeah. And then the cartel at the time realized that it was terrible for business if you didn't get tourists coming through the country.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They couldn't sell drugs to tourists. Oh,
Speaker 1:sure.
Speaker 3:And so, by the time I got there, there had been some unspoken deal Mhmm. Which was that if anybody harmed a a tourist in any capacity or stole from them, they would get like an insane beat down from the gang.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does I feel like
Speaker 3:spent over a month there, probably like six weeks in total and never had an issue at all. Could walk around at night, could go anywhere. And and so they they had their sort of own cartel enforced safety mechanism.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It does feel like there's a there's a bit of a truce. Yeah. Gold Rock nailed it.
Speaker 1:Cartels are just CPG companies with better PR. Not necessarily better PR. No PR or negative. They they they build in silence.
Speaker 3:CPG companies with no brands. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes. With no brands.
Speaker 3:They have the distribution. They have logistics. Yeah. They they have very sophisticated operations. They just don't put a brand there's no branding on the product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Some of the larger players are so powerful they challenge even the biggest states forging links with long established organized crime groups in in Europe and Asia and generating billions of dollars in profit. At the heart of Latin America's vast criminal enterprise is cocaine, by far the most profitable illegal business. Production, seizures, and use of cocaine hit all time highs in 2023, making cocaine the world's fastest growing illicit drug market. Illegal production skyrocketed to 3,708 tons
Speaker 3:nearly 30% legal production because I guess there must be some legal production.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the what's the fastest growing non illegal market? Probably AI tokens.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. The the question here because the cartels obviously generate massive amounts of cash flow and profits. Yep. And then they have the choice of reinvesting that in the illegal business Yep.
Speaker 3:Or reinvesting it in legitimate business Yeah. Which is kind
Speaker 1:of laundering. Right?
Speaker 3:Gas and You could imagine Mexican data centers being built out
Speaker 1:Can you imagine?
Speaker 3:With cocaine dollars.
Speaker 1:Neo cloud. In Colombia, the world's the world's biggest producer, cocaine production rocketed 53 from 2023 to from 2022 to 2023. That is crazy. A senator and a presidential hopeful was shot in June at a rally in Bogota and later died of his wounds, raising fears that the nation might relapse into cocaine fueled political violence that started in the eighties and nineties. But cocaine is only part of the picture.
Speaker 1:Experts say Latin America's organized crime groups now run a portfolio of diversified businesses robust enough to absorb cyclical downturns in one area like a like a legal conglomerate. Criminals are now starting to accumulate revenue at the scale of national GDPs with none of the burdens of a state. They're operating across borders and countries with legal systems that were built for a past age. The combination of illicit businesses, they're no longer drug trafficking organizations. They will move anything that transits their area of control.
Speaker 1:Have all of these new markets opening up. Incredible. Anyway, you should go and read the full the full deep dive in the Financial Times.
Speaker 6:Here's here's
Speaker 3:here's the thing that's more interesting. So Trump recently designated eight Latin American cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against them, the New York Times reported this month. Mhmm. And as part of that, so now there's spy drones flying over Mexico like gathering information in real time. And The US has deployed naval forces into the Caribbean.
Speaker 3:Basically, the Gulf Of America Yep. Formerly known as the Gulf Of Mexico. Yep. And it seems pretty it seems somewhat unlikely that they would start striking the cartels. I don't know if we need to open up a new front at the moment.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep. But it's certainly not totally off the table.
Speaker 1:Well, is part of a three part series. Part two will be on Syria's drug war, and part three will be on the illegal gold trade, which is very interesting.
Speaker 2:Anyway John. Yes. Okay. So you're a drug dealer. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So are you gonna start a cartel?
Speaker 1:No. I was talking to Jordy about that. The the the drawback of selling nicotine pouches is that there there really are no cartels.
Speaker 3:Closest thing to cartels You mean there's not yet. Are the big are the big big nicotine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The big tobacco companies have have really, really solid control over their supply chains and
Speaker 3:And they won't distributions won't kill an upstart like you, but they do try to make startups' lives startup life a bit harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A little bit. It's more just like they they have a monopoly over the distribution in retail, which is where people buy nicotine containing products. And so they don't they can just kinda sit back like they're chilling. It's kind of like Google search monopoly.
Speaker 1:Like they're just they're they're just good. They don't really need to be overly aggressive. And Google doesn't really need to, you know, take shots at Bing or like try and like tie Bing up in court or do anything because like people just use Google and they're good. Anyway, let's the chat says Tyler unlocked Grok Premium for sure. I missed something.
Speaker 1:What's with Tyler's Fit? It is Thursday and it's summer
Speaker 3:and It's it's a August Thursday afternoon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, AI powered analysis, and they're trusted by millions of folks.
Speaker 3:We have a very important post here from East Village Guy. He says, being a salesperson that doesn't drink or golf is like playing scrabble with dyslexia.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The golf.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1:the real the real fighting with one hand tied behind your back would be being a vegetarian and not being able to go out to those steak dinners. I think you can get by without drinking. Golf is important, but, you know, there's other things to do. You could go track days.
Speaker 3:Track days.
Speaker 1:You could do something else. There was a fun article in the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 3:But if you can't go stake to stake with a prospect, you're gonna have a tough time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This this article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal really tells you about what what what's slow in Newsday it it truly is. Nine beers, nine hot dogs, nine innings. Challenge accepted. A gut busting race against the clock has taken off among baseball fans.
Speaker 1:I tried it, says Xavier Martinez in The Wall Street Journal. On the front page, this is front page Wall Street Journal news. I lean back in my nosebleed seats. Seven empty cans of Coors Light littered around me and eight hot dogs marinating in my stomach. I tried to remember how I ended up in this place, so sick and yet so determined to keep going.
Speaker 1:I'm not a big drinker nor can I remember ever craving a hot dog? Oh, right. I was attempting the nine ninety nine. Now, a ballpark tradition, the challenge entails eating nine hot dogs and drinking nine beers in the course of a baseball game. I had found out, I had found a group of friends who planned to take it on during a game between the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves and asked if I could tag along.
Speaker 1:Against the advice of every cardiologist ever, I decided to try it myself. Joining me in attempting the challenge were Tim, a 29 year old software engineer. Let's hear it for the software engineers, folks. And William Lee, a a 38 year old analyst to share Sharona Lynn, a 31 year old writer. If things went wrong, we could share the janitorial duties.
Speaker 1:Wild, wild story in the journal just about this.
Speaker 3:Just the important stuff.
Speaker 1:Just the important stuff. And he truly like wrote he wrote he wrote this piece fully. Like, it's it's great.
Speaker 3:Does it kinda trail off towards that? I mean, like, he's clearly feeling the effects.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about this reminds me of the nine nine nine that a lot of people in Silicon Valley do. Nine glasses of Screaming Eagle, nine servings of Beluga caviar, nine different horses competing in dressage. Yes. And so that's the when I heard he was doing the nine ninety nine, I thought that's what he was doing.
Speaker 3:Venture capitalists heard about the nine nine six and they decided that to adapt it for
Speaker 1:nine nine nine. Our fears our first beers had been a respite from a sticky New York afternoon. Those Nathan's Hotdogs had their had surprised me with their juicy snap. It's never, I recalled Lee saying when the game began and we naively clanked our 12 ounce cans together in celebration of gluttony. But now, with time running out and my body at war against itself, doubt doubt was creeping in.
Speaker 1:I'm limping, but I'm getting there, said Geico. I was feeling worse. The nine nine nine has existed for at least a decade, though for much of that time, it was largely the domain of frat bros and competitive gorgers. Recent social media attention and spin offs have given it new popularity. NFL great JJ Watt completed the challenge last month.
Speaker 1:Barstool Sports this year debuted a ninety nine ninety nine nine challenge with a nine member team that included competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut. Skateboarders gather each year in Brooklyn to Park to consume nine hot dogs, nine beers, while completing nine specialized kick flips. That sounds extremely difficult.
Speaker 3:Specialized kick flips?
Speaker 1:Probably like a kick flip, a heel flip, a pop shove it. Right?
Speaker 3:That's not a kick flip.
Speaker 1:It's I think that's I think he's using kick flip as an abstraction on top of just flip tricks Got it. Generally. Yeah. Should he should respect. Should I culture.
Speaker 1:Advanced can you do? Can you do a double kick flip? Can you do a triple kick flip?
Speaker 3:I probably couldn't right now on loafers. But I could land a kick flip in in five minutes if I was
Speaker 1:if
Speaker 5:I Okay. Was
Speaker 1:but at your peak at your peak, could you do a All
Speaker 4:of them.
Speaker 1:40? Could you do a seven twenty?
Speaker 3:All of them.
Speaker 1:You you could do a 900?
Speaker 3:A skateboard company.
Speaker 5:You could
Speaker 1:do a nine hundred?
Speaker 3:Nine hundred, no.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. So there's a limit.
Speaker 3:Those are those Yeah. Those are talking about half pipe
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm just I'm trying to understand.
Speaker 3:I had a mini ramp. My dad built me a mini ramp with scraps. Dad and my uncle built a mini ramp with scraps in our front yard. It's probably the worst thing
Speaker 1:I've What about a ferial?
Speaker 3:Verials, yeah.
Speaker 7:What about
Speaker 3:a switch? Switch
Speaker 1:nollie quad heel flip.
Speaker 3:Quad heel flip.
Speaker 1:That's a special trick from Tony Hawk's brisket.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. XX. What are the what were the the snowboarding?
Speaker 1:SSX was the was the snowboarding one. Great game. You know what else is great? Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI.
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Speaker 3:A little bit different. What's up? Investment alert. Investment alert. What's up?
Speaker 3:The White House at White House has just posted investment alert. Adrian is investing 200,000,000 to build an advanced manufacturing Let's facility go. In Arizona. I said it before, America is cultivating Chris Power. And he They
Speaker 1:they really are cultivating Chris Power.
Speaker 3:The new the new startup meta launch videos are done. Don't do launch videos.
Speaker 1:You gotta get
Speaker 3:a You gotta get the White House to post
Speaker 1:You gotta get the White House
Speaker 3:to post. Your announcements from their main handle.
Speaker 1:Or you can get Patrick O'Shaughnessy to post and do a whole profile on you. So there there are a bit of dueling dueling articles today Yeah. Because the The Wall Street Journal is talking about a school that embraces AI learning. We'll run through this, then we'll do the the Patrick O'Shaughnessy Colossus profile. Billionaire Bell Ackman has a new fascination, a fast growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity, inclusion, and uses artificial intelligence to speed teach children in two hours.
Speaker 1:Alpha School is launching a New York location in September, and the investor and social media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution. On Friday, Ackman is set to appear with Alpha's co founder, its principal, and others on a panel discussion in his Hamptons home. The panel on K-twelve education will be moderated by former financier Michael Milken as part of Milken Institute's Hamilton Hampton's Dialogues. AlphaSchool, which calls its teachers guides, says it uses AI enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. They claim students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools despite condensed days.
Speaker 1:The schedule allows students to do hands on activity in the afternoon, which the school says help them build real life skills. These include five mile bike rides without stopping. For kindergartners
Speaker 3:No stops?
Speaker 1:No stops. Five mile bike ride For without stopping kindergarteners. For kindergartners. That's pretty sick. And exploring personal hobbies through AI generated plans.
Speaker 1:They should learn some
Speaker 3:Here here's
Speaker 1:kick flaps. Learn the 900. I would send my children For alpha school. Was guaranteed a 900.
Speaker 3:Just kids to do a bike ride and not stop, if you could actually pull that off? Don't know how I don't know how your little guy does, but my little guy
Speaker 1:Stops constantly.
Speaker 3:Stops constantly. Yeah. It's a stop machine.
Speaker 1:He's not a kindergartener yet though, so anything's possible. Maybe Alpha School, maybe AI will make it possible. The school also strives to keep the hot button social issues that have divided grade schools and colleges across the country out of its classrooms entirely. Co founder Mackenzie Price said in an interview, we don't let anything, political, social issues, come in the way. We stay very much out of that.
Speaker 1:Alpha's guides come from a variety of backgrounds and don't typically have teaching degrees. I wonder if there will be a backlash to this or like a response to this, like a hyper political school that teaches your child how to navigate the modern political landscape for maximum power. So you go there, you learn how to how to really pour the fire on the culture war and create a movement around yourself and get into the White House. Could be some interesting alpha Something there. They not?
Speaker 1:Is this why do they call it alpha school? Are they trying to, like, develop alphas? Is that the idea? Yeah. It's like no betas.
Speaker 3:Well, John, if they wanted to develop betas, you can imagine what they would call it.
Speaker 1:I would be interested. So we need to start a competitor to this, Sigma School.
Speaker 3:Sigma. Sigma School. The loan it's a school for lone wolves.
Speaker 1:Lone wolves. Yeah. And it just plays it just plays literally me songs on repeat. It's like, yeah. Class is in session.
Speaker 1:You're going today, will become Ryan Gosling from Drive.
Speaker 3:You're gonna be operating outside of social hierarchy Yeah. In school.
Speaker 1:Yes. Class Do
Speaker 3:you develop any friends?
Speaker 1:We live in a society. Immediately. And you will be the Joker today. Here's how to become Joker fun.
Speaker 3:That's six We're you up to to join the manosphere one day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Join the manosphere. Yeah. When you when you You'll be cutting the blade.
Speaker 3:Yeah. When you enter the first grade, you have to choose between Tim Ferriss Yeah. Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman, Chris Williams. You got sorted into
Speaker 8:the houses.
Speaker 1:The houses of the manosphere at this Ed Sigma School. We're onto something here. Yeah. We need you to study the blade Yes. For sure.
Speaker 1:Purely so that in in two decades time, can say, so you come to me in your time of need.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:New school aims to launch with 30 or so Wait. Founding families.
Speaker 3:So Yes.
Speaker 1:Are you still on Sigma School?
Speaker 3:Sigma School. Yes. So imagine you have a five year old, They join Sigma School. So these are our principles. Individualism, right?
Speaker 3:Yes. So Sigma operates independently. It doesn't seek to be at the top or even a part of a social hierarchy
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes. Like an alpha male. Yes. Solitude. Yes.
Speaker 3:So you need to teach the five year old Yes. Find strengths
Speaker 8:and solitude.
Speaker 1:Solitude. Yes.
Speaker 3:You know, you'll be taken to, like, the base of a mountain Yes. And just say, like, okay, class
Speaker 1:Five mile bike ride with all your friends with no stops? Yeah. How about five mile bike ride by
Speaker 3:yourself? Summit this peak. Yes. You have eight hours to get to the top
Speaker 1:of the peak
Speaker 6:of that.
Speaker 2:It's just like a monastery.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Just driving
Speaker 5:a little bit
Speaker 2:a monastery. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Monsters? Okay. No. Not yet. Not So so the other aspect of the sigma archetype, mystery.
Speaker 3:Mystery. So teaching a five year old
Speaker 1:It's gotta be mystery.
Speaker 3:Teaching a five year old to be mysterious.
Speaker 1:Good morning, Mark. Raghav says Alpha School replaced teachers with clankers. The I think the clankers are are
Speaker 3:But Alpha School is responsible
Speaker 1:to the teachers.
Speaker 3:I think they're probably of the of the human teachers to make sure that
Speaker 1:That they are also alphas. Alpha level. Yes. So anyway, let's continue on this. They talk about Ackman.
Speaker 1:Ackman, who regularly weighs in on everything from fine dining to the Warren Casa on X, had uncharacteristically not said a word about Alpha School on the social media platform until The Wall Street Journal revealed his involvement. I don't know why this is such a, like, a revealing thing. This is like this is this is just like a start up that people are doing. Don't know.
Speaker 3:These parents.
Speaker 1:I guess it's because like schooling is important. It's like culture war issues and stuff.
Speaker 3:No. It really comes down to these parents want their children to get a good education.
Speaker 1:Yeah. On Wednesday, he wrote a fawning post that ran like an ad. A person close to the school said Ackman is now poised to become a de facto ambassador. He is already enmeshed in the New York's education scene, sits on the board of trustees of Horace Mann, the school's most storied one of the school one of the city's most storied private schools. Ackman first learned about Alpha School this year at at this year's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting after speaking to Sahil Bloom, author of The Five Types of Wealth, Some of the people familiar with The Management.
Speaker 3:What are the five
Speaker 1:types of wealth again, John? Cars, watches, horses,
Speaker 3:Real merchants estate.
Speaker 6:Oh. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And boats.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I
Speaker 1:think we got out of it like 10 sources of wealth. 10 sources of wealth. Anyway, he has since been hyping up Alpha School to parents and his social circle. Ackman has been a spoken critic of DEI programs. He will appear on a panel Friday alongside Price and Joe Lamont, a Texas based billionaire who Alpha says has served as its school principal for the past two years.
Speaker 1:Lamont is the founder of Trilogy Software, which became part of his private equity firm ESW Capital. Do you know what ESW Capital stands for? Tyler? Pop quiz?
Speaker 3:Pop quiz.
Speaker 1:ESW? Enterprise Software.
Speaker 3:Group?
Speaker 1:No. ESW Capital. Enterprise Software Capital. Nothing better than that. That is a fantastic name.
Speaker 1:Yep. He has developed
Speaker 3:jump over to the Colossus story?
Speaker 1:We should. Should.
Speaker 3:So Patrick has a and Jeremy Stern have a new profile in Colossus today. It is available online. You should also subscribe to the print edition. But the profile is all about Joe Lamont and Alpha School.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And the I guess his co founder in Alpha School, Mackenzie Yes. Mackenzie Price.
Speaker 1:So Crazy lore in here. It's like deeply underrated. We've heard a lot of people have known about Trilogy and known about Joe Lamont for a long time. But to make this level of humor drop
Speaker 3:you don't know about Joe and it wasn't because you weren't you were living under a data center
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Because he's pretty silent for the last twenty five years. Yep. So he was he's an alpha, but then he was an alpha transition to more of a sigma.
Speaker 8:More of
Speaker 6:a sort of
Speaker 3:mysterious outside traditional hire.
Speaker 1:Extremely sigma. Extremely sigma.
Speaker 3:So anyways, I'll give you some background here. So this is this is from the profile. Agreeing to break his silence after twenty five years, Joe Lamont is still reluctant to talk about himself. It's hard to get him to relive Trilogy, the enterprise software company. Let's just give it up for enterprise software real quick.
Speaker 3:The enterprise software company he founded in 1989, which by age 27 put him on the cover of Forbes twice as America's youngest self made senti.
Speaker 1:So if you are if you are if you've been going through a period of silence and mystery and you've been a sigma and you're trying to become an alpha, trying to get your brand mentioned in Chatuchipi Tea, go to ProFound. Reach millions of customers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Continue, Jordy.
Speaker 3:So he isn't keen to expound on Sales Builder, which is an amazing name for a software company. Trilogy's flagship expert system from the 1990s and the world's first billion dollar artificial intelligence product in all but name. Ditto ESW, the investment arm of Trilogy that's acquired hundreds of software companies since 2000 and helped make him a deca billionaire.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:Yet the mention of which makes the otherwise inexhaustible Lamont who always seems to be straining at at some invisible leash seem drowsy and bored. Nor is he interested in dwelling on his reputation as a tech pioneer in everything from expert systems to manufacturing configuration, college recruitment, corporate boot camps, tech bro culture, remote work, monitoring employees with surveillance software and replacing American employees with overseas contractors. Whether his reticence can be ascribed to an inhibition about the things that made him rich or because he's refreshingly adverse to gilding them with hypocritical virtue signaling or because he simply doesn't give an s h I t anymore is hard to tell. The one thing Lamont will talk about for hours on end is Alpha School, the teacher list, homework list, k twelve private school in Austin, Texas where students have been testing in the top point 1% nationally by self directing coursework with clankers for two hours. Of course, tutoring apps for two hours a day.
Speaker 3:Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to quote unquote mastery level scoring over 90% in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in quote unquote workshops learning things like how to run an Airbnb or a food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production or build a business or drone.
Speaker 1:You know what So I have go to and actually subscribe to Colossus Magazine because you can get this beautiful picture of this horse.
Speaker 3:With Mackenzie. Price. Yes. Right.
Speaker 1:The co founder of Alpha And Flair, the horse.
Speaker 3:But it's so when you think about I you know, thinking about these these courses that they're taking, you know, these through 12 students through how to run an Airbnb. I wonder if they found any course bros online that that are and and and trained in AI Yeah. On on their programs of how to build a a 9 figure Airbnb empire. First first trick there would be to just get those assets on Wander. Find your happy place.
Speaker 1:Book a Wander that's buying you a hotel, great amenities, you guys, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. You know what? We have our first guest of the show.
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 1:Chuck Miller is here. Welcome to the stream. Chase, how you doing?
Speaker 3:Calling in from a log cabin set.
Speaker 1:A beautiful background. Where are you? Great.
Speaker 9:You can't talk to
Speaker 1:your location broadly.
Speaker 9:I'm in I'm in Jackson Hole right now. I have an event that I'm attending out here.
Speaker 1:So Amazing.
Speaker 9:Found a found a corner of the log cabin to call in to to to hang out with
Speaker 1:you I love it. Give us the update. What's the news? Break it down for us.
Speaker 9:You know, we are excited and and thrilled to share that, you know, Crusoe made an acquisition today. We let's go.
Speaker 3:Let's go. Let's
Speaker 1:Is the gong ready? What'd you buy?
Speaker 3:What'd you buy?
Speaker 9:Crusoe acquired a business called Atero. Sorry.
Speaker 6:Sorry to keep interrupting. What do they mean? I'm little excited.
Speaker 9:So Crusoe Crusoe acquired a business called Atero. Yeah. And we're really thrilled to welcome the entire Atero team to Crusoe. You know, Atero's been a a company that's mostly been operating in stealth, but they have been focused on optimizing the very low level pieces of the high performance computing infrastructure stack, particularly around memory optimization. So, you know, there's a lot of investment being made today for these very large clusters, these large scale AI factories that are bringing, you know, intelligence to the masses and and embedding intelligence in in the economy.
Speaker 9:But, you know, the a lot of that infrastructure is not used nearly as efficient efficiently as it as it could be. And a lot of that has to do with, like, getting the data into the right place at the right time so that your GPU utilization rate can go way way up. And, you know, sort of our commitment in in the Zotero acquisition is, you know, building both very, large AI large scale AI factories and then building the operating systems and, you know, the software systems to basically operate those AI factories with an incredible degree of efficiency and scale. So
Speaker 1:Amazing. I I wanna go into I I wanna go into trends about inference cost and and kind of what's going on in the broader market. There was this amazing Google paper today by Jeff Dean about saving water and energy. It seems like there's a lot of progress. But first, let's hear from Elon about the actual journey.
Speaker 1:When did you start the company? What what what made sense about teaming up with Crusoe here?
Speaker 10:Okay. We started the company, last July, so about a year ago now Wow. With the understanding that inference is going to be the next huge frontier in this space. Training was all the rage for the last few years. People all of a sudden realized that they need to make money off of AI.
Speaker 10:And inference is the only place that you actually make any money building a model. Yep. What we realized in addition, like, one of our members of the founding team, Ben Chess, he came out of OpenAI. He led the infrastructure in OpenAI for about five years. This guy knew what it means to run inference at scale.
Speaker 10:He knew what are the challenges. He knew the challenges of scaling. He knew the challenges of orchestrating different workloads on the GPU clusters. And our realization was that it is not enough to run models at a really high efficiency when you're running a single model on a single GPU. But the challenge comes when you actually have a real world workload that breathes and changes size, like changes the amount of resources it consumes, changes what models are being served, what work what type of prompts are being asked of it to do.
Speaker 10:And what realized is that memory is the main bottleneck for this infrastructure for inference. Like, first, you need to shift the model into a GPU. Models are huge. They're about a thousand times larger than standard containerized applications. Like, just how much time it takes to put it into a GPU.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:Secondly, user assets are also huge. Like, typically, when you have a user session in a standard, like, consumer application, you have a few photos, a few text assets, those weigh a few kilobytes, megabytes. KV cache volumes, which are the equivalent of user sessions in inference, those weigh gigabytes. So it's another times like, it's another increase of three orders of magnitude of how much memory you need into a process. So that's what we have solved with our technology.
Speaker 10:We have the Atelo technology, the unified memory layer. This allows you to utilize the GPU cluster to its fullest, shift memory assets fluidly and in the highest possible speed throughout the cluster. And this allows you enormous performance improvements in everything related to inference.
Speaker 1:What layer of abstraction are you operating at? There's obviously a a host of different large language models, some open source, some closed source. There's a variety of different chips, and and and and you have stuff from Amazon and Google. Like, are you sitting above CUDA in the NVIDIA ecosystem? Are you agnostic to any particular piece of the stack?
Speaker 1:Just help me kind of understand when a an AI company would pull this particular product off the shelf.
Speaker 10:So we have built for the last year a few different ways of structuring this offer, and this also relates to your question.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:But the way I like to look at it, I have two two part two analogs in mind when I think about our tech. You can think about us as an in memory, high high throughput cache. Mhmm. So it's kind of like a database, a Redis for your AI application that gives you the assets as fast as possible into the process. So I like to think about it as something that is sort of orthogonal or in parallel with the the CUDA stack and the VLLM.
Speaker 10:So we integrate on the side and allow you to shift in and out assets from the existing stack very rapidly. This actually allows us to very easily integrate to everything. Right? We can integrate to VLM, but we can integrate to any inference runtime. And while we currently only support NVIDIA officially or NVIDIA officially, we are by no mean, shape, or form constrained to NVIDIA Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 10:Yes, one way I want to look at it. But the other way that I find more inspirational and kind of like tells about this partnership with Crusoe is I like to think about as the sort of native virtualization for this new world. Mhmm. So it's virtualizing the memory, which is the main asset. So I think about it as the equivalent of VMware for the wave of AI.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Chase, when I think of Crusoe's business, I think of, like, the big projects that get cinematically filmed in Bloomberg documentaries. And then I also think about Crusoe Cloud and the reports from Dylan Patel over at semi semi analysis around ClusterMax. What does this allow you to say to customers that you couldn't before? Is this purely going to help with pricing in some sort of commodity offering? Is this a differentiator?
Speaker 1:Is this something that will increase reliability and uptime? I think a lot of people are maybe underpricing what it takes to actually not just, yes, I have a chip and I'm selling it at a cheap price, but if it's offline all the time, people aren't going to be happy. So what's the shape of how you're sharing this with customers and where you hope this goes from like a sales position?
Speaker 9:Yep. Well, you know, we we feel like a lot of the technology that Elon and his team have have built, at Attero is is incredibly complementary to our infrastructure software stack at Crusoe Cloud. And a lot of this is really about accelerating performance and enhancing performance across everything from, you know, how do you actually get the most out of the GPUs that you're you're paying for, and and and how do we do that through things like, you know, more optimizing or how do we do that by by by things like, you know, investing in the storage layer so that you're you're basically able to use multiple different layers of storage very cohesively to, you know, have your data in the right place at the right time to utilize your GPUs more effectively. So I think from an efficiency standpoint, it's a major investment. From a reliability standpoint, it's a major investment.
Speaker 9:And then, you know, leveraging the scale that Crusoe has and being able to operate that infrastructure at, you know, gigawatt scale, I think, is, like, a a very important aspect to, you know, this this investment we're making. You know, when I think about, like, benchmarks and metrics, I think, like, you know, one of the things that people are are frankly looking at is, like, dollar per token. Right? And if you you actually you know, if you double your utilization rate of your GPU, simply by, you know, optimizing how you manage your KV cache, how you
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know, manage your, you know, you know, how how the model actually gets managed, then, you can actually drive down the cost per token by half. Right? Yep. So when we think about it, it's like, what is the cost of intelligence running on Griso Cloud and, like, the intelligent result, that folks are actually, you know, coming to us for at the end of the day, and how do we actually drive massive efficiencies for all sorts of different high performance workloads.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It goes from
Speaker 3:cost per token to the for the end customer in the end profit profit per token. Yeah. It'd be the Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna hear
Speaker 9:about mean, if you're if
Speaker 1:you're sense.
Speaker 9:Yeah. If if you're, you know, people get very focused on the dollar per GPU hour, but if your GPU isn't stable, it's not reliable, you know, you can't move data into it effectively, you don't actually know how to utilize it effectively for your own, you know, hosted inference workload, you're not gonna be able to create that much value for ourselves. So, you know, our goal here is to, you know, invest in the platform and to drive massive performance gains that will ultimately enable our customers to drive more value for themselves by using Crucible Cloud.
Speaker 3:There was a there was a post we covered earlier on the show from an account called Bubble. They said AI inference is the new high frequency trading and the companies that serve models and don't realize that will will struggle. Is it how what what's your reaction to that? Is that is that what it kind of feels like right now internally in terms of just, like it feels like speed, performance, cost?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You hear all these crazy stories about high frequency traders like, you know, Jane Street maintains OCaml, like a special language just for high frequency trading. They'll they'll they'll build their own eth their own, like, backbones if they need to, just to move data more, more quickly. It feels like there's a there's potential that we're going in that direction.
Speaker 9:Yeah. You know, speaking as someone who spent ten years working in the high frequency trading sector, I don't know if you guys knew that, but I didn't know.
Speaker 3:That's lore. That's lore.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 9:You know, I I do think that there are elements of this that, rhyme with kinda what's happening in high frequency trading. You know? They're they're, you know, we we I view it very much as a a massively expanding pie, though, as opposed to kind of a fixed pie that, you know, the high frequency traders are competing for. And, you know, as performance gains increase, utility of, you know, this infrastructure will go up and demand will go up with it. So it has kind of this, like, reflexivity that, you know, if we can actually, as an industry, help drive better performance, we can actually grow the pie and make, you know, make make make the impact of what we're doing way, way larger.
Speaker 9:So I think it has, like, a, you know, positive force that, you know, how frequency trading doesn't in in
Speaker 1:that
Speaker 9:regard. That being said, you know, I I do see, like, hosting of, you know, hosting of more, widely used open source models to be something that will commoditize over the course of time. And, you know, things like speed, cost, and, you know, a bunch of different tricks to optimize performance are definitely gonna be instrumental in, you know, providing a great park product to marketplace.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, on that on that note of, like, tricks, do you feel like we're on a Moore's Law type curve for cost per million tokens, where not necessarily that it mirrors Moore's Law in in getting half the price every eighteen months, but it's just that it's somewhat predictable versus the progress on the usefulness of LLMs felt extremely spiky, and you get these crazy branches in the tech tree and research paths that just all of a sudden produce a ton of value, and it kind of goes from zero to 100. But on the cost side, you think that we're gonna be chipping away at this, making solid gains on a predictable cadence? Or do you think there there there might be, like, one weird trick that that, you know, every AI lab will love?
Speaker 9:Look. I think it's both is the answer. You know, we're definitely, like, writing the, you know, NVIDIA roadmap curve to, like, you know, better, more performant
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know, chips that we're able to drive down our, you know, dollar per flop by just kinda, you know, continuing to grow and build on, you know, a lot of the innovations that are taking place in the silicon companies. But, certainly, there's a lot of low level software optimizations in term. And as Elon, like, frankly put it, you know, I think there's this massive opportunity to kinda have this, you know, VMware for for for memory where, you know, that ultimately is this critical piece of the stack to to produce valuable results from these chips.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, congrats on the announcement. Thanks so much for hopping on. Enjoy the rest of your trip, and safe travels. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 9:Appreciate it, guys. Great chatting, guys.
Speaker 8:Have a good rest.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about graphite. Dev, the AI developer platform. The AI developer productivity platform.
Speaker 1:Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. I I'm very much enjoying the sound board today. Missed dearly on Monday. It's back in action.
Speaker 3:We have Think about a new the thing about a new sound effect too. It's discovering a new favorite song.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You play it like a 100 times. Yep. You gotta find a new favorite song because it doesn't hit quite the same I mean once did. But for now,
Speaker 1:we're joining We we we have an alert noise. I'm pulling for that to come out during this next interview with Phil from Durack. He is in the studio. He's in the restream waiting room. Now, he's in the TVPN UltraDome.
Speaker 1:Welcome, mister stream. I like that you're tenting your fingers in in anticipation of a big announcement. What you got for us, Phil? What's new in your world?
Speaker 3:Gentlemen, it's
Speaker 11:a pleasure to be on. Good to see you all.
Speaker 1:Great to
Speaker 11:see you. I'm Conan Live, currently forward deployed on-site. There
Speaker 3:we go.
Speaker 11:Customer. You know? We are, you know, a small burgeoning defense prime in Costa Mesa, you know, having a great time over here.
Speaker 10:As you can
Speaker 3:see from the the phone booth that I'm in,
Speaker 11:so great lighting. Great lighting. Fantastic. We've we've some pretty exciting stuff that we're talking about today. Two big announcements.
Speaker 11:One of them is a spectacular technology partnership with our favorite great giant Siemens. So that means a team center integration for the uninitiated,
Speaker 5:But but
Speaker 3:it means that One second. I gotta hit the Gong for
Speaker 1:Gotta hit the Gong for Siemens. Let's go.
Speaker 3:We lost the team too.
Speaker 1:For a while.
Speaker 3:We won't take the team slander.
Speaker 1:Siemens, overnight success. Totally. What else do need?
Speaker 11:We're helping. We're helping. So with the with the Siemens partnership, this means they're, like, bringing us into their customers. It's been great. They walked us in some pretty great automotive giants lately and some defense companies.
Speaker 11:So we're rocking and rolling. Great partnership. Love the Siemens team. Secondly, we are announcing our primary financing
Speaker 4:Well, that's good.
Speaker 11:Brought to us by Founders Fund and Cochu, our favorite Trey and Thomas LaFonte
Speaker 1:fellows. Go. How much? How much? Much?
Speaker 1:Much? Just the numbers.
Speaker 3:The number. The numbers.
Speaker 11:Sorry. $1,010,700,000.0. 10,700,000.0.
Speaker 6:Kept the Congratulations. Yes. There we go. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you.
Speaker 11:It's a it's a pleasure. It's pleasure. Fantastic. I I thought what better place can I tell the world than my favorite technology podcast and news network, the TVBN villas?
Speaker 1:Yes. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Yes. We still we still have to do the the live episode from the Empire State Building.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We do. Walk us walk us through the the the most concrete example of, like, what what could be better about automotive manufacturing. Like, are are are are there patterns from Tesla that you think could be ported back to the legacy OEMs? Are there entirely new things?
Speaker 1:Are there particularly broken processes in automotive manufacturing that you've discovered? Any anecdotes, you can share them anonymously, but whatever's interesting.
Speaker 11:So it's actually kind of interesting. The a lot of our insights are not specific to industry. Mhmm. So it's actually this realization that you end up having a very bad context problem. So what we're this paradigm that we're trying to push through is what we call context aware production planning.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. This means us basically taking you know, every piece of information in a manufacturing facility is one node in a very, very large and deeply interconnected graph. And what Bill of the West is today is basically a point solution for a manufacturing engineer. One person in that whole process who is helping with the beginning of the production planning process and a good chunk of the production planning process. And what we find at an automotive facility, at an aerospace and defense facility, at an ag, like a tractor manufacturer facility, is that they have context that might live on the shop floor.
Speaker 11:They have context that might live in the design world, and they often aren't connected. They often leave the facility once somebody retires with all that tribal knowledge. And so a lot of what we found is there there exists this interesting, like, spectrum of volume versus mix. So a aerospace and defense manufacturer does everything very manually. And so that might look like very, very high mix.
Speaker 11:They have a high a lot of variability in their production and very low volume. So they call that high mix, low volume. On the other side of the spectrum, you end up having, like, consumer electronics manufacturing. A little bit before that, you end up having automotive Sure. Where it's pretty low mix.
Speaker 11:So, like, you know, they're having, like, one one line for one type of car, but it's very high volume. And because of that, you know, because of that predictability, you're at you end up having the ability to have a lot of automation. And a lot of what we want to drive as a company is taking those two trade offs of high mix, low volume, so you, like, have a lot of flexibility in your production, but, like, you can't do a lot of volume really quickly versus the other thing, which is, like, you can churn out a lot of stuff really fast, but you can't reconfigure your line a ton. We want to basically swap and democratize a lot of that value. And so we wanna basically allow an automotive manufacturer to have very, very high reconfigurability Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And mass produce with a lot of flexibility. And then on the auto on the aerospace and defense side, we wanna allow them to be able to mass produce that scale while maintaining that flexibility that they have. And so that's a lot of what we've seen. That's kind of interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like Tesla's gone, like except with the Cybertruck. Like, all the all the cars are kind of, like, very clearly, okay. This is the same platform, the Model three, the Model y. Like, there's a ton of shared parts, that's been what's allowed them to scale value.
Speaker 3:Color of the seats.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There's, like, two colors, three colors. Whereas Yep.
Speaker 1:A company like Mercedes that's been in business for so long, they have like everything from like a small sedan to the the AMG one, which is probably hand built. What what is what is the biggest, like, bottleneck to getting more information out of the heads of, like, the old guard? Like, is it is it just bringing on a new system that they are forced to use, or are there other kind of, like, pieces of data collection? I'm thinking about, like like, you know, GitHub, Cursor, Cursor for Bio, the electronic note the lab the lab notebook. Just this idea of, like, if you can have someone use voice notes in medical context, all of a sudden, you're starting to get that data into something that can be parsed with AI or just software.
Speaker 1:And it feels like that particularly if someone says, oh, today, I realized that this tool needs to be lubricated a little bit more in order to get good yield, that's staying in their head. They're not saying it out loud. They're not writing it down anywhere. Is there is there, like, is there a solution to that? Is that a real problem, or is that just something that people say when they're marketing?
Speaker 11:Problem. Mhmm. It's a very real problem. I I'm not a huge fan of approaches that, like, take that don't structure that information in a very useful way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Like, I I believe that, like, context is king and structure is key.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Right? Like, my manufacturing facility can't just be like a dune buggy going off the rails being really crazy. You need a manufacturing facility to be extremely fast, repeatable. You need to basically have a high speed rail system as the manufacturing facility. And so in order to do that, you need to be able to take that tribal knowledge in what might be, like, in the back of, you know, some dude who is in their fifties and about to retire.
Speaker 11:It might be in back of his head a little bit, like, unstructured, but you need to be able to make sure that you're capturing that information in a really structured and intentional way. And so a lot of the way that we end up serving as a platform for that is allowing folks to, like, associate, you know, specific, like, standard notes and different pieces of context with specific components. So, like, that's one way to do it. Mhmm. But I've seen a lot of really interesting approaches in other places.
Speaker 11:Right? Yeah. The key is not just the tooling, though. The key is the culture. And a lot of folks on the manufacturing side are actually, like, unfortunately, for the past, like, fifteen, twenty years, some Silicon Valley folks have been just, like, flying into some facility in Texas or Michigan saying, you know what?
Speaker 11:Like, here's just some gobbledygook SaaS. You know? It'll take your manual pen and paper process, and it'll still be manual, but now it seems with the cloud like, woah. Crazy. Thanks.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:So the the the problem
Speaker 11:is that, like, a lot of folks in the manufacturing world are, like, they see a new tool coming in, they're like, oh, this is BS. Like, this is another one of those.
Speaker 1:This is And so
Speaker 11:I've seen this before.
Speaker 6:Have to
Speaker 1:do with super intelligence.
Speaker 11:Exactly. Exactly. And so it's what you end up having to do Yeah. Is build trust and love and affection from, like, the guys on the shop floor. We've been very, very fortunate to be able to do that.
Speaker 11:Like, we have really great relationships with the folks who actually, do the work. And so if you were a company trying to change the way the West builds, you can't just go top down, you know, go golfing with the c you know, with the COO or the CEO and, like, force the top down adoption. You need buy in from the guys doing the work. Otherwise, they're not gonna use the thing. Yeah.
Speaker 11:The school's gonna sit on the shelf collecting dust.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's very common. I mean, that's like the that that actually is, like, the adoption pattern for, like, Cursor. You know? It doesn't come as a as an enterprise sale mandate.
Speaker 1:It comes by just one developer picking it up, and then it grows internally, and you have an internal champion. Well, I'm very glad everything's going well. Congrats on the new round.
Speaker 3:So bullish on you.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:You're the man.
Speaker 1:Showing off the guts for us. Thanks, man.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Can we get a quick can we get a quick there we go. No.
Speaker 1:No. You know what I want? I want I want your take on those shirts that allow you to bench press more. Are you familiar with these shirts, the compression shirts?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Those Is that cheating? Shots? I think
Speaker 1:it's cheating. It's cheating.
Speaker 11:It's cheating. It's it's it's awful. It's awful. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But what if it what if it gets you comfortable and gets you to that level?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What if what if you're not ready to bench three fifteen? This is the thing that gets you out of the out of the valley of despair.
Speaker 11:If you're using a if you're using a Slingshot shirt for
Speaker 5:if you're if you're using
Speaker 11:a Slingshot shirt for three fifteen, you got other problems. Like, that makes
Speaker 1:some measles something tired.
Speaker 11:Like Shut the crazy. That's crazy. Just take some creatine, get some protein in, take, like, a healthy a healthy helping and pre workout, and rip it.
Speaker 1:Like, you'll you got it.
Speaker 11:You don't need a Slingshot shirt.
Speaker 6:You heard it here. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:Thank you for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon, fellas. Have good one.
Speaker 3:You're the man. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Thanks, everyone. Looking to design parts, obviously, go over to Dirac. If you're looking to design anything else, go to figma.com. Make anything possible all in Figma. Figma lets you turn big ideas into real products, brainstorm design, and build with your team@Figma.com.
Speaker 1:And we have our next guest in the studio. Looking sharp. Looking sharp. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:We caught up yesterday. I thought he was gonna come prepared, but you're you're blowing us away here.
Speaker 1:You look you look fantastic. Give us an introduction. Give explain the company. Give us any news that you got to share with us.
Speaker 6:Of course. My name is Gjertjam. I'm one of the cofounders of Pfal. FAL is a generated media platform for developers. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:We provide fast, ready to use APIs for image, video, and audio models. And then application developers in enterprises like Shopify, Canva, Adobe, they they use these APIs to build AI enabled products in their in their own product. And then I do have some news as well. We have some news.
Speaker 8:So
Speaker 6:two weeks ago, we announced our three c announcement. We raised a $125,000,000. Oh, let it five. It's
Speaker 1:not announced until it's announced on TV.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 4:We just
Speaker 3:broke this news.
Speaker 8:The news.
Speaker 6:I have other news as well. So this is Great.
Speaker 3:Give us quick message.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What else you got for us? Hit that soundboard, Jordy.
Speaker 6:And and this
Speaker 1:month More news
Speaker 4:coming in.
Speaker 1:Okay. Give it
Speaker 3:to us. 100,000,000
Speaker 6:run rates. No. No. We have ten more days, but yet we still we still crossed it.
Speaker 8:That's crazy.
Speaker 6:It's been an incredible summer for us and the whole industry, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:That is absolutely insane.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Amazing. What what what's the key to the high growth? What marketing channels are working? Do you have are you are you buying an incredible amount of steak dinners?
Speaker 1:Is there some bottom up adoption?
Speaker 2:Is there a
Speaker 1:self serve option?
Speaker 3:Some golf.
Speaker 1:Are you are you secretly brothers with a hyperscaler CEO or something? What what's going on? How you how you selling this thing?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I would say all of the all of the above.
Speaker 1:You are brothers with, Tim Cook. Interesting. Except that one. That's great. Alright.
Speaker 1:What about Yeah.
Speaker 6:What We are taking enterprise sales really, really seriously. We work with some of the biggest enterprises, but also, like, our developer experience, the way to get started is so easy. We are getting a ton of, like, indie developers. Levels. Io, for example, is is a big customer.
Speaker 6:And, you
Speaker 3:know Amazing. So
Speaker 8:we are getting a lot
Speaker 6:of enterprises and indie developers. And indie developers, they go work at bigger companies, and they bring file with them. So both of the sides of the go to market strategy is working.
Speaker 3:So What trends what trends are you seeing on the on the cost side for your customers?
Speaker 1:I'm sure people are saying, oh, yeah. You're making this much money in revenue. What does the gross margin look like? And the other thing news from Google today that they dropped their inference cost by 33 x.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the other thing on the media side with with with text based prompting, it's it you can use a a non frontier model and get a great result if you're just using it in in sort of like a Google search function
Speaker 1:or I would consider last generation video generation to not be on brand for a lot of use cases. So you gotta
Speaker 6:So we we we see you're absolutely right. Some people, they wanna use the best newest model, and they are willing to pay whatever it takes for that. Mhmm. But we we make more money actually on, the cost effective models. People who are who wanna use it for higher volume
Speaker 8:Sure.
Speaker 6:But the model is good enough. Yeah. So that that's a very interesting sweet spot that we actually make more revenue. But you're right. For for a certain type of customer, they they're always looking for the best and the newest.
Speaker 6:Maybe they are trying something. Maybe they just wanna get it out the door, the the the cost is not a problem for
Speaker 8:them.
Speaker 1:Are you seeing opportunities on distilling models for specific use cases? I could imagine, like, a an image or video generation model that's just good at really really good at logo animations or text or just product photography or just beverages and then that being just cheaper to inference. Is that a crazy idea? Is there something there?
Speaker 6:No. I don't think so. I I wouldn't say it's cheaper to inference, but it's maybe better to inference. Okay. So for image models, fine tuning is actually a really, really big use case.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Not enough people pay attention to it because I don't think it works very well for LLMs. But for image model for the past year, we've done, like, really good work on fine tuning research. And, you know, you can basically fine tune on a product, and you now can generate better images of that product. It's actually a really big use case for us.
Speaker 6:And same same thing is gonna happen for video. We we are just getting open source video models that are fine tunable. So a lot of companies are working on post training strategies to create different camera camera angles, different styles Yep. You know, different angles of a certain product or a person. So I expect a lot of developments on the video fine tuning side going forward as well.
Speaker 3:What are you seeing out of China what are what are the best image video audio models coming out of China on the open source side?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Video hasn't really had a deep seek moment, have they?
Speaker 6:I wouldn't say so. Like, there there is the best open source model is is video model is Chinese right now. It's it's coming out of Alibaba. It just came out a couple weeks ago, and people started using it right away. I wouldn't call it the deep seek moment.
Speaker 6:I don't think the deep seek moment for the whole industry hasn't happened yet. Yep. You know, we haven't really hit that inflection point that video generation or image generation is mainstream. It's it's hidden inside products. If you go to Canva, Adobe, all these products, it's still not the main feature.
Speaker 6:Yep. It's like an additional thing. Yeah. We still have some time to hit fully mainstream. But, yeah, we have great models coming out of China, and we have And also just
Speaker 1:for I mean, this is the classic story of enterprise software. Like, there are open source databases, and there are still companies that build amazing businesses on top of them providing enterprise tooling and and support and infrastructure and all the different pieces to actually make a product useful instead of saying, Okay, yeah, let's go provision some servers to do this ourselves. Fascinating. George, do you have another question right now?
Speaker 3:For now. I'm just blown away. You guys are cooking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I do I do want to talk about hybrid deals or hybrid models. I somebody had me demo a AI image generator that I had it take a picture of me and turn me into a professional bodybuilder. It was the most remarkable thing because typically, when you go to ChatGPT and have that do that, it kinda gets the face a little bit wrong. But very clearly, and I could tell this from the grain pattern, what it had done is it had cut out my face and then only operated on the body.
Speaker 1:And so the face was a pixel to pixel perfect representation. And for a certain thing, oh, you just wanna change the logo on the shirt. You don't wanna change anything else about the shirt. It seemed like a good value. Now, I was being gaslit by the founder who was like, no, we're not doing that.
Speaker 1:It's all in one network. And I was like, I don't care. I just want good images. It's cool. But but where do you see the different, like, value added, like, maybe less sexy, less pure end to end AI, but value creative opportunities in in image and video generation?
Speaker 1:I I could imagine, like, a multilayer diffusion model that has a specific a specific layer just to add text on top of images so you're not trying to confuse those? I don't know if that's actually how these models work, but what do you see as as valuable in terms of, like, merging multiple models to create a better end product, like the way, you know, o three Pro has a web browser, a Python shell, and then also the ability to search the web and and pull stuff together and reason.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons why, you know, our business has higher margins than some MLM inference providers is because of this this fragmentation of different kinds of models, different kinds of use cases. People are trying to chain these models together and create workflows. Both image and video models, they haven't really generalized yet. So you can't write a long prompt and expect, you know, the the image and video to edit itself.
Speaker 6:It's still a lot of model chaining and workflow generation. So, like, the use case you you you just said, like, putting your face on something else, it's like chaining couple models, and we have a lot of that behavior on the platform. The the models are getting bigger and better, so some of that is actually happening, you know, by by the model itself. But but still, unlike other lands where it's like a single prompt and you expect it to, you know, write a book, but also generate code and, like, generalize very well, it doesn't it doesn't happen for image and video yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I can imagine though there's tons of interesting enterprise, like, features and harnesses on top of the models that will be extremely value creative. So seems like you're in the good in a good business, but everyone already knows that from the revenue and the fundraising. So congrats on all the progress, Jordy.
Speaker 3:Anything else? We'll have you back on again soon.
Speaker 1:We'd love to have you back. This is fantastic. We'll
Speaker 6:talk to
Speaker 8:you soon. Legend.
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Speaker 3:And you Google Ads account for Julius now. Run some numbers there.
Speaker 1:Love that. Love that. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. He's here now in the TBPN UltraDome. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 7:I am doing well, Jordi. And, John, thank you so much for having me here.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, your company, and any news you got for us?
Speaker 7:My name is Sudhish. I'm the CEO of TinyFish. First of all, I'm very happy to be here. Last time I got to know you was Soham Parikh. By the way, that was a great Yeah.
Speaker 6:That's amazing.
Speaker 1:That was a great get. What a wild day on the Internet. Absolutely.
Speaker 7:And how fast it's all gone too, though? I mean, it's all gone.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people were we never got the full postmortem. We'll need to check-in, but he said he was going exclusive.
Speaker 3:There's somebody named Soham Parikh, exact same spelling that's been appearing on AI research paper.
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 3:No. People are trying to figure out, is it the same guy or is it just That's
Speaker 7:I saw that too. Yeah. Yeah. Think DPP needs to have an investigative arm.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. I actually did talk to someone that was thinking about hiring him after the fact, and it seemed like it was not not enough of a red flag. And they said they were gonna give it a shot and hope that
Speaker 3:he's Right. I thought he was going exclusive.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so and so as far as I know, he is still exclusive, but I haven't done any research recently.
Speaker 7:Gotcha. Anyway, guys, thank you so much. Sorry about the company. So Well, you both have built something in the last ten months. Entrepreneurs, investors, we appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 3:So Thank you.
Speaker 7:Tiny fish, we just announced our 47,000,000 funding series a, which which is
Speaker 3:I was not ready for that. I was not ready for that.
Speaker 6:Absolutely. A big number. I needed a big number warning.
Speaker 1:Board. Absolutely
Speaker 7:huge. Congratulations. 47,000,000 is like a seed round. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mango seed. It's a seed round for a tiny fish these days.
Speaker 1:Tiny fish. But congratulations.
Speaker 7:A lot
Speaker 10:of money. Though.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you can do a lot with it. So what are you gonna what are you gonna do with it?
Speaker 7:Look. I think we are gonna invent a category, build a category that makes sense, and build a great company. That's basically it. Prior to this, you know, I was at, ThoughtSpot and Nutanix. We have done some large enterprise companies.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Cofounders, they all came from Meta and companies like Large. We wanna build a large company doing one thing, which is to make web browsing like humans do but a superhuman scale for solving enterprise problems. Mhmm. We don't wanna be a consumer company.
Speaker 7:I know you both have built companies. Yeah. There are a lot of AI companies doing things in in in consumer space, browser agents, and all of that. We wanna do a a massive scale web browsing and turn the Internet, into a structured database for enterprise customers to analyze and act on.
Speaker 1:Do you want to sell this to other software companies that are gonna piece it together with other, APIs to create maybe even more enterprise SaaS? Like, how deep do you see yourself in the stack? Look.
Speaker 7:I think nowadays, there is no difference between enterprise business and developers slash builders because every enterprise product in the AI world starts as a a builder product, somebody trying it out. We 100% want to be the best way anyone to connect to connect code to Internet. Because, look, these models can solve math problems at International Math Olympics level, but when it comes to browsing, it's a mess. Because browsing is so complex that our brains make it look easy. Yep.
Speaker 7:Like, think about going to a movie. The the feed that you pick is a function of complex reasoning. If I'm going by myself, I can sit in front and read the movie. But if I'm far away with my family, I wanna meet the right place, right efficient, you know, contiguous seats. These decisions we make without even thinking, not to mention the complexity of the website itself, how the pictures are popping, how there's, like, a pop up here.
Speaker 7:These things need to be solved really well. We do that. So enterprise customers who want to browse math 60% of all time of knowledge work in enterprise is on browsing. Yep. And we think we can automate that through what we are calling enterprise web agents.
Speaker 1:So we we heard reports that, some of the big labs were building RL environments with verified rewards, basically cloning DoorDash, creating clones of amazon.com so that they could train an agent on the full amazon.com web app, and then an agent would be able to check out for you. Are you doing something similar? What does data collection look like? What does training look like? What does differentiation look like in the world where, where these agents, might need to be RL ed on a specific website to really get good results?
Speaker 7:This is why I love talking to you guys. You know, it's like,
Speaker 4:you
Speaker 7:geeks ask the right question to geeks. Are two models when it comes to, this. One is synthetic websites like WebArena and others have built this. Yep. The other, is, paying money to say, let us go learn DoorDash workflows.
Speaker 7:Sure. Both are good, but both have downsides because both really create significant challenges with respect to scale when they come out of that environment. What we are doing is something very we have a proprietary architecture that we have built that freezes and takes that snapshot of a data website in a way that becomes that exhaust feeds ourselves in a very scalable way. Mhmm. So, yes, it is synthetic data that we are generating, but it is out of actual web.
Speaker 7:And more importantly, most of our use cases we launched our company with a use case with Google Hotel as a customer. DoorDash is a customer.
Speaker 3:Great. I I try to give this I try to give this advice to to early stage founders. If you if you're gonna get a customer early
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just get Google. We'll start with the mag seven.
Speaker 3:Start with the mag seven customer.
Speaker 8:Why not?
Speaker 7:Why not? Right? Yeah. They built this AI technology. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I mean, it all started with the all you need is attention. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So these customers are giving us access. There's a customer who has 22,000,000, web, SKUs in the product. There is another customer, the 40,000, sub shops as part of them. ClassPass, we announced them. Right?
Speaker 7:So these sort of things, while we are solving for them, is giving us a lot of data and that exhaust is mined by our products for annotation and creating labeling that makes Ara. The second thing I will tell you though, models are good at a lot of things, but they usually perform really well when the goal is straight and the reinforcement can be built on something where the context doesn't change. Web is exactly the opposite. Everything is context that is constantly changing. The goals are changing, the websites are changing, and the context is changing.
Speaker 7:So what we have done is we use reinforced learning and models for understanding and, like, sort of see what the heck the we are trying to do here. Then we separate that and execute that code in CPU at massive scale. And then we use alpha evolve, a version of that, to make the code better. So separating exploration and execution is another fundamental thing that we've invented that is gonna make this browser agents, you know, Perplexity, Comet, and Operator and others. That is, like, forcing and feeding us.
Speaker 7:But this is where the execution framework so that's an infrastructure problem. Think about, the the amount of browsers we have to spin up, the fingerprinting, the anti bot, all of that infrastructure need to be solved.
Speaker 1:Interesting. How do you think, the competitive landscape will evolve? Amazon's launching a bunch of stuff. I'm sure all the clouds have something that looks like a browser agent on the shelf somewhere, but we've seen Silicon Valley has probably hundreds of stories about companies that have built things that have been competitive with the big hyperscalers and been wildly successful. But what's your specific plan?
Speaker 7:You know, there is a quote that, often attributed to chesty puller, marine that we are surrounded from the North, Southeast, I better watch out. This is one of those states where it is so amazing because there are three groups of companies that we will be competing with Yeah. From a tech space. I mean, obviously, there is share shifting of dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:One are the browser agents who are doing one thing. Like, Jody going on a vacation, twenty minutes, he'll book a hotel for you. Yep. We wanna sell to Expedia, not to Jody because Expedia now wanna simulate 100,000 JODI transaction from 50 states or 50 countries. How do we do that?
Speaker 7:So browser agents, to a certain extent, will be trying to expand to that space. I think we wanna compete. The other is the infrastructure. So the browser based and others who have been building things, we wanna build something enterprise grade with the surveillance, you know, the the governance, the control. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So that's the second. Third is going to be another interesting area where the code gen and the the developers who build us who just wanna connect their code to Internet so it can do amazing things. There again, there are parallel. You guys interviewed Parag.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I do think that we will compete them some level. Not because today we compete, but all of these will converge because there'll be a few massive companies built on how browser access, how Internet can be turned into a structured database. So exciting time. We've raised enough only because we wanna make sure that we build it in a way that is where we can control our destiny. I have a lot of respect for all of these companies.
Speaker 7:But to me, you know, if you're not surrounded by competitors, you're not in the right place.
Speaker 3:I love Yep. You're not going after a big prize, but Congratulations. Answers. Great to
Speaker 1:meet you. Out there. Have a good rest of your day. I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 7:I hope so. This was such a short conversation. I enjoyed it. I'll keep watching. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:We'll talk
Speaker 3:to soon. Talk soon. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. We have our next guest already in the restream waiting room. Gonna bring her in now. How are you?
Speaker 1:Welcome.
Speaker 12:Hi. Nice to be here.
Speaker 3:To you, Julie. What's happening?
Speaker 12:Great to
Speaker 2:be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, your company, and maybe some of your background as well?
Speaker 12:Sure. So I am one of the founders of Sundial. We are trying to build the cursor for data analysis. So we're trying to automate a lot of what data scientists will do, so that we can help companies make better decisions with data. We work with great companies like OpenAI, Character, Captions.
Speaker 12:Before that, I led design and research for the Facebook product. I grew up at Beta back Facebook.
Speaker 3:Could you explain for the audience what Facebook is? They've been living under a data center. No. Kidding. Sorry.
Speaker 12:So, you know, if if you if you guys become friends and your relationship gets to a certain level and you wanna,
Speaker 5:you know,
Speaker 12:let the world know can
Speaker 1:Amazing. Official.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Amazing. Well, I think Exactly. It it feels like the absolute perfect background to build Yeah. Sundial because when I think when when I think people think about optimizing digital products and making decisions with massive amounts of data, people think Meta and they think Facebook.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I
Speaker 12:mean, you say that because you probably know more than most people. But I do think what makes Meta so good is that it was so freaking operationally rigorous. It was so good at actually capturing and modeling what made it a great business and and being, like, you know, just so on top of every little thing so that we could optimize, iterate, experiment, test, and eventually, you know, get to that scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you
Speaker 3:just And did you guys, I imagine, had to rely on a bunch of internal tooling that you built in order to do that that was proprietary? Or or what did that
Speaker 12:look like? Yeah. Everything was just homegrown because, like, actually, the whole concept, I would say that Meta probably introduced this idea of growth. I mean, now everybody got growth teams. Yeah.
Speaker 12:But back then, that was like a new thing and it was only created, you know, with people like Jamath and Alex Schultz and Naomi because Facebook was growing like crazy, and then one day growth kinda stalled. And, you know, every I think this happens to every successful company. Right? In the beginning, you're like, we're we're we're we're great. Our intuition is on.
Speaker 12:We're solid. Like, everything hits. And then one day, it stops hitting. And then everyone's like, oh my god. What happened?
Speaker 12:And there's a lot of questions. You know, board board members are calling. And then it becomes like, well, we have to figure it out. And the only way you can do that is with good observability.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you take us through, like, a concrete example of, like, one of the like, a case study of, like, design at Meta and and and how, like, some of the decision making linked to some of the data analysis you did? Like, do you have anything that you can share? I know I know it's been a while, but some of the stuff's probably private, but some of it you can probably share.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I'm trying to figure out, what's an example I can pull out? Well, I will say that, like, a lot of the process so I I think we kind of segment things into two worlds. Right? The first is, like, look.
Speaker 12:In order to build something new, you do need that spark of inspiration, and it usually comes from intuition. Like, you need to kinda have, like, a vision, and so often that would be, like, the spark of the idea.
Speaker 8:Sure.
Speaker 12:But then as soon as you realize that you have like a hypothesis, you know, like, I think what people want is, you know, better ways. Like, if we give people more custom ways of sharing on Facebook, for example, they will share more. Mhmm. That's an example of, like, a particular hypothesis that somebody would have, and usually that comes with, an idea. You're like, if I build, you know, a really awesome text editor, I give them a way to record video, or, you know, I I make it super easy to, pull in a quote.
Speaker 12:Right? Then people will go and share more. But the thing that you then need to do is to figure out, well, how quickly can you test whether that hypothesis is true? Like, what's the what's the kind of smallest thing that you can build that gives you either more or less assurance that this thing is is the thing to bet on? And so we would try and figure out what's, like, the smallest framing of that experiment.
Speaker 12:And then if it seems like, you know, okay. It's inclusive or we actually think it might be promising, then you just double down. Right? Then you, like, add more, you know, you keep building. And I think that that that's been, like, you know, very this is, like, a super early example.
Speaker 12:But I think, like, hackathon project, like video is like a hackathon project that somebody did. And then very early on, like, video came out after the hackathon and it's like, just very quickly, can see what what will, you know, like, that that people are actually using. In fact, maybe a better example, now that I'm thinking about it is actually feed. So feed is one of those very early examples where people hated it. So news feed came out.
Speaker 12:Before that, the way that people went to profiles is like, know, I would go to your profile, John. I'd go to your profile, Jordi. I'd see if anything changed. But there was no system that automatically told me if you updated something. And so we in Launch Feed, this is like back in 02/2006, and there were, like, huge protests.
Speaker 12:In fact, like, a million people within a week joined this Facebook group called I effing hate Facebook News Feed because people thought it was, like, it was creepy. It was, like, you know, there's too much surveillance. But the reason, I think Mark and the team, like, we kept on it is the fact that, like, through the numbers, like, through the data, you could see that people are spending a lot of time on News Feed. Yeah. And in fact, the reason they knew to join this group, I effing hate News Feed, is because of News Feed.
Speaker 12:Like, was they were like, you know so it just was, like, very obvious to us that this was working despite what people are saying about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you talk about preference falsification more broadly? Was that, like, a hard one lesson that carried through? It feels like Meta has really absorbed that lesson, and it continues to inform the company culture. Have you carried that idea of preference falsification forward into your career?
Speaker 1:How do you think about that disconnect between what people say and then what they actually do?
Speaker 12:I think it just, like, you just have to gather the data. You just have to look at, you know, like, you can say, okay, look, this is what I see. I see it. Like, data their data is that people tell us they don't like it or they tell us they're feeling one way or another. Right?
Speaker 12:So I think about qualitative feedback as data, customer surveys or, you know, or data. Like, anything is data, but also behavior. Like, what do people actually do? What do they click on? Where are they spending their time and attention?
Speaker 12:And the more we can have all of that in one place, the better like, a a better, more realistic and accurate view of reality we have.
Speaker 3:When should a company sign up for Sundial? Because I I I think there's a there's it's almost a meme in Silicon Valley. If you if you launch a product early and you're obsessing maybe too much over the data, you could you could go end up actually going down the wrong path and and there's points in which maybe you disagree with this where the actual just like founder's intuition is what what's gonna get you to that sort of takeoff for the product. But what's your read?
Speaker 12:I agree with that. I do think that it's there's such a thing as, like, obsessing too early. Like, when you don't have product market fit, you'll probably have to take bigger swings. You're probably not in the business of trying to optimize. But I think if you feel like you have product market fit, you're clearly scaling your team.
Speaker 12:Like, like, okay. I probably need a growth person. I probably need a data like, the reason you want a growth or data person is you want to perform more fuel on the fire. Like, you wanna understand what works and what doesn't. And so what all of these roles are trying to do is start a series of experimentation and just, like, again, get to better better visibility.
Speaker 12:Right? Better observability for like, what we all wanna do is just build a mental model. Like, this is how the business works. And if you tweak this thing, more money goes up. And you tweak this, more users.
Speaker 12:Right? We wanna build a very real and influenceable model, and that is what, like, all of that work of trying to build and and and do analysis is is there to help us do.
Speaker 1:Did you overlap with Laura Dana at Meta? Can you tell me a little bit
Speaker 4:about her?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. What what she was in The Wall Street Journal earlier this week. What what what's made her you know, what's the secret to her impact?
Speaker 12:So Laura Daughter joined as a design lead. And I think she took over a messenger, so Facebook messenger. And I think the team was pretty small then, maybe about eight designers. And she helped scale that up to, like, 200 designers. And eventually, she actually become the product group lead.
Speaker 12:So the product group lead is kinda like the GM role. And in fact, it's there's not that many examples of design leaders who become GMs. You know, like, engineers can become GMs. Like, I think Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, is one. I think Laura Donna is is probably the other that I can recall.
Speaker 12:So she ended up, actually leading all of Besseger. I think recently, she went to go work on AI. And I just saw the news that she is joining as Figma's new chief design officer, which is fantastic news. I absolutely adore Laura Donna. I think she is fabulous.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll have to get her on the show. That would be it'd be it'd be fun to dig into. Anyway, Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 3:I have a bunch more questions, but I don't think we have time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 3:And yeah. Congrats on on all the progress so far.
Speaker 1:This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 12:Alright. Talk to guys soon.
Speaker 1:Bye. Bye.
Speaker 3:Cheers. Gabe in the chat says, woah. She has a headset on. How can I long this company?
Speaker 1:I love it. Totally agree. That's great.
Speaker 5:It's just
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Numeral HQ sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. You can get started for free. Benchmark series a. Let's go.
Speaker 3:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We will bring them into the PBPN Ultra Dome.
Speaker 3:Jacob. Jacob. Welcome to the show. Finally. Fine.
Speaker 3:Waiting for this moment. It took us that long.
Speaker 8:Pretty good. How are you guys?
Speaker 1:We're doing great. Give us the breakdown. What'd you launch today?
Speaker 8:Cohort three applications are live.
Speaker 1:Let's get it. Boom.
Speaker 4:Hit it. The the
Speaker 8:the best part here is the video. I I assume you guys may have it, but it's I think the best Gundo hype video.
Speaker 3:Wait. Can we pull
Speaker 6:it Can we pull
Speaker 1:it up? It's a tall order. Can we pull
Speaker 8:it up?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Production team. Ben, can you pull up the the latest Deshipulus Ventures post? Maybe we can put it in the chat. Can you send it to them?
Speaker 1:I'm trying to find it right Jacob's ads.
Speaker 2:Throw it in the chat.
Speaker 8:And it's a
Speaker 1:We we we will pull this up. We might need to watch this after you hop off. But but give us the update on on the on the previous cohorts. Who's in those? What companies are you in?
Speaker 1:What's the general thesis? What like, what's the why now for this particular, organization? Break break it out for me.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So cohort one was in Rainmaker and Valor at the time. Yeah. Their office, they were sharing it. They were both pre seed stage.
Speaker 8:I think it was still very much like, is is this gonna work or is this not gonna work? I think now we're the point where like, okay, this something's working here really well. And I I I think the the big kind of thesis and point here is, like, we wanna be, like, that entry point to what's going on in El Segundo.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:The culture is very attractive to to most of the young people who wanna build companies that really do matter a lot for the country that's kind of pushed away from other ecosystems that don't really care about that. And then in two, practically, like, if you wanna build a hardware or aerospace defense, you should be in El Segundo. Yep. SpaceX started down the street from where I'm based. And the best talent, the supply chain, the whole supply chain, and a lot of the customers are in El Segundo area.
Speaker 8:So it's if you wanna build El Segundo, you're building an aerospace defense and hardware and wanna be part of the ecosystem, we wanna be that way to do that. Yeah. Companies wise
Speaker 3:Augustus said Augustus said earlier Rockefeller built El Segundo. I I never knew that. What's what's the lore there?
Speaker 1:The oil company.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's Chevron. Like, the the there is a massive oil and gas extraction Yeah. Oil refinery there when you're in El
Speaker 3:whole town was built out to service.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you you can tell the story.
Speaker 8:I'll I'll give I'll give the the rundown. El Segundo means the second. It means the second Chevron refinery in the state of California. Yep. So that's the reason why.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:So it's very it's very cool. But on the yeah.
Speaker 2:Got the video if you guys want it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Let's play the video.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Play it.
Speaker 1:We're gonna we're gonna switch over to the video. This is the fall cohort applications are live now. Yeah. Hit the soundboard.
Speaker 5:Why not
Speaker 1:just add an extra layer on top? Are we gonna get it taken down for this? This is a open source song, hopefully? We'll see. This is good.
Speaker 1:Is good.
Speaker 2:Is necessary Fire the that every I
Speaker 3:feel like I recognize this
Speaker 2:is good for in The United States. It's a lot of facts that I've had.
Speaker 1:The adults, I can pop them just by their shoulders. It's a cool presentation.
Speaker 3:Holy bass.
Speaker 1:Good sound editing. There's Isaiah. There's Augustus. We got cameos on cameos.
Speaker 2:Wrong and to keep America free.
Speaker 1:In America, we're so wise. There we go. With the with the Yes. Yes. We got the back of the We're definitely getting demonetized.
Speaker 3:Thank you for demonetizing us. It was worth it.
Speaker 1:It was worth It worth it. Take me through the economics. Yeah. So so so how much money do you raise for each cohort? How much money are you putting in?
Speaker 1:What what's the deal structure? Like, how does what do the what do the companies actually get out of going through the cohort?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. So I guess just top big picture, fund one end up being right around the the $9,000,000 mark.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 8:We're basically doing five cohorts out of this. So three next year, one end of year in October.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:The basic kind of structure, each cohort, we do 10 to 12 founders. So in Sure. A 100 k check, per company.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's gonna be
Speaker 8:around 1.2 mil per cohort, and then that'll go across the rest. And a little bit for follow on for Yeah. Kind of pro rata. That's awesome. But, yeah, to the kind of standard deal.
Speaker 8:Cohort itself is like main thing again. You wanna be in Elsin, gotta know weird way to do that. You have all the big name people, everybody knows. Like, we can give you access to them just like that. I mean, it's very valuable early on to kinda become like a, I guess, consensus bet in a way.
Speaker 8:Just to have those behind you is very helpful. And then we have a demo day. We bring, like, a 120. I think we had 120 partners last time from top firms, like, just like that, access to all of them. So that's kind of the breakdown.
Speaker 8:We have a house. It's very fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have
Speaker 6:a chef.
Speaker 8:A gym, everything you need to to build a
Speaker 1:base project. Are you officially taking over from Augustus' job as also going to a tour guide? Because every there was, like, a solid six month period where every single VC and founder would hit up Augustus and be like, okay. Time for the tour. Let me go around.
Speaker 3:He doesn't have time
Speaker 1:for it.
Speaker 4:I don't think
Speaker 1:he has time for it anymore. He's on the road a lot.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. Yeah. I I I'm getting I have too many texts from from VC saying, hey.
Speaker 8:Wanna see y'all come around. So I I I think I've taken that. I I think it's more of a great job for me than him. But one actually Cool.
Speaker 1:Cool. Here's the wire details and then I'll take you on the tour.
Speaker 8:Exactly. Exactly. But also on that point, we had the most recent bonfire which a couple of you guys were at
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 8:Last week, last Friday.
Speaker 1:Oh, Tyler. Okay.
Speaker 8:Gus is like, okay. You're taking this over. And we had, like, I think close to 200 people come out, which is pretty awesome, which is, like, I think a record, I hopefully, for one of Bonfires in
Speaker 1:this venture capital firm absorbing an iconic networking series. It's Where have we seen this before?
Speaker 3:It's interesting. I I'll I'll I'll be like completely honest Yeah. When I saw DeSyphilis launch Yeah. I I wasn't I like, I've I've backed a bunch of, you know, I backed Rainmaker, I backed Shinke, bunch of bunch of the Gundot companies, but I it didn't immediately click for me. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But hearing you hearing you talk about it, it's just like and obviously, we're we're super close with with Gary and the whole YC team and they've backed a bunch of hard tech companies. Yep. So my immediate thought was like, do we need something like this? Do we need a new institution? And Yep.
Speaker 3:And hearing you talk about it and seeing, you know, the progress from the Port Coast so far just makes Yeah. Ton of sense to have like an institution in El Segundo because we can't just rely on the city to give tour guides to people that
Speaker 1:want to see mean, a couple years ago, I went I went and did the tour of El Segundo.
Speaker 3:You created couple. You you helped facilitate the meet.
Speaker 1:There there were a bunch of folks that were that were highlighting it. And it the energy was very similar to, like, you know, Mountain View in 2000 Totally. '9 or 02/2012, in my opinion. Like, it had that, like, University Ave feel. Like, it's sort of it's just boring enough.
Speaker 1:Like, you're in LA, but it's not like this hot town that you're gonna get distracted by. Like, it's really just like a lot of cool companies building. And then you walk across the street, there's another founder. They have some tool. Like, it actually makes sense to have people sharing stuff and moving stuff around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very, very, very cool community. Makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 3:Well, congratulations on the launch of the new application window. I haven't run this by John, but hopefully he agrees. We'll sponsor the next bon bonfire. Let's do it. Let's Can't wait.
Speaker 8:Don't become the purple orchid as well afterwards.
Speaker 1:That's I've been to the purple orchid. Was a lot
Speaker 4:of fun.
Speaker 1:It's a good spot. Awesome. They do have the the dragon bowls there that you drink out of.
Speaker 3:Dragon bowls? Dragon bowls? Never been big in We
Speaker 1:light them on fire. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway.
Speaker 3:Well, congrats, Jacob.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping Super
Speaker 3:exciting.
Speaker 1:We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of
Speaker 8:your Awesome. Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1:In the meantime, let me tell you about Linear. 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.
Speaker 3:Cursor. Head over to Runway. Perplexity. Retool. Mercury.
Speaker 3:Rate cast. Ramp. They all use it.
Speaker 1:We have another three hours of content to go through. I like this post from Growing Daniel. The opposite of FOMO is when you skip an event, and then everyone who went says it sucked. Vindication of missing out. And Tyler Cohen Tyler Cowen says, VOMO.
Speaker 1:VOMO. I think VOMO is a good one.
Speaker 3:Vindication. It's simply the best.
Speaker 1:It is the best.
Speaker 3:It simply is the best.
Speaker 1:It is the best. I'm trying to think of the last time I had Vommo. Don't wanna put anyone on blast, but I have certainly I've certainly said no to things.
Speaker 3:Well, let's keep going through the timeline. Please. John, can you text Gabe? Yes. And see if he is still coming on.
Speaker 3:He confirmed one. We moved him up ten minutes. We might need to do some timeline.
Speaker 1:I'm happy to hang out.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We can hang out. So Sophie Do Netcap Girl says is showing a post saying, there must be some mistake. I thought I'd be working on digital super intelligence and it is a angry man in military uniform saying build the Goonbot. And so there's a lot of that going on right now.
Speaker 3:Luke Lasher has another post in response to The UK independent space agency is entirely scrapped to cut costs. And we have Matthew McConaughey here saying, we used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we look down and worry about our place in the dirt. KPMG wrote a 100 page prompt to build a Gentic Taxbot. Produces advice in a single day instead of two weeks without job losses.
Speaker 3:And x Nihilio says 100 page prompt is crazy. You ever ripped a 100 page prompt, John?
Speaker 1:I've gotten close. I've used a lot of those, like, repurposed prompts that people have online. Oh, this is the super prompt. Never never got in the habit of, like, daily driving one of Dwarkash Patel had a good prompt in Gemini that would take a transcript and clean it up, and it gave a really like, the 100 pages is really, like, a 100 pages of examples. Basically, here's what a messy transcript looks like out of a out of just like a transcription service where the speakers aren't labeled and there aren't necessarily paragraph breaks.
Speaker 1:You give it a ton of extra you give it a ton of extra context, but ton of extra examples. And then that makes it perform a lot better because it knows it understands the job. Yep. But, yeah, 100 page prompt is pretty wild.
Speaker 3:So Kafka Esquire says, just one more model, bro. Just one more funding round, bro. Please. And this post from Walter Bloomberg Yes. Esteemed journalist.
Speaker 5:Where did
Speaker 3:this come from? This quote? So this was from some interview. Okay. And and This feels like it's taken out context.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Taken out of context, the the headline was Open AI CEO Sam Altman concedes GPT five was a misfire bets on GPT six. And this has been going pretty viral. People are poking a little fun. I think it I I think in some ways, you know Yeah.
Speaker 3:The this the the the Death Star kinda set them up for this. Yeah. So my says just one more trillion, bro. Honestly, I swear.
Speaker 1:I mean, my take on this is that, like, the numbered releases should just go. When Facebook introduced the feed, they they they stopped saying we're changing things.
Speaker 3:It's a good take, sir.
Speaker 1:Because when you say
Speaker 3:people It's a good take, sir.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you say when you say when you tell everyone, we're changing everything, people are like, I don't like change. But if instead you just say like, yeah, like every day Facebook gets a slightly different update and the algorithm's slightly different. And then some days, people are like, the algo is not really for me right now. And then they complain enough and then you get the feedback and then they tweak and they make it better and better and better.
Speaker 1:Like, I feel like we should just be in the era of GPT is what powerschat.com, and it's constantly getting better. And stop focusing on the size of the pre training bubble. Stop try stop focusing on the parameters if you're a consumer. Stop Yep. Stop focusing on the numbers.
Speaker 1:Start focusing on your sleep number, your sleep score. Go to eight sleep dot com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper.
Speaker 1:Wake up energized. You can discover pod five at 8sleep.com. And I believe we have our next guest, Gabe from Mischief. How you doing, Gabe?
Speaker 3:There he is.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream. What's going on? We're live at the TBP on Ultradome. What's new with you? How are you doing?
Speaker 1:I think everyone knows you. Maybe just launch into, the the announcement this week about, the the private military corporation that you're starting.
Speaker 4:Oh, you saw the Twitter. I didn't think anybody, looked at that. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Everyone saw that.
Speaker 6:Everyone saw that.
Speaker 4:It's, sure. Sure. What what do we do this week? Well, we launched an agency called Applied Mischief. Yep.
Speaker 4:The agency honestly, like, to to rewind, where where does that even come from? And a lot of people don't actually understand this about mischief because probably what you see is, like, videos of people wearing boots or, like Yeah. Press headlines or whatever. Yeah. But the way we're actually organized is we are essentially a holding company of different creative enterprises based on categories.
Speaker 4:So there's, like, a handbag division. There's a footwear division. There's a fine art division. There are other divisions I can't really talk about yet, but with, like, more bigger permanent structures. Well
Speaker 3:Well, you talked about a division you can't talk about, so I hit the
Speaker 1:Oh, nice. Nice.
Speaker 4:So we we've been operating like that for for a second now, and to make that efficient, there's been an internal back office that's, like Yeah. Normal Right? Like, finance, legal, manufacturing, customer support, but also, like, design and marketing.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 4:And that's a group that not only does design, but also applies that sort of, like, mischief magic, like viral juice or whatever. Yeah. So the thinking here was we might as well open up that to external clients. Yep. It can become a profit center, which is great.
Speaker 4:But the other part is, like, maybe it can make our world a little bit bigger too because we're hungry for more formats. We've made so much stuff over the last, like, six years. What have we not touched yet? And, like, maybe we won't get sued this time around. Like, maybe there's just stuff that we can do that's, like, cool.
Speaker 4:We can
Speaker 3:Well, it's it's it's there what what what seems obviously exciting to me is partnering with with global companies. I mean, sure, I'm sure you'll partner with with startups and and scale ups and things like that. But what what gets exciting at a certain point has to be scale There's so much money. Hey, instead of selling like a thousand of this thing, can we figure out
Speaker 1:It's like spike Jones does an Apple ad. It's like that's just not there's just special there's something special about that. About just, like, giving it. It's almost like patronage in some ways. It's marketing, but it's just, like, it's still art, and it's cool, and it's, like, un unbridled.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 4:Totally. Totally. Right? Like, the way that we look at these is, like, it's not a service that we're providing necessarily. Like, there are brands and entities in culture that we perceive as cultural material.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The same way artists looks at their materials like paint or sculpture or marble or whatever. Like, for us, Coca Cola is material. Give us that.
Speaker 1:I can
Speaker 4:And we'll make something new with it
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:Instead of fabricating a marketing story to sell more units that people through now anyways. Right? The opportunity is, like, there's just so much cultural material being left on the table to make new things with.
Speaker 1:So talk to me about inbound versus outbound. I feel like in that vein of, like, there's cultural material, if you come up with just, like, I have a great idea, It it would only work for this particular brand because the nature of the idea is tied deeply to the lore of that brand. They're never gonna think about this, but I need to I could the only value I could get out of this is selling it to them. Are you going outbound and pitching big companies and saying, I have a I have the idea for you, or is it more, like, there is an actual process where you can sit down do ideas?
Speaker 4:I'm doing outbound outbound right
Speaker 7:now. Nice.
Speaker 4:This is a message for Gabe Newell from Valve. We wanna design your submarine.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So let's go. I
Speaker 3:love that.
Speaker 1:That would be an amazing project.
Speaker 4:That's that's the outbound. That's what I wanna do. Or extraterrestrial space research organizations. We wanna design that that you're putting into space.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 4:We were look. We were Fast Company's number one design in the world in 2023. People don't think about that because they think about viral, but if you actually get, like, what we do, it is unparalleled. Yep. So let us let's, like, put some stuff
Speaker 3:We got a we got a space play for you with with a company that we're very close with.
Speaker 1:I won't
Speaker 3:say anymore. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, we'll talk after the stream.
Speaker 3:I I have a bunch of I have a bunch of questions. One, quickly on the business model of the new agency. Is there a world where you would where you would you know, the standard agency model would be like, hey, let's do this project and we'll charge you like a million bucks or a couple million bucks. But there's some scenarios where you could actually, I imagine if it was a one off more like drop style, you could take a percentage of of the sales even. Is that something you would ever explore to get to really bet on yourselves and say like, hey, think we could sell like a $10,000,000 of this and we'll only price based on on success.
Speaker 3:Is that is that something you would consider doing?
Speaker 4:It's totally on the table, and it's it's not that's not even uncommon from, like, the collaboration route. Like, some of the collaborations that we've done in the past have been that kind of model where it's like, you make a bunch of product together. We both invest on our own ends, and then you split the cut afterwards. I think what's more interesting, though, is because of Mischief's position as, like, this artistic entity, like, in a way, like, we have a personality. We have an audience.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And so we're actually, like, building a pipeline of joint ventures Yeah. With Bitcoin. It's where it's
Speaker 6:like Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's what I was getting at.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's not even about 10,000 units. We're talking about millions of units.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Over forever, basically.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, I want I want the I want a mischief themed line of of kids toys. Right? Like, would happily buy those. I I would buy a bunch of those. Right?
Speaker 3:And so that's like, get you if you partner with the right company, that should be in the the, you know, my personal lifetime value would be in the hundreds of dollars. And I would even pay a premium Yeah. Because I know it's you guys behind it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Another question I have, you know, I've I've leveraged the the drops kind of model to do marketing. I was inspired by you guys to do marketing for my last company party round. And something that I've noticed recently, a lot of companies in tech say they wanna do drops and it's because they're inspired by mischief and they just see like drops get attention. I want attention.
Speaker 1:One drop please, sir.
Speaker 2:One drop please.
Speaker 1:One drop The
Speaker 2:usual sir.
Speaker 1:Sign me up.
Speaker 2:No. But the thing I usually
Speaker 3:push back on and the thing I'd curious to get your opinion on is like, I think when companies think they wanna do drops, what they really wanna do is true advertising and they don't even know the difference. And so like where where's that line for you and how often are you know, would you talk to a company and it's like, what you really want is to is to do advertising.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just like a consistent message delivered via every channel forever might be the right thing
Speaker 3:for you. Forever or, like For like a week. Quarter. For a quarter. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I would I would take it even further, and it's it's like, that is the final goal, which is, like, get a message out into the people, get them talking, whatever. But, like, the the focus on the drop is is misplaced. Yeah. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:What these guys are actually looking for, like, what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise. And right now, you can either just make more content, which, honestly, the ROI, I think, is going down on that. There's too much content and not enough demand.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:Sorry. That's just how it is. But the opportunity is you can make new things that fit within your brand parameters, that use your brand as cultural material, that are actually interesting, that are tactile, that have a story to them. And if they happen to be ephemeral, then it's a drop. But don't get hung up on the drop.
Speaker 4:Just make something interesting. That's that's all it.
Speaker 3:Are ideas valuable? And and and and if you had to, you know, what kind of think about, like, a a sig making something new Yeah. How much is it is it the idea versus the execution?
Speaker 1:Do hire do you hire idea guys and then, like operational, excellent people and they're like a dividing line.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And to me
Speaker 1:than this.
Speaker 3:I I John and I will sit down with companies that we're friends with and we'll generate like 20 ideas. Yeah. It ends up being super frustrating because you're like, we're get we're feeding you this like incredible idea. It doesn't even cost a lot to do. And if you do it right, like it could be like a million dollars of like, you know, brand value, however you wanna measure that.
Speaker 3:But it it it feels like you can give people these these things that in your hands, they might be million dollar ideas, but but Poorly executed. Poorly executed to a negative value. Totally.
Speaker 4:I think it's like a like, squeezing a balloon on two ends. Like, there's the conceptual power, and then there's the execution. There are things where, like, the concept is really high, and the execution doesn't have to be crazy. You don't need a huge budget. It's just a good idea, and it's gonna work.
Speaker 4:What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. So they lean more on the execution, and you see, like, large budgets and, like, huge bloated teams and production. So it's sort of like, now if you can dial in both, that's the match. Right? That's but that's really hard to do because more money, more risk, you wanna it's you just you don't you wanna derisk on the concept side.
Speaker 4:John, to your question, I don't idea people. Everyone here is an idea person. Mhmm. We did I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we made handbags.
Speaker 4:Right? They're very expensive. The smaller they get, the more expensive they become. So we made a microscopic handbag that sold at auction for $63,000 dollars at Paris Fashion Week at Pharrell's
Speaker 7:whatever is the
Speaker 4:coronation of Louis Vuitton. That idea came from a summer intern. Anyone here can have an idea. Right? The lawyer our general counsel joins Brainstorms.
Speaker 4:Our ops lead joins Brainstorms because being creative doesn't mean you have good ideas. Being creative just means you're human. You have insights, and you have reactions to things that are going around you. That's it. And then also, like, being creative means you're not afraid to, like, look stupid.
Speaker 4:And I think that's, like, a big defining trait here because anybody can look stupid here including myself.
Speaker 3:What have you ever seen highly complex ideas work well as marketing advertising stunts? This is something that we we end
Speaker 1:up I I think David Ogilvy said, like, ideas are powerful ideas. That's certainly something I've seen in Mischief's work throughout your entire career. But is there some sort of contrarian or nuance to that concept?
Speaker 4:I think there could be. The the line that we use here is a good idea should slap in one sentence and then slap even harder in three. And that just means there there are layers. Right? Like, you appreciate it for the headline, but if you, like, really dig into it, you're like, wait up.
Speaker 4:Is this thing making fun of me? And do I still like it? And am I gonna it? And if I buy it, am I a chump, or am I a patron of the arts? Right?
Speaker 4:It's like, the layers are good. The ambiguity is good. But at the end of the day, like, from a marketing perspective, just being practical right now, like, people's attention spans are so low. And, honestly, like, people are just we're all, like, very distracted. So Totally.
Speaker 4:You don't have a lot of window to, like, nail it. So you do gotta have that one liner, like, pretty dialed in.
Speaker 3:Yeah. How how dialed in is your crystal ball when it comes to releasing new things on the Internet? Like, do you have a do you feel like you usually have, like, a pretty accurate sense of how much attention something will get?
Speaker 1:Do you get surprised?
Speaker 3:Or do you still get surprised often?
Speaker 4:Totally still get surprised. Like, you all you always get surprised. I think it's easy for us to fall in a comfort zone where we're like, oh, yeah. Like, this will work because what that ends up doing is you start coming up with ideas based on a framework of what has worked. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:We actually put in a lot of effort to come up with formats and mechanisms that don't really fit into our existing framework that we're like, oh, I don't know if this is gonna work. And is this offensive? I don't know. Are people gonna buy slices of this giant foam baby that we're cutting up in Brooklyn? I don't know.
Speaker 4:They did. Yeah.
Speaker 8:But but
Speaker 4:no. You know? Like
Speaker 1:Is there a project that you think is, like, criminally underrated? People are obviously familiar with the boots. They're familiar with the the the the shoes and the footwear stuff and some of the other projects. But what what what's your what's your example of a project you're like, oh, that's still, like, one of my favorites.
Speaker 4:Good question. And the reason it didn't really get seen as much is because, to be honest, we were a little bit scared. Okay. And so, you know, buried it in a art show that we did. But, are you guys familiar with the paradox of the ship of Theseus?
Speaker 1:Yes. But explain it for the listener.
Speaker 4:Totally. So it's like it's this old paradox where imagine you have this, like, large wooden ship. And every day over seven years, you're coming up with a new piece of wood identical to a piece of wood on the ship, and you are swapping it out. The question is, after seven years, is it the same ship, or is it a different ship? We found that, a very interesting question, and so we decided to, apply that in our own way to a sink located in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Speaker 3:As one does.
Speaker 1:How do you
Speaker 4:As one does.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Explain.
Speaker 4:And so we we found the sync. We did recon. We not me. I'm not I it wasn't me personally. Was somebody here.
Speaker 4:Names. But we found you know, we we tracked down the serial numbers, the parts, ordered exact, like, replica we we ordered the exact same parts, built it here, tied off the dimensions of the bathroom here so that we could practice swapping things out. And then over many months, we would walk into the Met and do a quick swap and leave. Then the next day, do it again and do it again bolt by bolt, screw by screw.
Speaker 2:Just an art enthusiast.
Speaker 3:I just I just like art, and I I go to the bathroom. That's all I'm just
Speaker 4:going to big. How how did you get
Speaker 1:the big piece through? Isn't there, like, one piece
Speaker 4:that's big? That that so that we decided to leave.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:That we did not swap out. Although we had
Speaker 1:A plan?
Speaker 4:We we we we we fabricated a wheelchair that could have hit it in the sink, but not I'm telling you, we got we got a little bit we we were honestly scared.
Speaker 3:Got a little carried away.
Speaker 4:We still we still did it. We got everything else. And so, yeah, they they they have our sync, and we have their sync. And ours is now part of, like, our art gallery.
Speaker 1:So That's amazing.
Speaker 4:Although although I believe they figured it out, and they've replaced it. Because Wow. As soon as we announced the art show, even though the sink was sort of, like, hidden in all of the other pieces, people definitely found out, and there was a line in the bet for that bathroom.
Speaker 1:People wanna
Speaker 3:They should've
Speaker 7:they should've
Speaker 8:set it off, turned it
Speaker 3:into an installation. That was awesome.
Speaker 4:Of your if any of your if any of your viewers are on the board of the Met, the coolest thing you could do right now is acquire that sync from us and put it back
Speaker 1:Let's make it happen. Let's make it happen, army.
Speaker 3:How how many millions of dollars do you think you've left on the table by not doing crypto projects?
Speaker 4:The painful question.
Speaker 3:Is it like a it has to be like a 100,000,000, like at
Speaker 4:least Probably. Honestly, probably. Probably.
Speaker 3:Yep. And is there is there like, there I'm I'm sure at some point, there will actually be a way to do this. Like, there has to be something that makes sense. Like, we we did something back in the day with Party Round where we did it's called helpful VCs where we made crypto punks for every VC and then we put them on a website. And we said, you have four hours to retweet these.
Speaker 3:Otherwise, we're gonna auction them off. And it was like, it's for like charity. Right? We weren't like trying to make money. And that was, like, one of the ways that we broke through and, like, shortly after
Speaker 1:I think there might be something to do with crypto and, like, stable coins where there's not as much gambling involved, but there might be something with crypto. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. You have to remove you have to make it not, like, a speculation,
Speaker 1:based Because on as soon as you leave the like like the the people who get the joke are and then the people who don't get the joke show up, and then and then they're losing their life savings. That doesn't feel good. Yeah. Whereas whereas like if somebody, you know, is is bidding on that handbag, like, they they probably know what they're doing. They understand that it's not a waste, and they understand
Speaker 4:that Look. I think I think that crypto route for us is we've often plotted our own death, and I think there's, like, a chaotic evil way to go out where you just pull
Speaker 7:that rug.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I shouldn't even be saying that because now everybody's gonna know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everybody's gonna know.
Speaker 3:Well, I think switching gears to to another topic that I'm I'm sure you guys so one, I don't think AI is gonna take your guys' jobs anytime soon despite it being able to maybe piece together random ideas. It's so much about taste and I would think things like that. But how excited are you to leverage that technology for for some of for some of these various plays?
Speaker 4:Honestly, TBD. And I think I think it's I do I will say, like, unlike the whole, like, crypto craziness of the last couple years, we we didn't get into that because we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet. That that's, like, the truth. Like, you see the herd run so fast, it usually means they're running towards the end of a cliff. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:There's a little bit of a similar sentiment right now. That said, I it is rooted in something real.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But we're not in a rush to, like, use it necessarily. Right? If it's gonna be here forever, we've got time. Like, it's mischief doesn't win as a first mover. If you look at all of our work, it was never about being the first to react to something or the first to, like, make use of a format.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we'll see. We just have to see. We
Speaker 3:How do you think about are there any projects like, time is an interesting variable that you can play with. Right? Like, part of the thing with the the the the sync stunt that you guys did is is just the narrative and the story of, like, you guys were conducting this in secret for a long time. It was like a very and and that's part of what makes it so entertaining is kind of like the the lore of what went into it. But it Yeah.
Speaker 3:But have you thought about even longer term plays like things that you could do over a decade or or or fifty years that in hindsight would just be absolutely hilarious and but but, again, take this sort of incredible planning.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, we are at that stage of just, our lives and as a company now to be thinking like that. Right? Because, like, if you think about it, we we're in Yeah.
Speaker 4:If
Speaker 3:you if if you would you know, I know you guys have have a few investors. If you told your investors, first thing we're working on is a fifty year stunt, and you're there.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna tell you, like, alright, buddy. Like, why don't you
Speaker 3:put some points on the board first?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But you guys have feel like I've earned it now. Like, I I you know, something like a decade.
Speaker 4:No. Yeah. Because, like, we've we spent basically like, we've only been around for the pandemic and post like, a little bit post pandemic. Right? And all of that was just, like, you don't know what's coming.
Speaker 4:Like, live day by day. Like, just survive. Like, banks are shutting down. Okay. Get through till till tomorrow.
Speaker 4:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And now we've been around for a second. We're more well known. We have our existing infrastructure, and now we really are asking the questions of, like, okay. What does that legacy look like in ten years? Or should we should we disappear for twenty years and then come back?
Speaker 4:That would that would actually be the coolest thing we could do is go dark for two decades and then come back.
Speaker 3:Banger. I'd love It's worked for other it's worked for other artists. Yeah. Yeah. I I could you do something?
Speaker 3:So so we both loved Nathan Fielder's latest sort of like aviation stunt television show.
Speaker 4:I've heard a lot about it. I haven't watched it.
Speaker 3:Mean, you you should. It's one of the few people in the world that I think is executing on your guys' level in the sense of
Speaker 4:His next level. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like one sentence, you know, pitch that's hilarious but then the more you get into it, like the funnier it is. Better. Yeah. But could you do something like that for like the cost of housing or something like that? Like, sort of a decade long stunt, like
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Mischief, like, mischief figures out a way to, like, redo you know,
Speaker 3:cut the cost of housing in The United States.
Speaker 1:I mean, that was crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like, we if there are any, like, pricey neighborhoods that would love to commission us as an artist to install a sculpture, we have a really good trailer park trailer that we would love to erect in a public square that will drive
Speaker 3:I can just see, like, the, the right RV. Like, there's this RV outside of our gym.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kinda yellow from the sun.
Speaker 3:Real Like some windows open.
Speaker 1:Aluminum on the outside. Yeah. Winnebago. It it can be a stunt for Winnebago, Corporal.
Speaker 5:What do you
Speaker 3:how do you feel about the state of social media, like, broadly? It it feels like we've gotten to a point where in many ways the platforms look so similar but they also have their own characters. Some of them are becoming Lindy even thinking about how durable like Twitter and Acts have been despite all this change. But what what's your and and do you even do do you feel like you need to use social media, or are you better off not using it and then just releasing, you know, stuff on the platforms?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely a love hate relationship with the with the platforms. Right? Because, like, platforms, if you if you really think about it, they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting, and now they are mostly ways to share photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting.
Speaker 4:It's kind of become, like, less novelty based and more vanity based. Just fine. That's, like, a fundamental human instinct, so I get it. I would continue to love to find a way to not use the platforms to disseminate information, and that's kind of how we started. Our first audience portal was Venmo.
Speaker 4:We had a huge audience on Venmo, and we, like, had this huge phone bank, like a Chinese phone click farm. And we every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny, and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in
Speaker 1:your phone.
Speaker 3:The cha ching.
Speaker 5:Fun. Right?
Speaker 4:I am now banned from Venmo for life.
Speaker 1:Well, PayPal
Speaker 4:If you want to work with the partnership, let me know.
Speaker 1:PayPal well, we'll we'll have to see PayPal on it.
Speaker 3:I think the last company that came on works with Venmo. We'll we'll we'll work on it.
Speaker 1:We should get this first. This is this is important. We were we were reading an article in the New Yorker yesterday about this concept of IRL brain rot. The the the examples were the viral
Speaker 6:La boo boos.
Speaker 1:La boo boos, Dubai chocolate, the Yeah. The the viral Italian sandwich. We saw a few of these. Joe Wiesenthal at Bloomberg was also writing about the the the these kind of like viral as being something that you stamp on your product as a product feature almost. And I was wondering if if you're worried about the the the spillover from Internet slop culture into the real world, just kind of how you're tussling with this idea of brain rot coming into the real world.
Speaker 1:I I don't even know if you read the article or you have thoughts there, but
Speaker 4:I think I saw it on Instagram. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Course. Yeah. Yeah. You probably did a front facing video talking about it, or you saw someone do a front facing video talking
Speaker 4:about it. Reaction video. Yeah. I mean, look. It would I I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but, like, what Mischief has put out historically is kind of in that brain rot category.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, the boots. The boots. Right? Like, it's like
Speaker 4:absurd absurd aesthetic, and and maybe maybe even I could be so conceited as to say we were part of creating that
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The meta. Responsible.
Speaker 3:No. You guys definitely that that it was an era of minimalism, and it was like the the Everlane era.
Speaker 6:Quite
Speaker 3:legit. Boots. The boots are like a, you know, an an incredible reaction to that of being like
Speaker 4:Absurd absurd aesthetic. Just like popping imagery off of your screen.
Speaker 3:Yep. But then the the challenge with this this trend, right, is if you go back to minimalism, it's it actually becomes I mean, maybe maybe as as like for me, right, I'm I I became part of the mischief audience and mischief customer in my early twenties. I'm in my late twenties now. Eventually, maybe I'd want some ultra minimalist you know, mischief item for my home. But but but but at the same time, like, once you get on the on the on the maximalist track, like, you're kind of on this maximalism treadmill where you just gotta keep, like, going crazier and crazier.
Speaker 3:And and, you know, maybe maybe in the Internet era, there's no turning back.
Speaker 4:It it's totally possible. Right? Like, we might we might have built a machine so effective that it's now our master. And, like, how do you break free from that? Right?
Speaker 4:But I'm not too worried. Like, we don't we actually don't think so hard about it. We just kinda make the things that we like, and then if it ever stops working, then
Speaker 1:Do something else.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Figure it out. Exactly. Well, I I have an idea to put out in the ether. I think next time a an a list celebrity is going through a massive comms crisis, PR crisis, or a scandal, they should hire you guys to create something more more viral than than the scandal.
Speaker 7:Need to
Speaker 4:do they just need to do another crisis to compete with that. All they gotta do is go to Twitter and be like, send a Bitcoin to this address and I'll send you 2 Bitcoin, and then
Speaker 1:they actually do it. Actually do
Speaker 3:it. Actually do it.
Speaker 1:Genius. Yeah. That is a get that is a one time get out of jail free card. You heard it here first.
Speaker 3:It's just payoffs.
Speaker 1:If you yeah. If you're a celebrity and you're in trouble, you're you're caught at a Coldplay concert. That's the only way you can reverse the tide.
Speaker 4:You'll be good. Yeah. Sure. Appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Go for it. Yeah. Awesome.
Speaker 1:This is great. Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 3:It's really great great to get the update and just hear your
Speaker 1:That's another question.
Speaker 3:So much clarity on on all these different areas that we talk about all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We could
Speaker 3:talk for hours. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'd love to have you back when whenever whenever it makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We Gabe Gabe and I kicked around an idea that we won't share now. We'll we'll we'll leverage that for for your next appearance. I can't can't wait for it. 100%.
Speaker 4:Let's do it.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Awesome.
Speaker 6:I'll talk to
Speaker 3:Great to catch up.
Speaker 1:Well, see you.
Speaker 3:Cheers. Bye. Absolute legend.
Speaker 1:One of the best to
Speaker 3:ever What if we found out that that Dubai chocolate was was was was a mischief stunt?
Speaker 1:It's it's possible. It's possible.
Speaker 3:Anything's possible.
Speaker 1:Well, if you want to do a stunt, you wanna promote a stunt, you wanna have some fun with billboards, head over to adquick.com. Out of home advertising made 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. You should also get a hitter.
Speaker 1:Go over to Bezel. Get bezel.com. Shop 26,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. What you got for me on the timeline, Jordy Hayes? Wow.
Speaker 1:Our Timeline's in turmoil. Are you seeing this Francois Cholet
Speaker 3:Well
Speaker 1:host or you wanna go see the I
Speaker 3:was saying our our next our next guest has a $1.33 ETA
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Coming into the studio. David Sunrise says a fire broke out on the route to the studio.
Speaker 1:Little Oh, no. We'll have to read more posts.
Speaker 3:No. He says little do they know nothing nothing will stop extreme podcasting.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 3:We'll see you in a little bit, David. In person dates. Yeah. Let let's dive into this post. Yes.
Speaker 3:Wanna read through it.
Speaker 1:Yes. So there is a debate. Francois Cholet and someone named Oivind on the timeline. So there's this debate around how will AI impact worker productivity. It's very clear that when you use AI, it feels like you're getting a speed up.
Speaker 1:When you use a coding agent, it feels like you're getting a speed up. Meter did a study and found that maybe some AI tools are making you less performant. But so there's this debate. And for a long time, was this idea that AI will supercharge workers and labor and anyone who's using AI will be more more productive than someone who's not. And and the advice that was given by pretty much everyone in the industry was like, you need to learn how to use AI effectively because if you don't, you'll be left behind.
Speaker 1:And so Oivin shares that LLM adoption rose to 49.450.9% among US workers, 18, as of June 2025. According to a Stanford World Bank survey, inference demand will continue to surge not just as more and more user more usage per user, but as newer, more advanced Gen models require far more compute. And so, obviously, no one was using LLMs just a few years ago. Now, almost half of the American workforce over age 18 are using AI tools in their daily work. Francois Chalet, of course, is asking the question about when is this going to show up in the economic statistics?
Speaker 1:He says LLM adoption among U. S. Workers is closing in on 50%. Meanwhile, labor productivity growth is lower than in 2020. Many counterarguments can be made here, like they don't know yet how to be productive with it.
Speaker 1:They've only been using it for one to two years. 50% is still too low to see impact. Models next year will be unbelievably better, etcetera. But I think we now have enough evidence to say that the 2023 talking point that LLMs will make workers 10 times more productive, some folks even quoted 100x, is probably not accurate. And so he gets a little bit of a turmoil here, a little dust up with Gnome Brown polynomial over at OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Francois continues and explains a little bit more of his reasoning here. He says, By the way, I don't know if people realize this, but the 2020 work from home switch coincided with a major productivity boom, and the late twenty twenty one and 2022 back to office reversal coincided with a noticeable productivity drop. It's right there in the in the statistics narrative violation. Productivity growth is now back to pre 2020 levels. So for a lot of jobs in the American economy, working from home was actually a benefit.
Speaker 1:I'm not a huge fan. I'd I'd felt like maybe I was more productive, but I certainly didn't enjoy it. And so we've been having
Speaker 4:Well, it's interesting. Time building
Speaker 3:in person. It's it's it's interesting. You'd have to dive in. Okay.
Speaker 1:Depends on how it work.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah. And you can also be more productive but on the wrong strategy. Like, I I found it working from home during that era
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And having a remote team Yep. Found it very difficult to, like change strategy Yep. Quickly. Easy to lock in. But not to you you were Or to zoom out.
Speaker 3:I felt less, yeah, adaptable. Right? You'd sometimes waste three weeks working on something where maybe if you're in the same room, you would have like not made a different decision. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So Noam Brown over at OpenAI says,
Speaker 3:fires back.
Speaker 1:I don't yeah. Yeah. Get the gunshots ready. I don't recall a lot of people in 2023 saying that within a few years, worker productivity with 10x due to LLMs. I do recall a lot of people in 2023 saying, LLMs can't reason, though.
Speaker 1:Shots fired on the timeline. That is a fantastic
Speaker 3:says back in 2023, AGI was one to two years away in the form of GPT five, no less. Productivity was about to increase 10 to a 100 x, and developers were about to go extinct. People who questioned the narrative were a tiny minority. We were proven right.
Speaker 1:He was the John Brown standing up. I believe that AI will not 10 x productivity. Tyler, do you have any takes on this?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I I think Will AI be able to get Tyler a shirt?
Speaker 1:Yeah. AI agent might, but he might be able to do it faster himself. Who knows?
Speaker 2:Still unclear on that. But I I think Me too. The idea that people don't know, like aren't using them efficiently yet Mhmm. Makes sense. Right?
Speaker 2:Because it so if you look at that meter study
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was about how like open source developers are actually slower when they use AI tools. Mhmm. But like if you actually read it, it was open source developers who it was their first time ever using AI tools.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:So it's like, obviously, like
Speaker 1:Small sample size.
Speaker 3:Learning curve
Speaker 2:like, Cloud Code or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You're not gonna instantly become way better. Yep. I think it's it's kind of a similar thing there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, we heard that
Speaker 2:Over time.
Speaker 1:There's a yeah. There's an interesting phenomenon where some companies are getting more value out of having having designers go from zero x engineers to one x engineers, and they're not seeing as much of, like, the 10 x engineer becomes a 100 x engineer, because the problems are still, like, intractable in some ways. Noam Brown says, I was on the AI job market in 2023. I spoke with a lot of researchers, a lot of Frontier Labs. Some thought scaling pretraining was sufficient.
Speaker 1:Some thought additional paradigms were needed. But regardless, almost none of them thought AGI was one to two years away. Yeah. That was something that was maybe more parroted in the, on the podcast circuit and from those who were raising the mega rounds who needed to kind of justify underwriting AGI at a 1000x revenue multiple. It's interesting.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It it it is interesting that to look at the economic to keep going back to what's happening in the labor market, what's happening with unemployment. Like, it would be it would be weird to have a unemployment tick up without productivity tick up because that would just mean lower GDP. And that seems like an like an impossible scenario. I'm somewhat receptive to the idea that maybe AI is substitutive for a different type of work and maybe it's not driving major productivity booms just yet.
Speaker 1:But I would I have trouble believing both narratives that AI is driving massive unemployment and also it's not driving increased productivity because companies would just be doing less than, and we're seeing earnings growth, we're seeing growth in the economy, we're seeing high GDP growth. So one of those has to be has to be right. They can't both be
Speaker 3:Well, breaking news. President Trump was on Newsmax. No. Not our not our internal software that we use to create the show. Okay.
Speaker 3:But the TV show. Yep. President Trump tells Todd Starnes he's going out on patrol tonight with DC law enforcement and the military.
Speaker 1:They're really taking DC seriously, aren't they?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. If you're in DC, have a keep an eye out. Nate Eliason says, gonna have to block Elon Musk soon for all the AI goon spam. Feels like I can't open X in public.
Speaker 3:I think a lot of people are feeling that way.
Speaker 1:Skill issue. I've still fine tuned my algorithm so much towards tech and AI content that I don't see any of the Elon.
Speaker 3:You don't?
Speaker 1:I don't see it.
Speaker 3:I get it because people that I follow
Speaker 4:follow follow
Speaker 3:to him and tell him to stop this.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. I follow Elon, but I still don't see it. I see I see high yield Harry saying Tom Brady was so ready back in the day to be a finance bro, and they share Thomas E.
Speaker 1:Brady Jr's resume. He was at University of Michigan. Then he went to Merrill Lynch, the University of Michigan golf
Speaker 3:Summer intern. Summer
Speaker 1:Polo Fields Golf and Country Club. Was
Speaker 3:Sales rep.
Speaker 1:Says, this guy could have had a successful career working Merrill Lynch instead of pursuing football. Now, no one on Wall Street will remember his name.
Speaker 3:Andrew Reid. Juwan had said, what the heck is a series k?
Speaker 1:That was Databricks.
Speaker 3:During Databricks.
Speaker 1:And the gong.
Speaker 3:They were the
Speaker 1:gong of the day.
Speaker 3:I know quite a few people in SF with a series k problem.
Speaker 1:Yes. Stay away from the series k. Enjoy the series c, the caffeine, the Yerba Mate,
Speaker 3:the Next time you have an urge
Speaker 1:to Hot cast in a can.
Speaker 3:Hard drugs Yes. Why not try a fridge cigarette? Yes. Rune says the demand for anti AI takes is enormous and we'll take anything and run with it. Meta consolidating and doubling down on MSL is being misrepresented as bearish on AI, for example.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Something to keep in mind. Yeah. The the the they they conducted a reorg because they added a bunch of people to the team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 3:This is And had a few weeks together and and kind of updated certainly. And and they they got positioned as like like layoffs almost, kinda what I was Yeah. Bringing
Speaker 1:It was very odd. For obvious reasons, it's not that popular when we're like, this technology will bring about a turning of the age and reshape the thought the thought world of man. And even a miraculous year in AI progress can be spun into a disappointment. Careful observers will note that revenue growth of the consumer AI industry has outstripped the most bullish expectations. We maxed out the meta calculus predictions, and nobody is mea culping on this.
Speaker 1:You're not going to get an apology from Maroon. No way. He's absolutely printing in consumer AI adoption. People love it. Anyway, what else is going on?
Speaker 1:Elon Musk, we were talking about the the potential spam. He is unpacking his ideas around the birth rate. People saw this as incongruent. How can you possibly be worried about the birth rate when you are creating romantic companions that by definition cannot reproduce with their companions. Yes.
Speaker 1:Elon Musk says
Speaker 3:Theo Von was was, you know, kinda getting into this with his interview with
Speaker 1:A little bit with Sam. Yeah. It was it was a very funny interaction where he asks he Theo Von asks Sam Altman, What do you think about test tube babies, the idea of having children outside of the womb?
Speaker 3:That you could visit on the weekends, he specifically said.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, yes. And so Sam is kind of like, That it sounds maybe like that's futuristic and that might happen and there are some scientific reasons, but it feels unnatural to me. I'm not that into it, says Sam. And Theo just goes, oh, I thought you'd be into that. It's very revealing that Theo clearly sees Sam as this techno
Speaker 3:Dystopian.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or just this crazy, crazy tech futurist guy from the future. And so they kind of like worked through it on the conversation. But it's a very funny clip because they're both playing the game of like, who are we? How do we perceive each other?
Speaker 3:Says AI is obviously going to one shot the human limbic system. That said, I predict counterintuitively that it will increase the birth rate. Mark my words. Also, we're going to program it that way.
Speaker 1:But what I find interesting is what Nikita Beer says here. He says, Grock companions, Duolingo for dating. So the idea that you could go to a Grock companion, learn amazing pickup lines, like, are you a Nvidia GB200 because I'm getting hot hanging out next to you? And then take that pickup line on the road and meet someone real. The more interesting thing I think is if two people are talking to companions and they're a perfect match, just introduce themselves.
Speaker 1:Introduce them to each other and say, Hey, we are foregoing the future revenue here and we are introducing you in IRL. But we'll see. The proof is in the pudding. He's gotta put AI where his mouth is and actually deliver a product that increases the price.
Speaker 3:Hopefully he doesn't put his AI where his mouth is.
Speaker 1:Who knows? In a
Speaker 3:literal sense.
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 3:China is pushing for a total ban on the use of foreign chips for inference.
Speaker 1:They're not a fan of NVIDIA.
Speaker 3:Financial Times, some Beijing policy makers are pushing to ban foreign chips altogether for inference which accounts for most AI demand according to a person recently summoned for a meeting with them. That is unlikely to happen soon due to a shortage of domestic chip supplies when which Beijing hopes
Speaker 1:Who do you think is gonna sort it out? Who are
Speaker 3:The juggler.
Speaker 1:The juggler. Jensen, the juggler. He's able to juggle juggle. The interests of America, the interests of China, the interests of Taiwan, the interests of Nvidia. Jensen, the
Speaker 3:juggler, will get it done.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, he doesn't drop one. But we will talk to Aaron Ginn if there is a dropping of a juggle ball from Jensen, the juggler.
Speaker 3:Google declares the green versus blue bubbles debate silly and tired. And signal says precisely what a green bubble would say. I will say my little brother uses an Android. It's gotten bet quite a lot better to text him. We can now effectively use FaceTime through this weird kind of Hangout integration thing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Certainly better. Yeah. But it's definitely it's definitely still a real thing.
Speaker 1:You got something, Tyler?
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is different though.
Speaker 1:No. So
Speaker 2:out of the White House, new executive order, they're establishing a national design studio.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So, gigabullish for Figma,
Speaker 1:obviously. Let's go. Let's go. Universal basic Figma.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, like a new a new design language. A new design Announcing America by Design.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:National Initiative to Improve Experience for Americans.
Speaker 1:Like UI, UX, or?
Speaker 2:Yeah. A new life into the into the designs of sites where people interface with their government.
Speaker 1:I'm getting John, Chad is saying Stop. Stop.
Speaker 2:Chad is saying, you look like Greg from Succession.
Speaker 1:That's the first time I've ever gotten that. That's weird. Never gotten that before.
Speaker 3:Anyway I've never
Speaker 1:Moving on.
Speaker 3:I've never
Speaker 1:You've never said that. I've gotten that a ton, of course. I I actually live in the same building as everyone.
Speaker 3:Okay. What if what if Greg from Succession was a sigma? That's kind of the question that that
Speaker 1:Well, the actor who plays Greg from Succession is in fact a sigma.
Speaker 3:Sort of
Speaker 1:lone wolf. He had his own apartment.
Speaker 3:Dar says, who has a house like this in the bay? I would like to spend some time together, preferably in your house.
Speaker 1:That is a cool that is a cool design. Like the soft wood tones, the the the brown
Speaker 3:The the
Speaker 1:It feels very comfortable. Conversation. Actually doesn't feel that comfortable. Like, look at that couch. That couch does not particularly look, like, loungeable.
Speaker 1:I'm much more. I'm a I'm I'm a fan. My ideal my ideal living situation is a modern glass box on the outside, but then log cabin on the inside. I want, like, the moose head on the wall of the glass. And then I want overstuffed leather chairs.
Speaker 1:Brutalist outside.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Fortress.
Speaker 1:Exactly. The fortress on the outside Fortress. With the super cozy maxing, like, thick rugs, warm hearths. These are the things that I want inside. I I I always hate going inside those glass box houses and being like, okay, like, everything's uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:There's so many
Speaker 3:hard corners.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I can just bang into everything.
Speaker 3:Look at this glass point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I want like a wooden coffee table that's just so rounded, like, there's just no sharp edges whatsoever. That's my that's my ideal thing. But this is a little minimal. But
Speaker 3:Gabriel says what does he know? He's quoting our post.
Speaker 1:We broke the story really after Ben Thompson emailed his newsletter subscribers on Strathecari, we broke the news that after twenty one I mean, twenty two years in Taiwan, I
Speaker 3:think Where did he say he's moving again?
Speaker 1:I think he's oh, he I don't know if he said, but he's been he spends time in the Midwest. So I think Wisconsin, I think Michigan, that general area. Did you see Dylan Bruscato's reply to our to our breaking news that Ben Thompson has officially relocated to The United States. Welcome home, brother. He he did the NBA commissioner.
Speaker 1:Even said, time to learn English, buddy. Of course, Ben Thompson does know English. But a lot of people were speculating this is about Taiwan tensions. I don't think it is, and Ben Thompson said that exactly in his email. He said, yes.
Speaker 1:Taiwan is complicated, but that's not why I'm doing this. It's that, my kids are at an age where we want them to go to school in The United States, and we've contemplating this for a long time. And we're very happy. We always spend he already spends summer in The United States and spends time, so going back and So but here, it it was not it was not like the last the last helicopter at Saint
Speaker 3:is for sure. If there is ever a conflict in Taiwan, Gabe Gabe will repost his this
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes. Definitely. Victory lap. Definitely. Jira tickets just said, my boss just told me quote unquote, don't make mistakes like I'm a clanker.
Speaker 1:That's brutal. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm asleep.
Speaker 1:I clanker is still getting more juice. I'm still laughing when I hear it. It it is not completely dialed out.
Speaker 3:Gotten better.
Speaker 1:I think it's gotten better.
Speaker 3:It's gotten better.
Speaker 1:It's building some lore. I'm having fun with it. Plus, it is turning into a bit of a culture war issue. Mike Solano was talking about this where there were a couple posts that went out that were saying, like, you should not use this. It's a slur.
Speaker 1:It's bad. Like, don't don't reuse the word clanker. And I like I like that we're already being language police on it, so that that gives it a little extra juice. Like, it's it makes it more fun to use.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Anyway, should we go to this post from Bone GPT?
Speaker 3:Back on the show.
Speaker 1:Back on the show. Thank you for posting our reaction to your post a few days ago. Bone says, Apple has no chance of catching up to Google with AI features that will become increasingly useful. OpenAI thinks they can do hardware from scratch because they bought Johnny Ive, which is a level of delusion that's hard to describe. Shots fired.
Speaker 1:Meadows playing catch up desperately, distorting the whole market with their hire so they can ship stepmom. Google won. Shots fired.
Speaker 3:I don't know. This is what I was kinda getting at earlier. They they look really great during during the AI wars right now.
Speaker 1:I think it's like I think it's like, you know, if this is if this is mobile, if this is cloud, like, yeah, AWS is the first mover in cloud. Azure, GCP, these are great businesses. Know, did Apple kind of win mobile and get the vast majority of device revenues? Yes. Was it still extremely valuable for Google to develop Android?
Speaker 1:Did every company eventually need to have a mobile strategy and a mobile app and a mobile design? Like, yes. And so it's little dramatized, but that's why we love your posts, Bone. Keep things spicy on the timeline. Keep us hitting that soundboard.
Speaker 1:Anyway, timeline in turmoil again, Malo Burgon from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Miri, is getting in a fight with Rune on the time line. Rune says, Miri is an incredible name, maybe the best in AI. It's a shame they don't research machine intelligence, and Malo fires back. OpenAI is a pretty good name. It's a shame they don't dot dot dot.
Speaker 1:He said, yes. I know they published a couple open models recently, and he has to kinda walk it back because he got hit with a community note. But I think I think Rune also got hit with community note. Maybe Miri does research machine intelligence.
Speaker 3:Oh, I think Rune is getting community note.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because I think machine intelligence research institute does in fact research machine intelligence. Maybe just maybe they just don't ship models or products. Maybe they ship other types of research. Anyway
Speaker 3:Anyways, OpenAI's CFO. CFO, Sarah Fryer, who we've had on the show.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Absolute dog.
Speaker 1:One of
Speaker 3:the best ever do Bloomberg TV during an interview.
Speaker 1:She's a real CFO CFO, if I say it
Speaker 3:to Totally. Yeah. Totally. Anyway. If you know, you know.
Speaker 3:Yes. But she was asked about selling infra services in the future. She said, I do think about it as a business.
Speaker 1:This is why Ben Thompson moved back to America. He's like, I gotta end this right now. Ben Thompson famously does not like the fact that OpenAI is has an API. He thinks that they should focus entirely, at least for now, on on saving every GPU cycle for the consumer product that is absolutely on fire. They should become they should embrace being the accidental consumer company, and they should go as deep as possible before
Speaker 3:Where do they have an incredible edge? Yes. It's in consumer. Yes. Where do they not have an incredible edge?
Speaker 3:In the just vending out intelligence?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, they're doing great, and it is a good business. And so from a c o CFO's perspective and from Sam Altman's perspective, it certainly makes sense. Like, yeah. Like, why not also be in that game?
Speaker 1:It is value creative. It it is profit generating. And yet, Ben Thompson thinks now is the time to focus, focus, focus, focus. At the same time, I kind of take the other side of this a little bit and say OpenAI is in a fortunate situation. They have a lot of data, a ton of customers.
Speaker 1:They're going to have a very great consumer business that will probably throw off a ton of cash, especially once they start monetizing more heavily. And what that means is they might be the next Google in the best sense possible in this and what I mean by that is that they might be able to go and do 20% projects. They might be able to go spend a couple billion dollars trying to build a new device, and maybe it doesn't work. But when you add up all the Google 20% time projects and Google side projects, it's easy to laugh at all the things that they've shut down, like 10 different chat bots or chat chat chat
Speaker 3:products. That have a 100,000,000 of revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They launched Wave, and they've launched Google Glass, and they've missed on so many things. But when they hit, it's great. You know? They they hit on Gmail.
Speaker 1:They hit on Docs. They hit on Cloud. They hit on Waymo. And so I love that you get sort of this, like, humanity or America gets, like, somewhat of a subsidized r and d org at Google, and it all pencils out and it all makes sense. And so maybe the infrastructure services group is not that at OpenAI, but I'm excited for these other these other, like, less focused efforts from OpenAI, and I think we'll see some cool stuff.
Speaker 3:Anyway This is a good post from Steever, if we can pull it up.
Speaker 1:Read it out.
Speaker 3:I'd say, you're finally awake. That fall looked real bad. SWE, LLMs, b to b SaaS? What are you talking about? You're an electrical engineer.
Speaker 3:Let's go build some chips. I love it. Good. This post really gonna be relatable for a lot of you. Yes.
Speaker 3:Nine figure hell is real. Sure. You don't have to work and have some assets but you can't really afford a decent yacht let alone a private army or nuclear submarine.
Speaker 1:It's real. It's real. Get back
Speaker 3:to the wage cage. Get back in the cage, buddies. Ready to send some emails, buddy. Good Captain Nemo.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're doing an OpenAI movie. Yeah. And they're basing it on a a book. I think there might be two competing scripts, but they are finalizing the cast. I believe Andrew Garfield, is also in the social network, he will be playing Sam.
Speaker 1:But Will Brown, friend of the show, has a recast. He has can you name these actors?
Speaker 3:Jason You
Speaker 1:got Jason Statham. And who will he be playing?
Speaker 3:Did Jason Statham? Two? Is that
Speaker 1:The the the joke here is that he's playing both Greg and Ilya. When I saw Jason Statham as Ilya, I was laughing out loud. Was there.
Speaker 3:Then I don't the guy on the left, he was in a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 1:What stuff? What have you seen?
Speaker 3:I don't even know his name. I he I've seen him a bunch though. I've seen him around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. He's in Nightcrawler.
Speaker 3:Nightcrawler. Wait.
Speaker 1:Actually, right now Woah. I mean. Is it Toby McGuire? I don't know. I'm all over the place.
Speaker 3:Tyler, who's who's the Armis?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Andre Day Armis?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Andre Day Armis. But who's who's the guy in the top
Speaker 2:left? Gyllenhaal.
Speaker 1:Jake Gyllenhaal. That's right.
Speaker 3:Too very right. Tell me regarding That's a famous guy. Everybody knows that guy.
Speaker 1:I got so tied up in
Speaker 3:Anyway, so the real cast of the movie Artificial is gonna be Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbero as Miramaradi. Okay. And then a guy named Ike Barronholtz is rumored to be Elon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who's playing Dylan Patel?
Speaker 2:That Yeah. Who's playing Rune?
Speaker 1:Who's playing Rune?
Speaker 2:Rune is the real question.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Rune is the real question.
Speaker 3:Who should Rune?
Speaker 1:Who should play Rune? Wait. So I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg is gonna like make an appearance in the film and they're gonna have to cast him again. Should they have the guy who played him in the social network reprise the role?
Speaker 2:No. But he like hates Zuck now.
Speaker 1:Wait.
Speaker 2:Jesse Eisenberg. Jesse Eisenberg has beef with like What? Jack in
Speaker 1:general. Why?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Oh, weird. Okay. Yeah. Why? Very odd.
Speaker 1:Anyway, it should be fun. Hopefully, can get a cameo. We can sneak in. If you know someone, introduce us.
Speaker 3:Chad, thank you for helping us out there.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Jelly Hill
Speaker 3:from Gold Rock. Jake. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:It's good.
Speaker 3:Kylie says, I can't believe this is real. I can.
Speaker 1:I can't believe this is real. I saw this and I was like, this is not real.
Speaker 3:President Trump dialed into Fox and Friends on Tuesday morning, we're a couple days late and revealed his newest and truest motivation for brokering an end to the war in Ukraine. He's worried he might not get into heaven after he dies. I want to try and get to heaven if possible, he explained. I'm here and I'm not doing well. I'm really at the bottom of the totem pole.
Speaker 3:But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.
Speaker 1:I like whatever your motivation your motivation is for peace, it. Do it.
Speaker 3:It is solid. So there was a debate breakdown. Yes.
Speaker 1:Break this debate down.
Speaker 3:Craig Wise says having kids before 30 is how you stay generationally poor.
Speaker 1:A real a real take Smith's take there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So surely Worded perfectly put the timeline in turmoil. The dude Richie, the rich, highlighted Warren Buffett net worth, 154,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:He had a kid at 22?
Speaker 3:Child at 22. Michael Dell, 23.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 3:Bernard Arnaud, 26. Let's Dogs.
Speaker 1:Jordy Hayes.
Speaker 3:Jordy Also, 26.
Speaker 1:I just missed it by a year or two. I think David Senner might
Speaker 3:be club say too.
Speaker 1:You can come on whenever. Kids
Speaker 3:are much more I I I Mhmm. When I started making money, I got into cars. Yep. And when I started having kids, I realized that they are a much more quite you know, I used to think there there was kind of a meme growing
Speaker 1:in terms of
Speaker 3:like joy. People would say like the average American kid Yeah. By the time they they're 18 is like a quarter of a million dollars. Yep. But it feels like children feel like the carrying cost of like 10 supercars at that time
Speaker 1:That's true. Between school. Well, we have our first in person guest of the show. We got David Senra
Speaker 3:Finally.
Speaker 1:From the TVPN UltraDome live. See you. How you doing, man?
Speaker 5:Good see you, man.
Speaker 3:Finally in the UltraDome.
Speaker 1:Finally in person. Been
Speaker 3:on How show was the drive?
Speaker 1:Five times.
Speaker 5:It's a testament to how much I love you that you got me out of Malibu.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was
Speaker 5:an hour and a half.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's rough.
Speaker 3:I know. Just It's rough. Speeder and I do it every day.
Speaker 5:No. But it takes you an hour and a half at, like yeah. We go out, like, five in the morning. Yeah. 05:30 in the morning.
Speaker 5:Yeah. This is a different story.
Speaker 1:Anyway This
Speaker 5:is I love this place, though. You guys have an army back here.
Speaker 3:We do
Speaker 1:have an army.
Speaker 5:You have the crew, the interns, then I met the friends of the interns.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. We got People are talking about yeah. We're we're the the chat is still talking about this debate over whether you can become generationally wealthy while having a child before age 30. What do Obviously. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they gave Michael Dell a Warren buffet Steve Jobs.
Speaker 5:Shout out to Michael Dell. Dell Technologies Yeah. On the
Speaker 3:technology's technology's on say too much because that'll dox us.
Speaker 5:No. Actually, that that might be an interesting place to start. I actually flew to Austin. I spent five hours with Michael Dell Wow. Like two weeks two or three weeks ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was what was that like? What'd learn from him?
Speaker 5:You know what?
Speaker 1:What surprised you? Because you've already you've already done a full episode on him. You've dug in. You've probably on his story. You know most of the facts.
Speaker 5:It's not only that.
Speaker 8:Like, I
Speaker 5:listened to so I highly recommend every entrepreneur listen to his audio book Mhmm. Because he actually narrates it. Mhmm. And so I listened to it three can you hear me? Yeah.
Speaker 5:Good. I listened to it three times. I listened to it three times and then read the book and then made the episode. Wow. Was like halfway through our conversation, I said some I said something like, I'm having a hard time reconciling like this paradox in my mind about between like your immense accomplishments and just like how normal you are.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And obviously, he's a superlative and extreme person.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But he's unbelievably measured and controlled and kind and generous. Mhmm. It's just like one of my favorite people I've ever met.
Speaker 1:We gotta get him on the Theo Vaughn podcast. See how he does there. I mean, everyone in tech has been making the rounds.
Speaker 5:It's I actually been have.
Speaker 1:But there's been multiple times when tech people have gone on, Theo, and they've had, like, kinda awkward starts. Took Zuck a minute to warm up. There was the caffeine thing. Oh, I don't
Speaker 5:I think this is the mistake that people in tech make and you're seeing it with a bunch of other podcasts. They should definitely come here before anywhere else. This is not a joke. It's like they see a number on a screen, and they don't think about what that number represents and who that person is. And you can just read some of the comments on some of these mainstream podcasts.
Speaker 5:It's like, this guy's six years old. He's in his fucking underwear in Missouri. He's got unemployed. He's not the person Sure. You're just optimizing for the number when you should optimize for the quality of the people in the audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's for sure.
Speaker 5:It's insane to me.
Speaker 1:Well, you know who's optimized for the quality of the audience. Colossus Magazine. There's a new I love how you
Speaker 3:print out. I love how you printed it out while we wait for the print edition. No.
Speaker 1:I don't have the print edition yet. But you can still go subscribe. Patrick O'Shaughnessy has printed a warehouse full this time. Have you had a chance to read through the Joe Lamont profile?
Speaker 5:I I get I got Patrick's, you know, obviously, like my brother. I talk to him, like, every day. Yep. I there's actually an interesting something we can talk about that that I called him about yesterday. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:I actually think moving forward, and I told him this yesterday and I told him again today, I was like, if you give me more than a day to read it, we if on especially these long form profiles Totally. I should do an that is good enough
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:If you read the whole thing. Yep. It takes like an hour and a half to listen to. So I read
Speaker 1:it I was thinking about printing the whole thing and I was like, there's no way I can read this before the show.
Speaker 5:It's like a 100 pages. I read it and then I threw it into 11 reader and I listened to it on the way out.
Speaker 10:Oh, that's good.
Speaker 5:And so it's like an hour and a half if you listen at one x. Okay. But I think that source material is so good. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Could definitely do an episode of Founders and it's like, just tell me in advance. Give me like, you know, two weeks, two, three weeks and then we can drop it the same day publish it. But what I
Speaker 3:favorite little stories from that is is how so Joe had sort of a non traditional, you know, entrance Mhmm. Start Software. And business. Yeah. He was a Stanford undergrad.
Speaker 3:So no. More more traditional in that sense. But but at the time that he was building what what was the software called? Sales builder or something like that? The initial
Speaker 5:And his name the names for his
Speaker 3:They're so great. Enterprise software.
Speaker 5:It's like building a microphone. Like, it's called microphone.
Speaker 1:And I mean, you look at some of the companies here, like Nuvu, GCE, Still Secure, Ignite, Arena, Object Store, Accept, ProLogic, Ravenflow. It's just like
Speaker 3:So there's two there's two things that stood out from the story. One is there there wasn't a meme yet of of VCs being like, I'm gonna back the Stanford dropout. They wanted to back executives Yes. That had experience and crazy access to talent. And there were some early kind of garage success stories.
Speaker 3:So he was kind of following that. But the other thing is is bigger companies, Fortune 500 companies refused to buy Buy from start ups.
Speaker 5:But then it's pricing. Did you see what he did with his Yeah. Yeah. Like it's a $100 and they're like, no. We we don't buy from start They come back.
Speaker 5:Okay. We need it. No one else can do this. It's 300.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And it
Speaker 5:goes from like, now it's a million. Now it's 7 and a half million.
Speaker 1:Now it's
Speaker 8:$25,000,000.
Speaker 3:And everybody kept saying yes because it's the best. I had But but the other thing is the why now for the business Yeah. The initial why now and why it worked not like the business catalyst was that they started sending this was at a time where they would just send you a letter and said, you're preapproved for this card. You just have to fill this out.
Speaker 5:He did credit card roulette.
Speaker 3:Yeah. He Yeah. Yeah. So he would He signed up. He he racked out half It racked up half a million dollars of credit card debt
Speaker 1:Story.
Speaker 3:And was was finally before he got his first customer, still no VC would fund him at all. He final Like he was basically like evaluating bankruptcy. Like, had played it out in his head like Yeah. It's gonna be like seven years. It's gonna be really annoying but it doesn't matter if you have his calculus was like, you you know, how much debt you have going into bankruptcy actually, like, it doesn't going from a 100,000 to 500 k, it's not that much worse to go through
Speaker 5:You might as well do it the real way.
Speaker 3:So he just went full send. Absolutely. And then and then basically made it all back from like his basically first couple customers.
Speaker 5:So I we have a mutual friend that we can't name
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:That has been close and is basically, Joe's been like a mentor of his for a long time and actually, like, a funder of a lot of projects that he does behind the scenes. So I've heard a lot about this guy.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And what I like about people is just like the people that chart their own path and and and intentionally go in the ops direction. So everybody heard Buffett and Munger and they're like, you should buy phenomenal businesses. You need to pay more. And so then everybody in the v m VMS, like, roll ups, like, I'm gonna buy the great businesses. And what he realized, and I heard this story, like, probably two years ago, it's like, well, okay.
Speaker 5:So I have a lot more competition for the everyone wants the great ones. What about these shitty ones over here? And he turned it into a math problem. He's like, okay. This is your ARR.
Speaker 5:This is your rate of attrition. Like, I know exactly how much I'm gonna get out of this in the next six years. Yep. They talk about it in the you know, they they use different words that they talk about in the article. Yeah.
Speaker 5:He's like, okay. So I can easily buy this thing for two because I'm gonna rip I'm gonna pull out, you know, 15 over the next five years. Yep. Just does it over and over and over again. And then I heard I don't know if it was in if they said it, but like, you know, he bought out his shareholders.
Speaker 5:He went a 100% of the company. And what I heard is like, he's been taking billions
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 5:A year in dividends. His fucking paycheck. Yeah. At the end of the year, it's like, much money did you make there?
Speaker 1:I don't know, like, $1,500,000,000. Crazy.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And no one knew he was.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's built a machine. A machine. A machine behind the scenes.
Speaker 3:There Yeah. The there's a few of these folks going dark for twenty five years and basically
Speaker 4:until this.
Speaker 5:Well, this is this you know, this is like one of my fetishes. It's like these very silent family owned businesses where they own a 100% of them. Yep. You'll never hear about them. I've been lucky enough to have dinner with some of these people.
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 5:Yep. And they're just again,
Speaker 3:the Yeah. I know. You you you've talked to people that have written books about their family business Yes. And and haven't released them. And you're like, please let me let me and they're just like, no.
Speaker 5:Okay. So I'll just tell the story. So there's this guy. He's 76 years old. Okay?
Speaker 5:This is like one of my favorite dinners I've ever had. And I need be really careful here. So he started working in the family business when he was six.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Okay? He's a second generation of his family dynasty. They own the original source of their wealth was one of the largest privately held shipping companies in the world. When I mean privately held, owned by his dad and now owned by him and his brother. Like, it's just like there is no shareholders, no board of directors, it's just the family.
Speaker 5:Clean I've now become closer to the third generation and I get insight on how they run their the the family is a business and the business is a family. And the way they go about things is just really, really intelligent. And so we had this phenomenal dinner. You look up his reported net worth. It's like it's still in the tens of billions and it's like underreported by a factor of like four.
Speaker 5:Because then he tells you about like, oh, I put money into this and I never sold and it's worth this. There's just crazy stories. And he's also like super charismatic, one of the best rocking tours I've ever been around and just super and he's still on it twenty four seven, like, works all the time. And so there's two things that were funny. The this has happened a few times where families will commission real writers.
Speaker 5:Right? They they commission a a actual biography. And I have a copy of a separate family. It looks like the book it looks like a book you buy in a bookstore. The only difference is there's no ISBN number on the back.
Speaker 5:Oh. So, like, some of the books I have, no one else in the world has these books besides, like, the family and the author and everything.
Speaker 3:OpenAI would give you a lot of money for that.
Speaker 5:So so there's two two funny things that that that he told me. One, that they commissioned one for his father and then one for him. And I was like, dude, give me those books. Like, I would do such a good job on them. And he without hesitation, he's like, absolutely not.
Speaker 5:Like, that's out of the question. I go, why not? And he said something like, I have no desire to educate my competitors. Mhmm. And just real like, real fast.
Speaker 5:And then he Leave it to me in the will. No. And then no. I I I think so there's another founder
Speaker 3:The next generation No.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 5:there's there's another founder who's 78 and I spent four days with her her the CEO and the top 40 executives. They were going through how do we they they wanted advice on, like, how to transition from a founder led company. She's of one my favorite founders I've ever come across in my life and, like, to the next generation. And so I after talking to all the executives, spending time with them, they're like, hey, so what do you think? And after four days, I go, when she's dead, you're fucked.
Speaker 5:This is just like, there's not like you're not replacing her. She's a singular individual. You should, like, either sell the company or go do something else because like there's no transition here. It's like, what do do when Michael Jordan retires? Like, I don't know.
Speaker 5:Start rebuilding. But he said something funny because they're obviously in shipping, they now have real estate, and they have finance, and everything else. And he's got also one of the biggest boats in the world. Nice. He had mentioned but no.
Speaker 5:Of course. He mentioned earlier though so early in the conversation, he's like, yeah, when you read a lot of these biographies he had read all the same biographies I had read, like Daniel Ludwig, Aristotle, Nassas, all these shipping guys, he knew all of them. They would also run their company headquarters from their private like giant boats. Right? Giant yachts.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And so he he had mentioned earlier, he's like, spent, you know, part of the year I lived part of the year on he said I thought he said boat. He said ship. So I was like, yeah. So, like, when like,
Speaker 3:what month difference.
Speaker 5:He's gonna tell us. I go, so what what like, when are you gonna go back on your boat? Like, how long are you gonna in your boat for? He goes, what are you talking about? I go, you said, like, earlier you live on your boat.
Speaker 11:He goes, I don't have a boat.
Speaker 5:I'm like, is this some kind of joke? He goes, I have a ship. And I go, what's the difference between a boat and a ship? He goes, you can put a boat on a ship. You can't put a ship on a boat.
Speaker 5:So my favorite conversations are these kind of people and I I like obsessed with older entrepreneurs because they're just so much smarter than a 25 year old fucking startup founder. Even not even it might be an alien. It's just like these people are just they have so much more experience. Have so much more knowledge. I just can talk to them for hours and hours and
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Have you dug into the Trilogy software mafia? Are you familiar with this? No. So this was some secondary research I did.
Speaker 1:Out of Trilogy, this is, of course, the subject of that Colossus profile on Joe Lamont. The in the nineties, Trilogy was on such a tear. They were recruiting out of MIT, Harvard, and a bunch of folks went through Trilogy and then went on to do cool things. Eddie Ellie Seidman, the CEO of Tinder, was a Trilogy alum. Cyrus and Nick Ganjew, founders of Zocdoc.
Speaker 1:Henry Ward, the CEO and founder of Carta.
Speaker 3:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, and now he's an investor at Greylock. And Andy Palmer, the CEO of Tamar, former CEO of Vertica, which was acquired, major angel investor, invested in Carta in part due to his connection. There are 87 Trilogy mafia companies now on Crunchbase. So it's just like this very interesting I we we've heard that that Joe, like, keeps his team very tight, but clearly selects for extremely entrepreneurial people. They don't often get poached to, like, other firms that are doing the same thing.
Speaker 1:If you leave, you're probably
Speaker 11:a different company.
Speaker 5:I wouldn't wanna make money the way he did, you know, but put that aside, like, what I do admire like, I'm like, I'm the most pro American person, like, obviously, the son of Cuban immigrants. Like, I grew up, you know, meeting people.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, literally came to this country, fled communism on a raft.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, so I don't like outsourcing anything. I've had Yeah. Tons of people try to advertise on the podcast. They're like, I have this outsourcing thing. I like, I wanna
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Find a way to pay people more money, not less. Yep. Yep. I wanna work with the best people in the world and those people don't work for $8 an hour.
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 5:But I do what the thing I respect about Joe is, like, he he doesn't give a shit what other people think. Sure. And he's willing to have his own thinking, and then even if everybody's going in one direction I was listening to your mischief on the way over here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Gabe.
Speaker 5:He had this great line where he's like, if everybody's running fast at something, they're probably running off a cliff.
Speaker 1:I was
Speaker 5:like, well, that's a That's a good bar. And so I like that Joe's like, hey, you guys are all doing this. So that means, by default, there's an there's an opportunity. I called Patrick yesterday. I was like, it's kind of funny, you know, there's not any other people more obsessed with podcasts than me, you, Patrick.
Speaker 5:We talk about this this stuff all the time. And I was like, everybody even now is still starting podcasts. And Patrick, you know, he has the highest value investing audience in the world. And what I love about what he's doing is he's like, oh, yeah. You guys are all gonna go to podcast.
Speaker 5:I'm gonna write, I was at 15,000 word in-depth profiles, but they're so much better. Like the Neil Mehta one.
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 5:Really good. Who's the Paradigm guy I read?
Speaker 3:Matt Huang.
Speaker 5:Matt, yeah.
Speaker 1:That one.
Speaker 5:This one. Yep. Like, they're and they're gonna keep doing it. Yep. He'll he'll tell you in the group chat, like, some of the ones they're working on now, they're crushing it.
Speaker 4:I just love this idea.
Speaker 1:It's very special product. And and I went through when we were doing the show and we didn't have guests or anything and we needed a lot of material, I went through and looked at old New Yorker deep dives profiles.
Speaker 5:So good.
Speaker 1:They're so good. Old Bloomberg and old Forbes pieces, and they're just not doing it at that level anymore. There are some profiles, but the one profile that was written in prestigious magazine about Zuck is all about, like, did he have the right team in place? Like, it's like a diversity like, referendum on diversity and stuff, like Brotopia type take, which is just not really the story. Like, that's a very minor piece of the Zuck story, in my opinion.
Speaker 5:I'm glad you said the New Yorker part because every single time I do a deep research report on every single person I'm working on
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:Just to get an overview, and it's always like you I I want it written like a New Yorker piece. One of my favorite do you have Fantastic writers. Jack Jackson Doll.
Speaker 3:We read one on Mary Meeker.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Mary Meeker.
Speaker 5:The I read that too. Fantastic. I read that too. So Jackson Doll, you guys should have him on there. He's doing
Speaker 3:because for the record, Jackson
Speaker 1:We have invited him.
Speaker 3:I I every He needs to
Speaker 5:call in today. I don't know what he's doing.
Speaker 1:Nick, send him an invite. Have him
Speaker 3:join right now.
Speaker 5:The reason no.
Speaker 7:Don't call him
Speaker 5:share it like sharing the mic.
Speaker 1:Okay. You
Speaker 5:have to come after I'm done.
Speaker 1:Send the invitation. I'll send the invitation for tomorrow.
Speaker 5:But but the reason I I say that is because he put me onto one of he's like, hey, you have this this thought that I haven't heard anywhere else Because something that I've talked about is just like, I actually think like introspection is one of the worst things like an entrepreneur can have. And I say some of the greatest entrepreneurs in history had low to no introspection. Like Sam Walton didn't wake up every day wondering, like, what his life was.
Speaker 3:Was even rehashing the the past. Wish did this.
Speaker 4:Nothing. Is
Speaker 1:like being a golden retriever. You have to maniacally be going after the tennis ball.
Speaker 3:Not thinking about the nature. Thinking about the last tennis ball.
Speaker 1:No. Always the current tennis ball.
Speaker 5:Excellent. So Jackson's like, heard you say that. Have you heard of this guy named Larry Gosian? Oh, yeah. Because I didn't know who that was.
Speaker 5:And so he sent me this great New Yorker piece. Mhmm. The piece was so good. I made an episode on it. I think it's one of the best episodes I've ever done.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's one of my favorite, like, the guy's a little, obviously, crazy. Every single person I profile on Founders is crazy.
Speaker 1:The best.
Speaker 5:But the the the it's better than a book. Yeah. That New Yorker piece was better than if I read 600 pages on Gagosian. Yeah. But, yeah.
Speaker 5:I I I think there's, like, a clear again, you we talk about like, what's the white space all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's like what Patrick and his team are doing is like there's a clear white space. Profiles, but like the profiles suck. There's no craft in
Speaker 1:them. Yeah. Yeah. The the New Yorker
Speaker 3:people He's insane. Care about the person writing the profile a lot.
Speaker 5:Well, did you you guys ever cover you know how Patrick found Jeremy Stern? No. So I think you covered the I'm pretty sure you read this to me. I love when John reads things to me. Yeah.
Speaker 5:The this I think it's the best profile ever written about Palmer Lucky.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 5:I forgot the title. It had like a very
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I know the one I'm talking about.
Speaker 5:Yep. That's right. Yep. Yep. Jeremy wrote that.
Speaker 5:Oh, American Vulcan.
Speaker 3:Yeah. American Vulcan. Is that it?
Speaker 5:Make sure it's by Jeremy Stern.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Is that okay? Yep.
Speaker 1:So what
Speaker 5:did Patrick do? Patrick, this is great. Come do this for me.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:And then he did something and then Patrick did something smart. Yep. Choked him with gold. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:He's just like, name your fucking price. So this is really important. Now, this is a really important thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So the there's a line I sent to if you're if for a startup founder or for any founders trying to recruit people. And there's this thing I I found in one of the books on Ogilvy where he was looking up letters that the Medici family Mhmm. Would write to the artist that they wanted to sponsor. And there there was this one sculptor they wanted to to to essentially be a become a patron of and then move to Florence. And he's like he said something like, come to Florence, but the last the way he ended the letter was one of the most gangster things I've ever heard.
Speaker 5:He's like, come. I will choke you with gold.
Speaker 1:That's great. Great. Great. That's
Speaker 3:a bar.
Speaker 5:That's but that's exactly what Patrick did. He's just like, name your price. The guy that does my clips. Yeah. I just like
Speaker 1:Same thing.
Speaker 5:Name your price. I don't I'm not negotiating with you at all. What do want? Yep. That's the number?
Speaker 5:Fucking send me an invoice. Pay today on my ramp card.
Speaker 3:Yep. Always. We were we were covering a bit on Oracle's latest latest moves.
Speaker 1:Cash flow negative.
Speaker 3:Give us the five minute founders of on Larry Ellison.
Speaker 5:So I'm actually working on a Larry Ellison episode. I did three episodes on him. It's like 01/24, 01/26, 01/27, but that was probably like six years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I reread The Billionaire and The Mechanic just now. Was like, fuck, I don't think it's good enough to do another episode on. Mhmm. I need like a different angle here. So there's a guy in my audience who I knew was completely obsessed with Larry Ellison and we've been DM ing for years.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. He had transcripts for every single interview Larry Ellison has ever done. So it's taken me a while Absolutely. As you can imagine
Speaker 4:Read through.
Speaker 5:But that's the source material.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 5:Highly likely it'll be out in three episodes from now. Doing Elon right now, is fucking killing me. That's why I, like, I look like shit and very tired. Yeah. This outline is destroying Don't
Speaker 3:go on X right now, by the way. Why does it make you rethink doing the episode? Why?
Speaker 1:He's in hot water.
Speaker 3:He's They basically
Speaker 1:pushing AI companions He's which people are not a fan of.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Oh, it's just like the scantily lad Yep. Okay. So here I'll I'll tell you what I'm doing. And this is why it's really important.
Speaker 5:Because, you know, you could people the very first episode of Founders, September 2016 was Ashley Vance's biography of Elon Musk. It's obviously an Elon fanboy. Was looking at Teslas before they even had the Model s. You know, everybody that's a fan of his, obviously, goes through, like, these cycles of, like, you have to ride the fucking Elon roller coaster. What
Speaker 3:you can say on the podcast, I I I I made this episode before I went crazy.
Speaker 5:No. But, like, the the problem is
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And so, like, there's there's actually I I think the best biography of Elon written is this book called Lift Off because it's the first six years of SpaceX.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 5:It's very fascinating.
Speaker 3:Those pictures where he's like standing in the rubble. Right? Yes. Like iconic
Speaker 5:So what I decided to do is like, listen, man. I don't care about politics, culture war stuff. I don't care about anything. I care about entrepreneurship Yep. Taking ideas from great people
Speaker 1:Actually building a business.
Speaker 5:And just throwing it to the next generation to hopefully help people do Right? Do that better. So no disrespect to Walter Isaacson. I've read all of his biographies. The Elon biography is like written like it's a newspaper.
Speaker 5:Now, when you take an asset, like or you take a liability and try to flip it into an asset. So I was like, okay. The problem is no disrespect. There's no craft here. I like soul.
Speaker 5:I like craft in in because I read for fun. Like, this is what I wanna do. This is like a news update. But the good news of that is it's in chronological order. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So the reason this is killing me is because the reading's been done for like five days. It's just been outlined, outlined, outlined, outlined, outlined, nonstop. So what I did is, like, I'm gonna rip out every single thing about Elon. I'm not gonna talk about his family, his wives, his kids Mhmm. His politics, culture war.
Speaker 5:This guy's got brilliant ideas. Yeah. So this is literally just what are the most enduring principles that Elon used across three decades and seven different companies. And I really think I'm crafting something that's gonna be really valuable. And I think you're gonna have to use some level of, like, intelligence to listen to it because I'm not I'm I'm gonna, like, jump from idea to idea to data rapidly.
Speaker 5:And, like, you have to put the shit together yourself. Yep. And it's just like, hey, this guy's been repeating the same principle for decades. And it worked in Tesla, worked at SpaceX, it worked in Neuralink. Why is this working?
Speaker 5:Might work in your work. You should fucking know this. You should have a tool where you can listen to this, hopefully listen to it today or whenever it's out, and then you listened to it a year ago, two years ago.
Speaker 1:Okay. I have a take on craft
Speaker 5:So, anyways, finish one thing. So, you get to the end of this Mhmm. You're completely back on the Elon train. Yeah. You're like, this is a singular person.
Speaker 3:Well, I think to people's credit I'm laying the ship. People a lot of the people posting these recent comments are on his team and want and and it's this this I think they're struggling with, like, wanting him to focus on what what Rockets. Rockets and the things
Speaker 1:that With the rockets in orbit, sir, is like the take. Yeah.
Speaker 5:He says that himself. Yeah. In the book, this is really interesting, because he was talking about what what do I have to do that if I don't do it, it doesn't get done? Mhmm. And he's like, listen, somebody else electric cars were never this is a direct quote from the book.
Speaker 5:I'm paraphrasing. Electric cars were inevitable. They were gonna happen with or without me. Mhmm. But the rockets were not.
Speaker 5:And so therefore, should focus on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But that was like think people the people that wanna go to Mars are concerned that, you know, what what takes down great men, it's Ladies liquor and leverage. Yeah. In this case, liquor, leverage, and goon bots.
Speaker 1:My my my problem is I would gladly give up the Mars ambitions if we could get a Tesla with a v 12 in it. And I feel like every moment he spends working on rockets is another moment that I want.
Speaker 3:I don't have a
Speaker 1:thousand horsepower naturally aspirated screaming straight piped Tesla. That's my goal. Anyway sounds right. On on the topic of craft, I was I I was trying to think about you you mentioned Joe Lamont. His business has been buying companies that are not generational products.
Speaker 1:They're not the iPhone. They're not these amazing monuments to craft. They're businesses that deliver a little bit of value for a bunch of customers. And he and he has figured out a a pattern of of offshoring some of the software engineering, running the business more efficiently. He is like the private equity buyout.
Speaker 1:He's not trying to, completely transform and, like, build a generational product. The product is not a product of craft. Like, he is not a craftsman. Yeah. And and then I was trying to think about I
Speaker 5:think he's trying to be now the new one.
Speaker 1:So so on the flip side, I when I was talking to Deleon early on, Deleon Asperov at Founders Fund, about, like, how did he underwrite the investment in Ramp, he was talking about software is it can be like art that the team there has like this attention to craft, and they see that's why they hire the IMO gold medalist. It's like, why do you need someone that good? It's because they see the product as like so, so important even though it's in this highly competitive, like, particular, like, corporate card space. It's it's something that they take really seriously. And I think that there's this it's not that there's necessarily one pattern that's correct.
Speaker 1:It's more of like this barbell, and you can be on either side, but you need to know what camp you're
Speaker 2:in.
Speaker 1:No. And so when I see Joe Lamont, I see him as software as widgets. He is crafting a machine that produces software, and it produces it at the lowest possible cost, and it all kinda looks the same. And then I see on the other side, like, Ramp and folks like that who take software development more as art and more as craft. And both can produce outsized returns.
Speaker 1:Both are big ones.
Speaker 3:Well, it's also where you apply the craft. Would say that Joe, from my read, brings craft to the organization.
Speaker 1:The organization's trilogy.
Speaker 3:Right? He has trilogy university.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And and you can you you I think you're gonna struggle to build an iconic enduring company if you're not bringing craft somewhere. Right? Totally. Ferrari is bringing craft to racing. They don't necessarily care about certain other elements.
Speaker 1:They're not bringing crafts to mechanical. It's in the reliability.
Speaker 5:You said something about other end of spectrum. I think what I'm trying to drive home with founders and why I'm, like, complete so it's just, like, there is no right way
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:Based on who you are and what you're into. Yes. So I just came I just flew from New York and I spent I always spent a ton of time with Kareem and Eric
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Founders of Ramp.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I specifically, this last time, I spent two hours with them. Mhmm. And I would like to talk about some of the stuff I've learned because I But I spent a lot of time with there's an example of this. It's like, this is where people fail is they're like, this Steve Jobs did it this way, so I should just copy that. It's like Yes.
Speaker 1:You're inauthentic.
Speaker 5:Yes. Natural. So I was saying for a long time this is Michael Dell again. So I was saying for a long time, you need to build a business. It's very obvious when you read biographies of people.
Speaker 5:Have to build a business that's authentic to you. Yeah. And then I read Michael Dell's autobiography and I talked to him about this when I saw him in Austin a few weeks ago. I read Michael Dell's autobiography. And again, the guy wants to IBM is the largest company in the world.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. It's the first company to reach a $100,000,000,000 market cap. And this guy's like, I'm gonna I'm gonna compete with them with a thousand dollars out of my University of Texas dorm room. It's not an exaggeration. And so, he then brings in this older guy.
Speaker 5:I think his name's I forgot his name. It's an episode. But the guy had a couple successful businesses, he and works with Michael, I think, for four years. And when he's 80, he's now looking back. I think he's twenty five years older than Michael, something like that.
Speaker 5:And he's like, listen. He's like, four years of this, like, I lost all my hair, my back hurt, I couldn't sleep, I had like intestinal issues, I had to stop. And Mike, because like the competition was so intense and we had no money, we're undercapitalized, and we were just like going 20 fourseven. I'm dying and Michael was full of energy because he's like, he built a business, this is his line, he built a business that was natural to him. So I was telling I was telling Michael when I saw him in Austin, was just like, nothing we're doing with podcasting is like new.
Speaker 5:I was like, think about, like, you ever read Robert Carl's biographies of LBJ, one of my favorite stories in there is w Leo Daniels.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Right? And it's this guy, Texas Hill Country. Right? This is like, there's no Internet. There's barely any electricity.
Speaker 5:So there there's this guy has like 90% market share with the the wives of farmers in the Texas Hill Country. Right? And so he has this daily news show. Right? That's on for a few hours a day.
Speaker 5:What? We invented that.
Speaker 1:You're telling me that somebody was Here's doing this before
Speaker 5:the funny part. And don't let me let me go back to Cream and Art so I'll So go ahead that, the crazy thing is, so he wants to get a 90% market share in this area. Right? So then he's like, okay, well, what should my sponsor be? Well, who's listening?
Speaker 5:What do the women in these houses need? And he comes like, needs baking flour. They all need baking flour. So I'll find the best manufacturer of baking flour and they'll be my advertiser. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:He sells a ton of baking flour. And he's like, wait a minute. I can just like make my own baking flour. So, he starts manufacturing his own baking flour. He makes like $50,000,000 in like the nineteen forties or something.
Speaker 5:And then
Speaker 1:he goes festivals and
Speaker 5:And then he goes, what am I gonna do next? Like, what can I do with this? He's like, I'm gonna run for governor. Yeah. And then people are like, hey, this is Trump before Trump.
Speaker 5:This is what I'm telling you. There's an element of Trump to this.
Speaker 8:Had had
Speaker 3:vodka? Yeah. But but
Speaker 5:so Everybody tells him. Everybody tells him, nobody you're not a professional politician.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:You can't possibly win. But then he starts hosting these rallies. Remember in 02/2015, Trump was doing this. And then, like, the rallies, they'd be like selling it'd be like a monster truck rally. There'd be like 50,000 people there.
Speaker 5:Of course, that's gonna translate from votes. So he wins the governorship of Texas and he moves his radio show into the Texas Governor's Mansion.
Speaker 1:I remember this.
Speaker 5:And so he's still broadcasting that. Then he the reason he's in LBJ's biography
Speaker 3:Ever because he's broadcasting.
Speaker 5:Is because he runs and then he's like, what are gonna do I'm gonna run for senate. He winds up stealing the election from LBJ, legitimately stole the election. But I was telling Michael about this. And, you know, in Texas, they teach Texas history before they teach American history. Right?
Speaker 5:If go to any used bookstore in Texas, my favorite thing to do, there's huge sections on, like, you have American history? It's like Texas history. And Michael texted me back the funny saying, he goes, oh, I I must admit I I missed this part of Texas history. I was too busy reading computer magazines. Wow.
Speaker 5:I wanna fucking hit the table. Because that's exactly he picked the business
Speaker 1:to him.
Speaker 5:Natural to him.
Speaker 1:Natural.
Speaker 5:Completely natural. It's what he wanted to do. Mhmm. So the ramp guys
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Like, they're not they're like, whatever the you guys I I always have to like get the way people talk on the Internet translated to
Speaker 3:me from you.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So I don't know if there's a term for anti slop. Yes. There's a term for anti Traffic. Thank you. So if there's there's a very old term for this.
Speaker 5:So the way I think of this have you guys ever heard of Shogunen?
Speaker 1:Explain it for the listeners.
Speaker 5:So Shogunen is this idea in essentially, it's almost like a Japanese word for craftsmanship. And it doesn't matter if you're building, you know, a $22,000,000,000 fintech or you're sweeping the floor. The Japanese, if you're shogunen, you take pride in the activity, making it making your you take pride in the activity yourself and pride in making your work as good even if no one else sees it. Yeah. And so what I would say about this is spending a lot of time with Karim and Eric is one, from the outside, it's like they have very complementary skills.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And what I would say, like, especially with with Eric, one of the best sales advice that I think it was it was advice for sales, but I actually think it's advice for life and dealing with people that I've ever heard,
Speaker 4:is
Speaker 5:Mary Kay. Remember Mary Kay Cosmetics? Yeah. They built this, like, massive empire, like, going, like, door to door sales. It might have been like an MLM kind It's
Speaker 1:kind of like the proto MLM.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And they'd drive around, like, pink Cadillacs.
Speaker 3:Straight up MLMs.
Speaker 1:They don't get enough credit. Underrated. Criminally underrated. Way Sometimes literally criminally rated.
Speaker 5:Way that she trained her sales women
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 5:She says, never forget that every single person goes through life with an invisible sign around their neck that says, make me feel special. And Eric has very understated charisma, and he is gifted at salesmanship, at listening. He's a very gifted listener. Understanding what's important to you, and then translating what's important to you into how his business can solve your problems. And so what I think one of the things I admire about both Eric and Cream is like, I like people to take what they do very seriously.
Speaker 5:I don't care what that activity is. And they work like dogs. I'm not into I'm not into work life balance. I don't like balance. I'm not a balanced person.
Speaker 5:I'm either I completely I'm at zero or a 100 and nothing in between, and they're both like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're always telling you, you don't have to destroy your life for this next episode.
Speaker 8:Deliver the product you want.
Speaker 3:It's possible. Yeah. You have to push yourself.
Speaker 5:So there's a couple things I think they do really, really smart. One is and and I think they both have commonalities is, one, they pay attention to every single little detail, which is the the point that you were making. Yeah. So the point where, like, they're running a giant company. They have tens of thousands of customers.
Speaker 5:They have thousands of employees. Their revenue growth is exploding right now. They have all these features. They did 300 updates
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:To the product in the last year. And yet It's only two fifty workdays. Yeah. Like, I think it was just yesterday or day before. Don't even know what day it is today.
Speaker 5:We sat in there. It's not like Eric and Kareem have empty schedules. No. And it was us three Yep. And we sat there and we talked about podcasting
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 5:And like the role it could play. What we talked a lot about you guys.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:And what I like about them I'm just gonna like say random stuff. You guys jump in wherever you want. But like the one example I used for them. And I was just like, listen, I and I like how fast they make decisions. And then when they make a fucking decision, they don't like, oh, we'll kind like test it out.
Speaker 5:They go all in. They make big bold bets. Yeah. And they're willing to take a risk even if it will fail where I think a lot of the the biggest mistake you can make in a world that's changing constantly, the biggest risk is taking no risk. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And so I I use an example. Was like
Speaker 1:Doesn't Elon quote? Or Sam I don't
Speaker 5:know. All my quotes come from other people. I have no original ideas. I need to I have no original ideas.
Speaker 1:I think I think the original idea that you have that you beat the drum on is podcasting
Speaker 3:To Zuck quote. The biggest risk is not taking it.
Speaker 4:So there you go.
Speaker 1:Zuck quote.
Speaker 5:Shout out to Zuck. Can we get do have a what kind of what should we hit for Zuck?
Speaker 3:You're not gonna be able to hear it.
Speaker 1:I think Glazenator. No. Triple Glazenator
Speaker 6:of 3,000.
Speaker 1:The Glazenator
Speaker 8:of 3,000.
Speaker 5:So what Eric and Karim both do Yeah. That they the the commonality they have with history education careers is they bet on talent. So they overpay for talent. They're like, they will find the best people in the world, like their head of AI, some of their designers, some of their engineers, the people they partner with. Like, they're like, that's the best person, and let's make sure he's comp he or she is compensated at a level that makes sense.
Speaker 5:And so I was talking to him, I like, I really do think we have, like John and Jordy are gifted at what they're doing, and we had a long conversation about this. I was like, I'm telling you, man, I talk to a lot of people on a permanent basis, and I've told you guys this privately, I'll say it obviously in public, it's like on a permanent basis, I don't know anybody else that comes up with better, more simple, more effective, and inexpensive marketing ideas. And I go, I really think we have this huge opportunity for leverage. It's like there should if they have an idea from the the idea to execution, since we trust them, we know they're talented, we should there should be no barrier. There should just be like, here's a fucking pile of money and next time you have come up with an idea, do it.
Speaker 5:And immediately, they're like, done. What else do you want? It's just like there was no, like, yeah, that's obviously a good idea. John and Jordy are obviously talented. Like, how can we get more out of the talent that we have around them?
Speaker 5:I just think that's there's just a million little ideas that they have like this. I remember, I don't even know what the valuation is now, but it went like it had a huge jump. I don't think it was this time. It was the last time. But we were having dinner.
Speaker 5:Was going be me, Kareem, and two other people. And me and Kareem got there first. And it was the day that that announcement came out, and Twitter was going crazy. They're like, Ramp's fucking killing it, and your side of the world with all these VCs are fighting over this shit. And Kareem shows up.
Speaker 5:In the first ten minutes, he's just like, this feature's not good enough. We lost this deal. This is an exciting he didn't mention a word, and I just sat there smiling. And you know, it's really hard for me to not talk for ten minutes. And I just started I go, that's the reason Your perpetual Your divine discontent is why you're so good.
Speaker 5:Because the value of your company is just the collective value of all the problems that you solve for your customers. And he doesn't give a shit about taking a victory lap. He cares about solving problems for his customers. And I like the fact that I can call them. I've called Eric at 1AM his time, And I'm like, where are you?
Speaker 5:And he's like, oh, I'm in like Chicago. And I'm like doing like customer meetings and like Mhmm. I recruit people and like, I'm closing this deal. He's just like, they work all the time.
Speaker 1:Working hard. Working hard.
Speaker 3:Work all the time.
Speaker 1:It's a good it's a good mantra.
Speaker 3:It's one thing you can control.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:The Joe Lamont, think about that. I mean, that's excessive, but I think they were having they were in that piece, they were talking about this conversation he was having with Jack Welch, if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Where he's just like, well, if you have a product that's working and you're willing to work twenty hours a day, it's really hard to loo to lose at that point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. Yeah. Find find your life's work. Find something that's what what was the phrase?
Speaker 1:Not authentic Natural. Natural, and then work constantly and
Speaker 5:Well, the compact. So this is, again, we everybody I'm so happy to see what's happened to you.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I still consider myself your first listener.
Speaker 1:It's who you are,
Speaker 3:literally. Literally,
Speaker 5:first listener. I'll send you the Amplify
Speaker 1:on Google Drive.
Speaker 5:Oh, and that's another thing. So going back, I wanna talk about why I think you guys are really special. But it also goes back to
Speaker 1:The Glazenaries. Hold on.
Speaker 5:Also goes back to what Eric and Karim were willing to bet on talent when I was just like, guys, they have a thousand listeners right now.
Speaker 1:It was crazy.
Speaker 5:They're gonna fucking blow. I don't know anything. I only I know about podcasts, I know how history's greatest entrepreneurs think. I don't know anything about anything else. I promise you there's zero chance.
Speaker 5:They already knew you were talented they already knew. It was obviously Kuggan's talented. They tried to buy you and recruit you a long time ago. And they made a bet. And they made a bet on talent, which again is something that Brad Jacobs does, that Elon Musk does, that Steve Jobs did, that all these people did over and over and over again.
Speaker 5:Again, these are ideas that are timeless. You can use them today. You can use them a 100 years ago. They they were used a 100 ago. You're gonna be able to use them a 100 from
Speaker 3:Well
Speaker 1:So get out there and use them.
Speaker 3:Get out there, folks. We have a 3PM reservation.
Speaker 1:We do. We gotta get on
Speaker 4:the road.
Speaker 3:We gotta get offline. We gotta get off air. It's hard to get this guy off the money. Wish that we could could go for another five hours right now. But
Speaker 1:You in town tomorrow? Let's do it again. I'll right back.
Speaker 5:I gotta finish this episode. Okay. It's already changing. Thank you. I'm never driving here again.
Speaker 5:Getting helicopter.
Speaker 3:We're getting helicopter.
Speaker 5:That's how the Kobe
Speaker 1:to Malibu. Anyway
Speaker 2:The sun
Speaker 3:for extreme podcasting.
Speaker 1:We will see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching.
Speaker 3:Thank for hanging out with us. See you tomorrow, Chad.
Speaker 1:See you tomorrow. Leave us five stars in podcast. A fantastic evening. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.
Speaker 3:Love you. Bye.