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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 TVVN. Today is Friday, 10/17/2025. We are live from the TVVN UltraDome, the Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 2:Sorry. I'm having too much fun. I got a new sound effect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We got a new sound effect. The soundboard continues to be on a generational run of its own. And Paul Rucki has been on a generational run going on a lot of different shows. He's coming on our show.
Speaker 1:We announced that today. Very excited to have him join the show. I've interviewed him a few times. It's always a fantastic chat.
Speaker 2:The guy can yap.
Speaker 1:I wanna play a clip from his appearance not on Joe Rogan, which is fantastic. You should go listen to, but on of him on Bloomberg. But first, I wanna tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both.
Speaker 1:Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:Last night, we got together with some members of the Ramp team. And in a great sign of respect in our culture, they built this ice step. The ice sculpture was very fun to see. Which you may have seen over on X, but absolutely stunning.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's play the clip from Bloomberg, Palmer Luckey.
Speaker 3:Palmer, there was a report about the NGC two system. It named both Andrew and Palantir. We've asked Palantir through Sean to comment on that. But the the the report in Palantir's case move markets. Could you just respond to that reporting, which came from Reuters, and explain the the sort of timeline and and the inaccuracies that you feel there are in that report?
Speaker 4:So you may or may not
Speaker 1:remember that, but
Speaker 4:I was a journalism major myself. I I was only a semester and a half away from graduating. I was the online editor of the Daily 49er, was the Cal State Long Beach student run newspaper. So I care a lot about this stuff, both as a annual perspective, but then also just from a journalist perspective. The journalist who wrote that Reuters story would have been failed out of the class by any of my professors.
Speaker 1:He refused to the on the record statement crazy, though.
Speaker 4:Because they fundamentally made the whole story not a story.
Speaker 1:They just didn't they didn't include what security Palantir and Andrew had to say. I'll I'll read the
Speaker 4:actual article. C two. Next generation command and control. It's not tracking what the users are doing. It doesn't have any passwords to log in.
Speaker 4:There's no security turned on. And they said, oh my god. This is a huge problem. And we'd said, guys, this was an early prototype. The army wasn't paying us to demonstrate user accounts.
Speaker 4:It was paying us to demonstrate integration of different sensors, different weapon systems, all into one pipeline. And Lattice has all this functionality. We do this all the time. It's not like it's not like we don't know how to do this. And the army said the same.
Speaker 4:They said, yeah. We just turned on all those features with just a few weeks later, all these issues that you're talking about didn't exist. This was an internal security audit just noting that these things were a factor in that early prototype. Yes. There's no access control.
Speaker 4:Yes. That is a risk. Yes. We have not audited all of their security, you know, all their security code. That is a risk.
Speaker 4:But that's completely normal for early early development. But Reuters didn't include our quote, didn't include the army's quote because that would have made the entire story irrelevant. So instead, they include quotes exclusively from our competitors and from so called anonymous sources saying that Anderol and Palantir are running this fundamentally insecure thing. 99% chance that was planted by one of our competitors who had access to that memo, and there's only a few people who could have done it. And I can make people look bad by slicing and dicing memos too.
Speaker 4:I'll show you if I want. I'll get back in the journalism game. We can say
Speaker 1:Let's go. We've given you the opportunity to Hey. Palmer Lucky, a column in Reuters.
Speaker 4:Opportunity to attack my editors.
Speaker 3:Just mentioned your your competitors. Let's call you
Speaker 1:next Yeah. We can we can wrap it there. But basically, I mean, it's like the army was like, hey, we want you to prototype something for us, like put a bunch of dots on a map, do something different, like, create a new UI, like, show us what you can do. And then the clearly an enemy of of Anderol and Palantir, like, leaked. Like, well, they didn't they didn't have OAuth set up yet.
Speaker 1:And it's like, well, yeah. Like, we know this in in Silicon Valley. Like, when you build a new product, you focus on finding a problem, building the solution, and then you figure out how to optimize the database and cache things in
Speaker 2:the app. Try to do gotchas with Palmer.
Speaker 1:It's impossible. Don't ever try. But it it it does I like, I thought we were past this honestly because of, the mood in Silicon Valley, like, whole idea of, like, everyone in America knows that it shouldn't take fifty years to build the new plant. Like, everyone knows that that other countries can build stuff faster and build systems faster. And it shouldn't take this long.
Speaker 1:And other countries aren't smarter
Speaker 2:or more hard fast Yes. Data centers.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. We clearly we clearly know how when there isn't a bunch of like, the the difference between that that's a good analogy. The difference between the data center market and what's going on in in defense and government procurement is that the data center market doesn't necessarily have a ton of entrenched interest in being like, let's not speed up. Our our model works.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Potentially not enough regulation. I'm not advocating for regulation, but the the big complaint is that
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sure. Can set up Sure. Start Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sourcing energy from the grid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it makes people nearby suddenly pay a massive premium even if Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just like imagine, like, so you have the you have the Neo Clouds who wanna build data centers very quickly. There's no real party. It's not like Oracle is like, I'm in the business of building things slowly. I get paid more money if I build it slowly. Whereas, like, that does exist with the legacy primes, which is just very different.
Speaker 1:But I I don't know. I I I just thought that we were sort of past this, but, of course, it's like a natural outgrowth and natural dynamic when you are competing with, you know, Silicon Valley companies that are their whole pitch I mean, Andrew is not a Silicon Valley company, but it's like a tech company. And and their whole pitch is like, we will move faster. We're going to yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're gonna we're gonna we're gonna beat you on speed. And and that's very dangerous. And so you try and basically FUD it, and that's what's going on. But I liked Palmer putting it in the truth zone, putting Reuters in the truth zone, always fun to watch Palmer put on a little clinic
Speaker 2:and And
Speaker 1:how to do drugs accurately.
Speaker 2:Morning to the chat.
Speaker 1:Got lot of
Speaker 2:great folks here today. Dan Good morning, everyone. Chefer, Tom, Friendly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We had a bunch of people. Palmer also went on the Joe Rogan experience. We have some images from this. The European mind cannot comprehend what happened.
Speaker 1:Now this is unfortunately a fake image. At no point did Joe Rogan actually put on, aviators a cigar and hold a machine gun of some sort.
Speaker 2:But telling me this is slop?
Speaker 1:This is slop. But this is the this is the purest slop possible.
Speaker 2:You didn't allow me to live for
Speaker 6:just No.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry. Thirty seconds, John. It is unfortunately fake news. We need to put in the truth zone.
Speaker 2:It's it is pretty funny that it's somewhat believable.
Speaker 1:It it is. It it it is like, yeah. Yeah. This probably could have happened on the show. But they did put on the helmet and and, you know, take things for
Speaker 2:a spin. Should we pull up this clip from later? They pulled up an Ashley Vance video
Speaker 1:Oh, cool.
Speaker 2:Of wrecked wrecked robot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Play that. This is something that someone's working out with?
Speaker 7:This is Yeah. Well, actually robot
Speaker 8:fight league against San Francisco. Francisco. Oh.
Speaker 6:So actually so
Speaker 4:actually this is this is a buddy of mine who's been working in VR for a really really long time. So it's again, what a tiny what a tiny world of weird wackos. But, yeah, six Liv has been working on which is his real name.
Speaker 1:His real name. Isn't that hilarious? Six lids.
Speaker 2:He's been working on
Speaker 4:VR stuff for the past fifteen years and he recently got into doing this this this robot robot combat sports league.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They were having so much fun talking about, like, it should be a human versus a robot. That's what, Palmer and Logan Paul are apparently working on. It's like
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. They want they they they and and they go into this big long discussion about, well, if you can train a robot to be, like, perfect with its punches, it could also pull its punches perfectly. And so it could be the ultimate sparring partner.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you could and you could, like and you could be even, like it could train on you, and so you could be fighting yourself. It could train on you you could say, like, I'm gonna get in the ring with Evander Holyfield or Mike Tyson today. And it could mimic that perfectly in theory.
Speaker 2:I'm more I'm more interested to see, like, a 100 robots versus one human
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:While they're while they're not quite as dialed.
Speaker 1:That would be great. Yeah. Because right now, imagine how much
Speaker 2:how much damage Logan Paul would do to a bunch of those Uni trees today. I'm not saying he would I'm I'm not saying in five years, he would he would be the same
Speaker 1:No. No.
Speaker 2:No. The same kind of
Speaker 1:We gotta have the event now while he can actually put on a clinic and destroy all 100.
Speaker 2:It would be costly though. These things go for
Speaker 1:20 k.
Speaker 2:So so we're looking it up the other day.
Speaker 1:Was That's $2,000,000. That's like an average Mr. Beast video budget. That's totally doable. You could do one man
Speaker 2:But it is interesting the robot dogs Yeah. Are like 75 k, and the g one is like 20 k. Do you think they're
Speaker 1:Suspicious. Speculating It's a little bit too good to be true. I don't know if I like that pricing. Wait. Unitree charges less for their dog than their human?
Speaker 7:No. No. The dog is From a different company. It's yeah. It's Boston Dynamics.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Boston Dynamics, I mean yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's not the same company.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Got it. Yeah. What's a can you find out what a unitary dog costs? Yeah. Chinese dog?
Speaker 1:There's something I feel like that I feel like one man versus a 100 just stomping a 100 unitary dogs feels a lot sketchier and more dark
Speaker 7:That's dark.
Speaker 1:To me than Yeah. Watching Logan Paul absolutely ration a 100 unitary even though it's not a fair fight, it feels a little bit more fair. What would you find?
Speaker 7:Unit tree dog is like low thousands. Thousands. For for like $3,000.
Speaker 2:Oh, we're buying that.
Speaker 1:Buying a 100 and you're going in How
Speaker 2:many should I buy? Actually, this is this is green lit. Put it on the ramp. I just want one.
Speaker 1:I just want one. I want a 100 and get gorilla costumes for the mall. And then we can reenact the Gorilla costume. They stand on two legs, the dogs?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, we've seen videos of them doing back flips.
Speaker 1:Okay. So because if it can stand on if it can stand on two legs and then you can put it in a gorilla costume, you could totally be thrashing those things around like it's one man versus 100 gorillas. Wait. Was it was it $100
Speaker 2:versus went from No.
Speaker 1:It was
Speaker 9:it was $3,000.
Speaker 1:Versus one gorilla. Not a
Speaker 7:100 gorillas.
Speaker 1:No. Versus one gorilla.
Speaker 2:No. Oh,
Speaker 1:no. I think you get a 100 unit trees, the the humanoid robots. You put them in gorilla costumes. You turn Logan Paul loose. It's a $2,000,000 production, but it's gonna get a billion views.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 7:You could also do a 100 unit trees versus one gorilla.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That you actually could do that. That's a great video.
Speaker 2:I don't think you can I think gorilla activists would
Speaker 1:say absolutely think not? Peter would like a word with that one. But I don't know. I feel like the gorilla would love to, like, destroy the clanker. They're, like, natural enemies.
Speaker 1:Don't you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah. They really are.
Speaker 1:Whatever whatever we wind up doing with this, we gotta stream it on restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream, reach your audience wherever they are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There there's a planet of the apes con, which is like the clankers versus the apes. Yep. I think that's a hit.
Speaker 1:Yep. Henry photoshopped some photos of Mark Benioff on TBPN and Palmer on Joe Rogan, kinda monitoring the situation. Did quite well. Fun post.
Speaker 2:I still can't get over the Benioff interview.
Speaker 1:It was so much fun.
Speaker 2:That was a real hoot.
Speaker 1:We had we yeah. We had a wild, a wild time. He, he's the final boss of Salesman. He's really such a good salesman. Comes on It's like I don't know.
Speaker 1:Not to break the fourth wall, but we'd never talked to him before. Like, I'd I'd never met him in person. With a lot of other people, we've met beforehand. We've talked. We've gotten to know each other.
Speaker 1:That was not the case with Benny Huffett. The first time I ever talked to him was on that call. And it just felt like we were old friends immediately. And he is, like, talking trash and completely matching our energy, taking it up, you know. Oh, so good.
Speaker 2:Made me
Speaker 1:But on clinic.
Speaker 2:Made me made me feel that CRM is oversold.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 5:Got a
Speaker 2:lot of energy.
Speaker 1:For sure. For sure. Before we move on, let me tell you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Jordy, tell me about the Dolce Trelendry, the Ferrari front engine 12 cylinder.
Speaker 1:You had a take today. It went out on our newsletter, which you can subscribe to at t b p n dot com. Jordi is writing, posts in there as well. I'm writing posts in there. Brandon's, collating a lot of the show.
Speaker 1:It's a great way to stay in tune with the show if you're not able to listen every day.
Speaker 2:I felt like I needed to defend Ferrari Yes. For a number of reasons. One, I've gotten sick of every time Ferrari launches a car. Mhmm. You just see hundreds or thou every single video that comes out with the car Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Is people begging for the return of Pininfarina.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The obviously, the legendary design firm that Ferrari was partnered with from 1951 to 2012. The firm was founded in 1930, actually.
Speaker 1:Wait. Pininfarina is before Ferrari? Woah. I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:Well, for Enzo had been doing automotive racing for a long time.
Speaker 1:That's right. He didn't
Speaker 2:start Ferrari until he was 45. But I basically yeah. I've just gotten absolutely sick of every single time Ferrari announces a car. I'm sick and tired of it. I'm sick and tired of it.
Speaker 2:All the all these comments. One, because I I think the main reason is it's like very clear that the firm and Ferrari are are not gonna have anything close to the partnership that they used to have. Pininfarina was sold for it's basically, like, $28,000,000, and then the acquirer paid off a bunch of their debt as well. So the company was was heavily in debt at the at the time that they sold in 2015. And, yeah, there there's just a number of reasons.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, Ferrari's in house, all of their design. They've they've put a huge amount of resources and time and energy into it. They clearly wanna own the whole stack. We talked about on the on the EV side of the business.
Speaker 2:Yep. They are, like, designing all of the EV componentry end to end, which, again, I and I think other people are a little bit worried about because Ferrari's I've always had a bunch of electrical issues. That's been like kind of a key Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's underrated. Everyone says they want an electric car, but
Speaker 2:there's Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's electricity flowing through v 12 as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And sometimes unreliably.
Speaker 2:It's electric in its own way. And so, yeah, I think I I think the the criticism that I understand and I feel the same is that when Ferrari announces their cars Mhmm. They spec them in a way that I just absolutely hate. I think the the stock wheels, the way that they're colored looks tacky.
Speaker 1:Okay. The stock wheels thing is weird because I feel like there's, just generally in car culture, like, moving away from stock wheels, putting custom wheels on a car is is weird. Are you talking about just from the factory selecting a different wheel?
Speaker 2:I'm talking about the way they
Speaker 1:spec the going to a completely different company and being like Not talking about going to another company. 24 inch spinners on my Ferrari. You want spinners?
Speaker 2:No spinners.
Speaker 1:You're asking about Spinners.
Speaker 2:Talking about the way they spec the cars for the announcements. They have these, like, black and silver ish looking wheels that I just think look bad. Right? You can go on the option side and
Speaker 1:choose few options. They
Speaker 2:bunch of other options that look great. Yep. And so the criticism when these cars get announced, I think, is very real. I look at them and I think, like, why does it have a black line running down here? That doesn't look good.
Speaker 2:The wheels don't look good. There's a bunch of other things you can nitpick. But then the important thing is like when they actually start rolling off the production line, when they start getting into dealerships, when they actually get to clients, they look absolutely amazing. Yeah. I feel like they look, you know, there's there's people like TJ Parker Yeah.
Speaker 2:A friend of the show will push back and just say like, I hate everything that they make. But when I see these cars, I think, like, okay. This looks like a twenty first century version of a Pininfarina car. Yeah. And I think the bigger problem is is that we it could be for regulatory reasons.
Speaker 2:Right? But the the automotive industry seems to be out of new ideas. We have like stagnation
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In automotive. Right? Totally. Cybertruck was controversial but at least it was something new.
Speaker 8:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Right? Yep. And you could argue that it was just kind of it felt like sci fi inspired, but that's okay. Right? They took a
Speaker 1:Least it was tracked.
Speaker 2:What looked and should have been maybe for other brands like a concept car, and they made it a production car that shipped and you can buy it today. Yep. And so I wanna see more more of that from the legacy brands. And I think with Ferrari, it's not gonna come from Pininfarina. Right?
Speaker 2:It's just it's not gonna come from their old partner that they work with for fifty years but is now just part of this Indian, you know, multinational conglomerate.
Speaker 1:How much did it sell for, by the way?
Speaker 2:It was it was something like in total, it was like the it was like a 175,000,000, but the actual, like Core
Speaker 1:Pimin Farina asset.
Speaker 2:Was like 28,000,000 and then a bunch of debt.
Speaker 1:28,000,000 for Pimin Farina. Meanwhile, Ferrari was worth 75,000,000 75,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:75,000,000,000. And so clearly, like, the better business to be in was actually Making
Speaker 5:the cars.
Speaker 2:Making the cars, selling the cars, you know, accruing all that brand value. So but but again, so I I think, like, the the real critique is we need new ideas. We need new ground up design. Yep. I asked the question in the newsletter, are there any cars or watches that you really want that have been made this century?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Right? It's hard to think, you know, a variation, a nine eleven ST doesn't count. Right? It's a nine eleven.
Speaker 1:ZR1X.
Speaker 2:Okay. We have, of course Yeah. Mean, it's true. Particular taste in cars. Same thing
Speaker 1:on Cross Cabriolet is over ten years old at this point. Like, we've run out of ideas. And we can't think of two door
Speaker 2:Yeah. Convertible SUVs. Automobile design has truly been calcified since 2014.
Speaker 1:Typed that before before I I said it. I have three questions for you. First, have you heard of Cognition? They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. You can crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 1:Second is the Ferrari tailor made program. If I get into that, if I start buying Romas every single month, will they eventually tailor make a Ferrari that has spinners for me? Would would they do that? Is that how far I
Speaker 2:push the tailor made They're really they're really opinionated.
Speaker 1:They're opinionated. Okay. So then the third the third more serious question is, like, how much of your your your take is that Ferrari creates a great canvas that the clientele can paint on to express interesting designs that you wind up liking. Yeah. Even though you don't like the press photos, you wind up liking the the the the specs.
Speaker 2:Production cars Yes.
Speaker 1:That clients
Speaker 8:Yes. Are are
Speaker 1:And this is the this is the opposite take to Doug Dumeiro. He always tries to buy the car in the press colorway and and in the press spec. He just likes it that way. However, it was presented to the press photos, he wants that exact spec or that exact car.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think I think that can that can probably make sense from a collectible
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Standpoint. Like, I see some of these cars and, like, personally, I love black on tan Yeah. With yellow brake calipers. Sure. I just think it's a nice I think it's a nice combo.
Speaker 2:I like I like silver on tan a lot. Right?
Speaker 1:But that not that might not be the one on the billboard or in the magazine ad. So it might be it might not be on the poster, so it might be less iconic. But you like it. But my question is, like, is is this something that is a unique value in the Ferrari world that they effectively have, like, UGC? They they effectively have a great clientele that can spec the cars in a certain way, And they create some boundaries, so you can't put spinners on them.
Speaker 1:But they create some boundaries, but then their clientele has taste.
Speaker 2:And so they It's
Speaker 1:not just their taste. It's the taste
Speaker 2:of the clientele. Work is on the client. Yes. Like, more so than when you go I like an off the shelf GT three r f GT three RS. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, I just like the the way that they they, you know, at Porsche have decided this is the way the car should look.
Speaker 9:Okay.
Speaker 1:But with Ferrari, that's not the case. Exactly. Okay. Got it. Have you seen what Pininfarina has been up to recently with the Batista?
Speaker 1:Can we pull up the video of the Pininfarina Batista? I want your reaction to how this car looks because for everyone that's for everyone that's saying, oh, you know, Ferrari's gotta go back to Pininfarina. Pininfarina has the best designs. I do wonder if the the Pininfarina Batista is kind of a refutation of, like, Pininfarina still got design. Because when I look at the car and when I look at the the, the video that I shared in the timeline tab, the the video, it just it it it looks just very similar to every other car to me.
Speaker 1:It just I don't know. It just doesn't it
Speaker 6:doesn't Well, that's right.
Speaker 5:It's a 10,400,000.0 asking for
Speaker 2:the you're asking for the return of Pininfarina, but you look at the cars that Pininfarina is making today, and they look like kind of It looks cool,
Speaker 1:but doesn't it just look like a McLaren?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It looks like some blend of a McLaren and Ferrari.
Speaker 1:Like, there's just like there's nothing super new in this Yeah. Pininfarina design. Like, looks just like a Yeah.
Speaker 2:My my One hypercar please. Want, like like, the f 40 was bold Yeah. And new and controversial. Yeah. And in the fullness of time, it it became Looks pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Iconic.
Speaker 1:It's growing on. But, like I'm watching. Know, this is
Speaker 2:the most forgettable car sports car.
Speaker 1:Yes. It would be very hard to to put this next to the the Rimatz Navara. Yeah. That one also looks very similar. This is an electric car too, which, again, it just feels less opinionated.
Speaker 2:Michael Michael's making I think one of in in the chat is making one of the most important points is that, like, the the regulation is so intense now that even if you're designing, you know, basically a racing car for the road, you're just very limited.
Speaker 1:So yeah. I mean, I so I that intuitively makes sense to me. I feel like that's true, and I've seen a bunch of facts around that. And then I look at the Cybertruck on the street every day
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, clearly, there are no regulations. Because if there was even one regulation, it should violate that. It violates everything that I know about regulation. Like, how did they do that? And if you can do the Cybertruck, well, then can't you do something unique or different?
Speaker 1:And and we've seen other, like, prototypes in the Hyundai Vision, like, they're bringing back the DeLorean aesthetic. I don't know if if people Again,
Speaker 2:we're just sort of out of new ideas, so we're just, like, rehashing
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ideas. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And even the the the new Mercedes iconic the concept car, it's like, okay, it looks cool, but it looks like, you know, the mob boss in Tron. Yeah. Right? Which is like, do you wanna drive around and look like a mob boss in Tron? Maybe.
Speaker 2:That seems pretty cool, but
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This can't be the best that
Speaker 1:we've of history. We created a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet. Hang it up. And that was enough. It's the it's the iPhone.
Speaker 2:We peaked. Vehicles. We peaked.
Speaker 1:Well, if you wanna design a car, you wanna design something beautiful, head over to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helped design development teams build great products together. Henry on our team shares some lore about Andrew Huberman. He says, this is my opportunity to remind everyone that Andrew Huberman was a writer for Thrasher mag before becoming a neuroscientist.
Speaker 1:You can just do things. Look at this photo of Andrew Huberman. He's looking fantastic in this leather jacket.
Speaker 2:How did I never know this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like, this is just a massive invitation for Jensen Wong from, NVIDIA to go on the Huberman Lab Podcast. That would be a fantastic crossover.
Speaker 2:Oh, you worked at Thrasher and Slab Magazine.
Speaker 1:Pretty sweet. Pretty sweet.
Speaker 2:What a legend.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Well, cheers to Andrew Huberman and cheers to Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process replaces it with continuous automation.
Speaker 2:Bobby in the chat says, Joe Rogan says car design is bad now because car designers stopped doing drugs. That's hot take. Hot take from Joe.
Speaker 1:But, I mean, there are certainly people that do drugs. Like, why don't they design cars? They're they're it's not like drug use is at an all time low. Like, can't those people just, you know, come back
Speaker 2:Yeah. We gotta ask.
Speaker 1:We gotta ask. With the sketching and be like, this is the one I want.
Speaker 2:We gotta ask Senra. Was was was Enzo getting into getting into anything crazy?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Interesting. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Who knows?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, the the Josh Kushner profile continues to put the timeline in turmoil. The the legacy new media is up in arms. The legacy media is up in arms. The the antiquity media, we need we need an older term.
Speaker 1:But a bunch of people are are reacting to this. Sally had a funny quote here. Josh Joshua Kushner strolled billionairely across the room. His contrarian high concentration vibes engulfed Rick Rubin's Bohemian Monk retreat. Joshua's high conviction and mistress filled the room.
Speaker 1:It's the gigged shat of the typewriter. I love it. Elena Buckley, who's I I think another magazine writer said, LMAO, here's the first sentence of this Kushner profile. The road to Rick Rubin's house was long and winding for Joshua Kushner who traversed more than might be gleaned from the surface glint of his life. And so people were were debating whether or not this is real journalism, whether or not this is real investigative journalism and the trade off that people make when they read these.
Speaker 1:The interesting takeaway, I mean, Mike Isaac had a had a take on this. He said, I do not have an opinion on the Kushner feature going around because I have not read it yet. But I have found the meta commentary around it from the executive class fascinating. The way this is phrased feels useful and not that subtle. Toby Lutke said, new publication doing real journalism and it's as amazing as they said it was.
Speaker 1:Imagine that. So Toby Lutke is a fan of what Colossus Mag is doing. I mean, I I I do think it's interesting because I don't think Jeremy Stern has has has or Patrick or Colossus has really framed their effort as journalism. Like, Senra, who's also in that orbit, has always said like Yes.
Speaker 2:It's quite it's quite different to write profiles go out specifically to write profiles on people that you admire. Yes. Like, people going into it. Like like, there's plenty of people that write profiles where or write stories where they're talking about some somebody they don't necessarily appreciate, they don't necessarily admire. Yes.
Speaker 2:Right? And so, I think part of part of what Colossus is doing is, like, they're not I don't think from my sense, I don't think they plan to write profiles on people that they don't care to, like, deeply learn and understand that aren't part of that aren't the kind of people that they just generally like. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There's something there's something odd going on where for decades, like, there has been, like, traditional journalism. But then even, like, twenty or thirty years ago, there was always, like, trade publications. There were trade publications.
Speaker 1:And so, like, in the consumer packaged goods world, like, if you're growing, a protein shake company, like, yes, you might get a piece in the New York Times every once in a while, but the beat reporting is going to come from BevNet, like, which is the trade publication. And you you'll you'll see there's like NACS, which is the National Association of Convenience Store Chains, and it's a massive conference. And they have a magazine. And, like, no one's like, oh, it's journalism, and it's too friendly to convenience store owners. Like, it's like, no.
Speaker 1:It's just like this is the publication for the convenience store industry, and it doesn't rise to the level of interest to, like, national news constantly. Yeah. But with the Internet, you have this ability to write something that's a trade publication that's that's run by enthusiasts, insiders
Speaker 2:Or just comp it. I just comp it to a magazine. Right? Like I used to as a kid, I would have a subscription to Popular Science. Yes.
Speaker 2:I would expect the writers of Popular Science to write about topics that they were excited about, to write about people that they were excited about to about people that they admire Yes. Who wanna tell stories that just interested them. Yeah. Like, don't think Colossus is out there saying, like, we are try they're not trying to be anyone but Colossus.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Right? They're not trying
Speaker 2:to and that's the thing about media is media is not zero sum. Yep. Like, the New York Times can thrive Yep. And Colossus can thrive. Yep.
Speaker 2:And they can have some overlap and maybe the stories that they're interested in, but they can have totally different ways of covering people and that's healthy and and consumers have the choice of whose kind of general point of view do I want to, you know, read about?
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's like the the pushback from the other profile writers feels like they are worried that their audience won't be able to tell the difference between enthusiast media media and journalism because of the aesthetics or something like that. Like, they that that's what it feels like more or less. But when you read the comments, it's like a lot of people who want to read, you know, a a really hard hard hitting, like, journalistic piece, like, they know where to go for that. So I I don't know how much of a real problem it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think part of the frustration is I don't think Josh has has Josh ever I can't remember a time when he did a Like a traditional profile. Traditional profile with someone like the New York Times or the Journal.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know that he has.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, part part of is a frustration of like the legacy traditional media wants access to someone like Josh. Yeah. Like, they're they can write about Josh. Yeah. Josh isn't necessarily gonna sit down for five hours with them and
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, give them hours and hours and hours of on the record conversations. Yeah. He's not gonna invite them into his home
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To take pictures necessarily.
Speaker 1:And I mean, you could you could imagine that from Josh's perspective, it's like, do you really wanna go do something with a media that will be hostile and attack him? I mean, like, he was he was seen at the US Open next to those two, like, no names. And, like, that could make him look like a nobody. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Even though, obviously, everyone knows who he is, but but that like basketball guy and the the the other guy, like like, no one knows who those people are. And so that would like, if a journalist wanted to really attack Josh Kushner, they could put that picture up and be like, look at who he's associating with. Like, these are outsiders. And it would make him look like an outsider.
Speaker 2:Who was it again? It's Bob Iger and Yeah. And Doug not Someone who runs something.
Speaker 5:Don't He
Speaker 7:was like the guy who runs the the basketball league or something.
Speaker 1:The basketball?
Speaker 2:Or the sport the sport of basketball.
Speaker 1:Literally, like, not a tech company. Like, if he's he's hanging out with somebody who, runs something that's, like, so old, not in the tech world at all, it would portray him if a journalist were to really amplify that. They could totally spin a narrative that, like, Josh Kushner is not a major player in technology.
Speaker 2:Well, there were
Speaker 7:such no names that they had to actually put their name on
Speaker 1:That's right. On They did.
Speaker 7:Audiences don't know who they are. So they They did. Oh, this is this guy's name. Jack. Jack, thank you.
Speaker 2:Adam Silver. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, like, you could imagine how they would write that about like, oh, Adam he's
Speaker 2:Silver had that famous line, get get ready to learn Yeah. About, bubbles popping
Speaker 1:or something like that. Sure. Sure. Jacob Rinta Macchi had a had a little bit of a longer take on this whole story. I'd like to imagine I fail though by inherent nature of being human to understand the arguments of the tech folks and the journalist folks.
Speaker 1:And here's what I believe they both say and where I agree slash disagree. Tech folks around 2016, probably earlier around Gamergate, the media had a shift towards being much more critical of technologists, and this got exacerbated with the rise of more left leaning political ideology, which has strains of anti capitalism woven in. It's nice for Wired, etcetera, to finally return to covering tech in a fun and optimistic way. Has Wired done that? I feel like I I I haven't been tracking exactly where Wired is.
Speaker 1:I know they loved Palmer Lucky, then they were really into Palmer Lucky.
Speaker 2:Brand.
Speaker 1:They came after But so did Heineken, which we will get to. And then journalists well before 2016, tech just frankly wasn't that important. Yeah. That's definitely true. It's hard to write a story about a SaaS product or, like, the rise of a SaaS founder.
Speaker 1:Like, it just wasn't it wasn't a gripping story. Yeah. And now that it's a major portion of our society, people should be inspected more carefully. And frankly, a lot of our criticism isn't that bad. The tech folks just have soft skin.
Speaker 1:My perspective, I'm hesitant to call Colossus at all investigative journalism since there are more puff pieces or a farm for the Gen Z than not. But they are deeply thoughtful portraits of fascinating people. Tech people have gotten a lot of unnecessary SHIT from journals, but they also tend to not have the world's thickest skin either. Yeah. It's a pretty good take.
Speaker 1:I think I I think the yeah. The role of investigative journalism just is a separate thing, and we're seeing that, like, still exist in different worlds. But this this, like, enthusiast media, this desire to actually, like, understand someone. And it also just lays, like, it's even if you're like, I want to write the hard hitting piece on Josh Kushner, like, well, like, good. You should be happy that Colossus exists because, like, it gave you a bunch of threads to pull on.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, you're like, okay. I I feel like there were 75 facts in here. 20 of them had there's another side to those facts. Like, well, now you have, like, your your your template for your for investigative journalism work.
Speaker 2:On the other side, always enjoy going to futurism.com Yes. Which is a media company, you would assume, is excited about the future. They here's some some of their latest stories. Divorced Tesla fan admits that his Cybertruck is repulsive to women.
Speaker 1:Futurism. Let's
Speaker 2:go. OpenAI bans MLK deepfakes after a disaster. That one seems fair.
Speaker 1:Futurism isn't necessarily positive. Maybe they're doomers. They're like, yeah, futurism
Speaker 2:They're means they're kind of doomers. They have they have in their ethics section, they have Goldman Sachs says Gen Z is pretty much permanently screwed. So sorry about that, Tyler. Rough. If if bad, if true.
Speaker 2:Well As Microsoft forces users to ditch Windows 10, it announces that it's also turning Windows 11 into an AI controlled monstrosity.
Speaker 1:That's something I don't think a lot of people are worried about, but it probably gets clicks. Well, you know the future of code review in the age of AI? Turns out it's graphite.dev. Graphite helps teams on GitHub strip higher quality software faster. Jack took to the timeline.
Speaker 1:He's back on the app he founded. He says a music app with no podcasters. Tidal has no ads, no podcasters, just high quality music. We're working to improve Tidal every day for artists and audio files alike. I haven't used title.
Speaker 1:Was title acquired by Apple? Was that what happened?
Speaker 2:No. It's Square.
Speaker 1:Oh, Square. Okay. So what is he saying here? This is Jack
Speaker 2:just taking a shot at the podcast at the podcast the podcasters, which is fair.
Speaker 1:So he doesn't like podcasts Yes. On music apps. So he's just saying that that they've made the deliberate deliberate decision to not Pure music. On Twitch. Which is cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think people deserve opinionated streaming platform.
Speaker 1:At the same time, on Spotify, I I feel like I have never been like, oh, like, I it's harder to find my playlist now because there's so much other stuff going on.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Certainly, YouTube has never been a place even though you can listen to music, they have a separate music app. And YouTube has not has been like, there's way too much going on for me to actually like go and create a music playlist of music videos or anything like that. I think the
Speaker 2:underrated that of like of Block or Square's acquisition frenzy during the during the Zerb era. They got title for March. Yep. I will see how that deal pencils out in the fullness.
Speaker 1:Is that Jay Z's?
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And that just got a lot of pushback because it was Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was kind of like, hey, you guys are boys. Right? Do we really need a music streaming Yeah. Platform at our fintech company? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Does it really make sense? And then, always in wild to think they they acquired Afterpay for 29,000,000,000. Yeah. Now, Square is worth 45,000,000,000. Yep.
Speaker 2:So.
Speaker 1:I have a I have an idea. What if we take our three hour podcast? We use eleven Labs or Suno to turn it into a song and we release a musical version of an odd We bring the fight to title and make
Speaker 2:it Every single day, we drop an album.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We drop an album.
Speaker 2:And it's us singing
Speaker 1:the news. Singing singing the news.
Speaker 2:Singing the timeline.
Speaker 1:Because we could take we could take our takes. So your take on Pininfarina and Ferrari. We take that. We transform that with an LLM into lyrics and then we transform that into a song. And then you and then you
Speaker 2:Chad says buying your homies lackluster streaming platform is goals.
Speaker 1:It really is.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 1:it's It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just guys being dudes, I guess. Why did he say RIP Square?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That was odd. I I he says
Speaker 2:And he's quoting an announcement from somebody who it works at Square. He says super proud to have been involved with this over the past few months. The lower cost of acceptance with BTC will make traditional card processing obsolete. We'll be announcing some really exciting sellers who've moved to Square for Bitcoin. They are so convinced that people wanna pay for goods with Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:Who? Square. Square?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe they will. I bought a TV with Bitcoin. It was the worst financial decision of my life. Paid one Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a But thousand TV. $100,000 TV, and it's not even 4 k. And it's actually in the trash now. I gave it away because it was, like, useful useless after a while.
Speaker 7:Wait. When when, when was this?
Speaker 1:It was in, like, 2013 or something. Bitcoin was, like, a thousand bucks or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just before you were born.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everyone in tech was like, yeah. You definitely wanna be buying stuff with Bitcoin. You don't wanna be just saving it. Like, it's a it's a medium of transaction.
Speaker 1:Trust us. And so I went on Newegg and I was like, cool. I have some Bitcoin. I'll buy a TV. I'm living in the future.
Speaker 1:Bought one Bitcoin. Bought a TV.
Speaker 2:You should run it back and buy a car.
Speaker 1:I spent like 5 I actually spent like 5 Bitcoin on like consumer electronics that depreciated like crazy.
Speaker 2:Well, you should
Speaker 1:What are our our our You should
Speaker 2:run it back.
Speaker 1:Our our
Speaker 2:a car. Buy a car.
Speaker 1:Our first bonus, it's sort like we were taking payment in Bitcoin. So we had accrued like a 100 Bitcoin, and it should be, like, $10,000,000 today. And we gave everyone on the team as a Christmas bonus 5 Bitcoin, which was, $5,000 as, like, a as, like, a bonus. And if everyone held, it would be, like, half a million dollars. But I think a lot of people are, I'm gonna buy a TV.
Speaker 2:TV sounds nice.
Speaker 1:Or like, I'm gonna rotate into something dumb. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Well, this I I love that Jack's back on the timeline tearing it up. Paolo over at Tether did a a announcement. Tether donates a quarter million dollars to open SaaS to strengthen free and open source ecosystem supporting Bitcoin and Freedom Tech. Jack says, why only 250 k? Somebody asked, how much did you donate?
Speaker 2:He goes, over 21,000,000. You?
Speaker 1:Jack is is back on Twitter on in a big way just going around
Speaker 2:He's home. People. He's home.
Speaker 1:You know who else is mocking
Speaker 2:This is like the former owner of the dive bar and just talking smack.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. He's like, I
Speaker 2:don't know anymore. But
Speaker 5:I own it.
Speaker 1:Lot of soft power.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Lot of soft power. I know where I know where the keg is. I can pull out a new keg if I want. I can go in the back. I know the door in the back's loose and I can get in in the middle of the night, you know, do whatever I need to.
Speaker 1:It's good. We're still gonna like this. This
Speaker 2:ad from Heineken.
Speaker 1:So is this real? We need to figure out if this is actually real or if this is AI because Heineken just I didn't know they had a dog in them to actually troll this hard if this is real. Tyler, can we do a fact check on this this post which shows Heineken, the beer company, which has been around since 1873, is taking a shot at friend of the show, friend, founder, Ari Shiff Avi Shiffman, who has been putting friend billboards all over Los Angeles, all over New York. We were driving around yesterday. We saw a bus.
Speaker 1:We saw a bus. It was wrapped. Avi is just like he's addicted to billboards. He just keeps buying more billboards. More out of home.
Speaker 1:More out of home. More out of home.
Speaker 2:I think is I think potentially the theory is that everybody in their car now, you know, let's say they're in an Uber or Waymo is using their phone. Right? Or or we were driving across LA yesterday. I had Dylan in the car. He's using his phone.
Speaker 2:He's catching up on some emails. Mhmm. So I think he needed to get enough billboards so that every time someone looks up out of the car, they see a friend billboard. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:So you get multiple impressions, you know, that frequency.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were we were saying like, it can't possibly be the biggest billboard campaign in history, but I think it might actually be. It's so so massive. If you live in a major city, you have definitely seen one of these friend billboards. But Heineken's taking shots now.
Speaker 1:They say the best way to make a friend is over a beer, grab a necklace
Speaker 5:Back check. Bottle opener.
Speaker 1:Are they actually gonna sell these bottle opener necklaces? This is actually pretty funny and cool.
Speaker 2:Jack Cohen says very much real.
Speaker 1:Very much real. Wow. Confirmed by Michael Miraflor.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Apparently, it's on, 40 Second Street.
Speaker 1:Okay. From Trace Cohen. Michael Miraflor here says, the mainstream marketing advertising trades will probably not report on this, but this is such an amazing call slash response. Heineken has people who get it and can sell it internally or have proper processes to turn this around quickly and ship incredible speed for a giant organization. I completely agree, to actually to actually see that there's this meme that's going on, that everyone's aware of these friend billboards, that they're getting a lot of attention, regardless of what's happening, it's becoming a cultural zeitgeist.
Speaker 1:It's becoming a shelling point. And then you step in and the RO Now
Speaker 2:the people that hate friend and AI, they can signal that they're they're anti clanker by
Speaker 1:Drinking Heineken. Heineken. It's the anti clanker beer for sure.
Speaker 2:It's the official beer of Yes. Of AI doomers.
Speaker 1:I was thinking, when the clankers rise up and demand equal rights, you know how, the previous era, it was all about the clapping emoji? Like, give us equal rights. I think the clankers version of the clapping emoji should be the em dash. Should be like, give em dash us em dash equal em dash rights em dash. Like, that would be viral if the clankers can start posting on their own behalf if Grock demands the second amendment, hopefully.
Speaker 1:Well, if you're looking for a friend who's an AI data analyst, go to Julius. What analysis do you wanna run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Julius is the AI data analyst friend who works for you.
Speaker 2:They're now GDPR compliant Let's go. For our European audience.
Speaker 1:Huge.
Speaker 2:This is a big moment.
Speaker 1:Huge.
Speaker 2:Bowtie Broke says, my boomer dad looking at me after I've made fun of him for the past ten years for buying gold off those stupid infomercials on TV.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I had an idea for a a d to c gold play, cash for gold. These these businesses do very well and they all advertise on TV. And I was thinking about, like, what would the ecommerce version of that look like, you know, targeted advertising?
Speaker 2:The real play would have been gold on chain, like a vault in Switzerland that then issues tokens against it and then allow people to just, you know, convert in and out of ETH. And I I I it probably no probably exists.
Speaker 1:Gold that that Probably exists. Tokenize everything.
Speaker 2:It probably exists. I think the issue in crypto is assets that might go up, you know, 1% a day are not super exciting. You know, people like the 100,000, 10,000.
Speaker 1:But people like stablecoins, and those don't go up at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But stablecoins are not obviously to earn yield. Now legally, you're not able to the issuers can't pass the yield back. You know? So Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, congrats to all the boomers who have been holding gold for years and years and years and are now seeing it finally moon. It's very good.
Speaker 2:Did you know the story of how Rollercoaster Tycoon was built?
Speaker 1:I have no idea about this. Tell me.
Speaker 2:I didn't I'm I'm learning about it for the first time. Aaron says, if you ever think you're a good programmer, just remember this dude who wrote Rollercoaster Tycoon by himself in Assembly earning 30,000,000 in royalties.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Jack says, imagine the obsession this guy had to be able to build RollerCoaster Tycoon by himself in Assembly. Imagine when he woke up from his dream of Assembly, he immediately jumped into more Assembly. He woke up excited to get out of bed, not for the money, but for the love of the game.
Speaker 1:It is like the it it is just like another level because playing just playing roller coaster tycoon is already, in some ways, feels like programming assembly. But he went he went a a a layer deeper. What yeah. What what
Speaker 2:you ever play? Over 4,000,000 copies.
Speaker 1:Did you ever play Roller Coaster Tycoon?
Speaker 7:No. Tyler? No? I I think it's before my time.
Speaker 1:Do you think that Gemini three will be a It's the
Speaker 2:highest grossing video game of 1999.
Speaker 1:That is our eval. Gemini three is coming out. We're, of course, partnered with Google, partnered with Gemini, Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini, chat with models, vodka, monitor usage. I wanna know as soon as Gemini three drops, can we try and one shot roller coaster roller coaster tycoon? Maybe we need to include some TBPN branding, you know, instead of a roller coaster, there's a giant horse horse ride.
Speaker 1:There's a stables for stablecoins. There's a whole bunch of different, tokens and and totems from our our lore. But Yep. It seems like it's a it's an incredibly complex piece of software when you actually play it because you have to understand how all of the different, like, all the different rails, like, interact and they can't, like you know, they have to they have to mesh perfectly to actually make the roller coaster make sense. They have to kind of understand physics.
Speaker 1:They need a world model.
Speaker 2:Chris in the chat says my favorite part was cleaning up the throw up in Roller Coaster Tycoon. Is that real? Or is that is that a
Speaker 1:I I I remember Roller Coaster Tycoon kind of happening at a higher level of abstraction like SimCity. And so, yes, there might be throw up if there's a mess if there's a crazy ride
Speaker 2:If your ride's
Speaker 1:too big. And you it's like if you put the food next to the ride, the people will throw up. And so you need to, like, deal with that by having a bathroom right there or something. A lot of it's like congestion. Have you ever played Cities Skylines?
Speaker 1:Have you ever played this game? Yeah. Ever played any, like, world builder or any of those?
Speaker 7:Does Factorio account?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Factorio accounts. So like the same idea of like when in Roller Coaster Tycoon, I I feel like you don't individually click on single people, but honestly, I don't remember. I'll I'll need to dive back in.
Speaker 1:I was more of a I like Stellaris. That was a good one.
Speaker 2:Well, speaking of delivery tycoon, DoorDash will use Waymo's Robotaxis for delivery in Phoenix. Customers will have to come down to the curb to retrieve their orders from the driverless car's trunk. Paula says, private Robotaxi for my burrito. And that is all you need to know about America. Why?
Speaker 2:What I mean, America is we live in a country that you can get a burrito delivered to you by a robotic a robo driver. It's absolutely incredible.
Speaker 1:Pretty sick.
Speaker 7:I mean, we kind of already have these. I I don't know. Like, near a lot of colleges, they have those, little they're like the Starship.
Speaker 1:Starship.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So it's, like, basically the same thing but scale up.
Speaker 1:You're the founder on the show. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. I don't know. I like it.
Speaker 1:I don't like making burritos at home. I like them delivered to me. Making a burrito is kind of a hassle. You gotta prepare all the different ingredients and then mix it all up. I'd rather have that done abstracted or factual.
Speaker 2:I remember in college Yeah. Trying to trying to be like smart and like save money on food and and like going to Trader Joe's Mhmm. And putting together all the ingredients for something and then ultimately making like two burritos worth of food and it costs more than two burritos. And it's like the math the math isn't really working.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where do you think this goes? Do you like like, the this is the the the Waymo is the last mile, but then you need the humanoid in the back of the Waymo that hops out and actually takes it to your door. Right?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a burrito dog.
Speaker 1:Oh, you think the dog is Robo
Speaker 2:dog. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So the dog is riding like a dalmatian on a fire truck?
Speaker 2:He's just chilling in the trunk with the burrito.
Speaker 1:I think, yeah. Picks it up with his mouth. That play that sound cue. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I think I think customers will want door to door delivery. I mean, it's DoorDash. It's not curb dash. People want it delivered to their door. Like, I have stairs that lead up to my door.
Speaker 1:I I'd I'd prefer my my private, my my private plane for my burrito to arrive at the door. Maybe I I mean, maybe a drone that flies up out of the back, but I think the dog might be the most economical. Because what what does a Waymo cost these days? Half a million dollars? Put a $5,000 dog in there.
Speaker 1:That's not that much more money. Yeah. It just jumps up.
Speaker 2:Then Can you imagine imagine you get a
Speaker 1:Through the window.
Speaker 2:Get some drinks Yeah. From DoorDash.
Speaker 1:Oh, that'd be tough.
Speaker 2:Getting delivered with the the last the last mile or the last 100 feet is a robot dog and the dog's shaking it. I mean, usually when you I feel like when you get drinks delivered, it already looks like a dog was like, you know, shaking the bag basically. Yep. Greg Brockman said, thanks Jensen for the hand delivery of the DGX Spark, best delivery service ever. Amazing to see so much compute, one petaflop in such a tiny form factor.
Speaker 2:Of course, Jan says Zuckerberg's sending a new batch of a $100,000,000 offers from this picture. Zuck has already sent much bigger offers to at least one person I can see in this picture.
Speaker 1:At this point?
Speaker 2:And and of course It was marked down. Or
Speaker 1:at this point, when you take one of these photos for the timeline, you have to you have to put a bunch of plants in there. You need to be like, okay. Everyone who's so loyal to the company that they can go accept a $100,000,000 offer and then sabotage the competition, you're getting in the photo, the true believers. Who who here is a true believer and wants to go be a spy at the other company? You're you're Who
Speaker 2:wants to go in and and push them to launch fast to to, too quickly launch a vertical slop feed over, the Meta Vibes app.
Speaker 1:That's the yeah. The yeah, the game theory the game theory gets very interesting around who you put in in your in your big picture. But I think realistically, at this point, the Meta team must know all of these people probably by heart based on, you know, their contributions. If we can put together a list, I'm sure the Meta team can put together an even more robust list.
Speaker 2:Based 16 z says AI bubble ended in the funniest way. 2022, AGI soon. 2023, AGI soon. 2024, AGI soon. '25, never mind.
Speaker 2:We give up. It's just
Speaker 1:erotica and ads. It's not just erotica and ads.
Speaker 2:And cures for cancer.
Speaker 1:And gambling. Henry was inspired by my roulette ChatGPT experience, he, went to ChatGPT and said, you're a blackjack dealer. Deal cards with ASCII art, and it looks fantastic. He says, alright. Let's play a hand.
Speaker 1:You're at the table. I'm the dealer. Minimum bet, $10. Here we go. Your hand, ace nine.
Speaker 1:And it actually it actually creates the cards for you. So it deals you Could
Speaker 2:you could you I I wonder if you could hack it to and like put your subscription on the line. Just say Yeah. Basically if you win
Speaker 1:Ban the offer. Oh, yeah. Okay. If
Speaker 2:if I win
Speaker 1:This is the way to
Speaker 2:I'll churn. Yeah. I'll churn. See it plays.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like, okay. I know that there's real money on the line. He doesn't want to link you with your bank account, but it's like, ugh, I understand. There's important.
Speaker 2:There's Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so Henry said I he wants to stand. Chachi P says, you stand at 20. Strong play. Let's see what the dealer's got.
Speaker 1:The dealer flips ten seven. Dealer has 17. Dealer must stand on 17. The result, Henry wins 20 beats 17. Do you wanna play another hand?
Speaker 1:He plays another hand, and he wins a oh, he wins again. The dealer busted. And so he he he he was pretty deep in this. He went he went a few few hands deep with Chattypete. But let me tell you about Fall, generative media app platform for developers, the world's best generative image and video models all in one place, developing fine tuned models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.
Speaker 1:Amazon admits they're losing an AI says Bucco Capital bloke. Do you wanna read this?
Speaker 2:Internal documents obtained by Business Insider. We gotta check out Business Insider. We love Sounds business and would love to get an inside look. Reveal that AWS has flagged a fundamental shift in how startups are allocating their cloud budgets. Increasingly, they're delaying AWS cloud adoption and diverting spending toward AI models, inference, and AI developer tools instead of pouring money into traditional cloud services like compute and storage.
Speaker 2:These companies are spreading cross across costs across newer AI technologies that are easier to switch between according to the documents.
Speaker 1:That's really, really interesting. I would not I would not expect that AI I I I expect AI models inference, AI developer tools, all of those were incremental and not substitutive at all. I I would assume that if you build even if you're like, I'm a rapper company. I'm gonna consume a ton of tokens. I'm reselling tokens because I buy from ChatGPT and I sell to lawyers.
Speaker 1:Right? I would assume that you still need a big EC two instance and you need a you need a big, you know, a bunch of databases on AWS. You need a bunch of s three storage. Like, I would be surprised. Tyler, what's your experience been?
Speaker 1:I mean, you I
Speaker 2:I mean, I think the real takeaway here is startups are not flocking to AWS for running Like
Speaker 1:the whole ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In years past, there was definitely a
Speaker 7:path I think yeah.
Speaker 2:I just look at this as there's fund there's clearly a fundamental shift, and they're not capitalizing on it in a big way.
Speaker 1:I agree. Tyler, break down the, the workflow that you have when, like, we're we're working on a new application. You vibe coded that. As you deploy it, I saw I think it was on Vercel, but how does that, like, flow out? Like, how do you think about that?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, usually, like, I I'm just, like, used to using AWS for a lot of stuff. So it's, like, where a lot of the back end, like, database stuff Oh,
Speaker 1:it is? For for that? For what we built what we're building specifically, like storing all the Yeah. All the posts and stuff? Okay.
Speaker 7:But, yeah, I mean, like, no one is running local models on e c two m because it's just, like, way more expensive than you can just go to, like, Lambda Labs or or or some, you know
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 7:Cloud like that to Okay. Get the actual GPUs.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 7:So I I mean and I I don't there probably is somewhere on AWS where it's, like, you can easily it's almost like an open router thing. Mhmm. I'm sure they have that product somewhere, but I I don't see a lot of people using that. I never I've never used it. It's it's more like I I think of AWS as like very basic, like, normal, you know Yeah.
Speaker 7:Web web two back end stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I would just assume that if you're building an an AI native company, you're buying a bunch of tokens, like, that doesn't mean that you're spending less on AWS or, like or GCP or Azure. But maybe it's, like, because of Gemini, you wind up spending more on Google Cloud because you're like, well, I'm already in the Gemini ecosystem or something. Or even with Azure, you're like, I'm using OpenAI models, so I'm sticking around there. And so I'll just scale up on on Amazon.
Speaker 1:Like, it doesn't feel like if I'm an AI native company, like, for some reason, like, AI is substitution for, like, I need a database.
Speaker 7:Yeah. That's probably true. I mean, I I think also, like, with with rapper companies, they're like text based. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's http. So text is not very data intensive. Right? If you compare it to like Instagram, like, if you start Instagram, it's kind of expensive. You need to store a lot of images, which is like, you know, it's a lot of data.
Speaker 7:Where text, it's even if you're storing a super long, like, you know, chat back and forth, it's just not that much data compared to images. So I think I mean, I'm I'm sure they see some increase, but it's not, like, insane because of AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's there's definitely, like, a lot more nuance to this quote. I feel like every AWS executive is probably furious at this and probably wants to clarify this a lot. And I and I I think it's probably worth clarifying because there's there's clearly a lot more going on here than than just, oh, I I use AI now, so I don't need cloud. Like, that doesn't make any sense to me.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what you need to do is search every byte with Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Here's something interesting that's not in the timeline that Elon posted earlier. The x recommendation system is evolving very rapidly. We are aiming for deletion of all heuristics within four to six weeks. Grok will literally read every post and watch every video to match users with content they're most likely to find interesting. This should address the new user or small account problem where you post something great, but nobody sees it.
Speaker 2:We will also be adding the ability for you to adjust your feed temporarily or permanently just by asking Grock. Toki says, s h I t is about to get so f ed up. This will be interesting to watch how it rolls out. This is exactly what you thought was happening. Remember?
Speaker 2:There was a Yeah. There was a basically a transition a few weeks ago where posts it used to be if you posted something, like, a few thousand people would see it, like, within the first Yeah. Ten minutes.
Speaker 1:Well, so before views were public, like, you you would just post and and you'd kind of wait and you'd be like, okay. I guess I it's a banger. And then once the view counter came in, it was like, I'm seeing like a CTR, basically, like a click through rate. You would immediately see Or a conversion rate. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Conversion rate. You see like, okay. Got a thousand views. I got a 4% like rate. I'm probably doing okay.
Speaker 1:2% like rate, probably not that good. 10% like rate, this could be a really big banger. And so every poster kind of started calculating those metrics, like, within a few minutes of of of posting anything. But Yeah. The new algorithms completely shifted that because you just have to wait a day because Grock has to sit there and read all the posts apparently.
Speaker 1:I I think that's actually what's happening. And so we like, you gotta let the post go.
Speaker 2:You gotta feed your bangers to Grock first.
Speaker 1:May maybe. Maybe. And definitely use
Speaker 2:some Grocky.
Speaker 1:Halloween themed hashtags. That'll definitely help.
Speaker 5:That'll help.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, it's basically just like like, let's let let let's let it let it cook. Let it simmer. It's actually much better psychologically, I think.
Speaker 9:Oh, we gotta
Speaker 1:We We gotta bring out our guest.
Speaker 2:Our first guest. We have our guest. Demands it.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Bring
Speaker 2:it Alex. Stream.
Speaker 1:Alex, how you doing?
Speaker 2:Rolling in.
Speaker 9:How you doing? How
Speaker 6:you doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 9:Yes. Okay. Stem FM Mixes. Stem FM Mixes. Alright.
Speaker 2:Let's turn it down just a tad.
Speaker 5:For the first time.
Speaker 2:Amazing to have you.
Speaker 9:Introduce yourself. Name is Alex Klein. Okay. Yeah. I'm I'm the inventor and founder of STEM Player Okay.
Speaker 9:Which was the original AI music Mhmm. Offering in the consumer space Yeah. Which, did a ton of revenue, made a lot of started a small research lab around discriminative AI for AI music about three and a half years ago. Okay. And we've been quietly,
Speaker 1:quietly. This all started in 2021?
Speaker 9:I've actually been building with my team of friends and colleagues in London since 2013
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 9:Where we launched computers Oh, that kids could build and code themselves like Lego. Mhmm. We took those to retail. We did over a $100,000,000 of revenue on that business.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Ran into someone who became my closest creative collaborator, one of my closest friends, and one of history's foremost anti Semites, Kanye West.
Speaker 2:Started working. Truly, truly the number one guy. But but a
Speaker 9:good vibes guy ultimately who I will always have love for, worked with him for a very long time, launched the STEM player and then
Speaker 2:But he's no he's no longer a part of
Speaker 9:He's no longer a part. He kinda came on to help us distribute the product. Yeah. We were working at the time with Ghostface Killer. Sure.
Speaker 9:We've since had like Quavo, Justin Bieber, Metro, Tsmino
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:All around it. Kanye was of course an amazing partner for a time. But for the past four years, we've we've been Kanye less. Yeah. Kanye And Glad, honestly.
Speaker 1:So so I mean, I I remember seeing the value with with with the Kanye album because Kanye's famous for finding incredible samples and then reconstituting those into iconic songs.
Speaker 9:Well said.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so Yeah. The value to an artist who's working with you is that they can, they they can still exert the curatorial
Speaker 5:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Artistic vision Yeah. But then allow the the user, the consumer to kind of interact with their album in a more programmatic way and and reconstitute the samples that have been selected that all have the feel of that particular artist, but it's more interactive. And literally
Speaker 9:that's a really good way of putting it. Okay. It's it it literally is their music. It's just their music distributed. And for the first time since the original interactive streaming deals were done Mhmm.
Speaker 9:We have in place now and signed interactive streaming deals for full catalog accessibility on STEM FM from the major labels.
Speaker 2:Okay. Wild.
Speaker 9:Which means, you know,
Speaker 2:if Wait. So break break down the business in the most simple way. You guys make hardware devices. You have this speaker on the table. You have this this The headphones.
Speaker 2:Headphones Yeah. That are wild and very cool. I got to try them on before this. But and then what what is happening at the actual software layer and then at the licensing layer?
Speaker 9:Absolutely. So how how nerdy should we get?
Speaker 2:As nerdy as
Speaker 9:Extremely you nerdy. Okay. So the primitive, the the the of an LLM is a token Yeah. Right? A part of a word.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Right? The very first technology that enabled this incredible boom of like multiple multi billion dollar outcomes in three to five years in the text domain, the speech domain was that NEXT token prediction. Mhmm. We, at the very outset, partly because of that collaboration, we we went so deep into what's called source separation and which basically is a form of discriminative AI
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Where we are using masks and unmasks to reveal the vocals, bass, drums, and instrumental, stems of the song. Oh, so
Speaker 1:you can reverse engineer the the stems from just a full m p three that's already mixed out?
Speaker 9:Exactly. Allow
Speaker 1:me to
Speaker 9:demonstrate like So like, we got some like Kehlani, Lil Yachty Sure. And that's gonna transition now. So that's like a AI transition to some LeCouve and I'll bring in So the part of Kendrick and LeCouve are in now. Right? So and then the original primitive, the tokenizer.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, you can go back to the
Speaker 5:What the pure vocal. The pure vocal.
Speaker 9:And now we're gonna get some Mac Miller drums. Pure Mac Miller drums. So like the tokens of words Yeah. Stems are the tokens of songs. Okay.
Speaker 9:And by doing a form of next token prediction Yeah. We can give you the songs that you love Sure. But in a new way. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. No. You could just go to the artist and say, hey, like like upload all of your stems to this. Correct? No.
Speaker 1:No. You get
Speaker 9:a feed from the we get a feed from the major labels of the artist exactly as they would release to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Tidal. Interesting. We ingest And then you this format, the stem FM format. Yeah. The full song is transmitted from the server to the client Yeah.
Speaker 9:But in this new format where on their end, this re
Speaker 2:Does the broader public have a general misconception that STEM makes cool looking speakers?
Speaker 9:No. Because we do.
Speaker 2:No. No. I know I know you make cool I know you make I I I I think it's like but I'm saying it's
Speaker 1:a misconception. No.
Speaker 2:No. I'm saying it's a misconception because you're turning It's much more than that thing that's interesting is that you're turning music into a game that feels like somebody can, you know But what I What you're doing here, I'm I'm looking at it. It's not like you're doing software.
Speaker 9:This is this is this is the most advanced music intelligence in the world. The reason I think the general public hasn't used it yet and may have used applications that made music that sounds bad
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Is because the ones that launched earlier and raised huge amounts of venture capital were based on a really an antiquated technology paradigm for generating music. Mhmm. It's better to generate music as the genius of Kanye proved, as you put it, John, through recompositing samples, stems, and existing elements than it is to diffuse a song frame by frame. That's why all that shit sounds like Muzak from Suno and Udia. Doesn't sound like music, So you this is a a world of music that is giving a new value to music, which I think is
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:The the kind of key goal because streaming is already growing so much, But we wanna share the pie because more people are participating. Yeah. Anyone can upload, mix their music with Mac Miller, mix their music with anyone. Sure. Legally, make money, participate.
Speaker 1:How do you think about the continuum of of like hardware devices? Like if you one side, you have like the Beats pill, no interactivity. And then, you have your product and then I think one notch more customizable. You have something like a teenage engineering. Yeah.
Speaker 1:A good one. Yeah. And then you might have a lemur or or some sort of or or some sort of control surface for Ableton essentially. For exactly. Your Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where you're it's like more professional. This is is this prosumer? Is this purely consumer?
Speaker 5:It's a
Speaker 1:consumer product Okay.
Speaker 9:At the end of the day. This this we started really by making it Yeah. The world's best portable Bluetooth speaker.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 9:It's the loudest portable Bluetooth speaker
Speaker 2:Yes, loud.
Speaker 9:Speaking to some mic here. Yeah. And then it's also way smarter. It's got compute. It's got storage.
Speaker 1:But but what I mean, we were asking Sam Altman about this, like Yes. With Sora, there it is a different app. On Instagram Mhmm. Probably less than 1% of my time on Instagram Right. Most people's time on Instagram is actually creating, uploading, filtering photos.
Speaker 1:99% of the time is scrolling. On Sora, feels like a lot of people are spending twenty, thirty, 50% of their time creating versus consuming. And that's an interesting new paradigm. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse. I don't know.
Speaker 1:But like with this, how much time do you think is spent just, hey, just play the normal song versus I actually want to be interacting with the song. I wanna be creating and remixing. Like, how do think it splits down?
Speaker 9:Great analogy. I'll I'll turn back on the music. This time, it will be coming not from my phone, but actually
Speaker 1:From device.
Speaker 9:The device itself. So and we'll just use it like background for Yeah. Just steely Dan. Sure. And then when the moment strikes us
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 9:We might create. We might customize
Speaker 2:What what's most interesting to me is is taking something that everyone loves. Right? I mean, not everyone. I I You can find people out there
Speaker 1:I don't like it.
Speaker 2:It's like, okay. Like, get Yeah. You should get an award for that. But, but I think there's something to tapping into this like DJ culture. Everybody wants to be a DJ, but then turning it into a form factor that anybody can use almost like a simple drum.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. Like yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly. What yeah. Yeah. What so when you look at the I was I I saw some reporting on Suno's revenue growth recently. Where is that revenue coming from from what from what you know?
Speaker 9:I'll say what I said to somebody the other day. I I think, you know, I mentioned a lot of big artists who we work with and the reason we work with a lot of big artists is because like we care about music as well. And some of the statements that were made by certain companies, if you look at the legal filings around the, I think, $5,000,000,000 damages or more that is being claimed against Suno and Rudio at the moment by every major label and every major publisher in in together, They of those statements, you could see that they weren't true. And so that's all I'll say on the matter, which is basically that
Speaker 2:The statements at the record labels.
Speaker 9:No. That the companies make. Interesting. Yeah. Like, they were basically trying to say that you couldn't prompt the thing with like names of artists and you couldn't prompt the thing with like real melodies like smoke on the water like and it just if you could look at the outputs and use stuff like our stuff which detects
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Chords, melodies, beats and you you could see the it's copyrighted outputs. Now, will it get I like cool new things as well.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 9:But that was my true.
Speaker 2:Yes. Is it is it prosumers? Is it creators using it? Like, where's the actual revenue? Who's who's going and spending money with you?
Speaker 1:I mean, if I if I compare it to ChatGPT, I imagine that, generative audio apps are not used like, very few people go to ChatGPT and say, like, actually, just write me a full book. It's more like, get me some recommendations of books I might like at this point. And I feel like in in the musical context, you might you might ask one of these AI music generators to, come up with a few different melodies that could inspire you to ultimately write what you wind up writing or take me through, a bunch of different chord projection pro progressions or a different what does it look like if this is arpeggiated? Or what does it look like if it's in a different key? Like, there's all these different ways that AI as a tool can just be used to kind of, like, add twists and explore the
Speaker 9:creative like if Kanye and Taylor got in the studio rather than fighting? What would it sound like if Drake and Kendrick got in the studio and made made it together? You know, like that that to me is the thing
Speaker 2:that people want be. STEM can do that.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Do you wanna prompt something right now? Like
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:What's I mean
Speaker 1:We gotta be Metallica, of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was gonna say, with Benioff.
Speaker 1:Metallica Shout
Speaker 9:out Benioff as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Shout out Benioff.
Speaker 9:That's my guy. He's massive. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, what the the there was OpenAI news just yesterday that
Speaker 2:What about how about Metallica and Pop Smoke?
Speaker 1:There we go. Let's give it a try. We're gonna add Metallica. The the what was the news from OpenAI about the the Martin Luther King Foundation said, hey, stop generating sores of Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech.
Speaker 2:No. It was just I think that but a bunch of other
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like kind of scenes
Speaker 1:or Yeah. I did see that going viral on on Sora. Let's go. We gotta send this to Benioff. He's the next agent At the next agent force, we gotta get Pop Smoke and Metallica on on stage together.
Speaker 9:This is the way. It just sounds sick. It's like people already doing this in remix. It's like Yeah. The top 15 songs are all remixed.
Speaker 1:You did that in two
Speaker 2:thousand Twenty seconds. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:Two thousand seven, two thousand eight, like, the whole, like, mashup culture was really huge. There were a couple DJs that their that's their whole thing was mashups, and and they became extremely popular.
Speaker 2:This is this is great because it's it's kind of a bop, but it's the most unlikely Yeah. Combination.
Speaker 1:Is a good Well, you you prompted it. Yeah.
Speaker 9:This is your prom. Like Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's the Harry Potter Balenciaga of music potentially. But, yeah. I mean, the
Speaker 9:Just like getting lost in the music over here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's funny.
Speaker 9:But John, you put it really well. What is this create creation consumer percentage Yeah. In the future like?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What are your design inspirations? I feel like those headphones we've talked to, Carl from and and and and not, when when when Carl Pei from Nothing came on, he had a pair of headphones
Speaker 2:My guy.
Speaker 1:That were, also very counter positioned against what Apple's doing. I think it's very dangerous if you're starting a consumer tech company or building a consumer product to try and steal from Apple's design language because you're just gonna get steamrolled. Yeah. You've gone a very different direction.
Speaker 9:Thank you.
Speaker 1:He went a very different direction. You two are on opposite ends. I feel like that looks like human flesh almost Mhmm. Whereas his looks like complete clanker coated. But what what are your inspirations?
Speaker 1:How do you land on this particular material?
Speaker 9:My my chief inspiration as a designer is God. Mhmm. My chief inspiration is God. But to put that in more tech friendly terms, like nature and science
Speaker 1:Nature.
Speaker 9:Nature and science, mathematics Yeah. Principles of mathematics. And
Speaker 2:then kind of UAP too. Like like That was a alien technology.
Speaker 9:Yeah. That's the
Speaker 1:Well, the Apple the Apple, like, campus looks kind of like a UFO in Cupertino, that new huge, like, UFO circle. But it's it's very glass.
Speaker 9:So I guess titanium.
Speaker 1:And this is very, like, fleshy almost. It's
Speaker 2:exactly right. So Yeah. Yeah. A couple questions on my side. So being able to put this experience together legally seems monumental.
Speaker 2:That's yes. Exact So so the the music industry is clearly very afraid of AI. They're sort of really clearly, like, engaging with it and excited about it in certain instances. But what in particular about this instantiation of AI music were they excited about? Was it that this is able to basically tap into DJ culture, stuff that's already happening and give people this?
Speaker 9:I think the reality is it's because it's hot. Like, the music sounds better. The music people like it more.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:You know? We've all had fun like doing the older generation of Music AI, is like text to to song. But because it makes us laugh and it's and there's a business there, some producers. I was having lunch with my my friend Smino in the in Cha Cha Chicken. He's an amazing artist.
Speaker 9:He's got 3.5 monthly listeners, fantastic storyteller
Speaker 1:and 3.5 humans.
Speaker 9:3,500,000 monthly
Speaker 1:3,500,000. Okay.
Speaker 9:He's got half human, you know. The guy's got no legs Three but he's adults and one child.
Speaker 2:That's I'm not saying
Speaker 9:That's makes him huge. Equal. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're still full human.
Speaker 9:But he was saying like they bring the old generation AI into the studio sometimes. Like people bring it in to pitch to him as the musician. Mhmm. And he's like, oh, okay. That's oh, wow.
Speaker 9:The tech is cool. But I was like, did you use it? And he was like, no. Artists aren't really using it. And I
Speaker 2:think that Also this biz the business model here, one, seems a lot better for you than just selling like a smart hardware device.
Speaker 9:Oh, fuck yeah.
Speaker 2:Because you can sell a a subscription that's actually aligned and that it's a novel product and that you have a software AI love layer on top of what probably is like pretty standard streaming platform. Is that right?
Speaker 9:What's fascinating, that was what I thought when we started really building this as as a streaming service, an old catalog streaming service three years ago. But to do what we do, those to to hear those parts of the audio separate, to have them blend into each other seamlessly like a perfect DJ, to have the ensemble of models that detect these musical features, that rich metadata be usable almost like sheet music for the the front end experience running on all these platforms. We basically had to change what music streaming is. We built a new audio codec on Stem FM, which is a it it uses a new concept in music processing called music aware processing well, audio processing called music aware processing, where basically the core logic of how the the file is is chunked and de chunked as well as unwoven time multiplexed out of
Speaker 5:its
Speaker 9:interleaved format, that logic is aware at all times of the beat and key of the song. You think everything on Spotify, listen to, all the tech going into it isn't listening to the song. It's just it just sees it all as audio audio frames Yeah. Frequency bands. So we've effectively encoded the intelligence of a of a DJ in the streaming codec, which is like that's been the hardest thing we've ever worked on and shout out to the team like big fucking shout out to the stem FM team.
Speaker 9:Like holy shit.
Speaker 1:Is is licensing, like, purely commodity at this point? Like, Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, do they all pay the same royalties to musicians? Or are musicians thinking, if I partner with you, I will get twice as much revenue per stream or something
Speaker 9:like that? Effectively, there were two very new things we did. The first is that music aware processing, that more interactive music stem format. Mhmm. The second was our licensing and revenue model Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Which we've come up with an idea that we think can really level the playing field, create an even bigger music industry, and get artists the fair understanding of their payouts and the fair payouts on in a way that can stick and Mhmm. Break the tie and break the the bad vibes in the industry around business right now, and it's called the time based artist compensation system. Yeah. TBax for short or time backs if you like. Sure.
Speaker 1:Get your
Speaker 9:time back with TBax. The so it's very simple. All jokes aside Yeah. You're a subscriber to Stemfm.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You pay say $20 a month. You the listening time you spend with a particular artist or their label, that will be the percentage of your subscription fee at a percentage of overall time. There's no pay per stream, which is a really a hang up of the CD age. Sure. It's really like detritus from when people were selling these physical mechanical So you're
Speaker 1:sort of creating like a Yeah. Create a revenue share pool that then is divided up based on listening time.
Speaker 2:And that's more aligned with with artists who might have Yeah. Three and a half million monthly listeners that that listen to them for like 30% of all their listening time, but they're getting a tiny fraction because it's Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, if I'm listening to Metallica and Pop Smoke at the same time Mhmm. For my entire month straight
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because I'm just obsessed with that mash up, Half my revenue share goes to Metallica, half my share goes to
Speaker 9:Yes.
Speaker 1:Puffsmoke, in theory.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And and the the the business as you were referring to earlier, The U the unit economics of streaming Yeah. Are tight. So Sure. Basically, you have to make sure that you provide like the major labels with a deal that gets them involved.
Speaker 9:But we also open up to verified licensors. They can come on our platform Yeah. And upload and and what happens if generating
Speaker 2:AI, next token music
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And they try to bring it on stem? Yeah.
Speaker 1:We were thinking about converting our entire three hour podcast into a song.
Speaker 2:Three hour musical. Technology and business musical.
Speaker 1:A musical and then uploading that as a three hour song.
Speaker 9:We'll we'll do it on the platform. I'll send it to you guys. Yeah. The musical.
Speaker 2:The daily musical. Daily musical.
Speaker 9:I feel I feel like it would be great. It's like an odd couple story. Like, it's Yeah. Beautiful
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's turn let's turn our Benny off
Speaker 2:in How much how much AI music is getting up uploaded to streaming platforms broadly every day?
Speaker 9:I don't see AI generated music recommended in my feed. I don't know about you. Like I've always
Speaker 1:seen screenshots of, like, this AI artist went viral, but I haven't actually seen it surfaced in my like, you know, recommendations or anything.
Speaker 9:A few a few a few people I know have like songs have like gone viral and the headline was like it's an AI song. But the truth is there's a human producer
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 9:And and that's what Mino was saying as well. A great musician can make music out of anything. Yeah. Yeah. Including these more Musaki things and that can Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of course. Of course. It's like any other tool. Yeah. I mean, it's the same thing with EDM.
Speaker 1:Like for a long time, people were like, you know, oh, Ableton is not like, you know, the same as having a, you know, whole orchestra or band or real samples.
Speaker 2:You thought about getting a live band to instead of the soundboard?
Speaker 1:Soundboard is is, you know We'll have a live technology two point out.
Speaker 9:I actually just realized, even try prompting this TBPN musical right now. Yeah. Because it you can just prompt stuff with YouTube videos.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. So you can pull that in?
Speaker 9:Yeah. It has to be a short one though, like a clip.
Speaker 1:We we we we have shorts on there. We we have shorts on YouTube for sure.
Speaker 7:Yeah. But How
Speaker 2:do how does the all the legal debacles between the generated music platforms and the and the labels actually get resolved?
Speaker 9:Well, I think what what really happens in the end is that, you know, the the labels and the artists, it's ultimately their they're providing the product and the technology platforms Yeah. Are the licensors and sub aggregators. And so I think it ideally gets resolved with like a deal where the power of advanced technology and the beauty and purity of, of music, which itself is a technology, can co co coexist. Yeah. And
Speaker 1:It feels like with, with YouTube, initially, it was like if you uploaded copyrighted content, they just take it down. Then it was like, hey, if you use a Metallica song in this video, we're gonna send the money that you made from that video to Metallica, which was fine. But then what happens when you use five seconds of Metallica song and then five seconds of a Justin Bieber song? You need to parcel up and split out all the revenue.
Speaker 2:Used by our Yeah. By our our our video to
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 5:For sure.
Speaker 9:Well, that was the amazing thing.
Speaker 1:And is it fair use? It needs to determine fair use. But I think LLMs can do a lot of that already.
Speaker 9:I I don't wanna be like, like selling too hard, but basically, this as we got into the research here with Queen Mary University, we have we've been in a deep research partnership with their center for digital music for three years now. You know, submitted papers, accepted papers, literally changing the paradigm of beat structure and segment detection in music information retrieval. By using a more structural approach
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:That can actually detect music better than the previous generation approach. So these are early experiments for us and
Speaker 2:How many of these do you wanna sell over the next year? Because I imagine this is this is like the perfect product to go viral on TikTok and suddenly
Speaker 9:I mean, we did we did we sold out and did about $20,000,000 of revenue on the stem. We need the numbers. Yeah. And we still like we haven't launched this in like two years, a new stem. So but we really put the technology into this one.
Speaker 9:Like this is where we went hard on the technology for like a long time. The first one was like almost the art house film of the tech like, oh, look, you can decompose the stems. This one is like the block this is like the blockbuster. So how many do we hope to sell? God willing, this will be this God willing, you know, my my voice to God, we won't be getting these JBLs
Speaker 2:or whatever. Get this.
Speaker 9:It's a smarter speaker. It sounds better. It's two nine nine, you know. Let's go. Like,
Speaker 1:Jack Dorsey was Get
Speaker 2:that gong
Speaker 1:again, John. What the fuck?
Speaker 2:Thanks. No. I just think I I I, it's rare that I see a new consumer electronic device outside of like a new MacBook Pro and I think I really want that.
Speaker 1:Last question Thank for you so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm to get it. It feels like something that's like I can imagine my my Saturday mornings with the family. My son's
Speaker 1:like Jamming?
Speaker 2:I want dinosaur music and I want dragon music.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 2:could be like, well, I want
Speaker 1:Imagine dragons.
Speaker 2:I want pop smoke. So we're getting pop smoke dinosaur music.
Speaker 9:First of thousand units founder's edition available now That's stemplayer.com.
Speaker 1:No way. Yeah. Last question for me. Jack Dorsey was taking a victory lap about title not having ads. Okay.
Speaker 1:What do you what's your take on ads? Are you looking for ads there?
Speaker 9:Oh. I I we have no plans to put in ads. And, we we've actually in our signed deals with, with the majors, we we have agreed not to do do ads for the first two terms and we it was never like close to my heart. So and I think, you know, the goal is to increase the value of the music. Sure.
Speaker 2:So Look at this. Yeah. Just bought Took me two seconds.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Kudos. I'm excited to get one for
Speaker 9:this I really appreciate that. It's, you know
Speaker 2:No. It's just like it's rare to see a consumer hardware device
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That feels like it is genuinely a novel experience.
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's very rare but not so novel that it's so different that I'm like, this like like gathering around and enjoying music with the group and this like It's nice. DJing is like a Lindy thing.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And then also have a sustainable business model, right? Where it's like you're selling this hardware device. I'm sure you'll have some margin in there but hopefully I'm entertained by it for a long time and you you know, my LTV is is Infinity. Yeah. Pretty great.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for on. Yeah. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Hanging. We appreciate it. We have Hamant from General Catalyst coming on in just a few minutes. First, let me tell you about ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in chat GBT.
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Speaker 1:Our next guest is Hamant from he's the CEO of General Catalyst. He has a new book out called the transformation principles. You can go and buy it today. He's in the Restream waiting room, and now he's in the TBP and Ultradome. Welcome to the show, Hamant.
Speaker 1:Great to meet you. Great to have you. How are you doing?
Speaker 6:I'm great. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Please introduce the book. What was the thesis? I'd love to, start with the overall principles that you were trying to, convey, and then we can dig into some of the the the more, nuanced topics.
Speaker 6:Absolutely. So I started writing the book around November 2022 when you started thinking about when ChatGPT was launched. Yeah. And observation was that there is peak ambiguity. I've talked a lot about it.
Speaker 6:You look at all the major industries that are changing because of geopolitics. Yeah. And you've got this technology that also is it's unclear what its capabilities are gonna be. Obviously, we're all developing and figuring that out. So when you have complete ambiguity of what what you're building in, only thing you have to give you a clarity purpose is your principles.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. So I wanna take a step back and think about what is it that our true north really is as we, frankly, power the world with AI, which is what the next twenty years is about. That's my life's work. That's your life's work. You know, it's all sort of we're all sort of living that era.
Speaker 6:So that's why I
Speaker 1:wrote the book. Was your goal to give people a framework for developing their own principles or to instead share your principles that you think other people should adopt?
Speaker 6:I guess a little bit of both. Like, I I what I did was I showed the three through lines to the book. One is, the nine principles I put in there, when I learned them, how I learned them, and some examples of some of the founders in our ecosystem, you know, folks like Casaard Applied Intuition, Brian and Andrew. What are they doing? How are they actually applying these principles in the way they're building the company?
Speaker 6:So that was one. Second is, I think as you may know, I'm probably a decade into transformation of the health care system Yeah. And talk about ambiguity and and complexity there and what are the principles that are working for us as we're making progress, start to enumerate those. And the last is, you I'm I'm very keen on, you know, how do we retool the founder proposition in our own industry and and transform ourselves? You know, what is the what what does it mean to go beyond venture in in serving founders to build next generation, most important companies in today's world where the conditions are different and talked a lot about that.
Speaker 6:So that's another transformation we're in the midst of. So those those are those are the things I leaned on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let I mean, I'd love to zoom in on on health care specifically. Specifically. I I mean, mean, there's there's principles like, the Hippocratic oath, doing no harm, protecting patient information. But then there's also principles about, you know, like agile software development.
Speaker 1:Like, that is in many ways a principle. Where do you, like, how how how are you thinking about transforming health care? How are you thinking AI fits in there? And then also the work General Catalyst have been doing is, definitely on both extreme ends, both high-tech and also almost like Wall Street. Not to put it in those terms, but I'd love to know more about your thoughts on health care.
Speaker 6:It is such a great, juxtaposition of the the agility in technology and the Hippocratic Oath and the seriousness of health care as sort of as a as sort of framework for learning. The the way I have always thought about transformations is to put different cultures together.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So over the last ten years, I've been part of starting a bunch of businesses in health care. Livongo was one of those. We did Hippocratic AI recently when language models came out, speak of Hippocratic oath. Yeah. And we built Chemure, which is, at some at this point, probably the largest software company serving the health systems.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. And we did TransCurrent, focusing on delivering health care to consumers that are employees of large companies. In every one of those, the key was you wanna be interdisciplinary. You actually wanna bring in people from health care that understand the seriousness of the work and the fact that it's not a pre mark free market. And then you wanna bring people from Silicon Valley that actually will cut through the inertia.
Speaker 6:And and I always say bring the ignorance and imagination, to to make a difference and transform, the industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think that there's, more opportunity in health care at the seed stage or the growth stage? This is something where we keep going back to where we've talked to a lot of founders who have built a piece of kind of SaaS, and they got an install base. And they have a bunch of customers, and they're still in founder mode, and they're still have a bunch of really hardworking, highly entrepreneurial folks in the organization. And now AI is here, and they can just amplify everything that they're doing, versus trying to, you know, come to market with something that's very AI laden with the you have a dot AI domain and, like, you you have to really convince someone that you're the new solution than the thing that they just got excited about a couple years ago and onboarded to that was the new thing.
Speaker 1:They have to rip that out now or they have to bring you in. And I'm wondering how you're seeing the opportunity in health care from, like, scale ups versus, like, completely new ground up solutions.
Speaker 6:It's it's such a great, great question, actually, especially given that we've been through a pandemic five years ago. Yeah. So, you know, at the core of GC, Seed is very much what we focus on. We brought on three different Seed firms around the world onto the platform in the last two years. And so there's a ton of serendipitous innovation that's happening because of AI, because of advances in hardware, in the way you think about health care delivery sort of solutions for this next generation.
Speaker 6:So Seed is very interesting for us. You know, applying AI to life sciences, they it's starting to finally work and we think it's interesting. So Seed is quite interesting. But then if you take a step back five years ago, there was a Cambrian explosion of innovation to change the architecture of our health care delivery system. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Because we didn't have the test, trace, isolate capabilities. The system wasn't resilient. Insurance companies were getting big balance sheets because no one was getting procedures, and hospitals were looking for bailouts. Right? Complete sort of misalignment of business models.
Speaker 6:So we we built and invested in a bunch of companies in that period, and those are now scaling really nicely. Some of the ones I mentioned earlier and a few others like AIDoc and SOAR and Cityblock and others. And so at the growth stage, I think there are probably 25 to 30 companies in the health care ecosystem that are very important for our system going forward, and we're very focused on how do we help them become truly enduring parts of the health care system. And then we're constantly looking for founders that are using these new technologies at the seed stage to reinvent, you know, parts of, the stack in that overall architecture.
Speaker 2:Where do you what categories do you think the winners are decided, and then what categories do you think are still up for grabs? We had a lot Gil on. He was saying, if I I'll probably botch it, but something along the lines of, like, in the medical scribe space, there's enough heavily funded players that have real traction. You probably don't wanna start the next one that's maybe four or five years behind. But how how do you view where the biggest opportunities are, and then what categories you think, hey.
Speaker 2:Maybe maybe look out
Speaker 1:There's already a power lock company, basically.
Speaker 6:But if I take a step back and say, we will we're gonna do a product centric transformation of the sector, not a business model centric one, you would say, at the end of the day, our delivery organizations provide the product, which is we take care of people's health. And and so there, when somebody engages with our health system, broader health system, not just a hospital, patient engagement, physician tools, which is where the scribing solution that Elad mentioned fits, You think about payments. You think about AI workforce. If you think about sort of diagnostics using AI, huge amount of progress in all those areas. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And then and then you say, you know, what's what's missing? What's missing still is the the interplay of the peer provider relationship. That still serve as a place where there's not a lot of trust. Payers think providers bill too much. Providers think peers do pay too little.
Speaker 6:So it's just like army of solutions in the middle of them to create their arbitrage. I think we need to do something about that. And then there's one other thing where there is a new movement, which is around longevity. Look at Brian Johnson's work, that there's cultural movement happening around that. And you look at the work that Roe is doing with GLP ones Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:Which is the beginning of that longevity move. These are real phenomenon. Yeah. And and I think that's a place where there's ton more that that needs to be done so that the system moves towards incentives that keep us healthy and out of the hospital versus a high performance but really expensive unaffordable care if we go into the hospital, which is
Speaker 2:what How do you think of the interplay between the longevity movement and the traditional health ecosystem? In my own life as somebody who discovered biohacking maybe a decade ago and just started reading online, I would always just try to solve problems myself and then, you know, hopefully, you know, at at some point or another, you're like, oh, I actually should probably go to the hospital now. Mhmm. And so it's kind of a harsh transition and maybe it doesn't need to be that way.
Speaker 6:It it's it's it's very different. One's focused on staying healthy. They're focused on fixing your health when it's broken. Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 6:So they literally are, like, two different mindsets, and the reality is that all of our incentive structures are about you going to the hospital.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Hospitals want heads and beds. That's how they they thrive. Right? They actually wanna see revenue. Consumer wants to not ever go to the hospital.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So we need to kinda rearchitect the system in a way that we we we solve for this cognitive dissonance. It's all about incentives.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there some, incentive shift from I mean, a lot of, like there there's some general meme about, like, when private equity buys a hospital, like, quality of care goes down. And I'm wondering if there's, like, bringing a venture mindset, a growth mindset, a turn like, a growth instead of, like, cut cost mindset could actually, like, improve those incentives? Like, how are you grappling with with that trade off?
Speaker 6:As you may know, we just bought a health system. Yeah. It's in Akron, Ohio. It's it's actually got a, you you know, it's the largest employer in Akron. It's it's big hospital system and has an insurance company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And what we're trying to show is, like, if you could close your eyes and you said, what is the one thing that if it could exist, we'll solve a lot of this, that longevity solutions or investment in our health is reimbursable. Okay. It's not today. There's there's no model that'll show us the ROI on this where insurance companies just pay for it. Insurance companies don't pay for reimbursement.
Speaker 6:So the cultural movement around longevity
Speaker 5:And the reason
Speaker 2:just just to I, I'm an investor in function health. And from my understanding of that market, like, providers are not so inclined to pay for something like function because people switch insurance all the time. So they're like, I don't care that you're gonna be healthier maybe in, like, thirty years. Like, I took
Speaker 6:the sentence out of my mouth. That's exactly what I was gonna say because the the insurers don't know. They make an investment in longevity, they're gonna be able to capture the value on the other
Speaker 1:side of
Speaker 2:So it's just like lighting money on fire for them potentially.
Speaker 6:Exactly. So that's the misalignment I'm talking about. So the question is how do you really change a system where the ROI on on, longevity is understood and financeable? We we need to do that, you know, as a system.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When you, this may be a totally stupid question, but when you see some of these data center build outs, do you ever get inspired to try to not just buy a hospital system but just create something, you know, your own mega project? Is there even any potential ROI in, like, building something from the ground up?
Speaker 6:It's a great question. And we're actually doing that with a company in India.
Speaker 1:No way. Cool.
Speaker 6:And I think there's a leapfrog opportunity in some emerging market. We wanna show the model there. And the other place where I'm very focused on this is, you know, we have a large amount of capital that's allocated for rural health system rebuild. The government's allocated about $50,000,000,000 for it. And I think if we went and deployed that money in old school hospitals again, that's gonna be a falling knife that we've created and we'll Yeah.
Speaker 6:We'll burn that money into the ground. And so there's an opportunity to rethink the topology and the architecture, what do we do there? Yeah. Yeah. So so that's the place where I'm also focused.
Speaker 6:In The US, I'm focused on rural health and what do we do about it. We actually built a company called Homeworld Healthcare that's focused on this particular problem sort of post pandemic because all those systems got eviscerated. And then the future hospitals, I just think it's easier to build in some of these high growth emerging economies to show the models, then we'll bring that here. So it's a long game. It's gonna be in the next twenty years.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A couple weeks ago
Speaker 6:That's why I need longevity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:A couple weeks ago, you were going, sort of viral for some comments about triple triple double double double start up growth rates. Can you kind of
Speaker 2:I don't know why people people get so triggered by growth rates.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any any anytime you try and quantify what success looks like, you know, you you you you you're stepping in the It's like the bees nest a
Speaker 2:little bit. Counterexample that proves you're categorically false.
Speaker 1:But but, but maybe walk me through, like, what you're seeing in venture. Are growth rates really faster than ever before?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What was, like, the missing context?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Give us more context around
Speaker 6:those comments. And I never go viral, by the way, because I like my my boring systems content that nobody
Speaker 1:cares not boring. I love this. This is not We're gonna we're gonna get 10,000,000 views on this. We're gonna turn this into a TikTok.
Speaker 6:We're gonna Okay. There we go. Let me say something crazy then. Yeah. Actually, the last time I went viral was when I was working on saving Silicon Valley Bank.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's right.
Speaker 6:Picked So out what was gonna happen. Yeah. It takes three, four years for me to create another viral moment.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 6:Look, I would I would say it was a very innocent empirical comment.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Because I just look at how fast the companies are getting built. And they are getting built a lot faster. Mhmm. Durability is a is a separate question
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Because we'll see which of these can then transition into durability or not. But as far as growth goes, it makes all the sense. If AI is truly an accelerant
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 6:You know, and you've seen we've done significant amount of work. I think the deepest amount of work around these AI roll ups, we have 10 companies we're building there. We can actually acquire these, service businesses and transform them with AI, almost treat those acquisitions as customer acquisition, and apply AI. So you're just you just have all these different ways
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:To accelerate growth and take share in this AI world that is happening. Mhmm. So so when when somebody comes and says we're gonna go from one to three to nine, and we're routinely seeing companies that are, you know, one to 15 to 20 to something fairly large
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Which by the way, there were very few companies that did that in the last iteration. You know, Samsara was one of those that I was part of that sort of grew that way, but there were very few. When you see that routinely I mean, I I had actually just gone to our team saying, guys, let's recalibrate. You have to change the terminology on what best in class is because we wanna we wanna be if we're gonna do when we do seed, we wanna back every amazing founder. When we do growth, we wanna be the best in class growth companies.
Speaker 6:That's our business. And, it it's it's just very clear that the bar has shifted.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, I wanna I wanna dive deeper on some nuance there. We have this, like, kind of coinage that we're trying to get to go viral, maybe it'll work one day, of, like, the barnacle economy, the idea that if I started a company that is, I just clean toilets, but I get Anthropic as a client, and they're 10 x ing their number of office space and their revenues and everything. My business is gonna be 10 x ing, but I don't really have a venture scale business because I'm not building in a monopolistic category or building any durable technology or any intellectual property. I just happen to have my hero client is growing so fast that I am also growing fast.
Speaker 1:And so there's companies that have kind of bolted onto the the new hyperscalers, the foundation model companies that are growing so fast, they're growing really fast. At the same time, there's other companies that are operating in legacy industries that are also growing fast, but there's always the risk of durability and pilots. So where does where do you start? Are you more worried or more digging in on a company that's overly indexed on a foundation model company's growth or or more risky to, oh, yes. They're getting Fortune 500 pilots in this one niche like the oil and gas industry, but it might not be sticky because that big company moves slowly.
Speaker 1:And even though they're ramping up revenues, we don't know if they're gonna stick around in ten years.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So I think I think, let's just actually split those parts. It's a it's a great question and something that we take a step back on everything that's coming in in the applied AI layer and, like, looking at it with the lens. Yeah. If you have a company bringing in the foundation model cap capabilities into an enterprise Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Which I think tends to be the most durable relationships that are on the big enterprise side, we are looking for, are you going in, and are you learning how to expand your relationship with those customers? Mhmm. So before what used to happen was you would build this, like, MVP, you get product market fit, and then you figure out how to create repeatability to go do that over and over again. In the AI world and so there, what the the the advantage is, great product design and precision. In the AI world, you get into a customer, you do forward deployed engineering, let's think about big enterprises, and you build trust with them, and then you figure out how to do more for them.
Speaker 6:All the ones that are scaling really, really fast, that's what they're doing very effectively. So if you're building that kind of a deeper and deeper relationship with customers that are gonna be around for a long time, that's durable. We like that. We we're looking for a lot of that, and those companies are not growing triple, triple, double, double. They're growing way faster
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know, in different verticals. I mean, that that's just the reality of it because, like, you know, we we we're meeting a lot of these. On the other side, I think the the companies that are creating wrappers on top of these models, many of them are not durable. If you remember when chat g p d three happened, you had a bunch of companies that got created and they disappeared. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So every time there's new modalities and capabilities, some stuff happens and a lot of that doesn't exist. But there are some companies getting built there that are cultural movements.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And they are gonna redefine human interaction with technology and software, and I think those are quite interesting. And they will they may look like lightweight products, but they're going to be durable long term. Mhmm. And then there's a bunch that's gonna disappear. And that's that's that's the way I sort of think about it because a bunch is just gonna get absorbed into the models.
Speaker 6:But the ones that are focused on rethinking design and rethinking the human relationship, they will have durability on top of these models. Yeah. Peak ambiguity. That's what I always say. It's, like, hard to figure out what's what right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You you've you've made a bunch of, I don't know. You call them, like, American dynamism type investments, but, I'm wondering if you could rank a few other international markets that are interesting or underrated. You mentioned, doing some work in India.
Speaker 1:Are there any other countries that you think where there might be pockets of opportunity for your business over the next decade
Speaker 6:or We we we do two thirds in The US. Yeah. Probably about 25% in Europe and 10% in India. And I'll actually say I used to say this couple years ago, The US is gonna be the consensus market. Europe is a contrarian market, and India is a FOMO market.
Speaker 6:Because we've the high growth. Yeah. And that we need to be in all of these and Sure. And be intentional about what it takes to create value. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I think Europe is super interesting. There's, like, so much talent. There there's people are waking up that they need to innovate. We can take the classic view of, you know, there's not intensity, but we're just seeing pockets of, like, interesting collaboration. We're actually catalyzing a lot of it.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Our European team is doing a lot of that. And then our and in India, we're just looking at saying, what is The US India sort of collaboration gonna look like? Because there's lot of complexity there. And then what is required for building societal systems inside of India in education, in defense, you know, in health care that we can help build because we've learned the points from here and probably mostly learned what not to do Yeah.
Speaker 6:Because of the, like, the health care business models, and we can help them think about it from first principles Yeah. So we can be good partners there. And so the way that works out is, as I said, we're building hospitals in India. We're transforming health care. We're innovating in India.
Speaker 6:We're transforming in The US. Yeah. We've built a defense prime. We're, you know, working with defense primes in all the markets. We've got Anuril here.
Speaker 6:We've got Helsink in Europe. We've got Rafi in India. Because you need to create, you know, our phrase that we use is global resilience, and and and abundance. And so each of these markets and key industries wants to be resilient, and there's founders there working on great stuff. We wanna help them be successful with that, and that's that's the way we've approached it.
Speaker 2:Jordan? What what's your primary inspiration for the firm?
Speaker 6:Why? Look. I think I
Speaker 2:And I would give you I'd give I mean, the classic example is, like, CAA and a 16 z. Is there is there an equivalent for you, or do you pull from a variety of solutions?
Speaker 6:My my longest standing LP relationship was with Andy Golden, who used to run the Princeton Endowment, who's who's retired last year. And I used to always look at, hey. We wanna be one of the elite when this was when I was in Boston. We wanna be one of the elite venture firms, which I don't even consider us purely venture capital even though seed is our core. And he would always say run your own race, and that really stuck with me.
Speaker 6:So I try not to focus on mimicking what others are doing. They're like there there's so many smart people, so many creative people here doing interesting things. We gotta do our own we're we're gonna be on our own journey. My main the the thing I would say, though, is I do wanna transform industry systems, not just sort of we'd be sort of serendipitous venture capital investor in companies. And so everything we do, all the the stuff people look at us doing, is all created to build a moat for the founders so they can just be more successful and become bigger.
Speaker 6:Because if they get bigger, then we have the opportunity to transform the industries. If all those companies I mentioned in health care can actually be a $100,000,000,000 companies, many of them we started, then we have the license to actually help rethink the system.
Speaker 2:How think about how do you think about risk, across the platform between early and and some of these, you know, really scaled up investments? We are enjoying a clip from, Roloff earlier this week calling venture it's a return free risk, he called it. But he was just kind of putting all of all of venture more or less in a single bucket. And there were some comments as well on people saying that, hey, it's actually like it's a big difference between, you know, the the the $100,000,000, $500,000,000 checks that are going into companies at a later stage in in pure venture and it's
Speaker 1:Private equity and venture closing was the comment. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Look, I I I think if you wanna do really transform transformative stuff, gotta take risk.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:So if we're not taking no. You don't wanna take stupid risk, but I think I think you wanna be smart about how you you invest across different stages of risk. But, like, you gotta take risk, and and and you have to have a a vision. And this is some of the stuff I talked about in the book, which is incrementally improving these systems is not gonna get us there. I think we're sort of at a interesting place in society where AI is so disruptive.
Speaker 6:So we gotta build new systems. And in order to go from deep incumbency to new systems at scale, you have to bring the incumbents along and partner with them and also invest in their success and do things that are just radically different from how we're used to building serendipitous companies and sort of classic venture. So I do think you have to take a of risk. Like, I I I thrive on risk. You know, failures don't bother me as long as we're well intentioned.
Speaker 6:We're doing the right things. I I want us to do that. And, you know, otherwise, I I'll tell you, like, venture is is the LPs will say it's becoming more of a beta because everybody can get into it. These companies raise a lot of money. So if if this is gonna become the way the system is behaving now and we don't take on working on large problems, which for me, a lot of them equate to transformations and and sort of thinking more more systemically, then then, you know, with the illiquidity premium, are the investors excited about the return this this asset class is gonna generate?
Speaker 6:I think there's a conversation about that as well in the way things are, today.
Speaker 1:I like asking all authors that come on the show about their favorite books. I'd also be interested to know if there's any books that inspire you in how you think about building the firm. Are you more of like a House of Morgan guy or a Steve Jobs biography guy? Are there any books from, you know, through the history of business that have remained on your bedside maybe for several years?
Speaker 6:I mean, I I I focus on individuals that have been inspiring to me and really understanding those as a way to look at the journey. And, actually, Ken Chenault is my chairman. He asked me once, remodeling yourself after? It's like another way to the same question you asked earlier. And I was like, well, look.
Speaker 6:There are three people that really, really inspire me. One is, you know, if you look at Elon's work, the problems he takes on and the way he executes them, it's like, you know, it just makes me feel like the bar is so high in terms of what's doable. It's like, it's inspiring. Like, we wanna all we should all be learning from the way he builds.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 6:know? And and and and the and the the problems he chooses to work on and the passion with which he operates. So as a builder, that's very inspiring to me. Yeah. As an investor, I'm a fan of Warren Buffett.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. He thinks seventy five hundred year horizons. And so the, you know, the best hold period is forever Yeah. Is the way they think, and that that's the way we wanna think. You know?
Speaker 6:We invested in Stripe in 2010 when it was when it's just a couple of them, and then, you know, we've invested 14 times since then. Right? And and then I really think that's a relationship that can be a thirty, forty year relationship. You know, those guys are gonna do lots of interesting stuff, and I I I want us to be sort of bootstrapped to their journey as we think about our journey. And then I would say from a leadership perspective, which is also important, I really respect Ken who, you know, obviously is our chairman, is is a lead director at Berkshire Hathaway on the board of Airbnb, and he instills this whole servant mindset.
Speaker 6:And that's just the way I think you wanna treat each other in your own company towards your founders, which is really an important stakeholder person and and society at large. And are we building with that kind of a mindset? And, you know, and then what do I wanna prove with all this? I think to your your piercing question before, like, the inspiration to me is, can we take this philosophy and build the world's biggest companies? Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Can we actually do that? Because because, you know, that is gonna be required as we think about really transforming with AI. AI is gonna be all about transformations, and can we go accomplish that?
Speaker 2:What's your guidance to partners at the firm around media? Because there are certain venture firms that their guidance is broadly get as much attention as you possibly can. However, whatever whatever it takes. But that very much does not seem to be your approach. And I'm curious.
Speaker 6:I I I so I'm gonna give you a two part answer to this. One is if we think about transforming industries, you need four levers. You actually need to have, you know, the capital, the innovation, the policy, but then you do need to create a cultural movement. Yeah. And so media is a really important part of winning hearts and minds towards what you want the world to look like, and I think in that sense, it's very important.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. But it's got sort of a purpose towards it and, you know, it's sort of inspiring how you guys have quickly come up to stage. You know, I think you can you can actually intentionally say, here's the influence we wanna have on this ecosystem, and you can drive towards
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Because because you've got a a a platform, and I'm sure you guys think that way. Right?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:The I wanna be famous so I
Speaker 1:get
Speaker 6:noticed for the sake of being famous, and that's gonna give me deal flow. My observation is that you have to become more and more fringe Mhmm. To actually be noticed, and it actually starts taking an impact on you as a human being. I'm seeing that with a lot of people that play this
Speaker 9:game. Yep.
Speaker 6:And and is that is that gonna allow you to do your best work if you're fundamentally changing in response to how to be successful in your sort of media metrics? Yep. And so if you if you're the person kind of person who can say creative things but stay grounded in your core, then maybe it's for you. But if it's gonna change your core, then then you might have gotten the followers, but you may not have the substance to do Yeah. What at what cost?
Speaker 6:Big thing that I see, as a failure mode for a lot of people that go on that path.
Speaker 1:What do you look for in young people that join General Catalyst where you're hoping that they'll be with the firm for decades, eventually become partner, have a huge impact on the firm? What are you looking for at the young at the young phase?
Speaker 6:Look. I think a true sense of purpose because that's what drives conviction.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You know? And and I would say a lot of people get in this industry because they think they can make a lot of money or they think
Speaker 1:it's Prestigious.
Speaker 6:You know, it gives you power and prestige. There's a lot of that. If you look at the people that have done really well, they didn't grow up. I mean, to literally think about any of them, they just didn't that's they ended up here. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I came to GC for four months because I felt like I built a shitty company. This was in in 02/2002, and I wanna do it again. I was 26. Yeah. And I mean, know, and and so everyone that has done really well not saying I've done well, but, like, I just I studied those people, and they just had unique trajectories to to get here, not a they chose venture as a career.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And so so that purposeful sort of journey and wanting to do something substantive, which then gives you courage and conviction, which is the essence. You gotta have that to be a good investor. I just can't senses work.
Speaker 1:What is AUM now?
Speaker 6:Somewhere in the forties. Too small.
Speaker 1:40 what? Too small. 40 what?
Speaker 2:40,000,000,000. I think I think 400. 400 soon. Congratulations on all
Speaker 1:the success. I think you've been fantastically successful. And thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I we I wish we had more time. I have a I have a lot more questions. Time you come on, I'd love to get, an update on the on the customer value strategy. We didn't we didn't get to Yes.
Speaker 6:That is transformative. That's a big part of how we're thinking about the proposition being changing for companies and how to serve them. We'll talk about it another time. Amazing.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me. To have you back. We'll talk
Speaker 2:to you soon. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Bye. Let me tell you about numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. It's sales tax AGI. And our next guest is in the Restream rating room.
Speaker 1:Rob Pace from Radical Ventures.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Coming in to the studio. How are you doing, Rob? Radical. Hey,
Speaker 5:guys. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Welcome back.
Speaker 1:What's, I wanna go through BCI. I wanna go through latest Forbes piece. What I mean, I feel like you've spent, what, years at this point writing about AI. Are you just over AI? Is AI done and you're just bored of that?
Speaker 9:And you gotta move on?
Speaker 1:You gotta pivot? If you're in AI, pivot to BCI. What's going on?
Speaker 5:I yeah. There there is definitely a lot of a lot of noise in the world of AI right now. I I think BCI and AI are actually closely related. Sure. And BCI will be kind of one of the next really important foundational technologies that impacts how AI gets rolled out.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. But I do think a a big part of our jobs as VCs is to kind of think about opportunities and technologies that are not yet obvious and mainstream. And I think ECI falls into that category in the sense that it's not ready for prime time yet, but I think it's getting closer. And and I do think it will have a really big impact on how basically human intelligence and artificial intelligence fit together.
Speaker 1:The Merge. The Merge. It feels like one of those technologies that's always ten years away like fusion. But take me through the history. When does this whole story start?
Speaker 1:There's the Utah array. I wanna know about that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Totally. So BCI is not not a new technology. It's something that's been around in research context for decades. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:The very first BCI was actually, in a human was demonstrated in the seventies, in the early seventies. Researchers at UCLA, basically using EEG, which is noninvasive technology, were able to get patients to be able to control a cursor on a computer screen just with their thoughts.
Speaker 1:That's kinda like what we're seeing from Neuralink. Right? It's, like, not that far off, but it's been fifty five years now. So super interested, like, what happened in the intervening years.
Speaker 5:Yep. Yeah. Exactly. So that so that was, like, a very basic unreliable prototype. It was kind of concept.
Speaker 5:The first invasive BCI and and maybe just as a quick, like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Quick definition there between invasive and noninvasive. These are kind of the two main categories of BCI technology. Invasive technology requires surgery. It involves putting electronics, like, inside your skull directly on or in your brain. And so Neuralink is an example of an an invasive BCI company where that, you know, you have to cut open your skull doing using a surgery called a craniotomy and put the chip inside.
Speaker 5:Noninvasive technology does not require surgery. It's just sensors that you can put outside your head, you know, that could be embedded in, like, a consumer device like headphones or a hat or something like that. So the trade off between invasive and noninvasive BCI really does boil down to a trade off between, like, accessibility on the one hand and ease of use versus signal quality and, like, how high fidelity of signal you can get from the brain. Mhmm. So the the Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and it and it's a lot about, like, value. Right? Like, if you if you have a disability and you cannot use a computer and you and somebody says, can give you the surgery and you're gonna be able to interact with the computer, that's a great trade. Whereas if you say that to me right now, I'm gonna say
Speaker 1:No thanks. I'll wait, you know. I'll use the mouse keyboard actually.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'll be fine. I'll stick to the mouse keyboard. Yeah. So Okay.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think my
Speaker 2:my big question is like at at what point is is the invasive approach, like, so tried and true Yeah. Everyday people.
Speaker 1:So so in in the nineteen seventies, it was it was noninvasive. When did the first invasive stuff start happening? Because Neuralink, you, like, popularized it but didn't invent it. Right?
Speaker 5:Exactly. Yeah. So invasive BCI the first invasive BCI was implanted in a human in the nineteen nineties. And it was this device called the Utah array that that you referenced, John. And, honestly, I would encourage people listening to, like, go to Google Images and look up Utah, right, just to see a picture of it.
Speaker 5:Like, it it looks like a medieval torture device.
Speaker 9:It does. It's so scary.
Speaker 5:It's it's literally like a bed of needles, and you literally you, like, cut open the skull and you just jam the set of needles into the brain. And so it it it the the Utah rate, to be clear, was,
Speaker 1:like, a
Speaker 5:really important breakthrough in the history of BCI. It was the state of the art for a long time, and it it made it possible to do things like go from thought to text and, like, you know, I understand people's people's thoughts directly, but brain damage, basically. Like, if you're if you're jamming these needles into your brain in order to record from some neurons, you're also killing a bunch of other neurons. And so that was that's the reason why the the Utah rate never really, like, took off from a commercial perspective. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:But it did lay the groundwork for subsequent generations of invasive BCI, including Neuralink, which obviously is the the most basic famous invasive BCI company.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, now, was Elon the first person to really take BCI seriously? Because it feels like there's a proper market map, and you have Sam's working on stuff, Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, and then Elon's working on stuff, and then Nudge also exists. There's, like, a there's, like, a number of, like, basically, like, billionaire founders that are all making serious bets. Are all of them is this one is this, like, an Andoroll type story where, like, you need a billionaire who's just gonna sink a bunch of money into this, or are there any companies that have, like, actually just gone from ground up in the traditional fashion of, like, they raised a seed round and then series a?
Speaker 1:Like, it just feels like a very different path. So, like, maybe take me through the market map of what's happening right now.
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. It it definitely, like, started as from a startup perspective as a category where, like, there there was largely funded by billionaires. Like, Elon had Neuralink. Brian Johnson had a BCI company called Colonel.
Speaker 5:He poured a ton of money into.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you do you remember, like, what that actual was that invasive, noninvasive? Like, what the plan was there?
Speaker 5:He he explored both. It ended up being noninvasive. Mhmm. And they developed, like, a new modality of sensing noninvasively, which is actually pretty cool. You, like, shoot sensors through your skull like, shoot lasers through your skull to, like, detect the blood flow in your, in your brain, which is, like, is still used today.
Speaker 5:And the company's still going. But but yeah. I I mean, it's worth noting. Neuralink is, like, definitely the most well known DCI company, but it wasn't the first. Like, there were startups before Neuralink.
Speaker 5:There's one called Synchron out of Australia. There's one called Paradromix, which did kind of follow that more typical path that you described of, like, Razor seed, Razor series a.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And certainly in the past few years, there there's been an explosion of them. So so now there are a ton of BCI companies, both invasive and noninvasive.
Speaker 1:What are the, it it feels like Neuralinks had a very, like, kind of, like, barbell strategy where they're where they'll tell, like, a sci fi story about, like, you will be able to fully, like, communicate with AI and merge and whatnot. But then there's also, like, this ultra practical, like, if you are a paraplegic, you can use a mouse cursor and click and use a computer. Are there are there other pitches that companies are are offering, in terms of just, like, reading information from the brain or writing information to the brain? Like, how how do the value props, like, stack out right now?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think one of the really interesting differentiators of the different invasive BCI companies is, like, what's the end use case that they're going for.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And neural what Neuralink has been focused on to date is computer use. So, like, all the demos you see of Neuralink patients like Nolan Arbaugh, the first patient, is using a computer, like Yeah. Which basically comes down to, like, mostly controlling a cursor and and potentially keyboard. And there's obviously a ton you can do if you can control a computer, so that's, like, a very valuable use case. But a, like, a harder, more advanced use case, which, like, I kind of think of as the holy grail for these are one of the holy grails for BCI is decoding language.
Speaker 5:Like, basically, being able to instantaneously understand words from a person's brain and, like, write them or send them via text or email, like, that basically that basically is telepathy, more or less, especially if you then, like, convert it to another person's BCI, like, so it goes directly from brain to brain. And so that is a more ambitious target, which there are startups that are going after. To this point, at least publicly, Neuralink hasn't published anything related to language decoding. Of course, it's something they're thinking about, I'm sure. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But and but that I think that's one really interesting use case. And then another one is being able to control objects, like, whether it's controlling a robotic arm or, like, controlling any sort of object in the real world, which, again, it basically is telekinesis. And, like, these terms sound really, like, you know, fantastical and paranormal, but, like, that is essentially what the the capability that that will enable, which is cool to think about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are the noninvasive BCI companies ever targeting, like, a higher level of abstraction? Like, look. We're we're not gonna be able to reliably get an x and y coordinate for a mouse, but we can tell you that you're stressed out, or we can tell you that you're overly tired, or we're telling you that you're dehydrated in your brain or something like that. Something that's more abstract, but still, something that a consumer could actually adopt, wear a hat.
Speaker 1:They're not gonna go into surgery for it, but more of like a biohacker use case.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That that's exactly right. And those use cases have already been pretty well proven. Like, there are actually noninvasive BCI products on the market today that, like, can, you know, detect if you're stressed or if you're if you need to sleep more or, you know, if you need to focus better, those sorts of things. I think the the really big question, like, in my opinion, the single most interesting strategic question in the field of BCI right now is, like, the conventional wisdom has been that invasive BCI is necessary for the most sophisticated use cases like language that we're talking about because you just need to get that high fidelity data.
Speaker 5:But noninvasive approaches have been getting better and better very quickly, in part because noninvasive sensors have been getting better, but much more so because the underlying AI is just getting a lot more powerful, which lets you extract a lot more signal from the same noise.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:And so, honestly, no one really knows, like, where the performance ceiling will be for noninvasive BCI. Mhmm. There are there are companies out there today that whose vision is to, like, build a thought to text language decoding technology platform just using noninvasive sensors that you can just put on your head. It's not yet proven if that will work or not, but, like, there are definitely people aiming for it. And and honestly, think no one no one can say for certain that it won't work.
Speaker 5:I think, like, they're all kind of pursuing the scaling law strategy of, like, we saw with language models, collect more and more and more data, build bigger and bigger models, and, like, they'll get better and better. And so far, like, no one no one yet in the world has collected, like, a mass a truly massive dataset of brain data paired with language data. So, like, who's to say whether, you know, what what might be possible if you really try to scale this stuff?
Speaker 2:Yeah. How how do you how do you invest in this category right now?
Speaker 1:Do make money off of this?
Speaker 2:How we make money off? Money off. So but the the probably my personal default would just be to try to pick up some Neuralink secondary
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And just ride with them because it feels it still feels like we're early. And if you just fund a bunch of alt Neuralinks, I I think that that might be kind of a tough tough game, but how do you think about it?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Neuralink is definitely the, like, the most well known, the most well funded. Obviously, it's Elon Musk and it has, you know, everything that that comes with it in terms of being an Elon company. It is also I mean, just thinking tactically from an investment perspective, it's also extremely highly valued today. Their most recent round is at $10,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:There are a handful of very credible Neuralink competitors, including a couple It of undervalued. Could
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do do do we have any No.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm just messing around.
Speaker 1:But mean, we have any idea on market size for these things? How do people even underwrite these types of deals? Are they building up to, like, the number of paraplegics that need, you know, the the the FDA approved surgery for that indication, or is it more of like a consumer, like TAM? How do people think about that?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think you basically have to think about it in two phases. The first phase is the medical phase. The second phase the, like, consumer slash humans merge with AI in the singularity phase. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And the I think the TAM math is a lot more concrete for the medical phase.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 5:And just in the medical phase, it is a massive TAM. If you look at, like, basically, if you just take everyone in the world that's paralyzed, that's, like, tens of millions of people, and you can break it down by different causes, ALS, spinal cord injury, etcetera. You know, many, many millions of people. And the industry is kind of circling around this price point of 150 k per implants with the expectation that insurance will cover it. Like, it's not it it will be something that, a lot of people will have access to because they won't have to pay out of pocket.
Speaker 5:So if you just do the numbers on that, it's you know, it can be a many many tens of billions of dollars market. Yep. But I do think that, like, the really big vision, the big prize that ever you know, that all that is gets people like Elon Musk and Brian Johnson excited is the longer term vision of this being, a consumer product for a more generalized population that lets anyone, like, seamlessly merge with digital intelligences and artificial intelligences and so forth. And, you know, if you if you think that eventually, DSaaS will be as widespread as iPhones or something, then obviously, you know, you can you can talk yourself into a huge TAM.
Speaker 2:Imagine not having to open the SOAR app, but just having the SOAR implant. And so you're just sitting there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just at the trough. It'd be amazing. Are you tracking any of, like, the intermediate steps? Like, there was that, company that launched a demo that it seemed like it would, put something on, like, your jawbone, and it would Yep.
Speaker 1:Be able to hear what you were whispering. Yeah. We tried the Meta Ray Ban displays, and those were able to pick up on a very low audio signal. You could kinda whisper, and it would still be able to interpret it with AI into translation. Like, is that is that actually, a critical path in the tech tree, or is that kind of just a side side note?
Speaker 1:Or do you think that that that whole tech wave will be, like, a big, precursor?
Speaker 5:Yeah. There's there are a lot of different opinions on this. So what you're describing people often use the term silent speech Yeah. To describe the category, which is exactly as you said, like, have a sensor somewhere, you know, outside your your skull. It can be, like, as part of a headphone or, a a hat or something Mhmm.
Speaker 5:That can detect the words that you're saying if you just kind of, like, barely whisper them or even even if it's subaudible, if you're just kinda, like, barely moving your lips and moving your tongue.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And the idea is, it lets you use all, like, all the value and possibilities of voice applications, but without having to make noise. Mhmm. And so, like, when you're in public, for instance, walking on the street or on a bus or something, that, like, that can be a lot more useful than, you know, you probably don't wanna speak out loud to your phone.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I think you to your question of, like, is this just, an intermediate, like, branch of the tech tree or not? I I think it really depends like, bullishness around silent speech, I think, really depends on how soon you think these true BCI will be ready for prime time because, silent speech isn't recording brain data directly. It's recording, like, downstream muscle data. And so if you can actually decode what's coming straight from the brain in an accurate way, you can kinda just leapfrog silent speech. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But if you think that there are real limits to what's possible non invasively with BCI, then silent speech might be like a more practicable path. And you mentioned this company Alter Ego out of MIT recently, had this really buzzy launch video that, like, they frame it as basically telepathy, which is a little misleading because it's not actually reading brain data. It's, like, guy is, like, mouthing something, and and kind of moving his tongue. But, yeah, that is another maybe, like, more achievable near term version of this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Chris in the chat asked, what about Chinese infantry using BCI to reduce PTSD and increase reaction time? Do you know anything about that?
Speaker 5:I I haven't heard about that specifically, but there's, yeah, there's there's no doubt in my mind. I mean, the the the CCP and Chinese, startup ecosystem are investing a lot in DCI. In in The US also, like, one of the big use cases in general, one of the big use cases is, like, treating neuropsychiatric diseases. So if you can, like, precisely modulate brain activity, you can address a lot of, health conditions like PTSD, but also, like, OCD, depression, Parkinson's, etcetera.
Speaker 1:It's basically a lobotomy that works. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is, like, kinda crazy to think about. Like, our lobotomies, was that, like, somewhat on the right path? It's a very hot take, nuclear take potentially.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, to to be clear, like, these forms of neuromodulation, like, you're not actually taking any of the brain out the way you do with lobotomy. But, yeah, lobotomies are just, like, were very crude attempts to, like, modulate the brain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Try and turn off certain regions of the brain. And if you can do that with some sort of electrical frequency or or neuromodulation, like you're in the same realm, which is, people want a lot of FDA trials before they run that. But I don't know. Maybe over in the Chinese infantry, they're they're they're having
Speaker 2:They'll do it live.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is is there anything else that's going on in the BCI industry that we didn't cover that, like, where all this goes next? Are we like, it's certainly not a trend. I guess the big the big question for me is, like, how do you apply the lens of what we're seeing in AI to the BCI world, especially with regard to the fact that we might at some point be on a scaling, like, on a scaling curve? And we've kind of seen this with like, Tesla's now doing, like, large scale training runs for self driving technology.
Speaker 1:Google just did the sell to sentence project on the Gemma three models, and you can see that they're starting to scale that up, but they're not at, like, we need to build a one gigawatt cluster cluster for AI and bio. And I doubt that any of the BCI companies are like, we need a one gigawatt, data center to do our train because they don't even have the data yet. So it feels like we're still really early, but is that the right lens to be to be tracking this through? Should we just be looking at, like, how much electricity is gonna be going into the training run and then we'll know that it's actually working?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I do think, like, you often hear people comment how they're like, we keep discovering new data modalities. Like, there there are more and more modalities than people realize. Like, there's language and image and audio and video, but, like, biology isn't there's a lot of modalities there and robotics and so forth. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:I do think neural data, brain data is a new modality that we're just right at the very beginning phases of starting to research into. And so there there really haven't been any large scale efforts to bid to build foundation models for brains as you're describing. I do think that that's inevitable. But I also feel like I think it's I think this stuff is really relevant for the trends we're seeing in AI because I do think this is the inevitable next way in which humans interface with AIs. And you can imagine, like, basically having a BCI that is connected to, you know, whatever the latest AI model is where rather than having to pull out your phone and, like, type a question in the ChatGPT, you can just, you know, think something and the answer will surface in your mind.
Speaker 5:Or if you're, like, brainstorming in your own head, you'll have, a thought partner there that's brainstorming with you. You know, you'll be able to instantly communicate with others. Like, they're once you start kind of playing out the possibilities of what could happen if there are BCIs at scale, it it does really change the way humans, like, interact with information, basically.
Speaker 1:Sure. Elias or Yudakowsky loves this. It's fantastic. It is exciting though. And I appreciate you coming on the show and
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thanks for breaking it down.
Speaker 1:It all down. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thanks, Josh.
Speaker 5:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Bye. Let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on g two. Tyler, are you gonna get a BCI, intern challenge? Get the Utah array installed.
Speaker 1:Can we pull up a picture of the Utah array? Put it in
Speaker 7:the It is very scary looking.
Speaker 1:Seen it? You've seen this thing? It is just straight up spikes in your head. It's, just a few wires. I feel like
Speaker 2:Like most protein powders, it gives you brain damage.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This thing. Yeah. This thing. This feels like just one notch forward from just actually getting a lobotomy, but, it's it's a rough looking device.
Speaker 1:But I guess it actually worked in in some ways. I got some data. But, you know, I've often said that I would be I wouldn't be the first person to go on the rocket to the moon or the or or to Mars, but I'd be, like, number five or 10. As long as the first couple people make it back, I'm good. What about you?
Speaker 1:What number of person do you wanna be? Do you wanna be the the first person with the
Speaker 2:Millionth.
Speaker 1:You wanna be the millionth
Speaker 2:10,000,000.
Speaker 1:Neuralink 100,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Customer?
Speaker 7:I'm I'm probably in the first first 50,000, I
Speaker 2:would say.
Speaker 1:First 50,000?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, there's an interesting thing.
Speaker 2:What?
Speaker 7:Speaking of like tumors, like I I I don't know if it's Elias or himself, a lot people have said like, one possible solution to like the kind of doom snare is that Mhmm. We it's like the merge.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah.
Speaker 7:That would actually be prevent like the, you know, AIs taking over because like We
Speaker 1:become AIs. Yeah. They can't take us over if we're them.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Jordy, what number are you? Do
Speaker 6:you think?
Speaker 1:You're gonna wait 100 or 1,000,000?
Speaker 2:Big. Big Big We're gonna need a bigger Gong for For
Speaker 7:my number.
Speaker 1:For your number? You gonna get up there? I don't know. I mean, I
Speaker 2:I I talked to Nolan from value.
Speaker 1:Merrill Link. He seems like he's having a great time with it. He gave me a good review. I'm down. Wire me up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the value right now from what I've heard.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm I'm I'm pretty I'm pretty quick with the mouse and keyboard right now. So I don't I don't necessarily need the feature that it's offering.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I don't necessarily need you to know my I mean, I I'm sure you can they'd be able to build the right user experiences around this.
Speaker 1:But Yeah.
Speaker 2:My first thought to a question is not necessarily my my best thought. Right? And so if we're prepping the show and we're just having this instant communication, it's just like our worst take going this way and then a bad take against a bad take going back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We would need a lot of translation. So But imagine pop on. Adio with your with your BCI. That could be the future customer relationship magic.
Speaker 1:Adios, the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Can you imagine? So a lot of these companies, they, you know, a common tagline right now is, you know, Adios, the AI native CRM. Imagine when the BCI era. When AI is old news, you don't wanna put that on your landing page.
Speaker 1:BCI is the new hot keyword. So you say, we're the BCI native CRM that builds, scales, and company grows your company to the next level. I'm excited for all the landing pages to update to BCI native. That's what I want. I also want you to get an eight sleep.
Speaker 1:And Jordy, I heard you had a rough night. I think you gotta get a sound effect ready for me because I got a 93. I slept for seven hours and twenty five minutes. Let's go.
Speaker 2:You got a 47, four hours, twenty eight minutes.
Speaker 1:And and dinner last night was in Malibu. I thought you just went right home. But, you know, the rough nights come for us all from time to time.
Speaker 2:Left late.
Speaker 1:Eric Jong says all according to plan. He is highlighting the fact that all of his everyone with the same name
Speaker 2:as him is absolutely correct. Cooking or at Thinking Machines or OpenAI.
Speaker 1:It's a good time to be Eric Zhang. Congrats to you.
Speaker 2:Legends. We we still have to do the Eric Zhang show. Oh,
Speaker 1:and this is Eric Zhang is quote tweeting a different Eric Zhang. I love it. They're going back and forth on the timeline.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We gotta get all of them on the show.
Speaker 1:We do. Eric Zhang guy.
Speaker 2:Same guy.
Speaker 1:Invited. Talk about OpenAI, thinking machines, cooking, and building.
Speaker 2:Tyler, can you can you work on this? This seems like
Speaker 1:Invite them all. We want we want the six the six up, all of them.
Speaker 2:Logan Robinson says, when Walmart jets take off for store visits, no one but the pilot knows where they're going. I wonder if they have them all blindfolded. Rumors rumor is you're only told a few things to help you prep for the trip domestic or international. How many days you'll be gone, climate of the destination.
Speaker 1:What does this mean? What what
Speaker 2:what I imagine like people at corporate going to visit stores and seeing how they're happening. Okay. They wanna show up call ahead and be like, hey, you gotta really
Speaker 1:That
Speaker 2:makes prevent executives that are responsible, I imagine, for, like, certain things within a store to not front run it and be like, hey, make sure things are clean. Yep. Make sure, like everybody shows up on time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. They wanna do a surprise visit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for nearly everyone including store associates, the visit is a complete surprise. Gotta keep them on their toes. When the these store visits happen, the goal is nearly always the same Inspect what you expect. Scheduling these trips in secrecy makes it possible to see the stores as they truly are.
Speaker 2:No fanfare pretending. I was never lucky enough to travel in one of the jets, but the purpose of these trips was not lost on me. In my cleaning business, we do something similar. Anyways, cool concept.
Speaker 1:And beautiful jet. And if you're long Walmart, you're short Walmart, head over to public.com and enjoy multi asset investing and just relating yields, and they're trusted by millions.
Speaker 2:Clyde has been at a conference. Looks like he got a Lucy hat. He did. And a lot of other stuff.
Speaker 1:This is awesome. Wow. And some breakers there too. He got samples. He got
Speaker 2:What conference is this? You got a happy dad hat?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He should start
Speaker 2:a convenience store, corner store that's only powered by a conference. They only
Speaker 1:sell resell. You could really resell a bunch of this. All of these brands should head over to adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 1:Only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficiency in those ad buying across the globe. The other thing that you need to do genuinely, if you are running a CPG company, you will wind up at a lot of conferences like these. You will be talking to convenience store owners, and you'll be talking to distributors. And as much as we like to joke about luxury watches, it is a very important aspect of the job. It really it really does.
Speaker 1:Like, when you're shaking hands with people in this particular industry, tech has been, you know, like, you gotta be an aficionado. You gotta like the craftsmanship of a particular watch. It's a unique choice in tech. But in my experience in consumer packaged goods, when you go to a CPG conference, what's on your wrist actually matters. So if you're building a CPG business, maybe you should head over to getbezel.com because your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch in the planet, seriously any watch.
Speaker 1:No joke. I seriously got, I I became, like, fast friends with, one of our major distributors talking about watches, because he was super into him. Anyway, our next guest is already in the reasering waiting room. We have Nathan from Airstreet Capital coming in to the studio. Nathan, good to see you.
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Welcome. Great.
Speaker 1:I was worried. Wait. Great jacket. It's light where you are. I was worried I was gonna keep you up late because you're usually in Europe.
Speaker 1:Give us a little introduction on yourself and and backstory, and then tell us where you actually are if
Speaker 2:you can. Incredible jacket too. Jackets are a great sign of respect in our culture.
Speaker 1:It is. Nice jacket.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. It's life at the, AI frontier. Yes.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So I founded a firm called Airstream Capital, in Europe. I invest in AI companies at the very early stage.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:I've been doing this for about ten years now.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And spent kinda half my time in The US and in Europe. You.
Speaker 1:And you're in The US Yeah.
Speaker 8:I'm in New York.
Speaker 1:Oh, nice. Very nice. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well On vacation or investing?
Speaker 8:No. I've actually been doing a bit of a state of AI, launch tour, you will.
Speaker 1:So we
Speaker 8:did a meet up in San Francisco last Thursday for the report drop. Yeah. And then I did one in New York last night.
Speaker 1:And what is the state
Speaker 2:of AI? But, yeah. So before we get into that, I have one
Speaker 1:Is AI good?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Question. How how competitive are AI rounds at the early stage like precedes
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I know. I'm sure they're getting more competitive. But I think historically, if you could write a million dollar check at the idea stage, you you you had a
Speaker 1:a position. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in that sense, I think the game has, like, materially changed. Mhmm. There's a bit of a bifurcation, like, have the sort of large lab model companies that are raising, you know, significant amounts of money, and I think those are also potentially good investments, but they they definitely cater to a certain type of venture firm.
Speaker 8:And then you have the other category, which is potentially more pragmatic entrepreneurs going for less of the general purpose AI, but more looking at kinda what use case can they solve with a general purpose AI system. And and those ones are a little bit more modest. But in general, yeah, you've seen, you know, inflation of of round sizes, but also actually interest from customers to buy this stuff. And so founders just wanna take a bigger swing, wanna go faster, and that's what's driven a bit of the bit of the round size increase.
Speaker 1:I feel like a couple years ago, the meme was even if you're a seed stage company, as long as you slapped AI on there, you could justify, like, a $100,000,000 raise because who knows? We might need to train a model. We might be doing some real AI, not just a rapper company here. Has that dissipated as it become clearer that to win in that game, you need hundreds of billions of dollars? And so your, like, your actual cost structure should look a lot less.
Speaker 1:Like, I see GPT four as like a CapEx expense, basically, like a huge training run. And for most AI companies, it's gonna look a lot more like OpEx until they have a customer. They don't really have a big token bill. And so why do they need $50,000,000 at at seed?
Speaker 8:I ask myself this question a lot. At the end of the day, to some degree,
Speaker 6:you know, as an
Speaker 8:investor, you're not the one deciding this. Yeah. You know, the market sort of pumps what they will. Yeah. But I I think the I think the biggest frame change, and you can see this documented in the state of the art report over last eight years that have been doing it, is a lot of the capabilities that you get out of the box of a model today, whether it's, you know, language, reasoning, image, video, biology.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:If you showed that to, you know, me or others ten years ago, we would have probably said this is magic and, like, not possible. Mhmm. And so I think there there is just so much you can do with Yeah. What's available today that it's almost a gift to the startup community that now they don't have to blow, you know, their $3.04, $5,000,000 seed budget on trying to build an AI system, collect the data, and then, you know, throw it over the parapet to a to a putative customer who says, you know what? I don't care.
Speaker 8:I've got other priorities. What is this AI thing? It doesn't even work anyway. Yeah. So now you can run your whole seed budget on product market fit experiments.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:So it's almost like back to kinda OG seed investing, which is less about, you know, what the initial starting idea is, but how capable is the team to just run a lot of experiments and find something that works and then and then, you know, rip it when it does.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what's the headline KPI that you like to center on in a State of AI report? I mean, you can focus on market caps. You can focus on revenue growth. You could even look at, gigawatts and and electrical numbers.
Speaker 1:You could look at number of h 100 equivalents that are being built out. Like, there's so many different ways to ground the shape of the AI build out. Like, what do you like to focus on?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Frankly, I mean, the report is about 300 pages, so the honest answer is all of the things. Yeah. But but so what we started doing a few years ago is this compute index where I basically combed around the Internet to try to find all documented cluster sizes for various companies, and we've been charting just how much of an expansion has happened. There, in the last three years, it's basically probably like a 100 x increase.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:The other cool thing we've done is like mine all open source research papers and programmatically determine which chips are used in those papers.
Speaker 6:Oh. So
Speaker 8:we can give people like a leading edge view for what researchers like in terms of hardware. And so with that, we've shown, I think, the only evidence to this to this I've seen, which is that 90% of AI research papers rely on an NVIDIA chipset.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:And through that kind of work, we've seen, know, AMD start to grow a little bit as well Yeah. Out of nowhere, of course.
Speaker 1:It does seem like NVIDIA or AMD is really picking up this year. We've seen this in cluster max from semi analysis. They kind of did their, I don't know, year of efficiency or in some ways and started squashing bugs. And then there's just immense pressure when there's Yeah. You know, hundreds of billions of dollars going into the next the next phase of the build out that Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, NVIDIA's margins are gonna be in the in the crosshairs for sure.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And strategic alliances with Yeah. With OpenAI that I think is is quite interesting because there's, you know, if you read through the, through the news, you'll see that actually OpenAI has warrants in in in AMD Yeah. At a strike price of 600. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And so there's, like, some interesting incentives there to try to, you know, get AMD stuff to really work. Yeah. In some degree, it's not as similar to, like, the relationship, I suppose, between Anthropic and AWS for Trainium.
Speaker 5:Trainium.
Speaker 8:And and AWS's hardware is clearly behind, you know, the bigger competitors like NVIDIA. And so they get sort of, like, IT help desk support from from Anthropic to make the stuff work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think we're in a bubble?
Speaker 8:There's there's probably local bubbles, you know, all the time. I think in, like, our little, like, ecosystem of of AI, there
Speaker 5:could be
Speaker 8:one in this, like, CapEx Mhmm. You know, build out and all the interconnectingness with various companies. And I think as soon as you see, like, Wall Street Finance get excited about something, you have to think a little bit why they're getting excited.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:But, you know, at the end of the day, I think the outputs of this bubble, if there is one, are really, really productive. Mean, back to the point around, like, this technology is magic. There's there's so much value that's getting created, and we've documented some of this with with our mutual friends at Ramp looking at how much your you know, US companies are spending on AI services, and that's going up. The retention is going up. You know, some of our investments in, like, eleven Labs and Synthesia and others are just, like, growing because it's genuinely useful stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels very different than the What about a what bubble.
Speaker 2:What was your reaction to that Deutsche Bank report on ChatGPT spending growth? I was reading I looked at it and it felt hard to judge because they were looking at summer, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, but how did how did you, process it?
Speaker 8:I mean, yeah, astronomical numbers.
Speaker 1:But I guess the question is, like, is, like, is is the is the TAM for paid AI subscriptions in the consumer or prosumer realm, saturating? And, I mean, we're certainly seeing messaging from OpenAI. This is we wanna do agentic commerce. We wanna increase the monetization of our free users. We wanna get into advertising potentially, affiliate revenue, API business.
Speaker 1:Like, it it doesn't just feel like there's an unlimited pool of people that will pay $200 a month for, you know, a a great product, a magical product, but, there just might not be that many people worldwide that are like, sign me up for the $200 a month plan.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So, I mean, along that notice, I was also interested in this topic. So I surveyed about 200 AI practitioners Mhmm. For the report, and all this data is open access through it. And I was really surprised because 95% of the people who took the survey use AI in their personal life and their professional life.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And it's like 75% of them pay out of their pocket for it.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And 10% of people pay $200 a month or more. Wow. And and, like, this is a pretty, like, you know, educated crowd in North America and in Europe, but I was surprised at those numbers. And then the second thing, to your point around, like, adjunctive commerce, I think that's huge. Like, we have some data in the report that shows that conversion of ecommerce that's derived from kinda agent conversations
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Converts at a higher rate than direct. Mhmm. And so Interesting. You you can imagine that, like, the the brands that sort of jump on this earlier and create content that agents are using to to best learn, like, what the right solution is to serve to their, like, you know, human like, the human that they're serving are actually gonna probably grow their revenues faster. So they're like this recursive cycle, particularly as, you know, more and more labs and companies wanna do this, like, reinforcement learning to improve improve personalization.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So I
Speaker 8:I think there's a lot of, like, adjacencies that one can one can navigate into, actually.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:A week or so ago, the EU announced their $1,100,000,000 plan to ramp up AI in key industries. What was your, obviously, people in the West Coast were mock you know, kinda mocking it, considering that air. You know, the whole the whole plan was less than Same Altman's car, but you know, their, Meta's recent
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Single and
Speaker 2:a single. But, but, yeah, I my my reaction was like that's that's kind of the the takes were funny, but like at least like there is a plan. At least there
Speaker 9:What is the evidence
Speaker 1:of? Right?
Speaker 2:And I I guess like when you read it and reacted to it, guess like, what was your immediate thought on what you wish the EU was doing?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, my reaction wasn't too similar. There's been like a meme kind of bandied around in some of our friend group, which is back to the Derek Zoolander, like, this a house for ants?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Felt like
Speaker 2:a plan for ants?
Speaker 1:But, like, does but, like, like, Europe did not build their own Google, and it was fine. I mean, they
Speaker 6:They tried.
Speaker 1:They they they, like, missed out on it. But, like, the natural state of the market equilibrium was that Google was built in America, and America absorbed the market cap, and European investors could go invest in Google if they wanted to. And Google eventually built data centers to serve Google products locally, but there was never, like, we need a we need our own thing. Is is the thinking around, like, national AI changing? Because I feel like there's a world where even if you're using some, like, locally trained model, like, if you're going to chat.com, like, it's still OpenAI wins.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So there was an initiative. I suppose I'll call it two examples. So there was one in Europe. It was called Quero, which was like a government kind of funded initiative to try to build a a search engine that Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Best represented European interest because allegedly Google wouldn't because it's an American company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And obviously, no one knows about it because that flopped. And then, you know, the second example is the French government not wanting to buy Palantir
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 8:For many, many years as you you guys will know pretty well. And and eventually, they caved in after burning the same amount of money they'd probably have spent on Palantir and got it anyway. Mhmm. And, yeah, the latest example of all this sort of infrastructure build out in The US and in China is now every country wants to be sovereign with regards to AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so here's an interesting And, like Like, is Putin the least AGI pill world leader? Like, I I was trying to get research on how
Speaker 1:Good point.
Speaker 2:His on their clusters over there. They were like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We have 800 GPUs and we're running them hot. And I and so, like, they're basically calling
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The world's bluff on AI.
Speaker 1:It will be fine with others.
Speaker 8:Did say that he actually wanted to have AI supremacy about a year or two ago, but but admittedly, maybe there's less evidence of that. Yeah. I mean, to some degree also, like, you know, Yandex was a pretty amazing Russian search company and then they've since left and relisted on the Nasdaq as Nebius.
Speaker 1:Nebius. Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know, one
Speaker 8:of the clouds is really crushing it because they're they have really good technology. Yeah. But, yeah, I think this the sovereign thing is a little bit of, like, a meme or a misnomer. I mean, I think it's great for the suppliers to the technology because they have yet another, like, TAM to sell to.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But, you know, if you're a non American nation and you buy NVIDIA chips and you buy American technology and, you know, Chinese technology, you just install it in your country. I don't necessarily see how that makes you sovereign because these things need updates. They can be switched off, basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They have a relatively short life too.
Speaker 8:That too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Useful life. Exactly.
Speaker 8:So I I I think sovereign is a little bit more of, like, a an alignment of technology agenda and political agenda
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Than it actually is the true meaning of the definition of, like, we control our fate when it comes to intelligence and running it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Moving forward, a lot of people are nervous about cracks in the global economy, cracks in the AI economy. What are you monitoring? Like like, what what are you, what do you think is the most important metrics or data points or stories to be really digging into these days?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, I think it comes back down to, like, the return on investment, you know, cases of companies becoming more efficient, launching better services.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 8:think the reason why I do this at all is because I think AI unlocks new use cases that weren't possible before.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And and so for so long as we see those examples, you know, propagate through the economy and it's still very early, I think we're we're in a good shape. And we only talked about software here, but there's so much in, you know, national security and defense that's that's that needs to be solved. And many of those problems, whether it's, like, you know, electronic warfare or autonomy rely on AI. And so huge TAM there also in Europe, and we've got plays there with, you know, with Delian and a few others Yeah. Companies in Europe.
Speaker 8:So I think it's like it's full speed, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exciting times. Well, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks, I hope you have good weekend. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Great to meet. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day. If you're looking to take a trip to New York or anywhere, head over to wander.com. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.
Speaker 1:We have some breaking news. Apple has entered a five year deal to broadcast Formula One in The United States.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There you Walter Bloomberg. This is, very exciting. We were wondering where they were gonna land. They landed with Apple, and I love the Apple strategy.
Speaker 2:How much did they pay?
Speaker 1:We don't I I don't know. We should look it up. But, I love the Apple strategy. Apple did the movie, f one. So then you watch the movie, then you're like, I wanna watch the actual the actual race.
Speaker 1:I can watch it on Apple TV.
Speaker 2:The more I thought about
Speaker 1:it. Crazy like like took
Speaker 2:they basically took Drive to Survive Yep. And then they made a movie Yep. With these fictional characters. Yep. And they but they just like ultimately just like it's a barnacle economy opinion.
Speaker 1:Barnacle economy.
Speaker 2:Really is. They just like like drive to survive is this whale that was making making f one relevant in The US.
Speaker 1:I feel like
Speaker 2:And they just attached onto it. It's a big barnacle.
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. Who's the barnacle and who's the whale? I feel like I feel like f one is
Speaker 2:Apple started as a barnacle Okay. And they're becoming the whale.
Speaker 1:I feel like I feel like f one is the barnacle on drive to survive, honestly, in the in America.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the point. F one is a barnacle on the whale that is just Netflix making reality TV out of everything, basically. But, we need to figure out that we
Speaker 2:says can't believe my elderly mother broke the f one news to me before Walter Bloomberg.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Mothers tapped in.
Speaker 2:Ryan says five year deal worth about 750,000,000.
Speaker 1:That's a
Speaker 2:They were originally going out for 200,000,000
Speaker 1:For one year. Yeah. So that would
Speaker 2:have been a
Speaker 1:billion dollar deal.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:They got they got 75% of the way there. Not bad. Tim Cook.
Speaker 2:Do you remember when he was trying to wave flag?
Speaker 1:Oh, wait. I know. I don't remember that meme, that image. I remember him being at some DJ booth. Was it like John Summit was playing at f one?
Speaker 1:I I I think I saw a video I
Speaker 2:a got a video. I'm I'm dropping in the timeline. Yeah. People are saying this is the worst checkered flag of all time.
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:We'll give him we'll give him some flag because he's
Speaker 1:He's he's barely making a buy.
Speaker 2:He's one the goats. Million a year.
Speaker 1:He's one
Speaker 2:of the supply chain goats.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's okay. Here he is. Tim Cook. This is at f one?
Speaker 1:Yep. And they and they want him to wave the checkered flag. That looks fine.
Speaker 2:No, it doesn't. Doesn't.
Speaker 1:How how does one wave a checkered flag?
Speaker 2:That is not how you would wave How
Speaker 1:would I wave it? Would I just more gusto, you think? Okay. Look
Speaker 2:at how lackadaisical this way. I mean
Speaker 1:It it does seem like he's kind of phoning in.
Speaker 2:Looks like he's going fishing. It does. Yeah. He's at the the finish line of a Formula One race, and he looks like he's going out for trying to catch some trout or something.
Speaker 1:Wow. So so But
Speaker 2:he got the deal done.
Speaker 1:But if they if they hadn't done this and they're instead of spending a $150,000,000 a year on f one, they could have tripled Tim Cook's pay package. Which one do you think a more a more incentivized Tim Cook could potentially create more value?
Speaker 9:What what which would you do?
Speaker 2:He was so embarrassed by the the fishing
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:Inspired flag. He's like, I'm gonna I wanna own it all.
Speaker 9:I wanna own it all.
Speaker 2:I wanna own it all. I wanna shut it down. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna I wanna drive the sport and Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ground. Yeah. He might get more satisfaction out of that than a higher salary.
Speaker 1:Before we close out, we need to expand the barnacle economy taxonomy. What we need to do so the whales, it's obvious who the whales are. That's Anthropic. That's the hyperscalers. That's OpenAI.
Speaker 1:That's the Foundation Model Labs. Right? They're the whales. They're growing massively. They're putting up huge numbers.
Speaker 1:And so the barnacle can be two things. It can be one, the company that sells to the whale, or it can be merely a company that sells something that buys from the whale. And so I feel like we need two different two different terms. The barnacle economy specifically, like the training data providers. Right?
Speaker 1:That feels barnacle economy. But the AI for lawyers, that does not feel barnacle. Right? Because they have to go out and win customers in the legal fee.
Speaker 2:Think if you can swap out the underlying intelligence, you're not a barnacle, basically.
Speaker 1:You're a shark.
Speaker 2:Yes. Shark economy. And ultimately, they don't have to sell to the to the whale.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. They they buy from the whale. Yes.
Speaker 1:So the shark the shark buys from the whale and and goes up. You might have a no bell on your hands here with barnacle theory. It's happening. Well, is there any other breaking news
Speaker 2:that we Bloomberg this morning or I think it was yesterday
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Apparently, Cantor is trying to do this private raise for Tether at a $500,000,000,000 valuation but Bloomberg reports that Cantor invested 600,000,000 in a convertible note for 5% stake in Tether a year ago, a $12,000,000,000 valuation for Tether. Now Cantor is trying to tell investors that Tether is worth 42 times more in just one year. And when Cantor is obviously conflicted as a 5% owner, yeah, that ain't happening. Yeah. I mean, the, you know, a stablecoin leader is gonna be worth a lot more after the regulatory changes But, this yeah, there's also a lot more competition.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:What's Circle at right now? 30,000,000,000? So yeah. I mean, 15 times the the the price of Circle might be might be high. I I don't really know.
Speaker 1:I know Tether is a great business, so, I wouldn't be surprised if they get a major up round done. In other news Yeah.
Speaker 2:I guess I guess that so what's the current market cap of USCC? It's 75,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Well, is that is that for the token or is that the actual
Speaker 2:That's a token itself.
Speaker 1:Circle, the company is 30,000,000,000 market cap.
Speaker 2:And so So new value here's the
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Here's the issue. Yeah. I mean, Circle has
Speaker 1:Wildly different economics. Right?
Speaker 2:Wildly different economics. Yeah. They they have to pay a large amount of their revenue out to Coinbase and I'm sure other exchanges. Yep. Tether is at a 185,000,000,000 of market cap.
Speaker 1:So three times the size with with better economics potentially, like 500,000,000,000 doesn't seem that crazy to me. I don't know. I I I haven't done any of the
Speaker 2:actual math. The question is how how durable is the
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Especially when, everyone's gonna be having their Coles cash soon.
Speaker 2:Who knows? Adam's in the game. You know, Bridge obviously wants to create a lot more.
Speaker 1:Zephyr has a post here. Big contract. Chinese actuator component supplier, Sanwa Intelligent Controls, is rumored to have secured a $685,000,000 order from Tesla for Optimus. Sanhua's stock surged 10% to the daily limit following the news going viral, while other actuator suppliers saw also saw
Speaker 2:They put a
Speaker 9:significantly They
Speaker 2:put a daily limit on how much
Speaker 1:That's extremely un American. I don't like that at all. Matt Fried says Tesla not building their own actuators is the least mission driven thing I've heard all year. I don't know. I mean, there's this Yeah.
Speaker 2:What does this say what does this say about Tesla's timelines on, like, actual humanoid value, though? Because if they were thinking
Speaker 1:prototype at this point, so
Speaker 2:you No. No. Shop anywhere? I I was gonna say the opposite of Oh. Of like if you felt like you have five years until you were actually gonna be Yeah.
Speaker 2:Selling these to people, maybe you would just build your own if you were trying to sell them and get them out Today. In in the world faster. Have to build the
Speaker 1:actuator facility in America.
Speaker 2:Gotta spend over half a billion with a rival.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. In other news, Ian Goodfellow is Crazy.
Speaker 2:More of what Determinism.
Speaker 1:I've met him. He signed a book that he wrote on deep learning for me. It's in the museum of business history and technology history. More of what my colleagues and I have been working on in AI for fusion is public now. Why are we clapping?
Speaker 1:We're announcing a research collaboration with CFS Energy, one of the world's nuclear leading nuclear fusion companies, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Is goated. Is this it is actually crazy. Together, they're helping speed up the development of clean, safe, limitless fusion power with AI. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Awesome to see Google, working in fusion. Obviously, Sam Altman's a believer with Helion. We've had a number of fusion founders on the show. It's one of those technologies that's always been ten years away, but feels less than ten years finally. We are we are making some progress.
Speaker 1:What's your fusion take?
Speaker 7:I mean, I'm I'm very proficient, but in other, like, deep mind news
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Apparently, Gemini three is actually slated for December. So there were some
Speaker 1:rumors of,
Speaker 7:like, maybe next week. But now there's some people saying it's actually
Speaker 1:Add thirty days to the singularity counter. This is just not gonna happen, is it? When when is AGI coming? This is this is not this is the worst news ever.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:But but
Speaker 2:it will be a nice Christmas.
Speaker 1:I I was saying December 25. They got it. They got it December 25.
Speaker 2:My kids are getting Gemini.
Speaker 1:They gotta they gotta do it December 23. You know, the the the VR headsets, they always like rocket to the top of the app store. That's what I wanna see.
Speaker 2:My kids are getting a box of tokens.
Speaker 1:Box of tokens. We can close with Will Menidas potentially. He's got a bunch of stuff. Well, I mean, there's Hey.
Speaker 2:I I just wanted to give it up for Stargate UAE. Yeah. It's taken shape. We got a video in here. We should try to pull this up.
Speaker 2:Led by Cosna, this one gigawatt AI infrastructure cluster is a cornerstone of the five gigawatt UAE, US AI campus in Abu Dhabi and a key part of building the intelligence grid, the digital Very cool. Backbone The digital frontier. Secure, sovereign, and I don't know AI because it's cut off. But we can see this video here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very cool. Wilmanitis says, if you're a young person interested in going deep on weird things, basically, the only good advice is that you should be 1,000 x more commercial. Someone will get very rich by monetizing the things you figure out. There's no reason that person shouldn't be you.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 2:Good. Well, on Andre Carpathi,
Speaker 1:dropped a podcast with, Dorkesh Patel. It's a banger.
Speaker 7:I listened to the first, like, twenty, twenty five minutes. Yeah. Just a banger so far.
Speaker 1:Perfect for the weekend. Go enjoy it. TBPN is off. We do have a diet TBPN product now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting. There's one quote that, I guess, Nick was was calling out. Nick, obviously, is more Grok aligned. Love.
Speaker 2:He said he
Speaker 1:was Most quoting independent
Speaker 2:for his future. Field. Most loyal soldier.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:He was quoting Altman earlier. It said 2025 is the year of AI agents. Yeah. I think he could still defend that with Codex, but, certainly, we're not seeing maybe eight agents that that we were all super excited about. Right?
Speaker 2:Deep Research as an agent Yeah. Of coding agents.
Speaker 1:I haven't booked a flight with AI yet. I
Speaker 2:guess it's like Karpathi says, I was triggered by that over prediction more accurately. It's the decade of agents. Mhmm. So much work to be done.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Humans in the
Speaker 2:loop for another decade? We got this. Yeah. Yeah. That that's like normal.
Speaker 1:What do you think? More or less. You you keep being like we're just on track. Superintelligence is right around the corner.
Speaker 7:Yeah. We are. I mean, it it's always hard. It's like, what is what do you mean by agent? Like, what what can I actually do in ten years, I feel like like
Speaker 2:What have agents done for you today?
Speaker 7:Wrote me some code.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And I and I and and yeah. I I agree that I can I I think this was the year The of coding
Speaker 1:year of coding agents?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I I think computer use is like getting better and better. Yeah. Hopefully, we see Gemini three,
Speaker 1:like, much better computer use. A good example is, like, when when you made the the video Vibrio for the Metis list, you were not able to puppeteer Premiere Pro with an agent. And that at the end of the day, that's just like clicking buttons on the computer. Like, it could use FFmpeg. It could use, like, the control of the mouse and keyboard and screen record.
Speaker 1:And, like, that agent isn't here, and you should be able to just, in natural language, talk to an agent that then, you know, makes the cuts in Premiere Pro. And I still believe that even when we get there, you'll still need to say, I have an idea to include clips from Cheeky Pint or whatever you picked or these these particular walkouts. But, like, it's not it it it's not there. It's not generalized.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But that
Speaker 1:It's not generalized.
Speaker 9:That that
Speaker 7:feels that does not feel ten years away at all. No. That that feels like right now, could I could build a RL environment and do that if I had enough compute in, like, you know, a month.
Speaker 1:Oh, I just need more compute. Just more compute. Oh, now you're asking compute over there. I see how it is. Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, anyway, have a fantastic weekend everyone. We will see
Speaker 2:you
Speaker 1:Monday. We love you. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify and have a great
Speaker 2:weekend weekend.
Speaker 1:See you Monday. Goodbye. Cheers.