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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Friday, 10/31/2025. It's Halloween. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome. The temple of technology, the fortress
Speaker 1:of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 2:We have a fantastic show for you today, folks. We're gonna be talking about mag seven earnings, recapping what's happening in the public markets, the trillion dollar tech companies that have been, powering and holding up the entire global economy. Will they continue to hold up the global economy? So far, the answer is yes. I'm glad that chat is enjoying the costumes.
Speaker 2:Jordy, who are you today?
Speaker 1:You gotta be living under a data center to not know, who I'm dressed up as today. None other than Mark and Jason.
Speaker 2:Spitting image. Spitting image. How
Speaker 1:how am I how am I doing?
Speaker 2:I think you look great. I think, yeah. I think I think you nailed it. I saw some other folks. They they they of course, I am Ilya Siskiver.
Speaker 2:There are a lot of people that boil down the Mark Andreessen costume to just being bald, and that's, of course, not it. You need the shirt. You need the watch. You need the beard. These are all
Speaker 1:The only thing I'm not gonna be able to do very well is talk quite as quickly as as Yeah.
Speaker 2:It feels like the mustache and the and the outfit might be actually slowing you down a little bit. But I I'm not trying to channel, Ilya. We were watching Guardian video on Ilya, his interview, which is beautifully edited. And one of the most interesting I don't even know. It's like an interview.
Speaker 2:It's almost a podcast, but it's this, like, documentary. It's twelve minute video by the Guardian.
Speaker 1:They cooked.
Speaker 2:And Ilya is the only one who says anything the entire time. Yeah. There's no guest or there's no interviewer. There's no host. And it's just him talking about AGI will be able to do anything.
Speaker 2:We'll make it could be good, could be bad. And he he just has these crazy long way these these ways of answering these questions that are really interesting, and it fits with that medium. I don't know how much editing they did to get his answers to a place where it, like, had that kind of flow, but it's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Ilya's weights Ilya's words hold so much weight. Yeah. I think that's a good part. That format just works incredibly well. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, anyways, if you are watching the recording of this at some point in the future, I recommend whenever I'm talking, put it on three x speed Yes. To get the full Simulate. Mark experience. And we should talk about the the Gen AI company that we work with to make this possible, of course. I think people would be wildly impressed at, how little latency there is.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Kind of character consistency.
Speaker 2:Are partnered with Fall, the generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, developing fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.
Speaker 1:But, of course, we did this the old fashioned way, the Hollywood Way.
Speaker 2:The Hollywood Way.
Speaker 1:We were at the office at 06:30 this morning. It took, took hours to get to this point. Yeah. And, shout out to the to the whole team that, that made it possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a lot of fun. It's not a mask. It is makeup. It's, it's a series of prosthetics that go on layered up, with a wig for me and a beard for Jordy.
Speaker 2:They they they kinda take you through the the process of becoming fully bald and then add back whatever they need to, including the eyebrows. And the eyebrows do do a lot of
Speaker 1:the work. They do a lot of the work. They do a lot
Speaker 2:of the work. But, yeah, if you're if you're not taking Halloween this seriously, what's going on? You gotta be, you gotta be taking it seriously. Tyler, have are you taking Halloween seriously? What what what did you do for I'm
Speaker 3:taking Halloween extremely seriously.
Speaker 2:Well, who are you?
Speaker 3:Sam Altman at at two thousand eight WWDC.
Speaker 2:Okay. Looped. It's the yeah. You're the spinning image. Were those the colors of the polos he was wearing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think the camera temperature is
Speaker 2:Oh, you think that's what it is?
Speaker 3:Something in in real life
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:If the viewers could see, they would be
Speaker 2:And and and the hair is a perfect match and and you also had to do three hours of prosthetic makeup?
Speaker 3:I I was actually here a little
Speaker 2:earlier than you guys. Yeah. I was here
Speaker 1:back though. It is so strange looking across. It's very weird. And seeing seeing the spitting image of, of Ilya himself. Anyways
Speaker 2:Ramp. Time is money. Say both. Easy use corporate card, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:We partnered with Ramp, they never expected to to see Ilya No. Pitching Ramp. Pitching Ramp.
Speaker 2:This is this is why you advertise on TBPN. You get ad reads from Mark Andreessen.
Speaker 1:From the great the GOATs. The GOATs themselves. Yeah. We have a super fun show today. We have Lulu Miservi and Gabby Goldberg coming on.
Speaker 1:Later, we have Dean Ball joining. Who else do we have? We have
Speaker 2:Tyler, do you know Ball?
Speaker 1:Just trying to write
Speaker 3:That's last time we mentioned his name. Do you know Ball?
Speaker 2:Well, after today, everyone will know Ball because Dean Ball is coming on TVPN. We're very excited for that. So let's take, let's take a second to tell you about Restream one livestream 30 plus destinations. Of course, we are Restreaming today. Multistream.
Speaker 2:Reach your audience wherever they are. But I think it'd be good to just kinda go through, some of the headlines. Trump cut China tariffs after he met up with Xi Jinping. In South Korea, president Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping emerged from their face to face for their first face to face meeting in six years with a temporary detent in the bruising trade fight between detente, between the two superpowers. The US agreed to lower a fentanyl related tariff on Chinese goods to 10% from 20% after China promised to crack down on chemicals used to make the often deadly Precursors.
Speaker 2:Precursors. That would bring the average tariff rate on many Chinese goods to around 47% from 57%. So America's backing backing off a little bit. Beijing almost promised also promised to ease some of the controls it imposed on exports of processed rare earth minerals, for one year. China dominates the production of the minerals, which are in which are needed to make everything from smartphones to submarines.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's a a world tour of everything in the, in the trade deal. So we're we're slowly ratcheting things up, ratcheting things down. We had a good conversation yesterday, about this with Chris McGuire. You're welcome to go check that out.
Speaker 2:He gave us more details on the history of the of the, China trade war with The US. But the bigger news in tech world, of course, is earnings. Amazon posted a big jump in profit and revenue. Amazon.com reported net revenue net profit surged 39%, and revenue rose for the third quarter, propelled by strong retail sales as well as continued growth in its or in its cloud computing and artificial intelligence business. The ecommerce giant said Thursday that sales rose for the period.
Speaker 2:They rose 13% to 180,000,000,000, and net profit rose to 21,200,000,000.0 in that quarter. And so, you had a little bit of a take on what was going on in Amazon world. They've been sort of, at at at the last earnings, they were sort of left out of the AI narrative. Every all the other hyperscalers in their cloud businesses were, you know, telling great stories about acceleration and growth. And Andy Jassy was a little bit on the defensive.
Speaker 2:Well, now he's back on the offensive, and, the results were much stronger. So, they beat on the top line. They beat on the bottom line. They also beat on AWS revenue, which is great. The Tranium Across
Speaker 4:the board.
Speaker 2:Two chip business grew a 150% quarter on quarter. And there's still some debate over how Tranium will scale relative to TPU, whether, Anthropic is gonna buy a bunch of TPUs. Maybe they're gonna pull back on training. But it seems like like even if the top end is is diversifying and you have, you know, OpenAI saying we wanna be on every cloud or you know? That's not necessarily a bull case because there's so many more buyers coming from behind adding to it.
Speaker 2:So, my take was a lot of fun around Trainium underperformance relative to TPU, but they both seem to be catching up finally. I think it'd be interesting to see TPU on, on inference max. I mean, analysis is benchmark. Based
Speaker 1:on Are they opting in?
Speaker 2:Well so TPU and Tranium, the way Dylan Patel framed it to me at least was they haven't said that they're out. In fact, they oh, sorry. Drop my phone. Yeah. In fact, they said that they are in, but it's gonna take them time to actually provision everything because it is a significant cost, and it's something that requires a decent amount of resources.
Speaker 2:And there's, you know, a whole bunch of it's a big company.
Speaker 1:And it will determine the fate of their product line.
Speaker 2:Correct. Potentially. Potentially. And so yeah. I mean, people
Speaker 1:are gonna be paying a lot
Speaker 2:of attention. It's possible that they wanna, like, that they wanna get their ducks in a row, so they don't just get, like, clobbered Yeah. In this in this race. But, interestingly, AMD and NVIDIA were both pretty happy with the results. There were tons of there's tons of positivity about AMD in certain use cases.
Speaker 2:And Jensen on stage at GTC was, giving spending, like, minutes just on inference max slides and data. So
Speaker 1:my take from the newsletter on Amazon, I said, Jassy needed this after the timeline had turned up against against him pretty horribly. In the last few months, people even saw the headcount reduction from Monday as bearish. I think that just shows how far ahead Satya was. He did multiple rounds of layoffs earlier this year. And obviously, Amazon has its dance partner now.
Speaker 1:And so we'll see how this develops. One of my favorite posts, I think, from last week was somebody said, I don't care if I get caught. I was in I was heavily involved with the NBA illegal gambling scheme. My name is Andy Jassy. I work at amazon.com.
Speaker 2:I didn't realize that they were, like I I feel like once you get to mag seven level, you don't have, like, a retail army that gets, like, frustrated about, like, you know, middling financial performance. But I mean, that's he just does
Speaker 1:have a little bit of know, proud member of the Lag seven.
Speaker 2:Yep. You
Speaker 1:look at The Lag seven. Alphabet. The Lag seven.
Speaker 2:What's
Speaker 1:that? They were I mean, not the Lag seven, but they were the lagging part of the mag seven. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's that's a thing? That's a meme or
Speaker 1:did Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's a meme.
Speaker 1:It's a meme. I've never never heard this one. It's a it's a pleasure to introduce you to a new Thank you. Alphabet up 247% over the last five years. Amazon is still only up 62% even after the pop Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This week. So Well,
Speaker 2:that's the story with Amazon. We also got Apple earnings after we wrapped the show. Before I tell you about Apple, 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.
Speaker 1:Okay. Sarah Wang, GP over at Andreessen
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Just posted, the only thing better than Halloween is Halloween AI edition. In case you missed it, tagged, Ilya and Mark. And, of course, no AI here. We did this one the old fashioned way.
Speaker 2:We did this organically. The organic intelligence. Be interesting just to actually benchmark. I mean, obviously, the the the frontier video models are remarkable, but we've done this bezel bench for a while where we went and did something very weird and very specific. And, and on that specific use case of Tyler, a person that we it needs to be him.
Speaker 2:It needs to look like him, and he has to be wearing six different watches, and you have to zoom in from the very start all the way out. And he has to be lying down and, like, you so you have really to understand how the anatomy comes into the picture. The models haven't really been great. I feel like if we tried to recreate this, using AI right now, it would get pretty chaotic. The fact that we're alive choppy.
Speaker 2:Three hours. It'd be doing you know, you could do a face swap live. We've we've had some founders come on the show and do them, but it feels like it's almost more of just like
Speaker 1:a Yeah.
Speaker 2:Decarte. Decarte was really cool. Yeah. Decarte was awesome.
Speaker 1:But it was still very much felt like a video game. It didn't feel photo real. Yeah. And, and all rumors and touch.
Speaker 2:You can in fact touch. Oh my god.
Speaker 1:I'll be drinking through a straw today because
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Is it is it locking yours in? My take is I I have, I have the same level of prosthetic makeup on, but I'm just full sending it. And by the end of the show, I'm expecting this to be just be melted off my face base.
Speaker 2:Crumbling.
Speaker 1:We'll see how it holds up.
Speaker 2:We'll see how it holds up. And we also on. Tell you about Cognition. We're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 2:Yes. Did you wanna go to Apple or did you wanna go somewhere else?
Speaker 1:Let's go to Microsoft.
Speaker 2:Microsoft. Microsoft. What's your Microsoft take?
Speaker 1:Top line beat. Earnings beat. Stock traded down, three to 4% after hours. It's recovered quite a bit since then. I said I was surprised to see Microsoft trade down following earnings, but it's recovered since Satya, in my view, has already gotten a lot more credit for the company's opportunities in AI than Amazon and even Google.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. People have known about Google's strengths, but the big questions around search have held back performance to date. Microsoft hasn't really had any narratives holding it back, but I don't think people give them enough credit for the OpenAI deal. Mhmm. If you believe GenAI is a sustaining innovation and will transform knowledge work, there is not a company in the world that is better positioned from a product and a distribution standpoint.
Speaker 1:Again, we talked about this with Satya on Tuesday. Mhmm. There are so many companies that are trying to build Excel plus an agent on top of it.
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 1:Or agents for Excel Yeah. Which is exactly what Microsoft is also doing with Excel with Copilot. Right? They're model agnostic. They're gonna be able to let you know, bring in any any kind of intelligence that they want.
Speaker 1:And so, anyways, I I think, you know, they continue to be super well positioned. It's also fascinating because they have access to OpenAI's IP. OpenAI wants to be a big player in in, in the workplace. Right? You can imagine them getting into a bunch of other applications there.
Speaker 1:And so it'll be that competitive dynamic. It's just something that we're gonna be watching for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw some I saw some haters in the timeline talking about, Microsoft launched a research product, and the and the and the hot take was, like, Microsoft's late to launch this, and it's somehow worse. Like, they couldn't even just copy exactly. And I was and I was thinking, like, there there is something real about, like, when a big company launches one of those features, like, they typically have to move a little bit slower because maybe they're regulated by Europe. They're all they're international.
Speaker 2:They have you know, they obey all the different rules around, accessibility, and they have they have, like, 25. They might be, like, SOC two compliant plus ITAR compliant plus, you know, it's 25 other compliant Yeah. Levels. They just slow down, like, how fast you can move and how many things you can break. But that is very different.
Speaker 2:Like, as an early adopter, it's very different to look at a new product from a, you know, what, forty, fifty year old, you know, tech giant and say, yeah. I I I prefer, like, the the the cutting edge, product, as opposed to, like, what actually plays out in the market. Like, Slack was very much the same thing where Slack was this product that, was so much better than the alternatives. Like, if you I don't know if you ever used, like, workplace chat pre Slack, but it was I was basically born on on Slack. Okay.
Speaker 2:You're born on Slack. But but Slack really was, like, a delightful like, you know how there's those there's just those companies that come out and you're like, oh, like like this company takes design seriously. This company is a power user of Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together.
Speaker 2:But but you know how you get that vibe and then you get the other vibe where it's like, this company is owned by private equity and they don't really care.
Speaker 1:John, I gotta give you the the chat's giving you a shout out. I never knew John was so ripped. There's been some other comments. Yeah. Pull pull put it up.
Speaker 1:Put him up, John. There
Speaker 2:you go. Let's go. Ilya, AGI has been achieved. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Ben Gilbert in the chat. You guys are absolutely insane. I love it.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the stream, Ben. Thank you so much for stopping by. An absolute legend. We couldn't do this show without you. Massive inspiring everything that they've done over it.
Speaker 2:Acquired. Totally. If you're if you've been living under your data center, get over to acquired.fm. Subscribe.
Speaker 1:Let's get into Meta. Let's talk about Meta.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Meta. Top line beat, earnings miss.
Speaker 2:Massive loss, like a $12,000,000,000 not people are not talking enough about what happened. Like, it is crazy that you could be operating such a big company and just be like, oops, $10,000,000,000. And it's not like a
Speaker 1:I mean, think of how they've been spending.
Speaker 2:I yeah. Yeah. It is crazy. This is
Speaker 1:this is 72. Yep. You know, this is like, you know, I'm sure Meta and the executive team, it's like after a weekend bender checking, like, your credit card statement. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:It's like it's like you you have an idea maybe of what you spent Yeah. But it's way beyond
Speaker 2:that. Okay. Wait. So, Tyler, can you look up what the actual tax charge was? Because I don't think it was about Scale AI, which everyone a lot of people would say, oh, that was a lot of money to pay for something that maybe is an acquire.
Speaker 2:Right? Or, like, the $3,000,000,000 that maybe Zuck just paid for, like, one AI researcher. Like, he's been on the spree. I think this is a separate $10,000,000,000 charge
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is Came out of nowhere.
Speaker 2:I like I like the I like the metaphor of, like, you're just on a bender, you're just like, oh, my credit card bill is so huge this month. What happened? What happened? Wait.
Speaker 1:So are
Speaker 3:you talking about the $15,000,000,000 charge?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's five it's five more than I thought. I thought it was 10.
Speaker 1:I thought it was
Speaker 2:was 10 roughly 10.5.
Speaker 1:15 point something.
Speaker 2:14?
Speaker 1:Came out of nowhere.
Speaker 2:It was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, but we'll
Speaker 3:Okay. Yes. So so okay. So apparently, it was a one time tax charge
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Related to the big beautiful bill act. What? So
Speaker 6:I I'll I'll I'll read
Speaker 3:into this more, but it's not the
Speaker 2:It it has nothing to with research.
Speaker 1:No. It has nothing to with VR. In the x chat, it says, from what I read, they missed only because of the tax prepayment, which is only on paper, not actually cash, and they said it would save them on tax costs over
Speaker 2:time. Okay. Thank you, Noah. That's very helpful. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Okay. So they're so they're changing the amount of, like, how they're accounting for these taxes. And so they took the hit to earnings.
Speaker 2:But is that is that why is the stock traded down 10%? Is it specifically because of this onetime tax charge? Like, I don't know that it is. I think it might
Speaker 1:be I think it could be a little bit of vibes in the mix.
Speaker 2:I liked your vibe
Speaker 1:based analysis. Take was prefs be completely rebuilding an AI while simultaneously still finding footing in hardware. Core business rips, though. My take in the newsletter was the timeline loves the core meta business, but doesn't have a lot of faith in Zuck. I think that sounds harsh, but I think that is generally, generally real.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People thought Bezos, who had a similar similar level of control over Amazon, was crazy to spend like he did building AWS, and he was ultimately completely vindicated. Mhmm. People thought Mark was crazy going all in on the metaverse and VR, and so far so far that part of the business, like, has not shown any signs of of of being ROI positive. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, obviously, they're still shipping. They're the new Metairie bands are are, like, the the the leading publicly available pair of Yeah. Of of glasses.
Speaker 2:It just feels like the the win case there is like a it's like an AirPod sized business. Right? Yeah. Like, it's hard to get to, okay. Yes.
Speaker 2:This is gonna be as big as
Speaker 4:I don't
Speaker 2:Waymo. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't I don't know. I I I I think that if you actually win that category, it could be an iPhone sized business. Yeah. So I'm not saying that it's I'm not saying that he shouldn't be investing there. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I don't think the market believes that he's gonna win that category yet.
Speaker 2:Which is fascinating because what what what company do you think is in the lead in terms of VR and AR right now? Rank them. Who do you think is
Speaker 1:I think I think the I think the challenge is when products are not at the level where people are saying, I love this. I use this all the time. I use this every day. I can't live without it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You don't get credit for being at the leading edge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People aren't saying that yet.
Speaker 1:Like, people expect Apple to come over the top and do, you know
Speaker 2:They tried, and they didn't didn't pencil.
Speaker 1:I know. But now they're working on a on a pair of glasses, and it's gonna integrate with your iPhone. It's gonna integrate with iMessage. And, like, that's gonna be a real competitive, you know, challenge for
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. No. It's a really good it's a really good argument.
Speaker 2:It's really
Speaker 1:at the same time, giving Medi some credit, Reels is now a $50,000,000,000 revenue run rate.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's hit the hit the gong for the Reels team. Threads is also where is our where is our mallet? It's over here. Ilya Gong hit incoming. The moment you've been waiting for.
Speaker 4:Clean. Clean.
Speaker 1:Moving on. The market reacted positively to Scale AI acquisition and hiring spree, but I think investors have the right to be concerned about Meta's vision and ability to generate revenue from their Gen AI efforts either directly or indirectly anytime soon. I'm still shocked they released Meta Vibes. Mhmm. Knowing how much scrutiny their first release as a new team would get.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The product showed a complete lack of vision, in my opinion, and just product quality when compared to Sora, which launched about a week later. So it felt like they knew Sora was coming. They wanted to be first to market with an AI native social feed, and they did
Speaker 2:not that they just completely burned the ships on the Meta AI app? Like because that app was originally the reason that I have it on my phone is because I got Meta Ray Bans. And so Yeah. When I got Meta Ray Bans, I had to get the Meta app to use the Ray Bans. Then it turned into the Meta AI app, and it was like, hey.
Speaker 2:Do you wanna use this as an LLM? And I was like, I'm basically good on that front, but thanks. And then they and then they were like, well, do you want some AI video? Would you like some slop in this drop? Which is just like a it's just a wild canvas to be iterating on so quickly.
Speaker 2:They used to launch different apps every single time. Yeah. But, not not this time. I don't know. The meta vibes needs to turn.
Speaker 2:I still like the mid journey model. I think it is beautiful. I think I I think there is something cool to be done with that.
Speaker 1:Judging the But the needs more UI. Big problem is that you couldn't, as a user, consistently generate beautiful things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Whereas with Sora, it's not like they were necessarily beautiful, but at least they were entertaining. Yeah. And that's what kicked off that viral Yeah. It's just it's just got So the the main thing is, like, for Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Yeah. It's a lot more clear what winning in AI Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Actually looks like. I think Meta's gonna have to clarify what the win state looks like Yeah. Beyond just saying we're building personal super intelligence because investors are smart enough to know that, that, like, personal super intelligence Yeah. Doesn't mean a lot today when the business today is focused on monetizing the world's attention.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I expect them at some point to have to kind of clarify what their what their plans are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tesla beat earnings, missed, beat on revenue, missed on earnings. Stock reaction was down about 4% after hours. You, reposted the Bucho Capital blog post. I'm always so confused when Tesla goes down on earnings as business performance is completely irrelevant to the price of the stock.
Speaker 2:And it has been it has been more of a vibes based stock for a while. I had a more by the book analysis. I said, if you don't go straight shot to the full self driving equivalent for humanoid robots, basically no teleoperation, the project should be years behind what's going on with one x, I would imagine, just like the Waymo dynamic. Like, Waymo was able to launch a lot sooner because they could always fall back on, hey. There's a human tele operating this thing, so you can trust us on the city streets.
Speaker 2:And they've had a pretty good track record because of that. Tesla's going full moonshot, full send, but it but it's gonna take a little bit longer. Like, no one debates the fact that, like, Tesla's robotaxi fleet is a year or two behind Waymo's right now. Now the the the Tesla bull hope is that you come from behind and start compounding because you have just structurally better costs Yeah. Way more manufacturing capacity, more of a flywheel on the actual data and the training.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of options. And I said they also need to build a full size SUV.
Speaker 1:You're you can't wait for that.
Speaker 2:I just think it's so crazy not to build a full size SUV in America. Like, Americans love full size SUVs, and you see them it's like, I mean, it's as crazy as not being in the truck market for as long as they were.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting that Tesla has been so dependent on this on the luxury sedan for its entire history even though the luxury sedan has, like, completely fallen off in popularity. I saw, some some data on Lexus' sales. Lexus used to sell one of the most popular, like, luxury SUVs, and they sell, like, either, like, single digit thousands now of them a year. So it's like that category has gotten just killed by the SUV.
Speaker 1:And Tesla, of course, has the x and the y. Mhmm. But it's not exactly what your if if they were to ship like the Cybertruck SUV Mhmm. I think that would sell significantly better than the Cybertruck.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder if they'll ever do multiple brands. It's so normal at every other car company, but I see no reason why Tesla would ever do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, Lexus is what? Toyota's upmarket brand. Right? Yeah. Isn't that the linkage?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I doubt you on whatever. Mean, plaid
Speaker 2:was sort of like the the trim trim level.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I wonder if they'd ever do a different trim level. Right? Yeah. Plaid plaid plus, like like, what what is the equivalent of, like, the my bock of Tesla if plaid is their AMG? Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. But
Speaker 1:I don't think he cares about.
Speaker 2:They have that in in China. They have a, like, a Mai Bacafied model model x or model model s. That's like chauffeur where the seats
Speaker 1:Oh, the front
Speaker 2:seats are pushed forward, basically. I have other Elon Musk news, but first, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Elon Musk on data centers in orbit.
Speaker 2:SpaceX will be doing this. He said he's gonna do data centers in space.
Speaker 1:Didn't we say this out loud yesterday with someone? I don't know if it was on the show or not, but Yeah. It just seems obviously if there is
Speaker 2:an opportunity and it's big, they're gonna show
Speaker 1:it different. My, you know, it's easy to be bullish on space right now. Yep. But if you're investing in different categories, you have to imagine that if there are adjacent opportunities besides Starlink for SpaceX to do Yep. They will they will they will enter them if they are large enough categories.
Speaker 1:And so, again, that's,
Speaker 2:What does that mean for Star Cloud?
Speaker 1:I mean, I can still think I I I can still imagine them over time figuring out, like, niche, more niche use cases. But, you know, building the building the satellite cloud, I think, was something that, Elon is not gonna just, you know, happily hand over to someone else.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, let let's read through a little bit of this from Ars Technica. An artificial intelligence, as artificial intelligence drives the need for vastly more computing storage and processing power. Computing storage. What's that mean?
Speaker 2:Interest in space based data centers has spiked. Although several company although several startup companies such as Star Cloud have begun to address the problem. Address the problem. They haven't they're they're, like, identifying the problem, maybe maybe prototyping. This is very oddly worded.
Speaker 2:I'm, like, struggling to read this. The idea has also attracted the interest of tech barons. In May, it emerged that former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Relativity Space due to his interest in space based data centers. That's fascinating. I know that Relativity was was not doing well with kind of the v one strategy, and there was this turnaround project.
Speaker 2:And Eric Schmidt came in and was, I think, paying a ton to keep the business going and really investing. I had no idea that that was his thesis. Yeah. That's fascinating. Then earlier this month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted that gigawatt scale data centers will be built in space within the next ten to twenty years.
Speaker 2:That's big. Now Elon Musk, who's SpaceX owns and operates significantly more space based infrastructure than any other company or country in the world, has also expressed interest in technology. After ours wrote a story about the potential of autonomous assembly to construct large data centers in space, Musk responded on acts by saying that Starlink satellites could be used for this purpose. Simply scaling up Starlink v three satellites, which have high speed laser links, would work, he said on the social media site. X, SpaceX will be doing this.
Speaker 2:Very interesting. Yeah. I I I think it makes sense. The question is just like, yeah. What is the actual timeline for any of this this, I mean, no one really expected Starlink to ramp as fast as it did, and then it just, like, kind of worked.
Speaker 2:But, if there is, I don't know, a bunch of, if there is a lot of, like, actual fundamental, like, foundational science around, like, heat dissipation that needs to be done, that might be something that a little bit bottleneck. But at the same team at the same time, I kind of, like, I would kind of bet on the SpaceX team to figure that stuff out since they already do a ton of heat dissipation and material science just on
Speaker 1:It's it's it's also just fascinating to look at the
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Space industry versus the automotive industry. Like, the automotive industry is the most brutally competitive challenging business where Elon is having to compete with every car manufacturer in the world. Obviously, there's export import controls, in in automotive. But, in space, it's like, you know, you can imagine that being not a perfect monopoly, but certainly having every possible advantage in order to dominate in that category when the time is right. Should we talk about Apple before we before we continue?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Definitely.
Speaker 1:Apple beat top line, beat on bottom line. China sales declined year over year. You've been paying any attention to Apple, you know that their China business is slowly going away. IPhone revenue, they missed just just by $300,000,000. Not not
Speaker 2:50,000,000,000, or 4 49,000,000,000 this quarter.
Speaker 1:Yep. IPhone revenue is 49,000,000,000 versus, 49.33 estimate. Stock, is relatively, flat, since then.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the the this is the real, like, this is the real bombshell in their strategy. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, a third party analyst firm, said it observed great interest in the Pro and Pro Max models while the new iPhone 17 Air model showed virtually no sign of traction.
Speaker 1:So I saw my first iPhone Air in the wild yesterday.
Speaker 2:Didn't no. You saw that one get smashed. Tell that story.
Speaker 7:Which one?
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh, this this was this was genuinely, like, the most I I I posted about this. Later. During during LA Tech Week, we had a Why'd
Speaker 2:you put it in quotes? It was LA Tech Week.
Speaker 1:Well, there wasn't I mean
Speaker 2:It really wasn't an LA Tech Week event. You know, like, Los Angeles.
Speaker 1:Los Angeles technology. No. So we we Yeah. Had dinner with some some folks. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, there was there was a founder there from Venice.
Speaker 2:From Venice.
Speaker 1:And he was saying that the iPhone air is the strongest iPhone ever made Yeah. And that, he challenged anybody at the dinner. Yeah. There was, like, 20 people.
Speaker 2:Do you remember Bengate? Do you remember the I what what do you remember Bengate, Tyler? It was like the iPhone five or something. There was
Speaker 3:I was pretty young.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. You're probably before your time. But, but there was a time when the iPhone launched and you could just bend it. And it was like a lot of phones were getting bent.
Speaker 2:So this guy is going to you and and he and and he's going around and saying that no one can bend this phone. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is No. No. He said nobody can break this phone. No one can break it.
Speaker 1:This phone is absolutely unbreakable. Unbreakable. They've tested it internally. You cannot break it. It's the strongest iPhone ever.
Speaker 1:He Yeah. Compared it to every other iPhone, even the even the titanium iPhone. Okay. And so he was he was bending it like this Yeah. Going crazy.
Speaker 1:And he challenged anybody at the dinner to say, who wants to try to break this phone? And Agundo founder I'm leaving both of them unnamed. Agundo founder
Speaker 2:And we got Gabriel from OpenAI in the chat. Good luck, man. You're building cameos over there, but you're gonna compete with us.
Speaker 1:We're doing it the old fashioned way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're doing it the old fashioned way. It just took us three hours sitting here in makeup.
Speaker 1:What do you mean three hours? It was like more like four hours.
Speaker 2:Was like four hours. So, Gabriel, you sped that up just a little bit, but, you know, I think I think we're sticking with this for the for the meantime.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, anyways, this founder challenges the entire group at dinner. Any can anybody break this phone? The Gunda founder raises his hand, takes the phone, and, like, tries for a second and just snaps it, basically. Not completely shatters Like, completely broken.
Speaker 1:Won't even won't even turn on. And the Venice founder is sitting there saying, like, like, he was like in disbelief. Like every the whole room just went completely quiet and he was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna email Tim Cook about this.
Speaker 2:Emailing Tim Cook. What is he gonna do? You're not supposed to smash your phone.
Speaker 1:Anyways, on Apple, John, your take, you said sort of the inverse meta core business not at risk due to AI but not investing aggressively. Consumers seem happy to just open an LLM app. I could take I said Apple's trading at 40 times PE with very low growth. This feels steep even if I don't think they're threatened by AI in the near term. And then I highlighted a quote from Bernard Arnaud from LVMH.
Speaker 1:He said, I don't know if in twenty years time people will be using iPhones, but I do know they will be drinking Dom Perignon. It's a good one.
Speaker 2:And hopefully they'll be using graphite dot dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. In other news
Speaker 1:We should close it out with NVIDIA just to finish this little earnings wrap up. Basically, our our John, your take was on top of the world, but is that head that is the head that wears the crown heavy core AI factory build out going flawlessly, but unclear why NVIDIA is pushing data centers in space, humanoids, quantum computing, mumbo jumbo.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's real.
Speaker 1:Maybe You know this stuff's real. The same old day story question? Yeah. I said, I don't think Jensen would be, just chugging beers in Korea
Speaker 2:Chugging beer.
Speaker 1:If he was having a a rough one. So, we'll, see how it nets out their earnings or not until November 18.
Speaker 2:Some beers. Yeah. Yeah. What's wrong with Chuck in some beers? Especially I mean, you gotta like, he is superlative at this point.
Speaker 2:I I believe just quantitatively, he is the most value creative founder CEO in human history. Like, no founder CEO has created 5,000,000,000,000. I mean, like, no one's created 5,000,000,000,000 in any in any capacity, whether in in, in the CEO seat or or not. Because, like, with a with a Microsoft or with a or with an Apple, you have to start having the conversation when you're having the GOAT debate on how much credit do you give to Tim Cook for market cap creation, how much credit do you give to Steve Jobs. Right?
Speaker 2:And same thing with Satya Nadella and Bill Gates. Like, obviously, Satya has has taken Microsoft from 300,000,000,000 to 4,000,000,000,000. Does that mean that he's 10 times better than the founders that started the company in the GOAT debate of value creation? Like, I I he did have a big he had a lot of great shoulders to stand.
Speaker 1:About number go up.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly. But But with Jensen, you don't even have to have the debate because he's been the founder CEO the whole time. And so he is he's he deserves a beer. Let it let the man have a couple beers with his boys in South Korea.
Speaker 2:He's been on an absolute
Speaker 1:A couple more posts here. Jay Boldheart says, I'm sorry, but no company generating the cash meta is with the margins it has should ever be raising money. Of course, they announced another bond sale yesterday morning to fund their build out. Jay Boldheart said, absolutely pathetic. Maybe just spend a little less and don't pay every AI scientist like their Shohei Ohtani.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I want to understand more about the private credit dynamic here because I I believe that they're like, a good CFO would tell you that if you're buying land, you should get a mortgage because it can be secured. And there's just there's just some, like, cost of capital math that you should do, and it would actually be irresponsible. Like, if they were saying, hey. We're gonna build a new data center.
Speaker 2:We need to buy some land. We need to buy a building, buy a bunch of GPUs. And they're like, and guess what? We're not gonna use debt. Like, that's like that's like paying off your mortgage, basically.
Speaker 2:And it's like, okay. Yeah. You can pay off your mortgage. And you can be like, I'm one of those guys that doesn't have a mortgage. And it's like, congratulations, but you're probably not using capital efficiently.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so I when I hear that they're setting up a big data center and they're raising debt for that particular deal, I don't have, like, red flags flying off in my mind. But I don't know. This this this bulltard guy does.
Speaker 1:Semi analysis had a post here, quoting Sundar. Sundar said, over the past twelve months, nearly a 150 cloud Google Cloud customers each process approximately 1,000,000,000,000 tokens with our models for a wide range of applications. For example, WPP is creating campaigns with up to 70% efficiency gains. Swarovski has increased email open rates by 17%. Let's give it up for Swarovski.
Speaker 1:Email open rates and accelerated campaign localization by 10 x. Semi analysis says AI is not above all. Enterprise AI is very strong. Nearly a 150 enterprises each process 1,000,000,000,000 tokens with Gemini models for a wide range of apps. And then they say, wait.
Speaker 1:That's less than a million bucks per year per enterprise or a 150,000,000 of annual revenue, I e point 3% of GCP annual revenue. So
Speaker 2:The fact that Google leads a token count instead of revenue growth tells you everything. If enterprise AI was actually strong, those 150 companies would be spending 10 x more. I don't know about that because when you're a big company, like, you don't wanna break out, like, more GAAP metrics, non GAAP metrics than you absolutely have to. Like because if you develop some monster of a business, like the AWS IPO story, the whole idea that Amazon had this amazing business and was like, oh, yeah. Like, just include that in everything else.
Speaker 2:Like, definitely don't let everyone know. And Satya told this to to us on the show was he was like, when AWS had to disclose what was going on over there, was the best day for us because everyone looked at our business and we're like, they got the same thing going on over there. They got a monster of a business cooking. And so the question of, like, how Google positions this, like, do they wanna share dollars? But I don't know.
Speaker 2:I I just wonder I wonder what the shape of of GCP adoption is, if it's if it's nearly a 150 Google Cloud customers each processed 1,000,000,000,000, I wonder if It just it would be slice is.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, if Sundar would come out and says, we got enterprise AI to a $150,000,000 run rate, Everyone would be like But it sounds really good when you say 1,000,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That is a weird weird way to frame it. I don't know. I mean, the the the this is all this is all so weird because it's like, okay.
Speaker 2:So then what's actually happening in the core business? Because they they they crushed earnings. Like, they did they did great. And it's like five
Speaker 1:is still
Speaker 2:Are we just in this world where weird world where everyone where every business is like, yeah. I totally want like, I'll take $1,000,000 of tokens, but then I also need $75,000,000 more of just traditional databases. Is that what's going on? Like like like, what's actually driving the growth if not the token generation? Yeah.
Speaker 2:There might just be something longer tail going on here too. There this might just be, like, this slice of this 150 enterprises that's that's actually you know, that only makes up I don't know. The big question is just what percentage of GCP annual revenue is AI, is GenAI? Like, we've seen that the CapEx at Meta, they have Core AI. They have GenAI.
Speaker 2:Like, every everyone wants to track that now about what what workload is happening. Sometimes the hyperscalers don't know because they just said, look. I just rented you a bunch of GPUs. Are you inferencing a recommendation algorithm on it? Are you playing video games on it?
Speaker 2:Are you generating tokens on it? We actually don't know because we respect your privacy, and you can do whatever you want with it. So all we can tell the market is like, hey. We've we've sold a lot of GPU hours. Yep.
Speaker 2:And and and it's all it's all masked. Anyway, Tyler, what what you got?
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah. A trillion is just, like, not a lot at all. Like, like, OpenAI is doing, like, on just on the API, like, something around, like, 50,000,000,000,000 a month. So compared to that, I mean, if it's a trillion over the past, like, year Mhmm. Even if it's a 150, I mean, that's, like, that's pretty bad.
Speaker 2:Each 150,000,000,000,000. And you said
Speaker 3:doing, like, 260
Speaker 2:I I actually can't keep these numbers straight anymore. Like, there's I I this is like everything is like nothing's an apples to apples, and I think that's very much intentional. I think that you don't wanna be easily comped across anything. That's why everyone just focuses on valuation and then and then revenue and revenue scale.
Speaker 1:Dylan Patel says, so many people hated on us for the AWS acceleration thesis a couple months ago. And we were right, of course. Only we can do these calls due to our deep knowledge and insights with core research, data center accelerator, and tokenomics models. Amazon, and he does the AMZN with and just dropped sales at semianalysis.com. So I expect If you're trailing in to be printing the next Legendary chart.
Speaker 1:Twenty four hours. This was crazy. I wasn't sure if this was Mhmm. Fake news or not. But, on the Coinbase earnings call yesterday, Brian Armstrong Yeah.
Speaker 1:Went there was a prediction market that people were betting on which words he would say, during the during the earnings call, and he waited until the end. And he just read through and read off every single word that he had missed. He says Yeah. You know, I just wanted to add the words in here. Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain staking, and Web three to make sure we get those all in before the end of the call.
Speaker 1:So completely trolling. We've had that a few times during interviews.
Speaker 2:Because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just wanna, you know, add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and Web three. It's actually crazy that he hadn't gotten to Bitcoin until then. Like, why like, the like, that it really tells you a lot about how mature the Coinbase business is that you can get to the end of your q three twenty twenty five earnings call without mentioning Bitcoin, which was, like, the entire reason the business exists. But the business has grown so much. There's a lot else going on.
Speaker 2:Possible that he
Speaker 1:said it, and he just didn't remember.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe. But but it is it is funny that, that he's just But,
Speaker 1:yeah, one one thing is is we we've had prediction markets created around different interviews we've done. And and he was distracting when I'm looking at the chat and people are like, say this word. Yeah. Say that word again.
Speaker 2:It's crazy.
Speaker 1:Say it three more times.
Speaker 2:It's a very weird postmodern hyper techno capital accelerationist, like, aesthetic to be like, people are gambling on the words that you're saying in a livestream. It's very, very weird. I don't know what his I would love to know Brian's honest take on, like, how he feels about that. Like, there's a little bit of just the market is going to exist. It's gonna be a thing.
Speaker 2:And so he by doing this, he's kind of trolling the market to just say, hey. You're never gonna be able to reliably bet on this market because you never know what I'm gonna do, which is one way to interact with it. As opposed to being like, hey, guys. I know that everyone has a prediction market up on what I'm gonna say, and so please don't do that. It's like, no.
Speaker 2:Just like go create chaos, and then everyone will just know that it's a meme and chaos.
Speaker 1:Well, it's gonna just drive more attention to the next earnings call because people are
Speaker 2:gonna go,
Speaker 1:is he gonna well, I'll just bet yes on everything in case he does that again.
Speaker 2:Oh. Know, my the odds might
Speaker 1:be at, 95% for every word. And then he just says, like, he just doesn't mention it at all Yeah. And then everything, you know.
Speaker 2:It certainly it certainly kinda cements him as as just a very in the culture CEO and a very a very, like, online founder, which I think is positive. We are, of course, partner with Polymarket as a prediction market. We're usually tracking the largest companies on their largest company at the 2025. NVIDIA has been predicted, of course. And
Speaker 1:What's the percentage?
Speaker 2:Year. It's like 99% now. I mean, they're a trillion above everyone else. There there it was a horse race, though.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was really close midsummer
Speaker 2:Yeah. At one point. I mean, the the the market caps were were eclipsing each other, and they were going back and forth. And and at one point
Speaker 1:June 1, Microsoft and and video were both at 37% exactly.
Speaker 2:It's been a pretty crazy it's been a craze pretty crazy year because of the the tariffs and what and the AI narrative and the deep seek moment. The the horse race has changed a few times, and Microsoft has been in the lead. Apple's been in the lead, but NVIDIA's running away with it. And that deserves a beer with your boys in South Korea. What that's what he's been up to.
Speaker 1:Did you fully understand that there's a article here? Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost 11 and a half billion last quarter.
Speaker 2:That seems like in line with what we've been kind of assuming. It's like it's it's a massive loss making business. I don't know that we'd heard that they were on, like, a 40,000,000,000 loss run rate, but that kind
Speaker 1:of winds up amount of money that they've raising. Maybe Intel.
Speaker 2:Like, you you you mean the the, like, the the biggest
Speaker 1:Who's losing
Speaker 2:sitting there?
Speaker 1:Who's losing more money than OpenAI?
Speaker 2:Do you count CapEx as losing money? Because I I would I would almost as I would almost certainly assume that these are not losses. These are investments. So, like, if so, like, if I raise $10,000,000 for my startup and then I'm like, okay. I'm gonna buy a office building for $5,000,000, like, that's not negative 5,000,000 earnings.
Speaker 2:That is negative 5,000,000 cash flow. I've lost 5,000,000 cash, and I and I don't have liquid cash anymore. And so I would assume that a lot of OpenAI's losses are actually investments in CapEx one way or another. But there are also some mean, stock based
Speaker 1:stock based comp is factored into this as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that's also, in many cases, a noncash expense. And so still important to track, still significant. But, all of this stuff, it's like, I I'm kind of in, like, a wait and see until the until the s one drops, until we can actually get data. Do you have any
Speaker 3:intel So apparently, this is Yeah. This is double what they've like, what has previously been reported. Mhmm. So that I think before there was a report that said, the 2025, they were gonna do 3.5 in losses. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So this is basically double that. Yeah. But even then, it's still I don't think this is very surprising at
Speaker 2:all. It's so hard to track how much money they're actually raising because they'll they'll raise for a particular deal. They'll raise for Stargate. There'll be a a secondary transaction. It's very hard to understand, like, how much cash is actually going from investors onto OpenAI's, like, for profit balance sheet for that is that is, like, available to burn.
Speaker 2:And then once you have the cash, like, I think everyone's fine with the idea of Sam Altman burning money for twelve to eighteen months and going out and raise more. Like, that's not crazy when you're growing your business Yeah. Especially in a new category.
Speaker 1:In other news Yeah. Palantir sues former employees for stealing company secrets. Mhmm. Company alleges Peyr violated noncompetes to create Copycat AI
Speaker 2:firm. Interesting.
Speaker 1:They've the two employees, they're accusing them of stealing confidential data to build a rival company called Percepta backed by General Catalyst.
Speaker 2:I would not want to steal from Palantir. Bad idea. That seems like one of the worst companies to steal from.
Speaker 1:They will find you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they
Speaker 1:will kill you.
Speaker 2:Can't believe that, but, it is a is a wild thing.
Speaker 1:You you think about a company that's gonna have, like, you know, things pretty locked down.
Speaker 2:Their whole their whole shtick is
Speaker 1:knew what's going on. That if I I remember I read the article yesterday, but I believe they they tracked that the employee had Slacked themselves a document that they then opened on their phone and, like, presumably, you know, save. So Yeah. We'll see how this nets out. They say that taking access to Palantir's crown jewels such as source code and customer workflows to create what it called a copycat platform.
Speaker 1:So they're just trying to block them from using the data and to force the return of stolen materials. One of the comments says, never never go against a company that sued the government and won. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Sean Sankar was on the Ross Douthat. Ross Douthat. It was really good. I don't know how much he listened to, but, he he it's funny because they open with, like, the classic question of, of, like, what does Palantir actually do? And I don't know.
Speaker 2:Like, why are people so confused by that question? It's so crazy to me. It's like, and Sean explains it extremely well. He's just like, like, you have data. We help you understand your data.
Speaker 2:We help you understand what's going on there. You know, it's it's he's he's like, it's a data analytics firm, sir.
Speaker 3:It's the same other thing, when when Trey Stevens went on Sean Ryan. Yeah. Like, the questions were, like, almost the same exact questions. Like, what does Palantir do? Like and then Oh, interesting.
Speaker 3:You read the comments, and then everyone's like, this is the antichrist.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People go crazy, crazy, crazy. And I think it's I I like, Shama Shama is great example of, like, when you want to make a thing, like, if you're if you're running a manufacturing plant, you will have a a system for tracking like, if you're trying to make, like, yerba mate, you will have a system that stores, like, the specifications of the can, what type of ink you're using here, the the size of the can, the shape, what materials, how the how this gets printed. Like, that will all be managed in a in a particular software system. Then how how you're actually making the cans will be like, oh, okay.
Speaker 2:I'm producing 25 cans a second or whatever. That will be tracked in a different system. Then you might have a CRM to sell. Who do I sell these cans to? I'm selling them, you know, every every month.
Speaker 2:Jordy buys a bunch. So I have a CRM that tracks you. And he's just describing, like like, the different enterprise software tooling sets, like CRM, CMS, warehouse management system, inventory management system. He's just describing those and say and explaining how Palantir can tie them all together and how Palantir can build them, and sometimes you need custom ones for specific, for specific industries.
Speaker 1:Well, let's check-in with the Anyway, Palantir
Speaker 2:yes. What is the what do the Palantir Bulls say?
Speaker 1:The Palantir Bulls will get exhausted at these levels. Full send.
Speaker 2:I like the guy doing
Speaker 1:the back. Our our team workout should look like that. We don't break nearly
Speaker 2:enough of a sweat compared to this. This is so sick. Let's go. Look at this.
Speaker 1:Bro, backflips?
Speaker 2:I like that guy who's just, like, who's just, like, racing it like it's a chariot or, like, it's a horse race. That's hilarious. Yeah. This also seems slightly sped up maybe. What do we think?
Speaker 2:Do you think this is, like, 1.1 x?
Speaker 3:It's slowed down.
Speaker 2:Oh, you think think it's slowed down? Get on Julius dot AI. What analysis do you wanna run? Chat with your data. Get expert level insights in seconds.
Speaker 2:Where where to next? We got the mansion section. There's a bunch of stuff we can go through. Did you hear that the Hamptons market is making an epic comeback? Let's go.
Speaker 2:Finally. The moment Home sales of $10,000,000 or more houses are surging on the East End, even topping the COVID surge in the Hampton, New York's affluent beach vacation destination, the luxury real estate market, has come roaring back. Have you have you ever been to the Hamptons? I I still think I've never been to
Speaker 1:the Hamptons. I actually
Speaker 2:Bobby Cosmic was worried about the Maybe as a kid,
Speaker 1:but not as an adult.
Speaker 2:The number of home sales above $10,000,000 on Long Island's East End has surged to unprecedented levels, even topping the area's pandemic boom. The uptick comes even as Florida and other locales have replaced New York City as a primary home for many billionaires. The Hamptons is, for a lack of a better term, kicking a s s at the very high end of the market. Wow. Uncensored swear word in the journal.
Speaker 2:Absolute dogs over there in the
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 2:Writers. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1:Out of control.
Speaker 2:Out of control. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Would never.
Speaker 2:We gotta get this under control. No. I think I think that's not that bad of a word, a s s. The high end Hamptons market was in the doldrums before COVID. Home sales of 10,000,000 or more plummeted from 58 in 2015 to 30 in 2019 as the Ritzy area faced increased competition from areas such as Nantucket or Hudson Valley.
Speaker 2:And so there are some stories here, to the Banner Born.
Speaker 1:I've been working out my land thesis.
Speaker 2:Yes. I think,
Speaker 1:I think I think that it's probably the most underrated asset class right now. Well, don't All throughout all the alpha. I mean I mean, I'm I'm down to I'm down to share the alpha with with All the alphas are be the BIN. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I just think throughout, you know, all human history, people were like, how do I acquire land?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And then at some point or another, people just stopped. Right? It became just about getting the home
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And not thinking about land. So
Speaker 2:Where? Where do you want land? Do you want to buy Fifth Avenue to to
Speaker 1:to I just wanna buy up land in the area that I love the most, which
Speaker 2:American jurisdiction?
Speaker 1:Of course, America. California? Of course, California.
Speaker 2:So Southern Cal
Speaker 1:I'll never give up on California.
Speaker 2:I still think there I still think there's huge alpha in just acquiring massive swaths of Alaskan land. Yeah. I still think
Speaker 1:that this one out for a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think it's massively underrated because if if if global warming is real and unstoppable and we can't fight the force of global warming, well, then temperatures will rise, and Alaska will be the last beachfront property. It'll be balmy. It'll be amazing. Everything else will be a desert, but Alaska will be nice and temperate, and that's where you wanna be.
Speaker 1:We'll see.
Speaker 2:And if we cure global warming, if we stop global warming, if we wind up figuring out how to manipulate the environment, We we we become we harness the
Speaker 1:manipulate time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Manipulating time, manipulating the weather. If Augustus is successful, if geoengineering is successful, well, then it's not gonna be cold up there because we'll just be able to transform it into a lush, a lush environment. 72 and sunny all day. So I think in either in either scenario, no matter where you land on, on global warming, is it unstoppable?
Speaker 2:Is it preventable? Alaska looks great in that world. What do you think?
Speaker 3:Did you ever resolve your beef with the Alaskans?
Speaker 6:No. They didn't
Speaker 2:I had locked I so I posted on x. Actually, was Twitter back then. Like, four years ago, I posted, like, we gotta go to Alaska. We gotta build some condominiums. We gotta build some strip malls.
Speaker 2:We gotta build some skyscrapers. It's too it's too nice up there. And I was basically like, we're gonna we're all the tech people, all the all my tech friends, we're all gonna go to Alaska. And the Alaskans did not like this.
Speaker 7:I don't know.
Speaker 2:And they said, stay out of Alaska, you tech boy. And I was getting it I was gonna attack both the left and the right.
Speaker 1:Kinda listened too.
Speaker 2:I did. I I I I, in fact, I did not, invade Alaska. But, yeah, I was getting lots of DMs from Alaskans who are, you know, gun toting good old boy Americans.
Speaker 1:Do not step foot.
Speaker 2:Do not you wouldn't last a day up here. You're not tough enough for the Alaskan wilderness. And then I was also getting canceled by the left Alaskans who are like, this is my indigenous homeland. You can't come here, that type of thing. And so I was getting it from both sides.
Speaker 2:I wound up locking my account because the post went majorly viral in Alaskan, like, Twitter, Alaska Twitter. Of course, I was joking around, but, the Internet doesn't care about that. Twitter
Speaker 1:is such a small place already. Imagine how small Alaska Twitter is. Yeah. There's like six six posters up there. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Regional posters.
Speaker 2:But this is the this is the lesson for folks who, who post and are are worried about getting canceled. Not that you should go out there and and get canceled. But if it if it does if it does happen, if it it usually starts by somebody quote posting you, and you can tell that, you know, you posted something, you got a 100 likes, but the quote post is taking off and people are having a lot of fun quote tweeting you. Well, if
Speaker 1:you lock your ratio account on the original post is just abysmal.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So if that happens, you can just bail by locking your account, which then kills the quote tweet because it doesn't show up in the quote tweet. And so no one's liking or retweeting a quote tweet with just a this account is locked. And so it just kills the virality of the quote and the dunk, and so you stop getting dunked on. And then no one can really, like, DM you or or or reply to you or dig through your account.
Speaker 2:And so usually, at least in the short term, people are kind of like, moving on to something else. I'm not I'm not letting it percolate. We should talk to Lulu about, how to handle cancellations when she hops on. She's, of course, seen a bunch of these. Speaking of people who should be canceled, someone owns a disgusting house in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2:We gotta dig into the mansion section is really getting wild today. They put a curse word in here. Don't like that. They also, are listing an $85,000,000 mansion here for sale in LA, an estate with a curated collection of SEX toys. What's going on, mansion section?
Speaker 2:Why are you getting so wild
Speaker 1:on Crazy.
Speaker 2:Friday, October 31?
Speaker 1:I don't Spooky. It has a pleasure Not like them.
Speaker 2:A pair of Los Angeles mansions, one with a pleasure suite outfitted with a curated collection of sex toys, is hitting the market for $85,000,000. The seller is British music producer Alex DeKid. He's 44. He spent fourteen years building one of the houses, a roughly 24
Speaker 1:house Fourteen years?
Speaker 2:Yeah. He started when he was 30, I guess.
Speaker 1:He thinks in decades.
Speaker 2:He thinks in decades. In addition to the Pleasure Suite, the Hollywood Hills home, which DeKid called his entertainer's fortress, has eight pools, very cool, an auto elevator, and a private nightclub. In 2020, DeKid purchased a, an adjacent five bedroom home with its own pool for around 7,600,000.0, property records show. He bought the roughly 6,125 square foot house with the idea of adding it to the main residence, he said, but ultimately decided to use it as a guesthouse instead. DeKid bought the first property, a Spanish style home on the in the Bird Streets area for around 4,300,000.0 in 2011.
Speaker 2:The purchase came shortly after renegotiating his first publishing
Speaker 1:deal. Morale in the chat. Alex DeKid. He's 44. His middle
Speaker 2:name is Alexander j Grant. I basically got this house thinking it would be a six month remodel. But after more than a year of renovating, DeKid decided to raze the house, destroying it, and start over. It was like making an album for me, DeKid said. I got these other ideas.
Speaker 2:McClean, who's known for designing modern mansions, is a madman just like me, the kid said. The four bedroom house has a glass elevator for cars, a pleasure suite with a Murphy bed, and mirrored wall contains antique chairs customized with patent leather, upholstery, restraints, and chains. I think we're beyond the days of it being taboo to enjoy pleasure, the kid said. I wanted a place where you could feel comfortable and intimate and explore.
Speaker 1:Alright. Let's go to the next
Speaker 2:We're not we're not past it. It is taboo. Tear your house down.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:No. The mansion section is, is all over the place today. Shutterstock founder sells a Bridgehampton home. What a great time to get out of Shutterstock with the dawn of generative imagery. This has to be one of the hardest businesses to make.
Speaker 1:He's not out yet. He's still the chair executive chairman.
Speaker 2:Yes. But he's clearly sold enough to, to buy 57,000,000
Speaker 1:We should have we should have John on. I'd be interested to to hear how he's Yeah. How we how how I mean, I'm sure they they get so much traffic still. Yeah. And I imagine they just help people generate assets based on other assets that I mean, the
Speaker 2:bull case is the Reddit thesis, right, where you're licensing the data, and that's a and and that's actually Yeah. Very valuable, and the stock sort of pops off of that. He sold his oceanfront house in Bridgehampton, New York for 57,000,000 according to people familiar with the deal. He bought it for 40,000,000 in 2014. He's listed the house.
Speaker 2:The buyer of the identity the buyer's identity couldn't be learned. We're gonna figure that out, get to the bottom of it. Let's see. Set on more than two acres, the modern Bridgehampton home has a gym, a game room, and a media room. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Outside, there is an infinity pool. You'll love that. There we go. An outdoor kitchen, a fireplace, and a television, a private lighted walkway that leads to the beach. Sales volume in the Hamptons hit a fourteen year low, but it's coming back.
Speaker 2:And, the founder of Shutterstock is getting out at maybe the top, but a local boom. Very fun. Else is going on in
Speaker 1:the timeline? Back to the timeline in the journal as well.
Speaker 2:Blackrock turbo puffer.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Search everybody. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Continue, Drew.
Speaker 1:BlackRock stung by loans to businesses accused of breathtaking fraud. An entrepreneur tapped private credit funds to finance his telecom businesses. Now the lenders say he defrauded them. So, stock market news over on X as we have our fourth private credit collapse in two months. And this one shows exactly why institutional lenders shouldn't be justified to verify their own collateral.
Speaker 1:Baqim Bombat ran Keriox Capital, a tele New York telecom financing outfit that convinced BlackRock's HPS Investment Partners and BNP Paribas to lead him 552,000,000. The entire deal was built on one claim. He had legitimate receivables from T Mobile, Telstra, B Oh.
Speaker 2:Interesting receivables Sprott.
Speaker 1:Italia, Sparkle, and Taiwan Mobile backing the loans. None of it was real. Brom bought forged contracts that appeared to be signed by representatives from these character carriers. He created fake invoices, supposedly issued by these companies claiming they owed Keriox money. Then he spoofed email addresses mimicking these carriers real domains and sent verification Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Emails to make the receivables look legitimate. By stacking these fabricated invoices on top of each other, he created what looked like 500,000,000 plus in collateral. Lenders saw assets and funded the deal without catching any of it. Here's where it gets embarrassing when HPS and BNP Paribas finally tried to verify these receivables by actually calling T Mobile. The carrier said they had no idea what Keriox was talking about.
Speaker 1:No contracts. No no invoices. Nothing existed. One phone call would have instantly revealed the entire fraud. These are supposed to be institutional grade lenders with world class risk management, yet somehow they missed basic due diligence.
Speaker 1:While all this was happening, BrandBot's people were also stealing cash whenever payments came through the lender controlled collection accounts. Instead of applying those funds to the debt, they diverted the money offshore. So he wasn't just fabricating collateral. He was act stealing actual cash flows in real time. Lenders sued in 2020 August 2025 and froze all assets.
Speaker 1:Then they filed for the company, Karyox, filed for bankruptcy with up to 1,000,000,000 in liabilities and basically zero assets remaining. HPS is sitting on half a billion in losses with nothing to recover against. The kicker is that BlackRock acquired HPS for 12,000,000,000 in July 2025 specifically to expand into private credit and get access to its a $148,000,000,000 platform. Within ninety days of closing that deal, they're holding a half a billion dollar fraud loss on receivables that HPS supposedly vetted and monitored.
Speaker 2:Mean, that's not that big of a deal. Right?
Speaker 4:Half a billion?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's not great, but, you know, it is, like, 5% of the deal. Like, I feel like people get deals mispriced by a couple percent every once in a while.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's just this is a big deal in the broader context of, like, private credit has exploded as an asset class. Yeah. There's a lot of, you know, people of Yeah. It's a You know, we saw this with sloppiness. What was the Or not.
Speaker 1:AV in the chat. Large scale fraud is actually a sign of good times.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's true. Yeah. But,
Speaker 1:yeah. Who who knows? But anyways, that that auto parts, company that that went bankrupt a while back also had a bunch of
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:Private credit in the mix. And so I think people are just waiting for more and more
Speaker 2:We gotta dig into that mind. That story of the satellite repossession, maybe one of the the I don't know about credit gets gets crazy. I mean, there's a famous example of one, one one credit firm buying Argentinian debt and then repossessing a aircraft carrier or, like, destroyer, like a military boat. And apparently, same thing, can happen in space with with, satellites. Like, they are they it is possible to, more or less repossess them.
Speaker 2:And so I I think a lot of these a lot of these deals, a lot of these, a lot of these private credit deals are like, you're you're on a knife's edge in terms of, like, are you going to get continue to get payment, or are you going to need to get the value from the assets? Whereas in venture capital, it's just so much it's just so much further out on the risk curve that Yeah. You're you're never like Yeah. Am I like, I like, a big piece of my business is is making sure I can liquidate the Apple display monitors, you know, in the office or the Herman Miller chairs. It's like Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. That's gonna be basically immaterial to your business. It's gonna be the difference between, you know, like, 99% of the value is gonna come from 1% of the investments anyway. And then of the money you lose, you're not gonna be recouping an extra 5% making a difference.
Speaker 1:In some more positive news
Speaker 2:Google AI Studio.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires the right models and APIs up for you. You can get started at aistudio ai.studio/build.
Speaker 1:Continue. Britain over at Microsoft, says, please, mister president, respectfully let us buy this truck.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:He was responding
Speaker 2:to the 64,000 likes on that.
Speaker 1:Palmer says, working on this.
Speaker 2:Working on this.
Speaker 1:Got another 20,000 likes. So people want these What is these little Toyota trucks.
Speaker 2:But what does this mean in the Palmer context? Does this mean he's going to, like, call the president and ask Trump to allow it, or is he going to make a mod retro version of this car? Is Andrew all gonna produce this? Like, there's there's, like, 12 different ways that that, Palmer could, like, solve this problem of, like, Americans not being able to get cool trucks, which is interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know why I don't know if these these trucks are blocked. Yeah. Either blocked in The US or just you would have to import one yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But they I mean, INEOS is basically I think INEOS has basically done this. They're they're the they have a what do they have? It's not the main Grenadier. Yeah. But they have I'm pulling it up right now.
Speaker 1:The Quartermaster. The Quartermaster from Grenadier looks quite a lot like this truck, but it's certainly think this one from Toyota internationally sells for, like, 10 to $20. Like, it's very cheap.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People love to point out the fact that, the Ford f one fifty has the same bed length as these tiny Japanese k trucks. But interestingly, that's just why you should always buy the Ford f two fifty Super Duty crew cab with the long bed. Because if you just go for the biggest truck, then you will be bigger than
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Than the than the Japanese k truck. People love people love the k trucks. They have fun with those. Well, if you're starting a new truck company, you gotta get your brand mentioned on ChuttgpT. You gotta go to ProFound, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.
Speaker 2:Andrew Reed says, if I ran a company, my first act would be to ban hard boiled eggs in the office.
Speaker 1:Hard boiled eggs are really an insane snack. I put these in quotes because the smell The smell's crazy. Unbelievably bad Yeah. That you should be forced to eat them outside only.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's, it the it's is it more it's not more protein than a steak in a bag. You gotta go chesky mode. Chesky mode. The that that's the way if you wanna have if you wanna have protein on the go, throw a steak in the bag and take it with you everywhere.
Speaker 2:The hard boiled eggs in the office, that seems like a an odd choice. Probably a time and a place.
Speaker 1:Maybe they should put Name one time and one place.
Speaker 2:One place would be like doors. You know how in offices they have like like well, where you can go to the the smoking area. Like, I wouldn't have a problem with somebody going in if there's like a cigarette smoking area, like a back alley, and you can go into the back alley and scarf scarfs, hard boiled eggs. That seems reasonable. People are smoking less glass.
Speaker 1:Go outside, put one in each, you know, cheek, and then go back
Speaker 2:Like chipmunk mode?
Speaker 1:Chipmunk go chipmunk mode and then and then just pretend like you don't have them.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Yeah. I've never been I've never been big in the in the hard boiled egg thing. I have, however, been big into linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products.
Speaker 2:Need the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. Our first guests of the show are in the restream waiting room. We have Lulu Masurvi and Gabby Goldberg stopping by. Woah. Look at this.
Speaker 8:Oh, shit. Hey. Hey. Hey.
Speaker 2:You look fantastic. Is that a wig too?
Speaker 8:Great. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. But it's great to see you guys. We were watch shopping during
Speaker 2:our Okay.
Speaker 8:Break between sauna and eating cheeseburgers for breakfast.
Speaker 2:The lore.
Speaker 1:That's the is coming through.
Speaker 8:Hey, John. John.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Oh,
Speaker 8:sorry. Very good. You wanna show we're live. You wanna show the watch you got?
Speaker 9:Oh, this? Oh, this is nothing special. This is my AP Offshore, but
Speaker 1:it's been on this list for a while.
Speaker 9:So, yeah, great to finally cross that off the list. What watch did you get, Jordy?
Speaker 8:Oh, I got the Jaeger Lecout.
Speaker 2:Oh, there we go. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 8:So, it's in the same color, you know, to be canned green, and,
Speaker 2:it
Speaker 8:matches, the new my bok that I just bought.
Speaker 9:You know that's how
Speaker 2:you bok. Maybach.
Speaker 8:It's the May Maybach. Right. It's outside, and it matches this watch. And, so really sorry, guys. Let's let's get right into the show.
Speaker 8:John, you ready?
Speaker 9:Let's do it, Jordy. Alright. You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 9:Today is Friday, October 31. We
Speaker 8:are live from the TVPN UltraDome.
Speaker 1:There we go. Got the you even got the horse.
Speaker 9:Technology. The torture is inside it. The capital of capital.
Speaker 2:They got the they got the whole shtick.
Speaker 1:Wow. What is that? Is that the soundboard?
Speaker 2:What is that? Oh, air horn. Oh, the air horn.
Speaker 1:There we Happy Halloween, guys.
Speaker 2:Happy Halloween.
Speaker 9:Happy Halloween. Good
Speaker 8:to see you.
Speaker 2:The chat is absolutely loving this.
Speaker 9:Big fancy both, Ilya and Mark.
Speaker 2:So Yes.
Speaker 1:How did you guys advise oh, wow. With the loafers up on the desk. The loafers The
Speaker 2:level of detail here, the shtick is remarkable.
Speaker 1:Here. We'll we'll fire we'll fire back.
Speaker 8:Someone else it's a steak to us. It's a lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. On It's a a more serious note, what's what's the advice to to clients on on how to how to approach Halloween? Any is it is it just ignore? It's a distraction?
Speaker 8:Nope. It is as with every other day a chance to only lock in more.
Speaker 9:We actually yeah. We printed out some examples.
Speaker 2:Yes. Take us through it, please. What else you got for
Speaker 8:tell them about this one?
Speaker 2:You're disappearing. Wait. What is this? This oh, this is Halloween, the Halloween starter kit. I've seen this.
Speaker 2:But what is what is in the image?
Speaker 8:Okay. So this is spirit Halloween, the Brian Armstrong set. It includes one great
Speaker 1:For the whole for the whole head. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, perfect. Perfect. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 8:Full head. Everything below the head is
Speaker 9:strictly optional.
Speaker 2:We consider that? We were in we were in makeup for three hours this morning. We could have just shaved her head with a razor in the morning.
Speaker 1:That would've been so much easy.
Speaker 2:Would've done 90% of the work for us, really.
Speaker 1:And I could've just I could've just I could've just grown a beard.
Speaker 2:Yes. What what what other ideas do we have here? Let's see.
Speaker 8:So we've got oh, here's here's one that John and I like.
Speaker 2:Printed posts. We the the level of detail here is amazing.
Speaker 1:This is insane. Continue. We
Speaker 2:might have to lose the virtual background, by the way. We're we're like, it's really cutting in and out. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, I can I can see it? What is this?
Speaker 2:It's the stressed out guy smoking. Gay
Speaker 8:gay Halloween. What do you mean you're stressed out Hayao Miyazaki? Look at this. This is a
Speaker 2:That would be a fantastic costume. Oh, someone did it. Then that's what that post is.
Speaker 8:Someone's real fast. Oh, no.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. Yeah. You see you're kind of tripping in and out. It is wild.
Speaker 8:And then here, we thought this was very disrespectful of you in particular, Mark.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes.
Speaker 8:We'll never we see this person, we will admonish them on the spot.
Speaker 9:We're looking for them.
Speaker 8:We did like this comment from the random recruiter, This is my sleep paralysis
Speaker 7:I do
Speaker 1:I do look like a sleep paralysis demon. That's hilarious. I looks I I look a little bit scary. I don't know if I'm doing Mark, justice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The it it it's it's a it's a remarkable remarkable effort.
Speaker 8:We do have a Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who do you
Speaker 2:think won?
Speaker 8:That we did like.
Speaker 2:Do I look more like Ilya than he looks like Mark? Who win who wins the costume contest today?
Speaker 8:I think it's the Ilya thing.
Speaker 2:You think so?
Speaker 1:I think so. I I was getting freaked out before the show. We had, like, five minutes after the costumes finished. And watching a six eight jacked Ilya just, like, come around the corner is is scary.
Speaker 2:It is a wild, wild experience. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Climbing the yeah. It's easier to climb the mountain when you're six eight.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's the it's all in the eyebrows. The eyebrows are really everything. Because, as they were working on getting the the the makeup on, I was like, there's no way this is gonna work. Like, this is not this is gonna look like party city level.
Speaker 2:Like, it's it's fun that we did this, but this is not gonna look convincing at all. And, and it's definitely a crazy Your
Speaker 1:post, Lulu, this isn't, reposting, John's post. This isn't AI. This is human craftsmanship. But it's actually crazy. So, like, the the, crew that typically works on, like, you know, normal film productions, they did was it, like, 50 different layers of stuff that they were putting on our heads?
Speaker 2:It was one of the
Speaker 1:most popular they're doing they they did, like, a base layer. They did the head. They painted over our eyebrows. They glued, you know, things over the eyebrows, and they put another set of eyebrows on. Then they painted over that.
Speaker 1:It's actually it's gonna take, like, probably an hour to just get get all of
Speaker 2:this off. They said forty five
Speaker 1:minutes. Okay.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 8:know why you'd wanna take it off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right. You think do do I mean, obviously, we're in a unique position because we get to kinda have some fun on the show. It's like almost a comedy show in many ways. Do you think there's any hope to bring back April Fools' Day in a cool way, or will tech just, like, flop on that immediately?
Speaker 8:It's hard to do. Someone told me a couple years ago on April Fools' Day that actually doing it on April Fools is the cringey part.
Speaker 2:Ew. Interesting.
Speaker 8:You're surrounded by so many people doing it badly that it's really away from that. And there's they were saying, if you think of a great prank or jape or joke
Speaker 2:Just do it randomly.
Speaker 8:Why wait till April 1 when everybody knows?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there there was a company that the YC company that pissed a bunch of people off because they they created an IDE that has, like, brain rot in this in the Yep. In the software. So you can do, like, gambling on stake, you can do subway surfers and like they pissed they they because it's on the YC website, I feel like they've like they're putting like, you can gamble while you code. They piss a lot of people off.
Speaker 1:And I think if they had just dropped it as like a feature that was like a real feature that you could play around with but wasn't like the their entire brand Mhmm. It would have hit a lot harder and been and and gotten a much more like funny positive reaction versus people just being like, I hate this blah blah blah. Like, you know, why does this Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's almost like taking, yeah, taking the joke, like, too seriously. When when you haven't established your brand at all, then people there's just you're making people do so much work. I guess that's the I guess that's the benefit of doing something on April 1 is that you're there's a lot less work to be like, is this a joke? You can just kind of, you you can kind of lean on on you know, the audience needs to, like, like, you don't need to you don't need to you you don't wind up in a situation where you have to explain to, like, 10,000 people, like, we're we're kidding. We're kidding.
Speaker 2:We're kidding. Like, people kinda put it together themselves and be like, okay. I'm I'm I'm good.
Speaker 1:Are drops dead as a meta? Do you think? Like, it feels like launch videos and drops are both kinda over.
Speaker 8:So so I don't think that drops are dead. I think that that specific style of drop with the, like, launch video has been over is completely saturated and overdone. Yeah. I think you just have to feel like people are not gonna stop announcing things and stop dropping things. Just have to find new ways to do it.
Speaker 1:Well, meant drop in the I meant drop in the context of, like, we made this product with our branding on it kinda thing.
Speaker 2:I thought Base did a really good job. Did you see Base's drop for their $11,000,000,000 round? It was a newspaper. I I thought that was, like, well executed in the sense that, like, it had a lot of text. It had a lot of content there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tyler has it there. Join the charge. And I just thought, like, yeah, it's like it's not just like a T shirt. It's, like, way way deeper.
Speaker 2:And I'd I'd say the same thing for the for the launch videos. It's like, we we found a very unique aesthetic yesterday. I'm not gonna share it because I think it would be a good launch video. But there there are there are specific formats where it's immediately identifiable as like, oh, that's that type of video. And if you use that as your launch video, you'll break through, and you'll be the first person to take you know, the like, right now, it's like the default meta is basically like, after Game of Thrones, stick around for the interview with the the actors.
Speaker 2:Like, that's the aesthetic of most launch videos right now. It's like cinematic, couple minutes, interview with a few people, kind of like mini doc They said
Speaker 1:we couldn't build enterprise category.
Speaker 7:No one
Speaker 1:they said it was impossible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'd be a little commoditized. But, think you have fresh ideas.
Speaker 8:Said at one point I said at one point that somebody should do a version of it of those sorority dance videos.
Speaker 2:That's a great one. That's a great idea.
Speaker 8:That's a great one if you have someone who can do flips or if you just, like, all wear a matching outfit. Like, it has to be a company. It if you're, like, solving cancer doing cancer, that's probably not right. But as long as the joke is not too close to home. The problem with being a slop adjacent company that jokes about slop
Speaker 9:Sure.
Speaker 8:Is now it's so obvious that that is very close to what you're doing, and now you have to defend yourself. Yep. Like, what was that car company that was gonna do that rebrand a couple years ago? Jaguar. Was really bad too.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There was another?
Speaker 8:There was another one where they joked about a rebrand. I don't even know if it was a joke. They claimed it was a joke because people hated it.
Speaker 2:What? It's just I don't remember this at all.
Speaker 1:Claiming after getting a reaction that people don't like something and then saying, it was a joke is is not an effective strategy. I've seen seen that a little bit. The substrate launch was crazy. That was kind of like a Lulu and Gabby master class special.
Speaker 9:Well, James is We'll pretty let them know. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. We'll let Lulu and Gabby know. They'll feel really good about it. James Proud is in heavy founder mode, by the way. He did a lot of the writing and outreach and a lot a lot of that themselves, which obviously, we think is the right way to do this.
Speaker 8:Like, founder can't just sit it out and deploy it to do it all for them. But, yeah, Substrate, very cool company. Absolute, what do we call it, Absolute Dog.
Speaker 1:There we go. An Absolute Dog. Yep. That's the word. That's what
Speaker 2:we love using.
Speaker 1:He's an Absolute Dog. Straight from Pat McAfee.
Speaker 8:Alright, guys. Well,
Speaker 1:have a
Speaker 2:great rest of your Yeah. Get back to the gym.
Speaker 9:You know, before we go, we should talk about Ramp.
Speaker 2:Oh, please.
Speaker 8:What's going for us? We've got to we almost had a whole conversation. Before we go to the gym, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money to save both. Bill Payton, more.
Speaker 8:The average company saves 5% with There
Speaker 2:we go. Flawless, Adrienne.
Speaker 1:Incredible. 10 more time. We'll we'll have you guys, we'll have you guys do a proper proper guest, guest host hosting session.
Speaker 2:Guest hosting would be fantastic.
Speaker 1:You're clearly well yeah. Any some morning where we're like, oh, we two hours in the gym, not enough today. Yeah. We'll call you guys up and and you Exactly. But We're ready.
Speaker 1:Looking sharp. Are you hopefully hopefully, you guys have some other costumes for for later this evening, trick or treating. But if not, you know, tell them to tell them to go to tbpn.com, all the kids you run into, and and tell
Speaker 8:them to the children at tbpn.com and We're gonna hand out the APs. Capital
Speaker 1:capital. Cavi's gonna hand out APs everyone. You
Speaker 2:gotta get over there.
Speaker 1:Gotta get over there. Great to see you guys.
Speaker 2:Talk to you soon. Bye.
Speaker 8:Bye.
Speaker 2:We have to do a real ad read for numeralhq.com. Sales tax and autopilot. Been less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have Dean Ball coming on the show next. I don't know if he knows that we're dressed up as Mark and Ilya.
Speaker 2:Tyler, do you know Ball?
Speaker 3:Of course, I know Ball.
Speaker 4:Is one
Speaker 5:of jokes that
Speaker 2:getting funnier. Dean Ball is a senior fellow at FAI, author of Hyperdimensional, former senior policy adviser for AI at the White House and strategic adviser at the NSF, previously at the Mercatus Center. Do you know the Mercatus Center?
Speaker 3:Of course.
Speaker 2:Why do you know the Mercado Center?
Speaker 7:Tyler Cowen.
Speaker 2:Of course. The absolute goat himself. He's been at Stanford Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute focuses on AI emerging technology. He's in the restream waiting room. Dean Ball, welcome to TVPN.
Speaker 2:How are you doing, Dean? Good to meet you.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 9:Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Sorry to jump scare you on Halloween. We're having a lot of fun over here.
Speaker 9:I love it.
Speaker 1:I,
Speaker 2:it's crazy. You're you you look exactly like Dean Ball. Your your costume is flawless.
Speaker 1:Almost to a tee.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. You had it. Were you in were you in six hours of makeup this this morning? Make me look like Dean Ball?
Speaker 9:Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly what I said. Make me look like the former White House policy adviser.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. They do.
Speaker 1:Actually would be potentially the most, like, scary costume is getting prosthetic makeup to look like yourself. Oh my god. That might that might might feel
Speaker 2:It's a very jarring, very bizarre experience looking in the mirror and actually seeing it, like, for the first time in my life, seeing something that looks materially different from what with the way I
Speaker 1:And I and I will say I I did I did ask John. I was like, is is Dean ready to do a somewhat serious interview with us in extremely unserious characters? And we talked and we thought that we thought it'd be a really fun conversation Yeah. Even though even though we look absolutely ridiculous. But it's great to have you on the show finally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to have you on the show. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Featured a bunch of your writing on the show over the last year. So Yeah. Very happy to have you on.
Speaker 9:Well, thank you guys very much. It's great to be here.
Speaker 2:Let's kick it off with, sort of, what's top of mind for you. There's a lot of different, policy positions that I'm sure you could be working on. FAI is pretty big organization. It it feels very, very significant to me, especially right now in this moment, but also just feels like the organization generally has been on a massive upswing. What has been the key focus, this year for you?
Speaker 2:And then let's just kind of, like, continue to to to dial in the aperture and go and go deeper and deeper as we go.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Absolutely. So, I mean, started the year, I was still a kind of policy scholar and writing at think tanks, including at FAI. Yeah. Worked on state policy, you know, the all the crazy bills that were coming out at that time for AI regulation.
Speaker 9:And then in April, moved to the White House, and so I wasn't writing anymore. My focus was really entirely on the AI action plan Mhmm. Which the Trump administration released in July. Then a couple weeks after that, once the action plan seemed like it was in a good place and well accepted within the sort of bureaucracy of the federal government, I thought it would take longer to get it rolling downhill, but it really didn't take that long. So, once I felt like it was in a good place, I I retired, from that role and went back to the private sector where I feel like that's my strength, writing, communicating, things like that.
Speaker 2:What do you think is a bigger force in AI regulation right now? A, constituents who just don't like AI. I'm worried about taking my job. I don't like the way it looks. It's slop.
Speaker 2:It's bad. It's brain rot, whatever. Like, anti AI for just genuine direct I don't like it reasons versus, jockeying between labs of, like, if I can get this law through, I will have an edge over you, and we're kinda doing jujitsu between both people who are actually both pro AI but just trying to get a business edge. Is there one camp that you think is, like, more powerful?
Speaker 9:I think for the most part, it's the first thing you mentioned. I think it's that there's generally kind of a negative AI sentiment among the public. It's not that high salience of an issue. So people will say, I want AI regulation, but then when you ask them how important of an issue is that to you, it's like eight, nine, 10. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:You know, immigration economy is much higher.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:And, like, once you get down to eight, nine, 10, it means it's not really an issue that that many voters are actually making their decisions at the ballot box on. Mhmm. And so there's but there's this general motivation that's a lot of politicians feel of, you know, oh, well, we let the Internet get away from us. We let social media get away from us. We can't let the same thing happen again, and so we have to be preemptive and regulate this time.
Speaker 9:That's basically their attitude.
Speaker 2:Then, then why is California trying to kneecap AI? Like, is it just a bigger issue within California? What are the dynamics in California specifically?
Speaker 9:So California views themselves much like the Europeans do. They view themselves first of all, the one big difference is that California is also an exporter of technology. Yeah. But the people in Sacramento are not. San Francisco is the exporter of technology.
Speaker 9:Sacramento views itself really as a nationwide regulator. Their mentality is the federal government's not gonna act, especially president Trump. You know, they're they would say president Trump was irresponsible. So we have to act for him. And, you know, one one thing that a senior European diplomat told me when I was in government is when we wanna talk policy in America, we fly from Brussels right over DC to Sacramento.
Speaker 9:Interesting. So they'd they're coordinating you know, the European Union has a has a coordinating office Yeah. In San Francisco where they meet with legislators and, you know, companies, and it's basically, like, this sort of transnational governance regulation happening between California and Brussels.
Speaker 2:Interesting. And so, like, is it is it correct to frame the idea of the motivations of Californian regulation as, well, nationally, AI regulation might be eight or nine, but in California, it's much higher because there's more visibility, or is there something else that's driving, like, the California regulation movement?
Speaker 9:I'm not sure it's a higher salience issue for the voters in California, but I think it's a higher salience issue for the legislators Mhmm. Because the legislators smell power. Right? I mean, you can regulate this, you know, what I think will be a multi trillion dollar industry while it's still nascent. Before you know, one of the things about regulating now is, like, if you tried to regulate the iPhone now in a major way, well, like, a 150,000,000 Americans or whatever use iPhones, and so they'd be, like, mad at you.
Speaker 9:But, like, AI is still a little bit nascent, there's all kinds of use cases that might just be killed in the cradle.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And you can control it, you know, much much easier when it's a younger technology. And you can control it if you're California. You can control it for the entire country, more or less unilaterally, and it's democratic super majority state. So they have all the cards.
Speaker 2:Is so if it's a low salience issue, is there a world where this is all about, like, leverage to get to generate more taxes, to create a more balanced budget? Like, what what are what are the different incentives that are working within the California political, like, jockeying that's going on?
Speaker 9:I think certainly regulatory power is one of them, but I don't really think they're after money
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 9:Particularly. Yeah. If you're a California legislator, the basic reality is that money kinda just prints itself. Yeah. They're basically opposed to scarcity, like, petro state.
Speaker 9:Okay.
Speaker 2:We use technology.
Speaker 9:But the pet yeah. The petro dollars are not oil. Instead, it is capital gains taxation. Yep. I I had a I was once talking to a California legislator who was on the budget committee, and they get these, like, know, every other week or whatever.
Speaker 9:They get these, like, reports from the state treasury about the state's fiscal position. This was a couple years ago, of right post COVID.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And they were like, we had a $10,000,000,000 surplus in the last, like, month. And they're like, what? Where did $10,000,000,000 come out of nowhere? And it was the Snap IPO.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One.
Speaker 9:It's all just one IPO generates that kind of revenue for the state. So, you know, it and and it's gonna be like that on steroids when, you know, when when the Frontier Lab employees start to have their liquidity events. The state is gonna have an enormous windfall of capital gains tax.
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, there there was a rumor just earlier this week about OpenAI going out at 1,000,000,000,000, which would be
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's Already already the employee pool of the public the the PBC is worth roughly at current marks, like a 130,000,000,000. So multiple on that, it it's gonna be substantial.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How does this power struggle between Sacramento and and DC around regulation play out going forward? I think people like SACS have been, you know, not only talking about what Anthropic is doing, but, I imagine doesn't want AI to be regulated, you know, at at a state level. But how do you see this playing out over the over the next, call it, six months?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I don't think anyone wants to see AI regulated at the state level except for the California legislators. And so, you know, at the end of the day, I think that president Trump and AICzar Saxe have made their position clear that we want a nationwide legal framework to govern AI. The question is gonna be, can we can congress act? You know?
Speaker 9:Can congress get together and come up with something that sort of everyone can agree to? And I think we don't know the answer to that yet. Yeah. I think, you know, it's it's hard to see where the politics will go. AI politics evolve.
Speaker 9:They don't evolve quite as fast as AI, but they evolve quite quickly. And so we could be in a totally different there could be a total vibe shift between now and, say, June. June's probably your cutoff before the midterms to sort of get something serious done. Yeah. And, so, yeah, can can it happen?
Speaker 9:In principle, sure. But we'll, you know, we'll see.
Speaker 2:What are the I don't know. Like, what are the regulatory frameworks that either you think will actually land on or California is advocating for? I just remember we were watching the Elias Sitzgiver, interview with The Guardian a couple years ago, and the point he was making was, like, in the long term, AGI might see humans like we see animals and just convert the entire Earth, like, you know, all the land into solar panels and, you know, they're sort of like a complete AGI doom scenario. That doesn't seem like the focus of regulators today. He also was mentioning No.
Speaker 2:The the risk of fake news and the idea of generative content potentially muddying the waters of understanding what's real on the Internet. That one feels like it's totally here today, but has also kind of always been
Speaker 1:here because of Photoshop. Interesting. You know, tech I don't correct me if I'm wrong, but tech has never gone through like a tech lash where there's so much video footage of the key players talking about the doom states Oh, yeah. Of technology. So if you look back
Speaker 2:There's no yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:To any go look at interview footage of of of Sam Altman and and Yeah. All these people. And they will say like Yeah. Yes, there's, you know or Ilya, the one you're referencing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's very possible the world will be covered Yeah. With solar panels and data center. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we were playing that video Yeah. This morning while we were getting this crazy, you know, you know, costumes on. And like the the people that were doing it were like, that sounds horrible. Like they listened to the whole thing and they were like, I don't want any of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 1:it's not like during social media, there wasn't footage of Mark Zuckerberg being like, it's very possible that in the future
Speaker 2:That the election could be social.
Speaker 1:Media won't be social. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2:Like The Facebook data could be used to target voters or something like that.
Speaker 1:And so that's just like incredible ammo that I imagine in Sacramento they're pulling up and it's like, okay. You wanna go with what this guy wants and not what our
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. What's the dynamic there? Are they actually pulling up doomers?
Speaker 1:Be like, oh, I didn't mean that. It was just kind of a sci fi thing
Speaker 2:that we're talking about. It help with fundraising, actually.
Speaker 9:It it really depends. So there's there's there's people in the California legislature and and elsewhere that have sort of very mundane concerns, and that's, like, sort of your modal policymaker, I would say. That's kinda, yeah, your your misinformation, your deepfakes. The things not that are they're not serious, but that that are here today. And then there's the people that are thinking about these sort of very far flung doom scenarios.
Speaker 9:There's not that many legislators who do that, but there are a lot of people in, like, quote, unquote, AI policy Mhmm. Who think about that. And so they do influence some of the legislation. One of the funny things, though, is that thus far, the legislation that that camp, the sort of AI safety camp, has been able to get through, has actually been, like, somewhat more measured than some of the crazier stuff that we've seen the people that don't know anything about the technology and just kinda have a generally hostile attitude. Like, state of Illinois banned mental health chatbots, which is basically, like, if I ask ChatGPT, you know, if I say, like, hey.
Speaker 9:I'm having a bad day. Can you, like, tell me something to make me feel better? In Illinois, that's like a chatbot engaging in mental health services, and it's illegal.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 9:It's like really it's really crazy. Yeah. That's not like a doomer bill. You know? No.
Speaker 9:Totally. That's
Speaker 1:like that's like people Nashville has been Yeah. Going on their own path with with, because of how big the music industry is there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you get us up to speed on that, like the regulation of AI music? We were talking about Suno, earlier this week. I think we're gonna have the founder on, but would be very interested to hear the the how that landscape differs from other, regulatory pushes.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So you're you're talking about something called the Elvis Act,
Speaker 2:which
Speaker 9:passed, last year. And, yeah, basically, that's a bill that's about, like, name, image, likeness. Mhmm. Basically saying if you're a celebrity residing in the state of Tennessee, you can't if if someone makes an AI model that, you know, mimics your style or mimics a song of yours or your likeness or something like that, then you have a right to sue them, not for copyright, because copyright is a federal issue, but name, image, likeness is a sort of property right that's, like, done at the at the state level. Yeah.
Speaker 9:That's part that's a creature of state law for the
Speaker 2:most part. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So they that's what they control there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and, is there any early read on where that will pencil out? We were talking to I forget who we were talking to. We were talking to somebody about how, that is, oh, it was Zach Kukoff. He was talking about the Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, the how the Elvis Act plays into national geopolitics and some some players who are on the national stage are wanting to win in the in at the board.
Speaker 1:Pretty smart naming. The Elvis Act sounds like something that anybody would wanna pass. Sounds cool.
Speaker 2:You don't think it would you don't think it would go farther if it was the Gunna Act?
Speaker 1:What's going on? You had a post, it was last week
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Calling out, there's a group, Max, Tegmark said, a a stunningly broad coalition has come out against Skynet, AI researchers, faith leaders, business pioneers, policy makers, Nat Sec folks, and actors stand together and they say, we call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence not lifted before there is one broad scientific consensus that will be done safely and controllably, and two, strong public buy in. It's kind of a crazy thing to try to require from my view because even the scientific community cannot agree on much, and everybody has these, like, wildly different, you know, strategies and and incentives. And then, of course, it's very possible that the public will never that to rely on the public of of how we should develop technology that has to do with with national security and and try to make it like a a direct democracy. But but maybe unpack what what the latest is on that front.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So, I mean, the statement is very simple. It says no superintelligence until we have agreement that it's good until there's broad public buy in. So I think the first problem with this is, like, look. If you wanna have a letter signed by a bunch of important people or celebrities and whatnot that says superintelligence is something that has profound implications, and we should really think about it, and we should have groups of you know, civil society type
Speaker 2:of stuff.
Speaker 9:That's fine with me. There have been letters like that in the past, and I haven't complained about them. But when you say ban, you're making a ask about public policy. And not only that, you're actually making an ask about global public policy because, you know, the superintelligence could be trained in China, could be trained in The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia. A lot of other places are amassing large amounts of compute.
Speaker 9:It's not like we're the only people that can do this. And a lot of the researchers, you know, who do this work are highly mobile. So, like, you need a global treaty to ban superintelligence. That's what they're asking for. And the problem is that not only is there not scientific consensus about the safety of such a thing, more importantly, there's not scientific consensus about what superintelligence is.
Speaker 9:Is if GPT five or let's say GPT seven
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Say that it, like, can make novel advancements in mathematics. It can come up with new theorems and whatnot, come up with new science. But say it also can't autonomously plan a wedding for me. I think that's a very plausible feature, by the way. I think it's super it's super possible that we'll get advanced, you know, genius mathematic AI before we get sort of an agent that can, like, plan a wedding for you
Speaker 1:over the course. Truly agentic AI.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, what you know, which one of those is superintelligence? Totally.
Speaker 9:No. No. And so how
Speaker 2:So take an even more extreme example. We were reflecting on the original OpenAI definition with which Ilya was, like, reflecting on, which is, AI, you should be able to tell it to do a job, and it should be able to do that any job at the level of a human. And Mhmm. We were sitting for three hours getting makeup done, and we were like, okay. To replace this job with AI, you need, like, the most flawless humanoid robots because this is not a digital task.
Speaker 2:You need dexterity, but also understanding the artistry of how the colors blend and mixing the different chemicals and stuff. Like, it's just like it's just like and and that's for, like, you know, just a it's just makeup. It's it's like it's not it's not as complicated as the IMO gold medal, and yet because it exists in this cross domain world, it's somehow more challenging. So, yeah, it's just a fascinating thing that we do. We have
Speaker 1:The other dynamic that's interesting right now is, like like, I feel like the industry, like, is somewhat going through a small period of disillusionment Mhmm. When, like, the big labs are, you know, or or OpenAI doing, like, Sora and announcing erotica and stuff like that and realizing, like, wait, like Mhmm. I thought we were building super intelligence, like, why are we creating Yeah. More forms of social media? And but that's at the same time that you have like peak sort of like fear and like peak pressure to make moves from a regulatory standpoint because people are afraid of you know, runaway super intelligence and, you know, losing losing their job and and Mhmm.
Speaker 1:All these things. And also, big tech companies have been doing layoffs and the CEOs Right. Wanna say, like, well, we did these, like, the as a CEO, you wanna say, well, we're getting so much efficiency out of our, you know, AI. Like, of course, we're doing layoffs. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But in reality, it's like they just went through they've been bloated for a while. There's, you know, x is a good case study of, like, you can cut, you know, like, a lot of people and still have a functioning business. And so, I don't know. There's just such a complicated moment.
Speaker 2:Do you think there's a massive techlash coming?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Probably. It would be my guess. It's I don't know exactly what'll cause it. Maybe it'll be fears about labor market, which could be real, could be not could be caused by AI, could be not.
Speaker 9:Could also be electricity prices. I think that's that's very possible. Maybe electricity prices. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So, again, like, superintelligence ban, like, it's doing populist politics that are based on kind of vague emotional sentiment. Yeah. And that's, like the problem with that is that those kinds of broad statements that implicate policy tend to not lead to good places. Defund the police was one of them.
Speaker 9:Net zero by 2030 was another one, where it's like, we have no real plan for how to do this, but we're gonna articulate some broad goal that sounds good that everyone can kinda you know, you can just slide down the incentive curve of politics. And it's it's it will not lead to good places, I basically guarantee you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes no sense.
Speaker 9:Even if you're worried about AI safety. Even if you're worried about AI
Speaker 2:if you're if you're to rank the the reasons we we like, if we rank, like, AI safety is, like, the eighth or ninth most salient political topic, and then within AI, you rank the most salient worries, job losses, energy prices. Those are at the top. How far down do you have to go until people start caring about dead Internet theory? And, like, the slopification. Because it does feel like it's it's aesthetically, like, risky because if you launch a a model early, it's sloppier.
Speaker 2:It doesn't have great aesthetics. And then you're and then you're faced with the question of, like, so my Internet went my inter my my electricity prices went up, and I got slop as opposed to my Internet prices went up. And, yeah, I actually got, like, a kind of super powered Google search. Like, it's actually pretty great. Like, it's definitely helping me at work.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a little bit of both. I think there's a lot of people who say, like, deterioration of the Internet is definitely happening. Yeah.
Speaker 9:I think that's true. Right? I mean, I think it's the current experience of the Internet has gotten worse, I would say. And, I mean, with the exception of the AI models themselves, which are great. Yep.
Speaker 9:But, yeah, I mean, that's, like, probably true. I think it's I think it's up there. I think it's way above, like, catastrophic risk. You know? Like, I think if you were to put, like, autonomous cyber attacks, you know, bioweapon development, I think that's probably lower than
Speaker 2:No way. Interesting.
Speaker 9:Sort of slop stuff. I would guess. Yeah. Know it's interesting to see. I don't know if anyone's ever done that,
Speaker 2:but I
Speaker 9:think be interesting to see.
Speaker 2:So we were reflecting on this. This week, we had, Christina from Vanta on talking about security. Yeah. And then we also had the CEO of CrowdStrike on. And we were kind of blown away reflecting on we've been in the AI boom for two years at least, and we haven't really had a moment where we're like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:That major cyber that outage, that cybersecurity incident, that problem, that hack, that virus, that's generative AI uniquely. That hasn't happened. Like, AWS went down last week, and it was just misconfigured DNS on a database. There's been there's been a bunch of crazy cyber attack stories. None of them have been, you know, related to Gen AI just yet.
Speaker 2:I still think it has to be coming at some point. But until you get that solid anecdote, it feels very hard to go and run the campaign of, like, never never again will we allow this to happen when it hasn't happened for the first time.
Speaker 9:That's how it always goes with tail risks. You know? People can't really internalize them Yeah. Until they actually happen, and then there you go. Yep.
Speaker 9:I I actually wouldn't shock me if we see something like that in the next, you know, six to eighteen months. Mhmm. Because the models are now getting good enough
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:That that kind of thing seems possible.
Speaker 2:Cyber or biological?
Speaker 9:Cyber. Bio is gonna take a little bit longer. Yeah. That's cyber.
Speaker 2:Cyber.
Speaker 9:It maybe even cyber might take or bio might take much longer because, like, actually making a bioweapon is still hard in the physical world, but cyber is purely digital. There's already many skilled cyber attackers, so it feels it feels, like, plausible. Luckily, you know, cyber defense is keeping up right now. And, you know, there's we've seen a lot of advancements there too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. There are definitely, like, script kitties that go around and just like to unplug different pieces of the Internet for fun, and it's almost like, it can be state actors, but it's also it just feels like low stakes. It doesn't feel like often, like, these, like, little cyber attacks are, like, life and death. So they feel lower stakes.
Speaker 2:They feel more like theft and, like, economic crimes almost. Mhmm. But being like, I'm gonna go release a bubonic plague. Like, that feels like way more like act of war if or like Yeah. A mass murder.
Speaker 2:Like, you it puts you it takes you from, like, script kitty who wants to, like, you know, deface a website with a DDoS attack to, like, okay. You're doing a mass shooting now.
Speaker 9:You posted a couple how Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. Go to that. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Oh, I just think it's interesting how like these cyber risks though, like, we think of them as like, yeah, it's not an act of war. It's just an economic crime because it's like purely digital. Yeah. At the same time, like if North Korea had a bunch of people that were, like, going into hospitals every other week and, like, stealing medical equipment or, like, taking people's patient records
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:We'd be like, yeah. That's we're gonna kill you. Like Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna we're gonna destroy your country if you do that to us.
Speaker 9:So it's weird. It's it's it's interesting how people think about these things and sort of compartmentalize them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 1:You posted a couple days ago, my sense is that selling black weld chips to China would quite possibly be the most unpopular tech policy move of the Trump admin, especially on Capitol Hill. It's plausible that the long term, really even near term result, will be much more compute regulation. Any any updated thoughts on that front? It didn't Blackwell's didn't, I guess, come into the negotiation in South Korea, but you Yeah. Are you still expecting them to be a part of some sort of deal?
Speaker 9:I think it could very well happen eventually. And by the way, the wisdom of doing it changes over time. Right? Because the chips get worse over the chips you know, there's there's new chips come in, and they get much better. And so, you know, like, the idea of selling black wells to China in two years is very different from the idea of selling them today.
Speaker 9:I think part of the reason that it seemed like many people in the Trump administration, you know, were opposed to this move was that, like, you know, we're racking Blackwells in American data centers right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Right? Like, it was different with the hopper because the hopper was a previous generation. So the h 20, maybe the pill went down a little bit easier. But I think with this, it's like yeah. I I think I think that, you know, you have to I think it's on the merits and politically.
Speaker 9:You gotta wait. Yeah. You gotta wait.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what did you think about basically giving American companies a rofer on Blackwell? Is that something that you think makes sense?
Speaker 9:You mean, like, this is, the yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Basically, like, every American if every American company says, yeah.
Speaker 2:If Infidia says there's no more American companies that wanna buy from us, well, then, yeah, you can go sell them to China. That feels so important.
Speaker 9:Yeah. There's a bill in congress right now in the NDAA, the end of year defense bill called the GAIN AI Act that that basically tries to do this. You know, I think it's an interesting idea. I think the problem always is, like, how exactly do you operationalize that? Particularly because there's things, you know, in this that are, like, well, the public the the hyperscalers are gonna have to disclose things kinda to the public about, like, you know, that sort of sensitive proprietary information.
Speaker 9:So, like, how exactly do you do that? I personally have not been super in the weeds on GAIN, but, like, but, like, yeah, I think that I think the implementation is a challenge there. And that's kinda what I was saying, though, is, like, you know, so many people in congress are opposed to the idea of selling black belts to China right now. Yeah. That I think if the admin had done it in in Korea this past week, I think there's a very high chance that you would have seen maybe some legislation with unintended consequences pass.
Speaker 2:What about, the idea of you don't sell the black wells, but you do allow Chinese companies to purchase cloud computing resources from American hyperscalers? Is that more palatable? Who gets upset in that world?
Speaker 9:Well, that's the status quo right now.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 9:You know, that's that's basically what happens right now. And so Wait.
Speaker 2:Wait. But but, like, could DeepSeek or High Flyer actually go to AWS and say, we wanna do, you know, a a billion dollar training run?
Speaker 9:They could. Yeah. They there's nothing there's nothing restricting them from that. Now I think DeepSea kinda rolls their own. I think they build their own data centers Yeah.
Speaker 9:Do everything themselves. But, yeah, I mean, I I Chinese companies definitely do make use of American compute. Now that being said, I think the Chinese government doesn't like that. I think the Chinese government does all kinds of things to disincentivize them. And that's why it's it's a complicated thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:What's your approach to truth seeking? One of the challenges in trying to even conceptualize what the right policy approach is on a number of these issues is that everyone is just heavily conflicted. Like, there's just so much Mhmm. Money sloshing around. It's like the people that have the most knowledge of what's happening at the frontier quite possibly have somewhere between 10 and, a billion dollars kind of riding on a certain approach.
Speaker 1:And so I I I'm curious to know how you try to clock the truth.
Speaker 9:I always try to start from technical fundamentals. So when I decided to get into writing about AI policy, one of the first things that I learned to do was, like, train a toy neural network for myself just so I could see how things work. Right? And I like to really understand the sort of roots of the technology that I'm talking about, whether that's the physical world or the digital world. And that helps a lot.
Speaker 9:That helps ground you quite a bit to understand those sort of actual constraints and where the technology might actually go. And then beyond that, you know, it's listening to a lot of different people. It's understanding financial incentives closely. Right? You have you have to understand how everyone is incentivized.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And you kinda know, like, there are a lot of areas where incentives are for you to to sort of spin reality in a certain way. Those are a lot of other people who have incentives to just basically tell the truth, and you have to just be able to then get a differentiate between those things. And so, yeah, you know, I mean, it's like it's basically just yeah. There's no simple way.
Speaker 9:It's just read a ton of stuff, listen to a lot of people, maintain an open mind, and be humble all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. What, neck like like, how how are you forecasting next year? What do you think the most important issues? Is it more is it more of the same?
Speaker 1:Is it is there gonna be a new conversation that you kind of see on the horizon? You know, basically, like, is the debate around, you know, chip sales just gonna continue throughout the entire admin, or do you think it'll, at any point, settle?
Speaker 9:I think that debate will continue. And then I think, you know, more broadly, though, my guess is that that issue becomes less salient in AI policy over time, and probably more people join the sort of join the debate. Right now, AI policy is very much an elite conversation. You know? It's not something that a lot of people, like the average American, so to speak, is thinking about that much.
Speaker 9:But I think that starts to change. Again, maybe it's the electricity prices. Maybe it's the jobs. Maybe it's a little bit of both. Maybe it's also some crisis that happens, like cyber stuff.
Speaker 9:But I think that, like, in general, the salience will go up. And it will also be quite complicated because I also expect that in 2026, just like this year, a very meaningful fraction of GDP growth will be coming from AI. So, you know, policymakers are gonna find themselves, I think, in a bind.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Wait. Sorry. I I I know we're wrapping up, but, I'd love to know, your thoughts on, like, the AI as the only driver of GDP meme. How real do you think that is?
Speaker 2:How bad do you that is?
Speaker 1:Some people hear that, and they're like, this is bad. And then the other take is like, if we're not doing this, like, it's even worse. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So I think it is it is a big chunk of it. I I, you know, I think it's probably at least like 25 to 50% of of growth right now. Another big chunk, like, the q two number was really high. It was, like, 4%, and a chunk of that is definitely companies stockpiling in anticipation of tariffs.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. So they're, like, mass importing stuff, which is gonna be counted toward GDP.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So it's like there's some of that going on probably. And but, yeah, I mean, I think that it's almost certainly the case, the GDP you know, if I had to put an if I had to guess, I would guess it's something like 40%. AI is something like
Speaker 1:40%.
Speaker 8:Truly of
Speaker 2:course the world economy.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And that's just enabling AI. That's just AI CapEx. That's not even, you know, what is AI enabling. Like business services
Speaker 2:and and accelerated revenue growth and, your Productivity. Mean, like like, how much of Google's revenue should be counted in, like, AI GDP now or, like, Instagram reels? Like, it's an if there's an AI slop video that goes viral and that generates 20,000,000 in AI ad revenue, are we counting that in GDP? We have no idea yet. It's gonna be it's gonna be years before we understand it.
Speaker 1:Last last question that I I'd be curious to get the your read on is sentiment around, we're a couple months out from the Intel deal. Mhmm. How is Washington and, like, Capitol Hill feeling about that deal? Obviously, it it looks good on paper for the taxpayer, but but do do you expect to see, like, more of this kind of thing? We've sought with MP Materials as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But what's your read?
Speaker 9:I think you'll absolutely see more of it. More equity positions. I'm I'm long USG equity positions in private companies. For better and for worse, I think that will continue to be a thing. We've seen it throughout the critical mineral supply chain.
Speaker 9:In fact, a lot of other companies, not just NP.
Speaker 2:Intel How new is this on is this a Trump thing specifically? Is this is this a 20 thing? Are there other examples of Americans doing this?
Speaker 9:It's not new under the sun, but it's new in recent history.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 9:Particularly for companies that have, like, sort of consumer brands. Sure. But, yeah, like, it it is it is, this sort of national champion model is not something that's it's it's not again, America did it, you know, a lot. You know? There there are periods in American history where we did this
Speaker 2:And not and not in this total crisis. Like like, government motors, General Motors, the bailout of the banks. Like, that is very different than, okay, NVIDIA and AMD are doing pretty well. Intel's not exactly going bankrupt. There's a lot of market cap there, but we're still gonna come in and do something.
Speaker 9:I think Intel's position was really precarious, and you really needed that. I mean, you you I think you needed not just the injection of capital, which they were gonna get either way Yep. But kind of that vote of confidence and kind of that indication to the market that, like, hey. This really is, like you know, we're the US government is serious about this. That says things to OpenAI as they think about developing their ASIC.
Speaker 9:Says things to Apple. It says things to NVIDIA. It says things to all sorts of people. And you've already seen some of these companies respond in kind with, you know, new new orders to Intel or or at least partnerships with them of various kinds. So I think you'll see more of that.
Speaker 9:In terms of Intel itself, I think people in DC are pretty nervous still because Intel's got a serious hill to climb. You know? They've got a promising road map, and they have to execute on it. And thus far, the execution has been shaky, and their track record shouldn't make you confident. Has So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Have have you been surprised that we haven't seen an OpenAI Intel deal yet? Sam Allman seems ready to do deals with everyone. Intel feels like it needs a deal. It needs several deals. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That feels like a match made in heaven, and yet I haven't seen it yet. What do you think?
Speaker 9:I have to think it's gestating. Yep. I have to think that probably other companies too. Yep. I mean, if if they're smart, they will.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 7:Just as a
Speaker 9:political matter.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's just so many I I like, I've seen so many pundits like, Asianometry laid out the k the thesis that NVIDIA should dual source their CPU for Grace, for Grace Hopper, from Intel, make the CPUs there. Don't go to TSMC for those. Support Intel as a fab, and a and a provider. So, fascinating, dynamic, and I I I I feel like the intel story is, is gonna be one of the most interesting
Speaker 1:Any plans to write a book?
Speaker 2:You've written a book.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I've been Have you? No. I haven't. Okay.
Speaker 9:No. No. No. But I'm thinking about it. Okay.
Speaker 9:We'll see. More more to come maybe. I'm I'm pondering it.
Speaker 1:Hard to know what to say. It feels hard if you're kind of like writing about what's happening Yeah. To like pick something and like start writing, you know, hundreds of pages when like everything's so in flux that you could write like, you know, six chapters that then maybe made, like that weren't even an important part of the story. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 9:Yeah. If I picked up the phone and called an agent today, you'd probably be looking at a publication date of, like, q one twenty twenty eight. Someone just the other day, I was asking, like, why the hell are these supply chains so long? For for, like, why is the timeline so long for books? Yeah.
Speaker 9:And they told me it's because it's a manufacturing business run by humanities majors.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 9:It's like it's like, yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Maybe we, maybe the answer is Kindle print on demand or something like that.
Speaker 9:There you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Kindle Digital Publishing right next to all the literotica. We can slot in some some geopolitical analysis. And the
Speaker 9:the AI slot books.
Speaker 2:Yes. Oh, there's I'm sure
Speaker 1:there's so many Somebody's gonna hit you up and be like, I can generate you 10 books by next, next week.
Speaker 2:Where can people where can people find you? Where can people follow you in the meantime until the book drops in 2028? You heard it here from
Speaker 9:You can find me, I've got a substack at hyperdimensional and on Twitter at dean w ball, the ball like football.
Speaker 2:There we go. Dean. Thank you so much, Dean Ball.
Speaker 1:Great to finally have you on. We'd love to have you anytime.
Speaker 2:Chat all the time.
Speaker 9:We'll talk to soon. Guys. Great to chat. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Bye. Let me tell you about fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performing benchmarks, number one in competitive Bake Offs, number one ranking on g two. And breaking news from Sam Altman, GPT six will be renamed GPT six seven. You're welcome.
Speaker 2:He's doing the six seven meme.
Speaker 1:But it's a it's a joke. It's a joke. Okay.
Speaker 2:But wow. That one really did not hit. It's remarkably, remarkably not
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a joke.
Speaker 2:Funny. I I this got 30
Speaker 1:I thought
Speaker 2:seven you're thousand likes.
Speaker 1:I thought you were gonna say I thought you were gonna say it'll just be
Speaker 2:the chat GPT twenty twenty six. I would like that. I think that actually would be a better naming scene. No. He's having fun with the with the six seven meme.
Speaker 1:Go through some timeline Not not with Tyler.
Speaker 2:Not my shtick. Not my shtick. Well, I will first go through Adio. Customer customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 2:You can get started for free. Let's see. What what in the timeline should me and Tyler talk about? What is here? Tesla Roadster, Sam Altman, has asked for a refund.
Speaker 2:He says a story in three parts, a tale in three acts. Act one, your Roadster reservation is complete. This was in 2018, long time ago. Tyler was five years old. He put down $45,000 as a reservation payment.
Speaker 2:Then act two, Sam Altman emails reservations at Tesla. Hi. I'd like to cancel my reservation. Could you please refund me the 50 k? And he's just trying to he's just trying to raise an extra 5 k out of Elon.
Speaker 2:Did you notice this?
Speaker 3:Oh oh, because it was originally 45.
Speaker 2:It was 45 k. Now oh, okay. With interest, with inflation, Sam clearly deserves 50, but it's a wild move to just have 45 k on the line and be like, can I get 50? Can we round to the nearest 50? But when you're, you know, Sam, I guess it makes sense.
Speaker 2:It's probably pretty reasonable. So he says, can you refund me the 50 k? I think he's actually just rounding. I think he's like, yeah. Send me 45, but I'm gonna refer to it as 50 because I'm rounding to the nearest 50 k, I guess.
Speaker 2:But then he gets an address not found. Reservations at tesla.com is unavailable to receive, emails. Recipient has rejected.
Speaker 1:He could use the extra five.
Speaker 2:You think so?
Speaker 1:I think he could put it to work in the business. One more. Nobody's losing more money than an OpenAI.
Speaker 2:It's true.
Speaker 1:Every five k five k can go a long way.
Speaker 2:That's true. Yeah. Tesla and SpaceX seem to be doing
Speaker 1:That's one minute that's one minute of SOAR costs.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:Every minute counts.
Speaker 2:But, we yeah. I mean, this just feels like they, they changed whatever the email is in the last seven years. But it is remarkable that the project has been in in in process so long that the email address has been forgotten. And, also, I would assume that this type of stuff happens all the time because I imagine that people are canceling and placing new Tesla Roadster orders, like, all the time. So you would think you'd wanna be monitoring that box.
Speaker 1:Well
Speaker 2:Oh, well, it's funny to read into it as, as, like, more more, you know, battles between, Elon and Sam. Although, I don't think that's what's going on here. It's more of just just a funny quirk of their email configuration. Bern Hobart says, wow. Elon passes the replies to your email in under a minute test.
Speaker 2:That guy is going places.
Speaker 1:Bullish.
Speaker 2:Well, whatever you think about Tesla, you can buy it. You can sell it on public.cominvesting for those to take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Jordy Hayes, what would you like
Speaker 1:to do today? Let's bring in our next guest.
Speaker 2:Hayden Senkov, Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:There he is.
Speaker 2:You look fantastic. How are you doing?
Speaker 5:Hey, Jordy and John. Happy Halloween.
Speaker 2:Wait. Wait. Wait. What are you drinking? What is what is next to you?
Speaker 1:Wow. That's recognize this drink?
Speaker 2:Of course, I recognize that drink. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Is Andrew Huberman's
Speaker 5:way to
Speaker 2:say. Matayina Yerba Mate. We refer to it as a podcast in a can.
Speaker 1:It's hard to drink this on my end. The fake beard is getting into getting into the drink, but it's great to see you. You're looking sharp. Do you wear a suit often? You look very natural in it.
Speaker 5:You know what? I used to wear a uniform in high school. Yeah. It's coming back to me, and I'm a huge Formula one fan. So I feel like I'm already wearing, like, this is the cap you normally get when you're on the podium with kind of the reeds.
Speaker 1:So I feel
Speaker 5:very good taste here.
Speaker 1:Championship champ championship hat. How'd you actually get into Venture?
Speaker 5:It's a good story. I was Google's first product manager and then first international sales manager. Wow. Always wanted to start something. Both my parents were entrepreneurs, and I felt it's just kind of the way of the value go from being an operator to being an investor.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But interestingly, originally, I thought, hey. Maybe, like, the right way to do it is, like, go get a stint at a venture firm. And the five firms that I talked to not only told me I wouldn't make a good VC, they told me I wouldn't even make a VC. I just did not have a wherewithal.
Speaker 5:So I'm sure many
Speaker 1:people also told you
Speaker 5:that your idea would not run.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What like, they have any good reasons? Did you agree with them on anything? Obviously, they were wrong. But
Speaker 5:It's so funny. Like, I wasn't an engineer. I wasn't senior enough at Google. I never had done anything in venture.
Speaker 2:Like,
Speaker 5:again, maybe on paper it makes sense. But to be honest with you, it's the best thing that happened because I always feel rejection. I call it rocket fuel, and it was such such a simple situation where I have to burn the bridges, and the only way to prove the skeptics wrong to actually get into the business and do well. And even after twenty years, I'm like, 10 IPOs is still not enough. 100 exits, I think it should be 200 exits, and maybe then the point will sink in.
Speaker 1:Hit that gong. Oh,
Speaker 5:yeah.
Speaker 1:Great hit. How big was your how big was your first fund?
Speaker 5:The first fund, actually, I started as a solo LP and solo GP, which was only 4 and a half million. And then our first institutional fund in 2010 was only 41,000,000.
Speaker 2:Modest amounts. What Modest amounts. What story did folks tell at Google about the funding of Google that helped you kind of understand how venture works? Like, I've heard the story about, you know, Sequoia invested. That was probably more like a traditional round.
Speaker 2:There's also this, maybe apocryphal story about somebody going to their car and writing a check before the company was even founded. Like, what was your introduction to just,
Speaker 1:Bezos like taking a flyer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What what stories did you draw on where you were like, this worked out for this particular person really well in the Google story that I felt and experienced, and I wanna go and recreate that.
Speaker 5:I mean, look. I I I was there, like, right after the Sequen, Kleiner round. Mhmm. First of all, the the biggest thing about Google is that what people sometimes misunderstand about this business is all about outliers, positive outliers, and the best training for that is to actually be an outlier. And I think more than the VC story, to me, it was my experience working for Larry Page because every single thing that I've done at that in that first year for Larry, like, he would, like, see it and I'm like, this is kinda 1% of what I'm expecting.
Speaker 5:Like, you need to do things 10 x faster, like, 10 x more. And then it's like, you know what? Maybe humans are not meant to do that. And my joke is like one of my projects was to launch Google in international languages because I was an engineer. I spoke six languages.
Speaker 5:So and I'm like, look. You know what I can do for Google is make sure it's launched in non English languages. And he was frustrated with that. And so I always tell people, I'm an occasional and accidental father or grandfather of Google Translate because they're like, from now on, anything that's internationalization or translation, let's make sure machines do it and not humans.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. What what was your first what was your first true home run-in venture?
Speaker 5:So the first true home run-in venture, you can define it in many different ways. My first billion dollar exit was Meraki, which started as a WiFi project in Mountain View with Google. And I was one of three ex Googlers that invested in it. And the first IPO was Shopify. And that was amazing, like, showing up to NICE, not for Google's IPO, but, you know, as an investor that, hey.
Speaker 5:Like, you know, early believer, and the company was great. And what was crazy is, like, $2,700,000,000 valuation at IPO for Shopify, and today, there are, like, 150, like another 50 x from that. Google was similar. Like, it went 40 x from the IPO. And that, like, in in a nutshell, is like positive outliers, I can't imagine better examples of outliers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's remarkable. Completely. What about what about more recently? You've done Merkur, Supabase, and and others.
Speaker 1:Maybe we start with Merkur. We just had Brendan on earlier this week to talk about the new financing. You guys have been in a couple rounds now. Is that is that right?
Speaker 5:Two rounds. Two rounds. We are huge fans of Brandon and and his cofounders. Yeah. Look, I think it's another great example.
Speaker 5:When I started, like, right after Google, we thought going 0 to a 100,000,000 in ten years was a great achievement, maybe eight to ten years. You know, I had companies like Shopify go IPO in six years, but Merkor is a new breed of company. They went 0 to a 100,000,000 in gross revenues in eleven months. They're essentially have built this great platform where they can essentially find any type of talent or discipline in the world, find the people, have AI interview them, and generate expertise and data based on that. And it's just like again, like, it's what's so exciting about the AI age is these companies you never thought, like, would be at this kind of scale are able to deliver these things because it it's just that age and that that opportunity.
Speaker 5:We're very lucky to be part of it. You know, we are huge fans of Brandon and team. And then Supabase is another great example. Like, we are like, listen. Some of the most valuable tech companies were database companies, and somebody's gonna build a developer friendly back end.
Speaker 5:At that time, there was a front end company but no real back end company. And it was crazy because when we invested in Supabase, we did almost a growth round valuation and the traction was not even close to a million in ARR. And since then, the company has grown fifty, seventy, 80 x plus in just a And few that makes me think like what you're doing is really special because the private companies are growing 500 to 1000% and public companies are growing at 20%. So it's a 50 x delta. So if in case anybody's wondering why it's interesting and exciting, to be in venture or to be involved with private companies, the very best are doing an insane job.
Speaker 5:And I think those are the stories that need to be out there, and that's why I love my job. I feel like
Speaker 1:it's the best shot in the world. They they announced their series a in October 10/28/2021. I'm assuming you guys did the deal, like, you know, some late summer or something like that. At the time, was that a deal that you think maybe other peep people pat would have passed on because of the price? Like, just looks crazy?
Speaker 1:Obviously, peak.
Speaker 5:So we did the series b, and it was really interesting. Not only did multiple other VCs passed on price, but they went and then invested in competitors because they could get in at, like, half the valuation. But we never compromise what we believe is, you know, our belief in the founders and the company. Look, mean, at the end, this business is all about early belief and as all the founders, we get to participate in their journeys, and SuperBay is a prime example. They had all the initial signs that things could be really great.
Speaker 5:Like I said, you know, traction was really low. They were starting to, like, essentially, like, take off among developers, and it was built on Postgres. It was very technical, and people are like, no. Nothing could be worth that valuation at that stage with only that much signal. And I think that's kind of the magic of Felicis is that when we back these incredible founders, you know, the success is far from obvious.
Speaker 5:But then after we invest, like, these companies go through these insane hockey stick growth curves, and Superbase is a prime example of that as is Merkor.
Speaker 2:How do you think about what is different about this boom, this moment from previous cycles? The top things that poke out, that have have really changed in the last two years that justify more investment, that change the job of the venture capitalists are you know, we're seeing higher growth rates. We're also seeing higher CapEx requirements for some tech companies than before. We're seeing, just more potential new markets because you could be going after a labor pool instead of a different, like, an existing market. There's entirely net new markets.
Speaker 2:There's questions about enterprise adoption, churn. Like, what in your mind is is different this time around from the mobile wave, the the cloud wave, or anything else that informs how you're underwriting deals this year?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, look. I have seen the Internet wave as well as the mobile wave. There are a couple things that are really different. So one is the point that we were getting at is that venture game, it is, like, very basic, is essentially it's it's a growth game.
Speaker 5:If you find a company that is growing 50 x faster than public companies, it's gonna end up in a good place. And even if you're off by 10 x on price, if you're in one of those companies, things things things are gonna work out for you. Mhmm. Also, twenty years ago, like, when I first got into business, a lot of people would worry about distribution. But the reality is today, like, everybody's watching YouTube.
Speaker 5:Everybody has a mobile device. Distribution is no longer a problem. But what is really interesting that is different is the AI age. Normally before with software, first, the budget was limited. I don't think any company is gonna spend more than 10% of their budget on software, but also the value creation was different.
Speaker 5:Like, software, yes, it is helping you, but still people are working with it. You have to put data in it, And then to get value out of it, you have to look at the results and say, okay. Now I'm gonna do something based on what the software is telling me, and the software is, like, streamlining it a little bit. In AI age, what's really stunning is, like, you now can have a full closed loop without humans where everything is being done by AI. So the data entry is automatic, the data output is automatic.
Speaker 5:I sometimes think of a turbo engine in a car. Like one of the interesting technologies is you take the exhaust gas and then if you channel into the engine, the car can accelerate a lot faster. So in some ways, like what is happening with AI, there is growth vectors in so many different areas. I had to make an engine example since I'm But wearing Formula One like first of all, there was so much more value creation, and now you're going after labor, which depending on the sectors you look at is like forty, fifty, 70% of a company's budget. So the dollars at stake is so much larger.
Speaker 2:How how much more important is it now to think about terminal market structure? Because I'm I I completely agree with you. The growth rates are insane. The risk, I feel like, is is not that the growth isn't real. It's just that there's you you pick a market, and there's one company that goes from 1 to 10,000,000 in ARR to a 100,000,000 in ARR.
Speaker 2:And the and the and you project that out, and you're like, well, the market's 50,000,000,000. They're gonna get there really fast. But if the market can support 50 companies that all grow really fast and they all take 2% of the market, then you will see some sort of s curve in the growth rate at some point. And I feel like there's some markets that will probably be perfectly competitive, some that will be highly monopolistic and everything in between. And it feels like as a venture capitalist, it's gonna pay to be the type of person that can clock how markets play out.
Speaker 2:Does that map with what you're thinking, what you're trying to do?
Speaker 5:Look. I think you're getting at a very important point, which is it is not just enough to have high growth, but you need to have durable growth. And we use the examples of Google, Shopify, even, like, more recently, we had companies like Canva. Mhmm. And I think one of the things that people sometimes really underestimate is that that kind of high growth compounded will generate stunning results.
Speaker 5:And one of the things that I learned from both Google and Shopify is that if and when you choose the right markets, you will probably get the sizing wrong. But if you choose a mega mega market, even like at what we think success, there is still so much of the market left. Like, one of the things that I never realized is even when Shopify went IPO, it was less than 1% of that market. And that's what helped it, like, get a 40x growth after that. Same thing happened to Google, and the very best companies can also expand the market.
Speaker 5:So to your question, though, one of the things that we really pay attention is what are the motes of these companies is not just that they have the chance of high growth, but how durable will it be? A lot of times it's the founders. A lot of times it's also different elements. For instance, we very frequently talk about data motes at Felisys. Right?
Speaker 5:Like, one of the things that helps you differentiate is if you have data that nobody else has since data is the new oil, that's going to be a huge differentiator because at the end of the day, there's a lot of AI tech and that's more pervasive. But if you have data that nobody else has, that's going to be tremendous value. And if you start doing something where you basically become a key part of the process, people are not going to rip you off. So we just recently won a term sheet of a health care AI company. And what was interesting is through AI, they've been able to service a part of the patient market that here too was not possible to be served at a positive return.
Speaker 5:And the moment they fix that part of the market, hospitals are like, why am I only going to give you 35% of the market? You know what? The rest of the market, there are 19 players, but I'm just going to come straight to you. It's too much work. You guys can take 100% of our referrals.
Speaker 5:So it's yet another good example of if you do a really great job with the hardest part of the market, you can essentially have a much larger portion of the market. Nobody wants like, is interested in, somebody who's only going to win one to 2%. They want people that can do everything together and not just one part of it. And again, that's kind of also the big leap from software is maybe only solving one part of the problem and they want, like, a full solution. I want, like, a full turnkey, not just like, hey, the software can get you the numbers or analyze things or be the system of record.
Speaker 5:Now everything is about system of action and AI can enable that. And if you have a data moat on top of it, obviously that drastically increases chances that not only are you going to have high growth, but the high growth is going to stick with you.
Speaker 1:Did did the venture industry learn its lesson in 2021? Things got a little bit crazy. There was a lot of top signals. We had a crash, but at the same time, you did companies like Supabase at what was then a crazy valuation. And then now it looks like, you know, you bought it.
Speaker 1:It looks like you stole it. Now this time around, it feels like, you know, that that we we were I I remember in 2022, it felt like we were gonna go into, a VC apocalypse. It certainly doesn't feel that way now. Do you think do you think we learned any key lessons, or are we going to kind of relearn them in the future?
Speaker 5:Let me tell you an interesting lesson or maybe, like, a key secret is that venture business is you you have to be consistent. You can you cannot sprint and pause, sprint and pause. If you're not growing in this business, you're essentially losing, stagnating. There is no such thing as cruise control or, like, steady state. And I think the mistake that happens with a lot of VCs, if their conviction is not deep and they're essentially playing the market game, there are a lot of followers and not a lot of original thinkers, what happens is the moment the market gets risky and things look dire, people pause and like, oh, you know what?
Speaker 5:Like, I'm gonna stop making investment. And one thing I'm really proud is even in the '21 2021 vintage and '22 when things were really expensive, we still kept on making investments and we never slowed down and, you know, we were basically like steady growth. And part of that is because, look, this is not public markets where if there is 20% growth and your entry price is wrong, you're going to lose a lot of money. But if you find the right companies and you do have 50 to 100x growth ahead of you, even if you overpaid for them, you're still going to do well. In fact, the only way you're going to do well is to have these positive outliers that are fund makers.
Speaker 5:And so I think the biggest lesson is a lot of VCs spend too much time of this valuation high and low and this trend and that. The reality is you gotta be a surfer that can surf any wave in any season and not just one. Like, you can't just go to the beach and call it quits. You need to go back out. And, you know, I know Jordan lives in Malibu, he he's he's he's gonna like the surfer analogy.
Speaker 5:But the part of the other thing also is that you have to find the companies where there is gonna be so much growth that even if you got the price slightly wrong, it's not gonna slow down. So anybody who's like, oh, like, we're gonna be in this business and it's all about the price, They're misunderstanding it. It's all about, like, being early and understanding that incredible growth that's gonna follow. That's gonna basically give you the long term success. And so I feel there is definitely a delta between the VCs that are original thinkers that still had the conviction and the the the courage to make those bets, and not just like Supabase for us, but also companies like N8N.
Speaker 5:That was a sleeper company in Berlin, and all of a sudden, in fall, like, multiple VCs have woke up that they're doing a great job in Agentic AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a company. Interestingly enough, I saw it on getting people started making videos about it on Instagram, which I I look at as much more mainstream before I saw anything about it on on X, which is I think, a good sign. It means that it actually has traction outside of our little Silicon Valley bubble. Do you
Speaker 5:think about percent.
Speaker 2:How do you think about, your your philosophy on expertise versus, like, being a generalist. Yeah. There's a lot things to debate about this.
Speaker 1:Expertise on, like, a category versus, like, judgment around
Speaker 2:Yeah. Human. But take me through, like, advice for a venture capitalist who's joining your firm, advice for someone who's graduating high school and thinking about how to pursue. Like, what is your philosophy on on generalism versus becoming an expert in something?
Speaker 5:I mean, look, I think journalism in general, it's a really good thing. But I I think, look, there are there are a couple of really interesting secrets or insights. Number one, just to give you real data to make this point, is that when I started nVenture, the other thing that people underestimated is like they're like, listen. All these sectors you're invest in, you're not an expert in any of any one of them, and you're not gonna be able to make a good investment. I think people what people misunderstand is if you're an expert in a sector, you're going to look at a company and you're only going to look at the orthodox way of doing things.
Speaker 5:And when somebody comes in as an outsider and like, I want to do something the way it's never been done before, you're going to say that's never going to work. And so, like, the paradox here is the expertise. Right? Like, the experts are supposed to know the field really well, but that also anchors them in the way that things are done traditionally. Versus a generalist is going to be first principles and say, you know what?
Speaker 5:There's actually a new way of doing things, and if this thing works, it's gonna be amazing. And at Feliz is like, the most interesting stat that I'm most proud of is that we made early investments in companies, 53 of them that exceeded a billion dollar in valuation. Not a single one of them was led by an expert.
Speaker 2:It's amazing.
Speaker 5:And so, like, that's the thing. Like, when you got for free. When you guys started, you were not media experts or, like Yeah. Proven like media people and you had a great idea.
Speaker 1:Would tell you, the funny thing is in our case, like, I've been working in and around advertising my entire career. John had been an expert on on like content production, but we certainly were not experts on hosting a show. A lot of And I know and if you had asked us even literally, like, twelve months ago, if you had asked us, like, would you be hosting would you could you ever see yourself hosting, like, a daily show? We would have been like, like
Speaker 2:I always love that Paul Graham formulation, which is like most cofounders, like, if you look at the cofounding teams, it's usually, like, two or three people where each of them are are somewhat experts in, like, two or three disciplines. So you have someone who knows, like, marketing and finance and operations and then someone who knows, like, front end and back end and technical design and architecture and also some of the trade offs about how the product design works. And so you wind up with, like, you know, some level of expertise in 10 different categories bundled up in two to three people on a specific team that seems to work really well. But, yes, they're not like pure play experts, which is what we think of, at least what I think of when I think of expertise.
Speaker 5:A 100%. Look. I'm gonna add two more things, which is I think one one of the other elements of being successful, whether you're a founder or investor, especially as a VC, is it's all about the people. And I've actually done sales at Google, and you would say, how is that related to being a venture? At the end, it's a people's game.
Speaker 5:The founders are not, you know, taking money based on numbers, but if they can trust who you are. Mhmm. And so, like, being good with people and being able to relate to them is really important. So these days, when people are starting in the business, whether they're a founder or future VC or emerging VC, I'm like, look. Your biggest asset is your network and the people that you know.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. But the second thing is, especially for venture, you need to be exposed to outliers. Right? Like, I feel like my training at Google, you know, every single thing that Google has done in the six years that I was there, not a single thing was standard. Every single thing we did, we did a completely different way that has been ever done before, and the results were stunning.
Speaker 5:So if you've never been at a company where the founders and the firm was crazy enough to do things completely differently Mhmm. And you kind of understand that culture, that mindset, right? Like, we did talk about being generalists, but it is also important to have been exposed to some of these things. And then you're like, okay. You know what?
Speaker 5:Now that I have seen it, it's in my DNA, it's in my blood, I can kind of like see other signs of that. So being good with people, being able to understand outliers, at least being exposed to them, I think are key ingredients, at least in venture. So those are things that nobody ever told me like, hey. This is gonna be really important for you. But now after twenty years of doing it, I can tell you that it is very important.
Speaker 5:And like journalists, like, I worked in every discipline across four continents. I've done finance, sales, marketing, product. That was also really great. I didn't have to be the deep expert in all of these things, but being able to understand so you can, like, see around the corners and find little things, you know, just enough to make sure that you're not gonna make a stupid move, but you don't know too much that you would be too anchored in it, and you would be skeptical of a brand new way of doing things.
Speaker 1:Well said.
Speaker 2:I just can't get over how good your outfit looks and your frame looks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're ready to cohost with us.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Not a cult Thank you. Like, honestly, like, I'm I'm down to that. I love this hat, and I'm enjoying my goosebumps.
Speaker 2:Are you in SI?
Speaker 5:We are in Menlo Park, actually. Menlo Park. We do have an SF office.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:But we are in in in the Bay Area right now.
Speaker 2:Well, hopefully, cross over soon in person.
Speaker 1:Let's let's hang out soon. Are are you gonna be at F 1 Vegas?
Speaker 5:I'm I'm I'm thinking about it. So my older son is in varsity football. If there is no conflict with this game Oh, that makes sense. I'm definitely gonna be there.
Speaker 2:Okay. Cool.
Speaker 1:Well, let
Speaker 2:us know.
Speaker 1:Let us let us know if you are. We will we'll look quite different, because you can watch some older footage to to recognize us over there. Thank you for hanging out. Yeah. It was a lot of And I'm impressed with how that you were able to to do a normal interview when we look so ridiculous.
Speaker 1:But it was really fun chatting with you and thank you for sharing.
Speaker 5:That was a blast. Should I say Mark and Ilya, but very well done. A great impersonation. And, Jordy and John, it's such a such a pleasure. Let's do this again.
Speaker 1:We should audio team is appreciative as well. You're looking absolutely crisp.
Speaker 2:Everyone's a fan. Everyone loves it.
Speaker 1:Great stuff. Awesome. Talk to you soon. Have a great, have a great rest of your Friday.
Speaker 2:Have a good day. Bye. You too. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? I got a 92 on eight Sleep.
Speaker 1:You can
Speaker 2:go to 8sleep.com. Get a pod five.
Speaker 1:Code TBPN. I got eight thirty two minutes. Perfect. 93.
Speaker 2:93? Oh, you beat me by one.
Speaker 1:I smoked you.
Speaker 2:Good job. Well Smoked you. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBP and Ultra Dome. Wait.
Speaker 2:There he is. Is that who I think I think you're did you get full prosthetic makeup to look like Jacob Diepenbrock from the the skipless ventures? Is that what's going on here?
Speaker 6:That is correct. You guys need costumes better, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Your your Jacob costume is flawless. How was, how was demo day? Take us through it. What were the highlights?
Speaker 2:What are the new trends? What what's the actual structure? Maybe start there. What's the structure of demo day these days?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So yesterday, 2PM got started. We did a long wall space here in El Segundo,
Speaker 2:one of the OG El
Speaker 6:Segundo companies. It used to be ABL. Shout out to Dan Nice. At Keymont. Started 2PM.
Speaker 6:I think we had a 100 and probably sixty, seventy people come out for it.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 6:I had a panel with Augustus, Isaiah, and Ted. For the
Speaker 2:godfathers, the brothers. It was a good group. It's a great group.
Speaker 6:Founding fathers. Brought up with that. Everybody was hating on SF, which was all active investors in the in the audience.
Speaker 1:Why why hate on SF?
Speaker 2:Oh, well, Paul Well,
Speaker 1:so one one one thing is when we were there earlier this week, I thought they had like somewhat solved the human feces on the ground thing and it was like John and I walked home from walked home from dinner. Granted, it was about a mile walk and it was, like, at least six
Speaker 2:It was through the Tenderloin, which is a rough spot. There are rough spots in LA, but, El Segundo is beautiful. At least when I walked around, it was it's very clean.
Speaker 1:It's a If an industrialist, the smokestacks, you know
Speaker 2:That's actually a plus.
Speaker 1:Add to
Speaker 2:it. That's actually a plus. But yeah. Well, so how many companies graduate? And and it's a proper demo day.
Speaker 2:Like, people are giving pitches, raising money like that?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So so, we had nine companies pitch yesterday
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:From all over the country and a couple from out of out of the country as well. Yeah. We start off with, like I said, panel. Yeah. Nine pitches.
Speaker 6:They all kinda go out to their booths afterwards, and then all the investors get to know and get to talk to them and meet them afterwards. And then we had a sick little after party in in Manhattan Beach afterwards. So it it was great. But I guess companies happy to run through some. I also just posted a thread as well if you wanna pull it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll have the team pull it up.
Speaker 2:But, yeah. Yeah. Read through, and and let us know who's don't mind.
Speaker 6:So I I will say less defense companies this time than ever before. A lot more
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was gonna ask. And when we when we, across the different YC batches, like, there's very clearly, like, some core themes and trends that you've seen. So I'm not surprised to see, like, less we probably, like, don't we don't need the same volume of defense tech companies now, I think, in general. Like, there's just been so many like, every category
Speaker 2:now. The job's finished?
Speaker 1:Don't think the job's finished, but I think it's, like, probably healthy for, like, every category now Yeah. As a few players. Yep. They can now fight it out. Yep.
Speaker 1:One or two will rise to the top. Yep. We don't necessarily need 10 more backfilling trying to go after the same types of contracts.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think I think my general thought is, like, I think defense, like, prove that you can kind of disrupt these legacy industries and, like, build massive companies in in in in these kind of legacy industries that haven't really had venture interest until the annual SpaceX. And I think it's it's now like, okay. Like, we we we will do these these, like, hardware. We will do these kind of more, I guess, less tech, less venture heavy industries.
Speaker 6:There's a lot of stuff, like, that unlock. So, like, within energy, within mining, we just Yeah. Like,
Speaker 2:I always make this point where, you know, Sam D'Amico, I mean, SF founder, but he runs Impulse Stove. It's a stove company. And and I I don't wanna, you know, tell his story for him, but it always feels like, obviously, that's not a defense tech company. That's not an androle competitor, but that's the type of that's the type of company that maybe doesn't exist unless we make, like, hardware cool and get found and and get, and get VCs piling into the category. But take us through some of the some of the companies from this batch.
Speaker 2:Who stands out?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, it it's a smaller batch for, like
Speaker 2:Take us through them. HR.
Speaker 6:I'll I'll get I'll go through
Speaker 1:all of
Speaker 2:them. Them.
Speaker 6:Starting off, we got Petra Power. Shout out to Aaron Goodman.
Speaker 2:K.
Speaker 6:Hopefully, you're watching right now. He's doing basically, we're replacing generators. So, basically, building a new electrochemical process to replace the generator, and and there's, a massive bottleneck. Generators, obviously, energy Yeah. That we shorter is pretty real real, especially with the new data centers going up, and he already has has received $9,000,000 in DOD contracts, which is pretty
Speaker 2:crazy. Sick.
Speaker 6:Third one is wild. Second one's a pretty fun one, making shoes in America, autonomous shoe manufacturing at price in The USA.
Speaker 2:That's bold. That's very bold. That's a
Speaker 1:great deal. I'll go with orders. We're gonna make it in America. Okay?
Speaker 6:And there there's all these missile drone companies. We're we're making shoes, guys. We're making shoes in America.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 6:Three Hedges. They're one of the the few software companies. They're basically building a commodities hedging app for Oh. SMBs, typically oil and gas, to start because Interesting. It costs a lot of money to actually have, like, a hedging team.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And they said 97% of of distributors just can't afford Sure. A full team. So they basically make it their whole thing is Robinhood. They call Robinhood for industrial companies.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've seen a lot of startups do the the sort of, like, treasury management, just, like, earn a little bit of yield because maybe you don't have access to an investment bank and a whole treasury team. And so, plenty of companies have offered that type of product.
Speaker 2:It makes sense that, you'd need something a little bit different in the industrial space. Very cool.
Speaker 1:Imagine day trading commodities on your phone from this electric.
Speaker 6:All those are that too. That
Speaker 1:that would be
Speaker 2:What is Actonide?
Speaker 6:Actonide is pretty cool. So, basically, what they do is they enrich ICE tips, basically. So they started off with one material. So there's there's three materials in the Russian so the Russian sanctions list, these materials you can import or cannot import. There's three materials that are actually removed from that sanctions list, which means, like, you can get as much as you want because we just need them.
Speaker 6:The highest cost per gram, one is a material called terbium. It's used in Sure. In cancer medication.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:They basically make this material, and it they it's a $2 per gram material. They enrich it. It's $36,000 per gram.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 6:And then they already have it's in the two as well. Already have some some some some contracts on the very large contracts they just signed literally in last week. It was pretty sick. Like, Monday morning yesterday, Monday morning signed two contracts, locked in there with some companies that everybody, watching knows very, very well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The traction so far is pretty pretty amazing.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It was great. I think I think we definitely seen, like, the last over the last couple of batches, like, of an increase in in in in traction just because people wanna be here in El Segundo. People kind of see the brand we provide.
Speaker 2:And Yeah.
Speaker 6:And, that's, I think, pretty evident with the company.
Speaker 2:So techs.pro is Bloomberg for heavy equipment procurement. So that's oh, dealerships. Interesting. So, actually, figuring out, the the so Bloomberg, you you you think that means, looking across all the different industries. Like, how you can go on Bloomberg and find someone's auctioning off a, you know, a private jet, but they're also selling some, some slug of of equity or something like that.
Speaker 2:So this is a platform to connect buyers and sellers?
Speaker 6:It basically is, yeah, brings together people who wanna buy
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 6:Modern equipment, heavy machinery more generally. There's, like, no central database with all this this information. Just like BoomerX in Texas calls BoomerX in in Arkansas, and then they hopefully make it happen. But there's no, like, label database of all of this equipment. It's basically just, like, compile it all.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Kinda like with, like, CarFax, for example. Like, early on, there's just no data. And, like, basically, they just went out and, like, called all the dealerships. Like, hey.
Speaker 6:Like, how much does this work? How much does this work?
Speaker 2:Is Louris is Louris sort of sort of, like, the v two of the vertical farming era? The it says they turn grocery store rooftops into autonomous farms.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So, like, my take here was, like, vertical farming obviously been tried.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It didn't really work because
Speaker 6:it was all, like, climate, like, kind of carbon credit driven a lot of the time where, like, the actual unit economics not make sense with with that gone. Basically, they removed, like, one of the biggest cost which is real estate, and they basically just put these, like, blow up farms on grocery stores' roofs. And then it's, a pretty I mean, the the numbers are here. Like, it they have like, they don't pay for the actual unit. They have people to go in and and license them and and bring them out to grocery stores, and then they get, like, individual profit based off what the the grocery stores make.
Speaker 6:And then the goal is bring the the produce profits per grocery store up by 50%.
Speaker 1:The produce is then sold directly in the grocery store that it's sitting on? Cool. Exactly. Interesting.
Speaker 6:Colocation. And they're already, like, in in in store.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Pretty big
Speaker 6:contract recently, which is pretty exciting. But I I I think, like, generally, like, this again, food security is important.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:This stuff that was tried last, I don't know, five five five years ago or so didn't really work because of the, you know, economics like this makes sense. There's also these general tailwinds of, like, need to make food in America. It's, like, actually healthy.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 6:So that's them. Lark, Kai, Legend, at Skunk Works right out of college. Yeah. There's this new Moses standard, basically, which is, like, open source. Like, if you have a a component, it has to actually work with every type of system.
Speaker 6:There's no way to actually test this. They basically have a software that can test the compliance for, for any component, and then eventually gonna build the hardware to to test it in a more, in-depth fashion starting with the software.
Speaker 2:I like Blitzpanel. That's a good name. Blitzpanel reminds me of Mixpanel. But
Speaker 9:It's a
Speaker 7:pretty simple company.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:They make electrical panels for for cheaper, and they have a whole automation process he's he's built out. He was at, Pipe Dream Labs in Texas.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:He's a huge problem, and now he's basically just building the you
Speaker 2:know Going through all this stuff, it really shows you that there are, like, a lot of stuff that fill fit that that fits in thematically that does not feel like it competes with Andrew Roll, for example. Like Yeah. But they solve it feels, like, aligned with the general theme that you've put together of
Speaker 6:Is it?
Speaker 2:Cool, hard problems. There's a little bit of American dynamism, a little bit of military stuff in here. Tell us about, the last company, number nine.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So Arctis Energy
Speaker 2:Arctis.
Speaker 6:This guy reads old German papers from the forties in German, and he found this process that basically You What
Speaker 1:German alpha. What what kind
Speaker 2:of German what kind of German papers is he reading?
Speaker 6:You can guess. You can guess.
Speaker 2:That instill confidence. Tell this guy to clean it up. What is going on?
Speaker 6:No. The the the papers are scientific papers that were Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. That needs to be clarified.
Speaker 1:Good. That
Speaker 6:that is
Speaker 2:good. Clarified.
Speaker 6:Papers about scientific processes. No trouble.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. They did have some good scientists in the forties.
Speaker 6:Exactly. And one of these papers in in particular goes this way, making hydrogen for cheaper. Okay. And if you put hydrogen to make, crude oil for cheaper.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well, congratulations on the demo day. Thank you so much for coming.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Really cool lineup. And breaking it down. It's great. I mean, it's cool to see a lot of people focus on energy.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's that, like Yeah. People will criticize like, you know, accelerators and like for having like two like being like two on trend Totally. Healthy like we want a new we want a big group of companies, like, going after a bunch of different problems.
Speaker 2:This just doesn't seem like that narrow of a trend. It feels extremely narrow when you introduced it the first time, and it just felt like, oh, it's just defense tech or something. But, clearly, like, it's it's such a big area that some of these folks, if they're both successful, like, they're not even gonna do business together because they're operating completely different layers of the stack. It's just a it's just a fantastic end result and really cool to see the growth here. So congratulations.
Speaker 6:And I I think one one last point about, like, the general defense market that I think is interesting is, like, a lot of these big companies like Andrew Roll, like, Ceramic, like, the big, like, tier ones have already chosen, like, a winner and, like Sure. They're not gonna back another Andrew Roll competitor. So it's like it it you need to have, like, the the stack, like, the capital stack to be sensitive to be every single level of it and, like, all these these funds have already chosen somebody as, like, their winner. It's kinda hard to come in and, like, be back with these these funds. So I think there's, like, so many opportunities now to come because, again, legacy industries are, like, open for venture.
Speaker 6:There's a lot of talent flowing in. That that's what we're trying to kind of take advantage of is, like, new movement. The best talent and capital actually are since solving these hard critical, emotional problems.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Congratulations on another successful demo day. We will see you next demo day and hopefully before that, of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to
Speaker 2:see you, Jake. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Cheers.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
Speaker 1:Our next guest is a living legend.
Speaker 2:This is amazing. Founder
Speaker 1:of Fartiful. I'm sure she's dressed totally normal.
Speaker 2:Yep. Let's bring her in. Welcome to the show. How many, how many how many parties did you get invited to?
Speaker 1:Okay. Is this AI? Yes. Is this AI? Hi.
Speaker 10:I I wish because it would have been a lot easier to put on.
Speaker 1:This is a whole yourself? Or did you have
Speaker 10:a team? I did do it myself, which is why I missed a few spots.
Speaker 2:Oh, it looks great.
Speaker 1:It looks great. This is incredible. I mean, I feel like
Speaker 2:Incredible.
Speaker 1:Halloween is probably high pressure, like, on part on the part of full team. You guys are facilitating a lot of Halloween events. Like, you kinda have to really show up and do it right. So, congratulations. Did any This is your Black Friday.
Speaker 10:This is our Black Friday. This is our Super Bowl. This is our d day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for for teaching. Taking some time to talk to us on your Black Friday. Is it actually Black Friday in the sense that, like, the the servers will be melting, or is it just, like, it's the best opportunity to capitalize on the the value prop that Particle can deliver?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I would actually be curious. What are the what are the biggest holidays for or just days celebrations?
Speaker 10:Halloween is by far the biggest. Really? People No celebrate Halloween like 10 times. Like, everyone can go to multiple Halloween parties and it's very valid. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:You're only gonna go to one New Year's Eve party. Maybe during the holidays, you're, like, traveling, so who knows if you'll be around. But, like, everyone's here. Everyone's locked in. Everyone knows what the job is.
Speaker 10:And so, usually, it's like you'll have six Halloween parties. And I don't because, like, the entire particle team, I'm, like, kind of on call today, this weekend. But that's why I'm dressed up right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love the idea of you being on call and then there's some serious thing happening in the business. And you're just dressed up Zoom together and then you you dress up like this.
Speaker 10:Very serious. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's great. It's it's very good the culture. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. The servers are not melting because our engineers prepped heavily for this, but it is like a triple on call situation.
Speaker 2:How how has the business been growing? I know that, a couple months ago, there was like, oh, Apple's coming after you, and that felt like maybe it was just always gonna be
Speaker 1:Focus on yourself, Apple. Focus on yourself.
Speaker 2:But was that even, like, an o s h I t moment, or was it just kind of like, okay. We didn't really see any blip in the numbers whatsoever, and we've just been on a growth projector growth growth trajectory the entire time?
Speaker 10:When it happened, it was definitely, are you not allowed to curse on this show?
Speaker 2:We don't curse on this show, but you're welcome to.
Speaker 10:But Okay.
Speaker 2:Kids do watch. Our
Speaker 1:kids watch. So if you whatever you say, our kids will repeat to us later. They'd be like, what did Treya mean by that? Yeah.
Speaker 10:It was an oh darn moment.
Speaker 2:Here we go. Oh, shocks. Oh, shocks moment.
Speaker 10:But then we're like, let's wait to see how this plays out because I think so many startups go through the thing where
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Some big player comes in, and they you try to reheat your nachos, and it either works or it doesn't. And I don't know. Have have you guys gotten an Apple invite?
Speaker 7:No. No.
Speaker 1:You There you go. Yeah. I mean, it it seems like an obvious I mean, the other thing is Apple is not good at fun. Like, they they did the Genmoji thing and and they were laughed at for it. It was like kind kind of a cool Yeah.
Speaker 1:Product. But again, it doesn't even get real usage. And I just think Apple was always known for magical software because it was just like so Yeah. Polished and good. And I think they're becoming less known for Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I I have another take here. I'd I'd like to know if you if this resonates with you, you're obviously on the inside of this. But I feel like the the invite product has, like there are technical features that someone can clone and and and check the box, but the brand is so important. And I feel like when I get a part of full, it says something about what I'm going to expect walking in there. When I get a paperless post, that's a different vibe.
Speaker 2:That's a different thing. When I get a physical piece of mail that invites me to something, that's also a different a different brand, a different vibe. It sets me up. It's the welcome moment to the actual event. It's part of the event experience.
Speaker 2:And so I feel like there's a world where you could clone all the features, but it's not gonna bring the same energy, which is actually what your customers are buying in some way.
Speaker 1:Part of the product.
Speaker 2:I I think it's part of the product. But what how do you think about brand and how you stand out from the competition?
Speaker 10:I think it's brand, and there's something about you have to want to break the rules because a party is not, like, a corporate meeting. Right? A a a party is a party. And so we, from the very beginning, have always been like, the party page should feel as much fun as the party itself. Like, you're already asking guests to do a lot by RSVP ing.
Speaker 10:Like, you might as well make it fun for them and give them a reward, where they get to see the guest list after they RSVP. Like, you you gotta make it something where people can actually feel bought into the experience, and you don't do that by, know, building something that just looks like an online form or gets buried in someone's email. But I also think there's an interesting, like, cross platform aspect of this too. When you think about Apple, like, if I wanna invite people to my party, I wanna invite my friends who have an iPhone. I wanna invite my friends who have Android.
Speaker 10:Like, I don't care what phone my friends have. They're still my friends. Yeah. And so I think it's really important, and it's just it's hard for certain companies to
Speaker 1:actually get on this. Apple Does app only work if you have an iPhone?
Speaker 10:It it does work for Android.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 10:No. It's
Speaker 1:just was just say. That's just like that's just mean. Okay? Yeah. Not even being able to invite Android people to parties, that's just mean.
Speaker 10:I mean, well, they're already green friends. They're already like look like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's funny.
Speaker 1:What, so so we oftentimes, you know, if we're talking to an enterprise software founder, we don't typically ask the question like, what's the ten year vision? Like, where does this go? Because usually it's like more seats, you know, more contracts, more product Margin expansion. Expansion. But how do how do you like, you know, and I'm sure you've just been learning about what Partifull is as you as you built it.
Speaker 1:But like, has the vision like, what what was kind of the founding vision? What is it today? How has it changed? And kind of where where are you going? Because I I've always I've like I've seen like your posts or like different press hits throughout the years and there was some really funny post about like have not having any not making any money that that, that stuck with me.
Speaker 1:But, And obviously, just, like, you know, joking about it or whatever. But, like, yeah. Where where where did you start from and where are you going?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's it's funny how many people took that post, like, very seriously. It's like, you can't joke the Internet anymore.
Speaker 1:Was the exact what was the exact line? I I forget.
Speaker 10:It was just like, Partful won't make money. VCs gave us funding to help you party. Enjoy it, babes. Something like that. There are all these like very serious news articles of like, Particle said that VCs gave you a party.
Speaker 10:Like, is it true?
Speaker 1:That's kind of a if you guys aren't making money if you guys aren't making money, it's kind of a systemic risk to the part to big party. You know?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. No. We we will definitely we will definitely make money, just not right now. The the long term vision is if you look at where most social apps have gone, they've kind of turned into entertainment platforms.
Speaker 10:Right? Like, when when I open Instagram, I'm being fed a bunch of reels. I'm seeing less and less of my friends' content. TikTok is obviously huge, and it's also an entertainment platform. And so when you really think about it, the content that we're consuming is more and more just like, it can be Netflix.
Speaker 10:It can be YouTube. It can be reels. It can be shorts. It can be TikTok. But it's all just you're watching entertainment from people who you don't actually know.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. And so what's gotten lost in that is, like, where do you go if you want to actually connect with your friends? Where do you go if you want to meet more of the people who could be your friends? Because less and less, you or you're discovering them online. And so what we wanna do is create the home for you to hang out with your friends, see them more easily, discover new things to do, and new people to do them with.
Speaker 10:And we think that as big social actually stops becoming social and starts becoming big new media, that big social deserves to exist. And right now, it's small social. It's part of all, but the goal is big become big social.
Speaker 1:That's for you. I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we were talking to Brian Chesky. Is, you know, somewhat somewhat similar thesis, and I've it's grown on me so much, the barbell idea. You're gonna be there's gonna be the Internet slop feed. There's gonna be a lot of content and stuff, but then you're also gonna wanna touch grass, and both can be true, and you can kinda toggle back and forth.
Speaker 2:What's the most underrated part of fold that you've ever seen?
Speaker 9:Okay.
Speaker 10:So I the they're they're somewhat rated. It's not fully underrated. Okay. But I'm obsessed with the the performative contest. So there's, like, performative male Yes.
Speaker 10:Contest happening right now. I saw in San Francisco, there was, like, a performative reading contest. Okay. Performative reading. It's it's yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's just, like, there's something really funny that's happening where online meme culture, people are using Particle to take that offline. Sure. So they're taking like By
Speaker 1:the way, I know I used to go to the same gym as a kid who like initially went viral for the performative reading in Oh, yeah. New York where he was reading like like like some Infinite Jast or something. It wasn't that. It was like it was like a feminist
Speaker 2:Tyler's favorite.
Speaker 1:Feminist feminist text or something like that. And he's like, you know, reading and people are like, hey, he's been reading the same page for like Yeah. Thirty minutes. Like, what's going on? And that that I'm sure that was part of what kicked off this this kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Or like group seven on TikTok. Like, there's not like a group seven meetup, I think, this weekend in New York. So it's like the speed at which every single Internet meme now has a real offline part of full event that people are actually going to that's actually happening. That's been pretty cool to watch.
Speaker 2:Take us through the SF party culture. I'm here in nine nine six. It's getting crazier. Everyone's working nonstop. Is that bear is that a bear signal for your business?
Speaker 2:No one's gonna be partying.
Speaker 1:Right? Or are they just using it for, like, happy hour, come talk about SaaS?
Speaker 2:Oh, that could be a bull case. Break it down.
Speaker 10:996 call culture is very concerning to the party community. I'm here to declare a state of emergency in the SF party scene.
Speaker 1:We have to end it.
Speaker 2:The drinks, happy hours are coming back. It's okay to crack open a happy dad at 2PM. Pass me that happy dad. I'm gonna crack that open right now. Let's get the party started right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We do tech companies need to bring back boozy brunches during weekdays? Was that ever a thing? Like, what what's what's kind of the solution here?
Speaker 8:How do
Speaker 1:we get
Speaker 10:Maybe that's what we should start using our VC dollars for.
Speaker 1:The power lunch? The power lunch?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yes. Funding everyone's boozy boozy lunches and boozy dinners.
Speaker 1:I mean, that kinda that was kinda the joke in 2021. It was like there was, like, I you know, people used to joke 30% of all dollar venture dollars go to Meta. And then in 2021, it felt like 30% of VC dollars were going to, like, founder dinners. Like, it was just a founder. You could basically eat for free as a founder by just going to a different founder dinner every night with with a with a fintech.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. I I I I wanna keep going. I know we're way over time, but, I want you to synthesize something you've been thinking about, this this idea of, like, rage bait marketing being not effective long term. Synthesize that with some I feel like Particle's done a little bit of it, but you haven't, like, crossed any line, so it's always, like, worked out. Like, even that even that example you gave of, like, oh, we're spending all our VC's money.
Speaker 2:That's kind of rage bait marketing, but it never it never bubbled up to the point where people are like, oh, you don't have a sense of humor
Speaker 1:about it. That creates goodwill.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I've I've always
Speaker 1:loved the part of a brand. VCs are financing this party. They can and for the user, that's cool. Yeah. But but, there's that's that's quite that's quite different than, like, the memes that were going around earlier this year.
Speaker 1:People being like, I used VC dollars to buy this Lambo.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. And myself. Yeah. How how do you think about, like, rage bait, where the line is on your brand? Obviously, you came on a show that's I don't know.
Speaker 2:That mostly a joke, but somewhat serious, dressed up. Like, you have fun, but then there is the line. How do think about that?
Speaker 10:We there's a little bit that I think you kind of have to acknowledge it. Like, if a company's pre revenue, like, you know, there's clearly VC funding that's that's backing it, so you you can't not talk about that. Right? And I'm a beneficiary of VCs funding a lot of free Ubers in my peak partying era, so I have a responsibility to pay it forward to the next generation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But
Speaker 10:I I I think, like, we're here to make people happy. That's the entire purpose of the company. We're not here to make people angry. And so there's only so much rage baiting that, like, we at Partifle can do that's authentic because it's like, no. The rest of the Internet makes people angry, and we're, like, the one thing that's trying to not do that.
Speaker 10:So I think that's part of why we toe the line is just not as authentic to us if like, you know, the Twitter mobs are up in arms.
Speaker 1:There's also John, you were writing about the come for come for the tool, stay for the network. Oh, sure. This is, like, a perfect example, but a stronger like, I think a stronger example than
Speaker 2:than Come for the tool, stay for the network. John Kugen, Chris Dixon. Chris Dixon. It's me quite John Kugen. Last question.
Speaker 2:I and we we have to have you back on and go way deeper, but I'm super interested. It seems like Particle has complete and total domination over, like, tech culture in terms of, like, if there's a party that's happening in SF Tech, like, you found your beachhead. You've landed. You've dominated. How much time are you spending hunting around to find, like, these crazy adjacent markets for, okay.
Speaker 2:There's someone who collects some odd object in the Midwest and, like, you just dominate in Milwaukee now because, like, it you're Yeah.
Speaker 1:Outdominant is part of full because I don't
Speaker 2:It
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's grown it's grown a lot. So Yeah. We've never had boots on the ground in a market like DC or Boston or Chicago, and those are all huge
Speaker 2:Huge now. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. We're growing like crazy in London. Yeah. We do have on the ground there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But all just web flywheel stuff. Right?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. Just, you know, network effects.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just good old fashioned
Speaker 1:viral growth. Hit the gong for network effects. Let's
Speaker 2:hit the gong.
Speaker 1:Great hit. Alright. This was super fun. Yeah. Super you for taking, fifteen minutes out of your out of your, Bowl to come on.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, no, crises later today because the people are depending on it. Yeah. And, I'm excited for you to become, big social media.
Speaker 2:Yes. We're very excited for you. Thank you so much. We'll talk
Speaker 9:to you soon. You
Speaker 1:guys. Happy Halloween. You. Bye. Talk soon.
Speaker 2:Our next guest has been in the Rishi waiting room for far too long. Shishir Mettabura from Superhuman, formerly Grammarly. We're gonna break down the the rebrand.
Speaker 1:We had him on There when they acquired Superhuman.
Speaker 2:Yes. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 7:Welcome to
Speaker 2:show. Doing. Congratulations on the next iteration. We pressed you about this. We asked you.
Speaker 2:Is there gonna be a rebrand? And you were like, nothing to it now. I think you did. Yeah. But congratulations.
Speaker 2:It's done. And it happened really fast, actually. Yeah. Many corporations would take
Speaker 4:Glad it feels
Speaker 2:that way. A year. I know. I I don't know. It feels fast to me.
Speaker 2:But, anyway, how's it going? What are the key changes? What's the thesis? Why'd you go with Superhuman and not Grammarly as the as the key hero brand?
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's a that's great. Yeah. And I I we did talk about it two months back when we bought Superhuman. The big there there's two big changes we made.
Speaker 4:We changed the name of the corporate entity to be Superhuman instead of Grammarly. Mhmm. It's a little bit like the Google Alphabet transition. There's still Grammarly is still an important brand in our portfolio of products. We now have four products under the Superhuman brand.
Speaker 4:It's Grammarly. It's Coda. It's mail, which you used to know as Superhuman before. And the other big announcement is we added a fourth new product we call Go, Superhuman Go, which brings a new AI assistant product, takes the best parts of Grammarly, and makes it a platform.
Speaker 2:Okay. Wait. Explain that more to me because, like Okay.
Speaker 1:One one before we jump into that, I will say Superhuman is a perfect name for a suite of AI enabled apps Yes. At a time when a lot of humans, especially even, I would say, more so outside of the tech bubble Mhmm. Are like worried about being obsolete in an age of AI. And so this kind of ethos of like, let's give people superpowers, very strong. Yep.
Speaker 1:Makes a lot
Speaker 4:of sense. Exactly. You've all you nailed it. That's why we picked the name. I had two tests.
Speaker 4:One was it need to be broad enough for the suite, first thing you said. And the second one was actually the word human is more important than the word super. And it's actually part of the Grammarly DNA because Grammarly has always been about empowerment of humans. You still you know, we help you assist you in your writing task, but you still, at the end of the day, submit the the article, you you submit the essay, you write the email. We're just helping you be more human.
Speaker 4:So I love the concept of Superhuman that way.
Speaker 2:Okay. So walk me through the actual instantiation of the product. I understand Grammarly is, you know, like a widget
Speaker 1:But, yeah, let let's maybe talk about Superhuman Go, the new product because that's
Speaker 2:what I know context Yes. Please.
Speaker 4:Right. Right. Yeah. And actually, we teased it we teased that a little bit last time I was here too. And the the core idea is a simple reframe of Grammarly.
Speaker 4:So Superhuman Go takes the core underlying technology layer of Grammarly Mhmm. And opens it up as a platform. So most people think about Grammarly as a grammar assistant, and that that is a big piece of what it does. Yep. But underneath it is a layer that allows you to bring AI to a proactive embedded experience in every tool you use.
Speaker 4:Grammarly works in about a million different web apps, desktop apps, and mobile applications. And now you can run any agent, not just your writing assistant, on top of that platform embedded, connected, and personal.
Speaker 2:How do you think about the the wars at the various layers of the stack? There's a war
Speaker 1:They're fighting all of them.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's an AI system in basically every web app now. Like, if I go into Gmail, it's asking me to use Gemini. And then at the browser layer, there's Atlas versus, you know, the per what Perplexes got going
Speaker 1:companies built
Speaker 5:on prem.
Speaker 2:Also the the the OS layer. So I was reflecting the other day on on Gmail was trying to get me to use Gemini. Chad, be was asking me was was asking me to use Atlas, and then Apple was trying to get me to use Apple intelligence, and it's three helpful AI assistants all in just you wanna summarize this email?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So you said the keyword that you said ask? Yeah. So, actually, interestingly, my frame for if you took all those AI providers
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And you put them into
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I I call it the assist players, the chat players, and the do players. Okay. So the chat players, that's that's what you're referring to. There's a chatbot everywhere. ChatGPT is obviously synonymous with that category, and there's now dozens of them.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Those all ask you to go chat with a virtual human assistant. Sure. There's a set of folks working on what we call do, which is I want an AI agent that can go do things on my behalf as headless tasks.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:And, you know, I think the the most popular one right now or the one people are talking a lot about is all the ones in the coding space. You know, the the Anthropic team said 39% of their queries are for headless agentic tasks and being used for developers writing code. But at the bottom of that stack is another category we call assist, and that's the category where we bring AI to you. So I'll give you I'll give you one fun stat. We do about a 100,000,000,000 LLM calls a week.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. It would make us a top AI provider based on any anybody's volume. But we do that across about 40,000,000 users, which if you do the quick math on that, that's about that's a few thousand AI calls a day per person. So Wow. If you're a really, really good Gemini user or you're a really good Yeah.
Speaker 4:Tajikiki user, maybe use it a dozen times. Yep. Does yeah. Every time you press a key, every time you load a new doc, load a new app, we proactively bring AI to you, and we're figuring out all the places we can invisibly insert AI so it can assist you right where you're working.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:Will you any any plans to get into the browser game? Are you gonna let people duke it out there?
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's not our plan. I mean, I think I think we work our strength is that we work everywhere. By the I should say, I'm so excited that there is a browser game. I remember
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:When I was at I was at Microsoft when Chrome came out, and I worked at Google for a long time, and I watched I watched that happen, and then it just felt like it went away for a long time. It's pretty exciting, actually, that there's some competition in browsers. But we work wherever you work. We work in browsers. We work in the desktop.
Speaker 4:We work on your mobile phones. Mhmm. To to be honest, some fragmentation in the browser world is probably good
Speaker 6:for us.
Speaker 4:I mean, it makes it even more valuable to have an assistant that follows you everywhere, and that's the core of the technology we've built anyways. But, you know, I I I don't see us in that game, but I I'm I'm very curious to watch it.
Speaker 2:That makes
Speaker 1:a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations on the all the progress.
Speaker 1:You dressing up for Halloween later?
Speaker 4:I I well, I am I am dressed up. I'm the Superhuman CEO.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There we go. Nailed it. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:That's the most locked in costume.
Speaker 2:It's incredibly locked in costume.
Speaker 1:I love it. He's super superman himself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'd say. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:It's great to get the update. Love the new name.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. If you have a new name, you need to get on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Introduce everyone to your unified brand.
Speaker 2:Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. You also need to get a luxury watch to celebrate your new rebrand. Get your superhuman on your wrist with Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.
Speaker 1:Our next guest, is dressed up as the co founder and CEO of Linear. I can't wait to talk. Come on in.
Speaker 2:Kari, how you doing?
Speaker 1:Great to see you.
Speaker 2:Great to see Well,
Speaker 7:Craig Craig, thanks for having me again. And, yeah, like, my plan was the same as everyone else's. I could dress up like you guys. Go. I I it's already done so I thought like, well, I'll just do a different thing and not dress up.
Speaker 1:Well, you No. You're locked in. Locked in.
Speaker 2:Locked in.
Speaker 1:So you have linear. You you could you could plan to like, if you grew out the hair on the sides, I bet by next year, you could do a pretty good impression of of one of us without even a hat.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:A pure play. Great to see you. I I think did we overlap almost at were you at the, GitHub universe on Tuesday?
Speaker 7:No. I wasn't there, but, yeah, that that's why I couldn't join. But Yeah. But, yeah, we can we can talk about that or or something else.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we talked we we we got a good whirlwind tour of what, Microsoft's doing. Obviously, Satya has taken a victory lap on the OpenAI deal, and we talked to the Codex team over at OpenAI. We also, talked to some GitHub folks.
Speaker 2:And I think I think the general, shape of software development in 2025 is becoming clear. There there you have asynchronous agents that you can fire off. You're doing code review. You also have a tab completion model, an IDE that's getting smarter every month. But, I'd really love to hear how you see linear, evolving in that context and how and what I mean, you can think about linear as delegating different tasks.
Speaker 2:How do you delegate when you have, super long running agents? We were talking to the Codex team. What did he say? Something random?
Speaker 1:Sixty
Speaker 2:hours. Sixty hours? It's like, that's something you need linear to manage at this point. I mean, so but talk take me through how you're seeing folks, change their use of linear and what you're doing with the product.
Speaker 7:Yeah. One one of the things I've been thinking about is that, like, a lot of, like, linear was was founded before all this, like, AI things started happening more, and as well as, like, I think, like, most companies out there today have, like, even, like, large companies, they started before this this was happening. So Yeah. I think we're all in this journey of kinda like an evolution of, like, how do we do these things? So, like, what are the workflows?
Speaker 7:What needs to change? Like, what doesn't change? I've been, thinking about, like, the whole kind of writing examples. So, like, we used to write on paper, like, write documents on paper, then we moved to typewriters, then we moved to, like, online, like, text processing on our computers, and then we went to, like, online writing. The writing is still it's like you have a piece of paper on the screen, you're still doing the writing activity, and and then now, like, okay, like, the AI can also do some of the writing act activities, but it's kinda like a lot of the tooling changed around that activity or that concept or that need, but the activity itself didn't change.
Speaker 7:So, like, we still have, like, documents and papers as an idea because it's useful. Yeah. So I see that, like, kinda like the chains on the software industry similar that, like, the AI doesn't mean that we we will just throw everything out of the window. Like, there's no longer, like, any of these IDs or workflows or something, but it's more like we have to kinda, like, go piece by piece. Like, does this still make sense?
Speaker 7:Okay. It does make sense. Let's do that. And and, like, does this have to change? Okay.
Speaker 7:It does has to change. Or it would be better if it changes. So so I think, like, our thinking with that has been that, like, we want to help companies
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Move to that direction as well. So we do have the, for example, the agents platform where also GitHub Copilot now integrated with. So you can delegate tasks directly to the GitHub Copilot, then
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:It can work on a background. You can you can then, like, come back to see, like, what the results are and and review the code. We also have other agents.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is there any world where the ability to delegate to agents enables more nontechnical people it gives more nontechnical people a reason to have a seat on linear?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think, like, it it it's something, like, we're definitely, like, seeing today, and I think, like, it's one of the the values we can give to value we can give to our organization. So
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Like, IDEs and technical tools are are used by engineers.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But like, what we even see in our company now is like designers are making fixes with the agents. Yeah. Yeah. When they see something like, oh, this is like a little bit off, I can like properly instruct the agents like, this in a code base, do do, like, a version of this, and you can also, like in our case, you can preview the result through linear so you can actually see, like, oh, this is how it is and and test it. So I think it's, like it gives, like, a nice look for a nontechnical person to sometimes just, like, fix things when they see something, and it you don't always have to, like, assign it to the engineer.
Speaker 1:How do you think about, like, project management software broadly evolving? Like, do you expect to are you guys experimenting with any new paradigms? Like, agents are great in that right now. We even call them, like, human like names oftentimes. Right?
Speaker 1:Everyone has their, you know, like, sometimes it's a girl name, sometimes it's a guy name. And, like, the way that we're using them today is very much like a teammate. That might suggest that we're not gonna see a bunch of new UI paradigms. But are you and the team kind of like, what doesn't get shipped that you guys are kind of playing with, you know, behind the scenes?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think, like, I I like to think about there's, two areas. One is
Speaker 1:the
Speaker 7:organizational workflow. So, like, that that goes goes everything from like, what Linear really offers is, like, coordination and prioritization and communication and visibility to the organization. Like, this is the this is the direction we are going, and this is how it's going. And these are the people working on those things. And so I think, like, with AI, we can we we are looking for those, like, problems and, like, what can we actually fix there or, like, improve there with the AI.
Speaker 7:And then I think the other is the the individual engineering workflow, like, where does that change. So I think, like, there is definitely, like, something we're thinking about that. Do the issues still make sense? Do pull requests still make sense as a concept when you are, like, more, like, working with the with the AI to to develop something? I do think, like, there is still need for reporting things like bugs and, like, even and or, like, capturing issues, having discussions around it.
Speaker 7:So I don't think, like, everything is gonna change that. I think, like, a lot of times, what really help companies with this, like, some kind of direction and some kind of kind of, like, a guidance to their teams. Like, here's here's, like, a system for you to operate in, and these are the pieces, and this is the goals. And then you let them, like, do their work. So I I at least like to see that it's it's not like I don't when we think about the SaaS future or, like, SaaS products, it's it's more about the making them more proactive or self driving.
Speaker 7:Like, we like to say, like, self driving SaaS is that we we're not yet at the stage of, like like, with transportation. Like, we still need cars because we don't have teleports. So we need to now, like, we're at the stage of, like, let's make those cars self driving. And so I think, like, in when it comes to software products, I think we are also there that I don't think we are at the stage yet, and maybe not for a long time, that we no no longer need no software products. But I think, like, they could be much more proactive and driving things on their own on the background without you interacting at all.
Speaker 7:So the idea would be that bugs just fix themselves. So, like, when bugs gets reported, someone Okay. Like, the AI will fix it, and you don't even have to see it. I think there's still a need
Speaker 1:to I'm solve I'm excited for the future when teams can just go into linear and just watch a bunch of work happening. There's, you know, it's an agent an agent finds a bug, another agent solves it. An agent has an idea for a feature or user gives an idea, the agent ships it. It's, you know, the the fully autonomous future is wild. I was I I wrote a post maybe it was a couple weeks ago at this point or or last week about the uninspired company of Silicon Valley and and how I mentioned at one point that companies I'm sure now, like, so many companies have copied linear.
Speaker 1:I'm sure there's companies now that copy linear without even knowing, like, the origin of Oh, yeah. Design language. They're just like, oh, this is just the way that design looks. So I was wondering, like, your philosophy on like, you guys get a lot of credit for kind of, like, creating an entire way, you know, feeling for software and design language and all these different, you know, UI elements. Do you ever have a, desire to, like, re like, reinvent the next paradigm and and kind of ship something that would, you know, create create an entirely new, you know, version of the software that would completely reskin it?
Speaker 1:Or do
Speaker 2:you feel skeuomorphic. It's all just like wooden blocks and, like, simulation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or or do you just continue to own it and be the the godfather of modern software as a server?
Speaker 2:Random fonts everywhere, random colors everywhere.
Speaker 7:I I think I I we definitely think about that, like, especially on the website side that, like, what what is the next thing we can do since, like, everyone is kinda, like, doing this thing we're doing? Yeah. So I think there's definitely that need, but I think we in the end, like, we we try to be functional or pragmatic about the design that it still should serve the purpose. I believe that old, like, design quote of the form follows function. So it's like, you're you're not like like, with with productivity tools or other tools, I don't think, like, the point is to to be an artist or something.
Speaker 7:Like, you're not trying to, like, invent something crazy things just for the sake of it. I think it needs to be, like, to the purpose or the function of the tool. And then, like, around that, like, there's always, like, you can, like, try to figure out what what needs to what could be better or, like, maybe you can go against some convention when you when you have that reason. So, I mean, we're always looking for those opportunities. And I think for us, like, part of the, like, the mission of the company is to accelerate and inspire builders.
Speaker 7:So we we also do in a way, like, accomplishing the mission of inspiring a lot of different companies on how to design or, like, focus on the craft or the quality. So that's that's kinda, like, personally. What I also wanted to do that could we, like, shift this industry a little bit more into the, like, we can do nice things and it doesn't always have to be just, like, what metric goes up or down and, like or or some some other reasons.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Made the world a more a more beautiful place.
Speaker 2:I love it. So Yeah. It's a good time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time on Friday.
Speaker 1:Time you're passing through I like
Speaker 2:to the play. Ultra dumb person.
Speaker 1:We love to hang. Ideally on a day
Speaker 2:when we're not dressed up like fools.
Speaker 1:Like couple of characters.
Speaker 2:Can be a little bit more serious. No. But thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us and thank you for supporting the show this entire year. It's been very helpful.
Speaker 1:One of the very first few.
Speaker 2:We've had a lot of fun and everyone in the chat is celebrating Linear. Conor says he just onboarded his business onto Linear today, like, twenty minutes ago. Let's hear it for that. John actually says Linear is TPPN royalty.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:So awesome to see Kari in the ultra dumb. Thank you for coming by. We will talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Have great rest of your day. We'll talk to soon. Cheers.
Speaker 2:There's one scoop I wanna talk about. Katie Roof is confirming a scoop from Techmeme that Axios is dropping Human Interest, a four zero one k platform for small and medium businesses that aims to cut down on administrative work, raised a $100,000,000 at a $3,000,000,000 post money valuation. This is a leak, but I know the CEO of Human He's a good buddy. And so I just wanna say congrats to Human Interest because, it's very cool.
Speaker 1:And, Elon has a new pod up on All In. And on Rogan. He's on an hours.
Speaker 2:He's on a press tour. We gotta get him. Maybe this is the time to strike. Maybe we get him on TVPN next week. Well, well, the team seems to like the idea.
Speaker 1:We will see. Work on it. Thank you guys for hanging out with us on, on such a crazy day. Yeah. It's gonna be hard to we were while we were putting this on, we were talking about how do we one up this next year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What could possibly
Speaker 2:Let us
Speaker 1:know in the chat. As iconic as these two types.
Speaker 2:Elon and Joe Rogan. That would be good. I think I think throwing in a Rogan is a good one.
Speaker 1:You as you as Rogan even though you're fourteen in maybe fourteen inches taller than Rogan?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I I could see I could see Rogan. We could do Rogan and Alex Friedman. That could work.
Speaker 2:We could do a human.
Speaker 1:Alex would be the experts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The experts is good. Like, as other podcasters kinda hits. We could do a David Senra. We could both be David Senra.
Speaker 2:How about that?
Speaker 1:David Senra by David Senra.
Speaker 2:Yes. We could both be David Senra.
Speaker 1:An executive produced
Speaker 2:by David. That'd be a lot of fun. I think your mustache is actually falling off your face.
Speaker 1:I feel this weird thing where it feels like I'm sweating underneath everything. Yeah. But I think but it's it's I I've had this like scratch up here by this like fake vein and, I'm not able to itch it. And so I'm looking forward to taking
Speaker 2:this off. It's actually so trippy.
Speaker 1:A lot of people were asking, are you gonna am I gonna go home and trick or treat with the kids like this?
Speaker 2:I was thinking about it.
Speaker 1:No. I do not wanna traumatize my young children. Yeah. I will be, dressing up as something else. But thank you for, tuning in with us today.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 2:wonderful to the team that helped us pull this off. This was a very special funny thing. I never thought we'd be doing this, but that's the nature of this show. And so thank you for everyone that supports us. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast.
Speaker 1:Have a wonderful evening and weekend. Be safe. We will see you back here on Monday.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Can't wait. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Cheers.