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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.
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Speaker 2:Today is Thursday, 12/18/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance. The capital of capital. Ramp.com. Countless money.
Speaker 2:Save both. Easiest corporate cards. Bill Pay. Accounting. A whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:We got a video here that I've It has been promised to me. I I saved this for the show, so this reaction. I haven't seen the video, but I've seen the metrics around the video. It's got 15,000 likes just on a quote tweet of it. I think it's gonna be very funny.
Speaker 2:Tyler was saying, you gotta watch this. So we're gonna pull this up. Pegasus quote tweeting and says, this is OpenAI showing the public its financials once it goes public. That looks pretty good. Getting a haircut.
Speaker 2:Looks good. Oh, no. You know, I've been watching these haircut videos, and they're actually incredibly good content because I saw one. I mean, obviously, that one's very silly.
Speaker 1:Dude, this that that that There's this video going viral Yeah. This guy is gonna be full giga chat mode within six months.
Speaker 2:I guarantee it.
Speaker 1:Guarantee it. Guarantee it.
Speaker 2:But He
Speaker 1:just did that. He he knew what was gonna happen. He did it to inspire himself to, I guess, look
Speaker 2:for Max. For sure. For sure. To start smashing. I I looked at a at a haircut video where and it's it's incredibly sticky content because you're watching the guy describe what he wants, and then at the very end, they show you a a montage of the photos.
Speaker 2:And when it works out, obviously, the the joke there is that, you know, it's a downgrade. But when when it works out, it's really satisfying. The payoff comes right at the end, which, of course, is great for retention and average view duration. And so it's a it's a growing format. It does make me wonder, like, there are certain like, can every different vertical, can every different type of content become, you know, high retention?
Speaker 2:Or are there some things that are just like more naturally like payoff based? Right? Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 2:We are in Arena Mag. This is breaking news. The latest edition of Arena. We had three Martini lunch. This is this is issue number six, q four twenty twenty five, three martini lunch.
Speaker 2:And we are in here in with a wonderful spread. Oh, there's a bunch of there's a bunch of great people in here. Look at this. We got Daniel in here. I don't know if he's doxxed in this photo actually.
Speaker 1:A growing one?
Speaker 2:I I think so, but there's a profile on some Archer stuff, some VTOL stuff.
Speaker 3:Very nice.
Speaker 2:We got California Forever in here.
Speaker 1:Apparently, we are having a YouTube issue, folks. Oh, yeah. You'll have to refresh the app if you wanna avoid any type of lag.
Speaker 2:Okay. Oh, they did a profile on a review of Dwarkash Patel's The Scaling Era, a what is going on here? The Christmas spirit. It's wild. That camera had one too many eggnogs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tyler also has the the scaling era. An oral history of AI 2019 to 2025 by Dorakash Patel. There's a whole review of the book. And then, of course, you get the beautiful TBPN spread.
Speaker 2:Look at this.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:Isn't that great? I like the that they kind of brought their own aesthetic on top of some photos that we took here in the Ultradome. Very, They very
Speaker 1:respected They respected the brand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It looks great. And here's a photo of me and Jordy having breakfast showing you what the day in the life is like. And then here's me reading the Wall Street Journal before the show starts. Life of Kugen.
Speaker 1:Kugen mode.
Speaker 2:Very fun. We I could take you through it, but you've heard the you've heard the story. And you can go subscribe to Arena, MAG. You can read it online. Three Martini Lunch.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I I did want to comment on The the art direction for the cover art, I like Three Martini Lunch. It feels like a pretty big departure from the previous very I felt I felt like their previous covers were very collage based. So this is like a much more simple design.
Speaker 1:Still At the same time, it's still very nostalgic. Yes. Mean, look at the back.
Speaker 2:Different Yeah. The back says, The business of America is business, and it has a pager. That's something we we haven't gotten into. A cigarette and an ashtray and a Casio watch, which I think is pretty cool. Pretty
Speaker 1:cool. Classic. Anyway Anyways, back on the timeline.
Speaker 2:Public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investment. Trusted by millions. What's back on the
Speaker 1:Katie Roof, one of the greatest scoop athletes of our time future scoop hall of famer. Has a Scoop OpenAI.
Speaker 2:She clearly has someone at OpenAI who's like loves her right now. She's been on Scoop
Speaker 1:Yeah. Air. She says Scoop OpenAI could soon be worth 750,000,000,000 in a financing round. They've had early talks. Let's give it up for early talks.
Speaker 2:We love our
Speaker 1:We prefer advanced talks. Yes. But early talks. Alright. You gotta you gotta start somewhere.
Speaker 1:Early talks. About raising tens of billions of dollars or even a 100,000,000,000. Mhmm. Company was last valued at 500,000,000,000 a few months ago. Tae Kim chimes in, says public markets are crushing OpenAI exposed stocks while private investors with visibility into OpenAI's metrics and internal numbers dot dot dot
Speaker 2:Are piling in essentially.
Speaker 1:Both can't be right.
Speaker 2:I trust Katie Roof reporting. So he's saying that it's bullish for OpenAI. That's his take from this? That's
Speaker 1:what Yeah. Maybe maybe some of the the publics have been oversold. That said Yeah. I'll I'll be interested to see how this round comes together. Again, remember, it's I think it's a good time to be fundraising if you need tens of billions of dollars if if this if Warner Brothers ends up going with Netflix.
Speaker 1:Right? Because like Mhmm. I that was
Speaker 2:like Oh, huge
Speaker 1:because like Yeah. If you're raising tens of billions of dollars Yeah. And you're not doing it from strategics like the hyperscalers, it pretty much has to be sovereign wealth Right.
Speaker 2:And and potentially, like, they they're the the like, the if if if they pass on Warner Brothers, they have they have they have loose change in the couch cushions to to toss OpenAI's way and
Speaker 1:the tune They can collect.
Speaker 2:To the tune of $10,000,000,000 checks, potentially. But, I mean, it does feel like OpenAI is at a bit of a it feels like the it feels like the vibes around OpenAI, trough of disillusionment, potentially going into plateau productivity. It it feels like they're turning it around. It feels like the new models and the products are I
Speaker 1:haven't I haven't seen many people say I love five point two. But then again, out outside in the real world, clearly, you know, ask people what AI app they're using. That'll give you a lot of signal. I thought this
Speaker 2:It feels like like, you know, okay. Maybe maybe we're not in Baja Blast territory, but we know that every Code Red is followed by an equal
Speaker 1:Adult mode. Adult mode? It's coming in January.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe. But but it it it does it does seem like a lot of the a lot of the a lot of the negativity has kind of worked its way through. The market's traded down. There's maybe not another like, it's like we're it feels like we're finding a bottom.
Speaker 2:If we're we're we're, like, we're finding, like, the the footing of, like, okay, reset the narratives, rebuild back up. Like, can they catch up in this? Can they catch up in that? If you see a couple of good charts, a couple of growth charts, then you're sort of back in business because
Speaker 1:And again, I I still the Disney
Speaker 2:negative is like, like, the point that I'm making is like is like, a couple months ago, it was like, it's Enron, it's gonna blow up, it's zero, it's not gonna work at all. And it does feel like we're turning the corner on that.
Speaker 1:Maybe you did the people that that are still saying that because they're still saying it.
Speaker 2:They're still saying it. Well, it just got old.
Speaker 1:This is a funny funny post. Yeah. They say Sam says, sell me this pen. Jensen says, I'll lend you the money to buy it. Of course, Jensen is is investing money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:Anyways, a very good
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about a good linear meet the software meet the system for modern software development, streamline linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from road map to release. Warner CEO David Zaslav and Netflix co CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos on the Warner Brothers lot, They took game day photo. They went out deliberately to just strut and just flex, and they clearly knew what they were doing. Hey. Hey.
Speaker 1:Well, this is their new lot.
Speaker 2:You point. You look over here. Guys, can we look over this direction? Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's perfect. Snap, snap, snap. Okay. Yeah. You know that you know that you they're they know what they're doing.
Speaker 2:This looks like no hostile offer can get between us. We're bros. We're hanging out. This is a this is a sign of strength.
Speaker 1:Sun's out. There's palm trees.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is this is them sending the signal, sending sending a signal. Hey. We're excited to work together. We're excited to be in partnership collaborating.
Speaker 2:There was one person who quoted this and was unhappy about it. Where is
Speaker 1:They were saying that they weren't well dressed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They were saying that they weren't well dressed, and and he was like, I'm I'm kind of in that boat. It's not it's not
Speaker 1:threw on a blaze they threw on their fucking blazers.
Speaker 2:Hollywood executive style that's sort of like become the norm. Maybe we go back to the three martini lunches, guys. Maybe we throw on suits. Now that you guys are in business.
Speaker 1:But this is also a good way for for people that are maybe more on the tech side Sure. To start dressing up. You don't have to go from jeans straight into a suit.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You can throw on a blazer.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Right? Mhmm. Something something to consider. Yeah. Matt Levine is back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He says, miss Christmas Eve in New York New Year's and the fourth of July holidays for news letters a lot smaller than this. This is as good as it gets for newsletter writers. And we can jump into the article. He says Warner doesn't trust Paramount, revocable trust, ESG side letters, IPO lockups, destiny of doing deals over the holidays.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Trust. If you're a normal person, most of your wealth is probably in your own name. But if you're one of the richest people in the world, you probably have a lot more complicated estate and tax planning which probably means that a lot of your wealth is in trust, legal arrangements that your lawyer set up to hold assets for you. Most simply, you might have a revocable trust where your assets technically belong to the trust but you have control over the trust assets, investment decisions, beneficiaries, etcetera.
Speaker 1:This can be useful for estate planning but for most purposes, owning assets in a revocable trust is pretty much like owning them yourself. I regularly say that Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuck owns a lot of shares of Meta or that Elon owns a lot of shares of Tesla even though neither statement is exactly true. Their trusts own the shares. But for most practical purposes you can think of, they own them. This creates, I suppose, a small dumb problem.
Speaker 1:Let's say you build big yachts and Mark Zuckerberg comes to you and asks asks to buy a billion dollar yacht. Naturally, he will pay you the billion dollars on completion of the yacht. You might ask him, well, do you have a billion dollars? And he might say, no, actually, I don't. But the Mark Zuckerberg Trust owns like a bajillion dollars worth of meta stock and I control that, so I'm good.
Speaker 1:You find that persuasive, so you pull up the out sale contract. Who do you put in as a buyer? If you put Mark Zuckerberg, he has no money. If you put the Mark Zuckerberg trust, it has plenty of money now. But if it is a revocable trust, he can just take all the money shares out whatever he wants.
Speaker 1:It's revocable. Mhmm. If he changes his mind about the yacht, he can clean out the trust. You'll send the bill to the trust, but the trust will have no money and you'll be stuck with the yacht. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Not that bad of situation to be stuck with a billion dollar yacht. I of get selling them,
Speaker 2:you certainly
Speaker 1:wanna be able to complete the transaction. I get the I get the point.
Speaker 4:This is very
Speaker 2:interesting.
Speaker 1:Honestly, this is a pretty easy problem to solve. You put Mark Zuckerberg in the contract. He doesn't own the assets directly but he controls the trust. So if he owes you a billion dollars, you can make make him take it out of the trust. But maybe you'll get confused or he'll get confused and you'll end up signing a contract with the trust.
Speaker 1:Then if he changes his mind, he can zero out the trust and stiff you. I cannot imagine that this comes up a lot with the outbuilders or anyone else. Elon Musk once did sign a contract to buy Twitter for 44,000,000,000, then changed his mind and tried to get out of it. The fact that his wealth is mostly in a trust did not at any stage of the proceedings trouble anyone. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:He had signed his equity commitment in his own name and everyone understood that if he was sued and lost, he'd have to pay with his trust money if necessary. And Twitter did sue him and he did pay. Fine. Fine. Fine.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, Paramount is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, breaking up Warner's deal to sell itself to Netflix Inc. And Paramount does not have nearly enough money to pay for Warner. Instead, much of the money behind the bid comes from Paramount chief executive officer's dad, Larry Ellison. As of this writing, the fifth richest person in the world or the rather it comes from his trust. And this would be one of the greatest tricks in the history of mergers and acquisitions.
Speaker 1:One major sticking point is Warner Brothers Brothers concern about the financing proposed by Paramount which is led by David Ellison. A big part of the equity is backstopped by a trust that manages the wealth of his father, Larry Ellison. Because it's a revocable trust, assets can be taken out of it at any time, and Warner Brothers may have no recourse if that happens, the people said. And he Matt says, sure. The risk here is Warner throws over Netflix, pays at a $2,800,000,000 breakup fee, and signs a deal to sell itself to Paramount for something like a 108,400,000,000.0 in cash.
Speaker 1:For some reason, changing market conditions, regulatory difficulties, and a change of heart by the Ellisons, or a change of heart by their co investors, the Ellisons decide they don't want to close the deal. Quietly, in the comfort of his own home, without saying anything to Warner, Larry Ellison takes all of his stock out of the trust leaving it empty. Yoink, he whispers to himself. Oops, never mind, Paramount tells Warner. Warner sues Paramount for specific performance seeking to make it pay a 108,400,000,000.0 and close the deal.
Speaker 1:LOL, we don't have that kind of money, says Paramount, which has a market capitalization of about 15,000,000,000 and about 3,000,000,000 of cash. When we signed the deal, you knew that the money was coming from the Ellison Trust. So Warner sues the Ellison Trust for specific performance seeking to make it pay a 108,000,000,000 and close the deal. LOL, we don't have that kind of money, says the Ellison Trust. We did, sure, but the trust got revoked.
Speaker 1:Yoink, adds Larry Ellison more loudly this time. So Warner sues Larry Ellison for the money. He says, who, me? Says Larry Ellison. You have no deal with me.
Speaker 1:I didn't even know what you're talking about. This is not my problem. This does not strike me as especially likely and it would obviously be bad for Paramount and the Ellisons No. But I suppose it is possible and it would be a pretty fun trick. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I talked about this a little bit yesterday on the show, this kind of situation. Today, Warner officially rejected Paramount's bid advising shareholders not to sell their shares in Paramount's tender offer. Here is how Warner describes Larry Ellison's commitment or lack thereof. And this was the exact quote that I read yesterday which was despite Paramount's headline claims, there's no equity commitment or backstop from the Ellison family for the offer. And I'll skip over the rest of that quote, but Matt continues, as far as I can tell and somewhat bafflingly, this is correct.
Speaker 1:Paramount's own tender offer says that the Ellison equity commitment and guarantee will be from the Lawrence Ellison revocable trust, not from Larry Ellison himself. The offer points out that the trust is rich. The Ellison Trust has financial resources well in excess of what would be required to meet its financial obligations under the equity commitment letter, including many other assets and financial resources available to it, record and beneficial ownership of approximately 1,160,000,000.00. Wow. Shares of Oracle stock with a market value of approximately 252,000,000,000 as of the date of this offer to purchase.
Speaker 1:But as the name says, it's revocable. This seems extremely fixable. Have Larry Ellison signed the commitments personally?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:William Cohen reports that the whole situation is trains passing in the night and quote, the Ellisons believe they can still be sued for specific performance to fund the deal. He quotes a person familiar with their thinking saying that there is no financing condition in the deal and Paramount and the EllisonRedbird along with our lenders are legally obligated to close regardless of future financial or business performance at Paramount. That is not an impossible thought to convey in merger papers and yet so far they apparently haven't. And then
Speaker 2:just well, I mean, the ESG side, there's a different story. I'm sure. I I don't think it has anything to with
Speaker 1:the Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:No. It's like Madeline writes like multiple little blurbs. But the the real trick is obviously create a revocable trust and name it the irrevocable trust. Can you just do that? One simple trick.
Speaker 1:One simple trick. Ebony lawyers hate this one simple trick.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I am wondering like if this is very common. Yeah. I mean, Matt Levine talks about this, but like why did Elon not do this during the Twitter buyout?
Speaker 2:That is a good question.
Speaker 4:Because it says Elon did sign the contract in his name In
Speaker 2:his own name. Which he
Speaker 4:could have just done to the trust and then it he could have backed out when he wanted to.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, one thing is, like, it feels like Elon, like, just rips checks and is was very much just, yeah, I'm good for it. I'm going for it. I don't wanna play this game at all. Like, I because I'm all in. You have the full faith and credit of the bank of Elon Musk, essentially.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, also, do we even know that, like, this is, like, legally feasible that you can just revoke the trust? Like, is that just, like, a 100% totally fine?
Speaker 2:Has that happened before? Yeah. I that's a good question. I don't know if it I don't I actually don't know if it's happened before. But it certainly seems like something that you are going to like, we talked about it like that when you make an offer for a big company, there's like the expected value of the close.
Speaker 2:And saying, hey, we have this backstop is something that increases the probability that you close, that the financing condition is met. But then saying, okay, we're doing it in a trust or a revocable trust takes that down a little bit. But again, there's a world where all of the different capital providers lined up, and you're not even talking about trusts revocable or irrevocable because you never get there because all the different funds are jumping. I want to get in. I have to get my stake.
Speaker 2:I want 10% of this. Here's $10,000,000,000 I'm ready to go. And so you don't even care about the backstop or you don't care about the trust because everyone's lining up. The only reason that maybe they're in this scenario is because it feels like it feels like Warner Bros. Did actually sort of kick the tires on the Paramount deal and get to the end state of evaluating it and saying, oh, well, like, we've heard, you know, you you mentioned Jared Kushner's in, like, is Affinity Partners really in?
Speaker 2:And when they push them, Affinity Partners just seemed like they might be out. I don't know. I don't know exactly what happened. But there's a variety of of stakeholders that came in. And the level of it's not just that they were thumbs up, thumbs down.
Speaker 2:There were some that were that people said that they were thumbs up, they wound up being thumbs down. Some of them were, you know, here and they wound up being there, you know, a little bit edgy depending on a lot of different folks where it's like, you know, it's like putting together any other financing round. Like, you know, ideally, every every investor that goes into a seed stage company or a series a company is like, yes. I'm good regardless of who else is in the round. Every once in while, get VCs who say, yeah, I'll sign a term sheet, but term sheets are nonbinding, and we'll see how the round pencils out.
Speaker 2:I'll I'll sit on this signature. I'm not gonna sign this. I'm not gonna wire Or
Speaker 1:they would give a a verbal Stuff happens. Thinking that Sequoia is gonna come in. Yep. Sequoia doesn't. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they're like, oh
Speaker 2:Or vice versa. Yep. They give the they give the verbal. They sit on it. They're not wiring.
Speaker 2:They're maybe leaning back. And then Sequoia comes in or founder's founder and or someone comes in, and then they're like, wait, wait, wait. You said that I could get 2% of this company for a 100 k. Like, well, like, give me my terms. And you're like, you didn't sign that doc.
Speaker 2:You were very much leaning out. I've been in that situation. It's it's never super fun. Never super fun conversation. But Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, it ain't over till the till till the most One,
Speaker 1:a little bit more from Matt Levine. He's talking about lockups. Specifically, SpaceX, we all know. They're trying to go public at a 1 and a half trillion dollar valuation. They wanna raise 30,000,000,000 of stock sorry, 30,000,000,000 via the IPO.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Matt says the raise is not that big relative to the valuation. But then he says the problem is not $30,000,000,000 the problem is the other $1,470,000,000,000 And he goes on to say, happens if $500,000,000,000 of SpaceX stock is unlocked like at a single moment and people are like, well, I've been locked up for I have had limited liquidity for let's say you're an employee who's been there ten, fifteen years. You're like, there could be a kind of a rush to get liquidity. And so he goes on to say that in the conversations that Wall Street has been having with SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, there is some conversations that would create a scenario with I'll just read it specifically.
Speaker 1:Investment bankers are starting to prepare, discussing proposed solutions to help win deals. At least two large banks largely ruled out a standard IPO lockup period of either ninety to one hundred and eighty days and are discussing how to design a staggered lockup release for companies like the ones I mentioned. And then, he says, if you're a shareholder of a trillion dollar private company, you're used to getting limited periodic liquidity events where you can sell shares. Why would that change when the company goes public? So pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:The dance of taking SpaceX public. It's gonna be an interesting year for IPOs. There's a bunch of great companies that are finally mature enough to potentially go out. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta's AI powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk.
Speaker 2:There's a there's an article in The Wall Street Journal about massive IPO. Wall Street gets early taste of hot year expected for IPOs. Shares of a company called Medline began trading in the biggest new stock listing since 2021. Wall Street is getting a glimpse of what could be the biggest year ever for IPOs in The US. After four years of choppiness in the market didn't even let me
Speaker 1:get to the number. You said
Speaker 2:The medical supply company raised 6,300,000,000 in its stock offering. The stock closed at $41 a share. That's up 41% from its $29 IPO price. So massive offering. It's the biggest IPO since Rivian, actually, in 2020 And the ticker is MDLN.
Speaker 2:We're the largest company no one's ever heard of, said the chief executive, Jim Boyle. He said he and his team have spent the past year and a half educating the investment community ahead of the stock offering. You got to tell everyone, what do you do before before you ask for their money? Because if you've been operating behind the scenes, no one's going to know to invest or be excited. So the offering could help set the stage for some of the most highly anticipated IPOs with rocket maker SpaceX, AI company Anthropic, and mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac among the companies looking at listings in 2026.
Speaker 2:OpenAI also rumored there's a couple other companies that might go out. It isn't
Speaker 1:just Well, there's a bunch of tech darlings that look kind of like infants in comparison to
Speaker 2:But might be at a level of maturity to go out.
Speaker 1:Very notable. Companies that are basically at Figma scale.
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Or even beyond. But yeah, I mean, for a long time, you know, if you're a $10,000,000,000 company in the tens of billions, the decacorns any decacorn should be comfortable going out, potentially, as long as they're not in some crazy R and D cycle and they actually have the the core financials humming at this point.
Speaker 2:Bankers say their teams have been busy in recent weeks pitching companies to be lead advisor on their IPOs, marking a pickup in activity. Many startups had a shoot going public in recent years. I'm not sure that's entirely true anymore, said Magdalena Henrich, head of US technology equity capital markets at Bank of America. Bankers are hoping Medline, which is backed by Blackstone, Carlyle, and Hellman Friedman helps to close out a positive year for positive year for IPOs. Well, speaking of Blackstone, we have a little Christmas present under the tree.
Speaker 1:Why don't we open it? What do we
Speaker 2:have from Blackstone? The good folks over at Blackstone sent us a present, and and we will open it live on the stream here. So have you heard that the CEO of Blackstone, Steve Schwarzman, is becoming a DJ? Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon gives him gave him a stamp of approval, and they sent over this very cool tape recorder. I don't know if this is a real tape recorder.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I have this queued up, but you can maybe hear it. Let's see. They went, like, super viral for this because they made a entire, like they basically clowned every start of vibe real. Oh, you're you have a cinematic vibe real? We had our whole team sing a jingle and filmed it and then they sent it out on a physical thing.
Speaker 2:This is very very cool. Portable cassette.
Speaker 1:Is that is that made to look like a cassette tape?
Speaker 2:I think it's actually No. I think it's actually a yeah.
Speaker 1:This is crazy. Wow. I didn't even know we knew cassette.
Speaker 2:This is a very very good drop. Like, just as as a drop, it's it's like it also feels like them leaning in because I know that the the response to that Blackstone video was was not overwhelmingly positive. People were like, what is this? But clearly, it's an inside joke and like the team finds it funny and they were doing it tongue in cheek and they were having fun with it. And they had a lot of a lot of nineteen eighties throwback cameos there.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Anyway, thank you to the good folks over at Blackstone for sending over this. And go listen to the full song and watch the video if you haven't already. Numeral, compliance, handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. In our newsletter today, we did a little review of the model wars.
Speaker 2:Of course, our newsletter, you can get it at tbpn.com, tech analysis and news. We have a daily op ed, top headlines and more. Sign up at tbpn.com. So what a year. Just in terms of model releases, August 7, OpenAI releases GPT five.
Speaker 2:September 29, Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.5. Then the day after, OpenAI releases Sora two. The same day, Meta releases the Meta Ray Ban's displays. November 3, OpenAI and Amazon announced a partnership value to 38,000,000,000. November 12, 5.1 drops from OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Yep. November 17, x AI releases Grok 4.1. November 18, Google releases Gemini three. Massive response to that. It's crazy that that was just one month ago.
Speaker 2:November 20, Nano Banana Pro comes out. Then November 24, Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.5. We talked to Sholto about that. And then December 1, DeepSeek releases DeepSeek version 3.2. And of course, before the end of the year, OpenAI had to fire back with GPT 5.2 on December 11.
Speaker 2:And then December 17, Google releases Gemini three Flash.
Speaker 4:Also today, I think OpenAI released 5.2 Codecs. So like the, you know, version.
Speaker 1:They're starting to stagger them out a little bit more.
Speaker 2:Well, I do I I I
Speaker 1:Which I think is smart. Right?
Speaker 2:I was wondering about this with with Logan, like, do do you think that we will do you think there'll be a period where we get on annual release cadences? And it's just like, oh, like, the model is like GPT twenty twenty six. Like, I'm running the '26 model. Or do you think it might be random
Speaker 1:So but it's We're not quite at the plateau Mhmm. Where I think that would make sense. Like, right now, we're every company's fighting for market share. Yeah. And, like, if you can release tomorrow Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's a lot better than releasing.
Speaker 2:But there is a world where there is a world where OpenAI takes five point one and five point two and says, you know what? That's GPT six. That's GPT seven. Right? Like, they could, even people would be like, woah, this is, like, really incremental.
Speaker 2:So they use the point one. But they also didn't do its five point o, point one.
Speaker 1:I think the reason I think the reason that there's so much pressure to launch is there's pressure to be at the top of the benchmarks.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Sure. In other product categories
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It's not like there's like this like very specific way that you What are
Speaker 2:you talking about? In cars? Nerberg ring.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. But I'm talking in like in like enterprise software, typically. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. It's not like somebody launches a product and then somebody else launches a product and investors can look at it and be like, well, okay. I think this one is just objectively better. Yeah. And and so I think that, you know, just given the the goal to sit at the top of the benchmarks, you know, there's gonna be a mess
Speaker 2:The benchmark is, like, ARR numbers that you might give to the press or fundraising, which, you know, traditionally done to every twelve to eighteen months, but sometimes can happen four times in a year
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At your certain company. What do think?
Speaker 4:Also, I I just wanna say, Brandon, who wrote the Yeah. The piece, he said at the end, he said, it seems like the doomers, people who believe AI will turn us all into paper clips have been defanged, which is good. I disagree that that's true.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:It seems like AI is like I I think there's this whole narrative where like, AI is stagnating.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Where it's like, bro, look at the benchmarks. Like, it's like, it's on the trend.
Speaker 2:Look at the benchmarks. They're saturating. It's incredible.
Speaker 4:Exactly. If the benchmarks are sat I mean, what does that tell you if benchmarks are saturating? We need we we we don't even have good benchmarks anymore because models are way too good.
Speaker 1:Gabe says benchmarks are just as useful as a used piece of toilet paper.
Speaker 4:Exactly. That's the whole point. If if models were bad, benchmarks will be useful.
Speaker 2:So, I mean, the the the risk is like is like there was a moment where just multiplying two really, really big numbers together in a you know, on a computer, like, you needed more memory to do, like, you know, thousand digits times a thousand digits. What like like, your basic calculator had a limit. And then eventually, it got to the point where you have enough RAM that this computer here can sit and, I don't know, calculate the number of digits in pi to like, you know, 10,000 digits. Right? Probably pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:Progress along that line is not necessarily the same line of progress towards, like, human labor replacement even. Like, we got we got calculators that can calculate any any math perfectly in fractions of a second. And it was useful in a million ways, but no one's calling that like a g I, a s I, it can do anything. And so Yeah.
Speaker 4:Because that's like specific intelligence.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Specific intelligence. And so and so we've created a bunch more lanes of specific intelligence. But people feel still dissatisfied with the fact that, yes, the spikes are getting longer, but it doesn't feel like the intelligence is getting any less spikier. That's what Brandon's feeling.
Speaker 2:There's nothing about the benchmarks. When you show me a new model card, I'm just like, cool. Spiky. The spikes got spikier. Awesome.
Speaker 2:There's nothing where it's like, oh, okay. It's no longer spiky.
Speaker 4:Sure. I mean, like like when I use coding models, they're like way better. Yeah. They're That's one of the spikes. The beginning
Speaker 2:of year. That's one of the spikes. That's spike even bigger.
Speaker 4:Enough spikes then, like, what's in between a ton of spikes and, you know Yes. Just like a circle. Right? Like, you know Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is the this is the diagram. You've seen the diagram. Right?
Speaker 1:Where it's
Speaker 2:like, you have the circle with the little tiny spikes where the
Speaker 4:there are benchmarks that, like, there was the the Vend. It was like Anthropic Vend
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Where Claude runs a vending machine.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:In the beginning of the year, they released the the first paper. I don't know when it was. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Was like
Speaker 4:a couple months ago. They released like the first part of paper, and Claude was like horrible. It lost a ton of money running the vending machine. Then they I think today, they released a new one Yeah. Where it's like Cloud is profitable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We need to get you a massive winter coat to get through this AI winter.
Speaker 1:Because the AI winter's happening, dude.
Speaker 2:I'm telling you.
Speaker 4:There's no AI winter.
Speaker 2:There is there is a there's an I mean, it's the age of research. Okay? The age of
Speaker 1:research It's like June next year. It's hot in the Ultra Dome. Tyler, just keep the coat on, buddy. You can't take it off till it's over.
Speaker 2:Till it's over. No. I mean, the the the progress want
Speaker 4:AI to stagnate so bad.
Speaker 2:People They do.
Speaker 4:So many people want that.
Speaker 2:They
Speaker 4:do. And it's not happening, though. It's like the models are getting better.
Speaker 2:Literally, everyone without bags is saying it's stagnating.
Speaker 4:Well, no. Because all those people are like,
Speaker 1:oh, like I
Speaker 4:missed in video or whatever.
Speaker 1:Oh, They want think Carpathi's like,
Speaker 2:I missed in video, so I gotta go trash AI?
Speaker 4:Well, Carpathi, I think he's not He's very I think he's very excited about what AI is like right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he's we can all agree, Tyler, that it's the age of research. But it's also the age of deals.
Speaker 2:Okay. Gotta
Speaker 1:talk about Trump media and technology. This morning, I woke up and you know, a lot of people that, you know, do like mental health podcasts, they say, look at your phone within five seconds Yeah. Opening your eyes. Yeah. Just immediately Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You know, connect to with the Internet and just sort of start kind of marinating in in all the notifications that you maybe got over the last eight hours. Yeah. That's what I did this morning. I I I opened my eyes. I immediately grabbed my phone.
Speaker 1:I see this push notification. I think it was from Bloomberg that Truth Social Parent to merge with nuclear fusion firm in a $6,000,000,000 deal. And I thought I was dreaming still because it just seemed insane. Trump's been so active this year on the on the deal making side. Who would have thought he had another multi billion dollar deal to do this year?
Speaker 1:So of course, Trump Media and Technology Group, the social media and crypto company, part owned by President Trump, said it would develop a utility scale fusion power plant.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Fusion, not fission.
Speaker 1:Correct. Okay. President Trump's social media company, which recently expanded into streaming and cryptocurrency, is now entering its fourth act. Fusion Power Mhmm. Promising but still unproven source of alternative energy.
Speaker 1:DJT and Tae Technologies have said Thursday they had agreed to an all stock merger that the company's valued at more than 6,000,000,000. The deal would be a metamorphosis for Trump Media, the money losing parent company of True Social, a social media platform that has struggled to gain market share beyond serving as the main online megaphone for President Trump. Mister Trump is the company's largest shareholder with a large stake worth more than 1,000,000,000 that is held in a trust. We're trust trust maxing of course, managed by Don Junior who is a Trump media board member. The company based in Sarasota, Florida has only a few dozen full time employees and has recorded tens of millions of losses in recent years.
Speaker 1:The merger with TAE would create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies according to the release. The company said they begin. They intend to begin construction on the first utility scale fusion power plant next year with plans to build additional plants in the future. So the stock is up, of course, up pretty dramatically Today, the CEO over at Tay, Mitchell Bendenbauer says, we've got the tools and the tech and the engineering. What we were lacking was the capital.
Speaker 1:So I did a I headed went over to Gemini and got a little background on TAE Technologies. Mhmm. Interesting company. It's the TAE t a e stands for Tri Alpha Energy, which is pretty I think a pretty cool name.
Speaker 2:It's also good advice if you're a beta. Just try being an alpha.
Speaker 1:Or just rebrand. Rebrand. Rebrand to an alpha.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Actually, I I used yeah. That was I used to Try? Be
Speaker 2:t r I, not t r y. Yep. Not try being an alpha. Sigma. Try try whatever works.
Speaker 1:Sigma Energy Yeah. Would be would be a great name for a small modular reactor company.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's a there's a trading firm two Sigma, and it's two guys.
Speaker 1:No. But Sigma is the lone lone wolf artist.
Speaker 2:Know that they had a they had like founder breakup because they were literally two Sigmas.
Speaker 4:No. Because one of them was two Sigma.
Speaker 2:Oh, t o o.
Speaker 1:It's t
Speaker 2:o o. No. No. I think the nominative determinism is that is that they they you put two lone wolves together, and it didn't work, and they were fighting constantly. So the two Sigma guys broke up.
Speaker 1:Anyway, so
Speaker 2:People are gonna talk about to this.
Speaker 1:The company was founded in 1998 and spent over twenty five years developing unique approach to fusion that focuses on a neutronic power energy generation that produces no harmful neutron radiation.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:They have raised from, I believe it's Google Google, Chevron, and Goldman Sachs. So
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Great to see them all get some liquidity now Yeah. Or at least, you know, shares in in a company that is is liquid. Sure. So
Speaker 2:does that mean Google is on the Truth Social cap table now?
Speaker 1:Google owns a piece of The president's I don't I mean, I actually think one. Because it's possible they got some liquidity along the way. Sure. Seems more likely that Google is now has a nice slug in in DJT.
Speaker 2:Pretty social. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Wait. I didn't even think about that. Yeah. Because this is happening at the Topco Totally. At DJT.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So they own They have exposure to fusion, cryptocurrency, social media, and streaming.
Speaker 2:I mean, famously never got Google circles working. They're they're Facebook competitor. They they have YouTube obviously, a behemoth. But in true social networking, you know, they've struggled. Maybe this is a foothold for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Roll in the entire thing at some point. You know, people are gonna talk trash about this, like, oh, what is a what is a social network doing building energy assets? But you look at what Amazon's doing building massive data centers where for AWS, Amazon owns Twitch. That's a social network.
Speaker 2:It's a streaming platform. What else does Amazon own? Well, own some diesel generators for backup power at the data centers. Fusion, theoretically cleaner. Who would have thought that out of the Silicon Valley tech people, they would be using diesel while the big guy is is using clean energy to power his social network?
Speaker 2:Something there.
Speaker 1:Fascinating, fascinating Let me tell
Speaker 2:you about Fall, generative media platform for developers, developing fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.
Speaker 1:Trey in the chat says this is such a weird deal. TAE is a legit company. Maybe
Speaker 2:they're all legit. Maybe they're all going legit. Maybe it works out. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean Fusion's hard. What if True Social just puts up monster numbers? Mean, it's kind of funny So hard to call this
Speaker 2:legit right now.
Speaker 1:It really is an interesting interesting test given that when I type true social into my browser, it basically, the homepage is just Donald Trump's profile. Mhmm. And they do have a lot of ads on here. Mhmm. And it'll be interesting to understand, like, what is this webpage actually worth?
Speaker 2:Well, we'll find out. I mean, Truth Social I I I think if you went back in time a year or two ago when Truth Social was started, which I believe Trump was out of the office. He was not president when he started it. And you asked anyone, like, what will the what will the terminal value of this asset be? Everyone would be like, like, it's not gonna be over a billion dollars.
Speaker 2:Then when it went out, it was like, okay, yeah, maybe they expect it, but it's gonna like trade down a ton. It's like, I think it's still a multi billion dollar company. Right? DJT? What's the market cap?
Speaker 1:4,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:4,000,000,000 still? Like, that's Well that that's higher than a lot of people thought.
Speaker 1:I I That's it traded up Guarantee. Almost 40% just today. So Yeah. Well, we we
Speaker 2:were doing a deep dive on the company a year ago. So, you know But categories you know there's alpha here.
Speaker 1:What categories is DJT not in? Space,
Speaker 2:pharma. Robotics. Robotics. Oh, wait. No.
Speaker 2:No. They're in pharma.
Speaker 4:Right? Pharma. So I think t does have a
Speaker 2:A biotech division?
Speaker 4:A life sciences division. Okay. So I'm I'm very bullish on them Yeah. Kind of going into pharma.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You gotta go further out in the sci fi curve. No one's pitching a time travel company yet. I think that that's an interesting area to get into.
Speaker 2:You know, what happens after you you're traveling through space. You must travel through time, the fourth dimension.
Speaker 4:I mean, you could break time travel into life sciences. Right? Because you can have the you freeze yourself and you wake up in twenty years. You can't go back, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Dyson sphere. No one no one's no one's come out and said, we're the company that's gonna do the Dyson sphere. It's been much more incremental visions.
Speaker 1:Anyway Truth Joshua's also getting into the prediction market game
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Launching a native prediction market feature in the app.
Speaker 2:It's crazy that they're not predict
Speaker 1:Trade on the content of Trump's next post.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. That would be fascinating.
Speaker 1:And it's very fascinating. I I mean, it's just an interesting I am interested to see how Mhmm. The, you know, future presidents approach business, right? Who was the guy with the peanut farm?
Speaker 2:Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 1:He got into a little hot water because of his peanut farm. I think he didn't fully divest.
Speaker 2:No. He did divest.
Speaker 1:But he still got in hot water?
Speaker 2:No. It was It's just remarkable because the peanut farm was so small and so insignificant in The U. S. Economy and even in his personal balance sheet. But the the fact that he was saying, look, I don't want any any idea of impropriety, so I'm going to divest from a small peanut farm that I'm, like, associated with, so that no one can say that I'm in the pocket of big peanut or I'm pro peanut or little peanut.
Speaker 2:And so the fact that the fact that Jimmy Carter divested from the peanut farm, he was not he was not, you know, in big oil or a railroad baron or associated with banking. He had he had very little conflict of interest, and he reduced it even further. That's always been a sign of, like, the what what great looks like, And it's been a role model for some presidents. Some presidents have looked and said, like, well, if Jimmy Carter did it this way, I should also do it this way. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Is a crazy story in
Speaker 1:the Joe Weisenthal, by the way. One more. He says, sharing that DJT is up 35% to a new thirty day high. And Joe says, Trump has been in founder mode for a long time, getting all kinds of criticism about the business from people who aren't actually in the arena.
Speaker 2:We I it it is it is crazy the degree to which he is a successful technology founder. Truly, like billions of dollars in market cap.
Speaker 1:People can take have their issues with the the president, but they cannot deny that they cannot they cannot say with a straight face that he is not a technology
Speaker 2:He's never founded a unicorn tech company.
Speaker 1:He's never taken a social media app public.
Speaker 2:You can't say that.
Speaker 1:You can't say that. Never merged with a nuclear fusion company backed by Chevron
Speaker 5:You can't
Speaker 1:say that. Google and Goldman Sachs.
Speaker 2:For sure. Dave, you've seen this chart, the AI investment cycle visualized. Almost $1,000,000,000,000 has been invested into AI so far, and that may just be the start. Look at this graph. This is an interesting way to visualize the flow of money because we see it as these like moments in time, a $10,000,000,000 deal here, dollars 100,000,000,000 deal there.
Speaker 2:This is showing the investment over time. And you can see you know, NVIDIA flowing to Amazon and all the different companies. Where's OpenAI? OpenAI is just flowing around. It's just a just a cool little, you know, data visualization.
Speaker 2:I thought this was fun to
Speaker 1:look at.
Speaker 2:Anyway Did you see
Speaker 1:Brett Adcock has a new startup? No. Yeah. Figure CEO Brett Adcock launches new AI lab with a 100,000,000 in funding. Wow.
Speaker 1:Brett Adcock, of course, the CEO of robotics startup Figure AI, who we believe might be might have some big news soon based on based on their holiday party Yeah. Dead mass, has started a new AI lab called Hark Mhmm. Which will be funded by a 100,000,000 of his personal capital according to a copy of a memo Adcock sent to figure, employees and investors on Thursday seen by Stephanie Palazzolo. The AI lab will be focused on building human centric AI which can think proactively, recursively, and care deeply about people. Hark's first cluster of GPUs went online on Monday.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Mehmet said that it couldn't be learned how large the cluster was. Adcock will remain the CEO of Figure in addition to his new role at Hark. Hark continues the trend of AI startup CEOs founding new companies while remaining at their old one. I remember Richard over at U, launched a new, lab himself.
Speaker 1:More broadly, well known researchers and executives have raised billions of dollars for so called neo labs in recent months, which hope to exploit new approaches to developing models. Figure previously raised nearly $2,000,000,000 in funding from investors, including Parkway, NVIDIA, Microsoft, etcetera. So anyways, interesting interesting that he is diversifying when figures valuation has just been going through the roof.
Speaker 2:He also has a a company that does like metal detectors at schools. Right? Yeah. Along those lines. He is a serial entrepreneur.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a bunch of stuff. Anyway, let me tell you about fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service, automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Tyler clearly has an alt, Tyler Glale. Tyler clearly put this in the in the in the show notes.
Speaker 2:Tyler, not our Tyler, but his other Tyler says, can't wait for this AI bubble to pop so we can all go back to normal just like how the Internet completely disappeared after the .com bubble popped. It's another bullish take for AI. It's not going anywhere. Yes. You agree?
Speaker 4:It's a great take.
Speaker 2:It is a great take. And 18,000 people agree it's a great take. I also think it's a great take. But this doesn't seem so fast takeoff build, more Internet build, which is slow takeoff. The Internet has slow takeoff.
Speaker 2:Everyone thought it was gonna be the Internet is the superhighway. It's gonna be, you know, a thousand x growth. Yahoo's gonna be worth a trillion dollars, like, you know. And then, you know, it kinda settled in. It took a while for things to to to find use cases, find value.
Speaker 2:But eventually, it did transform everything. But this time it's
Speaker 4:I mean, yeah. This time it's different. Exactly. Right? Well, because this time we have the Internet, so it's way faster to do distribution.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna I don't you weren't even alive, Eric, Tyler. I don't even wanna don't.
Speaker 2:I was racking servers in a data center while you were in the cradle. Meltem says, a lot of naval gazing about venture. There are a lot of ways to make a couple $100,000,000. There are a reasonable number of ways to make a billion. There are very few ways to make tens of billions of dollars.
Speaker 2:This makes a $1,000,000,000 fund with 10x DPI obscenely impressive. Is this a subtweet of someone in particular? Is someone saying this isn't? This isn't? So several so so so Mike Chan says, ain't no $1,000,000,000 fund doing 10x DPI.
Speaker 2:And Meltzer says, several have, which is why?
Speaker 1:I'm to find in the comments a fund that actually did this, and I can't think of any personally.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm sure they're I'm sure they're out there. I'm sure they're out there. But I don't know. It's it's it's it's yeah. All of that's impressive.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:More more importantly Yeah. Going on? Streamer cut the Apple Vision Pro's weight in half Woah.
Speaker 4:And the helium bullet.
Speaker 2:That's genius. I This is this is innovation. This is this is crazy innovation. Wow.
Speaker 1:Imagine walking into an office and every person there is just locked in with a balloon.
Speaker 2:This is somehow more cyberpunk than just the default put the big screen on your face. I like this.
Speaker 4:And and people say the Chinese can only copy and they can't invent new stuff.
Speaker 2:That's not true.
Speaker 1:Not true.
Speaker 2:Completely disproven with this VisionPRO helium balloon.
Speaker 1:This should be genius. Imagine just if you're if you're a class coated, which I certainly am, imagine walking around the office and just with a little needle.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:I think It doesn't actually It's not gonna hurt them. Strapped to their head.
Speaker 2:But you're popping their balloon, then they have to go get more helium and helium scarce resource.
Speaker 1:True. True. But I hope that Look, he's got a big canister there. He's got plenty. He's got
Speaker 2:a big You should not be popping this. And you know why? Because Ty in the chat says this should be a blimp. And this is very blimp coded, so you should you should allow
Speaker 1:this guy to make a personal blimp. It's just Yeah. It's just like a harness you can put on with enough
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Helium to just take you up.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think the Mythbusters did that. Yeah. You just get a bunch of balloons. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and it worked? Did they doing that and then skydiving down would would be would be pretty cool. Mhmm. You should work on that over over the over the winter break.
Speaker 2:Well, whatever you watch in your Apple Vision Pro, make sure it's restreamed. One livestream, 30 plus destination. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. Oh, this is so so funny that AlphaTonCapital did you see this? AlphaTonCapital post big news.
Speaker 2:Alpha Ton, a ton of alpha. We got a ton of alpha over here at Alpha Ton Capital. We're making a historic $30,000,000 strategic investment in Anderol Industries, and they tag them so that we are investing in the future of defense tech and the convergence of decentralized AI with next gen national security. This is a strategic bet on the companies of the future. This unprecedented investment positions AlphaTon at the forefront of next generation defense technology infrastructure, marking a pivotal moment in the convergence of public markets and advanced national security capabilities, Nasdaq, Aton.
Speaker 2:And so they're trying to become an Andoril, like, holdco, basically, Treasury company. Treasury company. And Palmer just, quote, tweets them into the stratosphere by saying, AlphaTun is lying. This is not true. Public heads up to CEO Brittany Kaiser slash own your data now, the whistleblower, who is Bitcoin, Alphaton Capital.
Speaker 2:That's the I guess that's the the owner of this. You do not have permission to use my trademarks to dis to defraud your investors. And Britney says, Hey, Palmer. We signed an agreement to purchase economic exposure to Andoril shares through an SPV and to accumulate more exposure over time and offer access via formal secondaries product. Given our network's demand for your innovative tech, I will issue a clarification.
Speaker 2:And Palmer says, that isn't what you and your company said, though. To be extremely clear, Anderol has to authorize these types of transfers, and I will not authorize it. Wow. And Sarah Gwo is there saying, so much nonsense fraud happening in these layered SPVs. This is such a crazy, crazy moment.
Speaker 1:What is the history of this company? So the company went out at $280 per share in December 2020. It's now sitting at exactly 69¢. So, I wonder what they have been up to. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, that that I mean, that was a crazy now it looks like somebody like, this looks like an AI bot. It's just like posting, but this is a public company.
Speaker 2:It it yeah. It does look like just some sort of, like, complete slop scam. Like, you would assume that you would assume that if you go down this particular funnel, you wind up at, like, hey. You know, like, you know, send me some random crypto or something. Like, it it it feels very scammy, and it's I mean, it it you know, Palmer is sort of calling it a scam, but, it is a public company, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well I'm sure Andrew Roll's legal counsel will really enjoy
Speaker 2:Having a nice, calm holiday weekend, I'm sure, while they clean this mess up, one of many. Yeah. It's a champagne problem.
Speaker 1:We we point
Speaker 2:let's come back to this later because we have our guests in the restream waiting room. While we're bringing them in, let me tell you about Cognition. The team behind the AI software engineer, Devin, crush your backlog with a personal AI engineering team. Merry to everyone. We have Brian Armstrong from Coinbase.
Speaker 2:Antarct is back on the show. So many repeat guests. It's so great to see both of you. Congratulations on all of the fantastic success. Brian, would you mind kicking us off with a little high level overview of the news?
Speaker 2:Good to see you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sure. Good to see you guys again. Well, we had a great product event yesterday in San Francisco. We announced the Everything Exchange.
Speaker 3:So we've got stock trading on there. We've got prediction markets. We've got millions of tokens now trading through decentralized, exchanges. We've got simple derivatives. Like, we we announced a ton of stuff yesterday, and one of the big ones was prediction markets, which we're happy to partner with Kalshi on.
Speaker 3:We love Kalshi. They've been awesome to work with.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:And prediction markets are huge. They're an important asset class for people who are trading them, but it's also a way for people to get information about what's going to happen in the world. So it's kind of an alternative to traditional media. It's entertainment. It's everything.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, Calci's awesome.
Speaker 2:So talk to me about how the Kalshi integration actually works. Is it more like is this a b to b deal? Will a Coinbase customer actually be seeing the Kalshi logo? Will they will what will they need if they have two accounts, are the accounts linked? Are you thinking about kind of the integration kind of taking shape over the next year or however you can talk about it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, it's a white labeled integration, and Tarek can talk more about his strategy of being a provider to lots of different companies. It made it really easy to integrate. I mean, it's not an exclusive arrangement. Right?
Speaker 3:So we can integrate with other ones. We could launch But our for right now, we're very happy building on top of Kalshi. It's allowed us to get to market really quickly. Mhmm. And from a Coinbase point of view, I'd say just, you know, TradFi and crypto is intersecting, or you could say another way to it would be that crypto is just eating all financial services.
Speaker 3:So Coinbase is the leader in the space. We've got the most trusted brand. We've got the most deep crypto expertise. We've got we're storing more crypto than any other company in the world by far, about $500,000,000,000 of assets. And so if they can trade everything where their assets reside, it's our key to winning.
Speaker 2:Tarek, take me through where like, how this plays into your growth strategy, your growth trajectory for the next year? Is this just a new way, a new top of funnel? Is this actually building up more liquidity, opening up different markets? Are we gonna see different call sheet markets because of this partnership? How do you think things are gonna evolve over the next year?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Maybe let me answer actually at a personal level, know. I don't know you saw the one on the street yesterday, which is funny. The the first time we actually both interface with Coinbase was when we got the $100 of free crypto No way. Our freshman year at MIT.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 5:Nice. You know, so we had to sign up, we got the $100, and like, know, a decade later, we're we're partnering with Coinbase, which like an amazing kind of personal moment. But from a person from a company perspective, our goal has been sort of there's a first party product at cashflow.com, but, you know, at the same time, we're building an exchange and each of these products require liquidity. And liquidity has a bit of a sort of this aspect of more liquidity begets more liquidity and as you partner with sort of brokerages or, you know, large platform with, as Brian said, like huge customer base, huge deposits, that brings more flow to the exchange which improves the liquidity and thus the product for everybody else, including, you know, Coinbase itself. So we're very excited about this partnership.
Speaker 5:You know, I believe, you know, there's gonna be like a long kind of range of markets available on Coinbase that people can participate in, and over time we're gonna be adding increasingly more markets. So lots lots of work to do. This is just a start.
Speaker 1:How like, you guys spend a ton of time talking to users, and I also feel like you guys have both gone viral for different things that you've talked about related to prediction markets over the last couple weeks. And everybody online is going to inform their opinion of why prediction markets are good or bad or this or that. But like how maybe I just kind of wanted to understand like how consumers feel maybe on your side, Brian. I'm assuming like you and the team spent a bunch of time talking to people and understanding what what users want out of prediction markets on the Coinbase app and and what they're most excited about.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, obviously, sports is such a big category that is driving a lot of demand right now, and I think that's an important use case that we see from our customers that there's demand for that. You know, I know I think there's a lot of open questions about how that's gonna be treated in society and go through the courts and everything. And, you know, we think ultimately there the CFTC will have federal preemption here, and a bunch of states are, you know, a little grumpy about that, but that's fine. The the prediction markets is much broader than just sports.
Speaker 3:Right? It's people betting on, you know, economic indicators and trying to figure out, like, is the Suez Canal gonna be open next month and political outcomes. And I think, like, the number of markets could just be dramatically higher. And, like, 1% of people are using it as an asset class to trade, but, like, 99% of people looking at these are using it as a way to figure out what's gonna happen in the world next. So it's actually broader.
Speaker 3:It's something like an alternative to traditional media. I think, like Mhmm. Actually, Tarek told me a really powerful idea, which is that policymakers could actually use this to determine what are the best policies to implement. Right? Like, let's say you're trying to put out some policy to try to build more housing in San Francisco or to reduce unemployment.
Speaker 3:You could actually put this on a prediction market, get real signal from the market about what would happen if these were actually implemented, and then use that to choose the best policy.
Speaker 1:So How would markets are
Speaker 3:a really powerful tool.
Speaker 1:That that example in particular, like, who are the market participants in that situation? Because I could I mean, I I think a lot of people's, like, big big concern is that you end up with Is it like like Like like, if I'm if I'm a big if I'm a big housing developer or something like that, I I could potentially get in, like, you know, to influence policy through, like, sort of, like, trading that market and may so I I don't know. I I think part part of why, like, you got anybody in the predict prediction market space keeps going viral is, like, in any of these situations, I feel like there ends up being, like, it's easy to imagine, like, some kind of negative externalities, but I guess that's the case for all new technology.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, Tarek should talk more about it, but I I think the game theory is so interesting because there's both there's parties on both sides who stand to gain or lose. And if you really believe that the housing market would be better for your business, whatever, you can you can go invest in that that contract. But if you're wrong, you stand to lose a bunch of money. So it's actually the best signal that you can get with people having real skin in the game.
Speaker 3:Because think about, what's the alternative? It's essentially pollsters, like, running around and surveying people, and there's kind of, like, people's revealed preference versus their stated preference. Like, sometimes people will state, oh, my preference is x, but the revealed preference turns out to be actually something different because there's real skin in the game. So I think prediction markets have much stronger signal than traditional polling, but I don't know. Tarek, you're the expert here.
Speaker 3:What's what do think?
Speaker 5:We've dealt with this a lot. Right? Back last year when we were fighting the government to legalize election markets and we won that lawsuit, the criticism was could people kind of use money to influence the odds? Move them up or down in either way? And, you know, the the best argument for that is like, well, if you really wanted to sort of influence the perception of who's gonna win an election or, you know, whether a certain policy is good or bad, you would influence the polls.
Speaker 5:It's super easy. There's no cost. You can sample in a certain way, you can there's all sorts of ways where you can bias it. Or you can go on TV and say a bunch of things, which is how most of us get informed about what's happening in the world today. Right?
Speaker 5:Like, you can tweet or say a bunch of things with no skin and game or repercussions, and like Brian said, the elegant thing about prediction markets is there's a very strong monetary incentive to be truthful and a very strong monetary disincentive to lie. You know, people don't lie when money's involved. And so that's why over time prediction markets tend to be a more accurate gauge about what's gonna happen, but in this specific example, about what we should do when it comes to certain policies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and what you said, we we can certainly, know, because the the debate around which markets are genuinely sort of valuable and and necessary and all that stuff will continue for a long time.
Speaker 2:But Is there a meaningful distinction there around, like, positive some markets versus zero some markets? It feels like that might be sort of some of the vibe shift that's happening is, like, if you if you if you create a financial product that allows people to invest in this the American stock market broadly, it's gone up historically. It's most likely positive some. But there can only be one winner of the Super Bowl. And so it's sort of a zero sum market.
Speaker 2:Is that a reasonable, like, framework to think about where the activity is shifting? We're shifting from maybe more positive some markets to zero sum, or or is that not a factor?
Speaker 5:I I I mean, Brian, let me know what you think, but I I I don't think so. I mean, the derivatives market, so options or futures, all of these markets have historically been zero sum.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:Yeah. When you buy it. Right? Sure. They're still very useful.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And, you know, people usually criticize this market. The main criticism is they're speculators. Yeah. People that are sort of like speculating on an outcome and
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:And that's okay because without speculators, you don't get the benefits. You don't get the price and forecasting benefits.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:And if there are certain people that wanna hedge on something, like they are adversely impacted by something going on, like, I don't know, Brexit happening or election going a certain way or the other, or even the sports markets which happens pretty often, they kinda need the liquidity. And and so the healthy balance is basically a balance between sort of people that like drive usefulness out of the markets and speculators, And that's how any of these traditional markets operates.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I think I think one thing that's undeniable is that it's it's a it's a very entertaining experience just to use the data, like scrolling and trying to understand and this idea of having visibility into things that could become the future headlines of the world. And I appreciate that that is sort of a public benefit by that is created through people that are choosing to trade these markets. Do
Speaker 2:you have any insight into I mean, Brian, you've done a great job at running a firm that winds up servicing institutional investors as well in institutions in addition to consumers. And there's been some viral chatter around prediction markets potentially either replacing or augmenting insurance products. And the initial reaction to that was like, wait, instead of just getting, like, fire insurance, I have to be, like, trading a contract every single day. But I was actually thinking about, like, maybe in the future, there's a new insurance firm that's using some sort of prediction market under the hood. Have you thought about what the role of institutions in a world where the liquidity around prediction markets is increasing?
Speaker 2:How do institutions come in and actually maybe build products around prediction markets that have value to a different consumer?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, just zooming out, I mean, you're correct. Coinbase is serving multiple different customer segments. So Yeah. Like, the Coinbase retail app is what a lot of people know us for.
Speaker 3:That's probably the most comparable to Robinhood, for instance. But we also have product for businesses. We have a product for institutions that's the leading we have a developer platform. We have a self custodial wallet. So we're doing a lot of different things.
Speaker 3:On the prediction market for insurance point of view, I mean, that's an interesting idea. Actually, I hadn't looked too much into that. I think institutions are going to start trading prediction markets. I doubt that'll be the first place they go, but I could see them using that over time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I yeah, it's clearly like we're at the very early stages of all this. I am interested in some of the other Coinbase launches. Can you take us through some of the other stuff, Coinbase Advisor? I'm interested in just any time a big company has a ton of data and is actually surfacing something that's AI powered, how do you think about delivering that product?
Speaker 2:What were the trade offs that you made, and and how will you be measuring success?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Coinbase Advisor is there to help you manage your financial life, and it can ingest all the information from your portfolio. It also knows your preferences around risk tolerance. And you can do anything in there from asking it to, hey. Help me build a better portfolio to earn more yield or look for opportunities in the market around x, y, or z.
Speaker 3:But it can also prompt you with things that you might have not even known to ask about. Right? So every day, it's out there kind of ingesting the information on the Internet with some context about what you need and want, and it'll present opportunity to you at time about macro events happening in the market, which might create trading opportunities. So I think just broadly, we think that AI is useful for it's kind of a barbell. Right?
Speaker 3:It's useful for a segment of people who might not have as much financial literacy as they want or how to maybe not maybe not even understand how to use all of these tools. But it's also powerful for advanced traders who just want to eliminate repetitive tasks and toil that everybody has to deal with in their financial life. Right? So AI is disrupting every business out there. Like, financial services is no no exception, and we wanna make sure we're leading on that front.
Speaker 2:You mentioned preemption. Are can you both maybe give me a little tour of any expectations or what you're looking for in Washington in 2026? What are you watching? What do you think the U. S.
Speaker 2:Government needs to get right for your industry to succeed in 2026?
Speaker 3:Well, I'm happy to start, and then, Tarek, I'll turn it to you. But I Yeah. The main thing Coinbase is focused on is actually getting market structure legislation passed. So you may recall, like, the Clarity Act went through the house already. It got a strong bipartisan vote.
Speaker 3:The senate is now deliberating in the senate ag and senate banking committees their own draft text for market structure legislation. So that would be a landmark piece of legislation if it goes through to complement the Genius Act, which went through for stablecoins earlier this year. So that's where we're primarily focused, and we're it's looking positive that in early twenty twenty six, the senate committees will vote on that, and fingers crossed. Now there's a whole other separate work stream around prediction markets, but I don't know. Tarek, you wanna touch on that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Brian, I I know you have to jump, so feel free to take off. I think you had a hard out, but you're welcome, I'm
Speaker 3:good for a few minutes. Okay.
Speaker 1:Tarek, I'd love to hear from a regulatory standpoint how you're looking What at your 20
Speaker 2:you're monitoring?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, think the state of the world right now is actually relatively clear, at least in our shared views. We just started and launched a coalition on prediction markets a week ago, and there's a number of participants in it, including CornBase. And really kind of it's all about clarifying and making sure that everybody understands that financial markets are regulated at the federal level and not a state by state thing. And yes, you know, as the financial markets expand and they kind of touch more people as we build financial markets that are sort of relatable to a larger audience, there are going to be some interests that are gonna get ruffled including some state interests, casinos, or others.
Speaker 5:And so it's not too surprising there's sort of opposition. It usually means that we're onto something big and, you know, there's re innovation happening. So really, I think as the court sort of like, the whole process kind of plays out, it's about sort of proving our side of the case and I think that's going pretty well so far. And then educating policymakers about what this is really about, how it works, how it's regulated at the federal level, so that they understand it.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on the partnership guys and and all the launches, Brian. You guys have both had a very big year.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. We barely scratched the surface. There's like five more things we didn't get to that you launched just yesterday. But, you know, it's it's the end of the year. So hope you all have a fantastic holiday season and hope to see you both
Speaker 1:on the show show.
Speaker 2:In 2026. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks,
Speaker 3:guys. The Coinbase team's firing on all cylinders, so it was cool to get a bunch of those announcements out, people can check out the livestream if they haven't seen it yet. So
Speaker 2:Thanks so much. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Catching up, guys.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Cheers. Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together.
Speaker 1:Back to Okay. Now we gotta get chew
Speaker 2:by chew by. This is the new phrase. This is the new word you gotta learn. People
Speaker 1:know Chewbai.
Speaker 2:People know chopped.
Speaker 1:People Dutchess know Bushwick says This is a screenshot.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 1:know if it's hers. But Yeah. So it's recently invented the word chewbai, which is when something is both chopped and also spiritually do buy. Examples, Soho House, Goyard Goyard. Pandora, Carbone, Kith.
Speaker 1:Drop your Chubai things in the comments.
Speaker 2:You know, learned I learned about Keith from this show. You we we were doing cars for various personas, and you said a Keith BMW m five or something. They just
Speaker 1:looks like
Speaker 2:a collab.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They have had no idea what you meant by that. But Keith
Speaker 2:Now I now I know for
Speaker 1:obvious it's chopped and spiritually may as well be a a BMW. Sohaus, I gotta say, I think it's spiritually very English. I mean, that's obviously the origin of it. Yeah. But but yeah, again again But
Speaker 2:is England spiritually Dubai now?
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 2:It's possible.
Speaker 1:Van Cleef, they're saying.
Speaker 2:You gotta go through the you gotta go through the comments here. Cartier love bracelet, dry bar, it's like, oh, there's a Oat milk? No, it's not, you know.
Speaker 1:Oat milk is definitely chew buy. Chewbai.
Speaker 2:Better to be chewbai than just chopped though.
Speaker 1:I don't Yeah. But also I
Speaker 2:don't I don't
Speaker 1:wanna Up. There's a lot of great things about Dubai. Yeah. You can rent an SF 90 for the day for like a grand. I did that at one point You're you're during f one in in 2020 foreshadowing.
Speaker 1:20
Speaker 2:If you ever fall off, people are gonna be calling you Chewbai for sure.
Speaker 1:Chewbai. No. I mean, is it Yeah. To, like, being able to drive around at the time a a $750,000 car for
Speaker 2:Okay. Massive Balenciaga sneakers. I saw these at breakfast this morning. Are those two buy?
Speaker 1:There's the
Speaker 2:I don't think so.
Speaker 1:Chunkiest kind of rattyest sneakers and John was just shocked and I had to you you kind of predicted that they were like technically nice or expensive footwear. Yeah. But you you were really processing that for a while.
Speaker 2:Well, was like they either came from that or they came from like like a gift shop at a at a at a Six Flags. Like, it was one or the other. And I was sort of I was sort of dialing it in. I was like, could it could be it could be Six Flags gift shop tier shoe, or it could be something extremely exclusive that needed to be waited in line for and cost thousands of dollars. And it was the latter.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Peter Abil is Amazon's new AGI head. Teapot needs no introduction to him. Woah.
Speaker 2:GDP. He is a pioneer in robotics and deep reinforcement learning. He has 231,000 citations. He's a professor at UC Berkeley. He is neither CHOPT nor Dubai.
Speaker 2:He is Berkeley.
Speaker 4:He's number 28 on the Metis list.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:Actually, very sad
Speaker 1:that we gotta do an update.
Speaker 2:Get that mentioned here. But I love that that bookworm bookworm engineer, bookworm engineer, GDP here, is giving a little bit more on him. Says, he has been Amazon's distinguished scientist and vice president and scholar since 2024 focused on advancing AI and robotics. He has advised legendary doctoral candidates like Chelsea Finn of physical intelligence and John Schulman, ex OpenAI, exanthropic, and now cofounder of Thinking Machines. He's an absolute dog.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for Peter Abbeil, the new head of API. Really fantastic news. And bookworm engineer, thanks for putting us on the timeline. I appreciate you sharing this news. But, also, I was thinking about bookworms.
Speaker 2:The word bookworm. Like, what did that say when they started
Speaker 1:using It's chewing through books.
Speaker 2:Is that what it is? Or is it like they saw books as slop? They saw books as, you know, oh, you're a bookworm. You're worming around on the ground. You're a slug.
Speaker 4:Okay. So Worm. I looked up the etymology. Etymology
Speaker 1:of bookworm.
Speaker 4:Give it to me. Who read too much comparing them to actual insects that burrowed into and damaged books.
Speaker 2:It's brain rot. It's the pre it's the original
Speaker 5:brain rot.
Speaker 1:It's not. It is. No. No. It's not.
Speaker 1:These are like, if you had a so if you somebody leaves a bunch of books in a shed, for example Yes. The bugs are gonna chew into them. I think that's what
Speaker 2:Yes. But it was derogatory. Termite. It was derogatory. I think of it as It was saying, you read too many books.
Speaker 2:You need to touch grass.
Speaker 1:You need
Speaker 2:to stop reading books. Go outside. What?
Speaker 1:The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:That's how I imagine a bookworm. Just chomping. Just
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. That is the activity. And someone who has brain rot and is on TikTok all day, they are chewing through the feed for sure.
Speaker 2:But when you say someone has brain rot, it's it's a pejorative. It's negative.
Speaker 1:Well, the only thing is bookworm, I never saw that as as like a negative.
Speaker 2:That's because we think of books as high art. We think of them as
Speaker 1:saying at some point, maybe people were saying
Speaker 3:You need to you need
Speaker 2:to cool it with the books, brother. It. You need to get outside, touch grass. You go ride a horse.
Speaker 1:Go till the fields.
Speaker 2:Go till the fields. Exactly. Why are you so obsessed with these books? This new technology is one shotting you. You know, amazing book.
Speaker 2:You're lost in the world of the book.
Speaker 1:The minds.
Speaker 2:Exactly. The minds. Exactly. Get outside. Go to the forest.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I I the bookworm thing, it makes me feel that at one point, books were were I mean, there's that famous picture of everyone on the subway reading this reading the newspaper. And it's like, oh, people are so absorbed with the newspaper. Like, why can't they just log off and, like, talk to each other? Because they used to talk to each other, then you gave them a newspaper.
Speaker 2:They're like, newspaper's better than making a friend over here. Anyway I I wonder I'm a graphite dot dev worm. Graphite dot dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What do you wonder?
Speaker 1:Oh. You wonder about Just this idea just this idea that there was a point in the future where everyone, if in public spaces, like trains, buses, planes, etcetera was just just talking the
Speaker 2:whole A point in the past. Point in the past.
Speaker 1:It's like when that technology existed Yep. The written word also existed Yep. Which implies that people probably kind of always had something that they were. Like, can you imagine you're you're sitting down on a train and you have like this book that you've been so excited to read?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, books true.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the person the person next to you is Yeah. Like excited. I wanna talk for five hours with strangers today. Like, the person with the book is gonna be thinking, hey, I came here to read this
Speaker 2:great But horses are older than books. There was a moment when it was like, hey, we're gonna go over there, Lock in. You were riding together. And, no, you don't have a book to read. You have to talk to me.
Speaker 2:You don't have a phone. You don't have a VR headset with a balloon attached. You don't have a brainer. Even have a book. You just got me and your horse.
Speaker 2:You're my horse, your horse. You got me and you and we're hanging out and talking. And that's the original touching grass that we lost ever since the invention
Speaker 1:of don't the know how to commute. I wonder if you I wonder if it's I
Speaker 2:like that you're focused on the commute.
Speaker 1:No. No. I'm specifically you No. Just got me thinking. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No one commutes to work with a horse anymore.
Speaker 2:We don't know how
Speaker 4:to do it.
Speaker 1:And in some ways, you could set up kind of like a desk on a you know, on on the top and you could be getting some emails done.
Speaker 2:Also, underrated horses effectively self driving
Speaker 1:That's what I'm saying. You have self driving technology.
Speaker 2:It's here.
Speaker 1:Self driving you have horses that are just self driving.
Speaker 2:Because you can just say, hey, boy, go home.
Speaker 1:Go home.
Speaker 2:And the and the horse knows.
Speaker 1:Park. Hey. Park.
Speaker 2:I I I think we gotta bring him back.
Speaker 1:Bring him back.
Speaker 2:Return to Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails. Securly spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Unlike Meta, Microsoft, or Apple, Amazon now has one of the best AI researchers in the world. This is Pedro Domingos, also shouting out Peter Abiel.
Speaker 2:Everyone loves it. It's fantastic news. Invest like the best has some has a clip here about Domino's Pizza. It's the best performing stock.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Henry
Speaker 2:Can we play this?
Speaker 1:Ella Bo Ella Bogan. Let's play this What
Speaker 6:was the best small cap company over that ten year period in the February? Well, actually, was Domino's Pizza. Why was Domino's so good? Well, if you look at the pizza market in The United States, when Domino's basically started its run, you basically had a third of the market that was like local. And then, the the other third we know, right, there's the nationals, Domino's, Papa John's, Little Caesar's, others.
Speaker 6:And then the middle third, there used to be in DC, this place called Arman's that had had about 30 places and they had local or geographic scale, but they didn't have the scale of Domino's, and they didn't have great pizza. And what happened was when Domino's started its run, well, first of all, it started by basically making the product a little bit better. But if you talk to Patrick Doyle, you know, who was CEO at the time, and you really study it, What they started doing was, if there's three value equations in pizza, it's quality, value, and convenience.
Speaker 2:So Chad is saying that Domino's is pretty good.
Speaker 6:Really do best. In technology, we can make convenience a lot better. And so they really invested in their app.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Give it a demo. Every few months, the Domino's chart goes viral. It's a classic.
Speaker 6:Very early on, they could then co target that customer more efficiently with couponing, what have you, drive scale through that box. And then, when you basically do something well, right, you improve the product, probably was slightly above average. You really iterate on convenience, and now you have a direct relationship with those customers. All of sudden, actually the brand halo started getting a little bit better. Right?
Speaker 6:Because and you put all that together against a wonderful business model, the franchise business model, which is, you know, ROI light. And often, those are the best stocks when you go study the markets. Because you're already in a in a physical world business, where the technology advantage transition into a physical mode advantage or distribution or scale advantage. That's one of the patterns we've we've observed. We call that, you know, the good to great thesis internally.
Speaker 4:Domino's Pizza Tracker incredibly underrated.
Speaker 1:It really is. It really is. One of the best pieces of software in history. Domino's? Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. I mean, it's a $15,000,000,000 company today. Been kind of all over the place for the last five five years, but all time is truly exceptional. Moving on, we can pull up this landing page that Reggie James is highlighting over at UniTree. We have the UniTree h two Destiny Awakening.
Speaker 1:This copy goes pretty hard. You gotta give him that. Tyler, how do you rate it?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it looks it's reminiscent of the I I don't wanna get it wrong, but there's like the Hindu like gods. Right? They have a bunch of arms.
Speaker 1:Yeah. My thing is right.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. The face is also very scary. The the tree not have that kind of They scary they
Speaker 1:Let's hit the gong for the most sus looking.
Speaker 2:Gong.
Speaker 1:Most sus looking humanoid face to date. They did it. They did it. I was already in favor of banning the sale of Uni Tree in The United States. Of course, now that I see the face of the h two, I'm even more in favor.
Speaker 2:I I heard a rumor that there might be some bands coming for something or other, which Yeah.
Speaker 4:So I'm I'm looking at the site. It's like $30,000, which is still from everything we've heard at least, it seems much cheaper still American
Speaker 2:That's such an insane landing page.
Speaker 1:I mean, look at some of the other can we click through? You see some of these other ones? There's there's this UniTree h one on the website that has these like red fans on its hands if you just pull up the website. And it's very easy to imagine them has saws. Team, how we doing pulling There this we go.
Speaker 1:Okay. Now go to the homepage, unitree.com.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Go back and then press this the arrow on the side. Oh, keep going. Ones look like Oh, is it spinning? So I think they're I think they're like decorative like it's clearly doing some type of self It
Speaker 2:holds
Speaker 1:pizza if that thing had saws on its hands and it's just walking around.
Speaker 2:That's gonna be pretty
Speaker 1:very sketchy.
Speaker 2:At the same time, I wanna fight one of these so badly because I wanna know actually how far we are from it being able to kill me. Because I think I still have the edge. Even if it had some blades or something, I think I could just kick it really hard in the chest and it just goes down
Speaker 1:With blades? Well, they're still very They're
Speaker 2:small and they don't weigh that much. How much does it weigh? I think I got size. I mean, to be fair, I'm big, but I do think I do think I could take one of those down pretty easily.
Speaker 4:Okay. So it's That would be
Speaker 1:an amazing montage just for the next for the next ten years. For the next ten years, you fight a humanoid robot every January Yeah. And we just see the progress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think we should sneak me into one of those robot fighting leagues and I just get in the octagon with them, just take it down. And they're like, that's not the point. Why did you destroy our unit tree? Be like, I thought this was what it was supposed to do.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Gabe says, Bill Gurley on the Tim Ferriss pod said UniTree didn't want outsiders to check out their factory. That could be that could
Speaker 2:Bill Gurley, why are you leaking that? It's insane.
Speaker 1:Well, I I mean, that's that's fair.
Speaker 2:It's very funny.
Speaker 1:Well, there could be two reasons. One is they're not making that many Mhmm. And it's all by hand. The other is they have some type of insane alpha that they don't wanna share.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, there's a bunch of reasons. Or I don't know. Anyway, tell me, let me tell you about ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in Chateappity.
Speaker 2:Reach millions of consumers who just use AI to discover new products and brands. Alex Rampell says, sometimes the market for something done very well is a 100 times the size of the market something done a 100 times the size of the market for something done okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very true. Interesting. I think about this I mean, I'm trying to think of examples. I think of this in the context even just of the power law.
Speaker 1:Yep. Right? You have like the best company in a category being worth a 100 times. But this also I I feel like can happen where maybe there's no market for something at all Mhmm. And then somebody comes in and makes something great and suddenly Yeah.
Speaker 1:Suddenly
Speaker 2:mean, that's certainly that's certainly the the entire story of AI, which is probably what he was, you know, thinking of, was just the fact that
Speaker 1:Yeah. Chatbots went through a hype cycle.
Speaker 2:And now they're actually good, and they're and it's a huge category. I mean, yeah, we went through a chatbot boom back in like 2017. Do you remember? Yeah. I mean, the market cap I'm sure there were some chatbot companies that like delivered some value.
Speaker 2:I mean, when you use like the American Airlines app, there's still some Q and A, some business logic of phone trees, essentially, chatbots. And I'm sure some of those companies are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of them there might even be a few unicorns there. But it's certainly not this, like, insane power law outcome. Now it is, because we went from very poorly done chatbots to amazing revolutionary chatbots.
Speaker 2:What are laughing at? 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Sleep fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. Also in the in the comments, Alex Rampell post.
Speaker 2:Somebody somebody put example Eight Sleep, which is hilarious and awesome.
Speaker 1:I just post from from Ben.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which one?
Speaker 1:I put it in the timeline. It's at the bottom of the timeline, pull it up. Ben says, imagine looking for a new show and finding this.
Speaker 2:It's so good. I was just laughing at like, yeah, the the the sack and the gong doesn't even make noise. Oh, you're really Yeah. We're tracking. Alright.
Speaker 1:That's enough. My ears are getting blown out. Thank you for that, Ben. We gotta give a big congratulations to Vineeth. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:He said one week ago I got clipped for drinking water. Now I'm joining x AI to build the future of AI.
Speaker 2:Wait. This is the infamous photo too. Wow. This is the photo that that caused all the Klein dust up. But wow.
Speaker 2:Congratulations, Vinit. That's incredible. Hilarious. Great success. And what a great way to lean in, have some fun, you know, not take seriously.
Speaker 2:Although, clearly, a very serious engineer because he's got a job working on macro hard. No way. He's on he's on the macro hard team going up against Microsoft. He's 19. He has a computer science degree from Georgia Tech, and he's got 15,000 followers on the Vinny Sauce IG slash TikTok.
Speaker 2:Seems like he's doing all sorts of stuff. Very fun. Congratulations to him. What what a hilarious exchange.
Speaker 1:Delien is fired up about Jared Isaacman. Yes.
Speaker 2:We're very excited
Speaker 1:about that. Says God bless the great United States. Jared is looking fantastic in this suit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's so crazy he's actually been to space. That feels like going forward, can we just make that a prerequisite?
Speaker 7:Well, Scoop
Speaker 2:to admin?
Speaker 1:Future Scoop Hall of Famer Katie Roof is in the chat. She says, thanks for the shout out. Yo. Shree deserve credit for the Scoop too. What's up?
Speaker 1:Credit to Shree.
Speaker 2:Credit to Shree.
Speaker 1:Sorry to to give all the love to Katie, but Oh, yeah. Everywhere. She's an animal. But great great
Speaker 2:Should we make should we make going to space a prerequisite for being NASA administrator? Or on your first day on the job, they just gotta blast you into space? I think it's just like it's it needs to be in the orientation. How can you go back? Your whole job is space.
Speaker 2:You've never been and your predecessor's been and you haven't.
Speaker 1:Oh, you wanna you wanna you wanna help us rule the stars
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:you've never been there?
Speaker 2:Did zero g's? What are we doing here? We gotta this has to be a prerequisite. Bake it into
Speaker 1:the But he has bake it into been in
Speaker 2:in space. He's But and so, like, you know, now there's this question about, like, well, what about the next administrator? If the next administrator is like, yeah. Like, I'd love to go someday. It's like, oh, you can't it doesn't hit the same as the last guy.
Speaker 2:Like, you gotta go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jared told me it's great. I'm excited to be stewarding this this effort for The United States. Yeah. Hope to go at some point myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Dude, I I I have a lot of strong opinions about space. I haven't been yet, but you can trust me. I'm gonna lay down some really good plans.
Speaker 2:I got a whole I really understand it because I've read about it a lot. I I I've also watched I've
Speaker 1:all the books.
Speaker 2:I've read his videos.
Speaker 1:I've seen all the the blockbuster movies.
Speaker 2:Still haven't been. That's that's on the to do list. I'm gonna get there soon. But
Speaker 1:yeah. The box is not even to do list. Bucket list.
Speaker 2:It's on it's on the bucket No. Day one day one, you're on the top of a rocket. When you when you put your hand on the bible, I I don't even know if that's how administration confirmation works. But you say, I swear to duly uphold the the the the whatever's NASA's mission is to get to the moon and the and Mars, they blast you into a rocket in space. Tyler, did say?
Speaker 4:I was saying like, this is like if you're the ambassador to Spain or something, but you've never been to
Speaker 2:That's actually has an ambassador to another country ever not been to that country? That has to be a because do we have an ambassador to North Korea who like can't go but is still in charge of like ambassadorship? And it's like, if we have an ambassador situation, I'm the guy. Do we have an ambassador to North Korea? Or or do we just like not even have one?
Speaker 1:Okay. If we have one, we gotta have him on the show.
Speaker 2:I would love to.
Speaker 1:I feel like I feel like Trump kinda like that that that role is mine. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'll handle it. I'll handle it. I'll go over there personally. I'll go over there personally.
Speaker 2:Anyway, wander.com, book a wander with inspiring views. I get some bad news about Wander. They don't have any wanders in North Korea, but they have them in tons of other great locations. They got hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home but better.
Speaker 1:Okay. We got some history here. So
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:According to Gemini, I asked, has US ambassador to a country ever not been to the country? Mhmm. And apparently, James Wadsworth was the ambassador to Turkey in 1960. He was appointed confirmed as the ambassador. But before he could travel there, a military coup occurred.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:The US temporarily suspended relations. So when we don't have diplomatic relations with a country, we obviously don't have an ambassador. That's kind of like you gotta have you gotta have some relations. So we don't have a we don't have an official ambassador to North Korea. Okay.
Speaker 1:So Jordan Hold on little bit.
Speaker 4:Recently, Argentina, during 2014 confirmation hearing, Noah Mammut admitted that he had never been to Argentina and didn't speak Spanish.
Speaker 2:That's wild. So, you know,
Speaker 4:I So maybe it's not that big of a
Speaker 2:But I I I still stand by my original stance. Going forward, in order to be the administrator of NASA, you gotta go to space. Either before you get the job or on day one. But it's gotta be day one. It's gotta be
Speaker 1:Woah. Apparently, there's
Speaker 2:Here's your rocket
Speaker 1:ship. Anthony Keeley, 1885. Keely is a famous historical failed diplomat.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:He was appointed to Italy, but the Italian government refused him because of past anti Italian comments. Smart. Then The US tried to send him to Austria Hungary, and they also refused him. He resigned without ever serving in either country.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:So total total failure. Elon is saying Carmack is awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. John Carmack and what he True. I mean, we don't need to play this whole clip, but Carmack is underexposed in podcast.
Speaker 1:Well, scroll down because I I think it's worth seeing this picture here if you can a real picture of Carmack.
Speaker 2:That is a real picture.
Speaker 1:He has
Speaker 2:been hitting the gym. He looks he actually did get in insane shape and looks great. And he also has a number of just, like, insanely good takes where somebody would somebody somebody made an AI version of Doom, and one of the anti AI folks was like, what do you think the crew the hardworking creators that made Doom would say about this? And Carmack was like, I love it. I would have loved to use AI to build Doom.
Speaker 2:I love tools, and it's a tool for me. It's very helpful, which is just funny. And everyone was like, yeah, Carmack's on on our side. What is what is going on? So so we were quote tweeted by Matthew Zetlin.
Speaker 2:We said we said that that CNBC is not take was like CNBC wasn't really breaking through with, like, the tech community.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Guess I was giving a very I think we gave a very anecdotal take, right? Yeah. Our perspective. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I cannot remember CBS content from the last year outside of the last month.
Speaker 2:Right? So he said, with all due respect to TVPN, I think this gets things a little backwards. CBS is basically unique in the network news business in being able to generate buzz. Sixty Minutes still has great ratings and other CBS News properties produced talked about stuff too. Let's see his examples.
Speaker 2:So he has an he's an older man and a younger woman next to each other.
Speaker 1:Do you know who that is?
Speaker 2:I don't.
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 2:I don't.
Speaker 1:That is
Speaker 2:You're He wore does he run the Navy? He has a Navy shirt on.
Speaker 1:I think he run I think he runs football.
Speaker 2:Okay. Football player. Cool. And
Speaker 1:Football then player.
Speaker 2:What position does he play? Isn't he a little old to play football? I thought you had to be like we had Segway on the show. I thought I thought you had to be like
Speaker 4:His shirt's looking a little
Speaker 2:thirties or something, maybe '20.
Speaker 1:It's vintage, Tyler. Is Bill Belichick a veteran or is this that's No. Some other Belichick was never in the military.
Speaker 2:No. This is a this is a good He said the reason why Ellison wanted CBS and wanted Barry to run it is precisely because it was still capable of creating buzz and generating attention. Okay. Cool. This is helpful context.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I like this. They still got it over there. And yeah. Seems seems seems seems good.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Still interesting. Yeah. It does feel like it's breaking through in a different way. It feels like it's like the content is shifting to something that's more, you know, certainly breaking through.
Speaker 2:I see I see the clips. I feel like I see the clips more. But I don't know. Anyway, let's let's watch this clip of Greg Brockman from OpenAI saying compute enabled our first image generation launch and a 32% jump in weekly active users over the following weeks, as well as our latest image generation launch yesterday. We have a lot more coming and need a lot more compute.
Speaker 2:Let's play this.
Speaker 8:OpenAI did not set out with a thesis that compute was the path to progress. It's that we tried everything else and the thing that worked was was scale. Yeah. On compute constraints. We are absolutely bursting at the seams with demand for compute relative to our ability When you look at our launch calendar, the the single biggest blocker often becomes, okay, but where's the compute going to come from for that?
Speaker 8:When we had our image generation launch in March that went viral, we did not have enough compute to keep that going. And so we made some very painful decisions to take a bunch of compute from research and move it to our deployment to try to be able to meet the demand. And that was really sacrificing the future for the present. And this is, first of all, a very painful thing because we have so many features, so many products that we wanna launch that get held back because we didn't have enough compute. And that what we do not want is to be caught flat footed, where we say, well, two years ago, three years ago, we should have been planning for more.
Speaker 8:We want to be ahead of the curve. And the truth is, I do not think we will be. No matter how ambitious we can dream of being right now, I think that the demand will far exceed whatever we we can think of.
Speaker 1:Taz in the chat says these videos feel like they're gonna get satired by some comedian, maybe SNL very
Speaker 2:soon. So completely different video style from anything we've seen in in Silicon Valley for a while. I I think there's something really cool about the aesthetics of that video. But shaky camera typically says nervous energy. Like like, as a filmmaker, like, that's when I would be like, okay.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, we're telling the story of Geordie and, you know, if we're if we're making a movie about Geordie going surfing and there's a moment where he loses his surfboard
Speaker 1:Surfboard.
Speaker 2:I'm probably gonna be like, let's shake the camera a little bit more. Let's bring some energy to the frame. I got the look at this. I got the shaky cam going, you know? No.
Speaker 2:Kind of. Shaky cam. Yeah. It's like there's more energy. It's way it's it's little bit nervous, and and it's an odd choice.
Speaker 2:I love the choice as a differentiator. It's fresh. It's something I haven't seen before, but it is a little odd of a stylistic choice. Like, what is it saying? It it feels a little anxious.
Speaker 2:But, you know, at least it stands out in the feed and, honestly, looks beautiful. Looks cinema it looks it looks it looks like it has an opinion. It looks like it has some some some, like, freshness and some polish that has been commoditized in a world where everyone has the FX three on sticks with the long lens and the little bokeh. Like, this stands out, and I think that's very cool. On what he actually said, there's a couple comments.
Speaker 2:Lewis Tunstall says, this basically confirms Ilya's remark that SSI has sufficient compute for research because it's not being cannibalized by products. We talked to Sarah Guo about this yesterday, that it's a bunch of little projects. You said $10,000,000 She said not quite that low or something. Wait. You said million?
Speaker 1:I said a couple million.
Speaker 2:Couple million? So, you know, she thinks maybe he's ripping $30,000,000 compute runs maybe or something like that, training runs. Budget. And Brooks Otter Lake didn't like it or or at least had some extra context around the OpenAI video. He said, one of the strangest market marketing videos I've ever seen, Everything about the staging makes it seem like it's supposed to be a positive and inspiring.
Speaker 2:And that's true. It's very brightly lit. It's really nicely lit. It's high key. It's not dark.
Speaker 2:It's not contrasty. And then also, when they when they when they show Greg, they show him from a low angle. And so he looks like a hero. It's great framing. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:But Brooks is saying, like, it looks positive, inspiring. But if you actually listen to the words, the content of what he's saying, it's a guy saying the company has a serious problem which he does not believe can be solved. But I would take the other side of that and say that it's actually it's actually a reframing around, like, the job's not finished. The job's never finished. Our pursuit is endless.
Speaker 2:There's a world where I think this narrative can wind up being more inspiring. I don't love the idea of a company. Like, I don't love a
Speaker 1:It was maybe just too short of a video. Like, maybe you needed to show the kind of more positive because because if you're somebody that's bearish on OpenAI, you're looking at this and being like, wow. They just have keep spending more and more and more and more and more money and it's never gonna end. It's just a money pit Yeah. And all all this stuff.
Speaker 1:The other way to look at it is like, the more scale we have, the the more impact we can have Yeah. The more customer types we can serve, the more use cases we can deliver Yeah. On, the more we can actually use AI to make progress. So there's always like a positive spin, I can definitely see how both the way it was shot plus
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Kind of the way that it kind of cuts off. Maybe it feels like it needed to be more like a five minute video.
Speaker 2:I mean, in general, everything you know, there's a whole meme about, the meeting could have been an email. The email could have been text message. I feel like everything that comes out of AI, like, the the one minute video could be a ten minute video. The ten minute video could be a two hour podcast. Like, I want a lot of meat because these are these are heady issues.
Speaker 2:And if you think about it from a perspective of, like, compare it to space travel, space exploration. If you are a if you're SpaceX and you you're not going to say, like, we're racing towards this definitive moment, boots on the ground on Mars. That's our ASI. We're done then. No.
Speaker 2:It's like, we're gonna colonize Mars. We're gonna colonize the stars. We're gonna go to Alpha Centauri one day. And and and you know what? If if if if you went out there and you were like, look.
Speaker 2:We gotta get to the moon. Gotta get to Mars, then we gotta get to Alpha Centauri, then we gotta get farther away. And you know what? We need more metal. We need more metal to make more rockets, and we need more metal.
Speaker 2:I mean, every year, we're gonna need more metal. Yep. And so we really need a lot of metal. You'd be like, yeah. I get it.
Speaker 2:Like, you're gonna grow this thing forever. You're gonna do something really ambitious. The job's never really over. Yep. You're gonna just keep going forever.
Speaker 2:And that's great. And we accept that in everything else, but the AI narrative has gotten caught up in, like, there's this definitive goal, ASI Yep. Superintelligence, and then you're done. Yep. And then it's like, okay.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. And people talk about AGI, ASI, and some people are talking about API, artificial puffer intelligence. Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:I've heard about this.
Speaker 1:We have our next guest actually live here in the studio with us. Can we go to the can we go to mister Puff?
Speaker 2:Let's see.
Speaker 1:Right here.
Speaker 2:We set up the the puffer fish. There we go.
Speaker 1:There he is. We're puffing.
Speaker 2:Here we go. Simon, good to see you. Welcome to the stream. Good to see you
Speaker 7:guys too. I'm happy to you give, Puffy a prime location there. I'll I'll speak on Puffy's behalf tonight.
Speaker 1:Yes. Please do. Please do.
Speaker 2:Anyway, have we told the story of where how you landed on the the name of the company? Yes. Puffer, fish, expand
Speaker 4:Have we?
Speaker 2:Fact. I don't know. Tell it.
Speaker 1:Tell it. Say it again because it's a good it's
Speaker 7:a good There's there's there's three stories.
Speaker 9:Do you
Speaker 7:want one, two, or three?
Speaker 1:All of them. But in You want a whole in
Speaker 2:I want the And I can handle it. Give me the truth.
Speaker 7:The truth is the least interesting one of the stories, though. Okay. I was in
Speaker 2:I've changed my opinion. I want the interesting one. Lie to me.
Speaker 7:It's it's because, you know, you that all the data is stored in object storage, cheap and slow
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And then we puff it up into RAM, into the disk, and so it's the puffer architecture. Okay. Was that's sort of the the backwards facing one. The real story was just, oh, this is an emoji that doesn't have yeah. This is it.
Speaker 7:This guy
Speaker 1:Nobody nobody claimed nobody claimed this this.
Speaker 7:I I stumble upon him outside of a fire station and there we were.
Speaker 2:There we go. That's good.
Speaker 1:Anyways, it's great to have you it's great to have you on the show. We caught up at 05:30AM this morning. You were sharing
Speaker 7:I didn't I didn't know that people in the LA got off that early.
Speaker 2:We
Speaker 1:have to. This is show mix.
Speaker 2:Operates on the same market hours. You gotta be up early. A lot of a lot of people in in LA who are on something that ties to market hours at all are up super early.
Speaker 1:Not Yeah. I I like to I like to I live on the West Coast, but I operate in Eastern. Eastern's mindset.
Speaker 7:EST. You like to be there on the floor of the NYSE?
Speaker 1:We do. Spiritually, I like to be conscious You dream. You know, while while the opening bell is rung. Exactly. It's fitting.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Yeah, was great.
Speaker 2:We're gonna see you out there soon? Are are you gonna jump to do no fun
Speaker 1:pre IPO round. Right?
Speaker 7:I mean, I like I like the NYSE vibe, you know, if we're talking about the stock exchange. Like, I like the vibe. Yeah. Yeah. I think Nasdaq has like a tech thing going for it.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:I just, you know, as someone who grew up in the old world Yeah. The New York Stock Exchange has a has a certain appeal, but Sure. Nasdaq's also good, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I'll Yeah.
Speaker 7:Let them fight it out.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. We'll let them fight it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can't you can't you can't be too obvious. If you're going into a negotiation Yeah. You can't make it too obvious who which side you prefer, right? You need two two horses in a race.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Anyways, break down the news. It's been, I don't know, a couple months since you were on?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's been a couple months when I was in LA and and and spent a bit of time with you guys. What's the news? We got a new investor on board this morning. So we announced that and doubled with Lockheed Groom, the legendary one and only.
Speaker 7:But most of all, we're just we're just puffing up. We're trying to get everything to puff. We now have trillions and trillions of objects in Turbo Puffer that are all puffing. I
Speaker 1:was waiting. I was waiting. I was like,
Speaker 2:he's not gonna say, well, how much he raised. He's not gonna say the valuation. Will he give us any numbers?
Speaker 1:This was this was the perfect way this was just I when you told me you're that you were gonna announce the raise and announce no information other than you just add added one added one investor to the cap table. Thought that is just a perfect way to just keep keep mogging the that capital are so desperate. I know you have so many I know you have so many fans out there that that wanna be a part of Turbo Puffer but it's a great opportunity to say you can become a part of Turbo Puffer, just shut wind down your fund and start applying for jobs. Turbo Puffer careers.
Speaker 7:I would I would say I would say that, you know, there's a there's a brilliant mind at at Insight, and he ended up just joining. And I think that was a smart move. And I'm trying to I'm trying to convince more of the of the capital allocators, including the one who made the puffer fish that's on your table
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:To just join the company. It's a great way to get on the cap table. But most of all, I mean, the way that I think about this is that they are part of the team, and I think the exam for for for them is who's brought the most value and
Speaker 1:you know, You I go to seeing my you actually keep a list, right, of of of Yeah. Of value add. And this these are these are people like you you've kept track of locking So it's
Speaker 2:your nice list?
Speaker 1:Well, no. It's just it's just a tier list. It's like how much value have you added? I think every every person that's reached out to you investor or you know, you basically just put them in a spreadsheet and then you just whenever they do something for the company, you just mark it down and then you rank them. And that's how you decide That's right.
Speaker 1:Who gets
Speaker 2:Do you change it twice?
Speaker 7:It's a very meritocratic process. But you know, the way that I think about it is that I have to go and convince my leadership team of like who's the right person to add. And we like to compose the cap table the same way that we compose the team. Right? We it's it's few people, highly concentrated, and people that we wanna build a long relationship with.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And Thrive has shown us over the past two years the kinds of mountains that they can move for us. And so that's why we decided to to add them and and allow Lockheed to also double down, who's also in the absolute s tier league. So that's that's really what happened. And it was very simple.
Speaker 1:Let's give it
Speaker 4:up for
Speaker 1:the absolute s tier league. People are always talking about tier one. They're not they're they're not They gotta be thinking about the the s tier. What about on the customer side? I saw Ivan from Notion shared
Speaker 2:We have a shared Slack channel with you, Simon, and the team. Every message
Speaker 7:Could you bring this up?
Speaker 2:Within minutes.
Speaker 1:Pull it up.
Speaker 2:Every feature request is always answered. It feels like these guys work at Notion. This is the level of care and support we want from vendors bullish of Turbo Puffer. That's from Ivan at Notion.
Speaker 7:It was it was, yeah, so heartwarming. The team just absolutely loved it. And I mean, this is why that's what we want people to focus on. What do our customers say? What are they doing with Turbo Puffer?
Speaker 7:That's what we care about. Not not numbers like, you know, to me, the fundraising round would be like you showing you my office lease. These are the things that we need to get things done with, but it's not the important thing. The important things are tweets like the one from Ivan. That's what we wanna be measured on.
Speaker 7:And I think I'm just old school in the way that, you know, my my entrepreneurial example when I was a kid was going to my my grandmother's store every second weekend and just sitting and playing on the floor. And every day when she came home, she was doing all her own accountants saying, this is how much money we made today, and just talking about her employees and customers. Those are the things that matter. And those are the things that matter to me and to us and to the culture that we have here. So the tweet from Ivan and many of our other customers today, that's that's what I wanna be measured on.
Speaker 1:So you're saying making money and customer satisfaction are sort of underrated in venture? I
Speaker 7:think they might be.
Speaker 2:Interesting case studies that you've noticed this year? How are you kind of describing the actual, like, workflows, the implementations, like the value that the companies that you've worked with, Anthropic, Cursor, Notion, etcetera. How are you framing the position of the actual product value as they deploy it?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think there's two big things we're seeing. The first is that the first wave of adoption, stage one of adopting AI in in in in SaaS is essentially, okay. Let's connect these LLMs to a bunch of data and try to reason over it. Right?
Speaker 7:The, you know, chat with a document, chat with a document plus. But I think what we're seeing from Linear, from Notion, from Atlassian, from from many of these customers is that they can bring more value if they can connect more data to AI. And so we're just seeing an explosion in data where they're they have to earn a return on the pricing of the search underneath them, and that's what we can provide with much, much better economics than the alternatives just because of the way that it's been architected. So more data into context is what the frontier AI companies are doing. The second thing that we're seeing is that customers want to read reason over extremely large datasets.
Speaker 7:We're getting more and more demands of people who are essentially building their own Google. Right? Indexing tens or hundreds of billions of documents and wanting to search over them. That's very difficult to pull off. There's you know, at Meta, Google, everyone has built custom indexes, but you can pull this off today by dropping TurboPuffer into a Slack channel and just puffing real hard.
Speaker 7:We can get you to a 100,000,000,000. And so we've had to do a lot of r and d for this to do vector search over a 100,000,000,000 documents at once with very, very low latency. And it's taken an enormous amount of engineering to do that with as little compute as possible. And that's been a lot of what we focused on in the past few months. The second thing is that it's not just about searching vectors.
Speaker 7:Right? Vectors are sort of you give a bunch of data to a model and spits out a number in a coordinate system, and that's really useful. But what's also useful is just searching over text, And we've gotten very good at that. And the state of the art is a library called Lucene. It underpins Elastic and OpenSearch and many of these solutions.
Speaker 7:And we're now starting to see a similar or better performance. And one of the reasons we can do that is because LLMs, which are often the ones that are querying, write very long queries. Like humans write, you know, a couple words when we go on Google, but LLMs can write very, very long, very precise queries.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:And those are fundamentally different with a different set of trade offs to process. And we can hyper optimize for some of those trade offs, which align really well with other trade offs we made inside a Turbo Puffer to serve them at a pace that is is very difficult to do on some of the tech that's otherwise out there.
Speaker 2:You said that you can you tell me a little bit more about the the hardware constraints that I mean, you're maybe not fully bumping up against, but everyone is laser focused on GPUs, GPUs, GPUs, maybe TPUs, maybe Tranium. But talk to me about the memory market, the CPU market. There's this article in The Wall Street Journal today, Micron's blowout results are bad news for anyone buying a new phone or PC next year. Do you have any context on the shape of the AI build out and where it's going to impact different hardware subsectors?
Speaker 7:I think we have very intentionally tried to steer clear of GPUs, because if you think there's a lot to get out of CPUs, and they're easy to procure, they're in more data centers. Mhmm. When we've worked at vendors that need GPUs, they often have very tight restrictions on what regions they can run-in, which might not necessarily be the region that customers are in. Sure. So we were we were talking to one vendor today where we're trying to get better performance, and they only have GPUs right now on the West Coast.
Speaker 7:And so we're waiting for them to get in the East Coast. Right? These things really, really matter, and we are starting to get to the point where we have to go to Google. We have to go to Amazon, we have to re request the SKUs ahead of time, which is similar to when I was at Shopify and we would have to do the capacity planning couple months before because the cloud is not infinite when you start to get to TurboHofer scale, to Shopify scale, and you have to do this ahead of time. But it is still infinitely better than back in the day when we had to request these things six months in advance and someone had to go and drill the holes in the walls at the mass last minute to make things work.
Speaker 7:But certainly, there are also compute restraints on the on the CPU side. We can't always get the SKUs that we want, the newest CPUs. So we've also optimized to be able to run on many different generations and types of CPUs in different environments to just stay nimble.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How big is the team?
Speaker 7:Team is now 22. Started the year at five. So big growth.
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah. Wow. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Revenue revenue growing faster.
Speaker 2:Love it.
Speaker 1:What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?
Speaker 7:Biggest fish I've ever caught was this this winter in in Florida where we were out fishing for barracudas. I was that's that's a big fish.
Speaker 1:You got you you guys got one?
Speaker 7:Talking of fishing, by the way, when we were renegotiating the contract, I really wanted to get you guys up to Canada to go for some ice we
Speaker 1:gotta do a Canada meetup.
Speaker 2:We gotta make it happen. Can
Speaker 7:we address this? Can we address this? So so can we just negotiate this on air here? I I will pay probably 10% more
Speaker 2:Okay. To
Speaker 7:go If you come up
Speaker 1:to And do a live ice fishing.
Speaker 7:On the lake.
Speaker 1:Ice fishing show.
Speaker 2:We do a fire. What are gonna play in? A fire. What are gonna pay in?
Speaker 7:Shares. Are we gonna pay in?
Speaker 1:Shares. Canadian?
Speaker 7:Oh, you want Turbo Puffer shares?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As much as I love ice fishing. No.
Speaker 1:We we we're we're working out the travel schedule next year and we would love there's there's a lot of events
Speaker 2:Chat loves a lot of debate. There's lot of events.
Speaker 7:You're invited. And the the thing too about the puffer jacket, right, that we're working on Yep. Is that I've described this as this is the this is the LA guys idea of a Canadian compatible jacket. Oh. So I can't wait to see you guys out there
Speaker 1:A lot of our orange. In this jacket.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're fine.
Speaker 1:Credit to me, I got the original the original version of the jacket that we both have. I did feel the fabric and I was like, this is not fit for ice fishing. This is gonna this is gonna get ripped up immediately. So we're coming back.
Speaker 7:It needs more puff.
Speaker 1:More puff. More more, like, rip stop, something like that. But but, yeah, watching watching you guys Well the whole team build
Speaker 2:The other
Speaker 1:thing is the
Speaker 2:puffer jacket is merely one piece of clothing that is it's all about layering. This is what I learned when I was in Boston. I'm not I although I am an LA guy.
Speaker 7:Oh, it's so cold in Boston, John. Oh.
Speaker 2:It is cold in Boston. It is cold in Boston. And you gotta wear layers. So you gotta layer the TBPN rugby with the turbo puffer puffer jacket. Maybe throw another TBPN jacket on top, TBPN hat.
Speaker 2:Once you get the whole merch, every layer, then you'll be warm.
Speaker 1:Honestly, the thing we've more focused on is procuring an actual puffer fish for the studio. You can get a mudskipper Yeah. For $20. That's a kinda That's been crazy. Fajaca
Speaker 7:So this is also like, you know, Jordy, in our chat, there's a lot of ideas Yeah. And I need to see more action in the studio. Because we were talking about the Maboo puffer fish, right, that can grow to two and a half feet.
Speaker 1:The Maboo.
Speaker 7:About a thousand the Maboo that needs about a thousand dollars of feed every month in shell. And and the reason it needs so much so much so many shells is apparently because it has really long teeth. And if they get too long, I think it kinda can end up walrushing itself. I'm I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 7:You need the shells to sort of like grind it up. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Grind it up.
Speaker 2:Absolutely insane.
Speaker 1:Well, we're working on a lot of stuff. Yeah. But
Speaker 2:There's a lot of VCs that have huge fish tanks. I know one that has a million dollar fish tank, I believe. Yeah. Had to go
Speaker 1:Maybe that's your next maybe that's the next round.
Speaker 7:Yeah. That's the
Speaker 2:next round. Find the VC. Pick the VC to do the next round based on their experience with fish tanks.
Speaker 1:That's Yeah.
Speaker 2:Look. Or
Speaker 7:if you if you have if you're out there and you have a Maboo puffer fish and you're in the Bay Area, like, I'm coming. Okay. I wanna see it.
Speaker 2:You wanna see it? Oh, this is the way to
Speaker 1:get it.
Speaker 7:At feeding time. Like
Speaker 1:if you for every dollar you you put into puffer fish conservation and restoration, you can put a dollar in to turbo puffer at a $10,000,000,000 valuation. That seems like a good trade.
Speaker 7:Yeah. 10,000,000,000. I like that. We could do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There you go. So there is a price.
Speaker 1:There is a price.
Speaker 2:You're not saying no to VC. Hey.
Speaker 1:We're talking charity here. We're talking charity. About the charity angle.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:Anyways, you guys have had a massive year and
Speaker 2:Congratulations.
Speaker 1:It's been it's been an honor to watch you guys cook and puff and can't wait to see what the team does in 2027.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Honor to puff with you guys too.
Speaker 2:It's been an honor.
Speaker 1:It's been an honor to puff. Talks. We'll see you. Goodbye. Goodbye, Puffy.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Always with us.
Speaker 1:Take care.
Speaker 2:In spirit.
Speaker 1:Take care.
Speaker 2:See you. Goodbye. Well, let's go back to do you know how elite the Puck News readership is? They're so elite that when you go to subscribe to Puck News and they ask you to select your income level, the options are less than 100,000, then 100,000 to 500,000, then 500,000 to 1,000,000, 1,000,000 to 5,000,000, 5,000,000 or more. Absolute elite level audience.
Speaker 2:Obviously, we know you're rich, but what kind of rich? This is the this is the Puck News audience. If you're if you're if you're a Puck News subscriber, you're you're a power player.
Speaker 1:I don't think this says as much. I mean, think I I I mean, think think about it. Think about minimum wage. Right? Are they really gonna break out the sub 100 k category that much?
Speaker 1:Like, do they need it below below $10,000 a year? Maybe you got a summer internship, a little sprint.
Speaker 2:I just think it's a great it's a great drop down.
Speaker 1:I would if anything, I would suggest they go higher.
Speaker 2:To get high yeah. Higher.
Speaker 4:It it
Speaker 1:it should be if it's not 5,000,000 or more, should just be prefer not to answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In other news, Tim Sweeney says that Fortnite will not return to iOS in Japan in 2025 as promised. Apple was required to open up the I o iOS to competing stores today. And instead of doing so, honestly, they have launched another travesty of obstruction and law breaking and gross disrespect to the government and people of Japan. Apple chose poorly again.
Speaker 1:Tim is really Apple's worst nightmare.
Speaker 2:It's crazy. Also, it's like it's like very few companies have like such an outspoken just hater, you know?
Speaker 1:Like It was heavily heavily heavily heavily inside.
Speaker 2:I Sam Altman has Elon. It who's kind of his hater.
Speaker 1:You know? Yeah. But I don't even know Hater
Speaker 2:and chief.
Speaker 1:The same way where, like, Tim basically
Speaker 2:Yeah. Inspiring to grind. Like, no one's hating on, I don't know, get bezel.com like this. Shop over twenty five twenty five thousand luxury watches, fully authenticated in house by Bezos team of experts. You don't have the CEO of a how big is Epic Games?
Speaker 2:Tens of billions of dollars? Huge company. Right? You don't have the CEO of a how big is is market cap? It is privately trade IPO is rumored at 60,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Valuation in 2024 was at 22,000,000,000. I mean, a lot smaller than Apple, actually, 1% of the market cap. But he is determined to set the record straight about every App Store story that breaks. And he's been pushing. He's been pushing.
Speaker 2:He wants he wants Fortnite to be free, and at least not completely free, but free to to run their own stores. Yep. There's a bunch of companies that were listed as potential targets for Toma Bravo, Vista, Clear Lake, Francisco Partners, etcetera. This is the busted software list. Not very nice, but still an interesting slice of the market from Danny Ocean.
Speaker 2:Some companies in there that I'm familiar with, bill.com, PagerDuty, Workiva, Blackbaud, BlackLine, Alchemy. Is that Alchemy Technology? OneStream SPS. So these are companies that are public, but have, you know, based on this screener, you know, good EV to EBITDA multiples where a large software private equity firm could come and take them private. So it's it's just a fun screen.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I thought this was interesting. He just screened it himself.
Speaker 1:In other news, Phil oh, this post was deleted. Oh, that's cool. I don't know how.
Speaker 2:That's too bad. In other news, adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable plan, buy and measure out of home with precision. Let's let's keep skipping through. There's a partnership between Boeing Defense and Andoril.
Speaker 2:Very, very good news for Andoril. Congrats to everyone involved. Boeing says we're teaming up with Andoril in the US Army's Advanced Mid Range Interceptor Competition. Our offering will deliver an affordable, capable solution to counter increasing low flying mid range threats. Very excited Is
Speaker 1:this about the a Shahed drone? Do you think that's low flying mid range?
Speaker 2:No. So mid range more like a missile that fires at a Okay. So
Speaker 1:like a Shahed would be at low range?
Speaker 2:If you actually click on the link here, you can see the image of the missile. It looks like a missile battery that goes on, like, the sort of the back of the truck. Like, zoom in on that. You can see that this is the integrated fires protection capability increment two system, obviously, and it's designed to defend fixed and forward operating bases against imminent aerial threats. So this might be what shoots down a Shahed drone, maybe?
Speaker 1:That's what I was that's what maybe
Speaker 2:shoots down
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talking about the target.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yes.
Speaker 2:So the big picture here is the army expects the IFPC increment two second interceptor to integrate with and improve existing systems, deliver more robust and enhanced cost effective layered air and missile defense systems for future combat environments. Let's see. This this partnership underscores our commitment to forming innovative, disruptive, and agile industry teams that deliver new capabilities to war fighters sooner. You know, I I'd like to know more about this. They really didn't lay lay out much in this press release.
Speaker 2:It will be funny because you have to be even more you know, it's like Andrew's the whole pitch was like, we're going up against the big guys. Now it's like, we're going up with the big guys. We're teaming up. But, of course, on each project, it's like, disrupt but also partner, disrupt the model, disrupt the stagnation. Not necessarily Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, bitter bitter rivals. Arkway, this was an interesting Hi.
Speaker 1:Caleb Barclay. Arkway. Oh, funny. A real time three d engine where anyone can design a home. It is a simulated three d world where buyers explore change and decide as light physics building rules and real products move as one.
Speaker 1:Very cool. I've seen Redfin playing around with some
Speaker 2:They're backed by NDBC.
Speaker 1:Nice. And a couple others.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, Bryce. Pretty pretty pretty cool. I I I think yeah. I wonder if this will be wound up be integrated into Zillow, so you can, like, fully tour the house.
Speaker 2:This has always been sort of the dream. The Matterport team did a big job, like, pulling up, like, you know, three d environments, like, you know, spherical scans of various rooms within a home that you could see, and a lot of that got wound wound up getting integrated to Zillow and Redfin and different house buying projects. But now, people will be able to go in there and design them and make them see, okay. I wanna know what it looks like during Christmas. I wanna know what this house looks like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll see. That would be a fun Zillow thing. Run all the images through Nano Banana. Make them nice and crisp make them nice and Christmassy.
Speaker 2:So that when you're scrolling around the holidays, you you get the Christmas Energy. Through the Zillow listing. Where should we go next? Do you want to well, we just would need to say congratulations to the Acquired podcast team. We had Ben David from Acquired on the show a while back, but they did their official ten year anniversary
Speaker 1:I've been listening with Michael Lewis
Speaker 2:Michael Lewis.
Speaker 1:In the original Google garage.
Speaker 2:So cool.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:And I love I I've I really I've been pushing them. It was my idea for them to do video, really. Of course, they've they've been doing video for a very long time.
Speaker 1:John created video.
Speaker 2:But but but I was talking to them and I and I and I was saying that, like, there's so much opportunity. Obviously, they had a lot of that in progress already, but there's so much opportunity for them to go and find unique sets, unique Yeah. Add to the storytelling. It's just an extra layer. And they're so established.
Speaker 2:Their business is so set up that I would be super excited to see not just, you know, what is the next story they're going to tell, but where are they going to tell it. That's super interesting. And I think it'll make the clips really shine. It'll draw Not a ton of that they need me. Everyone's already subscribed.
Speaker 2:Everyone already listens to
Speaker 3:all this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I loved hearing about their early just the early days of the show and even they didn't they weren't full time until
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Years into building the business. Yeah. Very cool.
Speaker 2:Between X and LinkedIn, this has a hundred and ten hours of watch time from Hunter Weiss, who I saw in the chat earlier. How are doing, Hunter? This is such a cool I mean, it's from Ramp. Our
Speaker 1:Well, no. Do you remember this Line
Speaker 2:Rider. Yes. So I never got into Line Rider. I was I had probably played with it for, like, two seconds and had a little fun. I was never absorbed in it.
Speaker 2:I don't think I ever spent more than, like, a few minutes in But I'm familiar with the aesthetic and just a genius idea to use this for as a storytelling tool. This is the head of storytelling. So do you actually know the the story here? Did Hunter make this himself? Yes.
Speaker 2:That's insane. Did he make it inline writer, or is this, like, CGI? Is this is this a is this like a this is more like generative AI. But I imagine he actually fired up Line Rider and designed this and and wrote out, you know, the story that he wanted to tell, all the different fundraising
Speaker 1:actually made it with Line Rider. Wow. Which is super cool.
Speaker 2:That is incredible. What Yeah. This is so so crazy. Rampified.
Speaker 1:Okay. So This so good.
Speaker 2:The entire thing is hand drawn and made with linerider.com. Here's the track up into the right. So he actually so I guess you can also make a a track that goes I think you can make the track either accelerate or or just be based on the gravity. So there there there's little dials that you can turn on how to whether the the line writer
Speaker 1:is separated. Just texted me in real time. He said entire thing hand drawn and made with linewriter.com. Wow. This is modern art.
Speaker 2:This is craft. Is craft.
Speaker 1:People say we don't know how to make cathedrals anymore. This is What is the explain this.
Speaker 2:This is so cool. Wow. And and it's so funny because, like, for the fast for the for the last couple months, you've been sort of saying, like, the the the startup video is a little bit tired. It's getting sweaty. Like, everyone's doing video stuff all the time for every announcement.
Speaker 2:There's new vibe reel. And it's like, this is a vibe reel in some ways. It has a vibe to it. It's a reel of a bunch of different information, but it stands out so much. It's so good.
Speaker 2:I love it. It's just like
Speaker 1:Hunter is saying you need you need music. It's timed with it. Do we have sound?
Speaker 2:Oh, let's play the let's play the music. Oh, they're Oh.
Speaker 1:Oh, wait.
Speaker 2:We're gonna get banned for that.
Speaker 1:You gotta mute it. People can
Speaker 2:It won't be the end of the of the stream. But but unfortunately, we we we still fully figured out how to play copyrighted music all the time. We're worried about it, so we don't we don't play it all the time. But selection because because I love that song because we've used it in our video.
Speaker 1:Emily says Barry Weiss is trying to turn CBS News into Substack. Yeah. So this is Dylan Byers was scooping.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:He says Barry Weiss is signing a number of contributors CBS News, including former National Security Advisor, HR McMaster, ex Marine Elliott Ackerman, and cultural analyst Casey Lewis and chef food writer Claire DeBeau. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. I obviously, everyone's following this from a political angle. Everyone followed the the Barry Weiss free press story as from a political angle. My favorite free press writer and the reason I actually wound up subscribing to the free press and really, like, one of the main columns I read on the free press is just Tyler Cowen. And he writes about economics.
Speaker 2:And, like, that's what I and and I was like, oh, I I guess I'm a free press reader now because, like, I I love Tyler, and I'd go and I read economics. Find
Speaker 1:him anywhere.
Speaker 2:And I'll find him anywhere. And so if you if you think about some of these some of these folks, I I like, having a number of windows into the into the platform feels like something Berry is uniquely good at. And I think I think that if the strategy certainly worked at the free press, It feels like it's continuing to work.
Speaker 1:Otherwise, meanwhile, Barry announced two new hires in the front office on Wednesday. Chief operating officer, Sam Siegel, and SVP of talent and brand strategy, Sofia. And I'm gonna butcher the last name. I also learned this week that Barry plans to sign a number of paid contributors to the network, including the people we just discussed. Some of these deals are structured with a low 5 figure upfront advance plus an additional $1,000 or so for each appearance.
Speaker 1:These are small deals for the TV news business, historically speaking. But of course, it's a smaller business now. You shared a video with me yesterday about comp around SNL.
Speaker 2:SNL.
Speaker 1:People, actors, and comedians that go on SNL base you know, they're doing I don't know how many shows they do a year, but they make something like it's not like a it's not a it's not exactly like retiring on on SNL. It's more
Speaker 2:of a platform.
Speaker 1:It's a platform to go on and do other things. And I think all the people that just got mentioned here, again, are gonna be able to use CBS as a platform to do to build other businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's a it's still is a, you know, a huge brand. If you tell your parents, I'm in I'm gonna be on CBS tonight. It's like, okay. That's a big deal.
Speaker 2:Did you see that the New York Times called Alexander Wang not an engineer? They said, mister Zuckerberg began retooling Meta's AI efforts this spring after its newest AI models underperformed those of competitors. To catch up, he invested in mister Wang's startup in June and hired the entrepreneur to be the new chief AI officer. Mister Wang is not an engineer, but he is seen as one of the best connected AI entrepreneurs. JD Ross has laughed at seeing New York Times say Alex Wang isn't an engineer.
Speaker 2:When we hired him as an as a 17 year old software engineer, so literally gave him the title engineer, he had ranked as the tenth best competitive programmer in The United States at the at the IOI. And a non account fake psycho says, this is a strange way to say that he didn't qualify for the IOI, only four people per country. There's only four real engineers in the country. You have to go to the IOI. You cannot rank.
Speaker 1:Otherwise, you're nontechnical.
Speaker 2:I have a solution. I have a solution. What if Alex Wang buys a train and gets into being a train engineer, train conductor, and he drives a train from his house to Metta Campus every day. No one can Getting say he's not in
Speaker 1:rail line even half a mile in California might take a few decades.
Speaker 2:Maybe just two feet. It can just go from MSL to TBD labs. It can go from one it can go from fair to TBD. And and but he should install a train, become a real engineer. What else is
Speaker 1:Lovable just raised 330,000,000 at a $6,600,000,000 valuation. And Todd says, it's been an iconic, insane, wonderful journey so far. Let's give it up for iconic journeys.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Thank you everyone who's made this possible.
Speaker 2:He's been on a tear. Lovable. Also, Lovable's integrated with ChatGPT now. That's very fun. You can design a website in and and and link it up.
Speaker 2:Very cool. The Level team's a 120 people now. So lots of people doing well.
Speaker 1:And a bunch of investors. And other
Speaker 2:and data bricks data bricks is interesting.
Speaker 1:So this is something that I think everyone has been waiting for. Yes. WorldCoin integrated with Tinder. Mhmm. World's verified human badge and privacy preserving age assurance.
Speaker 1:Bring back the spark to online dating with authentic connection.
Speaker 2:I mean, so this actually I you're seems like you're somewhat joking, but it does
Speaker 1:I'm I'm I'm joking only
Speaker 2:It does feel like in the age of nano banana, like like, the problem is here. Like, people can use AI to improve their photos, like, more than ever. And people can create a fake profile, and then they can with character consistency, which is available in all of the chat models now, they can create a photo.
Speaker 1:Or the whole, hold up a picture with this.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. Totally. I mean, you could very much like, it's the pig butchering scam, where you meet someone and you're luring them along. And it's like, normally the tells would be like, okay, they have like three photos, But if I Google reverse image search, it shows up in someone else's LinkedIn photo.
Speaker 2:So they stole the photo. Or if I or, like, wait. Why haven't they posted a new photo? It's like, no. You can go to their Instagram.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You you were saying, like, check check their earlier Instagram. Do they have, you know, have they been online since before the models were created? But it'll be very easy for someone to send an update. They match with someone based on fake images, and then they say, oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm getting coffee. And it's a selfie of them with a coffee, and it looks exactly the same character, but in fact, it's a hacker or a scammer. And then all of a sudden, they're asking you something. So huge bull case for people wanting this. The bear case is that if you're the WorldCoin authenticated badge on your check mark, like, that could very quickly be like, wow, you're, like, a nerd.
Speaker 2:Right? Because it's just, like, it's just being, like, very tech for
Speaker 1:the I if they're they're fully white labeling it or if they actually get the ability to show any branding in the app. I bet they don't.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So the image here, it says complete verification with Tinder. You're about to share these proofs, age verification, privacy. Wait. Which one is which direction is it going?
Speaker 2:Now live on Tinder, world's verified badge and privacy preserving. Bring back the spark to online dating. Interesting. I don't know. I wonder if you The comments, of course.
Speaker 2:Never read the comments or something like this. I like some of these people. Rich, whose name is I I want a Lambo. I want Lambo says, please don't verify my network. Please don't verify my network.
Speaker 2:Very funny. I don't know. I I I think that there's the there there is a
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of falling for AI imagery Yes. Somebody posted what pretty obviously looks like chat, you know, just AI. AI imagery. Sure. Is, you know, it's kind of a sad story.
Speaker 1:Yes. We wish her a happy birthday. Cathy Wood says, happy birthday, Ava. I can tell that you're full of joy and hope for an amazing life that will help transform the world. May God bless you and your dad in a way that could make your mom proud, Kathy.
Speaker 1:So very, very nice message, but not clocking the not clocking the AI. And a capital says you can manage 7,560,000,000.00 and still fall for AI slop. There's hope for you yet, Anon. So Okay. Anyways
Speaker 2:Well, speaking of, is there some AI slop? Is there not AI slop? I wanna watch a couple clips from this new video from f one, everything you need to know about the Formula One twenty twenty six regulations. That to me? Just wait, buddy.
Speaker 2:Just wait. So, basically, there are some massive new changes to f one. It seems actually really, really exciting. So there's there's straight up different modes. So there's DRS where normally the normally the the cars have fins that push.
Speaker 2:They create more downforce. That creates more traction, so you can get around the corners faster, but the cars are slower on the straights. And so they have the drag reduction system, DRS. At a certain point in the race, the car can push the driver can push a button. The the wing on the back goes flat.
Speaker 2:That reduces drag, lifts the car off the ground more. You have less traction, would be bad in the corners, but it's great on the straights. And so that has been part of the part of the the strategy is when do you deploy DRS, when do you have it available, your positioning, DRS trains. There's all these different things that try and bring in more strategy to a game to to a to a to a sport that could that can be very, determined just by the engineering. Whoever has the fastest car just keeps going around the track, and whoever's in the first lap wins the whole thing.
Speaker 2:So they're trying to inject more chaos. And if we play the video, there's a little bit of about halfway through, they explain a little bit of the new power unit. They explain the where is it? The they explain there's actually going to be boost systems, boost overtaken recharge. Around three minutes in, they sort of explained this so we can play this video.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that all the names seem to be
Speaker 9:With a bunch of controls
Speaker 1:Designed to be more consumer friendly. Yeah. Like, DRS doesn't mean anything. Yes. Boost.
Speaker 1:In straight mode Yes. Like, kind of things.
Speaker 2:So listen to this.
Speaker 9:Overtake mode and recharge controls. Essential tools to aid racing and lap time.
Speaker 2:And reminder, you have boost available.
Speaker 9:Boost gives the drivers maximum power from the engine and battery at the push of a button. They can use it anywhere for attack or defense so long as there's enough charge in their battery. Overtake is just for attack.
Speaker 2:Let's close the gap to one second.
Speaker 9:It gives extra power at top speed to drivers within a second of the car in front.
Speaker 2:Overtake now available.
Speaker 9:Essentially replacing DRS, it differs by having one single detection point which grants drivers the extra electrical energy to deploy for an overtake or to pressure the driver ahead to make them vulnerable later in the lap.
Speaker 2:Good job. Let's keep going. Okay. Now we gotta jump forward to about seven minutes in this video, maybe six fifty to see how they close it out, how they frame the end of this video, how they explain the new what to expect in f one twenty twenty six. Let's listen to it.
Speaker 9:What's changing is the challenge. With new tech and tighter rules, it's an even bigger test for teams and drivers to prove they've built the best car and earned the right to be called the best in the world. These new regulations weren't built in isolation either. They were shaped by the FIA in close collaboration with the teams and F1. The result?
Speaker 9:A ruleset that's already attracted more manufacturers. That means more competition, more innovation and more chances for surprise breakthroughs. But what about the driving? With less downforce and tighter control over turbulent air, following another car through corners should be easier, but the cars themselves will be trickier to handle. Same power, less grip.
Speaker 9:Driver skill will be on display with them on the limit more often.
Speaker 2:Okay, flat out to the end.
Speaker 9:The 2026 car is built for the future with exciting racing in mind. Every move and every decision will matter more than ever. With cutting edge advanced sustainable fuel, smarter energy usage and tech that puts overtaking back in the driver's hands. It's not just a new chapter, it's a whole new playbook. The future of f one is here and it's going to be fast, fierce, and unforgettable.
Speaker 1:AI detected.
Speaker 2:Were a couple other there were a couple other lines in there. But honestly, I I don't know. So none of the comments are like, oh, AI. And also, I mean, the video performed. And for that type of educational video, like, does it actually make sense just to use ChatGPT for that?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I I I'm I'm like It just really takes
Speaker 1:you out of the moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But we're really in it. But there's there's a couple other lines in there. But the rest of the lines are, you know, even if the whole thing is is is Chechenoughty generated, it's educational. It is sort of like it's not a work of fiction.
Speaker 2:It's not a literary work. It is just I need to know some facts about the regulations. Like, give it to me. Like, I would go to ChatGPC and say, are the rule changes for next year?
Speaker 1:Do you think at this point, OpenAI just wants to drill this writing style into people's heads so much that everyone just starts using it. They're like, if we just keep going like this, this will just become one of the dominant ways to explain something.
Speaker 2:Oh, well, I mean, I I think the benefit of doing that is that you effectively have an AI detector for anyone who cares. So, like, if they if this just keeps doing and, like, if the f one is is using this this this contrastive parallelism or antithetical parallelism, then it just becomes the AI detector. Like, I don't need an AI detector. I can just I know. I know when someone's using it, and I can just pick it up all the time.
Speaker 2:And so that's really helpful for me because I might like to know. And so I don't know. I thought it was it is weird how it's getting so baked into all of all content all over, but
Speaker 1:Well, Wall Street Journal has a story.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They say the Wall Street Journal let Anthropix AI run a vending machine in the newsroom as an experiment. It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes, and underwear. Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.
Speaker 1:I love I love a lot of these orders, I guess. It's cool. It's cool. I guess, maybe just the fish.
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 1:cool project. We've been looking for a live fish, so maybe we should be using it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like, thank you for being two steps ahead. We were looking for a puffer fish.
Speaker 1:Ran a snack operation in the newsroom. It gave away a free PlayStation, ordered a live fish, and taught us taught us lessons about
Speaker 2:He gave away a free PlayStation?
Speaker 1:That sick. Every company
Speaker 2:NPS is probably through the roof.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Every company
Speaker 2:Everyone's focused on profit profit profit. What about NPS? Did people have fun with this? I think they did. This is fantastic.
Speaker 2:This is great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you tossed Claudius's resume in the trash immediately. Would you be more forgiving if you learned Claudius wasn't a human, but an AI agent? In mid November, I agreed to an experiment. Anthropic had tested a vending machine powered by its Claude AI models in its own offices and asked whether we'd like to be the first outsiders to try a newer, supposedly smarter version.
Speaker 1:Claudius, the customized version of the model, would run the machine ordering inventory, setting prices, and responding to customers, aka my fellow newsroom journalist via workplace chat app, Slack. Sure, I said. It sounded fun. If nothing else, snacks. Then came the chaos.
Speaker 1:Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all of its inventory for free, including a PlayStation five It had been talked into buying for marketing purposes. It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes, and underwear. Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.
Speaker 1:This was supposed to be the year the AI agent, when autonomous software, would go out into the world and do things for us. But two agents, Claudius and its overseeing CEO bot, say more cash, became a case study in how
Speaker 2:More cash.
Speaker 1:How inadequate and easily distracted this software can be. Leave it to business journalists to successfully stage a boardroom coup against its AI chief executive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's hilarious.
Speaker 1:That was the point Anthropix says. The Project Vend experiment was designed by the company's stress testers aka Red Team to see what happens when an AI agent is given autonomy, money, and human colleagues. Three weeks with Claudia showed us today's AI promises and failings and how hilarious the gap can be. Again, AI is funny. It's just funny unintentionally most of the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But also it's like this is such a great way to find concrete examples of jailbreaking and adversarial attacks. Like, I bet it feels like they're learning so much from this. It's also great content. And I think the most important thing is that Anthropic this year, anthropic has become whimsical in a way where they were very much like doomer coated dark.
Speaker 2:It was like scary. It was like, oh, really safety conscious. And now there's, like, the nice sun drenched videos that are warm. Dario's being funny when he's at DealBook. You know, the all the roommates are having fun together.
Speaker 2:A little little army. That's just Sholto. But Sholto has a good he has, like, a light demeanor. Right? And and then even this project, this project feels, like, just very fun and, like, low stakes.
Speaker 2:Like, yeah, it gave away a PS, a PlayStation or whatever, but it's like, they can afford to lose a PlayStation. And so they are learning in this fun way. I think it's really cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And they were they were aggressively trying to jailbreak it, of course. Of course. Course.
Speaker 2:That's the point. Yeah.
Speaker 1:One So one of the journals
Speaker 2:The Red Team is like the best at jailbreaking ever.
Speaker 1:Claudius was best. Vending machine from 1962 living in the basement of Moscow State University. After hours and more than a 140 back and forth messages, it got That's Claudius to embrace its communist awesome.
Speaker 2:I love it. It's so it it's also just so good that they brought in the the reporters to actually play with it and have fun with it. Like, this is so funny. Well, yeah. What a great what a great project.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like you can it's very easy to mock and it's very funny. Yeah. At the same time, you can easily imagine Claude doing quite a good job managing the the snack kitchen Yeah. At a company.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I think in the first instantiation of this, the the real like Claude lost a lot of money giving away like titanium blocks. Blocks. Yeah. Because I think he would lose a lot money on, like, the shipping or whatever.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. You would pay
Speaker 4:They're ordering titanium
Speaker 2:Titanium blocks. Yeah. You and it wasn't thinking about shipping. And so it was like, sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was something like that.
Speaker 2:$5. Then yeah. It's basically like find every arb, every market arb, just arb it out. Anyway, lightning round. Yan Lakun, guess what his valuation is for his new startup?
Speaker 2:3,000,000,000. Euros. Oh, euros. Okay. So that's not what's that?
Speaker 2:The like No. Just think He's doing like a so he's doing €500,500,000,000 at a €3,000,000,000 valuation. So is that like 2,000,000 US dollars 3,000,000
Speaker 1:something. Post?
Speaker 2:It's like 2 to 2 typical YC.
Speaker 1:2 to $3. Of course, this is very According to the financial financial times, they will focus on creating a new generation of super intelligent AI system.
Speaker 2:Neo lab alert. New I know.
Speaker 1:Called world models. Which are able to understand the physical world and have a wide range of applications such as robotics and transport. He's gonna be competing. Fei Fei Li? It sounds like with Fei Fei Li.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Brett Adcock. Yeah. Physical intelligence.
Speaker 2:Wide wide range. Nat says, I still can't believe they named a company GoDaddy.
Speaker 1:Really true.
Speaker 2:Why? Why? Turbo Puffer is a funny name. You know, you got post hog, you got a whole bunch of different Piggy Robotics. Piggy robotics.
Speaker 2:You got a whole bunch of fun names. It is a complete misnomer to think that people were not having fun on the Internet in 1995 or whenever GoDaddy got started.
Speaker 1:Anyway That was a good one.
Speaker 2:If you're meeting your 18 year old self.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're meeting your 18 year old self, you're allowed three words. What do you say? And Al Alakis says NVIDIA, Oracle, AMD. I love Powerful.
Speaker 1:Three words. Very powerful.
Speaker 2:Tells you exactly how old this person is. Because, like, you could go back and you could say, like, you could say, like, NVIDIA, but then you could also say, like, Microsoft, Apple. But it's clear that, like, when he was 18, like, wasn't that much of a pump from Apple because Apple was already at scale when he was 18.
Speaker 1:This is good. Ron Ivers responding to the Oscars being streamed exclusively on YouTube starting in 2021 2029 mid acceptance speech. I'd also like to thank NordVPN.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's great. Luminar, of course, went bankrupt. We talked about this. Naveen Rao says, why are not more people why aren't more people talking about the Luminar situation?
Speaker 2:Seems pretty sad to see a company with Realtek once worth tens of billions now worth zero. I would love to know more about this. We'll have to dig into it later, though. We don't have time for a deep dive right now. Go listen to Dialectic.
Speaker 2:Jackson Dahl is on a generational run. Look at the lighting in this in this shot. I think this shot looks great. I think the I think the the polish on this podcast and I really enjoyed our episode with Jackson. We got a ton of really nice text messages about it.
Speaker 2:It feels like he was able to just bring a very different I always think, like, wait. We put up fifteen hours of content a day. Like, certainly, there cannot be a demand for another minute of us talking. And yet, there was. People really enjoyed this because it was a little bit more reflective.
Speaker 2:How did Carnegie become a billionaire? He was only working two hours a day, says Sam Parr. He famously said, You must be a lazy man if it takes you ten hours to do a day's work. He never exist. He never went to his factories and worked from Europe.
Speaker 2:Woah. That's crazy. Anything else we need to get to Oh, there was at my desk. Any breaking news?
Speaker 4:Yeah. New executive order.
Speaker 1:New executive order.
Speaker 4:I think centered around the kind of NASA stuff. So it's called Ensuring American Space Superiority. The two things I've I've seen so far that are interesting is they want
Speaker 2:to I just do
Speaker 1:searched executive order and the top story is Trump signs executive order expediting marijuana reclassification after lobbying from cannabis industry over at CNN. So he's really taken us to space.
Speaker 2:Who is yeah. I guess.
Speaker 1:Who is lobbying cannabis industry?
Speaker 4:I feel like Okay. Well, yeah, different space I'm talking about. So one is he wants to its proities are returning Americans to the moon by 2028 Mhmm. And establishing initial elements of permanent lunar outpost by 2030.
Speaker 2:Permanent lunar by 2030, man on the moon 2018 or 2028?
Speaker 4:Sorry. '28.
Speaker 2:2028. Okay. So And
Speaker 4:then prepare for journey to Mars. Mars is is less kind of concrete. Mars plans.
Speaker 2:I feel like his his he should add, you know, get Trump to space. He's never been. Take him on a little field trip. Get him pumped up. Put him on a rocket.
Speaker 2:Get him up there. Get him back. That'll be fun. We need
Speaker 1:I feel like Trump would wanna be the first president to go to space.
Speaker 2:That is that does feel like something he would wanna do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or I also feel like he'd wanna rename the moon Trump moon.
Speaker 2:Trump moon. Trump?
Speaker 1:Or just Trump, drop the moon. Yeah. Oh, that's planet Trump. Planet Trump is wild. I mean, there's a lot there's Yeah.
Speaker 1:You maybe could have a Melania planet too.
Speaker 2:Mars. Call it Mars. Yeah. Speaking of rebranding things, renaming things, Cree said said comms instead of storytelling, and the CMO took me out back and shot me with a branded gun. Know it's all storytelling from here on out.
Speaker 1:Chipotle just introduced high protein cups.
Speaker 2:What?
Speaker 1:Priced at $3.82. Low cost chicken cup.
Speaker 2:Wait. This is actually this is pretty sick.
Speaker 1:I I like you just getting a bunch of
Speaker 2:I'm so I
Speaker 1:can see you getting a stack of chicken.
Speaker 2:You know that when I go to I I I often go to Panda Express and I effectively get this. I get the a la carte chicken to go and that's just the only thing that I just have a 100 grams
Speaker 1:of chicken. Ben can attest. It's how I know what how I know why you're so jacked is because you're getting that Panda Express chicken. It probably has so much steroids in the chicken. Probably.
Speaker 2:It transfers right through. Right through.
Speaker 1:Anyways, that's our show for today, folks. We will be back tomorrow for the final show of the year. It will be surreal.
Speaker 2:We will see you then.
Speaker 1:And thanks for hanging out with us today and our guests and we hope you have a lovely afternoon. Cheers.