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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, 06/02/2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple
Speaker 2:of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:How was your weekend? I I saw from x, you watched the new movie Mountain Head. Break it down for us. Give us a little Geordie review.
Speaker 2:I did. You know I don't watch a lot of movies.
Speaker 1:This is your second movie ever
Speaker 2:after Thorat
Speaker 1:was the other one you watched? The Boros.
Speaker 2:Cold classic. The cold classic. So I felt inclined to watch this film. Okay. It released on Saturday.
Speaker 1:And it was kind
Speaker 2:of pitched.
Speaker 1:Talked about it on Friday. Was kind of pitched as like very Silicon Valley coated, very very tech So
Speaker 2:this is by Jesse Armstrong. Sure. Creator of Succession.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:I did watch Succession. Yeah. I loved it. Yeah. I thought it's this blend of Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, dark humor Yeah. In a in a good storyline. And Mountainhead felt like the exact opposite. It was it had a really kind of I'll I'll give you the high level. I'll try not to give anything Sure.
Speaker 2:It's four tech entrepreneurs Okay. Who are going to meet up
Speaker 1:for poker All entrepreneurs. All founders? No VCs?
Speaker 2:It seemed like everybody was a founder, but of course, they dabble in investing Sure.
Speaker 1:As well.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:As one does.
Speaker 2:Anyway, so four of them are going for a poker weekend. Mhmm. I found out it was in Park City, Utah because Wander actually helped them get the house.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Fantastic house. So they all sort of like descend on this house for a poker weekend. Yeah. I think the deal or or their deal was no heels, no deals, and no chefs or something like that. Oh, it's like It was like one of those Brose trip.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was Yeah. Boys trip. So they get together. One of them, I couldn't I'm sure somebody's put it together better than I have, but it was like some it felt like a combination of Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg, social media guy Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Running this business called Tram. Tram. And he had released a generative AI tool that was so good that it was it started as they were sort of descending on this Park City home, starting to cause global chaos. There was like, you know, you could
Speaker 1:It's like a Doomer movie.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The idea the idea was that the deepfakes were so good that there would be a deepfake of like one tribe in Kenya attacking another tribe, and then it would spark, you know, real conflict.
Speaker 1:Wow. Wait. Wait. Wait. So so that that screenshot, you you you said, like, there's at least there's a new meme format and it's Steve Carell saying he is a d cell with crazy p doom and zero risk tolerance.
Speaker 1:Like, you didn't put that text over that.
Speaker 3:No. That's actually from
Speaker 2:the
Speaker 3:That
Speaker 2:is actually Steve Carell saying he is a D cell with crazy pee doom and zero risk tolerance.
Speaker 4:Wow. But
Speaker 2:we'll get to that.
Speaker 1:Okay. Anyway, sorry.
Speaker 2:So the movie, they descend out of this house. Good. Yeah. Tram has launched this product and it goes on. They're basically just hanging out over the weekend as this product gets worse and worse and worse.
Speaker 2:And I pulled up some notes. So deepfakes are causing global chaos. Mhmm. They're using a bunch of like very awkward buzzwords. Like you could tell it was written by people that didn't like tech entrepreneurs Oh, really?
Speaker 2:Or or bean airs or There was a funny dynamic where one of the one of the four bros is only worth half a billion.
Speaker 1:Oh, god. That's They
Speaker 2:they at one point, they go on a mountain and they write their net worths on their chest. Okay. And everybody has a b except the one guy who has just an m. Oh, okay. So it was pretty Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Pretty, you know, he was he was feeling really bad about it. Later Yeah. Now now this is just a dead giveaway. So I'm not gonna I'm gonna go there.
Speaker 2:Okay. Anyway.
Speaker 1:But I mean, like like the p pdoom thing seems pretty in group. Like, it's it's pretty close
Speaker 2:to, like, know Eventually It's
Speaker 1:a couple years old.
Speaker 2:Eventually, there's a guy one of the founders has some type of filtering technology that that that detects deepfakes.
Speaker 1:So they have to do a deal?
Speaker 2:And so the social media guy is, like, trying to do a deal with him. Okay. Says no. Oh. Filter guy goes to one of the other guys and says, we gotta get this guy, like, fired, basically.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Interesting. And so that's when Steve Carell Now, this guy's a doomer Oh, okay. With a crazy p doom.
Speaker 4:A crazy p doom.
Speaker 2:And then the three other guys plot to Yeah. Yeah. Kill.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:The other then most of the movie is them trying to kill Yeah. Would be a general movie.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It seems like it's it's part of that, like, I forget what they call it, like, mansion core. Have you seen this? Yes. Where E24 got very, very good at making a movie, like Knives Out, where they basically go and rent an incredible house.
Speaker 1:And then they shoot the whole movie there. And it just takes you around from one room to the next. And you're in this beautiful cinematic environment the whole time. And it seems to be an interesting takeaway for Hollywood that it's the higher leverage production. Because it has the aesthetics of a big cinematic movie, and they're shooting it on nice do that.
Speaker 1:But it's one house.
Speaker 2:It's like basically one location.
Speaker 1:And so if you rent just one location, all of a sudden, you're not like, oh, yeah. Our second unit is is in Tokyo for the scene where Batman jumps off the thing. It's like, that is so much more expensive. Moving around is so much more expensive than just being like, we're gonna dominate this one little house for a month. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then we'll just shoot the conversation.
Speaker 2:So that was it. So you pretty was basically one location. Yeah. It was a very nice location.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, it was like this weird combination of like, it was like a critique of the of the tech billionaires. Yeah. But at the same time, it was like using all this insider sort of teapot language. Very interesting. That would have been wildly confusing to somebody that wasn't a tech insider.
Speaker 2:Came away being like, I don't know who this was for. Like, I understand making a movie for the sort of anti tech crowd. Yep. Or making a movie that's like succession Yep. Meets meets AI.
Speaker 2:Yep. But it came away sort of neither of those things for me. And it was really rough watch. By the end, I was watching Oh, you did because I wanted to be able to comment Interesting. On the
Speaker 1:show right now. Interesting. There there there was a review, I believe, of the movie. It's the end of the world, and it's their fault. The tech bros have ascended to movie villain status by Charlie war Wurzel in the Atlantic.
Speaker 1:And and it has a very attention grabbing headline because it makes it sound like it's like, tech bros are really bad, but then it's about the movie. I don't know. It's just like part of the vibe shift. We'll see. I wonder I wonder who who who's giving it rave reviews.
Speaker 1:I'm sure. I mean, it certainly broke through on the Internet. But anyway.
Speaker 2:It has 79% on raw tomato.
Speaker 1:Not too bad. Yeah. Too bad. Well, we should talk about Andrew Reed's latest investment because he's investing in movies now too. Sequoia just invested a hundred million dollars into movie at a $1,000,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 1:He's joining the board and partnering with the founder and the movie team to champion great cinema around the world.
Speaker 2:You are a movie guy? Yeah. Have you are you a movie user?
Speaker 1:I'm not a movie subscriber, but I'm sure I've watched stuff that they've distributed or published, but probably just on Apple TV or just purchased those films or seen them in theaters. But it sounds like Mubi has a much bigger in, like, vision. And we kinda saw this with what what what's happening at a twenty four. It seems like a twenty four is expanding pretty significantly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But Andrew Reed shares a little clip here. What is Mubi? A streaming service, a distributor, a publisher, a curator, a cinema lover, a community? Yes. And there's a quote from the Financial Times or maybe from a different article about the company.
Speaker 1:It says, but, K. Corral is the founder isn't that the founder isn't just interested in topping the box office. He wants to reinvigorate movie going culture by creating an ecosystem that extends from streaming to publishing to arthouse theaters, offering movie lovers the chance to see the kind of offbeat visionary work that other studios are afraid to make. In doing so, he's intentionally creating a worldwide community of film devotees that has been neglected for too long. Very interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should get Andrew on the show and and and talk to him. And we have Scott Belsky coming on the show from a 24. I'm not sure how much he can talk about a a 24 strategy right now, but, I'm sure we'll get to know him and learn more about, how the film industry is changing. It's obviously super relevant to us since we're, you know, trying to bring media to Hollywood, and and we're building a media company here.
Speaker 1:And so it's, you know, it'll as these as these distribution engines change, it's obviously good to keep track of.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 1:Anyway, in other news, there's a couple things we wanna cover today. Obviously, we're gonna go over the timeline and break down everything. But the big news over the weekend was the Ukraine drone attack on Russia. They shipped shipping containers into deep into Russia, at which point drones flew out of the containers and hit strategic targets. We're gonna have two guests on the show today, Soren Monroe Anderson from Niros to talk about that, and also Connor Love from Lightspeed to talk that, and also defense tech investing generally, and a bunch of a bunch of other things that are going on in his world.
Speaker 1:Yep. And there are a couple other founders and and folks coming on the show. Let's go to Cole Rotman and talk about he made his own version of the minus list, which I think in some ways is potentially I don't know. It's like in some ways even
Speaker 2:more the Rotman list.
Speaker 1:The Rotman list. Yeah. So he says 16 investors have led two series a rounds that became $5,000,000,000 companies since 2020 since 2012. You can see a pattern. Alfred Lin in consumer marketplaces, Andrew Mack in fintech, Mamoon in b to b work tools, Mickey Malka in fintech, Mitch Lasky in consumer social.
Speaker 1:And so he he basically his algorithm so the the Midas list has always been a little bit tricky because funds report the allocation of deals differently. Yeah. Are you familiar with this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. They wanna they wanna they're gaming it a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a game.
Speaker 2:It's giving sometimes a little more credit than maybe they should to a certain investor on certain deals
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In order to
Speaker 1:So if I remember correctly, like, the Midas List has a great data partner through one of the LPs that's in that's basically an LP in every fund. And so they have a really good they have really great insight into ownership by individual firms into individual companies and valuations of those companies. Yep. And so sometimes those marks can be a little bit frothy, it can be debatable because there could be, like you know, you could you could have made the Midas list for being in FTX, and then the next year is a And so it it doesn't feel like it has a staying power. But in general, they have a very good tie between VC firm and company and valuation and entry price too and and multiple.
Speaker 1:But what they don't necessarily know is the individual who is responsible for the particular deal inside the firm that doesn't necessarily get reported to LPs. And so what funds will do sometimes is they will kind of shift the chips around the table afterwards to give maybe the hero partner that they're trying to boost up more credit for deals that they were only tangentially involved.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If one if one partner led a Yeah. Certain deal but then had no chance of getting on the list at all Yeah. They might say, hey, look. You're going to take one for the team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And then there's also the question of like, sometimes partners change from one firm to the next. Who gets credit for that deal? If there were two partners at one fund that did a really amazing deal, and then one of the partners leaves to go to another fund, then that partner's gonna wanna take that deal credit with them. Yep.
Speaker 1:But that other fund is gonna say, hey, well, it's our position. So we should actually Yeah, it's our guy. Yeah. The guy who left, he left because he was saying no.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's on the press release.
Speaker 2:He wanted to
Speaker 1:pass. He wanted to pass. Exactly. Exactly. So there's a whole bunch of funny But this is kind of an interesting methodology because it's it's almost simpler.
Speaker 1:It's basically just like, who's the series a lead investor?
Speaker 2:Who joined the board.
Speaker 1:Who joined the board, which is probably easier to figure out. Although, even board seats change their arms sometimes.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because it's like, oh, your company's doing really well. Well, we're gonna make our name partner the board member instead of the the person that found the deal, which is sometimes rough. But sometimes, actually, some investors are like, no. I I I don't wanna be on the board of a public company, so I'm happy to hand it off to the my the like, the storied partner at my firm in order so that I can go and be on more boards at the earlier stage. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so the the the true goat list here, series a lead investors that have had $35,000,000,000 plus outcomes since 2032. You got Doug Leone, Hamant from General Catalyst, Keith Ruboy, and Marc Andreessen. And then and then and then there's maybe 10 or 15 that have done two two series a lead investments in a $5,000,000,000 outcome. Now, it is kind of
Speaker 2:I saw Ilya Ilya Sukar Oh, yeah. Posted and was like, just one more deal, then I'll be happy. Because he's he's got two from from the
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So he just wants to be the the the clearly, you know, there's a big gap between the the threes and the twos. No.
Speaker 1:If Ilya wants to move up the rankings, in short term, change his name to Aardvark. Aardvark suit car. Because it's it because within the list of of VCs that have done two $5,000,000,000 deals, it's alphabetical. And so Alfred Lin's up at the top, so you gotta have two a's in front of you to jump Alfred. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So Aardvark Sukar is the ticket. I mean, that's what Bezos did with Amazon. Right? He was like, I wanna be first in the in the dictionary. So I'll just I'll I'll I'll use Amazon because it's an a name.
Speaker 1:It'll show up first.
Speaker 2:Pleasure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, congrats to everyone that made the Rotman list. Very, very, very fun to see this.
Speaker 2:This could be the start of something very
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's an interesting
Speaker 2:Could be the start of a new list, John.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting methodology. Of course, it doesn't really take into account if you had three deals that were exactly $5,000,000,000 you would be ranked higher than one person who got the $100,000,000,000 or the trillion dollar company.
Speaker 1:And so you kind of miss out that. And also, it's like, this is particular to Series A lead. What if you got 20% ownership in the seed? Like, that's probably even better. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Know, lower entry price. So there there are always nuances to these lists, but it's still fun to to see all the all the goats in one place, in one in one goat herd. In one herd. In one herd.
Speaker 1:Give me the last soundboard. There we go. We got a new soundboard today. We got some more soundboard. You know the news?
Speaker 1:You can save time and money with Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to sign up.
Speaker 1:Do it. Andreessen Horowitz and Coastalope Ventures are backing a Bridge AI for doctors at a 5,300,000,000 valuation. Let's hear it. Why are you clapping instead of hitting the size gong? It's a $5,000,000,000
Speaker 2:Sometimes I like to clap. I'll hit the There we go. There we go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, a part of an interesting trend, obviously, application layer, an important narrative, more focus on these verticals, Harvey having a lot of attention.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:I heard OpenAI is something like 80 plus, 90 plus percent penetration with chat just in terms of users, MDAO or, MaoDAU, like the MaoDAU ratio. Like, just in terms of users, users, the ChatGPT app has been the runaway success in consumer. But there are still nuances to how medical data is handled. Yeah. Vertical applications.
Speaker 1:And so the vertical applications are are exciting, and that's certainly driving this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this investment will double Bridges' valuation from only a few months ago and underscores the tech industry's interest.
Speaker 1:It's crazy that this the first time I was hearing about this company, and it's a and it was at a 2,750,000,000.00 valuation. Like, there used to be when when a company makes unicorn, like, it is big tech news.
Speaker 6:It breaks through that day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And now it's like, Call us when you're at ten.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a Bridges CEO, Shivrao, a cardiologist turned founder, said earlier this year that part of his motivation to start the company was that his handwritten notes from patient meetings were often illegible. This inefficiency also made billing and summarizing patient interactions a nightmare. You end up feeling bad about yourself, Rao told Bloomberg in an interview in February. Everybody ends up losing.
Speaker 2:What's been a game changer is that with a bridge, just walk in the room, have the conversation, and you're present making eye contact Very cool. Which is very cool.
Speaker 1:Found in 02/2018. Wow. Even pre ChatGPT. They've been they've been working for a long time. The company initially struggled.
Speaker 1:Ralph faced a wave of skepticism from his health care peers and doubts about the efficacy of AI tools. At one success. There
Speaker 5:we go.
Speaker 1:At one point, Ralph feared the company's heartbeat was getting more and more faint. Then came ChatGPT and the rapid progress the capabilities of generative AI tools and a bridge became an overnight success six or seven years in the making. He said, let's go. Amazing. Since then, the startups have made more than $400,000,000 in venture capital funding as investors raced to back application layer AI startups that make language models like OpenAI more useful for doctors, lawyers, salespeople, and other professionals.
Speaker 1:Earlier backers include IVP, Elad Gill, Spark Capital, Bessemer, Union Square Ventures. Good to see every all of those people finally having
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's good to see Welcome.
Speaker 1:A lot to
Speaker 2:get a get get seed to unicorn.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. You just You're you're always rooting for them and and hoping that they'll come from behind and make something happen. And they did. Let's move on to David Holes.
Speaker 1:It says, at SpaceX, I saw oxygen snow in zero gravity. I saw methane bubbles shimmering like crystal glass and liquid oxygen swimming pools that ripple like silk. I remember sunset plasma vortices flickering through compressed data streams at Mach 25. Pink. You think it glows on its own, but really it is in celebration for those who hurdle monuments through the sky with dreams of earthly beauty everlasting.
Speaker 1:Wow. It's so it's so amazing. He's like little poetry. He's yeah. I mean, he's clearly, like, writing in a way that, like, you know, the LLMs cannot.
Speaker 1:He's, like, flexing, basically. I that's the way I I see this. But it does seem like he got a pretty incredible tour of SpaceX and probably got to hang out with Elon and talk about robots and all these different world models and how Midjourney can partner with that and whatnot and all the cool things that he's doing. Yeah. The interesting thing about Midjourney and David Holz is that his his methodology is obviously, he's very, like, scale pilled, very AI pilled, but he's not trying to build the average image of what's on the Internet.
Speaker 1:He's just trying to make the images look good. And so he's bringing this, like, artistry to the process, and and that leads to, like, a particular mid journey look that can be seen as, well, this all has the mid journey look, but, like, he's happy as long as, like, the mid journey look is good, I think. Yeah. So interesting interesting way. Anyway, if you're looking for design tools, go to Figma.com.
Speaker 1:Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figma.com.
Speaker 2:And they now have websites. If you want to make a website really fast, make it in Figma and just publish it. It's pretty great.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is hilarious. So I think, wait, was this just a few days ago? Sahil, from, from Gumroad, tweeted, if I give you 1,000,000 and you give me the 1,000,000 back, we'll both be at 1,000,000 ARR. And Stephen Tay says, no freaking way someone actually did this IRL. And it's a story
Speaker 2:about Yeah. Really rough. So this company Builder AI Okay. Just shut down. Oh, rough.
Speaker 2:They faked business with Indian social media startup Verse See Innovation for years to falsely inflated sales.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. So basically, they'd just be like, hey, we're gonna sign up for a 50,000,000 ARR contract with you and then you're gonna sign up for the 50,000,000 ARR contract with us and we'll both be at 50,000,000 of ARR. Even though it just wasn't real. So anyways, unfortunate. Steve and Tay here, very savage, tagging both companies.
Speaker 1:He's pretty savage. That's rough. Anyway Yeah.
Speaker 2:They say in many cases, products and services weren't actually provided to either company for these payments.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. So it's completely fake.
Speaker 2:There was a contract Yeah. Yeah. And then there was a payment. Yeah. But it was effectively the same amount.
Speaker 2:It sounds like they, you know, adjusted it Yeah. Slightly. But
Speaker 1:Because there's always been like this this take kinda going back to like the .com boom around how a lot of the a lot of the .com tele like like, in Internet providers were selling to, like, fast growing Internet companies, and they were doing kind of, like, equity investments, and then the money would flow back to the telecom provider. And it was, like, pretty circular and kind of
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Created a little bit of the bubble narrative. Yeah. And people were always kind of saying that about, like, NVIDIA and, like, the big tech companies. But, you know, it's very different when, like, yes, in like, Microsoft might buy NVIDIA GPUs, and then NVIDIA might buy Microsoft Excel licenses Yeah. To to run their business.
Speaker 1:But, like, both of those are clear value creations and they're independent contracts. And so it's it it it's very much more, like, arm's length.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the other thing is if a hyperscaler is is investing compute into a start up Mhmm. The start up isn't they're getting investment dollars, spending that back with the hyperscaler. They're not necessarily, like, using they don't use a new investment to drive new investment. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Way that, like, if a hyperscaler would spend had a contract with them and they were sending it back, it's Yeah. Yeah. That's that's quite a different situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Much tricky. Much much trickier. Anyway, if you want to automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously, go to Vanta.com. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework Nothing.
Speaker 1:Or managing a
Speaker 2:compliance Makes me wanna hit the air horn like automated compliance, John.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah. I I think you threw this one in here. Andrew Huberman talking about the health indicators that no one talks about, the strong desire to work and build things, whether for the intrinsic love of the work, the rewards, or both. Yes.
Speaker 1:We need sleep and some need recreation, but drive is at least as important as any other metric.
Speaker 2:Basically, grind set Yep. Number one biomarker to be tracking.
Speaker 1:I completely agree. And I think that I was we we asked Brian Johnson about this, and we said, you know, Warren Buffett is in the news because he was stepping down, but had a phenomenal run, particularly from age 65 to 90. You know? Like, those are some of his most productive and consequential years of his career when most people spend those in retirement. And and also, he drinks Coca Cola and eats C's candy and eats McDonald's and doesn't do biohacking.
Speaker 1:Right? And yet he seems as healthy as you can possibly be. And Brian Johnson was kind of like, oh, well, he's like a single outlier. But I was talking to somebody else and they're well, like but Charlie Munger had, like, the same diet. Like, he this person was like, I went to dinner with Charlie Munger, he had, like, five glasses of wine or, like, ate the steak and, like, ate, like, all this stuff.
Speaker 1:And so I I I think that, yes, like, a life's work is it's not that it's a complete replacement for a healthy lifestyle. You should do both for sure.
Speaker 6:I think
Speaker 2:I think it's that the human spirit can overpower its environment and inputs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's there's there's some, like, physiological or biological explanation for this, the whole idea of the Being built different. Yeah, being built different. But no, I remember you hear about the mother who lifts a car to save her baby. That's kind of apocryphal, but it's also in an intense moment of stress, the body can send a signal to to really, like, refocus and kind of like you're basically just, like, shifting around all the energy in your body to, fight this one thing, whether it's, like, like strength or focus or something.
Speaker 1:And it and it appears that the brain works pretty similarly. There's there's some interesting case studies where traumatic brain injury victims, like, they'll they'll get hit in the head and they'll become savants. And so they'll be able to remember every single word in a book. And and it's just like, why is that? And I think what and and it's and it's odd because
Speaker 2:Don't tell David Center that. He's gonna get it. He's getting himself in the head.
Speaker 1:No. But but but but the question is, like, is, like, if we have that ability, why didn't we evolve to do that? And it's because, like, we're actually fine tuned not on just pure recall, although it's extremely impressive when you can see someone who's
Speaker 2:It's not as valuable as
Speaker 1:It's not as valuable as compression and and synthesis of information across different domains. So you actually don't need to be the memorizer to really win in our society. But we do have the ability to do an immense amount of rote information. And so there's certain brain treatments and and and, like, effects in the brain that can kind of shift shift the the the focus and, like, the output and the performance of your body to something. And so you can imagine that if you're if you're, like, incredibly driven for what you're doing, your body kind of sends these signals that, like, hey.
Speaker 1:We need to we need to be on top of the game. We need to fight back all the bad stuff and deal with the endless stream of Coca Cola that's coming into our organs. Anyway, very, very, very, very fun post by Huberman. Anyway, Dan Primak, has an announcement that Mary Meeker is back. We covered her on the show early on.
Speaker 1:We did a whole deep dive based on her fantastic profile in The New Yorker. Mary, you're always welcome on the show. She has a new trends report. This time, it's focused on artificial intelligence. It's over at Bond Capital.
Speaker 1:Remember, Mary Meeker went was on Wall Street, Sell Side Analyst for a very long time. The the the.com whisperer then went to Kleiner Perkins, eventually spun out and is running a growth growth equity fund called BondCap. And Ev Randall worked there, former friend of the show or former guest on the show,
Speaker 2:current Yeah.
Speaker 1:Friend of the show. And people are people are being spicy in the comments. This is the most sell side thing a sell side person has ever done. Bad day for left aligned text fans, I guess, because the the deck is centered or something. But but we can share some of this, and we can go through some of
Speaker 2:these Yeah. Why don't we go through the outline first? For the first time
Speaker 1:Coordinating with some of the guests. So for the first time, I'm going to be hopefully driving this. We'll see. Hopefully, this will work. And I don't dox my private keys.
Speaker 1:I don't have private keys on here. So trends in artificial intelligence from Bond. Good name for a fund, Bond, James Bond. So, of course, she worked with his team. The deck.
Speaker 1:There are some
Speaker 2:aura despite not even being overly designed. It's just when Mary Meeker makes a deck, people
Speaker 1:People pay attention. Attention. It definitely has, like, classic Wall Street investment bank aesthetics.
Speaker 2:Wait. So why don't we start with the outline? I'll read through it. Okay. Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. First section, seems like change is happening faster than ever. Yes, it is. Second, AI user users plus usage plus CapEx growth is unprecedented. AI model compute costs are high, rising, plus inference costs per token are falling.
Speaker 2:The performance is converging and developer usage is rising. None of this stuff should be too much of a surprise, But
Speaker 1:Yes. But they've all been kind of like vibes and whispers and Yeah. And hot takes issued on Duarkesh's podcast. But now we have kind of like the Wall Street interpretation of the same trends, and it's instantiated in data, which I think is very fascinating. And so we'll go through some of this.
Speaker 1:Seems like change is happening faster than ever. Yes, it is. Developers in the leading chip makers' ecosystems, the number of developers has started absolutely mooting to over 6,000,000. AI plus This
Speaker 2:why wouldn't she just call this NVIDIA?
Speaker 1:Well, so this is this is developers on top of NVIDIA. Yeah. So you can think about this like CUDA engineers, essentially.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 1:People people developing on top of NVIDIA as opposed to, like, doesn't wanna say this or she's saying this instead of this.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It it it a lot of it's just like Wall Street parlance. Right? But
Speaker 2:So this is only okay. Yeah. Yeah. Doing it every
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Leading USA based LLM users. Yeah. Rock it up to 800. There's obviously OpenAI.
Speaker 1:It's literally the OpenAI chart. And it's funny because CodeTwo, I believe, put out a similar report, which we can maybe go through. But they just say OpenAI, and they have Sam Alton's face right next to it. Yeah. But yeah.
Speaker 1:So ChatGPT obviously grew very quickly, but just this year, they doubled from 400,000,000 to 800,000,000. It was this huge, huge, huge spike. The question is always the monetizability of those users because as as as large Internet companies Yeah. Eventually reach saturation, the value the incremental value of the next billion decreases a lot. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because you're you're getting into developing nations, and and there's less propensity to spend. The advertising dollars go further. And realistically, there's just lots of countries where you can't sell 202 hundred dollar a month subscriptions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or even 20.
Speaker 1:Or even 20. And so AI user plus usage plus CapEx growth on it is is unprecedented. Internet versus versus leading USA based LLM, total current users outside of North America. And so the Internet share of total current users kind of grew slowly, and you can see that LLMs came out. And they started it at 50% of Internet users and rocketed to 90%.
Speaker 1:And this is a big part of the AI narratives that we already have the Internet. Like, the like, the
Speaker 2:It is the world's the greatest distribution engine in history.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, you know, like, bits bits move faster than atoms. Yeah. And even though the Internet was a bits movement, it it it was bound by atoms in the sense that you had to put pipes in the ground, and you had to make and sell phones to get the penetration up. And now you when you're leveraging on top of that, you actually it's like OpenAI might build a device, but they don't have to to get on 90% of they don't they they to get 90% penetration.
Speaker 1:This is a funny one. You're gonna love this. So AI user plus usage plus CapEx growth is unprecedented. The big six USA technology company CapEx big six.
Speaker 2:That's what
Speaker 1:people say about big tech.
Speaker 2:They always say
Speaker 1:They don't say Magnificent Seven. Yeah. Big six.
Speaker 2:Big six.
Speaker 1:And they and she so it's Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, AWS only, and Meta platforms. Just ex Tesla. Just writing Tesla out of the Mag seven to create the big six. And it's and normally, you might say, okay. Well, it's like a car company, but, like, has an AI division that is, like, a scam.
Speaker 2:They they changed the name of their self driving Yeah. From Autos to Tesla AI. To Tesla AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. So a little bit odd, and maybe you should put that. Maybe Tesla isn't investing at the same level as the other big six, I suppose, but it's still just funny to to coin kind of like a new a new term. But, obviously, CapEx is increasing very quickly.
Speaker 1:We and we we track that during earnings to see that I mean, it's really just like a few of the hyperscalers that are driving this, but there are multiple big tech companies that are investing at the $60,000,000,000 a year range now. Total So
Speaker 2:Tesla's total CapEx for 2025 across the entire business was projected at just 11,000,000,000. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's nothing compared
Speaker 2:to a
Speaker 1:a which stuff is spelling like. Like, Google, Microsoft, and AWS are all in, like, $60.70, 80 range billion.
Speaker 2:Yep. Gotta get those numbers up. CapEx for ants.
Speaker 1:I mean, it it is when you think about the CapEx that goes into a car plant as well. That's, yeah, that's definitely significant.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying. Like, it's but at the same time, Elon's getting this sort of off balance sheet With that XAI. Through XAI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so there's there's there's trends in declining cost of of inference. This is interesting. Seventy two years that you can see the cost curve here. So, the the cost of it it it's it's kind of an odd metric here because we're talking about AI inference cost, which was so high to begin with.
Speaker 1:It's it's kind of apples and oranges, but, basically, electric power went through this, like, pretty slow driving down the cost over time. Computer memory fell off on more of a more of a asymptotic curve, and AI or inference is just basically a line straight down as it got incredibly cheap.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:AI monetization threats, rising competition, open source momentum, China's rise. China's obviously growing in LLMs, but interestingly, it seems like went way up from 0% penetration in February of twenty twenty four. By February of twenty twenty five, had grown to maybe 10, but then had fallen, or maybe it was even higher. Maybe it was 15%, and then it had fallen. So the the pushback against deep sea is maybe working.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. China versus rest of the world here. Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 1:I don't know where else we wanna go with this.
Speaker 2:We can Yeah. AI monetization threats equal rising competition plus open source momentum and China's general rise.
Speaker 1:But you can go through the whole thing. There's a lot to dig into here. Global GDP, the computing cycles over times, the AI era. All it's interesting. It's all focused on just telling a story almost to like the public markets.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this one's interesting. AI and physical world ramps equals fast plus data driven. Doesn't really say much, but charting a rideshare versus autonomous taxi provider. So this is Lyft versus Waymo in the San Francisco operating zone market. And so you can just see Waymo really running away with the market.
Speaker 1:I was over by LAX yesterday, and they're they're I saw like five Waymos all in the same like block. And they're really dominating LA now too.
Speaker 2:Everywhere. They're everywhere. It feels like they're every tenth car.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. People prefer them. Like it's a better product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was I was barbecuing with a buddy last night and he was like, yeah. I was, you know, I I I was I watched this waymo. Pole was parked in a red zone and then just like ripped out and ran a red going left. And he was like, yeah, like you know, just me, I I sort of don't fully trust them right now.
Speaker 2:I'm like, you drive around LA? That's like Yeah. Normal moves for people in LA. Like, There's people that go out, they're like, I am going to break a lot of traffic laws today. And they just do that.
Speaker 2:So it's it's not great that it's not great, but coming along.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was talking to a friend who, over the weekend, who's been saying that Waymo is completely cooked for a long time. And now he's like, no, Waymo's going to be fine. Because apparently there's one guy that did the company who's just insanely cracked and is basically solving all the technical problems. And so he's like, yeah, I'm actually kind of bullish on it. But he still maintains that pretty it's still heavily human in the loop.
Speaker 2:You think the AI is anonymous Indians as
Speaker 1:the number you would No. Of. He says that I think the number he quoted was I was like so he was saying it's not remote controlled in the sense that it's like hands on the wheel, right? It's not somebody's remote controlled driving like it's a video game. But they are watching a screen and then they can press a button to be like, Okay, brake or go around or throw the warning lights on or like, you know, okay, this is fine or I'll draw on the screen.
Speaker 1:It's like they can intervene very easily.
Speaker 2:Well, think I said this maybe last year or early this year. If you're Waymo
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's worth $5 an hour to have somebody exclusively focused on the one car.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not
Speaker 2:You don't have that many disaster.
Speaker 1:So apparently the ratio of support humans to Waymo's is less than two, but more than one.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so they've proven that it's not fully just one to one, but it's close.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They
Speaker 1:can I think it's like 1.7 or 1.4?
Speaker 2:Make it not one to one. But even I think that pure teleoperation is cool. Totally. I would love to be able to pay somebody $5 an hour, dollars 10 an hour to drive my car.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's also funny because it's like everyone kind of knows that this is happening, that there's some sort of teleoperation involved at least. And most people who understand it at that level think it's a good thing. But then you'll see like a headline about like, oh, it's actually like anonymous Indians or whatever, and it's framed as like a bad thing, which is very odd. But I've always felt like maybe Google is like keeping it as an ace up their sleeves in case there's more pushback on Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, oh, this Waymo is too risky, then they can say, well, actually, we we do have a human. We didn't even tell you. But, like, we we're we're even safer than you thought we were. Yeah. So, like, you should or maybe they tell it to regulators behind the scenes to say, hey.
Speaker 1:We're really, really
Speaker 2:But that also presents, a whole other set of problems, which are, Okay, do the teleoperated people need to get do they have international driver's license? Yeah, have no idea.
Speaker 1:Well, they might not be international. They might just they might be in the San Francisco area.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:Or they might be yeah, at Waymo HQ or something. Or Vegas. I mean, we fly the drones remotely from Vegas.
Speaker 2:I just think we would have had one of those people leave already and
Speaker 1:be like Whistleblow? Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe the exit package is too delicious.
Speaker 2:Just can't Too delicious.
Speaker 1:Just can't get out. You got out don't
Speaker 2:give up on that sweet This
Speaker 1:was an interesting slide for a few reasons. 260% annual growth over fifteen years of data to train AI models led to an absolutely exponential increase in the the size of training of data sets, which feels less important now that we're in the we're post pretraining era, I guess. But, you know who's up here right at the top? Aramco Metabrain AI. I love that Saudi Aramco just trained a massive LLM somehow.
Speaker 1:Didn't make it to my news until this moment. But there's a whole bunch of these here, and you can kind of see that the curve is changing. But then at a certain point, you run out of tokens on the internet. Yeah. There's some interesting stat.
Speaker 1:Like, all of GitHub is, I think, like 10,000,000 tokens or maybe 100,000,000 tokens. Like, it's just not that big of a data set.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's pretty massive data sets you can get off Hugging Face that is almost the entire internet that's like 44 terabytes
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, to
Speaker 2:put it into context, which you could get like a 50 terabyte hard Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I was talking to some folks about, is there a world where, like, what we're seeing with v o three and Google's cornered resource, which is the YouTube dataset, could something like that happen with Microsoft that owns GitHub? Because they they have the best code data set in theory. And they're just like, well, it's not that big of a data set. It's already been exfiltrated. And so plenty of people have all of GitHub just saved locally, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it's it's not as much of a corned resources. Like, very very few companies have been able to been able to scrape all of YouTube, even if some have like maybe tried to do stuff here and there. It's clearly not the same as as as as the as the resource that YouTube has. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What else is interesting in here? I mean, we could go through other stuff, impact of improved algorithms on AI model performance. This is the the the the classic, like, chinchilla scaling laws. Just kind of breaking down all the different all the different trends here. But let's go back to the timeline,
Speaker 2:and let's Back to the timeline?
Speaker 1:I think so. Is there anything else you wanted to talk in here?
Speaker 2:You're really hitting Mary with the boring.
Speaker 1:No, there's just a lot in here. I don't know if we have enough time to through each slide. We should have her on to give us the highlights.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we should have her on. This is pretty
Speaker 1:interesting, the AI milestone timeline. I've, I've covered this before. But, 1915 1950, Alan Turing creates the his Turing test to measure computer intelligence, positing that computers could think like humans. In '56, Stanford computer scientist John McCarthy convenes the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence, a term he coined, great coinage, artificial intelligence. Arthur Samuel, in 1962, an IBM computer scientist, creates a self learning program that proves capable of defeating a top US Checkers champion, precursor
Speaker 2:to the
Speaker 1:chess stuff. 1966, Stanford researchers deploy Shaky, the first general purpose mobile robot that can reason about its own actions. Then there's an AI winter that goes from 1967 to 1996. Unclear of these AI winter narratives because that was like That was also so was the craziest moment
Speaker 2:Space winter.
Speaker 1:Attack. True. But but but also More of
Speaker 2:a moon landing winter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess. But there was an there was an incredible amount of, like, underlying technology built in that period that That enabled the next. Was directly correlated with Yeah. With other artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1:Even if you just go back to, like, you know, linear regression got faster during that period of Computers got faster. This was the era of this is, like, the rise of Intel. Like, NVIDIA was born in this winter. And so the AI winter narrative is always a little bit odd because you can always go back and draw a pretty smooth line after the fact. But in the moment, it feels very flat.
Speaker 1:But anyway, the the AI winter ends with Deep Blue in 1997. IBM's chess playing computer defeats Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion at the time. In 02/2002, Roomba, the first mass produced autonomous robot vacuum cleaner that can navigate homes is launched. I didn't realize Roomba has been around since o two.
Speaker 2:O '2. Wow. It's a vintage robot.
Speaker 1:And now they got some competition with Matic. Yeah. The the Matic founder came on. He sent sent us some some cleaning robots, and they've been working wonders.
Speaker 2:It's actually crazy.
Speaker 1:Toby Lutke was
Speaker 2:posting about it Toby was posting about it. I it's amazing how my children have it completely welcomed the robot into the family.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 2:Like, they say Really? Hi, Matic. Really? Like, they, like, chase it around while it's working. It's, like, it's totally a member of the family.
Speaker 2:That's incredible. It makes me very even more robot pilled than I already was.
Speaker 1:It's great. 02/2005, Stanford a Stanford team builds a driverless car named Stanley. It completes a 132 mile course, winning the DARPA Grand Challenge. That, of course, starts the the the great rivalry between Sebastian and Andrew.
Speaker 2:We'll get excited about we'll really get excited about Waymo when it can win Le Mans.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Right? Yes. Like, just twenty four hours.
Speaker 1:Waymo has so much money, they really should get an f one team.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It would be amazing. Yeah. And just be like, yeah, there's still a driver in there. We we, like, we just bought, you know, some random team. And and we're winning because we're putting a lot
Speaker 2:of money into the car. Imagine an f one race, but it's like a roller coaster. So you're not actually, like, driving. You're just, like, experiencing, like, insane.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think it would I think it would be deeply uncomfortable if you weren't properly trained.
Speaker 1:For sure. But 2010, Apple acquired Siri voice assistant and integrates it into the iPhone four s model one year later. 02/2014, Eugene Guzman, a chatbot, passes the Turing test with one of three judges believing that Eugene is human. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 1:I I thought we didn't I thought we didn't even get close. I mean, that doesn't feel like passing. I thought passing would have to be greater than 50%. So don't know about that exactly, but I thought that the Turing test was basically, like, impossible right up until GPT three. But I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess I I guess they were doing some good stuff back
Speaker 2:2014. Of passing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They never really had an official organization body, like an Olympics of that, like some recognized like, we will be the ones to do the Turing test on everything. It's always just been like philosophical test. 2018, OpenAI releases GPT-one, the first of their large language models. 2020, OpenAI releases GPT-three, an AI tool for automated conversations.
Speaker 1:Microsoft exclusively licenses the model. Yeah. That's a good summary of the Microsoft relationship. And then in 2022, OpenAI releases ChattyPT to the public. And let's go became Massive.
Speaker 1:Fantastic consumer product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm interested. I actually
Speaker 1:now that we're here,
Speaker 2:want to see the entire
Speaker 1:so this is the timeline from
Speaker 2:2023 to 2025.
Speaker 1:So is seventy years here on this slide. And then this is three years. So
Speaker 2:OpenAI in March twenty third of twenty sorry, March of twenty twenty three. OpenAI releases GPT four multimodal model capable of processing both text and images. Yeah. Same month, Microsoft integrates Copilot into its 360 degree Mhmm. Three six five product suite.
Speaker 2:I I remember that day. Remember exactly where I was. Yes. It was
Speaker 1:Yeah. Will echo in history.
Speaker 2:Will echo in history.
Speaker 1:You know, you know, funny thing is that it actually would have if they did Clippy that day.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If they had been like, we bring back Clippy, and Clippy
Speaker 2:And he's now God.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's God. It's also so funny with the paper clip narrative. Know, everyone's Yeah.
Speaker 2:You remember? So so this still feels so long So that same month, Google released Bard Yeah. It's ChatGPT competitor.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Hello, Bard. Yeah. You don't hear about Bard much anymore because it was rebranded to Jazzy. Same month, Anthropic releases Claude. It's AI assistant focused on safety and interpretability.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Late a few months later in November, '20 '8 countries, including The USA, EU, and China, signed the Bletchley Declaration on AI Safety. Sounds dramatic.
Speaker 1:Of course. The conclusion was that they want it to be safe, not dangerous. Yeah. We all
Speaker 2:agree. I think we can all agree on. Yeah. March of twenty twenty four, the US Department of Homeland Security unveils its AI roadmap I don't that It's hard to say that that was one of the most consequential moments in the last few years.
Speaker 1:Lama three was though.
Speaker 2:April 2024, Meta Platforms releases its open source Lama three model with 70,000,000,000 parameters.
Speaker 1:This is so funny. So there's two stars after the open source. And if you're in tech, you would think that the stars would indicate like, oh, the difference between like open weights and open source code and open data set, right? Like that's the nuance of like open sourcing and LLM. And also like they did open source it, but they set this limit where the other hyperscalers couldn't use it.
Speaker 1:What does the does the
Speaker 2:It says open source is AI models and tools made publicly available for use modification and redistribution. Yeah. So that's who this I mean, this is, again, this is It's a little yeah, very, very oriented towards the East Coast, specifically the world of finance.
Speaker 1:But we love the world of And they gotta get an up to sea on this stuff because they're gonna be able to invest soon in a lot of this stuff if they're not already. Yep. So they gotta learn.
Speaker 2:So May of twenty twenty four, a year ago, OpenAI
Speaker 1:This is so fast. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Things are moving quick. OpenAI releases GPT four point zero, which has full multimodality across audio, visual, and text inputs. Same time, Google introduces AI overviews to augment its
Speaker 1:search That's very important
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For Google because that product has grown super super fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I will say now, I gotta give them some credit that I use AI overviews. Totally. Because when they pop up
Speaker 1:They're usually pretty
Speaker 2:they're usually very effective.
Speaker 1:And they do hallucinate, and there's ways to jailbreak them and stuff. But that's accepted. But if you're not trying to do that, you can get a pretty good experience. I did see a hilarious UI mock up that was just Google has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever. And it was just go all the way back to the original Google search bar, but just have it be a Gemini text box.
Speaker 1:And so it like the same aesthetics as the original Google, but it would just be a text box that you would put the Gemini like and it would say like, do you want to think upload PDF? Like, what model do you want to use? And then it would be like, send. Yeah. And so it would just be, actually, you go to google.com and you just get Gemini.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which would be aggressive. It would destroy a lot of the revenue in the short term, but who knows? May maybe it happens at some point. At least it would be interesting if it happened, like, on a per user basis.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, if they know that this user would retain longer and actually be better monetized by by seeing a Gemini prompt, they could serve that to you. Because they have, like, an advanced search product now that you can kind of, like, opt in or out of on Google.com.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Think that's Do you think they knew if if the PMs really knew how much we love big tech, they would start to experiment with us more.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because they know we'd give them a chance to really iterate, improve. Yeah. You know, we're not gonna just try something and churn. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I would never churn off Google. Out of respect. Apple. Anyways, Apple on July of last year releases Apple Intelligence, an AI system integrated into its device
Speaker 1:Is that when they is that when they released it? I thought they I thought they announced it then and then released it over the next, like
Speaker 2:Well, I
Speaker 6:think it
Speaker 2:was available in beta. Yeah. It wasn't fully released until they released the new iPhone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was delayed.
Speaker 2:On September of last year, Alibaba releases a hundred open source QUEN 2.5 models with performance in line with Western competitors.
Speaker 1:Will Brown, big fan. Yep. Loves all the different research models.
Speaker 2:Big Queen guy.
Speaker 1:Big Queen guy.
Speaker 2:Then December, OpenAI announces o three its highest performing model ever. Reasoning model. We basically are in the present now. We had DeepSeek at the beginning
Speaker 1:of the Yeah, DeepSeek. And yeah, DeepSeek, I guess that
Speaker 2:was the during That was really kind of the deepfires moment for DeepSeek.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was. DeepSeek released R1, R1 zero, open source reasoning models. And yeah, the O3 versus R1 moment was really crazy because R1 was so free and accessible, and O3 was really paywalled and gated. And so a lot of people's first interaction with reasoning models was R1. And so hoping I had to to fire back very, very quickly.
Speaker 1:Yep. Also, Alibaba unveiled QUEN 2.5 MAX, which surpasses the performance of other leading models, Claude four o, Claude 3.5, GPT four o. On some reasoning tests, OpenAI releases, GPT 4.5, Anthropic releases the Claude three seven, SONNET, and then ChatGPT reaches 800,000,000 weekly users. Let's hear it for ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's just it seriously is unprecedented in so many ways. Yeah. Ten years from now, somebody some some kid will be raising, trying to build a research company, and they'll be like, well, OpenAI started as a research lab Yeah. And then became a consumer Internet hit. It's like absolutely wild.
Speaker 1:Anyway, there's a ton in here we could go through.
Speaker 2:Let's go back to the timeline.
Speaker 1:Let's go back to the timeline. I'm gonna stop sharing.
Speaker 2:We got a post from Dennis. Demand for v o three has been off the charts. Millions of videos have been generated in the past few days alone. Now available on mobile and in more countries Mhmm. Including The UK.
Speaker 2:So the funny thing here with the timing Yep. Of Mountainhead is that the entire plot of Mountainhead is based on a v o three like product being so good Sure. That people can't tell the difference
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it causes global chaos.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It feels like v o four will be that good.
Speaker 1:Well, depends on the rate limits. Yeah. That would be an important plot device.
Speaker 2:Yep. If Well, that was part of the plot is it was like people were saying, like, you need to contain it more. And he's like, oh, the metrics are so good. We gotta let it rip.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Yeah. But I I I don't think the v o three is is causing global chaos with the the
Speaker 2:rate you Except I did. I did.
Speaker 1:You can go.
Speaker 2:I thought briefly. I mean, I I had seen the movie Saturday night and then Sunday Mhmm. I saw some of the protests happening in Paris.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I did think for a second this could be, you know, it's shaky video.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Could
Speaker 1:be
Speaker 2:A
Speaker 1:lot of
Speaker 2:chaos, smoke. It's at night. Yeah. I if I just glanced at it
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I always just wonder, like, how much how how important is fake video? Because there are so many other tools for misinformation that have existed for decades. So just lying in text, like instantiating fake text has always been possible. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? Photoshop has existed. I made it up. Source, I made it up. Also, I mean, one of the classic misinformation things, especially during, like, riots and times of That's misinformation.
Speaker 1:During, during a lot of these, like, protests and and different moments is, they will just take a, a photo or real real video from three years ago or from a different location
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And be like, look. Like, this is this is,
Speaker 2:you know Or another classic
Speaker 1:This is the Los Angeles fires, and you're seeing, like, a a wildfire from, like, Montana or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or you just do a freeze frame or it's an image Yep. And then you write text that supports
Speaker 1:a different narrative than what actually There's so many different tools in the misinformation tool chest. Like, I agree that that d v o three and and generative video will be one, but it will very quickly, you know, turn into, okay. Well, like, I need to I need you to treat this video just like I would treat just like a block of text or like a screenshot or an image that could have been photoshopped.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, is it is gonna be a very Yeah. Interesting question. I mean, the we were talking with a friend of the show and he was like, the the worst part of Mountainhead is that it's real. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:This idea that, like, tech, you know, the tech elite are destroying, you know, humanity and they don't care. Right? Boo. Boo. Boo.
Speaker 2:It is, I mean, there's so much about the internet that isn't that isn't real or is that embellished in different Totally. And Anyways, speaking of social media, we have a meme from Eddie Kwan. Kwan. He says, I often think of this and it is a woman saying, thank you for ruining my life. And it is the Instagram octopus saying, I'm literally an algorithm designed to maintain your attention by learning from your behavior and mirroring back that which consciously or not captivates you and the social worlds through which you move.
Speaker 2:I am literally one of the most fascinating tools for collective and personal shadow work ever created. That is only if you can learn to recognize that you aren't disturbed by social media, you are disturbed by your own reflection.
Speaker 1:So what does it mean that my Instagram Explore page is entirely bodybuilding content?
Speaker 2:And golden retrievers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I think it's my own reflection. So it's saying, like, I could be a generational bodybuilder. Yeah. That's what I I I potentially am.
Speaker 2:And I've told you that many times.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:Told you
Speaker 1:many Elite level genetics, fantastic insertions.
Speaker 2:That's the only thing that if you said, I'm going to quit the show
Speaker 1:I'm going to be a bodybuilder, foot bodybuilder, I would be like Yep. That is your Yeah.
Speaker 2:100%.
Speaker 1:It's that and supercars and watches. It's really so ridiculous. Anyway, let's do an after linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps.
Speaker 1:Let's
Speaker 2:go. Go.
Speaker 1:I'm bored. They got Linear for agents. Start building.
Speaker 2:Do it. Check out Linear. Do it. We are pushing Linear to the limits internally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're excited. Antibiology says, gave a talk at Edge Esmeralda on the scientific history leading up to repeat today. Gonna post soon. Stay tuned.
Speaker 1:Very excited
Speaker 2:about I think I included this more as a mental note. Yeah. But I wanna do I wanna do a deep dive on Ray Pete just because he's influenced so much of a lot of the think the current thinking around health. And we should have Anabology on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should have,
Speaker 2:like, a few different
Speaker 1:people in that space come on while we do some deep dives. Yeah. Peter.
Speaker 2:Exactly. But I met Anabology at
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:At this event last year. Cool. Friend of of Justin Maers. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, back to Mary Meeker, Bucco Capital bloke. Says, I asked Gemini and Chachapiti to construct a pull portfolio based solely on the new 300 plus slide Mary Meeker AI trend report. Here were the results. Who do you think wins?
Speaker 1:And so we have, Gemini says 15% NVIDIA, ten % Microsoft, ten % Alphabet, nine % Amazon, six % Meta, key enablers and differentiated AI leaders. They got TSMC, Apple, Tesla, growth in AI apps and infrastructure,
Speaker 2:Salesforce, and all of how It's very interesting.
Speaker 1:Good company. I don't know. This seems interesting to me. What do think?
Speaker 2:Waiting waiting meta at 6%?
Speaker 1:That does seem low. But, again, it's like all of the I mean, there's some stat where, like, the Mag seven grew revenue, at something like 30% annually over the last, like, two quarters. And the rest of the Fortune 500, if you average all of them up, they grew at, like, 5% or something. 88%. And so, like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You you could say, like, yeah. The Meta feels underweight there, but you gotta take it from somewhere because you Yeah. You you know, like, every point you're taking from you're adding to Meta has to be out of NVIDIA, and that's a great company. Or out of Microsoft, and that's a great company.
Speaker 1:But, yes, I I agree with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. Anyway, let's go through a a real quick overview of what we're about to talk to our first guest about. The Trojan truck, how Ukraine just made nowhere safe across 400 kilometers
Speaker 2:on the show today.
Speaker 1:We can do it tomorrow or something. Across 400 kilometers of Russian territory this morning, delivery trucks completed what looked like a routine stop near five Russian air bases. These Trojan trucks with cargo containers disguised as garden sheds opened, up upward to release clusters of first person view quad copters into the bright morning sky. Minutes later, the over 40 aircraft were burning, including irreplaceable strategic bombers that form a core component of Russian this image.
Speaker 2:This had to just come out
Speaker 1:of This is, like, where they prepped, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think it's like But it's an interesting dynamic for Ukraine to be, like, marketing Totally. The world.
Speaker 1:Totally. To show, hey. We did this, and we're giving you enough to actually tell the story completely because It's
Speaker 2:ex I mean, this whole plot is extremely crafty. It is.
Speaker 1:For sure. Well, we have a great guest to discuss it with us today. We have Soren from Niros who builds drones and has been to The Ukraine. And so we'll bring him into the studio and ask him how he's doing.
Speaker 2:How are doing? There he is. Welcome. Great.
Speaker 7:How are you guys?
Speaker 1:We're good. We have new soundboards, so expect some wild some wild cards. Some wild
Speaker 2:stuff. Perfect.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, we we we missed you on Teal Fella Day. Hope you're doing well. Maybe you can kick it off with just a a brief overview of what you're tracking in the news. I mean, we just we we just covered this, this incredible Ukraine operation. What information how are you processing it?
Speaker 2:Let's let's have him do a quick one minute intro Sure. For anybody that didn't hear him the last time Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And isn't familiar at, with your background. That's great.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Absolutely. So I am the cofounder and CEO at Neuros. What we're doing here is building scalable defense systems starting with drones. My personal background is I was a professional drone racer for a long time.
Speaker 7:I've been building and flying FPV drones, first person drones for about ten years. Competed with Team USA, won the world championship, started a company in drone racing, and then got really, really pulled into defense a couple years ago. And now Neuros has been around for about two years. I've been over to Ukraine many times. We have a lot of products deployed there, and we are now the the highest rate drone production line in America.
Speaker 7:So we've been really trying to ramp production, you know, looking at what the Ukrainians are doing and taking a lot of inspiration.
Speaker 1:And how much of the drones right now are FPV versus fully autonomous? Is that is that an important distinction for what you're building?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It is an important distinction, although the line is starting to get more more blurry. Mhmm. The vast majority are FPV. Sure.
Speaker 7:In in Ukraine too, the vast majority of drones in general are FPVs, and the vast majority of those are completely manually piloted.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I had no idea that you started a drone racing company before this. Did you ever get that to scale, or was it still just like benchtop? I remember the first time I saw your facility, you were kind of hand assembling. It sounds like now, the the supply chain is much more robust.
Speaker 1:But what was the what was that early experience like?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So the company, it's actually still operating. Primarily, we're focused on at at the beginning, we were focused on building the, materials for race courses. So there weren't really there wasn't a really good place to go for serious racing pilots to to buy, like, the the the gates or what they call what you actually fly through.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So we you know, this this is a lot of actually working with the Chinese, you know, industrial base, figuring out where we can go to get these better materials. And then a lot of the arbitrage was actually in the shipping, figuring out how to do, you know, know, shipping all over The United States with these very heavy items without driving the cost super high. And then we moved into, other types of components. We we we like to collaborate with kind of the the top racing pilots in the world. So we make, like, frames and motors and other things that are really tailored to the needs of, the the best pilots.
Speaker 7:But it's still operating. I've I've passed it off now.
Speaker 2:Oh, cool.
Speaker 7:But it was a really good experience also to see how easy it is to go on Alibaba and, you know, get something done in a matter of weeks. Basically, like, to full product in a matter of weeks versus, you know, working with US suppliers that would maybe maybe get you a sample.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Those gates are somewhat tech enabled. Right? Because I've I've seen, like, the LEDs on them. And do they actually have a sensor that can tell if the drone went through the circle?
Speaker 7:So they do. That's usually on the kind of hobbyist setups. That's that's more on the, like, just start and finish gate, and it's a separate system. Our ours were purely just a a fabric. Okay.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 7:But that is a key part of it as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Before we dive into the news, specifically the news over the weekend, could you give us a high level overview history of drone warfare in Ukraine? Because I understand it's been progressing super rapidly, on both sides, and I and it'd be helpful to understand kind of the different stages.
Speaker 1:Did they ever have, like, predator drones, like the global war on terror type drone, or did they jump straight to quadcopter and kind of, like, leapfrog the technology?
Speaker 7:So, you know, you've had
Speaker 3:this
Speaker 7:this, Russian aggression war in Ukraine since 2014. Obviously, the full scale invasion was 2022. But even during that that period before the full scale invasion, there was some usage of drones for surveillance and, dropping explosives. These are primarily still, like, small drones like what you're seeing now, but this was not a a proliferated technology. Then when the full scale invasion happened, within a few months, the Ukrainians started thinking about all these ways that they could use, you know, inexpensive drone technology to get a an asymmetric advantage, and that is where FPV drones started becoming a really, really big deal.
Speaker 7:So they pioneered the, really this idea of, you know, putting an explosive on a racing drone and using that as a precision strike weapon. There were instances of this happening in other places, but they really scaled it, and they've really refined it. And then Russia was was much slower to take it seriously. Although now they're they tend to, in some ways, outproduce Ukraine, and they have a much, you know, more direct line to China, where most of these components are coming from. But since 2022 and FPV is just starting to get used, now it's reached an unbelievable scale.
Speaker 7:It's estimated Ukraine is gonna produce four and a half million FPV drones this year, and those are ranging from, you know, ones that are this big to 15 inch propellers, fiber optic controlled drones, many different types and sizes of warheads, different configurations. And I can talk more about the drones that were used in in operation Spiderweb as well, because those were really interesting. But what we've seen is just this vast technology landscape, where new clever ideas like fiber optic are, you know, gonna be the the hot thing for a few months. And then they sort of just become another tool in the tool belt, and it's just this constant arms race.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk about talk about this this attack was was unique in a bunch of different ways, but is this something that had been in to your knowledge or or just, you know, more generally known to be something that had been attempted multiple times or, you know, maybe, like, I'm curious to know, yeah, kind of the backstory on on this type of attack. Because it seems, you know, it's massive difference to be using this technology way behind enemy lines versus using it, you know, at the front line.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So primarily, FPV drones are used on the front line, say, the kind of 30 kilometer band across the zero line. What was so unique here is that it was FPV drones, short range drones, being used 4,000 kilometers inside of Russia.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 7:It it was this unbelievable application where, you know, we you've seen the Ukraine using long range one way attack drones that are going, you know, 1,500 kilometers, to strike targets deep inside of Russia. But here, these were small drones actually driven in on on, trucks, basically, in the tops of shipping containers. And I don't know of any, operations that were similar to this beforehand. I think, it was not something they wanted to, give away. And Yeah.
Speaker 7:The drones were actually operating on cellular. They were not operating on local like, the the normal low latency local radios you use for FPVs typically. And so I think, you know, this is gonna be something that a lot of people are gonna look at and and see. If you have drones that are operating on cellular, you can't really tell them apart from cell phones. That's really hard to defend against, really hard to detect.
Speaker 7:But now it's going to going to be part of air air based defense is thinking about drones that are operating on cellular being piloted from basically anywhere in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk about talk about the Russian response, the immediate response to this incident from the footage that I saw and I think most people saw that that tracked it. It it seemed incredibly challenging to respond to it quickly. Right? By the time you could sort of organize a response, a lot of the the core damage had been done.
Speaker 2:What what do you think the the the the question I think that every country is asking themselves now is how do you defend against this type of attack, whether you're at war like Ukraine and and Russia are or you're just, you know, thinking, you know, long term?
Speaker 7:Yeah. This clearly poses a massive threat to critical infrastructure. I mean, being blatant, The US does not have any defenses in place that would stop this from happening. We already know. We we there's already news stories about drones that are flying over our air force bases, and we can't do anything about it.
Speaker 7:And I think the only approach here has to be a a multilayered system where you're looking at all the different types of electronic warfare and also considering things like satellite communications and cellular communications where you're basically able to turn those off on the flip of the switch, which is a huge, a huge inconvenience and a huge, thing to build into the infrastructure. But clearly that's going to be required.
Speaker 2:Then you And and you mean that just just to drill down there, you mean, asking Verizon or AT and T or every cell provider in a certain area to turn off, you know, cell coverage because a drone took off, you know, is is Or a fleet of drones.
Speaker 7:Or a
Speaker 2:fleet of drones, but either way, it's hard to tell if they're a threat or just, you know, some recreational use.
Speaker 7:I mean, I'm I'm sure many people on the Internet will tell me why this is a very stupid idea. But when I think about this, it's clearly, Russians were not equipped to jam drones operating on cellular. That is totally possible, and we could have, better cellular jammers. But if they had been able to recognize this threat completely and turn off all the cellular networks in that location, then it basically would have stopped this this operation completely. And so that's where my mind immediately goes with something like this.
Speaker 2:Do you think they had electronic warfare or or radio blocking equipment set up at that airbase and it just, you're saying it wasn't functional?
Speaker 1:Or it wasn't for that particular band. Wasn't blocking cellular. It might have been blocking low latency. I forget, what was the actual frequency for the radio that you were using with the heads up display that we were that we were playing?
Speaker 7:It depends. So
Speaker 2:Sure. That
Speaker 7:that's the that that is the the point. So basically, you can actually see in the videos Mhmm. The drones take off and they have GPS. And once the attack starts, they lose GPS, which means GPS is getting jammed, which makes total sense. That's that's a common way of defending against these one way strike drones.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 7:So air bases are gonna already be set up with GPS jamming and, you know, so is Moscow, so is Kyiv.
Speaker 1:Like Yep.
Speaker 7:That's common. But they're not set up to just obliterate cell phone usage on air bases. And and they probably do have jamming for, like, control links in the 915 megahertz range, video links in the 5.8 gigahertz range. Mhmm. There's other common ones that are probably they're more well equipped to jam.
Speaker 7:But when I I think what caught them so by surprise was the use of cellular.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, you we've talked about some of the different you said there was kind of like an ensemble approach to stopping these types of attacks. Walk through some of those because I remember seeing, like, oh, we're gonna train eagles to catch the to catch the the the drones, or we're gonna just have guys with shotguns that shoot them or anvil drones or nets or electronic takeover. There's so many different approaches. And it feels like, at least in The US defense tech space, there's a whole bunch of startups going after different counter drone, counter UAS strategies.
Speaker 1:And it feels like there might be an ensemble one. But what do you expect to kind of be the the the mix or the road map or the tech tree that we go down to kind of prep for defense against this type of thing?
Speaker 7:First off, our strategic bomber should be inside of hangars. I think that would be a great start.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But as you mentioned, there are these really basic things like nets, that that do help against FPVs, but, you know, that's not gonna last very long. Right?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:I think you're going to see a a mixed layer, especially with, electronic warfare combined with interceptors, combined with, the sort of kinetic defeat like the bullfrog system, where, you know, you have an automatic machine gun turret that's able to to shoot drones out of the sky. The last line of defense is really guys with shotguns, and that that can actually work against an FPV drone, but, you don't want to be want to be relying on that. So I think it's one of the things that worries me the most is that I've never seen a jammer in The United States made by a US company that can reliably take out FPV drones. And I think we're very, very far behind in the practical application of of, electronic warfare, especially with these, like, local radios. So I I believe this is a huge area where we need to start investing dramatically and putting way more attention.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. So I wanna walk through a little bit more of this. You mentioned GPS gets jammed, then they're going over the cell network. There's probably a way to provision, like, almost like licenses to operate on the cell network that might make it harder.
Speaker 1:I imagine that they had to, like, effectively, like, buy Russian SIM cards and set them up in the drones. But talk to me about the the actual flight experience of flying remotely over cell because I imagine that it's low it's high latency, low bandwidth. So is this like, when you fly, it's remarkable. It's, like, super precise. I imagine this is a little bit more jerky and a little bit slower.
Speaker 1:And so you could probably take advantage of that, but can you characterize the type of flying that we might have seen if we were on the ground that day?
Speaker 7:Absolutely. So I spent a lot of time looking at the flight videos and the pictures of the FPV drones, and these are not normal drones. These were very special, special builds to accomplish this. So one of the key characteristics of these systems, that are operating off of cellular where you do have high latency control is they are fully stabilized. So they're doing altitude and position hold, which is not actually normal for an FPV drone.
Speaker 7:Normally, you're running on a a firmware called Betaflight, which was developed for racing applications. And it's really precise. It flies really well to a human pilot, but it it doesn't really have built in stabilization. They were using ArduPilot, which is another open source firmware, and it's used widely across drones, but not usually for racing drones or for FPVs. And so you can see that it it actually shows in the on screen display from the videos that they're they're doing that position hold.
Speaker 7:You can tell, it's it's not like a normal FPV drone where they're putting it at kind of any angle. Mhmm. And what was also really interesting is they set these up to not fly into the target forward like you would with a normal FPV strike drone. They descended flat onto the target, and they had a camera on a gimbal that can point down. So what you would usually do is is have a warhead that's pointing basically in the same direction, forward direction as your FPV camera.
Speaker 7:And on these drones, they had two warheads that were basically pipes between the motors. That way they could descend with that camera looking straight down and descend onto the area with the fuel tanks of those bombers. And the other advantage of that is that those drones inherently were flat and and stable when they're sitting in the container. Instead of having one big round warhead on the bottom
Speaker 2:I see.
Speaker 7:They had these two smaller ones on the sides, which made it much easier for them to pack them flat inside the top of that shipping container.
Speaker 2:Interesting. And so having a relatively larger target than a FPV drone would typically had enabled that. Right? They just had to land kind of within a I I don't know. I don't know what the the surface area was, but 20 something feet to really have the effect?
Speaker 7:They were landing on a pretty precise location, but it was a it it was they were able to do that, especially because they knew the targets were stationary. And it's pretty easy to descend, you know, onto a flat wing Yeah. Versus if you're going after a moving vehicle or a soldier or anything like that, descending flat onto them is gonna be really, really hard, especially in that full stabilized mode.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What do you think the pipeline is for identifying targets? Are they using satellite imagery to see that the bombers are not in hangars, and then they can, clock that in?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What wasn't there there was a treaty at some point too that required bombers to be parked Oh, really?
Speaker 1:Sorry. About that. No.
Speaker 2:I think it was Anyway I'll look it up.
Speaker 1:Well, that might be rolling back soon.
Speaker 2:No. I think it did get abandoned already. But there was some historical precedent for nuclear assets needing
Speaker 1:to be Sure.
Speaker 2:Visible.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, yeah, I wanna talk about target identification, and then I wanna talk about just essentially complete offline drone flying and targeting with computer vision and a kind of closed loop. Basically, doing GeoGuesser on the fly and just popping up and realizing, like, look around. Okay. I'm in I'm like I I I can kind of guess that I'm a thousand miles outside of Moscow. There might be a target somewhere nearby.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna fly over there. Okay. I see. I can identify a hangar. I can identify a bomber.
Speaker 2:Before we dive into that, let me give some context so I don't leave people hanging.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there was a treaty that the strategic arms reduction treaty, start one, signed in 1991 by The United States and Soviet Union Mhmm. Included provisions for transparency and verification such as placing strategic nuclear delivery vehicles like bombers at declared satellite observable locations to ensure compliance with the treaty's limits on nuclear arsenal. So it was broadly it was suspended by Russia in 2023, but there was still this sort of global infrastructure for storing these types of assets in a way that you wouldn't store them today if you were sort of building systems, from first principles.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So to answer your
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Your question, John, I have to imagine that satellite imagery and also just, you know, this was a very well planned out plan for a year and a half operation. And it was clear that, Ukrainian SBU was operating inside of Russia on the ground. And so it was pretty easy for them to gather that intelligence of where the bombers were and, you know, when would be the right time to to strike. So I don't think that's the you know, that's not the main challenge here. But there was a lot of talk on on x about using AI and and training models to identify the planes and and people saying that this was, autonomous drones.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:To me, I watch these videos very closely. There is nothing to indicate that these were autonomous drones. It actually, to me, looks very obvious that they're they're fully manually piloted.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And that also makes sense where where you have a a one shot mission, and you spent so much work to set up the cellular network or, you know, these drones that work on the cellular network, it would not make sense to trust that to, some kind of unproven terminal guidance on a completely new set of targets.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 7:Where we will get to is drones that are able to accomplish missions like this completely autonomously.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And what you were kind of alluding to is is, like, this GPS denied navigation world that's getting a lot of attention right now, where basically you have kind of your known map, and then you have what the camera sees, and you're able to match those together and and say, look. This is where I am. Typically, you need to do that in a pretty confined space because you have to preload all of that map data.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:But that's really, really useful if you especially on these these one way strike drones, the larger drones, when you're trying to do deep strike and hit a precise target. And you've accepted the fact that GPS are is just gonna be completely useless because And
Speaker 1:cellular Yeah. As well. Right? Right. So total signal jamming.
Speaker 1:But you maybe don't have to load all of Google Street View from all over the world, but you could load in just this 1,000 mile region in Russia. And then you kind of know that we're going to start here. So you need to be grounding, and then you can compress that ideally with some AI maybe or just some general compression to load as much as possible on the drone. But I'm wondering about, like, if we're if we can't do that without, like, an NVIDIA GPU onboard, that's gonna change the weight and cost and all the economic equations around this. But it sounds like we're maybe close to that already.
Speaker 7:I can speak from the nearest perspective, which is we are specking all of our autonomy to, work on a computer that doesn't kind of ruin the inherent nature of an FPV drone. Right?
Speaker 2:It needs
Speaker 7:to be small enough. It needs to be low enough cost, and that doesn't tend to be an NVIDIA GPU for the systems we build. But you can still do a lot with that. And and there's also these much more traditional, forms of of navigation. You know, inertial navigation has been around for a very long time
Speaker 2:and and
Speaker 7:works quite well. And so you what you wanna do is actually combine these different things together. Sure. And it's going to depend on the the user and the doctrine if they will be okay with drones just fully autonomously going after targets. But, it's it we are getting very close to the point where you could have a low cost FPV style drone that's completing a mission, basically on its own, flying to a certain area, scanning for targets, identifying those targets, and then basically just saying, like, go or no go, and then you just have to click a button.
Speaker 7:That's that's what I think we're actually approaching quite quickly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are there, international treaties around that? I mean, it feels like the the decision to maybe not destroy a military asset that doesn't have a human on board, but certainly to, like, take a human life, that feels like a a pretty distinct Rubicon that would be, discussed in the global order at the or at the UN before it happens. And yet it does seem inevitable as technology prog progresses. But where are we in that type of discussion and, like, Geneva Convention stuff?
Speaker 7:I think the line gets blurry with AI because we've had weapons for a long time where you press the button, and once it fires and it can be fine for hours, you're and you're still never calling it back. Right?
Speaker 1:Like a cruise missile. Right? Exactly.
Speaker 7:And so my opinion here is that the systems that Niras builds and these systems that are are enabled by AI and and, drones in general are are are much more precise and cause much less casualties of civilians.
Speaker 1:True.
Speaker 7:And that idea, I think, is is starting to proliferate. But, it's it's heavily debated. I don't think anyone could give you a a perfectly clear answer of this is exactly what everyone's agreed upon. Because Totally. When you get in a situation like Ukraine where you are just defending your territory and it is an all out war, those things don't seem to matter as much.
Speaker 7:Right? You're just you're you're coming up with the most clever solution to get it done with your limited resources. And so I think it's it's really the only thing that matters is what is actually going to happen in a real conflict. And we can look to Ukraine for that, and we can think about, what potential adversaries The United States has in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does seem like the like, like, if the Ukrainians had the choice to to, you know, like, send a couple more mortar shells and, like, kill 50 Russian people, they would have much rather just destroyed the capital assets of these exquisite bombers that are very hard to build and are and are, you know, not, like, strictly speaking, valuable than human life, but certainly, like, more strategic to the to the war effort. So, yeah, it it makes sense that, like, a precise instrument like a drone would actually favor targeting the the the the bomber, the asset, as opposed to the human, which is
Speaker 2:potentially good. How are you seeing you you mentioned a little bit about how the the warhead this time around was different and that it was flat so it could be packed into the the truck. What what is the what's the general evolution of of of that you're seeing on on the warhead side?
Speaker 7:So the classic image of a Ukrainian FPV drone is a seven, eight, 10 inch FPV drone with an RPG seven warhead Yeah. Tape or zip tied to the bottom, and some type of homegrown initiation board to actually trigger that. And then there's a blasting cap that just goes in the back of the RPG seven. That's, like, the most common setup, and there's a lot of images of that. For a long time now, Ukrainians and Russians have been building purpose purpose made FPV warheads, and these can be, you know, basically from scratch.
Speaker 7:We, on our systems, have warheads that are are very purpose built for the, the intended target. And so that's really just depending on the mission. You're able to quickly swap on, swap off, various different warheads. And I think that's the the ideal scenario where you can support a a wide array of different effects, and swap them out quickly.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Can you talk about the economics between the drone and the munition? It seems like the, like, the the disposable drone was quickly adopted. And is that a function of the fact that the warhead costs more than the drone, or they're roughly $50.50? What's the evolution been there?
Speaker 1:Because you could imagine if you wind up in a world where munition cost is driven to $5 and the drone is still hovering around a couple hundred, well, then it might make sense to release the munition and retry and return the drone even if it's, somewhat low probability.
Speaker 7:Yeah. The costs are roughly $50.50 on an SPV system. And it it really depends, but I I would put it roughly $50.50.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 7:Why you don't want to release the munition is because the point of an FPV drone, it is that it's the cheapest and most precise guidance system you can have.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:So as
Speaker 7:soon as you decouple that, even if it's very close to the target, you're losing precision, and it's not a a great cost to actually blow up the drone. Right? And you we do have bigger bomber drones, which makes sense because those are much more costly
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:And they're able to carry very, very heavy warheads. But to me, the the, reason why an FPV is so good is because it is actually just kind of a guidance system around a warhead.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you say we, you mean the US Armed Forces, not near us?
Speaker 7:I mean Or
Speaker 3:common sense. You're saying interchangeably.
Speaker 7:The collective.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, what what what is in the in the Niros portfolio right now? How is how is scaling production been?
Speaker 1:And I'm interested in specifically knowing, like, what are the downstream what are the frustration points that you've experienced building that manufacturing line that you maybe even expect someone to build a start up around to make it easier? I've been talking to a lot of, defense tech friends who are employees, and I've been telling them, like, if you just go into the the the the most hyperscale, the most aggressive startup, like, if you wanna be a founder, but you crush it there, like, you might discover something that needs its own its own business instead of, like, looking at a market map and trying to decide that way. Like, go experience the pain. So where has the pain been? Where has been the opportunity?
Speaker 1:And and how has that process been scaling up the manufacturing line?
Speaker 7:So speaking to our our current products, we produce Archer, which is our our FPV drone, built on an allied supply chain. It's certified by the DOD for for usage and to be cyber secure and supply chain secure. We have Archer Strike, which is the version of that where we actually integrate the warhead system. And then we have our our various different ground stations for different use cases. Crossbow is more tactical and portable.
Speaker 7:Longbow is our max range, max anti jam ground station. We have other things in the works, but the the main focus has been scaling the production of Archer in the ground station. It was quite painful earlier this year. We went through sort of the first version of a production ramp, which I think for any company ends up being a really, really painful time. For us, it was all of our not all, but we have all of these custom electronics that we we bring in from a board house in Arizona.
Speaker 7:And, we were finding these really high failure rates in some of the designs, and sometimes it wasn't even because of something we were doing. And so we had to to spend a lot of time to get those components to a really high first pass yield. So for a while, it was lots and lots of testing, lots of drones failing at the end of line test. Now we're in a really stable spot, and and that is is going quite well. We're, shipping very consistently about 1,500 drones a month, but ramping that actually very fast.
Speaker 7:On the ground station side, there's also been a lot of engineering challenges. But I think what's more interesting, what you were alluding to is the is the supply chain. And, one of the big things that I think you'll probably hear a lot of drone and defense tech people talking about right now is the supply chain for brushless motors. Yeah. We have worked with a a partner outside of China to scale up their capacity.
Speaker 7:But even right now, that's still a a game where, you know, we're pushing them to go faster, pushing them to make new specs, and and they are not prepared for the volume that we're doing and that we're planning to be doing quite soon. So this is one that I've seen a lot of folks getting interested in. I think there's some really good efforts that are starting to, appear within The US and and allied countries for making brushless motors. But there's probably gonna be need to be a lot of people serving this because there's many different sizes, many different specs. One of the challenges here is also the the neodymium that goes into the motors, and the other raw materials are also typically controlled by China.
Speaker 7:So there's a many, many layer supply chain problem that, you know, one single drone company isn't going to fix on its own.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I talked to a friend who was, doing business with an international founder who had experience in the brushless motor industry in China and was thinking about setting up an operation in America and was asking this this other friend, he go, yeah. Like, we wanna get set up, but, of course, like, we wanna be where the action is because we have a supply chain. We'd love to set up in the Brushless Motor District in America. Like, wherever the district is, where all the brushless motor companies are, like, we'll go set up there so that we're just just walking distance.
Speaker 1:So if we need a specific material and they had to explain, like, no. No. No. No. Like, America doesn't even have a district for that.
Speaker 1:That's not even a concept here. Like, we don't have any companies, but we also don't have the rest of the supply chain. And and China's really, really done a great job of, like, creating not just the power law outcomes like the DJIs of the world, but also all the minor supply chain companies. They're all right next to each other. So if you need some piece of, you know, equipment, you can just go across the street.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like what's happening at El Segundo right now. You guys are building it up where you can go over to Cameron at Rangeview and say, hey, can you help me with this part or something like that? But we're a lot earlier on that curve. So hopefully it's solved. I know people have flagged the brushless motor industry quite early, and so people are definitely working on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 4:I'm sure
Speaker 2:you're gonna have a very busy week.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm sure we weren't
Speaker 2:the first people to Give you a call. Shoot you a text. We appreciate you coming on. Get your thoughts. So thanks for coming on and breaking it down.
Speaker 2:And thanks for doing what you do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 5:Absolutely. Cheers.
Speaker 7:Thanks, See you.
Speaker 1:Quickly, let me tell you about Numeral. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. What is this?
Speaker 2:It's just a cool
Speaker 1:it's just a cool sound effect. Go to numeralhq.com. Put your sales tax on autopilot. Next up, we have Connor Love from Lightspeed coming He's been on the show before. We're gonna get an update from him on all things in the defense tech world, what he's thinking about, how he's seeing things in the government.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream, Connor. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm good. I'm doing alright. Good to be back, guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, he's got a suit this
Speaker 1:time. Oh, looking great.
Speaker 2:Well, you
Speaker 1:love the suit.
Speaker 3:I wanted to I I won't say I dress up just for you, but, you know, I would have taken the suit off far before this, you know, if I wasn't coming on.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Good. Good. Thanks so much for jumping on. Have you been tracking the Ukraine story closely?
Speaker 1:Any insights there? Anything in the portfolio that's at all relevant in the defense tech world? Do you expect a response from the US government or guidance or change to any strategies? Really, any takes on that?
Speaker 3:I mean, first shit, what a what a time to be alive. I mean Yeah. You know, I'm sure your your your Twitter feeds and and your group chats were blowing up, no pun intended, over the weekend. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty crazy.
Speaker 3:I mean, let's be honest. Like, first, I'm not shocked that that the Ukrainians did this. Yeah. I mean, the execution seemed to be flawless from what we can pull from from open source intel. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I do think, though I mean, again, it's not a surprise. The the Ukrainians have been mastering drone warfare for the last handful of years, and, you know, you wanna call it their you know, they called it spider web. Like, this was their this was their Trojan horse. This was their, you know, Israeli beeper. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and the outcome is is is is pretty impressive, to be honest. I mean, what what what from the outside looking in, like, the Russians woke up over the weekend, and they thought they were getting their $4 team orders, and what did they get? They got a thousand, you know, FPV drones, you know, blowing them to smithereens. That's so crazy. It's pretty impressive.
Speaker 3:I mean, my takeaways from this are really twofold.
Speaker 1:Please.
Speaker 3:The first is like, there's never been a clear signal of where warfare is going. And to be clear, what, you know, what I when I view this from, you know, both the the entrepreneurs in my portfolio, but also from my perspective, I mean, world is about, you know, cheap, attributable, a lot of times autonomous systems. And that's, you know, playing out in warfare. That's playing out in other areas of life. And then the second thing is, you know, candidly, it's like it's it's it's really hard to defend yourself at the pace at which things are changing.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And and and again, like, I know we do some things here in The United States and are trying to be on the front end of a lot of this innovation. But when this happens, I think this almost just resets everyone again and says, alright. How do how do we respond to it? And I think it's to your point, it's not a it's not a direct US response.
Speaker 3:It's more of, hey. What do we need to buy? What do we need to develop, you know, for our own fight in in, you know, in some way, shape, or form?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What do you think obviously, you're a venture capitalist, not a geopolitical strategist, but what what what's the right Russian response to this? Is it, hey, we suddenly need to be wary of having cell coverage anywhere near strategic military assets. I mean, it it seems like Yeah. Ukraine and Ukraine in Ukraine's perfect world, they could run this style of attack a bunch and copy and paste and hit other targets, but it feels like something that was dependent on cellular technology that Yep.
Speaker 2:That's something that the the Russians can revoke, you know, fairly fairly quickly. Sure. It'll be inconvenient, but I'm curious if you have have a take.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, you know, to be honest, when I think about how do you defend against this? I think there is, you know, I wouldn't call this the easy answer of just, you know, turning off off the cellular network. I actually think the the only way to do it kind of practically is in layers or in a multitude of of of different ways because, you know, yeah, the, you know, the reality is if you looked at how the Ukrainians carried out this attack, they did so on the local, you know, Russian cell network. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Which, again, I don't think any Russian kind of defense unit, any of these bases was ever thinking that they would have to turn off their own cell network. And then there's just the practicality of how you do it. I mean Yeah. I think there was, what, four or five different attacks that hit all at the same time. What do you what do you do?
Speaker 3:You you turn off the network for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people? And, oh, by the way, this is, like, a dirty little secret that nobody talks about. You know? Yes. You have your military systems that are protected and all that, but a lot of coordination is happening through WhatsApp.
Speaker 3:Lot of coordination on and so all of a sudden, you turn off the cell networks, you're actually inhibiting your own defense, your own response, the the first responder, you know, the you know, getting your own people out of there. So I I think it's a bit more complex than that. And then the last thing I'd say is just like, even if you do this in layers, you know, you you need to be resilient in a way, but you're you're not gonna stop everything. I mean, was just brilliant master class of, you know, again, if if maybe there was a plan we didn't know this, but maybe there's a plan for, you know, a hundred bases, and we only hit five of them. And and and so if you think about just the the broad, you know, geopolitical, you know, geographic coverage you you have to have, think to be a % certain on anything, it's just you it's impossible.
Speaker 3:You can't do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting. There was, like, that Huawei narrative for a while about five g towers and potential backdoors. It was always about it the the narrative is always about spying. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think now you have to consider sabotage, not just espionage. And the idea that if you could even just provision a tower that has some sort of just just if this SIM card comes through, just let it go through. You know? Don't don't worry about it. This this this SIM card can always communicate.
Speaker 1:That's that's very scary. So I wonder
Speaker 3:I mean, by this is a funny aside, but it's it's real. I mean, back when I was in Iraq not long ago, we would go buy, like, burner phones to be able to, like, check the news and Yeah. You know, catch up with your family on on obviously non pertinent things. And every now and then, I was you know, I was in Northern Iraq, and every now and then, I would go just pull up my Google search on this burner phone. And my location happened to be Tehran, Iran almost every time that I would go to search there.
Speaker 3:And I'd be like, oh, this is weird. That's that's actually where I am. So, again, I I think I think it's really hard to do in practicality. Think the the the manner is, like, you just have to have resiliency. You just have to have a bunch of different options, both on the defense and and the offensive side.
Speaker 3:I mean, look at what the Ukrainians are actually using for the majority of their drones in Ukraine right now. Fiber optic cable. They're not even using net networks at at this point too. So
Speaker 2:Can you actually what what what is that info can you go a level deeper on what that fiber optic emphasis Yes.
Speaker 1:Soren mentioned that, but I don't actually understand. Is it like a cable that flies through the air?
Speaker 3:What what Oh, a %. I mean, think about it. It's it's it's arguably unlimited amount of fiber optic, really thin filament cables that all all it's doing is is it's transmitting data to the to to the drone. Yeah. And, you know, you're inhibited, you know, arguably by how how much fiber optic cable, how much how much kind of filament can you lay out?
Speaker 3:And so
Speaker 2:it's actually like a spider web that they're just drawing across the sky. %. So you could have and it's I'm I'm so curious to actually understand, you know, we don't have to talk about it today, but the actual mechanics, is it, like, effectively on a spool that's just Yeah. Running out?
Speaker 5:That's that's literally what it
Speaker 3:looks like. I mean, I I haven't been on the ground in in Ukraine, but when I talk to my portfolio of, you know, founders and companies that either are or have kind of partners there, I mean, you literally drive around the front lines of Ukraine right now, and all you see is just miles and miles of clumps of all this this severed fiber optic cable. So, again, I think the just to zoom back, like, I actually think the takeaway here is that the pace at innovation that's happening both in Ukraine, but, like, let's be honest here. What we are watching in in Ukraine and in Russia is a precursor to what life looks like in The Pacific. And and I think that's, you know, maybe sounds a little bit doomsday in in a way or another.
Speaker 3:But if you don't think that the Chinese are watching what happened to the Russians and and either changing their own kind of defensive plans, you know, building new kind of technology and equipment, you're just you're you're wrong. Like, they are. You know that for a fact.
Speaker 2:I I remember because it was somebody at Andrew was responding to one of these posts, but a Chinese official was posting this video a render. It was a render. A render. We're getting roasted for using a render. But it was like this mothership style aircraft drone that was launching hundreds of drones off the And so that's like the scary thing is, know, could you have, you know, stealth aircraft at at some point that that can actually do the same type of deployment that this these trucks did.
Speaker 1:Like a new b 52 should be dropping FPV drones instead of just untargeted bombs. They'll just be a
Speaker 5:lot more targeted.
Speaker 3:I mean, I think I think there are many I mean, again, I think the the the reframing that's happening both on in my mind as an investor, but, candidly, like, also in the DOD and the in the government side, is before we used to think about deterrence just by, like, hey. Let's buy the big new exquisite system. Let's buy the thing that if we stack, you know, head to head, like, again, I think I I shared this with you guys before. But back when I used to work in The Pacific, we created this really kind of popular and widely distributed unclassified, you know, slide that was literally just all of The US ships stacked up against the Chinese ships. Just like, you go look at the math, it's this crazy crazy metric.
Speaker 3:We're, you know, grossly behind by, you know, hundreds of ships. And that's just one example. I think the the frame the mind the mindset we had then was just like, oh, well, then if we get more systems and we get more of these things that have these big effects, then we're gonna win. We're gonna deter conflict. We're gonna win.
Speaker 3:I just think the paradigm has changed. Mhmm. Now it's about, okay. What are the means that we actually have those effects? And it's not just about, I hate to say it, buying another f 35 or buying another aircraft carrier system.
Speaker 3:It's let's think about this as a parts of a whole thesis and say, okay. If I can build a missile that cost a tenth of what we used to have, if I can use a drone that cost a thousandth of what we have, but have a thousand of them, have 10,000 of them, you actually achieve, if not a better end outcome, in just a different means. And by changing the modicum of how you deliver it, the enemy has to change how they defend against it. So again, I I just I think that's the future of of of where we're going. It's not gonna look just like what happened, you know, over the weekend in Russia, but it's gonna rhyme.
Speaker 3:It's gonna look very similar to that.
Speaker 1:Do you think this speeds up, DOD procurement in any way? I mean, it's certainly such a such a visceral and, like, tractable problem. We've seen Androle working in counter UAS for years, but there's also a ton of other startups taking different approaches. We have the secretary of the army, Dan Driscoll, on, and he was mentioning that they are ready to see demos from even early stage startups. They wanna see things.
Speaker 1:And you think about not even in great power competition with China, but just if there's an army base abroad, they're going to wanna fight against this, and they're gonna want a really robust ensemble of counter UAS technologies.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, why don't you give us, I'm curious how you think of the market map of counter UAS technology because, you know Yeah. We've had Steve Simone on from Allen Control That that can be a great solution if you're on a battlefield. Right? Yeah. But if you can't you can't, you know, protect against an NFL stadium
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:For, like, counterterrorism by, like, shooting, you know,
Speaker 1:rounds Bullets everywhere.
Speaker 2:Into the air in the middle of a city. Right?
Speaker 1:Unless you're in Texas.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Texas.
Speaker 3:I don't know. I I think the way to you know, back to kind of my my defense in, you know, multiple layers comment. I think the way you look at this market is almost like a spectrum. Mhmm. On one end of the spectrum, you have what I would define as, like, the nonkinetic stuff that, in a weird way, can be kinetic.
Speaker 3:But this is, you know, your EW jamming. This is your, you know, laser based systems. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have, like, something as simple as, like, shooting a bullet or shooting a shotgun at something. And I think, again, there's there's a there's a middle ground here, which, you know, you start to take both, like, EW resilient things, but then also, like, you know, you mentioned the Anvil drone from from, you know, Andoril of of a drone flying and hitting another drone. I also just think there's there's this layer that no one else really talks about.
Speaker 3:And when you look at this, you know, what happened over the weekend, there's a full like, how would you have solved this in the first place? You can be like, oh, yeah. We can shut down the cell network. Can get a bunch of shotguns. We can get a bunch of, you know, different systems that shoot down systems.
Speaker 3:Or you could just do better counterintelligence and understand, you know, in some way, shape, or form that this and that's hard to do to be really really honest. Because one truck gets in, you still have an effect in some way, shape, or form. But, you know, in the end, I think, like, the US military is not just gonna buy one of these systems. They're not gonna be like, oh, let's go with Andrew Rolls' Anvil. They're gonna buy a litany of these things.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And if you think about just the the sheer complexity of the locations at which we are at and where our critical infrastructure sits, a single solution doesn't solve the problem. Mhmm. I mean, you know, go talk to you know, I know you guys were talking about the cell network earlier, but you guys should get a famous John Doyle, who's now building a business called Cape, but used to be an early Palantir He's building a private cell network. And part of what he's doing is enabling for know, we call it a pace plan in the military. When you shut everything off, you still have a way to kinda communicate and talk.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, in the end, I think you're gonna see this litany of of many buys as opposed to, like, one solution that that that solves them all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder if there will be almost, like, adversarial camouflage for computer vision based models. Because I mean, I've seen situations where people were worried about facial detection. So they would wear specific makeup with triangles. And it would look very odd to a human.
Speaker 1:But to a computer, it would read as just, I can't process this at all. And so can imagine
Speaker 3:It's crazy because in a way, this isn't new. Go back and look at World War II. What did we do? We built literally wooden towns across the channel because when people were looking or doing it, it looked like it was real. Now it's just, you know, the technology has has fast forward so far.
Speaker 3:But but, you know, in in in the end, I think, again, it's one of these things where it's like, you know, there's gonna be no single solution that that fits them all. I do think that and this is, like, worth commenting. Mhmm. I think a lot of times when we look at, you know, we as investors or entrepreneurs building or even just the general public thinks that the DOD has truly autonomous systems. And and the reality is is, like, you have humans in the loop on 99% of what's happening, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker 3:I just think the scary thing is, like, you know, call it our our doctrine, call it our Geneva Convention laws, call it whatever you wanna call it. But the reality is when shit hits the fan with China, do you think they're gonna have a human in the loop and making decisions of how to kill or not kill something? They're just gonna kill things. And and so to me, it's like we, you know, we need to be thoughtful about how we do it. We are a beautiful democracy who cares about life and and kind of human nature.
Speaker 3:But at the same time, like, we're not really doing autonomous systems yet. And that just makes me a little scared, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Put this in the context of DJI and TikTok. The TikTok ban was always a little abstract. It was like, well, it's kind of brain rot for kids, and that's not great. But people watch Instagram reels, that seems maybe equally as bad or maybe fine.
Speaker 1:But maybe they're steering the algorithm to influence our it was all very, like, four steps away from something bad. And so it kind of didn't catch ground and didn't really get off the ground. But DJI has been in the news as a potential ban target. This seems like it concretizes the feeling of danger so much more intimately than TikTok, where it was like, oh, well, like, the, you know, the CCP could find out that you are into luxury sports cars or or something, and they could do something with that. They could blackmail you.
Speaker 1:But that's very different than drones explode. And so maybe we don't want drones. So, do you have any takes
Speaker 3:on that? Even even more important, it's like, look who's using those drones. I mean, again Oh, this is this is what we did. I mean, you know, I was in the military not too long ago, but I remember on some of my first training exercises, this this new team, and I don't even know who
Speaker 7:they were off the top
Speaker 3:of my head, but they came to us and they're like, hey. We're gonna try this new thing that's drone warfare. I was like, oh, shit. We developed a new smaller predator or something like that. They literally just pulled the DJI out of a box.
Speaker 3:They said, hey, go screw around with this in the woods. And, like, we did. It was, like, super cool. We invaded on some stuff. But I think you're right.
Speaker 3:It gets super scary when we're taking the feeds and the data and the information from that drone. You know, not necessarily touching it, putting it into our classified system because there are there are controls for But, again, even even some of the you know, again, you should talk to, you know, Soren. You should talk to the Orca guys. You should talk to, you know, Andy from Vector about, like there there's a lot of open source tools that are actually used as think everything from, you know, navigating, you know, the the fight computers of these drones. But Yep.
Speaker 3:Even in those situations, like, we just have to be thoughtful. Again, I am on the side of again, when I was in the military, everyone would get so scared about classifications, and no one wanted to get in trouble for this reason or the other. The reality is, if you're so scared about using some type of tech, then you're gonna lose. It's gonna be the different way. It's not gonna be the information leakage way.
Speaker 3:So there's some middle ground of, like, we need to just set a policy, and and hopefully the policy is broad enough. And then, oh, by the way, hopefully, like, US Builders are building at the same time so we can build a capacity that actually meets it. But, you know, the the story is not clear here in the future other than, you know, we need a US version of that to be able to to to operate in similar ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The capacity issue is so interesting because it's like, even if DJI is just a friendly consumer drone company, by virtue of buying a hundred million dollars worth, like like, pull this massive demand signal to scale the supply chain results in an industrial capacity that is dual use, even if the products that reach America are never dual use.
Speaker 3:I mean, this you know, again, I said I'd put on a suit for you, but, I was talking with a with a with a member this morning, a member of congress this morning, and this is actually what we spent 90% of our time talking about, which is just, okay, say we all agree and say the DOD in congress fixes our acquisition pathway, say these are the right things to buy. You can't just snap your fingers and build these things. I mean, this takes time. I mean, go look at what what Andrew is doing in Ohio. I mean, I think they're doing it at a pace better than anybody else.
Speaker 3:But, like, same thing with Saranac on the on the boat building side too. But it it it takes time. You know what I mean? You can't just have thousands of systems tomorrow. You need to make decisions today Yes.
Speaker 3:That are doing everything from the supply chain to again, like, you know, Congress gets gets a little scared sometimes, or the DOD gets a little scared sometimes. It's like, well, if you're not a prime, we can't trust you to give you a bunch of money up front to develop it. And finally, that that's, like, changing. That culture is changing and saying, like, actually giving a hundred million dollars to Castilian or Andoril or whoever in advance of them building it is probably a 10 times better answer than, you know, giving it to a prime, but we're not there yet. Like Yeah.
Speaker 3:We're still pretty far off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Soren said they're the highest producing US manufacturer right now.
Speaker 1:In their class?
Speaker 2:And they're putting up 1,500 a month or something
Speaker 1:like But but the Ukrainians built millions.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They're putting up 4 thousands a day. Like Wow. In just a and again, it's it's a it's a different ecosystem. People come to me a lot, and we're just like, well, isn't the US DOD gonna do this? And, you know, part of me says, like, no, because I I know how slow we move.
Speaker 3:The other part of me just thinks that, like, there is some value in, you know, what we call interoperability. And, I think that's kind of somewhat an old school way of thinking, but, like, you need to know that if you give a thousands of one type of drones to, you know, one unit, that the next unit is gonna fight in a similar way where, you know, the tactics and techniques kind of all all align. Because in the end, like, what we what we aren't talking about with these drones, what we aren't talking about with these new missiles or systems is, like, there's an entire downstream integration, and there's a training that happens. It's not just like, okay. Once we have them in the warehouse, we press a button and we win the war with China.
Speaker 3:Like, no. We need to train, integrate, and and, again, that's just another problem. Again, like, there are some companies trying to trying to go attack this. Like, Andy at Vector is doing this. He calls it, like, warfare as a service model, which I think is, like, really interesting.
Speaker 3:It looks more like training with a little bit of tech. But Mhmm. Yeah. I just think there are big gaps. And, you know, I'm optimistic about the future, but, you know, I have a, you know, a one year old daughter.
Speaker 3:It's like, this is what I think about. Like, this is what keeps me up at night, man.
Speaker 1:Talk to talk to me about nominal. Any news there? And and really, like, how does that type of product and interface with, like, just the the the general news and tenor in DC right now?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I I I know you guys have had Cam on your show Yeah. A couple times, the the the founder of NOBINAL. Yeah. I think I think what we're what's super interesting is we are seeing this wave of new hardware development in The US.
Speaker 3:And historically, it's been in a manner and in a way that's very much like, hey, here, Lockheed. Here's your hundreds of millions of dollars. Go build. Go iterate slowly. And now we're getting you know, what looks more like the SpaceX, like, build the thing in flight.
Speaker 3:I mean, this is what Castilian's doing. This is what many other companies are doing. And so there needs to be this, like, software, you know, both, you know, telemetry and and ops you know, observation layer. But it's also just like the tools that if we wanna get to this end state of having a million drones in the hands of our warfighters, having hundreds of thousands of of, you know, autonomous systems, having thousands of missile systems, you kinda need to build all the infrastructure and enable it below it. That's both on the supply chain side, like I was talking about, but also on the software and development side.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. So I just think what you're seeing, you know, nominal is one example, but there are many other examples of this, is, like, you're seeing the picks and shovels built out for this ecosystem. I guess there will be big winners in, like, the hardware categories that's owning the product. But I think there's going to be just as many winners on the downstream, both infrastructure side, and call it supply chain, call it software, call it whatever. And again, I just I'm optimistic about the market.
Speaker 3:I'm not necessarily optimistic about the outcome of our security and safety in the world. But, you know, that's my job as a venture capitalist, I guess.
Speaker 2:That's rough. Always paranoid. What was your reaction to the meta Andoroll news last week around VR? I'm sure it wasn't a surprise. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm also curious if you think we're gonna see more if that gives, you know, other big tech giants kind of full permission to to lean in to that kind of partnership.
Speaker 3:Yeah. VR is a weird one for me personally. And again, like back in my time in service, there was this, I'd call it a research project through Army Research Laboratory, where they were trying to develop, and again, really old school, you know, bad, you know, VR at the time, but use it for, like, planning purposes. And the idea is, like, in the military, you get out these two dimensional maps, and you look at something and say, like, hey. This is how we're gonna plan.
Speaker 3:This is where forces are gonna be. And it's it's really slow. It's it's obviously not optimal when you talk about terrain and kind of other things. So I was part of a unit in the Pacific actually where we were testing this back then. And I remember taking it to, like, the brigade commander or the guy who, I don't know, was in charge of 5,000 or so soldiers.
Speaker 3:And, I have this I still have this photo of on my phone of him with these glasses on, like, standing there being like, what do I do with this thing? You know? And, again, like, it's part of this is a cultural thing that we need to shift. Yeah. But, you know, I I think when I see the the you know, Palmer, you know, going back with Mark, and I put a it puts a smile on my face because to me, it's like, this is the best of what we need.
Speaker 3:We need the best technology companies and the best defense technology companies working together in some way, shape, or form. And the reality is where, you know, ten years ago or more than that when I was in and we tried this and technology wasn't there, I know for a fact that, you know, the solution and the hardware and the software around it is 10 times better now. So I look forward to see what Andro comes out with. I mean, shit. If anybody's gonna do it, Palmer is probably the right guy to do it.
Speaker 3:But Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We'll see. You know? I I haven't seen the outcome yet, So I'm I'm excited to give it a try.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I really just feel like if it's anyone's game to win, it's Palmer. It's like the perfect merger of everything he's done in his career.
Speaker 2:In my view, he was going to win that category. It was just whether or not he would have to reinvent the full production capacity, reinvent the technology that he
Speaker 1:already created. Patented there and gave to them. Yeah. What is your take on Golden Dome? What companies or or industries are you tracking related to that?
Speaker 1:Obviously, we have a missile defense system, but we're planning on ramping it up. Yeah. What what what do you think is interesting if that project kinda gets off the ground?
Speaker 3:I mean, I'll I won't bury the lead. I don't think anyone knows what Golden Gnome is or isn't Mhmm. Which is okay. I mean, the thing that I give President Trump a lot of credit for is Mhmm. He has these big audacious things, and he just goes and wills them into happen.
Speaker 3:And, again, I'm not an expert in from the inside the DOD, but, like
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That's how you have to get a lot of stuff done. I mean, you have to almost make it not too big to fail, but put the cart before the horse in order to to to align both congress and DOD support behind it. I think from a from a principled kind of, like, what can it do perspective, it's an absolute no brainer. I mean, again, like, to to to look at the technology that has happened in Israel and to understand that, like, one, Israelis developed that, but, you know, we we we had, you know, a a, you know, a say and an input in that as well, that we don't have that in The United States just seems that, you know, again, other things that make me feel uncomfortable. I think the reality is is that there's there's gonna be a lot of different components of this that still need to be built.
Speaker 3:I mean, there's there's an entire space component. There's an entire, you know, kind of missile and effector component. I mean, in a perfect world, when we can see and know everything coming, we actually need to be able to do something to it. And if you think we have enough missiles to respond to, you know, everything we see, potentially, you're wrong. So, I think it's a goes back to comments on my statement before.
Speaker 3:These things take time, and I'm glad that president Trump has these audacious goals in getting it done before his third term. I just think it's it's arguably, in my opinion, if done correctly, it will be a Manhattan project like undertaking, where it's gonna take multiple different depart it's not just going to space missile defense and saying, hey. Solve this problem for us. I mean, this is gonna create a new line of budget. It's gonna create new kind of work streams.
Speaker 3:It's gonna need new congressional support. The beauty is we got a bunch of awesome space companies and a bunch of defense companies that can respond to it. I just don't think anyone knows what it looks like yet. So excited and optimistic, I would say.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. Like, as soon as we as soon as we were talking about Golden Dome and, like, the space based ICBM weapons, like, big guys, Now we need, a golden spider web defense system to, like, stop, like, the local drones and do
Speaker 3:I mean, it's layered. Like I said, you know, you know, to some extent, missile defense system. I mean, probably not with you know, don't have the full specs, but probably not with the height of those drones we're we're kind of fine at.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 3:But you fly a one way drone a thousand kilometers or, you know, 3,000 kilometers, you throw it up high enough in the air, like, a % something like, you know, Golden Dome can help with that.
Speaker 1:It feels like a missile attack, honestly. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, again, like, this is the last thing I'd leave you with, which is I do fundamentally believe back to my both spectrum on defense. There's also a spectrum on offensive weapons too. Like, everyone thinks that the answer is a $10,000,000 missile, and that's the most exquisite best thing that's gonna save us every time. If we can get better both, you know, on the on on the low rain excuse me, on the low cost, high performance missiles and in drone based systems
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I actually don't even think we need those, you know, hundred million dollar, 10 million dollar systems in the end. But, again, something optimistic to look forward to.
Speaker 1:It's great. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is fantastic conversation. Always a guys.
Speaker 3:Alright. We'll chat soon.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 2:great trip. Thanks, Connor.
Speaker 1:Bye. Let's tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks.
Speaker 2:And Let's
Speaker 1:have Melissa in the in the studio. She has some massive news, and we're gonna need to hit that size gong. Can you introduce yourself? We're welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Let's go. We're gonna have
Speaker 1:to hit the real size gong. So, break it down. What are you announcing today, and why should we hit this gong?
Speaker 4:Yes. We are coming out of stealth with Neddick today and announcing our $20,000,000 fundraise from whoo. Let's founders, fun and Greylock. And Mike will be amongst amazing other investors and visionary founders and growing our team to surpass
Speaker 1:Hit the wide. Hit the wide.
Speaker 2:Hit the wide.
Speaker 4:Go for it. Best one of the best.
Speaker 1:Here we go. Back to background.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 4:Thank you. Thank you, Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1:Now that we've gotten the important stuff out of the way, what does the company do?
Speaker 4:Yes. We work with the backbone of America. Okay. We're building for the essential services industries like home services. Podcasting.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exact. You guys are essential. That's why I'm here. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I could be doing a lot of different stuff today. But, you know, we give them an AI revenue engine so that when they are these are industries, even though they're super important, they're affected by labor shortages, external circumstances, and demand changes, physical infrastructure. So when they have high demand, we help them handle it. So you get all they get all the dollars and help their end users. And when they're low on demand, we help them generate demand.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:So that you can always maximize the revenue.
Speaker 1:What what is a good example customer? Like, we we hear about these SMBs in, like, this abstract context, but is that is it actually, like, one guy who owns an LLC who has a few employees, or is the median customer more of a, like, small business or medium sized business with, dozens or even hundreds of employees? And then I wanna walk through how they actually use the product. Is it is it replacing or augmenting an existing kind of Salesforce or or someone that they have internally, or is it just, kind of helping individuals do more with less?
Speaker 4:So we work with actually pretty large customers that would be owned by private equity
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:From, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to a few billion, of dollars, as well as smaller companies that are around, like, $1,020,000,000 dollar revenue size.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So across the board, we started with the larger ones to really, you know, demonstrate the impact of our platform. At the end, this is also a business. But now, actually, this is a life life passion for me because I do wanna help with smaller companies as well. That's how I came across this problem as a customer myself for HVAC in my own home. So we just announced a very large, partnership with Nexstar Network to be able to help a thousand companies that are more on the mid market side as well.
Speaker 4:And for the smaller you know what? We wanna support everybody. I think we would start with some materials for them to get ready for AI before maybe they roll us out, but, you know, we wanna really help across the board. So one example would be how are they using it. They're actually completely integrated with our platform.
Speaker 4:So we would use first party signals about their customers as well as third party signals, like, find from weather to, you know, really property information or different types of things to help any of the customers that are coming in so they get help immediately. Mhmm. And these are complex jobs. Right? Like, there's actually quite a bit of information you need to collect to be able to deploy the right labor.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And then based on that data, we predict the user's next need. You know? So I'm almost building for myself. I'm like, I would never think about these things.
Speaker 4:For me, I wish somebody told me, Melissa, you're gonna need this next month because, you know, I don't know. A storm is coming or San Francisco weather is again terrible, so you gotta fix this. So and then we turned that into predicting the next need for their end users so that the companies can really cultivate, the relationship with their customers, but based on need versus random promos. Right?
Speaker 1:So everyone wants everyone wants their HVAC system, like, tuned up before the big heat wave hits. Exactly. You can do essentially outbound sales to existing clients and potentially new clients before that hits with with, like, the correct information, the correct pitch.
Speaker 4:But Exactly.
Speaker 1:What is the actual medium? Are you sending text messages, emails, phone calls, all of the above?
Speaker 4:Yeah. For inbound, we're really integrated across the board on all channels. So voice, text, online widgets, web chat, third party integrations.
Speaker 1:Okay. Everything.
Speaker 4:Because revenue doesn't come from one channel. Right?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:It comes from all channels. And, you know, cut the same customer. If I'm in a meeting right now, I might be texting an essential service provider right now even though I'm busy. But a few hours later, I might call them. Right?
Speaker 4:Yep. On the outbound campaigns, we really do see a lot of success with especially text since it's much more respectful. So we started from there, and we'll be rolling out more channels.
Speaker 1:So I'm I'm I'm intimately familiar with all the tooling in email. You have Mailchimp and all the different a AWS, SES, and all the different systems that have built up to make that easy. And I can imagine how you would automate that. Talk to me about automating a phone call. It feels like with Whisper, transcription and then, text to speech, we're now kind of past the Turing test on that.
Speaker 1:But are you building stuff yourself? Are you training your own models? Are you partnered with other AI companies to provide that piece of the stack, or is that so integral that you're handling it yourself?
Speaker 4:This is actually the integral part of this, that certain technologies have passed the Turing test. But, actually, for really, you know, mission critical workflows like this where you are absolutely, utility and you can't drop, all the, work and, you know, the engineering really focus goes to the orchestration. Right? So what does it mean is that, like, when depending on whatever workflows that you're handling, which models are the best? When they're not the best, how can you actually fine tune only for that task?
Speaker 4:And how can you make sure not only it looks good in a demo, we actually a culture, we don't ever do demo. We show real deployments and let you test. But it it's very different out there when you're talking to somebody with an accent or that person doesn't even know what they need. Right? It's actually very complex.
Speaker 4:So all of the engineering work not only goes, you know, improving and integrating machine learning advancements, but also doing our own orchestration, fine tuning, as well as evaluations so that you can be like utility and really reliable when you're replacing these systems and augmenting the teams that rely on this. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's the process like selling AI to SMBs? We've had a bunch of people on the show that sell to larger corporates, Fortune 500. There's an excitement from the Fortune five hundred to just buy AI Yep. Even if they're unclear of what the value is.
Speaker 2:I could imagine you see two scenarios. One, where owners or operators are excited about potential efficiency or more revenue, more leads. But at and then another side which is like, well, I don't know about this AI stuff.
Speaker 1:Why are you doing accent, Jordy? Why are
Speaker 4:doing accent? You actually you know, you'll be surprised. This is why I'm building for these industries. These are probably the best founders and entrepreneurs I have ever met in my life, and I'm in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I worked very hard to get here. And now all these founders, truly, they are extremely ROI oriented.
Speaker 4:They're extremely customer oriented, and incentives are very aligned. Right? Like, they only do better if they serve their end customer better, and I only do better if I help them do better. So it's extremely aligned. So we actually don't see you know, they might ask questions, but
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Everybody is extremely open about it. They know that that future is here. They can stay behind. It's not like the enterprises you're a little bit alluding to where, let me just put this on my board deck and have, like, a a few million spend here and there to show how AI oriented I am, and then they won't actually use it. No.
Speaker 4:These people actually are absolutely incredible and partner with us so closely to see it in numbers. Right? We let them even track it. This is how much you generated from only AI handled jobs or interactions. So we've been very happy about it, and it's the same from a $20,000,000 revenue business to a billion dollar revenue business.
Speaker 4:Obviously, there might be a few steps here and there, but I am pretty happy about how incredible of entrepreneurs I'm working with in this industry. I think I choose, to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You mentioned I always I always think it's it's funny when when people in Silicon Valley, like, look at these maybe trade businesses and they think, oh, I can just, you know, get a better
Speaker 1:Yeah. Some software. And it's like,
Speaker 2:you realize the person that was operating this business for twenty years is like a is like a fixture of their community.
Speaker 1:Like, those are like They
Speaker 2:are extremely hardworking. They're working fourteen hours
Speaker 6:a Yeah.
Speaker 4:Their overnight success comes over twenty years. Yes. Not just like various
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I don't know. And like tonight in my bedroom I built this and now I
Speaker 1:have my 14 Yeah.
Speaker 4:Went viral and now
Speaker 1:I'm the hot kid on the block and
Speaker 4:all the VC. And in terms it's their families, right? Totally. Everybody really investing investing in this. And even when you work with a larger company or owned by it, like, everybody's truly invested in this.
Speaker 4:To give you a sense, like, I have brainstorming calls with my customers on Sundays. They'll call me with really cool ideas, and I'm like, interesting. So So try this. The next day, I'll follow-up with a try this one. Try this demo.
Speaker 4:Let's see if you like it and then we'll actually launch it this week for you. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do
Speaker 1:see So I
Speaker 4:absolutely love that.
Speaker 2:What what's how are are you do you guys leverage your own tools at all? Or do you have your own internal tooling to be more efficient? I I from what I can see, you don't have very many employees and Yeah.
Speaker 1:And What do you use for outbound?
Speaker 2:Very quickly.
Speaker 4:I know. Hopefully, you'll help with that. We're hiring across the board, especially with for our engineering, but also go to market teams now and product. So we actually do utilize various tools internally just to increase engineering output. But also still, especially when it comes to various coding tools, I will say because we ship for really mission critical workflows, you need to make sure that it might, like, accelerate you and augment you, but you still have to make sure everything is ready for production because we're handling a lot of large volume customers that are really deploying these services to help somebody maybe after a storm.
Speaker 4:Like, a few weeks ago in Saint Louis, it happened after the tornadoes. So we have to make sure everything is really getting that check from us and, like, the best engineers we have hired across MIT, Stanford, scale, Palantir, HRT. But, yeah, I mean, if you're a fool if you're not using, augmented tools for your team. And you are right. We are a small team, and that is by design because I think all of us are also here to create the best things out of nothing, right, and really keep our culture and grow in that way.
Speaker 1:You mentioned you worked really hard to get to Silicon Valley. Can you give us a little bit of the the journey in the background to get here?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I will say building a company is almost as hard as getting, to here from a small town in Turkey. I grew up in the Mediterranean. This was, a tiny town actually in Turkey on the Western Coast. And, yeah, I think it is an incredible community, but there is absolutely, like, no opportunity, especially for someone like me who is focused on math and computer science.
Speaker 4:So I tried to first leave. Actually, I went to boarding schools that I got in starting age 13. So I haven't lived at home since 13, and then spent some time in India when I got into United World Colleges actually for two years. And I thought that's how I would learn English because my English really sucked. And I did.
Speaker 4:You know? I'm doing pretty fine. And, yeah, from there, it's been my dream to come to Stanford, and I didn't know anything about it, actually. I only saw it through a summer camp I came to on a scholarship. And, even my flights were funded by thousands of emails I sent to businessmen in Turkey, and one of them responded and sent me here to California.
Speaker 4:That's right. And when I saw it, I was like, I have to be here. And since then, there is no, you know, easy way of explaining this. It's you I I think probably I fought tooth and nail, to be able to, really get here. And I'm glad because I love this place.
Speaker 4:And mainly for me, it's about the people. Everybody's interested in your ideas. Everybody's interested in making them possible for the world. And if anything, I wanted to change one part of it when it came to my own company is that I wanna build for the real world, not just for Silicon Valley or other startups. I want to build for America and then and the world, like this country that gave me a lot of opportunity, and then, hopefully, globally, the real world economies that run everybody's lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know you worked at scale. Can you talk a little bit about human in the loop or business process outsourcing or any sort of, like, the centaur model of AI and how that might play a role in your current or future road map?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So it actually, labeling does not play a lot of role for our road map. Like, right now, obviously, it was big, especially when you're improving these models. There was a lot of labeling, and then it turned to expert labeling. Now you really focus these models in terms of how is it gonna be better in physics or coding, etcetera.
Speaker 4:But for us, human in the loop actually comes from, collaborating very closely with the teams of our customers because they will have actually, many times what we see in these industries that they won't have, like, BPOs, what we call, or outsourced call centers. Sometimes they might have, but they'll have also internal teams, which are very valuable resources. So what they can do with us is that they spend their time only for mission critical interactions when they need to take over and actually see the context from the conversation about the person, about the home so that they don't have to repeat anything. They can build rapport immediately. And for the remainder of time, since AI is really handling everything else, that they can focus on more more important and high leverage tasks, whether you're helping with accounting, whether you're helping with actually making intelligent business decisions about where to grow.
Speaker 4:And believe it or not, a lot of people start from there to build their careers in these industries. For example, our engagement manager management lead, she actually joined us from our earliest customers, and she started as a CSR. Right? Don't worry. They're amazing Spilled has more.
Speaker 4:And, you know, she was making a location change. We did everything right. I love, you know, like, you immediately coming into that. Did you do anything?
Speaker 2:No. No. I mean, it's great. It's like, you could just say, we're we're gonna take your your star employee, but we'll give you the greatest software that you've ever experienced,
Speaker 4:and we're gonna get you Now they also get to interact with her, but
Speaker 1:just now Yeah.
Speaker 4:Supported by us. Off balance Alright.
Speaker 1:It's off balance sheet r and d now.
Speaker 4:Exactly. I'd like to think that they got a lot of tools from that, but she started actually as a call center employee Sure. Twenty years ago. And she's so smart and incredible that really built the domain knowledge and went to consulting from there and a VP of customer experience and really built, right, her career. That's what we want for the people.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, actually focus on the things that you can shine in and, build your career in, not just the menial tasks you don't want to do and only spend time on customer intake.
Speaker 1:Sure. Talk about, business model, pricing model. Salesforce has been Mark Benioff has been talking about, cost per resolution in the customer service perspective. There's other, companies that are doing consumption based pricing, seat based pricing, what's working, what's not, what are you seeing, resonate with your customers best?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think we don't do, cost per resolution. It's actually an interesting pricing model, but I think works better for customer support companies for tech when it's all about tickets. And even then, I think it's a little bit iffy because, I mean, what's the resolution? You're able to close the ticket.
Speaker 4:How many of us have been in a situation where I'm, like, getting this automated email that my ticket is closed, and I'm like, well, I am not close. You know, I am not done here. Like, I gotta I need that help. So for us, we really work in enterprise contracts with our customers. So, they get on a there's a platform Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Kinda package that they choose based on which products they wanna use and how expanded of channels that they want. And then on top of that, they have a volume package that they add so that they can spend it across any channel that they liked. And this also gives them that ability that we're not just signing and goodbye because in a lot of these industries or quite frankly in any company, AI is not just like I got on it and now it works. It doesn't. You really have to make it work and ensure that it is working for their operational workflows.
Speaker 4:So it gives us the ability to do that and closely partner. And then as we go to mid market, that was something well, that's why I was super excited about this Nexstar partnership because they have decades long experience in these industries, and they have accumulated so much knowledge that today we're able to deploy a netic tenant with that knowledge for their members so that, you know, a lot of the like, maybe they won't have any lift to do. They can really roll it out directly from the business insights they would be getting from an amazing membership like them anyways. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. So is there was, like, a meme for a long time about, like, the the search fund gonna buy a business, gonna do a roll up in in these, like, SMB markets. Is that has have these have these markets been already rolled Like, is it are are we past
Speaker 4:that? Yeah. There's quite a bit of roll ups. I'm sure you'll be interested in it next, you know, to be the annual.
Speaker 1:No. We're gonna roll up all the podcasts.
Speaker 4:See, I'm sure. I'm sure you're looking into it already. Yeah. Yes. There's quite a bit of roll ups, to be honest.
Speaker 4:It, like, really became popular recently because there's quite a bit of capital out there. As you also know, even from venture capital, there's so much capital that they're
Speaker 1:looking Yeah. Things are crossing over and being, yeah, we'll play
Speaker 4:as hard. But that one could go wrong. Deploy. Yeah. Only either deploy cut the startups that don't need it or do roll ups.
Speaker 4:Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 4:Yep. So, yeah. There are quite a bit, but I think, again, the winning strategy becomes even if you have a roll up, right, it's a lot about how are you creating value. Mhmm. What tools are you using?
Speaker 4:What tools are you not using? What where was the company or this combination of companies you have gotten when you got them? Yeah. And how are you really implementing changes to serve your customer better? So we work with various, companies that are owned by incredible private equity partners.
Speaker 1:All of us private equity. Thank you. Yes. Finally getting some recognition. We love private
Speaker 2:equity on
Speaker 1:the show.
Speaker 4:Yeah. They don't get any recognition
Speaker 6:at all. Nothing.
Speaker 5:They're getting
Speaker 2:enough credit. They private equity is really the backbone of America I because it finances.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 4:It totally is. And it is.
Speaker 2:S and Bs.
Speaker 4:Right? Yes. Yes. I'll tell you what happened. I think, twenty years ago, maybe, know, it was all around in all of these industries, it doesn't have to be one, a lot of companies to be picked up.
Speaker 4:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Totally. Today, that's not the case.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Course. Right? Like, you're not really looking for that perfect business. Everything is stellar and, like, waiting for you to be picked up in Mhmm. Somewhere in the heartland of America.
Speaker 4:So I think private equity actually have to be very innovative, and I think they're obviously already numbers focused. So they are looking for true partners, and that's how many of our engagements started with these companies. Like, actually, it wasn't even about our company. It was about talking about AI honestly, straightforwardly. What's gonna work for you?
Speaker 4:What's not gonna work for you? And I think they are really seeing that for value, they have to change. It's not just about using one playbook, and it works for you for forty years. And, they realize now that a lot of them have to make it work for these companies with the right partners and, you know, take good decisions. So I think I love that we are coinciding with that change.
Speaker 4:Right? So it's kinda harder to compete there as well because everybody has capital and not much to really roll up around. Right?
Speaker 1:Well, let's hear for the capital. I mean, at least there's a lot of capital. Congratulations on your round. Thanks so much for coming on. Tremendous momentum.
Speaker 1:Conversation.
Speaker 4:Thank you for having me, and we're so excited to be here, especially for the two people who also work very hard. Especially you, John, have built companies that optimizes performance left and right with Soylent and Lucy. Love
Speaker 2:to do
Speaker 4:it. Probably, we take that from from that culture.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Well, we'll talk to you
Speaker 4:send some.
Speaker 1:You know? Thanks so much
Speaker 4:for Exactly.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker 4:Thank you. We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 4:See you.
Speaker 1:Next up, have Jordan Schneider from China Talk coming on.
Speaker 2:Jordan. We're gonna ask him An absolute dog.
Speaker 1:Is is China important to talk about?
Speaker 2:Break it down for Who's talking about China?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who's talking about China? Jordan, welcome to
Speaker 4:the stream.
Speaker 1:Jordan. How are you doing? Can we get a sound Oh,
Speaker 6:these guys.
Speaker 1:Oh, we got the horse snake. Oh. That's the year of the horse. What year is it in China?
Speaker 2:I don't know. We're we're playing around with sound effects. You're playing around with backgrounds too.
Speaker 3:I think it's the rat.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're the rat? That
Speaker 6:seems like a lot fun. Last year was dragon, so it's like it's worst Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. I wanna start with the victory lap. I said I said tariff war gonna not be a big thing. We're not gonna be talking about it in four four years. Push back.
Speaker 6:We're not gonna be talking about it in four years?
Speaker 1:So so so when you came on last time, we were talking about how it seemed like complete doom and gloom. Like, the Trump tariffs were absolute chaos. It was complete disaster. And I was saying that, like, this is within Trump's control, and so he could potentially roll them back, and the market would go back up and everyone would be breathing a sigh of relief like, oh, okay. That was a crazy time, but we're not in this insanely high tariff regime, so things aren't that bad.
Speaker 1:And we would look back on it like we looked at the previous trade war, which was a crazy time but did not, like, permanently change the structure of America. And so it feels like we we we we walked to the edge, and then we walked back from the edge. And it's less of a story now.
Speaker 6:But am I right or wrong? Let's be clear. Who's who's walking him back from the edge? The justice system. The supreme court is gonna take the decision out of his hands.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:Sure. And then it'll just kind of be slower and more awkward, and his lawyers will actually have to do work to write these section two two thirty two investigations, which, like, I guess, they'll just have chat GPT. Right? Because, like, there are no lawyers right now and they
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And USTR. But come on, man. I mean, look. Yeah. Two days ago, like, some reporter asked about the taco trade, and then he said, fuck it.
Speaker 6:We're going back up to 50.
Speaker 3:So Okay. Look. I mean, it's
Speaker 6:the the the story the saga is not done. We have four years of this. Yeah. Old men don't change their habits all that often. This is clearly the thing he enjoys most about
Speaker 2:the I've taught I've taught old dogs new tricks
Speaker 1:All the time.
Speaker 2:All the time.
Speaker 1:I got ten year old Newfoundland at home. He just
Speaker 2:literally just
Speaker 1:got balance the ball in his nose. He's he's doing great. No. No. I hear you.
Speaker 1:What Bring
Speaker 6:him the pod.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He should
Speaker 2:he should.
Speaker 1:Well well well then, what else is is driving the news? Obviously, the, the Ukrainian drone attack is very interesting in the Ukraine Russian theater. Is there a reaction from your community in China world yet, or are we waiting to hear how that plays out? Already, we're seeing defense tech companies talk about counter UAS more seriously, DOD procurement modernization. You could imagine that this brings DJI into focus, but how should we be framing it within the the China lens?
Speaker 6:I got a, I I got a line from a group chat. Please. What, don't ask a woman their age, and don't ask a TEAL funded defense tech startup where they get their batteries from. Okay. Spicy.
Speaker 6:Look. I don't I don't know. I mean, it's it's a it's a brave new world we're walking into, and I'm worried that we're not ready. I think there are definitely a lot of advantages that The US has, but one of the great ones is manufacturing and and sort of and and, like, speed and agility of procurement. And if you look at what's happened in Ukraine over the past two years, like, the amount of iterations
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:That all of these drones have gone from and the different electronic warfare, like, and counter responses and the the sort of the the the size and scope and, of these different drones and being able to scale up manufacturing of them. And then now we have fiber optic drones, and now we have, like, things to cut the the cables of the fiber optic drones. I mean, just the the the speed at which you have to innovate when you are fighting and dying is so much faster than what The US, does. And because, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not against high, you know, were not against, like, great powers. Thank god.
Speaker 6:The sort like, the new things that the enemy was able to bring to the battlefield was much less challenging, and you could kind of be, like, fat and lazy and still mostly be okay and not have Well,
Speaker 2:I mean, even even IEDs massively transformed
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Battlefield at the time. And that was another kind of asymmetric trade in some way where, you know, a small homemade device Yeah. Could could take out, you know, cause huge loss of life. But but your Totally. Is totally taken.
Speaker 2:It wasn't like 4,000,000 drones a year being produced and flying through the sky and and taking
Speaker 1:There was just so many IEDs that that it did kind of breed private sector defense innovation in the sense that, like, one of the first use cases for Palantir was map all the IEDs, see that if it if they if the ones in this area have nails and the one in that area have TNT and dynamites over here and c fours being used over here, you can kind of cluster those and see that the bomb maker must be in this city, and then you can go and find them. Yeah. And so I mean, yeah, it is this, like, cat and mouse game. Right?
Speaker 6:But I think if you just if you look at, the story of the procurement side of all that with the MRAP and the other sort of, like, physical, like, hardware changes that the US government needed to to supply its troop to supply the troops, like, it was so fucking slow. Sure. And, you know, not not the best showing, I think. If, like, even even, like, Al Qaeda can kinda get you on your toes when it comes to technological innovation. So I don't know.
Speaker 6:It's a bummer, but, hopefully, folks are are waking up and doing their best on this. I mean, I I gotta Yeah.
Speaker 1:You mentioned, like, the drone battery thing, but, like, it feels like people woke up to that after Skydio, the the the Skydio, battery ban. And so I would imagine that there's that there's probably dozens of companies working on reshoring drone batteries right now. Right?
Speaker 6:I I hope. I hope. I mean, I'm sure they are, but it's it's some it's yeah. I mean, it's it's it's look. It's an obvious thing.
Speaker 6:But what what's interesting, I think, is, like, to what extent on both the Ukraine and the Russia side of this, there are just, like, Chinese parts that are that are driving both of the both of the armies, which
Speaker 2:is Okay. Let's let's switch to a kind of a less contentious issue. Immigration. What's going on? Okay.
Speaker 2:What's going on in terms of The students. Students, research labs. What's what's the high level update?
Speaker 6:Well, I wanna challenge you guys Mhmm. A little bit. Please. Because you have a lot of CEOs and investors in the Silicon Valley broader ecosystem. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And they, as well as anyone else in this country, understand just how important international talent is to the future of American science and technology flourishing. So I would be really curious for to to get these folks on the record to just even talk about their experiences kind of like coming to America and getting their, you know, getting their first h one v visa and the sort of the the the challenges and the opportunity that that, like, you have to and the sacrifices you have to make.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, the
Speaker 1:the woman Yeah. The woman we had on just before
Speaker 2:you was from Turkey, made it to Stanford, had some random Turkey Businessman pay for her flight so she could just get here Yeah. And is now building, you know, incredible company. So we certainly recognize the importance Yeah. Of inter international talent Yeah. And I'm broadly in favor of brain draining the world as I think you are as well.
Speaker 2:I don't I don't follow immigration, you know, law or trends Yeah. Nearly to the level that I imagine you do, specifically around China. Mhmm. And it's an interesting time. I mean, we had some Stanford students on that had written that article that was Pressuredly
Speaker 1:from the CCP.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, it was widely read and it was also controversial Yep. Because many of the sources were anonymous, but it also seems to be something that people just take as fact Yeah. That there is a lot of, you know, sort of low level espionage information gathering happening on campus. But I I was more less less trying to get your take your take more trying to get, like, the late the core
Speaker 6:kind of The one zero one. Development.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Development.
Speaker 6:So I think I think there are two well, it's it's there are a number of things going on. First, the Trump administration is threatening, like, revoking Harvard's ability to take international students. We'll just we'll see how legal that is. But that is a remarkable development and something that I think is sort of, like, spread if it, like, ends up being a tool that's used across a lot of different universities is really dramatic. Like, if you look at a lot of the sort of top 10 lists of publications, there's, like, Harvard and then there's MIT and then there's eight Chinese universities.
Speaker 6:And the fact that, you know, they're going after, like, what is the like, one of the four most important centers of research in America is really concerning. And I think part you know, if you look at these if you look at the STEM programs in America, oftentimes, I think CS is, like, over 70% foreign. And the the programs aren't stupid. Like, they want more American students because they understand that there there are a lot of challenges by by having you know, you end up having this sort of exposure, but the fact is just the talent isn't there. And you wanna you wanna have the best and brightest in your programs go on to, you know, do amazing research and start amazing companies.
Speaker 6:And so this is sort of the world we live in where, you know, American primary and secondary education is not going to fill up these slots fast enough, particularly for you know, CS is kind of an exception to the rule. A lot of the hard sciences, you know, are grueling. They don't pay particularly well, and the sort of the the options to to just, like, you know, be a CS major in in in college and, like, go get a degree for the past fifteen years have been much more lucrative than, like, studying mechanical engineering or electrical engineering. So kind of if we're trying to sort of, like, re industrialize and build the future, like, you need PhDs and you want the best PhDs. And scaring them off by having the the head of the the the nominee for the head of the immigration process say that he's in favor of revoke revoking OPT, which is like the ability for students once they graduate for any major.
Speaker 6:I think you get a year, and if it's a STEM major, you get three years where you just have a blanket work authorization. So you don't need your employer to, you know, get you in the H1B lottery and sponsor you is a big part of the value proposition for going to school in The US alongside being able to go to the best research universities on the planet. So you have on the one hand from, like, the demand side, I guess, students being a lot, on you know, just having to price in an uncertainty factor of whether or not they'll be able to stay in their stay in The US, much less stay to the to the to finish their program. And then on this on the supply side, I guess, the the Trump administration having the NSF spend half as much money as it's authorized to spend and kind of blanket cutting off universities which are on the shit list for whatever reason to the tunes of, you know, billions of dollars just like, sorry, Hans Hopkins, sorry, Harvard, sorry, Penn, which is leading to layoffs and worse research. And I'm annoyed because the future is gonna come slower, and America's gonna be worse off, because we're taking these, like, incredibly unfortunate errors.
Speaker 1:Have you seen any pressure on the o one program? We talked to a Sejal Wen, Thiel Fellow, who's been trying to speed up the o one process for those extraordinary candidates, and it seemed like he was pretty optimistic about that program continuing and flourishing, but maybe that's just not enough in your in your mind.
Speaker 6:Owen? Back in a year. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And and and other thing and, like, I mean, we have 500,000 foreign students in America. I mean, aside from, like, a like, this is the thing that is funding the universities. Like, there are there are, like, maybe 10 schools that have billion dollar endowments. Mhmm. I mean, you're going to start seeing a lot of universities go under, which is, like, just sad in general.
Speaker 6:But this is this like, education is not a zero sum thing. And I think that's kind of, like, one of the the the the the more sad talking points. It's like, why aren't there more slots for Americans? It's like, no. Like, the American slots in all these universities are being subsidized by all the undergraduates and master's students from abroad who are paying full ride to this, where, you know, we have, like, you know, in state tuition and
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And whatnot. I mean, it's a it's a it's a different ballgame.
Speaker 1:How how would you think about changing higher ed? I mean, there's been this this idea that, you know, like Harvard, for example, was founded hundreds of years ago and was servicing a population of maybe, like, 30,000,000 people. And now there's probably a billion people that have heard of Harvard or may maybe, like, in the candidate pool. And but the but the class size hasn't scaled. Would you scale up these elite universities and try and get the elite pedagogy into more hands or into more minds?
Speaker 1:Or are there other things that you think we could we we could do? Because this feels driven by some sort of dissatisfaction with the results of higher ed. I don't know if you agree with them. Maybe you think it's perfect. But certainly, there's the first question of, like, there might be a flaw.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of student debt. There's a lot of people going to schools and taking on debt to pursue degrees that don't necessarily pay and they don't make economic sense. How would you change higher ed without disrupting, like, the the the brain drain equation?
Speaker 6:Sure. I mean, I think at a macro level, it's important to recognize that, like, anti intellectualism, like, beating up on the universities is has, like, a long and storied tradition in American history, you know, going going back to McCarthy and even before. So, like, the fact that politicians are making hay shitting on academia is not, like, something that is particularly novel. Should you know, if I was, like, the the secretary of education and I wanted to use a stick, I would do the exact thing you the exact thing you said, John, and say, like, you need to spend down a percentage of your endowment every year if you wanna stay tax eligible. And should does that mean, you know, growing your class size by 25% every year?
Speaker 6:Sure. Absolutely. Like, there are there is a glut of professors, and there is a demand glut and, like, who are like, who is gaining by Harvard staying small? Like, there are few people who get in who, like, get to feel more special about themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What is your model for higher ed? I mean, like, Tyler Cowen kind of, mention he he posited that higher ed is a bundle of goods. It's it's both a a day care for parents to get their kids out of the house. It's a dating service.
Speaker 1:It's also, you know, a a series of textbooks that are you are forced to read.
Speaker 2:It's also like a music festival.
Speaker 1:It's a bunch of different products bundled. And it's prestige and signaling essentially a one word summary of your SAT score. And you could potentially unbundle those. Don't know if that's necessarily Or summary
Speaker 6:of your SAT score.
Speaker 3:I like that.
Speaker 1:Right. Like if you say Harvard, people know, Okay, potentially, you've been filtered for IQ at some level. And so is that the correct model? Do you disagree with that? Or do you think that's a good thing?
Speaker 1:Because I'm hearing, like like, I'm hearing higher ed is perfect, and I I don't really buy that. But but I'd like to know what vectors you would improve.
Speaker 6:Well, I mean, I think, like, there is a real golden goose aspect to what we have, particularly when it comes to science research. Right? Okay. So, you know, look, I was a history major. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I think a lot of the sort of, like, soft, they don't teach us any anything, like, real stuff, like, critique baked into what you said is is a lot more applicable to the humanities. I mean, thinking back, like, could I be where I am today? Would I have the mind I have if I just, like, read all the books they assigned me in college instead of taking the courses? Like, I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But, you know, could I become a biophysicist without, like, having access to a lab and professors to, like, train and tutor me? I don't I'm I don't really think that's the case. So there so particularly when it comes to to sort of science and engineering disciplines, like, is a real aspect of mentorship and, like, hand holding that needs to exist. And I agree with
Speaker 1:the path of for exactly I agree with the bio side. CRISPR came out of academia. The transformer did not. And in fact, the one academic lab that is listed on the transformer paper attention is all you need? Canadian.
Speaker 1:It's a Canadian.
Speaker 2:Elizabeth Holmes had never been in a lab before
Speaker 1:she started ten point
Speaker 6:nine company.
Speaker 1:All those
Speaker 6:no. No. No. If you if you actually go back to the transformer paper and look at the, the authors, most of them, by the way, have PhDs, and most of their PhDs were in labs that were funded by the National Science Foundation. So Okay.
Speaker 6:I don't necessarily think you could, like, write off AI, as not being something that, like, had bay had government funded basic research behind it. I think that was absolutely a crucial thing. And, you know, we've had a lot of AI winters over the past Mhmm. Few decades where people have sort of well, in industry has basically given up on the technology, and the only folks that
Speaker 2:were The sixties. Funding it
Speaker 6:and doing the research were in government you know, given government money and working in in in university. So, like Okay.
Speaker 4:That's fair.
Speaker 6:Like, it's the it's the place where not where the stuff that you can't get venture backed funding happens. And No. You know, I think that
Speaker 1:Everyone can get venture backed funding now. There's unlimited venture. There will never be enough venture capital. Let's just venture fund everything, even the basic research that won't return ROI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm sick of VCs preferring a deck. Like, don't even prefer it. Just idea Yeah.
Speaker 1:Check. This is the long term solution. Just I wanna go through
Speaker 2:a couple.
Speaker 1:We we we we
Speaker 2:got executive order for DJI band Yeah. In the next two months. Yes or no? Sure.
Speaker 4:Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I'm worried about my drone racing league.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I hope I hope that I hope they Do you actually do you actually race drones?
Speaker 2:Chinese last one, Chinese AR VR. Should we be paying attention to it?
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 6:Yeah, man. I wrote a whole feature about the Chinese AR ecosystem. There are it's a it's a really interesting development because basically what happened in The US, was Meta consolidated it. And you had a handful of startups that all kinda gave up because there was a trillion dollar gorilla in the room. But China is a much more dynamic ecosystem.
Speaker 6:You have, like, six or seven players who are all exploring all these different hardware trees of, like, where to put the battery, and do you need the screen on the glasses? Do you not need the screen on the glasses? So, you know, chinasalk.media, it's one of our more recent articles kind of looking at at at Rowkit and a number of other a number of other Chinese startups, which, like, all have products that are 300 to $600 and are really cool. Fantastic. Can I pitch can I show a book?
Speaker 6:Please.
Speaker 1:Before we go to
Speaker 6:the next step. Okay. So it's coming out tomorrow, I believe. The party's interests come first. Joseph Torigian.
Speaker 6:It's a 500 page biography of Xi Zhongshi, who is Xi Jinping's dad. And it is this incredibly detailed, like, wild ride through this guy's life. He started as a he joined the Communist Party when he was 15 in 1926, and the first half of the book is, like, all these crazy war stories where he is, like, fighting and executing nationalists and Japanese, and then, you know, he becomes he's, like, the he's, like, the highest flyer in the nineteen fifties. Like, he's promoted faster than everyone in his thirties. And then the Culture Revolution hits, his life gets completely ruined.
Speaker 6:Xi Jinping's fifteen. His dad is this, like, black stain on the party. And the amount of sort of, like, family trauma that the dad and then the son by proxy, like, ingests over the course of their life is just a is is is kind of an unfathomable thing that you can only really experience by just, like, living day day through day through this guy's life. And the fact that he was able to write this book, you know, I see I see books with this level of detail about folks like Stalin because the archives have opened at this point. But Joseph did an incredible job, like, reading all of these memoirs and talking to people and digging for stuff.
Speaker 6:And, if you want a sort of window into what Chinese elite politics looks like, it is a really, a really special piece of scholarship and something that comes around really rarely in the, in the China studies space. So, Tyler, you guys should get them on the pod.
Speaker 1:I would love to. Would to. Cheesy things dad.
Speaker 6:Sounds amazing. Highly recommend everyone check it out.
Speaker 1:Thank you for the That sounds fantastic.
Speaker 2:Let's do it. Thanks for coming on, Jordan.
Speaker 1:We'll talk you soon.
Speaker 2:Always a pleasure. Cheers.
Speaker 4:You guys.
Speaker 1:Next up, we have Max from Arena Magazine.
Speaker 6:Are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Speaker 1:We we we have the Arena magazines right here.
Speaker 2:Always. You always have to keep one.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the studio, Max. We always keep your arena on you. Hi, Max. Oh, he's got it behind With the
Speaker 2:tie. He was ready.
Speaker 1:Bolo. Looking good. What's new?
Speaker 5:Well, we we we just moved into a new Arena Magazine World Headquarters.
Speaker 2:World Headquarters.
Speaker 5:The Pensacola. And, you know,
Speaker 1:we It's not Arena Magazine headquarters, though. It's the Intergalactic Media Corporation of America. Correct?
Speaker 2:Wait. Don't you have a new website too? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:That's the other big thing. Launched our new website during the first hour of the
Speaker 1:show. Congratulations.
Speaker 5:Or, actually, it may have been the second hour. It wasn't ready during the first hour.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:We we wrapped it up in time for the third hour of the show.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 5:So so we took a look at all of our favorite websites for sort of consuming long form text, and, you know, Silicon Valley won again. We couldn't find any superior form than the software documentation website. And so, initially, we actually thought about, like, hosting the website on GitHub and just using markdown files for all of the essays. Wow. We didn't literally do that, but we built a site that's, you know, based on engineering docs.
Speaker 5:So it's in it's in it's in dark mode.
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 5:sciency vibe, and we think that people are really gonna love it.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah. This is great. Oh, very cool.
Speaker 2:I like how I can decide if I wanna focus or not. There's a little button. That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, focus just puts it right in the center. Okay. Cool.
Speaker 5:You can you can you can you can get rid of all of the prompts for you to send us money by by subscribing, or you can leave them in there.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 5:We we got we got we got a lot of fun stuff, and, you know, it's sort of it's sort of, you know, almost a relaunch of the magazine after we did the first four print issues. We're now gonna really make a big push to, you know, get a lot bigger, and that happens mostly on the Internet.
Speaker 1:So what's the Amazing. What is the flow, for, specifically, windowing? I know Taylor Swift is very good at this where she goes on a tour, and then there's documentary that comes out later.
Speaker 6:Right.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 6:you have to see
Speaker 1:her in person, and then you go watch the movie in theaters, and then you can stream it. And a lot of the streamers made the mistake of allowing you to binge all 10 episodes right up front, and it doesn't create these, like, shelling points, these moments. Are you thinking about gating articles to the physical magazine first, then putting them on the Internet later? How how are you thinking about that?
Speaker 5:You know, it's great that because our readers who pay us get the print magazines first, we really don't have to be in a rush to put things up on the website that are in the print magazine. You know, until now, there's basically been a % overlap between what's on the website and what's on and what's in print. That's gonna change a lot because we're gonna do a lot a lot more stuff online. But, know, we had something very funny happen in the first few months of the magazine, which was subscribers emailing us upset that we had posted an article online before they had gotten the chance to read it on paper, which is it's sort of it's it's sort of sort of sort of strange, but also really made sense. And so, yeah, we we put things in print first, and, you know, we're not really sure how the how the cadence is gonna go.
Speaker 5:We'll figure it out.
Speaker 2:Are you gonna are you gonna increase the frequency at all as you go bigger, or just trying to go bigger with the stories? For
Speaker 5:us, quarterly is about the right pace. We might go we might go more than that. But the truth is, in order to publish, like, you know, every week or even with us every month, you'd have to reduce the paper quality to, you know, get the printing time down. It takes us, you know, it takes us multiple weeks to go from, you know, submitting the files to the printer to the magazines ending up in mailboxes. Whereas, you know, something that's arriving in your mailbox every single week on what I call glossy toilet paper, which is the sort of very, very light paper where it's falling apart, it's been stapled together, you know, you can do that at a very fast cadence.
Speaker 5:It's it's it's it's no good. So what we're gonna do, increase the online volume quite a bit, do a lot more stuff there, but keep the print magazine sort of, you know, spare and and, you know, four of them per year and super high quality.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. You recently wrote a profile about Brian Schemf, CEO of Anderol. What stuck out to you about him? What was the most interesting takeaway from spending time with him?
Speaker 5:He's he's definitely a genius and a and and a stand up guy as well. I mean, I just thought it was sort of funny to, like, write a piece about a man that, like, most people are unaware is the CEO of this company that they all know. Yeah. And, you know, even some of the people that I was sort of, like, discussing the piece with in advance were, like, who's the CEO? And all of the Underworld cofounders are, like, emphatic that Brian is CEO.
Speaker 5:Brian has the best decision making. Brian is absolutely in charge as everyone expects the chief executive officer to be. I mean, Trey said something, you know, like, you know, I I I trust his judgment more than my own. And, you know, there's a lot of, like, fun stuff in that in that profile. Even stuff about Palmer.
Speaker 5:Palmer has zero direct reports at Underall, and it was Brian who told me that. And I thought that that was amazing. Zero.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating. I mean, it's probably the perfect perfect situation. He can just go around the company and and invent and do what he does best and evangelize and and and tinker and also just, like, drop into certain projects, be an individual contributor if he needs to be, be a manager if he needs to be, but but doesn't need, like, a like a standing staff.
Speaker 5:Right. One of the other things that this is not about Brian in particular. In fact, Brian thought it was sort of funny when I pointed it out to him. He must not have noticed before, but everything on the Ondrill campus has been set in the same typeface with with with the exclusion of the government mandated parking signs. And so it's like everything.
Speaker 5:The signs on the gates, the room labels, the the stationary, it's all been set in Helvetica now, which is sort of a, you know Sure. Two thousands recut of Helvetica. And you don't see, like, design discipline like that anywhere. But now that I'm a magazine man and I'm thinking about letter forms and typography all the time, it's like you you notice it very viscerally walking around honor roll that they've done everything to, like, exacting specifications. And they also use the same typeface as
Speaker 2:That's real brand. Brand is not a logo or a website. It's it's it's, like, showing up with that level of consistency, which makes
Speaker 5:sense in the products. And, you know, it's it's the idea that, like, don't you dare try to design something. Let the design team do it. Because there's, they're protecting the the identity. And even the, you know, the drones, the missiles, the tanks, the submarines, they have the exact same typography as the stationary and the meeting room names, and I just I I I had never seen it before.
Speaker 5:You know, you go on, an airline or whatnot. The typography is all over the place. And that was, like, that was my sort of, you know, one of the standout things from from visiting the, from visiting the Ondore campus.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about growing the magazine in terms of, balance between full time writers and con and contributors? It's an interesting place to send a thought or an essay or something. And so I imagine that it's it's more tractable to be a contributor at Arena than have a column somewhere else. It's probably a little bit more manageable for someone who's maybe not writing all the time. But at the same time, you probably want a steady heartbeat of writers.
Speaker 1:So how are you thinking about balancing those things?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, so first of all, we want anyone and everyone that's got something to say about, you know, technology, capitalism, civilization to send it to Arena. We're very, very good editors, and it's, you know, it's very useful to have editors. And and we provide that service to to to to anyone, to help them to help them get their word out. Some of it will end up in print.
Speaker 5:Some of it will just be online. You know, we have some full time people. We'll have some more full time people. We have some contributors. We'll have a lot more full full time contributors.
Speaker 5:I think that on the it's on the, like, extremely polarized ends of this spectrum that you start to get into weird stuff, which is, like, way over budgeting for having, like, full time writers. Mhmm. You know, you can sort of create this Frankenstein where it's, like, it's some full time people and some contributors that will create the most interesting balance. Mhmm. It's not gonna be the most interesting balance if it's all random contributors or if it's all full time staff.
Speaker 5:And and so, you know, we mix it up.
Speaker 1:How do you think about the different types of pieces that you want to like, what what what is the shape of the different type of coverage? Like, obviously, you have profiles. You probably also have op ads. You're not really doing breaking news No. Or investigative journalism.
Speaker 1:What was it called?
Speaker 5:Not news.
Speaker 2:You're saying not news.
Speaker 1:Not news. Anything but news. But what about, like, what are the other areas that you're interested in exploring? Like Forbes famously has the Midas list and the Forbes four hundred. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Are there gonna
Speaker 5:be list products or anything
Speaker 1:like that?
Speaker 6:One of
Speaker 5:the things that we talked about at the very beginning was, like, how how how to do lists in a non awful way. Yeah. Haven't figured it out yet.
Speaker 3:So we're not doing we're
Speaker 5:not doing we're not doing lists yet.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe there's maybe there's a future contributor in listening right now who can come up with something.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I don't know how to figure it out. If someone can figure out how to how to how to make a better list, then I'm all ears.
Speaker 2:Switching Yeah. Switching gears. Gears. What's AI adoption like in Iowa?
Speaker 5:You know, it's it's well, the Google was just, just yesterday put $7,000,000,000 into, like, a a campus there, but it's just, you know, it's just for server racks or whatnot. I'm not sure that the people are really are really, are really following suit.
Speaker 1:That's similar in Abilene in in in Texas. There's I mean, Stargate's gonna be staffed with, like, not tens of thousands of people, like, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a very, very small organization.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You know, my mom my mom just retired as a teacher, and all of her teacher colleagues are complaining about the kids using ChatGPT, so that's good.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 5:That's good. The kids are the kids are up to it. But, I mean, I I sort of doubt whether any of my neighbors are are are are paying are paying attention to it. I sent one of them a a poem that I had written with with Claude. And he was like, how's this so funny?
Speaker 2:That's such that's like the the biggest alpha right now. It's just it's just using models to generate, like, super thoughtful, creative, you know, work for people that aren't online. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean, I assume that there are some, like, you know, people in Iowa that are on Facebook that are looking at the sort of AI images and being, wow. That's beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did you have a did you watch Mountain Head yet? Did you have a reaction?
Speaker 5:I haven't. I'm sorry to say. I heard you talking about it earlier. I guess I Yeah.
Speaker 2:It it's just it's it's the the main kind of narrative of the story besides being a critique of the tech elite is that, you know, it's it's this global catastrophe because AI has gotten so good that nobody can tell what's real and what's fake and
Speaker 5:and I I I so I so disagree with the framing. People already have a lot of trouble figuring out what's real and what's fake. AI is going to be an improvement over over over over the status quo in certain ways.
Speaker 1:Okay. How are you using AI at Arena? I imagine that you're not using LLMs to actually write whole articles, but what about proofreading or even just
Speaker 2:Well, trained a model to remove em dashes after they generate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then problem solved.
Speaker 1:And and also the word Delve is is just find and replace. But I but I imagine that the problem of typesetting and transforming text from just a big block of text into something that fits nicely in columns, that feels more tractable and more tactical than the artistry that goes into writing an actual article. Is that useful? What about AI images for collages? Has that been useful?
Speaker 1:Anything like that that that that that's kinda popped up.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So on the writing front, you know, I'm prepared for the day, which it is, like, better, but right now, it's not. Yeah. At least not compared to what we can do.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And based on the way that the, like, that the LLMs operate, they tend to be pretty they'll use the same sentence structure over and over again.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:Sure. For me, it's a tell. Yeah. I I'm not saying I could, like, judge it 100%. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But a, no one wants no one wants to pay to write to to read something that's been that's taken zero sort of marginal minutes to do.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:It can be very useful for brainstorming. It can catch some of the copy edits. My mother tends to be better at copy editing though than any of the any of the GPTs now. Yep. But yeah.
Speaker 5:Yep. We have we have we have we have subscriptions to to all of them out the wazoo to, you know, to to to to to use them. But yeah. I mean, people are people are coming to Arena for a bit of an analog thing in the first place, which is a print magazine. And so it's like, to the extent that the AI can help us do more with less, it's great.
Speaker 5:But the core sort of writing work is something that is you know, we're also trying to keep that, you know, art alive.
Speaker 1:We were just talking to Jordan Schneider at China talk about higher ed and some of the problems there. How would you kind of diagnose the problems, if any, in higher ed right now?
Speaker 5:I mean, I think that people tend to focus on the on the elite institutions because of their sort of cultural power. But, I mean, clearly, the biggest catastrophe in higher ed is that we we we we agreed to indefinitely fund higher and higher loans at the federal level for students to pursue degrees from universities. And it's not it's really not the Harvard's that are the problem in that equation. Mhmm. It's the it's the universities that can't offer much, but that we're allowed to sort of way over inflate their budgets
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:With the with the with the federal loans. And so I this is this is a you know, related to the China point, I read a funny story that the University of Illinois took out an insurance policy in 2018 hedging against a decline in Chinese enrollment.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 5:But the lawyers messed up the contract, and so it was invalid in December 2019. And then it took them, like, five months to renegotiate it during which time the the COVID pandemic happened.
Speaker 1:It happened. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Literally nuts. So I'll always have the lawyers read the fine print. I think it's possible that Claude would have been done a better done a better job than than those lawyers in that instance.
Speaker 1:Maybe or maybe Harvey.
Speaker 5:And so
Speaker 2:I think Somebody somebody, you know, that wants to go super risk on in China should bet on a rise in American students because right now there are, I I guess, roughly 800
Speaker 1:US students in China.
Speaker 2:In China, which is It's very low. Unfathomably low. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I have no idea how to diagnose what goes on inside China or or why people would wanna go over there. I don't know how to I don't know how to price that one.
Speaker 2:Interesting. You think we're getting a DJI ban in the next couple months? You feeling feeling excited?
Speaker 5:I think that people will be upset if they ban, like, the best product available. I I I I say this with, a fervent desire that we have one that's, like, that's, like, amazing, but I'm but I'm not I'm not I'm not sure that I'm not sure that for random civilians, it's going to it's going to fly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's hard if it's not popular. Anyway, anything else, Jordy? I think we're good.
Speaker 2:This was great. Congratulations on the
Speaker 1:new website. Good luck. We Go to Arenamagcom.
Speaker 2:Actually always keep we've kept an Arenamag Yeah. On our desk at all times in the entire history of TBPN. We got it.
Speaker 1:We love physical media.
Speaker 5:It's a very good desk object. And I'll just say, we're gonna have even better desk objects in the future.
Speaker 1:Oh, can't wait.
Speaker 2:I heard you I'm excited. I mean, I know you can take it up a notch to where it's more of a book. Totally. These are sort of like chapters in technology and industry. And well, I have no I legitimately have no inside knowledge.
Speaker 2:I'm
Speaker 1:just because
Speaker 2:I just see what you Anyway,
Speaker 1:thanks so much for coming on the Cheers.
Speaker 2:Wait. Thanks, Before you leave, before you leave, we got some new sound effects I want you to hear.
Speaker 6:You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Speaker 2:We're working we're working on these. Anyways, have a have a great afternoon, Max. Thanks for going on.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to Bye.
Speaker 6:I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
Speaker 1:I still don't know where these came from. Like, these These are
Speaker 2:from COD. These are
Speaker 3:like Yeah.
Speaker 1:But like, how do they change the voice? Is this, like, AI generator?
Speaker 2:It's effectively, like, the Captain Price voice.
Speaker 1:Can just do a Captain Price generator.
Speaker 2:But it's Ben making it's Ben making
Speaker 1:Is that Ben's voice?
Speaker 2:That's Ben's voice.
Speaker 6:Wow. Multiple journalists on the horizon.
Speaker 2:Market clearing order inbound.
Speaker 1:I like the killstreaks. This is great.
Speaker 2:I see a large IPO on the horizon.
Speaker 1:That's so good. I love it. Good really good impression. I love it. Anyway, thank you so much for watching today.
Speaker 2:Wait. Do we not have more timeline? I'm gonna be
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do some timeline. Let's do some timeline.
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah. Congrats to Jacob Kimmel. We generated the most visually striking data of my commute career at New Limit this week. We have a real opportunity to create medicines that add healthy years for everyone.
Speaker 1:Jacob's been on the show before, of course, started New Limit with the help of Brian Armstrong or in partnership with Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase, and, and really pumped us up. But he he barely teased it, but, it seemed like something happened that was very good there. We also need to tell you about Adquick. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Go to Adquick.com.
Speaker 1:Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology out
Speaker 2:of home I'm about buy every billboard in SF. Market clearing order in that.
Speaker 1:I love it. We covered the we covered the attack. James Cadwaller Cadwadolar? I don't Cadwalader. It says, g g, try Ramp.
Speaker 1:Which startup in The US is known for shipping new features the fastest?
Speaker 2:This is ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:This is Ramp.
Speaker 2:I Ramp gets the top spot.
Speaker 1:These are hotly debated. This is the this is the generative engine optimization, the GEO that Andreessen's been writing about, the AI SEO. Like, you gotta be
Speaker 2:you gotta be Well, this is what this is what James you remember, we had James on. This is profound.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is okay. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yep. They're absolutely cooking.
Speaker 5:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Mean, this isn't this kind of thing isn't by chance. You know?
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:We have a post from Kareem Kareem. Kareem says This is funny. Wild to me how much of a nothing burger AI has been so far.
Speaker 1:It's been two point five years, and the most tangible effects of AI are students cheating more in slightly higher realistic Facebook sloth. I don't want vibes or speculation or demos. I want one concrete real world achievement from the current generation of AI that's not that's not potentially a big deal, but actually a big deal right now because I got nothing. And, yeah, it's just very funny because obviously, like, LLMs have have been vended into, like, every enterprise everywhere and and are, like,
Speaker 2:just Yeah. Basically, constantly you're not a business person.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. But also just, like, like, day to day use of, you know, for a lot of people, like, OpenAI has just replaced Google.
Speaker 2:It it this Kareem doesn't clearly doesn't respect how insane it is that people are using something else for search besides Google. Right? That that alone.
Speaker 1:That the entire Like Microsoft, which is currently, I think, the biggest company in the world, has tried for two decades to unseat Google.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they now own a large part of a company that
Speaker 1:Yeah. They actually kind of did it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. And,
Speaker 1:yeah, pretty, yeah, pretty pretty pretty remarkable. Let's also tell you about Wander. Go to Wander.com. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
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Speaker 2:It's great that we can talk about it now. Yeah. We basically leaked Yeah. Weeks ago, but John Andrew was on and broke it all down. And and he's going for 300,000 homes
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:In a decade. Love to see it. We have Patrick asking what is the lightest, thinnest, most comfortable and simple watch? And the best recommendation that I saw here was from Will Benitis
Speaker 1:What'd he say?
Speaker 2:Recommending Richard Mill. Richard Mill. It's And I agree with him. I think it's a great option. You gotta hit him Otherwise, a Royal Oak.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I would Extra thin.
Speaker 1:Why not a Graf Diamond's Hallucination?
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's getting up there.
Speaker 1:You know, not the thinnest, lightest, or most comfortable. Will watch, but, you know,
Speaker 2:it makes a statement. Will recommended the RM 66 manual winding flying tourbillon Yeah. As a good entry level piece. Yeah. So skeletonized, it is
Speaker 1:fantastic. Patrick should go with like an Urwerk. That would be interesting.
Speaker 2:That'd be interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I mean, seriously, if he's looking for something like in that category, it's probably Patek Philippe Calatrava, Vacheron Constantin, Patrimony, or JLC Ultra Thin, probably. Something along those lines is gonna be probably what he's looking for. He didn't really specify dress watch versus sports watch in the thin.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:It I I think he'd look good with a dress watch. So hopefully, you can pick one up on on bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
Speaker 1:I think I think that tweet is just permission for us to introduce Patrick to the CEO of Bezel over text message as soon as the show wraps.
Speaker 2:Yep. And you guys you guys should really talk.
Speaker 1:You guys should talk. It's not a double opt in intro. It's just happening, Patrick.
Speaker 2:Zero opt in.
Speaker 1:You you posted about it. You got a 40,000 views on this post.
Speaker 2:It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. We got a post here from Gabe. He says, quote, LMAO has survived and even thrived over years, but its cousin, ROFL, Raffle, has faded into indignity.
Speaker 2:The cruelty of fate. A 20,000 likes. Wow.
Speaker 1:Didn't notice that.
Speaker 2:Really resonated.
Speaker 1:That is wild.
Speaker 2:A one twenty banger is
Speaker 1:really good.
Speaker 2:Really good.
Speaker 1:But it's so true. It's so true. There were all these different acronyms.
Speaker 2:Let's bring it back.
Speaker 1:Rufflecopter, r o l m a o really stuck around, though. Yeah. There were a bunch
Speaker 2:of Let's bring it back. Hey. Yeah. Mean TB nation.
Speaker 1:Underrate is that l o l is still around, you know? L o l made it through.
Speaker 2:See, I actually I I adopted l m a o really late. Yeah. Like, within the last two I just I never had a huge amount of respect. Yeah. For LMAO?
Speaker 2:No. LMAO.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but wait wait. Are you do you draw upon LMAO more frequently than LOL?
Speaker 2:Less frequently. Yeah. I'm sprinkling it in, you know.
Speaker 1:I think I like like the I I also like the Like, it's honestly Variation of the LMAO's. Is also good. Because you can go, that's like not good. Is like barely trying. Once you get into the three has Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like, okay, I'm actually giving you some positive feedback here.
Speaker 2:LMAO is usually I usually use it when something's actually ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Like, somebody is doing something that that is just silly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't really have any of the eye roll that the LOL does. The LOL can just be like, oh, come in kinda laughing at it.
Speaker 2:It'd be more of
Speaker 1:LMAO is is like a little bit higher. But Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we gotta bring back ROFL, raffle. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Rolling on the floor.
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Speaker 2:Cool. That they feel similar in many ways. And, also Redpoint backed, you know, so you know it's a banger.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You got Logan Barton in the deal. Just attributing he's like the main
Speaker 2:He's our Biden
Speaker 1:guy I know in Redpoint. Course he every deal at Red Point.
Speaker 2:Of he let it. Classic.
Speaker 1:No. Jeff Brody McGovern Polytechnic alum. Let's go. What's that? The founder of Red Point went to my high school.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way. Yeah. Jeff Brody. And so What a dog. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just being like, yeah. Shout I've never met him. But just be like, shout out Redpoint.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Shout it out.
Speaker 1:I would die for Redpoint. I would die for Big Tech. And I and also, I wanna give a shout out to Captions app. The founder's been on the show. Big fan of Captions.
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Speaker 1:It's actually a new URL, mirage.app. So they're kind of like forking the two products
Speaker 2:A of companies have been doing that with with I I feel like that's a more recent occurrence where they'll spin up kind of a new brand and app to kind of test something.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. More news. Please. Apparently, Elon is doing some type of share sale. $300,000,000 share sale that values the company at a hundred and 13,000,000,000 for x AI.
Speaker 1:Oh, x
Speaker 2:And the official the official Neuralink round actually got announced today.
Speaker 1:Oh, oh, that was just, like, leaked earlier. Yeah. It's actually out now. That's great.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:Well, congrats to everyone at Neuralink. I believe it's 9,000,000,000 now is the valuation. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Crazy.
Speaker 1:Speaking of things that start with nines, my sleep score, 90 I'm back in the game.
Speaker 2:Back in the game.
Speaker 1:See how you did. Getting eight sleep, five year warranty, thirty night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping.
Speaker 2:Had That's to
Speaker 1:fuel your best days.
Speaker 2:I an issue. The power went out in the middle of the night, Saturday, in my neighborhood.
Speaker 1:So Well, we're
Speaker 2:through off don't
Speaker 1:care about Saturday. I want
Speaker 2:want I got a 90.
Speaker 1:90? Oh, let's hear it for me.
Speaker 2:Hear it for hear Let's Let's hear it
Speaker 1:big dog.
Speaker 2:A I'll give it to you.
Speaker 1:Once a week. I got back to back days coming up. I'm I'm I'm I got you.
Speaker 2:Let's see what you do tonight.
Speaker 1:Let's see let's see what numbers I put up. Anyway Nobody outsleeps me. Nobody.
Speaker 2:Anyways Thanks so
Speaker 1:much for
Speaker 2:will see you tomorrow. Go leave us a five star review if you like the show.
Speaker 1:That's fun.
Speaker 2:And we appreciate all of you. We're excited for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:See you later. Bye.