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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.
Speaker 2:Today is Thursday, 07/24/2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome.
Speaker 1:The Temple Of Technology. The fortress science.
Speaker 2:The capital of capital. It's Google earnings. Earnings season. Baby, big tech earnings are happening now. Google reported earnings last night.
Speaker 2:Ben Thompson has a breakdown. It's in the it's in the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:Them again.
Speaker 2:Bunch of good posts. We're gonna break it down for you today. So, bugo capital blokes says, many queries that moved to OpenAI will move back to Google. AI overviews are good now. Less hallucinations.
Speaker 2:I've experienced that. For some of those quick answers, Google's still really fast. Two, can move to AI mode for follow-up. I haven't really played around with that yet. Have you bounced into AI mode very much?
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:You have. Of course. In Google searches, you've actually done that? Yeah. Oh, interesting.
Speaker 1:And and the main thing missing
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:From Google search and the reason why ChatGPT has so good Yeah. Is you can search something, get information, and then chat with that information.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now you can do
Speaker 1:that. Typical, you know, you're going down a a search query, you click onto a page, you can't really chat with the page or Yeah. You could maybe search for information on So that that was the key innovation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Type into toolbar v open new app. That is a huge advantage. A lot of people have you know, the the primary app on their laptop is that's open is a Chrome browser for most people. And so, you know, command t and you're already searching, that is a huge advantage.
Speaker 2:And that's probably why ChatGPT is starting an open ass thinking about a browser because if they can replace that, they can get way more queries into ChatGPT. Four, Google's models are better. They search the web better. I don't know that their models are that much better. I haven't noticed that specifically.
Speaker 2:I know that they're better on like some benchmarks and they're certainly dominating on that Pareto frontier graph that Swix puts out. It feels pretty comparable to me. But yeah, it makes sense that they would search the web better because they have, you know, what two three it's it's
Speaker 1:it's it's they try to obfuscate it but to my knowledge, ChatGPT will leverage Google search.
Speaker 2:It does feel like that's kind of happening. And then Cloudflare just gave them a massive structural advantage. That of course is because Cloudflare by default now, they used to have like the big easy button for blocking all AI crawlers. Previously, if you had a website and you didn't want to be crawled, you could put that in your robots.robots.txt. So whatever your website was slash robot.txt.
Speaker 2:Yep. Crawlers should go there. And out of the goodness of their own heart, they would respect that, but it was not legally binding. So you could still scrape a website legally if you were using it in a fair use context, transforming it like for search. Now Google famously did respect robots.txt.
Speaker 2:They did for a long time. They still do. But now Cloudflare has disabled AI crawlers by default. The problem is is that Google has two crawlers. They have Googlebot, which crawls for Google search, which you definitely wanna be in for sure for the SEO.
Speaker 2:Who doesn't wanna be findable in Google? And then they have Gemini crawler, separate crawler that you can disable with Cloudflare. But the there is still AI sort of crawling happening with the Google bot because if the Google bot goes and and crawls all your web pages for search, that your data will show up in the in the, AI overviews, which feels like they're not maybe training the foundation model but they're still summarizing it and they still might be they still might be reducing traffic. Now, for publishers and content creators, that's harmful potentially. But for e commerce people, it's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Yes. There was a post on r /seo five days ago Okay. Titled ChatGPT Plus is secretly Google powered. My hidden page experiment proves it.
Speaker 1:So he created a dummy page index only in Google Mhmm. And got it to show up in ChatGPT plus results within hours. The same query in Bing, DuckDuckGo, etcetera, still returned zero results.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:And he did this by coining a nonsense word, put it on a page that was not linked anywhere, forced Google to index it via the search console. And then asked chat gbt plus to define the term which he invented and it quoted the hidden page verbatim.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So, yeah. I wonder what that relationship's like. I mean, OpenAI has, you know, I I I felt like they were always be there would always be some relationship with Microsoft because Bing has really solid search infrastructure. Like, for a while, people were saying like, Bing has as robust as a of a crawling infrastructure as Google.
Speaker 2:Like they built the technology. They just weren't able to actually transform, you know, customer behavior to the degree that people would by default go to Bing. They ran this big campaign, Bing it and Go and all this. And it never really happened, but the tech was always good because they were they knew what to build and they went and built it. They just couldn't change people's behaviors.
Speaker 2:So interesting. I wonder if Google will be bringing out the sharp help us anytime soon for OpenAI. Anyway, let me talk about ramp. Time is money. Save both.
Speaker 2:Easy as corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. So Tane, who's been on the show before, says Sundar Pichai on Google CapEx. With this strong and growing demand for our cloud products services. We are increasing our investment in capital expenditures in 2025 to approximately 85,000,000,000 and are excited by the opportunity ahead.
Speaker 2:We gotta hit the gong.
Speaker 1:Hit the gong for Sundar. Well deserved. Sundar pitch AI.
Speaker 2:He's pitching AI. He's pitching it successfully. The the the Google earnings are staggering. So 14% jump in year over year revenue. Guess their ARR, their annualized revenue.
Speaker 1:Wow. I don't even oh, run
Speaker 2:Their run rating, 400,000,000,000 almost.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:They did they put up 96,400,000,000.0 in the second quarter and said CapEx. It's like, it would be a lot if it was in millions. It's in billions. They said that CapEx would increase 13% to 85,000,000,000, and that compares with 52,000,000,000 last year. So that's a big, big increase even above expectations.
Speaker 2:Ben Thompson has a great analysis of this and is it came away, from my reading, pretty excited about it. So Andrew Curran also has a post here. Says, Sundar Pachai on the earnings call, the growth in usage has been incredible. At IO in May, we announced that we processed 480,000,000,000,000 monthly tokens across our surfaces. So that's both AI search features and Google search AI mode, Gemini, also API stuff.
Speaker 2:So overall, tokens, we're gonna have Nicky Melka on the show. Later. He's gonna talk about token factories. We're The demand for tokens is is immense. And and it's and it's really just weaving its way into all these different nooks and crannies.
Speaker 2:It's certainly going mainstream. If you just ask a friend who's not, you know, in the horse race of who's gonna win just a just a normal friend, look at let's look at your screen time. How much time are you looking on ChatGPT? You're gonna see ten minutes.
Speaker 1:Gonna see thirty
Speaker 2:minutes a day.
Speaker 1:This was buried, not in the main post. But Andrew follows up and said, he said there would be over 70,000,000 user videos made with v o three which is which is impressive especially considering that they massively rate limit everyone. Yeah. You you pay $500 a month and you get a measly couple videos a day.
Speaker 2:It's hard. It's hard to
Speaker 1:actually Somebody made a great very cool intro video using VO three.
Speaker 2:So they've doubled tokens since May and then yeah, totally
Speaker 1:The more interesting thing here is that Safe Super Intelligence, Ilia's small $32,000,000,000
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:AI upstart is gonna exclusively use Google TPUs. That's exciting. That seems like a bombshell.
Speaker 2:Maybe. I mean, you gotta get big infrastructure somewhere. And if everyone's optimizing against NVIDIA, maybe there's maybe there's like a slack capacity in TPUs. I mean, you're certainly like, if you are trying to bet on a hyperscaler to hit your horse too and you see that Google's increasing their CapEx pretty significantly to 85,000,000,000, like, you you know that they are going to have, like, enough capacity to surface to to to service you to the tune of one gigawatt or something like that if you wanna do some massive training run. I do wonder how how compute constrained SSI is in the sense.
Speaker 2:Like like, much is Ilia feeling the scaling wall? Because for a long time, it was scale is all you need. Just go bigger, bigger, bigger. And that's certainly the playbook that we've seen Sam Altman run with with the Stargate project and with the bringing in Masayoshi Son, bringing in Donald Trump and Crusoe, and putting together this, like, team that can actually marshal half a quadrillion dollars. Is that right?
Speaker 2:It's 500 no. No. Half a trillion. It's it's 500,000,000,000 They they wanna
Speaker 1:haven't marshaled it
Speaker 2:yet, John. It's a lot of money. Yeah. They're working on it. It's half a trillion.
Speaker 2:But but but SSI, at least at least like the the the rumors or the memes around it have been very much have been more focused on let's advance the research. And maybe that next phase of research is not purely compute bound. It's not it's not purely, hey, we're in this scaling race. We're gonna build a bigger transformer. That's that's honestly a little bit of what Elon's been He's saying, like, we have the transformer architecture.
Speaker 2:We're gonna scale this up a ton. And and where we are great is building a massive cluster, the Colossus, 100,000
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:GPUs. We'll build it faster, and we'll get it up to speed, and we'll train it. And in three months, when most people would think it would take a year, we haven't been seeing that from SSI. S s s we haven't seen, oh, SSI has tents with GPUs in it. That that's their that's their edge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the the edge with SSI, as it's been pitched at least, has always been foundational research progress, just making making progress on on the underlying research that might be an elegant solution that increases the efficiency, and you get a better model with even less GPUs. But if they need a ton, Google will have them because they're investing more in CapEx more than ever before. While talking while taking a question on agentic capabilities, it sounds like Sundar said this, when we built our series of 2.5 Pro models, it's the direction where we are investing the most. That's definitely exciting progress, including in the models we haven't fully released yet.
Speaker 2:Long answer on agentic progress. The good news here is that we are making robust progress. We think we are at the frontier here. He said that they he said they have projects running internally, but now they are slow and expensive. They see the potential and are making progress on both.
Speaker 2:Gemini has a deep research product, which I would call an agentic product. Yeah. The question is, are they going to try and match what ChatGPT launched with agent mode sooner than later? Is there a security or a risk thing? Google's been a little bit more hesitant to just throw stuff out in the wild, but they're moving very quickly.
Speaker 2:And I think they will probably be able to get something up. There's certainly nothing on the CapEx or or model capability side that would stop them. And Elon Musk just says, wow.
Speaker 1:Well, Elon is playing the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Speaker 2:It's like, I I love these guys. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Love to see it.
Speaker 2:It's not a it's not a knockout drag out fight. So, let's go over to Oh, this is interesting. So Moffett, Nathan Michael, who's been on Strathecari a few times in the Wall Street Journal was quoted, what people worry about is just the math around search. Isn't AI going to be negative to search? And they went out of the way many times on the call to say, that's not what we're seeing.
Speaker 2:And so there's this big question on can can Google avoid disruption by integrating the new disruptive technology, artificial intelligence in a way that doesn't destroy their core business which is search ads. They're putting up 80,000,000,000
Speaker 1:in revenue a year on it. My personal feeling is that Chrome specifically is just so unbelievably sticky. Yeah. As long as it takes the average person to to, you know, hitting hitting two buttons to get to the point where they can do any type of search, Google will continue to dominate. Because right now I can hit command t Yep.
Speaker 1:Search something quickly. Yes. I'm sure I could update the default like search Yep. To something else, but I haven't.
Speaker 2:There was
Speaker 1:a And I love the model.
Speaker 2:There was a time when I bounced around. I remember having Opera installed and Firefox installed for a while. And then for the last decade, it's just been
Speaker 1:I used to love there was a moment, like, probably five years ago that I was loving Safari. It was just so snappy and fast and simple.
Speaker 2:I believe it's also built on Chromium. But, yes. Course. But it's not a Google product, so they so they could in theory reroute reroute No.
Speaker 1:Safari is not built
Speaker 2:Oh, it's not?
Speaker 1:On Chromium. Interesting. Uses Apple's own web kit
Speaker 2:rendering Okay. Do I do like so it's weird. I use I use Safari on my phone and Chrome on my desktop, which feels like it totally breaks the continuity. Right? But I've just I've just kinda stuck with that and it's been fine and I don't have like tabs that float in between.
Speaker 2:They're kinda separate, but it's fine. Really quickly, this show is brought to you by Restream. One stream, 30 destinations, multistream, and reach your audience wherever they are. We love Restream. You can sign up for free.
Speaker 2:So let's go over to, Ben Thompson talking about Google earnings. He has said, I've repeatedly laid out the theoretical case for why AI is potentially disruptive to Google, and we asked him about this when he came on the show. My question was, like, is there a world where where revenue and profit from from generative AI products is actually not as counter positioned against Google in the sense that, like, if they had launched the Gemini app first and become the ChatGPT, they'd probably be seeing a drop in search volume, but then also seeing revenue spike from an even more popular Gemini that's monetizing even better. And and was it a question of them just, like, not being able to take that pill, or or was it more about, like, the risk in PR nervousness than
Speaker 3:The thing that Ben
Speaker 1:said that stood out That stood out to most, the most to me, and I'll probably butcher it a little bit. But he effectively was saying like, it's really hard for companies to change who they are. Yeah. When you look at Google's mission statement to organize information and make it universally accessible and useful, that is so deeply aligned with AI. Yep.
Speaker 1:It's like what does ChatGPT do? Like organizes information and makes it useful. Right? Agents like ChatGPT agent is making that information useful.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so it just feels like, again, like generative AI is, like, deeply aligned with the core mission. And so it's easy to see, you know, them continuing to win here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I think the the problem is is, like, the like, disruption comes when you create a product that is not as good, but the financials are structurally different. So the idea of, like, if AI disrupts, like, a law firm, you look at this product or even, like, I don't know. What what what's the classic example of of of disruption that people go through? I don't know.
Speaker 2:But, like, this idea of
Speaker 1:like Yeah. The big thing was Innovator's Dilemma.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In Innovator's Dilemma, the example is like a new product comes to market that does something 90% as well. And and so it's like unacceptable to the people that are buying the current product. But then over time, it gets better and better and better until it replaces the current product. And so there is a world where if they had just changed the the Google search bar to just be like, this is just an LLM now, people would have been really, really disappointed with that shift, and they would have been like, I want to go back.
Speaker 2:And ripping that Band Aid off to the tune of, what, $300,000,000,000 a year in in search revenue would be really painful. So they had to take a more a more iterative, like, stepwise improvements, but it seems like they're doing well. And Ben Thompson is kind of echoing this. He says, Once again and however, I have to come to Google's defense. All available metrics suggest that the company is doing quite well.
Speaker 2:Indeed, I would go further. You can make the case that the company's biggest mistake is not going harder. And so, they flip infrastructure spending is through the roof, as we mentioned. So in in after the q four twenty twenty four earnings and their announcement that they were spending 75,000,000,000 on CapEx, then Google Google Cloud's revenue numbers disappointed, but this was because they didn't have enough GPUs and they were actually constrained. So they they missed on top line.
Speaker 2:Like, didn't bring in enough revenue, but their margins actually improved. And so what that means is that there was so much demand that they had pricing power. And they could say, no, we're not giving you any discounts because everyone wants these GPUs right now or the TPUs. They want our infrastructure. So we don't need to we don't need to sell them at a discount.
Speaker 2:And so their margins were really good and what that revealed was that they were they were capacity constrained and that justifies the bigger CapEx spend that they're going into right now.
Speaker 1:And Google is still the poly market which company has the best AI model end of twenty twenty five. So December 31, there's been one and a half million of volume and Google is still sitting comfortably at 46% chance of being at the top of LM Arena at the end of the year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is this is such a crazy supply constraints metric. So the Google CFO Anat Ashkenazi said on the earnings call, in cloud as I mentioned, the demand for our products is high as evidenced by the continued revenue growth and the cloud backlog, guess how big their cloud backlog is? Just the demand for for Google Cloud products that they can't fulfill because they haven't built the data centers. Like, but if they had more capacity, they think that they could deliver this.
Speaker 2:A $106,000,000,000. That's so much money.
Speaker 1:Great. Honestly It's so much businesses should try to put themselves in the position
Speaker 2:Yes. When they
Speaker 1:have the It's a little billion of demand that they can't.
Speaker 2:106 106,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:We try to not give business advice because it's so Yeah. It's fraud. Well, it's just it's just like every business is different. Every every founder's different. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But in general Yeah. If you can develop a a a demand
Speaker 2:It's a good call for like a YC company. Like, you go on stage at demo day and you say like, yeah. We have LOIs and we have some demand backlog.
Speaker 1:We have a $106 billion. Of demand that we're unable. There was actually a YC company yesterday Yeah. Or or two days ago that that was getting a little bit roasted because they were like, they launched a product and they were like, wow, today was insane. Our servers our servers went down immediately.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you could see the user chart and they had like 250 users. And so people are like, wait, like your entire your product went down on 250 users.
Speaker 2:That's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Anyways, but happy happy for their success.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Figma. 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 so this so he keeps going into the CapEx.
Speaker 1:Wait. Before we do that, Figma make is generally avail Go to Today. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can
Speaker 1:go to figma.com/make and just start building various products. Tyler has been using Figma Make to make a product that we'll be releasing very soon.
Speaker 2:Very excited for that. We will we will announce that soon. So from the earnings call, given the strong demand for our cloud products and services, we now expect to invest 85,000,000,000 in CapEx from '25 2025, up from a previous estimate of 75,000,000,000, just a 10,000,000,000 incremental investment. Absolutely massive. Our updated outlook reflects additional investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers, and an acceleration of the pace of data center construction primarily to meet cloud customer demand.
Speaker 2:The challenge Pichai cautioned in an answer to an analyst question is that it takes a while for these investments to come on board. So of course, the risk is like you overbuild, but there's certainly no evidence of that given the massive backlog. So the other interesting thing that Ben dips his toe into. So Ben Thompson, Mr. Techery, famously does not get caught up in trade deals and non CEO employee shifts.
Speaker 1:They're below his line.
Speaker 2:They are below his line. They're below his line. But he had to chime in on the CFO change that happened at Google. So he says, I'm always hesitant to delve too much. I like that he's throwing in a delve.
Speaker 2:You know it's not written by a It's bait. But he's baiting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's baiting for sure. He's like how dare you accuse. Yeah. He's like you can go back and look at how many times I've used
Speaker 2:Dell for millions of I created Dell. I coined that word.
Speaker 1:There's a YC company called Dell
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. As well So that's doing
Speaker 2:he says, but it's interesting that the goo that the earnings call was Ruth Parrott's last one as CFO. Parrott earned a lot of plaudits for getting Google spending under control in the late twenty tens, but what seems clear in retrospect that is that 52,500,000,000.0 that Google spent on CapEx in 2024 was too little. And so he's kind of like, you know, noodling on this idea that maybe the CFO was too cautious going into an AI boom.
Speaker 1:You could lose your job
Speaker 2:over that. Called a maybe Ruth Perrott was calling top signals like us. It looks terrible. Fortunately, we don't lose our job and we There's
Speaker 1:nothing wrong with calling top signals.
Speaker 2:There there there's something wrong
Speaker 1:with underinvesting. Water if you're calling specifically calling the top. Yes. Trying to identify top signals
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Is more of a meta game.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, basically, Google, it it it does seem like Google under invested in CapEx in 2024 based on demand, wound up with that massive backlog, missed on top line, couldn't couldn't make enough money, couldn't generate enough revenue, had higher margins, that's great, but but didn't deliver on the cloud side on on the actual scale. So Ashkenazi's Ashkenazi's calls, meanwhile, have repeatedly reiterated that Google Cloud is particularly supply constrained.
Speaker 2:They don't have enough servers. And the company has now surprised investors twice in six months with the scale of its CapEx plans. Let's go. Says, this, in my opinion, is incredibly bullish for Google. Go back to this, the disruption lens, which we were kind of noodling on earlier.
Speaker 2:The exact avenue from which you would expect management resistance to a disruptive innovation to flow is from the is the CFO office. Like the CFO should be resistant to disruptive innovation. And when you look at the history of companies that got disrupted, the CFO is saying, we have a good business. Let's just keep printing cash. Like this new thing, let's not worry about it.
Speaker 2:Let's not Nokia
Speaker 1:CFO. Exactly. Are you guys seeing the numbers?
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, like, for a lot of those companies that got disrupted, it's like they were printing cash, high dividends for decades even after the disruption happened. The next, the iPhone comes out. And in order to actually do something to compete, they have to completely go into start up mode. They have to burn a ton of cash, cut their dividend, stop stockpiling cash, issue debt, do a ton, raise more equity maybe.
Speaker 2:Like, they have to become a new product development company, and it would be very, very difficult, usually.
Speaker 1:BlackBerry's annual revenue in 02/2005, 1,900,000,000.0. BlackBerry's They completely BlackBerry's annual revenue in 2024, 580,000,000.
Speaker 2:It's a cybersecurity company now. They bought a couple cyber security assets while they were valuable, while they were like, you know, while the stock was up. And then eventually, they wound down the phone business and just kind of became a cyber security company. Because obviously they had a ton of enterprise contracts because BlackBerrys were sold into like large enterprises as you know, work phones. Very few people had BlackBerrys as like everyday phones.
Speaker 2:But so they had all those, they had like solid sales team, solid connections, bought a new asset and were able to continue the business even though obviously it's not the company that it once was. So Ben Thompson goes on to say there's a there does seem to be a major shift in mindset in terms of the company's willingness to lean into AI, particularly for a segment Google Cloud that even in the best case scenarios is significantly lower margin than the company's core business. What's interesting about that margin point, however, is that it too is another reason to be bullish on Google's prospects. Google is the only company we talked about the TPU thing. They're the only company with an at scale ASIC alternative to NVIDIA's GPUs which should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end to the extent that cloud compute
Speaker 1:At scale
Speaker 2:to a
Speaker 1:point where they've they're gonna be able to support SSI. SSI. Which is crazy. Not just their own needs.
Speaker 2:And then and then there's also another question
Speaker 1:in the sorry. The dynamic that's interesting is, like, OpenAI needs to massively scale infrastructure and and as we covered earlier this week commit to spending tens of billions of dollars with with Oracle. Yep. And their revenue today doesn't support that. Obviously, their their growth trajectory is absolutely insane.
Speaker 1:But OpenAI being in a position where they are competing head on with Google for this very very critical consumer use case, search knowledge retrieval
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And ultimately usefulness. It is a extremely tough position for OpenAI to be in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the other hyperscalers are working on ASICs that are alternative to NVIDIA GPUs, but they all seem to be following the similar path, trying to get line time at TSMC, not fully at scale. Then there's also the question, you know, I think a lot of people's mind is like, is this the end of history? Is there something that's coming down the pipe that could disrupt the NVIDIA GPU monopoly, the CUDA ecosystem, or even the Google TPU? And semi analysis has a funny meme here way down in the stack about the next generation of chips that were that that have been pitched from startups like Etched and a few others.
Speaker 2:So Semi Analysis says, although baking transformers into silicon may sound cool, it's most mostly just a marketing slogan. 90% of transformers flops are just GEMMs and two fifty six by two fifty six or one twenty eight by one twenty eight systolic arrays in TPU and in TPU tranium are already optimized for these. Even modern GP GPUs with tensor cores are optimized well for GEMMs. Even if you bake transformers into silicon, aka just create a giant systolic array, most of your die area will still be taken up with SRAM cells. That's the memory.
Speaker 2:And you will still face the memory wall since your HBM memory bandwidth will be the same as GPGPUs, TPUs, and Tranium. And so the meme is transformers are just 90% matmoles. George Hott had a similar analysis or take just saying that if you look at the actual energy use of GPUs right now, there isn't that much opportunity to squeeze more value out of them. They're pretty efficient and most of the most of the energy that goes in goes into these very, very specific math calculations that are already pretty optimized. We did hear from someone something about the this is from Martin Scarelli that Jane Street or was it was it Jane Street?
Speaker 2:One of the high frequency trading firms figured out how to run one of those very, very basic map mole calculations on a GPU more efficiently, and I guess kind of open sourced it or something or got out into the into the research world. So it it doesn't it doesn't feel like at this moment, I still think that there's a interesting bull case for the etched crew in some ways, in some niches or something, some specific models. But it doesn't seem like there's some new disruptive chip architecture that's gonna come out and and obviate the need for both Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs. And so Google's very well positioned as Ben Thompson is writing. So he says this should give them their position that they have an at scale ASIC alternative to NVIDIA GPUs should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end to the extent that cloud compute becomes commoditized is the extent to which Google actually has a margin advantage.
Speaker 2:Because if all of the clouds are commoditized, but all of them are on Nvidia, and then Google is taking the Nvidia margin basically from their TPU, they should be in a very good spot. This is to be sure a bit weird. Parrott gained these plaudits those plaudits because there was so much waste in Google to cut which was downstream of the company's amazing monopoly and margins and search which hardly seems like the recipe for a structural cost advantage. But here we are.
Speaker 1:Sundar is gonna tell every employee, we're cutting your daily massage allowance from three massages down to one. We're deeply sorry, but we need to get fit.
Speaker 2:Gotta get fit. And you gotta get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a
Speaker 1:company's framework. Talking with Christina yesterday. She's an absolute dog.
Speaker 2:Boardroom general.
Speaker 1:Boardroom general.
Speaker 2:She put the KPIs in orbit.
Speaker 1:She she really has.
Speaker 2:She really has.
Speaker 1:Did you see that? Did you see that?
Speaker 2:It. The Reed shirt.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Reed's chart. She says It's just the Andrew said Christina often talks about stacking rice on the chessboard. Yeah. I didn't see this until after the show but I was like it seems like you guys are just chopping wood.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. There like
Speaker 2:That's what it is.
Speaker 1:Putting in the work.
Speaker 2:Just you know, a couple percent here, a couple percent here. Just very consistent growth, very consistent growth, very smooth growth curve into a monster of business. So, congrats to everyone over at Vanta on the new round. And we will go back to Google. So, more broadly, the way in which Google seems to have flipped the switch in terms of going all in on AI along with Meta's spending on AI talent really does strongly suggest that AI in the end is a sustaining technology that favors the incumbents most of all.
Speaker 2:Both see a line of sight to new revenue streams and critically, both can fund AI from profits, not speculative investment or debt. And of course, both have distribution including search. Sometimes the Empire Strikes Back. I love that. So there were other takes from from search.
Speaker 2:You'll have to subscribe to Sir Techery to get the full analysis. You gotta go and subscribe to Sir Techery. If you're not subscribed, what are you doing? But the interesting takeaway from from search is that there it seems like Google's being a little squishy about hey, we don't want to report certain KPIs anymore. So they used to report paid clicks, and now the chief business officer, Philip Schindler, is saying and and on your paid click question, look, to be very clear, I think we said this before, we manage the business to drive great outcomes for our users and attract attractive ROI for our advertisers.
Speaker 2:We don't We actually don't manage to pay clicks or CPC targets which is fair and good, but it's funny because Ben Thompson is like, but I want that data. That would be helpful to me.
Speaker 1:I mean, when a business has a metric that they tell you is important for a long time and then they suddenly tell you it's not important.
Speaker 2:Don't worry about it.
Speaker 1:You gotta But
Speaker 2:it does make sense. They're a huge business. They've moved on to to bigger and like higher levels of abstract.
Speaker 1:Just look at the growth in tokens. Yeah. Yeah. But Don't worry about anything else.
Speaker 2:What what he says is that there are there are product changes and policy changes that actually drive better monetization but at the expense of paid clicks and that's probably AI searches and stuff like that. You'll see in the 10 Q paid clicks were up 4% year on year, but a number of factors affecting this these metrics from quarter to quarter such as advertiser spending, product changes, policy changes, user engagement. So it's really important when it comes to pay clicks and CPC to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions solely based on these metrics. Don't put me in the truth zone on this, he says. So Ben Thompson, this is exactly what you said.
Speaker 2:I don't even think you pre read this but you basically have Ben Thompson working in your head because
Speaker 1:This is what I said when Ben Thompson came on the show. Was like, I think your way of thinking has been so ingrained into my mind Yep. That I I think that I have an original thought and you've already thought it.
Speaker 2:Okay. So this is what he says and it's literally I haven't read just the article. It says, the more that management tells me not to pay attention to paid click rates, the more I want to pay attention, which is exactly what you just said. Regardless, once again, the fact that paid clips, paid click pay clicks were up 4% and search revenue was up 12% makes it clear that search growth is primarily being driven by higher prices. And so the actual number of clicks is up 4%, but revenue is up 12.
Speaker 2:That means that they're monetizing each click better. But people are obviously gonna read into, oh, paid clicks aren't growing that fast. Like the actual pie isn't growing that fast. They're just getting like It's basically like, you know, once Instagram reels is is popular, everyone's watching it, then you just gotta put more ads in the feed. Right?
Speaker 2:And that's kind of that seems like what they're doing and that's what's driving search revenue up 12%. AI overviews is another question. This is a funny one where basically the the chief business officer Philip Schindler at Google says basically says that AI overviews are monetizing as well as other Google searches. And Ben Thompson says, given the fact that the vast majority of Google searches don't monetize at all because people just click on the link
Speaker 1:That's what I'm that's asking. Oftentimes the if you're searching for information that you can have very low purchase intent. Right? Like, how many times a day do I search for a specific fact? Yep.
Speaker 1:And never would have you could show me the best ad in the world, I wouldn't click through because I'm just looking for a fact.
Speaker 2:Yep. So if you're looking for something like, you know, Hulk Hogan's age, that's not a that's not a purchase intent. If that comes from an AI overview or it comes from a you know how they used to have those, like, knowledge boxes or, like, we would pull from Wikipedia. Or if you click on Wikipedia, none of that is making Google any money. So it really doesn't matter the UI or the actual underlying technology to get you that answer.
Speaker 2:And then Gemini is on absolute tear. Really remarkable. How how many monthly active users do you think the Gemini app has? These are MAUs, not DUs.
Speaker 1:On the mobile app? Web app?
Speaker 2:Gemini app. Combined? Yep. I think this is probably across mobile web and desktop but I would assume mobile.
Speaker 1:520,000,000.
Speaker 2:Oof. Big. Right? And
Speaker 1:it And that's signed like, I guess I get I mean, they kind of get the it's kind of a they cheat code because everybody already has a Google account so they're like Yep. Signed in. Yep. But in in term I I don't know.
Speaker 2:They're monthly. And and what we know from semi analysis is that they're not taking share of queries that much. But 450,000,000 downloads on an app and monthly active users is pretty pretty high. And so Yeah. If there's if there's a world where Google can build a business around if they can bring in ads faster and keep the Gemini app cheaper and offer better better products and like you get deep research, you get agent, you get the $200 tier, the ad free if if OpenAI and ChatGPT has a $200 tier that's ad free and then Google's giving you the same product and the same experience but with ads for free.
Speaker 2:Like that feels like an Android IOS battle going on. That feels like something that could actually be pretty sustainable and kind of drive this like little bit of a duopoly. I don't know. We'll have to see how it goes. But daily requests grew over 50% from Q one to Q two.
Speaker 2:And I think everyone everyone is is pretty surprised by that. And I was also surprised when I went and pulled up the the Gemini app. When I went to go download it, the number of five star reviews is like hundreds of thousands. And I was like, okay. This is very serious.
Speaker 2:And that reflects the actual number that they shared, 450,000,000 monthly active users. So still a lot of work to be done. I was very frustrated when I went to go get v o three. I got the Gemini app and they were Are they
Speaker 1:already having it?
Speaker 2:But I couldn't access it.
Speaker 1:Is Gemini some frustrations default in in Android yet?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I I imagine that it has to be preinstalled in the next round of Android phones that go out. Why would you not want that preinstalled in in there? But I don't I would be surprised if that's what's driving it because, I mean, how many Samsung Galaxies have they sold in the last quarter? Probably not 200,000,000, right?
Speaker 2:I doubt that that's what's driving the growth. But maybe that might be an interesting thing how many of them are pre installs, preloads. But even then you have to open it to become an MAU. But yeah, maybe maybe they're testing, maybe people will churn and go back
Speaker 1:to OpenAI and GPT. Android users have had access to Google assistant for a long time. Yep. That's getting phased out.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's just
Speaker 1:gonna be Gemini.
Speaker 2:Yep. Well, let me tell you about graphite. Dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free at graphite.dev.
Speaker 1:I don't know if people can hear but anytime we do a an ad read, the entire team breaks out in applause in the studio. So it's really
Speaker 2:Let's hear it for some advertisements There we we go. In other very very sad news, Hulk Hogan has passed away at age 70. 71. Cardiac arrest was what you said. Right, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I didn't actually delve into that. Looked a little bit more into, some of the history. I wanted to know a little bit more about his his story. There's a whole bunch of different profiles. There was at one point going to be a biopic about him.
Speaker 2:In a recent interview with Variety, director Todd Phillips revealed that his long gestating Hulk Hogan biopic will not progress. Unfortunately, it got canned. This was back in about a year ago today. I love what we were trying to do, but that's not gonna come together for me. Chris Hemsworth had signed on to play Hogan in early twenty nineteen with the Joker writer and director duo, Todd Phillips and Scott Silver attached to lead the charge.
Speaker 2:Film's producers, you got Phillips, Hogan, Hemsworth, Bradley Cooper, Michael Sugar Suger? Suger? I don't know. Stacked. And Hogan's long long time pal and and New World Order stable mate Eric Bischoff.
Speaker 2:In a July 2020 interview with Total Film, Helmsworth described the training he'd have to undergo to transform into the eighties WWE icon. As you can imagine, the preparation for the role will be insanely physical. I will have to put on more size than I ever have before, even more than I put on for Thor. There is this accent as well as the physicality of and the attitude Hemsworth said. The Hogan biopic would explore his rise to stardom in the early nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2:His WWF World Heavyweight Championship win over the Iron Sheik in 1980
Speaker 1:It's a role. You know that Hemsworth has a personal fitness training app I called Center.
Speaker 2:I have heard of that. Is it good?
Speaker 1:Like, well, I'm really gonna have to use my app a lot for this role.
Speaker 2:Maybe we should start using his app. Get on the Hulk train. Become Hulkamaniacs as they call them.
Speaker 1:Did you grow up watching wrestling at all?
Speaker 2:I didn't. But I was aware of Hulk Hogan just through the lore because it was so dumb.
Speaker 1:Well, even I I feel like I would hear more about Hulk, Hulk Hogan in the context of the Gawker saga.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. We should go into that. I wanna I wanna pull up this Hulk Hogan video. I'll send it to the the team. There's some, like, great, like, rants.
Speaker 2:Where is it? There's one where he's where he's talking trash about something. Wow. Everything's just, like, RIP. But he was he was legendary at, like I don't what what do they call in UFC where you, like, are pre show pump up talking about the competition?
Speaker 2:I guess it's like a promo. Is that what it is?
Speaker 3:Makes
Speaker 2:sense. This one. Seek and destroy. We gotta watch this. I will put it in the tab so we can watch this.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, we should talk about the Gawker fallout a little bit. Let me put that in there. The best promos. Hulk Hogan, Seek and Destroy. Let's pull that up.
Speaker 1:Hulk Hogan has recently been a founder. He has Here it is. A real American beer
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 1:which yeah. He did with Okay. The Budweiser family.
Speaker 2:This is what we need to channel. We need to bring this energy to the show every day.
Speaker 4:Fully defending, but there are those right now that are questioning whether you can withstand the big man.
Speaker 5:I don't care about those people, man. I don't care about those people that aren't stark raven Hulkamaniacs. I could care less what they think. I'm fighting for life, brother. I'm fighting for all those people that have remolded their lives, man.
Speaker 5:Modeled after Hulkamania. Get their priorities in order, man. Walk around with a lot of pride. As far as those people that are on Andre the Giant's side, I wish they'd come on down too. I like to slap them around just for a warm up.
Speaker 5:But I've already gone through my transformation, man. I'm ready for Pontiac, Michigan. I'm not the Hulk anymore. I'm the Hulkster man. Look into my eyes, man.
Speaker 5:Oh, come That mountaintop, back off, little man. I'm on that mountaintop, and I'm waiting for you, Andre. And I'm guarding that mountain. And the Hulkster that's guarding has got a 32 inch neck, a 64 inch chest, the largest arms in the world. And I'm here to seek and destroy, seek and destroy the cancer of Andre the Giant, seek and destroy the Weasels empire.
Speaker 5:And what you're gonna do Andre in Pontiac, Michigan when Hawkamania destroys you.
Speaker 4:He is indeed absolutely livid. Going against the man that one time he looked up to and respected. Hulk Hogan to the fans.
Speaker 2:That's the energy I want, Sundar Pichai to bring to Google. I got 85,000,000,000 of CapEx. I grew 50% top line. I know I'm coming for Sam Altman. They're coming for me.
Speaker 2:I'm coming for I'm coming They're coming for me. I'm coming for them. I got 450,000,000 MAUs on the Gemini app. The search overviews are going great. They're monetizing just as well as regular search results.
Speaker 2:Come here to Mountain View. Catcher. Get down to Mountain View. And if you're riding with if you're riding with the the Andre the Giant, like, you gotta be a Stark Raven Hulkamaniac. That's so good.
Speaker 2:I love it. Chris Hemsworth signed on to play Thor from Thor, signed on to play Hogan in early twenty nineteen. He said he had to put on a lot of size. The biopic would have explored his rise to stardom in the early nineteen eighties, and then Hulkamania takeover that ruled the wrestling world well into the nineteen nineties. Phillips' take on Hulkamania was going to stay away from Hogan's recent controversies instead focus solely on the early years.
Speaker 2:Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are currently developing a film titled Killing Gawker that will explore Hogan's campaign against the media empire in the wake of an explosive home video.
Speaker 1:Hulk Hogan was six foot seven which is why
Speaker 2:Pretty close.
Speaker 1:You'd able to heightmog him.
Speaker 2:Pretty close to me. He's crazy.
Speaker 1:He's got you on next He's next for sure.
Speaker 2:For sure. And I think I will be staying away from his supplement stack. Hopefully hoping hoping to make
Speaker 1:it Yeah. Longer. Really sad though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very sad. What a what a career and what a fantastic The Hulk the Hulk Hogan theme song, I am a real American. Such a good song. Such a great rallying
Speaker 1:name of his beer, Real American Beer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fight for the rights of every man. Such a good song. Light, crisp, crushable. So, is a there is a reflective piece in the New Yorker about Hulk Hogan's Gawker lawsuit that we can go through.
Speaker 2:But first, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the modern Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product road maps. Go to linear app homepage. And, you know, if Hogan's selling beer, you gotta get you on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot.
Speaker 2:Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
Speaker 1:Friend of mine is was business partners with with No way. Hogan on that. That's crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we have Zach Kuukhoff joining at noon to break down the AI day yesterday in Washington DC. The besties met up with the
Speaker 1:They crushed it.
Speaker 2:Hill and Valley crew. Honestly crushed it. We have a bunch of great posts that we can run through. First, let's go through a little bit of the Hulk Hogan loss Gawker lawsuit. This is from 2016, well before we actually saw the the results from all this.
Speaker 2:But, on Monday afternoon, a Florida jury added $25,000,000 in punitive damages to the $115,000,000 it had awarded Hulk Hogan on Friday in his invasion of privacy case against Gawker media. Hogan sued Gawker for posting portions of a sex tape it received from an anonymous sender. It's a shocking amount, not least because it's $40,000,000 more than Hogan, whose real name is Tade de la la, had demanded. Verdicts of this size can pose an existential risk to media to a media company. That's what happened to Gawker.
Speaker 2:Gawker has reported that it earned $44,000,000 in revenue in 2014. In in January, Gawker's owner Nick Denton announced that he had sold a portion of his company to investors in order to fund this case. Gawker will certainly appeal the verdict as it should after it pays a bond of up to $50,000,000 arguing that the jury was unreasonable in finding that Hogan's right to privacy outweighed Gawker's right to publish the material, which it believes was of public interest which is a very yeah. It's
Speaker 1:it's Strange defense.
Speaker 2:It is. It is. It is hard to to argue. He is a public figure but this is a very personal thing.
Speaker 1:I mean, if they had just posted that it existed and they had seen it.
Speaker 2:That's true. And that's kind of what's happening with the Wall Street Journal. They're not posting everything all the time with regards to the to the to the Trump Epstein stuff but they're they're referencing that it exists that they verified it and that seems to be a safer path for media companies to to kind of report that they've confirmed that something exists without actually putting everything out necessarily. So the publication of the videotape of consensual sex between adults is not the most appealing place to plant a first amendment flag, but it is worth considering the possible effects on publishers if a judgment of this magnitude is allowed to stand. And so the the fallout from Gawker was certainly celebrated in tech because they also had, Valley Wag, which was, very annoying to a lot of people in tech because it was basically like TMZ for tech.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you were aware of ValleyWag back
Speaker 1:before Before my time.
Speaker 2:Before your time. But it it did have like a chilling effect. I remember being at South by Southwest and a friend of mine who's a venture backed founder at the time was was really into doing handstand push ups and was doing handstand push ups at a at like a party that was being thrown that were people just kind of hanging out and he was just doing some handstand push ups As one does. As one does. And and there was a value add reporter there and wrote about it as a characterization of like how bro y the situation was, but didn't include his name.
Speaker 2:And he was like, I dodged a bullet. Because like, could have been forever outed his I mean, in many ways
Speaker 1:does many ways, he could have built his aura I agree. If he if he was named.
Speaker 2:In the modern era, it would have been incredibly bullish. Mhmm. But at that time, it did feel like something that could destroy you. It was it was a very tense time. Very, very tense time.
Speaker 1:Roy Lee, would not have, done well during that era. Yeah. Maybe he would have maybe he would have changed the meta though. Because he's making he's making shirtless posts on the timeline. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Bringing them into the modern era.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is it is it is an interesting interesting thing. Like, Valleywag would probably be writing about Cluely a lot and framing it in a different way. There's already probably folks out there who are framing Cluely as particularly bad on the other side of the aisle or in the in the anti tech category. But it just doesn't seem to have the same effect.
Speaker 2:It certainly doesn't stop venture funding or customers or any of that. It doesn't it seems to be that we're in a different era where people people in tech were were clearly, it was controversial in tech. People were definitely divided.
Speaker 1:I think it would be good if there was some law that required if if media company wanted to write about someone's physique, they should have to post physique.
Speaker 2:Oh, their own physique. Yes.
Speaker 1:So that should just be in the footnotes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's important context.
Speaker 2:Anyway, in other in other news, Spin dot ai, the number one customer the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake off, number one in ranking on g two. Go check out fin.ai.
Speaker 1:And OWN is apparently helping launch a media company. Yeah. And so, you wanna go work for OWN or this new company, which I believe is called Cool Tech News, go check it out. They're looking for a producer.
Speaker 2:The founder of Nikola, the electric vehicle company that went bankrupt and landed its CEO founder in prison for a brief time. He was in jail for life, then he got pardoned. Just did a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson, and Nate Anderson from Hindenburg Hindenburg Research had a lengthy rebuttal to this that I thought was pretty interesting. So Nate says, I am Nate Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg Research. Reference
Speaker 1:Okay. And just for context Yes. If people haven't seen this yet, Tucker is basically positioning the takedown of Nikola as a woke witch hunt. Is that is that is that an accurate summary?
Speaker 2:It's it's kind of unclear. I think he's I think he's more just really, really open and digging into, hey, Trevor Milton. Like, tell your side of the story. And, it seemed like it seemed like Tucker didn't come with really strong opinions. At least for the part that I saw, it didn't seem like he was taking a super strong stance on, like, whether hydrogen is a good strategy or what happened.
Speaker 2:I haven't dug in in dug in but a lot of it a lot of those claims, think, don't come from Tucker. I think they come from, from Trevor Milton. And so the the real debate it seems like is between Nate Anderson and Trevor Milton's side of the story. I wouldn't say that in this podcast interview, Tucker has a particular like thesis that he's advancing. He's more just asking Trevor Milton to tell his side of the story.
Speaker 1:And people are not People
Speaker 2:are not happy with this for sure.
Speaker 1:People saying pitiful. Someone else is saying Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster and pathological liar. Other guy is saying terrible take, scam artist platformed. Anyways, another person just says, seriously? Question mark?
Speaker 1:And even TikTok investors is
Speaker 2:TikTok investors? Memeing
Speaker 1:it just being like, wow. This is I mean, is
Speaker 2:a lot of people got burned. Right?
Speaker 1:The funny thing too is is he was Wasn't he initially prosecuted during the Trump admin?
Speaker 2:Yes. So, Nate goes into this. He says, I'm the founder of Hindenburg Research referenced repeatedly in this bizarre fantastical interview. During my career, I helped expose numerous financial scams including over a dozen Ponzi schemes and numerous instances of public companies lying to and stealing from investors. Of course, he's talking about Hindenburg Research, his firm.
Speaker 2:I am immensely proud of the career of that career including our work on Nikola Motors referenced in this interview. Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster held criminally responsible for the incineration of hundreds of millions of dollars in retail investors' hard earned money and should and as should be unsurprising, Milton in this interview seems just to fabricate key events and information out of thin air. Unfortunately, with zero critical questioning or pushback from Tucker. For starters, contrary to Trevor Milton's implications that his prosecution was some sort of Biden administration conspiracy, conveniently neither Milton nor Tucker share that the investigation into Milton was started and disclosed in September 2020 under the first Trump admin as well as before the twenty twenty election. There were numerous inaccuracies throughout this interview.
Speaker 2:The claim that Hindenburg paid employees for inside information is patently absurd. The key whistleblower discussed in the interview was only briefly a contractor for Milton. He was so horrified by what he viewed as Milton's repeated false claims that he did a tremendous amount of research on his own unraveling numerous additional suspected lies that Milton peddled to the investing public. Further, Hindenburg didn't coordinate anything with media or the DOJ. Such entities ran their own investigations for the for their own purposes unconnected to us.
Speaker 2:There was ample evidence that Milton misstated numerous aspects of his business and as as the company later itself acknowledged. What's interesting is like, I feel like when we talked about the Marques Brownlee Escobar phone, like MKBHD kind of broke that story and did some investigative journalism, wound up getting his hands on the phone. And then the DOJ or the FBI came and said, hey, we want that phone as evidence. We'll give it back to you maybe in five years. And so, it's interesting that that it seems like the DOJ according to Nate Anderson did not coordinate with Hindenburg.
Speaker 2:Maybe that's just because Hindenburg was doing public research or just doing like informational research and didn't have any like hard physical evidence. But I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the DOJ reached out to Hindenburg, it seems like they didn't coordinate according to Nate Anderson. It would take hours to write out all the other absurdities, have truth, innuendos and false statements in this interview. But in the interest of correcting some of the record, here's a handful. Milton waxes on about his pardon, but no one mentions that Milton's lawyer was Brad Bondi, the brother of AG Pam Bondi, nor did anyone mention that Milton donated $900,000 to Trump in October 2024, less than a month before the recent election, strategically timed well after his criminal conviction and immediately prior to the presidential election.
Speaker 2:What's interesting is like like, you know, you you you take a company to bankruptcy, you wind up in prison for life, you would think that you get zeroed pretty hard to the degree that you don't have $900,000 sitting around to make a political donation. So I'm very curious about how the money flowed around post bankruptcy, post post post indictment and and conviction because I think that will change the calculus of people that are thinking about doing crazy stuff in the public markets. Yeah. Because if you're like, okay. Yes.
Speaker 2:I might get thrown in jail but then I can squirrel away some money, donate it, get pardoned and then have half left over to hang out like that's a pretty good deal. So
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Certainly not the functioning of the system that we want. Very very odd.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the other thing that Nate calls out Yep. He says, waxing poetic about hydrogen in the interview echoes Nicholas lies to retail investors that it successfully produced hydrogen at a cost 81% lower than anyone on earth, a feat that it would have upended the entire energy industry had it been remotely true. Nikola's head of hydrogen production, presumably in charge of this world, world changing scientific breakthrough turned out to be Milton's own brother who had no scientific background and previously did odd construction jobs in Hawaii.
Speaker 2:See, I wanna push back on that because last night, I was like 7,000 deep and I feel like I cracked the code to Too bad. The the energy markets.
Speaker 1:ChatGPT had you pretty convinced that It was too. Yeah. You could produce hydrogen.
Speaker 2:It was like, John, you're you're onto something.
Speaker 1:You're onto something here. It doesn't matter that you're a podcaster. Go public. Yeah. It does not matter that you're just a mere podcaster.
Speaker 2:You cracked it. You cracked the
Speaker 1:the the you know, one thing you can kind of Tucker could have pushed on was Yeah. You rolled a truck downhill and you and you marketed it as though it was a functioning vehicle.
Speaker 2:Yep. That was a big one.
Speaker 1:And doesn't seem to be something that he pushed back on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Big questions about short selling. And he makes the case that short selling is good because it creates a financial incentive to expose companies that lie and engage in fraud. I think I agree with that. I think I'm pro short sellers.
Speaker 2:Although, of course, they can be very frustrating if you're on the other side and you're being shorted. Fortunately, TBPN is a privately held company, so we don't have to deal with short attacks. At least not now, but
Speaker 1:who knows? With that, let's bring in our Washington correspondent, Zach Kukhoff. Zach.
Speaker 2:How you doing? What was
Speaker 1:your reaction what was your reaction to Trevor Milton going on on Tuck? Tuck Radio.
Speaker 6:I just think terrible choice of, network to go on first. The clear answer was TBPM.
Speaker 2:I I don't know if I'm ready. I I don't know. It's a tough
Speaker 1:We just come we'd come with a fact sheet of just fact by fact and say, did you roll the truck down the hill?
Speaker 6:You tell him you wouldn't have coddled him the way that soccer did?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't know. When we had Soham Parikh on people
Speaker 2:People were saying we went
Speaker 1:we went too easy. But clearly, we got him to just admit to having multiple jobs immediately. The question
Speaker 2:was was are you working multiple jobs? That was my first question. He just said yes. And then, you know, from there it's like, okay, he's admitted it. Like, let's talk about redemption.
Speaker 2:Was there a possibility?
Speaker 6:What else did people want him to admit? Like five other made up things he hadn't done?
Speaker 1:Think I think the critique that was fair was that he's clearly a pathological liar and Yeah. Fairly charismatic. And we probably just should have said, hey. Seems like you're still lying. But at the same time, we gotta check-in with the company he just joined.
Speaker 1:He said he's going what did he say? He said he's going
Speaker 2:Exclusive. Exclusive. Exclusive.
Speaker 7:Exclusive is
Speaker 1:the term. I'm going exclusive.
Speaker 2:I'm going exclusive. Just one job now. I don't know. I I still wanna believe in redemption. Not many people believe in redemption.
Speaker 2:That's where it was interesting. But yeah. I mean, like like the the I suppose that if I was interviewing Trevor Milton, the first question would be, did you roll the truck down the hill and did you did you actually do that? Because that is the fraud claim mainly. And if if it's like, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I did that. I made a mistake. Now I'm on the redemption path as opposed to, you know, like, you know, waffling around it.
Speaker 6:As opposed to, no. I didn't roll it downhill. The truck was just built that way. And the hill was just
Speaker 1:built that way. I mean, has been a big we gotta call out. This has been a big week for podcasting. You have Sam Altman on
Speaker 2:The Yvonne.
Speaker 1:The Yvonne. You have Netanyahu on the Nalcoys. And you have Trevor Milton on Tucker Carlson. I mean, what a week. What a week.
Speaker 1:But And Zach Kukoff on TV.
Speaker 6:4 figures of equal stature. Correct.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:I think I think higher stature than some of these.
Speaker 6:Well, higher than some lower than
Speaker 7:others. Correct.
Speaker 1:Exactly. What's going on in your world? How was yesterday? It looked Good to it down.
Speaker 2:Like
Speaker 1:total total also total podcast victory.
Speaker 2:Total podcast victory for sure.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think, somebody said All In is now state media, which I loved. I was like, yesterday literally was total podcast dominance Yeah. Which was wild. It was very well done.
Speaker 6:Major props to frequent TPPN guest, Dalian, who did an amazing job. I think, you they pulled the whole thing together in, yeah. Christian and Dalian. Yeah. They put the whole thing together in, like, ten days.
Speaker 6:You guys noticed? The whole thing came from nothing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. They're
Speaker 6:they're Ten days.
Speaker 1:When you get a twenty minute block on the president's schedule, you gotta move quick.
Speaker 6:Yep. That is exactly exactly true. So
Speaker 2:I started Hilling Valley a couple years ago just as a dinner, but now there's, like, enough of an organization. I think it is, like, a company at this point that's doing these events, they have a playbook. And they every time they execute, it's better than the last one. So really
Speaker 6:My understanding is they have, like, 30 something people who help put these things together. It's a serious it's a real operation that really staffs it up.
Speaker 2:Where was it?
Speaker 6:It was at the Mellon Auditorium, which funnily enough is, next door or maybe even part of the environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. So it's a nice it was very funny because I would not say it was a particularly environmentally focused group in the audience, but beautiful space nonetheless. Honestly, a highlight of the day for me and probably for everybody there, a very funny, very well done POTUS speech. End of the day keynote, real red meat for us and for tech on a lot of the key questions on AI development. Also, lot of very funny, crowd work, like, really talented crowd work bits on Jensen and on Dun and Burgum.
Speaker 6:I was like, wow. It's gonna be a really talented Netflix special. This all gets packaged up.
Speaker 1:And and did he have a did he have did did Trump have a good line on Jason too? Or I couldn't tell if that was fake news or No. Or it was
Speaker 6:It was it was real. Trump gets up. First thing he says is, thanks to the All In podcast, Shmoth and David, and, yes, even Jason. And there was a huge pause for laughter, and he goes, yes. We're even thanking Jason today.
Speaker 6:A lot of Jason Galkanis jokes. I will say one interesting dynamic after thing that I don't know if I don't know if it was streamed online or what wasn't. But one interesting dynamic that I don't know if folks saw, the Jason was doing the voice of the liberal in the in the questioning. He was, like, trying to really put a little bit of the heat on some of the, Trump admin guests, and it was an interesting departure from everybody else who was asking questions.
Speaker 1:That's good. That's valuable. People will find a way to hate that, but it's good.
Speaker 6:Yeah. No. It's good to get the diversity of voices. I will say clearly some people that I don't think necessarily expected it, but, yeah, it was good to get the, the diversity of voices
Speaker 2:That's fun.
Speaker 6:Out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. What was the best line though? The best the best line to me was somebody asked Jensen to talk about America's AI advantage and he said, the one thing that no other country has is president Trump.
Speaker 6:That's right. That's why Jensen gets to that's why Jensen gets to export age twenties because he's had good lines like that.
Speaker 5:You
Speaker 6:know? It's wild. Amazing. It was a well done speech. Honestly, was well done event.
Speaker 6:I would say highlights for me from, like, a serious way, the big one for me was fair use training of the copyright material for AIs. This is the one we've been asking about for a while, and a lot of companies have been talking about it. In fact, there was a recent entropic court case that ruled on this, said, look. If it's trained on legally procured, legally purchased copyright material, that's fair use. That's in scope.
Speaker 6:If it's stuff that you're pirating, which allegedly Anthropic and Meta and others have done to build their corpus corpus of data, that's when you get into legal trouble. This was the first time that I've heard the admin come out and codify that, which is really nice. So I love that. I love the energy permitting stuff. There was a lot of stuff for all the abundance boys on permitting, a lot of permitting reform questions, accelerating data center build outs, a lot of trying to streamline getting new sources of energy online.
Speaker 6:And then, yes, there were some talk about how do you try to tighten even while we're still letting folks like China by age twenties. Some talk about things like location tracking for export controls too. So there was a lot to like in the speech. I actually thought it was a very, very well done speech, and it was funny because there was actually a live I know it is who's who's your partner? Is it Kalshi or Polymarket?
Speaker 1:Polymarket. Okay.
Speaker 6:So there was probably a Polymarket. I saw it on Kalshi. There's probably a Polymarket market going at the same time
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Where people were betting on things like, will Trump say David Saks name
Speaker 1:Oh, shit. In this speech.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Before it gets resolved. So I thought it was really, really well done. Vance spoke super well.
Speaker 6:Bergam and Chris Wright had a very funny panel, the two of them together where Chris Wright and Jason got into it mono a mono a little bit, which was interesting to hear too. But great and really good energy in the space. A lot of good companies. Hadrian did a very good, almost like a sermon on the enthusiasm of reindustrialization. I love Chris from Hadrian did that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's been on the he's been on the roadshow with that because, he's he's probably giving something some similar version of that at Reindustrialized. Yes. Worked worked out the bit. Took the tight five to DC.
Speaker 2:We love to see it.
Speaker 6:It was a tight five. It was great.
Speaker 2:That's great. What, I I how should I think about this AI plan, this documented website that's been floating around? Yeah. Is this is this more of like like laws aren't changing, but this is just these are this is the plan for the laws that we will eventually change. Is that the idea?
Speaker 6:So think about it in two ways. One way is this is the White House using its bully pulpit to call for a series of changes that, yes, would need congress to enact them or would need agencies to change their policy. Right now, agencies changing their policy is something the White House can do. Yeah. The other side is, look, there are two EOs that were signed live on stage yesterday that Trump's did a very theatrical signing off, which is beautiful.
Speaker 6:Nice. And those are things that the admin can do directly. So there's some things for example, some of the energy permitting stuff, it's you know, there's certain things like doing categorical exclusions from NEPA that are a little bit more within the realm of, things that can be done. My understanding is via EO. But there are also things, as you guys know, a lot of permitting is done at the state and local level.
Speaker 6:Right? So the White House can't necessarily say we're going to overrule what state and local government does on permitting as a fiat. They have to work with partners all up and down the stack of government to get what the AI action plan calls for actually implemented.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So how big are those EOs? Like what were people tracking on those? And then I
Speaker 1:I What guess the there was was was one of the EOs around making it so that states can't enact AI safety laws for the next ten years? What do do do you have specifics on that? That felt super significant.
Speaker 6:So there were three AI EOs. I said too early, I was wondering. Three AI EOs and sometimes why. One was on bias free AI, which Okay. Is something I would instead frame as transparency.
Speaker 6:Right? There was a lot of talk about woke AI and removing things like DEI from AI implementation. The actually specific version of that, the the instantiated version of that, is that model providers that they wanna be used in government procurement have to attest to the values to be transparent about the values that go into their models. That's AIEO number one. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:AIEO number two is trying to fast track some of the development work we did. So it's fast tracking some of the data center permitting stuff that we did. And the third AIEO that we talked about is the export expansion. It's funny, Jordi. The thing that you're asking about, which we talked about last time, right, this idea of a moratorium on AI regulation for ten years, the big challenge is to actually get that done.
Speaker 6:That's something that has to be now done actually beyond my understanding, is beyond the scope of just what can be done in an EO. Right? Something that can be started has to actually transcend that as well. And some of the challenge, like you saw today, California is already starting to push back on the idea that the federal government has preemption ability over California's ability to regulate it. And the truth is there are powerful senators like Marsha Blackburn, who we discussed last time, whose job it is to protect their local industries like the music industry in Nashville, Tennessee, right, her home state, who are not gonna be thrilled about what I think is a pretty reasonable but ultimately controversial idea of trying to create a standard set of regulations that aren't 50 patchwork states because the default, and Trump mentioned this in his speech, is that in 50 different states, whoever's the most restrictive is who people end up following.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One because
Speaker 1:if you're a product if you're a product company or or a foundation model lab, you wanna be available everywhere. So the default is like Yeah. Basically be be allowed under the most restrictive regulations.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's One kind of funny framing I was was was kicking around was the idea of no paper clips. So, this kind of marks a shift away from worrying about AI doom. We're not worried about getting paper clipped. We're not worried about fast takeoff, this crazy doom scenario.
Speaker 2:So we're pulling back on safety, pulling more, pushing more into geopolitics. Let's actually scale up infrastructure, get these products out into the world because we think that by and large they're safe and now the game is to win on more or less like industrial capacity. Like if we're just producing way more tokens than every other country that will help our GDP, we will grow that way. The flip side of the no paper clips is that there's no move to do a new operation paper clip where we where we pulled scientists from Germany to America to build the bomb. And the and the and the the reference point there is that something like something like 75% of AI researchers on Meta's super intelligence team are, I think, on o ones or they're not
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 2:American citizens. And we've seen the deep sea team and Manus and, you know, there's some venture capital firms that are investing in Chinese AI and kind of the bull case is like, okay. Well, get them from China to Singapore and then get them to Silicon Valley and then we have the team on our side. And so it feels like that's the one area that wasn't really discussed. I I know immigration's obviously just a broadly hot topic, but in terms of like brain drain of the ultimate top AI scientists, is there any movement or people thinking about that?
Speaker 2:Is there any nuance coming up between, okay, maybe that's a different maybe that's a different problem set or different question than like dealing with, like, fentanyl dealers coming across the border.
Speaker 6:So I don't know that that was super within scope for the AI action plan. I'll tell you personally, there are definitely people who are thinking about an operation paper clip or how do we get the world's best and brightest, the truly truly elite, right, even above people who might qualify for o ones
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:To come and build in America AI with their families. That's the first thing. Second thing is, listen, the question you're getting to, which is a question of soft power, is a question the admin is thinking about. Right? And so the reason that the AIEO sorry, the AI action plan is so supportive of open source and open weight models is because the admin views it as a national security imperative to get American soft power, I e American models, to become the most widely used in the world.
Speaker 6:So the soft power lever the admin's pulling, I would like to see more and I'm hugely supportive of getting people here on a really targeted basis, ultra elite talent
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:To come here and build as opposed to building for adversaries.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we're talking about, like, 50 people. It's like it's
Speaker 6:super Yeah. Exactly. Super It's like 20 people.
Speaker 2:It should be a completely different different discussion than like, you know, border wall or anything. Correct. AI researcher has ever been impacted by a wall. Like, that's not
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's exactly right.
Speaker 2:Maybe the pre training scaling wall is their problem. Right. I
Speaker 1:know I know you have to run Yeah. Sorry. There were there was a post yesterday going viral. Somebody realized you could Venmo the government to help reduce the national debt. What's the right amount to start Venmoing Uncle Sam if you wanna do your part?
Speaker 6:Listen. There's daily basis. On tips now. So we should all be tipping the government, help them. They should be tipping.
Speaker 6:We should be getting tips, paid in tips, no tax on that. And then we could turn around and tip the government in Venmo as
Speaker 2:well. Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's all I
Speaker 7:would say based economy.
Speaker 6:As much you
Speaker 2:do. As much as you
Speaker 1:can do, but every day.
Speaker 2:Really quickly
Speaker 6:But
Speaker 2:every last day. Question for me. We'll let you go. That point on open source is really interesting. It feels like Mark Zuckerberg could be the national champion.
Speaker 2:He could be the hero of American open source with the Llama project. We don't know if Llama five is gonna be open source. Behemoth had trouble getting out. He hasn't really given clear guidance on how hard he's going into how we how hard he's gonna stay in open But what how do you think the mood is around Mark Zuckerberg in DC? Is he a winner or loser?
Speaker 2:The Wall Street Journal had this article on, you know, how much people have donated. Obviously, Jensen Spiel's ascendant. Elon Yep. Feels like he was at the top and then kind of dialed back a little bit but is still doing okay. The other hyperscaler CEOs are like, none of them are in bad bad positions but Zuck is like the interesting one where you could see a really interesting partnership form but I don't know where we are on that.
Speaker 6:Zuck, I think is interesting. He took a big swing. I'd say, listen, I wanna go do the cultural work. I wanna enmesh myself really deeply. Yep.
Speaker 6:And we've learned is this is an admin that really respects power and success. Right? Success is its own ability to attract more success through virtuous cycle. Jensen does well in part because he's tremendously gifted interpersonally, but also because he's the CEO of the most valuable company in the world, and the admin respects that. Right?
Speaker 6:And when he comes to town, know this is an admin that loves talking about things are number one, things are the biggest and the best and most important, and Jensen has that. Zuck, Zuck tried to Orifarm a little bit.
Speaker 7:You know
Speaker 6:what I mean? He tried to get in here and do a little bit of that, and I don't know that it's fully landed for him. I agree. Listen. I hope he keeps Llama five open source predominantly because I think it would be a great bite at the apple for him with national priority here.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But part of that's gonna also be his ability to invest and do some of the interpersonal retail stuff that Jensen's done so well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. With with OpenAI launching the open source model, you have to wonder if if if like National Open Source Champion of America is a title that Sam Altman is like, I'd like that.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Exactly. It
Speaker 1:doesn't
Speaker 2:Even have like direct economic value, if it comes with political power, that could be incredibly So interesting to see how it breaks down. Thank you much for joining. We'll let you get to your
Speaker 6:next meeting. Sorry. I'm making
Speaker 1:you miss your next one. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Talk to you soon. And we will tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 1:CRM.
Speaker 2:It's the next gen of CRM. And speaking of gens, gen z has a particular nihilism I call get my bag culture says Jasmine's son. The mentality of everyone's grifting so I better get my own. This ties into the Trevor Milton debate that we were having earlier. They've never voted without Trump on the ballot.
Speaker 2:All content is sponsored content unless proved otherwise. Post truth politics is all they know. The president's been scamming for the last ten years so don't be meek and virtuous or else you're gonna lose. So no wonder why you end up with Cluelly. Bit of a hot take.
Speaker 2:Interesting. But I do think that there's this there is this
Speaker 1:interesting thing though just to call out that the the Cluelly haters will be in shambles over this. But Roy was posting yesterday that he set up a 20% employee option pool Woah. Clearly. Okay.
Speaker 2:So he
Speaker 1:was paying a lot and people are pushing back being like your burns gotta be crazy.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And his pushback was basically, we're way more efficient
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To you know, you can get to 10,000,000 of ARR with a small team. Yeah. I pay people a lot and I also you can also give them a lot of equity. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I I do I do worry a little bit about just as we see more meme stocks, it gets more tempting. So for like like and that that meme about like you have five years to get the bag Escape the permanent underclass. Permanent underclass like and and if you're just seeing people get away with things that feel crazy and you're like, well they like everyone else got away with it. Maybe I should get away with it too.
Speaker 2:It is it is sad we need Gen Z founders building permanent structures, institutions, products that will outlive them. And there hasn't been a ton of those. Alex Wang was certainly the the leading candidate as kind of all star gen z company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And people people were pissed when I mean a lot of people were super happy when Ross Ulbricht was pardoned. Yeah. A lot of people were upset. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They were like he was dealing drugs on the internet and tried to kill someone. I think there's Allegedly. Allegedly. Well, Is it alleged? No.
Speaker 1:I think I think he did order the hit Yeah. But it didn't work.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Like it didn't go through because he was talking with a with a undercover agent.
Speaker 2:It happens to the best of us. Sometimes sometimes you put something on
Speaker 1:the Trump's like, who hasn't ordered a hit?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sometimes you put You
Speaker 1:never ordered one hit?
Speaker 2:Not even one. Sometimes you put something on on an underling's to do list and they just forget about it. It happens. And you're like, ah, they dropped the ball. It happens.
Speaker 2:Anyway, in other better news, there's a profile in Colossus of Rompton, Naomi That boy. Who you you've worked with, you've met and he says
Speaker 1:He's a dear friend.
Speaker 2:We we've been quietly building Abstract for nine years. He's your friend. He hasn't been on the show?
Speaker 1:Well, he's never done any media. Literally never. So this is like the first significant media that he's ever done. Interesting. He's been very very under the radar.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We don't
Speaker 1:have to list out his full portfolio but if you look at you can go to abstract.vc and check it out. Backed a lot of incredible companies. He backed my last company. Yeah. Was was an incredible partner and has been a true friend throughout as long as I've known him.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And I'm excited for him to talk about it. It's a crazy story. He had a fund, blew up, went bankrupt when he was 24 and he's 34 now, has 1,800,000,000.0 under Wow. That's impressive.
Speaker 1:And he's an absolute dog. I can't wait to see him at the top of the Midas list. For sure. It's gonna happen.
Speaker 2:So that will be in the next edition of Colossus Magazine which you should of course subscribe to. Yeah. You can read this article now. The man with the hot hand needs to link up with the man with the hot leather jacket. Jensen Huang apparently dropping a bombshell at the AI summit that we were just talking to Zach Kukoff about.
Speaker 2:I have 60 plus leather jackets. My wife picks them. That is the scoop that I need to hear. Bev, thank you for reporting on the ground. Jensen Huang says I have 60 plus leather jackets.
Speaker 2:That's a lot. One for every week of the year. I love it. Anyway, another quote from which you mentioned, Jensen Wong. America's unique advantage is that no country could no country could possibly have is President Trump.
Speaker 2:He is happy to be partnering with the president, the commander in chief. Also, a reconciliation of sorts between Delian Asperuhov and Chamath Palihapitiya. In DC, they're comparing Anacondas and a I r r's. Delian and Shermoth of course to put the timeline in turmoil a couple weeks ago talking trash to each other. All friendly.
Speaker 2:All's fair in love and war.
Speaker 1:All's fair on
Speaker 2:the timeline. Taking a friendly picture together. You'll love to see it. I love a reconciliation even if the the the language is a little vulgar for my taste. But, great to see two capital allocators hanging out in DC together.
Speaker 2:Christian Garrett also broke it down.
Speaker 1:Man behind this behind the scenes pulling all the strings pulling all the strings.
Speaker 2:Last night was truly something special. David Sachs and the all in pod brought Jacob Helberg and Deli and I in to something that we'll all never forget. The business of America is business as Calvin Coolidge said. It was never more important than last night. Friedberg stressed the importance of showing how the everyday American and those who the system has not worked for are already experiencing job creation and transformation due to AI.
Speaker 2:Winning the AI race will be a bigger will be part of a bigger story that benefits us all. There were members of Congress from both sides of the event showing how there is a unified front that's bipartisan around techno industrial policy and the opportunity AI presents itself. Jacob Helberg and those in the admin now have to get to good work. Amazing work, dude. Congrats as Will O'Brien.
Speaker 2:Bobby Good Latte says saw some of the post looks absolutely epic. So all three former guests you love to see it. So president Trump said he had planned to break Nvidia up until he learned who Jensen Huang was. What's funny is I don't I I don't even know how you would break up NVIDIA. Like it's it's just just a it's a fabulous semiconductor company.
Speaker 2:Like they it's not like the Intel thing where you have you have a fab and then you also have a design company. I mean I guess you could break down like gaming and AI training or something or I I just I I don't know where the dividing line would be would be. It's really just like they haven't The story of Nvidia isn't They they don't have an Instagram. It's not They they don't have a story of, oh, they acquired this company and it and it got really big and it saved them from disruption. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Could
Speaker 1:break it up and say, okay, you're gonna have an AI division and a gaming, you know,
Speaker 2:but gaming's like a rounding area. Yeah. I mean, they have some other stuff that's in there. I mean, I don't know. You break out Kuda or something.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 1:I don't know how you force Jensen to sell off the majority of his jackets.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Break up the jackets
Speaker 1:Pay down the national debt.
Speaker 2:But anyway, Jensen's been in DC. We saw him there a couple weeks ago, couple months ago and he's been doing the work to get to know Donald Trump and it has worked out spectacularly. And now, Jensen is the
Speaker 1:I have a I I we I I this will go unmentioned but I had a we have a friend of the show and Jensen walked up to us and the friend introduced himself and his company and Jensen didn't know the company and he's like, oh, it's so bearish for me.
Speaker 2:Wait, that was Jensen? Yeah. Oh, okay. I know the other side of that story.
Speaker 1:Didn't realize it.
Speaker 2:I thought it was a random person.
Speaker 1:He's like he really took it personally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1:you know, he's been on a generational run since. You wanna
Speaker 2:be known by the greats? The folks who only worked at Denny's and then started a generational company. Never ignore anywhere This is an interesting thread by Kevin Bryan talking about how the New York Times is reporting on the AI action plan. Kevin says, come on man. There's no way you can read the AI action plan and think this is the first order thing that that the first order thing that New York Times readers should know about it.
Speaker 2:Anthropic is positive. AI has huge implications for the national economy, defense, future of science. Half this article is about copyright. It is wild how much tech journalism comes from a place of extreme hostility towards the technology. It often reads like a r f k writing articles about new pharmaceutical breakthroughs.
Speaker 2:No wonder the Silicon Valley set completely ignores this. And then he closes with a post about, 90% of mainstream writing on AI is one encoded bias, two theft of copyright, three wasting water and electricity ad nauseam. Gangs gang folks in these labs think they're curing cancer. Honestly, Who gives anything about one two and three given that even if those worries were true they aren't. If you think those three things are the most important policy issues or even the biggest downside risks of AI and I mean this in a let's be real not
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hard to argue that energy use by itself is a bad thing. Yeah. And it and it is true that data centers require an obscene amount of energy. We talked earlier this week about how Oracle's Oracle's partnership with OpenAI, where OpenAI will be spending $30,000,000,000 a year with Oracle by 2027, at least how it was reported, will require two Hoover Dams worth of of energy, which is an exceptional amount.
Speaker 1:But as energy production has gone up, so has human prosperity.
Speaker 2:There's plenty of water for the data centers. There's plenty of water to fill your Eight Sleep. You can go to 8sleep.com. Get a pod
Speaker 1:I'm back. Five year warranty.
Speaker 2:Three night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go get a pod five.
Speaker 1:I've been ill. I finally put up seven and a half hours last night. I'm back in range. My HRV, I'm no longer looking dead. And I got over two hours of REM sleep last night.
Speaker 2:So we have been I'm feeling
Speaker 1:lot better too.
Speaker 2:From Andrew Zenhorowitz joining in just a few minutes. In the meantime, let's do some timeline. I wanna dig into this Financial Times article.
Speaker 1:I think we're gonna need more Let's
Speaker 2:do that later. The headline, of course, just to keep you up to speed is that NVIDIA chips worth $1,000,000,000 were smuggled into China after Trump export controls. We've heard about this black market. We've heard about people stuffing suitcases full of them and flying around the country. They're not the biggest thing in the world, so it's easy to route them around.
Speaker 2:There's always a question, could the government have done more? Could Nvidia have done more? What are Who are who are the truly the bad actors? There's the
Speaker 1:Crazy graphic right there.
Speaker 2:Good graphic. Love it. But we will we will cover this later in the show.
Speaker 1:Danish is throwing some shade at Ilya. He says, how you got 32,000,000,000? He doesn't have 32,000,000,000. And don't take the Turkey flight to restore the hairline. I would have Pavel Durov's myself into a Greek god instant.
Speaker 1:It was financially feasible. Dude does not give an f about anything but the mission incredibly bullish.
Speaker 2:Okay. You So don't think super intelligence is gonna be able to cure hair loss? Like that's gonna be the single prompt.
Speaker 1:Right before cancer?
Speaker 2:Probably. It does seem more tractable. It doesn't seem that crazy. Very rude. Anyway, people having fun on the timeline.
Speaker 2:Oh, well, we have Andreessen Horowitz partner, Vinita joining in just a few minutes. And there's a post about Andreessen Horowitz. So James Lynn says a 16 z in Sutter Hill Ventures.
Speaker 1:What's the context here?
Speaker 2:Oh, yes.
Speaker 1:Avadon Yes. Rodonski says recently got asked which VC firm changed the game like Steph Curry did
Speaker 2:for metaphors and tech these days. You love to see it.
Speaker 1:It's tough when you know nothing
Speaker 2:about examples of VC firms that changed the game like Steph Curry did for the NBA, Andreessen Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures, but in completely different ways. James Lynn here says a 16 z realized that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbid 10 x what other people were offering. I don't know if that's actually happened that often that you go get a term sheet and interesting comes in at 10 x the price. But they've certainly been aggressive on pricing and it's worked out in many cases. Yeah.
Speaker 2:For early rounds 50% higher. But Yeah. But So it got them Twitter, Instagram, Coinbase, GitHub, Andoril, Airbnb, Slack. Round sizes went up after that. Sutter Hills saw trends in cloud computing, incubated Snowflake from idea to IPO.
Speaker 2:They made Mike Spicer, a partner, the interim CEO, hired the technical cofounders, funded the entire series a. They had 20% stake in Snowflake at IPO at a $33,000,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 1:Worth 12 it was a $12,000,000,000 position for So pretty much the best incubation of all time.
Speaker 2:So a 16 z finds talent and makes several outsized bets. Sutter Hill sees a trend and operationalizes one to two companies completely in house. Now larger rounds are the norm, and the venture studio model is much more common. That makes a ton of sense. We'll have to ask Vinita about that when she joins.
Speaker 2:What else do we have here in the timeline?
Speaker 1:I also think you can't you you can't leave YC out of that group. Right? It's Who
Speaker 2:else changed the game? An
Speaker 1:different model but highly highly highly effective.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think the initial YC, the way it changed the game was that it made it completely possible for college new grads to go and start a company without getting any experience in enterprise or in business. And so that was the initial arb. Like, Sandhill Road existed. Sequoia Capital existed, Kleiner Perkins existed.
Speaker 2:But if the Airbnb guys had gone straight to Sequoia.
Speaker 1:Family round to get a friends and family round done.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So if the Airbnb guys, I think had showed up to Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia, who actually I think wound up doing the Airbnb deal later. I think Sequoia did. Pre YC, that might have been like, this is a little weird company. This is a little bit out of our sweet spot, but then you go through YC, you get coached by Paul Graham at the time and you polish things up such that you're ready to go and ready to talk to the big firms.
Speaker 2:And Paul Graham, I think famously told the Sequoia partner like you should do the Airbnb deal even as weird as it is. Like think about you know eBay for space and it worked out. Fantastic story.
Speaker 1:Pretty much good.
Speaker 2:We have Veneta from Andreessen Horowitz in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Speaker 8:Hello. How are you doing? I'm your Airbnb fan.
Speaker 2:Yes. What yeah. What's your what what what's your take on this on this a 16 z changing the game by recognizing that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbidding for early rounds? What do do you think that resonates? Do you feel like Andrews and Horowitz has changed the game in venture?
Speaker 1:Totally unbiased. Take two coming out.
Speaker 8:Totally unbiased. I do believe my partners are changing the game. No. And part of what's amazing about a 16 z is our willingness to bet in every sector, every vertical, every part of the economy, really every part of the economy, you know, both locally, domestically, and globally. So my corner of the world, it's a big corner
Speaker 7:of the world.
Speaker 8:It's a $5,000,000,000,000 corner of the world is health care. Yep. And one of the things I love about our firm is that we've really established a dedicated strategy here too Yep. And hopefully changing the game here too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Has, how has bio investing, healthcare investing changed? We were talking about the Airbnb example. It feels like it's it's it's easy for a couple folks with just a hope and a dream. They don't need to do a friends and family round.
Speaker 2:They can just go to Sandhill Road. They can go to places like YC. They can go to Andreessen Horowitz directly and and raise a seed round and have enough to actually pay the bills, hire a couple people, do a couple tests, launch a consumer app, launch an enterprise app. Has there been a meaningful change in the way health care and bio companies get started? For a long time, it felt like the only way to do a company in that space was you're at MIT and you do some partnership with Flagship Pioneering and then you IPO and then you're living and dying by your FDA trials.
Speaker 2:The traditional venture path felt very just like a completely separate track, but how has it evolved from your experience?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Great question. I mean, I think we're absolutely part of the agentic wave. I've never seen so much interest in the role of AI agents in transforming how science is done, how research discoveries are made, how drugs could be developed. The FDA launched an AI agent called ELSA, cute name, but, you know, potentially signaling, you know, a transformative role for AI even in the regulatory agency, which is kind of a mind blowing mind blowing thing to think about.
Speaker 8:Right? You would have thought that it would have been the innovators and the start ups kind of pushing AI first and then waiting for the regulator to say, yes, we believe these predictive tools are going to help us make drugs. So I think we are seeing a really different market pull than ever before. At the same time, the business models in health care, you know, are still similar, and the core products that drive value are still similar. So we're in the business of making new medicines, so are the startups that we back in large part, or making the practice of medicine way better and transforming the practice of medicine.
Speaker 8:And both have some really established business models around them. Drugs that work that have an impact on patients get paid for. They get paid for because they save the system money. Services, we pay for because people need services on time at you know, from the right specialist for the right disease. And so those are all, you know, great business models in which to in which to invest and in which startups can run.
Speaker 8:But certainly startups are now running in a much more capital efficient way and a much more AI powered way than they ever were before. We need good agents in the game Where in our space
Speaker 2:is Silicon Valley's sweet spot or like strike zone in bio? Because I I was reading the Wall Street Journal today about a company that does, they're developing robotics for lab testing equipment. So basically like pipetting, you know, famously it's like a PhD student just going like this all day long. Bunch of robots doing that. Makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:That feels like Silicon Valley all the way. Same
Speaker 1:How thing how many cursor for bio pitches have you you got? Is it is it in the hundreds?
Speaker 2:But that feels like more in the sweet spot. When I think about like an ERP system for for biotech companies, that feels a lot easier than saying, I'm going to take a cancer drug through the FDA trials and I'm never going to go public. I'm going to raise growth rounds at every stage. Like we haven't seen that much, but maybe we're still just early in that trend changing.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And I think part of that, the trend is changing in part because of the same trends we're seeing in other verticals that AI is getting paid for through labor budgets, and AI is not necessarily replacing but augmenting labor. Right? Ninety percent, ninety plus percent of all chemical screens for new drugs fail. No drug comes out of it.
Speaker 8:Ten percent of all nurse positions across the health care system are vacant. We can't find the nurses to fill the positions. Right? So we're living in a world where actually we need agentic resources to come in as labor, and that is different than the world we were living in before where we were trying to squeeze out IT budget from, you know, let's say, a large pharma company or, let's say, a hospital system to deploy the types of Silicon Valley technologies that could have been transformative for the industries. And so now that there's a lot more, you know, autonomous task completion
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:As well as augmentation well beyond what humans could do in those fields, I do think some of those Silicon Valley technologies, you know, obviously, yes, they are being formed. Yes. We are absolutely being pitched the cursor for bio right now, and and we think it's very credible. We think it absolutely is the case that if you have a lot of data, you you're a company that's, let's say, run clinical trials before, managed many, many drugs through development, you should have agents crawling through that data, learning what humans might have missed, learning why things failed, why things succeeded, and then bringing that knowledge to your next set of set of endeavors. And so, absolutely, you know, this kind of regime of of a fully virtual agentic lab that for every one human scientist, you know, has hundreds of agentic scientists is a really, really interesting interesting vision.
Speaker 8:At the same time, making the drug is really valuable. So we really do think that great innovation can take it all the way and can you know, great start ups can actually develop their own
Speaker 1:their own Yeah. How how often a company comes to you that wants to be more on the picks and shovels side kind of infrastructure, maybe more b to b. How often do you find yourself encouraging them to own, try to take it all the way and actually like use whatever innovation or or insight they have to not just make that product available to other bio or pharma companies, but, you know, actually deliver the end value?
Speaker 8:I think it really depends on the founders and exactly where the innovation sits. We've backed both. We're long on both infrastructure for the industry and, you know, SaaS, forward deployed SaaS, SaaS plus agentic implementations. And, you know, I think we think a lot of that has a ton of value and will fundamentally change how every organization operates, and not every organization is going to build their own cursor like tools for research. At the same time, sometimes the innovators who are closest I'll give you a real example.
Speaker 8:You know, autoimmune disease is horrible. Ten percent of people have an autoimmune disease. And sounds like science fiction, but recently, we tried CAR T therapy. Take take my T cells out of my body, engineer them, and instead of attacking a tumor cell, attack bad autoimmune cells. Okay.
Speaker 8:Well, that's interesting. And what if I could deliver it in the same type of vaccine type format that you got your COVID jab in, an LNP and an RNA that
Speaker 1:I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine a jab. Yeah. But maybe that's just a comment.
Speaker 8:What it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like it's like reclaiming
Speaker 1:tech bro. Reclaim it. We reclaim tech tech bro, technology brothers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The pharmaceutical industry definitely needs
Speaker 8:to replace
Speaker 2:the job.
Speaker 8:The name of this thing to tech nerds. It just
Speaker 1:What about
Speaker 8:But you know, you know
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 8:So to finish that story out, to make that requires a lot of engineering and a lot of optimization and a lot of so called Silicon Valley style optimization, and so we're seeing that. A company in our portfolio called Orbital Therapeutics announced really exciting data in monkeys, you know, demonstrating that that might be possible for autoimmune disease.
Speaker 7:So I
Speaker 8:think it goes both ways. Silicon Valley tech is gonna permeate every company whether they're based here or not and whether they're making drugs or not.
Speaker 1:Do you think that these sort of early IPOs that drug companies have done historically is a feature or a bug? Like if if we have more developed private capital markets, do you think that like is it even right that effectively retail, uneducated retail could just be taking these like, you know, gambling in the public markets on effectively FDA trials? Or is there a better way?
Speaker 8:There is a huge public market for biotech. The stage at which companies access those markets in the last few years was miscalibrated. And so that's why you see the headlines you're seeing with respect to public biotech stock performance, with respect to public fundraising challenges for companies because they were very far from the clinic. They were very far from generating commercial value. They were very far from demonstrating hard data that they were close to developing a product of value.
Speaker 8:So I do think the the private markets continue to be to have massive pools of capital in them, and biotech companies will stay private for longer. But, you know, at the same time, we're seeing huge demand and appetite for technologies that work from pharma companies that have a really rich ability to continue to back biotech companies, partner with biotech companies, fund biotech companies, buy biotech companies. So, we partnered up with Eli Lilly on that front and started a whole dedicated fund focused on supporting the biotech ecosystem, and that serves pharma and it serves the biotech ecosystem too. Right? And so there are lots of ways for companies to continue to make progress on those technologies while private until they until they have the metrics that justify justify going public.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. You said something earlier around, nursing job vacancies. How do you what's your thesis on how that market evolves in four years? Are we still gonna see, you know, hospital systems unable and and various groups unable to get the nurses that they want? Or do you think that AgenTic systems can can kinda backfill those roles and and they just there there will be more kind of balance in the market.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I I hope we also project needing fewer roles. I mean, we are projecting that we're gonna be short over 3,000,000 health care workers just in The United States alone over the next year. Right? So it's a huge number.
Speaker 1:And the people so and and and the people making those projections, are they AGI pilled? Are they humanoid robot pilled? Like, I I I it's cool that the FDA has a chief AI officer that feels Mhmm. Important. But anytime I'm like reading into projections, it's more interesting to get a projection or or insight from you given that you're backing all these companies that Hey.
Speaker 1:I can understand that reality and wanna
Speaker 8:wanna Right. That's a big number. That's based on, you know, the job count know, job that health systems and providers are opening but unable to fill based on the projected increase in health care demand as their population ages. But absolutely, I I hope it's not really that high because there's only, like, 8,000,000 total job vacancies in The US. That's, like, almost half our total job vacancies in health care alone.
Speaker 8:So we we have to actually decrease our need for those jobs, and we could redirect some of our extremely skilled health care existing workforce from answering phone calls, dropping up pick you know, picking up drop balls, recommunicating the same information to patients, recommunicating the same information between providers who are trying to coordinate. There are a million ways in which our system does not work today, and so I hope that number goes down. But the reality is that, the willingness to try out the agentic solution, whether it's for documentation, whether it's for getting prior auth from an insurance company, or whether it's for actually providing a clinical consult, has never been higher because the reality is today, we don't have the humans to fill those jobs. Wait times are long. Thirty percent of Americans skip care.
Speaker 8:Like, they skip or delay prescribed care. We're a developed country in which that's happening, and sixty, seventy percent of Americans say, I will see an AI doctor. Like, just give me, I will see one. Like, at least I will engage with one. And in fact, I'm probably gonna engage with one before I engage with a human doctor now.
Speaker 8:Right? We've all changed our consumer behavior that way almost overnight. It's a pretty remarkable shift that's happening that will, I hope, make us need a lot fewer than than those that, you know, that number of of open jobs.
Speaker 2:I I I remember what was it? In, like, 02/2008, there was a boom in electronic medical records startups like Athena Health was one of them. And there was kind of like two waves going on that were kind of adding together and making those businesses work. One is like a technological wave obviously like we had access to cloud databases and cloud infrastructure and better software and so you could actually like put medical records securely in a cloud and so that was obviously like a great business. But then there was also an EHR mandate from the Obamacare legislation I believe.
Speaker 2:Are there any regulatory tailwinds that are adding on top of, like, the AI technology tailwinds right now in bio or health Yeah. Care
Speaker 8:Absolutely. So there are first of all, I will say, historically, historically, a lot of health care software and technology was adopted because of regulatory incentives and payment incentives. Yep. But for the first time, we are seeing bottoms up adoption of tools and technologies and and an extraordinary NPS of health care software with scribing tools, like those developed by companies like Ambiance and Abridge, you know, you know, you know, evidence, access tools like what what Open Evidence has built. And so for the first time, we're also seeing pull that's just like, hey.
Speaker 8:This is better. I don't need the government to give me a, you know, a kickback to tell me it's better, but it is better. So that's a separate trend that we're very excited about. But huge regulations are also going to incentivize a better technology infrastructure. So price transparency is a good example.
Speaker 8:There are clear incentives and penalties for not being able to share transparently your price your pricing cards as a provider, as a payer, and to create that type of open access for patients. And so building that infrastructure layer is gonna be super important. The administration's talked a lot about patient choice. That could be patient choice with respect to how you use your benefit dollar, patient choice with respect to what plan coverage you select. And ICHRA is a good example of a potentially big change in the employer sponsored health care space.
Speaker 8:So these are all financial rails and incentives. CMMI continues to advance value based initiatives that basically prioritize preventive care and say, hey. At the end of the year, if you save the government a dollar, you save CMS money, dear smart provider who's using technology, you'll make money. Right? So that's a clear financial incentive.
Speaker 8:It's good for patients. Generally, being out of the health care system, preventing something before it costs a lot of money is good for patients. But the financial incentives and policy incentives do need to, you know, do provide a huge accelerator in our space, and that will continue to be the case.
Speaker 1:Can you give us the update on the drug pricing EO from, I don't know, was it six weeks ago, eight weeks ago? It feels like a year ago at this point. There's been a lot that happened. We had a bunch of people on the day of, and a lot of people were kind of saying that it wasn't going to be as impactful as it kind of felt in the moment, but what what's the update there?
Speaker 8:I don't think there's been a policy update. Like, you know, nothing has been enacted yet. That's still an EO. Yep. The the concept of it, of course, was to say was to use international trade as a backdrop for holistic negotiations inclusive of drug pricing to say, you know, as part of an overall tariff negotiation, why is it the case that The US pays two or three times or more for the same exact drug that another another country pays?
Speaker 8:And so that it is a logical question to ask, and, we know that CMS is continuing to ask that question. But the actual policy is gonna depend on quite a bit of, you know there are a number of moving parts and a holistic policy with respect to every other every other country. So it's important for us to retain huge incentives, and it's not gonna be as simple as cut the price, get great drugs. That's not how the market works. Yeah.
Speaker 8:But should the price be more equitably shared across countries, it's an absolutely reasonable perspective to have.
Speaker 2:How popular is open source in the bio world? I feel like the Cursor for bio thing is very interesting. But when I think about the electronic lab notebooks that folks are using, like, if it's not open source, you can't fork it. And it feels like part of Cursor's ability to grow really fast was that they they sit on top of your code base and you can change IDEs very quickly. But if you're you if a researcher is using a closed source lab notebook that has a database built in, that company is gonna be like, no, no, no.
Speaker 2:Like, I do not want you just stealing all my customers or like migrating off. But are is open source popular? Are there opportunities? Like, what's the Versus Code equivalent, I guess, would be the question?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think there's a lot you know, in bio research, there's a lot more informatics and and less organized software. I think that will change. But historically historically, there is a lot of bespoke informatics, which is why some of the agentic adoption, like, for exploratory informatics research is happening on its own, and people are adopting open source agents for resources like that. You know, the structure the protein structure models like AlphaFold
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:Were followed by a number of models that were open sourced. And within a period of weeks, thousands of scientists, thousands of companies adopted, additional structure prediction models. Mhmm. Bolts two was a popular one. The CHI model.
Speaker 8:A number of startups put out open source models, and we saw really fast adoption, which is kinda cool. Right? It's like it's a scientist sitting in a company who says, I wanna try that, you know, and see if it would help my workflow. And, actually, I wanna benchmark it, and I wanna try three at the same time. So we didn't have that many great open source resources like that before we had datasets, but not necessarily models and APIs to those models that made them easy to use.
Speaker 8:So I think that that in that whole ecosystem is in its, like, square one infancy of growing and exploding, but you're gonna need a library of models. You want to be able to try all the models. You want your agents to be able to use the models without even a human interface. And so suddenly, the same thing that's happening in enterprise software in every vertical is gonna happen here too. You know?
Speaker 8:Agents on behalf of scientists will be able to select which models to use, try five models at once, and then incorporate the results and predictions of those models into a workflow, you know, that is deeply integrated with, you know, with other agentic automation. So it's none of that's built, I would say, for for the vast majority of the industry. And so it's a huge, huge opportunity for startups to build.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Last quick question. Maybe if you could answer in in sixty seconds, that's the challenge. What what is the, what's the vibe on the Stanford campus right now? Are people dropping out of, you know, PhD programs to start companies in in bio?
Speaker 1:I'm sure we're seeing, people dropping out of PhDs to join meta and other AI research orgs broadly, but I'm curious if that's happening in in bio.
Speaker 8:There are a number of fast growing AI biotech startups, right, that are bringing AI and computational tools to model training. So we are seeing that. If you're asking, know, is it a response to federal funding changes? I think the you know, that's always been the case that a large fraction of trainees from university campuses end up in biotech and pharma companies, and that's great. It's a great outcome.
Speaker 8:I don't think you know, I do think there's probably, in the near term, going to be continued exploration of industry alternatives to federally funded research. And I really hope that there that the the, you know, federal grant funding is clarified and and and and that there's more stability on university campuses for federally funded research because some of that infrastructure is absolutely has been behind
Speaker 1:Shaking.
Speaker 8:A huge number of these of these innovations.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You
Speaker 1:so much. Great to chat.
Speaker 2:Talk to you soon. Cheers.
Speaker 7:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Next we have Mickey Malka, the founder of Ribbit Capital. Really quickly I will tell you about Adquik. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
Speaker 2:And, we hopefully have Mickey Malka. How are doing Mickey? Good to meet you.
Speaker 9:Hi guys. Good to see you John and Jordy. How are you guys?
Speaker 2:Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:Great background.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's going on background. Break it down for us.
Speaker 9:Those are some NFTs. Wonderful. From an artist called Bright Moments. They did a exhibition all over the world, and these are crypto citizens from the 10 cities around the world where they had their exhibitions.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Amazing. It's great to have you on the show. We've been excited for this. You guys have been on a absolutely crazy run and it's awesome that you're starting to talk about it a bit more.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wanna start with like your background. I think that you might actually have a nontraditional path to venture or at least a very interesting entrepreneurial journey prior to launching a venture firm. So can you just give us a little bit of on your history and how you wound up running
Speaker 9:Of course. Rivet. So I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm still entrepreneur. It just happens that I started when I was 17 years old, and that's all I know how to do. And I started in financial services.
Speaker 9:Growing up in Venezuela in the early nineties, it was inflation, crises, bank failures, all the things that you need to learn in your life. I had them by the time I was 22 years old.
Speaker 1:Speedrun.
Speaker 9:Oh my god. Yes. Lightspeed through all of that. So I started four different companies around the world before the the word fintech or crypto even existed, always trying to do something in in around the Internet and making money better. Simply, that was the whole thing.
Speaker 1:And And what did and what did did some of those first companies look like? Were they specific to problems that you were having in in Venezuela, or were they global by nature? I I love some advice.
Speaker 9:One was it was the first online trading platform for Latin America. A little bit what Robinhood is today. Yeah. But imagine that in 1998 in the beginning of the Internet, and you could trade online stocks of every local Latin American market. Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile.
Speaker 9:We had a Brazil. We had a we bought its stock exchange seats in all of them, we were able to allow people to trade. So Amazing. That that was the one of the first ones. And then I I And you were you were
Speaker 1:you were, like, 20 at this time?
Speaker 9:I was 23, 24 when I started. Yes.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 9:That company. And and there were no venture capitalists in Latin America. There was nobody. We had to convince some people in The US and New York to fund us and headquarter in Miami to avoid any kind of problem with choosing a place in Latin America. And and that company became the largest online broker dealer in South America.
Speaker 1:Wow. Insane. And then where do you go from there?
Speaker 9:I went to Spain because my first company was acquired by a big Spaniard bank, and the Internet had blown up. Little bit like when they think it was all hype. It will happen to AI eventually when they will all and people will think it was it was all wrong in, eventually, the future. But and I started the first online bank in Europe. There was no online banks.
Speaker 9:It was a bank called Openbank because it was supposed to be open twenty four twenty four seven, three sixty five. It still runs in Spain, and it was Were
Speaker 1:you were you the
Speaker 9:starting bank.
Speaker 1:Was was adding open to the start of a word? Were you the first person to do that? A trend.
Speaker 3:Open a high. Open store.
Speaker 9:We're taking over the open words these days.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Pay
Speaker 2:me my fee. I I coined that. Yeah. That's wild. What what who is the first LP to kick you off?
Speaker 2:Like, what was the story
Speaker 1:Well well, first, have to ask. I'm I'm assuming there wasn't bank there wasn't like 20 banking as a service platforms back How did how did you get how did you how did you convince a bank to in In banking. In Europe to to bank?
Speaker 9:Well, I I I had to become regulated. By the time I was 25 or 26, I was regulated by eight central banks Wow. To go through the whole KYC bank approval process myself.
Speaker 3:Was the same thing
Speaker 9:I learned?
Speaker 2:Is it more just like you filled out the forms perfectly? You sent the right messages, or were you, like, kind of knocking on doors trying to grease palms to make it happen?
Speaker 9:All of the above.
Speaker 2:All of above.
Speaker 9:Depending on the country, you had to do a lot more. Were a lot more technical than others. Yeah. But definitely, you had to see they had to see that I was not just this kid who didn't know anything about finance. And then I had to pretend I knew a lot about finance.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So yeah. You wanna continue with that?
Speaker 1:Now from where where did that go? I I I don't wanna leave a cliffhanger.
Speaker 9:So so that business grew to the fastest bank in Europe. I sold it back to them to them to the bank that we were partnered with. Mhmm. And then I moved to Brazil, started on I got approval by the president of Brazil back then, Lula, which is again president now, to approve a new banking license granted so we could start a bank to serve the on bank with financial services. So I lived in Sao Paulo, did that for three years, became the largest retail bank in the country serving almost 15,000,000 customers.
Speaker 9:That was I'm
Speaker 1:seeing a trend. I'm seeing a trend.
Speaker 2:Trends on the Bad day to be unbanked. Well, no.
Speaker 1:No. It's gonna sound You seem to like being the fastest growing or the number one in the category.
Speaker 9:You you know, what I like is making allowing people to when when people have access to better money, it makes their life better. Yeah. It's not about having more money or less money. It's just making money better. And better money means you should be able to invest the same way I can anywhere in the world.
Speaker 9:You should be able to get the best loan and not get your knees beaten up if you don't pay it back a credit. You should be able to get a good insurance product no matter where you are or what you're trying to do. That's what I call better money. So I think the journey of my life has been one of pursuing that better money makes life better. And moved to Silicon Valley eighteen years ago to start a company in payments before the iPhone came out.
Speaker 9:I I had a feeling people were gonna tap and pay with their phones. So we were one of the first companies tapping on NFC stickers, putting them on back of the phones. You could pay for in merchants. And and that when the App Store came out with the iPhone, we were the first wallet in the phone. Wow.
Speaker 9:So that moment was like an moment. When you saw mobile and you saw the App Store, this is like, this is what I had been waiting for twenty years as an entrepreneur. That moment in time when suddenly you can compete with incumbents in a playing field that they were not looking at. Mhmm. So that's where Revit Capital started.
Speaker 9:Instead of building one more company, because I always consider myself even though we always move the ball forward, I was a failed entrepreneur because the best entrepreneurs never sell their companies. So I decided to start Revit as a way to say, this is the one I'm gonna run until the last day I wanna run it.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Sorry. Now we're now I'm going backwards. Can you talk to me about some of the wedges that you used in the previous companies to actually drive adoption of a new banking product or a new bank online. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I have to imagine I have to imagine starting in markets like, you know, Spain Yeah. Brazil, etcetera, help help you, you know, many It it's been the narrative violation over the last twenty years has been that developing countries adopted fintech faster. They adopted new methods of payments, new you know, much faster than developing countries in many ways because there just wasn't that legacy infrastructure. So I'm curious if you even think you would have been successful if you had had just tried to come and only crack, you know, the The US market.
Speaker 9:No. I would have been a failure. I would not understand the world. I I'm I was never the best student at school, but I was a student of life. And walking through the streets of all these countries and seeing how people behave with money was the best class and the best master class I could have gotten.
Speaker 9:Because at the end, everything you do is building a brand. And and brand means trust. And it's very underrated to understand how long it takes to build trust and how fast can you make it shake or disappear or fracture, and then how long it takes to bring it back. Mhmm. So if you see a pattern in everything that we've done is working with teams that we believe can build a brand and working with them because that is the only moat that you can build that gives you the chance to succeed in financial services.
Speaker 9:Because every financial product at the end, it's a commodity. It can be copied. You can start with free commissions, It will be copied. You can start with free credit scores. It will be copied.
Speaker 9:You can start with free interest rate lendings or tipping. It will be copied. So it has to be the brand. And that's a special DNA that I got to understand from working in markets where people's level of trust was even lower than in developed markets.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How how do you actually build that trust and build that brand in some of those markets? Is it different in Brazil than other countries?
Speaker 2:Are you talking about the the feel of the product or actually just the marketing and telling people what your brand stands for? Or does it infuse through the interactions with bank teller in the virtual environment probably?
Speaker 9:I think it's all of the above. It's the little things.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:It's really telling a story in a way that people believe and consistently see that you're doing that. Mhmm. And everyone every company does it in a different way. So there was a a story I remember from Nubank in Brazil when we backed them super early. You know, in Sao Paulo, they are 18,000,000 people, but there's I think there's, like, 4,000,000 dogs.
Speaker 9:It's almost like one dog for and so whenever they saw that you you had a transaction on your credit card for a a a vet, you you they will send you cookies to your home.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 9:Right? Because it meant that your dog was sick or something was happening. So imagine but those are little things that you do that with consistency. And if the message is we care about you and we're paying attention to what's going on in your life, that's how you build that trust. It's a bunch of little details.
Speaker 9:There's never a big thing, but it has to be genuine. And you can see when when CEOs or teams are not genuine, you can see it 10 miles away.
Speaker 1:How do you feel about so so you did the first institutional round of Coinbase and Robinhood. Correct?
Speaker 9:Yes.
Speaker 1:And did did you did you think at the time that that those companies did you have a feeling that that if they were successful they would end up ultimately competing with each other because it's not exactly head to head yet but you can imagine ten years from today these companies will just be going at it. And maybe that's just because of the trends around bundling and Fintech, Right? If you can create one product, you can add a bunch of others. If you can earn someone's trust in one category, you can expand out. But I think we're at this really interesting moment where the last ten years were about you had like, you know, traditional Fintech and you had Crypto and they were these distinct categories.
Speaker 1:But it seems that it it seems very obvious now that they will be, you know, massively overlapped in a ultimately just one category, which is money.
Speaker 9:Yes. So we we were the first institutional round to Coinbase and Robinhood, but also to Revolut, which is the same camp, and and also to NuVanc. Yeah. Also to we were super early, and we build with MercadoLibre and MercadoPago, which is a competitor of NuVanc. You know?
Speaker 9:So if you had told me back then that all these companies were gonna be competing for this, we would have never guessed it ever. And and the reality is
Speaker 1:Well, I'm surprised you say that because it seems like you you have a bit of a you got a secret crystal ball or something if you were gonna
Speaker 9:Well, five years ago, we told our our our LPs, our investors in our one of our investor day meetings, that the rails of crypto and and financial services were actually starting to blend, and it was gonna be indifferent. And then companies that didn't do both were gonna be completely spaced out or lost the window of chance to build. So five years ago, we started to see it, but not it wasn't obvious before that because there were different geographies and all of that, but now they're competing globally to each other. So the way I think about it is the first decade of all of this momentum was the few companies that will have the right to win. And they've earned it by building brand, by building teams, by delivering on services, by getting licenses, by doing all these things that they need to do.
Speaker 9:So now we have a, call it, 30 or 40 players worldwide that we call the compounders, the one that will deliver and compound for the next decade. Now this second decade of those 40 names or 30 names is a decade where they steal market share from every single incumbent.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Because so far, they haven't that much.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But this decade, with AI, with crypto, with the way they're building new products, with the way they're using their own brands, with the trust they have, with the government regulators leverage they have today versus five years ago, buckle up because what's coming is gonna be really fun if you're an incumbent and really tough if you're an incumbent.
Speaker 1:What lessons do you think the the company, the Coinbase's, the Robinhood's, etcetera of the world learned in 2020 during in 2021 during that sort of chaotic market cycle that it it feels good and that and that many of them learned various lessons. Was also told to ask you about
Speaker 2:Are you talking about COVID era
Speaker 1:or Yeah. Just the whole like, you know, the Like Robin Hood that felt like You know, the Robin Hood, GameStop, saga, those moments. It feels like there was a lot of hard ones, lessons. And then we've started this new cycle, this new bubble, whatever you wanna call it. And hopefully, lot of them have taken those taken learnings from that and are are implementing it, whether it's around risk management and things like that.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So I think the lessons from that time was when COVID started, most of these companies were not ready to turbocharge. And what happened during COVID, if you look back, is that you probably fast track four, five years of customers and growth into twelve months. Yeah. And none of these teams were prepared for it.
Speaker 9:Being at home, not being able to do much more, it just supercharged all of these companies. And they overhire, and they were working remote, and they didn't have capital, you know, frameworks in place because the growth was unexpected. And we remember getting a bunch of calls during that time. In the beginning, like, this is amazing. And then, like, this is getting tough, and this is gonna be problematic.
Speaker 9:And and it it can crack here or there. And when we got the phone call at three, four, five in the morning from Robin Hood saying the GameStop day and what needed to be done, And we funded them in four hours, almost
Speaker 1:half a
Speaker 9:billion dollars that we didn't have, that we asked a bank to lend us to do it.
Speaker 2:We've all
Speaker 1:Called it an old favor from an old friend?
Speaker 9:Yes. Literally, a favor from literally, a favor from an old friend. And that's what it takes to build relationships in banking. You need decades of that so you can call in that favor when it's needed. And that day and look at how long it took for the brand to regain the trust of the market.
Speaker 9:It was almost two and a half years
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:From that moment. And you gotta be a special leader and a special team to go through that turf and come back out of it. And now they're hitting their cylinders, but they got their story right. So you can see it in the Brian Armstrongs, in the Nikolay Soronskis, in the Vlad Tenevs, in the David Vales. They have that now.
Speaker 9:They went through that, and they're on the other side, and they're all between 38 and 40 to one. So they got the best decade of their life coming coming their way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What does that mean for competition at the early stage? It feels like it's it was really it was in in in retrospect it seems like a no brainer to back disruptive technologies in this huge market finance. But now you have if you're starting a company that's gonna carve out a little slice of, oh, Robinhood's not touching this yet or Coinbase isn't touching this yet. It's like, well, those companies are incredibly well capitalized and they're run by founders who are not about to retire anytime soon.
Speaker 2:Seems kind of dangerous. So where are you seeing pockets of opportunity in the early stage? What are you seeing in the next generation of founders that might actually go and be able to carve out enough of a slice to grow into a generational company?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I think what's coming for or the I'm more excited for what's coming this next decade than the last decade, if you ask me. The last decade was just a setup for this decade. And there will be a bunch of new teams and companies. And we have been spending time with the young generation, like kids who are between founders who are between 19 and 25
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And or 19 and 27, call it. Their brains are just faster. Their ways of thinking about how to build products is just different. They are they they spend the best years the the year of COVID learning
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And learning how to think really fast. And I've been blown away on how quick they are understanding and how quick they are to build. So we have these thesis that we've we've been we've been we wrote. It took us almost a year to write, which we call it token factories. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And it's this world where forget about crypto rails or or fintech or AI. All of these things are blending. If before it was fintech here and AI and crypto here, and we said that they blended, now we have financial services with crypto rails with AIs. And the thing between all of them is that they're all tokens. Everything is a token.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. So we we call it the token factory token revolution era. And tokenizing information, tokenizing money, and tokenizing power. And how those three things combine, it's where we're seeing some of the best entrepreneurs working. So that's what got us really excited.
Speaker 9:So we found a bunch of small young teams who are building what we call now token factories, companies that are building either access tokens that give you abilities to connect anywhere they want in the world to do anything. There's expert tokens. These are companies that are generating knowledge or expert information that is solely unique, that is gonna change the way you manage wealth management, wealth advisory, the way you manage insurance product, insurance agents. And then you have what we call asset tokens. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And stablecoins is the first of the asset tokens outside of Bitcoin. It's the first of the of the true asset tokens.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about real estate. I feel like that's the that was something in the at the peak of the crypto boom 2022. We were starting to hear about mortgages on chain, physical assets on chain. We're now starting to see stocks get on chain and and obviously US dollars which are much more tangible than artworks for example. But it feels like most of this generation's entrepreneurs probably learned a hard lesson during the global financial crisis of like the risks of over financialization in the real estate markets.
Speaker 2:But maybe like how do you see things developing or or or real estate assets playing out generally over the next decade?
Speaker 9:So I I I think you you John, you said something that was really important. If you look this wall behind me Yeah. Artists always tell you where the future is going before we get there.
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 9:And NFTs was a and it wasn't about just about the beauty of the art and the tokenization and the provenance and the transferability and the democratic. It was the first asset that was truly put on chain. That you trusted, that you knew there was only one of each, that you knew who had it, and you knew when it was minted, And you could finance, you can lend against it, you can pledge it, you can do whatever. So guess what? Artists did their job.
Speaker 9:They showed us where the world was going. So to me, I'm very grateful because that's how we learn what was going on. And then we found companies like Figr, who's tokenized most of the mortgages that you got HELOCs right now. They're the biggest HELOC tokenizer in America. Then you had the Circles of the Worlds and the Tethers tokenizing dollars, and there's, like, 10 more coming behind them.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Then now you have Robinhood tokenizing stocks. So I think the problem with mortgages is that they don't move that much. Out of all the financial assets, they probably transfer themselves 10 times in a in your lifetime, maybe five. Maybe you buy a home, you have it for so it's not the lowest hanging fruit need of a tokenized asset, even though it's a great asset to tokenize.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. But I think we're gonna get there because right now, the SEC and the all the regulators have put the real rules in place to seek tokenization. And the best organizations, you're not gonna see. You're not gonna realize their tokens.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 9:But suddenly, you're gonna be able to click make two clicks and get a mortgage against us. Mhmm. And you're gonna be able to do one more click and swap to another mortgage issuer and not miss a beep on your payments
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Or or in your servicing. Those that's what the consumer is going to see. That's what the consumer is gonna see with Robinhood, tokenized stocks. You don't you're gonna have the same UX experience and just trade stocks anywhere in the world, not knowing that they're tokenized. And that's that's where we get super excited.
Speaker 9:Because we're just at the beginning of that ecosystem, which is probably like growing up again in the nineteen seventies when you're about to electronic create electronic payment transfers.
Speaker 1:How how have you thought about the investability of stablecoins as a category when it feels like a feature for so many of the companies that you've already backed? I know you I know you guys did Privy, which recently sold to Stripe. But Yes.
Speaker 2:That bet that bet Bridge. Yeah. He's in both.
Speaker 1:What what was the other one? Bridge. Bridge. Oh, there you
Speaker 3:go. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 9:It it sounds like I I we we told the Stripe that we're we're shareholders. We love them. We're good friends with Patrick and John and the whole team and Will. We told them that we felt that we were we were we were their core of their team because the two investors we need in stable going infrastructure, they took out of our plates in less than a year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Wild. But but yeah. So so you you made some infrastructure bets. Are there are there consumer bets that you see going forward? I I know there's a bunch of different potential use cases but again it's so easy for an existing company to add stable coins and they already have the distribution and the customer network to quickly, you know, service?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So it's a great question, Jordi. We we've been trying to find we've been looking worldwide for consumer applications that start with stablecoins first as a user experience. We haven't found one that will say, this is the way it's gonna work to scale globally at a scale that matters. So that's why we have been backing much more the infrastructure providers of all these schemes because they feel like they have a lot more growth potential than than the consumer side.
Speaker 9:But I think we're just starting. I think now we're starting to see the beginning of agentic experiences with crypto rails and and AI Yep. With through agents. And I think in that intersection, we're gonna find native stablecoin retail brands that are gonna provide services that you don't expect. So we've been we've been investing a lot there in learning.
Speaker 9:We've been testing ourselves a lot there. We have our own thesis on how it's gonna work, so we're actually building some of them and learning. But we expect to see entrepreneurs worldwide working around them in the very near future. My my guess is in the next year. We will be surprised to find a few already.
Speaker 1:Well, when we when you come back on and and hopefully, you'll come back on many more times between now and then. But in I'm I'm assuming in 02/1930, we'll have the same conversation again. You got every single new stable coin pure play that mattered. What about on the issuer side? I feel like the big now that stable coins have clear regulation, it seems like we'll see a lot more people start to issue them.
Speaker 1:Is that needed? Do you see use cases or are the USTCs and the Tethers, like, providing kind of enough value right now?
Speaker 9:I think people underestimate how important the Tethr brand is worldwide. I think when you when you are in Argentina or in Venezuela or you're in Indonesia, they don't even say USDT. They just call it Tether. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 9:And I think Tether has a chance to be a really global brand that most people were well, under imagine the scale of it. Circle has a great reputation institutional side, but we're super early. I mean, think about it. We're only $250,000,000,000 into stablecoins. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:We should be in $2,000,000,000,000 in the next year or a year and a half or two. And if we're not there, something's off. Mhmm. So for that, we'll probably need, like, five, seven, 10 more names. Now you're not gonna care as a user, to be honest.
Speaker 9:You may have a preference. I remember growing up, my parents and us to to save money from inflation in Venezuela. Every Friday, we walked to the bank branch, and we bought travel checks. And and it was a way a way of saving, which is literally the same as stablecoins today. And those travel checks in the era, you could buy American Express travel checks.
Speaker 9:You can buy Thomas Cook, which were Mastercard travel checks. And there was another third brand I forget. I didn't care which one we got. All I care was getting the dollars and being able to save. So I think but over time, I remember my family's Q2 American Express Travel Checks.
Speaker 9:For whatever reason, it had, like, a better recognition brand. So I think we're still in the early days of that, and that's going to happen. And I think we're going to see five to 10, and we're going see the incumbents issuing their own token and stablecoins. And now the bridges of the world are going to be super important because they're going to be the bridge to connect all of them no matter what what what you're doing. And it's going to be very simple to solve.
Speaker 9:So my guess is five brands in the next five years.
Speaker 1:Wow. Great. Great. Very exciting. This was awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:You're a legend.
Speaker 2:Hoping on.
Speaker 1:Come back on again soon.
Speaker 9:You guys are doing amazing job. We'll be following your show, and congratulations. It's really fun, and you bring super fresh content and news and people to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Nikki.
Speaker 9:Talk to you
Speaker 1:again soon. Looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:Bye. Bye. Up next, have Casey Neistat. Recently
Speaker 1:The YouTuber. The creator.
Speaker 2:He's a broad retro now. Working on the chromatic, which we've been playing in the studio, working on the m 64. How are doing, Casey?
Speaker 1:There he is.
Speaker 7:How Alan, are good to see you.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the stream. What's new in your world? How did the are those the nothing ear ones? Give us a little review.
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah. These are fantastic. I actually had to take them off because the noise canceling on these is, it's it's like too good and I'm at home right now and my kids were screaming two seconds ago. Yeah. But, yeah, these things are fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We had Karl Pay on the show a week ago and he put them down and I was like I was too afraid to ask like, oh, are those for me? Like, are you gonna leave those for me? I kinda want those. I need a new pair.
Speaker 2:I'll to pick up
Speaker 7:You know It's I'm not enough of an audiophile to know what if something sounds good or not. Like, it's either good or it's not good. Yep. But physical switches, like buttons you can touch Yeah. I really like.
Speaker 7:And the like the Apple I don't know what they're called. What are they? AirPod AirPod Maxes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. AirPod Maxes.
Speaker 7:There's no on off switch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, I can't digital crown.
Speaker 7:I needed I needed an on off switch and you have that.
Speaker 2:I like I like your textiles, Keith. Yeah. Yeah. You are you a big teenage engineering guy? It feels like kind of like that that that they're almost coining like a trend that's like becoming more mainstream now.
Speaker 7:Teenage engineering is the only company whose products I buy religiously even though I have no idea how to use any of them.
Speaker 2:The same thing happened to me. I bought the
Speaker 1:little kids. I was
Speaker 2:like, I'm a musician now. Couldn't figure out how to make a song.
Speaker 7:I gotta use it.
Speaker 2:I love it. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Looks good on a desk.
Speaker 2:Beautiful? It's so beautiful.
Speaker 7:Someone that cares that much about the craft. Totally. I wanna be part of that.
Speaker 2:Support them unconditionally. Yeah. So tell me about ModRetro, how'd that come together? What what what is the news in your world?
Speaker 7:You know, the ModRetro thing's really funny because I I my video says all this, but, like, I'm a big retro gamer. Mhmm. I'm guilty of sometimes playing Call of Duty on my Xbox, but it doesn't work out when you got a wife
Speaker 1:and kids. Guilty. Every every man should have an allocation of time daily for Call of Duty, you know, getting Getting on on rust with your boys.
Speaker 7:Yeah. He's so close to that w and then the door comes fly open and children come running in. Yep. It's challenging. Yeah.
Speaker 7:But I'm 44, so, like, Apex of video games for me was, like, 1989, I think, getting a Game Boy the first year they came out for my grandmother for Christmas. And, like, you guys are younger than me, but before that, all we had were those, like, l LED LCD games that were, like, really janky, like the Tiger games, and they were terrible. And the first time I turned on the Game Boy and, like, saw the Nintendo come down, I was like, holy. This is such a moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And then Nintendo 64 came out when I was I was in like, just getting into high school as a freshman. We used to sneak out of high school, get on the city bus, like, the the regular bus, and then drive two towns across, and then walk a mile and a half to Toys R Us to sit in Toys R Us and play the demo of Mario 64 when that thing came out. I think it was in '94, so I was 12 or 13 years old.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So I I love that stuff. And Mod Retros, when I first learned about it, when I first learned about Chromatic, their Game Boy, I thought it was really stupid. I didn't understand because you can get those, like, Chinese ones off of Amazon for $50. Yeah. And a friend of mine was like, no.
Speaker 7:This is great. They're doing great things. Do you wanna talk to Palmer about it? And I'm a huge Palmer Lucky fan. And I was like, I'd love to.
Speaker 7:And I don't know that I've ever been evangelized so much in my life. Like, by the end of that call, he didn't just convince me, but I was like I felt like an idiot for not seeing Yeah. What ModRetro was. And then as I got to know Torin, who who is the the CEO of ModRetro and understand the vision for the company, was just so, like, overwhelmed. Was like, this is the most, like, beautiful vision ever.
Speaker 7:I don't understand the business of it. It makes no sense to me. But the fact that these guys have the guts to do this, like, can I be a part of it? And I think I pitched back to them what I understood the company was, and they're like, that's it. That's what we wanna say.
Speaker 7:And I was like, alright. Give me a job, and my job will be to figure out how to communicate that, and we'll make videos and stuff. And they're like, sure, but we're not gonna pay you. And I was like, great. I'll take a business card.
Speaker 2:That's not
Speaker 7:a business card. Prices. It's been great working with I've also I'm an investor in ModRetro. I have a vested interest in them succeeding, but, I mean, that's not the that's not where the passion to be a part of what they're up to comes from for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So many places we could go with this. This is fantastic. What yeah. Do you think that there's a world I mean, I I love the handheld gaming stuff.
Speaker 2:I my my experience having kids was I stopped playing console games. The n 64 was actually my first console ever. And but once I
Speaker 7:started What was your game? Kids
Speaker 2:Super Mario 64 for sure. Golden Eye was big. Big head
Speaker 8:Golden Eye.
Speaker 2:Golden Gun. You gotta do that. And then a couple other Donkey Kong and was never really into the Mario Kart racers but then Smash Brothers kinda took over and that was the real competition with everyone eventually.
Speaker 1:I think what I think what's exciting to me is like building new new consumer hardware that will still turn on and work and bring joy twenty years from now. I had I had the the game I have like my Game Boy Pikachu edition from growing up. And I When Mod Retro came out, I went and found it and I turned it on and it worked. Yeah. And that was like such an amazing moment for me because like when like I haven't I've got old iPhones lying around.
Speaker 1:I've never been like not one, I've never been like, oh I should could turn that on. It's gonna be fun. Yeah. Right? Because it's like it's not evergreen.
Speaker 1:It was of the moment and you just move on. And so I think if mod retro can do anything which is like make consumer hardware which is so disposable today across all these different categories and make it so that you're gonna get your mod retro or your m 64, you know, this year and then you're gonna turn it on in thirty years and like, you know, bridge generations.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's I think there's there's it's easy to sort of shit on, planned obsolescence because it is real. I think of that like we woke up my house woke up this morning at 07:30AM because the refrigerator repairman finally showed up and was banging on our door at at 07:30 in the morning. The dog was freaking out because our two year old refrigerator doesn't work.
Speaker 7:And this is a refrigerator that has WiFi.
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for WiFi. Everybody always Everything.
Speaker 7:It doesn't work. It doesn't work. That's your choice. Think about that, it's like that refrigerator that we had as kids with the one big heavy aluminum door, like, just worked. It worked forever.
Speaker 7:But in order to keep selling shit, you have to keep coming out with new things. And I think that's the negative of planned obsolescence. But I think when it comes to consumer technology, there is an argument for having to keep up with the rate of innovation. You know, like, the new phones that come out, every time you get a new phone, it does do something that your other phone didn't. So there's a maybe a reason for that.
Speaker 7:But I think with that sort of tidal wave of innovation that feels faster now than it ever felt when I was young, I think we we lose some great things. Yeah. And, you know, my understanding of mod retro, at least what I want it to be, and I think what what what Palmer and and what Torin also want it to be is, like, let's identify consumer electronics that people just love, like, had an unbelievable relationship with. They really like, the love I had for my Game Boy, I don't know that there was another thing that I owned through my adolescence that I treasured more than my Game Boy. And let's bring them back, and let's do them justice.
Speaker 7:Let's build them so they last forever. I think Palmer's quote when I was interviewing was, we don't wanna build another Game Boy. We wanna build the last Game Boy, like, the last one that ever needs to be built. And that's the vision with m 64 as well. Like, you can get emulators.
Speaker 7:They're kind of they kinda work, but let's let's build the thing that that, you know, you and I had, John, when when we were kids, and let's have it last forever. And I, you know, I just think there's so so much romance in that. When you start digging deep, you can start to see products everywhere. And, you know, ModRetro's tiny. There's a couple people working out of a small office, but, like, the list of of products that that we wanna build, the list of ideas that we have is is endless.
Speaker 7:And that's like a that's a really exciting thing to take on.
Speaker 1:It's also such an interesting company because you're trying to recreate things of the past that were good products and you wanna improve on them but you need to stay true to the original product. Otherwise, you know, what are you I mean, it's not to say that that Mod Retro couldn't one day create, you know, novel totally novel products but Mhmm. It is like an interesting constraint and challenge and you actually have to it's it's really it's in some ways it's easy because you know exactly what you need to build but in other ways it's harder because you're taking a product that was almost in its original form and still, like, you need to make it it needs it should be better. Otherwise, you know, what are you doing?
Speaker 7:Yeah. You know, like, one interesting challenge, and I'm not the right person to speak to this, so I'm not the technical guy, but to make the screen match the old Game Boy screen was an exhaustive process. So when you buy one of those handheld emulators that looks like a Game Boy, the Chinese made ones, they have fairly high high pixel density screens on them. So in order for them to get the look of an old Game Boy, you're using multiple pixels to emulate a single pixel. So it's inaccurate.
Speaker 7:And real psychopaths I'm not one of them, but I appreciate it. Real psychopaths on Twitter have done, like, this super zoom into a pixel, and you realize that Mario is, like, jumping a half a pixel too low or a half a pixel too high within the frame because of the limitation of the screen. And Torin and and Palmer's, like, religious obsession with matching that screen was one of the hardest things to overcome. So it was actually harder to build something that matched the quality of a product that's twenty years old than it would be to actually get the latest and greatest screen and just plug it in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I remember Palmer saying something about, like, a couple of the companies, the screen is actually rotated 90 degrees. So instead of the scan lines coming down this way, they go across this way, and then they just transform it at the last second. But it's like this bizarre bizarre thing that you would never really notice of, but it's this craftsmanship that actually you feel, I feel like. And it feels like something that's just like been lost in this like everything's disposable, everything's junk, everything's a knock off culture.
Speaker 2:And it feels like I I don't know like it just feels like it's worth it to have stuff that exhibits craft and taste. And even if I don't, even if I'm not the one that can tell that Mario's one pixel too low when I do the jump like, the fact that the craftsman worked on the product means something. I I it's hard to put an exact, like, quantitative value on it, but it you feel it. Right?
Speaker 7:That that is the gamble that is the company. Yeah. Palmer said that in in my video where he's like, you know, maybe nobody cares about this, but but weirdos like you and me, but that's enough. And I think it's like there is an argument that's like, well, who cares if it's off by half a pixel? And if you're one of those people, totally cool.
Speaker 7:You're well there's plenty of products in the market for you. But if you're someone who does care, if you're that weirdo that buys teenage engineering products because you just value the integrity of the product so much you wanna have it Yeah. Then, you know, there's a place in this world for companies like Mod Retro.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what do you think about, like, the temptation to just make, like, one small change? Like, the Chromatic has a USB C port on it. That's a huge upgrade. But you could easily turn this into, like, well, like, you know, we have the technology to make the m 64 handheld.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, then you're in Switch territory, and all of a sudden, it's, like, a completely different product. Right?
Speaker 7:I they I'd look that it's ever present. And that's that's the problem with sort of limitless you know, like, when Nintendo was building this, what, four almost forty years ago, thirty five years ago now, they were so limited by what the technology enabled them to do. Yeah. Like, when you think about the Sega Game Gear, I don't know if you ever had one of those.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:Great product.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:This big, but it was the first one that had really great color screen on it. And it took six double a batteries instead of four, like, the Game Boy, but the battery life on it was, like, forty minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you remember the n 64, like, expansion pack that you put in to, like, double the memory? That was
Speaker 7:Yeah, dude. I remember. That would have the rumble pack that shipped to the scarf box. That was, like, the greatest innovation ever. My mind exploded when the controller shook.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Dude, these, like, like, these add ons because, like, they couldn't bake it all into the first product,
Speaker 7:and they they upsell. And that's that's indicative of the limitations of what tech can do. Totally. And when you look at, like, you know, I don't know what what Samsung announced last week two weeks ago at Unpacked, and you're looking at what the limitations are today of, like, a folding screen that's as thick as 10 sheets of paper, you realize how far we've come. But when you go in the other direction, there's kind of no limits, and you're looking to make something that was made thirty years ago.
Speaker 7:The problem is, like, where do you draw the line? And I think that's a really, it's a really interesting thing to try to overcome and confront.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What can you teach me about the lore of, in the video camera world? I was looking at a cool new music video and it had this fisheye lens and this grain and I was kind of digging in and it seemed like they shot it on like a Sony skate camera with mini DV tapes. Like, this feels like something that I was looking at. Maybe I could buy one on eBay but it's probably broken and I want someone to go remake it.
Speaker 2:But then, of course, you always have like, oh, you could just like throw the filter on there in Premiere or whatever. But what are some of the what are some of the iconic video cameras or just like creative tools that might, you know, be worth revisiting at some point?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's it's such an interesting examination, and and your your question's great because my family and I are out. We're in Massachusetts for for summer vacation, and there's a lot of kids around. Like, we went and got ice cream last night,
Speaker 5:a lot
Speaker 7:of teenagers around. And a lot of these kids go up and they ask me for selfies.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 7:And the amount of teenagers that come up to me and ask me for selfies, and they're carrying the point and
Speaker 6:shoots Wow.
Speaker 7:That we had Yeah. In, like, the February, like, your phone camera was good enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:They all carry them. No one makes that camera anymore, which means if you have one, you have an old one. Yeah. And every one of these kids has it. And when I I asked them because I'm I'm curious, like, why do you carry that?
Speaker 7:They're like, I love the way it looks. Yeah. And I I think we've reached this point, like, iPhone, cell phone photography, it all looks still perfect Yep. In a way that it almost becomes artificial. Like, I think the iPhone five was the last iPhone where when you took a picture, just sort of took a picture.
Speaker 7:And then after that, every time you take a picture now, on any modern smartphone, it takes a picture and then runs it through an algorithm to make the picture sweeter and cleaner and sharper and better for you. And I think there's sort of this yearning for something that feels more real and authentic.
Speaker 1:It's like you look at a you're at a store looking at at a picture, you know, a camera from a picture from from 2010 or a camera or a picture from an iPhone today is like you're at you're at the grocery store and there's the organic apples they look they look good but like they're a little fucked up and and and you know they maybe like whatever part of it's kind of rotten and then you look over and you see the perfect apple and like intuitively you know that you're like that it's a little bit too good to be true that apple over there, you know. Yeah. And I think I don't know the other thing that's real is removing the camera like adding the camera to the phone has been one of the greatest innovations of the century. Right? In in in many ways.
Speaker 1:But now removing it, removing the camera from the phone and being able to leave your phone and just bring a camera around is also an innovation. Right? Going going going backwards and I think that's the other thing that that kids like and and I found that's nice. If I'm going to the beach with my kids, it's nice to be able to bring a camera but not have my phone.
Speaker 7:Yeah. My daughter is 10. This is the first summer she's allowed to, like, walk around with her friends without a parent, and she has a flip phone. And she had this whole argument for getting an iPhone that has nothing on it but the phone and messaging. And my wife and I had this discussion, and the reason why we said no.
Speaker 7:It has to be the flip phone is because of the camera. Like, it it introduces a new level of sort of attention and why you're in purpose. And the reason why we wanted her to have a phone is simply to stay in touch with us. No other reason. But the minute you introduce this other sort of novel aspect of it, it becomes much more of a social dynamic and a social consideration in the way that you're trying to get away from that.
Speaker 7:But I think just going back to the camera things, this is such an obsession of mine. I think that we are quick to quick to ignore or look past the relationship we have with with the aesthetic that a camera yields. And when you see those pictures off of those old point and shoots, they look like something specific. Like, when you were talking about that old skateboard fish eye DV look, it looks like something specific. You have a relationship with that.
Speaker 7:When we see stuff that looks like it's VHS, we think of the eighties or the nineties. And I think now there's just sort of this generic aesthetic across the board, this, like, crispy flat four k phone thing. And there's this desire to have something that that it has some sense of identity attached to it. And that's why we're seeing these sort of Gen z types, you know, looking for older tech that's that reflects more of who they are, more individuality. And I think that's a trend that we're gonna see continue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's this generation's vinyl.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I've joked that I wanna film I wanna film the first podcast on Panavision film or something. Just spend a fortune developing the film.
Speaker 1:What other what other what other consumer tech categories are you excited about? We're having we're having the founder of Wave on and I and I in twenty minutes and they got like 12,000,000 views yesterday for launching like sunglasses that well, just livestream constantly. Do you have a
Speaker 7:do you have a ratio of positive to negative mentions in those 12,000,000 views?
Speaker 1:I mean, I think everybody people had a viscerally negative reaction to it.
Speaker 7:That's that's my take on it as well. And it makes me think you know, my my, software development company, Beam, my startup, we started that company in 02/2014, and a little known aspect of that company is initially, it was built around Google Glass.
Speaker 2:No
Speaker 7:way. And we actually you know, we we rewrote the code. We rewrote the the software that Google Glass ran so that a singular function, which was you push a button like this, it captures ten seconds and immediately shares it to your feed. That's where we started with that. And I remember meeting with Google, and they were excited about it, and they showed us what Google Glass two was gonna look like, and we're like, fuck.
Speaker 7:Yeah. We started raising money based on that. And then a week later, they announced they were killing the entire Google Glass program, and we we backed off. We're like, alright. We'll just do it on the phone now.
Speaker 7:But I think when you ask about sort of the social impact of being able to livestream all the time or the negative reaction that we're seeing based on on Waves' video they posted yesterday, I think the social dynamic is something that is often overlooked in the hardware startup world. I think of the Humane AI pin. You know, a really good friend of mine worked for for Humane and, obviously, super excited about new technology. Yeah. Sam.
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah. Which, parenthetically, you joke about Panavision for a podcast. Sam Sheffer has in his studio for his live streaming setup a VHS camera hardwired into his deck so he can livestream from VHS.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 7:But Sam would be around
Speaker 1:We tried to I tried to hire Sam, by the way. We worked with him on a project, and I was like
Speaker 7:He's way too hot. He's way too hot.
Speaker 1:Gotta be he's gotta be sold.
Speaker 7:He's way too big of a deal. Yeah. Sam's the best. But when I'd be around him and he had his AI pin on, I was always sort of looking down at that or, like, thinking about what I'm saying and uncomfortable about, you know, speaking openly to him. And I think, like, that's what I mean by social implications.
Speaker 7:Like, you know, my phone is on my couch right here, but if we're sitting together and I'm holding my phone like this the whole time we're talking, you're uneasy about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So when I think of a pair of glasses that are livestreaming or at least have the capability of livestreaming the whole time, when I look at them, I'm uneasy. Yeah. And I think of this you know, maybe the most extreme example of this is, Apple Vision Pro, which, you know, blew my mind when I got that thing. Like, yeah, I made the most the most glowing video about it because it was the greatest technology I've ever used. But later that night, because I made the video the same day I got them, I'm at home using them, and my wife is like, JC, take those fucking things off your face and pay attention to your kids.
Speaker 7:And I was like, oh, you can't wear these around other people.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And I was like, how did they not see that? And I so I I think about that because, like, we're sort of accustomed to people using their phones, and it's kind of okay. Like, we're used to this. This is not okay. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so when I think about wearables, I think that that is going to be a gigantic thing to overcome, which is
Speaker 1:Well, the crazy so so Amazon acquired a company. It got announced this week called Bee which is a brace Mhmm. After after all everything they faced with Siri, Siri's listening to me. The Bee band just listens to you all Every day single conversation. Everything.
Speaker 1:Everything. And and I and it's and it's cool. Like, I I think all new tech for the most part is cool. Do I want my team to be wearing a bee bracelet? Are we gonna allow people to wear bee bands?
Speaker 2:This might be a bee free zone.
Speaker 1:This might be a bee free zone. You know?
Speaker 7:There's I'm not gonna have any friends that wear b's. I don't have any friends anyways, but if you have a b, it just means, like, we can't hang out. Yeah. Yeah. Because it makes it makes me uncomfortable.
Speaker 7:And look. I think there's an argument. It's like, get over it. Like, you fucking Luddite. Like, this is the direction everything's headed, and you're being recorded all the time anyway.
Speaker 7:Sure. But in the interim, I do think, like, there is a there's a learning curve. I think that Meta's decision to put wearable glasses with a camera on them in Ray Bans, the most common sunglasses in the world, was brilliant because we're all familiar with this pair of sunglasses. Like Yep. There was no learning curve.
Speaker 7:There was no, like, what's that thing on your face? We know what it is. Mhmm. I think how emphatic they are about having the indicator light. There's no way you can turn it off.
Speaker 7:If you cover it, they don't record. There's some degree there at least
Speaker 1:there's That's important. Like my my question my question for the the wave founder in twenty minutes is, should your glasses be bright red and have like you know a circle in the middle of your head that's flashing that says I'm recording.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean if you
Speaker 1:So that people
Speaker 2:can If someone shows up with a TV camera like I don't feel like, oh, this is in violation of my privacy. I'm like, I know exactly what's going on. The news is here. And if I step in front of that camera, I'm on the news. Like, it it it we have a social understanding of that.
Speaker 1:We still might not wanna be around it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm like, actually, I'm gonna turn around and walk the other way because I don't wanna be seen on on this camera or whatever. I don't know.
Speaker 7:But there's there's an understanding there. Yeah. And look, on on Wave's website and the q and a, there's a question like, is there an indicator light? And their answer is, yeah, but you can turn it off. And so, like, I know, I don't know.
Speaker 7:I read that, it makes me a little bit queasy Yeah. As a guy who has a camera on him, you know, all the time and and so much of the the videos that I've made is about filming everyone in the whole world around me. Totally. I still think there's something honest about having that camera on your shoulder, pointing a camera at someone, versus, like, you know, the glass hole movement of the, you know, Google Glass, which, like, by having this on your face, everyone was uneasy around you. I think it's even a big hurdle to overcome as we eventually, like, figure out what this hardware AI future is going to look like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What do you think about, like, airplane demos? It feels like all there's so much tech where the demo is like, you'll love this on an airplane. The Apple Vision Pro is a great example. A lot of the a lot of the handheld
Speaker 9:But it
Speaker 1:devices doesn't work when it's dark?
Speaker 2:It's not too dark on planes. Okay. Does work very well on planes. But it's this like weird niche use case that feels like killer application and then you actually get out into most of your life is not spent on airplanes usually and so
Speaker 7:Yeah. Look, if if that's the best you've got like, I travel more than most people I know, we're still talking about, you know, maybe double digits, maybe, maybe ten hours a month tops.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So, you know, 4,000 for a face computer that I use ten hours a month on an airplane, which by the way, it doesn't work for me on an airplane. Like, I didn't like it at all on an Okay. No. It will work. Like, it check on you perfectly.
Speaker 7:No. When you're on an airplane, you're surrounded by strangers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:The idea that, like, I'm just gonna go like that and watch Avatar with all these people around me. You know, I don't fly Spirit that often, but I have a flown Spirit, and I know what goes on in those flights. Like, it it just again, like, just implication of yeah. The social implication of it, You you know, think if that's the best you've got, then maybe, you know, maybe you're not thinking holistically enough about your about your hardware.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How do you how do you spot talent? You you you discovered Sam. Someone in the chat was asking.
Speaker 7:It's a great question.
Speaker 1:Have a a framework for it.
Speaker 7:It's a it's a it's a difficult question, but, you know, it's the same I I approach it the same way that I approach, investments. And it's seldom the work, and it's almost always the the individual. You know? Like, I I think Sam is brilliant, but he's brilliant at everything that he does. He's brilliant with the work that he at Humane.
Speaker 7:He's brilliant at the work that he did at The Verge before that. He's brilliant with his own YouTube channel. You know, I've I've got a a dear friend of mine, a kid named Hunter, who works in the building with me, but
Speaker 1:he's a a friend, and and we invest together. So
Speaker 7:Hunter's Hunter's fantastic, and, like, I don't know what Hunter does because every time I have a conversation with him, he's starting some new business or some new endeavor. Like, the work is almost irrelevant. It's the individual. And I think it's like, it's that mentality that you have or you don't have. Not everyone has it.
Speaker 7:I do think maybe you can get it if you don't have it. But when I see that in people, I I have a tendency to sort of gravitate towards those people. And when I look at the when I look around at the friends of mine that I have some sort of professional relationship with, a professional admiration for, they all have that thing, that that sort of desire to to see it through, whatever the it may be. So, you know, I I guess the short answer is like, it's always the person, never the never the product.
Speaker 1:That's great. Hunter's in the chat by the way. He says hello.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:The another question I have is we've been thinking about AI generated images, video, etcetera is getting so good. If it stays at this pace, you're going to be able to generate characters consistently. You're you're already seeing this on Instagram, people just creating entire personalities for influencers in different verticals. Do you have any type of strong thesis around how how that will play out if we're gonna have sort of organic influencers, regular humans and then you know these synthetic
Speaker 2:Pros and cons.
Speaker 1:I've been thinking about in the context of you know an example is like, I don't want the AI Andrew Huberman. I want Andrew Huberman to get health advice from because I know Andrew and I trust that he's making the best decisions and and studying you know and making you know these recommendations and and understands the weight of that and you you have like a synthetic Andrew Huberman in five years. Doesn't care if he could convinces a million people to do something dumb with their health because he can just shut the account down and turn a new one on. But I'm curious how you think.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Okay. My cynical take on it which is which I believe is accurate. I'd wager that this is accurate, is that it's a tidal wave that none of us will will be able to to overcome. We can hold our breath for a while.
Speaker 7:It is a tidal wave. And I wish I had a better analogy, but it's a little bit like, you know, when Toy Story came out in 1999. It was the first computer animated feature film, and it was great. I loved it. But then five, six years later, there was just this, you know, onslaught of computer animated films, and I was like, you know what?
Speaker 7:The hand drawn stuff is better. I missed that. When CGI first started getting introduced into films, I was like, no. Practical is better. I like practical better.
Speaker 7:That's gonna be the thing. And it's like, no. You're gonna lose. And I think AI is probably the most existential version of that. I think that it's just going to be so good that it's going to become irrelevant.
Speaker 7:And old people like us might appreciate, you know, real human things, and we might keep it alive. But the generation behind us, my children, when they see draw hand drawn animation, they're like, what is this? They don't care. It means nothing to them. So I think it's just going to get so good that it really doesn't matter, and that that tidal wave is going to consume everything.
Speaker 7:And I think that we're we're it's the progress that we've seen over the last couple years of how good it is and how quickly it's developing is incredible. But when you look at the capabilities of, you know, the latest rock and the latest GPT, you look at how smart these things are. You look at what the sort of conversations you can have with with any of these agents, and then you look at how good the images that can be spit out by, you know, Google's video or or whichever whichever AI you you might be fond of. It's like they're just gonna marry really, really quickly. And I think five or six years from now, we're gonna start to see real sort of erosion in the space because what they're delivering is gonna be so good.
Speaker 7:You know, like, another example is, like, we haven't had a number one song yet that's completely AI generated, but it's gonna come out of nowhere. It's gonna be, like, Gangnam style, which, like, the novelty of it allows us to dismiss the lack of humanity that this song has. The first AI song that's gonna be a number one hit is not going to be a Bob Dylan esque song that comes from the soul. It's gonna be something fun and outrageous, and we're gonna forgive that AI made it. And then slowly, it's gonna start to chip away.
Speaker 7:But I think it is a losing battle, and the optimistic take on that is I think that there is going to be an extreme premium, but on the humans that are able to sustain because of of what they represent uniquely. You know, maybe another bad analogy is it's like, I love Marvel movies. They're fucking fantastic. But as far as cinema goes, like, you know, there's an argument that said it's like, those kind of artistry that we saw in the the seventies or eighties, like the the apex of cinema where it comes from one when you think of a Tarantino movie, you think of, you know, a truly great filmmaker with a voice. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Marvel movies are something else.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But they're fucking great, and we love them. We all show up to see them, and we're okay with that. And I think that's going to happen with AI, but it's gonna happen at a rate of acceleration that we've never encountered before. And it's gonna be so good that we're willing to forgive it, and I think it's gonna leave a handful of people out there. Maybe Andrew Huberman will be one of them.
Speaker 7:I hope so. I'm a fan of his as well. But it will put an extreme premium on the sort of human voices that are distinctly human, that distinctly represents something that AI could never. When you look at the landscape of media, a lot of that shit could be replaced by AI.
Speaker 2:So the power law gets steeper.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 7:Well That's like a five hour conversation, by
Speaker 2:the way. Well, we'll have you
Speaker 1:back on again soon.
Speaker 2:This was Please. Is awesome.
Speaker 1:And congrats on your new your new fake but very real role at ModRetro.
Speaker 7:So I appreciate it. Thanks for the time, guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have fun in Massachusetts. We'll talk soon.
Speaker 2:We'll talk soon.
Speaker 7:Appreciate it. Take care.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Bye.
Speaker 1:Airhorn for Casey.
Speaker 2:Up next, we have Alex from Bright AI coming in the studio. But let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. Interesting. What else do we need to cover today?
Speaker 2:There are a bunch of posts we've been through but we have our next guest here in the studio. You will welcome him in. How you doing? Welcome.
Speaker 1:Hey, welcome. Alex. What's happening?
Speaker 2:Hey, guys.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thanks for hopping on. Give us an intro. Breakdown, who you are, what you do for everyone who's listening.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I'm CEO and founder of Bright AI. We build physical AI solutions for all the sort of essential services that society can't live without. So things like, energy grid, you know, power supply, water infrastructure, HVAC, pest control, and all those things. So we have a platform that lets you kind of real time observe this distributed physical infrastructure in the world and, solves a bunch of the problems that people have in those industries in terms of, like, labor shortages Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, breakdown in the aging infrastructure, sustainability challenges, all those things.
Speaker 2:Is the customer more government focused or private companies?
Speaker 3:They're private companies now. It sort of touches, touches everything, you know, these these services. I've, obviously, every con everybody alive is a consumer of these things.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know? And as a result of that, there's plenty of government involvement, but, they tend to be owned privately in The US. So big utility companies, service providers, you know, pest control operators, like all different sorts of companies. And then you've got this crossover interest with, you know, the national interest and so on as well.
Speaker 2:Where's the strain the worst right now across those different areas? Or, like, where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain?
Speaker 3:It's, it's pretty severe everywhere. So, like, The US has got a you know, if you grade the infrastructure, it's like a c minus or a d. So most of the critical infrastructure was built, you know, just before and after World War two. And it's, like, course, like, typical American plan with a twenty year lifespan. We'll figure it out afterwards.
Speaker 3:And now it's just you know, in a lot of places, it's, like, really held together with duct tape and and wire. And, so if you look at all those industries, you have this aging infrastructure, and then you have a labor force, like a systemic labor problems because older, like, older technicians are aging out instead of it's a bigger economy now, I guess. You know? It's still cool work to do, but younger workers are just not signing up for the journey to be a, you know, twenty five year time horizon to be a master technician in these spaces. So all of it's, crushing.
Speaker 3:I mean, to give one example, it'd be like water infrastructure. Like, 30% of the water we clean up leaches back out into the environment due to leaks in the pipes everywhere. Like, my town has wooden pipes, if you could believe that. What? It's crazy.
Speaker 9:I mean, it's pipe out
Speaker 2:of all.
Speaker 1:I know about I know about all the lead pipe that that our country depends upon to deliver water to to homes, which is concerning but wood pipes That feels
Speaker 2:like a good thing. It feels like an aqueduct. I'm I'm down. Give me a wood punch. It's probably safer.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 3:It's like I know. It's something a beaver. Don't know but it's it's bad.
Speaker 2:Like the
Speaker 3:fresh water is leaching out and the bad stuff is leaching in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So you're active in a bunch of different industries. Yeah. What is like, what is a go to market been?
Speaker 1:What is even the sales cycle look like? Is this you coming to these owners of these various assets and saying like, we're gonna help you leverage AI and it and it's looks like, you know, kind of Palantir's forward deployed model? Are you doing something different?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's in that zone. I mean, we bootstrapped through the first 100,000,000 in revenue. So it's like I was trying to figure out that that that path path through path to customer.
Speaker 1:We need a word for bootstrapping to a $100,000,000 run rate and then and then raising some capital later, but it it it it needs its own. Maybe it's Hawkinson's Hawkinson's model, something like that.
Speaker 3:There you go. Well, I've I've raised too early a bunch of times before, so I can, like, give warning at the other founders. But believe you should raise capital when you got the pattern figured out. But I had to figure out that go to market. All the beginning stuff was through private equity firms.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. So it turns out that their, you know, private equity kind of sits and and basically owns all the service companies that service this infrastructure. And so and they're also very aligned with, like, five to seven year cycles where they wanna drive change, like, big EBITDA growth and change in these in these industries. And so that's where all of our first customers have come from. So we work with a lot of the biggest private equity firms instead of their their secret weapon for physical AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What yeah. What's the latest news on the fundraising side?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we we just raised a $51,000,000 a.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Yeah. Co led by Coastal Ventures Fantastic. And Inspired Capital. And we picked those guys because, you know, cost Cosa's super badass.
Speaker 3:They were, you know, the first and earliest check-in OpenAI. They'd lean forward into sort of the future of abundance.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You're e you know, there and then Inspired is, a lot of people don't know about, but at New York based firm, deep they're in infrastructure specifically and super great founder operators, you know, and all that. So it's, it's good.
Speaker 1:Do you see do you think the company will always be a software, more of a software provider? Or is there a world in the future where you guys would just actually buy the and operate the underlying asset if you felt like you could do it, you know, better than other players in the market?
Speaker 3:It's a good question. You know, we provide a lot of software and hardware today. So our platform combines
Speaker 2:IoT devices. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We have, like, sensors and robots and these wearables that you put on the frontline workers, and it ties all this, like, crazy distributed infrastructure into one big, like, physical AI learning loop, if that makes sense. And, we found some industries, like, are more efficient than others, but, like, the most efficient one we found like, give you an example is, like, 50% of the time they send a technician out, there's nothing to see. That's the most
Speaker 9:The most efficient one.
Speaker 3:We found. A lot of them are, like, 90% of the time you send somebody out, there's nothing to there's nothing to do. But you still keep going in case it goes really bad. And so, you know, I think in some of those industries where you get we're seeing 90 plus percent productivity gains, that might be so disruptive that we actually have to come in and just buy and operate assets directly to sort of make the value unlock happen in the biggest way. But, you know, we'll see.
Speaker 3:Right now, we talk deeply with these operators. It's a great, great way to go fast.
Speaker 2:I was actually a customer of your previous company, SmartThings. What's the through line? What are the lessons that you learned from the first IoT company to new IoT devices? What what are the biggest lessons from that story?
Speaker 3:Man, you're you're welcome and and sorry, I guess. You know, that where it landed for you. But SmartThings was amazing. It was Yeah. You know, we grew it to today, it's, like, 500,000,000 households.
Speaker 3:It's, you know, more than 2,000,000,000 connected devices. Pretty big platform Yeah. All over the world. I guess what I learned so I learned a lot about scaling and sort of making IoT work. You know?
Speaker 3:It's it's matured a lot since then, and so, you know, those things are good. I think I I feel like I was solving the wrong problem, though. So my wife hated the not to say this in a bad way, but she, like, progressively hated the company more the more time went on. Like Like wants regular light switches and stuff. Like she doesn't
Speaker 2:stop Yeah. Totally. Your
Speaker 1:always know.
Speaker 2:That was my that that was my experience. Like I there was like magical and then slowly like little like like hiccups creep in and those Yeah. Like the expectations of software and hardware or modern technology are these that it's perfect because it's a computer and it's a robot.
Speaker 1:Had I had a A 100%
Speaker 2:of the block.
Speaker 3:Market. Wrong market. You know, it's not a
Speaker 2:big enough. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'd I'd love your take on Sonos. We've been talking about Sonos a ton. What do you think they need to do to, make the make the app open faster? I opened the Sonos app. It takes me ninety seconds to adjust the volume and I'm like, I don't know how I haven't churned.
Speaker 2:Maybe I should but Well, I'll be
Speaker 3:negative on Sonos but I've gone through two like hopeful waves of buying it completely in my house and then Yep. Eventually.
Speaker 2:Same thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And, it's in the orphan stage right now. I think I just donated a bunch of, like, great gear.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's the most they have, like, the best sound and all that stuff, but talk about, like, missing the software opportunity
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, every stage in the company.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 3:And, you know, I just don't see you know, it's sort of Alexa sort of faded out in a way. Apple Home, it's not going anywhere. The Google Home stuff hasn't really like, Sonos has this opportunity to, like, own they could be the thing that, like, unlocks things like ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, John's
Speaker 2:idea John's
Speaker 3:idea is that they should buy
Speaker 2:My idea was was Sonos is trading at what, like, billion market cap or something? Yeah. My idea was OpenAI literally bought them.
Speaker 1:They shipped, like, 5,000,000 devices.
Speaker 2:They shipped a ton of devices. And OpenAI has fantastic engineers. Whatever the engineering problem is
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They can fix it, I believe. I don't know. It's a wild it's a wild theory.
Speaker 3:License Scarlett's voice this time and, like, you know Yeah. That that would
Speaker 1:be cool. Super properly.
Speaker 2:See, not the not the not the dumbest crackpot theory we've ever come up with. But we we will leave the the the wild riffing to the next one. Thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations on the back
Speaker 1:of Really, really tremendous progress.
Speaker 2:Great news. Good luck out there.
Speaker 1:We'll talk
Speaker 2:to you soon.
Speaker 1:Talk soon.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Up next, we have Chris from Waves coming in
Speaker 1:Chris.
Speaker 2:The studio. Some funny.
Speaker 1:Blobs. Went viral yesterday. We should play his video maybe before he joins. Let's try
Speaker 2:pull up the video that went viral yesterday about waves, the the glasses. Okay. I'm hearing it. Let's bring it up. Let's see it.
Speaker 6:Is the spot. The
Speaker 2:cinematography on the Star Wars ads is getting insane. It feels like noise cancellation. It sounds like the audio is switching. A banana.
Speaker 1:Get the fuck out.
Speaker 2:So when he's tapping it, is he starting a livestream or just taking a Clipping? Clipping. Oh, clipping. I'm not late, am I? Wait.
Speaker 2:This is this is beam. This is what Casey Neistat was describing. Ten ten seconds or
Speaker 1:Yeah. The bars for startup launch videos is 10 x.
Speaker 2:It's insane.
Speaker 1:Getting project x vibes. You remember that movie?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Your average, like, the public company has trouble producing marketing videos at this level.
Speaker 3:Whoops.
Speaker 2:This is remarkable. Here we go. Oh, no.
Speaker 1:What you got? Woah.
Speaker 2:Now we're getting into FPV, hardcore Henry. Somebody just pulled
Speaker 1:a gun at a house party, I guess. It's wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you have a life like that, maybe you do need to be recording all the time. Hey. Does she have it on too? It recording?
Speaker 2:Recording me? Oh, there you go. Okay. Oh, records from the
Speaker 1:center. Okay.
Speaker 2:Cool. Let's bring him in. I'm excited to talk to him about waves. Welcome.
Speaker 1:What's going on? The man the man that kicked the hornet's nest.
Speaker 2:How are doing? How's the last How's the foot?
Speaker 1:The last twenty four hours stung. I mean, a lot of
Speaker 10:been wild, man. Yeah. Been amazing. It's really really awesome just
Speaker 1:to be Before we start sorry. Are you recording this? No. No. No.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You can. You're live. We're recording recording it.
Speaker 10:Yeah. No. These are cosmetic.
Speaker 1:They Okay.
Speaker 10:They they're not
Speaker 2:Not not live. So, yeah, this is kind of like a typical hardware prelaunch vision statement, collect preorders, and then start manufacturing, I assume. Yep. Very cool. What what was the key takeaway?
Speaker 2:What was the good response? What was the stuff that you think you need to address? How has the overall response been? What have you, like, learned? What did you expect versus surprised you?
Speaker 10:So I'll talk about the good and the bad. I think, you know, we we have hundreds of creators in our inbox right now. It is it is really popping off. I mean Yeah. I think, you know, Twitter is is very much like a tech forward audience but even with that, I think with the virality, we were really able to lock in our ICP here.
Speaker 10:We have some of the biggest names in IRL that want to work with us. I can't name names right now, but, it is very exciting. The downside, I mean, like, I think I think we we we got a lot of feedback about privacy.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 10:And, you know, I think we're we're still pretty set on our stance here. Like, we're gonna ship with an indicator light, but in the conversations that we had with content creators, a lot of them emphasized the fact that, like, you know, they they want something that allows them to capture candid authentic moments because those go the most viral.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And if in certain situations that means them being able to disable the lights, we wanna give that option to them. So yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's distinctly, we were just talking with Casey Neistat. He said that if you try to cover the indicator light on the meta Ray Bans, then stops filming. Yeah. And so do you think part of your opportunity is that you're willing to go and do something that Zach Zach won't?
Speaker 2:Counter positioned.
Speaker 10:I think so. Like, I mean, I I don't think meta realizes where the puck is going. I think they're they're way too focused on, like, adding AI and waveguide displays and trying to go after a bigger market that we don't really know is going to fully adopt just yet. What we're seeing now is, like, the most retentive Ray Ban's users are content creators. And what are they doing?
Speaker 10:They're posting social content on Reels and TikTok. They're posting prank videos, Riz videos, like social interactions, interviews, things like that. Right? And all of them that we talk to are just like, we wanna take this and we wanna go live. Like instead of me flirting with somebody on a short clip, I wanna actually live stream a date and have a chat, tell me what to say and what to do.
Speaker 10:Right? So we just wanna be able to enable those kinds of content to to exist.
Speaker 2:How is the actual live streaming infrastructure? I assume this pairs with your iPhone somehow to pass to to like some sort of stream key to or whatever. Yeah?
Speaker 10:Exactly. It's just RTMP. So we stream to the phone and then phone streams to either the the streamers back end and then to Twitter Kik or just straight to the streaming service.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is there any like pushback from Apple on this type of thing? Are they pretty open with those particular APIs? It's effectively just a camera.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Are apps that exist already that let you this just
Speaker 2:a different camera.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about the how do you evaluate like the technical risk? The the glasses look great. Small. They're very and they look really tiny.
Speaker 1:You're trying to pack a lot in there. Maybe the the actual quality of the video matters less early than just the ability to have that FPV view.
Speaker 10:So I'm pretty confident that, you know, we'll be able to hit a pretty similar quality to a Meta Ray Banz or a Meta Oakley. We we have good connects in Shenzhen that have set us up with some really good suppliers. And, you know, I think, like, if if the issue is, like, can we fit it in these frames? The answer is yes. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Like, the way we've sized it is is kind of unique in that. I almost call these, like, the hockey stick temples because Sure. We keep it thin in the front and then, like, thicker in the back. So PCB, internal battery, and then swappable battery.
Speaker 2:That'll be the swappable. Temples. So Yeah. They two different batteries? You can swap one and then swap the other and then swap the other.
Speaker 10:Only one swappable battery.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:But we'll we'll pack it with two. So, like, while while you're using one, the other one's charging.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 10:So you can just flip flop. And it's hot swappable, so you don't have to stop your stream.
Speaker 2:You don't have to stop your stream because there's enough battery juice in the actual glasses that when you take the battery out, you have a minute to swap the next one or something.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:What were you doing before this?
Speaker 10:So I originally started this company with my cofounder to do sub vocal speech recognition. We did a lot of stuff with, like, neurotech and just, like, ML research. And I think we were caught in this loop where, like, we wanted to make a cool gadget, but we were way too research focused and not market focused.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And we just decided to do a full one eighty and just, you know, I'm I'm very inspired by what Roy Lee has done and what Avi has done with their products. And I I just think that, like, you know, really focusing on a retentive user, so I e a content creator, but then also making a gadget that's just cool, and nice to wear and doesn't look like a super bulky thing and just I think that's that's the goal for me.
Speaker 2:So Sub vocal. So you were thinking like hardware device that I can whisper and it picks up what I'm saying?
Speaker 10:Or just mouth out words. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just mouth out words. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 1:How much did you spend on the launch video? Yeah. It's very well well produced.
Speaker 2:That thing looks amazing.
Speaker 10:So I mean, we have a we have the next Spielberg on our team, Donald is is an amazing individual. We we actually filmed it in Canada. So Cool. For context, my cofounder and I were both Canadian. Yeah.
Speaker 10:We filmed it in Vancouver. It was around, I'd say USD, like, maybe $50.60 k.
Speaker 2:Wow. Solid. Yeah. I mean, we invited you. I mean, it looks like Super Bowl quality.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. And there's so many different actors. I'm assuming you just like actually had to hire a bunch of people.
Speaker 2:Now now none of the footage is from the same sensor that will be in the actual camera. So there'll probably be some sort of disconnect there. But hopefully people are happy with the final sensor. Do you
Speaker 1:have
Speaker 2:any goals? Like, you know, we shoot on FX threes. I like the full frame look. I like a 12 megapixel, you know, four k. Obviously, can't stuff all that into, you know, something the size of a little smartphone camera.
Speaker 2:Where where are the break points in terms of quantitative metrics for a camera to get good enough that people will actually share it? Because even with the Meta Ray bans, the the pictures and images I was taking and videos, they weren't jumping out to me as like, yeah, these are really great to post right now.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think a big thing with with the metas is just image stabilization. Like, if you're like walking around while while you're taking the video, there's like almost like a bobbing effect. And I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. Low light is another thing.
Speaker 10:I mean, you're kind of working against the volume that you have to fit the sensor. So you you are already constrained with how much light that you can actually capture.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, you know Dark party scene you filmed, that would be extremely rough, dude. Yep. Kind of a wild choice, not the sunny day. But it tells a better story, so I I I get why you did it.
Speaker 2:And, obviously, this stuff will get better, but there are, like, laws of physics around, like, you just can't fit a medium format sensor in
Speaker 1:In a pair of glasses.
Speaker 2:Unless it's an eye patch. Maybe maybe that's the future. You just put the full sensor right there. Probably.
Speaker 1:What how do you expect the what do you expect the go to market to look like? I imagine you could partner with a bunch of just big streamers and really focus on delivering value for them and then if it working well for them, then you would have like the next 100,000 people ready to go. Is that how you're thinking?
Speaker 10:That's exactly what we're doing. Yeah. So we're we're already talking to big IRL streamers about partnerships.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 10:We're going to Shenzhen in a couple of weeks just to get the beta device ready, and then we're gonna test it on a 100 different creators and just get their feedback, iterate, improve the user experience. And then, you know, we were trying to do mass production q one next year. And I think, like, you know, there's kind of just like an infinite marketing glitch here. It's like, if we give these streamers early access to just show what this kind of content can look like, it'll just inspire other creators and wanna be creators to to buy this product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is there I feel
Speaker 1:like there's like gonna be a whole new like you could create a whole new class of IRL creators. I can imagine somebody that's high they just do hiking or they just ski Yep. Or they, you know, they and I'm sure people do that already but if you make it really truly seamless Yep. And I can imagine creators that yeah, are more like the like like these like ambient videos and music on YouTube where there's
Speaker 2:not Study really with me Yeah. That type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of crossover.
Speaker 1:Interesting. We'll get it set up. We'll get glasses on Ben, our producer. We'll have a Ben cam feed.
Speaker 10:Awesome. Hey. We'd love we'd
Speaker 1:love to do a
Speaker 10:pair when we have one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For sure. On on kind of like pricing and technology, one thing that I thought was interesting about the Vision Pro was that it was like almost an order of magnitude more expensive than the Quest, but it was very clear that Apple was able to spare no expense, get the best screen and they jumped forward a lot in terms of just quality. Didn't really hit the mark in terms of retention. But when I think about a streamer, most people who are doing it professionally spending $3,000 on a Sony camera is totally reasonable.
Speaker 2:Is there a world where instead of Metas Ray Bans, which are in the couple $100 mark, you go to a couple thousand dollars and you're buying and you're providing a more prosumer, more professional level product, and that actually acts as differentiation and then maybe you go down the price ladder over time. Are you looking into that? Is that is that even something you could do?
Speaker 10:Oh, absolutely. Like, I think right now, we're we're gonna stay sort of like in the mid market, but we we would ideally want to find like bigger, like, creator groups and like I mean, like, imagine like could I almost imagine having, like, a super pro version that's, like, 1,500, $2,000, and, like, mister beast uses it for beast games. You get the POV of, like, every single contestant in beast games. Dude, that would go crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And like, I I that's something I would really wanna see.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Mean, people do that with like the head mounted GoPros.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit awkward and just doesn't land as well, but but you can get great footage out of a out of a GoPro mounted to your forehead if you're racing around. Andrew, do have anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 1:No. This is great. Congratulations. Thanks for jumping on. Congrats on the launch.
Speaker 1:I think a lot a lot of the peep a lot of people's like concerns are real but I think there's ways around it it ultimately will just come down to how individual people choose to use the tech the technology. Like there's gonna be people that use this to live stream privately for their grandma. So they can grandma can feel like they're hanging out with the grandkids and there's a bunch, there's just so many like There
Speaker 2:are people right now who use the cameras in their iPhones to violate people's privacy at Coldplay concerts. Yeah. Like that happens. So we Yeah. It's not
Speaker 10:a device problem. I think it's more of an actor problem. You have people that are gonna do weird shit and we we don't condone that. Yeah. I think we're just gonna focus on creators that wanna make genuinely good content.
Speaker 10:I didn't I didn't get to see what Casey was saying because I was in another call.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:But I would love to just pull up to New York this weekend and have a chat with him and show him the frames and get his thoughts. If that's something he's interested in, if he still likes the original vision of Beam, I would be more than happy to have a conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm sure he'd have a ton of interesting feedback that you could incorporate and and twist around and just it'd be a great meeting of the minds.
Speaker 10:Real quick. John, just wanna say loved your videos on startups. Like, I would I would always watch your like startup history videos while eating dinner. Like, I I love a meal in YouTube. So just like that was that was should you should go back to that at some point.
Speaker 10:I I think it would be really cool. Yeah. Yeah. But TBPN is awesome, man. I love
Speaker 2:the show.
Speaker 1:This is great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're having a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Chris. Awesome having you on and and good luck with everything. I'm sure I'm sure your round will be done by the end of the week. For sure. Good luck.
Speaker 1:Knowing how knowing how the valley moves these days. Oh, bug. Yep. Have fun out there.
Speaker 10:Okay. Take care guys.
Speaker 2:Talk to you soon. Bye.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. Yeah. It all comes down to the device itself is not bad. It's how it gets used and I think there's a bunch of really cool use cases here.
Speaker 9:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well
Speaker 2:If you want another wearable, go to bezel. Get bezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. You know, why why why you know, who needs a camera on their face and they can have a Patek Philippe Nautilus on their wrist.
Speaker 1:Condo the wrist. An RM. For sure. For sure, dude.
Speaker 2:Brandon Jacoby, we got some trade deal news. He's starting a new decade today. More focused and motivated than ever. It's time to build.
Speaker 1:I Shout out to Brandon. I'm an idiot. I I I was like, you're 30? He's like, no I'm 29. I'm starting the I'm starting the thirtieth year.
Speaker 2:What? That's what
Speaker 1:he texted me.
Speaker 2:Is this his birthday?
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. This is this was him announcing his birthday.
Speaker 2:Okay. I thought he was going I thought he was going to a different job or I
Speaker 1:was also very confused. Everybody's confused about your post. Stick stick to Figma, Brandon.
Speaker 7:Stick to Figma.
Speaker 1:We got a post here from
Speaker 2:Put the pixels in the bag.
Speaker 1:Just put the pixels in the bag, bro. We gotta we gotta shout out. I'm Rita Block officially joined the S and P five hundred yesterday. She says it's not the finish line. It's a signal that what we're building has staying power.
Speaker 1:Inclusion brings broader exposure. Proud of our team. Focused on what's next. Hit the gong.
Speaker 2:She's Jack Dorsey, one of the greatest ever doing it.
Speaker 1:CFO over at Block.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Liquidity says incredible work fellas. Sydney Sweeney had a campaign with American Eagle that went live yesterday. Of course, American Eagle was up 6% on the day and then 17% after hours. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Makes total sense.
Speaker 2:But aren't I I heard all like the big the big LPs are pouring into Andreessen Horowitz right now because the just on the rumor that Sydney Sweeney might be joining Andreessen as a partner. Is that true?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the fund has to be the new the new raise
Speaker 2:and Completely unsubscribed. On that news.
Speaker 1:Did have somebody I did have somebody smart text me and say, is this is this real?
Speaker 2:I I I heard the news and I was like, I think it's real. I think it's real. But but to me I thought it was that Andreessen was investing in a company that had done a marketing deal with it. Sydney's. I didn't realize that the rumor was joining She as a
Speaker 1:kinda has the Midas touch right now. She did Doctor. Squatch, $2,000,000,000 exit. We got a post here from Nat Eliason. Yep.
Speaker 1:Fantastic post. He says, Waymo is a godsend for working parents. Need to hand off the baby between meetings? Them in a Waymo and send them to your partner across town. Impossible before now.
Speaker 1:Really grateful we have this technology. This went super viral. I'm sure Waymo was like trying to get a don't think there's definitely not allowed against the terms of use probably illegal in multiple ways. Wow.
Speaker 2:But he was clearly Waymo bombshell.
Speaker 1:He's he was clearly joking. I I was thinking about this though. I I do think it's a game changer that you know, how much time do do parents spend every day just like commuting their kids to and from school. Mhmm. I think AVs are gonna be great for families.
Speaker 1:For example, like I I remember like as a kid, my brother's school would start at a different time than mine and Mhmm. Like one of us would have to wake up earlier than the other. I think we're gonna be living in a world where
Speaker 2:You don't have to hang out at all.
Speaker 1:No. It's like more quality time and and less you know commuting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But who says the commute isn't quality time? It can be.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:It can be it can be a moment to you know actually have a conversation kind of unplug from all
Speaker 1:of I've the literally listened to hundreds of hours of dinosaur content driving.
Speaker 2:But you gotta you gotta give a lecture. You gotta show up to the commute ready to get
Speaker 3:With
Speaker 2:pep on the t rex.
Speaker 1:Today is the first day of the rest of first grade. Up speech in the Just
Speaker 2:lock in buddy. Get in there. I want you to win. Want you to win. Build the biggest sand castle.
Speaker 1:We have another post from tweet Davidson. He says, in your twenties you get sorted into one of these four houses like Harry Potter.
Speaker 2:I got both of them here. Celsius, Celsius is out. You're I'm
Speaker 1:a big fan of three out of the four of these. I'm not thinking of the green one.
Speaker 2:What's the green one?
Speaker 1:Are you joking?
Speaker 2:I don't know what that is.
Speaker 1:It's a matcha. Matcha? Yeah. You're definitely white part? Probably oat milk with with a bunch of canola
Speaker 2:oil Never in been We can
Speaker 1:do a matcha taste test if you like it. Wait. Because matcha like it. I matcha has never been for me and never will be.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I clearly just like
Speaker 1:There's never been a big into that world.
Speaker 2:No. Diet Coke for sure.
Speaker 1:For three out of the four.
Speaker 2:Celsius. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:I'm not I'm not I'm not I'll I'll have a Celsius in Mid.
Speaker 2:I I I do drink one every every day though.
Speaker 1:And we gotta give it up for Satya Nadella. That's a releasing GitHub Spark, a tool in Copilot that turns your ideas into full stack apps entirely in natural language.
Speaker 2:Coding game.
Speaker 1:They're getting into the game.
Speaker 2:Interesting interesting that they're not positioning this as a Claude code competitor. More is like a Figma make
Speaker 1:Well, definitely not a Claude code competitor. This is more of like a Yeah. Yeah. Figma make, Lovable, V0.
Speaker 2:Competitor. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Bolt competitor. Could be a knockout
Speaker 2:drag out fight.
Speaker 1:Every in the future, every SaaS company will have a little text box that lets you generate more SaaS. Yeah. And this is how SaaS will SaaS oral bar.
Speaker 2:The oral bar
Speaker 1:is SaaS. Industrial. Big SaaS wants you to think Big that SaaS wants you to think that you can get in the game too. On their infrastructure. You can.
Speaker 1:You can.
Speaker 2:You can. We we have we have a vibe coated project that was very handcrafted as well from Tyler coming soon. Dropping soon.
Speaker 1:I'm very excited about that.
Speaker 2:Jack, wait wait. Let's go to Tyler. Any news in your world before? You're you're taking tomorrow off.
Speaker 1:You're I'm not I'm just I'm not taking it off. Yeah. The Yeah. You're gonna work so hard tomorrow when you're remote. I have some breaking news.
Speaker 1:I'll bring this up. Yeah. It's not working but
Speaker 2:I'll Okay. Okay. Yeah. Bring up the breaking news. We got some breaking news.
Speaker 1:We got We got a lot Gill scoop. A lot Gill is raising a 1 and a half billion dollar fund which if closed would be one of the largest halls for a solo GP. Love to see it. Natasha's got the scoop. Hit it.
Speaker 1:I'm sure this will be oversubscribed.
Speaker 2:Oh, we got the wipe. I like the wipe. Good job production team. That's fun.
Speaker 1:Very very
Speaker 2:I mean Have fun.
Speaker 1:I could I could see a lot at some point with a with a $10,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The real the real story that's the investigative journalists have to dig into. Is there anyone else on his payroll? Because if there's even one assistant.
Speaker 1:No. There's he's got a fantastic team. Jacob or Mackey. He's got a fantastic
Speaker 2:But he's not a solo g p.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think he's a solo investor.
Speaker 2:Everyone's always the only guy around. He's got other people on
Speaker 1:the He's got a team but I but I
Speaker 2:Maybe he doesn't have another g p.
Speaker 1:It's probably I would He's the
Speaker 2:only g p but
Speaker 1:he has company.
Speaker 2:What if he had like 500 associates, 300 principals, 200 partners, and he's the only GP. He's And he's I'm a solo GP. I'm a solo GP. I have a bigger infrastructure team, bigger back office than Andreessen. But I'm still don't you call me a solo GP.
Speaker 2:I'm not a platform fund. Platform fund territory. But congratulations. Absolutely an insane investor.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Yeah. We covered his post yesterday basically saying these are the early winners. And of course, he's in all the number one. He's in the number one company in all of those categories.
Speaker 1:We got a post here from Jack.
Speaker 2:Crazy run entrepreneur for a long time. Color this this DNA company.
Speaker 1:His book too is is Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:High Growth Handbook, Legend
Speaker 1:He's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Everything he does, hits out of the park.
Speaker 1:Jack Corbett Yeah. Has a post He's a went super viral. I was referencing this with Zach earlier. He says, you can Venmo The United States to pay off the national debt. And so they have website you can go to.
Speaker 1:Gifts to reduce the public debt. And you can just make contributions. You can use ACH, PayPal, Venmo, debit or credit card. So if you're really a patriot, go max out your credit card for Uncle Sam and make a make a gift to this country.
Speaker 2:Is it a tax write off?
Speaker 1:That's a good question.
Speaker 2:Does it count as taxes? Can I just Venmo my taxes now? If I'm like I owe this much
Speaker 10:Probably. Send it
Speaker 2:in and then be like take that
Speaker 1:as a deduction. If this is not tax deductible, that would be the most annoying thing ever. Very funny. Jamie Cuff has launched PACE, the agentic process outsourcer APO for the insurance industry. Jamie is an absolute dog.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. I met I think I met him in 2021. He was at retool Oh. At the time. So excited to see him back in the game with his own startup.
Speaker 1:Yep. Brian Norgaard, he says a rating system for men in the dating marketplace was inevitable and so is one for women. That's interesting.
Speaker 2:Signal says there will never be one for women in his humble opinion. The market dynamics are skewed because every woman is going to for the same guy West Elm Calib effect. Oh, that's an old story. I remember West Elm Calib. That was interesting.
Speaker 2:For dudes, it's an adverse effect. Yeah. I don't know. Reviewing women that feels like that would get disapproved by the app store for some reason. It just feels odd.
Speaker 2:I don't know. We'll see where it goes. But it it is odd that I don't I haven't heard rumblings about like there's a Reddit out there that already exists because like the whole idea of like the rating system app. What was it called? Tee Tee that app?
Speaker 2:Like that like what was new about that wasn't that it was an app. It's that it was a trend on Reddit. I think Reddit or some sort of community. Some sort of web based community beforehand. But anyway weird times.
Speaker 2:I was talking to a friend of the show about tea and she said it's what did she say? Something like it's a Stalinist ritual or something like that. And I kinda went over my head but I thought it was funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know how I feel about it. We're we're trying to get the founder on. You can imagine he's pretty busy at the top of the app store and getting a massive amount of hate constantly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't think
Speaker 2:But also probably doing a lot of project management. It's in his blood.
Speaker 1:It really is. Yeah. Product management.
Speaker 2:Let's let's go through this fun story from Charlie Munger. Very interesting to to dig into. In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old. He was hired at the law firm Wright and Garrett for $3,300 per year or $29,851 in inflation adjusted dollars as of 2010. He had $1,500 in savings equal to about $13,570 now.
Speaker 2:A few years later in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced. He had been married since he was 21. Charlie lost everything in the divorce, his wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena, not far from where I live. Munger moved into dreadful conditions at the university club and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac which his children said had a horrible paint job. According to the biography written by Janet Lowe, Molly Munger asked her father, daddy, this car is just awful.
Speaker 2:A mess. Why do you drive it? The broke monger replied, to discourage gold diggers. Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his son Teddy had leukemia. Heartbreaking.
Speaker 2:In those days, there was no health insurance. You just paid everything out of pocket and the death rate was near one hundred percent since there was nothing doctors could do. Rick Rick Garran Rick Garran, Charlie's friend said Munger would go to the hospital hold his young son and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying. One year after the diagnosis in 1955, Teddy Munger died. Charlie was 31 years old, divorced, broke, bearing his nine year old son.
Speaker 2:Later in life, he faced a horrific operation that left him blind in one eye with pain so terrible that he eventually had his eye removed. Incredibly incredibly rough and then to go on an absolutely generational run after that, man, really speaks to resiliency and perseverance. What a wild story. Anyway, we need something to cheer us up. We need to go to Howard Lutnick Investments.
Speaker 2:His his investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald is offering to buy the right to businesses tariff refunds basically betting that the courts will overturn the tariffs What? From Ryan Peterson.
Speaker 1:What does Lutnick know?
Speaker 2:Financialize everything. This is wild. What does Lutnick know? Yeah. Mean, if you're maybe if you if you have if you paid a bunch of tariffs and you're expecting some refunds or thinking that there might be there, could get the cash flow now if your business is in trouble.
Speaker 2:That's obviously relevant customers. In other news, SpaceX direct to cell phone coverage is growing fast. Elon posted a chart that's, not quite going hyperbolic, but certainly growing exponentially. I didn't realize that direct to cell was was was growing as fast as it was. I I didn't even realize it was that available.
Speaker 2:I see the I see the the generic satellite service show up on my phone every once in while and it's usually a harbinger of very bad connection. But but but Starlink should be much faster.
Speaker 1:Well, that is a great place to end the show This has been a fun one. Yeah. Lots of range. Yeah. Leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 1:It helps the show. It does. And we were charting today.
Speaker 2:We're climbing the rankings on Spotify.
Speaker 1:Number 14.
Speaker 2:You can help us. Like going. Listen to the show on Spotify giving us five star
Speaker 1:review. If you're on Apple Podcasts, I do recommend switching over to Spotify. Oh, yeah. We got video.
Speaker 2:Oh, that does make sense. Would
Speaker 1:be Anyway. A very We hope you have a fantastic day. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:See you tomorrow. Bye. Cheers.