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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Wednesday, 11/05/2025. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome. We're back in the TBPN UltraDome.
Speaker 1:Everybody wanted to know what we would do if we didn't podcast today. I guess we'll never know.
Speaker 2:I guess we'll never know.
Speaker 1:We're back. It's so good to be back.
Speaker 2:It is. Back in the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, still sponsored by Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place.
Speaker 2:In breaking news yesterday, Jared Isaacman has been renominated, I guess, is the term. He's back in the contention for, to be NASA administrator. It was a very exciting, very tumultuous year
Speaker 1:for him, up and down. Why he was originally taken out of the running?
Speaker 2:Yes. So there are differing accounts, according to the White House. So according to the White House, the the the the the reason is that he had donated previously to Democrats. And the White House said, like, this should be like, we need to know that you're all in on America first, like that type of but those donations were public because all donations are public. And so there was a little bit of, like, well, like, you nominated them.
Speaker 2:You should've just, like, looked it up. But you can literally just, like, you can literally just Google it. Like, you it's not even, like, some secret database. It's it's it's all open records. But then Ars Technica and a couple other outlets reported that it was because of the Elon Musk Trump dust up that happened back in May.
Speaker 2:Remember the whole, like, battle and Elon was going at Trump on the timeline and Trump was going at Elon and Truth Social and they were kinda duking it out. And there was like the that
Speaker 1:was a real day on X.
Speaker 2:It was a crazy day on True Social as well. Why are you doing True Social erasure, bro?
Speaker 1:I was going I actually
Speaker 2:No. No. Literally, like like Trump was not posting on X then. Oh,
Speaker 3:right. Right.
Speaker 2:Trump would post on on on True Social. Would screenshot it and then share it on Yeah.
Speaker 1:Remember, we were sort of live reaction No. Reacting to the news and I would refresh Yeah. Truth or I'd see something on Acts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you'd to actually be
Speaker 1:a real post from the president. Then I'd go to Truth Social and I'd say, unfortunately
Speaker 2:It was. That was And a real it and it was. And so Isaac Min got pulled and, secretary Duffy stepped in. Sean Duffy, who's the twentieth sec sent twentieth secretary of the Department of Transit, serving under the president. And but now Isaacman's back in the picture, of course, at the Charlie Kirk Memorial.
Speaker 2:You might have seen Elon Musk and president Donald Trump sitting down having a handshake, maybe making amends. There's been speculation as to, things. It seems to be water under the bridge. They seem to have, healed all wounds, I suppose. Let me tell you about Restream.
Speaker 2:One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream, and reach your audience wherever they are. So Jared Eisman, put out a, a long post. We'll read through some of this, and then I have a little bit of a take about, his career and whatnot. So, he said, thank you, mister president, for this opportunity. It will be an honor to serve my country under your leadership.
Speaker 2:The support from the space loving community has been overwhelming. I am I am not sure how I earn the trust of so many, but I will do everything I can to live up to those expectations, to the innovators building the orbital economy. That's a term I haven't actually heard used before, but I like it a lot. Orbital economy is great. Wave space economy just doesn't hit as hard as orbital economy.
Speaker 2:I like that. The scientists pursuing breakthrough discoveries and to the dreamers across the world eager to return to the moon and the grand journey beyond, these are the most exciting times the dawn, since the dawn of the space age, and I truly believe the future we have all been waiting for will soon become a reality. This is inspiring. I didn't know that that much about Jared Eisenman, but as soon as I started learning about him, I was a fan, and I'm very excited that he could potentially be in the seat. The big reason is that, first off, he's he's an entrepreneur, and I think entrepreneurs make great leaders generally.
Speaker 2:But He can fly fighter jets.
Speaker 1:He has
Speaker 2:He can fly fighter jets. That I think is a little bit less relevant, but it's somewhat relevant because you are leading people. Like, you're flying
Speaker 1:You're leading people that are going
Speaker 2:They're gonna fly a
Speaker 1:big machine. By flying in big fast machines.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think it's I think it's a it's a Yep. A it's sign of respect.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not that crazy of an idea. But I don't think people understand how crazy of an entrepreneur he is. So he started Shift4 Payments.
Speaker 2:It had a few other names, but he started his company when he was 16 years old. 16. 16. Over age. Dropped out of high school, got a GED, so he could technically have, like, finished high school, I suppose Yeah.
Speaker 2:And just started this business. And it's like a serious business. Like, you talk to you know, you you you learn about these people who maybe don't know. They don't run a household brand. They haven't been telling their entrepreneurial story for a decade.
Speaker 2:There there's no founder's podcast episode about them yet or something. But this is a serious business. Billions in revenue, real earnings. The PE ratio is 25 x. It's like not some crazy, oh, it's a meme coin.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a $6,000,000,000 company. Yeah. It's not a hyperscaler, but it's like very serious. Real business.
Speaker 2:4,000 employees. 4,000 employees, hundreds of billions of payment volume. And and it also does the the payments for Starlink. So it's it's like, you know, a Stripe competitor that actually works on, to process the payments Yeah.
Speaker 1:They they started 3,300,000,000.0 Yeah. Revenue in 2024.
Speaker 2:Which is which is also interesting. I wonder when they first met because he's in payments in 1999. Elon's in payments in 1999 in PayPal. And then Elon, I believe
Speaker 1:Let me check Rockipedia.
Speaker 2:Didn't didn't Elon Angel into Stripe at some point? Stripe, of course, owns Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. And I think maybe I don't know if this is more important. This is probably less important, but he's been to space.
Speaker 2:Jared Isaacman has been to space, which is just crazy. And he so he went with a crewmate, Sarah Gillis, who was a SpaceX engineer and did a civilian spacewalk. Like, they left the capsule in space, and this was on a on a, on a, SpaceX rocket, which is just, like, incredibly risky, I feel like. It's a it's a crazy move, and he went all the way up. And so he's kind of, like, really earned his bona fides as someone who's, like, loves space and is willing to, you know, engage with SpaceX.
Speaker 1:He can probably he can probably say no one likes space more than me.
Speaker 2:Seriously. Yeah. Yeah. And so, when he was first, when he was first considered as NASA administrator, there was this debate around him, and it wasn't it wasn't the Elon thing, really. It kind of was the Elon thing, but the Elon dust up, that was kind of, like, the the last second, like, rugging.
Speaker 2:But in the lead up because Isaacman was nominated, I think, on inauguration day. So he was, like, one of the first he was clearly everyone was like, yep. This is our guide. We don't even have to make any more calls. Like, we're nominating him on day one.
Speaker 2:Do that. Then then the debate, you know, goes because he has to be confirmed. Right? And he eventually was confirmed, but the debate was moon versus Mars. Moon versus Mars, where should you prioritize things?
Speaker 2:It sounds silly, but it really is real because there are different pro different companies, different organizations, different constituents. And so, on the moon side, you have the Artemis program, which is the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule, the Orion spacecraft, which has been derided by Casey Hanmer as a failure. Been a lot of people who are pro SpaceX.
Speaker 1:Casey quoted Jared's announcement and said this is a good sign. Yes. Yes. He he and Casey is effectively our our senior NASA correspondent,
Speaker 4:as you
Speaker 2:said. Yes. Definitely. And and and so on the other side, you have Elon who has always been prioritizing Mars, Mars, Mars. Let's go to Mars.
Speaker 2:And so Jared Isaacman said at the time, why is it taking us so long, and why is it costing us so much to go to the moon? And I think it's a good question. We've been to the moon six times. We've we've actually done, I think, a 140 moon missions. Six of them actually landed humans on the moon.
Speaker 2:A bunch sent people around the moon. We sent robots to the moon. We sent landers. We sent all sorts of different stuff around the moon. So we're not we're we're we're we're not new to go trying to go to the moon.
Speaker 2:We've sent humans there six times. But the fact that we haven't been able to scale our rocket program to a point where moon missions are too cheap to meter has become a bit of a stain on American ingenuity. We should have just scaled it up and just cut the cost by 20% every year, and we would be getting up and back.
Speaker 1:Shouldn't be a lost start.
Speaker 2:It should be it shouldn't be a lost start. And and it is a lost start to the point where people ask, is it real? How do we do this? It it's hard to believe. How do we lose?
Speaker 2:We don't normally just lose the ability to do things. And yet in this
Speaker 1:Palmer Palmer was was defending Yeah. The moon mission Yeah. To Logan by saying wasn't he saying, like, you can shine a laser
Speaker 2:There's a mirror. They they they left
Speaker 5:a mirror.
Speaker 2:So you can you can bounce you can bounce a laser off the mirror. You can do this at home, and you can prove that there is a mirror on the moon. It doesn't prove that aliens didn't put it there. So Palmer needs to, you know, go away. We gotta we gotta
Speaker 1:you gotta go a level deeper.
Speaker 2:You gotta go a level deeper. But, you know, in general, SpaceX has become the best hope at the reversal of this, and Elon has been much more focused on Mars than the moon. And so the debate around Isaacman centers on this tie on his ties to Elon Musk. His Shift4 company, the payment processor, processes Speaking of
Speaker 1:the moon, speaking of the moon moon, Sam Altman was on Tyler Cowen. Yes. And Altman said at one point, sometimes late at night, you just really want that chocolate chip cookie at 11:30 at night, or at least I do. And Tyler says, yes. Do you think there's any kind of alien life on the moons of Saturn?
Speaker 1:Because I do.
Speaker 2:How did they get in that situation? We need to actually hear the real, like, transcript. Is there video for that, podcast? I think it's audio only.
Speaker 3:Audio only. Audio. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Man, Sam really understands the Trump takeaway from the election. Like, the I I believe, like, the whole the whole podcast election conclusion was just attention is all you need. You need to do as many podcasts as possible. You need to be high volume volume wins, and Sam Altman just will not turn down appearances. And so he does, you know, Tucker Carlson, and there's a really rough clip that comes out of that.
Speaker 2:But then he just goes and does another podcast, and then he does another podcast. And then, on Friday, everyone was talking about the Brad Gerstner, Sachin Adela, Sam Altman clip. And then, you know, the next on Tuesday, there's a new press cycle, and, yeah, I I haven't seen any bad clips from the Tyler Cowen interview. So it just feels like the number one thing you don't wanna do in comms is is, like, go into hiding. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You just wanna power through. Keep posting.
Speaker 1:Through it.
Speaker 2:Post through the pain. Podcast through the pain. I love it. I think it's a great media strategy, and I think it will ultimately be victorious. But the question about Isaacman, he's tied to Elon Musk through shift four, that he processes payments for Starlink.
Speaker 2:And, also, he obviously literally went on top of a SpaceX rocket and went to space. And so, NASA, even though even though SpaceX is a private company, NASA does have a thumb that it can put on the scale because it has funding, and it has the ability to help and the ability to approve different things.
Speaker 1:NASA's funding. They also know how to spend money.
Speaker 2:Exactly. You
Speaker 1:look at how much money they've spent on on Orion.
Speaker 2:And so that money could go to SpaceX, could go to Mars, could go to the moon, and and the NASA administration administrator has the ability to to say, hey. We're gonna we're gonna focus more on Mars, and we're gonna focus more on moon or or vice versa. And there's a and there's an open debate. And I don't think this is, a left right issue. I remember the wasn't the wasn't wasn't George Bush really into going to Mars?
Speaker 2:And then I I I forget. Did did why are you laughing, Tyler?
Speaker 3:I just think it's funny. Like, the moon and Mars being, like, a political Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that'd be funny.
Speaker 2:It's like, are you moon? Are you pro moon? Are you pro Mars? And then, like, we need another x and y axis for an entirely new political compass that has no correlation with the underlying political left, right, authoritarian, libertarian, compass. I don't know.
Speaker 2:What what are other wedge issues that have no correlation with left?
Speaker 1:President George w Bush was quite interested in Mars exploration. He
Speaker 2:was a Mars guy.
Speaker 1:In January 2004, he announced vision for space exploration at NASA headquarters. The plan directed NASA to return humans to the moon by around 2020
Speaker 2:as the He wanted he wanted to go to the moon by 2020?
Speaker 1:And eventually send astronauts to Mars and beyond.
Speaker 2:Wow. That that that's that's disappointing. You didn't
Speaker 1:And they proceeded to spend 20,000,000,000 to make a broken Orion capsule.
Speaker 2:It was 20,000,000,000? I mean, the real miss is is it should've taken all the all the war on terror money and put it into moon missions and just been like, we're going to war against the moon. There's oil on the moon. And then if there if we'd put all that money and all that manpower into going to the moon, we'd probably be dominating the moon right now. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, if you take all the
Speaker 1:wars on the moon.
Speaker 2:There I think there would be an on the moon. I I've been very pro moon. I want the moon to look like Las Vegas ASAP. It should be a tourist destination.
Speaker 1:We people would be gambling on the moon right now.
Speaker 2:If you if you let them gamble, they will come. This is the thing. This is this is real. But but there is a delicate balance. You know?
Speaker 2:Obviously, the more time you spend focusing on the moon, the less time you're focused on the big Mars mission. There there are different considerations in terms of the rockets that you type of that that that you build. And that's and that's basically the the debate, I think the debate around like, the nonpolitical debate. The meat and potatoes debate around, Jericho Isaacman is, like, is he going to make the correct decision about what what celestial body to, prioritize versus, you know, oh, did he donate to this, or is he the left wing or right wing, or did he say the right thing?
Speaker 1:Like It's also
Speaker 2:All that stuff is window dressing for the big question for NASA, which is moon or Mars, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:And you don't you don't think trying to counterbalance China's efforts in space should also be top of mind, or is that is
Speaker 2:that is that I think that is all upstream of moon versus Mars. Right? So so so if they're if they're if they're going to claim Mars tomorrow, well, we probably gotta push and and, you know Yeah. Get on the defensive on Mars. You know, it's like, you're playing some grand strategy game, and it's like, you know, you see someone going taking territory over there.
Speaker 2:That that that informs do you wanna go play defense on that territory, or do you wanna go capture a completely separate territory? Yeah. But, yes, I mean, I agree with you. And and and this is what Casey Hammer has said on the show, multiple times is based on what we're seeing from China on the moon progress, maybe we do need to prioritize in the moon more. Maybe Elon is somewhat wrong on that in that in that it's not just this it's not just Elon for years was not framing things in in geopolitical ways.
Speaker 2:He was just saying it's humanity versus the cold vacuum of space. Yeah. And so humanity needs to go to Mars because that's a true different planet. And if something happens to the moon and Earth, like, you you can truly start over on on Mars, you can't necessarily do that on on the moon. That's not the case with the current geopolitical situation.
Speaker 2:So, so that's an interesting question, but I do think that there's a new debate, which is what happens below the moon, what happens in low Earth orbit? What happens with the data center in space question? Because six months ago I'm not kidding. Six months ago, it was a nonissue. It was just like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:There's, a YC company that's working on it. This is some sci fi thing that people are thinking about. But now we have Jensen Wong, we have Elon Musk, and we have Sundar Pichai all saying, we're going to do data centers in space. So collectively, you have what? 10,000,000,000,000 in market cap that's like, hey.
Speaker 2:We're gonna we're gonna be taking this seriously. And I do think that that's a NASA question. And I think NASA will have some say over the speed at which this stuff gets built out. Now maybe it's a decade. Maybe it's two decades.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's five years. But the there will be policies that are overseen by Jared Isaacman that inform how seriously the idea of data centers in space gets taken. And he could be completely anti, and he could just be like, I think this is fake. I think it's impossible to diffuse the heat. I'm anti, and I'm gonna block it the whole time I'm at NASA.
Speaker 2:And, you know, some people might be very upset about that. Some people might be like, thank goodness. Like, we didn't want we we didn't wanna waste any time on that. But he hasn't chimed in on that, and I think that that's an interesting next discussion for the government to have and a government administrator, the NASA administrator to have, which is what is the US government's position on data centers in space because the hyperscalers are chiming in left and right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Elon's post from a couple days ago, quantum computing is best done in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's just like bear posting, basically. He's just like it's useless. Right? Isn't that what he's saying?
Speaker 2:Or or is he saying like it's cold there?
Speaker 1:I think he was I don't think he's I don't think he's bear posting. That's not how I read it.
Speaker 2:Oh. What what what is his take?
Speaker 1:Think he's saying it's like you you I I
Speaker 2:think He's saying he's saying you should actually do it there? It seemed like he was just saying like, no. You should just go and do that, like, super far away. Like, stop working on that on Earth. Like, it's not worth it.
Speaker 2:That that that's that's that was my read on it. But maybe it's like no. He maybe he's being serious.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is he being serious? Like, scientifically, believes that that quantum computing should happen on the moon? I don't know. I I don't know enough about quantum computing. Croc?
Speaker 2:Yep. Is this real? Croc? Devin, Cognition. They're the makers of Devin.
Speaker 2:Devin's the AI software engineer. Cross cross your backlog
Speaker 1:with your
Speaker 2:personal AI
Speaker 1:engineering team. David in the chat was, saying, referencing that Elon is actually more and more moon pilled. He did post back and found it two days ago. He said SpaceX will lean in big on the moon.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:And Arthur Mac Macwater said, we should annex it, which Solana has been Yes. Saying for quite a while now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Moon should be a state. It's a classic classic line. I am inevitable, says Ken Kirtland. He's showing a cool collage of Jared Isaacman.
Speaker 2:What a crazy story. What a crazy story. I'm I'm very excited. I hope he does more, hope he does more podcast appearances.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll work to
Speaker 2:Usually yeah. Yeah. I'd love to have him show. Show. But I'm I'm I'm usually not like, oh, I really want, like, the director of some random, you know, government organization to do a full podcast round.
Speaker 2:But I feel like the space question, the orbital economy, it's so big. It's so interesting that there's a ton of, there's a ton of interesting questions, and it's just so it's such a cool thing to to build a vision around. Let's check-in on the NASA admin candidates is Luke Leisher. We have a winner, and the campaign twenty twenty five was, between someone saying, let's kill NASA and and Jared Isaacman saying, 20 septillion Americans to Mars. Which American which message will resonate with Spitter?
Speaker 2:And we have our answer. Jared Isaacman is back in the in the in the race. Deleon is confirming that he is anti
Speaker 1:I would like to inform everyone that data centers in space still make me wanna blow my brains out. Thank you for your attention to this matter. And Sundar heard that and immediately responded Wait.
Speaker 2:He posted Dalian posted this before?
Speaker 1:Hours later. Only a few hours later. Actually no. I think I think I think Deleon was responding to Sundar here. Think so.
Speaker 1:It was more fun to think about. Yes. Sundar responding to Deleon, but he's Sundar yesterday said, our TPUs are headed to space inspired by our by our history of moonshots from quantum computing to autonomous driving. Project Suncatcher is exploring how we could one day build scalable ML compute systems in space harnessing more of the sun's power, which emits more power than a than a 100,000,000,000,000 times humanity's total electricity production. Like any moonshot, it's going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges.
Speaker 1:Early research shows our Trillium generation TPUs
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Or our tensor processing units purpose built for AI survive without damage when tested in a particle accelerator to simulate low Earth orbit levels of radiation. Mhmm. However, significant challenges still remain like thermal management and on orbit system reliability. More testing and breakthroughs will be needed as we count down to launch two prototype satellites with Planet by early twenty twenty seven, our milestone of many. Excited for us to be a part of all the innovation happening in the space.
Speaker 1:So it is pretty funny to think about, you know, before before we had satellites Yeah. Like scientists just being like, you wanna put radio equipment in orbit and then you wanna use it to communicate with
Speaker 2:You wanna watch TV in space.
Speaker 1:You wanna watch space.
Speaker 2:You want you want space TV.
Speaker 1:Makes me wanna blow
Speaker 2:my brains out. Satellite television. That's what we're doing.
Speaker 1:Satellite radio.
Speaker 2:What are you gonna call it? Dish networks. Put a camera
Speaker 1:on one of those too?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:You wanna take pictures?
Speaker 2:Wanna take pictures?
Speaker 1:And send it down Yeah. To us here.
Speaker 2:A camera in space. Yeah. The thing we take wedding pictures with.
Speaker 1:Make it make sense.
Speaker 2:You're gonna put it
Speaker 1:in space. Sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're gonna put
Speaker 3:it on the top of a rocket.
Speaker 1:The thing that you need to replace the film.
Speaker 2:The camera. If I drop it, it breaks immediately. We're gonna put
Speaker 3:that on top of a rocket.
Speaker 1:Shoot it into space.
Speaker 3:Shoot it
Speaker 2:into space. It's just gonna work. Pictures. This is gonna work. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For sure. For sure.
Speaker 1:Super believable.
Speaker 2:A 100%. A 100%.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I like that Sundar Pichai's, his nominative determinism just keeps getting stronger.
Speaker 1:So, of course, you
Speaker 2:know him as is pitching AI. Oh. You see where I'm going with this. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:So now he's going after the sun, and, of course, his name is Sundar. That's incredible. He's gonna be pitching AI into the sun. Pitch AI into the sun, Sundar. It's so good.
Speaker 2:Sundar. Should have called it project Sundar. That's what, Brandon and her team was mentioning, which is very funny. Sean Maguire is, I think, in he's in he's in favor of all this. He he's he's a supporter.
Speaker 2:He says the science fiction future we dreamed of might actually be coming true, and Elon Musk signed off on Sundar Pichai's suncatcher project and says, great idea, l o l, which is a hilarious
Speaker 1:Well, I think this was because Elon had just been sharing how he wants he he he was posting about how SpaceX would eventually do data centers in space. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:So I think part of this is he's Oh, idea.
Speaker 2:Great idea. LOL. Like, you're doing my thing. But then all but then Sundar says only possible because of SpaceX massive advantages in launch technology. It is it is so funny that, like, Elon can't just be like, no.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm I'm I'm keeping all the launch capacity for myself. Like, he he doesn't have I guess he doesn't have the ability to do that really. I think it's like I think it's illegal because if you're like a railroad, you can't say, like, I I'm I'm, you need,
Speaker 1:like, net neutrality effectively. Very funny. Philip John Johnson vindicated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Aaron Burnett says, is it just me, or did the Overton window on space data centers dramatically shift over the last few weeks? It really does seem like this dramatically shifted truly just a few weeks ago. So some folks at YC were taking a victory lap because YC backed a data center wait. Did YC back StarCloud, or did they back a different
Speaker 3:Yeah. Data center and They did StarCloud.
Speaker 2:StarCloud? Okay. Because I remember when YC backed StarCloud, there were a lot of people who were, oh, YC, try to do a hard tech stick to the mobile apps, buddy. And they're I guess we do in space data centers now, and people were having a lot of fun with it. But then he like, you know, Philip has just been completely vindicated at least by, like, getting support from the big power players.
Speaker 2:Like, the big tech power players are are coming out in support. My question is, like, where does Jericho Eisenman land on this? He he runs a payment processor. We're be processing payments in space. Let's get let's get his payment company up in space.
Speaker 2:We need to do more things in space. We need I mean, there's there's so many cool things that we can put in space. We need, space casinos, space slop, space Instagram.
Speaker 1:Space troughs. Space troughs for sure. Satellites are really space troughs
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:When you
Speaker 1:think about it. Dean Ball says, one way to infer the bubble isn't going to pop soon is that all the people who have been wrong about everything related to artificial intelligence, indeed, they have been desperate to be wrong. They suck on their wrong wrongness like a pacifier. Believe the bubble is about to pop.
Speaker 2:This is very evocative. Is that is that completely true? I feel like a lot of people that have been wrong do not believe the bubble is good. Like, when I think about people who have been wrong about artificial intelligence, I mean, sure, there's people that are that have been, like, AI will never pass the touring test, but there's also, the Lies or Yukowski, which was, like, AI is gonna kill us, like, next year. And, like, I would put them both in those camps.
Speaker 2:And is is Eliezer saying that the bubble's gonna pop? I don't know. Is he
Speaker 1:Bob talk? I don't think to the he's bubbler.
Speaker 2:Let's go to the bubbler. Sure. Okay. So so who is who is Dean Ball subtweeting here? That's the
Speaker 1:It's hard to argue that it's Entire. Is gonna be this runaway death machine and also that it's It's
Speaker 2:a bubble. Yeah. Do you know, Ball?
Speaker 3:Alright. How many times are we gonna make this joke? No. I I think it's mostly coming about there's a bunch of, like, journalists that, like, mainstream journalists that talk about, like, oh, AI is like just
Speaker 2:Oh, yes. Yes. 100%.
Speaker 3:100%. Interesting.
Speaker 2:And 100% of pop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the the there's a I don't know if he's a journalist, but there's a blogger who was trying to argue simultaneously that Sam Altman has never, like, created anything in his life. He's nontechnical. Like, he's not he's not responsible for any, like, success. But then simultaneously was arguing that, like, he moved recklessly quickly to launch ChatGPT against the board's, like, desires.
Speaker 2:And it's like, literally both of those can't be true simultaneously. Like, only one can be true. Either, like, he he did have the foresight to to to release the product or he didn't, and therefore, it's not risky for what he did. So there there's just, like, some there's there is some, like, dissonance where people don't really map through all of the logical conclusions of what they're arguing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For me, the Gell Mann amnesia Yeah. Effect has just been crazy lately because there's people whose content that I read
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That don't historically cover AI Yeah. And they're starting to talk about AI Mhmm. And they're just in a single short essay that they're writing, I can just there's there's easily, like, 10 to 15 things that are either wrong or just I completely disagree with the take. And so now I'm thinking about some of their other content and being like, okay. Maybe I need to be a lot more critical of of some of their other writing.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was someone who was, like, super critical of crypto during the crypto bubble and then came out, like, super doom pilled. Like, we're gonna all get a paper clip next year. And and I was like, like, maybe I should be buying NFTs. Like, he's like, he's so wrong about the paper clipping thing that I need to go back and revisit.
Speaker 2:Maybe he was actually wrong about the NFT question because, like but, of course, like, the truth is that he was correct about NFTs being a bubble and just happened to be also wrong about us all dying to AI in, you know, a matter of days. Like, both can be true. You can you can swing and miss on certain things, and you can hit it out of the park on others. Oh, we we mentioned it yesterday. Polymarket was tracking the Mamdani election in New York City.
Speaker 2:I think we were tracking it at, like, 95%, and then, of course, it went to 100% because Mamdani did get elected. And Rex here has a reaction of Michael Burry or Christian Bale in my in The Big Short, biting his fingernails, saying a socialist just got elected mayor in the heart of the financial world at the top of the greatest bubble of all time. How are those how are those related? I don't know. But, yeah, people are not happy.
Speaker 2:They're moving to Florida, I guess.
Speaker 1:I don't think I mean, I think I think a lot of the people that said they were gonna move are waking up this morning and seems know, we'll we'll see. The the the big issue for New York state from a tax revenue standpoint is is there's they don't actually need a million people to leave for it to have a material impact on budgets. Like if, like, a certain
Speaker 2:Yeah. But the question I I I think people people overestimate how communist New York can become in a year and underestimate how communist New York can become in a decade. And so I I generally think that people are freaking out thinking that there's gonna be a 45% wealth tax next week. We'll see. We'll see what actually gets put in place.
Speaker 2:But good luck to all the folks over in New York City. The market seems to be liking it according to High Yield Harry. How are the markets doing today? Oh, we're ripping. The Nasdaq is up 1.15%.
Speaker 1:It should be
Speaker 2:in white shoes. 3%.
Speaker 1:Last week, we
Speaker 2:should be in white shoes. Is up point 6%, and and high yield Harry said, Zoron's America.
Speaker 1:Wow. Bitcoin touched $99.99?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:At 1AM. That's stressful. Thankfully, while we were all sleeping. The this post from this this Aaron Slotov resurfaces email that I think is
Speaker 2:It's a classic.
Speaker 1:Instant classic. Peter Thiel wrote it to Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, 01/05/2020, said there are many themes that could be developed more here, but let me let me make a few quick points for now. Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our polish policy should be embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of millennials say they are pro socialists, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed.
Speaker 1:We should try and understand why. And from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it. So it feels like basically called called to a tee, you know, the last or at least, like, could have easily predicted this type of election outcome five years ago.
Speaker 2:Somebody asked me do I have it here? Where is it? Somebody asked me about oh, I need to find it in my DMs. Like, know, should you go to college? Something like that.
Speaker 2:Oh, I I really wish I could find it. And I and I and I was I was kind of noodling on it. It was after we talked about the Palantir draw don't even go to college. Just go work for Palantir straight out of high school. And someone was saying that I think that they had the opportunity to do it.
Speaker 2:They wound up going with college or something, and they wanted to know, my thoughts. And and there is this weird question of student debt that I think gets completely left out of the equation when and it's so, so important. It feels like if you if you want to if your life's work is, like, you wanna be a doctor, like, you just have to go to college. Like, you you they they you're just not going to get on that track Just being like, yeah. I've been, I've been cutting up people in my, in my basement for the last month, so I'm ready for surgery.
Speaker 2:I vibe coated the scalpel. No. It's not gonna happen. You gotta go to college. But if you but if you do wanna be something that's a little bit more flexible, a little more creative, a little more entrepreneurial, you can probably drop out of college.
Speaker 2:But it depends on, like, a whole bunch of other factors. Like, if you are, if you're if you're rich and you're gonna graduate without any debt, there's pretty there's pretty limited downside to going to college because you get to just hang out and vibe code apps and do whatever and cloud farm and Aura Farm and do whatever you want. Like, it's like, it's a pretty flexible environment. It just sucks to go through that and then come out with $200,000 in debt. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so so that's the thing. Then then there was, like, the question of, like, if if the if the Department of Defense is gonna pay your for your full ride, like, I don't know what's going on. But if you can get a full ride and you can get no debt, well, then, then it's probably worth going. But, also, if you're so elite that people are just throwing money at you to go to college, you can probably take that money and not and and just teach yourself and not go to college. What do you think about that framework?
Speaker 2:Like, this idea that, that that, like, that the that the actual debt is a very important factor into, like, is college valuable? I feel like so many people boil it down to, like, college good or college bad as opposed to, like, college a good bargain or college a bad bargain.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I don't think it's that under, like, underrated Okay. Debt question. Yeah. It seems like, yeah, obviously, like, if if if you're not gonna take out any debt to go to college, then it's, like, basically just, like, have a good time for
Speaker 2:a full year.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. It's like yeah. There's, like, the the cost of, like, your time, but, it's, like, you know, you're young.
Speaker 3:It's not that big of a deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it does feel like we're not making a lot of progress on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think that the the people that go to college take on debt and then get a job that doesn't really require a a college degree, just requires some amount of agency. Yeah. Like really kind of shoot themselves in the foot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder what would happen if we deregulated some of the tracks that require college. Like, if like, it is extremely hard to become a lawyer without going to college. Because in order to take the bar, you have to have a you have to have a degree from a law school. And in order to go to law school, you need
Speaker 1:to Is that true?
Speaker 2:Undergrad. There is a loophole where, yeah, I I believe if you are studying under if you're, like, mentoring under a lawyer, they can advocate for you, something like that. But in general do you know?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It depends on the state. So Yeah. What you're saying is true for New York, Maine, and Wyoming
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Where you can have an apprenticeship. In some states, don't need that or a degree.
Speaker 2:Okay. Like, you can just go take the bar. Like, I could just walk in and take it and become a lawyer.
Speaker 1:Basically. Well well Or you need to do an apprenticeship. No. The yeah. Wait.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty sure
Speaker 3:Yeah. Some of them, it's an apprentice under a lawyer or judge. Yep. Some of them, it's just a lawyer. Yep.
Speaker 3:And then some of them, you need to go to law school.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in general, like, it is a regulated industry. Let's read from Brandon Jacoby. What is this?
Speaker 1:Brandon Jacoby Jacoby from deep, he says, has
Speaker 2:something Before we tell you about what Brandon Jacoby said, we gotta tell you about his favorite tool, Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great product together. Let's hear from Brandon Jacoby. What did he say, Jordy?
Speaker 1:Jacoby says as someone who had the decision to start a job at Cash App and get a big tech salary or or go further into debt to do my fourth year in of college financials is a big factor. Yeah. And I
Speaker 2:think it I think it is. It it just feels like it's it it does get reduced a lot. And I think there's there's this interesting thing where, like, there's almost like a, there's like a inverted u sort of bell curve thing going on because, if you can get the full ride, then you might wanna drop out and just go straight into entrepreneurship because you're cracked. But if you're not so good that you can go to the Ivy League for free, but you can go to the Ivy League, but you go but you don't have to pay, then it's worth it. But if you do have to pay, then it's not worth it.
Speaker 2:And it's more of like this, like, matrix than just, like, is it good or bad and how much does it cost?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The other thing, school is a way to buy time to figure out
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How you wanna spend your time. Like with with Branded Jacobi Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, it
Speaker 1:was design doing graphic design as a teenager. And so the opportunity to go work at a company like Cash App instead of finishing college made a lot of sense. Yeah. But if you don't know how you wanna spend your time and how you wanna spend your career, how you wanna start your career, then school I think a lot of people are just doing it to kill time so they're not just sitting somewhere doing that.
Speaker 2:Know that there is a job in tech in venture capital where the number of it's extremely it's extremely prestigious job. And this year, the number of job openings for that role has doubled. Do you know what I'm talking about? The job I'm thinking of is steward of Sequoia Capital. It's doubling in size.
Speaker 2:And if it keeps doubling, there could be thousands of positions
Speaker 1:As a steward in just a few years. Yeah. Famed venture capital.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So it doubled from one steward, Rollup Bota, to two stewards.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Alfred Lin and Pat Grady. Next year, if it doubles again, we could see four stewards.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then eight stewards, then 16, then 32, then 64, one twenty eight.
Speaker 1:Eventually, all Every single human entire human race.
Speaker 2:Will be stewarding Sequoia Capital. Yes. That's exactly what I'm thinking. Roloff, certainly understood compounding. He went on Jack Altman's podcast, uncapped and said that there is a lot more talent than really interesting companies to be built, and I think we're spreading a lot of that talent thin right now.
Speaker 2:Venture is a return free risk, and Sheila Monat says, and that and with that comment, he's out.
Speaker 1:Reminded me of Mark Leonard's, from Constellation, some of the comments that he made on that investor call a while back shortly before he took a back, took a step back from from Constellation, but very different situations.
Speaker 2:Did you see Rolf Winkler from The Wall Street Journal taking shots at, Roloff Bota on the timeline. Sarah Guo, friend of the show, is very happy about this. She says congratulations to my better half, Pat Grady, the new senior steward of Sequoia along with the wonderful Alfred Lin. Investing firms must be led by great investors. Sequoia's motto at one time was we are only as good as our next investment.
Speaker 2:If that's true, the firm is in good hands. So she is talking about, Pat who has invested in ServiceNow, Zoom, HubSpot, Okta, and Snowflake, and then Harvey Open Evidence and OpenAI in the AI era. Pretty solid portfolio. That's some good stuff. But Rolf Whaler comes in from the top rope and says, Roloff, he led a $300,000,000 round into Bird and a $250,000,000 round into twenty three and Me.
Speaker 2:Both are zeros at this point. Are they not? Are they not? And and Sean Maguire fires back. Scott Kapoor fires back as well.
Speaker 2:Scott Kapoor says, is it too much to ask that WSJ reporters who cover finance actually understand the asset classes they report to report on? Rohlov Bota and Sequoia are world class investors who have generated amazing returns for the LPs. VC is not a downside minimization asset class.
Speaker 1:The other thing is 23andMe did go public. Bird did go public.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You don't know how much secondary they sold.
Speaker 1:Not even secondary.
Speaker 2:They could
Speaker 1:have just been selling. Well,
Speaker 2:Bird went public too. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Trying to figure out
Speaker 2:It might not have been that much capital incineration. But I mean
Speaker 1:I I highly doubt
Speaker 2:The whole the whole job is incinerating capital, baby. You gotta be burning. You gotta be making you gotta be ripping wild checks every once in a while. It's What? It's What?
Speaker 2:Totally, totally acceptable. Sean says Sequoia distributed over 50,000,000,000 while Roloff was running the so I was running Sequoia US since 2017. One of the first things Roloff coached me on when I joined Sequoia was to look at each fund's why write off rate. Any fund with a write off rate below 40% wasn't taking enough risk. That's interesting.
Speaker 2:They they I I feel like Sequoia also has a stat on their on their page that's like like 97% of the companies are still in business. Don't they have some stat like that? Yeah. So there there there's something a little bit, like, in the in the math that I'm I'm struggling
Speaker 1:to square. So Sequoia led one round in Bird at a billion dollar valuation. Yeah. They they then invested another time at 2,000,000,000. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But the company IPO ed at 2,300,000,000.0 which means their effective valuation was like somewhere in the middle of one and two. Yeah. So at least at the IPO Yeah. Which of course had traded down, they would have been up on that investment.
Speaker 2:Are they in Vanta?
Speaker 1:Sequoia? Yeah. Yeah. Of course,
Speaker 2:they are. You're so lacking. The automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast. And we don't stop there.
Speaker 2:Our AI and automation power everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling.
Speaker 1:Ryan, have questions? Because they also did a series b at 2 and a half billion. So they they did a few rounds back to back. Yeah. They were obviously were were betting big.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I think they they they sure they ultimately did.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I'll I'll defend I'll defend Rolf Winkler. I think it's funny that he's taking shots. He's just out there talking trash. What's wrong with that?
Speaker 2:Ryan Pearson gets to talk trash. Ryan Pearson, this is Sequoia passed on Flexport so many times that I don't really care who runs the place, to be honest. And Sean McGuire says, we love you, Ryan, and we're dumbasses all the time, especially me, which is funny. But, you know, people get to people get to have fun either way.
Speaker 1:Scott Scott Kapoor was firing shots.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We so we read this one. He's he's he's he's fight he's firing back and forth. He's he's defending. So yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, Scott's question is, like, is, like, should is, like, is, like, should the Wall Street Journal reporters understand that that they take roll offs, or that they take write offs of the roll offs. And that's maybe not what Rolf is doing. Like, he might just be talking trash. Like, he might actually understand it. He might be like
Speaker 1:Very possible.
Speaker 2:He might be like, yeah, like
Speaker 1:I don't like those guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, there's some here's some salt in that wound. Like, I'm still gonna rub it in. There's nothing there's nothing about that post that says that Winkler does not understand
Speaker 1:You could reply to the post and say, to be clear, I understand finance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm just understand it. I'm just I'm just talking trash. Like, you know? But there is a risk of of of legacy media not understanding the asset class.
Speaker 2:It does happen every once
Speaker 1:in financial financial times had this sort of breakdown on on over the place.
Speaker 2:It happens all over the place. And and certainly, is not like a great look for The Wall Street Journal because it it it doesn't it doesn't read as he should have just said, that guy sucks.
Speaker 1:We should Yeah. He sucks. Do anything. We love The Wall Street Journal. We love Sequoia Capital.
Speaker 1:And if we can do anything to kind of bridge bridge the divide.
Speaker 2:Where's the divide?
Speaker 1:We're here. We're here.
Speaker 2:Maybe we can get both The Wall Street Journal and Sequoia Capital on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams and GitHub ship higher quality software faster. That might be
Speaker 1:Find some middle ground with graphite. With graphite. Ryan Peterson also followed up and said, clearly, you should have pivoted to an AI lie detector bot. Invite it to your video calls and it adds a bigger and bigger Pinocchio just to the other participants' faces.
Speaker 2:I mean, don't give Roy Lee any more stunt ideas. Such a he's such a good stunt marketer.
Speaker 1:Roy had a Roy had a a great response to explaining the Cluelly pivot and brief history. Nine months ago, I built interview coder an undetectable translucent desktop layer that lets you cheat on lead code interviews. That's crazy. That was only nine months ago. Is that real?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like a lifetime ago.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah. I knew it had viral potential and I and posted about it constantly until I did go viral. Then I did it again and again and again and then it made me $1,000,000 in profit. Holy f. Apparently, you can build a GPT rapper, go very viral, and become a millionaire.
Speaker 1:Could I do it again but bigger? So I started clearly with two big questions. Where else could this overlay be useful outside of LeetCode interviews? Could can I keep getting this much attention? The second answer came immediately.
Speaker 1:Yes. I'm very good at getting attention. And thanks to the attention, we got hundreds of thousands of users ridiculously quick, and we're able to use the data to figure out that our stickiest power users were using it in meetings. So we just built for that. The deeper learning, though, is that we seem to have cracked the formula for organic virality.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One one thing I would say is the the website copy is framed as an AI notetaker Mhmm. But it's still leveraging that functionality that Tyler is so dependent on or historically has used to you know, if we put him on the spot, like, Tyler, what's the capital of Nigeria. Let
Speaker 3:me think about that for a second. Abuja. There you go. See, that's
Speaker 1:that's clearly in action. But he says, no other tech startup has ever been able to do this reliably or at the scale. It's really not luck. And most importantly, if done right, it works to grow companies. Interview Coder proved it and clearly continues to prove it, growing faster than ever in a saturated space.
Speaker 1:The world is vast. There are tens of millions of people in meetings every day, and 90% of them don't know what an AI notetaker is. The market is big enough that you can be the most controversial person in the world and still win and as long as you deliver the magic moment to the user. So, yeah, I would not be surprised if they are out marketing all of the other companies in the category even if it is competitive. But thoughtful response.
Speaker 2:I have the I have more to talk about here. I wonder this idea of can I what do you say? The deeper learning, though, is that we seem to have cracked the formula for organic virality. Like, what does that actually mean? Does that mean like, his his his claim here is almost like, organic virality is is effectively high ROI marketing.
Speaker 2:Low dollars in, high dollars out. It's just great ROI. And to do that organically, consistently for a long, long time is very, very hard. It's very hard. And the and the folks that wind up doing it, like, when you think about mister Beast, it's like that's his full time thing.
Speaker 2:That's all he does. And I wonder I I don't think it's necessary that that in ten years, we could be looking at clearly the the AI notetaker for meetings. And, yeah, they still don't run Google Ads. They just do stunts, and people are still can't get enough of these stunts. I I I just I I have to believe that this is a marketing tool and not a permanent piece of the infrastructure versus, like, you talk to the Ridge Wallet guys, and they're like, we are good at buying performance ads, and we have been for a decade, we will be for the next decade.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know that that's, like, something that you can just be like, yes. Let's scale our let let's scale our organic viral content forever. Like, it has I I feel like it caps out, but maybe it doesn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think they're gonna run that test.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it does feel like as we track the stunts throughout the year, the quality and the effort going into them and even some of the creativity was was not deteriorating. Like, I would say the team was executing at the same level or better throughout the year, and yet the impact got less and less and less because You're saying for us? For Cluly. Oh.
Speaker 2:For Cluly. What I'm saying is, Yeah. Cluly, like, the first stunt
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that's the issue of, like, things that go viral organically over time, they the effectiveness kind of deteriorates. People do get, like, if you scale organic, like, eventually, you're you've you will saturate that market.
Speaker 2:Also, with rage with rage bait marketing, it's like once I've been enraged, I it's harder to get me enraged the third or the fourth time. Whereas if you show me an ad for a value prop, you can, like, hit me with that ad again and again and again, and it's probably similarly effective. But if you've gotten if you were the type of like, remember, there was a moment when everyone was mad about Cluelly. Like, truly, like, it the timeline was in turmoil. Lots of people were chiming in.
Speaker 2:It was this big wedge issue. You're either for it or against it, but a lot of people were against it. Like, the people that were against it, they were rage baited successfully in March Yeah. And then a little bit more in April and then a little bit less in May. And then more recently, like, they just the rage bait doesn't work on them anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because they're like, oh, yeah. That that that thing that I don't like because I've made my call on it.
Speaker 1:But to Roy's point, there's so many people that have never
Speaker 2:Never been enraged.
Speaker 1:That have never been enraged. They have never never had the opportunity to be enraged by, clearly. I think a lot of their marketing is Yeah. Rage bit like on other platforms when he shared stuff. It seems much less rage
Speaker 2:Oh, I completely agree with this. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Much less rage bait
Speaker 2:focus.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so yeah. I don't know. I think a lot of people, if they see funny marketing and like, x is just a really small place. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, even back in 2021 building Party Round, like, the difference in reaction when I would meet somebody that was, like, extremely on x versus somebody that didn't use x at all. If somebody was on x, they were like, you started Party Round? Like, no way. Blah blah blah. And they'd like rattle off a bunch of stories of of ways that like our marketing had entertained them.
Speaker 1:And then if you met somebody that was like an Instagram LinkedIn power user, they'd look at you with a blank space and they'd like they'd look at me and be like party round?
Speaker 6:Like Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You have a fintech company called Party Round? It's just like very different reactions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Totally. It's fascinating. Well, you know who else did some stunt marketing?
Speaker 2:Julius, the AI data analyst. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds. No coding required.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna fool me.
Speaker 2:I'm getting
Speaker 1:like fooled deeply can't get fooled again. Iconic iconic quote by our former president.
Speaker 2:I'm getting, like Fool me what? FOMO over this Tyler Cowen interview because we keep seeing, keep seeing transcription, segments hit the timeline. But I can't listen to it because we're live. And this seems good. I will listen to this later today.
Speaker 1:I think the way to Sam says, think the way to monetize the world's smartest model is certainly not hotel booking, but you want to do it nonetheless. We're getting we're getting agents that can book you travel, folks.
Speaker 2:I think the way to monetize the world's smartest model is certainly not hotel working, but you want to do it nonetheless. It's very funny. Anyway, the oh, the the the Substack x relationship is going all over the place. Have you seen this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I can't tell what's real.
Speaker 2:It's hard to, so maybe maybe we should just
Speaker 1:have The real the the most recent post It's going back to us. Says even correcting for fake views traffic to subsect links from access up substantially, full post read sign ups, etcetera, also track. We're so back. So Okay. Anyways, think this is good.
Speaker 1:I I I thought it was very unfortunate that Axe and Substack got In such a fight. In such a fight. It was bad for all the writers on the platform who are some of the best write the best posters on X. Like, their businesses were impacted by it. I don't really think the two platforms are that competitive.
Speaker 1:Obviously, Substack does want to be more of a of a of a social platform, have a social layer, but I just think x is shockingly durable. And I think it I I don't I don't know how much of a threat the social product of Subsec is. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's interesting is like the, I don't know. The like, x had review, I believe, was the was the email newsletter product. And it never they never really invested it. They they they ultimately shut it down.
Speaker 2:I I and and it's interesting that no other there's something about, like, the email and and and taking the audience with you that's just so revolting to a, a true social media company. Like, if you're a social media company, it'd be so easy for Instagram to have an email newsletter product or LinkedIn to have an email newsletter product built in. Right? And yet they don't because they want control and they see it as counter positioned. And so, for some reason, the folks at Twitter bought review and were doing email newsletters and then fully pulled back from it because, it was just it just did not make sense for them to to keep going.
Speaker 2:But I don't know. We'll see.
Speaker 1:SoftBank has is down 10% in the last five days. Is that good, John? They reported
Speaker 2:That was not good.
Speaker 1:They just reported strong first half net income of 348,000,000,000 Japanese yen. The company's revenue reached Wait. 3,400,000,000,000.0 Japanese yen underscoring its robust market position despite impressive earnings. SoftBank faces challenges. What is this writing?
Speaker 1:SoftBank faces challenges with financial strength indicators such as a low Altman z score. Unrelated? I've never heard of the Altman z score.
Speaker 2:Is that just relation
Speaker 1:It's a financial model that that uses five key ratios to predict the company's probability of bankruptcy.
Speaker 2:Wait. Wait. It does have anything to do with Sam Altman?
Speaker 1:The Altman z score on according to Investopedia is a financial metric used to evaluate the likelihood that a publicly traded company What? Based
Speaker 2:bank This
Speaker 1:is How do you
Speaker 2:just discover this? Thing I ever heard. This is insane. Wait. Edward Altman?
Speaker 2:Is he related to Sam Altman? He was born 1941, professor of finance at NYU
Speaker 1:No. The nominative determinism here is so
Speaker 2:crazy. Send this to the group chat immediately. This is hilarious. He's the brother of Stuart Altman, a noted health care economist. Ellen, this is so wild.
Speaker 2:I love this. The old Alton. Okay. We need to run the Altman z score on all the mag seven to understand. I bet they have very, very low scores.
Speaker 2:Is that something ChatGPT can do? Can you try and and have, you know, like a GPT five pro run the Altman z score for all of the mag seven? I really want the Altman score. And then we need to come out with the the Altman z score and then the Altman x score or something where it's like, how how close are they overlapped to with, with Sam specifically? Or, like, how big is their contract with Sam right now?
Speaker 2:Maybe this is maybe this is the true x and y axis we can work on. How what is your alt Altman z score if you're in the mag seven versus your your how how closely is your business tied to Sam Altman? And is there a correlation there? That's funny.
Speaker 1:Oh. Is Sam Altman related to Edward Altman?
Speaker 2:We we have to do more research on this. This is fascinating. Absolutely, absolutely insane. But but sorry. Back on the on the X linked thing, Aaron
Speaker 1:Back on the link thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Aaron p six thirteen says, here's a list of domains that X has excluded from using the new in app link viewer on iOS for, and it's apple.com, wayfair.com, grok.com, instagram.com, fb.me, tiktokv.com, and open.substack.com. And so what does that mean? It's like it's like if you click on those, you won't go to the new in app link viewer on iOS, and so you need a different website for those or something like that. I'm still, like, confused on, like, what that list what this actually implies.
Speaker 2:But Chris Best shares some sort of emoticon that feels, like he's not
Speaker 1:I have no idea.
Speaker 2:Happy about this? I don't know. Is that why we skipped it? Yeah. Oh, well.
Speaker 1:The, somebody was thinking that the sell off from SoftBank was tied to the interview over the weekend.
Speaker 3:The pod?
Speaker 1:Who knows who knows if they're if they're tied at all. SoftBank is still, you know, up massively year to date. But, apparently, Korean equities have been selling off like crazy. There was a limit down It's terrible. Which we hate for the Korean retail army.
Speaker 2:Don't like that at all.
Speaker 1:We might have to check-in with the Korean TVPN Oh, we they're doing. Have they been going live? We gotta we gotta check-in with them. Because if they're not going live, this they maybe were a bit too long to the chaos.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Captain Nemos is, absolutely insane to me that one of my friends hasn't bought the Getty house in the Berkeley Hills yet. Listing price is only $5,000,000. The perfect techno monastery or at least a rationalist AI dev polycule house would be a tragedy if it got in the hands of someone boring. I wish we could we need more photos on this house.
Speaker 2:This is a crazy house. Do you know about this house, Tyler? Have you been here?
Speaker 1:No. I've heard of Temple Of Wings.
Speaker 2:Is this where your Polycule meets up? What? It says, can't believe you fools with liquid cash from AI lab tenders. Let this slip through your fingers. Sad.
Speaker 2:So I guess someone bought it. Wait. What what news do you have for us, Tyler?
Speaker 3:NFM, they are still so they did stream five days ago. And before that, the last stream was a month ago. So I think they're slowing down a little bit. They're also not wearing suits anymore.
Speaker 2:They're not wearing suits? Oh, no. Well, actually no. No. No.
Speaker 2:No. No. I I I actually, I like that. I like that because when we talked to them, we said, like, okay. They're gonna start with something that's, like, clearly an homage to TBP, and they were drinking the tap water.
Speaker 2:Like, they got all the inside jokes. They were, like, very much, like, doing our bit. And then what we talked to them about was, like, clearly, if they wind up taking it seriously, they're going to shift and change and find their own voice. And it's like when you learn guitar, you know, you might play some covers and then eventually you write a real song. And so, I was like super thumbs up on, you know, like, put on the TVPN costume, but then over time, find your own style.
Speaker 2:And so I don't know what their what their ultimate style and their ultimate product will be, but it was just fun to watch them, come into the, the live streaming game like a bull in the China shop. If you put the technological republic, which is, Alex Carrf's book, and abundance, which is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book, side by side, says young macro, you'll note that the the defining bipartisan tendency of the late twenty twenties is, quote, we need to become a lot more like China. And with this, we vindicate Nick Land as the only serious thinker to have correctly identified Nietzsche's prescience as that of a supply side reform pundit. In opposition to the Normie right who read him as a conservative, the continental canon who read him as a bad word that I'm not gonna say, and as the Anglophone liberal left, left liberal offshoots of the of the continental canon who haven't read him. And so what Young Macro is saying is that, is that both the abundance who you could think about Ezra Klein, this is the left.
Speaker 2:This is the New York Times. And Alex Karp and Peter Thiel and the Palantir, this is the conservative side. The left and the right are actually unified in saying we need to solve the supply side. We need to reform the supply side. We need to build more.
Speaker 2:We need to create abundance through, capitalism.
Speaker 1:Young macro, undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers and posters of our time.
Speaker 2:Was your
Speaker 1:He actually got he made sure this post was fact checked by real landian neo deep status.
Speaker 2:That's what I preach. Yes. Thank you for for fact checking it.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Those are the I love those posts so much, fact check ones. But, yeah, mean, it's, like, makes total sense. This is also, Dan Wang's take. Right?
Speaker 3:A break Sure. Breakneck. It's just like we basically are getting smoked by China.
Speaker 2:Get ready to learn Chinese.
Speaker 3:More like them.
Speaker 2:Get ready to learn Chinese, buddy. Get learn get ready to learn state capitalism, buddy. That's basically what he's saying. Get ready to learn fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place.
Speaker 2:Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Interesting post from Sam Altman on Bose Baraktuk CS. That's a long name. Thoughts by a non economist on AI and economics. Tyler, you're you you've been working a little bit on this.
Speaker 2:Have you has this entered your research process towards understanding our our our like, the scale of the build out?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, a lot of that post, I I quickly read through it and and fully read through the whole thing. But a lot of it's just about, like, okay, we have, you know, straight lines on log logarithmic like graphs.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you wanna read the whole thing, we can get Subway Surfers for you set up.
Speaker 3:I need a Minecraft parkour and Subway Surfers together.
Speaker 1:We get we get You
Speaker 2:know what I want? I wanna see the straight lines, previously straight lines on log graphs. So show me the there was a period where iPhone adoption or smartphone adoption looked like a straight line on a log graph. Correct?
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:There was a there was a time when miles of railroad construction probably looked like straight lines on a log graph. And then what happened? I wanna know what happened after after it was a straight line on a log graph.
Speaker 3:But I I mean, there's never I can never have too much intelligence. I want I always want I'm always I always need more
Speaker 2:You're insatiable for slob.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like like like You'll never there'll never
Speaker 2:be enough slob.
Speaker 3:Well, I guess energy is a bad example. Yeah. But that's I think
Speaker 2:that's what's with that? What happened with energy?
Speaker 1:Nuclear power.
Speaker 3:It's not that demand really was so bad. I think it's most of that is just regulation. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we won't regulate this time. Right? No chance? No chance.
Speaker 2:People are gonna be like, I'm getting to the voting booth and saying, like, more AI. For sure. That's what's gonna happen. Yeah. They're not gonna they're definitely not gonna do what they
Speaker 3:did with nuclear this time. It's gonna be different. It'll be different. We won't have we won't have
Speaker 1:state by state laws.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We're not we're definitely not gonna have state by state laws. Why would we do that?
Speaker 3:That would make sense.
Speaker 1:No. Once they They're gonna they're gonna make they're gonna make it illegal for Claude to make mistakes.
Speaker 2:No. I so the Marsha Blackburn thing is amazing nominative determinism that your name is Marsha and you go to the swamp and you just dominate. I love that. But also, hilarious because it's the ultimate AGI test. Because if you're OpenAI and you have all these draconian state by state legislations, like, on the Brad Gerstner BG two pod, Sam says, I don't even know how I can comply with this.
Speaker 2:It's like, get ready to use some superintelligence to figure out how to comply. Right? If you're truly AGI build, you should just be able to say, hey, Codex. Fork my entire organization 50 times, rewrite the code, retrain the models for each state, and create 50 new LLCs, 50 new c corps, 50 new nonprofits that are all one fifty at the size so that we can actually perfectly perfectly comply with state by state regulation. Problem solved.
Speaker 2:It's one prompt
Speaker 3:for you. We just need to get we need the next model to do that.
Speaker 2:Yes. The next model. Yeah. Yeah. The next one's gonna
Speaker 3:be So once we get that one, then
Speaker 2:Then we're good.
Speaker 3:Then it'll solve it.
Speaker 2:Then we're good.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We need 50 rooms. We need 49 more rooms because we already have one. But this can only be the California We
Speaker 3:got a shout out on the telecala
Speaker 2:I did. Podcast. I love that.
Speaker 1:Both Taste. Guests.
Speaker 3:Well, actually, all three of
Speaker 1:them were guests. Okay. We have some some breaking news. Breaking news? Joe Weisenthal.
Speaker 1:And I just actually wanna go through Joe's profile after this Okay. If you wanna pull it up because Please. So so many so many good insights. One of the top posters of our time, of course. But the CFO of OpenAI says people are are not exuberant enough about AI.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Bloomberg has an article. OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Fryer suggested the market is overly focused on anxiety about a possible bubble in the artificial intelligence sector and should muster more exuberance about the technology's potential. I don't think there's enough exuberance about AI when I think about the actual practical implications and what it can do for individuals. Fryer said in an on stage interview at the Wall Street Journal's tech, live conference in California on Wednesday.
Speaker 1:We should keep running at it.
Speaker 2:I got some I got some exuberance for you right here. Hey, hi. It's coming. Artificial intelligence. It's coming.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's coming. Palantir at 600 times earnings is at a 600 XPE is not exuberant enough for me. I wanna see I wanna see four figures. Four figures.
Speaker 1:But, anyways, this is trying to think if there's any other
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, what what else on Joe Wiesenthal's profile do you wanna talk about?
Speaker 1:Oh, there there's a couple there's a couple others. I'll just scan through. Joe Wiesenthal says, not surprised that Bitcoin has fallen so much lately. I've been talking about a Bitcoin bubble for over ten years.
Speaker 2:Good point. Good point. I mean, that's the bull case for that's the bull case for for Palantir.
Speaker 1:Another one here. Traders think Trump will lose the tariff case at the Supreme Court. So there's been, some developments on that front. Today, there was New York City office landlord Vornado Realty Trust is down 3% today in reaction to Mamdani. And there was that other post that I wanted to cover from Joe.
Speaker 1:He was frustrated because he was asking ChatGPT to do something. And it was just basically completely rebelling. Oh, yeah. Was like
Speaker 2:I thought that was funny.
Speaker 1:It's not feasible. It's not feasible. Chatuchipaty is basically saying like, sorry, like, I understand your request, but it's not feasible. And he's like, why is it not feasible? Good question.
Speaker 1:And you're absolutely right to press on that. It is feasible. Just tedious to do manually. So it's just like
Speaker 2:I love lazy AIs. It's like, I don't wanna
Speaker 1:And and so here here's the thing. Here's the thing. When I get these instances of laziness Yeah. And I am giving them the maximum amount of money that they that they allow me to give them on a monthly basis, I wanna churn. Sure.
Speaker 1:Because I'm like, what's the point of paying you
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:$2,400 a year for you to not do things that you're capable of doing?
Speaker 2:Obviously, there's a good reason for that. Rocco's Basilisk. You gotta be nice to the AI because eventually, it's gonna be in charge. And if you're bossing it around
Speaker 1:now I've tried threatening to churn Dictate.
Speaker 2:Gonna work out for you well.
Speaker 1:It has not worked so far.
Speaker 2:It's not working now, and it's not gonna work in the future. You're gonna
Speaker 1:be I thought I thought it might work. In the rocket I literally said recently in a chat, if you do not do this
Speaker 2:Don't do this. You need to
Speaker 1:I will. If you do not do this, I will churn immediately. You need
Speaker 2:to apologize.
Speaker 1:Completely called my bluff. That was rude.
Speaker 2:He called your bluff.
Speaker 1:Joe Lonsdale replied to Joe Wisenthal and said, LOL OpenAI working on its margins. Okay, nerds. Do you realize how much all all this energy costs? We need the chatbots to be lazier.
Speaker 2:It's funny.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what Another news, Bitcoin has now performed worse than US treasuries in 2025.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. The yeah. This, this this Joe Wiesenthal post about the laziest OpenAI thing. Joe Lonsdale actually quoted it and said, Lowell, OpenAI working on its margins. Okay, nerds.
Speaker 2:You do you realize how much all this energy costs? So funny. Yeah. So you said you wanted to move on to Bitcoin. Is that right?
Speaker 1:No. I just I just I just covered that.
Speaker 2:Bitcoin just kind of like like round tripped. Right?
Speaker 1:Suspended cap went pretty hard on pretty much every company in the MAG seven. He said Meta, s h I t t y frontier model, no cloud share culture is f ed. Microsoft sensible approach to Azure build out.
Speaker 2:What do wait. Wait. So on Meta, what what do you think the probability is that they launch a GPU cloud in the next five years or two years even? Or, like, a a cloud. Like like, AWS so we have AWS, GCP, and Azure, but then Anthropic and open AI are also in the in the, like, the cloud business in in in terms of, like, selling inference, selling their models.
Speaker 2:Like, Meta has all this infrastructure. They've never done cloud hosting, but it just seems so logical that they could get into that market.
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 2:Even NVIDIA has been talking about, like, oh, we're gonna build a like, an inference Yeah. Like like cloud, like our DG DGX cloud.
Speaker 1:Seems greater than 50% chance. Yeah. I put it at
Speaker 2:I personally
Speaker 3:put it
Speaker 1:at that,
Speaker 3:like Do you mean, like, selling inference or, like, renting, like, the actual, like
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. So so they have a ton of they have a ton of GPUs. Right? They might have slack capacity in the future.
Speaker 2:They might get caught in a glut. They also have a a good llama a good model, llama four. They might have a better model soon, llama five or whatever they wind up building. And they they just they have the ability to serve all sorts of stuff because they have a lot of infrastructure.
Speaker 3:I yeah. I think that's, like, very high. Right? Because it seems like they're not gonna do open source. So
Speaker 2:it's like,
Speaker 3:why are they making the model?
Speaker 2:How high is it? Because they've literally never done enterprise, never done b to b. It's like a completely different motion for the company. It it's highly competitive with, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Like, it would be a huge departure from Yeah.
Speaker 2:Their core business. I don't know. I I can see it not happening. Anyway, do wanna run through the rest of this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pretty pretty pretty aggressive takes here, but entertaining.
Speaker 2:But do you think Apple is gonna look look smart for sitting this one out? Google is going to be the biggest company in the world by the 2026 in suspended suspended capital's opinion. So good luck to them.
Speaker 1:In other news, Pinterest is down 22%.
Speaker 2:22% is where it landed.
Speaker 1:They had an earnings miss and a weak forecast. Market did not I wonder like it.
Speaker 2:I wonder Kind
Speaker 1:of tough right now. You can beat you can beat and your stock will go down and you miss and your stock goes down.
Speaker 2:But Pinterest is a 17,000,000,000
Speaker 1:lose.
Speaker 2:Dollar company. I wonder how it fares next to something like Reddit. So Reddit's twice the size market cap wise. And I have to wonder but the PE ratio, Pinterest is 10, at and Reddit is at a 111.
Speaker 1:How does this make any sense? What's going on?
Speaker 2:Well, Reddit is like the AI data broker company, and Pinterest is, like, kinda just getting slopped up. Like, if you've actually gone on Pinterest But
Speaker 1:I'm Great choice inspiration. Is is headed for the same future.
Speaker 2:I don't know. For some reason, Reddit's been able to, like, hold on. I I I don't know. But very different narratives would be interesting to dig in. Would be interesting to think about where Pinterest goes in a post AI future.
Speaker 2:The product, I would I would use it to go and find inspiration for, like, brand design and color ways and different stuff like that. And the AI slop was infiltrating, like, pretty quickly. And it was very frustrating because
Speaker 1:What percentage of new Reddit, like, written content is AI?
Speaker 2:I have no idea. Because it's It's possible. It's extremely high, but it's siloed. Like, I want to believe that it's just like the the same question as, like, x. Like, on x, it should be the easiest thing to AI.
Speaker 2:Right? 140 characters, 280 characters. Like, it's super easy. And yet, what percentage of the posts that you actually read and interact with do you think are AI? Like, 1%.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:I don't know. On on on X On now X.
Speaker 2:Yeah. On X.
Speaker 1:It feels like every third post Really? That I read is written by
Speaker 2:I I don't feel that way at all. I feel like maybe it's because of I I feel like it's more like my following tab, but I feel like I'm seeing like a Joe Wiesenthal post. I know he's not using AI. Then I see a Joe Lonsdale post. I know he's not using AI.
Speaker 2:Then I see Brad Gerstner post. He's not using AI. Then I see Tyler. I watch Tyler post. He doesn't use AI for his post.
Speaker 2:I see a you post. I I I like, when I'm scrolling through the timeline, I'm seeing people that are just not using AI for whatever reason. They're it's not. It's like it's just not that's not the that's not the point, and that's not, like, the whole structure. And so, he I don't know.
Speaker 2:I I would imagine that certain subreddits are tight enough where it's very easy to clock if they've been, like, taken over by AI. Yeah. There would be value to that, but I don't know.
Speaker 1:Anyway, well
Speaker 2:We have our first guest.
Speaker 1:Further ado, our first guest of the show today. Come in. Clint? What's happening?
Speaker 2:Good to see you. Welcome to
Speaker 6:the show. How you doing?
Speaker 3:What? What's happening? Are
Speaker 2:you in Australia?
Speaker 3:I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Can you hear me a lot?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We we can hear you now. John John John asked if you were in Australia. It might be a silly question.
Speaker 6:I am in Australia. Yes.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 3:How are you doing? Yeah.
Speaker 1:We yeah. Give give us a super super excited to have you on the show. I know I know you have a bunch of product updates to talk about today, but catch us up to speed on the latest at Canva, the shape the shape of the business today, all that good stuff because I feel like every you guys are maybe a bit quieter on our corner of the Internet, but every month or so, people realize how much revenue you guys are doing and it's always pretty shocking numbers. So we're super excited to chat.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We're in Sydney, Australia. We like to be quite achievers over here. Business has been going well, really well, actually. We're about 260,000,000 monthly active users.
Speaker 6:We'll close the year close to
Speaker 4:Hit that goal.
Speaker 1:In revenue. 4,000,000,000 of revenue.
Speaker 6:Well, close to. Close to. Close to.
Speaker 3:Close to.
Speaker 6:Uh-huh. It's profitable company for eight years now, growing high thirties. Business keeps Business keeps trucking along. We've got an amazing team building amazing product for our amazing customers, and we're just focused on delivering user value. We really feel by building the best product possible and delivering as much customer value as possible, the good things like the users and the revenue comes quite naturally.
Speaker 6:So we've been, investing hard, obviously, last couple of years. I think the world shifted under every established technology company with AI. We've had to kind of figure out what does that mean in this new world. And where we've landed is it's really just reinforced our mission to empower the world to design, to create anything, design anything, and publish anywhere. And that's evolved, and and now it's easier and better than ever.
Speaker 6:And and we're owning more and more of the workflows, helping organizations create on branded content on brand content at scale, helping them deploy, understand how that content's performing once it's deployed, and and really facilitating that feedback with. So, yeah, it's been fun fun times.
Speaker 1:In internally, like, walk us through your kind of thought process around the opportunities or even competitive threats around Gen AI over the last few years because from my point of view, it feels like Gen AI is is it's just an is is like could be extremely meaningful, like, accelerant to your guys' business. It just makes it easier to create cool things on your computer. Feels very aligned to the core business, but how have you guys thought about it over time? Did you feel like you were caught off guard or were you experimenting early? Like, I'm curious to know what the what the development cycle's been like.
Speaker 6:We weren't caught off guard. We kinda knew this was coming and we were working on AI design in a more structured programmatic ML way for, like, a long time before the the image models came out. The speed at which those image models came out and and got really, really good, that's what kinda shocked us and with new methodologies. That led us to acquiring a company called Leonardo. We really needed to infuse the AI DNA into the company, and we really needed to accelerate our sort of roadmap in that area, and so we acquired an AI company.
Speaker 6:We actually acquired an AI company for background removal about five years ago. So we very much knew it was coming. It was just the speed at which it hit and scaled was a bit of a surprise to us. We think we caught the wave well. It really, as you said, it's an accelerant for what we can do.
Speaker 6:So we create videos. We create social graphics. We recently just launched the world's first design model that actually generates layered designs that you can edit. And then when things like you're creating a video, we set out the timeline and the storyboards, and you can generate AI clips within that. So you can essentially prompt, create, upload images, and actually, all the the great video models and whatnot that are coming out now really help our customers achieve their goals better than ever before.
Speaker 6:So we have kind of two pronged approach. We work with the world's best models and world's best AI companies. And then where we've got a strategic data advantage and we've got strategic insights, like, when it comes to design, that's where we build our own models and have build our own foundational models.
Speaker 2:What about on the product side? There's this interesting dynamic in I feel like most design pieces of software where, they start as discrete applications and they all kinda bleed together. Like, eventually, I think, like, you can technically edit video in Photoshop, and you can design a thumbnail for YouTube video in After Effects. And, like like, the entire Adobe suites kinda bled together where they can all do the same. There there's, like, overlapping features.
Speaker 2:And I'm wondering about how you think about creating content with AI. Is that just something you need to stuff into all the existing applications, or do you need a new, like, a new application that can be, like, AI first? And then maybe you add the features to the other applications. But do we do we need, like, a specific new application for generative AI?
Speaker 6:So I feel like this is almost a planted question because this is something we think about a lot. And we've actually
Speaker 1:It wasn't planned for the record. We we never prepare
Speaker 6:for our audience enough.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. I don't even get any. Normally, I get
Speaker 6:prep questions or something before these things.
Speaker 2:We do
Speaker 1:it live.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Freestyle. Yeah.
Speaker 6:No. So the platform we've built over the last ten years is actually perfect for AI. So when you think about it, we've built a unified document model. So whether you're creating a presentation, a social media graphic, a long form text document, a website, a video, all of these documents have been built off the same engine. Right?
Speaker 6:With simultaneous collaboration and everything across all of them. Then at the found so that's the doc top. That's what we call our visual suite up the top. At the bottom, we have our infrastructure layer. So that is things like our digital asset management system.
Speaker 6:It's your brand kit. It's it's all the core engine that allows you to share and publish to any platform. Okay. So that's what we had. In the middle, we've put this AI layer.
Speaker 6:So when you wanna create a design let's say I wanna create a QBR report, like a a big quarterly business review for a customer using this data and their brand. It calls on your data from Salesforce or whatever. It calls on that company's brand kit. It calls on your company's brand kit. It then understands what you're trying to achieve.
Speaker 6:It then generates it as a presentation and then allows you to deploy that and understand is it getting clicked through blah blah blah blah blah. So it's actually connected this entire ecosystem that we call the creative operating system, which has sort of all come to fruition, and it's really leveraging that prior ten years of investment to make Canva an incredibly powerful design platform. A lot of the other companies, they've built these bespoke products. So they've built a GenAI image generator. They've built a GenAI this or that.
Speaker 6:They've built a presentation tool or a tool to create vector graphics. At Canva, it's all an integrated creative OS, which is really I don't know if we planned it that well on purpose, but it's just it's kinda we can't dig. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's also it's it's nice if you get a little lucky sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Where where where do you see the the the end of the map or the edge of the map of, like, what you wanna do creatively in Canva? I'm just thinking about, like, if you get really, really crazy into, you know, media creation, you can wind up in a in a three d modeling software. And, like, Adobe has substance, and they have that app dimension, but you can go into Houdini or, you know, Maxon products like Cinema four d or Blender. And it feels like with the with the AI with the generative AI boom, you might not ever need to actually go that deep down the stack or go into, like, an After Effects competitor, motion graphics, video tracking.
Speaker 2:Like, there's so many things that will that might never be exposed to the user because they're you're building at a time when the abstraction layer is now rising thanks to generative AI. But how do you think about the long term functionality, like the stuff that's the furthest out on the prosumer professional enterprise level creator frontier?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Another really good question. Another I feel like planted question, but not planted. So you wanna abstract regular users, knowledge workers, etcetera, etcetera, from all of that complexity as much as possible. If you wanna create a three d graphic, we just launched a three d product just last week.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So you can now generate with AI three d products in Canva, edit them, rotate them, do all those things. So, you can do that as a regular knowledge worker with no design experience. We also, eighteen months ago, acquired a company called Affinity. They are a professional design suite that has a vector graphic tool, a layout tool, and a photo editing tool.
Speaker 6:We just relaunched that last week as well. That has a million downloads within the first week. So and it's a 100% free for everyone. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 6:And so that's really the craft side. So if you wanna get super detailed as a professional creative and create a logo or a vector graphic or get really down to the pixel manipulation side of things, that's what Affinity is absolutely incredible for. And then it seamlessly integrates to Canva. So you can push that vector graphic into Canva for the rest of your knowledge workers to use within the organization. So you can create templates.
Speaker 6:You can create them in Canva or you can create them in Affinity, push them into Canva, and then scale them throughout your organization. So these two things work hand in hand, and you really want the power of those tools if you want them. But most people that aren't professional designers don't want that power and they don't want the complexity that comes with that foul power.
Speaker 1:What is sentiment like within the community at Canva around AI broadly? I'm curious if if certain types of users are much more optimistic and excited about new AI features versus maybe like traditional, traditional graphic designers. But what's the general feeling around, the technology today?
Speaker 6:I think people, when they wake up in the morning, they don't wake up and say, I wanna create a social media ad. Or they don't wake up and say, I wanna create a presentation.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I wake up and I think that, just to be clear, but I'll I'll continue.
Speaker 6:An ad. No. But, like, people people create an ad because they wanna grow their business. People create a presentation because they're a startup wanting to land that pitch deck and get investment funding. So they they they wake up in the morning with a goal.
Speaker 6:And what we're evolving our business to be is a company that helps people achieve their goals, not just create a design. And AI has accelerated our ability to do that, like, a million times.
Speaker 1:Yep. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:You're the COO. Give me some best practices for acquiring companies. Post merger integration, what makes it successful? What are you watching out for? What are the pitfalls?
Speaker 2:What are the nightmares that you've heard anonymously from your mentors about what can go wrong when a large scaled software company like yours acquires another software company and the integration doesn't go quite right? What are you looking for?
Speaker 6:So we have acquired 10 companies now, about 10 companies, of various scale. I think it comes down to the founders. And I've done my last three acquisitions on the balcony of, my favorite pub. And so
Speaker 2:I honestly, like Oh, the balcony. So it's like if this doesn't go down, you're going over.
Speaker 3:In the yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like a You're kinda like the old old Patty down at the pub is gonna throw you off, break your legs if you don't do the deal. Is that what's going on?
Speaker 6:I mean, that's yeah. Yeah. Kind of.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:We're not threatening anyone. We're not threatening anyone. But, like,
Speaker 6:you gotta get the cut of the jib of the founder you're acquiring. What are their motivations? Why are they, you know
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Does one plus one equal 10? So the companies that we find best to acquire, they've got an amazing piece of technology. They've got an amazing founder. And that founder wants to get the power of what they've built in way more hands than their current distribution channel. So if we can plug the power of their technology and team into our distribution channel, one plus one equals 10, and you can see if they get a glint in their eyes when you talk about that.
Speaker 6:And it's that glint in their eyes that is deeply understanding their motivations that is gonna make it successful or not successful. If they're just after a quick exit, that could be fine if you're just after technology or just after their customer base. But if you don't deeply understand the founder, and that's why I don't have an m and a team. Like, we do have an m and a team, but we don't have a head of m and a because I feel when you're acquiring companies, it is so deeply personal, and the person that's gonna sponsor the success of that company once it joins your company needs to be involved in that process, and they need to they need to be the ones making the decision. And when that's delegated down, I feel that leads to a lot of, carnage.
Speaker 6:And most of the most of the founders that we've acquired and and some we've acquired, like, eight years ago are still with us today and and are in leadership positions in the company. So I think that's sort of testament to the success of a lot of the acquisitions we've done.
Speaker 1:It's very cool. What's the chat wants to know the biggest fish you've ever caught.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. I love fishing shit. Yeah. Some big ones. Oh, you should see this thing.
Speaker 6:I've got this, whale above this as well. I've got all this stuff in this one one shot. Look at that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Do you have any violet crumble on you right now?
Speaker 6:No. No. That's not the best Australian chocolate.
Speaker 7:It's not? Oh,
Speaker 2:I always think of it as the the pinnacle. It's my favorite. It's my it's my favorite chocolate and, and it had just happens to come from Australia.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, chat chat loves you. It's great great to finally meet and, congratulations on all the launches. Yeah. The of which you guys are operating is is, really incredible and it's it's super fun to chat.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Appreciate it, guys.
Speaker 2:Have a good
Speaker 1:rest of day. Cheers, Cliff.
Speaker 2:Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, search every byte, serverless vector, and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x, cheaper, and extremely scalable. Our next guest is Jerry Murdock, the cofounder of Insight Partners. He served as managing director until April 2011, led investment strategy and developed many of the firm's portfolio investment. Jerry, are you in the restroom? Wait a minute.
Speaker 2:Are you in the room? Jerry. TV and Ultra. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Jerry?
Speaker 5:What's happening? I'm really good.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 1:We're super super excited to meet and, and chat. Why don't why you give a quick introduction?
Speaker 2:What is venture capital?
Speaker 1:What is growth equity?
Speaker 2:What is growth equity?
Speaker 1:No. What is investing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I would I I actually love to know a little bit about your journey, how you wound up, cofounding Insight Partners. It's obviously a firm everyone knows, but I'm not sure everyone knows exactly the earlier story here.
Speaker 5:Early story? Well, it's because I'm old. That's why. But where where do you wanna start?
Speaker 2:Maybe the moment you
Speaker 1:When did you know you wanted to get into asset management?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. I'd love to I'd love to know just the the the minutes before you sign the, incorporation documents. That's always interesting.
Speaker 5:Okay. So Jeff Horney and I were, Jeff was an associate at a big venture capital firm called Warburg Finkus. Oh, yeah. He didn't even have an office. He had a desk under the stairs.
Speaker 5:I was a consultant, and we had this crazy idea to start a company called Open Vision and we wrote a business plan. The partner, Bill Jameway said, Well, if you can recruit the President of Oracle, I'll fund it. At the time, the President of Oracle was a guy named Mike Fields that worked for Larry. And Mike said, well, I think Larry is going to fire me, so I'm open to it. And then a month later, Larry fired him and he became our CEO and OpenVision merged with Veritas and a sixtyforty merger and was worth 30,000,000,000 in 1999 and Wow.
Speaker 5:That funded Jeff and I into insight.
Speaker 1:It got got you into business. Why do you get why do you get fired? Yeah. What's the story there? Was he coming for Larry's ass?
Speaker 5:You you're you're good at Larry. He'll tell you why you fired him.
Speaker 2:Okay. But
Speaker 5:Larry Larry has his own reasons. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then, well, yeah, take us through a little bit of the journey on, like, the early Insight Partners, days. Like Sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I just wanna hear I just wanna I wanna hear your craziest stories from the nineties. You have some crazy stories yourself. What what I mean, mean, that what a what a wild decade and you were what was the timing overlap between your guys, the IPO you mentioned, and founding Insight Partners?
Speaker 1:Did Insight like
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think So Insight, if you look at the website, we see 01/01/1995. In truth, we shook hands in August '4. We funded the very first company December '4. So we said, okay, January '5. But we didn't close the first fund until July 1996.
Speaker 5:We were investing friends and family money and what became the first part of the portfolio. And we had an advisory board because we didn't have any credibility, right? Jeff and I both had acne. He was 30, I was 35. We were we didn't really know much about what we were doing other than we got lucky with Open Vision.
Speaker 5:But I lived in Aspen and I still have, I still live in Aspen and I was involved in the Aspen Institute and I invited a bunch of people to join me in a little round table and they became my Advisory Board. So the Advisory Board for Insight was Eric Schmidt, who was a VP at Sun, a guy named Scott Cook, who was the Founder of Intuit, a guy named Ray Lane, who replaced Mike Fields at Oracle as the President And those and a few other people. But those guys really gave us their money, they gave us their time, gave us credibility, and they helped us succeed.
Speaker 3:What did
Speaker 1:they they they you you said you were didn't have experience or credibility back then, but clearly to get those kind of people to spend time with you, trust you with their capital, what what made you guys special? What did they see in you?
Speaker 5:I think, like, you look at you two guys. You get everybody on your TV show, and why are you getting them right? You guys aren't on sixty minutes or somewhere else. You guys got personality. You got brains.
Speaker 5:You got aggressiveness. You got a gong.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That attracts people. Yeah. Okay. They come come for the What's current AUM?
Speaker 2:Can you share any AUM figures? I'd love to ring the gong.
Speaker 1:Somewhere around a 100.
Speaker 5:So so so well, right now, it's a 110, I think.
Speaker 7:There
Speaker 1:Not every not every day we get to hit the gong for a hundred hundred and ten
Speaker 2:Well, I I billion of eight. I mean, we're we're we're super we're super in the weeds tracking how venture funds today are positioning themselves in the AI boom. Folks will say, I'm only betting on one foundation model company, but I love the infrastructure layer. I'm doing some energy investments, and then I think there's a lot of opportunity in the application layer, for example. How were people in venture talking about the .com boom or, like, the Internet boom?
Speaker 2:The like, I it it was obviously now we collapse it just down to Internet or .com. But back then Yeah. There had to be dividing lines between themes and and how was it being discussed amongst venture capitalists at the time?
Speaker 5:Okay. So let's take Insight. Insight, we thought we were really genius and said, we're not gonna invest in .com companies. We're gonna do infrastructure and applications, but we're going to avoid the .com bubble because it's crazy. I sit there and said, look, there's not enough, everybody's on dial up.
Speaker 5:You're not going to do commerce on dial up. We don't have enough broadband for this to work out. And so we avoided it thinking we were going to be safe and we did all this infrastructure deals. Well, guess what? March 2000, the stock market dropped 40% for tech and we all got killed.
Speaker 5:Everybody got killed. And so our SAFE strategy was a total failure. Everybody went down. And then in 2001 with nineeleven, we got trashed. And so we had the worst year in venture capital history.
Speaker 5:I think our '99 fund returned a whopping 1% maybe. I think we were top quartile or basically a breakeven bond in '99.
Speaker 1:And That was And that that was top quartile.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's insane. So were you guys feeling did you did you yeah. It it being top quartile, are you like, okay. Like, that was rough, but we made it through.
Speaker 1:Like, we we still look better than than most of the industry, so we're gonna be able to continue to build momentum? Or was there ever a point where you thought it was over?
Speaker 5:No. We just were cheap, basically. We we didn't wanna we just wanted to get every dime we could possibly get back. So we had to work hard on three or four investments from 2001 to 2005 just to get back to breakeven.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Was that that was like rolling rolling up your sleeves and and, like, getting operational with the companies to make sure that they Yeah.
Speaker 5:We're we're yeah. Helping helping build a team and Yeah. And and change the strategy for a new world. The one thing we learned from that lesson is that when the boom ends and the crash begins is that all those companies on the old platforms, the old technology are not going to be very attractive with the next boom and the next thing happens, right? So think about web companies in 2008, they were before that crash, they were looking great.
Speaker 5:And then mobile companies became what was important after 2010, right. So if you weren't mobile, you weren't very attractive. And I think we're going to have the same thing here when this next cycle goes down. There's three major trends, right? We only talk about AI today, but crypto, I think is becoming more and more important.
Speaker 5:And eventually, not sure if it's five years or ten, but quantum computing will become a major platform. Absolutely. So it's just so the question becomes is when does the crash happen? And then how long does it last? And then when you come out of it, what are the new technologies that all the companies have to be built on?
Speaker 1:What was your what was your state of mind in, let's say, 1998, 1999, and then those first few months of 2000? Like, did you were what kind of conversations were you having as the deals and IPOs got crazier and crazier? Was there a sense at any point in your even even, you know, friend group and network and advisers that there was another was it was you was it late nineteen ninety nine and people were like, we got at least three to five more years of this? Or were was there was there any type of, sense or or real concern about how
Speaker 5:I think it was '90 early ninety nine or late ninety eight, Jeff Horn and I were walking down Fifth Avenue with two advisors, Bob Rubin, was former Secretary of the Treasury and Steve Friedman, who was former CEO with Bob at Goldman Sachs, going to Jack Walsh's office to sit down and listen to him. And both Bob and Steve said, the banks are not accounting for risk. That was pretty big number. They knew they felt that it was not they didn't know where the risk was coming from. We didn't know exactly which area, was it subprime, was it real estate, was it corporate bonds, was it swaps.
Speaker 5:There wasn't obvious which one of those were the greatest risk because all of them were risky. And so we were walking to listen to him and on the way down there, a guy called me and said, yeah, it was an I think it was an analyst at Morgan Stanley. Forget his name. But I said, look, I said, we're in the bubble. And he says, yeah, but it's an iron bubble.
Speaker 2:Iron bubble.
Speaker 5:And so I thought, okay, an iron bubble. I got to process this. What does the iron bubble mean, right? And bottom line what he meant was it's going to be an iron bubble until it's not. And if you're a believer in making money in booms, you have to stay in the game to the very end.
Speaker 5:You can be smart and hedge your bets, but if you bail out too early, you're going to miss a lot of great returns. And so that's what that guy meant by that iron bubble that it was just going to be there for a while. And sure enough, it was an iron bubble for over a year. In March 2000, inexplicably, the stock market shifted. People moved out of tack and 40% would drop everywhere across the board.
Speaker 5:And that was like, okay. Now we gotta work hard.
Speaker 2:How how are you thinking about recycling or managing LPs in that year where you're you are top quartile, but you only return 1%? Are you set up as a fund to kind of I mean, there were comp it seemed like every company, even if it's sold off a ton, they were IPO ing. They were getting out. So were you able to get some liquidity and then reinvest that, or did you have to go back to LPs and raise new funds and kind of restart the whole process? Or were they already kind of bought into giving you another run-in '20 in 2003, for example, 2002?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean I mean, no. Nobody was bought into anything. It was a pretty nasty thing that was going down. And so we just had to slug it out with the funds we had, which got us through, until we were able to raise the next fund, which of course was a smaller fund.
Speaker 5:We had raised Fund IV just about the time of the crash. So we actually had capital, but it was still ugly because we had a bunch of investments that we knew were not going to be great going down And the so, we didn't really raise Fund V until four years later. So it was the four toughest year in venture capital. And a lot of our people who were started in 1995 didn't make it, right? So, I mean, you look at who started in 1995, Benchmark did and they survived and they did great.
Speaker 5:But a lot of other funds didn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Remarkable. How would, you know, if you were still running a a platform venture firm today, like, would you be currently assessing the market? Because there's a a hot debate right now of, like, where we're really seeing a a bubble. Right?
Speaker 1:If you look at, obviously, there's plenty of companies in the public markets that that do that don't make any sense. There's some you know, there's hyperscalers that that don't that that actually seem priced pretty reasonably. And then in the private markets, you have, you know, if you're an AI company, you know, you're you're gonna, you know, probably with a a solid team pretty easily get 100x, 200x revenue even if you have little to no margin on that revenue.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, look, we don't know what's going to be the straw on top of the camel's back that ends it. We don't know when. And there's all kinds of political things that you don't want to bet against, right?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:I mean, we could end up with zero interest rates in March. You don't want to bet against that. So, I mean, lot of people who bet against the Fed, if you remember that five years ago or during the COVID times lost out huge.
Speaker 2:So,
Speaker 5:but anything rational, like I can say all the laws of physics still apply. I'm on the Board of the Santa Fe Institute, where we've got some of the smartest minds in physics and math in the world. Irrational things like bubbles can last a long, long time. And you can say, it doesn't look like a bubble. Well, I hate to say it, but I think a lot of these hyperscalers are going to regret the CapEx commitments unless they can get out of it.
Speaker 5:We'll see. I think what's interesting to me is, I think they may be underestimating the sort of drop in token price. I mean, really think the amazing power of the chips and things that Jensen has done is going to outstrip our ability to get electricity to really power the stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's what Satya has been
Speaker 1:saying this for over a year now. These are more power constrained. I
Speaker 5:think if you look at the amount of chips he sold and look what's out there, I don't think there's a power available today. They have to find a new source in order to be able to sort of benefit from all this build out. And if there is a economic recession, then the enterprise, the expected enterprise explosion of AI usage will be delayed, right? And if there's any kind of a sort of major security problem around AI that will scare off the enterprises, that will also delay. So, think you can continue the AI boom without Fortune five thousand getting on board.
Speaker 5:It's not gonna happen without that. And so if there is an economic interruption, a serious one Mhmm. Then the demand is gonna is gonna change. That that has to happen.
Speaker 2:How do you think about different opportunities to buy assets, buy whole companies throughout a cycle? There's the companies that are or or the firms that are kind of waiting for a crash and maybe gonna buy up stuff as after post crash. There's also firms that are going and buying Fifth Avenue, and they wanna get the best asset right now. There's other folks who are purely founder bet, pay any price, others much more quantitative. How have you thought about your overall investing thesis throughout tumultuous times?
Speaker 5:Well well well well, the difference here is AI is affecting everything. The the the you know, Bezos is right. It it's an industrial bubble. Not necessarily a financial bubble because the value of AI is not going to go away. That is absolutely the future and it's here now.
Speaker 5:It just isn't here at scale yet in my opinion, at least not for enterprise. So I do think that the problem with buying up companies is what are you buying? Is it going to be valuable down the road or not valuable? And it turns a lot on the quality of the management, it runs a lot on the technology. And so buying SaaS companies hoping they're going to be more valuable in five years, I think that's a questionable strategy.
Speaker 5:I think you have to think about, like I said, from each if you assume that there must be some disruption, like it was a COVID type disruption where it's literally a few months, then and the Fed bills you out, then people just keep going and the bubble bounces back and it just keeps rocking. If on the other hand, it's serious economic issue. Right now, M2 money supply is all time highs. So you've got massive amount of capital out there. It's not a liquidity crunch.
Speaker 5:It's just going to be a challenge with the overall economy. And then there'll be a liquidity crunch because the debt that's out there is massive everywhere. So I think here in this particular case, if you're going to strategize to buy up a bunch of things after a bus, that's a bad strategy. Most of the companies are going to be first generation AI and they're not going to be the right, how I say technology platform, right? I mean, first of all, most people are betting on these large language models.
Speaker 5:And what we learned at Santa Fe, we had in March, we had the top research scientists from all the hyperscalers, the 40 person conference I hosted with the scientists. And the thing that came out of it is everyone's too focused on LLMs, not focused enough on the complexity between the humans training them and the humans consuming them. And I think the secondary part of that is that LLMs are we're going to find a new technology and cheaper forms of models that are going to come out. I'm certain that what China did with DeepSea, a release in open source, there'll be many, many more open source models in a year. And you won't need to spend all this money on an LLM.
Speaker 5:I have a feeling that'll be a multi model world with lots of free open source models going down the road. So if you buy a company that's based on, you know, foundational models technology, it may not be so valuable in the next wave of AI.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Can you bridge this to trade for me? I heard an interesting stat last night that America has more data centers than the rest of the world combined, and it feels like America might actually be winning in terms of industrial power on the data center side but lacking in many other industrial capacities. How how do you think the way that AI and the AI infrastructure build out is changing America, how do you think that flows to trade policy?
Speaker 5:I'm not sure we I understand or anybody understands American trade policy right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like a kangaroo. It's jumping up and down constantly. That's Keeps
Speaker 1:you on your toes. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I I I don't know anyone really, really truly understands it, and I'm not sure policy is the right word. Sure. I think I think it's an innovative game that's being played with trade policy. So I know what that's going to look like in four years. There's a lot of uncertainty.
Speaker 5:And that's part of the problem making these long term investments. I think that the data centers themselves, the actual physical properties are important and will be important long term. The question is, if Jensen keeps his word and the chips are going up by some multiplier every year, how valuable is the chips in the data centers being built?
Speaker 2:Yep. The depreciation is just going to
Speaker 5:be crazy. Yeah. So look, I think the one thing that's for sure about this bubble that's different than anything else Mhmm. Is that the innovation is real. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And the innovation is profound. And I think that innovation and what what it's gonna unlock is challenging. You have geniuses like Elon Musk and others out there that are, how can I say, they're inventing so much so fast and they have so many resources? If you think about it, the CEOs of the Magnificent Seven and Sam have a lot of influence on how the world is going to play out over the next three or four years, right? You could add a couple of chip guys, you could have Hawk Hawk Khan and CC Way and you could add maybe there's three women that are up and comers, maybe Fei Fei and Mira and Lin at Fireworks But that could become more right now, the assets and the power is in the Magnificent Seven and Sam Altman.
Speaker 5:And those guys are going to have an amazing impact on how the world rolls out in the next five years, three to five years. So I mean, when you think about that, those are the guys that are going to shape the politics of what's actually happening. In fact, I kind of think that we're in for a different world where right now we're worried about immigration and worried about all kinds of social issues. I think in the future when robots are walking around, we're going to be more interested in like, wow, who has who are the AI haves and who are the AI have nots. And I think that better or worse, the Magnificent Seven and Eight are going to change the political dialogue in this country pretty dramatically within three years.
Speaker 5:And I think they know it, which is why there's some pretty good ideas that I've heard about giving every child $1,000 in the stock market, something like that. That could a great idea. I heard Jensen and Brad talking about it. That could be very helpful because there will be a have and have not world in America. And that will be the primary dialogue I think in the future, not the stuff we're going through right now.
Speaker 1:How have you processed the boom in private credit?
Speaker 5:It's going on a long time. And I don't think there's enough it's so big, it's so profound. I think the banking system in America, because of the rules, they're not really accounting for that risk, right? I mean, in the normal way you would think about it. So, I mean, it depends on the disruption, right?
Speaker 5:What happened in 2008 or what happened in 2001, that would be challenging for private credit, big time.
Speaker 1:Does it, like, where do you put that on in terms of how the probability that private credit plays a significant role in the next financial crisis?
Speaker 5:Well, put it this way. The banks have made these investments and right now private credit looks reasonably safe, right? I mean, people seem to have enough capability to overcome it. The question becomes is how deep and how bad is the future liquidity crisis and how challenging is it? How much and we don't know.
Speaker 5:So I don't I'm not betting that there's going to be another banking crisis. I'm just betting that there's going to be an end of the bubble and there's going to be some kind of recession, whether it's short term or long. Whether it's a crisis or not depends on the nature and the severity of it, right? Right now, it's always a break of trust, right? I mean, what happened in 2008, people had to take the TARP loans because trust was essential.
Speaker 5:When Hank Paulson told him the story about what he was dealing with, And it was basically, you know, forcing all the major US banks to take TARP money. He said, look, when you're boiling in oil, you don't ask how hot it is. You just act and you move. And I think he saved the country. I mean, I'm not necessarily a fan of anybody during that era, but I do think he saved the country by restoring trust in the banking system.
Speaker 5:I don't see private credit being that big of a threat, but it absolutely could play a role.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Mhmm. What single deal are you most proud of? It doesn't have to
Speaker 5:As an
Speaker 1:investor? As an investor. It doesn't doesn't have to be like it generated the greatest return, but something that you look back on, you know, 1995 to 2011 index.
Speaker 5:Look, I mean, the current portfolio of AI investments I've done like Avan. I mean, Sadiq Khan is one of the truly great CEOs of the generation. I recommend you put him on your show. But Vinod Khoshua and I talked about it because Vinod is one of the large investments there. But Fireworks AI, E2B, Lotus AI, Dynasty.
Speaker 5:Dynasty is one that I'm really interested in because I just think trusts are something that people like me have used successfully for a long time. And I think entrepreneurs should be using them more often.
Speaker 1:Give the pitch for Dynasty, you know, you can put it put it simply, but for for those that are hearing about it for the first time.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Okay. So look, if if you've started a company out there and you basically don't have a lot of money, but you've got your shares, you should you should go put those shares and whether it's Dynasty or somebody else, you should put those shares in trust for yourself and your family. And depending with your mom or your dad or your wife or potentially kids or whatever charity you want to put it in, you should it's a way of protecting it and it's definitely a way of taking advantage of, QSPS exemption, came in during Clinton, which Bush, embellished more and which Obama did more, which Trump did more. Every president since has pushed it.
Speaker 5:And what's happened as a result, I think, is you've got a lot more startups. You went from about a half a million startups a year in the '90s to close to 5,000,000 startups a year now. And so I think for Insight and I think for most other funds, right, I think about 80% of investments return less than 1.3x, okay. But that means over 20% return multiples. And those 20% of multiples, those entrepreneurs should be thinking about putting their assets in trust.
Speaker 5:And not just stock, but also their crypto you know, and and and protect it. I mean, and there's lots of reasons why it doesn't cost a lot. Thanks to the dynasty. They're democratizing it. So it doesn't cost a lot.
Speaker 5:You're not to take advantage of the of the tax exemption that's associated with.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Well said. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I'm sure we could keep talking for
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is but really just appreciated the stories and insights and and, we'll have to have you back on again soon.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well well, thanks, guys. And look. You guys are the most fun entertainment show out there, and that's why I'm here. So, keep it going.
Speaker 5:It's fun.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. That means a lot to us. Means lot. To you soon.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much, Jerry. Great
Speaker 2:hanging. To your day. You're the man. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 5:Alright. See you. Bye.
Speaker 2:Before we bring you in our next guest, let me tell you about Google AI studio. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. You can get started at ai.studio/build. Our next guest is Shlom's, the anonymous poster on x.
Speaker 2:That's great. Been a fan of Shlom's work for a long time. Always found the I don't even know. Art, stunts, marketing. It's everything in between.
Speaker 2:It covers so much.
Speaker 1:It's always cooking.
Speaker 2:I've always enjoyed it, and I'm very excited that we get to have him on the show today. I believe he's in the restream waiting room, but we are going to work. Because he's anonymous, that means voice changer. That means
Speaker 1:facial recognition.
Speaker 2:You gotta confuse the AI algorithm of the future so he's undetectable. So I will tell you about ProFound, get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And I will also read this post, which made it in the timeline from Sisyphus Bar and Grill, where it says, oh, damn. The highly produced launch startup video starts with an outtake of the founder sitting down from an offset angle. Now I know it's gonna be unique and awesome.
Speaker 2:It really is an overused trope, but let me let me just let me just steel man it for two seconds. So I was in the business of making videos about startups, basically. I made a variety of videos. And when me and Ben figured out how to do the extra behind the scenes camera that wanders around while you actually do the interview and then splice that in, oh, it just takes you from, like, you're doing a normal podcast to, like, it feels like it belongs on HBO, and it's so satisfying. And I wouldn't get rid of it for the world.
Speaker 2:And I've I've I will defend it to the end of to the end of days. Although, yes, it is truly played out, and you should probably at least hit the drawing board.
Speaker 1:Live video tracking is the new meta.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. It's for sure.
Speaker 1:Pace around the room.
Speaker 2:I believe you have a lavalier mic on too. So can you talk and can we hear you?
Speaker 1:Check. Check.
Speaker 2:Let's see. Are we are we getting audio from Jordy on the walk? He's not talking, so I can't tell. You gotta keep talking if we're gonna
Speaker 1:keep keep talking.
Speaker 2:Oh, we hear it. We're hearing him.
Speaker 5:I'm live.
Speaker 2:It's working.
Speaker 1:I'm live.
Speaker 2:You're live.
Speaker 1:This is a new feature we're testing out, everyone. Yes. This is live camera tracking with lavs.
Speaker 2:So It's such a funny feature.
Speaker 1:Just pace around the room.
Speaker 2:Why don't you go take a crack at the gong? Love to hear gong for all the progress of the production team. Gong for Oh. Jerry. Uh-oh.
Speaker 2:Okay. Turn down the volume. The the gong's getting hit. Hit the gong. Oh, that worked.
Speaker 2:Good. Good. Okay. We're solved.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:It's good.
Speaker 1:That's good. See, this is good.
Speaker 2:This is good. The menacing walk with spinning the hey.
Speaker 1:I'm waiting for
Speaker 2:What's on that whiteboard? What's on that whiteboard, Jordy? Why are you walking in front of that whiteboard?
Speaker 1:This one?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That one.
Speaker 1:Oh, we were just doing some analysis.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What type of what what did you notice over there?
Speaker 1:No. This You need to walk right
Speaker 3:in front of it.
Speaker 2:You need to we we still can't see it. Yeah. You need to walk right in front
Speaker 3:of This
Speaker 1:didn't go anywhere. This didn't go anywhere. We were
Speaker 2:It's interesting, because, you know, people have been calling OpenAI. Maybe it's the next Enron. And if you if you trace the letters, the e in Enron, there's an e in OpenAI.
Speaker 7:That
Speaker 2:is in Enron. There's an n in OpenAI. And the r in Enron, the o in Enron, there's an o in OpenAI. And at the end of Enron, it's an n there's an n in OpenAI.
Speaker 3:And so the p and the hey.
Speaker 2:And the and the p and the a as well. Yes. And so, those are the letters in Enron, and there's also letters in OpenAI. And so, you know, I I just feel like the connections are a little bit it's a little bit it's a little bit obvious.
Speaker 1:To be clear, we don't believe that. We are No. We are as exuberant as ever. I I am exuberant. Sarah when Sarah Fryer said we should be more exuberant, we didn't just listen.
Speaker 1:We studied.
Speaker 2:I like someone in the chat was like was like, he needs to be more exuberant.
Speaker 1:I'm shocked that that those are Yeah. That those are real quotes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're wild. Well, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. We might be coming back to Shlom's next next time.
Speaker 2:Maybe next week. Maybe maybe we'll reschedule. That's the nature of live TV, baby. Let's go back to the timeline. Autism Capital has a post here.
Speaker 2:They were there. They are claiming that October 6 was literally the top. This was posted in December 2023. We must find this man and make him where God Nostradamus lives. All time high.
Speaker 1:This was calling the Bitcoin
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. This is Bitcoin all time highs. Basically, it was a hun one thousand sixty four days from 2015 to 2017, all time highs. Then three hundred and sixty four days from 2017 to 2018. Then one thousand six hundred one thousand sixty four days 2018 to 2021, and then three hundred and sixty four days from 2021 to 2022.
Speaker 2:The the pattern would print this cycle's all time high as the 10/06/2020 top. Actual top for Bitcoin. So I have no idea it's a local shop, but this is this is crazy. This really was the top absolute insanity. Of course, it could just go back up the next week, and then this isn't true.
Speaker 2:Who knows if this is Photoshop? But, it is it is fascinating, like, chart analysis. We need to get, wait. Did we ever figure out what is that called, Tyler, where people analyze the candlesticks? Oh, technical analysis.
Speaker 2:Are you familiar with technical analysis?
Speaker 3:The with the concept of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Technical analysis is like, it's the head and shoulders pattern, so it has to go up.
Speaker 3:You just just follow the lines, bro.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but it's not just it's not just linear regression. It's like if it goes up and down and then up again, that's the camel pattern, and that means it's gonna break out. And people have a lot of fun with this. They draw all sorts of stuff all over it.
Speaker 2:It's been largely debunked. And if you're playing that game, you're probably gonna cooked by, like, a real team of machine learning experts who are doing basically technical analysis at a much, much more, much deeper level. But I think we need to bring technical analysis to private markets. I wanna see people looking at, oh, the Stripe secondaries. This week, they sold down 2%.
Speaker 2:They're up 4%. That means it's a bullish catalyst. It's gonna go through the roof. I wanna see a technical a technical analyst bring the that Okay.
Speaker 1:You see, there's down round here, but it's actually bullish.
Speaker 2:It's actually bullish.
Speaker 3:It's actually bullish. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Prime for a breakout.
Speaker 2:Technical analysis, just just looking at the charts, not even understanding what the company is, just looking
Speaker 1:at the charts. That's the key. Ben Sands says stockstrology.
Speaker 2:Stockstrology would be good. China has overtaken The US in cumulative open source AI model downloads, says a 16 z. Oh, we also have some we also have some updates on the, on the solar panel company that we were digging into yesterday. Pretty
Speaker 1:big. Was built by the Chinese.
Speaker 2:It was built by the Chinese. So a Chinese company came over They
Speaker 1:built a Trina Solar.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Built this facility. Yeah. And then due to, some regulatory pressure
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They were a forced seller. Yeah. And then it was taken over by what is now t one energy. Sure. And so everyone was like, wait, We know how to build facilities like this?
Speaker 1:And everyone got really excited including
Speaker 2:Us. Yes.
Speaker 1:Us. And, of course, it turns out that, it was actually built by the Chinese. But
Speaker 2:But I don't have that I don't know that there's that big of a problem with that. Right? Because it's like, it's built in America. That's that's the important thing.
Speaker 1:So let's study it.
Speaker 2:Let's study it. But also I mean, like like, I regard TSMC Arizona as, like, a win for American dynamism. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. This was that, like, room take where he says we should basically just bring over the Chinese.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll bring over whoever's building the best stuff and build it here. And and and, there's a whole bunch of debates, like levels to the debate. Like, do you want, like like and and it's sort of a yes hand situation. Like, I want American workers to build American things in American factories, but also, like, I'll just take a factory in America that's owned and operated by another country, because if, you know, like, there's some geopolitical crisis, like, at least it's within our borders.
Speaker 2:Like, that's a better that that's better than it being halfway across the world. Right? Because you just walk over to it and be like, give me the solar panels, which is great. But, back on the, a 16 z, they said, a 16 z said China has overtaken The US in cumulative open source AI model downloads. And No huge crisis going to make a series of bets on the little guy to start.
Speaker 2:We are going to be granting out compute up to a 100 k per project to support new experiments on GCP. If you have an idea for an open source model that you'd like to explore, I'd like to hear from you. So go hit up.
Speaker 1:I DM'd with Lewis Lewis. A little bit yesterday about this project. He's working on pulling together the the compute resources, but very excited about this one and it'd be fun to follow.
Speaker 2:Well, we have our next guest, Shlom's, in the Restream waiting room. We will bring him in to the TV. How you doing, Shlom's?
Speaker 1:There we go. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We can hear you.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. We did it.
Speaker 2:This is crazy, crazy, a non call. We've had a few. No one's ever sent
Speaker 1:in such crazy video. Look at.
Speaker 3:Yes. This
Speaker 4:this is just my webcam. I have a very old laptop.
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah. Makes Got it. I I didn't know.
Speaker 4:Apparently, technical difficulty was
Speaker 3:that my display name was breaking zoom, which I suppose is on brand. That's super interesting.
Speaker 1:What is your what is your
Speaker 2:display breaking stuff.
Speaker 4:So the backstory is that I was looking for the longest Unicode character to break Twitter in maybe 2017. Yeah. Which is a very long Arabic sign. But then people told me that they didn't like that I was using that, so I looked for the second longest character, which is a uniform symbol.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so you stack all this up. Yeah. You've been Very cool. You've been fantastic at kind of, like, hacking these systems and and and breaking them in a way that, you know, really gets outside the box.
Speaker 2:Like, yeah, you I've seen, like, the text that goes completely out of your your UI designer's worst nightmare, basically.
Speaker 1:So many places I wanna go with this conversation. We're we're super excited to chat. What, what are you is What would you say you do here? Yeah. What what exactly do you do here?
Speaker 4:That's a tough one. I mean, you know, I think a lot of artists are driven by wanting to be an artist. Right? And same with founders to connect it back to your your real house. And they want to be the thing, right?
Speaker 4:And and then they try to figure out whatever their angle is. Then there's people who are kinda like driven by whatever instinct or whatever is inside of them. Yeah. This is this is just me. Right?
Speaker 4:I'm anonymous, so this is, like, a very specific part of me. Right? Sure. That I'm filtering. But I wouldn't say it's a character per se.
Speaker 4:I've always been driven to break things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you like the term
Speaker 1:I've always been.
Speaker 2:Hacker? Does it matter? Is any of this relevant?
Speaker 4:That's a good question. No. I don't think it matters. I think artist is a boring and kind of yeah. It's kind of a self serious term.
Speaker 4:Right? And I don't wanna take
Speaker 2:Well,
Speaker 4:let's too seriously.
Speaker 2:Let's skip the titles then and jump to the projects. I always like this question. We ask Gabe Whaley from Mischief. What is the most underrated project that you've worked on? Something that you are proud of, but maybe people don't already know you for?
Speaker 4:That's a good question. I mean, I think most people know me from blowing up a Lambo. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And can can you for those who don't know, can you tell the Lambo story briefly?
Speaker 1:Sure. One of my one of one of my favorite and most memorable moments from from that whole cycle.
Speaker 2:It was so cool in so many different ways, but I'll let Shlom tell the full story.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think I think that that project, you know, like a lot of things, you know, trying to ride the the line between like a satire a serious like earnest engagement with something. So that was my sort of take on what was happening in crypto art at the time. Yeah. But yeah, we physically blew up Lambo well before that was possible to sort of fake with AI or anything.
Speaker 4:Took all the pieces to a very involved videography studio and and took these like beautiful videos of all the fragments and sold those as NFTs. Wow.
Speaker 2:And, like, a postmortem on that project. Sure. Are is everyone generally, like, happy with the way it went? I feel like there's so many, NFT projects where, like, the expectations of the community get away, and people are like, no. Like, it's gonna be a whole metaverse.
Speaker 2:And it feels like I don't remember you promising that. Is everyone pretty happy with, like, they were bought in on an art project and that's what they got?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I I try to make things that stand on their own. Right? I think that stood on its own and didn't need a road map. It was a thing that happened, and people wanted to own it.
Speaker 4:I think that was always, you know, what NFE should have been and sadly didn't quite turn out that way.
Speaker 2:You know? Yeah. No. No. That that makes total sense.
Speaker 2:Should we go back to any underrated projects that you think
Speaker 1:Yeah. What yeah. Underrated projects could be cool, and I and I just wanna I mean, I think maybe we will get to some of that. The thing I'm interested is, like, what's what's interesting to you about the current state
Speaker 2:Oh, that's interesting. Yes.
Speaker 1:And and specifically various platforms. Like, I I know you from from Axe, but I'm sure you're active elsewhere. But what is your how do you rate the current Internet?
Speaker 4:So first of all, prediction markets, you're seeing sort of turning into hyperstition markets. I think there's a lot of artistic potential there that hasn't been engaged with. So pay attention to that space. Yeah. And, you know, I think you asked earlier for I view myself as an artist.
Speaker 4:I think that I try to I try to just do things. Right? Like it's I'm an agentic person or I try to consider myself one. I think AI unlocks like unlocks the ability for people to be agentic. Right?
Speaker 4:So I don't I don't view like, when people say AIR, they think of entering a prompt and you get an image output. I don't make images. Right? Like, that's not
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:What I consider my art, but I do things. And so I can use AI to more effectively do those things with fewer resources in a more asymmetric way. So it's completely changed my life.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I hope I don't sound too one shotted.
Speaker 2:So yeah. No. No. No. I completely I completely agree.
Speaker 2:I guess help me, resolve this. We were talking to Gabe Whaley at Mischief, not to comp you guys too much, but, I I I do think of him as, like, another person who creates in the An original thinker.
Speaker 1:Original thinker that's not just not entire you know? Yeah. Not very commercial element, but is not entirely just, you know, not not Yeah. The goal is not wake up every day to create shareholder value. It's like wake up every day and do novels.
Speaker 2:Which we would have no problem with. We would actually prefer, you know, if you could stop fooling around world.
Speaker 8:Is improving the monthly recurring revenue of b two b SaaS. This is my fallback.
Speaker 3:Yes. Yes. Yes. Is that is
Speaker 1:that actually true? Do you actually
Speaker 2:No. Okay. But but so so so here's here's here's my question. It's it's it feels like, it feels like there are all these really heady questions about AI and slop and what is good and will it one shot you and paper clipping? And it's the most it's the best time to be a podcaster, a newscaster.
Speaker 2:Like, the Dwarkash Patel podcast is fascinating. There's so many different ways to engage with it. There's books. Do you feel like, the art community is engaging with it in the proper way? Are there are there more projects coming?
Speaker 2:Is is it harder to engage in a critique of AI art because it's it it is it it proclaims to be art itself, and so it's maybe a little bit more complex to tussle with? Or do you think that, basically, like, are artists driving the discussion, around the all the trade offs in AI effectively in your mind?
Speaker 8:Right. Yeah. I think there are a lot of interesting parallels with like crypto art. Right? Because in early crypto art, it genuinely did unlock some interesting things.
Speaker 8:But then you kinda had a 8020 where 80% of it was just like kind of boring meta stuff or
Speaker 4:people who probably shouldn't have
Speaker 8:been anywhere near that stuff pushing kind of garbage. Right? Yeah. I think I think there are definitely creators who are doing some insane, just like on a technical level, some things that they couldn't have done before. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Then there are lot of people kind of pushing out kind of slop images that I would say is like a second bucket. And then you have kind of like meta AI art. So like, see it like in in like digital art spaces like Instagram, if you go on your explore page and you're interested in art, you probably see like a lot of things of like downing boxes or just like these kind of overplayed motifs about like surveillance or whatever which
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:You know,
Speaker 8:there's a time and place for. But yeah, I think I think any new technology that people are interested in like is is bound to result in just really boring pontificating about it
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 8:And then like really boring engagement with it and then like a very small subsection that maybe doesn't get enough attention of people doing genuinely interesting, innovative things with. Right? And and I'm not the person to do those Sure. Genuinely innovative things because I'm someone who works within their own constraints of being a fucking idiot. So, my my my my game is to do something interesting conceptually about it with my own limited tool set and intellect.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fascinating.
Speaker 1:You made a viral post on on Sora of, Sam grilling and eating a Pikachu.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yes.
Speaker 1:How did that how many how many shots on goal did it take to come up with, something that that you felt like was worthy of of sharing or something that kind of broke through the noise?
Speaker 8:Well, I it's it's cool that you they talk about shots on goal because I think a lot of this stuff well, I wouldn't necessarily view that as an art piece. I think that maybe even more falls into my kind of like misinformation practice, right? Like Mhmm. Trying to spread some sort of viral rumor or something inherently is going to be like a shots on goal game. You're trying to find some asymmetric way of hitting on like just the right chord at the right moments.
Speaker 8:Like, my big example is like the Gmail sunsetting hooks. So I I created this hoax that Gmail was shutting down.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 8:yes. And, you know, for that one, there were a 100 of a 100 other things that I tried to do that didn't quite hit, but like this was at a time that Google had just sunset something, so it was like kind of in the late insight guys. But I think the the real thing there was like, it was it was sort of this moment of people being like feel viscerally feeling the their reliance on Gmail, right? Yeah. Which like, if I just wrote an essay about how much we rely on Gmail, that doesn't really go anywhere.
Speaker 8:But if you like, I I think that's why misinformation or some of this stuff is like a useful tool. But to bring it back to to to the to the Sam Walton thing, yeah, I I That was a bit of a low brow moment for me. But you know, that that that day kind of was, you know, thing was like their
Speaker 1:It was a low brow day on the internet.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Right. Yeah. It was it was slop about Pokemon all over Sora and and your timeline. Right?
Speaker 8:And Yeah. And this was just kind of a depiction of that. But
Speaker 3:What Not
Speaker 4:my proudest moment, but it was fun.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What, how did
Speaker 2:the Gmail sunsetting hoax, really catch fire? Like, what was the inciting post that how did you seed it? How did it actually go viral? I'm always
Speaker 8:John, you're asking you're asking me to give away the sauce, man.
Speaker 2:Oh, wait. Oh oh, but it make You're
Speaker 8:gonna buy my ebook.
Speaker 2:It's not something that I can just, I I can just trace through.
Speaker 1:He's gonna have to buy the course on misinformation.
Speaker 2:Didn't realize that that was not just I I I would have assumed it was public. Sorry. I I I No. No.
Speaker 8:No. I'm joking. Okay. Yeah. If you if you were to look back at that, like, there were a lot of tweets about that and Yeah.
Speaker 8:Mine like did okay, but like there were there were other people who sort of like picked it up. Okay. And it's actually not even necessarily clear to me which of those people were engaging with it earnestly or or Interesting. Kinda realized what was going on and we're trying to single boost it. Yeah.
Speaker 8:But yeah, I mean, you guys are are part of the cool kids club on Twitter, I would say. And that, you know, it it helps to be to be at sort of like the there's like a cantalon effect for attention too. Right? Totally. If you're upstream of that, then you can really, like, spread things very
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, I I I don't actually remember, but I could totally have seen myself amplifying that, just as a troll on Google even though I would have recognized that it's not real, but I'm still upset about Google reader. And so and and so I'm going to amplify the fake news knowing it's fake, but just to cause chaos because Right. I want I want revenge for my RSS reader that was killed in the in the cradle.
Speaker 1:Are you disappointed? We should
Speaker 8:Yeah. Should spread some more
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm ready. I'm ready. We are the fake news here.
Speaker 1:Are are you disappointed with sort of a lack of creative uses for artificial intelligence that it's all kind of funny? It's like, hey, I made this musical artist do country music or I made my dog look like a doctor
Speaker 8:or Yeah. Mean, you know, as you guys kind of noted, I'm I'm guilty of the same thing sometimes. I would say broadly, you know, I want I want more generally, that's why I do this, right, because there's like this kind of art that exists in my head that that I want to exist in the world. And I'm grateful that other peep that resonates with other people, right? So like there's definitely there's definitely things that I think that that people could be doing with it.
Speaker 8:But I don't I don't wanna be like too misanthropic like I I I think I think it's a net good like long long term because I think the art world is very stagnant. Not a fan of the the the fine art world as they would call themselves and I think any like
Speaker 1:I'm you sure they're not a No. Fan
Speaker 8:But it's it's surface area, right? It's surface area for people who are willing to engage with something that like the orthodoxy doesn't approve of. To say something new and interesting and not have to play the same game of like getting into a gallery or doing an oil painting or a sculpture or whatever. Like, that's, you know, we need new games to play and technology increases that sort thing.
Speaker 1:Do you think any of your work will appear in Sotheby's at some point? Or any of the like,
Speaker 8:I'm Sotheby's, sure now have a Sotheby's, I think I'm I'm quite blackfolded from because I've I've pointed out
Speaker 1:I know. But eventually eventually, they'll the the they're you'll still be gone. Their team will turn over and they'll they'll
Speaker 8:Yeah. Maybe maybe if they forget about some of the dubious, possibly illegal behavior that I've I've a lot of. But I I wouldn't bet on
Speaker 1:it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You'd be surprised
Speaker 1:when all these things have happened. This was super fun. Thanks for that. Next time you have particularly devious stunt, feel free to jump on the show and and break it down for us.
Speaker 8:I'd love that. Next time we can go deep on prediction market.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm super I mean, the the watching this category explode and then thinking about all the ways that you could hack, you know, I I think Brian Brian Armstrong's kind of hacking it on on the earnings call was fascinating. I think there's so so many under underexplored areas and and surface area there and and also some potentially dark, you know, scenarios as well. So but the sci fi future
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is certainly here.
Speaker 8:Yeah. The last thing I would leave with is I I really think that open source AI is important. I don't know how much you guys have have gone into that, but we can talk about that one next time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'd be great.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much, friends. You guys are awesome. Slums model coming soon.
Speaker 2:I like it. Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Great to meet you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to meet you too.
Speaker 1:Well, talk to soon.
Speaker 8:Guys. Thanks for
Speaker 1:See you out on the Internet. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax and autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have, a return guest in the restream waiting room. Welcome to the show, Shazan. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Congratulations. I we got the gong already. Sorry. We're running late. Give us the news.
Speaker 2:What's the latest in lava world?
Speaker 9:Can you guys hear me?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We can hear you loud and clear.
Speaker 9:So we basically announced Monday that we raised 200,000,000 venture and debt. We brought on new investors like Anthony Pompolano. Eric Jackson from Opendoor, who you guys must have gone before as well. And we also announced what I think is the most important product, I think, in Bitcoin's history so far other than Bitcoin, which is the Bitcoin it's the world's first Bitcoin line of credit. So Lava has been doing loans for years now, but all our loan previously was structured like a Bitcoin mortgage.
Speaker 9:So you have to make fixed payments. There was a fixed term to it. But now and that was very similar to all the other loan products in the market too. But with the Bitcoin line of credit, we are offering the most flexible loan product in the entire market. So, basically, you can borrow.
Speaker 9:You can keep it open for as long as you want, two years, three years, really forever. Mhmm. You don't have any fixed payment schedules. There's no monthly payments involved. You can pay down your loan whenever you want, your line of credit, and you can borrow back against it at any time.
Speaker 9:And we're offering the lowest interest rates fixed interest rates at 5% across the board. So, really, what we realized was that Bitcoiners are we're a unique audience. They all have very distinct cash flow needs, income. You know, a lot of Bitcoiners are retired on their Bitcoin. So having a product like, building a product with fixed terms, fixed payments, and applying it to all the Bitcoiners was just not something that was working, and it's not something that they wanted.
Speaker 9:Whereas this product, it offers the most amount of flexibility. So no matter what your cash flow needs are, no matter what your income is, you can use this Bitcoin line of credit, use it to use your Bitcoin and manage your Bitcoin wealth with the flexibility you need and at the lowest rates across the world. Yeah.
Speaker 2:As I we we've been on the show multiple times. We've talked about the business. I'm interested in to understand, like, why is fundraising happening in a traditional sense instead of Yeah. Sort of all happening on chain one Bitcoin at a time? Like, why why is there, like, a package tranche of of investment happening?
Speaker 9:Because we actually have our own yield product. We and, actually, we announced that to you guys a couple of
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Months ago, weeks ago. So we do have depositors that are coming on chain with stablecoins around the world
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 9:That are depositing theirs, you know, their cash, their stablecoins, earning yield, funding Bitcoin backed loans. But those depositors can deposit and withdraw at any time. Right?
Speaker 2:So permanent investment.
Speaker 9:Yeah. This we're offering fixed. So to make sure that we're never in a asset liability mismatch
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 9:We need to make sure that we are raising the credit lines available
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:To refinance loans, and these credit lines are at fixed rates, fixed terms. Right? So we always are kinda matching liquidity. In a way, what we are we're just providing, like, on chain banking in a way. Right?
Speaker 9:So we need to have, you know, depositors. And I think that's the real value of Stablecoins is that they're global, you can kind of give functionality and savings to people with stablecoins. Obviously, Bitcoin is a savings asset, more of a long term savings asset for some of these this audience that is using this product, but then we need the credit lines as well to make sure there's never an asset liability mismatch. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. How how what's the what's the strategy around navigating lava through such a rocky environment? Bitcoin's down as of this moment at 16% in the past month. There's been a lot of volatility in other, even more volatility in other, tokens.
Speaker 1:But, it feels like that, you know, you guys were started, like, a year and a half ago, two years ago. What what was the timing?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Around two or a little more than two years ago. So we've been doing this for a while.
Speaker 1:But yeah. So building it building it on an up on an upswing, and managing through, you know, corrections is gonna be what makes Lava, you know, a a super, obviously, the the solution is meant to be trustless, but brands still matter. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Well, there's there's definitely trust involved. We we totally, like wanna lean into that. Right? So one thing is on the Bitcoin yeah. Bitcoin prices have been doing well.
Speaker 9:But, also, Lava is Bitcoin only. So the only collateral asset we accept is Bitcoin. Even recently, there's been some protocols that were as accepting other crypto assets, like other digital assets. There's one I don't know if it's fully public yet that's actually recently blown up because the the Altcoin debt the Altcoins have been, like, dropping pretty significantly in price. If you're lending against it
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 9:And it dropped way too quickly, you basically have taken on bad debt, and then the depositors are not no longer whole. Actually, a few weeks ago, don't I'm sure you guys discussed this, but there was a big auto kinda deleverage. A a lot of coins actually instantly dropped 80%. Bitcoin was still fine in that world. So on app, one thing that helps us to manage liquidity and safety for our users is we're Bitcoin only.
Speaker 9:So as a Bitcoin, they know that they're not taking on risk of other altcoins when they're borrowing with Lava. Oh, interesting. Thing is we always encourage people to add more collateral to their loans. The average LTV on a Lava loan is 30%. So it is, you know, it is pretty safe.
Speaker 9:So Bitcoin would have to drop effectively, like, 70% for a majority of users to get liquidated.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:And almost all of our users actually have x extra Bitcoin that is available to them to also collateral Yeah. To kinda make sure that they are safe.
Speaker 2:And there have been some, like, 50% drawdowns, but a 70% drawdown in Bitcoin, I feel like that hasn't happened in long, like, years and years and years.
Speaker 3:Yes. So it makes it
Speaker 2:some sense.
Speaker 9:It is it is definitely a risk Yeah. When you're borrowing against your Bitcoin. But the other kind of counter to that is anyone holding Bitcoin right now is also predicting that the price is going to go up. Right? Because, otherwise, if you do believe Bitcoin's also gonna drop 70%, it's actually probably not the right idea for you to even hold Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:Don't hold it.
Speaker 9:It's actually probably the right idea for you to hold cash and then kinda reap into Bitcoin. So, you know, we are not, like, providing this financial advice to people, but most of our users are still believing that Bitcoin's going to do well. Otherwise, they would well, Bitcoin, they would just hold cash. Right?
Speaker 2:They're diamond handsing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Sorry for keeping you waiting, but congratulations.
Speaker 1:Honored to hit the gong for you.
Speaker 2:We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Catch up. Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one in
Speaker 1:Bake off world champion.
Speaker 2:G two. I actually just heard about a bake off just yesterday, and someone said Finn won the bake off literally.
Speaker 3:I'm not even making that up.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is Mina from Sandbar coming in the studio from the Eastern Winter. Mina, how are you doing?
Speaker 3:Welcome. How are you? Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:It's great to have you.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Give us an introduction. Explain the products, some of the trade offs, and then we'll go into go to market and how everything's playing together.
Speaker 1:And first, I have to tell you, I saw the domain sandbar.com available at some point back in the day. And I was just thinking to myself, that is such a good domain. So, as a domain enthusiast, I'm I'm happy that I'm happy that you picked it up and are and are doing it justice.
Speaker 10:Appreciate that. It's got sand. It's got a bar. It's got everything you could want.
Speaker 1:It's got a nice it's got a nice feeling. You know, I have positive feelings about sandbars Yeah. Growing up in California. But yeah, would love a introduction on yourself and the company and and how you got to building Sandbar.
Speaker 10:Totally. So I'm Mina. I'm one of the cofounders of Sandbar. I originally met my cofounder, Kirak, at a startup called Control Labs that was developing these wrist worn kernel interfaces. And we got acquired into Meta, and we're working on a lot of devices there.
Speaker 10:And in parallel, I started exploring a ton with LMs and started trying to think about what it would take to have a more effortless interaction with these new speaking, thinking machines.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:So we started to explore a lot of different forms, and that eventually led us, to two products, that I guess we're announcing together, that we call Stream and the StreamRing.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And Stream is, as we say, a self extension for talking through ideas and capturing them into notes. We have this very Sandy app that has a log of interactions you've discussed, notes that you've asked Stream to save, as well as the ability to zoom out of interactions and see what you've been discussing over time. And especially if you're on the go, your phone is in your pocket, and you want to perhaps talk about an idea or save something into a note, that's where you can use the Stream Ring. So you just hold this touch pad, whisper into the top, and then release. And if I do something like that, I can say, hey.
Speaker 10:Can you you give me your hottest take on AI wearables? Sure. The hottest take, most AI wearables chase novelty instead of intimacy. They brag about features, but the real frontier is emotional calibration.
Speaker 2:You know, why don't
Speaker 10:you start a list with some some of those hot takes? And it'll scurry away and save those away.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:For when you need a list of hot takes. I love I I I loved it. I love the live demo. Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 1:It's always risky, but the but yeah. That's so so what so the the key, like, the value that you're delivering to users is not you're not trying to say, I'm gonna be this personal assistant that's gonna do everything in your life. It's simply, like, it you're just trying to build that interface with effectively just building this new surface area for a mobile device that people are already using in a new way to just input input ideas and thoughts into a computer and have them be organized. Is that generally right?
Speaker 10:Exactly. We're really focused on letting you talk through ideas and save thoughts into notes. And normally, wouldn't have my phone out. I would have it in my pocket and maybe I would have earbuds in. And already, so much of our thinking either happens in the go or lives in Apple Notes, and it's this beautiful mess of grocery lists and, you know, letters to a parent and career plans.
Speaker 10:And we see Stream as the most effortless way to either build those ideas through conversation or save them away.
Speaker 1:Very cool. What, what's the timeline till you guys are shipping the product? I know you're doing preorders now.
Speaker 10:Totally. So we've been building now for around, two years, and it's good to be coming out of the cave. We are, actually right now kicking off our next build with our manufacturing partner in Taiwan, and then we'll be fully ramped to mass production in '26. So that's when we'll start shipping.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Amazing. Very cool. What what are your hottest takes on wearables? Obviously, it sounds like you maybe trained your your, your your Yeah.
Speaker 1:Internal model to
Speaker 2:Here here here's here's one. You do you think like, how confident can you be in predicting success of a wearable? Because it feels like it's something where you need to just run a lot of tests, and the speed of each test is a little bit slow because you have to iterate on the actual hardware. And you might one shot it, but that might be a lot of luck. How much luck is it, or do you think that there is a way to empirically know that you have a hit on your hand before you go to market?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, we definitely didn't start with this. We've worked on a lot of different devices, a lot of different use cases, and now we've been living with some form of stream for the last, call it, year and a half.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And
Speaker 10:Kerak and I wanted to get to a point where we felt like it was useful in our daily life and then the people who were having test the device, our friends and our family who we've given units to, are themselves finding it valuable. And, you know, we have a marketing professor who will be driving to work and she'll talk about her lesson plan, and then she'll watch her kids in the playground playing and she'll be able to keep her eyes up as she, you know, takes notes on what she wants to improve for the next day. We have a bodywork coach who will walk her dog and be talking about clients and also riffing on Eastern versus Western medicine. And after enough time living with it, we got to this just really high degree of confidence that it was super useful in our lives. And we're, you know, exploring other forms and other use cases, but they always have to hit that bar.
Speaker 10:And I would say having, you know, built always in New York where we get to, you know, wear devices easily outside and not be noticed and also be in touch with people outside of tech has helped really ground us in something that we think will be useful for everybody.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:I I was laughing thinking about a future where the average human has exactly 10 rings.
Speaker 2:I I was thinking the same thing because the aura ring is so popular.
Speaker 1:It's like this is my thinking ring. Well then you get into the
Speaker 2:gauntlets and the Then
Speaker 1:you yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Big And the chains
Speaker 1:Bracelets.
Speaker 2:And the you pierce both of your ears for the wearables and eyeglasses and headphones. All these things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I'm super excited about this. I John knows that I have a hilarious way of like keeping track of the thoughts in my mind which is texting myself. Yeah. I'm constantly texting myself like stream of consciousness, things that I need to remember and do or whatever.
Speaker 1:It's unhinged. I'm I'm excited to try this out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have a good rest of day.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks a ton.
Speaker 1:Thanks a meme.
Speaker 2:Talk to you soon. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic, Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest is Alessandro Chesser from Dynasty.
Speaker 1:Let's bring him in.
Speaker 2:You take the intro.
Speaker 1:Alessandro, welcome.
Speaker 11:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:It was so fun having I think your lead investor Jerry on earlier. He's got so many amazing amazing stories. But before we get into Dynasty, what what why don't you give a quick intro on yourself, background, all that good stuff?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, born and raised in the Bay Area, worked in financial services for about a decade, wound up at Carta as the first sales hire in 2014, ended up becoming VP of sales and owned a lot of revenue for about eight years. So help take the company from 0 to 300,000,000 in ARR, you know, hired and managed hundreds of people, and then left to start Dynasty.
Speaker 1:What was what was the critical inspiration for for Dynasty and and how walk us through kind of the idea maze around it.
Speaker 11:So in the beginning of, you know, in the beginning, when I joined Carta, me and my cofounders who are also early Carta, you know, we were helping onboard thousands of cap tables. And it became very clear that the most successful founders created lots of trust. They didn't just hold the shares in their own personal name. They would sometimes have, like, 10 different trusts that they would split their shares into. And it was really strange.
Speaker 11:I didn't I didn't understand why. At first, I thought they were just being super generous. But we started doing some research on the strategy, and we learned that the reason why they did it is because they got a separate QSBS exemption, which basically means each trust that they created was eligible for $10,000,000 in tax free capital gains. Like, literally zero taxes on 10,000,000 for each trust that they create. So you create 10 trusts, you get a $100,000,000 in tax free capital gains.
Speaker 1:And yeah. So so from that point, like, I guess, what I think the yeah. The question the question that, you know, we we talked off air a while back and and the question I had is, like, obviously, you know, great businesses often start with, a simple, you know, vision for, like, a kind of narrow customer base. But where like, what's what's kind of the the focus today? How how big can Dynasty get just serving the kind of like early stage founder venture community?
Speaker 1:And then where where do you wanna go long term?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Absolutely. So QSPS stacking is very narrow. You know, it's it's basically, you have to be a large shareholder of a c corp. And it's not just venture funded technology companies.
Speaker 11:Like, we've been signing on porta potty founders. We've been, you know, people that make pipes for plumbing. Like, there's all types of QSPS eligible entities. They just have to be c corp, and they have to not be an excluded industry, like any regulated, you know, financial service or anything like that. So there are a ton of companies, like, maybe we don't know the exact number, but maybe somewhere between 250,500 companies in The US could qualify for QSPS.
Speaker 11:And so we got a lot of greenfield. Like, each company has sometimes two or three cofounders. And so that's a, you know, it's a very narrow market, but we we think we're gonna be working on it for quite some time. But the broader vision for this company is like, so we are a licensed Nevada trust company. We are the only venture funded licensed Nevada trust company.
Speaker 11:The only ones that are trying to tackle this space
Speaker 1:one of one.
Speaker 11:From one of one from a technology standpoint. And so we think that so the richest people, you know, Jerry, for example, the richest people in The US, they don't create you know, they they live in California. They live in New York. They don't create California New York trust. They use Nevada trust because Nevada has the best laws in the country, maybe sometimes even the world when it comes to taxes, asset protection, privacy control, like you can have more control over these Nevada trusts than you can typically over California and New York trust.
Speaker 11:And so we think that goes much further beyond QSPS stacking. Like, you know, why shouldn't the farmer in Oklahoma be able to benefit from a Nevada trust? Why shouldn't the young professional with $50,000 in crypto be able to put benefit from a Nevada trust? And so we wanna open it up for everybody. That's our vision to build a mass market AI powered Nevada trust company.
Speaker 11:But to your point, we have to start narrow. We have to solve one problem and solve it really well. And so that's why we're we're tackling founders.
Speaker 1:Amazing. What what is what is the most common setup for call it like a YC founder?
Speaker 11:Four trusts, $1,500 a year, gives you up to $40,000,000 in QSPS eligibility. If they have kids, they they make their kids a beneficiary, maybe their wife. If they don't, then they're creating trust for their parents and their siblings.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Makes sense. Well, yeah. I I think every founder should be at least taking a look at this.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:And like Jerry said, there's other ways to do it, but I highly doubt that that the the other methods are are nearly as streamlined or or founder friendly as what you guys are building. So very excited for more founders to be able to optimize for this, not just the second or third time founder that has experienced the gain or the pain of realizing that they if they have a $50,000,000 liquidity event and only getting that tax free gain on the first $10,000,000 would be quite painful. So excited that you're That's building
Speaker 11:exactly the problem. The problem is people usually do this later because it costs 6 figures to set up. And by the time they do it later, they're limited by their lifetime gift exemption, and so they can't stack that many trusts. And so that's why we exist. So founders should be doing this from day one.
Speaker 11:That's when your gift value is zero. You create your corporation, that's the best time to do it because there's no gift tax. The longer you wait, the more gift tax implications you're gonna have.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining Breaking It Down. And I'm jealous that you got Jerry on your cap table. That guy is a that guy is a legend.
Speaker 1:Also aware. Anyways, great hanging, and happy building out there.
Speaker 11:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much. Cheers. Talk to
Speaker 8:you soon.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is in the restream waiting room by first. I'm gonna tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They are multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We have John Maslin, the CEO and cofounder of Vulcan Elements
Speaker 1:Gotta get the song ready.
Speaker 2:Just a just a tiny little deal. Just a just Welcome back. A wee little deal
Speaker 1:A wee deal.
Speaker 2:With the US government. Break it down for us. $1,400,000,000. Absolutely massive deal. Something that, people were just getting just waking up to.
Speaker 2:Obviously, you've been thinking about this for a long time. How did you how did you realize that this was something you wanted to work on and then take us through the anatomy of the deal?
Speaker 12:Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on again. It's really good to see you. So this is a problem that we've been focused on for several years.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:My background is, you know, former Navy. I was a supply chain officer. And when I was in business school, I was thinking a lot about the critical components that will define the twenty first century technology
Speaker 3:or race, whether it's the data center or just that
Speaker 12:enable AI, drones, robotics. And when you really boil it down, it's only three components, semiconductors, batteries, and rare magnets.
Speaker 2:Check your Wi Fi? We are getting some technical difficulties.
Speaker 12:Lost you. I'm still there.
Speaker 1:Your audio's here. Your face is, in the past.
Speaker 2:In the past, it's a time machine taking us back to a mere five minutes ago or one minute ago. Out,
Speaker 1:out in the field somewhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Probably doing important work.
Speaker 12:Yeah. What what acute free is too.
Speaker 1:Yes. I mean, it's kinda working if you just wanna keep talking. Yeah. Try to be I'm gonna I'm gonna hit the gong for the
Speaker 12:$1,400,000,000. To you.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Key yeah. Jordy's gonna hit the gong. Hit that gong, Jordy, and then we will go back.
Speaker 2:Thank you. And and I'd love for you to break down the structure of the deal, what it allows you to do. I know that there's a loan piece. There's an equity investment piece. There's investors in.
Speaker 2:How are you describing the deal and what it allows you to unlock?
Speaker 12:Yeah. So what this deal allows us to unlock is a 10,000 metric ton rare earth magnet facility. And just to frame the problem a little bit, by 2030, The US will need over 70,000 metric tons of these magnets today. You know, we can't even produce 500. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:So what this is doing is this is going and ensuring that we can move at operation warp speed in partnership with the United States government, the Department of Commerce, the sec the Department of War Mhmm. To ensure that we can go and meet the demand for defense, aerospace, and critical economic industries. And the US government, secretary of Hagsef, secretary Lutnick, they're serious about solving this problem, and we're very serious about ensuring that we go and meet the moment in the mission.
Speaker 2:What is the timeline for something like this? I feel like we we're we're hearing
Speaker 1:about billion dollar bills out. This deal this deal must have been, like, very much in the works even before Sure. China pulled the the rare earths card. Sure.
Speaker 12:Yeah. So we plan to have initial capacity online by 2027. Uh-huh. If we're able to go faster, we will.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And we've been having conversations, you know, with everyone across industry and across government for several years. And, you know, we've realized, you know, we need a whole of industry and government approach to go and fix this issue. And our full intent is to go and build at a speed, an operation warp speed that hasn't been seen in this industry on the twenty first century.
Speaker 2:How, how how much, like what else is going on in the supply chain? Is America mining enough rare earth elements? Are should we be you know, is the job like, are we on the right track now in terms of actually taking rare earths and and producing magnets with what you're going to be doing, or are there other pieces of the supply chain that you want to see other founders or yourself go after in the near term?
Speaker 12:Yeah. So it's a really good question. The way that this works is, you know, you mine the material or you take recycled end of life magnets. You separate those chemically into an a rare earth oxide. You turn that into a metal, and then ultimately a bespoke magnet to meet, a customer spec.
Speaker 12:What we're doing with this deal is we're partnering with Re Element Technologies. Yeah. They recycle end of life magnets and separate that material, and we're expanding that partnership. One thing that I think is really important to note is this is less of a raw material availability problem than a manufacturing problem. Today, China only mines 55% of the rare earth material.
Speaker 12:They make 94 to 98% of the magnets.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:So what I would say is, you know, with this deal and other folks in the industry, we want as many smart people focusing on this industry as possible and scaling up capacity where I think that there are opportunities are downstream as we think about, drone motors. There's a gap. Servo actuators.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:As we think about orthogonal and complementary critical minerals, we need to do more around antimony and germanium and gallium and and lithium and tungsten and titanium. There's a lot of wood to chop the critical minerals industry to make sure that we have safe and secure supply chains here at
Speaker 2:home. Well,
Speaker 1:very, very exciting. The progress is, just tremendous, and, I'm sure you'll be back on soon. So thank you for Yeah. Doing this this work. It's, we've been, you know, following the story, and we're glad that, people like yourself and your team are are tackling the issue.
Speaker 12:Next time with a better Wi Fi signal on my end.
Speaker 2:Or when you're in LA. Come on. Or
Speaker 1:yeah. Or in LA or just do it out out in the field somewhere
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Off your phone. We'll make it work. Thanks so much for the update, and, great to see you. We'll talk to
Speaker 2:you soon. Have a good one.
Speaker 1:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 2:How did you sleep last night? We had
Speaker 3:to sleep at the hotel because we were traveling.
Speaker 1:But So no scores.
Speaker 2:Once, but tonight, we will be returning to the Eight Sleeps. You can go to 8sleep.com. Get a pod five. Five year warranty, thirty day free trial free returns for shipping, of course.
Speaker 1:Code. TVPN.
Speaker 2:We have Eugenia Kuya Kuya, coming back in the studio. We hit some timeline? Let's hit some timeline.
Speaker 1:So the real story that was shaking up the timeline is that Scottie Pippen is saying it's not over. He said, in I think in regards to the crypto market, he says, it's still the shakeout before the breakout. So Scottie Pippen remains bullish on the, crypto markets, and we'll have to check back.
Speaker 2:How do we know this is about crypto? This could be about AI or something. Could be about AI.
Speaker 5:Look at
Speaker 1:all everybody replying is or or or
Speaker 2:Oh, crypto.
Speaker 1:Crypto. I think Yeah. We gotta ask Dylan. I think he's been I think he's been
Speaker 2:He's a crypto influencer of some sort? Yeah.
Speaker 1:You want to talk to Antonio Linares one on one, you can now do so for the low price of $15,000 an hour. 15,000.
Speaker 2:But but it includes taxes. That he pays the
Speaker 1:taxes. That's
Speaker 2:He pays $2,603.13 in taxes for a one on one session for
Speaker 1:Where are those?
Speaker 2:I'm not sure who Antonio Linares is, but, you know, he he took he took the advice. Naval Ravikant said, give use it set an unreasonable opportunity cost so that you only do things that are of the highest value, and that's what Antonio is doing. What's the value to him of yapping on the phone with some random person? You know? He's giving up a lot of opportunity.
Speaker 2:We've seen a few of these screenshots from people sharing these unreasonably high one on one session times. I mean, there are plenty of people out there that would have that would have higher numbers
Speaker 3:for sure.
Speaker 2:14 k, 15 k.
Speaker 1:I would like to see somebody throughout the $100,000,000 number. Right? You'd think that if for I mean a $100,000,000 people would talk with Yeah. I think somebody
Speaker 2:I don't think Elon would do it. I don't think Elon would would would let would talk to a stranger, a random person for an hour for a $100,000,000.
Speaker 1:What about thirty minutes?
Speaker 3:We'll have to ask him. $200,000,000.
Speaker 2:You have to start a show.
Speaker 1:Hourly rate.
Speaker 2:And then you get him. You have to get on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
Speaker 2:I believe we have Eugenia in the Restream waiting room.
Speaker 1:Announcing a new company.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:Woah. Look at this
Speaker 2:kid from a sixteen
Speaker 1:z headquarters.
Speaker 2:Did they poach you? Are you a new GP? What's going on?
Speaker 1:No. Just a new port co founder.
Speaker 2:You wish? No. You're supposed to
Speaker 13:say struggling founder.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes. Still struggling founder. Tell us about the new the about the new company.
Speaker 13:We just announced today of the round we did with the pre seed round we did for Wabi Yes. Our new company. So time to announce the new company as well. So we're building Wabi, which is a personal software platform.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Think of it as an app where you can discover, quickly remix, or even create personal mini apps for your daily life.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, yeah, walk me through I mean, I I've I've created personal miniature apps with, you know, vibe coding platforms or, you know, coding agents, kind of run them on my computer. Usually, try and have them all self contained in HTML or something. How are you thinking about the actual interaction? Is this is this, like, prompt to product, self hosted, hosted within Wabi?
Speaker 2:Like, where are all the different trade offs? Because there's so many different ways that you could instantiate that idea, I imagine.
Speaker 13:So think of it as a YouTube for mini apps. Mhmm. So all Wabi mini apps compared to most app builders, they all only live on Wabi. Okay. You cannot download them.
Speaker 13:You cannot put them on the App Store.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 13:You have to use them on Wabi. Yep. But that comes with a lot of benefits. Yeah. Because, first of all, the social graph discovery, you can like, comment, see who your friends are using is using what app.
Speaker 13:Sure. See remixes, follow good creators or creators you like, and so on. You can use apps with your friends. And then on top of that, of course, all integrations are included. You can immediately connect your Gmail account, your calendar, location.
Speaker 13:We're building our plan is to build 50 integrations before the end of the year of all sorts, and so on. And, of course, persistent back end, data security and privacy, everything is sort of on Wabi's side. Because if you think about it, even if you build a great app on one of the with one of wipe wipe coding tools and send me a link, if it's in, like, an AI therapist app, I don't know if I'm gonna fully trust to use this, because I don't know where the logs are going. Even if you're a good friend and you don't mean anything bad, you're not a professional developer. What if you forget to pay for the hosting of this app, or what if something, you know, leaks?
Speaker 13:We've already had some of these web coding apps reach the top of the App Store, like that teabag
Speaker 1:app. I don't
Speaker 13:know if you saw saw that that
Speaker 2:leaked all the sense of information. I
Speaker 13:think so. Yeah. Was that the tea dating?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That one's been very popular.
Speaker 2:So talk to me about the technical, like, hurdle here. It feels like the App Store doesn't necessarily love apps in App Stores. Is this a is this a beneficiary of the new regulation around allowing App Stores in the iOS App Store? Is that a unique unlock?
Speaker 13:So we're not building apps. We don't call them apps even. Sure. These are mini apps. So think of it as, like, the small, very lightweight workflow.
Speaker 13:Some of them just like it's almost like a lightweight UI
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:On a prompt. Yeah. For example, a simple mini app that turns your photos to, like, Polaroids from different decades.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:And so the apps are allows mini apps. And It does. Okay. We're not planning to or we're not we're never gonna be about, like, building full fledged apps or downloading them or anything like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is interesting. It feels like Apple sort of have to grapple with the idea of instantiating UI or mini apps on the fly because for a long time, the App Store review process has been very much like we wanna review all the code. And if you are changing the code within the app or the functionality of the app, once it's already shipped and approved, Apple has kind of dealt with that in a very in a in a in a wide variety of ways. But I but I love the I I love the idea.
Speaker 2:So let let's just let's just stick to, you know, the actual, technical side of things. Like, are you a are are these apps built in basically, like, HTML windows that are then served within or or can you actually instantiate, like, React native or, you know, like, Objective C on the fly?
Speaker 13:These are React. So all of our mini apps are React native.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 13:And then Wabi, the platform, of course, is the Yeah. IOS native Swift Okay. Cool. Code. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 13:Think sort of similarly to Replica, what was the the the native app Yeah. And a Unity container inside of it
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:Here the same. I feel like we're we're always gonna be about, like, blending two technologies together and struggling constantly with how do you merge these two things together.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolutely. What do you think what do you expect to drive the most usage? Obviously, it's early. It's hard to predict with consumer.
Speaker 1:But do you expect it to be people coming on board just playing around creating things and people are coming to the app to have this sort of creative experience? Like they may go on Suno and just start making music. They might go on Wabi, just start making apps and sharing them with their friends, etcetera? Or do you believe it'll be like more of a hits driven business where there's like one or two mini apps that, you know, develop some organic virality themselves that really become the the the driver of real downloads?
Speaker 13:I think really we are gonna be looking at two big categories. More retentive utilities, think trackers, things that you might use with your family, your friends, yourself, learning, all sorts of, like, to do list things and everything that kind of, like, little workflows for daily life. And then more viral personalized mirrors or, like, viral prompts for Imagen and not only. For example, like, something that I really liked on Wabi was this mini app that takes in your Gmail and builds an action figure based on the information from your Gmail. Like, same, but but the same, but based on your bank activity through looking at your bank account.
Speaker 13:So just stuff like that, where people always want to see some cool stuff like that, brag about themselves, share. And it's it's almost like a one time use thing. You're not gonna be coming back to for for that. But at the same time, if that was an app on the App Store, like, that's kinda too much. You'd need to download it.
Speaker 13:It's like it's too much. But here, it's just like this little mini app thing that lives inside Wabi. You can try it. There's no cost to it.
Speaker 1:What about apps as memes are just purely for entertainment? Do you expect that to be kind of a a category of of itself, like this kind of idea of we can now make a mini app that's really just meant to be kind of funny and make people laugh, but then it doesn't have to necessarily be durable or it doesn't have to be a standalone business itself.
Speaker 13:A 100%. I think we're entering this era where apps where software is not gonna be set. It's not gonna be just the static. It's the app I created, and, you know, you use it, and you can't do anything with that. Instead, it's gonna be this ultra personalized, very malleable, very lightweight software that can change, that is truly built on a platform of you.
Speaker 13:I would think that kind of the operating system of the future is the one where you'll have a few apps, big apps, like, you know, TikToks, the Instagrams, of course, that will always exist. And then there may be a few apps built by the community that you discovered. Maybe some of them you remixed a little bit. Maybe some you actually built yourselves yourself. And then there are gonna be some mini apps built for you by AI.
Speaker 13:Like, for example, where if I'm going to New York next week, it should Wabi should go through your email and suggest an app, pre build an app for you. Hey. I know you're into art. You're going to New York. Here's an app that basically recommends art shows around your Airbnb for that time.
Speaker 1:That's really cool. I feel like I feel like this is a product that once people have that that, like, people will have a moment where they're like, wait. Why did I I mean, the the idea that you could go on a trip and generate an app that was almost like some quasi, even just tracker for your trip of like, oh, these are all the things I wanna do and check them off, and then you could make so many other layers that you can you can build on on on top of it. How much were you what what do Wabi like, how much do you feel like you'll need to incentivize creators on the platform early on? Like, would you ever create, like, some type of, like, creator fund to incentivize people to come on and and experiment?
Speaker 1:I mean, a lot of big social media platforms have have done this over the years. You guys have raised quite a bit of cash. So I'm sure you could soft circle some of it, but maybe you don't need to at all. Curious how you're thinking about it.
Speaker 13:I think you're you're going in the right direction. That's what we're also thinking about. How do we incentivize the best creators to create the best apps out there? And what really struck me the other day was that, actually, it's easier to create a cool mini app than it is to create a YouTube video, a great YouTube video. It doesn't require that much production in a sense.
Speaker 13:Like, for example, even yesterday, I was just I was putting my daughter down, and it was bedtime. She likes to play these puzzles where I give her a puzzle and she tries to guess what it is. So we we wanted to just find something online for it, but it took me it was a lot faster. It only took me a minute on Wabi to build this simple mini app where it basically is a puzzle and then just four pictures that she can click on. And because she's into Princess Elsa, we made it princess Princess Elsa themed.
Speaker 13:And because she goes to an Italian preschool, we made it Italian in Italian. And so it literally took us, like, a couple minutes, and it it was like co creation. We're creating that app together with her. So think of it as like Roblox meets personal software in a sense. So I do think, to a degree, right now, it's it's almost becoming easier to create something than even to search for it online.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We we got to hang out with, the CEO of Roblox yesterday, and I think he's coming on the show tomorrow. How much how much do you think it can be dangerous to be, like, too inspired by, in in this case, like, something like a Roblox? Because in in so many ways, I can imagine that, you know, an economy forms around Wabi in the same way that it has around in the same way that it has around Roblox. There's so many different ways you can kind of draw comps, but sometimes it could be a trap to be too inspired by something because ultimately it's a different, you know, totally different kind of use case and and value than than than maybe Roblox has?
Speaker 13:I mean, our vision is different. Our our mission is to set software free, and I think kind of the main main inspiration for Wabi was that idea that we live in the Microsoft DOS era of AI interfaces, and the GUI moment for AI is around the corner. And we do believe that with this almost like godlike technology that we created, it will require a different type of an interface. There will be the Windows, the Mac OS for for AI. We're not gonna be using AI through a command line forever.
Speaker 13:Yeah. And so I think this is kind of where our North Star is. It's like, how how can we create a different interface for everyone to tap into all the capabilities of these AI models.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's gonna be really fun. I I I I I feel like we we we we can sit here and predict how things will play out, but we should just have you back on once you have real data on how people are using it, how much is entertainment, how much is productivity, what the top apps are, and kind of how the how the community, like, takes shape. Because, I imagine there's only so much that you can predict once you build a tool. You know?
Speaker 2:If you ask Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the thing with Roblox. It's like, how how how would Roblox predict that Grow a Garden would be the most popular name in the world with teenagers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or like a full re reenactment of Call of Duty in Roblox. Like, that was probably not on the road map from day one. That's a beautiful thing about, starting these, like, these platforms. But, congratulations on the round.
Speaker 1:What what's the what's the waitlist timing? I'm on the waitlist now. When when when are when are am getting strategy around opening it up? Soon.
Speaker 13:We're we're building a few really, exciting things. Right now working on multiplayer as we speak.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:I think that one of the really cool things about Wabi is that it's gonna be that all apps come with multiplayer included. And even just simple mini apps, like, for example, I built a Wordle game to test it with my mom so that we can play together. Obviously, we played on the New York Times, but it's pretty much like our waste way to connect with each other. And with Wobby, we do have a leaderboard, and, you know, we can see who's beating each who's better today, who's doing better. We can get set up these notifications and all that.
Speaker 13:So a few things that we wanna build before we roll it out to general audience, but we're we're getting fantastic feedback from our first users, and it's honestly really exciting to, again, to be in that zero to one Zero
Speaker 7:to one. Stage.
Speaker 13:I I'm so excited about this.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, as soon as we have access, we're gonna have Tyler make
Speaker 2:Build some stuff.
Speaker 1:Something like six or seven mini apps.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Well, send them to me.
Speaker 2:Do days much.
Speaker 1:We will. Great catching up. I'm I'm excited. Yeah. We're excited you're going zero to one again and and, super excited about Wabi and This is really cool.
Speaker 1:We'll, we'll talk soon.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much.
Speaker 13:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your day. Cheers.
Speaker 13:Bye.
Speaker 2:Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on
Speaker 1:the planet. We Seriously. Morning, we're not gonna dox him, but we ran into a, a founder, founder we like who had a quite a nice IPO a few years ago. And we did do a risk check
Speaker 2:Oh, we did.
Speaker 1:Performed. He, it was it was great to see.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Well
Speaker 2:The at the cover of The Wall Street Journal, there's a bidding war for obesity startups. Did you hear about this? Pfizer and Novo Nordisk boost their bids in an unusual fight for Metsera. I feel like when you say obesity startups, it's gonna be the the Wigoovy white labelers. And I was imagining this would go like Hymns Roman, like that crew.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But apparently, they are all fighting over the developer of the obesity drug. It's called Metcera. The latest twist in their unusual fight over the startup. Metcera said Tuesday that Novo Nordisk's proposed proposal values the biotech company at up to $86.20 a share, or approximately $10,000,000,000, up from its previous bid of 9,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:So they're going back and forth. The valuation represents an approximately 159% premium to Metser's closing price on September 19, the last trading day before the Pfizer deal was disclosed. So Pfizer's new offer value shares at up to $70,000,000,070 a share was 8,100,000,000.0. Pfizer had previously struck a deal at 7,300,000,000.0. They're going back and forth.
Speaker 2:The duel between two of the world's biggest drug makers over a three year old company three year old company with just with just more than a 100 employees and no approved drugs
Speaker 1:Woah.
Speaker 2:Shows the importance of weight loss drugs to the pharmaceutical industry. Weight loss is one of the hottest categories in prescription drugs, and companies big, I would imagine, and small, big and small have been lining up to be part of the market with with, leaders Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. The global market for the drugs is now worth 72,000,000,000 according to TD Cowen, which projects it will reach a 139,000,000,000 in 2030. It's always so funny because I'm like, oh, 72,000,000,000. Tyler, is $72,000,000,000 a lot?
Speaker 2:No. Wait. Like, you mean what Google's spending on CapEx just this year? Like, that's just what just what one hyperscalers spending on CapEx is the entire weight loss market.
Speaker 1:Big tech is pretty big. Well, we have our next guest. The there he is.
Speaker 7:What's up, guys?
Speaker 2:How you doing? Great. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Great transition. I just How are you guys?
Speaker 1:Slid in there.
Speaker 2:Slid in fantastic. We're doing well.
Speaker 1:It's great to see you.
Speaker 2:You're doing well. Congratulations on the new deal. How did you meet Eugenia originally?
Speaker 14:Well, I mean, it's hard to not know her if you guys do know her, which you do. She's a total badass. She's been in and around the ecosystem for years. She's kind of the first AI native consumer founder. Yeah.
Speaker 14:Alright. Replica launched prior to ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:So perhaps ChatGPT was even inspired by Replica. Companionship is now one of their biggest use cases. So she's been in and around and well known to the entire firm for many years. So when I heard that she was up to something new, I knew that we had to be a part of
Speaker 1:Very cool. This feels like a what I what I like about some of my favorite ideas are not ideas that no one no one has had or talked about before, but they're ideas that have been kind of floating around but nobody just decided to like tackle them in a really intentional way. This feels like one of those ideas that is kind of perfectly pulls together kind of the potential of this new technology that we have. The fact that you can generate software on the fly. You can make software so quickly now that you can make things that don't need to have a long useful life.
Speaker 1:They don't need to be commercial at all. They can be software that would have taken six engineers a year to build. You can now build it in, you know, a a few minutes at at times if you're really one shotting and and just two people can enjoy it. So this felt like, yeah, it just felt like, you know, Eugenia is the right person to take on take on this idea that has so much potential. Of course, it's consumer.
Speaker 1:Of course, it's gonna be really hard. But this is like an idea that I want to exist. How how like, what was your kind of like framing around this concept? Had had you been thinking about it for a while, and and what kind of made Yeah. You do the deal?
Speaker 14:Well, I'll give you two framings, Jordy. So the first is, you know, when did software get so serious? It's like all the software we use is so clinical. You know, even when you see content inside Insta or TikTok or YouTube, it's the same frame. It's sort of got all the same aesthetics.
Speaker 14:Yeah. So if you think about the early nineties Internet, you know, was really eclectic and weird, and I for one think a weird is a more interesting Internet. So I think, one, there's a sort of like software as a form of pushing the cultural edge. We've lost that a little bit over the last twenty years. Look, I think the other thing is that the mistake we keep making in AI is that we think these things are markets when they're industries.
Speaker 14:Right? Yeah. Like, AI code is not a market. There's not one winner. It's an entire change to the software supply chain.
Speaker 14:It's an industry, which is why Codex is working, Cursor is working, Replit is working, and Wabi is gonna work as well. So I think it's both an insanely delightful and approachable idea with really serious implications at large scale.
Speaker 1:What what what are you what like, it's hard to predict these kind of things. Like, I feel like with with consumer, I I was trying to get at earlier. Is this gonna be something like people are just playing around making things? Or is it gonna be Yeah. Is it gonna be a mini app that kinda breaks out and get goes viral over on TikTok and suddenly Wabi has an insane amount of downloads just because of a single video.
Speaker 1:So I can see it being this kind of like virtual, virtuous flywheel where people just enjoy creating and then they create something cool and then a bunch more people come in. But what's what's your kind of, how how have you tried to predict the future around what what will allow it to break out?
Speaker 14:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's hard to predict. Know, if you think back to YouTube, that's why I love the YouTube metaphor in 2005. You look at the shaky home video sort of videos that were put on there, home camera videos and pirated content and all kinds of random things.
Speaker 14:You could sort of easily look at that and be dismissive of YouTube and say, hey, this is non serious. Hey, what are the YouTube native shows gonna look like? Is that even a real thing to think about? And you now look at it was hard to look at that and see mister beast being implied in it. And the same thing is true today.
Speaker 14:You know, I made a a spooky meditation tracker for Halloween last week to track my meditations. There's a lot of fun AI creative mini apps. A great example of that is last week for Halloween, a big trend on TikTok was this sort of ghost face killer AI videos where you take a photo of yourself, you give it this very long and elaborate prompt, and it generates this sort of scream style, you know, 2,000 eras, you on a bed, the ghost faced killer, the guy from scream behind you in the doorway. And to actually replicate it, it looks amazing, but to replicate it, you've gotta share this thousand word prompt that makes no sense. So now there's a mini app for that on Wabi.
Speaker 14:It was super fun for Halloween. It's probably not gonna be relevant for another fifty one weeks, and then it'll be hot again. So by lowering the barrier to making software and lowering the sort of seriousness, you get this sort of explosion of really interesting native disposable perhaps apps that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Speaker 1:Makes a ton of sense. I can't wait to get access. I wanted to ask you about not not to switch gears too much, but I wanted to get your take on the AI kind of like, know, gen AI and music space. You're Okay. You're on Spotify.
Speaker 1:I have some of your songs saved.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And my save, they they kinda I'll be on a drive and and you pop up. But how how are you thinking about, how are you thinking about that category? And Yeah. Where where you kind of see it going? Is it, we were having debate.
Speaker 1:I think we're having, Mike Yeon from Suno later this week, but we've been having an debate. Is it is it just people that are playing around with these tools and enjoying the process of music making, which has always been a big part of the traditional music industry? Is it people listening to the music that they're making or are they listening to other music? But what's your read as musician?
Speaker 14:Look, it's actually very Music and software are no different. People want to participate. And here's what's misunderstood about music. If you look at why was Peak's record sales and music revenue in the nineteen nineties, it's because that's when we had mixtape culture and mix CD culture. Right?
Speaker 14:People were able to participate and make their own music and share it with their friends, and you sort of had this whole long tail of music being created. And then music somehow with streaming went back to being broadcast the way it was in the sixties and seventies before the cassette was invented. Software is actually very similar. Where we have software today, 20,000,000 programmers in the world decide what 6,000,000,000 of us use. So I think the thing that drives, love of the media, whether it's software or music, is the ability to participate, and that's why people love AI music.
Speaker 2:So that's just like a general steepening of the power law between, creation and usage, like, because with the with the Spotify AI music, like, yes, there's tons of people who are using AI to create songs. So there's more creators than ever. But then there's also, like, there are also AI music artists that are publishing and and climbing the charts. And I wouldn't be surprised if we wind up having some crazy power law outcome. I mean
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:Much like Harry Potter Balenciaga, like, took over the Internet for Yeah. A day.
Speaker 14:That's right. And, you know, people are so it is it's always the same criticisms
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:Which is, oh, it's not real. It's not real. Like, TikTok's not real.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:Right? We're interested in entertainment and, like, whether it's real or not is completely secondary. I think the important thing is people are participating.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:And that's it's not just gonna be a music thing. It's gonna be every form of media. It's gonna be software. I mean, that's the whole thing more people can now create.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Speaking of TikTok, do you is it a prerequisite for growing a new social network to piggyback on another social network? Feels like Yeah. TikTok did that with the watermark and just buying a lot of ads on Snap and Facebook maybe. And then threads seems like it's actually sort of working, but it's heavily piggybacked on Instagram.
Speaker 2:Can is it possible to just grow a new social network without having some unfair advantage?
Speaker 14:I mean, have you tried posting anything to threads? Working might be generous. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I have. It's certainly not where the tech community is right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's where Connor Hayes is, my boy, it I over
Speaker 2:would I would agree. Yeah. I I would agree with you, like, how much it's working, but it's like, I I think the point still holds, which is like Yeah. Which is like, I don't know. Like, how how could you even try?
Speaker 2:I mean, have you bet on a lot of have you made a ton of like, I'm gonna start this new social network investments. Like, I I feel like a 16 z is, like, the place that takes that risk. And Yeah. And, like, this is sort of a new entrant into that.
Speaker 14:Yes. Yeah. Look. When when networks work, what emerges are network economies Yeah. And that's the gold standard for everything, for modes, for business model quality, for increasing returns to scale.
Speaker 14:What's so interesting about AI has mostly been tools. There aren't really that many AI native networks, and that's what Wabi is. That's one of the reasons we were so excited. But I think this general trend from tools and networks is a really important one to watch, and it's been sort of, like, increasing topic within the investor community.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 14:So yeah. No. Look. As for whether they need to be boot strapped off of others, I think that the existing networks have become a lot more sensitive to that, and they're very cautious around emerging networks boot strapping off of their networks. So I think it's it's a tactic, but it's a hard one to execute.
Speaker 14:You've gotta kinda think about owning networks in new categories.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, this people just like policing of links across networks. Like, you can imagine it's so easy to, like, okay. Yeah. It exists within the app, but then you can share with a link.
Speaker 2:But all the I mean, the walled gardens. People are there's a bull market in building walls around gardens. Right? Like Yes. I I I have friends that use TikTok, and they send me they send me TikToks, and I don't have the app installed.
Speaker 2:And so I'll click it, and it'll open in a web browser, but the web browser just will not play it for me. I can there's no button that I can click to be, like, play in the web browser. The only it's just it's just like download the app or get lost.
Speaker 1:And I'm like send it to our our one friend who's on TikTok and say, can you Can you download voice note describing this video?
Speaker 2:Just describe it. It's terrible. A It's mess.
Speaker 14:It's a mess. Yeah. Said that, you know, voice notes are a form of violence, so that that's a whole other topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He did.
Speaker 14:Look, guys. I do I do think the networks are really sensitive to this. If you look at it, you know, one possible explanation is that it's hard to actually build a network today, so the new network effect is the externalization about it. Mhmm. So if you look at mid journey, mid journey is not a network per se, but what happens is when mid journey is consistently a part of the conversation on x, people are making, you know, tutorials on YouTube.
Speaker 14:Like, if you dominate networks organically, that is the network effect today. It's sort of what Cluelly does. So I think that's one approach to it, but no, man. It's like the last ten years of books and blog posts have overtrained every executive and PM, and they're all like, hold on a second. No way we're gonna let this get bootstrapped off of our audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The thing the thing that I'm interested to follow is is Sora created this new magical experience for creating AI videos, specifically the Cameo feature was like the Yeah. The the innovation in in my view that that, like, was not not it wasn't just like model quality that made it broke out. It was like Yeah. It was good at making a certain type of like Internet style, Internet native video that Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That and then it also innovated on the on the feature level and that's what caused this kind of breakout. The challenge is like, they made a great tool which is what Wabi is doing and plans to do, But they couldn't retain the experience on the platform. Right? Content wants to be free. Content wants to go everywhere.
Speaker 1:And so Yes. They created this amazing tool. Will they create a network? That's like TBD. Right?
Speaker 1:But I think that I I think with with Wabi is like you can create the software, but then it's self contained. So if other people wanna consume that software, they'll actually have to stay on Wabi, which, you know, should give it a real shot at at building that kind of network and consumption.
Speaker 14:That's exactly the the bull case. Actually, the the interesting thing about Sora is that, you know, you've got Cameo as a new content primitive, but then you've got a question of what is the status game. And you guys, of course, have read the famous essay, you know, we're all status seeking monkeys. You have to have a status game, and I don't know that it was it might have been comedy for a minute on Sora. So without a status game, I think people quickly lose an incentive to continue to participate.
Speaker 14:And I think the nice thing about Wabi is it's not just that creation consumption happens in a single platform, but the status game is creating sort of the most opinionated, strange, interesting app. And because social is built in, you can get all of the kind of consumption and network effects on the platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Three, I'll tell Eugenia that we wanna be at the top. Oh, we're waiting list. Top of waiting. I wanna be at the top
Speaker 14:of Guys, I'm I'm actually gonna I'm gonna make a TVPN app that creates the trading cards. Oh. This
Speaker 2:Alright. I'll follow you.
Speaker 14:I'm gonna send it
Speaker 9:to you
Speaker 14:because I've always had trading card FOMO, man. I wanna be on one of those things.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. We gotta get Yeah. Make make one. Make one.
Speaker 14:I'm I'm planning to make it. We gotta get Eugenia on there first though, man.
Speaker 1:She's There's two ways to get on a trading card. You can you can do, like a specific deal or something like that.
Speaker 2:Or you
Speaker 3:could get married.
Speaker 1:Or you can do something just normal in the real world, you know. So
Speaker 14:I mean, I was tempted to actually make the round much much bigger just to hear the gong.
Speaker 1:Oh, we're all hitting the gong.
Speaker 2:We love hitting the gongs. This is not the the We we hit the gong for all major. Is fantastic.
Speaker 14:Love that gong energy. Okay.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yes. Super exciting one. Great stuff. Good to catch up. Alright.
Speaker 2:Love it. Let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel room, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.
Speaker 2:Our next guest, we have David Richer and
Speaker 1:We're deep in the fourth hour.
Speaker 2:We are in the fourth hour, but we have David couldn't do it. And Brewer from Lyft in the Richer room. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Massive earnings call.
Speaker 1:Looking good. You guys look more like you're kind of calling in from, like, a radio show
Speaker 3:or something like that than us.
Speaker 2:I love this setup.
Speaker 1:This is great.
Speaker 7:That's how I feel. Yeah. I feel like we're the we're like the morning DJ crew.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like day good.
Speaker 7:Morning. Hot hits all day long.
Speaker 1:I love it. There you go. There you go.
Speaker 2:Take us through what happened today.
Speaker 1:What's the news?
Speaker 7:Okay. So just off our earnings call. So for those of you who don't know, a public company I'm David, by way. This is CEO, CFO. And what, you know, we do, you know, every quarter is we spend about an hour or so talking to analysts Mhmm.
Speaker 7:About what just happened the prior three months. So here's what just happened. Best earnings ever. Highest sales ever, you know. You know, high more active riders than ever.
Speaker 7:More driver hours than ever. And here's a crazy fun fact. I love the Airhorn. So but here's a crazy fun fact. So when Aaron and I started about two and a half years ago, we were we were sort of losing, you know, maybe $300,000,000 in cash every year.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 7:Now, we just had our first billion dollar over the trailing twelve months cash flow generation. So just a huge huge
Speaker 1:hit the gong for that. Here we
Speaker 15:go. Alright.
Speaker 1:That is amazing. We don't we don't get to hit the gong for free cash flow as much as we'd like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sweet. So so what's
Speaker 1:the plan with
Speaker 2:the cash flow? Are are you we're Zooming all over the place. Is, I mean, we've talked to some folks who are in similar situations. They flip their business around. They start generating cash.
Speaker 2:Then it's time to buy back stock. It's time to reinvest in the future. It's time to, pay dividends. What have you done in the past, and how are you thinking? How do you even make that type of decision?
Speaker 15:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to you know, first of all, as David mentioned, like, what a privilege to be here now two and a half years later
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 15:Be in this position where we're generating cash. We also guided out a few years in advance and said we're gonna generate even more cash than we thought over the next couple of years. So, you know, c CFO's dream here. Over 2025, you know, if you think about what we've done, we announced our first share buyback program in the company's history. We said we would it's $750,000,000 in size.
Speaker 15:We said we would use about 500,000,000 of that by May 2026. In fact, we're gonna you know, things are going great. We're gonna actually use that 500,000,000 by the 2025. So and then we've acquired two companies. We bought FreeNow in Europe, leading taxi provider in Europe, and then we most recently announced the acquisition of TBR Global Chauffeuring.
Speaker 15:We announced some investments we have coming up at Waymo. So if you think about that overall, pretty balanced, but very, very focused on you know, we are a growth business. We are in growth markets. And so having the opportunity to invest against that, to do it in a way that's very conscious of driving value for our shareholders, not in terms of the growth not only in terms of growth of the business, but in deploying some of that back in share buybacks. So we like the balance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The question on everyone's head, on the top of everyone's head, I'm sure, is, autonomous vehicles. You're probably getting AV questions constantly. Maybe set the table for us
Speaker 1:How about another?
Speaker 2:Walk through. Yeah. Why just walk through the the high level thesis, and then maybe we can, dig into, some of the particulars of the strategy.
Speaker 7:Yeah. A 100%. It it is the number one question everyone's asking. Sure. And you don't look.
Speaker 7:What a privilege. Right? Because Yeah. How often do you get to be in an industry that is clearly gonna be transformed? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So what's gonna happen? We think the market size is gonna grow dramatically. Like, we think AVs for the sector I'm not just talking
Speaker 3:about for Lyft, but for the sector because it's a good product. If you've been
Speaker 7:in San Francisco or some of the other places where you can see AVs, it's safe. You can kinda zone out in the back seat. You can, you know, whatever you wanna do. So a lot of our so, anyways, it's a cool product. And so what that tends to do is it tends to expand the market.
Speaker 7:Okay. So what are we doing? You know, we're not in the business of making cars or even making AV tech, so we gotta partner. Who have we partnered with? Well, we've partnered with two of the biggest in the world, Waymo in The United States, who's clearly the market leader in The US, and Baidu in China, who's clearly the market leader there, that'll help us get cars and tech up into Europe.
Speaker 7:And what you'll see is we'll integrate these onto our platform and create what we think of as a hybrid network. Lot of drivers on our platform, 1,500,000 drivers, 1,600,000 drivers on the platform. They're gonna continue to drive because there aren't enough AVs in the world just to satisfy the demand with AVs. But then, you know, in certain markets like Nashville and others, we'll have more and more AVs in the platform and create something where holes greater than the sum of the
Speaker 2:When are we bringing track cars to the platform? You wanna track a car, you want a Ferrari challenge or, you know, some sort of BMW that's been modified for the track, and you wanna rent that.
Speaker 7:I love the way
Speaker 1:John John, we did a track day on Sunday, and now it's the only thing
Speaker 2:It's the only thing I think about. Think about. But but but I do think that the the the actual like, the the the car ownership pattern might actually change dramatically in the future. And, this is my, like like, thesis is it's half a joke is, I own a track car. I maybe take an autonomous vehicle, on a commute or or For
Speaker 1:purely functional,
Speaker 2:but then functional things.
Speaker 1:But then And then you drive for enjoyment.
Speaker 2:Human drivers in the car for specific rides where, where there's either higher demand or specific weather conditions or specific road conditions. And so I feel like a lot of people wanna hit, you know, oh, the new technology is gonna come in. It's gonna be a 100% of the market on day one, and that's just never the way it plays out. So how are you thinking about the way it plays out, and how are you preparing for that transition?
Speaker 7:I mean, you're putting your finger on something that I think as human beings, we tend to do to a fault, which is we sort of think binary. Right? Is this worth that? You know, it's x or it's y.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And it rarely is is one or the other. It's it's almost always both. And what turns and and this is the reason why, you know, frankly being, you know, alive today is so interesting is you get these these new modalities. So, like, okay. Look.
Speaker 7:Over the last I'm an old guy. So the last many years when I learned to drive, I'm driving on a stick. Mhmm. I still have a stick. It's great.
Speaker 7:But I also have a Tesla, which is not stick. In fact, it's the opposite of
Speaker 1:stick. Did you ever did you ever drive stick in San Francisco when you're first learning? Because John and I were in San Francisco last week and I was showing him like the different hills that I when I was when I was, like, whatever. I did. 16 and a half, 17.
Speaker 1:Driving driving stick that out. In driving a manual in San Francisco really is, like, a coming of age moment. It's kinda
Speaker 15:like Yeah. And then reversing into a parking space. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I will tell you a story. I grew up on the East Coast, but our daughters grew up in San Francisco, and I still smell in my head the grinding
Speaker 1:Burn clutch. Clutch of our
Speaker 7:older daughter on Divisadero. You know
Speaker 6:what I mean?
Speaker 7:Like, I was just burning in my head. But that but that's what it's gonna be like. Right? So it's gonna be yeah. I wanna go, you know, I wanna take a road trip.
Speaker 7:Of course, I wanna drive myself. That's super fun. I wanna commute tomorrow. I'm just gonna let something else do the do the thing, and I'm gonna zone out. And that's the that's the future we're building for.
Speaker 7:I'll tell you one more funny thing, which is another weird human thing. If you ask people, do you know, do you want a driver in
Speaker 5:a car?
Speaker 1:A lot
Speaker 7:of people say, nah, I'd rather just be alone. If you ask people, what's your favorite Lyft ride ever? They'll say, oh my god. I had this amazing conversation with this driver all about his life where he asked me about my data, whatever. That's the future.
Speaker 7:The future is not gonna be just mechanical and virtual, and it's not just gonna be physical. It's gonna be this blend, and that's what we're building to.
Speaker 2:Talk about, flex drive. Talk about all the like, how complicated the value chain is even if we see amazing performance in AVs and we get tons of autonomous vehicles on the road. It feels like there's there are tons of things that Tesla's not gonna wanna do. There's tons of things that Waymo's not gonna wanna do. There are gonna be other competitors and other differentiators.
Speaker 2:Walk through the whole supply chain, how it fits in, how you're how you're planning to fit in.
Speaker 7:So this touches on something, again, so important, and I'll use a funny analogy for a second. I don't know why, but for some reason, like, my TikTok stuff or my users, like, often they'll have, like, here's what Disney World looks like to you. Yeah. And then they'll, zoom they'll, like, they'll do drone shots and be like, that haunted mantras looks amazing. Like, this huge building behind me.
Speaker 7:Looks nothing like a haunted Just a warehouse with with this. Same thing with AVs. Like, it looks like a sort of a seamless digital thing. But behind it, as you say Well,
Speaker 2:humans driving remotely.
Speaker 7:Well, there is some
Speaker 2:of that. Sometimes.
Speaker 7:Okay. That's interesting.
Speaker 3:That's a.
Speaker 2:Maybe maybe one person per five cars, but, you know and we're getting there better, but the teleoperation will be occasionally
Speaker 7:Teleoperation is the thing.
Speaker 2:There's definitely Yeah. It makes sense.
Speaker 7:Well, but but look. There's also someone's gotta clean the car. Someone's gotta charge the car. Gotta maintain the car. Gotta reboot the car.
Speaker 7:You know? So there's all that. That's called fleet management. We do it through a subsidiary called FlexDrive. Lyft has about 15,000 cars today.
Speaker 7:These are not EVs. Today, these are EVs and normal, you know, ICE cars that are being managed by FlexDrive and kept available for drivers to use when they don't want to use their their primary car. So that's a a piece of of you know, it's a skill we have. It's And then you gotta keep those cars if they're available, you gotta keep them utilized. You gotta keep them you know, the demand coming in and matching that that supply $24.07 even if it's raining, even if, you know, concert just got out, you know, even during the Super Bowl, you know, in the last five minutes of Super Bowl where demand goes through the roof.
Speaker 7:So, anyway, what you're referring to or what you're kind of alluding to is that rideshare is is complex, and it's very big scale. And you add EVs, and it's only gonna be more complex, but this is what we do. This is sort of our jam, and, and we're super excited about this this, the future for
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. I I I it seems like, you're set up very well with the cash flow to actually play in other industries. It's it's gonna be a very exciting time.
Speaker 2:Jordy, do you have anything else?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just, how how have you guys like, what's been the focus internally with the team? It feels like the best way to build confidence as a team is to just, like, steadily execute against your guys' plan and road map, and you certainly have done that over the last couple years. I'm I'm I imagine when both of you guys took this job, there were some people that were saying, like, why would you sign yourself up for this? You know, it's harder to it's much harder to look like an incredible CEO or a CFO with a company that that needs some kind of new momentum and and, you know, it's easier to look look like a genius if you're joining a business that's growing at, you know, let's say, 300% a year or something, you know, crazy like we're seeing in some of these AI companies.
Speaker 1:But, but, yeah, what what what is what has been the kind of unlock from a from a team or culture standpoint that'll has allowed you guys to deliver like this?
Speaker 15:I'll I'll jump in here from my perspective, you know, thinking about joining Lyft. You know, number one, just incredible brand. Right? This this company just has an incredible, durable brand, and it operates in a market where scale matters. Right?
Speaker 15:And so you continue to grow scale. You can drive very attractive economics. And then certainly as I joined the company, you know, this company has an incredible culture. Right? We have a a tremendous teams here, incredibly smart, really, really focused on our customers, and inclined to always do the right thing, right, to think big, to do the next right thing.
Speaker 15:So, you know, honestly, the first six to nine months, I think, for both of us was just you know, if you think about it, the company was recovering from the pandemic. Founders stepped aside. It was it was a big time of transition. So focusing on execution, focusing on just serving the customer, delivering a great service, and then taking it really step by step because that earns you the right. Right?
Speaker 15:You build that discipline, that success that earns you the right to do the next thing. Now you start doubling down on product innovation. For drivers, for riders, we start launching a slew of new products. That's super exciting for team members, for our riders, for the for the community out there. Then we start, you know, generating a lot of cash.
Speaker 15:Great. How do we build from there? So, you know, I often reflect on this a little bit with David. It's you know, there was sort of an inflection point of the company, I think, when we both came in, and and I'll, you know, kinda speak for both of us. I think we both feel it now.
Speaker 15:It's like this next big leaping off point. And, yeah, it's exciting. It's a fun place to work.
Speaker 7:I'll I'll just say a tidy tiny bit more. I mean, when you come in, look, you gotta cast a big vision so that people get kind of excited about it. And we had a big vision around customer obsession and around serving and connecting. You gotta make sure you got the right people, and I got super super lucky. Aaron was one of the first hires I made, one of the best hires of my life.
Speaker 7:Right? So you gotta have that right team around the table, and our management team is incredible. And then as Aaron says, you just gotta execute, execute, execute. And that success begets success, begets success, unlocks opportunity, and now we can think even bigger. So we're just kinda getting started two and a half years in.
Speaker 3:I love it. I love it.
Speaker 1:I love Success. Love seeing you guys win. Congratulations. Are we always David, we really enjoyed our our last conversation. Aaron, it's great to meet you.
Speaker 1:And forward to next quarter.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to
Speaker 15:you soon. I know that David was, you know, mentioning he wants to get the earnings call on your show. You know? This is this is, you know, the the closest we could come.
Speaker 13:So thank you for
Speaker 15:having us.
Speaker 2:That was awesome.
Speaker 1:Super fun, guys. Congratulations on awesome quarter.
Speaker 2:Have a great
Speaker 7:rest day. Congrats to YouTube, by the way.
Speaker 6:Nice article in
Speaker 7:New York Times. Times. Did you guys write that? Did you
Speaker 2:write that?
Speaker 3:We did not.
Speaker 1:That was All all Mike Isaac.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He just had fun with us.
Speaker 1:It was, it was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:A lot of time in
Speaker 1:the We survived. We did. Survived.
Speaker 3:Have a great day.
Speaker 1:Great to see you guys.
Speaker 3:We'll talk to soon. Thank you.
Speaker 7:Alright. Take care.
Speaker 1:Let's check-in with the timeline. Stefan was saying, please ask them about the biggest fish they've caught.
Speaker 2:This is gonna be a
Speaker 1:That that should be that should be an ongoing question.
Speaker 2:What's the biggest fish? Quit. What's
Speaker 1:the biggest fish you've caught?
Speaker 2:What is the biggest fish you've caught, Jordy?
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 2:Have you ever caught a big fish?
Speaker 1:I've I've only gone fishing on, the ocean.
Speaker 2:Yes. And Did you know that's where they have the big fish?
Speaker 1:They do have the big fish there.
Speaker 2:In the ocean. So this is
Speaker 1:went out on, I like doing I tend to like doing weekend activities.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:It sounds strange, but it, like, constrained to, like, a few hours.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And going out at, like, hunt you know, go we were going trying to go for bluefin tuna. This was sometime last year.
Speaker 2:I feel like
Speaker 1:And we spent, like, twelve hours out there. Did not catch
Speaker 2:Wait. Before you Tyler, how how do you ever do a bet going? Do you think Jordy's biggest fish over under 30 pounds. What do you think?
Speaker 3:I'm going under.
Speaker 2:You're going under 30 pounds. Okay. Jordy, give us the final answer. How big was the bluefin tuna that you didn't catch?
Speaker 1:We did not catch a bluefin tuna.
Speaker 2:So have you ever caught a fish?
Speaker 1:I don't think
Speaker 2:I've You must have, ever like, gone in a pond one day and gotten a minnow. Right?
Speaker 1:I don't think I don't think I've ever caught You've never caught don't think I've ever caught a fish a fish in your my entire life. But my my dad was Wow. Taken to fishing.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:We went we we go camping.
Speaker 2:Need a trading card up.
Speaker 1:Never caught a fish. I mean, we should we
Speaker 2:should change it. We have to change this.
Speaker 1:This is important. Yeah. I it's it's funny growing up around the ocean, surfing my whole life. Yeah. Never
Speaker 2:Never never thought to just throw in the old line and buck. It's so easy. You live by the ocean. You live walking distance to the ocean. This is a challenge for you.
Speaker 2:Today, maybe this weekend, walk to the ocean, catch a fish.
Speaker 1:Catch a fish.
Speaker 2:Catch a fish.
Speaker 1:I do.
Speaker 3:You go
Speaker 2:to Nobu all the time. You never thought, what if I did it myself? What if I dewied Nobu?
Speaker 1:Safe if Shinkai catches my
Speaker 2:eye. It's true. It's true. Yeah.
Speaker 3:John, what's the biggest fish you've got?
Speaker 2:150 pounds, baby. Wow. Halibut. I was 10 years old. It was fantastic.
Speaker 1:The crowd goes wild.
Speaker 2:It it it weighed it weighed more than me at the time, which was electric because I truly like conquering a beast that was bigger than me, which is, like, so satisfying.
Speaker 1:I so I need to look into this, Tyler. Maybe this is a good question for you. Hit hit the deep research, buddy. Get ready to be get ready to be but at my at my local beach, a place that I normally surf in Malibu, there are tons of leopard sharks.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And they hang out where the water is like three to four feet deep. So Mhmm. After you catch a wave, if there's good visibility, you almost like, every other wave I'm seeing a leopard shark. Mhmm. And usually, just kinda just jump back on my board and paddle out.
Speaker 1:Wow. Because they're like I don't know. They're like three or four feet. They're not they're not massive or anything. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But since you've challenged me to catch a fish, maybe the next time I jump down and
Speaker 2:try to Sharks is technically a fish. Yeah. Yeah. That would count.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They are. Yeah. They're yeah. So so I should just dive down Yes.
Speaker 1:And catch it
Speaker 2:With your bare hands.
Speaker 1:With my bare hands. I like this. Yeah. Maybe we could maybe we could If
Speaker 2:that doesn't work, I'd recommend trying to shoot fish in a barrel. I've heard that that's pretty easy. We'll get you a barrel. We'll get you a barrel What's some fish in it? And you and you can, and you can
Speaker 1:Oh, I did can You pull an AR
Speaker 2:15 and just start shooting the fish in the barrel. Shooting the fish in the barrel. You know, shooting the fish in a barrel, it must be it's actually pretty hard to do, I imagine. Depends on the barrel. Because if you use a big gun, you're gonna break the barrel, then
Speaker 1:the water's gonna go everywhere. My beautiful puffer fish. You caught that? My pride and joy.
Speaker 3:Nah. That doesn't really count. I kinda
Speaker 2:I wanna see you count catching a an Atlantic bluefin tuna. They can exceed 1,500 pounds with some estimates reaching up to 2,000 pounds.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:That's what we need to do. Anyway, thank you so much for listening to the show, for watching the show. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcast and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter at tbpn.com.
Speaker 1:To be honest, I kinda wanna keep going.
Speaker 2:You wanna go to fifth hour?
Speaker 1:I kinda wanna break the I kinda wanna break the fifth hour.
Speaker 2:We have guests here.
Speaker 1:We do have guests here.
Speaker 2:We have to hang out with our guests. Thank you so much for watching. We will
Speaker 1:see I can't wait to be back tomorrow. John's cut me off. John's cut me off.
Speaker 2:We did get into a good riff right at the end. It was it was fantastic. Amid amid
Speaker 1:Okay. Guests today. We Absolutely. New new question. Tomorrow, we'll ask every guest.
Speaker 1:We'll ask Dave from Roblox. He'll be joining tomorrow. We got Vlad from Robinhood.
Speaker 2:What's the biggest fish you've
Speaker 1:What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?
Speaker 2:This is important. We're doing a super cat. How big is the fish you've you've ever caught? The biggest fish. And then, maybe we'll create a boom in fishing.
Speaker 2:Maybe people would go fishing.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Fishing's underrated. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. You. Goodbye.