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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Tuesday, 01/06/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance. The capital of capital.
Speaker 1:Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both these corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We actually ran into some good folks at Ramp today
Speaker 2:at breakfast. Calvin.
Speaker 1:Very good omen to the start of 2026 to run into some some folks at RAMP. We had a good time. Anyway, they were here in LA. They're working on a secret project that I'm sure we'll talk about at some point. But
Speaker 2:You'll hear about it.
Speaker 1:They where they weren't is they're not at CES because RAMP is not a consumer electronics project.
Speaker 3:Yet.
Speaker 2:Yet. You could see them get into the AI hardware Maybe.
Speaker 1:Maybe. They should launch anyone out. They should launch a TV.
Speaker 2:I saw that Razer launched an AI companion. You know, Razer The Razer computer.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gaming Yeah. Company.
Speaker 2:They have an AI companion now. Companion. They launched at CES. So you should never count anyone out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It really is like the the festival of creativity for, like, weird AI projects, weird tech projects. Everyone has some side. It it it has a little bit of, like, hacker culture to it almost, but it's also a little washed. Right?
Speaker 2:Is it hacker? I I I
Speaker 1:It's not hacker. It's more just like, I don't know, bizarre spin off. What do you
Speaker 4:think?
Speaker 5:I think it's it's I think at this point, it's, like, fairly boomer coated.
Speaker 1:It's very boomer coated, but it's
Speaker 2:also so I think I I I was talking to a buddy Yeah. Who texted me yesterday morning Yeah. And said, are you at CES this week?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He seemed desperate to hang out. Yeah. And I said, unfortunately, I'm not. And I was thinking about it and it's and in some ways, it feels like somewhat of a humiliation ritual Yeah. For people in tech to say like, you just had this nice holiday and now we're gonna force you to go to Vegas and schmooze For
Speaker 1:a week.
Speaker 2:For five days.
Speaker 1:Get ready to go to Vegas.
Speaker 2:Get ready to schmooze.
Speaker 1:It sounds exhausting. I I've actually never been to CES. But they do you know what they call CES? They they they still got it in terms of the branding. They're coming in strong.
Speaker 2:What is it?
Speaker 1:CES refers to itself as the most powerful tech event in the world. Really bringing the superlatives.
Speaker 2:It might be. It might be.
Speaker 1:Mean, I think it still is.
Speaker 2:It probably still is. Okay. Yeah. There's a bunch of launches that we should talk about. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We wanna talk about the Smart Brick Okay. For sure. From Lego. But why don't we go into your to your office?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I I call it the death of the tech conference because I noticed something which we'll get into. But what's interesting is CES launched so long ago, 1967. Isn't that like I I would have said, like, '85, maybe '92. Right?
Speaker 1:What was '67.
Speaker 2:What were the
Speaker 1:'67.
Speaker 2:Consumer electronics at the first event?
Speaker 1:So, I mean, the the number of things that launched at CES is are is actually crazy. So the VCR launched at CES. Like, the thing that you put the tape into. I know you don't watch movies and you never had a VCR. I had a VCR.
Speaker 2:I actually did.
Speaker 1:You had a VCR?
Speaker 2:Like a personal Yeah. Little
Speaker 1:You put the tape in. You have to rewind it when you're done watching the movie. That launched at CES. CES started in 1967. It was a sleepy affair until 1970 when Philips unveiled its n 1,500 video cassette recorder.
Speaker 1:Until that point, VCRs cost upwards of $50,000. Imagine dropping 50 g's
Speaker 2:on it. Okay. At the first one in 1967, they had transistor radios. Yeah. Early color televisions.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Phonographs. Yeah. And tape recorders.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm gonna tell you more about what launched at CES, but first, I'm gonna tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI super computers for training and inference at that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 2:Can we can we show our new our new
Speaker 1:We have the Lambda lightning round. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not CGI. It's here.
Speaker 2:Here in the studio.
Speaker 1:And, we're we're we're very excited for landing a lightning round. We have a lightning round today with a bunch of folks, including, Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Simenoff. We have, Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks.
Speaker 1:All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you with the linear lineup taking you through
Speaker 2:Pull it up. Guests There we go. Day. Alex Epstein, Jamie We're
Speaker 1:gonna dive into the piece that I wrote yesterday about energy with Alex. He's an expert in energy production.
Speaker 2:Are gonna cap it off with Lulu today.
Speaker 1:We got a massive lineup. So anyway, speaking of lineups, the lineup of stuff that launched at CES, the Atari Pong console 1975, the CD player launched in 1981 Woah. At CES, the Commodore '64 1982, the DVD at 9 1996, the Xbox in 2001. And we really gotta play this video of how the Xbox launched because it will 2001, Bill Gates gets on stage at CES. He doesn't host his own conference, which which is what I'm gonna talk about with my thesis of, like, what why the tech conference is dying.
Speaker 1:But he launches and, you know, today, we think we're so cool. Oh, tech companies, they have vibe reels, they have cinematic videos, and they go on podcasts, and they do podcast circuits when they launch things. Get on stage with Dwayne The Rock Johnson. That's the bar because that's exactly what Bill Gates did in 2001 when he launched the Xbox. We gotta play this video With Dwayne.
Speaker 6:Unveiling the Xbox.
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 6:This is the product that will be out later this year, and there's an amazing amount going on working with partners who help build the hardware, working with the software developers, working with the retailers. The program around this thing is really quite phenomenal. But the box itself is another thing that we put a lot of energy in.
Speaker 7:So you may have
Speaker 6:been wondering what this great
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 6:Device was here.
Speaker 1:This is showmanship.
Speaker 6:This is the Xbox.
Speaker 1:This is the Xbox.
Speaker 6:For the first time, let me now unveil Look at this. Xbox.
Speaker 1:Woah. Do you ever have one of these?
Speaker 2:With the controller Yeah. In the in the Yeah. Plexiglass. Very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Dangling down there. This was iconic. Play Call of Duty, the original Modern Warfare was on there.
Speaker 6:The sign here was driven by spending time with gamers. Mhmm. And actually putting the control in their hands. Yeah. Try it out.
Speaker 1:The controller was huge the first controller was so big. They had to make a smaller one because they just went, like, way too big for some reason. I guess they were testing on the wrong type of people or something.
Speaker 2:You were they testing on you?
Speaker 1:No. There's this whole meme that it was, like, really good for Shaq, but that was it. And Shaq loved it or something. That I seem to remember this. I don't know.
Speaker 6:Loaded as you move
Speaker 1:That's it.
Speaker 6:From level to level. And what you're seeing on the front, the eject, the on off button, and four game ports. That was one of the big pieces of feedback was people didn't wanna be limited to two.
Speaker 1:They Yeah. The the PlayStation, I think, just had two at the time, and maybe the n 64 had four, but this is, a big jump jump forward. People.
Speaker 2:Then Dwayne comes out?
Speaker 1:Yeah. $2.46 while they are skipping ahead. Let me tell you about Labelbox delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. And we can go to two minutes and forty six seconds.
Speaker 6:So state of the art that they'll only be done right as we finish the manufacturing. So we'll plug those chips in. Except for that, everything in this box is the final design.
Speaker 7:We're gonna
Speaker 1:Look at this. Getting a celebrity like that? Like, OpenAI had so many announcements this year.
Speaker 8:Fit. There was
Speaker 1:the whole Scarlett Johansson thing. They didn't bring out the rock. Yeah. I might wanna use that sometime, Bill.
Speaker 6:Well, thanks, Rock. And it
Speaker 1:really is Rock. Thanks, Rock. The celebrity cameo
Speaker 2:My box.
Speaker 1:Launch is completely forgotten art. We don't know how to do this anymore.
Speaker 6:Five time WWF champion.
Speaker 2:Alright. Pause for a second. Because I think people would be shocked at how inexpensive it could be to Oh, work with a a a effect. I don't know about a list, but maybe like an aging out, like somebody that was iconic Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Actor Yes. Totally. An athlete, etcetera. And just instead of spending $30,000 on some insane launch video Yeah. Just get a camera and hire some celebrity Yeah.
Speaker 2:And have them explain your product.
Speaker 1:That would be I I that would be genius. Yeah. I mean, you see a lot of these There
Speaker 2:was that there was that that drink company that that did this. Do you remember? They they had some celebrity, like, read every sign. Remember that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Orca. Orca.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We remember it today. And and a lot of a lot of founders have figured out how to marshal the right resources for really cinematic footage, good editing, a bunch of things to to introduce their product, but some of them just aren't charismatic on camera, unfortunately, and they just don't have the reps. So if you bring in a celebrity, it can just also, it's just way way more thumb stopping. Like, you're just gonna be scrolling and be like, oh, what what is The Rock doing there promoting your product?
Speaker 1:Obviously, not everyone has the resources of Microsoft. I bet that was expensive, and who knows how doable it is. But I bet if you get creative, there is a way to do it. Anyway, CES, when it launched, I thought this was impressive. 1967, no, like, no precedent.
Speaker 1:There's not really a tech community. It's sort of new. 17,000 people show up. 200 companies put on exhibitions. That seems like a lot.
Speaker 1:It's grown not even 10x. I mean, this was, this year or in 2024, they had 130,000 attendees. Like, it's grown a lot, but it's not you know, it started out pretty big. I personally love consumer technology. I've always been like a tech nerd and liked tinkering with gadgets and whatnot.
Speaker 1:But I think this year should be more interesting because the Bluetooth, WiFi, IoT, all that stuff was like sort of annoying. Maybe the AI stuff gets annoying, but I still feel like there's more opportunity for actually cool integrations with AI in all sorts of different hardware things. At the same time, I was at Best Buy over the break and I saw a TV that said it was powered by AI, and I was just shuddering thinking about how bad of an experience that probably was because what is it going to be trying to do? It's probably not integrating a frontier model. It's probably some really, really sloppy thing.
Speaker 2:Samsung had a big announcement last year.
Speaker 1:Perplexity integration.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. That makes ton And of again, I just think any time you're in a situation where you could ask your TV Yeah. For information, it's probably easier to ask your phone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Usually. Usually. And yeah. And so I I think you need to be a little bit more first principles when you think about these integrations thing.
Speaker 1:We'll into some of the stuff that actually launched that sounded interesting. But I wanted to go into the history of, like, how the tech conference like, the the the tech conference that's not linked to a single company sort of died, a lot of it goes back to the iPhone, actually. So the iPhone, probably the biggest consumer electronics product in history. It should have been launched at the Consumer Electronics Show. Like, it is the consumer electronics juggernaut.
Speaker 1:Should have
Speaker 2:been launched. Most important consumer product
Speaker 9:Ever.
Speaker 2:Of the twenty first century?
Speaker 1:Totally. And they got scooped by Macworld because Jobs wanted more control over how the presentation would go, so he chose to debut the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco on 01/09/2007. And Macworld was technically independent from Apple, So the conference was created by IDG, this international data group. Very interesting story there. They had Computer World and PC World and a bunch of different conferences, publications.
Speaker 1:Guy started a magazine. Great
Speaker 2:name. International Data Group. Fantastic. We don't know how to make names like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's right up there with IBM. Seriously. And and and he, you know, kind of scaled this business. Eventually, Macworld was technically independent from from Apple, but Apple was, like, obviously the cornerstone draw to the event.
Speaker 1:They'd give them the keynote, great floor space, and then all the other independent third party Mac developers. So if you were developing a piece of software or even just, like, you know, a phone case, it didn't make sense at that time. But, like, you could imagine all sorts of different peripherals, a printer. You'd go there and figure out partnerships and do deals. Launching the iPhone at Macworld, which happened at the exact same time as CES, It allowed Jobs to control everything about the big reveal, the lighting, the pacing.
Speaker 1:He was famously like fanatical about this. He rehearsed for weeks and weeks and weeks. He wanted things exactly. He wanted certain demos to happen after, and he just got way more control at Macworld than he would have gotten at CES. And the big thing is that at CES, journalists go around from booth to booth and they compare spec sheets.
Speaker 1:So with TVs, know like four k, eight k, three d, not three d, OLED or refresh rate or number of ports, price point. So they create these, like, charts and they keep everything in a category. And he wanted to be category defining and he wanted to break the category. And he also did not want to be compared to to the Nokia n 95. No.
Speaker 1:The Nokia N95 was actually the best weird
Speaker 2:It was more more performant.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It beat it on basically everything at the time.
Speaker 2:He didn't wanna go spec to spec.
Speaker 1:He didn't. He didn't. So the Nokia had three g already. It had GPS. It allowed for copy pasting of text.
Speaker 1:It had a front facing camera. It had a five megapixel rear view.
Speaker 2:We can copy and paste. Don't have that No.
Speaker 1:The number of features of the Nokia N95 was crazy. It could record videos. The iPhone couldn't record videos. It had a five megapixel camera instead of a two megapixel camera. It even had an FM radio, which I don't I don't think anyone really wants.
Speaker 1:But, you know, it had a bunch of features that if it was just if you just created a table of iPhone versus Nokia n 95, the Nokia beat it on, like, you know, 10 different specs. The only thing that the iPhone really had going for it was that it had a touch screen, and and the Nokia didn't. But people didn't think they wanted a touch screen at that point because most touchscreens were terrible, and the iPhone sort of had the first good touchscreen. And then also it had some other unique Apple innovations like a full featured Safari web browser, but it didn't even have third party apps. The Nokia did.
Speaker 1:And so Steve Jobs was able to sort of reframe the whole iPhone discussion as like, it's just this own thing. Don't comp us to Nokia. Why are we talking about Nokia? We're not gonna talk about Nokia. They're not at Macworld.
Speaker 1:They're not allowed to be here.
Speaker 2:Best marketer of all time.
Speaker 1:Clearly. And everyone copied him. So very, very quickly, every tech company wanted to do the same thing, set their own agenda, have full control over the event from start to finish. Apple actually pulled out of Macworld two years later, went started doing WWDC and and and their own their own self hosted events, self distributed events. Obviously, technology itself makes a lot of that easier.
Speaker 1:Cameras are cheaper. You can livestream. You can to restream, and you can and you can your your event everywhere. So you have Google IO, Microsoft Build, Meta Connect, Samsung Unpackedly. When Zuck introduced the latest Meta Ray Ban displays, he didn't do it at CES.
Speaker 1:He didn't wait for CES. He was just like, I'm gonna have my own event. He did it at his own event. He created his own news cycle. And it was like he had full control over that.
Speaker 1:And so everyone's followed Jobs Playbook, and it's been remarkably successful. Like, I don't think it's been a miss. The older tradeshow format still works for lots of companies, and big tech companies do still have presences. So just today at CES or yesterday, Jensen was there, and and NVIDIA unveiled Vera Rubin, their new
Speaker 2:Which looks incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it it also, it's not a consumer electronics product. It's of an odd place to do it, but it's like a fun event. But even NVIDIA has their own conferences now. So and but the the my main takeaway is, like, just, like, in terms of key moments in tech history, I don't expect them to happen at independent trade shows anymore.
Speaker 1:And truthfully, they haven't happened there for decades. We looked at the VCR and the CD player and the Xbox. That's over 25 years old now at this point, although The Rock alongside Bill Gates is an iconic moment. But that is of old at this point. And still, there's plenty to get from a show from CES.
Speaker 1:It's a fantastic place. If you're in the industry, you don't go as like a fan. A lot of people who are Apple fans will watch an Apple keynote just to know, Hey, should I buy the new iPhone? You don't really go to CES with that same idea or that goal. You go because you're there looking for a supplier or someone to distribute or
Speaker 2:You go because
Speaker 1:you're in the industry. Your CEO has is Get ready to drink by the in Vegas.
Speaker 2:Get ready to go.
Speaker 1:Seriously. Seriously. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.
Speaker 1:CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And there are some fun things that did launch at CES. The first thing that I wanted to go through was The Wall Street Journal's write up of CES coverage. It's interesting because it's almost no consumer electronics. So of course, they highlighted NVIDIA, the faster artificial intelligence chips, Vera Rubin, the CPUGPU combination.
Speaker 1:Mercedes Benz, NVIDIA has a partnership to make the first autonomous car built in partnership with Mercedes Benz set to hit US roads in the first three months of this year.
Speaker 2:The tire of my Mercedes Benz Oh. Exploded autonomously this morning on the way to work.
Speaker 1:Been complaining about the roads in LA and making this point like you need an SUV since the beginning of the show.
Speaker 2:And my and my and and what's happened? Yeah. We've had three tires blown
Speaker 1:out Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. On What's up? On LA roads. I do think I was complaining about I don't I'm not sure if it was on air or off air, at but least in the last forty eight hours Mhmm. I was talking was joking about needing an SUV for the LA roads.
Speaker 2:And of course, this morning It's true. At 05:35AM, the tire did not survive a pothole. Anyways Ridiculous. Going forward, AMD, the journal says AMD also unveiled its latest AI chips known as the Instinct, which will launch later this year. They're expected to be AMD's strongest competition to Nvidia yet.
Speaker 2:Shares fell more than 2%, however. Uber Yeah. Uber's ride hailing company plus EV maker, Lucid and Neuro, have begun on road testing for their planned robo taxi service. Uber expects to offer the service in San Francisco later this year. Stock jumped five and a half percent.
Speaker 2:So CES, least announcements are still moving Yeah. Moving the market. There's some
Speaker 1:other cool stuff. I mean, Dell's in here. They're reviving the XPS computer line, but the they also launched a massive 52 inch monitor or something like that, a six k monitor. And I feel like that could be pretty sick if you need
Speaker 2:If you're monitoring Situations. Of course. Get, like, six
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Six of these.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Lego launched a smart brick and There we go. High-tech Star Wars toys.
Speaker 2:This was this was the launch launch of the year contender, and it's Already? It's the first week in Star Wars. So let's let's pull it up if if But
Speaker 7:yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's this. Let's watch.
Speaker 9:For a smart minifigure. And you'll see from the sound and the color when it detects it. But it's not just looking for the minifigure, it knows who that minifigure is and actually it knows where that minifigure is.
Speaker 2:So, as I move the minifigure around,
Speaker 9:you'll see different lights and colors depending on where the minifigure is compared to the brick.
Speaker 10:What does this allow us to do? Well, you
Speaker 2:saw it actually. Children.
Speaker 3:That's good. I
Speaker 1:think this is good. I I remember
Speaker 2:We turned every Lego brick into a mini iPad.
Speaker 1:I I remember there were
Speaker 2:We're excited to addict your children to Lego.
Speaker 1:There was some sort of Lego programmable computer, but it was much larger. It was about this big when I was a kid. And
Speaker 5:Yeah. They go mind storm.
Speaker 1:Mind storms. That was it. That was amazing. Because you could actually learn to program a little bit, and you could do little, like, self driving cars like line following. You could draw a line on the ground that can have a little camera that looked at the line and follow it around.
Speaker 1:And it it it just let you build
Speaker 2:Ryan says the LEGO Turbo Puffer is gonna need a rebuild. Totally. Simon, we need to make this a smart Smart Lego Puffer. Smart Puffer. For sure.
Speaker 1:But, yeah. So, Lego's launching the most ambitious brick it's ever made. A tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic two by four Lego brick. It will make entire Lego sets come to life with humming lightsabers, roaring engines, light up blasters, and more from the verge. Love it.
Speaker 1:Coverage. Very cool.
Speaker 2:Boston And of course, Boston Dynamics. Yeah. Demo champions of the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They got a Best to ever demo. Robots, some 11 Labs voices. 11 Labs build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology.
Speaker 2:There actually is a real call
Speaker 1:to action.
Speaker 2:Let your robots talk
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:With 11 Labs.
Speaker 1:It definitely needs it as feature.
Speaker 2:So Boston Dynamics Yeah. Is starting the year strong. Mhmm. They seem to be upset that Figure is valued at roughly one Ford Motor Company and they're not happy about it. So they're they're launching they had a new video of Yeah.
Speaker 2:Various Boston Dynamics robots in de a facto Hyundai?
Speaker 1:Here. They've been doing this for so long. But don't know. It looks good. I don't know.
Speaker 1:How tall is it? Two point three meters? Oh, that's how long it can reach. That's pretty big. I feel like a lot of the humanoids have been really, really small.
Speaker 1:Just kind of like smaller. Is this is this not CGI? I I can't even tell at this point.
Speaker 2:It's looks like
Speaker 1:Wow. So good. Was a cool move.
Speaker 2:The way that it can move
Speaker 1:is That was a cool move.
Speaker 2:The way that it stands up is wild too. Yeah. Standing up. It looks like a spider and
Speaker 1:then it's Yeah. Kind of Yeah. Very disconcerting. But that one is crazy. Oh, that we we we saw this from one of the Chinese humanoid
Speaker 2:Do you think that swap them
Speaker 1:from battery?
Speaker 2:Maybe their one of their first use cases could be gloving at
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's really trendy. I've been seeing that. Gloving. I saw some video of somebody gloving on an airplane or something.
Speaker 1:You see that one? But, yeah, you saw that.
Speaker 2:Tyler, you need to start gloving. Yeah. When a founder anytime a founder raises more than a $100,000,000, you gotta say, can I glove for you?
Speaker 1:Can glove for you? What is that? From like EDM culture or something? I don't know. That's very funny.
Speaker 1:Sorry. What what else is in this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Boston Dynamics robot has an operating temperature range of negative four degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty interesting all the way up to a 104.
Speaker 1:104.
Speaker 2:Six feet two inches tall.
Speaker 1:104 feels like that's
Speaker 2:Got a great build, honestly. Six to a 198 pounds can work at negative four.
Speaker 1:What's this mid face ratio?
Speaker 5:How's this upper maxilla? It's a it's circle.
Speaker 1:It's a circle. Okay. Well, perfect. That's a perfect ratio, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So apparently, Hyundai is preparing to deploy tens of thousands of their robots into their manufacturing facilities.
Speaker 1:They're 66 pounds sustained, you know, weight capacity. Most most people can lift more than that. Come on. We gotta get those numbers up. But, yeah, this will be interesting.
Speaker 1:I I wonder I wonder what the future of this company's trade traded hands so many times. It's owned by, Hyundai right now. They gotta spin it out. They gotta go public. They gotta get this thing in the public markets again.
Speaker 1:They gotta launch on the New York Stock Exchange. If they wanna change the world, they gotta raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:Great idea. Should we talk about Jamie Dimon?
Speaker 1:Let's do it.
Speaker 2:In The New York Times today, Jamie Dimon's 770,000,000 haul shows how bankers are on top again. Mhmm. Let's give it up for the bankers.
Speaker 1:Mean, this Gong worthy, bro?
Speaker 2:This is Gong worthy. Let's do it.
Speaker 4:First Gong.
Speaker 2:Trump admin is lifting regulations and deal making is heating up for Jamie Dimon. Being JPMorgan Chase's chief executive was more lucrative in 2025 than ever. For nearly fifteen years, Jamie Dimon, the bank chieftain, has carried around what might as well be a talisman when he sees regulators, elected officials, and journalists. Wait.
Speaker 1:What? Talisman?
Speaker 2:What are talking At just just the right time in meetings, he breaks out a single page printout that he calls a spaghetti chart. On it, mister Diamond's under underlings have crammed in tiny type a comically complicated flowchart meant to represent the various laws and regulations to which his company, JPMorgan Chase, is subject. The theatrics have finally worked. The Trump admin is not just taking apart regulations, but attacking the whole regulatory agencies that date back to the two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine financial crisis and were meant to keep banks from giving in to their worst impulses. Regulators have also made it easier for banks to pedal in risky assets, again, like cryptocurrency and President Trump paused enforcement of of foreign anti bribery rules.
Speaker 2:Interesting. The deregulatory bonanza alone makes it the best time in a generation to be a banker. There's more. Falling interest rates in a permissive set of antitrust overseers are helping reverse a lull in the lucrative business of arranging M and A as the $100,000,000,000 bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Brothers Discovery shows. Once imperiled real estate loans look steadier, thanks to the rebound in in office work.
Speaker 2:Stocks are near record levels. The bond market had its best year since 2020, and gold and silver have soared, all of which feeds the trading businesses that keep Wall Street's profit machine humming.
Speaker 1:Let's hear
Speaker 2:profit machine. In other words, as analysts at Keefe, Bruyette and Woods recently put it, there's something for everyone. Big big bank stocks rose 29 in 2025, almost doubling the gain of The US stock stock market overall. Smaller lenders and community banks, tend to have a narrow narrower focus on areas such as residential mortgages and consumer checking accounts, also gained but performed considerably less well. So again, I mean, a big part of this is, banks have just been, you know, obviously lending with their hands tied behind their backs as as the p, as the private credit chat.
Speaker 1:That's true. That's actually true. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So they're just sitting And it's sort the
Speaker 1:same thing with like crypto. It's like, you know, if there's going to be a if you're gonna have a competitor that's like less way less regulated, that is a very that's a huge problem.
Speaker 2:Why would I work with JPMorgan Chase when I can work with World Liberty Financial?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is reinventing
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Financial. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like like the whole debanking sell or not debanking, bankless movement and stuff. Like, I I don't know that it's been a huge headwind.
Speaker 2:But No. I think I I think the the combination of m and a
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And private credit that that they have just been Mhmm. You know, private credit is just much more loosely regulated.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A combination of salary bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciation in his allotment of the bank shares yielded roughly $770,000,000 for Jamie Dimon, for the chief executives of Citi whose shares rose more than 65% in 2025 after the bank slashed tens of thousands of jobs in a year's long restructuring. And Goldman Sachs shares
Speaker 1:Tyler laughing for Tyler displacement.
Speaker 2:No. No. Because
Speaker 5:they were up 60.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Okay. Oh, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because the way that you reacted there looked a little No.
Speaker 5:You're cheering. Obviously. For the for
Speaker 1:the labor displacement. But this is not this is not AI driven, of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So anyways, they're counting some unrealized gains here, of course. Yeah. But anyways, big, big year for Jamie Dimon.
Speaker 7:Let's
Speaker 2:see. Should we pop over to Tuna?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's in
Speaker 2:Tuna says let
Speaker 1:me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents, baby.
Speaker 2:That's right. Tuna says, your soul is out of balance because you have fallen out of touch with your consumer demographic. Pay more attention to your personalized ads. Let them flow through you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Pay attention. They do really tell you something about I've I've
Speaker 1:been getting I mean, speaking of the CES consumer products, I've been getting personalized ads for the board, the the the smart game board. But we had the founder on the show and I bought one.
Speaker 2:I bought one too.
Speaker 1:What what give me your review. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Haven't played it yet. No. So so here's the challenge.
Speaker 11:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We had less help around the house Sure. Over the last two weeks. And board is designed for, I think, kids like I think it's like six and up. Like, it's not it's not like a under five game. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so trying to pull that out and play when you're just gonna have, you know, like one or three year old just like, you know, messing with it. It's pretty much impossible. But I'm excited to play it Yeah. Hopefully this week.
Speaker 5:The review guys should play live during the show.
Speaker 4:Right
Speaker 1:here? We should. Yeah. The the review from the four and a half year old was a plus. He loved it.
Speaker 2:What'd you play?
Speaker 1:We we stuck to the more simple games, I think. Also, they're still rolling out some of the games. So it ships and you get a number of pieces in bags. And and some of the pieces that they ship to you, the games haven't actually finished. They haven't finished coding them, I guess.
Speaker 1:And so they're not live. But we played this sort of like space invaders game that you put this, like, sort of triangle block on the screen. And then when you're in this one zone, you're basically firing at these asteroids that come by and you break them up and you get the score. And it was interesting. It was intuitive enough that the four year old could pick it up and actually get some points, But there were enough layered mechanics that if you collected enough of this material, you could turn on this massive laser beam that would sort of, like, destroy everything.
Speaker 1:So there was, like I I found myself being like, oh, I know that there's a that it's possible to get 4,000 points even though we're averaging, like, 2,500 points now. If I really max this out and we were to play this at a high level, like, the skill ceiling's actually sort of high, which is fun. So I thought that the game design was pretty good in that one. Then there
Speaker 2:were I love how you don't you don't every like, every game, anything like that, you're just like, I need to max it out.
Speaker 1:Oh, for sure. I need
Speaker 2:to max it out. For sure. Like, even if you don't care about it Yeah. You care about maxing out the score.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I told It's a
Speaker 2:good I told bosses
Speaker 1:in Medic. One point, had the highest score in Robo Recall in
Speaker 2:the world. Okay. So apparently, so so, Vaik on our team says, my three year old nephew loves the weird alien dog game.
Speaker 1:So Is that the one point?
Speaker 2:Is apparently, it is suited for three year olds and I need Is to get into
Speaker 1:is the is the weird alien dog one where it it comes in the house and you have to wash it off? That's the one. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Because that one's really funny. It's more like a Tamagotchi. Like, you're supposed to check on it every day and it comes in from the house.
Speaker 1:It's all dirty. So you wash it off. You soap it up. Scrub it. And and you have all these different tools.
Speaker 1:So you have a little watering can, and you put the watering can on the screen of the board. And when you do, it it sort of showers the pet, and then it washes it off. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I
Speaker 1:think for board to
Speaker 2:sell Yeah. A million units Yeah. They need like a super super viral individual game.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't I don't think it's gonna it it won't be enough to have like a hand, you know, eight games that are all fun. Yeah. They need a breakout. This is a hits business. Right?
Speaker 2:So they need Sure. They need Like a katan. Yeah. Like, I think People they're gonna need
Speaker 1:are getting together specifically to play this game together. Yeah. None of the games were at that level. All of the games felt like a couple minutes and you're done and the mechanics you could play them again. There's some repeatability, but none of the games were so intense that also, there just aren't that many pieces.
Speaker 1:Like, there's most of the games have, like, six pieces. There's 10 pieces. And so if you had resources I guess all those resources could be sort of digitally, like, counted, which might be nice, actually, because you can play a more complex game with more resources where you know, have have you ever played one of those board games where there's, like, 17 different resources and you have all these different tokens and counters, and it's like it actually gets overwhelming and annoying? I don't know. But let me tell you about vibe.co because maybe Vibe should advertise on streaming TV.
Speaker 1:Because Vibe dot co is where d to c
Speaker 2:You mean bored.
Speaker 1:Startups. Oh, yeah. Bored. AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. That should be their next place to advertise.
Speaker 1:I like it. And you and every and it's a lesson to everyone to get in touch with their consumer demographic and pay more attention to the personal ads. You need to let them float.
Speaker 2:Did you wanna talk about Yes. Capital in the twenty second century?
Speaker 1:Yes. Let's read Philip Trammell's post. He says a week ago, Dwarra Kesh and him, Phil, posted a fun essay using Thomas Piketty's Capital in the twenty first Century as a lens through which to explore the possible impacts of AI on inequality, as the Financial Times kindly put it. That was all it was meant to be. The discussion has definitely become more intense than I'd expected.
Speaker 1:This is my first time on X in any serious way. Welcome to the arena, brother. Get in. Buckle up.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the dive bar.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it's been good to see so many people engaging with the essay and the topic. I can't complain about the negative responses since I expect most of the positive responses were from people who did not read it at all and just like seeing another person another reason to tax the rich. That's funny. I hadn't thought about that.
Speaker 1:I I think there's also people that gave a positive response just because they like Dorkash. Right? And they're like, oh, cool. New Dorkash thing. I I I'm I'm a fan.
Speaker 1:But there is one point some people, mainly economists, have raised that I should acknowledge briefly. Also, I mean, this was a I I don't think they wrote it knowing that there was going to be this whole, like, Ro Khanna, Peter Thiel, Teddy Schleffer, the whole, like, wealth tax thing that was going on in California. Yeah. And they just happened to drop something that read like a critique or a commentary. It was in the zeitgeist at the same time, but I don't think that was intentional.
Speaker 1:I think they were working on this piece for, like, probably months. It's like a very it's like a paper. And so it's not like they were like, oh, let's react to Ro Khanna's viral post and let's hammer this out. It might have even dropped like the day before. But he says he's responding to The Economist that put him in the truth zone or at least tried to.
Speaker 1:He says and before I read this, me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security, the leading AI trust management platform. Please, Vanta. So they say the labor share could rise if human provided goods and services are gross complements for capital provided ones in our utility functions, what Nordhaus twenty twenty one might call on the demand side. And even if we build machines physically capable of producing everything people can, what Nordhaus might call on the supply side, this gross complementarity at the utility level could be maintained indefinitely.
Speaker 1:Funnily enough, on the list of on the long list of blog posts I've been hoping to write for a long time, one is titled Is Labor a Luxury? Is about how this possibility is underappreciated but then makes a case for why I think on balance it probably won't happen in the long run. Naturally, I'm especially prioritizing that post for now. As for now, my only substantive reply on the question is a lame, just give me a month. But whether the case is wrong or right, I promise it doesn't rely on a conceptual mistake like assuming that galaxies made of capital will have to get a higher share than labor because they'll be large and productive at producing the incomplete set of goods they are used to produce.
Speaker 1:Maybe that blog post should have come before this one, but I figured that in writing the current blog post, exploring the case against long run gross complementarity on the demand side would be a distracting rabbit hole because, one, Piketty implicitly assumes gross substitution across the board already two, Nordhaus and related discussion have taken the position that advanced enough machines would probably yield gross substitution across the board so that we need fast growing all purpose robots to drive the supply side singularity or gross substitution on the demand side so that we were satisfied with large quantities of IT consumption goods instead of shifting our demand for non IT goods. For capital to accumulate rapidly but consumption to be bottlenecked by labor, the price of consumption goods would have to rise relative to that of capital goods. This is totally fine, of course. We're imagining a very different future in all sorts of ways, and I think it is a very far future, but it is one interesting to think about.
Speaker 2:Maybe maybe it'd be helpful to kind of summarize it, people haven't read it. Yeah. The kind of key fact. So the so the thesis is basically like inequality is gonna get worse because of AI. That's core thesis.
Speaker 2:And maybe you need to figure out a way to different methods of taxation to redistribute the wealth that is ultimately Yep. Created if if people cannot effectively increase their own capital via their labor. So Yep. Key factors, they talk about privatization of returns. So like very very hard to get exposure to x AI Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right now if you're just a normal person. Yeah. Two, most people have their wealth in their home. Right? And the issue is like home equity is not a good way to benefit from increasing returns to capital that come from automation.
Speaker 2:Right? So if you have a home, I think they said, if you have a home in Ohio and you have like $300,000 locked up in that, you're not gonna get some massive incremental return from that. Maybe somebody that is pursuing AI automation or building factories or something, they could buy your home at a premium, but they could also just buy acres and acres and acres of just land somewhere else in The US at far, far less. They talk about the end of international catch up, which is basically that poor countries historically had a lot of cheap labor. They'd bring in capital.
Speaker 2:They would turn that and they would Put the create cheap labor to work. Yeah. They'd create value and retain some of that value Yep. Even though a lot of the investment was foreign. And then and then the the sort of they talk about, like, wealth transfer as the a lot of more developed economies are sort of like aging aging out effectively.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. But certainly sparked debate. I thought I thought this post from Tomas Bargartour was interesting.
Speaker 2:This was sort of reaction to the post. Tomas says, Both Rakesh and his critics imagine an absurd world. Think of the future they argue about. Political economy doesn't change rapidly, even as the speed of history increases in the literal sense that the speed of thought of the actors who produce history will be thousands of times faster, not to mention way smarter. These are agents to whom we've seen like toddlers walking in slow motion.
Speaker 2:It is complete insanity to expect your OpenAI stock certificates to be worth anything in this world, even if it is compatible with human survival. So many can't contend with the scope of what they project. They can't hold in their mind that things are allowed to be different, so we get bizarre arguments about nonsense. Own a galaxy? Question mark.
Speaker 2:What does this mean for a human to own a galaxy in an economy operated by minds running thousands to millions of times faster than ours? Children? What sort of children? Copies of your brain state? Are you even allowing yourself to think about the level of bizarreness required?
Speaker 2:Because these are table stakes, and even they will be economically obsolete curiosities by the time they're created. Things will be much weirder than we can possibly comprehend. How often have property rights been reset throughout history? How quickly will history move in the transition period? Why shouldn't it trample on your stock certificates if not the air you breathe?
Speaker 2:But institutions are surprisingly robust. Maybe they are. How long have they existed in their current form? How fast will history be moving exactly? Suppose OpenAI aligns AI, whatever that means.
Speaker 2:Will it serve the interests of the US government, the CCP? Will they align it to a humanity weighted by wealth to OpenAI stockholders, to SAMA, to the coterie of engineers who may as well be AIs who actually know WTF is going on, to the coding agent who implements it, tax policy, question mark. Truly the important question. What does it mean to be a human principle in this world? How robust are these institutions?
Speaker 2:How secure is the human mind? Extremely insecure, given how easy humans are to scam. There's gonna be a lot of incentive to break your mind if you own check notes, a whole galaxy. Oh, you will have an a a a little AI nanny to defend you now? Wow.
Speaker 2:Isn't that nice? Please return to the beginning of the paragraph. A human owning galaxies? That's bad space opera. Treat the future with the respect it deserves.
Speaker 2:This scenario is not even close to science fictional enough to happen. So anyways, I guess push back here generally, hey, even in the scenario that you lay out, things could get so crazy that we won't have any the institutions just break
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The way that the world currently works breaks.
Speaker 1:The
Speaker 2:the thing with the thing with I was thinking about with if you own a bunch of OpenAI shares
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In this sort of fast takeoff scenario, is this to maybe there's a world where you could pay for things with OpenAI shares. Right? But is a super intelligence gonna say, oh, oh, yes. I would like to buy some OpenAI shares. Right?
Speaker 1:Or would they just corners
Speaker 2:the market. Buy them all or just rebuild, you know, effectively You just know, so so It is a lot. This I I think it's in any type of these in any type of fast takeoff scenario, how do you actually it's hard to have I think I think the I I love reading love reading this essay. I'd like to see more of them. But it's so difficult to any scenario you can imagine, there are 50 there's an infinite number of parallel realities where none of the same ground rules apply.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I wonder the twenty second century thing is is it does mean, you keep you keep coming back to like this idea of fast takeoff. And it feels like even in some sort of like slow progress, like if you just extrapolate like the default trend lines and nothing really changes, like you still see a lot of these effects happen with tech companies becoming more powerful and the owners of capital becoming more powerful. Ben Thompson had an interesting an interesting interpretation of this saying that he said, This gets at what I found the most frustrating what was most frustrating about Patel and Trammell's point of view.
Speaker 1:The core assumption undergirding their argument was also about the human condition. It just happened to be negative. And he basically said that, like, you have to imagine a world where humans remain the same and that they are still, like, bothered by wealth inequality. Because in this scenario, there's abundance and there's enough, like, like, robots can just pre create everything, so you have, like, unlimited, you know, everything you could possibly want from a consumption perspective. But you're still bothered by the fact that, like, that guy owns 10,000 galaxies and I only own 1,000 galaxies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not right.
Speaker 1:And that yeah. Yeah. It doesn't feel balanced and that's and and it's odd because you have to think about this world where, okay, you own galaxies that are hundreds of thousands of years apart and so you it takes you, like, a million years to get there. And it's like and maybe you're still bothered by that. Like, it would be funny if we if we discovered aliens that were just extremely rich.
Speaker 1:Like, that make us all worse off? Like, would would would Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos go to bed sadder if they found aliens, like, know, a million light years away?
Speaker 2:Like, your size is not size.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're just like, yeah. We actually we're actually sitting on an eye an entire planet of diamond, and we're we're worth quadrillions of dollars. Everyone here is worth quadrillions of dollars. You guys are nowhere near us in terms of wealth.
Speaker 1:Would that actually bother you? Or would you just be like, oh, it's okay. There's those aliens that are over there. I can't even get to them. It doesn't affect me.
Speaker 1:Like, how much is it how much is wealth inequality a direct focus on, like, the keeping up with the Joneses, like, neighbor effect, the direct memetics of, like, the person that you see as your as your equal? But don't know. He Ben Thompson kind of returns to this idea that you have to assume that something about the human condition holds where humans are upset by wealth inequality, but they don't value other humans or the work of other humans or the creativity of other humans and they don't see any value in that. And so because he's making the point that he he quotes Louis CK in in an October 2008 appearance of Late Night with Conan. And he says, everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy.
Speaker 1:And as you all you've almost certainly seen this clip, but if not, it's worth watching. Louis CK focuses on three incredible Can
Speaker 2:pull it up?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let me let me send it to the team and see if we can drop this. So he says, Louis CK focuses on three incredible technological innovations and how quickly we took them for granted: smartphones, Internet access on planes and the act of flying itself. It's certainly a sentiment I can relate to in just the last seventy two hours. I have chafed at slow airplane WiFi, complained about jet lag from having literally traversed the globe, he went to Taiwan and back, and gotten frustrated at an iPhone bug that is sapping my battery.
Speaker 1:It is also terrible. Until I remember, I have access to everything, anything, everywhere, can be anywhere, anytime. And oh, yes, I can achieve both simultaneously. If anything, you can make the case that technological innovations, virtue of conferring their benefits on everybody, has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse off. That's a very, very weird concept, but I I I feel it as well.
Speaker 1:Let's watch this Louis C. K. Clip.
Speaker 8:We may be going back to
Speaker 2:that, by the way. But
Speaker 8:in a way, good. Because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the side. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy.
Speaker 8:Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. We had a phone that you had to stand next to, and you had to dial it.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 8:Do do you realize how primitive you're making sparks in a phone, and you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more Right. Oh, this guy's got two zeros. Screw that guy.
Speaker 1:Why do I wanna
Speaker 8:And then if if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank for when it was open for like three hours. You'd just stay in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you ran out of money, you'd just go, well, I can't do any more things now. Right.
Speaker 9:Right.
Speaker 6:I can't
Speaker 1:do any more things.
Speaker 3:That's it.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 8:That was it. And even if had a credit card, they the guy would go, ugh. And he'd bring out this whole chunk chunk, and he'd write you have to call the president to see if you have any money. It's all true kids. You had to call the president.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It was ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 8:Do you feel that we now, in the twenty first century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah. Because now we live in an in an amazing amazing amazing world, and it's wasted on the on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care because this is what people are like now. They got their phone, and they're like, ugh. It won't give it a second.
Speaker 8:Give it's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of, like, too slow? I was on a I was on an airplane, and there was Internet, high speed Internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists.
Speaker 8:And I'm sitting on the plane, they go, Open up your laptop.
Speaker 9:You can go
Speaker 8:on the Internet. And it's fast, and I'm watching YouTube clips. It's I'm in an airplane.
Speaker 1:2,008
Speaker 8:And
Speaker 1:then watching YouTube breaks on a TV
Speaker 8:And they apologize. The Internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, this is bull Like, how quickly the world owes him something
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 8:He knew existed only ten seconds ago. Right. Right. And on planes flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story, and it's like a horror story. It's they act like their flight was like a cattle car in the forties in Germany.
Speaker 8:That's how bad they make it sound. Right. They're like, it was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for twenty minutes. And then we get on the plane, and they made us sit there on the runway for forty minutes.
Speaker 8:We had to sit there. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non contributing zero?
Speaker 8:But you got to fly you're flying. It's amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, Oihan. Wow. Yes.
Speaker 8:You're flying.
Speaker 2:You're He wants to bring back clapping. Clapping on Oh, yeah. Alright. Pause it. Pause it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I did I this reminded me a couple days ago.
Speaker 1:Before you tell us this, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 2:Great stuff, John. A couple days ago Yeah. My my one and a half year old Mhmm. Has not has not been sleeping super well. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Toddlers, they go through periods where they sleep well, and then they stop sleeping well. And with my three year old, we hired a when he was going through a similar phase, we hired a sleep consultant. Yeah. These are people that just help your baby.
Speaker 2:It's like a sleep coach for your baby and Yep. And and the parents or whatever. And with my three year old, we hired somebody and they effectively you know, that's effect the effective rate is like hundreds of dollars an hour. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because there's some retainer and blah blah blah. And it works really well. Like, it it's a lifesaver. But with a one and a half year old, a few days ago, my wife just goes to an LLM Yeah. And just, like, breaks down exactly
Speaker 1:What's happening.
Speaker 2:Like, what's happening.
Speaker 1:Here's the answer.
Speaker 2:And it is effectively running calculations based on the child's age and their sleep patterns now and how to get them back on a better sleep pattern. And within twenty four hours, like, the problem was totally solved. Like Yeah. Back to sleeping on the right schedule, napping on the right schedule, like, basically one shot at it. And I was just thinking how, you know you know, OpenAI has gotten so much specifically, Sam has gotten so much pushback because he'll go out and say, like, we're gonna solve this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're gonna have person you're gonna have, like, a personal tutor in your pocket and all And the then people, like, you know, hammer him because it's, like, well, then we're doing Sora and we're doing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You know, adult entertainment and things like that. But it's act like, AI is actually already delivering on Well, you this sort of
Speaker 1:Do you remember the Fallon clip that where that went viral? Where where Fallon asks him, like, are do you use ChadGPT to parent your kid?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He was like, honestly, like, it feels weird to say it, but yes. And it's like, that's exactly your experience. It was like Yeah. It is it is helpful. And, yeah, it is it is a weird thing.
Speaker 1:But the it's it's this, it's this when technology goes broad, it becomes available to everyone. I was reflecting on on airplane travel over the break. You know those pictures of, like, back in 1965, planes used to be so nice, and now you're, like, stuffed in the back like cattle? You know you know these photos where you're like, we gotta return to 1965 planes. I ran the numbers, and it and it turns out that the total amount of flights the total amount of passenger flights, like individual person gets on a plane, goes somewhere in The United States in 1965, in total, across everything, is the same number, almost exactly the same number, as total first class flights in 2025.
Speaker 1:And so, basically, anyone who could fly in '20 in in 1965 is now flying first class, and then you added there's 10 times as many non first class flights that are happening as well. And so it's like you you basically actually kept that level of service. It just became known as first class.
Speaker 2:Different product.
Speaker 1:But in 1965, even just getting on a plane was first class because it was really expensive. It got cheaper, but all those all the rich people stayed in first class, and then and then you gave the ability to fly at all to 10 times as many people. And and and that just continues. And so but it's this weird thing because that doesn't feel satisfying because you see the people up in front of class and you're like, I want to be up there. Let me go back to Ben Thompson and close this out.
Speaker 1:But first, let me tell you about Figma. FigmaMake isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build Okay. Code back prototypes in the app.
Speaker 5:You always have this critique of Yes. Of the coding models, and you're like, oh, they're not being used by everyone because the United app is so bad.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 5:You always have this Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 5:And then so there's this post. It's in the timeline. Okay. It's someone they say, one of the things I love about United is how good their iOS app is.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Because it it, like, it works well, and they they're just, like, glazing it.
Speaker 1:I I yeah. I I talked to Arun about this as well because I brought that up when I was talking to him, he was, kind of stomped. And then and then when I talked to him again, he was like, actually, I think it's better than you think it is. I think it's actually pretty good. And and so so I think that I think that you're you're right, and it's a good point that, like, the software the quality of the software is increasing.
Speaker 1:And I think I've probably been unduly mean to the United app. It's probably it's probably better than I'm giving it credit for. I'm probably just remembering bugs from years ago, and I just have a bad taste in my mouth. But there there there's there is something that AI is not at least solving immediately, which is just the business realities of where businesses have walled gardens or adversarial business incentives. So I'll give you an example.
Speaker 1:Apple TV. It's a great product. I I love the Apple TV. Plug it into TV. Works really well.
Speaker 4:Are you talking about the Apple TV?
Speaker 1:The physical device. Yeah. On the Apple TV physical device, yes, we're going here, is an app called Apple TV. And they have set this to be the default. I didn't know this, but you can actually change the button, the home button on the Apple TV, the Apple TV remote to go to the home screen, which has all the icons.
Speaker 1:So if you want to watch Netflix or HBO, you can go there. But by default, it now ships with a the home button goes to the TV app, which is a unifying layer over all of the content. And so if you want to find sports or you want to find the latest Apple TV show or you want to find something that's on Peacock or Paramount plus that will be integrated in there, and it's a great universal interface. At least it should be a universal interface, except Netflix said we're not participating. We want to be in our own app.
Speaker 1:So you cannot find a Netflix show in the TV app on the Apple TV box. And that is something that, like, no amount of vibe coding It's not a coding issue. It's a business model issue. It's Apple and Netflix are in competition, and so they have decided not to do a deal. And that results in a worse user experience, but better profits for both companies, and it's an irrational thing for them to do.
Speaker 1:And there's no amount of clawed code that can solve for that. So my take now has evolved to be that
Speaker 5:Why don't you move the goalpost?
Speaker 1:I will move the goalpost.
Speaker 2:Move the goalpost.
Speaker 1:I got to move the goalpost because the the AI AI coding models, until they can solve fundamental business competition issues with with a singles prompt, it will not satisfy my AGI. I need Netflix in my Apple TV app, and then it will be AGI. Then it will be AGI. Because it's not it's not a coding problem. It's a business model problem.
Speaker 2:I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to move the goalpost back Yes. Back back where And they started to
Speaker 1:business model problems are are enduring, and Ben Thompson makes the case that that that there are human conditions, there are human elements that will be enduring even
Speaker 2:in
Speaker 1:a post software only singularity.
Speaker 2:I had some there was a post I put in from Samuel Hammond over at FAI. Oh. He said, was just asked about my current views on AI takeoff speeds, both in the sense of GDP economic effects and the time gap between AGI and ASI, given I believe we'll get fully automated AI R and D by 2029. He said, here's my response via a quick email reply. Re GDP, I think we'll get a higher trend TFP level growth rate as past general purpose technologies.
Speaker 2:This will be a new higher growth regime, five to 10%, but not hyperbolic exponential growth.
Speaker 1:So not with the Elon triple digit?
Speaker 2:Yep. So bare. Real output will still be bottlenecked by infrastructure, legal and regulatory regimes, supply chains, human in the loop. We will still see a DigiFoom software singularity, but this will feel more disinflationary than anything. Sure.
Speaker 2:I mostly captured in consumer surplus. A lot of knowledge work will be outright automated, but a lot will still remain given human rents Mhmm. Social relationships Yeah. Celebrity status and demand side factors, people liking other people, science
Speaker 1:Big and question for me this year, you know, Anthropic is is, you know, they have created the drop in software engineer, right, with Cloud Code. It's it's clearly working. But, and it's changing that industry. Today, their goal for 2026 is clearly like the drop in replacement, like what is the cloud code for every other industry. And it'll be very interesting to see if we see a if we see progress in AI SDRs because that historically has been steak dinners, wine, relationships, like getting to know people.
Speaker 1:And it's been a more much more human role that hasn't been verifiable in some, you know, oh, I you know, you checked in this code. It worked. So you're you get paid.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not just hitting the right key strokes in the right order.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Any good SDR will tell you, it's not actually about the emails that you send. That's just one piece of the puzzle. Anyway,
Speaker 2:so he says science and R and D will speed up dramatically, but these will have delayed GDP effects. Given production cycles and the fact that a lot of fast fusing beneficial science greatly improves quality of life, I. E. GLP-1s without necessarily boosting GDP, I think this interim TFP growth regime will last until the mid late 2030s before entering another even higher growth regime greater than 10% as robotics matures and reaches scale production volumes. Fully automated factories and robots that can themselves build the factories that build other robots will have much more tangible effects on economic output.
Speaker 2:This is also when you start to see the bombal effects start, forcing adoption in areas that may otherwise be resistant. E. G, we get robocop and robonurses because the human cops and and nurses become prohibitively expensive in comparison. And he goes on to some other stuff. But thought that was just kind of relevant on Yeah.
Speaker 2:From a from a timeline standpoint when you're trying to understand capital in the twenty second century.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. To close out what Ben Thompson is talking about here, he says, when he was a child growing up in a small town in Wisconsin, he said, I had some sort of vague sense that there were rich people in the world, but my perspective, but from my perspective, taking my first airplane flight around the age of 10 was a source of great wonder. It It even provided a sense of status. After all, many of my friends had never flown at all. That was the comparison that mattered to me.
Speaker 1:Social media or more accurately user generated content feeds, which are increasingly not social at all, has completely changed this dynamic. All I or anyone needs to do is open Instagram to see beautiful people on private jets or on beaches or at fancy restaurants living a life that seems dramatically better than one's dull experience in the suburbs or a cramped apartment. Never mind that this me that the means of achieving that insight is a level of technological wealth that would have been incomprehensible to the richest person in the world fifty years ago. To put it another way, what Louis CK identified in this clip was the extent to which human happiness is a relative versus an absolute phenomenon. What we care about is how much we have is not how much we have, but how we compare.
Speaker 1:That, by extension, is what drives the technological paradox I noted above. More capabilities, more broadly distributed, has tremendously enriched the world on an absolute basis, but the end result, however, has been the dramatic expansion of our comparison set, making us feel more immiserated than ever. If we discover the trillionaire, quadrillionaire aliens, we're
Speaker 2:all
Speaker 1:done.
Speaker 2:It's be brutal.
Speaker 1:It's just like, oh, there's an alien out there with a with a two mile long yacht and a and a plane that holds 700
Speaker 2:Their yacht is actually an asteroid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:He has so much crumb hearts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and he has just piles of chrome hearts everywhere. He'd be truly, truly
Speaker 2:He he never wears the same pair of chrome jeans
Speaker 1:twice. No. Never. Never.
Speaker 2:One one more post from Boaz Barak. He's over at probably mispronouncing his name. He's over at OpenAI. Wrote a post on Less Wrong on New Year's Eve. Said White Pell.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:I mean, a White Pell title, certainly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The title of the essay is You Will Be Okay. He said, seeing this post, which is another post on Less Wrong and its comments made me a bit concerned for young people around this community. I thought I would try to write down why I believe most folks who read and write here and are generally smart, caring, and knowledgeable will be okay. I agree that our society often is under prepared for tail risks.
Speaker 2:As a general planner, you should be worrying about potential catastrophes even if their probability is small. However, as an individual, if there is a certain probability x of doom that is beyond your control, it is best to focus on the one x fraction of the probability space that you control rather than constantly worrying about it. A generation of Americans and Russians grew up under a nontrivial probability of total nuclear war, and they still went about their lives, Even when we do have some control over possibility of very bad outcomes, it's it is best to follow some common sense best practices, but then put that out of your mind. I do not want to engage here in the usual debate of p doom, but just as it makes absolute sense for companies and societies to worry about it as long as this probability is bounded away from zero, so it makes sense for individuals to spend most of their time not worrying about it as long as it is bounded away from one. Even if it is your job to push this probability down, it is best not to spend all of your time worrying about it, both for your mental health and for doing it well.
Speaker 2:I wanna recognize that doom or not, AI will bring a lot of change very fast. It is quite possible that by some metrics, we will see centuries of progress compressed into decades. My own expectation is that, as we have seen so far, progress will be both continuous and jagged. Both AI capabilities and its diffusion will continue to grow, but at different rates and different domains. I believe that because of this continuous progress, neither AGI nor ASI will be discrete points in time.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Rather, just like we call recessions after we are already in them, we will probably decide on the AGI moment retrospectively six months or a year after it had already happened. I also believe that because of this jaggedness, humans and especially smart and caring ones would be needed for at least several decades, if not more.
Speaker 1:How about
Speaker 2:Let's go. It is not a it is a marathon, not a sprint. Again, this like this, you have two months to escape Yeah. Permanent two years. It's it's it's really, you know, even if you believe that, try not to operate on that.
Speaker 2:Like trying to be trying to become Yeah. Rich in in two months Yeah. Is gonna make you do things that are not super productive, not super enduring. Yep. And I think that young people just need to get that concept out of their head.
Speaker 2:And still, you don't need to be thinking on don't try to think on a ten, twenty, thirty year time horizon, maybe like a legacy career. Right? Which is like, I'm gonna be a lawyer and I'm gonna get a 5% raise every year
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Until I retire. But think on three, five year Yeah. Time horizons and don't have this stupid sense of of urgency and the sort of insane scarcity mindset. I just I just don't think you're gonna do very good work. He continues, people have many justifiable fears about AI beyond literal doom.
Speaker 2:I cannot fully imagine the way AI AI will change the world economically, socially, politically, and physically. However, I expect that like the industrial revolution, even after this change, there will be no consensus if it was good or bad. This is, I was thinking here people have been, kind of asking like, hey, why why are we trying to automate everyone's jobs? Mhmm. You know, people are like, I actually like I know I was complaining about my email job but I like that I go and I write some emails, I get paid.
Speaker 2:Yep. I go home. Do we really need to automate this? Continuing, us human beings have an impressive dynamic range. We can live in the worst conditions and complain about the best conditions.
Speaker 2:It is possible we will cure diseases and poverty and yet people will still long for the good old days of the twenty twenties where young people had the thrill of fending for themselves before guaranteed income and housing ruined it. Nothing like the thrill. You've had that thrill in the Tenderloin back in Yeah. The day For sure. On a on a YC budget.
Speaker 1:I'm just thinking if they if they really do cure cancer with all this AI, it's just it's so over for the grave diggers.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:For the morticians, the coroners. Anyone in the death economy is just gonna be displaced immediately.
Speaker 2:Cooked.
Speaker 1:They're out of a job. They'll have to find something new to do. But I I I'm I'm optimistic that they will find a new Yeah. New new job. Anyways Let me tell you about AppLovin.
Speaker 1:Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today. Speaking of DAUs, do you think OpenAI is gonna buy Pinterest?
Speaker 2:Where is this coming from?
Speaker 1:Came from the information. They they made a list of predictions. We went through a number of predictions yesterday on the show. This was just one of them. But it seemed like it hit a nerve because people did sort of report on it like it was a rumor or like it was some leaked document.
Speaker 1:It was just a prediction. But do you think that that would make sense? This idea that, you know, Sora was sort of, you know, supposed to be a social network. It's it's still in the in the charts. It's just it hasn't seen, like, massive adoption.
Speaker 1:Maybe you go and you and you buy So a social platform.
Speaker 2:I thought it I thought it was incredibly unlikely just because I can't I I personally am trying to find the logic of why this is a strategic asset I to mean,
Speaker 1:x x AI has x and Twitter and
Speaker 2:Wildly different I I would have to understand what percentage of content that is uploaded to Pinterest today is AI generated.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of
Speaker 12:AI.
Speaker 2:I would I would expect that a lot of Pinterest content is just It
Speaker 1:used to be so good too. I remember when we were doing the initial brand exploration for TPPM and Technology Brothers, I'd go on Pinterest and find interesting images, and it was a lot of still frames from movies and stuff. And and you would see a little bit of AI, and now it's just so much AI.
Speaker 2:And So they did around 4,000,000,000 of revenue in 2025.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. I just I just don't know I just don't know what they're really I just don't know what they're really buying here. But Yeah. The CEO's name is Bill Ready. So the nominative determinism would be that he's ready to
Speaker 1:For a deal.
Speaker 2:Ready ready ready to do a deal. So that kind of takes me from, you know, one Yeah. To 2%.
Speaker 1:And the founder, Ben Silberman, and Silver's been mooning and they have similar similar names. So maybe Pinterest will moon. This is this is the level of
Speaker 2:analysis. You can only get here, folks.
Speaker 1:Let's go through this Rittenhouse Research post about OpenAI's business. But first, let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So Alex Kandrewicz sat down with Sam Altman December 18 right before the break.
Speaker 1:He says he had a long substantive conversation with Sam Altman about OpenAI's strategic position, its plan to build memory into ChatGPT, is already ongoing. It's enterprise play, compute AI devices, and whether AGI is still a useful term. Rittenhouse research breaks it down and says, the biggest takeaway from this very good interview was Altman's outline for how OpenAI's financial model could eventually work. OpenAI enterprise is growing faster than consumer. Companies do not want OpenAI to train on their prompts.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Apparently apparently, right right when right when we said you will be okay, the stream went down.
Speaker 1:No way. I yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Technology is like, nah, actually, you're not.
Speaker 1:OpenAI enterprise growth is constrained by lack of compute capacity. Enterprises coming to OpenAI asking for custom APIs and ability to process trillions of tokens, which OpenAI can't provide yet. Rapid growth in inference revenues from these enterprises at a stable to improving gross margin percent will eventually drive inference gross profit dollars large enough to fund OpenAI's training investments. OpenAI could curb training investments today and reduce cash burn, but training investments should translate to more inference revenue down the line. If OpenAI is not seeing overwhelming inference demand, there is flexibility in their $1,400,000,000,000 of commitments.
Speaker 1:Have to think a good portion of these are earmarked for training runs. Dollars 1,400,000,000,000.0 of commitments takes place over a number of years. We kind of knew this, but it feels like Sam's maybe just signaling to the market that there is more flexibility in the spending commitments than maybe people initially thought. And that was sort of always penciled in because there was a gradient from like, this is a press release. This is a handshake deal.
Speaker 1:This is still being papered. This is contingent on milestones or there's some flexibility here, but it but it kinda got all lumped together. And mentally, people were just putting it on, OpenAI's balance sheet as liability when, in fact, there was some flexibility there all along. While the 1,400,000,000,000 of spending commitments is, of course, absurd and almost surely was intended to position OpenAI as too big to fail, I feel like there's much more logic to their capital planning process than I previously thought after watching this interview. That's great.
Speaker 1:What a comeback. I mean, people were really flustered by Sam's appearance on BG two. It feels like his appearance on the Big Technology podcast is sort of a return to form, resetting of the narrative, And he clearly, like, thought about how to peel back the onion of the $1,400,000,000,000 commitment. So Rittenhouse closes by saying, if you assume they raise $75,000,000,000 in one last private round, 25% haircut to the rumored 100,000,000,000 and another 75,000,000,000 in an IPO, that's so much money. The model probably pencils out where they have enough capital to bridge until they reach cash flow positive.
Speaker 1:So they can do it. They can get out and and there is enough. So I don't know. Nathan wasn't a huge fan. Said he found the pod a little too spoon fed and not very info dense.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I don't know. I I'll I'll have to give it a listen. But for Well I will have to tell you about Linear. Linear is the system for modern software development.
Speaker 1:Linear is purpose built tool for planning and building products.
Speaker 2:The product planning tool behind OpenAI.
Speaker 4:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Should we take it over to Jocko? Yeah. Jocko Willi. Jocko.
Speaker 1:Of the greatest
Speaker 2:one of the greatest podcast capitalists maybe. Right? Apparently, I didn't even know he had this brand Origin, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu made gear. Apparently, somebody is a somebody in the government is a is a Jocko supporter because they threw Maduro in some Origin looking sharp. Got him out of the Nike tech.
Speaker 1:It's called Origin Built by Freedom Hoodie on Maduro.
Speaker 5:We gotta get Maduro on some TPPN merch.
Speaker 1:I I think we absolutely do not have to do that. Yeah. That's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Yeah Silence. Really been turned.
Speaker 1:Into into these photos. There there's a whole bunch of of photos. I guess he was transferred and he made the cover of the Wall Street Journal again.
Speaker 2:It was interesting.
Speaker 1:He says I am he says he's innocent. So, you know, innocent until proven guilty.
Speaker 2:I think Marco Rubio was talking about how they don't have to pay out the reward now because they've just got themselves. We, of course
Speaker 1:I feel like we deserve a little small slice for promoting the reward.
Speaker 2:Did we did we did do a promoted post for capture of Maduro back in q one of last year. But but, yeah, I I ultimately think the I think Delta gets all the credit. Maybe the DEA.
Speaker 1:They do. Ousted Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro pleaded not guilty to drug traffic king charges during his arraignment in US federal court in New York City on Monday, defiantly telling a judge that he was still the head of his nation despite being whisked away by US forces over the weekend. I am innocent, he said. I am not guilty. I am a decent man.
Speaker 1:I am still the president of my country, he said through a Spanish interpreter, adding that he was a prisoner of war and had been captured from his home in Caracas. Maduro's top lieutenant, Delsi Rodriguez, was sworn in as Venezuela's acting president Monday. And Delsi Rodriguez is picked by Maduro, so should be a Maduro ally. But there's been back and forth on how much he'll be cooperating with The United States. Security officers were out in force in Caracas, running checkpoints and patrolling neighborhoods to prevent protests.
Speaker 1:In Manhattan, Monday Monday's hearing kicked off a nearly unprecedented legal battle over a foreign leader in a US court. The arrest of a head of state presents challenges for both prosecutors and the defense. The two sides could spend years sparring over the legality of Maduro's arrest and charges before he goes to trial.
Speaker 2:Chat says, Maduro uses perplexity because of Ronaldo.
Speaker 1:Not because
Speaker 2:of Somebody's gotta
Speaker 1:ask you what? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe maybe the Lewis Hamilton sponsorship.
Speaker 1:Helmet sponsorship, honestly, massive props to Perplexity. That is a remarkable one because apparently, the the drivers can sell the stickers on their helmet themselves or something like that. And so, you know, when you watch Lewis Hamilton's helmet cam, he has a Perplexity logo right on his helmet that I guess he was able to sell directly and it didn't go through the team or something. So he gets to keep all of that money or something.
Speaker 2:That's a crazy
Speaker 1:It seemed like an interesting interesting
Speaker 2:He had he had some leverage there. I wonder the chat is going off saying good, you know, the Jocko line. Do you think Maduro is looking in the mirror, from the clink?
Speaker 1:Got got captured by US Delta Force. Good.
Speaker 2:Good. Wearing his origin.
Speaker 1:Arrested arrested on drug trafficking charges. Good. Good. More inspiration to grind harder. Time to lock in.
Speaker 1:More more it's an opportunity to learn about The US legal system. You're gonna learn a lot. Anyway, fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle customer support, go to fin dot a I. We have a surprise guest joining us.
Speaker 1:Casey Newton from Platformer dug into the whistleblower, the Reddit, the AI food delivery story. We're having him join the show. We're very excited to be joined by Casey. How are you doing, Casey?
Speaker 2:Welcome.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Hey, guys. Hey. Long time, first time. Nice to see you.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping on a short notice.
Speaker 2:What a moment. So great to have you.
Speaker 1:Absolute scoop of the century. Incredible story. I was riveted reading it. Thank you
Speaker 2:so much for the hard work. The the scoop hall of fame.
Speaker 1:Scoop hall of fame. I think I I don't even know if this is scoop
Speaker 2:and investigative journalism. This is because this is j.
Speaker 1:Peeling back the onion. I don't know. It was great. But, but how did you did you see this go out on social media? Were you on Reddit?
Speaker 1:Like, did you encounter this story first?
Speaker 3:That's exactly right. Believe it or not, I first saw the screenshot on threads with somebody saying, like, look how evil the food delivery companies are. And, you know, I was, like, a few days from having to come back and write a column again. And I thought, hey. Maybe this turns into a for me.
Speaker 3:So I was super bummed when the whole thing fell apart, but then it was actually my boyfriend who said people might actually be more interested to know about how the whole thing fell apart.
Speaker 1:So I
Speaker 9:don't think he
Speaker 13:was right
Speaker 1:about that. So so what was the process like to actually dig into it? What what was your interpretation? Because Because we read the Reddit post. I saw the screenshot, and I was kind of like and people are going back and forth.
Speaker 1:Is it AI generated? Blah blah blah. It didn't feel AI generated to me, but there were some red flags in there, like being drunk at a library seemed weird. And and he said something there was some other element in there that was, like, very, very odd to me. I forget exactly what he said.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 3:Some people are, like, pointing out the em dashes that were in there. And, you know, this is one of those where, like, the moment that that everyone knows it's a hoax, everybody knew it was a hoax from
Speaker 7:the first word.
Speaker 3:You know what
Speaker 13:I mean?
Speaker 3:Like, everybody figured it out before I did. Yeah. But that that's fine. The truth is, I didn't figure it out right away. I did think it seemed plausible.
Speaker 3:Like, we both know that Uber and DoorDash have been caught doing some pretty shady things over years. So I thought it was at worst it it was at least worth messaging the guy and see what he could tell me about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Great. So did you message him on Reddit?
Speaker 3:I did. And I sort of assumed that, you know, by that point, the post had, like, I don't know, 80,000 upvotes. I thought there's no way I'm ever gonna hear back from this guy, but instead, he messages me back within nine minutes, which, again, in retrospect, was probably a tell that maybe there was something fishy going on here. But, yeah, he was happy to get on signal. He did sort of strangely only to give one or two word answers.
Speaker 3:Like, I was expecting them to, you know, be a little bit more verbose based on the post. Again, another red flag in retrospect. But, you know, I've talked to a lot of sources like this over the years, and initially, a lot of them are pretty skittish. They don't know you. They don't have any reason to trust you.
Speaker 3:You're gonna have to build up that trust over time. But, you know,
Speaker 2:the same with Soham Parikh. He came on and he was just like, yeah. Worked for five companies at once. It wasn't skittish at all. Just immediately immediately admitted to doing something really bad.
Speaker 10:It was
Speaker 1:a very odd moment. Yeah. The the thing that stuck out to me in here was he he claims that that the that the speed up fee, what what is it, is psychological value add, but then and so he says it does nothing to speed you up, but then in the next paragraph, he says that that, in fact, they're slowing down all the other orders, which again
Speaker 2:So you are getting are
Speaker 1:getting a speed up. So it's not logic it wasn't logically consistent to me, which was a little odd. That was more of a red flag than any of, like, the it's an AI generated text. And I want your reaction to this because if you were a whistleblower and you and you're writing something and you're worried that your boss is gonna be able to clock your writing style, it doesn't seem crazy to me to pass your your testimony through ChatGPT and just say, hey. Rewrite this like it's, you know, GPT five.
Speaker 1:Because then, yes, it will have Em dashes. Yes. It will have telltale AI generated things. But the points will stand. The facts will stand, and then you'll be more anonymized.
Speaker 1:So do you think there's anything to that?
Speaker 3:Sure. I mean, this is a lot of what the job is now of being a reporter, particularly in tech where we're working with really savvy companies. You know? Like, I've reported a lot about Meta. They have former CIA agents over there who are doing, you know, investigations of leaks like this.
Speaker 3:So we have to spend a lot of our time trying to do OPSEC with our sources. So, yeah, if the source said, hey. I might run this through an LLM to sort of take the stink of me off it, I would say go for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So then
Speaker 2:what Okay. Yeah. Okay. So you messaged this guy. He responds.
Speaker 2:He starts sending you proof. What kind of proof is he sharing? Yeah. How did you process that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the first thing that you know, I'm I'm obviously wanna know his name. He's not comfortable sharing that at first. He says, I could send you an an employee badge with my face and name blurred out. And, you know, in in this line of work, it's you kinda just wanna keep them talking.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, see what they'll share, and it'll all sort of add up to something over time. So I said, sure. Let's see it. He sends over a badge.
Speaker 3:I don't know if you're able to sort of show it on the screen. I have a a new funny story about it. But, it says that, you know, it's an Uber Eats badge. I learned today from a reporter at NBC News that she had sent him her employee badge, and he appears to have used that as the basis for this and said, transform this image into an Uber Eats badge. Right now, seeing her original image, and he literally just must have put it in Nano Banana and said, turn this into Uber Eats.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's super interesting because I was looking at the actual image being like, are there any telltale signs? I'm, like, pretty good at clocking little things, but Nano Banana really is good at, like, leaving enough of the original image you don't get any of those weird
Speaker 2:I feel like you would grind things to make it look like an iPhone photo anyways.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 3:The the tell by the way, I've heard from some, former Uber folks today, and the tell that they wanted me to know is that there are not actually Uber Eats badges.
Speaker 2:That's the other thing I was gonna say.
Speaker 3:It's Uber.
Speaker 2:You just it's Uber. It's it's not a separate company.
Speaker 1:That's funny.
Speaker 2:Why would it why would you have a separate It
Speaker 1:was a little bit of a
Speaker 2:badge. So And then and then you got and then there were some internal document that you got as well. What was up there?
Speaker 3:So this honestly wound up being the most interesting thing to me was that I had said, look. Is there anything you could do to corroborate your story? And he was like, well, I'm sort of uncomfortable with that, but let me see what I can do. He disappears for a full day and then comes back the following mornings. This is Sunday morning and says, does this work?
Speaker 3:And it's an 18 page document that presents itself as a sort of highly technical overview of how they built the system that sort of, takes advantage of drivers' desperation.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Okay. So what's the who what's your theory on who this person is? What's the point? You know, this what I'm in some ways, like, I I feel like DoorDash was the loser here. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I feel like DoorDash has a reputation for just, like, being incredible, ruthless operators. And so people are just like, oh, this is DoorDash for sure. Yeah. And and then and then and then they had to come out and defend themselves and say, we don't even use this language.
Speaker 1:There's probably like some fourth tier like, the fourth player in the ecosystem that we don't even know is, like, languishing at, like, $400,000,000 market cap. And they're like, we're trying to be as ruthless as that, man. Like, trust us. Like, our profit's gonna be great next quarter. And we're like, no one thinks it's you.
Speaker 2:No one thinks I just don't understand the point. Is this is this Yeah. Yeah. Is this, like, a
Speaker 1:short seller? It could
Speaker 2:be disgruntled
Speaker 1:driver. Did you get any any any interest or any ideas of what this could be? Like, why are people doing this?
Speaker 3:So, I mean, again, like, this guy, like, his his answers are so short that I never really got any sense of motivation. I, you know, I do think like, this was over the holiday break. I do think that there's a chance that this is, a bored teenager, you know, in in the basement type of thing. Yeah. But I think, know, one thing I haven't done and I would encourage people to do is, like, were there any Polymarket or Calci trades around the time of this post dropping?
Speaker 3:Like, because it wouldn't be crazy to me if somebody was trying to, like, take the Uber or door d DoorDash market cap and, you know, make a few bucks.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, they could do that in the public markets or or I guess in prediction markets or or or may may because sometimes there's, a dedicated prediction market for this specific thing. Like, is it real or not? And then they could
Speaker 3:be trading that Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because they know it's fake or something. What what what do you think the the actual platform should have done? I mean, DoorDash was very they they did the founder led comms. They did the corporate comms. They did a they did a number of things.
Speaker 1:Do you think they handled it well? Is there something that they should be doing with journalists when something like this happens to, like, not put their finger on the scale too much, but be open with you? Like, how how should they respond?
Speaker 3:I think they did the right thing. They they both came forward, and they just said, this is categorically false. You know? The Ubercom said, like, this is a fake document. You know?
Speaker 3:They really just sort of, like, went all in. They put their credibility on the line. And, you know, often corporate comms are a lot more measured. But with this one, they were just very confident in knowing that this did not come from them, and so there was no reason not to just leave with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Where else are you seeing interesting, like, AI fake news stories pop up? I've been there's this interesting irony that I mean, I don't know where you stand on, like, the water issue, but it feels like the electricity issue is something that people should be talking about, and the water issue is maybe way less important. And yet, like, AI has created this, like, somewhat fake narrative about itself, and it's, like, a victim of its but it's not fully AI generated, but there's just a weird, like, paradox there where people seem to be distracted.
Speaker 3:I mean, to me, the thread that ties all those together is that AI is a superpower for motivated reasoning. Like, if there is something you want to believe, like, AI can immediately generate the materials that will help you sell that case to other people. And we're all just gonna kind of have to like upgrade our cognitive hygiene and say, now know that there are tools that can get me to sort of believe my own eyes when I shouldn't be doing that. And it's screwing with my mind. That's why I wrote this piece.
Speaker 3:Like, whole thing is screwing with my mind. Yeah. And I I want all of us to be having a conversation about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There there was a very interesting thread just, like, two weeks earlier maybe about someone claimed to have delivered a DoorDash delivery, but they just generated an image of the person's front door or something, which I guess they got that image from Street View or something. And that feels like a fraud that would make you, like, dollars, then you'd get deplatformed. Deplatformed. But it is weird that like mean, Rune was posting that hopefully DoorDash will be the first major company incentivized to build a reliable deep fake detector, very doable, though it will become a Red Queen race, and hopefully license out technology.
Speaker 1:I never would have picked DoorDash as the company to do I would have thought YouTube or Instagram, but I don't know. I don't know if you've seen anything else going on in this
Speaker 2:How does you that's affected. So so do do you think that this post, even though it was fake, ends up creating any type of change in terms of how these platforms have are operating? Because it seems like right now that you have kind of like from my view is like actually like as these platforms have saturated and everybody uses them whether they're, you know, using them to earn a living or or supplement their income or they're using them as a consumer, Everybody seems to be like frustrated with the platforms. Is that just the enduring state of delivery products where people and and maybe it's solved through robotics where eventually these platforms say like, we heard that you hate working on our on our platform. The good news is that you don't have to anymore because we have drones and and, you know, little little toy cars driving around.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but where do how do you think the the if anything anything in the industry changes over the next kind of year?
Speaker 3:It it's a good question. It's a big question. I think that anytime you feel dependent on a platform, you come to resent it. And people do feel dependent on Uber Eats and DoorDash to bring them their dinner, particularly, you know, if you're living in Silicon Valley and ordering from them, like, three or four times a week. You know, I think one reason why the fake resonated was that it was so easy to believe a delivery platform would wanna figure out how to pay their drivers less.
Speaker 3:We've seen them do it in other real ways in the past. And so my hope is that if there's any change here, it is that these companies now realize, look, if if you truly build an exploitative system for your drivers, there will be a backlash and people will turn against you. So that would be my hope coming out
Speaker 1:of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Odd odd vibes for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What I I'm interested to know about your process using AI tools as a journalist. I feel like the hallucination incidence has definitely gone down. Like, just in terms of, like, if you just need a fact or you just need to know what's the biggest company in the world, like, these are good knowledge retrieval tools. But, obviously, you have a very high bar for what is factually accurate and what you're printing.
Speaker 1:What is your process for when you need to maybe not hunt down a specific fact in a story, but you need to corroborate it with, you know, you're just looking up a whole bunch of extra context around how DoorDash operates. Is Uber Eats a wholly owned subsidiary? All of these different things, like, would there be a badge? Like, how how are you using AI tools in your day to day to day?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. So I think that I'd probably use AI tools maybe more than the average reporter. Like, I feel like I understand the ways in which that I can trust them. I'm happy to turn to them and say, hey. Give me an overview about this industry that I haven't written about very much.
Speaker 3:The reason that I'm comfortable is that I'm using bots that cite their sources and, you know, as a long time journalist, I know which sources I can trust. So I'm happy to do that. The other thing that I do is I'll sort of go out and get my own facts for the columns that I'm writing, but then I'll feed them into ChatGPT if I'm just really good at this and just say, fact check this for me. It does a really great job of catching my mistakes all the time. That was not true a year ago by the way.
Speaker 3:So that's one of the places where I felt the most AI progress in is in using these things as fact checkers. Don't let them write the column, but absolutely let them try to catch, your mistakes because in my experience, they will.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you agree with this idea that for what you do, the writing, the instantiation is not the hard part.
Speaker 3:Well, how do you mean that? Because there's a lot of, like, days where I'm on deadline where the writing absolutely is
Speaker 1:the Oh, really? Okay. Hard Because so so what I've heard is that is that it's the, you know, it's the it's the ideas inside. It's the facts. It's the scoop, it's the information that you spend seven hours.
Speaker 1:And then when it's time to go type it up and file, yeah, you kind of know the phrasing, you know how to write. Sure, you might dictate a little bit, but, like, you're not just going to ChatGPT and say, write a call.
Speaker 3:No. I'm not. And and, like, honestly, like, even if I wanted to do that, I still think that they're not great at it. Although, I will say the most recent version of Clawd when I gave it this test was, like, good at mimicking my individual style in a
Speaker 9:way that sort
Speaker 3:of freaked me out a bit. But I just think that, like, mode like, at least my readers, like, they want to know what I'm thinking. And if I delegate that job to a chatbot, they're probably just not gonna wanna pay me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I also think people are surprised readers are surprisingly open to, like, the rough edges. Like, they they they actually don't necessarily need everything to be in the super consistent style guide that you would get from enforcing an LLM on top of everything you published. And if you use parentheses one time and then quotes another time or brackets and other like, it just doesn't really matter. It actually gives more flavor and texture to the writing, and so people are open to that.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think readers tend to be really forgiving when you tell them what you're doing. And if they hate something, listen to them. There was a time when I was illustrating my columns with AI generated images because I thought it was cool to have the superpower to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So many readers were like, please stop doing this. We hate this slop. I was like, alright. Like, we're in this together. I'm gonna stop doing this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah. There's been there's been all sorts of like yeah.
Speaker 1:It really depends on like the community that you're building. What what how how res how Yeah. Like, respected, that that's Do
Speaker 2:you think you'll ever come back to x?
Speaker 3:Guys, it's a it's now just like a CSAM generator and notification app. Like, what are we
Speaker 13:doing here?
Speaker 1:Mute mute all that and then hang out for the Andre Karpathy post. You know? There's some good stuff. You know?
Speaker 2:There's some diamonds in
Speaker 3:the posts are great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You you gotta you gotta really hone it in on the AI researchers who are still hanging out there. We
Speaker 2:Yeah. You have to accept that you have to accept that you're getting engagement farmed. I think Nikita shared earlier that that like that all the the highest engagement days of an x history have all been in the last week. Yeah. Part of that is like the Maduro Story.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Story. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Still. Anyway, thank you so much for
Speaker 2:anytime anytime you have a story, give us a
Speaker 1:Where where can people find you? Give us the landscape of the of the Casey Newton empire.
Speaker 3:Sure. It's very simple. You can just go to platformer.news. You can find this story and I also co host the Hard Fork podcast. And why don't you head over to youtube.com/hardfork?
Speaker 3:Check that out too.
Speaker 1:There we go. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest
Speaker 2:of Casey. Cheers.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Our next guest is Alex Epstein. He's live here in person in the TVP and UltraDub. Alex, welcome.
Speaker 2:There he is.
Speaker 1:Yo. Good to see you again. You brought us books. Thank you. Nice to see you, Ken.
Speaker 2:Good to see you. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. You don't have to have these happy dads. That's for later. We have a happy dad investor coming on the show. Nice.
Speaker 1:But for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself. How how are you describing yourself these days? Obviously, you're an author. The book is Fossil Future. You can get it wherever books are sold, I'm sure.
Speaker 13:Yeah, traditionally I do energy expert and philosopher, because I actually think philosophy is the reason people disagree about energy.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 13:And then these days, it's really independent policy advisors, since most of the stuff I do is is behind the scenes with government trying to get them to adopt energy freedom policies. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Do do you do you feel like the book touches on the philosophical debate around energy?
Speaker 13:It touches would be a It centers on Would be an would be an understatement. Yeah. I I mean, I I think of my life really, or the last nineteen years in energy Yeah. Have been basically two things. One is trying, and and the one the book addresses, is trying to shift the conversation from an anti human conversation to a pro human conversation about energy.
Speaker 13:Actually, think, did we meet at Hereticon? Is that where you
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 9:We might
Speaker 13:have met at Hereticon or one of Peter's other things, but I gave an example in my talk there that I think is the easiest way to see that we have an anti human of thinking about energy, which is I'll ask people, hey, which of the following words would you use to describe our current relationship to climate? So are we in a climate crisis? Do we have a climate problem? Do we have a climate non problem? Or do we have a climate renaissance?
Speaker 1:And,
Speaker 13:you know, that audience is gonna be more it might even consider renaissance, but most people won't. Right? Most people will say crisis And or then extreme is non problem. But then I share the data, which you can actually look at the rate of deaths from climate disasters,
Speaker 9:such
Speaker 13:as storms and floods, extreme temperatures, etcetera, and it's very clear cut. And we have this just incredibly dramatic ninety eight percent decline in those deaths.
Speaker 2:Which would imply Renaissance.
Speaker 13:Which would imply Renaissance.
Speaker 1:Oh, and that's over like a 100 years?
Speaker 13:That's over the last hundred years. Okay. Yeah. If you go back further, it's even Sure. Sure.
Speaker 13:It's even more. And then if you look at the data in terms
Speaker 2:of Yeah. There was damage something even even with the California wildfires a year ago, I think there was something like thirty deaths, which was the most deaths in a in a fire in recorded history in California, to to from from what I remember.
Speaker 13:Yeah. And I mean, wildfires is actually I was gonna mention the economic piece of it. Like, even economically, if you adjust for GDP growth, the damages are flat. So you would say it has to be a renaissance, right? I mean, we're much less threatened from climate than ever.
Speaker 13:And if you think about that in fossil fuels, and you think for a minute or two, think, well, that actually might have to do positively with fossil fuels, because fossil fuels power the irrigation systems that alleviate drought. Drought is actually the number one climate killer historically. Yeah. They obviously give us heating and air conditioning to deal with extreme temperatures with with and even abnormal temperatures, and cold is by far the bigger killer than heat, and we have all kinds of sturdy infrastructure and storm warning systems. So it's this really interesting phenomenon where what actually happened is, as I put it, fossil fuels didn't take a safe climate and make it dangerous.
Speaker 13:They took a dangerous climate and made it safe. But the interesting question in terms of philosophically is, why is it that so many people say we're in a climate crisis, even though from a climate livability perspective or a pro human perspective, we're in a climate renaissance? And I'm telegraphing it a bit, which is that they're not looking at it from a prohuman moral perspective, they're looking at it from an antihuman moral perspective. But specifically the perspective that our goal should be to reduce or eliminate our impact, which is the idea of being green.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there a factor here of just, like, media awareness, like the fact that, you know, in times of old, you wouldn't if there was a fire, like the Palisades fire, you wouldn't see that everywhere for weeks on end, but now there's much more visibility. So I hear about an earthquake over there or a storm over there, and so it feels like there's more
Speaker 13:happening they would otherwise. That people can use, but, of course, they could use the opposite
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 13:Mechanism. I mean, they could say, and this would happen all the time, look at this look at this minor climate problem
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:That a hundred years ago would have been a total disaster. Like, compare this to the Galveston storm a hundred So years my conclusion is the people leading the charge who think it's a climate crisis like, there are lot of people who just ignorant of these But the people who know these facts, who know that we're in renaissance from a climate livability perspective, they're evaluating the state of the climate not by how good it is for humans, but by how little impact we've had.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 13:So their goal is an earth with minimal human impact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 13:And by that standard, we are in a climate crisis because we have had some
Speaker 1:Impact.
Speaker 8:Impact. Of course.
Speaker 13:And so my view is if our overall impact is positive for humans, that's a good thing.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 13:Their view is if there's more impact, that's a bad thing. Yeah. And this is this illustrates that this is overwhelmingly a philosophical disagreement. Mhmm. So whether you view today, if once you know the facts about climate livability, whether you view it as a climate renaissance or climate crisis, that's not based on science.
Speaker 13:Nobody nobody has disputed these facts. I mean, New York Times tried, everyone tried, nobody has successfully Vivek really popularized this when he ran for president, because he learned this in Fossil Future, everyone tried to refute him, and nobody could do it. Yeah. So it's only that you have a different, what I call in philosophy, what we call in philosophy, standard of evaluation. You're looking at the same facts Yeah.
Speaker 13:but you have a different measuring stick. And my my basic contention is, if you look at fossil fuels in a balanced way from what I call a human flourishing perspective, the benefits are obviously far far greater than the negatives, including climate
Speaker 1:wise.
Speaker 13:But but that's that's why, like, have the moral case for fossil fuels and fossil future, which is about why global human flourishing requires more fossil fuels. But it's The number one thing I'm doing is I'm just changing the yardstick by which we're measuring it, and I'm using that very consistently.
Speaker 2:You think AI is taking the wind out of the climate crisis sails Yes. in the sense that the climate crisis was a powerful story for the media industrial complex because let's say, you know, the slow news news day or week, the TV can just show a big chart on the screen of a bunch of counties and they're all red and it looks looks really bad Yeah. Just because of the the the way the graphic design is done. Yeah. And now we have this like worldwide sort of systemic fear of this impending I I feel like that Oh,
Speaker 1:oh, so you're just people are talking about AI dooms,
Speaker 2:not climate change. We're just using way more energy.
Speaker 1:We're Yeah.
Speaker 2:Making new gas turbines. Yeah. And then there's also the media story of just giving this sort of like media Yeah. The media industrial complex loves a sense of impending doom.
Speaker 1:Eliezer Yudakowsky is more popular than Al Gore as of yesterday, or as of last year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, content is
Speaker 1:getting much more AI doom is just a bigger,
Speaker 13:media think right now it's much more the energy side. Yeah. Much more the energy Yeah. But the doom side really concerns me, and AI is actually the only issue I'm considering getting into Mhmm. In terms of mastering it and mastering how to communicate it, just because I feel like there's nobody has really mastered it from the pro human, pro technology side.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. It's hard to No.
Speaker 2:I I said this yesterday. I mean, the tech industry right now suffers because nobody can nobody can speak in into a a a let's say, like, the Super Bowl demographic. If a tech founder went and talked at the Super Bowl during the halftime show Yeah. And they were like, we're gonna automate all the jobs. Everyone would be like, boo.
Speaker 2:Boo. Boo. Boo. But but like boo, like, this guy sucks. Get him out
Speaker 1:of here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're And so it's been very difficult. People talk about UBI and this sort of post scarcity element if you can just bring a bunch of robots online. But nobody, especially at the labs, I feel like has I I don't even think this idea of like a personal tutor or personal expert in your pocket is really I don't think people appreciate it that much even though the labs talk about it. So finding the pro human narrative, I think, is super important. It's something that's, like, critical to the industry because I think we're in the second the beginnings of, like, the second real techlash.
Speaker 2:You had the sort of, like, social media techlash era. Now we're in the AI techlash era. And it's only gonna get worse if we just keep promising the world, hey, we're gonna automate your job away. You're motivating me
Speaker 13:to This is the tension in my life right now because, you know, I've been working in energy for a long time. We've gotten to this point where the opportunity Like, lot of the debate has shifted, and I've had some role in that, but also the politics have shifted where I and others have never had more opportunity to actually change the policy for the But then AI
Speaker 2:You're kinda getting shiny objects.
Speaker 13:Well, I'm not deterred yet, but it's But also, I need to innovate in AI actually for what I'm trying to do, and energy, and there's Anyway, so it's tempting, but I would just say if anyone here is watching who thinks that you might be able to be this, I would much prefer to help you
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:And teach you what I've learned in energy and applied to AI than do it myself. It would be more of a matter of like, I got plenty to do in energy, but there needs to be somebody doing this. So alex@alexepstein.com just
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 13:Send me a email. Email.
Speaker 1:Can you set the table for me on, like, the state of American the American energy industry? Because I grew up at a time when the big oil companies were the biggest companies in the world. ExxonMobil was the largest company in the world. And then now we live in the era of big tech. And I'm wondering if the big oil companies are still well run.
Speaker 1:Like, they don't feel founder led. They don't feel like they're in founder mode. I don't know the names of people who are running large energy companies. I can't
Speaker 2:Elon Muskov Energy is not
Speaker 1:where I can Kids at
Speaker 2:kids at elite universities are not like clamoring juniors being like, I'm on woodworking Yeah. Oil and
Speaker 13:I'm older than you guys, and I remember because I I was at one of the top math science high schools in the country, then I was at Duke, I just remember thinking later, because I myself had no interest in fossil fuels at the time and a little bit of an aversion, I'm like, looking back, none of those No. Brilliant people wanted to do this. Yeah. Like, it wasn't aspirational. So interestingly
Speaker 2:But is it is is it an industry where the product has such insane product market fit that you don't need the most elite executive operators.
Speaker 13:Some, but so here's the thing is, I don't think oil and gas has attracted overall the best of the best. There are definitely some brilliant people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 13:The bad news is that electricity is much much worse.
Speaker 1:Okay. Explain that.
Speaker 13:So, well, so the thing about oil and gas is and a lot of this the two variables are gonna be what's the degree of freedom in the culture or in the in the political system for achievement, because that's gonna determine largely the economic upside. Yep. And then there's the issue of the culture. So with the culture, obviously there's been huge hostility toward oil and gas, and of course coal as well. And that deters a lot of people early from even wanting to go in.
Speaker 13:The positive of oil and gas is that it's, within the energy industry, it's by far freer than many many other parts of the energy industry. If you look at, say, particularly in Texas, you look at where the Permian Basin dominates, you can get a permit to drill in the Permian in a few days. Now, it's the Texas Permian, if it's the New Mexico Permian on federal lands, much different story. You know, that stack of paper is probably 10 times higher.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 13:But there's a lot of a lot of oil and gas doesn't involve federal permitting, which I hope we talk about, because trying to fix that at the moment. So what what that means that you can act a lot more quickly on good ideas, which attracts good people. Mhmm. Now, if we shift to the electricity sector
Speaker 2:I had a real quick, I had a last year, I was at a at at kind of a VC founder dinner and one of the one of the founders there had some some company, I think, in advertising, but he had a piece of land in California that he was just he had been drilling oil on. Really?
Speaker 4:He just
Speaker 2:had like a small, like, kind of lifestyle business. That's crazy. But he ultimately there was some new regulation that was getting passed, and I think that basically put him out of business.
Speaker 13:Oh, weird. Yeah. Mean, calif I admire all these people in California, to some extent Colorado, and it's it's hard. I actually refuse to invest in energy just because I advise politicians, and it creates conflicts of interest, but I just say as hypothetical investor We
Speaker 2:don't a post conflict era.
Speaker 13:No, I mean, I'm very
Speaker 2:extreme about conflict avoidance. No, no, no. Appreciate that.
Speaker 13:But it's it's yeah. California is really hard. I mean, you can you can of course imagine high risk, high reward things, but it's just you look at the governor
Speaker 2:on import so much oil, wouldn't we wanna produce some?
Speaker 13:And Yes. And there's a bit of a shift there, just as there is in New York, and Massachusetts, they're a little bit more open, but it's bad. But if we take the power sector, I mean, first of all, we're talking about something that is institutionalized as a monopoly in the first place. And then, not to go into too much detail about the power sector, but there's we started quote unquote deregulation, which is just a new and in many ways worse form of regulation. We started that a couple decades ago, and broadly speaking, there are two really big types of electricity systems.
Speaker 13:One is a traditional utility model, where the utility does everything. So they have the generation, what's called the transmission, so the longer distance travel, and then the distribution, which is the more local stuff. So in that, you can imagine that doesn't tend to attract the best people, because like a lot of monopoly type things, like a lot of the military stuff, it's a cost plus So and you get paid for spending more money. You get paid for incurring more cost. But then as bad as that is, the market model is a mess, in part because they allowed once intermittent solar and wind came on, they allowed that to be treated as a reliable power source when it's not, in fact, a reliable power source.
Speaker 13:Now it has utility, but it's primarily a fuel saving device. So people think like, oh, you hate solar. You hate it's not about that. It's just what does it functionally do? Mhmm.
Speaker 13:What it functionally does in the vast majority of cases is it saves you fuel on a reliable power source. Mhmm. Because most of what we need in electricity is we need on demand electricity. Okay. And with a solar panel or wind turbine, you can't get on demand electricity.
Speaker 13:Yeah. It's both the existence and the amount is weather dependent.
Speaker 7:Yep.
Speaker 13:So if there are situations such as, say, China with coal where they have, you know, a lot of coal power, and they need enough coal power, they need that much capacity to meet their peak demand. But if you have a bunch of solar, and particularly if they overbuilt a bunch of solar that they were trying to sell to the rest of the world it didn't work as well as they thought, you can you can have basically Kohler, right, coal plus solar, where every time the sun shines, yeah, to what extent the sun shines, you're saving fuel, and depending on your fuel cost, that can be efficient.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes
Speaker 13:sense. Now, it tends to be efficient at lower levels versus versus higher levels. But so the electricity markets got screwed up for many reasons, but that was the biggest one, where if you allow solar and wind to compete as reliable sources, it screws up everything, and in particular, it screws up the economics of the reliable sources. Yeah. Because if they're not if it's a monopoly and one person owns everything, you can decide, hey, I'm gonna pay this much for solar for fuel savings, and that you can make it work when it works.
Speaker 13:Mhmm. But if you have a quote market where all the generators are competing independently, and you allow solar to be its own independent generator whenever it's available, that natural gas plant doesn't benefit from the fuel savings. It loses operating revenue.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 13:And so this is what we did to all the reliable power plants on the grid is we subsidized the hell out of solar and wind Mhmm. Spammed the grid with this fuel saving infrastructure, but on the power markets it doesn't benefit them, so it's screwed up. So this this gets technical, but you can imagine that a lot of the people who've succeeded in this field are there there can be a scam element.
Speaker 1:You have
Speaker 13:some smart traders, but their efforts are not going to a productive thing. So it's both talent level issues with the utilities, but then you even have some smart people in the markets, but their intelligence isn't being well directed, because it actually can screw up the grid. Yeah. And then the culture has pushed pushed so many people into the green space where the relative opportunity was much less Mhmm. Than in fossil fuels and in nuclear, if you had a proper market.
Speaker 13:So that's that's it's really bad
Speaker 1:You mentioned nuclear. Get us up to speed on how you're thinking about nuclear these days. It feels like there's incredible energy both the government just announced a $2,700,000,000 grant yesterday. Right. And it feels like there's nuclear startups for the first time in my lifetime getting funding.
Speaker 2:I learned yesterday that we get enriched uranium from Russia. Or
Speaker 1:we did. Hopefully not used to.
Speaker 13:Yeah. There are other people who can do it too. So I know, you know, you wrote that really interesting essay yesterday on energy production. And I think in your space there's many forms of energy production, but the main thing is going to be electricity production, and specifically it's what's called dispatchable or reliable electricity production, so on demand. We could talk about how AI fits into that, but in general, I think there are four things that have screwed that up.
Speaker 13:And one is the near criminalization of nuclear power.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 13:The issue with that is that's a hard one to unwind quickly.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:So if you if you look at there's a lot there's this attempt at a nuclear renaissance, and I'm working as hard as anyone to try to make that happen, we're not yet having any kind of rapid build of new nuclear infrastructure. You know, since the establishment of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1975, we only started building any reactors from we only started conceiving and completing reactors in 2023 for the Vogel plants in South, right, in South Carolina, and they
Speaker 1:were When
Speaker 2:were they actually you're saying they didn't
Speaker 13:There was nothing that went from conception to completion from So 1970
Speaker 2:they got completed in 2023.
Speaker 13:2023, but with, you know, 10x cost
Speaker 2:overruns.
Speaker 13:So we have now There was already some progress before this administration. Had what's called Advance Act, which was a significant improvement, tried to redirect the NRC. There are definitely much better people at the NRC now, so they're headed in a much, much better direction. Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, are aligned, but we're just talking about something that we've lost arguably fifty years of potential progress, because we something in the late sixties where nuclear was, by many estimates, the cheapest form of electricity and the safest in terms of reliable electricity. It was already true with that technology.
Speaker 2:Cheapest, safest, cleanest.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, cleanest.
Speaker 2:I mean, the talking point
Speaker 1:that I hear about the NRC is that we haven't approved any new nuclear reactor designs, but we also haven't just been copy pasting the ones that work. Right. So it's like two fold problems.
Speaker 13:And this the nuclear industry is fascinating in terms communication, because their usual thing is just we have to change everyone's opinion about perception about nuclear, and then we can do stuff, and
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 13:Which I think the public is more pro nuclear than they think, even historically. Right now it is. Think I what we have to do, what you're looking at, which is say, wait a second. We could already produce these large nuclear plants and get this incredible result. Why don't we fix that problem first?
Speaker 13:Because we actually know how to do these things. There are all these exciting companies doing new things. But part of the reason is these communications people have an aversion toward traditional nuclear because it has these negative associations. But you to kill those associations. You have to kill the idea that this was uniquely dangerous.
Speaker 13:No, it was uniquely safe. Like Chernobyl has nothing to do with what we would ever do in The United States. That was like a half weapon, half reactor, and even that damage doesn't compare to the damage done by a lot of other things Totally. In the Soviet Union. Yeah.
Speaker 13:I mean, as one economist put it, Soviet toasters probably did more damage.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. That's amazing.
Speaker 13:I don't know if that's a stat, but that's No.
Speaker 1:No. No. I agree. So nuclear,
Speaker 13:it's like, what we need to do is we need to fix the political stuff as quickly as possible, and we're getting some funding there, but we have to recognize that it's the overall problem is just a political restriction problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 13:So that is a very exciting thing to do, but it is the least near term Sure. Of the four things. The other things are I mentioned, the electricity markets are screwed up.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 13:That's part of a broader set of preferences for solar and wind
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Or for intermittent energy, let's just say. And the other piece of that, which I was involved in and has largely been fixed, but not totally, is the subsidization of intermittent energy. So that was in the big beautiful bill. That was a lot of what I spent $20.25 on is Yeah. Killing as many of trying to help people who wanted to kill those kill as many as possible.
Speaker 13:Sure. So we've got the nuclear criminalization. We've got the preferences for intermittent energy. The biggest thing by far is we have the prohibitions reliable solar reliable fossil fuel energy. And that's you'll hear about things like the endangerment finding, there was the Biden Clean Power Plan two point o that basically made it illegal for existing coal plants to function, for any new natural gas plants to be built past a certain date.
Speaker 13:So and then we have the general permitting problem,
Speaker 2:which is
Speaker 13:anti development permitting. So you just imagine we had all of these factors restricting the supply of electricity, and then we had the previous administration and others artificially increasing demand through electrification. Right? Forced electrification, so trying to shut off natural gas in homes, trying to force us to use EVs, which I'm totally in favor of people using freely, but we pay over $50,000 per EV. Like, taxpayers pay
Speaker 1:over 50,500.
Speaker 13:No. No. That's just one small part
Speaker 1:of it.
Speaker 13:We could go into all the different subsidies, because there's a lot of fuel economy trading
Speaker 1:Super in the supply chain.
Speaker 13:Where you basically get Well, you basically
Speaker 2:It's wild it's wild too, because you get the subsidy, and then the consumer buys a vehicle for $60,000, and it's worth half that Yeah. In, like, 12
Speaker 13:But it's it's also the way the fuel economy things work at the federal level and the California level. A lot of what they do is they set the fuel economy standards impossibly high for regular vehicles, and then they give EVs this ridiculously low high fuel economy score.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 13:And so everyone, Tesla on down, just trade makes huge amounts of money trading their Oh, emissions
Speaker 2:got it. And that's
Speaker 1:where per vehicle that
Speaker 13:Yeah. By the way,
Speaker 1:this is
Speaker 13:something the current administration has been doing a good job at the in terms of the administration. Executive actions try and undo a lot of these things, but you want as many undone congressionally. So again, we have these factors of artificially restricting supply, artificially increasing demand, and then of course the one you guys are focused on is the organic increase in demand via AI. So the what I'm
Speaker 2:trying to fix is just stop restricting supply. How do you do you predict that this feels like, you know, rising energy costs have always been a political issue. They're gonna be like at the forefront, I think, of a lot of debates going forward. Politicians, I imagine, are gonna try to score points by Yeah. You know, beating back data center development just because they know their constituents are gonna cheer it on.
Speaker 2:How are you advising all these different players at at the at the center of these debates on on how to how knowing that energy usage is gonna go up dramatically with with data centers one way or another, what what is your how do how do we kind of thread the needle?
Speaker 13:So there's there's what to advocate policy wise and what to advocate messaging wise. So let's start with messaging wise. So one thing is to pin the recent and and baked in rises on the proper culprits.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:So there's an attempt to to pin it on reducing subsidies. It's in particular I I try not to be political about this, but there's this idea of Republicans reduce subsidies, therefore, that's why your electricity bills go up. The the timing doesn't even work on these things. The logic is actually the opposite. The subsidies, by depriving one of the things they've done is they've deprived the reliable power plants of capital, they've had less reliable power, and so what happens is you have shortfalls in supply relative demand, and that puts the market prices up.
Speaker 13:In particular, what's called capacity markets, which you see particularly in regions like PJM, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, that whole region, like those prices go up. So there's just this all this false narrative. So what people need to recognize is the reason prices are going up is because of prohibitions on reliable power, and preferences for unreliable power
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:And then artificial force electrification. Like, need to understand that. The data centers, one thing people need to understand is new demand does not inherently increase electricity prices. In fact, usually what it does is it decreases electricity prices because you have the same amount you have relatively the same amount of capital spending spread out over more different entities. You'll have different, you know, Burgham interior secretary, former governor, like he and Chris Wright, secretary of energy, have been pointing out, hey, North Dakota is looking really good price wise, and they've had massive increases in data centers.
Speaker 1:Because they've been investing more in energy?
Speaker 13:Well, no. Because the data centers, there's on any grid, you have the peak usage Mhmm. And then you have the regular usage. Mhmm. And you very rarely hit peak.
Speaker 13:Mhmm. So when you have more demand
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 13:You're actually spreading out the cost among
Speaker 2:more. Okay.
Speaker 13:So the the one of the questions with AI that's interesting is, what's the flexibility of the demand profile going to be? Because the more flexible it is, the less you need to increase the peak, which is which is good to increase the peak, but that's the most expensive thing to do. The more you can use off peak Yeah. The more you're actually lowering prices.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And this is already happening a little bit where sometimes if you prompt an image generator, it will in your in your in the middle of the day, it'll go across the world, and it'll use it where it's dark there in the middle of the night because there's maybe more energy or something or, like, away from peak load. Yeah. What do you think about my my question of, you know, energy production growth in America 2026? Are we going to see, you know, a break in the curve?
Speaker 1:Are we already seeing a break in the curve? Is this even the right question to be asking about just energy progress in America over the next few years?
Speaker 13:I mean, it's a good it's a good measure of progress, particularly industrial progress to look at energy production in general in a country, and the fact that we've had flat electricity usage. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if you
Speaker 13:look at ours versus China's, I think we're at about one fifth their industrial Yeah. Electricity usage. So those are really bad signs. So it's a sign that you're being less productive than you can, and often that you're offshoring things because you have such a restrictive anti development environment. With the electricity thing, it's it's one of these things where I'm trying to create the future, so I try not yes.
Speaker 13:Yes.
Speaker 1:But But you're rooting for 5% growth this year.
Speaker 13:Well, yeah. I'm rooting for the enablement
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 13:Of the capacity. Sure. The nice thing is you have a lot of smart people in the administration who are really interested in this Mhmm. Problem. So that's that's a good thing at the margins, because then you can you can make things happen more quickly.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:You have private industry is very focused on this Mhmm. Because of AI Yeah. Whereas they haven't been Totally. Before. So you're getting a lot of ingenuity.
Speaker 13:And it's and gonna be really interesting to see there's gonna be a lot of things at the margins, and we'll see how they add up. I mean, one thing is we use we're using very small oil plants, natural gas plants. You know, they're talking about using the back up generators in Walmart on the like, there's gonna be these interesting questions, and it's we have a new class of smart people who are now being added who whose now focus is on generating more dispatchable
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 13:There there's lots of things you can do. I mean, there's interesting things you can do with with batteries. Like, you can this I'm in agreement on Elon with, like, you can you can build batteries and you can charge them off peak. Mhmm. People think you need solar and wind to go with batteries, but actually the easiest way to deal with batteries, and the way most batteries get charged today, is you have a reliable source of energy and you charge it off peak.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Right? You can run your nuclear power plant at night and charge batteries, and then for a few hours you'll have those batteries to meet peak demand. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 13:You can also what's called upright natural gas plants. So a lot of the natural gas plants in the country were built a generation or two ago, and they might get 30% less capacity than a new natural gas plant. But you can, without dealing with the fundamental supply chain issues in many cases, you can actually add capacity to hundreds and hundreds of existing gas plants. So we've got there's a lot of industrial potential. There's a friendly administration.
Speaker 13:What we have fundamentally, though, is ultimately the administration doesn't properly make any law. Enforces the law. It administers the law. And so what we need as much as possible is to do things congressionally.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:So subsidies were one piece of it. The thing right now that I'm very focused on is permitting reform, and that is because because it's impossible to get permits for things, so it's so difficult, and I don't know how much time we have, but there's a lot there's a lot that needs to be fixed, and it's it's actually hanging by a thread right now.
Speaker 2:We'll have to have lot of time because you're our new energy court. Yes. Yes. We can't let you leave without talking about the actions in Venezuela, how that's
Speaker 13:Sure.
Speaker 2:Impacting kind of global energy markets. Mhmm. You know, everybody on X has their own theory of why we did it and all that stuff. But let's talk about realities of how this can impact just different geopolitical dynamics.
Speaker 13:Alright. Let me just say one thing to the audience. Because one reason I was excited about coming here is you've got you know, a group of people that's very engaged and I think interested in these issues, but that I don't always get to Yeah. To speak to. And I just posted this on X, but I want people to know, like, if you find this exciting, we're hiring, and I just put out, you know, for one of my groups, Energy Freedom Fund, which is the only principled pro freedom lobbying group in the world, basically.
Speaker 13:We are yeah. $50,000 referral bonus if you can find anybody.
Speaker 1:Woah. That's Yeah.
Speaker 13:And we have an assessment. There's an assessment that will tell us whether you can do
Speaker 1:it or not.
Speaker 13:Oh, interesting. It's two hours, so people are up for it, it's worth doing. If you do a decent job at all, we'll at least give you good feedback. But yeah, that's my limiter right now in fixing these problems, is we have enough money, fortunately, but we have a talent deficit. So this is one reason I wanted to come on today.
Speaker 13:Cool. So let's talk about Venezuela. I mean, Venezuela I try to be a master of energy and not pretend to be a master of other things. So obviously, many aspects of the Venezuela situation are beyond energy. There's two really interesting things about this that are important.
Speaker 13:So one is that this is not making a difference, a big difference to global oil markets in the near near future. So we're talking about something where Venezuela is kind of like Venezuelan oil in some ways is like nuclear power, whereas it used to be good
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:And it should have gotten better. But, you know, you're talking about going
Speaker 2:It's all potential.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Well, it's you know, it was once, I think its peak was three and a half million barrels a day. So right now, we're at about a 102,000,000 barrels a day, and by the barrels is 42 gallons. It's about, you know, 500,000,000 gallons or so of oil, you know, produced a day. And 1% of that right now, a little less than 1% is coming from Venezuela.
Speaker 13:Mhmm. And both because of how dilapidated so much of the industry is, how much incompetence there is, and also because physically the crude they use in terms of heavy crude is more difficult to process than other things. It's it's not like this is just you're gonna go from one to three anytime soon.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 13:Sure. So there's a lot of invest you know, this is not any kind of slam dunk. By the way, Canada has in some ways better oil. Mhmm. It's a lot freer country.
Speaker 13:I think we're totally under utilizing Canada as a trading partner. So it's an interesting I I think economically near term, it's not super interesting. It's not as exciting as people think. It's probably most exciting for oil field services. If you invest a bunch of money and send a bunch of people down there, yeah, that benefits Halliburton and Schlumberger and that kind of thing.
Speaker 13:Also benefits potentially Gulf Coast refineries who are very good at this kind of crude, then they don't need to get it from Canada, so then it comparatively hurts Canadian people. So there's that whole thing. The thing I find most interesting though is that for the first time that I can ever remember, a pet issue of mine is now in the public, or this pet issue is in the public, which is that all of these oil countries stole our oil. Like, this is I'm I'm really I don't always agree with exactly how the administration is saying it, but it's very important. And read the the book The Prize is is really good in this regard.
Speaker 13:Daniel Jurgen. Yeah. He he's he's not as judgmental as I am about this. Mhmm. He probably doesn't have as negative a judgment, but you just look and country after country, what happened was they had some, you know, random, mild dictator type person or king or, you know, wasn't the most evil person in the world, but they made a very clear deal with the West.
Speaker 13:So you take Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia couldn't even find water Mhmm. Before we came there, you know, before the West, and particularly The US came there and Standard Oil, right? And they couldn't find water. Mhmm.
Speaker 13:That was their that was their big problem at the time. And then we, of course, make it possible. We get what's called these concessions. We're we're getting a kind of right. And what happens is just they keep pulling back on these things, and because of cultural and political forces at the time, nobody stands up to them.
Speaker 13:So they they keep stealing more and more, and then they just totally nationalize it. They declare it their national heritage. They've totally broken the agreement, and then they use this to fund some of the worst dictatorial behavior
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:In the world. So I think it's very, very important that people are now saying explicitly, hey, we had rights to that oil, it's been stolen, and there's Yeah,
Speaker 2:some because sort this of has been memed memed to no end over the last few days, which is, you know, when people see Trump say that's our oil or something to that effect, people normally dunk on it, because they're like, well, how could that possibly be the case? It's we don't this own is not the fifty first state, it's not our land. Right. But you're pushing back and saying, no, we actually did Yeah, originally have
Speaker 13:mean, it's not we, it's specific companies, right? Yeah. So we need to be clear on it's not the government's thing. But it is an interesting, it's a real case of reparations, because the seizures happened not too long ago. I mean, you're talking about a lot of them culminated in the seventies, and then you're talking about the forties, maybe through the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 13:And then they even once they nationalize it, they screw over companies in different kinds of ways. So I think this is a really good thing, but it needs to be talked about in a very precise way. Mhmm. One thing that that Trump will do that I think is wrong is, like, he he'll have sort of a feeling of, like, I want all these other countries' resources. So, like, I'm so excited about Greenland, and even making Canada the fifty first state, and then talking about Ukraine in certain ways.
Speaker 13:And I think there's you're on really firm ground when somebody actually broke contracts with your companies. There's a difference between like, oh, I'm really excited. Like, having the
Speaker 2:mentality It that others would be nice to have access to that versus there was a time when there was a
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A contract in place.
Speaker 13:And and access, we can access them in a very real way by trading with them. So with Canada, we have enormous opportunity that I think we're squandering right now. I think we should be there's a lot I mean, is a whole other issue, but I think we should be supporting Ukraine a lot more. So, yeah. But but it is a really interesting narrative shift that is a good thing.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for getting us up to speed. We have to jump to our next guest.
Speaker 2:Be back on again.
Speaker 1:But we'd to have you back on the show, which is fantastic. Alright. You so much. The book is Fossil Future. The author is Alex Epstein.
Speaker 1:Go get that job. So much. Stopping by. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, securities, and more, all with great customer service.
Speaker 1:Our next guest is the founder of Ring at Amazon, Jamie Simenoff is at CES. We're gonna have him break down how CES is going. Jamie, sorry for keeping you waiting. Thanks so much for taking the time to jump on the show. It's great to meet you.
Speaker 2:Great to doing?
Speaker 4:Doing great.
Speaker 1:I would love to hear how is CES. I imagine you've been going a long time. I've actually never been. It feels like a playground for me. I'd love to go sometime.
Speaker 1:But, how is it this year? How does it compare to other years? What are you introducing there?
Speaker 4:It's it's so it's it's pretty overall, CES is pretty fun. I think this is, like, my fifteenth or seventeenth year or something like that. So it's been a long time.
Speaker 8:You've really
Speaker 4:been I started I I yeah. I start I started, you know, building the booth myself and driving in here in a in a in a U Haul truck.
Speaker 2:And That's nice.
Speaker 4:You know, graduate have graduated now to a booth that, you know, is built by professionals.
Speaker 1:Wait. What what how do you build the first booth? Is this, like, plywood, or
Speaker 2:are you With scraps and a cave.
Speaker 1:In a cave.
Speaker 4:I actually took I actually took the Shark Tank set, you know, when I was on Shark Tank. Yeah. And I took the Shark Tank set, and we, like, put it in a U Haul truck, brought it to CES. It turns out that you can't use power tools as a nonunion person at CES.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so, like, we we were, like, violently, like, threatened. I couldn't I couldn't afford union labor. So I'm like, guys, you're gonna have like, pull me out of here in handcuffs. Like, I have to get this booth done.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. Yeah. That's wild.
Speaker 4:We literally build build the booth, and it got bigger and bigger. Yeah. And now we've yeah. We we've graduated.
Speaker 1:Okay. Tell me the story of Shark Tank, and I wanna know if you could play it back. With everything you know now, do you think you could have convinced the sharks to invest?
Speaker 4:I mean, everything I know now, sure. Would have told them I'm gonna build the world's largest home security company and sell it for a billion dollars. Do you wanna invest?
Speaker 1:But you could have told them that. You think they would have gone for that?
Speaker 4:I I should have told them that. You know, it's like, don't worry. I'll I'll let you invest in a 7,000,000 valuation. It's gonna sell for a billion. You're totally fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One of
Speaker 4:the great successes. It but it is, to be fair to them at the time, like, I didn't
Speaker 1:know Yeah.
Speaker 4:What that was gonna do. You know? It was it was we were a doorbot. We were figuring it out. Like, a lot of, you know, like, a lot of startups and things, we didn't necessarily pivot, but we pivoted inside of our own sort of mission many times to get to where we are today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and how how do you describe the scope of the company? I mean, you you teased it. You said it's the world's largest home security company. But what's the shape of that?
Speaker 1:What's the footprint? What does your organization look like? Take me through sort of a day in life.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I mean, know, because of an Amazon, there's some things we reported. So we have over a 100,000,000 cameras out there, a profitable business.
Speaker 2:Hit that Gong. Hit that app loving Gong, John.
Speaker 4:There we go. There we go.
Speaker 2:It's a camera shaking hit as Love it.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Thank I I mean, did you ever think you'd be at that scale or what what was the introduction?
Speaker 4:No. I I I remember when I launched this thing, Nest I think when Nest sold to Google, it was reported. I don't know if it's true, but they were doing, like, 30,000, like, units either a month or a quarter.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And I remember thinking to myself, man, if I ever got to 30 like, you know, it's like, if I ever got that big Yeah. You know, holy and and, yeah, we're now I mean, it's like, you know, literally a 100,000,000 plus cameras out there global. I and the for me, I we the mission to make neighborhoods safer, the impact we've had there has been substantial, and that's I I truly am proud of, like, I I really try to focus on those things and then the output, let it happen. Let people reward us for purchasing a camera because they think it's gonna make their home or neighborhood safer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. It makes a ton of sense. Can you take me through sort of how you are thinking about the product suite, the the the feature sets, like how you're positioning the the overall portfolio and then some of the announcements today.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, I mean, from a macro side
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I I look at AI as IA. So we're we're the intelligent assistant. And so our job is now where you know, when I launched Ring, emotion alert was like mind blowing. Like, dude, you got emotion alert from your front door to your phone?
Speaker 9:Like, that's
Speaker 4:crazy. Now you hear they hear them too often. And so our job is to use AI Yeah. To basically curate for you as an individual, unique to your home, what you wanna see when you should be interacting with it, and really take down the number of alerts and increase the the efficacy of them. So that's that's like from a from a macro, that's what we're
Speaker 2:doing. How are you how are
Speaker 1:you thinking about the trade off of, like, cloud based artificial intelligence, obviously, processing a ton of video constantly that feels like something needs to be done on a server. At the same time, there's privacy, so people might want it done on device, but that creates power constraints and all sorts of things. Have I mean, also, I feel like being at Amazon is great because I feel like most people trust Amazon to be secure because AWS and all this stuff. But, how have you how have you tussled with, like, where the AI lives and the benefits and costs and trade offs there?
Speaker 4:So for us, it's it's layers. You try to, determine if it's a human or motion event at the camera level so you're not just flooding to your point, like, you're not flooding the AI or the servers, the cloud. But the sound kind of it's very expensive. I mean, it's using a lot of power, using a lot of processing. So it's like trying to have, like, these different layers.
Speaker 4:But, you know, where we like to end is the cloud. We like to have the cloud as the place that's doing the final processing. AI is moving so fast that in our area, I think anything you put at the edge is gonna age like fish on a hot day. And so we're trying to be very careful not to put too much intelligence at the edge because that intelligence, it it decays so quickly that by the time you actually ship that product, it's maybe no longer intelligent. And I I want my team to be able to write on and, you know, build code and put out features that are literally the best in in the world at that moment, and the cloud really is the only place to do it right now for that final sort of piece.
Speaker 2:Where are you most excited for various models to improve? Like, do we need capability advancement, or do you feel like there's a capability overhang where there's enough product that that it's, yeah, more about implementation?
Speaker 4:It's such a good question because there's there's so many, like, places where we're putting models and different models and custom models and this like, there's so much coming out, but I would say where you're going with it, I think we are starting to now I think that the AI is ahead of what we can sort of, you know, chew and sort of digest our food with. I think it's actually getting farther along than we can put the features around it, the UI around it, and and have customers understand it. So I do think it's actually starting to get almost faster than we are in that, and it's up to us, like, now to try to figure out, like, how to get because, again, no one our our customers don't buy technology. They buy something that makes their home feel safer, makes their home better, like, gives them more attachment to their home. They're not buying the best AI.
Speaker 4:They're buying the best service for their home. And so it's our job to sort of not sell them technology, sell them, obviously technology in the background, but sell them the features and the services. So but I do think I have not been able to find lately, and it's it's amazing how quickly this is happening. Every idea I have, it's like the AI is ahead of the idea. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Whereas before, the team would be like, well, it's not really there yet. You can't do that. Like, you don't understand. And now it seems like it's it's really just going so much faster than even I can sort of think.
Speaker 1:Is that Okay. Is that reengaging you as a leader? I mean, it's been over a decade. I feel like there's a lot of times when, you know, post acquisition, you're at a large company. It can be exhausting.
Speaker 1:Maybe you wanna go fish all day or something. I don't know if you fish. But the but but the AI moment, it feels like it's been reengaging a lot of business leaders. Have you had that effect over the last year?
Speaker 4:Oh, I totally. Like, I there's so much we can do. We can build it so fast, get it out. I mean, we launched today I I was I I live in Pacific Palisades, I live in the fire zone. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, you know, it's like yeah. As you know, like, was a crazy thing. Yeah. So I was able to go from like, living there, seeing what happened there
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, and then building a feature that we launched today, which I think will hopefully be a a a way to assist in future fires, which we did with Watch Duty
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:Where now you'll get an alert as a Ring customer if you're in a fire zone. We had over 10,000 cameras in the Palisades area.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so now you now you would get an alert that says, like, would you like to join in to Watch Duty and give them sort of And now we'll have an accurate up to the minute map from AI looking for embers, looking for smoke Oh. And and seeing where the fire is jumping. And so we now we can give real time information to to everyone, and hopefully Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wanna talk a little bit Yeah. Yeah. Kind of a little bit about kind of some more sci fi stuff. I'm curious to kinda get your opinion on. So John and I John's in Pasadena.
Speaker 2:I'm in Malibu. So this time last year, John like, I I didn't have electricity, cell service, anything like that.
Speaker 1:So you live in a house that previously burned down?
Speaker 2:Yeah. My my house burned down in 2018, was fully rebuilt. And then I and six months after I bought it, I was like, it's There's a reason it burned down. No. But the the it it burned down because, like, an ember had floated from a faraway fire, and embers floated to, like Yep.
Speaker 2:Six houses in my neighborhood. Yep. And all of them just burned down. And luckily, the majority of the homes were fine. And I was just thinking like, there's gotta be better As we, you know, head into the kind of robotics era, there has to be better You know, detection is one thing, but then actual response feels like inevitable next step over time when if it's literally a single ember that can, you know, be the reason that a multimillion dollar property burns to the ground, we should be able to detect that quickly and put it out without having, you know, a bunch of heroes in a truck drive, you know, 10 miles and Yep.
Speaker 2:Come put it out with water. Right? So how are you thinking about kind of, like, actual response? And and is that even something that Ring would do, or do you think there's other startups that should leverage your guys' detection?
Speaker 4:So this is where I'm like, we were we worked with Watch Duty. So our our Firewatch, which is our system that we go into where AI is now watching your camera, you've put it in this mode and said, like, yes, I wanna share this. That then pipes right into watch duty. Watch duty is what's happening. The command center has watch duty up.
Speaker 4:Residents have watch duty on their app. So that is the centralized place where the map is forming on the fire. And I my hope is that and and being in the fire myself, I saw that, like, a a a bush is smoldering next to a house, and I could go put it out with my feet. You know, people are like, how'd you put out the fire? And I'm like, I I literally would stamp on it until it was out, put some dirt on it.
Speaker 4:Like, now if that had kept going, and, you know, I don't know, like, the exact incident, but, yes, that's what happens. Like, that keeps going, then it burns the house down, and that house starts up fired and puts out more embers. And so if we could if if you could see that on a camera and and say, oh, wow. Like, there's this thing has jumped over to this area It's a quarter mile away, and there's smoldering next to this house. You can put it out so much easier and deploy those resources.
Speaker 4:So I think that's why what's what's great about this one is we're bringing the information in, and then it's going to watch duty, which is already being used by all of the people that are deploying the resources today.
Speaker 2:Yep. Are you excited about robots and drones as as responders to various home, you know, home security wildfires? We You have Boston Dynamics.
Speaker 1:Sorry. Amazon has a drone that flies around your house, but I is that a Ring project, or is that
Speaker 4:I was I I built I built that.
Speaker 13:You built that. No way.
Speaker 1:Tell us about that.
Speaker 2:How was that built? And then and then specifically, so Boston Dynamics has been showing off their new humanoids. I've been wanting somebody to build a a humanoid home security product forever. I'd love to have a just a My guy. Menacing.
Speaker 2:I I mean deterrent it it's having, you know Yeah. Various criminals knowing that most homes now have, like, you know, video.
Speaker 1:I mean, the just those signs that you put in the in the in the ground
Speaker 2:American protected by help.
Speaker 1:Like, that helps a little bit. But, yeah, I would love to know more about drones and robotics.
Speaker 4:So there's different, like, different layers to drones. I mean, so you have companies like Axon out there that are doing police drones and, like, literally are, you know, going miles. So for both fires or, you know, responding to something, there's that layer. And then I think there's gonna be layers down all the way to where we were, which is like, I'd say the complete other side, which is inside the home. So having like a small drone inside the home that can fly around, see what's going on for security.
Speaker 4:I'm very bullish on the whole robotic space. Like, in general, I think AI has also, you know, what took what was so hard for us years ago when we're building this thing is now I don't wanna say it's easy, but wow, is it different? Like like, there's a real tailwind behind us. And so, hopefully, I mean, you guys are you guys are in LA. Maybe I'll bring something by the studio in few months.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But but more specifically, is the idea of a humanoid pacing around your property, is is that is is is that a reasonable deterrent? Is there any Have
Speaker 1:you built one? Is one in
Speaker 2:your garage right now? So here's reason the reason I say is because like when people are like, oh, you have a robot that's gonna do your laundry. It's like, well, I have a wonderful woman who does my laundry and I like employing this person. And if you give me an $80,000 a year robot or $80,000 robot that's gonna depreciate and it's gonna do a worse job, I'm like, I'm happy with the human. At least for Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yep. You know, the next few years. Right? Whereas hiring somebody to stand in your backyard.
Speaker 1:All night long.
Speaker 9:All night long.
Speaker 1:That's a brutal job.
Speaker 2:That's like 150 k a year. I don't know if you're somebody that's actually, like Yeah. Worth worth
Speaker 4:And and it's also it's a it's there's all these studies of security guards that they like, their their effectiveness goes down, like, literally, like like, algorithm it's like it just falls off. Mhmm. And you think about it, it's like just because you get so bored. Right? Like, you're sitting doing the same thing every day.
Speaker 4:Nothing's happening. So it's like the effectiveness of a security guard is actually like, human security guard is very tough to be because you're not it's not normal that you're actually doing something on the security side. So I do think robotics I think at the higher end places, enterprise, maybe there will be, you know, humanoid security. I we always look at it from high volume, low cost. Like, I'm I'm always on, the high volume, low cost residential side is where we start.
Speaker 4:And so, you know, what can we build to bring robotics in into and around the home and the neighborhood that's affordable at high high volumes, I don't think I don't think that's gonna be a humanoid for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That said, if a humanoid costs $500 or something at some point and you could do it, of course, like, it's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I also I was saying to John the teleoperation potential here, which is like, hey, ring dissect something. I have somebody somebody could be anywhere in the world. Suddenly, they can pop into this embodied form factor and actually be a physical deterrent because, I mean, so many people in I mean, LA, like, I Still get a different Talk to anybody that lives I mean, the Palisades had, like, prior to the fire, an insane break in epidemic. I have friends who would have multiple break ins in their home per year, Super, like, elite operators that would come in, use metal detectors, figure out where your safes were, pull them out, throw them out in a truck.
Speaker 2:Yep. It'd be like five minutes, everything's gone. So there needs like, video is not enough for true deterrence. Like, there's gonna have to be Yeah. Physical.
Speaker 4:And we have stuff like virtual security guard that is you can set it in, like, you know, for my house when I go to sleep, I set virtual security guard on. If someone comes on the property, they're notified, goes to a human. So, like, there's response. So I think that's That's really cool. I I I do think you're correct though in how you're looking at it, is like, it's not just technology.
Speaker 4:Like, the idea that, like, just technology is gonna solve everything is not correct. I think we can use our IA, like our intelligent assistant, to bring people into the scene when they need to be on a limited basis. And when you do that, I think I think that's how, like, for example, you're talking about the Palisades, like, how you would reduce that crime or even try to zero out that crime Yeah. Which I I do believe we can do over the next few years with deploying the AI as well as merging it with other human responses.
Speaker 1:How has the enterprise side or the b to b side of the business evolved? What's the shape of it? When what trade offs have you made to focus on particular niches or verticals? I'm interested to hear Yeah. Because obviously, this technology applies everywhere.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we really started focusing residential. Mhmm. That pulled us into small medium business. You know, we're in know, over half a million small medium businesses use us.
Speaker 4:We don't even know exactly all of them.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Yeah. Of course. Because they treat it like homes. They buy it as like a prosumer effectively.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. So we don't like know exactly how many, but but we think it's, you know, it's definitely north of of, call it, half a million.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, you know, just like it's like how the iPhone sort of slowly got into or not even that slowly, but got into the enterprise.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 4:yeah. Like, the iPhone like, you know, Apple didn't have
Speaker 6:a bunch of
Speaker 4:salespeople go out and sell enterprise iPhone. Yeah. It's, you know, the the CEO brought the iPhone in that they had and said, don't want this other I'm
Speaker 1:not using a blockchain.
Speaker 4:Anymore. Not using a blockchain. Yeah. That's exactly right. And so I I think we've kind of gone slowly up the stack.
Speaker 4:Today, actually launched a whole line of new cameras that are multi four k lens, like, really higher end, we call it the elite line. Mhmm. And I I do think that will sort of get us just kind of similar to the iPhone getting into enterprise. I think it'll pull us in, and we'll see we'll kinda see how that goes. We also now have an App Store
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:That people can build custom applications because historically, again, pre AI, the a camera did security. Like, that was all it could do in in sort of reasonable, you know, cost efficient way. Now if you think about like a like a coffee shop, if you have Ring cameras all over your coffee shop, why isn't it telling you that a table was dirty and someone wanted to sit? Why isn't it telling you about the line? Why isn't it telling you about which team is the fastest?
Speaker 4:Why is it like like, we're seeing it. Like, it's all there. And so being able to allow the long tail to be built by entrepreneurs, just like any marketplace or any app store, I do think we're gonna unlock a lot of value for enterprise and small medium business that way. So I'm I'm really excited. We actually just launched that today too.
Speaker 4:We launched
Speaker 7:a bunch of stuff today.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine that being really good. Have have you been focused more on job sites than, like, large enterprise, like, software campuses, that type of that type of security? That feels like it may be a separate problem, but I could imagine you getting there at some point.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, we like, job sites have been great. We have a lot of solar powered cameras, so people use them. They put them on like, you'll see them on a pole. Like, you'll just take one of we have cameras with lights.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So that's also good on job sites. Like, someone walks onto the job site at night. Yeah. Light goes on.
Speaker 4:Camera's there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:We have a talk down so you can say, like, you're being recorded. So, like, there's a lot like, we have the virtual security guard. Sure. We launched today one of the trailers. Have you seen those trailers that are out the parking lots?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Those are solar panel on top and a bunch of cameras, that that type of thing. I've seen
Speaker 4:those Yeah. So we launched one that's more of, I'd say, like, product, lower cost in that market. Again, high volume, low cost. Yeah. So we're gonna I wouldn't be surprised in the next couple of years.
Speaker 4:We sort of really have a big dent in the enterprise, but we're not gonna do it through the front door. We're not gonna sort of not be responding to RFPs. We're not gonna have an enterprise Salesforce.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:We're gonna just, you know, come in like the iPhone. Like, let let let it come in.
Speaker 1:I feel like I feel like you could spin that up in a heartbeat at Amazon, but but it makes sense for the overall strategy. One one last question, and we'll let you get back to CES. How do you think about, camera sensor technology in security cameras and door cameras? I was looking specifically, at, like, a wildlife, like a squirrel cam for my son who's four and a half. And I was but I'm also, like, a camera nerd.
Speaker 1:We use, like, you know, Sony FX threes and full frame Yep. Cinema lenses here. And I was like, I sort of want, like, a four k, not just four k, but, like, full frame cinema lens hardened just to find my squirrels, and it's, like, a ridiculous thing. I don't know that that's a real real product, but how do you think about the the the learning curve and just the diffusion of just better camera sensors, better lenses into these commodity consumer products over time?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So there's definitely a diminishing return. Yeah. You know, you can go to, a 20 k or, you know, like, k sensor. It's it's, like, not gonna for a nor again, special applications.
Speaker 4:Yes. But for, like, a normal home, it's not gonna give you any more value. Yeah. Ideally, 4 k is a giant leap. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:We now have a whole four k line. Yeah. With our elite line, we have like now like multi multi four k lenses that are Different. Lens down to the pixels. So it's really pixel like, what you really wanna look at is pixel density.
Speaker 4:Like Sure. That it's actually not four k, two k. It's like, is the pixel density
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That the camera delivers? And then that's also, like, the AI can only process what it sees. Like, the the camera can only be as smart as what it sees. I do think the current line of four k cameras we have right now for most residential use cases Mhmm. Are as good as you're gonna want at the price point, and then we'll just kinda let just like everything in technology as eight k sensors come down, as bandwidth goes up, we'll kind of keep adding that.
Speaker 4:But I do think we're right now, like, kind of right at the edge of that curve of price, you know, price to sort of quality, what you need.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a lot sense. Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 2:No. This is super fun.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a lot
Speaker 2:of fun. Appreciate you making the time. Great to meet you. Happy customer success. Thank you for
Speaker 4:Thank yeah. Exactly. Success. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. It's amazing. Well, enjoy the rest of CES. Have a great rest
Speaker 2:back on soon.
Speaker 1:And we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Quickly, let me tell you about Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 1:We have an exciting guest. We have Jeff Wu and Jake
Speaker 2:Let's bring them in.
Speaker 1:Joining TBP NFL.
Speaker 2:Here they are.
Speaker 1:How are you guys doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 11:Good. How are you? Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1:We're good. Congratulations. Can you set the table for us on the most recent raise? How did it come together? What's the goal of the fundraise?
Speaker 1:How how are you describing the the strategy of the fund these days?
Speaker 12:I mean, I'm happy to kick it off. I mean, the anti fund, we think that boomer VCs are boring, and just like there are new AI companies Yeah. And the next generation of American entrepreneurs, like, taking over just the like, just like the business ecosystem
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Think that the same opportunities exist for VC.
Speaker 1:What was the original anti fund? Like, how'd you come up with that name? Why what are you anti?
Speaker 8:The boomers. Yeah.
Speaker 11:A lot a lot of a lot of time. We're both founders and Yeah. We know how hard it is dealing with VTs and move slow and updates and not providing any value, and they just become a nuisance. And I think we were very founder first and wanted to bring a value add. I think what we can bring is, like, distribution, marketing, all of these things, expertise on social media, advertising.
Speaker 11:We work with obviously, invested in the OpenAI, but then worked with the Sora team to help launch the product, brought in the content. So that's just, like, one really good example. But that's what we wanted to do is just be anti the establishment, essentially, and and bring something new to the table that wasn't just money. We believe money is a commodity and that things beyond that are way more valuable in helping grow the companies. And I
Speaker 12:think the double click on that. I think as founders and as VCs, you have to be anti establishment. I mean, we are disrupting existing large players. If we don't want to take over existing large markets, then you should not be in this business. Yeah.
Speaker 12:So that should be what you expect as a founder, but you should expect that from your investors. If your investor is not as hungry as you, maybe you choose other investors.
Speaker 2:What what can you say on fund strategy ownership targets? My my assumption is that you you guys are multistage, so you're kind of flexible. I I imagine there's pre seed rounds that you'd be excited about leading, but at the same time, you don't mind participating in in a later stage round where it's a breakout company and you can, you know, add fuel to the fire.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I think the way we think about it is that we've taken barbell, but we call it extreme barbell. We wanna be the first check-in technical founders, and that's people just dropping out. With their first phone call, we'll put in a $102.50 k, just put them in the business. Or we identify and and build, you know, really great relationship with Sam Altman and Mark Chan of OpenAI, we want to support what we think will be generational defining companies.
Speaker 12:Yeah. And I think everything in the middle is very hard. And I think we know where we're strong and where we're may potentially, you know, weaker.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tell me more about this Sora partnership or or or that project. Like, how did that come together? What was the reaction? I feel like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did you hesitate at all about giving up your name and likeness? I mean, you and Sam Altman, you guys kinda first. And I think it went it went surprisingly fine. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But what yeah. What was the reaction?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So the they wanted to build a social media platform, and we met at the inauguration with Sam Altman. We were, like, talking about how there needs to be a new social media platform, what does that look like, etcetera. And so we just started having idea brainstorms, it eventually turned into what what Sora is. And then just helping them on the functionality, you know, me and my brother's expertise of however many years we've been making content, all the little dials, triggers, change this button, change that button, make this easier, boom, boom, boom.
Speaker 11:This is what fans are looking for. Super detailed stuff. But then once it finally came to to launch, yeah, it was it I gave my name, image, likeness, and I knew it was gonna get crazy. I I wasn't hesitant, and it just caught like fire. And, obviously, we saw the the results and what happened, and it was a pretty phenomenal experience in marketing and, like, showcasing what the Internet loves these days.
Speaker 11:Yeah. One of
Speaker 12:our portfolio companies, archive.com, tracked a billion impressions in six days of Jake Wow. Sora.
Speaker 1:That's so many. Makes sense. What advice are you giving to, folks who wanna become creators in 2026? It feels like a completely different era from the Vine days. At the same time, there's some lessons that never change.
Speaker 1:But how are you seeing it?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I would say authenticity is everything. I think showing your whole entire life is the key if you're a new and up and coming creator, like the struggles, what you're going through. Tell tell your audience about financially what you're doing and what you're having to do. Talk to them about your ups, your downs.
Speaker 11:Share with them your your life story, and then you just have to be posting and posting. And I think a lot of people aren't good at editing, like, simple stuff, captions, music, video, timing, how long is the video. So it is very difficult, and you're competing with every single platform as a content creator. You're competing as a content creator, I'm technically competing against Netflix. Why are they gonna watch, you know, some dickful Instagram videos versus going on onto Netflix?
Speaker 11:And so you have to realize that you're actually playing one of the hardest games. Mhmm. And people think it's easy, but it's actually a very, very technical thing. And you have to have a certain skill set to be able to do it. And you have to be entertaining.
Speaker 11:You have to be providing something that's a niche that no one has ever seen before. We we have the Paul brothers, we have the Speeds, we have MrBeast doing his videos, we have Whistling Diesel blowing up trucks and cars. So you what are you doing?
Speaker 12:That's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. John has talked about this. You you used to be able to get a million views by just having a Ferrari. Now you know you're blowing up. Very good.
Speaker 2:The game's changed.
Speaker 4:How Yeah. Well, do you feel like
Speaker 1:have went the car or rent the car to, give the car away where you take the tax deduction to now you must destroy it, which is
Speaker 2:How do you, so so 2025, there was a lot of founders doing, like, rage bait marketing.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:yeah. This style of, like, using rage bait in content was popularized on YouTube and various social media platforms. I would say, Jake, you've done this very, very effectively at times of being under, knowing I'm gonna put out this video. It's gonna make a lot of people mad, but lot of people are gonna enjoy it too and they're gonna become fans and I'm okay to alienate some people. Do you how how have you kind of like evolved like that even like, what is your framework?
Speaker 2:What is the right amount of Yeah. Rage to to generate in an audience and and and because you really need to thread the needle.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So the way I look at entertainment is invoking emotion. You wanna invoke fear, sadness, happiness, That's good.
Speaker 2:So Good. Good. Good.
Speaker 1:Just fear
Speaker 2:and sadness.
Speaker 8:But, yeah, you need
Speaker 1:all of them.
Speaker 2:You need all The full spectrum.
Speaker 11:That's what I'm committed to. Yeah. And I don't care who likes it or not. That's what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:Emotional I
Speaker 11:post a video where, like, I was acting like I was depressed, like, traveling around the world in, like, my jet and on vacation.
Speaker 3:Was like, what is life
Speaker 11:I was like, what is life even about? And I was trolling and, like, my friends text me like, yo, bro. Are you okay? I'm like, yeah, bro. But the video got, like, 30,000,000 views because everyone was like, oh, this is, like I'm kinda sad too.
Speaker 11:Yeah. What is life even about? And just different random things like that. So just be committed as an entertainer to invoking emotion, and you you can't care about the result of what anyone thinks because at the end of the day, people will come back because they feel something. That's the key.
Speaker 11:Sure.
Speaker 1:Someone asked me to ask you, all time all time record for bench press.
Speaker 11:I've done three fifteen
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 11:Like, three times.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 8:That's where I can go. There we go.
Speaker 2:What, what do you find yourself when you're talking with founders, bringing up stories from like the fight game and and different because I because I met like building a company kinda can feel at times like getting waking up, opening your email, getting punched in the face, maybe an investor's reject ing you, a customer went with a competitor Yeah. Etcetera, etcetera. You're pretty used to getting punched in the face and and chewing glass at this point, and I imagine some of those learnings carry over.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Well, 100%. You know, I say after boxing, everything is easy because you're actually physically having to fight every day and taking the licks and punches, and you have to bob and weave. Sometimes after the first round, you go back to the corner. Boxing's a great analogy for life.
Speaker 11:In your companies, you have to go back to the corner, talk to your coaches, reset, come out for the for the next round, and you can be losing a fight and still win in the end. Not me against Anthony Joshua. My jaw is broken, but
Speaker 8:I'm sorry. But
Speaker 2:But you're still yapping. Didn't take
Speaker 1:You're still here. People are wondering, hey. Can he talk on the show? And, you know, here, it's proof.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I have a little bit of a lisp right now because of it, but, we're just pushing through.
Speaker 12:This is store at Jake,
Speaker 2:actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 11:This is the AI version of me I tapped in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you talk maybe both of you could, talk to me a little bit about focus. You're both involved in a ton of stuff, you know, boxing, content, investing, building companies. W. At the same time yeah.
Speaker 1:W. At the same time, I think of you as, very insightful early on on the importance of daily work, daily repetition. The It's Everyday Bro is a meme, but I actually think it's deeply insightful and the key to many successes. And I credit a lot of the growth that we've had here with becoming a daily show instead of just this show that is every once in a while. And I'm wondering how you deal with focus and and when when is the time to go all in and do something every single day.
Speaker 11:Yeah. You have to figure out that org chart for yourself in terms of what do you know feeds the rest of the ecosystem the most. And for me, that's boxing. But I look to Elon Musk as an example. Right?
Speaker 11:How he's build built some of the biggest companies in the world, and he's managing all of these teams, and he's devoted and, you know, sleeps on the couch in the offices. You have to be that level of committed, and it's a nonstop working, hustling, you know, whatever it is that you you have to do. But I I think the importance of having a great team around you allows you to be able to do a lot of things. Jeff, that boxing fuels the rest of the ecosystem, the content, the businesses, the attention, the all of these things, the networking, the connection. So then Jeff can put his priority as anti fund, etcetera, and it all turns into this great flywheel.
Speaker 11:But it's definitely just staying committed and working harder than, you know, anyone else that's doing it or just as hard and just really checking the temperature if you're actually doing that.
Speaker 1:Have you guys have you guys done any recent deals?
Speaker 12:Some the most recent things that we're excited well, I was gonna say We're get happy, dad.
Speaker 2:They just happen to crack open a half.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Just wondering. You you you
Speaker 12:know what happy investors and happy dads. That's awesome. The milk boys are are homies
Speaker 1:and Yeah.
Speaker 12:The bros are are great. It's a great operating team plus. I think that influencer led CPG play, I think, is challenging, but, like, the very, very best operators are the best celebrities we like to partner with. So another example of that is Khloe Kardashian's Cloud Popcorn. And, obviously, our own business is w
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's your guys' framework for for for investing in celebrity brands? Because people have the sense that, oh, so let they they see celebrity brands that work and they just assume that all celebrities see They the Travis Scott with his canned cocktail brand that that looked like it had a lot of potential but didn't go anywhere. And there's a bunch of other examples like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm curious like what you guys think the formula is. Is is is a creator limited to, you know, one brand over a ten year period? Do you do you see a multi brand strategy emerging? What do you think?
Speaker 12:Yeah. I think it's I mean, similar I I'd say similar assessment is a normal investment. Right? 90% of startups fail. So I think we just like look at that statistical norm and just expect and even for celebrity let or not to just have that statistical pattern.
Speaker 12:But then I think after that, it looks at but what you do have is that you have a unfair distribution advantage, and you need to make sure that the market in which that distribution focuses actually makes sense. Mhmm. Right? Like, think Happy Dad is a great example for Melt Boys to me is like the frat bro older of Internet. And there's you know?
Speaker 12:I I don't know. They're like 30 now,
Speaker 1:so they made their.
Speaker 12:But but to me, it it that that is a very good founder market product fit.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Right? And and I think if celebrity or not, you just look at that thing as an asset just like there's a technical advantage. Why are OpenAI researchers just like raising a ton of money out the gate? Because like there is an assumption that they have some technical ability to have to find product market fit. So it's the same thing with with a celebrity.
Speaker 12:It's just like they're very distribution oriented. And I think it's maybe a little bit less quantitative. It's it's maybe more taste driven. I think that's where I think Jake, I I value, and I think Logan as well, they have seen over, you know, ten, fifteen years of being famous, how many people that have come and gone as famous people. I think it's super rare to be top of field and relevant across multiple platforms for such a long time.
Speaker 12:So I think Yeah. Those are patterns we we we pull out.
Speaker 1:What about the launch of w? I thought it was interesting because you didn't do what I thought you would do, which is direct to consumer purely, just sell just to the audience. You came out of the gate with a big retail partnership. And I think maybe some influencers or just celebrity type people, they forget that the CEOs of big retail establishments might be in their audience too. They might be able to get that introduction to Walmart sooner or Target sooner.
Speaker 1:And I was wondering how deliberate that strategy was. As you reflect on that strategy, would you recommend it to someone else in that position?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Well, 100%. I think playing across the the board also is key. But we wanted to go retail first, and we saw the success of that with my brother's brand with Prime and the accessibility of, you know, all of our fans walking through the these stores on a daily basis. I would say a lot of my fan base is a Walmart shopper and etcetera.
Speaker 11:So, yeah, being able to have those content points digitally, but also in person and people seeing the things in stores and, yeah, being able to have retail d to c, all of that, I think, is is super important. But we decided to go with the retail first strategy, and
Speaker 2:it's worked out great. Part of, I think, the way that you guys have maintained, such relevancy is just reinventing yourself. Obviously, you reinventing. You're going from a YouTuber to a fighter. Do you think about, fighters have notoriously short careers?
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm sure you'll you'll be able to come out of the woodwork when you're 60 and do the Tyson thing, you know, lock lock up another 100,000,000 pay per view. But I imagine at some point, maybe maybe in your forties, you'll yourself again. Do you think about are are you thinking five, ten years out around how you wanna reinvent yourself again? Or are you just tunnel vision on boxing at the moment and and nothing else matters?
Speaker 11:No. Yeah. Definitely, no. I I naturally will lead myself into politics without a doubt. Like,
Speaker 1:it's Woah.
Speaker 11:It's within me. I'm passionate about it. I I follow it very closely behind the scenes, and I try to speak up as much as I can to help my audience better understand it and to state my opinion on things. But I don't know what that exactly looks like.
Speaker 2:Are you thinking like AI czar or president? What what? Controller of
Speaker 1:a local city.
Speaker 11:I just wanna help the the world, and I know it's needed, especially in the generations moving forward. And that's, you know, something that Charlie Kirk was doing. I don't know if it's something that looks like that, but it is needed, and it's very important. And I think since the beginning of my whole entire career, I knew I wanted to help kids and help the world. And that's what I've done with my charity and boxing bullies and renovating gyms and all of these things, but I know I can do it at a even greater level.
Speaker 11:And so working on some things in that area in the future will definitely be exciting.
Speaker 2:Well, chat's saying Vance Paul 2028. So Let's go.
Speaker 8:Let's go.
Speaker 5:Well, thank you. Awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, great great to have you both on. Congratulations. Be back on soon. And, yeah, congrats on the new fund Yeah. And the recent fight.
Speaker 2:And the
Speaker 1:portfolio. Excited about there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You guys pretty much got them all. Company. So, it's been, very cool to watch.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thank you, guys. Thank guys. Soon. Talk soon.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Our next guest is Matt from Doctronic.
Speaker 1:He's the cofounder and CEO.
Speaker 2:Here we go. And we're
Speaker 1:gonna welcome him to
Speaker 2:the stream. What's happening, Matt? How are you? Can you hear me? Not yet.
Speaker 7:I don't know what's happening with the AirPods.
Speaker 2:There we go. There we go. AirPods. AirPods are rough. They create the split second delay.
Speaker 2:Now it feels like Oh, I
Speaker 7:didn't know that.
Speaker 2:We're face to face now. How are doing? Great to meet.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Great to meet you too. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:First time on the show. Would love a quick introduction on yourself and the company.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So I'm Matt. I've been building startups for a long time, twenty five years at this point.
Speaker 7:Built a big success. Yeah. Right. Big built a big, e commerce unicorn called Moto Operandi a long time ago.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:A lot of startups. Computer science from Carnegie Mellon. Doctronic is the number one AI doctor. Right? So got 20,000,000 patients, or or 20,000,000 consults so far, 2,000,000 patients.
Speaker 2:Wow. And
Speaker 7:we're an AI doctor where anybody can come for free and talk to AI, etcetera. And we have a telehealth practice behind it too. So you can talk to AI. It's gonna diagnose you. At the end of that, you can take all that information, full diagnosis, full treatment plan, etcetera, and talk to our doctors.
Speaker 7:So it's a a pretty straightforward, simple process. Our doctors are are available twenty four seven, licensed in all 50 states.
Speaker 2:When when did you when did you start the company, and and what is, what's been the primary kind of distribution method? Is this something that people just they end up they have a pressing need, they want medical advice, guidance, they're gonna find you, or are you selling through you know, how how are you actually getting 20,000,000 people using the
Speaker 7:Yeah. So we're direct to consumer. We launched in September '23, so been around for a while. Actually, when we launched, there was this open question, you know, did anyone wanna talk to an AI about their health? It was kind of an unknown.
Speaker 7:It was, you know, early early in the the GPT four days.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And it turns out it's a resounding yes. Right? People really wanna talk about their health. The other question was, could you make an AI accurate enough to practice medicine? Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And it turns out you can. You can't just use the foundational models. You have to do a lot of a lot of work with them. And so we're direct to consumer.
Speaker 7:We get a huge amount of our traffic from just organic search. You know, we get a 100, a 150,000 people hitting inside a week. Yeah. And then, of course, we're doing social networking, paid stuff, etcetera.
Speaker 2:How much more do people when when when people have a doctor in their pocket, do they are they going are they effectively talking to a doctor or an agent that's acting as a doctor? Is it is it 50 times more? Is it a 100 times more than they usually would? Because I mean, think everybody's experience like, you know, researching it was, you know, doing a search, adding Reddit to the end. Now people might try a foundation model, and it's obviously giving a disclaimer.
Speaker 2:Well, we're a foundation model. We can't actually give, you know, medical advice. Do you have to put a disclaimer like that or or still? Or Well, so does it actually work?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Super interesting. So so first off, let let's let's talk about, like, how often people use it. So I think the the stat is the average American sees their primary care doctor three times a year, which is, you know, kinda crazy. And, of course, there just aren't enough primary care
Speaker 2:guys out there, they're, like, three times three times in my life.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Right. I haven't seen mine in years. So my wife is a doctor, which makes it a little bit easier, but yeah. Like, you know, but but my wife doesn't wanna help me anyway.
Speaker 7:Right? That's that's not something you ask your wife. But but yeah. So, people are using the system multiple times a month. Right?
Speaker 7:So we're close to weekly active users for a lot a lot of people. So the question is to, like, what what would happen if you had a real doctor in your pocket is, I think you've talked to them about everything. You've talked to them about how you wake up in the morning, your back is sore, you know you have herniated discs. Is it worse than a couple days ago? You don't know, but you talk.
Speaker 7:Right? Mhmm. And it slowly gathers all this information about you.
Speaker 9:Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So so it's certainly changing the way people are are interacting. As far as disclaimers go and such, we are so our AI for most situations outside of the state of Utah right now doesn't practice medicine. It's gonna talk to you, and it's gonna always say, look. Wait.
Speaker 2:In Utah in Utah, you got it does practice medicine?
Speaker 7:Wait. What? Yeah. That's the cool part.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's what
Speaker 7:we announced today. I'll tell you about that in a sec. Okay.
Speaker 1:So Sure.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just so outside of Utah
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Know, let's say you're on a diagnostic pathway and you go through the diagnostic agents, etcetera. Right? The the AI is gonna kind of come to this consensus, and they're all gonna say, look. It's probably one of these four things. Right?
Speaker 7:And here are four treatment plans for each of those, here's and a note that you can take to your doctor. And we're not practicing medicine. You can also take this to our doctors. This is all just for you to take to your doctors. It's a tool to help you communicate with your doctors, and it's more accurate than ChatGPT and Gemini and all those because we're feeding it all sorts of, you know, this massive corpus of medical documents that our doctors have written for the LMs, and we've got lots of agents.
Speaker 7:We can get into details some other time. Right? Mhmm. But it doesn't practice medicine
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:At all.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 7:It's gonna just take Do you you do you
Speaker 2:think that, this aspect of Gen AI is still kind of underrated by the world? I had a kind of a weird cool moment this week where my my one year old wasn't sleeping that well. My wife was about to hire a sleep consultant that we had hired for our first kid. She started talking with an LLM, and it basically, within twenty four hours, had, like, got the one year old on a sleep schedule that was working again. And that was such a cool moment because I was like, we were happy.
Speaker 2:Historically, it was so worth it to hire a sleep consultant because if your kid's not sleeping great and they can and you get them sleeping great, it's like life changing. Yep. But now but most families are not gonna spend a thousand dollars to have some expert come and coach them on sleep schedules Yep. And things like that. So it feels like underrated at a society level.
Speaker 2:People just see the slop in their different social feeds, they're like, this is dumb. Why are we building data centers? And yet I
Speaker 7:think it's totally underrated. I read the other day that 20% of ChatGPT traffic is health related. And for for things like that, helping you sleep train your child Yeah. Awesome. You're like, use ChatGPT.
Speaker 7:It's great. Right? But when you actually wanna start getting into medicine, like like, real actual medicine, ChatGPT can't do that. It can't. I mean, even if it could, right, it probably shouldn't.
Speaker 7:Right? But it's not gonna help you understand a prescription and what the dosage should be and what the schedule should be. If you have high cholesterol, it's gonna say you probably need to take a statin, then you need to get some exercise, which is great and true. Right? And that's just helping you with your health.
Speaker 7:That's not practicing medicine. Right?
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And which, you know, again, outside of the state of Utah, we're not doing that either.
Speaker 9:But
Speaker 7:Yeah. We we have a partnership with the state of Utah now, with, with, the Utah AI Learning Lab. And so that launched a couple weeks ago, but we just announced it. So our AI is allowed to legally renew prescriptions for residents of the state of Utah with no oversight from doctors.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:I see Tusk Ventures on the cap table and I And Fei Fei Li, the GOAT? I mean, Fei Fei Li Oh, yeah. Fei Li is amazing. Amazing. But I Fei Fei Li signals, like, you know what you're doing technically.
Speaker 1:Tusk Ventures signals, like, this is gonna be a city by city, state by state, like, battle, at least for those who don't know, Bradley Tusk worked with Uber and and did a lot of the on the ground Regulatory regulatory work.
Speaker 2:Athlete hall of
Speaker 1:fame. Exactly. Regulatory athlete. And so I'm wondering, like, do you think that there needs to be regulatory change on a state by state basis? Is there a federal preemption discussion in the mix?
Speaker 1:Like, where does all this go? Yeah. And and what what are there any, like, keys to success for you, on the regulatory side?
Speaker 7:That's an awesome question. So historically not even historically. Currently, states regulate the practice of medicine. Right? Sure.
Speaker 7:If you want to practice medicine in a state, you get licensed by that state's medical board. Yeah. We believe that what we're doing is practicing medicine. Mhmm. Obviously, the state of Utah agrees.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so we have been kind of mitigated from the laws in in this AI sandbox with Utah that prevent non licensed doctors from practicing medicine. We think this applies to other states too, and other states have regulatory sandboxes for AI, and we're talking with them as well. It's just that Utah is super innovation friendly and forward thinking. They're the first. They're the best.
Speaker 1:They're Sure. Sure.
Speaker 7:Sure. Really good at this. That's great. What do what do think this the state's right. Okay.
Speaker 2:What what do what do doctors think about Doctronic? Are they happy that they're I
Speaker 7:love it.
Speaker 2:Their patients? Because the patient's coming in, they're informed. The the Doctronic's already kind of summarized the symptoms and the conversations, gets them up to speed quickly, helps them process more see more patients themselves.
Speaker 7:We we see it like a 10 x efficiency in our doctors in treating patients because the AI has done all of the work gathering things. My cofounder who is a doctor, I'm not, but he is, he says it's like having the best chief resident in the world seeing every single patient for you. Right? It just it just does all that work. But then it says, look.
Speaker 7:It's it's one of these four things. You you figure it out, but it's almost always the first one. Right? The AI is just that good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I I've had a couple funny experiences lately. I went to the pharmacy, picked up some, medicine. My wife asked me to ask the pharmacist how to use it, I watched the pharmacist, you know, just use an LLM to get the answer.
Speaker 1:Right. I was like, wait a minute. I I have a more expensive plan. I should just be doing this myself. So the generic is is is Wait.
Speaker 2:You're not even using is is is
Speaker 1:demand gonna be some sort of hybrid where you have a human in the loop to accelerate progress? Do you already have that? What what role do you see as, like, building out the the the hybrid, portion of the business in certain states that are maybe less, aggressive about moving quickly on this?
Speaker 7:Yeah. There's certainly a place to use those efficiencies you get from AI in The States that are are not able to move that quickly. Yeah. Our hope is that that hybrid approach won't last for long because we will prove that this is effective and works really well. It saves the taxpayer money.
Speaker 7:It makes people healthier. It reduces cost. Right? The health care system is enormously complex and far too expensive. Yeah.
Speaker 7:There aren't enough primary care doctors. Yeah. No primary care doctor wants to renew prescriptions. Nobody went to med school saying, gosh. I hope I can renew prescriptions.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I I I sure hope that we'll be able to move faster, but there are definitely hybrid approaches. We're already doing that with a bunch of our our our video visits in in other states that don't allow for this.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:Do you have a background building in ecommerce? So a little bit of a tangent, but I was curious what you expect to see at the intersection of of LLMs and commerce this year specifically. It feels like last year, people started discovering and doing a lot of product research using LLMs. It feels like this year will be the year of, like,
Speaker 7:action action. Right?
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 7:Like, I I said, I sure hope we're shopping in ChatGPT
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or
Speaker 7:or or Gemini. Right? I should be able to buy something from there. Yeah. I shouldn't have to go to Amazon.
Speaker 7:I should just be able to click buy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 7:Love to see that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Something as simple as that. Yeah. Amazon's like, actually, we like our search ad revenue business quite a lot.
Speaker 2:They'll figure it out.
Speaker 1:I I I'm sure they'll have their own LLMs or something like that. What do you think about, like, the actual feedback loop on the I feel like there's the value of medicine is not just treating the patient but then filtering those results back into future research efforts to update on what's working, what's not, both on the individual patient level and also on the societal level. How do you think about improving the system over time? It's a little bit different than just coding, in my opinion. But, how are you thinking about, you know, successive interactions with the patient?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, you know, AIs can learn more and remember more about patients anyway. And and the funny thing is, you know, we measure NPS with the AI and with our human doctors. And we have great human doctors. Right?
Speaker 7:Like, we we we pay a lot. We hire the best. Yeah. Everybody still likes the AI a little bit more. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:That said, I don't think that AI is going to replace that deep human interaction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course. Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 7:Like like, there's there's this easy 80% of these rote interactions that you have with a doctor where you're just like, look. My kid's sick. I need an antibiotic. Yep. Let's just figure out which one is most appropriate.
Speaker 7:Let's get the AI to handle that. Yeah. I I don't you know, specialists diagnosing chronic conditions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. At the same time
Speaker 7:people are always gonna be
Speaker 1:I I at the same time with that, if if the kid's sick, they need, antibiotics, I I feel like you should still maybe bring them into a clinic, get some data that can't be accessed on the And so doesn't that lead you to some sort of, like, B2B scenario or somewhere where you're acting more as a copilot than, you know, a b to c company? Do you think you'll get there, or is that something that's, like, adjacent?
Speaker 7:I I think that's adjacent to where we are right now. I I guess I guess the way I think of it is, we are pretty well positioned to handle anything that can happen during telehealth visits right now. Mhmm. And that's kind of our goal. Right?
Speaker 7:There there's already this a bit of a line drawn that said these are these are things that can happen with telehealth. Mhmm. And so, I mean, you're right. There are certainly cases where you just need to see someone we we had one the other day. I mean, they happen all the time, but we talked about one today.
Speaker 7:Someone had an appendicitis. Right? The AI said, look. You you need to go to an ER. You can to an appendicitis, and it's about to rush her.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And the person still chose to see our doctor. And it was great because the doctor said, I totally agree with the AI, but this is pretty emergent. Like, you probably should go to the ER. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And they did. And they were taken care of, and and it happens. Yeah. So we're not gonna try to to do those things that we can't do via a telehealth visit anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very cool.
Speaker 1:Esther, follow-up. Hope you have great twenty
Speaker 7:percent success.
Speaker 2:Are you the first AI licensed to practice law? Or Or medicine. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. First of all.
Speaker 2:That is that is wild.
Speaker 1:That's a big compliment.
Speaker 2:I feel like yeah. I I imagine in five years, we'll look back on today as a as a very big moment. So congrats to you and the whole team. It's great to meet.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.
Speaker 7:Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses.
Speaker 2:Let's Gusto. Let's Senra. Let's Lulu.
Speaker 1:We'll bring them in in a couple minutes. In the meantime, I'm gonna tell you about Cognition, the software. They're makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 2:We have, some breaking news
Speaker 1:What's the breaking
Speaker 7:news?
Speaker 2:From two hours ago from x AI. They've raised a $20,000,000,000 series e.
Speaker 1:20,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:X AI completed its upside series e funding round exceeding the 15,000,000,000 targeted round size and raised 20,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:It's a huge
Speaker 2:Investors include Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management
Speaker 1:Antonio Gracias.
Speaker 2:Qatar Investment, Authority, MGX, and Barron Capital Group. What is Barron Capital Group? That is that Barron Trump? No. No.
Speaker 2:Since 1982.
Speaker 9:Okay. Since 1982.
Speaker 2:Not Baron Trump.
Speaker 4:A little bit
Speaker 2:Strategic investors in the round include NVIDIA and Cisco. Let's give it up for Cisco. Investments getting in the mix. We're still working out the kinks with this gong. We're figuring out that that was that was a clean hit.
Speaker 2:That was a clean hit. But we're figuring out the new kind of method how to strike it effectively. But that was a great hit. '20, XAI says 2025 was a year of breakthrough momentum where the XAI team advanced a multitude of key initiatives, including data centers, Grok four, Grok Voice, user metrics, and Grok Imagine. I'm very excited to see what Grok pulls off, Grok and the x AI team pull off this year.
Speaker 2:They are highly highly motivated, highly capitalized, crushing it on the infrastructure side and a lot more to come.
Speaker 1:Well, before we bring in our guests, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. You can see Bitcoin is back up 93,000.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software development, web apps, servers, and databases running one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. And with that, we are ready to bring in our guests.
Speaker 2:Do it.
Speaker 1:Elon is saying that we've entered the singularity. So he is fully AGI pill, fully singularity pill.
Speaker 2:Lulu's singularity.
Speaker 1:GDP growth Narrative percent. At at with GDP growing a 100% a year, 20,000,000,000 for x AI in series e seems like a steal.
Speaker 2:How about 200,000,000,000?
Speaker 1:How about 200,000,000,000? I I'm dying to see the the the user metrics. Eventually, people will pull out will pull out why are we doing bubble talk? Welcome to the stream. We have Lulu.
Speaker 10:Hey. Welcome to you,
Speaker 2:Jeff. Welcome.
Speaker 1:We have David Sender up back in the studio for this handle. The summertime. Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Hey, guys.
Speaker 1:How long are you in LA, Lulu?
Speaker 10:Welcome to It's a matter of hours.
Speaker 1:Matter of hours?
Speaker 2:Matter of hours.
Speaker 10:It's like twenty eight hours.
Speaker 2:Twenty eight hours.
Speaker 9:Wouldn't either
Speaker 1:of you like a happy dad? What is it? Is it weird? Oh, it's a fruit punch?
Speaker 9:Gluten free fruit punch? It's a
Speaker 1:fruit punch with 5% alcohol. I'd like to
Speaker 10:see it for the ingredient.
Speaker 1:It's the latest anti fund investment.
Speaker 8:That's great.
Speaker 2:We've had Nal Khois, John Shaheed.
Speaker 10:I think I'm the wrong demo for happy dad.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's Jeff
Speaker 4:Wu described as frack boy, unc
Speaker 1:unc frack boy brand. It's a hilarious way to describe it.
Speaker 10:I have the right demo.
Speaker 2:All we're all I turned I turned 30 over the holiday.
Speaker 1:That's almost so
Speaker 10:was I gonna ask. Yeah, could tell.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you can tell.
Speaker 1:No, it's just the lack of looks maxing. Lulu, take us through the most recent post burning up the Internet, 3,000,000 views. Give us the pitch.
Speaker 10:Okay. The pitch is that every year has a big theme. Alright. Let's get Thank you.
Speaker 4:There you go.
Speaker 10:Alright. Every year has a big theme for where narrative alpha is gonna
Speaker 2:decide as the narrative And
Speaker 10:then I share what it is, and then hopefully we do the thing. So in 2024, it was going direct. That was where the alpha was coming from because everybody was going through three different layers of intermediaries.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Then last year, it became just grab attention for some people at people should go direct some of the time.
Speaker 2:Well well, I I also said I said, if everyone has a cinematic launch video, no one does. Yeah. Like, just it got to the point where it's like, I'll just read I'll just go to your website and I'll see what you do. Yeah. I don't need to see the the the 50
Speaker 10:And they're all kinda the same. So companies are spending 6 figures on these cinematic launch videos. No. Are. They're like a 150 k.
Speaker 10:And they're all the same. So anyway
Speaker 9:How did you guys spend on yours?
Speaker 2:$2? $2.
Speaker 10:These are
Speaker 1:And I included a helicopter rental.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Mean, a Shout out to them for handling the ride.
Speaker 10:Video. Yeah. Value per dollar off the charts. Yeah. So this year, the narrative alpha is gonna come from doing real things that are enduring Yeah.
Speaker 10:That are hard Okay. That are gonna stick around, and then just to keep doing that for a really long period of time. So I liken it to going to the gym instead of, like, fasting for seventy two hours and not drinking water, and then showing up for the bodybuilding competition one time. Just go to the gym three times a week and do somewhat normal stuff, but do that for infinity weeks, and then you'll be a fit person.
Speaker 9:Which founder is doing the best version of that right now? Or the best job at that right now?
Speaker 10:There Okay. There's a bunch. Toby Luca.
Speaker 3:It's hard to pick
Speaker 2:a favorite.
Speaker 10:It's hard to pick a favorite. Toby Luca. I'm I'm biased being on the board of Shopify. But I I think if I were to look objectively, Toby is somebody who doesn't try to do the flashy thing. He's actually kind of averse and nauseous for trying to do the flashy thing.
Speaker 9:He's showing much more of his personality too on his Twitter feed lately.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Well, he also can't not. You know, some of these people, Brian Armstrong is another example.
Speaker 1:Think you tried to Toby's story is he did an obscure Starcraft podcast where he just because he's a Starcraft fan and so he just went on and talked about Starcraft strategy. And that was a cool, like, going direct moment year years ago. This happened, like, seven years ago. But it just felt like, okay, he's a lot of comms people would probably tell him, like, no, stay on message. Like, you should be talking about Shopify.
Speaker 1:But he's like, look, there's probably people in that audience. Also, just having fun talking about StarCraft with some people that are interested in StarCraft. And so he did that, and it made for me, it made him a much real realer CEO. It just kinda painted a broader picture of who he is.
Speaker 10:And the StarCraft stuff directly translates into how he runs Shopify.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 10:He runs Shopify like a Zerg sword. You know? That's like his corporate strategy. And
Speaker 2:You know
Speaker 9:what's funny? What? I had breakfast with Kareem from Ramp. Do you guys know about Ramp? Yeah.
Speaker 9:We're Oh, yeah. Yesterday. What is it? And we talked about Toby and his using his love of video games for how he actually runs Shopify. We had this conversation yesterday morning.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. It's people are feeling that with agents now, where it's like it feels like you're Puppeteering. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. A few please, let's Okay. So the overarching theme is to do real things that are gonna be enduring and lasting. Mhmm. Couple of the sub things under that, what what makes things enduring and lasting?
Speaker 10:One is beauty is back. Being beautiful is allowed again. We've had a decade look maxing for companies. Got it. Pretty privilege for companies.
Speaker 10:Sure. Like the same way that people get better treatment, and they're literally seen as Tyler's smirking, because he's like, this is my era. The same way that people are seen as more confident, more intelligent, more trustworthy Mhmm. If they simply look and present better. The same is true for companies and products.
Speaker 10:So there's like, put a a inordinate amount, almost an extravagant amount effort into that. Mhmm. Another one is
Speaker 2:It's so much harder too because it's not just enough to have a pretty website.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, every anime you you have to somehow demonstrate that it wasn't one shotted by
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Some vibe coding app. Right? Which they can you can make a make me a website that looks like linear. Mhmm. Like, that's really easy now.
Speaker 2:And that was like the gold standard.
Speaker 1:Field's demos of the Figma maker. He Mhmm. He he, like, vibe coded, 10 different websites and they all had, like, the most obscure because he has a lot of artistic references that he can pull from. It was things that I would never come come up with. But all of them looked like not linear clowns.
Speaker 1:Like they looked like very unique and I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like beauty and original thinking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The instantiation of it was not what made it special. Yeah. Was the
Speaker 2:actual idea.
Speaker 10:So we there was basically a decade when we just had to pretend that every single thing in person was equally beautiful.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:And it was not allowed to say that something was less beautiful than another thing. And now it's allowed again. Apparently, this the Victoria's Secret runway show
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 10:With the angels and the wings is back. It's just Back. It's allowed. It's allowed to be pretty again. Another one is things that are not perfect.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. The just be yourself. But like CEOs just being themselves in a way that is maybe not optimal. Mhmm. Like, Palmer Luckey can go on any show in the world at any time.
Speaker 10:He did a recorded Zoom with me. Toby did that StarCraft thing a while back. Mhmm. Brian Armstrong went on a podcast with, like, I don't know, 500 listeners or something a little while ago just because he liked the guy's content. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Was good. Palmer Luckey is literally the best podcast guest in the world. I can't tell you the I just spent eight straight I spent a longer time with this. Eight straight hours trying to stump the guy. I was with him for eight straight hours.
Speaker 9:I had to call in other podcasters. It just happened to be there.
Speaker 1:I called Frederictus. We
Speaker 9:couldn't we I was like, I don't I have nothing else to talk about,
Speaker 1:man.
Speaker 9:I don't I just can't. And he was unlimited with, like, his knowledge on
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Every single subject. Storytelling is off the charts. I've never met anybody with a mind like that.
Speaker 2:Okay. So so here's the thing though. So people see Palmer. Yeah. He's an archetype that founders wanna emulate now.
Speaker 9:You can't.
Speaker 2:He's the ultimate Joe Rogan CEO. And I think that founders shouldn't feel this pressure that they need to be like, that is a certain archetype. And it's possible that you can say like, oh, you should every founder should just have a growth mindset. Maybe you're not great on a three hour podcast. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You should just become great. Mhmm. But I think people need to pick other archetypes. I feel like Toby is another archetype. Like, he's not just trying to put up fifty hours on podcasts.
Speaker 2:Right? More like strategic and and different using different channels.
Speaker 9:He's about to do my new show, so we'll be in this sequence how it goes.
Speaker 10:So he'll be making four hundred twenty minutes of sustained intense eye contact. I love this concept of calling in other podcasters for backup.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, you're watching
Speaker 1:So, like, doing sustained sustained effort, know, accomplishing something great, that sounds amazing, but in the short term, like you do have to acquire some attention from investors, employees, customers. What what do you think of I love Jocko Welling's Instagram where he goes to the gym every single day and he takes a picture of his watch in the morning just to prove that he wakes up. And it's an interesting thing because it's not as labor intensive as like going on a podcast doing a whole tour. It's not really self aggrandizing, but it just like reminds you of him every single day. And I'm wondering if there's a I don't know
Speaker 2:But you never forget about Chaco. I never forget about Jocko.
Speaker 1:Okay. So But but I but I wonder if there's like a a business equivalent of that that might emerge. Maybe maybe we can't just come up with it right now, but I wonder if someone will come up with something like that where you're like, oh, this person is is in the zeitgeist constantly with something that's actually very high leverage as opposed to do doing mean, Josh
Speaker 2:Simon does that one. Good morning. Morning. We are going to win. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Augustus does this. So anytime it rains in Continental America, he has a comment on the quality and quantity of the rain.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 10:Sure. And if it's not raining, he's like, is it not raining? Oh, it's raining in China. Why is it not raining over here? Just like, he's he just made himself the the weather guy.
Speaker 10:So any day that has weather is a chance for Augustus to remind you that he has a company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What were you gonna say about Chaco, dude? I know you're a fan.
Speaker 9:I also just spent time with him. And
Speaker 10:How many hours?
Speaker 1:You've been on podcast tour. You've talked to everybody. So
Speaker 9:there is funny. We were Was that
Speaker 1:the first time you
Speaker 9:met him?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. And What was that like? I mean, you're like, can you give some context on your relationship with Jocko?
Speaker 9:I can't tell you what was going on. I can just give you the context.
Speaker 1:Talking his
Speaker 9:hip was a cool Basically, yes. Can't tell you what
Speaker 10:I remember. I can't
Speaker 9:tell anything about it.
Speaker 12:All I
Speaker 9:know is we were we just happened to be in an undisclosed location. We're the only ones up at 04:30 in the morning.
Speaker 10:Strip club. Strip club.
Speaker 9:And so no. No. No. I've never. Never.
Speaker 1:Gross. I never went to sleep. No.
Speaker 9:I think it was in the
Speaker 2:deep in the Pacific.
Speaker 10:No. Undisclosed location.
Speaker 9:So anyways, I'm in this, like, hut and it's nothing but the, like, windows. It's like a circular room surrounded by windows, all all dark. And I see a slow, huge silhouette. I'm like, what the fuck is that? Oh, what the freak is that?
Speaker 9:And then I see his I know his face and I just see his giant head and I have a big head, I'm not making fun of him. I see his giant head. I was like and I opened the door, go, Jocko, come in here. And I was like, you don't know who I am. And I basically told the story, I go, just just sit with me for at least a minute.
Speaker 9:Because as he was coming in there, he's been my alarm clock every for like five years.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 9:And he's like, get up, get to the gym. Like, literally, that's my alarm clock and has been forever. So, yeah, I wound up having, like, of course, we talked for a podcast for about podcasting for, an hour. And I explained to him, like, the reason I started a solo history show reading books of, you know, autobiographies is because I found your podcast in 2015 that was doing that for people that served in combat. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And these stories were crazy. And the book review was like an hour. And I was like, I'm learning so much, and then I'm also reading all these I was like, I should just do that for business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I should go back and listen to some of the old Jocko episodes.
Speaker 9:There's we had a long talk because he just hit episode 500, and I was like, dude, I don't you're a very clear communicator. I listened to your episode 500 where you're talking about this is what my podcast is gonna be. I like, I don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Speaker 10:Person? So you you study them from afar to, like, the maximum extent possible, but then when you interact in person, is there, new stuff that
Speaker 13:comes Yeah.
Speaker 9:100%. Like, it's it's just man, like, I'm in I'm in trouble. Like, I'm in real big trouble with this new show because I am completely addicted to it. Yeah. It's all I wanna do.
Speaker 9:I called Rob Moore. We're gonna have dinner with him. We're all having dinner tonight, guess, else knows. But
Speaker 1:Doxing. Undisclosed locations.
Speaker 9:And he's just been lining people up. Was like, I want some fucking smart, driven, other maniac in front of me every single day. Like, I want to do this every single day. I can do it every single day. Lulu's been insane with connecting me with all these people.
Speaker 9:She she sent me our We were together with Gabby in New York at the Cognition event, and you had the funniest thing. You're like, David, you have groupies, but your groupies are 90 year old billionaires. No. Middle aged. Not 90.
Speaker 1:90 year old.
Speaker 9:Middle aged billionaire men.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so she's been incredible about connecting with those people, and then I'll get on the phone with them and, immediately. You just click and we can talk forever. Yeah. So yeah, of course, just learn so much, and then I'm high as a kite. I don't do any drugs.
Speaker 9:Justin was texting me about this masseuse. Guess I shouldn't say
Speaker 10:You gotta finish that sentence really fast.
Speaker 9:Lulu texted me, like, remember, like, a couple weeks ago, you're like, you we need to travel everywhere together. You need a a
Speaker 10:He needs a crisis comms person on staff with it's like hockey teams travel with a dentist. Yeah. He needs a crisis coms person next to him Sounds great. To tell the waitress, like, oh, no, what he meant was, oh,
Speaker 13:sorry, man.
Speaker 2:He doesn't Yeah.
Speaker 9:So to answer your question, yeah, you just learn so much more, and then, like, even with somebody like James Dyson. Right? I read his first autobiography five times. I've read his second one at least two times. I've read highlights from both those books dozens of times.
Speaker 9:I read his encyclopedia on the history of greatest inventions over and over again. I thought I knew everything about the guy. And like, then I got to spend three hours with him in New York, and it was just like I was learning more about what motivates him, how he was, and the cool thing is how great all these people have been. Unbelievably witty, kind, generous, just like great people. Everybody's I think I ended that episode with everybody says, hey, don't meet your heroes.
Speaker 9:Was like, fuck those people. They're wrong. Like, I met my hero
Speaker 1:James Dyson seen the Dyson Airblade meme? Have you seen this?
Speaker 9:No. Haven't.
Speaker 1:So there's this meme that goes viral every Christmas. So you're familiar with the Dyson Airwrap?
Speaker 9:Of
Speaker 1:course. It's the hottest gift for men to give their wives, probably something like that. But it's usually used by women with long hair. And Dyson also makes the Dyson Airblade, which you which is when you're at the when you're at the airport bathroom, you put your hands in and it and it it's, it dries your hands very aggressively. And so, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so the the and so the joke is always someone takes a picture of the Dyson Air Blade and says, I got this for my wife and she's upset with me. What happened? And it's just a very funny thing because, you know, imagine giving something.
Speaker 10:Can use a Dyson
Speaker 1:Air Blade?
Speaker 10:Okay. One of the best case studies comes from Dyson. This is when the predecessor to the Airwrap, which was the the blow dryer was coming out, like the hair dryer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And I actually flew to China and met with the guy who was responsible for spreading the gospel of the Dyson hair dryer in Asia, at a time when everybody still thought of them as just like air filters and vacuums and stuff. Yep. So what they did was Okay. Normally, what you would do is you have an ad campaign and then you put it in the stores and then you you advertise that they're in the stores and you try to get people to buy them. What they did was they went in completely stealth mode under the cover of night and put them into the most expensive salons and then didn't say anything.
Speaker 9:They told me about this.
Speaker 10:So then Okay. I'll tell you the
Speaker 9:tell me.
Speaker 10:Go ahead. I'll So they put them into the we should learn to speak in unison. They put them into the most expensive salons, and then after every cut, at least for women's hair, what men do. For every cut, you get a blow dry. You I once tried to not get the blow dry, and they tried to make me pay extra, like, you must get a blow dry.
Speaker 1:So you gotta cut a blow dry. So
Speaker 10:they just start doing your hair with it, and then it blow dries it much faster and better, I guess. And then the women ask, what is this thing? And it looks really different too. It looks super futuristic. What is this thing?
Speaker 10:Where can I get one? I'm sorry, you can't get one. It's only for salons. You have to be a special now you've got the richest women in China with the right hair for it, who really care about their hair Mhmm. Obsessed with this thing that they hope that they can get.
Speaker 2:That they can't
Speaker 10:get.
Speaker 1:It Yeah. Crazy Is that come from Dyson or people he hires?
Speaker 9:I don't know who it came from, but the interesting story is
Speaker 1:But is he a distribution genius in addition to being an inventor or is he He someone who's very good at hiring marketing?
Speaker 9:He describes himself as an engineer. Yeah. There's a lot in the way Dyson thinks that's very similar to Kareem Mhmm. Where, like, I asked him about this on on the episode too where he's like, he has a very Dyson has a very simple organizing principle. It's just like, he picks up a product and he's just like, why can't this be better?
Speaker 9:And so he goes, then I make it better. And then I put it back down. And then I pick it back up and go, why can't this be better? I And find another way to make it better. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And he goes, I just never interrupted the compounding. Mhmm. So I've been doing it for forty five years. And so he's the I just read about his family office. He's reorganizing his family office right now.
Speaker 9:He's the richest person in Britain. From what I understand, the the numbers that are reported are vastly under
Speaker 2:Do you wanna hit the for him?
Speaker 1:Does he have an heir to the Dyson empire? Like, do we know who this next CEO is gonna be? Is it like a Warren Buffin situation Greg So Abel was gonna come in?
Speaker 9:His son works in the business. I highly suspect they're gonna go the route of of what the Waltons did. We were like transitioned to professional management. They Okay. That's nothing they told me Yeah.
Speaker 9:But that's just like my
Speaker 1:The feeling.
Speaker 9:Read on on the situation. Mhmm. What was the question about Dyson before?
Speaker 1:Oh, just is he a marketing genius or
Speaker 9:Oh, The engineer. Early engineer. No. So, yeah. His whole thing was just like, I just have to make it better.
Speaker 9:The largest the crazy thing about the beauty categories, what she's talking about, is like, how do you actually infiltrate infiltrate and like spread that? And it's exactly what Lulu just said. And then what they told me is, you know, the the the biggest revenue category is still obviously the vacuum cleaners.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:Just like everybody has them. They're $500. High margin. Yep. But their beauty category is only ten years old, and it's also already Right, mister.
Speaker 9:The second biggest source of revenue. I highly suspect they think it's gonna be bigger than the vacuum cleaners, but it gives you insight into to Dyson, because Dyson is obsessed with vertical integration.
Speaker 13:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And so he starts with beauty supplies, and then what else do you need? Well, what else do you now he has, like, styling creams and stuff like that. But it's not he's like, I'm not just gonna make a styling cream just to make a styling cream. So he also has
Speaker 1:That's not vertical integration. That's horizontal integration.
Speaker 9:No. No. Check this out. I'm gonna I brought you in there. Okay.
Speaker 9:So next year, they want me to go to their UK. We're gonna do another episode with them. I'm going I'm gonna tour his UK headquarters and the farming because he's essentially, like, applying some of the highest tech
Speaker 1:farming. Okay.
Speaker 9:So all so this is the way he thinks, If I'm gonna do styling cream, every single ingredient
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:From the styling cream and all these other things have to come from my farm. Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 10:It's like Zuckerberg with some academia nuts.
Speaker 1:Wait. I I mean, academia nuts? I thought he was only doing beef.
Speaker 2:No. He's gotta make
Speaker 4:the nuts to
Speaker 2:feed the
Speaker 4:No. Wait. Really?
Speaker 10:He plants the macadamia trees to get the macadamia.
Speaker 1:I had no idea.
Speaker 10:You don't?
Speaker 1:You just use No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Store bought macadamia nuts?
Speaker 2:Woah. Jeez.
Speaker 1:No. I get chicken fingers from
Speaker 9:I talked to a guy that listens to I talked to a guy that listens to founders that like cornered the the world market on macadamia nuts. He's like a young kid. He's what's the the brand that's advertised on Rick Rubin's podcast and all the other ones? Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, it's
Speaker 9:one like 28 year old kid in like South Africa.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 6:Can I tell
Speaker 10:you about a beauty thing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hit
Speaker 10:us. So anytime something becomes a beauty thing, the margins get better and the cost goes up. So like Stanley Cups, remember how a year and a half ago Stanley tumblers became viral? Mhmm. They did this massive influencer campaign, but they didn't go to like water influencers.
Speaker 10:So the way that Stanley Cups were positioned before was a blue collar working man would take a Stanley Cup to work alongside his like pale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I always saw it as a camping
Speaker 10:was. And then, they went to beauty influencers and grouped it as a wellness product along their wellness and beauty things. Yeah. So you might pay $10.15 dollars for like a water bottle to drink water out of, but you would pay nearly infinite dollars for wellness and hydration. So they went to like beauty and wellness influencers who would do like yoga stuff, and then after their workout, they would do like dewy skincare
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And then they would have like their Stanley thing there the whole time. So you could charge like five x more.
Speaker 9:When you when
Speaker 2:you That's very interesting.
Speaker 9:When you talked about the
Speaker 10:That looks delicious.
Speaker 9:I love these things. I'm drinking way too much, by way. So when you talk about like the the comps predictions for 2026, and you just talked about there's gonna be emphasis on beauty, like what is that actually like? What's an example of that?
Speaker 10:An example is what the basics, like the website looks good, the product looks good, but then the experience is beautiful. The experience feels calm and serene. There are some things where it just feels chaotic and stressful. It's like a beautiful experience, beautiful physical spaces. So physical spaces in general, I think, are going to be a big deal because these are solid, tangible
Speaker 2:Anti AI.
Speaker 10:I don't think it's anti AI Okay. But we still exist here in meat space, IRL, in the world of atoms. And so, making beautiful spaces
Speaker 2:It's a little rough. It's a little rough. We it's a celebration of podcasting
Speaker 10:It's masculine beauty.
Speaker 9:A spaceship.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. With spaces, how do you coach founders on the value of community events? Because I've gone back and forth on this. Sometimes when, like, a small company is like, yeah, we're hosting a dinner with, like, a bunch of founders.
Speaker 2:I'm like, should you really host a dinner or should you Like, founder of the rest of
Speaker 9:the dinners aren't any good.
Speaker 2:So that's that's your that's your take. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:But but how do you, like It's all how do you how do you understand the value of, like, community building and IRL community building?
Speaker 10:So you have to define the if you're
Speaker 2:gonna create beautiful Yeah. Spaces, obviously, you want people to whether they're your team or customers Yeah. Etcetera.
Speaker 10:So one of the other things themes I think are useful to one of the other themes that I think is useful to think about for this year is qualitative over quantitative. So last year was very quantitative. It's just like get as many clicks, get as much engagement as possible. This year, I hope that we all think more about, well, who is it and what is it? And so, who is in the community?
Speaker 10:People will say our community and what they mean is anybody with a credit card. And actually, it should feel like, well, there are some people who don't belong in this community. Because if it's exclusive, then there's more value to be Like, you don't wanna go to a club that whatever secret club you went to with Jocko. People don't wanna go into a club that anybody can walk into. Like, you're right.
Speaker 10:You don't wanna go into
Speaker 1:a club that has
Speaker 9:no bouncers. Crossfit gym. It's a crossfit gym just for podcasters. That's great.
Speaker 1:Do you think we're actually in a post rage bait era? Because we okay.
Speaker 2:Aware that
Speaker 3:he's managing
Speaker 9:the question. Right now.
Speaker 1:You're rage bait. Because saw we saw a lot of rage bait
Speaker 10:I think every podcast is
Speaker 1:the same. And then and then They are. And then and then Jordy wrote rage bait is for losers. It felt it felt like it did it did sort of update the valley and VCs to where a VC would kinda say like Yeah. This is maybe not the deal I should be doing.
Speaker 1:They're they're gonna think twice about it. It's a little bit less like handcuffs off. But
Speaker 2:We had Jake Paul on earlier.
Speaker 1:Just works and it's human.
Speaker 2:He's gonna make effectively make a billion dollars from rage baiting.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Right? Like he's rage baited his way boxing? Yeah. 100 he every time he fights now, he makes a 100,000,000 rage bait? I mean, the entire see him get
Speaker 7:knocked out.
Speaker 2:Is it's it's the way he shows up. He's like Oh. He wants to be like the
Speaker 1:most Oh, yeah. Punchy Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He wants to be the guy that people want
Speaker 1:to see. He's being the heel. The heel.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's the heel. Sure. Okay. But that so that's like a durable strategy.
Speaker 10:But that's something but there's something underlying that. So underlying that is the heel persona, and then the actual punch to the face happens. He's in the ring. There are people who are who at least have created things that are just pure rage bait, and when you sweep away the rage bait, there's nothing else there. It's just rage bait all the way
Speaker 13:all the up.
Speaker 9:You said something interesting that me, John and Jory talk about off camera all the time, that people are chasing numbers Mhmm. But it's more important than the numbers. It's like who is in that number? What does that number represent? Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So like if you ask John and Jordy, like, not trying to be like Mr. Beast, they're not trying to get the most views.
Speaker 1:They said, I don't know Quality of audience.
Speaker 9:I'll just say this publicly. They were like, we want the top 200,000 people in tech and finance and business paying attention to this every single Yeah. Like the best of the best. Yeah. And if we hit that, they'll get everything they want out of life as opposed to having 20,000,000, you know, people sitting in Idaho or no offense to your new your new hire Idaho.
Speaker 2:Nothing wrong with Idaho. We love Idaho.
Speaker 9:Sitting at Idaho sitting on a couch eating chips or some shit. Like, this is like that's not I'm not interested in entertaining that person or educating that person. Yeah. Yeah. But like, this is something that It's it's fascinating you brought that, like, you you you're bringing it to, like, the what's happening in 2026, where it's, like, I feel like if you talk to podcasters, especially, like, in business, it's, something we've been doing for a long period of time, where it's just, like, you're not just going after views.
Speaker 9:You're going after actually high quality people and giving them useful information so they can actually, like, utilize in their daily life.
Speaker 10:Like, you would not trade one Michael Dell listener for any number of non Michael Dell listeners Yeah. For 500,000, millions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about does AI have a narrative problem? Does reality problem? Are we entering the new tech tech lash, updated tech lash probably?
Speaker 1:We talked to Sarah and Jenny about this all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I I I just think like you can't, you know, we have venture capitalists come on the show and they'll say like, I don't care about margins because we're displacing labor. And I'm like, you gotta rephrase that. You replace You gotta call it later. You gotta reposition that because you're pissing off everyone.
Speaker 2:On one hand, you're like you're you're saying like we're burning money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even the investors are unhappy. In this case, David said it was like, you make some money, make
Speaker 9:some money.
Speaker 2:You're excited about like you have a people are yeah, people are basically like average they're like, no, this is amazing because it's gonna create job loss. And it's like figure out a different Yeah. And and and I don't even know, you know, again, you can debate on whether or not that's actually gonna be true. Right? Like, you you hundreds of years ago, if you told people like, you're not gonna have to work in the field, you're gonna have to shoot you're gonna go get your matcha, go to a pilates class, and then you're gonna send three emails, and then you're gonna go home.
Speaker 2:And that's gonna be you're gonna earn a living that, they feel like.
Speaker 1:Day in
Speaker 2:the life.
Speaker 9:Day the life. Day
Speaker 10:cafeteria.
Speaker 1:But yeah, comms issue in AI.
Speaker 2:And just tech broadly, there's so much we just talked to a guy who now has made AI that is licensed to practice medicine in Utah. Right? Mhmm. Should be a huge white pill. Right?
Speaker 2:It's gonna be like the cheapest Yeah. Possible way to get access what should be quality quality care. And also just
Speaker 1:convenient. Even if you the money, have to go to the doctor, book it, it's a whole thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Lowering access, it's like amazing. But there's a lot of tech leaders who aren't making that case effectively. What do you think?
Speaker 10:You know the David Foster Wallace anecdote that he said with the two young fish are swimming
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And they come across an older fish, and the older fish says, morning boys, how's how's the water today? And they said, what's water? AI feels like water to fish now. It's like everywhere all the time. And so when I see companies try to use having AI as a selling point, it's like bragging that you have cloud storage.
Speaker 10:Or like, you know, like, right? Like, yes, and And and I think
Speaker 2:We're in the cloud.
Speaker 10:With connected solutions. Yeah. It it feels not only just tired and worn out. What is it that Dave Chappelle said about Afghanistan? It's bombed out and depleted.
Speaker 10:You know, there's just no more value to come from using the list of AI buzzwords. People are fatigued. So just skip to what is the thing that it actually does, and then prove to me that it actually does do that Mhmm. And then you're good. And then as for the broader messaging
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like tech is right now is a heel. Right? Yeah. It's like, yeah, we're gonna automate a bunch of work.
Speaker 2:And Mhmm. Tech has historically played the role of we're connecting the world, we're changing the world
Speaker 9:Mhmm. For
Speaker 1:giving you something that delights you
Speaker 2:and And right now, the tech industry is like unintentionally operating as the heel. Mhmm. So it's like, if you if you wanna be a heel like Jake Paul and you want people to kinda
Speaker 10:punch you.
Speaker 2:Wanna see you get punched, that's Yeah. One thing. But I don't think the tech industry actually wants the entire world No. To hate it.
Speaker 1:No. Mhmm. Not at all.
Speaker 10:Well, there's a tension between what you wanna say to attract talent
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And then what you wanna say to not be hated and maybe get customers. And these people live in different worlds. Mhmm. So the the the customers and please don't hate me category of people are not in this tech bubble, whereas the engineers and technical people you wanna attract very much are. And so sometimes companies feel like, I I get this question a lot, like, how do we talk to both audiences at the same time?
Speaker 10:And sometimes what they'll do is they'll say, okay. Well, talent matters most of all. We're just gonna talk about how awesome and technical this is and how much money we're all gonna make and how many jobs it'll replace. And then that lives forever, and now they have to go encounter normal people, and their and
Speaker 2:the the old interviews are gonna get pulled up. Right? Like, how often do the lab leaders have a comment that they made about, like, at some at a less wrong like Yeah. Convention like seven years ago comes up today. It's like, wait, you're trying to sell me AI.
Speaker 2:You told you were telling people seven years ago that it was gonna kill everyone.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:How do I square these things?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the famous quote is Sam Altman, something to the effect of AI might kill everyone, but in the meantime create a lot of profitable businesses. It's like you're clearly trying to talk to two different audiences Yeah. In that same sentence. Yeah.
Speaker 1:One is like, I'm taking AI doom seriously, is good. Yeah. But in one community gets that and likes that. And then another is like, hey, there's economic opportunity here for businesses and startups, and he's kinda put his y c hat on for that one, and it's like two different messages in one sentence.
Speaker 9:So what
Speaker 1:No. Go.
Speaker 10:What people miss is that there is overlap in the Venn diagram. Yeah. It's it's not just over here and over Like, there's actually some overlap even if it's just a sliver. So for example, the concept of what makes my own life better Mhmm. And it's made my life better so much that I want this for other people too.
Speaker 10:That appeals to talent, that appeals to normal people, or something that is like, okay, in this world where a lot of things are ephemeral or fake or are not making our lives better, I wanna make something that is high quality and enduring that I'm proud to one day tell my grandkids about. That's a great message for talent. Mhmm. They don't wanna build the next little toy that goes away in six months after raising a bunch of venture money. They wanna build the thing that is like an enduring an enduring artifact of human ingenuity.
Speaker 10:True. And and that's the thing that people want Yeah. To
Speaker 9:Definitely. I think Bezos has the best line of this. He's like, we're trying to build something that we can tell we can be proud to tell our grandkids about. Mhmm. So if you look at what you're doing, like, through that lens, it's like, it be your grandson's on your lap, you know, twenty, thirty years from now, like, would I be proud of, like, grandfather did granddad did this shit.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. What are you we're on the phone. You mentioned about the, like, anti being anti ephemeral as, like, something else that you think is gonna happen in 2026. Like, can you say more about that?
Speaker 10:I don't know that it'll happen, but it's what I hope will happen, and it's what I would encourage founders to try to make happen, which is so much is happening all the time. So I I looked up the literal technical definition of white noise, and it's basically just maximum intensity at every frequency altogether, so that it's mushed into this nothingness. Mhmm. And that feels like the information environment that we're in. And the only way to break through the white noise is is you don't actually compete on being loud.
Speaker 10:And compete competing on, like, temporary intensity is not it. But one normal volume or quieter note that is sustained for a long period of time actually does cut through. The other thing that's cut that cuts through is super personalized and super local things where someone could only be talking to you. Like if you're at a cocktail party have you heard of the cocktail party effect? If you're at a cocktail party
Speaker 9:I wouldn't be at a cocktail party.
Speaker 10:You're at a secret podcaster crossfit retreat in the ocean before the Venezuela raid. And there's just noise and you can't But hear if somebody says, David Senra, by David Senra, if
Speaker 8:you turn David Senra,
Speaker 10:then you would hear that, because this this is like the secret frequency for you.
Speaker 9:Yeah. People love hearing it on him.
Speaker 10:Yeah. But but people also love hearing the thing that they are feeling and can't express articulated in words that they wish could have thought of.
Speaker 9:This is this is gonna be a random thought that kind of affirms what you just said. I just spent a crazy amount of time reading Bruce Springsteen's autobiography. Mhmm. And it's kinda crazy because it's 600 pages, and he wrote the entire thing by hand. It took him seven years.
Speaker 9:He wrote it, like, longhand multiple times. But he said something that I feel the the reasons one of reasons people listen to Founders is very similar to why he says people go to his concerts. He's like, people aren't coming to my concerts to learn something new. They're coming to to remember something that they know is that they already know is true. To be reminded sorry.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. To be reminded of what they already know is true. I think it's very powerful.
Speaker 10:There are not that many new truths in the world.
Speaker 1:Play the hits.
Speaker 10:Play the hits. A few eternal truths that resonate to all humans from the dawn of civilization.
Speaker 9:I need to put like faces on these ideas though. So like, who else is doing comms the way that you would recommend? Like who do you think just think is doing the the founders are doing the best at at at this? Are they just literally your fucking all your clients? This is like going Well,
Speaker 2:part selective about the clients you work with, so you can you have the luxury of being like, well, I only wanna work with people that I think can be great because I am gonna be limited in my ability to provide a great service by how great like, somebody like, Augustus, like, fresh out of college, you can tell from a first conversation with him that he has a potential to be a Joe Rogan CEO. Right? Like, that it's just something within him. Right? And you can identify that pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:At least, I personally can clock that in like a fifteen minute interview if somebody's gonna actually if somebody's like well suited to be the kind of going direct CEO, that kind of thing. But there's different again, there's different archetypes that work for different
Speaker 10:is amazing. He does his own stuff. Like, he's had these huge high profile interviews. He just sets it up. I have a couple Augustus stories that I think are so emblematic of how he does these things.
Speaker 10:One is the first time we ever met was after this founder after after like a Founders Fund event, and everybody had this huge sushi dinner. And then the next morning, which was eight hours from the time the dinner had concluded, he texted me, he's like, want a lift? Please just like always on. But the second thing is there was this incoming potential hit piece about how it was about how He liked the gun dough was too male dominated. Know, there was some reporter that was still stuck in 2019, wanted to write an article about, like, there's not enough female representation in the Gundo, and he texted me and he's like, gotta go consult with the boys.
Speaker 10:So he goes and consults with the boys, and he's like, alright. We're we're ready to deal with this. What should we do? And I said, I think you should just talk to her. And he said, has anybody ever tried just being hot and charming?
Speaker 10:I actually think, no. It hasn't really been tried. You should go try
Speaker 1:it.
Speaker 10:Do wanna know
Speaker 9:the advice I gave Augustus?
Speaker 2:Didn't that work with Shkreli too? Martin Shkreli? Didn't he like
Speaker 3:Really worked.
Speaker 2:Didn't he risk up like journalists? No. I see him.
Speaker 10:After her marriage, and then she wrote a book
Speaker 9:about it.
Speaker 10:She left her husband.
Speaker 9:That's great. Alpha widow.
Speaker 11:I guess
Speaker 6:guess the
Speaker 9:advice I gave him. You need to spend more time with these older entrepreneurs.
Speaker 10:I swear to god.
Speaker 9:Because he's like Yeah. Me and my boys are killing it. I go, listen. Listen, man. Like, I like you.
Speaker 9:You're a nice kid. There's a 100 fucking companies there. Five are gonna be here five years from now. Like, they're all dead. They don't even know it.
Speaker 9:Like, you're just you you don't know what you don't know because you're so goddamn young. I go go spend time with older entrepreneurs. I just promise, like, still hang out with the young guys, still do whatever you're doing. It's like, just talk to somebody that actually survived, was successful in Survive for half a century.
Speaker 2:This is good. You're gonna bait the Gunda into having a 100% success rate. We're not gonna let this podcaster come over from Miami and say that only five of us are
Speaker 1:gonna be standing That
Speaker 10:is how they operate This
Speaker 2:is good. This is good. I can see what you're doing.
Speaker 13:No. It's all
Speaker 9:startups. It's not just that. It's nothing to with their their wherever they happen to be geographically concentrated. It's just most of them are all dead. And that's the point.
Speaker 9:Just like you're Yeah. You're paying attention. This goes Building
Speaker 10:during things.
Speaker 9:Exactly. I'm anti ephemeral. I am succeed today, tomorrow, five years from now, ten years from now, forty years from Like, that's the, I think, the important thing.
Speaker 10:I'm scared. You told me that I I I introduce a lot of people to you. I'm scared to introduce someone to him who hasn't been in business for, ten years and made billions of dollars because he's not being
Speaker 2:honest. No.
Speaker 9:I will He's
Speaker 10:like, call me when you're a billionaire.
Speaker 9:No. That's not you. Kind of. No. I I I've been doing a bad job of just hanging out with all the older entrepreneurs because this is what I happen to be interested in, and No.
Speaker 9:Because you just learned. Dude, I told this story recently. It's like, I spent I'm part of the thing about differentiation, which is why I love Dyson, I think what we talk me and we talk about this all the time. Podcasters don't think about differentiation, so I'm like, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 9:I'm gonna grab some interesting podcast guests that I know are really good, but I also wanna convince people that don't do podcast at all Yeah. To come on. And I've spent a lot of time doing this and they it takes a
Speaker 1:long He's got he's getting it.
Speaker 9:You saw that? Guy didn't curse.
Speaker 1:Almost. But he pulled pulled
Speaker 9:it back
Speaker 1:at the last
Speaker 9:second. And so I talked to one guy. He's 71 years old. He worked in his company for fifty years. He just sold it for $50,000,000,000.
Speaker 9:Wow. And I spent an hour with him in New York. And the information he transferred to me in an hour, it's just like it's it's crazy how much information It's crazy. That could happen. So Yeah.
Speaker 9:I what I have to do a better job of like taking that information. I mean, I guess the no. I don't have to do a better job at this. I do this on the podcast. Just listen to the podcast.
Speaker 9:Like, take the generation the information from the old guys and push it to the young ones. You just gotta listen. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna go back to this though, because I'm still not getting Who's
Speaker 10:Who's really well?
Speaker 9:I I loved your Pirate Wires piece that came out, I think, yesterday or the day before. Is it literally just comes down to this last paragraph, like, people who are really gonna stand out are the people who are willing to be candid and truthful?
Speaker 10:Yes. So
Speaker 1:Agree with Jake Paul. That was his number one advice for creators in 2026. It's very similar.
Speaker 10:You, me, Jake Paul.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Everyone's when people are like, the idea of authenticity is important Mhmm. You will have just heard that so much, it means nothing anymore. It's just like, yeah, it's important. But then they don't actually go and practice it.
Speaker 10:Can I tell you a secret?
Speaker 9:Why don't you think they practice it?
Speaker 2:I think people are
Speaker 10:They don't love themselves. Scared. They're getting gaslit.
Speaker 9:They don't
Speaker 7:love themselves.
Speaker 10:Why do you have to take it to another level
Speaker 2:like that?
Speaker 10:Because that's all the
Speaker 9:stuff that's important. It's like, I'm looking
Speaker 2:at No. You things really
Speaker 9:I think a lot of people I think a lot of From people the outside. A lot of people are so terrified of what other people think about them. They have low self esteem. I I have this argument on with most people think entrepreneurs are like too arrogant and I say the opposite. I was just like, we have so we could have so many more entrepreneurs.
Speaker 9:We don't have an epidemic of overconfidence.
Speaker 1:We an epidemic of humbleness.
Speaker 9:We have no. We have an epidemic
Speaker 10:do vote Number no more
Speaker 1:one
Speaker 9:have an epidemic of people that don't believe in themselves enough.
Speaker 10:Which is why they let themselves get gaslit. True. Yeah. Don't Okay. So so I'll give you a little bit of a roundabout answer because you asked Weird.
Speaker 10:Who does this really well. Okay. Eric and Kareem Yeah. Were great
Speaker 9:What company are before
Speaker 10:I met them.
Speaker 8:What companies?
Speaker 10:Time and Funny. Time is funny to say both. They were great No. Before I met
Speaker 13:Oh, goddamn.
Speaker 10:We're on it. We're live. This is why they were great before I ever met them.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And if I had never met them, they would just continue to be great. And when we talk and brainstorm, a lot of these it it's not like they wanna do nothing or they wanna do something that sucks, and I'm like, no, you should do something that's good, and they take that away. They have the fire, the ideas, there's a million things that they wanna do, and sometimes it's helpful to have somebody bounce that with you and say, like, even if this is not normal, do it anyway. Right? A lot of times,
Speaker 9:a little like, Rick Rubin in you. Has anybody ever told you that?
Speaker 10:Is it the beard?
Speaker 1:The hair?
Speaker 8:No. It's not
Speaker 9:the I'm I'm stuck in this edit from hell for like fifteen hours. The damn episode's only gonna be like forty minutes long, but I've I've kind of messed it up. And so I'm like, I've been inside of his brain for a while. Yeah. And then I also listened re listened to the old episodes I did on him.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. I really admire, like Do you remember when I text you? I was like, dude Or I didn't say dude. I was like, I want you to do the new show. Do you remember what you how you responded?
Speaker 9:You said, you're crazy. And I'll because I was like, no. I'm serious. No. I was like, I'm serious.
Speaker 10:And then you hit me I said, David, are you out of your mind?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 9:Yes. And then you hit me with a meme. Do you remember the meme you sent? Have you ever seen
Speaker 10:anything fast yesterday?
Speaker 9:It's like, oh my god.
Speaker 10:Oh, is it Big Bird at the table? Yes. I sent them the Big Bird
Speaker 2:at the table.
Speaker 9:So it's like Lulu's Big Bird and you have like Daniel Ek or Brad Jacobs on the on the other ones. I'm very fascinated and kind of obsessed with people who have singular careers. That's what I told you. Was like, you are you're literally like, oh, people don't I don't even know how to say your last name. I have no idea how to pronounce it.
Speaker 9:Because I don't I don't even ever hear it. I don't even ever hear it. It's just Lulu. You have a very single
Speaker 10:I'm person in writing.
Speaker 9:But the stuff here that's coming out of your mouth is very strange to me because it sounds like I'm hearing Rick Rubin, which like he there's a you should read his book, The Creative
Speaker 10:I have.
Speaker 1:It's great. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of like, you got a lot of Rick Rubin.
Speaker 10:But sometimes you just give people permission to do the thing that they would have that the world is telling them is not normal and they shouldn't Yes. Do
Speaker 9:And his whole thing is about listening without judgment. And just like, you you you go into this idea where like the world is way more complex and you you you we tell stories about the world, but we don't actually understand what's going on. Right? And so his whole point was just, like, stop overanalyzing, stop overthinking, like, try it and then see what happens and see how it feels. And he basically goes off a lot of intuition and he thinks, like, the essentially, I'm not gonna speak for him, but I highly suspect that he thinks the truest human wisdom is actually in, like, from the subconscious.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. Not from, like, the rational, like, part of our brain or the even the storytelling part of our brain.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Which suppresses the
Speaker 9:But again, he he does a great job too, because, obviously, he he went direct. He has his own podcast. Mhmm. But when he goes on other people's podcast, it's not like, oh, who's this? He's the same person everywhere he goes, which goes back to your importance of consistency.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. John, don't even try to end the show.
Speaker 1:We gotta hop on with Munich. Sorry. Munich. I can feel the
Speaker 9:body language as soon as you do this.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming
Speaker 3:on podcast.
Speaker 1:It's been fantastic.
Speaker 2:Show today. We almost made it to the fifth hour.
Speaker 1:We almost did.
Speaker 9:How long has it been?
Speaker 1:Long has do we we do have to have fun with you in just a few minutes. Four hours. Nice. Yeah. We'd love to have you back on the show many times this year.
Speaker 2:It's It's gonna gonna
Speaker 1:be a
Speaker 13:great year.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be fantastic.
Speaker 2:Thank you both for
Speaker 1:coming on.
Speaker 10:To the year.
Speaker 2:Thank you guys. David just had he just had to get one more podcast in for
Speaker 1:the day.
Speaker 2:He just couldn't. He's got a true addict.
Speaker 1:Thank you, everyone, for listening to TVPI today.
Speaker 2:Will be back
Speaker 1:at 11AM Pacific Goodbye. Goodbye.
Speaker 9:Goodbye. The four of us need