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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:Orange mode. It is, we're cozy maxing. It is Friday, 11/14/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDub, the temple of technology, the fortunes of finance, the capital of capital. It's raining in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2:It's raining in Hollywood, And so we're cozy maxing. We're in extremely orange lighting. We had put the fire on, maybe a little bit too orange, honestly. The clips are gonna look a little bit crazy from today. We might we might switch back at some point.
Speaker 1:But Matt says we need the white suits today for sure. We didn't do white suits
Speaker 2:today. This the market opened down 2%. Was a disaster.
Speaker 1:No. We're back up.
Speaker 2:We're back up. The whole
Speaker 1:market's up. We need to put the word
Speaker 2:The Nasdaq's up. The Nasdaq's up. Okay. And over the last six months, the Nasdaq is up 20%.
Speaker 1:Wow. Would you look at that?
Speaker 2:Would you look at that? Would you
Speaker 1:look at that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Rougher news, but but lifted. Lifted.
Speaker 1:In bigger news and more important news
Speaker 2:Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. Yes, Jordy?
Speaker 1:Today is National Pickle Day.
Speaker 2:Pickle Day.
Speaker 1:You heard it. Not pickleball day. Not pickleball. Pickleball day. Elad Gil, broke the news this morning.
Speaker 1:Yes. And that could explain
Speaker 2:He's into tracking national days. Explain the volatility. That could. That could. There's basically a day every day.
Speaker 2:Like, every day is some special day. There's, like, probably National Podcasters Day. You know? There's a because because they they've extended it. It's it's, you know, Father's Day, Mother's Day, then there's Grandparents Day, then there's aunts and uncles Day.
Speaker 2:And people just went crazy with the days. A lot of marketing firms figured out that you needed a day to have an excuse. So there's, like, donut day. National eat it up in
Speaker 1:day or whatever. According to Google's AI overview, tomorrow is National Philanthropy Day. And then it is also celebrated as National Recycling Day, National Drummer Day, Hot Socks Day.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So we got days for days.
Speaker 2:It's also restream day. You can sign up for restream today, one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multistream, and reach your audience wherever they are. Blue origin, massive landing yesterday. Let's watch the video.
Speaker 1:Pull it up.
Speaker 2:Sawyer Merritt has breaking it down. Jeff Bezos's rocket company Blue Origin has just successfully landed. Let's play the clip. This is New Glenn, the rocket booster. Oh, no.
Speaker 2:On a barge in the middle of the ocean. Twenty five years after its founding. Look at that becoming the it's only the second company in history to land a rocket booster after SpaceX. What what a moment. Remarkable.
Speaker 2:Insane. It it it it in some ways, it's it should be expected. It's been a decade since SpaceX did exactly this. This is a wild video. This is this is like I mean We kept the hand rockets.
Speaker 2:Always amazed by, the fact that they can keep the cameras even rolling or live streaming at all during these crazy moments where there's fire all over the camera, for example. But they did it. The smoke clears, I believe, on this video at some point, and you see the rocket booster sitting there on the drone ship standing. It did not crash. It did not blow up after they brought it back successfully.
Speaker 2:It's an orbital class rocket. Very exciting. I was I was thinking about the the implications of this. It's interesting. It's like, on the one hand, like, yeah, you're ten years behind SpaceX.
Speaker 2:Like, SpaceX did this this exact thing 2015. Right. 2015. It's been a decade. On the other hand, it's like China hasn't done it, and they've obviously wanted to.
Speaker 2:And so that's really cool that America has two companies that are doing it. They're now in competition. And so when we were talking to the folks about the Space Center.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Space sparing empire.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There there there's been this question about, like, will the launch costs come down, or will Elon just eat a 100% of the margin himself with SpaceX because he's done all this work? Well, now there's maybe gonna be a little bit more pressure. We're seeing that from Firefly. We're seeing that from Blue Origin.
Speaker 2:Like, stuff seems to be working. I think a lot of people wrote off Blue Origin like Virgin Galactic. It was just like billionaire side project. SpaceX was the serious one. I think there's still, you know, there's still a decade behind, but it is just crazy that, he's he's been able to keep it going for so long, making a lot of progress.
Speaker 2:And I was just laughing to myself about this idea that in any other industry, if a founder came to you and was like, yeah. We're we're a decade behind the lead the leading leading company in the category, but we're staying with it for another decade, you'd be like, what? Like, you're a decade behind? Like like, you know, like, you're you're a GPT one level, and they're a GPT five level. Like, you're you're going to pivot in
Speaker 1:that case. Right? We're just trying to get to GPT two level. Yeah. You're like, wait.
Speaker 1:By the time you're at GPT two, they're gonna be at GPT six.
Speaker 2:Seven. So six or seven. And but it is just a different industry. It moves a lot slower. And Bezos has just built a crazy company.
Speaker 2:I mean, they've never, like, they've never really done a pry like, a major financing that's been from a headline firm that just kind of it feels like it's all funded by Bezos. There might be something else going on. There's there's some rumors of, like, small secondary transactions here and there, but there's really no, like, you know, logo Blue Origin logo on tier one fund. You just won't see that. That's just not a thing.
Speaker 2:And what's interesting is that it's a massive company, so over 10,000 people work there. Worked it's been twenty five year project, as I mentioned. But, also, you know, it's not it's like the idea of the idea of hiring 10,000 people and rocket scientists, like, not cheap people. You know? Imagine I mean, there's some of them are probably, you know, relatively new grads, but there are some serious salaries to bear.
Speaker 2:And then just funding that off your own personal balance sheet for twenty five years is crazy. But Bezos has, like, 250,000,000,000. SpaceX has raised to date, like, 12,000,000,000. And so even if you just assume that Bezos is burning the exact same amount of money, even twice as much money, that's 10% of his net worth. Like, it's just it's just a doable, like, check to write, which is crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it's almost the equivalent of, you know, somebody working in big tech setting up a cafe that loses some money, but they get a lot of enjoyment out of it, so they keep it going. Yeah. Yeah. It's not it it may never be, like, a rational economic Yeah.
Speaker 1:Activity. But in this case, I mean, if if, you know, the implications are that you could end up in a situation where there's a duopoly Yeah. In launch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, SpaceX is what? It multiple hundreds of billions. And, you know, Blue Origin seems to have somewhat of a similar capability at some point. Like, you yeah.
Speaker 2:What's the fair market value of Blue Origin? Is it a billion? Is it 10,000,000,000? Is it 50,000,000,000? Like, if it was a public company, just like you know?
Speaker 2:And and you're just comping it to SpaceX for whatever reason, whether or not that that math makes a ton of sense. Like, you could imagine it trading in the billions for sure. Like, you could imagine trading in the high tens of billions. So, obviously, we don't know that much about, like, the financials, how profitable this stuff is. It's a very, you know, kind of behind the scenes come.
Speaker 1:Virgin Galactic is sitting at a $200,000,000 valuation Yeah. In, in the public markets.
Speaker 2:I I know that they SPAC'd. Thought that they had despacked.
Speaker 1:It's sitting at, in it peaked Yeah. At, let's see here. It peaked in well, it had it was all over the place. It peaked at $1,218 a share in 2019, and it's now sitting at $3 and 61.
Speaker 2:I think it was one of the first Jamal SpA SpAx. Right? I think it was one of the one of the first ones. And and they had a very different approach. Virgin Galactic was, like, doing the space plane thing where we take off from the ground, off of, like, a traditional landing strip and then they just fly higher and higher and higher.
Speaker 2:I don't believe Virgin Galactic ever made serious progress towards, like, a reusable rocket like what, Blue Origin's done. And I watched an interview, a walk, a walk and talk tour of the Blue Origin facility with everyday astronaut and Jeff Bezos, and it just seems like he's he loves it. Like, he's just doing it for the love of the game. It doesn't matter if it's gonna take 10% of his net worth. Like, he's he's so happy watching
Speaker 1:be a spaceman.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Watching him look at this massive rocket with the welding points, and he knows what type of welds they used for what pieces of the rocket. Like, it's clearly just one of the most entertaining things you can buy is just a rocket factory that builds rockets and does cool stuff. It's, like, so exciting, so thrilling.
Speaker 2:It's it's gotta be way more thrilling than, like, sports betting, for example, because you're you're you're kind of there's a lot there's a gamble. Right? You put all the money in the rocket. The rocket either explodes or it goes up and comes back down. It's gotta be thrilling.
Speaker 2:It's gotta be a dopamine machine. So he's having fun. Yeah. The other interesting thing is that because they don't do this, like, regular tender offers that SpaceX does, there's a lot of employees on Reddit who are kind of like, hey. Like, my stock options are kind of worthless.
Speaker 2:Like, I don't know how to exercise these. I've been at this company for a very long time. And if I was at SpaceX, I'd probably be cashing out a lot and, like, retiring very comfortably. But since I'm at Blue Origin, I I'm not really I don't really have the same level of liquidity. And you could imagine Bezos running a tender offer process that mirrors SpaceX's just by himself.
Speaker 2:Like, he just personally takes out a billion dollars of cash, which he has, and buys a billion dollars of stock from the employees, like what happens to SpaceX when there's a billion dollar tender offer, but that comes from other investors. It could just come from him, but it doesn't feel like that's happening at least from the, you know, the couple of Reddit threads that I read. So it's weird because it feels like the like, SpaceX has this another unfair advantage of employees who'd go there and think, oh, wow. I'm getting paid, you know, couple 100 k a year, but it could be millions if we really deliver. So we gotta go the extra mile.
Speaker 1:Not just that, but I will have a a consistent opportunity to get liquidity.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 1:And Versus Yeah. You know, some of the people that sounds like the the people that you found that that were at Blue Origin for a long time
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Are probably sitting there, you know, basically Yeah. Saying to themselves, if I had joined SpaceX in a worse role
Speaker 2:Some of them literally said that exact thing. Yeah. They literally said that exact thing.
Speaker 1:Now And I'm sure those people had an opportunity to go to SpaceX too. Oh, yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Some of them. Some, I'm sure. Now now the other interesting thing is, like, it is fine to just be like, yeah. Like, we just pay you cash. We pay you a lot of cash.
Speaker 2:We pay you, you know, higher than market cash. And and so the the like, people do need to, you know, make their own decisions. The employees can make the decisions either way. But it's just interesting that that Blue Origin's, like it feels like they're somewhat fighting with one arm tied behind their back. They're also way behind on the, on the actual progress of the, of the reusable rocket.
Speaker 2:They're clearly you know? Like, they they they don't have an answer to Starship. Starship is four times the capability of this New Glenn rocket that just landed. So they're they're they're they're behind in many ways, but they're still ahead of China, and they're still number two. And number two in this category has gotta be thrilling.
Speaker 2:Gotta be exciting. And I think it might actually be a decent business. I don't know. I'd love to dig into it more. I'd love to
Speaker 1:have Probably more thrilling than owning a Formula one team.
Speaker 2:Maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Beza, you know I
Speaker 2:mean, he also, like, sent
Speaker 1:his exposure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He sent his wife and her friends to space. Like, that that's something that, like, you really can't buy otherwise. Anyway, what you can buy is a relationship with Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API.
Speaker 2:Delian was very excited about this. He said, hot damn. Blue Origin just landed New Glenn rocket on their second flight, officially become the second company ever to do it after SpaceX did it a decade ago. Incredible moment for the commercial space industry. The orbital economy has got to be excited about this.
Speaker 2:More competition means potentially more just cheaper prices on Yep. Payloads to to orbit. So exciting exciting stuff. And we yeah. We'll be interesting to see.
Speaker 2:I also saw that, Project Cupier, which was Amazon's Starlink competitor, I believe, is rebranding to Amazon Leo, l e o. I like that. Yeah. Some people were really upset about the rebrand. I I thought it was kinda cool, but they are definitely going to be getting into the space Internet.
Speaker 1:Bezos just posted a close-up picture of the rocket Oh, let's pull it up. Putting it in
Speaker 2:Well, we pulled that up. Let me tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. There's also an an article in Per Aspera just dropped the Dan Golden spoke in front of US space leaders on a subject that's been weighing on him. He's bored by space.
Speaker 2:By that, he's bored with low Earth orbit. SpaceX solved cheap launch and still the only, the entire commercial space economy is largely one thing, communications.
Speaker 1:Look at this picture.
Speaker 2:Imaginary wow. Look at that. So this is the this is taking off?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Look at that.
Speaker 2:It's it's crazy it took so long to get this photo up. They should've I guess, it's taking look at that. Wow.
Speaker 1:Stunning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One of the reasons why Blue Origin has, like I I I talked to somebody who worked at Blue Origin, and he was telling me that, one of the reasons that Blue Origin moved a little bit slower than SpaceX, is that, they leaned a little bit harder on the exquisite system going really big. And Elon had this idea of, like, let's try and make a whole bunch of small things that we bundle together. So if you look at the number of engines in the bottom of that, I think it has, like, six engines, seven engines. And if you look at the bottom of, like, a Starship, you'll see, like, what, 30 engines or something?
Speaker 4:33.
Speaker 2:33 engines. And so Elon has has has been bigger at least on, hey. Let's let's make modular pieces of equipment that can be moved around with maybe not a huge crane. Maybe you can just put it in the back of a truck. Maybe to work on this engine, you can do it in, you know, one normal room instead of a massive warehouse.
Speaker 2:And so the the size of the individual pieces of Starship, it adds up to a massive rocket, but each of the pieces can be worked on individually. When you start working on these really, really big systems, any small change, like, cascades through the rest. What what what are you what are you laughing at?
Speaker 1:Laughing at Gabe. Gabe's fining me for not wearing a suit.
Speaker 2:I told you, dude. I told you.
Speaker 1:It's John's very against it too. I'm very against it. But I just love this I just love this puffer too much.
Speaker 2:Okay. Enjoy. Enjoy.
Speaker 1:Well, Dan Gold is
Speaker 2:is upset about this. He he wants asteroid mining. He wants he he says no wealth being extracted from the solar system. That's like it's it sounds intentionally written to inflame and none being brought back to Earth. Where are my asteroid minds?
Speaker 2:Dan Golden writes. I guess, I'm The Economist. Very interesting.
Speaker 1:We're all asking the same thing, Dan.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. So the steam machine, is this what you wanna move on to?
Speaker 1:Let's pull it up.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's pull up
Speaker 1:the video.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger. Build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Steam Machine is going to be huge, says Josh Konstein.
Speaker 2:So many Mac users wish they could play PC games, but they don't want expensive complex PCs. For a fraction of the price and headache, they'll be able to play PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and indie games on the Steam machine. Now the Steam machine was actually part of the part of a launch. There were actually three things that they launched. Okay.
Speaker 2:The launch video was very cool. They launched a controller, a box, like an actual computer, the Steam machine, and then a VR headset. So we should see. What's interesting is that we don't know pricing yet. There's a few other things.
Speaker 2:The the they call it the steam frame. Valve is saying that it's going to be cheaper than the $1,000 Valve Index, which is their previous VR headset. And I think it should be close to VisionPRO. Not quite in terms of the display. It seems like the display per eye might be, closer to just beyond the Meta Quest three s, which Tyler, of of course, was demoing.
Speaker 2:And you said that with the Quest three s, you couldn't quite use it for work. It was a little screen door effect. It was a little pixelated.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I I would not wanna be reading a lot on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But the the Apple Vision Pro felt like it was at that level or or almost at that level. But they do a bunch of interesting things with the with the Steam Frame. So, if you get the Steam machine, it can it's designed obviously at the level of specs that allow you to, run VR games off of it.
Speaker 2:You can run VR games directly on the headset, but then they have a Wi Fi dongle that you can put on the Steam machine that will stream the VR game to your headset using six g. Think that's a six g Wi Fi router. So six g is I think it's like a different different patch of the broadband spectrum or the Wi Fi spectrum that's, like, less cluttered than when you go into your, you know, like, two two g networks on your on your Wi Fi and you see the different like, there can be a lot of clutter, especially if you're in a an apartment building.
Speaker 1:So Chibibi says, now make this for on prem LLMs. And that's, I think, more or less what sim for Satoshi is building. Oh. Building a a a brain for your desk.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Very
Speaker 2:cool. Tinybox also from George Hotts is similar. And I believe NVIDIA launched something that is a a computer that's designed for basically on prem LLMs, a very high end graphics card sort of wrapped in a in a in a package that can be
Speaker 1:delivered to Microsoft. Steam has won. There's no reason to get an Xbox. There's no reason to get an Apple VR headset. They all run on Linux.
Speaker 1:It's the ultimate computer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We should pull up the actual Steam official hardware announcement trailer because I think that it's a unique way to actually announce something, and I liked just the way they did it. Just watch this, Jordy, and and listen to the transitions between. It's it's it's a couple minutes, so we might need to sort of skip through it.
Speaker 5:Hey, everyone. This is Steam Deck. Steam Deck is our powerful portable
Speaker 2:So this is product that, like, it's already out. Take your steam line. And Anywhere. And and this has been on the market for a couple years. Sold, I think, very well.
Speaker 2:Everywhere. No one really knows because, Valve is such a quiet company. They're not publicly traded.
Speaker 5:We're excited to talk about the future of Steam Deck, but not today. Because this isn't a video about the future of Steam Deck. This is a video about the future of Steam Hardware. Today, we're announcing three new members of the Steam Hardware lineup. All connect you with powerful PC gaming.
Speaker 5:All are optimized for gaming with Steam, and all are shipping in early twenty twenty six. Let's start with this one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think it's cool how they they they they start with something that's familiar, and then they, like, bring you into the next
Speaker 1:Well, the reason it's important is because it's a product that has shipped that people like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So It sort of, like, reestablish them.
Speaker 1:Hardware gets like, people have so little trust in a lot of new hardware products. Totally.
Speaker 2:And then also there's this interesting factor of, they the the Steam Deck is is loved, but also they're doing some rebranding here. Like, the previous VR headset is the Valve Index, not the Steam Index. And and as you'll see later in the video, they're they're re they're renaming the product from Valve VR headset, Valve Index to Steam Frame. And so they're leaning more on this, like, Steam as their unified hardware brand even though the company is Valve. And it feels like they're trying to create more unification across the brand.
Speaker 2:So putting it all together in one
Speaker 1:be a good the the the main Controller? No. The main computer. Do you think it'll be good for, like, a sim sim racing rig?
Speaker 2:I think it would probably run I I think I think all of this would run sim racing extremely well. The only thing is that you would still need to add the peripherals for correct, like
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Control and, like pedals and steering wheel, all that stuff. But but listen to this part Steam machine. Here here. Go back like ten seconds because this transition, I think, is really well done. The
Speaker 5:new Steam Controller works with any device running Steam or Steamless, whether it's a PC, Mac, handheld, smartphone, Steam Deck, or the new Steam machine. Oh, this is the new steam machine.
Speaker 2:I like that. It's, like, very, like, cute and quirky. It has, like, I don't know, just, funny aesthetics, but they they that's the first time that they introduce the name of the product, the next the next product. And then they do it again, like, a minute or two later. And I just think it's like, it it it has this, like, sort of, like, friendly, quirky, like, aesthetic that fits with the video games, but it's it doesn't feel like it's from anywhere particular.
Speaker 2:It feels original. I don't know.
Speaker 1:What do think about the black cube?
Speaker 2:The black cube? I think it's fine. I mean, it's it's it looks like it fits in a media console where it's gonna live next to a PS five. I actually think that that's probably better than the PS five is such so such an awkward shape. Like, it's it's it's really, like, long and big.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I I think that this is probably a better, just, like like, you can fit that on more on on more desks and in more closets and in more little media cabinets. I wouldn't have gone anywhere. I wouldn't have done anything differently.
Speaker 5:With the low latency wireless connectivity of the Steam Controller Puck built right in. And it's great for streaming your games to your phone, tablet, laptop, Steam Deck, or Steam Frame. Oh, yep. This is Steam Frame.
Speaker 2:So they do it again. And then they tell you, okay. We got a new VR headset. And it's such a funny way to introduce like a new VR headset. Like, this is this is the first time they talk about this VR headset.
Speaker 5:Hardware. Stream all your Steam games, VR and non VR alike, in this comfortable, lightweight, wireless VR headset. Steam Frame uses camera based tracking, so getting into your games is as easy as slipping on the headset and waking it up.
Speaker 2:So this is a shift. They used to you used to have to mount cameras around your, like, gaming area, basically, and then it would track you with those cameras. Now it's all done on the headset. This is the same way the Apple Vision Pro works. This is the same way the Meta Quest three works.
Speaker 2:This is not, like, new, but it is it is new for valve.
Speaker 5:Steam Frame also pairs seamlessly with the new Steam Controller, a great companion for playing non VR games in the headset. To make sure streaming is smooth and stable no matter what, Steam Frame includes a wireless adapter that lets you stream
Speaker 3:your this is this is interesting.
Speaker 5:To your headset over a fast and dedicated WiFi six connection.
Speaker 2:Six.
Speaker 6:And the
Speaker 5:game is streamed to your frame optimized for VR using new technology that allows for the highest resolution streaming exactly where your eyes are looking. And Steam Frame is a PC running SteamOS. In addition to streaming, you can install and
Speaker 2:play Where you're looking in the VR headset, that actually gets streamed to you in higher resolution than the rest of whatever else is in the headset. Woah. Because your eyes can you know, like, you're looking at me right now. I'm in full resolution. This is blurry.
Speaker 2:So we will send you a blurry rendering over here. And this has been done in VR at the local level before, but they've figured out how to do it, like like, in the in the latency loop with the like, actually streaming. So they call it, like, foveated streaming as opposed to foveated rendering, kind of the the next generation of this. And so you should be able to play, like, very high fidelity VR games and stream them from this device. And and all of that just keeps weight and heat off your face, which is exciting.
Speaker 2:Tyler, any reaction? What would you pay for this? I I think we should get the whole suite. I love it. Let's play it on the on the fireplace.
Speaker 2:You
Speaker 1:know? Put it in there. Former addict over here. So, of course, he wants wants the whole
Speaker 2:Well, no. The whole package. We're gonna get this thing. We're get we're gonna get this. We're gonna get the one x, and then we're gonna get that new, Google model to play it for me.
Speaker 2:And I'll come in. I'll be like, how'd how'd you do this weekend, buddy? Did you crush? Because I was hanging out in the kids. I was going to baseball.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps get you compliant fast, and we don't stop there. Our AI automation powers everything from evidence collection and and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Michael Saylor is maybe not going down with the ship.
Speaker 1:This is the most insane
Speaker 2:It's the most insane thing that a public company knows us. Let's start with the positive. It looks like a Chad. He looks like an absolutely Chad.
Speaker 1:Yes. He's in by himself in a rowboat. You know, it looks like there's a bunch of people on this on this ship. He's not worried about them. He's worried about getting as far away from it as he can.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. The ship is going down.
Speaker 2:The ship is going down.
Speaker 1:He's looking like an absolute Chad. This is Jess says, brother, you are supposed to go down with the ship. So I just think, you know, this was posted this was posted like, you know, very early in the morning this It's possible he just was playing around on Okay. No. No.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:He did not do this. This is from an account called Atlas Holdled instead of Atlas shrugged. Atlas HODLed with the orange square icon. Bitcoiner, Atlas huddled describes themselves as Bitcoiner and AI artist No. He posted
Speaker 1:this from his own account.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. He took the image from Atlas
Speaker 1:or he Okay. Oh, okay. You're saying he didn't make it.
Speaker 2:He didn't make it.
Speaker 1:But he liked it.
Speaker 2:He liked it.
Speaker 1:And he thought it was a good idea to post.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Him.
Speaker 2:Yes. And so Atlas Home from a burning boat. Day and refers to themselves as a chronicler of Michael Saylor. Like like that like, they're clearly, like, a super fan. Like, they create fan fiction, fan content.
Speaker 2:This was something that Atlas HODLed generated. And then Michael Saylor took it and was like
Speaker 1:He's like, yeah.
Speaker 2:I gotta post this today.
Speaker 1:That's great idea.
Speaker 2:When the stocks down, like, 50% or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's down 52% in the last six months. Yes. And he thought, yeah, that's a great idea.
Speaker 2:And so the I could
Speaker 1:post it.
Speaker 2:And so the reaction has not been good because as Jez put it, brother, you are supposed to go down at the ship. Like, he's the captain of the ship. Why is he not on the ship? It's such a crazy image.
Speaker 1:Michael, Miraflores says, so you're abandoning a sinking ship when you're supposed to be the captain.
Speaker 2:Nice. It's such it's such such a funny, situation. Let me tell you about graphite dot dev. And then Jordy, you can read the next one. Code review for the age of AI.
Speaker 2:Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You wanna read this from Valuations?
Speaker 1:Valuations says, god, I love markets. Where else do you get an objective answer to whether you're a genius or a total effing moron in real time? Master is down 50% since this was published. And this is a quote from Sailor, the captain Sailor himself. He says, unless you do the requisite hundred plus hours of studying Bitcoin on top of a hundred plus hours of micro strategy, you should not enter this trade, he said, because it is a very sophisticated trade that 99.99% of Wall Street doesn't even understand.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, the problem with 99.99% of Wall Street not understanding your your business model or your trade is that they might not buy, and that might drive the price down. Right? Isn't that Yes.
Speaker 1:If institutional investors Yes. Don't understand it, maybe they don't feel confident.
Speaker 2:The so so, obviously, people are dunking on this because the the stock has traded down 50% since this was published. I do think that there is something that's, nice about posting something like this. Like, if you are running a meme stock, or you're running a company that that has a lot of retail attention, it's very nice to actually go to, the community and say, hey. Like, you should really study for a hundred hours, study the asset that we're investing in, and study this company. You should make an educated decision.
Speaker 2:It it it is a little bit of just, like, do your own research. Although, obviously, the there's a little bit of read on this, which is like this is just like I'm saying that I'm doing something so complicated when, really, I'm just huddling Bitcoin, like, by my own admission. But I do I do think that there's something somewhat responsible about saying, hey. Do the research. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I wanna give a little bit of credit for that. Yeah. Anyway, where to next? To Julius, the AI data analyst. Connect your data and ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds.
Speaker 2:No coding required.
Speaker 1:They have a very funny campaign up around San Francisco right now. I won't I won't spoil it for you Mhmm. But there's a number of fantastic billboards.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Cantor Fitzgerald, now controlled by the son of Howard Lutnick, is having its best year ever, says Joe Wiesenthal. Congratulations to Brandon Lutnick. One unusual item might appear on Cantor Fitzgerald's year end expense receipts, quote, I just left the floor and told someone I'm happy to buy them a cot because they need to come in on Sunday and not leave until Friday, joke Sage Kelly, 53, co CEO of Cantor Investment Bank as he sat down for an interview at his New York office.
Speaker 2:Climbing Wall Street's league tables, jumping out in front of the cryptocurrency boom, and returning to SPAC fueled deal making, the private New York financial boutique is having its busiest and most successful year on wreck record. Cantor is now controlled by Brandon and Kyle Letnick, the sons of Howard Letnick, joined Donald Trump's administration as commerce secretary earlier this year. The firm is on track to post revenue in 2025 of upwards of 2,500,000,000.0, an all time high and a jump of more than a quarter on last year. According to people familiar with the matter, when you
Speaker 1:How do they do
Speaker 2:it? And you have How
Speaker 1:do they do it, John?
Speaker 2:How do they do it? A lot of grinding. I've I've I've met Brandon. And lot of, I mean, it feels like Cantor has been early to a bunch of, like, sort of risk more risk on investments than other even pre administration, they were early to the stablecoin thing, I believe, early to a bunch of crypto stuff. Just a little bit more risk on relative to the other investment banks.
Speaker 2:And so, have done very well. And then, of course, now, even further entrenched in DC, further entrenched in Wall Street.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. That would certainly help give confidence around some some bets that maybe other firms would find a bit riskier.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, there's a little bit of, like like, this year, a lot of there's a lot of there's a lot of certainty that came to crypto. But building that that, consensus around, like, okay. The certainty is actually going to come. There is certainty that certainty will arrive.
Speaker 2:That took a big, big leap. And you can you can see that if you know the administration very closely, you could assess that. Whereas, people have been waiting around for certainty on tariffs, and that's taking a little bit longer. But the certainty on the crypto stuff has certainly moved a lot faster.
Speaker 1:The executives bristle at suggestions that their new connections in Washington are contributing to that success. Instead, they say Cantor has grown with a lean team and is reaping the benefits of years of preparation for booms in sectors that more established banks have kept at arm's length. Its two fifty deal makers are set to post revenue north of $1,000,000,000 At $4,000,000 per banker, that's about double the rate at the firms on Wall Street. Interesting.
Speaker 2:That's like Cantor has broken more than AI AI researchers. They're, like, completely broke compared to AI researchers, like, by a thousand x. They're making, like, a thousand times less money than fundraising.
Speaker 1:No. That's talking about the earnings that Yeah. That individual
Speaker 2:So so so as a group, they'll make a billion dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So They could have just been one. They they could have picked the best guy that they had And
Speaker 2:gone into AI.
Speaker 1:And spent all day training.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the the bankers are making 4,000,000 on average. Of course, there's also, like, the overhead of the firm. That's not profit. That's revenue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Versus at some of the labs, you might be making 400,000,000
Speaker 1:per Yeah.
Speaker 2:Per research. So, really pick the wrong industry to go into, and, you know, our heart goes out to them.
Speaker 1:Cantor has brokered more US IPOs by volume this year than any other firm and is fifth in all US equity offerings after overtaking stalwarts including Barclays and Citigroup. It's seen a boom in trading largely from clients outside The US and is on track to acquire hedge fund O'Connor from UBS Group by the end of the year. A deal that's facing a last minute hitch after the unit was hit by losses related to bankrupt auto parts supplier First Brands Group.
Speaker 2:First Brands is really is really all over the place. Really wreaking wreaking havoc.
Speaker 1:Much of Cantor's revenue haul comes from a surge in crypto deal making including fundraising for multi billion dollar treasury companies which hold and trade digital assets, but also from the firm's early push into covering now booming sectors including rare earth minerals, quantum computing robotics, and data centers.
Speaker 2:Wow. They went along the boom and they they're making making it rain. The rainmakers are
Speaker 1:Kelly says, I promise you, we're not getting anything handed to us. It's easy for our competitors to say that because they're not here living and breathing what we do every single day.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Anyways Fantastic. Very impressive.
Speaker 2:So should we move over to
Speaker 1:Let's Alfred Lin
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Has hit the timeline. He says the latest on Outlier's path, our Sequoia. This is our Sequoia. It has always been our
Speaker 2:Is Outlier a product? Outlier's Path?
Speaker 1:I think that might be a blog.
Speaker 2:Oh, wait. Okay. Sorry. Outlier's Path. Welcome to Outlier's Path.
Speaker 2:Having spent more than so this is out I think this is Alfred Lin's personal blog. Through this collection of posts on Outlier's Path, I hope to provide you with the provocation to get better at getting better and prove your critics wrong. Okay. Yes. So this is this is this is the name of his personal blog.
Speaker 1:Okay. Cool. A b in the chat. Legendary
Speaker 2:What is that?
Speaker 1:Chat star. Says, interned for Cantor last summer. Great experience.
Speaker 2:Oh, nice.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Very cool. Alfred says, this is our Sequoia. It has always been our Sequoia. It has always been our Arrakis, our doom.
Speaker 2:Our doom.
Speaker 1:No. He says, it was never Don Don's Sequoia nor Michael's, Doug's, Jim's, or Roloffs from the very beginning when Don chose to build a partnership and name it after the longest living tree on Earth. Sequoia was meant to endure not through individuals, but through us, the collective strength, integrity, and vision of the partnership. And just as it was not theirs alone, it will not be Pat and Alfred's Sequoia. It will always be our Sequoia.
Speaker 1:We are responsible for something enduring, privileged to stand on the foundation built by those who came before us and responsible for making it stronger for those who will come after. Together, we have the opportunity to do our life's work, to make a dent in the universe, to leave our fingerprints on the partnership, and to shape Sequoia into the place we want it to be for the future. Principles guide us, m dash, anchored in in purpose and mission. Beyond that beyond that, we wanna trust and empower one another. Our purpose and mission remain to help the daring build legendary companies for any Gen Z in the audience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How would you translate that? I would
Speaker 1:translate Gen Z. Our purpose and mission remain to help those with motion
Speaker 2:develop aura.
Speaker 1:The markets. Aura farm the industry. Our guiding principles are
Speaker 2:Is any of this like an update? Is anything of this like a
Speaker 1:The only thing that
Speaker 2:change to the strategy?
Speaker 1:I think that this was just their first, like, you know, really public statement as as the new co stewards.
Speaker 2:But but but what is changing here? Like, like like, we already have the news that that there that there are now two stewards. Is there are they going to be focusing more on AI companies or less on AI companies? Or, like, are they be more on growth stage or less on growth stage? Like, is there a change to the strategy?
Speaker 1:No. I think I think this is just reminding people what the firm wide strategy is. Mhmm. Right? They've gone through this has been probably the roughest year on record for Sequoia in terms of, like, comms.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Right? Just going through the Sean, like, Sean Maguire being in the headlines constantly. Yeah. It's not the kind of, you know I feel like coverage that
Speaker 2:not break through in tech and, like
Speaker 1:I I don't think it I don't think it's affected their brand with founders and and internally in the industry very much. But, no, I I think this is this is just a good statement.
Speaker 2:I mean, I guess I guess here is the answer to that question about, like, what is this response to? And Alfred says, some people have asked if we will continue to make new investments and lead the investment team. The answer is is an unequivocal yes. We will source and lead new investments, and we will remain co leads of the early and growth teams. And so they're open for business.
Speaker 2:They're doing deals. They want to actually be investing.
Speaker 1:And the big question
Speaker 2:I I like, yeah. I I would imagine that, like, the leader at most firms is actually doing deals, but they usually have a different flavor to them, a different shape. Like, you know, when I think about, like like, Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Horowitz. Like, he's he's clearly, like, the, you know, the leader of the firm to a degree that, you know, if you're coming in for your seed pitch, like, you're probably not DMing him first. Right?
Speaker 2:He's not the first stop on the fundraising tour. But when Elon is raising money to take Twitter private, like, yeah, he is texting with with Mark. And that money does come out of injuries and coffers. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And if they and if they are aggressively trying to win a deal Yeah. That Mark might Yeah. Send the founder a note directly.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And and so and so when I look at Alfred, I would say, oh, well, if, you know, Tony from do from DoorDash is working on a new DoorDash? DoorDash is working on a new project or starting a new company or or, you know, heavily investing in a friend's company. Like, yeah, that probably goes straight to him. But, no, he's probably not
Speaker 1:down 23% in the last month. It's now DoorDash. Still.
Speaker 2:But, yeah. I mean, he's, he's probably not gonna be, like, you know, sitting there taking notes at Yeah. YC demo day. Although
Speaker 1:Here's the big question with this post. Yes.
Speaker 2:Was it a
Speaker 1:Alfred says at the end, this is not just a partnership. It is a living Emdash. It is a living, breathing legacy.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I I so it it, like, it reads to me, honestly. It reads to me like, yes. It it yes. The blog post went through ChatGPT and got a and got a pass.
Speaker 2:It got a pass.
Speaker 1:Got judged up.
Speaker 2:It got a pass. I I would say that, Alfred, if that happened But if that happened, please do yourself a favor. Go to ChatGPT and go to your settings. And in personalization, put custom instructions and say, never use Emdashes.
Speaker 1:But maybe this is just a way to publicly support a portfolio company, OpenAI.
Speaker 2:That's true. That's true. Might be And then also also, the thing that's really triggering, Jordy, more than the Emdash is, I believe, is what's called antithetical parallelism or cons or contrastive construction. That's it's not this. It's that.
Speaker 2:For years, that's been a fine phrase. But for some reason, in the reinforcement learning pipeline
Speaker 1:This is actually the number one way that I detect AI generated comments on social media more than the m dash
Speaker 2:Yep. Is The contra the contrast
Speaker 1:I'll be reading something that looks like a thought you know, like some random social post Yeah. Comment in there. Yeah. It's not this. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So anyway
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not it's not the it's not the the the username that triggers me. It's the contrastive construction. So yes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. You you should be able to, like, at least edit this out because I just find it annoying at this point. Like, I'm I'm you have just seen it so many times that I'm just like, I need a different flavor of of text. And so you can do this.
Speaker 2:For a long time, you could put this in your Chuck EBT personalization. It and it wouldn't work. It just didn't do anything. And, I complained about it on the show, and Sam Altman announced that, I think they fixed it. And I think that I think that you if you want less Emdashes, Sam Altman says that, removing Emdashes so he says this is fourteen hours ago.
Speaker 2:This is the biggest scoop possible. He says small but happy win. If you tell ChatGPT not to use Emdashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do. Somebody
Speaker 1:there somebody a screenshot was going viral yesterday of a of a newspaper. And at the end of the article Yeah. It said, if you want, I can also create an even snappier front page style version with punchy one line stats
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Bold infographic ready layout. What? Preferable for maximum reader impact. Do you want me to do that next so they have
Speaker 2:that accident? Accident?
Speaker 1:I hit
Speaker 2:print. That's awesome. I love it. Well, if you wanna generate images, video, or audio, head over to fall. Generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop and fine tune models that serve as GPUs and on demand clusters.
Speaker 2:Speaking of generated video, we gotta watch the cat. We gotta watch the cat.
Speaker 1:Pull it up.
Speaker 2:We hate we oh oh, I hate AI slop. I'm Jordy. I hate AI video. Sore is bad. Sore is bad.
Speaker 2:Wrong.
Speaker 1:Some audio
Speaker 2:on. This video.
Speaker 7:Thing. Go home.
Speaker 2:It's remarkable. The cat is playing the piano.
Speaker 7:What did I say about the noise? It's the middle of the night.
Speaker 2:And someone comes outside and takes it away. Done. I'm taking it in the the nature of the video bagpipes? I like the bagpipes one. There's something about keeping the, the video intentionally low res because it's a doorbell cam where it doesn't trigger the uncanny valley because the doorbell cam always looks bad.
Speaker 2:Whereas if this was trying to look like four k footage, it would not look as good.
Speaker 1:That's We gotta get that instrument.
Speaker 2:That's a good that's a good instrument. Can you hear me? I like that.
Speaker 6:With this.
Speaker 2:Go home. This is it it's funny because they clearly created some sort of template that didgeridoo.
Speaker 7:Hey. Knock it off. It's midnight. Give me that thing.
Speaker 2:But it does get extremely repetitive because she always comes outside and says knock it off again and again. And so, the like, seeing this just once is enough for me. Knock it off. It's midnight. The symbols is pretty funny.
Speaker 2:Physics on those symbols not quite right, though. Know, there's work to be done here. The gong. The gong. Let's do it The gong.
Speaker 2:The cat hitting the gong is great. The gong looks exactly like our gong, honestly. So it turns out
Speaker 7:Midnight aerobics now?
Speaker 2:The horn is shaking. Okay.
Speaker 7:Volume down.
Speaker 2:I'm into it. How many
Speaker 1:of you Switzerland Seven. Reaches agreement with The US to cut tariffs to 15%.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:The deal would reduce an extraordinarily high tariff rate at 39% that had threatened to cripple Swiss exports. We all know what those exports are. The United States and Switzerland said on Friday that they had reached an agreement to lower a punishing 39% tariff on Swiss goods, a change that will help to reduce the cost of exporting Swiss pharmaceuticals, gold, watches, and chocolate to The United States. The deal came after a meeting between US and Swiss government officials on Thursday and an unusual visit by a group of high level Swiss executives to President Trump in the Oval Office last week. The Trump admin put a 39% tariff on Swiss exports in August, blindsiding a longtime ally in delivering a sharp blow to Switzerland's economy by significantly raising the cost of the country's exports to The United States of drugs, dairy products, gold, and watches.
Speaker 1:The tariff was one of the highest rates set for any country, which administration officials said was in response to a substantial trade deficit The United States had with Switzerland. I wonder why we would have a large trade deficit with Switzerland. The 15% tariff will now be the same as the tariff The United States charges on goods from the European Union, which reached a trade deal in July. So as part of this, there's gonna be roughly two Swiss companies committed to making 200,000,000,000 in investments in The United States by 2028. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And The United States also agreed to cap tariffs. I didn't know Switzerland had a semiconductor industry. Have no idea. That's fascinating. Capping those as well.
Speaker 2:Well, do have some AI researchers over there who are who are, like, poached for Meta. Right, Tyler?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think Lucas Bayer was over there. There was an OpenAI team set up over there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting that I I haven't heard of an OpenAI team in many of the other European countries. It seems like Switzerland was, a uniquely, like,
Speaker 4:special I place for think most of the I mean, there's a lot of AI going on at Mhmm. I never even know how to say
Speaker 3:Oh, London.
Speaker 4:ETH Zurich. Yeah. There's that university that's, like, very it's, like, it's, like, the premier European Ethereum Zurich.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not. Right? No. It is different, though.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. No. It's not. ETH I should look up what it stands for.
Speaker 1:Okay. But Yeah.
Speaker 4:There's a lot of AI, like, research going on there.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 1:Situation room says, Patek to open factory in Wisconsin.
Speaker 2:That would be hilarious. Wisconsin made petech. What what have you have you been monitoring the the the GPT 5.1 launch? Like, has it has it been going well? It feels like it's been, like, kinda quiet, but it's
Speaker 4:People seem to generally like it. Yeah. I I don't know. I mean, they they didn't release benchmarks.
Speaker 2:So Okay.
Speaker 4:A lot of the, like, technical people aren't, like, super Yeah. Concerned. I mean, I
Speaker 2:I I'm seeing some charts that kinda showed that it it's more that they're just pushing the model router, like, further to the edges. So it can reason for even longer if it needs to, and it can reason for even less time if it if it just can come up with the answer quickly more quickly. And so all of that feels like better cost optimization instead of just hitting everything with a hammer. Not everything needs twenty minutes of thinking. Some things need thirty minutes, though, and some things needs one minute of thinking.
Speaker 1:I I tested it using GT three RS Bench
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Where I was trying to have
Speaker 2:You were going agent to commerce mode, though
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Which is a little bit early.
Speaker 1:Just using 5.1.
Speaker 2:Use agent mode?
Speaker 1:No. No.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. I think I think if you do agent mode, it would so to to say exactly what happened because it's an interesting failure case.
Speaker 1:I just said find me at G T 3 R S, Green 992 in The US that's currently listed for sale. Yes. And it found me one Yes. That was on cars and bids Yes. That sold over two years ago.
Speaker 2:Well, cars and bids, clearly, Doug Gimura site. Cool cars from the modern era. We love cars and bids. We love Doug DeMuro, but that is frustrating because it already sold. But I think with agent mode, it would have actually, like, opened the website and clicked around a little bit more.
Speaker 2:I'm not exactly sure how to trigger that, but maybe you just need to chat with him more. Maybe you need to be clear about your prompt. You might have needed to do 3.5 pro or or what is it? 5.5 o pro, I guess, now.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Five.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Five five pro. I mean, feels like we're back in the air
Speaker 1:of prompt agent mode right now.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll see how it does. We'll come back to
Speaker 2:it. And is there a difference between agent mode on 5.1 and agent mode on five pro? Don't know anymore. I don't know. They're it's getting they're they they did such a good job of, like, narrowing it down and, like, unconfusing it.
Speaker 2:And then now they're like, let's put a little bit more confusion in. Let's just add a little bit back. The fact that it says 5.1 is like crazy to me. It's like like
Speaker 1:Chad wants to know about all the cans behind behind Tyler.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. What you got? You got Red Bulls back there?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I got
Speaker 2:a little energy drink. You got yeah. Taylor, as Dave
Speaker 1:called it, pallets of fridge steaks.
Speaker 6:Pallets of fridge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's some DC
Speaker 2:Your background is actually hilarious. We should we should move the we should move the refrigerator to the other side so we can see the refrigerator because the refrigerator's lit lit lit up. So if you slide to the right, yeah, you can see the fridge.
Speaker 1:There we go. It's cool.
Speaker 2:So we should flip that around, or or maybe just move the camera. But, anyway, you you might have noticed Jordy's wearing the puffer jacket. That's because we are sponsored by Turbo Puffer, search every bite, serverless vector, and full text search built from first
Speaker 1:person on
Speaker 2:Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Will Minitis took to the timeline to say, in the flow, in quotes, he says, the essential question for the modern allocator, the deal guy, or the venture capitalist is, do you wanna be in the flow? Size of checks, size of fund, personal economics, character of deal, character of behavior, lifestyle, and every other single question is downstream of whether or not you are in the flow or not. Let me explain. Is this
Speaker 1:Tyler, do you think this has something to do with having motion?
Speaker 2:It seems related.
Speaker 4:I mean, Will is kind of like unk status. I don't know if he would Woah.
Speaker 2:Shots fired.
Speaker 1:Shots fired. Calling
Speaker 2:him an unk. Like, what
Speaker 4:he I I I mean,
Speaker 2:is this because you believe I I I thought he was very young. I thought he was a Teal fellow just a few years ago.
Speaker 4:No one knows how old
Speaker 2:he is. Is there a theory that he could be unk? He's certainly wise beyond unkers.
Speaker 1:Theory.
Speaker 4:No. But I'm saying this is like the equivalent of having motion. So I I agree with you.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 4:But, like, I don't think he would be one to use that kind of that vernacular.
Speaker 2:The parlance. Yeah. Let me explain. Think of the flow as the world's greatest nightclub. It's open twenty four seven.
Speaker 2:Many of the coolest and richest guys are there. Guys seem to get rich just by a dint of hanging around, and the lights never turn on. It's a party that never ends inside the flow. The only decision you have to make is to keep partying. Sure.
Speaker 2:People get hurt inside the flow. Sometimes guys buy tables they can't afford or get addicted to habits they can't maintain. When this happens, the flow gently returns them to pedestrian life, and the party continues. No one ever seems to notice. When you're inside the flow, the only thing you notice is the guys at higher rungs dangling over a seemingly endless set of 10 x markups and lifestyle expenses to exhaust your newly found carry.
Speaker 2:Inside the flow, we don't fly commercial. Mark Rowan is constantly calling, and we have houses on Gin Lane. The flow gives us, gives to those who give to it. There's nothing wrong with being in the flow. Many great investors live their lives entirely inside of it and have beautiful economics, families, and even return capital to incredible endowments inside the flow.
Speaker 2:But very few people make the conscious decision to realize that life is possible outside the flow, that you can get rich, build great companies, generate excess returns by being far, far, far outside the flow. But you can only have one foot in. But you can't only have one foot in. If you're going to enter the flow, you must do it entirely. No one gets rich hunting for value on Madison Avenue.
Speaker 2:If you're in the business of buying marquee assets, you need to systemically order your life around paying marquee prices. Across asset classes, you can neatly order firms into in the flow and out of the flow firms. In the flow tend to have softer j curves because they're able to quickly make deals consensus and achieve markups through other friends at the party. Firms outside the flow tend to be a bit slower, have much more profound j curves, but can achieve incredible returns if they persevere. Many of the social oddities of allocators are actually social oddities of being in the flow.
Speaker 2:My friend Kyle Tucker names the main one below.
Speaker 1:Going guy for guy at every social occasion.
Speaker 2:Explain. I can't believe what he said at the Paul at the Apollo AGM in Lake Cuomo. Ari Emanuel introduced me to the pope. I just bought ramp forwards at 500 x from Bill Ackman's dog walker. This is If you if you find yourself with a strong distaste for this lifestyle, that's okay.
Speaker 2:There's a rich life possible outside of the flow. But you need to make the consensus decision day in and day out to either be in
Speaker 1:the flow Conscious. Decision.
Speaker 2:Oh, conscious. To either be in the flow or far outside. The flow only gives to those who give their all to it. What a great piece of writing. That's funny.
Speaker 2:Nassim Talib said, the opposite of success isn't failure. It's name dropping the bed of percrusties. And somebody somebody you know, Antonio says, in my experience during booms, most get flow curious then pull back, then the pullback comes and people become contrarian and look down their noses at flow folks without even the self awareness to refer to their dabblings as a phase from when I was younger. And Will Menaita says, you are describing being half in, half out of the flow. This will kill you.
Speaker 2:The flow takes from those who attempt to take from it without giving their all in return. The flow only gives to those who give their all. It reads like a plot of a horror film. It's fantastic. And or or like the the substance.
Speaker 1:Write a write a novel, Will. Please.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What a way with words. Do you think this is inspired by, that, that conference he went to? It was more outside of the flow potentially?
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:I think I think that
Speaker 1:might
Speaker 2:be a little bit of what of what's going on. Then the Main Street. Yeah. You see I mean, we we talk about this with David Senora a lot where who's coming on the show in in just a few hours. Wait.
Speaker 2:Wait. What? Is he do we were were you not supposed to say that? Sorry. I think he's coming on.
Speaker 1:He he said he was he was scheduled. Okay. And then we took him off the schedule because he had to travel for the day. Then he then he had some plane issues. Okay.
Speaker 1:And he said, save the 2PM spot. And then now He just bailed? He's he's on another Okay.
Speaker 4:On another
Speaker 2:plane. Well, we'll get him back on the show soon. But, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're listening to the show, obviously know who David Senra is, the creator of the founder's podcast and the host of Senra. Senra with David Senra.
Speaker 2:But David is someone who who has observed folks inside the flow and outside the flow and really sees both sides of it, I think. And that's one of his unique unique strengths is that, he is not entirely captured by the flow. And because and and maybe maybe, Will's point would hold in the capital allocator world. You have to be in the flow or out of the flow. You can't be half in.
Speaker 2:But, but it certainly does not hold true for what David does, which is, you know, storytelling and understanding the history of greater the world's greatest entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1:The flow, I think, could be summed up by, are you dancing in Manhattan? Yeah. It's very, very Manhattan thing.
Speaker 2:Oh, in Manhattan, but also in Sand Hill Road, I think. Sure. Is is similar. Are you dancing with Google AI Studio? Create an AI powered app faster than ever.
Speaker 2:Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires the right models and APIs up for you. Get started at ai.studio/build.
Speaker 1:Will says friends that have done well in the flow seem to share these traits.
Speaker 2:Oh my god. This is such a long quest again.
Speaker 1:No. He he had to follow it up.
Speaker 2:He had follow it up.
Speaker 1:Had a 100 of net cash on rent expenses, so they constantly feel pressure.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Love that. Cash. Zegna sneakers, ABC cardigans. Okay. I felt very We'll educate you.
Speaker 1:Yes. Low first marriage success rates, high second marriage success.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Lots of flights, constant two, three city rotation.
Speaker 2:Couldn't be
Speaker 1:Spend 99% of their time talking about deals that make up less than 5% of deployed dollars. Okay. Office either in Soho or 9 West.
Speaker 2:Oh. Oh. So he's really calling out his his Manhattanite friends, his neighbors.
Speaker 1:Now here's where he contradicts himself. Oh, no. Maybe not. He says constantly holding large amounts of cash, making
Speaker 2:fun things to be tipping. Grand. You're you're a notorious tipper. You're a notorious cash tipper. So you you fit into this piece.
Speaker 2:We should
Speaker 1:Very low laptop usage, constant cell phone usage.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Can't make it through an hour without taking a call. We had a workout with one of these guys this morning. We felt we felt really we felt really bad. This this guy, we showed up to the gym for a workout and had breakfast with him.
Speaker 2:Good buddy.
Speaker 1:And he he had to he he had had to step away for three calls
Speaker 2:during He was on the grind. Like, by the time we had finished our first coffee of the morning, he'd had four calls. It was crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know I guess that could be
Speaker 2:one call before the show because we're like, we're so we're in our own flow. Our flow is not the flow, and it's it's the TBPN flow. We spend, like, no time talking to other people except on the show. So the it's a very, very different lifestyle, I think, from, like, what he's describing. But I've seen this.
Speaker 2:And and, I mean, this would, again, just work as a novel or a movie. We're we're watching the birth of a modern Bret Easton Ellis. I know you haven't seen American Psycho, but it's a fantastic film. You should check it out sometime. It's also an interesting book.
Speaker 2:And and and and the the Patrick Bateman of the nineties is you know, this is a this would be a great foundational portrait of an individual who could be stylized in the in a Bret Easton Ellis style, which would be very very interesting. Let's continue reading. But first, let me tell you about ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in Chateappity. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.
Speaker 2:So where were we? They they have a lot of cash. They're in Soho, 9 West.
Speaker 1:Lunch guys, more more so than dinner guys, never breakfast guys. Lacrosse or hockey in high school, not rowing. Okay. That's Tyler. Wait.
Speaker 1:Which one did you do? Guy.
Speaker 4:I played lacrosse.
Speaker 2:Oh, flow guy right here.
Speaker 1:Zoom calls, not cell calls. Okay. I can see that. Friends that have done out done well out of
Speaker 2:the flow. Can't tell him. Do you wanna be in the flow or outside the flow? I I guess the whole point of this is that you either wanna be all the way in maximizing it, flow maxing, or you wanna be rejecting it entirely. You just don't wanna
Speaker 1:be Well, let's get into the out of flow zone.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's
Speaker 1:see. Be in the middle of nowhere. Jackson, Park City, Discover
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Properties, but still on a resort. Multiple dogs, mostly more dogs than kids. Usually, low trust kind of cagey to pin down and get a meeting with.
Speaker 1:Okay. Once they trust you, you can't get rid of them. Okay. Almost universally happily married, rowing in high school, not lacrosse or hockey.
Speaker 2:I like how specific
Speaker 1:Low meeting count, lots of depth. I think he I know the two people he's describing here. I'm gonna dox them. But Yeah. Phone calls, not Zooms.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Denim shirts are full suited.
Speaker 2:Does one begin with a t? Yes. Okay.
Speaker 1:Seems to have unspeakable amount of money. Does one
Speaker 2:does one begin with j? What? Does one begin with a j?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Always funding some cultural project movie, magazine, etcetera that's on the brink of failing. Okay. So I will say both of these are friends of the show. First one first one has not been on the show. Second one has been.
Speaker 1:That's the only the only Okay.
Speaker 2:Wait. Wait. Wait. I okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm we we can go more into it later. This is hilarious, though. I feel like both these guys have been on the show. We've clearly had many specimens who fit into both. And and I think Will's Will's point is that there are multiple ways to make a buck, and there are just different archetypes within the world of capital allocation, within the world of of being a deals guy.
Speaker 2:I think this is this is interesting. It's like we're we're peeling back the onion. We're going a layer deeper on the deals guy archetype, which has been, you know, been workshopped by Will and and Jeremy Gaffan over the last few weeks. So they're having fun.
Speaker 4:Are you guys more in the flow or out of the flow, do you think?
Speaker 2:I I don't think I don't think we qualify for either because we are not deals guys. We are not capital allocators. I think step one of even deciding if you're in or out of the flow is the first line of Will's original post. The essential question for the modern allocator, the deal guy, the venture capitalist, I'm not a deals guy. I'm not an allocator.
Speaker 2:I'm not a venture capitalist. So it's an irrelevant question. It's like it's like, are you more of a center or a power forward? It's like, I'm a podcaster. I I that that doesn't even apply.
Speaker 2:And so you can only be in the flow or out of the flow if you are at least in the game, the game of capital allocation. And, it's a it's a funny time to reflect. Anyway, let's move on to linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. Just in, the stock market is an extreme fear, and the ball is being thrown at is that Kobe?
Speaker 1:Yes. That's Kobe John. Unfazed.
Speaker 2:He's unfazed.
Speaker 1:Completely unfazed. Scooks is unfazed.
Speaker 2:Checked in with our with our retail correspondent. He was shook at 06:30 in the morning or something. What was it? 05:30 in the morning he woke up, and he he was looking at the premarket report, seeing red, very nervous.
Speaker 1:It was no. No. It was thirty seconds after
Speaker 2:the Okay. After the opening when the stocks dived. He is monitoring the situation much more than we are. I I watch the public market moves on the order of, like, weeks, you know, or or even, you know, although there's a big day, it's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. I'll throw on the white suit.
Speaker 2:I'm not monitoring it
Speaker 1:for the hour. It based on the the color of the suit.
Speaker 2:Totally. Because I I I really do think in more of, like, months and and years and longer time horizons than than days. It's yes. I think it's centuries, actually. I'm thinking.
Speaker 1:This Interesting. This new options, esque platform
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Called Euphoria has been going viral. Ben Eifert says, honestly, this is so cute and fun. I'm not even mad. I love gambling. This is so gamified.
Speaker 1:I don't think it presents as investing or democratization of derivatives or whatever. It's entertainment. And look at this. What is this? Tyler, are you playing this?
Speaker 4:Should I get on this?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, Jordy, should we talk about, like, one of our most degenerate ideas ever? I mean, at this point, like, it's just gonna yeah. The zoo the the zero minute option. Yeah. I mean, at this point, like, somebody's just gonna build it.
Speaker 2:At least we'll be on record for joking about it. So two years ago, when shortly after Jordi and I met, we were introduced through, by Will Menidas. We are kicking around ideas. One of those ideas was a nicotine pouch for finance bros called Xcel. We actually wound up launching that.
Speaker 2:You might have seen that. We've talked about that on the show. The other thing that we kicked around was so if you've been tracking options trading, you can now buy zero day options. These are options that expire after one day. So you're only betting on the movement of the stock over the course of one day.
Speaker 2:And, and my idea or our idea was, what if you made it more degen? What if you made it zero minute options, and you got it down to something on the order of how long it takes to pull a slot machine and then watch the slots tick over. So you would be democratizing high frequency trading, for example, and you would be, placing a bet. You would the the the the UI was effectively you buy $1 of this out of the money option. In 90% of the time, you lose the dollar, like you do when you're playing slots or you lose the penny.
Speaker 2:But, you know, one tenth of the time, you 10 x your money, and that's the nature. And, basically, you can you can derive the exact same probabilities that exist in a slot in a literal slot machine. You can derive those exact same probabilities from the financial markets with particular derivative instruments. Like, mathematically, you can recreate a slot machine that acts with the exact same probabilities using derivatives, using zero minute options.
Speaker 1:We'd have terrible founder market fit on that one because I don't
Speaker 6:Horrible. Horrible.
Speaker 1:But It was fun talking about
Speaker 2:forever now. But it's hilarious. It's one of those things. The the the real problem is that, like, it is just a this is just a market entry tool. You're gonna become, like, sort of a meme, and then you have to go build the rest of the financial institution.
Speaker 2:And then you're up against Coinbase and Robinhood and public and a whole bunch of other serious competitors who have way more infrastructure. And so, like, the the the cute little game, can be a good a good marketing tool to launch your company, but there's a lot more that you have to do. But it can still be profitable. And, hopefully, you're doing it in a in a in a way that isn't just totally the degen gambling because Good luck.
Speaker 1:I can try to
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a little bit of degen on degen, combat out there. But you know what's not degenerate? Numeral.com. Sales tax and autopilot.
Speaker 2:Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go get build an honest product. Start a woodworking shop. Make a chair.
Speaker 1:Sell wood.
Speaker 2:Sell it online. Shopify.
Speaker 1:Sell Mothogany online. Yeah. Mothogany. Wood of business online. Sim for Satoshi says the AI bubble has already popped.
Speaker 2:Yes. I said this too. I said this too. Three weeks ago, the stock traded down 2%. The bubble popped.
Speaker 2:Now we're back to reinflating. Yeah. Exactly. I agree with
Speaker 1:Simp. Simp says the information, however, is yet to propagate evenly. Mhmm. And he's sharing a quote from Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems in 2002. The quote, at 10 times revenue to give you a ten year payback, I have to pay you a 100% of revenues for ten year straight in dividends.
Speaker 1:That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you have to pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal.
Speaker 1:And that assumes a zero r and d for the next ten years. I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? You realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are. You don't need any transparency.
Speaker 1:You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking?
Speaker 2:What was Sun Microsystems trading for in 2000, and then what were they trading for in 2002? Because this reads like he's apologizing for a massive sell off in the stock. That is pretty crazy. Yeah. What a what a wild.
Speaker 2:I like bone here. Bone GBD says, if you're if you're in AI, pivot to finance and go short. It's ridiculous. Badminton is live streaming in China, and you can adjust whatever angle you want. This is very cool.
Speaker 2:So they film it with a whole bunch of different cameras, and then you can pick the angle. Imagine being able to pick your own angle while watching TVPN live. That would be something special. Maybe we should steal this back from the Chinese. This seems like some awesome innovation.
Speaker 2:Now, Tyler, you you don't think this is Gaussian splatting. Right? Gaussian
Speaker 4:splatting? No. I mean, it's not smooth.
Speaker 2:You think this is just a bunch of cameras. It looks like a bunch of cameras. Yeah. That's right. But you
Speaker 4:could do this with Gaussian sliding.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that'll be the next the next iteration, the next version. But we're pretty far away from, like, real time on that. Right?
Speaker 1:Real one knows that the the shuttlecock is the fastest moving object that's been recorded in sports.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 1:It goes hundreds of miles an hour. Hundreds? Yes.
Speaker 2:No way. I mean, it's it's like faster than a golf ball, faster than a bowling ball. Yes. It's faster than a football. It's faster than that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Hundreds of miles
Speaker 1:an hour. They confirmed golf ball.
Speaker 2:I'll put you in the truth zone there. What about rifle shooting? Does it go faster than a gun? You've seen those at the Olympics where they're shooting the pistols. Right?
Speaker 2:It can't possibly go faster than a gun, than a bullet from a rifle, in a pentathlon. No way. I got you dead to right size.
Speaker 1:Okay. So this is AI overviews. It's probably hallucinating. Okay. And it says this this actually you might have found a really incredible Insight?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Hole in the reasoning? Okay. What do you
Speaker 1:No. A bullet is not faster than a badminton shuttlecock.
Speaker 2:No. Let's go.
Speaker 1:I guess, but so
Speaker 2:Tyler, keep working.
Speaker 1:They're talking about bird
Speaker 2:Keep keep looking. Okay. Badminton shuttlecock speed during badminton game. How fast does that go? I want miles per hour, hopefully.
Speaker 2:And then I wanna know how fast an f one car goes and how fast a bullet out of one of those pistols goes at at the, at the Olympics. Because we all know that iconic image of the woman No. And the Turkish guy
Speaker 1:AIs.
Speaker 2:At the Olympics and the guy with all the gear AI shooting.
Speaker 1:AI is And then
Speaker 2:is is false. AI is false. Okay.
Speaker 1:He's convinced.
Speaker 2:Does anyone have any real numbers? Anyone have any real numbers?
Speaker 4:Okay. Like, a top speed for shuttlecock is, like, 300 miles an hour.
Speaker 2:300 miles an hour? And how much is a bullet coming out of one
Speaker 1:of those guys? Miles an hour.
Speaker 2:2,000 miles an hour. Wow. So off by an order of magnitude, Jordy. In the truth zone, it's okay. We'll clip it in a way that makes it sound we won't clip we won't include the correction.
Speaker 2:We'll just clip
Speaker 1:you saying of the best AI generated content.
Speaker 2:Gonna go mega No.
Speaker 1:A bullet is not faster than a badminton shuttlecock. A badminton shuttlecock is the fastest moving object in sports, while bullets can travel at over 2,000 miles an hour. Wow. Let's give it up for digital guys. We didn't create digital god.
Speaker 1:We created digital gods.
Speaker 2:Is something like your boy would tell you. This is something your your your your guy would say. Allad Gil is doubling his fund target to nearly 3,000,000,000. Congratulations to Allad Gil. Let's let's ring the gong.
Speaker 2:First gong of the day. First gong of
Speaker 1:the day is Ryan says AI told me that John's gong is faster than a bullet. Gong is faster. I believe that.
Speaker 2:Let's go over to the we have a new we have a new segment on the show. We have different press releases that have been coming. Drew, let's see. Oh, yes. Okay.
Speaker 2:We got the mic. We got the PTZ camera. Are you guys tracking me? What are we doing? Are we tracking me?
Speaker 2:Who's tracking me? I I I I oh, it's this one. It's this camera. Okay. So first, let's see.
Speaker 2:Cursor at 29,300,000,000.0. We had Spencer on the show yesterday to talk about it. They raised 2,300,000,000.0 in its third funding round this year. Third in the year. They used to raise money every twelve to eighteen months.
Speaker 2:Now it's every three months. Maryland governor Wes Moore announces Landmark AI partnership to transform state service delivery. Is going on here? Westmore announced a landmark partnership with Anthropic and Percepta, a general catalyst transformation company, to harness AI to tackling child poverty, expanding housing access. So they're gonna ask Claude to build houses, I guess, something like that.
Speaker 2:Anthropic will provide Claude to workers across Maryland state agencies and lend technical support to help design, deploy AI powered initiatives. One example includes a new Claude powered virtual assistant that will help residents apply for benefits, update information, track applications. What do you think, Jordy? Thumbs up. Thumbs up.
Speaker 2:I mean, honestly, like, if if there's is there a better like, like, the DMV website notoriously is bad. If you can have an AI agent and use it instead, that's probably an upgrade. Congrats to them. What else we got? TeamShares.
Speaker 2:TeamShares, a tech enabled
Speaker 1:What are they up to?
Speaker 2:Acquirer of high quality small and medium enterprises is listing on the Nasdaq via Live Oak v combination. $126,000,000 pipe led by accounts advised by T. Rowe Price.
Speaker 1:I like I like how nobody wants to say SPAC anymore. They just Yeah. All the words around it.
Speaker 2:TeamShares acquisition based. Is that what this is? TeamShares programmatically acquires companies with half a million to 5,000,000 of EBITDA from retiring owners, integrates them with the TeamShares platform and helps employees earn company stock.
Speaker 1:This is And so
Speaker 2:they're rolling stuff up. Slow ventures company. That's right. That's right. What else we got?
Speaker 2:YC StartUp Multi Factor launches the first password manager built for the AI era. That's gonna be tough competition. Right? Because 1Password is extremely sticky and potent like, he's not he's not asleep at the wheel. We've had the CEO on the on the show.
Speaker 2:The the the 1Password team partner with browser based and is obviously trying to be, you know, the 1Password for the AI era. But there are some other folks. Why are you laughing?
Speaker 1:Why are laughing? Because Gabe, I think, is looking at the Happy Dad in the corner. Yeah. Of course we have here because we love John from Happy
Speaker 2:Dad. John Chee.
Speaker 1:We support our friends.
Speaker 2:So this is let's read this. Multi factor, Y Combinator, fall twenty twenty five. So we might have interviewed company founded by a former CIA agent. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Oh, let's go.
Speaker 2:And a former NASA scientist. Wow. What a team. Today announced the launch of its
Speaker 1:Straight out
Speaker 2:of the deep kind password manager that allows both humans and AI agents to access online accounts securely without ever underlying exposing underlying credentials, a public demonstration of its proprietary security technology. The company will temporarily make its actual corporate bank account accessible to the public starting on November 12 through a read only checkpoint link containing $1,000,000 in business funds. That's a that's a cool stunt. I wonder I wonder what their go to market will be fully. I wonder how they'll how they'll whether they'll wind up going more enterprise and then and then down into the individuals or like what 1Password did, they got a bunch of consumers on, and eventually, eventually, people started using it in business like like we do.
Speaker 2:You know? We started using it personally and eventually for business. Introducing super media AI native professional network. They're going up against LinkedIn, I guess. The business the best practices of building companies are of are unevenly distributed.
Speaker 2:Every great company has pockets of excellence and its own blind spots, the knowledge behind they're announcing an AI native AI native professional network. What else is in here? There's a big stack here. Beehive is taking aim at Substack, Squarespace Woah. And something else.
Speaker 2:It's there's a notification pop up that says, would you like to would you like would you like notifications? Look at this dude. It's like, oh, yeah. Like, here's our press release, but, like, you know, you can't read whatever. I guess Patreon.
Speaker 2:It's probably Patreon.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Okay. We a sweeping product release of 10 new tools spans website creation, podcasting, digital product sales, and analytics. Congrats to Beehive. Triple glaze. Triple glaze.
Speaker 2:Beehive is no longer just a newsletter platform. On Thursday, the company released a sweeping slate of 10 new products at its winter release event, repositioning itself as creator content operating system. According to cofounder and chief executor executive Tyler Denck, Beehive's been on a tear. I know a bunch of people that love it. We're obviously on Substack.
Speaker 2:Go to tvpn.com. Sign up for our Substack. There's been we talked to some people that have used both. They're both cool. Probably some reasons to use Beehive, some reasons to use to use Beehive and some and some reasons to use Substack.
Speaker 2:Kinda just depends on your your use case. And then the last one is AirJewel Technologies announces third quarter results and provides business updates. This is a tech platform that unleashes the power of water from air. Interesting. AirJewel is addressing emerging opportunities driven by powerful macro trends that are fundamentally reshaping global water and energy markets.
Speaker 2:That is
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for global water markets.
Speaker 2:Pulling water from air. You know what I was laughing about? I was thinking, you know, Bezos has spent something like, what, $25.10 $10,000,000,000 on Blue Origin. And there's so many billionaires that have just wasted, like, hundreds of billions of dollars when they could like, trying to do world hunger when they could have been building rockets. Like, we need to we need to, you know, really, really shame the the billionaires who are wasting money on something that's just nonsense instead of, like, building rockets.
Speaker 2:They gotta build rockets. That's what we gotta do. You've seen that?
Speaker 1:Wait. Who said that?
Speaker 2:There's just there there there's there's constantly a there's constantly a wave. I'm I'm I'm I'm joking about the constant wave of, like, Elon could Elon could cure cure world hunger. Well, there's a bunch of billionaires that have been trying to cure world hunger. They spent a 100,000,000,000 on it. They could have been building rockets.
Speaker 2:Anyway, fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bake offs. Number one ranking on g two.
Speaker 1:Elon's Elon's public service is making a car that costs less than a gym membership.
Speaker 2:It's really gonna be like a $50 car. Oh, where did we where did we land on the on the Roadster? So the new Roadster, we we talked about this in the show. Elon went on Rogan, and he said, maybe it'll be a flying car. And he and he specifically said, the demo will be shocking.
Speaker 2:Like, the demo will be amazing. And so I was trying to debate with Jordi and Tyler this morning. What what will the demo be? Like, what will it actually be? Like, I don't think anyone assumes that you will just be able to, at the demo, hop in the Roadster, and be like, take me from LA to San Francisco, and it just flies you there.
Speaker 2:Like, that seems unbelievable even as a demo. But what will the demo be? And there's been a couple different examples of this. Did we ever find the video of the the jumping Chinese car? This is such a crazy video.
Speaker 2:Jumping
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's pull it up. Chinese car. Yeah. This one. The b y d Yang Wang u nine, the supercar that jumps obstacles.
Speaker 2:There's a video here. Let me try and put this in the timeline. Let's see if I can send this in. So, so there's there's that. And then what was the other one?
Speaker 2:The MyBock g l GLS bounces. Right? There's this bouncing mode. There's a
Speaker 1:GLS 600.
Speaker 2:GLS 600.
Speaker 1:And that's technically to help you get out of sand, I think?
Speaker 2:Of course. Of course. Yeah. That's that's what it's not just for the influencers to, like, flex on each other.
Speaker 1:When you're doing a little fundraising Yeah. Out out in The Middle East
Speaker 2:That.
Speaker 1:And you get stuck in some sand in your Maybach? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And there's and there's also the the Mercedes g Wagon, the electric g y wagon, the g six fifty with EQ technology, I believe it's called, something like that. It's not And it does a tank turn. And so the the the let let's watch this. Yeah. Look.
Speaker 2:Okay. So that is technically a flying car. All four wheels off the off the ground. I would call this the minimum viable flying car, and so I'm expecting the Tesla Roadster to be able to do something slightly above this. Right?
Speaker 2:But the question's like, how much above this? Like, will there be a rocket engine on there? Will there be fans on there? I was kicking around the idea that they would put a fan on it. Somehow, maybe it would pop out a bunch of fans, and the fans could suction the car to the road so it could go from zero to 60 faster.
Speaker 2:Maybe you could reverse those fans and actually hover the car a little bit or or elevate the car. But I want I want a firm prediction from you, Jordy, on what you think the what what the amazing flying car Tesla demo might be. Like, what do you think it actually might be? Because because it he's gonna demo something, and he's gonna and and and he's probably not gonna be just a car that flies you from San Francisco to to New York. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, that would be truly, like, mind blowing.
Speaker 1:I love I love your theory. I think it'd be very cool if the fans could could create some amount of thrust. Yeah. But I find it hard to believe Yeah. That it would actually be able to lift one of these cars.
Speaker 1:They're very, very, very heavy Yeah. Because of the battery. So I'm going with something closer to the ability to do something like the this jump like we're seeing with this u nine.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, I have a little bit of, I had I had GPT five, like, kinda crunch some of the physics numbers on this. So suction fans with good skirts could plausibly improve a plaid's, like a plaid Tesla, like a Tesla Model s plaid, zero to 60. If it was if it was gonna do two point four seconds zero to 60, it could go down to 1.6 or 1.8. So the pressure needed is only a few kilopascal scales over a three to five meter area.
Speaker 2:And so so it's so it's it's potentially possible that you could use fans to create more downforce. And fans, I believe, were actually banned from f one, because there was a moment where creating artificial downforce with fans was and I think there are some supercars that have fans that create more downforce and suction the car to the ground so you get more traction. So that is that is a feature that could be there. The question is, if you reverse the fans for lift, you need a lot more rotor area and near megawatt power to hover a two ton sedan. Even if you could supply it, the battery would give only a few minutes before thermal or energy limits intervene.
Speaker 2:And so I feel like when we're talking about demo, there's a world where the demo is, like, yeah, it uses half the battery and it's just a party trick, but it does lift the car off the ground for two feet or something like that. Tyler, what do you think? Do do you have any firm claims on, like, what what the flying car demo might actually be?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I I I don't see, like, actual wings coming out. That seems, like, overly ambitious. Yeah. I Have a little faith.
Speaker 2:Because there is a world where it's, like, the roadster event is actually just, like, a straight up, like it's just a helicopter. Like, they just launch a helicopter, and then it's like, yeah, it flies. It's a flying car, but it's mostly a helicopter.
Speaker 4:Yeah. My my idea was some kind of glider or parachute comes out. Mhmm. And then so you can kind of drive off a cliff, and then you kind of glide.
Speaker 2:I like the gliding idea. I think That would be extremely high stakes.
Speaker 4:Like, you know, when you see a ramp on the road and then you hit it and then you kind of glide down.
Speaker 1:2.6 says, I don't think we're getting flying cars. I personally love being stuck in traffic. There is an incentive for Elon to get people stuck in traffic. They're more likely to become best friends with Grock. And so the more time they're in traffic, the more time they're talking with Grock.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:There's somewhat of a flywheel there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, we we I wanna react to this this what if the few what if the what if the loved ones we've lost could be part of our future?
Speaker 1:This I've never actually seen a more hated line.
Speaker 2:Sort of controversial. Let's dig into it. Let me first first, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And so Hip City Reg, who's been on the show Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's play the video first.
Speaker 2:Let's play the video first, then we'll go into the reactions. Baby Charlie.
Speaker 7:See? Oh. That's wonderful. Kicking like crazy. He's listening.
Speaker 7:Put your hand on your tummy and to him. You used to love that.
Speaker 2:Too
Speaker 7:dancing in there.
Speaker 6:Oh, why?
Speaker 7:Mom, would you tell Charlie that bedtime story you always used to tell me? Once upon a time, there was a baby unicorn who didn't know he knew how to fly. This baby unicorn was like your mom because she didn't know that she knew how to fly, but she knew how to do all kinds of fabulous things. Hi, grandma. Hey, Charlie.
Speaker 7:How was school today?
Speaker 2:Pretty good road out there.
Speaker 6:I'm in this crazy shot in basketball.
Speaker 7:I don't really care that much about basketball. What about the crush? Stop.
Speaker 2:I like that this this video presumes it will have see through phones too. Like, maybe we should build that first. That seems like a really profitable business if you can create a see through phone.
Speaker 7:You loved that.
Speaker 3:You would have loved this moment.
Speaker 7:You can call anytime.
Speaker 1:I mean, does feel like it's I mean, it's shot maybe by the people that did Black Mirror.
Speaker 2:It literally seems like they hired the same team. Wait. So is she alive in the real world? Oh, no. They're scanning her before oh, that's crazy.
Speaker 7:I am. I'm absolutely I'm your mother after all.
Speaker 1:I mean
Speaker 7:Funny stars.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:do. They're thinking, okay, the retention on this product. You gotta you gotta get it you gotta get it before your loved ones pass away. You gotta be harvesting the training data. And then at any point in the future, if you churn, they they delete your loved ones forever.
Speaker 2:Did did this guy pivot? His banner says the climate reality project.
Speaker 1:I think Calum Worthy is a former Disney star.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting. Canadian actor. Then he might He's known
Speaker 1:for his roles as Des Wade on the Disney Channel series Austin and Alley.
Speaker 2:Well, then he might have access oh, he's he's he's he's worked with Netflix, so he might be connected to the Black Mirror folks.
Speaker 1:Reggie James says Yes. Digital necromancy to capitalize on the grief of the vulnerable. Straight to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
Speaker 2:Okay. So do you want this? Would you ever use this? I think I'm not in the market. I don't think this is for me.
Speaker 1:I think I think this would would have I feel like I know too much about AI.
Speaker 2:Like, I I would just I would know that this is that this is AI generated, and so it wouldn't it wouldn't, like, fool me. I need to I I I would think I need to be fooled.
Speaker 1:AB says they delete the s three bucket if you don't make the payment. Super dark. I I think this is one of those things that would actually have quite a lot of demand. Mhmm. Because a lot of people are are just gonna process this and say, I'm I'm really fearful of my loved I ones
Speaker 2:don't know. I I I think this
Speaker 1:I just think you're you also find it hard to believe how many people are best
Speaker 2:friends Yeah. I I do. I do find it hard to believe. And there
Speaker 1:are millions of them.
Speaker 2:Good question. So you think that you think this is
Speaker 1:And it's tough because I I mean
Speaker 2:You think this
Speaker 1:I miss my grandparents. Potentially. I want my I I wish that my grandparents were around to spend more time Yeah. With my kids. There's stories they've told me.
Speaker 1:There's songs they've sang.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's all these incredible moments that I will never relive and I wish I could experience those moments. Yeah. That being said, am I gonna be a customer of this? No. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's weird that incredibly they dark, but I think there will be a surprising amount of demand Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of this. There's been a there's been a a couple there there was a there was a YC company that was something much, I think, more heartwarming than this, which was, it was a service that you'd purchase, and then they would email or or do, like, a phone call with your parents essentially to collect information about them and and put it together into kind of, like, the life story, and it would just tell that for you. But it was all real. It was just like like, you might not have the time to go and record ever like, a podcast with your parents, but if they help the company would just help facilitate it, basically. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Do you think, OpenAI would launch a competitor to this? I don't
Speaker 1:know if they want another PR crisis.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. I mean, if this gets big, it would not be much of a PR crisis to launch a competitor. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like I think if if this is successful established, if it's successful, they'll launch a version of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, let me tell you about public.cominvesting for those that take it seriously. We got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We have Ev Randall in the studio. The new tearing up the top general line.
Speaker 2:Partner at Benchmark. Welcome to Dom. Thanks so much for coming by. Thanks for having me. Happening.
Speaker 2:It's happening. Show. Oh, you oh, you picked me. You selected the Mataina, the podcast in a can. That is Andrew Huberman's work.
Speaker 2:Big fans of it here. He's on a tear. And you're and you've been on a tear. Introduce yourself again. What's the latest news?
Speaker 2:How how do you describe yourself these days?
Speaker 3:Gentlemen, great to see you both. Yes. First time
Speaker 2:in the
Speaker 3:Ultra Dome. Yes. It's as incredible as I imagined it to be.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 3:So, I'm Ev Randall. I'm the newest partner or newest general partner.
Speaker 2:General partner. General Don't
Speaker 1:forget that first part. Don't undersell yourself.
Speaker 2:Don't undersell yourself. Congratulations. The
Speaker 6:big G.
Speaker 1:Thank you. The big G.
Speaker 3:That's amazing. At Benchmark.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. How did it come together?
Speaker 3:It was it was really it was it was a pretty unique recruitment process. Mhmm. It was one that was initiated actually by Chetan.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And we actually he just reached out to grab dinner a few months back. And a lot of it was was just pure vibes and relationship building.
Speaker 6:This is
Speaker 2:a tip for GPs at other firms. Don't let your partners get dinner with anyone at other firms because they're out of there.
Speaker 3:So it's, know, like
Speaker 2:You get dinner.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Had dinner. And, you know, like investors will this oftentimes with each other.
Speaker 6:It's like, you know,
Speaker 1:you're
Speaker 3:all you're all looking at similar things, looking at similar spaces, doing a bunch of research.
Speaker 1:Frenemies.
Speaker 3:Frenemies. Yeah. It's like you're you're all in this competition, but you're also, you know, you can you can be of immense value to each other. We're all marking each other's
Speaker 2:He he's been quiet on the timeline Yeah. For Benchmark. We'd love to bring someone to the team that could that could be a little bit more controversial. No. But what what did he actually say about like the problems that he wanted to solve that
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was could bring to him? And more so what was like the pitch, the hard Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Think I I think that the the pitch because it wasn't really like, hey, we need to we need to solve all these problems, but it was just, I I think, like, a pitch around alignment
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:About what the partners at Benchmark really like doing.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And he was like, hey, like we are a group of people that really love to get involved with very, few companies every year.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Each one of the general partners there invests in one to two investments per year
Speaker 1:Per year.
Speaker 3:And gets really, really involved Yeah. And tends to get involved relatively early in the company's life life cycle.
Speaker 2:And and and, like, break that down a little bit deeper because you could be like, I could have a VC that's like, oh, yeah. You're the only investment I made this year. But I called them and they're like, sorry. I'm on 45 back to back, like, pitch calls because I gotta find that one really good one versus someone who's like, no. I'm actually, like, in the office regularly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I take other pitches. So, like, is there a material difference in the day to day actually spending time with companies? Or is it really just highly selective and then you're still doing, like, a ton of outbound and inbound and just hearing pitches constantly? And it's more we're more just saying, like, the cream of the crop is, like, the picking.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I think the the rate limiter and the bottleneck is definitely the picking. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like you're still meeting tons and tons of people. Sure. You can still learn even if you're not investing in a company or you don't partner with the company. Yeah. There's so much that you can learn
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:From every single founder, every single company Sure. That is building something. And so even though we only partner with a few, we're still meeting a ton. We're meeting a ton of co investors. We're meeting a ton of founders.
Speaker 3:We're meeting a ton of awesome operators. So so it's still immense amount of relationship building and networking.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We just end up only partnering with with with a few of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you feeling about entering a new role, new firm for you at this moment in the market? It feels like where there's a lot of froth. A lot of people have already made their bets on the different foundation labs. Where do you see opportunity to kind of like make your mark with the new team?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really, really interesting because it's a like almost like life cycle of a market Mhmm. Like selection, like like Yeah. On the timeline of like like there there was a lot of great investors that just ended up starting their check writing career in 2021.
Speaker 3:Yes. And they did a lot of Yep. Investments in 2021 because it was relatively frothy period in the market. Yep. And to no fault of their own, really, a lot of them ended up having like a pretty rough initial track record.
Speaker 3:So it's always something that you're thinking about is like, what part of the market cycle am I joining this firm in? What am I writing checks into? Because if you started in 2023, that was an amazing time to write checks. Everything was whether you're at the growth stage or the early stage. There's a lot of the companies that are now these stalwart AI leaders starting and picking up steam, then you also had a bunch of growth stage companies that were relatively cheap on on like a multiple basis.
Speaker 3:So 2023 was an amazing time. 2021 was an awful time to start. I think that the scary thing a little bit is that, like, I don't think any of us know or have any idea Yeah. It's hard. If this is 2021, '20 it's definitely not 2023.
Speaker 3:Feels a little bit like 2021.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I think, you know, if you ask somebody if it's is it 97? Is it 99? Yeah. Is it 2001? Yeah.
Speaker 3:No one really knows. And so I think you have to be if it's '91
Speaker 2:got another decade. Let's one. Go. It's
Speaker 1:one's afraid to say it.
Speaker 2:Everyone's like, it's '98.
Speaker 6:It's '99.
Speaker 1:The bubble popped. '91. Last week.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It did. Now we're back. Actually, this morning, at the open, it popped and now we're back. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's over. It's over.
Speaker 3:Well, I was at dinner with somebody the other day and they said something that I thought was really smart, which was that they're like, the the the main reason I'm scared right now
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is that the only time that I've seen everything work
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Was also in 2021. Like, the issue about 2021
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Wasn't that people were doing big investments into companies that were bad. The issue was that everything was absolutely ripping.
Speaker 2:Like And was that just because of the pull forward in ecommerce due to the shift and, like, you know, like, I remember Palatzo Low end time.
Speaker 1:Great. So Stop
Speaker 2:spending all the money on
Speaker 1:in the amazing. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Or if
Speaker 3:you think like think about I mean, obviously, it depends on the category, but think about like e com like e commerce enablement or commerce enablement. Yeah. There's like a whole crop of startups that came up, and it just so turns out that when we're all locked into our houses
Speaker 2:Everyone's just, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 3:And just like, oh, you just the
Speaker 1:capital starts flowing and then it flows into one company and then that company goes and buys a bunch of software and they're probably using like even a recruiting platform looks like, hey, this could be a billion dollar business because come every company is like, we need to hire as many people as possible. Yeah. It's very recursive. Yeah. Recursive.
Speaker 3:It's kind of like Recursive. We're we're getting big words early. Big words early. You know, it's it's all interwoven. And, like, obviously, you're you're starting to see that a little bit with, like, the AI trade this year.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And there was like, I I did this presentation a couple months ago for for this group of of of CIOs, chief chief information officers at And large I was doing some research on macro, and I was like, my god. Of the top 20 year to date return Mhmm. Stocks in the S and P 500. So of the S and P 500, of the 500 companies, which 20 have had the best year to date returns, 18 of them were related to the AI trade.
Speaker 3:Yes. Like it wasn't you know, and and not just like, you know, Micron and Yeah. Nvidia, but like GE Vernova and Yeah. Like, Bloom Energy and like, all of these things about, like, the supply chain
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Of AI. And that scared me because I was like, oh my god, like, The US economy, like, the pensions of our parents are riding on the AI trade and are basically riding on, know One man. Each yeah. One one one superhuman man that is, you know, signing up all
Speaker 1:these Yeah.
Speaker 3:All these these huge deals. So I think in 2021, you definitely saw that where, yeah, you had all these massive impacts from from Zurp, from COVID, from people being inside, from companies go digitizing and buying a bunch of software. So even things that at first principles were kind of like mediocre companies, they looked unbelievable. And so it's hard to blame anyone for investing in these companies because until then, tech had been so secular. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Like, was not a cyclical market. Like, the
Speaker 2:march Yeah.
Speaker 3:The march to cloud wasn't like this like up and down thing.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 3:It was like each year, the incremental share of cloud relative to like on prem was like nice and steady. Yeah. And so you're when you're trained that you're investing in a secular market that always kind of linearly goes up Mhmm. You're trained to invest on like on on good numbers because they usually continue.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And 2021 was the first time where you really saw the cyclicality and I think some people think that the AI trade could also be cyclical given the actual infrastructure build out that sometimes is built up via debt Yeah. And leverage and all these things that could
Speaker 2:end When up blowing you look at what's going on in the public markets, is it fair to say that the first year of the AI trade and and the boom of those 20 stocks that you mentioned was driven by basically earning surprises? Like, NVIDIA just being like, oh, wow. Every hyperscaler bought so many more. Like, the the the cash flow is going up. The actual business is growing.
Speaker 2:And now we are shifting into more of, the LOI economy, the Mhmm. The forward contracts. And so that's been a little bit more of what's moved the market. And and maybe that's why Oracle is kind of traded up so much, but then round tripped because people have said, oh, that's amazing. But actually, we're gonna discount that a lot more than we did on the day that the deal was announced.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Another framing that that I would use actually is like usually in these cycles, it starts with like the core Sure. And then you start just layering on derivatives
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:From that core. And so it's like, okay, a AI demand is, you know, maybe two orders of magnitude higher than we thought. Yep. So who is the first order benefactor of that?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:NVIDIA. NVIDIA. Like who is, you know, the the GPUs.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And then as as the the cycle continues to play out, it's like, okay. Well, like, what's the first derivative of that? It's like, well, okay. Like, what goes into these data centers? Turns out like these turbines that GE Vernova Yep.
Speaker 3:Creates and like, oh, now they need to buy all these, you know, all all these, like, specialized things from Broadcom Yep. And then, like, now Micron. And so there ends up being that. And then, like, there's, like, this cascading of these derivatives Yeah. Until, like, the nth one is, the shit coin market and, like, the meme coin market.
Speaker 3:Yep. And so now it's, like, oh, wow. Like, these like three quantum, you know, computing companies that have zero revenue combined for $75,000,000,000 of market cap. And you're like, wait. Wait.
Speaker 3:Wait. Wait. Wait. And that's that's when I think everyone kind of pauses and they're like, wait. Wait.
Speaker 2:Hold on. And then and then I think it goes even further.
Speaker 1:I didn't pause. He he he it. Locked it.
Speaker 2:Speaking of Scrawley, I think that, like, there are people that are trading the quantum stocks because of the AI boom. Because, like, they have been told that that the next thing after AI or the next big unlock for the AI revolution will be quantum. Meanwhile, like like Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was GTC. I remember I was watching the stream Yeah. Yeah. And and they had Brad reading off the the teleprompter Sure. And he was talking about, you know, the opportunity in with quantum and AI.
Speaker 1:So this is a narrative that
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That NVIDIA as a company has certainly
Speaker 2:been a little bit back and forth.
Speaker 1:Okay. But as a company as a company, that was a part of their narrative for
Speaker 2:the ATC. Yeah. But it's sort of like furthest out in the risk curve and that's why, you know, if we see, you know, Nvidia selling off by like a couple percent every week, the quantum stock, I I see charts where it's like down 20%.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's they're like levered trades on the core. Yeah. All these derivatives. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So it's like, know, people are like, oh, Nvidia is not going up, you know, 10% a day now. Yeah. What could? And then you go to like the derivative and it's like, this isn't going up so much per day now. Well, what could next?
Speaker 3:And you keep going. And now you see, think over the last month, like so many of stocks are down 45%. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think Nvidia is down that much, but many of these other stocks are down 40 to 50% over the last month because they're kind of the canaries in the coal mine or like the leading kind of derivative that is almost like a levered trade on the core.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And we've had we've
Speaker 1:it it's been an incredibly rough week in the markets and now everyone is sitting saying, please deliver Jensen. Now, I have I have so it's Wednesday. Yeah. They they have earnings after the close. And I feel pretty good about it because of the, you know, Jensen, you know, smashing beers on video.
Speaker 1:A month out from earnings. Really good.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You belong in a pawnshop. That's that's like some deep analysis.
Speaker 2:Jordy loves this type of analysis. The vibe the vibe I
Speaker 1:don't care about the numbers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I I have no idea what they're what they're promising.
Speaker 1:But but trading on vibes just the movement. Yeah. And and then the other, I mean, the other factor here is like just the the challenge of of this market is you have that within the same two, you know, effectively two week period where CoreWeave gets rated by semi analysis as this sort of like only platinum tier
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Neo cloud
Speaker 2:Two years
Speaker 1:the best product in the category. And and they're down 30% in the last five days. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, 30% in last
Speaker 1:five And now people are saying, yeah, may maybe NVIDIA ends up ends up, you know, having to
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, buy them. It it would certainly would would not go well if they were to
Speaker 2:What's the least AI company you've done as a deal in the last couple years? Gosh. Because everything has some I mean, even Anderol Industries, you know, it was just like AI. And now there's obviously an an AI narrative there in some ways, but it's like definitely just a hard tech company.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's hard. It's it's funny because, like, sometimes as an investor, you're almost trying to, like, do some portfolio construction.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:And you're like, man, it'd be really nice if I had something that was uncorrelated with the AI trade. Exactly. Because if it all goes down, you know, 80% or whatever, then like I'm gonna need something. Yeah. I mean, it's so different in in private markets because Sure.
Speaker 3:Especially if you're investing at the early stages, like, none of this stuff matters. Like, when like, by the time the companies exit
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:You have no idea what the what the stock market's gonna look like.
Speaker 2:You have
Speaker 3:no idea what the macro's gonna look like.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And so you like, thinking about this type of type of stuff is is usually like, you really should, like Mhmm. If you're zooming out and thinking on, like, a ten year time horizon, should you still be ultra long AI? Of course,
Speaker 2:you should. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Of So it's almost like you you kinda, like, pump fake yourself into being, maybe I should do like an anti AI play or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's interesting.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 3:I think there's like some parts of cyber security
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That actually are still not Yeah. I mean, a lot of a lot of like, you know, a lot like data security is like, oh, well, like, you know, need to secure your data into to secure AI. So, a lot of you have been cyber has moved into AI, but there's still some pockets of cybersecurity that aren't
Speaker 2:AI related. Do do you think there are durable learnings from the Palantir story of being sort of like the forward deployed engineer almost being consulting, building custom software. It feels like with AI, there's a lot of folks who are sort of doing that. And it seems really exciting because you can go and get a Fortune 500 client. You can go ramp revenue really quickly.
Speaker 2:You there's there's all this question about like, well, does this is this gonna look like high margin SaaS in ten years?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But we already ran that experiment with with Palantir. Regardless of what you think of the the the price earnings multiple, like, you can tell that the margins are good and the revenues are real. Yeah. And so, like, it clearly worked out. And and, like, if if you were investing in that and, you know, even if you were at, a, I don't know, 40 multiple, like, you'd still be doing very well based on the early investments.
Speaker 2:And so I'm wondering if you think that that model if something permanently has changed in the way SaaS is delivered into the enterprise, or you think that people might be overfitting on that?
Speaker 3:No. I think it absolutely has. And the way that I talk about this, I call it the legibility gap. And what I mean by that is if you get a Gmail account, it does not take very long for you to, like, understand how to use Gmail. Like, anyone can kinda, like, pop on, even if you're boomer and, like, I'm like, oh, like, I've used an email account before.
Speaker 3:Like, this is just sort of, like, a slice of an email account. Yeah. I think the issue about AI is that not only are the capabilities so new for the broad population that could use them, they also evolve so quickly. Like, you think about, you you know, not having ChatGPT three years ago and now everything that we can do or especially on some of the media models, how we had, like, Will Smith, like, the the grotesque version of that initial video. And now we have, like, absolutely perfect Will Smith eating, you know, spaghetti and meatballs.
Speaker 3:Just the the rate of evolution. Like, I I so I I'm I'm from, like, a rural town in in Colorado, and a lot of my friends work still in my hometown and they're like, hey, like my job to the heartland. That's right. Shout out. Shout out to Colorado.
Speaker 2:Nick over there went to Colorado as well. Guess he's gone. But he's a Colorado guy too.
Speaker 3:Oh, amazing. Yeah. The but but like, they'll they'll come to me and they'll say, look, like my job now
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is like, I put any work task I get. You know, they're doing some, you know, random you know, they're an accountant or doing some administrative role for the for the company. They're like, my job now is 90% of any work I get. I feed it through Clot or ChatGPT or whatever tool that I'm using on the AI side. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I turn it into my boss, then I go golf. Because my boss, like, still doesn't know how to use any of these things. Woah. So they, like so the business owners have no idea how to use these tools.
Speaker 1:They value how they exist.
Speaker 2:To, like, the associate.
Speaker 3:Literally. It's like I I
Speaker 1:I To the golf courses.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I call it, like, synthetic UBI because it's, like
Speaker 2:That's fascinating.
Speaker 3:You know, because it's, they they like, there's just this insane legibility gap where Yeah. So many businesses still have no idea what you're
Speaker 1:these tools were available during the COVID era, like the remote work.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Oh, my god. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or it was like, yeah.
Speaker 3:People could have 20 jobs instead of the five that they were running with COVID.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think the whole FD like, the thing that the FDE position solves Mhmm. Is the legibility gap. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:When you're like, hey. We know that there can be a ton of value produced here. We just don't really know how, and we don't even really we can't even put our arms around the evolving, capabilities because, like, maybe you implement Mhmm. You know, one of these AI tools. And in six months, it's like a brand new tool because, you know, Cognition rebuilt Yeah.
Speaker 3:Rebuilt Devon off of four or five Sonic. Yeah. And it's like, well, if if, like, the the product is evolving that much every six months, you probably need someone in a post sales capacity to continue to educate the customer Yeah. Especially if they don't live in Silicon Valley Totally. You know, like tracking every single new model release and they're in some random place and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Barely even use ChatGPD or something
Speaker 2:like that. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. How are you thinking about your focus in terms of stage? I mean, Bond, Founders Fund, I've thought of you as a growth guy for a long time.
Speaker 2:Are you moving earlier stage? How is Benchmark thinking about growth versus early stage? Are those just like antiquated terms? Because you can do a growth Was this this part
Speaker 1:of was this all part
Speaker 2:of the plan
Speaker 1:to end up at Benchmark where you get to go you go and learn the methodologies and the approaches of everyone, how they work, and then you go compete with them on every deal.
Speaker 3:Exactly. In the final job. Exactly.
Speaker 1:The final job. It's like, no. Well, I see
Speaker 2:how they've done it, and now I'm doing it my way.
Speaker 3:No. I mean, it's certainly being able to see up close a lot of the greats and how they how they do the job and Mhmm. And the frameworks they use has undeniably been so important for my career and my development as an investor. Mhmm. I think like what it what it came down to and something that I learned over my entire career slowly, like, again, I started in PE.
Speaker 3:And so, like, the idea of venture was so foreign when I was Shout out capitalism. Wait. Like, the the idea of venture was so foreign when I was first coming into the industry that I really like, growth was like, felt safe. It felt like what I was good at. And I've just learned over the the however long I've been in the industry that, like, where I felt the most fulfillment, where I felt the most joy is actually the investments in the relationships I've built.
Speaker 3:Someone like a Sean Henry or even like a Parker and Matt at Rippling where it's like you get in even at the early series b. I think there's this like line where like if you can get in and build a relationship and be on the board with a founder when they're still figuring everything out Mhmm. When it's still like the primordial soup phase of a company, there's just all this like there's a deep relationship and all this context that you build Yeah. Both with a founder, with a team, and, like, the underlying organization that you're working with that just let like, if you get in later, you just, like, can't go back in time and get that same amount of Yeah. Relationship building context.
Speaker 2:Rippling in the series g, you can't use we. I thought you're
Speaker 3:involved. No. I I
Speaker 1:still would. I still would.
Speaker 3:But but, you know, it doesn't feel as good.
Speaker 2:The we.
Speaker 1:Rippling bringing up Rippling reminded me. So you were you were talking about this forward deployed model.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And every start up Good. That's doing anything in the enterprise feels like they've adopted this. Right? And it's, like, part of their pitch. Customers obviously like it if, like, you'll put somebody in my office and build software that's specific to me.
Speaker 1:That sounds great. But I feel like during when when Parker released the I think it was the series a memo for Rippling about this concept for a compound startup.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's what's the postmortem on? Because it felt like every startup started saying, we're doing a compound compound startup. We're gonna build three basically, products at once at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it and it's worked very well for Rippling. But I I it's hard for me to think of any other startups that, like, adopted the approach that worked for Rippling, which, like, the context there was they worked basically, for my to my knowledge, like, they worked in silence for years. And then they came out
Speaker 2:had built, like, seven of those products literally before. And so he was like, okay. I I kinda know what the way I want that product to look. He's not doing as much zero to one discovery in each of those, like, someone who starts with point solution might.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I think the rippling story and like where I think where a compound startup can really, really work Mhmm. Is is like, one, yeah, there's there's this fat build in the beginning where you need to build all this platform architecture because the whole idea is like, you need to build some form of platform architecture that's going to make building each point solution that you end up bundling faster. Mhmm. Like if it's just gonna take the same amount of time that it would any other startup to build each product, then there's kind of no synergy for building the compound startup.
Speaker 3:Like they all need to interact and be built on the same platform. I think the other key learning from Rippling is that a lot of the products that they were that that they've built and that they sell are not like, I don't wanna, like, say commodity in, a negative, like, they don't matter way, but they're just not these, really it's not Figma. You know? Like, it's not like a designer that's, like, I'm not gonna use, like, off brand Figma. I have to use Figma.
Speaker 3:Like, it's my lifeblood. It's my everything. Mhmm. When you have, an application, you know, an applicant tracking system or like a time and attendance thing or like employee reviews, there's so much value in in the integration of data with like employee reviews being integrated into your HR suite rather than just having like the nicest UI or having the product that feels the best. The value of having a bundled suite and a compound startup is really powerful when the actual products don't have to be the complete bleeding edge best of breed.
Speaker 3:They can be very good, but they don't have to look the absolute nicest. They don't have to have that last 10% of, like Mhmm. Of, like, complete fine tune effort. And the the buyer and the user actually still gets a ton of value actually from the integration of all those products together.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And the, like, sum of the parts is a lot more valuable than if each product in its individuality felt a little nicer to use or something, but wasn't integrated tightly into a single product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was always wondering if someone was gonna run the compound startup playbook in in fintech.
Speaker 1:It's called Revolut. I I was gonna say it's called RIP. I mean, RIP is
Speaker 2:No. So so so I'm sorry. I so I meant I meant consumer in the sense that, like, you know, Robinhood has crypto and
Speaker 1:It's called JP Morgan.
Speaker 2:Has different has different financial products where you can, like, build a whole company on Coinbase and and manage payments with Coinbase. There's a whole bunch of different functionality there. But there aren't that many companies that I've seen that have come out to market with with one on day one, you can trade stocks, invest crypto, get a mortgage, get a car loan. This is a credit card. There's points.
Speaker 2:It's like, it's been a little bit more focused on the consumer fintech side in America. At least from my perspective, there's been payment money transfer services that have gone gone really big. There's, you know, a consumer credit card like there's that built reward. Isn't that what company that does like cash
Speaker 3:Pay with your rent.
Speaker 2:Pay with rent. And it's like and and maybe one day that grows into I it'll also do mortgages and then they'll also do stock trading and investing and IRAs and all that different stuff. But it just feels like probably because of the regulatory, it's a little bit different, but no one's really
Speaker 1:because, like, eventually people are gonna tie a lot of their, like, financial life to the ins like, the firm that gives them a mortgage. Right? Yeah. So not being able these companies starting out, they don't have their own balance sheet. Right?
Speaker 1:They're neo banks, so they're kind of, like, operating on top of other banks.
Speaker 2:But It's just like, there are startups that have done, like, new mortgage, where wasn't there better better mortgages. Right? I think that went public at one point, has done quite well. And and and so, like, if that business has been has been has was was buildable as a startup, and then also you have a credit card startup, Like, you you you would think that you could build both at the same time. Maybe it's just too distracting.
Speaker 3:I don't know. Well, honestly, you should, highly highly suggest listening to Nick at Revolutalk.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Because he he basically set up his organization somewhat similar to Rippling in in like Interesting. He set up all these product pods.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And they had an initial wedge which was basically this like FX product
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:For people that were traveling around Europe. Like, you know, young people were were going around Europe and you could do very easy FX and that was kind of like the wedge for their first cohorts. But they really, really quickly Mhmm. Focused on just how do we go as many products if they're high quality as possible. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And now they have tons of consumer products and b to b products. Mhmm. And, like, they're all doing a ton of revenue.
Speaker 1:Like, it's
Speaker 3:it's kind of an unbelievable story.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's
Speaker 1:Earlier this week, you kicked the platform VC hornet's nest.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You you said that Andreessen Horowitz is a zero. Right? That's what you said? You said it's a it's a zero?
Speaker 2:It's just I'm
Speaker 1:even I'm not even be fodder for another clip. Learned my lesson. My question was did you did you kick the hornet's nest to inspire yourself to grind harder? Because I feel like I feel like there's immense pressure now to deliver a five x net.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. It's true. It's true. It's true.
Speaker 1:True. It's fun because eventually, who knows, maybe the
Speaker 2:performance 4.9. Mark Andreessen's personally gonna be like Dunk. Dunking on you.
Speaker 3:He Yeah. He's going to fund the op sec that that uncovers our returns.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. He's gonna paint a newcomer to come to them.
Speaker 3:No. No. I I think that the whole thing from this week I I think the the biggest lesson or or like it it it shone the light for me Yeah. Just like the the purpose of the algorithm. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like the algorithm exists to kind of like the algorithm needs, like the algorithm is the beast
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:And the beast needs controversy. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it was so funny because the first day that the interview came out. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, all this happened on the second and third day. So, like, the first first day the interview comes out, you know, all the all my friends, all these firms are like, oh, it was great.
Speaker 2:I thought
Speaker 3:it was, like, pretty nuanced and, like, moderate takes and, like Yeah. You know, it's good. You were kind of pitching the benchmark strategy is unique.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And then the second day comes out and it's, of course, like, these clips with, these very, you know, kinda leading tweets and things. And then it's, like, then it's, like, you know, knives out
Speaker 1:and government officials coming after you.
Speaker 2:The government
Speaker 6:I know.
Speaker 2:I wanted
Speaker 1:to, like, check if my passport still works. I'm like,
Speaker 2:I hope some
Speaker 1:of my passport still works.
Speaker 3:No. So like I and like again, like I I think if you look at any of the individual clips or anything
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like sure, you could take things from them that I think were more incendiary or like more Yeah. More controversial than the actual context of the conversation. I don't like know, You mean context.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But you've but you've also you've you've been commenting on different fund strategies for years, playing different games, your essay, your bombshell essay about the crossover funds. Right? Tiger, co two. What what is your what is your like, what predictions did you actually make in that piece?
Speaker 2:And then how did they play out? Because I feel like a lot of the firms that you identified as running these strategies are still around doing those strategies and it seems like they've done very well. And so
Speaker 3:For sure.
Speaker 2:They did like people might have read your original piece as as like a critique, but in fact it was just the you're just shining a spotlight on a new strategy that exists Yeah. And runs. Is that right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and on like, if it so the original piece is called Playing Different Games. Yeah. Check it out on Substax. It's great.
Speaker 3:But the the the actual point of the original piece, and probably what I got wrong about the original piece more specifically, was I zeroed in on Tiger as the Yeah. Example. Yeah. And I and I actually was like, oh, I'm bullish on Tiger because I think this is a good strategy.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep. So I I actually said like, hey, this is a great strategy and it's going to continue. Yeah. And the strategy being like, hey, there there's like venture returns historically, if you look like since 2000, at least of the great funds have been awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, every great fund that is raised like and by the way, the only way that you raise really large funds
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Is if you earned the right by having amazing returns.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:So all of these brands have had really, really amazing returns. Mhmm. And the the simple math was that you could put a lot more money out the door, especially as we had the emergence of these companies that show increasing returns to scale. This is the whole idea behind the MAG-seven, is that in technology when you have network effects like you do in consumer social or economies of scale like you see with Amazon, you just keep winning at a greater and greater scale assuming that your TAM is big enough. So the whole point of the essay was like, hey, wow.
Speaker 3:Even if you reduce your implied returns a fair amount on on your forward returns, if you just put more money out of the door, there's just so much more like absolute dollars to be had for for all of these firms. So I think what like, in the four years since that piece came out in 2021, think I that has been the prevailing trend in venture. I mean, very clearly. I don't think it's you know, it's a very consensus thing to say that a lot of these firms have realized that like, wow, there's so and like, I think it's actually the beautiful part about our asset class now is the menu of options and the menu of ways that you can practice the craft of venture growth
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And be extremely successful and partner with really good founders Yep. And make money for your LPs is extremely broad.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's only gotten broader because a lot of these leading firms have really expanded and increased their capital velocity or like dollars out the door per year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like there's a lot of venture capital that might actually be more like private equity or it feels like we're sort of is there a factor where we're just taking an asset class that has existed for a long time, investing in a company that has 10,000,000,000 in revenue, and we're calling that venture now? Is it are we just renaming it, or is it somehow structurally different? I'm just looking at, like, if if you're investing in OpenAI right now, is that even a venture investment?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I mean, like, this is always, like, even if you look at playing different games, I always say, like, venture growth. I do Yeah. Venture slash growth.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Because, like, you know, I think most people would call it growth or, like, not just call it venture capital itself. I think the structural change that we have seen
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And a lot of people actually have gripes with this. I I like, you can you can be on one position of this or another. But I think there there is some validity to the the idea that that some people complain about, which is if you look at what's happened, what like, where the structural change has happened is that companies just don't IPO maybe ever anymore, but they certainly IPO way, way, way later in their life cycle than they used to. And so the complaint that some people have is this is essentially stealing returns that people were able to get in the public markets because if you're IPO ing only when you reach a $200,000,000,000 valuation instead of a $10,000,000,000 valuation which used to be the norm ten years ago or even fifteen years ago or whenever it was, that's a 20 x that, like, the public market investors don't get Yeah. That is now fully in the hands of private market.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Shopify is a great example. I think they went out at, $44,000,000,000 or
Speaker 2:something, like, tiny. For sure.
Speaker 3:It's like that, you know, where, like, met
Speaker 1:One question have is, like, do you think that the partner at a platform VC that's like a non founder partner, maybe maybe early mid thirties, do you think that's the most dangerous job and venture? Because I feel like there's this pressure to deploy and build a track record, yet at the same time, like, you're on the chopping block
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:If if you deploy and a bunch of bad bets and we see a correction and there needs to be, like somebody needs to get fired for it. Yeah. Like, in some ways, it feels like a benchmark earlier stage. You're somewhat insulated from the kind of downstream chaos where you can make a bet. It can get marked up a lot.
Speaker 1:But even if it trades down during a correction, you're still up Yeah. Massively on your winners.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, like, to be fair, like, I don't think it's unique to to platform firms at all. Like, if I don't make great investments, I'm also screwed.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, like, at the end of the day, you you need to build a really good portfolio, and, like, no one is spared the results of, like, not investing in great companies. I think where that becomes somewhat true, and again, everything is so dependent on the firm and every firm's culture is so different, that's actually one of the things that I think people don't understand really about venture growth is every firm, the way they do things, the variance is way higher than I think maybe any other asset class where like the work and the cult like how you do things is relatively similar. But I think where that can happen in a platform firm is where just like the supply and demand of like things you're able to be the point person on is negatively inclined towards you. What I mean by that is there's maybe 100 good companies that exists at whatever stage. Each maybe stage, there's maybe 50 great early companies, 50 great growth stage companies.
Speaker 3:If you have 20 partners, the math is just like, okay, if you have 20 growth or let's say 25 growth partners, since I'm bad at math, and you have 50 good growth companies, that means there's two good companies per partner. And maybe like the senior senior partners get like 10 instead of two. And so there's just this there's this reality where it's like there's some efficiency frontier where you're trying to be able to be the relationship builder and the point person and the board member for really great companies. But when you have a ton of people within an organization, it just becomes mathematically harder to to just have, like, shots on goal enough. You're not gonna win every single deal either.
Speaker 3:And so it's like, okay, how many am I covering, and how many, can I win? Like that just starts to diminish. It's also it's not a perfect framework because again, like, it's it's also not like a solo it's not golf. It's not a solo sport. Like it is a team sport.
Speaker 3:And so I think a lot of these places that have good cultures, they're more focused on, okay, how do we win as a team? Multiple people can work a company. Multiple people can be on the board or one person's a board observer or whatever. So it's not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I do think some people at those firms do feel those impacts for sure. Are you AGI pilled?
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 2:Like, what's your what's your like, how have you processed that question? How have you engaged with the the discourse around everything from just how powerful the models will be in one, five, twenty years
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What that means for your investing thesis versus even just like the fast takeoff AI doom. Has that stuff ever rattled you? Have you always just been, I'll wait until it shows up in a spreadsheet? I don't know. You seem like a pretty even keeled quantitative person who's not getting lost at some yay rationalist party and going off into sci fi land.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I mean, I am definitely of the belief well, one, I think AGI has become like a near useless term.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's almost like agents at this point. Like both of these things are so nebulous
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That and and like the product marketing around them has been so brutal
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That like they've just lost all their meaning. Yep. So I think actually when people Quickly.
Speaker 2:Agents didn't exist as a marketing term two years ago.
Speaker 3:And now it's already played out.
Speaker 2:And that's what
Speaker 3:I thought. That just shows you the the, you know, the cycle of these things Yeah. In in 2025. Yeah. But I think that like so like AGI like when you say like what you just said, I think it is actually probably referring to, like, ASI, like Sure.
Speaker 3:Artificial superintelligence. Like, I think the the bottleneck and the rate limiter for AGI, is, artificial general intelligence, which maybe you could define as, like, when do we have, you know, an AI that can do what like a reasonable adult can do Yeah. In any given situation, is fully dependent on how quickly we can distill the technology through the economy. Yeah. And I think like and this is like Tyler Cowen talks about this.
Speaker 2:It's actually more about the inference than the pre training.
Speaker 3:Well, not even about inference and pre training. It's literally just like about the the FDE. Oh, sure.
Speaker 2:It's just actually deploying it. Someone to use it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like deploying it into the economy. Like these like it just takes a really long time. And no matter how fast these growth curves are, there's just
Speaker 1:notable that that you you gave the example of somebody, you know, at a let's say, like, some company where they're doing their job with Claude, but their boss doesn't know that. Yeah. Because they just wanna be able to do their job quickly and go golf. And then that person gets presented with a better solution. They get a pitch on, hey, I we can actually, like, replace your whole team.
Speaker 1:And they're thinking, like, well, there's a chance I could maybe golf more. There's also a chance that I could lose my job. And so I think there's gonna be this interesting tension where the people that
Speaker 2:are I'm not replacing the associate. He uses so many em dashes. He's amazing. He's also getting really good at golf randomly. Like It's also a scratch golfer now.
Speaker 2:Every time
Speaker 6:I go out
Speaker 2:with him on a week, seems like he's been practicing a ton. No. No. No. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:What what about the, the just the stakes, geopolitically? Because, there's been this critique of benchmark of like, oh, maybe you guys are a little bit more open to investing companies that are indexed to China somehow. Mhmm. This is not new. Excel has investments in China.
Speaker 2:There's a whole bunch of different stuff. It can go both ways. Do you think that but but it it feels very predicated on if you think AI is a super, like nuclear weapons level technology, then it's harder to rationalize. If you think it's more like an Excel sheet and autocomplete, maybe there's a little bit more of a deal to be done even with competitor.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like the the fine line I'd I'd place on that is that, like, we we certainly, like like, I think all of us Mhmm. Certainly within Benchmark, but I think everyone in in the industry wants Western AI to win. Sure. And we do think it's bit of a race, and we want nothing more than Western and US AI to win.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That does not mean that Chinese citizens or people that were born in China or people that at some point in their lives have been in China cannot contribute to and be a huge factor in building Western AI. Yeah. If you look at the there's, you know, that that tweet that had like the poach list for the Meta AI team.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:It was like 15 of the 20 were Chinese citizens or at some or were born in China or whatever it was. There was kind of Chinese representation on the Meta team. Sure. And so, again, like the the investments we've made have been in companies that are in Singapore or in The United States. And just if like if there's people that were born in China or Chinese citizens working on AI that they want to build and help the world in a Western context with our values and our value system and distribute it globally, not just within China or whatever, and not even building in China, then of course we want to support those teams.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 3:think there's an immense amount of AI talent in China and would behoove us to have them building for Western allies for The United States and making sure that we win the AI race rather than scaring them off and pushing them to only work for China and for the CCP.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes sense. Are you thinking has has your has your thinking on open source AI updated at all? I've kind of gone back and forth. John Ludig, a friend of ours, has written about this saying that, you know, the scale of the of the effort and the capital intensity to really have significant progress on the model side means that open source AI might struggle.
Speaker 2:At the same time, a few weeks ago, we saw Brian Chesky say that Airbnb has been using open source models and seeing a lot of great results there. And so there's obviously different use cases for each, but how are you thinking the market will play out? How are you thinking of how do you how do you make money as a for profit company in open source? Are we looking to Red Hat as an example, GitLab? Like, what do you like in that category, if you like it at all?
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. It's it's a great question. Think there's there's like two angles that I would take for this. One on frontier capabilities versus like where open source is, let's say for like general models.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I use something that I call the mom test, which I refer to by mom. Yeah. And I always joke that like there hasn't been a query on chat GPT that my mom has made that like GPT like 3.5 couldn't handle. Sure. So I think there's like an increasing amount of queries and there's an increasing amount
Speaker 2:hate for this from the moms.
Speaker 3:From the mom? Yeah. No. Okay. Because I am talking about my mom, not their moms in general.
Speaker 2:My mom. Moms that are watching right now. This is the most controversial thing you've said. I'll I'll show. You you can take shots Don't give me clip funds.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The mom community Mom
Speaker 2:will say gonna be coming out. Actually actually, I'm puppeteering 25 Claude code instances right now to run this family, and you better show some respect.
Speaker 1:No. Okay. I love the Randall
Speaker 3:the Randall mom test. And I think there's like an increasing amount of queries as frontier intelligence continues to get pushed.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:There's just an increasing amount of queries, an increasing amount of inference that you just don't need the frontier capabilities for anymore.
Speaker 2:Some of the stuff
Speaker 6:you can even cache. Yes.
Speaker 2:Like, because, like, if I had asked for, like, just give me the high level history of benchmark.
Speaker 3:Like, it could just, like serve that up on a five one. You don't even need to. Need to do inference.
Speaker 2:You don't
Speaker 3:even need It's like, yeah. Could
Speaker 1:do Google search.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You could.
Speaker 3:So so there's so there's there's that piece, which I think that, like, increasing amount of the like, there's always gonna be places that
Speaker 2:are more appropriate here. Businesses too. Yes. Because there are certain things where it's like, we just need to scan every transaction for fraud, and we're not actually doing a deep research report on it. We're just saying, hey.
Speaker 2:Does this have, like, bad words in it?
Speaker 3:And for a
Speaker 2:large language model, you can just use the 3.5 level
Speaker 3:And model or something like then and then actually in other in other modalities besides, like, code or I mean, code code, there's actually some great open source models now. But, like, in generative media, especially, the open source ecosystem is extremely vibrant. There's a ton of amazing open source models. And I think the open source models probably have way, way more tokens Yeah. And like token volume than closed source models.
Speaker 3:And the way that you actually make money on this, there's an amazing company called Fowl that is a generative yeah. Give it up.
Speaker 2:Are you kidding? We were sponsored by them. Are you sponsored by Fowl? Yeah. We do the
Speaker 3:Shout out Berkhan and Gorkem. We love the legends. Batwan, all the guys there. But they but they're an inference cloud for generative media. Sure.
Speaker 3:And so they're like a distribution mechanism for open source model providers to get video develop like generative media developers to use models. Yeah. And then for the developers, it's like the one stop shop. You get like a single place where you can drag and drop anytime a new model comes out. And so it's almost like this destination point that they then monetize via providing the inference for the models.
Speaker 3:And so I think like when you have all this open source, there's still a ton of money to be made via inference Yep. Via kind of, like, reselling GPUs, if you wanna call it that Yeah. And all the stuff that you can provide in terms of, like, inference optimization on top of that, even if you're not just providing, like, a LLM output via an API like you would with a closed source model.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how are the portfolio companies that you work with how do they think about competing with OpenAI? I think the question of, like, what if OpenAI does this is coming up a lot. We've, you know, seen we had Mikey from Suno on. They've they've grown tremendously.
Speaker 1:There's been talks that OpenAI will get into music generation. So that's kind of a conversation. I don't feel I don't I don't think Suno will be very threatened by that. And generally, it feels like OpenAI is already at the scale, like, and and and is operating like Google does, where they're gonna launch a lot of products that don't work and that's Yeah. Kind of okay.
Speaker 1:And so if they copy you, it doesn't mean you're dead, but but it's a real threat. How are you what are those conversations like and how how do you think the CEOs view that as a competitive threat?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I I think it's like it's I think it's incredible for these startups to have like this bar. It's almost like having it's like the lock in bar. And it's like if you're not gonna
Speaker 2:lock in bar.
Speaker 3:Like if you're not gonna like exceed the lock in bar, which is like whatever the labs can produce when you're probably not even their their number one priority, then like maybe you should pack
Speaker 2:it up.
Speaker 3:And like and and just like and call it a day because like you like that's the like that's that's the bar. Like you need to exceed it. And so I think I don't like, had this concern about so many different companies. Like, people had this concern about eleven Labs at one point
Speaker 6:when Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, OpenAI was coming out with all these these voice products and people were like, my god. What does this mean for eleven Labs? Yeah. And now they're like they're doing they're accelerating. Yeah.
Speaker 3:They're they're doing better than they ever have before.
Speaker 2:So I
Speaker 3:think that like really
Speaker 2:miss like the taste element. When we were talking about you from eleven Labs, we noticed that even though Midjourney has been on a very different path, there's something about what David how David Holes runs that company at Midjourney, the way he thinks about training the model that it just looks it doesn't it's not that it looks like there's no benchmark. It doesn't necessarily look better. It just looks more like David Holes' vision for what good looks like. And it's like, I feel like when I see mid journey image, no matter who prompted it, I'm seeing the art of David Holes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I feel like there's something about that in the texture of the voices from eleven Labs and the flavor of text that comes out of of OpenAI. And there's a little bit of like the people talk about this with like the flavor of code from Claude, for And the vibes can come out of the organization in a way that it's hard to just say, Okay. We have good vibes and images. Let's copy paste that all over the place.
Speaker 2:It's just the culture doesn't necessarily shift. Shift.
Speaker 3:100%. And I I think most of the times that I've heard a pitch from somebody around like, well, like this this, you know, this part of this like this model or like this modality is rapidly commoditizing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. A founder and a team is able to build a high taste product
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:In a market that's big enough where you can have ACVs and, like, prices that are high enough per customer to, like, build and be able to distribute the product Yeah. All those companies are doing tremendously well. There's not been a single company, I think, that, died because of the labs. It's because you didn't build a high taste product Yeah. That could be distributed to a wide audience.
Speaker 2:It feels like we're probably not in the like, the the the era of, like, getting steamrolled by AWS was like, well, yeah, I want my I want my hard drives right next to my CPUs. Yeah. And and I don't know that people are right now saying, like, I need my voice model right next to my, you know, agent model. Totally. They're like, no.
Speaker 2:Actually, I'm okay with a little bit of latency because the whole thing is slow, basically. It's all it's all, you know, a couple seconds lag, sometimes ten minutes of lag. And so maybe, there's not so much. I wanna talk about, the neo clouds and these interesting deals that are going on, because benchmark where you're at in terms of the scale of the firm Mhmm. Feels not necessarily set up to do some sort of company that's gonna wind up being super capital intensive.
Speaker 2:But then at the same time
Speaker 1:But they did fireworks.
Speaker 2:You've done fireworks and then also
Speaker 1:gave the most, like one of the most iconic lines of this month. He said a lot of companies out there are gonna be scaling into bankruptcy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then also, like, the private equity background
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bond. I feel like you're you're maybe better equipped to understand how private credit will interface with a founder. You're somebody that would make sense to have on the board potentially. But how are you thinking about these new companies there where it's not just r and d spend, it's not just burn for salaries. There's something else going on in the almost financial engineering of building and winning a category.
Speaker 3:Yeah. A 100%. Yeah. I think like our role at Benchmark Mhmm. And we've done investments like we've obviously invested very very early in fireworks.
Speaker 3:We have some robotics investments that we're incredibly excited about that will be very capital intensive.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I think one of the pitches that we can give to founders is there there's like there's nothing more scarce than a benchmark a in today's market. Mhmm. And therefore, there's no higher signal and there's
Speaker 2:We have another sponsor, Numeral, who who who on their website they had benchmark series a and every time we did the ad read, every time. So you know.
Speaker 3:You know the mantra? Oh, we do. Yeah. So so like part of our Yeah. Value prop in our job is like downstream capital
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Should not be more cheap for anyone else than someone that has partnered with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I do think we put an immense amount of effort in into helping companies understand and helping downstream investors understand the business equation
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Of these more complex companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like a a company that did this extremely well actually in the public markets, Affirm, when it went public, a lot of the sell side analysts that were covering Affirm, I think, didn't really know how to, like, handle the company and didn't really know how to, like, model out the actual business equation of the company. Yeah. So they actually did, an I think it was called the financial modeling day. Oh, wow. And they, walked through, like, a 30 slide deck that you can actually still find on their investor relations site of, like, this is our business equation.
Speaker 3:This is what Yeah. We optimize around, and this is how we grow and produce value for shareholders.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 3:it was just like extremely clear, extremely legible. Yeah. And I think it really helps the investor community and the analyst community Yeah. Like better understand the business. And it's like, one, ideally, founders also have some sense of their business equation because they're they're building their businesses.
Speaker 3:But it's also something that hopefully that that myself or any of the other of the of the partners here can also help both sharpen the thinking of the founders, but especially the downstream investors that wanna know that there's a strong business equation that they're Yeah. Investing behind.
Speaker 1:Emil Michael was was getting into it with you earlier this week. Feels like the the TK era has sort of continued.
Speaker 2:Two different government officials coming
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Really got whole TK was way obviously, you know, ten years
Speaker 2:apologize for it.
Speaker 1:No. No. No.
Speaker 2:Can you take full responsibility? That's not
Speaker 1:what I'm saying. I wanted to understand like, you know, when that comes up, when you're when you're in process with founders Sure. Sure.
Speaker 6:Sure.
Speaker 1:Like what what is the like what are what are those conversations like from your side and how how is the firm approaching kind of those concerns from founders about Yeah. Actions that the firm took a decade ago?
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's good. Yeah. I I I mean, amazing question and I think our response every single time whether or not it comes up and I think it it I mean, it's week four, so I actually don't know how rarely it comes up, but it's really come up so far in my my time at Benchmark, is talk to the founders we work with today or that any of the partners within the firm have worked with.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And see, what, like, Benchmark like, I am 25% of Benchmark. Yeah. Jatin is 25%. Eric is 25%. Yep.
Speaker 3:Peter is 25%.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Benchmark is not some corporation
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:That has, like, rules and bylaws. Mhmm. Like, the firm is us. Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so talk to as many founders as you want of people that we have worked with Mhmm. And see if our references are better than any other investors. And our bet is that and and one one that is proved to be true, I think more often, way more often than not, is that you will not find a better reference firm from the founders that we work with as individuals. Yes. I'm talking
Speaker 2:like Smaller benchmark.
Speaker 3:I was, you know Our benchmark. I think I was in high school or maybe I was in college, you know, like
Speaker 2:It was like
Speaker 3:dancing to to young like what what
Speaker 2:I would do private equity deals and get hammered on the weekend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was doing I was
Speaker 3:doing like a private equity case study during during that. I'm like, I I like I literally I can't speak
Speaker 1:to Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. I think I think I think being able to, like, focus it in and be like, the firm is the four of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so go as deep as you want on any of our
Speaker 2:our track record. Yeah. Yeah. And I I know There
Speaker 3:really wasn't. That's the song. What was the that was the college anthem. That
Speaker 2:was great. What what what about, you know, you're you've been on a on a meteoric rise, principal, then partner, now general partner. What do you think it takes to get to general to steward?
Speaker 3:Oh, to to senior to
Speaker 2:senior to steward. Do think it's in the cards for you?
Speaker 1:I actually did have a I I If you are
Speaker 2:at Sequoia as senior steward next year, I am gonna blow it's gonna be insane. I wouldn't put it past
Speaker 1:How how it does does Girly still play a a steward esque role? How involved I'm assuming a bunch of his money is still Yeah. Right. In in in the funds.
Speaker 3:Yeah. A few a few things on this. One, there like there is I think this is a common misnomer
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Just because some people like Bill, obviously, extremely famous for his blog. He's he's very, like, outward facing.
Speaker 2:Podcast too. Mean Podcast like, he really sailed off in the in the sunset. He got some great takes on BG two. Totally. But
Speaker 3:there there is like there is no sense of stewardship. There's no Interesting. That does not exist in the slightest. There is no senior partner and like and and like there there's there's nothing like that
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Both in the actual economics, obviously, but actually just in like the culture and the way that we do business. Like it is completely like, there there is no sense of that. And I think that's a common misnomer because some people are a little bit more public or, like, outwardly facing or more famous. That is not how the firm operates. But it's true that, like, the retired partners that are no longer active GPs play an unbelievably
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Active role. In a lot of our active investments now, in a lot of the capital for the funds comes from both the current GPs and the previous GPs. They feel extremely bought into the continued success of Benchmark. They also just like, it was such a huge part of their identities for so long that it's like, yeah, I now regularly talk with Bill, with Matt Collar, with all these people that
Speaker 1:were That was Florida Gators.
Speaker 2:Are you brushing up on the
Speaker 1:Bill's Florida Gators.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, school pride between
Speaker 1:myself and That's great. That's great.
Speaker 3:But So they're they're super involved. They help us with companies that we're looking at, with companies that we already work with, and I think that's a really unique part of the partnership.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. What what's his what have you learned from Bill Gurley? Have you learned anything yet? Has he updated anything?
Speaker 2:Have you have you obviously, you go from Bond, Mary Meeker, one way of thinking about the world to Founders Fund, PT, wildly different way
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thinking about the world. But you probably take lessons from both Yeah. I imagine. Have you learned anything from Bill either in the last four weeks? I know it hasn't been that long, but even just from reading his work and listening to him?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I feel like Bill was the first venture capitalist I ever learned anything from. Because when I was, like, interviewing to get into the business,
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 3:always reading above the crowd.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:I was always reading his blog. He had such pragmatic, instructive blog posts Mhmm. Like all revenue is not created equal. Yeah. He had all these great things about network effects and marketplaces.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And like when you're looking for buzzwords to say in an interview when you're 22 and you have no idea what you're talking about Yeah. They were an absolute gold mine. Love you. And so I felt like I I've been learning from him for
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for buzzwords. Shout out buzzwords. A fantastic way to advance your career.
Speaker 3:Useful buzzwords. I'm not saying that as a drug story.
Speaker 1:No. No. But, like, for me, they're a goal.
Speaker 2:Thing is so real. We we go to YC demo day and they
Speaker 1:they Evergreen.
Speaker 2:They've to, like, reinstate, like, okay. What's contracted ARR versus ARR? What's how how fuzzy is this? There was something on the timeline earlier this week. Someone was saying that they went to go interview at a company that said that, you know, the real revenue was, like, one sixth of what the founders had said.
Speaker 2:And that that's, you know, in a frothy market, those the the temptation to lie gets even further or embellish.
Speaker 3:Right? So I I think like the biggest learning I think that people can take from Bill is like he just keeps it real. Yeah. Like it doesn't matter what the market is. Totally.
Speaker 3:Doesn't matter if it's up market, down market. Yeah. Like he cares about the real. Like he cares about like Sure. What is the like what is the business quality when you actually dig in.
Speaker 3:It's not about, you know, eyeballs. It's not about vanity metrics. It's like what does this business look like and what is it gonna look like over the next ten years? And it's not like he hasn't taken immense amount of risk like he invested in bunch of marketplaces before they had flipped network effects. But he just knows how to, like, drill down and kinda figure out what is fluff and fake versus what's real.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you guys thinking about consumer social? I feel like as long as I've been, in and around the venture world, when there's a hot series a consumer company benchmark is is at least on it, paying attention. It just feels and then and then I can say, personally, I've I've experienced immense pain investing in consumer social. It doesn't matter if a company has a million users.
Speaker 1:They can go from zero to a million users in Yeah. In forty eight hours and you can invest right there and then it'll be a write off the week the next week. So it's extremely painful, but I'm curious about how the partnership is thinking about it today. Is it is it, obviously, you guys are a generalist fund, but is it still is there anybody specifically on the partnership that like, cares a lot about backing the next breakout consumer, you know, consumer software company?
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. A 100%. And I again, it's it's such a deep part of the firm's history that I think all of us are itching. Itching for
Speaker 1:It's the highest status, like like, winner. Because it's like, you know, if you back Snapchat and then and then and then you have a half a billion users out there that are like, yeah, use and love Snapchat every day, it just hits harder than backing, like, even the next Databricks because people are probably becomes a cultural
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's like a cultural touch Trophy. In a trophy. Yeah. I think so so the I think the toughest thing about consumer social, why it's been really, really hard, is that back in the day when consumer social was starting, it was actually about consumer social.
Speaker 3:Like social networking was actually social networking.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Every single social networking platform has turned into an algorithmic short form video platform. Mhmm. Because that is the most addictive Yep. Form factor Mhmm. Of content that someone can consume.
Speaker 3:And eventually, you you just have this profit motive that means that you optimize for the amount of time spent on an app per user per day. And so they're like, they just crowd out like the currency of these companies. One is obviously users, but then the amount of time spent interacting with the product or interfacing with the product typically. And when you have these, like, extremely addicting algorithmic short form video platforms, you just kind of squeeze out the seconds in the day. It's like so hard to, like, how could you get someone to spend thirty minutes a day on your app versus versus any others?
Speaker 3:Like, the challenge is just so much harder than it used to be when people still weren't spending that much time on their phones, now we all spend all day on our phones.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think that the bar and the challenge is actually much much much higher, but I do think that Mhmm. I mean, one, we we do have a new breakout which is ChatGPT Yep.
Speaker 6:Which is unbelievable.
Speaker 3:So that's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm talking about the next, you know, like the next year, basically. Yeah. Like, who's really itching?
Speaker 3:So we we obviously, I'm not gonna say the company because we just signed this, but we actually did just sign a consumer social series a. And so There we go. You can you can stay on the lookout for
Speaker 2:Why did you hit that
Speaker 3:for that get the gong for it. I was I was looking for an excuse to do the gong.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For the for the anonymous series a that we can't
Speaker 1:Solid first hit.
Speaker 2:First hit. First of many. Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1:Last last question I have.
Speaker 3:That was a big gong. I know you I keep bringing
Speaker 2:that up.
Speaker 1:Little little pop quiz. I'm not gonna tell you who wrote this, but I want you to guess whether or not this was written with AI. This this is not just a partnership. It is a living, breathing legacy. This
Speaker 2:I mean, I I think I think most people are at a at a at a point where they might, let Chattypu Tees do like a run through at the end and it might have inserted this, it's called contrastive parallelism. It's not this, it's that. Mhmm. I'm not a fan of that particular construction Mhmm. But it's something that Chattypu Teeth just kinda sneaks in everywhere.
Speaker 2:But who knows? It can be a tell. Yeah. But yeah. If you you you kind of you kinda gotta rip some of the stuff out because if AI starts doing EmDashes too much, even if you love using the EmDash, you just kinda lose it because otherwise people will be like, AI AI.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:Last thing. Predict last last, question. Mhmm. Do you think that it felt like this year, just the flood of deals meant that there was less seasonality Mhmm. In venture.
Speaker 1:Right? That there was companies that were raising those companies have raised like three, four rounds this year which meant that like they were raising during winter Yeah. Like, winter kind of holiday time. They were raising
Speaker 2:during August. Talent wars were during summer. Like, Zuck was, like, having dinner with people in mid middle of summer. Open AI would try to take a week off, and he got butt ton of people poached.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it feels like going into I I could see people taking a bit more of a breather this this this kind of like holiday season, but I'm curious any any kind of predictions around that front?
Speaker 3:I I think I think we've moved to not having season like, think the seasonality thing, at least for now, is that anytime you're in a hot market, you're just gonna have people working around the clock. Because again, it's almost like the the return to office thing. If you're like a sales rep in like 2022, it's like, how do you wanna differentiate? Well, if one guy's just doing Zoom meetings and you're willing to fly to the prospect's office. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's a huge edge.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:So think that's the issue now, especially in a hot market where things get marked up and and sequential rounds happen very quickly.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You just end up having, like, that that like, you know, Christmas is now the opportunity for someone to go preempt something. Yep. I do think that most of the good teams kind of realize that even if you can get a deal done What's December 24, also, like, it's probably just gonna be better if it's done when everyone there is just like a level of energy that happens in the fall, that happens in the spring, that happens
Speaker 2:like, if, like, there's like, wow, the VC, you know, gave me a call to try and close the deal, like, from the from the operating room when his first kid was born. And I'm like, yeah, dude sounds kinda like a psycho. I think I'm good if you just like waited
Speaker 1:Or or the founders, it's like, yeah, I raised my round while my wife was giving birth.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like savage.
Speaker 2:It's like You you can go a little bit too far and kinda turn people off. But but that is fascinating. Thank you so much for
Speaker 3:guys. Thank you so much. I want a shout out shout out to my wife, Kaelin. Okay. Shout out to my six month old, Theo.
Speaker 3:Oh, go.
Speaker 1:Let's hit my
Speaker 3:dog for
Speaker 1:the sixth week. Six month old. Imagine, love you guys. Imagine being a imagine being a baby and you and you come on come
Speaker 3:on to this earth and
Speaker 1:you're like, wait. My dad's a GP at Benchmark?
Speaker 2:I hit the jackpot. I hit the jackpot.
Speaker 1:Papa's a GP at Benchmark. I just spawned into this.
Speaker 2:Wealth post economic on day one. Let's go. Let's go. Let's bring in our next guest. We have Adam Faze, CEO of gymnasium.
Speaker 2:While he's hopping on, let me tell you about 8sleep.com. Get a pod five. Welcome to the show. I will also tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 2:Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise k. And data to enable efficiency in this environment. Adam,
Speaker 1:Adam. Please. Let's settle this. I've never asked you this because I was kind of always embarrassed to this. I already know where we're going.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I just think Are you phase clan? Yeah. No. I think It
Speaker 6:is my real last name.
Speaker 1:It is your They
Speaker 6:did try to sue me. No way. The original name of gymnasium was FaZe World. Okay. They do own the trademark for the word FaZe.
Speaker 1:Okay. Wow. So we are What is the origin of the name? FaZe is such a cool It's classic name.
Speaker 6:Okay. So this is I've never actually really said this story before. My dad is from Iran. Mhmm. His real last name is Amir Faiz.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. And then when he moved to America, he changed his last name to Faiz. Mhmm. So I was born with the last name Faiz. Okay.
Speaker 6:But it technically my middle name is Amir, so it kind
Speaker 2:of Yeah.
Speaker 6:Still as Amir Faiz. It's
Speaker 2:There there's There's Ellis Island There there's there's a term for when that happens. Like, I believe I was probably a Mick Coogan at some point, they took off the Mick. They just simplified it.
Speaker 6:That's right.
Speaker 2:Fascinating. Well, for those who don't know anything beyond this, can you introduce the company, kind of how you how you position yourself?
Speaker 6:100%. Mean, run a company called Gymnasium. Yeah. Is a short form unscripted studio that primarily lives on TikTok and Instagram. Okay.
Speaker 6:So we make shows that are these organic viral shows that would have been on TV twenty years ago, but instead live on these platforms of young people.
Speaker 1:Media. No. No traditional. Media.
Speaker 6:I really gotta say, think you guys are single handedly bringing Hollywood back. Know, city has been
Speaker 2:We're trying to. In
Speaker 1:the media department. Have you ever lived in LA?
Speaker 6:Born and raised.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 6:I lived in LA for twenty four years. I moved to New York four years ago.
Speaker 2:You went you went to high school here?
Speaker 6:I went to Loyola High School downtown.
Speaker 2:I went to Poly.
Speaker 6:No way. You grew up in that.
Speaker 2:Didn't know that. I grew up yeah. Yeah. I played with some loyal guys on with on the rugby team There you go. Cougars.
Speaker 2:I'm sure we could play, know, Who Do You Know?
Speaker 1:But of your most of your shows are in New York.
Speaker 6:Is it? Almost entirely New York based actually until recently. So we just launched a new show this week called Girl Room Mhmm. Where we investigated the most disgusting girls' bedrooms in LA This
Speaker 2:is me.
Speaker 6:That we could find. Okay. And we ended up renovating them.
Speaker 1:You're just exposing. Exposing.
Speaker 6:I truly I can still smell some of the bedrooms that I was in.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But we're actually here shooting a different show this week in Boyle Heights Yeah. Where I just came from.
Speaker 2:Okay. So walk me through what, actually producing a show looks like. Yes. Do do you hold the camera? Did you did you ever hold the camera?
Speaker 6:100%.
Speaker 2:Did you do Always.
Speaker 6:Do you have the camera?
Speaker 3:And did edit a few
Speaker 1:shows. Okay.
Speaker 2:But now what does the team look like?
Speaker 6:Well, to kind of back up, I I grew up in LA being obsessed with Hollywood. All I ever wanted to do is make movies and TV shows. Cool. And spent didn't go to college, spent about eight years working up the ladder in traditional Hollywood for like studios and production industry is coved. And it basically, I mean, during COVID, I all of a sudden fly have the set.
Speaker 6:During COVID, I just got deeply addicted to TikTok like so many people. Sure. Honestly, I stopped watching TV.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:And so there was a part of me that just felt like this feels like the future. Yeah. At the same time, working at a studio where like spending five years trying to make a movie that like Brentwood would love Yep. Didn't really feel that culturally relevant. Okay.
Speaker 6:So
Speaker 2:zoom out for me a little bit and show me the difference between why you what you're doing lives on TikTok and not those crazy, like, the Quibi, the new era Quibi, like the vertical. It's vertical short form. Yes. There's a couple Chinese apps. You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 6:Real shorts. Oh, you're you're talking about, like, the scripted short form A 100%.
Speaker 2:Like, is that where your stuff goes in five years, or are you permanently separate?
Speaker 6:Goal of this was, like, let's just go where the people are. I was watching TikTok. I was watching Reels content. And I'm like I want to make shows in the place where people actually are. And so we've only ever produced things that are unscripted.
Speaker 6:It really started three years ago now working with a guy named Kareem who hosts Subway Takes. Have you ever seen that show?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No way.
Speaker 6:He did a show called Keep the Meter Running. Where he would like hail a taxi in New York and he would tell the driver take me to your favorite place and keep the meter running while I spend the day
Speaker 1:with That's each cool.
Speaker 6:That show I held the camera on.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:Awesome. And so it would be me, a friend and Kareem and we'd actually just hail a cab in the street of New York and get in with them and spend the day with them. That show kind of changed everything for us because, you know, Kareem was someone I had my eye on him for a while of just someone who I thought was super talented and I And wanted to hang out with I asked him if he had any ideas for a TikTok show and this was like the fifth idea he pitched. And it was so obvious, like, I wanna know where that taxi driver goes. And so we spent three hours with this first taxi driver we ever shot with.
Speaker 6:And I can remember thinking like, how the hell are gonna put this in a two minute video clip? We had never posted anything on TikTok ever before. We spend a week that at the episode is like perfect in our eyes. We put on an account that has zero followers. And as a result, we're like, we're not gonna even check the views because it's a brand new account.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:The next day, Kareem goes into his bodega across the street and someone taps him on the shoulder and he's like, I love your show.
Speaker 2:One day on his episode
Speaker 6:coming out. He's like, what
Speaker 2:do you
Speaker 6:my show? Wow. And he looks at his phone and it had 1,200,000 views. Wow. And I think the cooler thing was of those 1,200,000 views, 99% were in New York City.
Speaker 1:No way. As he's been to walk around
Speaker 6:the city that day, started tapping him on the shoulder being like, hey, I love your show. Hey, can I get a can I buy you a beer? Can take a photo with you?
Speaker 4:How are the outgames?
Speaker 6:That show now has like 400,000,000 views and has I think about 800,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. And it's grown Kareem's own career into becoming like the the mayor of New York City. Totally. So I think from that point on, it was just clear of like, hey, this is a place where people actually wanna watch serialized content Yeah. And what are the types of stories that we wanna go?
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you think about monetizing something like that? It feels so hard to stop and do a mid roll ad.
Speaker 6:It's impossible.
Speaker 2:And it also feels like if you're like, oh, I'll just do a separate promoted post. Yeah. TikTok's like, we know what you're doing. That one's gonna get 10 views and then when you're back to normal programming, we'll give you a 10,000,000 views because they know what's good and what's
Speaker 6:what's I mean, is the problem with short form media in general. Sure. The reality is these platforms do not have an incentive to pay you. Yep. One, because they know the benefit that you get by being viral on these platforms.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But also like their excuses like, hey, you're scrolling eight videos for every one ad you see. How would we know how to pay that
Speaker 2:person? It's like we you you know everything. Exactly. You know the data. You're gonna be fine.
Speaker 6:We can figure it
Speaker 3:out.
Speaker 6:You know, we figured this out on our show, Boyroom, which was like the early version of Girl Room and it was, you know, really disgusting men's bedrooms. Who has grosser bedrooms? So the difference we we really did find the difference here. Guys have disgusting bedrooms.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Girls are just hoarding. They're hoarding so much shit that they refuse to get rid of. So that's the big difference between the two shows. But on that show, it was so viral so quickly. The top comment in every episode was a girl saying, I can fix him.
Speaker 6:You can't. The second comment was always, you should fix their rooms.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:And so we started quickly getting in touch with Amazon and a bunch of other companies figuring out like, how could we turn this into a renovation for them? Sure. Sure. Sure. Ended up making an amazing partnership with Amazon.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 6:We did an entire renovation season of the show still on TikTok and Instagram. And out of that partnership birthed this brand new show, Girl Room, which is actually co owned by Amazon.
Speaker 2:And also Amazon in world doesn't feel forced. At all. It's like very logical that if
Speaker 6:In you fact, rev you're making the show better.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 6:Know, we would never be able to do a renovation show without the help of And so I think what's really cool here is like through this partnership with Amazon, I think what we've realized is like the views and attention that we get on these platforms organically is something that every Fortune 500 company desperately is trying to figure out.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 6:And so what we've really started doing is having this conversation with brands. It's like, you're a media company, whether you realize it or not. And if you were to think of yourself as a TV channel, what are the types of shows that you would program on
Speaker 2:that channel?
Speaker 6:And so we're starting to work with brands on creating original shows on these platforms that kind of live in the universe of their brand.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there very little competition? Because it feels like the legacy businesses that Obviously, there's competitive Well, no. So there's like, the feeds are deeply competitive. Sure.
Speaker 1:I'm saying, like, people that are trying to do this highly produced unscripted content that's not just an iPhone Yep. That's not an individual creator doing like a day in the life Yep. Or doing that. Like it feels like they're like it feels like they're because the traditional like unscripted TV businesses Mhmm. They're so in this mindset of like, okay, I like create a concept and I pitch it and maybe I make a pilot Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Or I'm an established, you know, studio and I can just like go and get the budget just off of belief alone. They're still in this mindset of like, need to sell this whole show to a network. And I think that could create an environment where you're kind of in this lane with a model that's very disruptive being like, I'm not gonna go to the network at all. I'm just gonna go straight to the feed and do and and be able to do churn out a super high volume of content, I'm sure with, like, great margins too, and just kind of, like, sidestep the whole industry.
Speaker 6:I mean, there's a few things here. One, I think what's been really cool is, like, New York has become like the capital of this new era of media. I think, you know, LA was the center of influencer for so long. Like, never forget the TikTok houses in 2020. I think that slowly started shifting with like the Washington Park ification of TikTok content.
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 2:And all
Speaker 6:of a sudden now all these short form content studios started bubbling up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're right.
Speaker 6:You know, think for those of us that have been in New York for a few years, there is a bit of an industry now where we all know each other.
Speaker 2:We're all
Speaker 6:pretty close with each other. Yeah. What I will say though is like on the flip side, I think especially like being in LA right now, this is an industry of people that still refuse to accept that like the Internet has become television. Oh, interesting. You have so many talented storytellers, an entire generation of storytellers Yeah.
Speaker 6:Who are out there trying to pitch their show to Netflix Yeah. Instead of realizing like, hey, how can I go make this myself? Yep. And I think the crazy thing is like we have so many examples of success now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And it's like a mat like, in what world would TBPN be this successful if you guys were on CNN?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or or or starting there. Mean, it's weird because in Silicon Valley, we've like, you would be so crazy if you were like, I have an idea for a new technology. Let me go try and pitch it to Amazon Web Services. You'd be like, no.
Speaker 2:I I build the first version. I raise a little money. I build it. I build it. And then eventually, they come and try and buy me.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And that's like the DNA of Silicon Valley, and yet Hollywood just is still in the process of, like, adapting to that of just, like, yeah, just go do it yourself. Like, the cameras are available. You can make stuff with an iPhone.
Speaker 6:And I think what's so hard is, like, we haven't had startup DNA in this city ever. I mean,
Speaker 2:you know, Hollywood did in 1920.
Speaker 6:Of course. Right? Exactly. And that was the original moment. But from that point on, we had a hundred year long industry where it's like, this is how projects
Speaker 2:Just get calcify, calcify, calcify.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 6:I think as a result, we built an industry around the way that things worked. It's really hard to all of a sudden accept like, hey,
Speaker 2:the
Speaker 6:rules could not be more different now and might never go back to that. They will never go back
Speaker 3:to that in the
Speaker 6:first place. So I think what's cool, though, is I really do believe that any talent we've ever worked with would have been a television star twenty years ago. I think any show we made and and are continuing to make would have been a TV show twenty years ago. And I
Speaker 1:think How much yeah. How much inspiration do you I I like, think when I think about TVPN, we've had maybe a 100 or so people, like, kind of launch, like, some, like, show that is inspired in some way by what we're doing, even though what we're doing just looks like normal television. Yeah. It's been around for fifty years. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you look back at some of these, like, old unscripted shows and be like, okay, we wanna do a dating show in that format. We wanna do a home renovation show in that like A 100%. We wanna do a cooking like cooking I feel like I I've I've pitched
Speaker 2:What is
Speaker 1:we pitched like TVPN for cooking.
Speaker 2:Somebody Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It wouldn't look anything like TVPN but it'd just be like a daily cooking show Yeah. That kind of like has the aesthetics of like a legacy television show. But it's like built for the social platforms.
Speaker 6:Yeah. A 100%. I mean, I think what I try to tell everyone is like Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube are television at this point. Yep. And so as a result, the entire history of television is up for grabs to recreate on these platforms.
Speaker 6:And so I think it's really interesting to think about what are the shows that spoke to you when you were younger and figuring out what is the newer version of making that today. But I think the big difference is there is the format side, which boy room and girl room are formats. But I think the real opportunity that exists here is certain star creators out there have the ability to grow multi $100,000,000 businesses fueled by content. Mhmm. And I think these are people that need programming help Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Because they themselves are a TV channel at this point and they need operating help. I think that really is where we're gonna see things start to go and it not just be a landscape where, like, Mr. Beast is the only one that's figured this out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How how do you think about platform exclusivity, the aesthetics of the different platforms? Because I think from a from the outside, a lot of people would assume that Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok are feature complete identical platforms. It's vertical video. Mhmm. And yet content that does well on one doesn't do well on the other.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:are we Could we see a flip where TikTok says, no. We want this as an exclusive show or Instagram. Like, will that ever will
Speaker 2:that already basically doing that in the sense that some content will do better on on one platform than another just because the audience or the algorithm or the feature set there. But will it go farther to the point where you could build a whole show and it's every episode's going viral on TikTok and they're all flopping on Instagram for some weird unknown reason.
Speaker 6:Mean, we've had that experience. We have certain shows that have totally flopped on TikTok and Instagram and are the most viral thing we've ever made on YouTube. And most often, it's the other way around. But I think it goes back to like what is the reason that someone is opening that app in the first place? If I'm opening Instagram
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's to check my DMs. Yep. It's to check my notifications. Mhmm. Maybe see something from a friend.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. And then I'll get stuck in reels and doom scroll for three hours. TikTok, I am going on basically to watch television. In fact, I don't want to see what my friends are posting because I don't think they know how to make TikToks. And I'm going on being like, hey, show me like what's the television future.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 6:so as a result, like, you're willing to watch longer content.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:It's not about sending something to your group chat that's like a degenerate meme. Mhmm. And I think it really is the closest thing to like short form television. Mhmm. YouTube shorts, I think either you're 13 or 70.
Speaker 6:I don't really know who else uses YouTube Shorts in between that. Mhmm. But I think like, you know, this show is a really great example of that. Of like, it does feel like this show was originally designed for x. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I would imagine that it quickly becomes a YouTube show though
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Just as it turns into more of
Speaker 1:a television. That's oddly right.
Speaker 2:Do you think there's anything that we should extrapolate from the expansion of short form from it was six seconds on Vine, and it was about one minute for a while. Now I think it's three minutes on most of the platforms.
Speaker 6:You can do up to sixty minutes on TikTok.
Speaker 2:Sixty minutes on TikTok. Is there are we gonna see the meta of thirty minutes is the just the right amount of time? Because that's what that's where TV landed. Mhmm. And that's kinda where YouTube landed.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, mister Beast, it used to be eight minutes, then it was twelve Mhmm. Then it became 20, and then 20 plus ads is kinda 30, and you're in the twenty, thirty and then you see video essays go up to 40 and Right. And, you
Speaker 6:know I mean, I I look, I think the one thing you have to remember short form content is, like, part of the reason for its success is that, like, dopamine rush
Speaker 2:that you.
Speaker 6:And so like you are kind of addicted to this scroll and wanting to be punched with like some new hit of energy. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 6:there is a limit.
Speaker 2:Edit to some extent. Totally. That's what
Speaker 6:But I think it's like there is
Speaker 1:a He's a modern blackjack dealer.
Speaker 6:And at the end of the day at the end of the day, I mean,
Speaker 4:anything that's a long form video I'm watching two x
Speaker 6:on these platforms because, like, hey, look, I I might wanna watch eight minutes of a rug cleaning video on TikTok, but, like, gonna watch it in two x speed. But I do think that
Speaker 2:You watch eight minute rug cleaning videos on TikTok at two x
Speaker 6:at speed. Four in the morning, you get hooked.
Speaker 2:The rug cleaning,
Speaker 1:they're already sped up. Right?
Speaker 2:You gotta They're already sped up.
Speaker 6:But they're already, think, on four x.
Speaker 2:They're on, like, four x or 10 x. They're basically time lapse. Cleaner
Speaker 6:and cleaner the
Speaker 1:do you think
Speaker 2:Hold on. We gotta stay on this. Do you do you feel like you
Speaker 1:Let's check your screen time. Let's let's check the screen time.
Speaker 6:Just those No. Look. I look. In general, I will say, I think there are, like, a lot of problems with short form content to begin with. Like, I don't think this is a good thing to be giving children and then expecting them to, like, enter the world in a normal state.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, like, I would actually defend, like, like, a Subway interview series as something that is a little bit more vegetables than
Speaker 6:whole thing. I think knowing that these platforms are the sole source of like information entertainment Yeah. For an entire generation of kids Yeah. We have a moral responsibility Quality. To flood as much good shit as possible I agree.
Speaker 6:On these apps. I agree. I think at the same time,
Speaker 1:you Your room do have doesn't have start to look like this. Really does. Is another way
Speaker 6:the way, I also think if you're just putting a smile on someone's face, you're making their day Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is funny. There was a moment in time, maybe it was like five, ten years, where people had this righteous like, they would make this sort of like righteous statement. I don't watch television. And then if you actually piece together, it was like, I don't watch television, but I get entertained in these sort of like short bursts that collectively add up to four hours a day, but I would never watch television.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't even own a TV. Yeah. Just pay $2,000 for a new phone every twelve months. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I'm hooked up. But I
Speaker 6:do think that's the thing. It's like it is time to start sounding the alarm bells a little bit of like what goes behind the scenes on these platforms. Yeah. Because like I don't know if this is the best thing for young people to have.
Speaker 2:Yeah. From a really young age. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's an opportunity to recreate some elements of Vice? Like it feels like they they were making video content that in my view, feel like doesn't get made as much anymore.
Speaker 6:It's by the way, some of the best content still on YouTube to date. Yeah. And I and I and I think it's interesting because the views continue to go up Oh, like year after year. I will say what I'm not as bullish on these days is a faceless media company. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I think Vice was sort of that last try
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Of what happens to build like an actual media company on
Speaker 2:the Internet. Yep.
Speaker 6:I think
Speaker 2:talked about this all a
Speaker 6:Shane Smith type Totally. Would a 100% be successful Yeah. And maybe could have some people underneath them. But I think like TBPN, for instance, is not a faceless brand. It's not CNBC.
Speaker 6:You guys are TBPN. And I think like that is
Speaker 2:Andrew kind of how anything's going grow going Callahan. Like, five is Andrew
Speaker 6:Callahan, And
Speaker 2:if it was truly just like, oh, it's just the Channel five is a faceless aesthetic
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 6:For fun. And I think A24 might be the last faceless media company. Like, they created a brand of prestige. I don't know how easy that is to do going forward. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you think live streaming goes from here?
Speaker 6:Live's the future. Mhmm. And I think, you know, most of the people that we're talking about in culture right now, you guys included, are live streamers. Whether it's like iShow Speed or Kai Sonat or on a completely other end of the spectrum, Nick Fuentes. Sure.
Speaker 6:There's a reason why we're talking about these people. And I think it's because you're giving a daily amount of content that can be clippable and hack the algorithm of every single platform that exists. And so I think we are in this sort of post platform state where you might have your preferred platform that you use, but it all kind of has the same content at this point. And so people are larger than any one app if you do this correctly. And I think live is like the real spot where that kind of comes to fruition.
Speaker 1:Are you working on any live shows?
Speaker 6:Definitely have live shows in the works. I mean, had like the huge honor of of working with Aisha Speed on his Oh, yeah. Speed Does America tour which he was live for thirty five days straight.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 6:He filmed himself sleeping for thirty four nights in a row. Woah.
Speaker 1:And I mean I I didn't know he didn't I I assumed he was going offline.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. No. No.
Speaker 6:No. He did not turn off the camera for thirty days.
Speaker 1:Isn't there a real risk of going crazy?
Speaker 6:I think it's all he knows because he's only 20 years old and he's been doing this for like four years, which is crazy. Yeah. Someone had a great point when we were filming which was like, he turned our world into the Truman Show because it's not like he's on some set. Like, the set is the city that we live in.
Speaker 2:What's really interesting about iShow Speed is I think people see the viral clips. But if you open up a stream and just click to a random moment and you actually understand how he's interacting with chat, how he's like killing time and filling dead air.
Speaker 6:I think he talks to chat
Speaker 3:in a
Speaker 6:way that I've never seen anybody on Earth. I mean, he knows who chat is. Yes. And when he says, I love you, chat. You're like, he actually loves Chad.
Speaker 6:It's He's talking to that young 13 year old kid Yeah. Yeah. Or 50 year old guy that, like, for some reason, is watching this every
Speaker 2:single People don't understand with the streamers how high skill ceiling talking to Chad is. Ludwig was talking about if he had to start over, could he be successful in the modern era as be as a streamer? And his his first bullet point was, I'm good at talking to chat. And so that's a skill that I could immediately cash in on. But then, of course, you have to figure out, like, how do you get your first viewer?
Speaker 2:And so he does a bunch of stunts, he he ran this experiment, and somewhat successfully. But mostly, I was just it was just interesting to hear someone talk about, you know, the nature of live with chat is so different than TV. Mhmm. Bloomberg has a chat room, but they never talk to chat on Bloomberg TV, you know? And I was thinking about how funny that would be because every all the A lot of legacy media,
Speaker 1:they turn off chat places.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. But you can turn off YouTube comments. They'll turn off comments. I'm talking about right now, like, there are multibillionaire hedge funds that have Bloomberg on
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Bloomberg chat going on their Bloomberg terminal. Yeah. And yet, the person They don't connect once a while. They don't connect. No.
Speaker 2:They don't connect. No. Which is so fascinating.
Speaker 6:But like, this is what I explain to everyone of like why I think live is the future. Yeah. There was a moment on the speed tour where he was in Cincinnati. He's having lunch. There's like a glass door at the front or glass window at this restaurant.
Speaker 6:And of course, like anywhere he goes, there's a crowd of thousands of kids that are outside trying to go see this kid. Speed goes to the window at one point just to like get a better look at the crowd. And there's one kid front and center. This kid is so excited to see speed that he bashes his head through the glass window. Like World War z zombie shit.
Speaker 6:And I think like that is the answer of like this medium is so powerful that it's somehow making this like 12 year old kid into a zombie Yeah. Because of the connection that he feels with speed. Yeah. Is live. That's not like uploading a TikTok video.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. There's there's a very like yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just so many interesting How do you TV threat.
Speaker 1:You're behind the camera. You're creating shows and different concepts and and through that, you're creating inevitably creating stars and future superstars. How do you think about, like, partnering with talent in the short term and the long term? That I feel like one of the big challenges that when you look at at creator modern creator led media companies, you have Barstool, Dave Portnoy. He created other stars.
Speaker 1:They end up going and going independent or going and doing other deals. Alex Cooper then was a Barstool creator, left, then like, you know, Alex Earle to some degree. Then Alex Earle leaves and the cycle sort of like Mhmm. Continues. And I think that's like probably that maybe like one of the number one challenges for 100%.
Speaker 1:Gymnasium is like how do you This is something enough to create the star and then how do you kind of partner for the long term.
Speaker 6:I mean, this is something that like honestly I evolved my own perspective on. I think for a long time, tried to figure out, like, how could we hold on to that star? And I think where I've completely changed my opinion is, like, the creators have the power. And even if they didn't start as a creator, but now they are, they hold the cards. And I think Yeah.
Speaker 6:All you can hope to be is the best partner to them Yeah. But it is for them. Yeah. They are the ones that are in control. And so I think where we've really shifted with gymnasium is like, gymnasium at this point is very much a television studio for brands to make themselves into TV networks.
Speaker 6:It's like we can turn brands into creators. But I think there is another completely different angle
Speaker 1:where we're You can retain the brand Yes. Longer. And if you're creating a diversity of creators or talent that work effectively for the brand, then you're effect you're not you're not entirely indexed to one superstar. We even saw No. By the like media lost, like Totally.
Speaker 1:Mister Beast. Right? They they
Speaker 6:think about this. Like, if you are Skittles and you're building the Skittles digital network of shows, and by the way, as a result of that, you've given three new kids a platform that are now going go be famous. Their story will always start with they got famous for being on like this Skittles network. They might be your best brand ambassador you ever have. I think that's like a blessing Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 6:If someone were able to become a Starfishing like that. So I think it makes a lot more sense on the brand side of things, But I think, like, the real future of this industry is helping creators turn into massive massive stars.
Speaker 2:Do
Speaker 1:you feel threatened at all by AI? I feel from my point of view and understanding your business, I think humans are gonna wanna watch unscripted shows from real people. Mhmm. I don't know if it's gonna hit the same to be like watching Boyroom and it's like, yeah, we generated this crazy AI room. It's super dirty.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And here's this AI person who made the room dirty. Yeah. And it's like it like there's something about it being
Speaker 2:Yeah. In people will will do the investigative journalism to be like, oh, boy room is now AI generated. We caught them. Totally. And that will destroy it'll be like cheating in chess.
Speaker 2:I I I imagine.
Speaker 6:I mean, look, I think the benefit is we're young and run a startup in an industry that's kind of being created every single day. Sure. And so for us, I think we're always looking to see like what tool is coming out and see if we can use it and help us make our own shit better. But I think the reality is like when anyone's ever said, hey, like in the future, people are gonna watch an entire new set season of succession by generating it. It's like, at the same time that you say that, the NFL has never had a bigger audience.
Speaker 6:And I think, like, we humans have an innate desire to watch the same thing at the same time and be part of, like, a culture moment.
Speaker 2:What's interesting about that is, yeah, NFL has bigger audience than ever, but also there's more people playing Madden and watching effectively virtual Totally. Football every year as well.
Speaker 6:But they're watching a human playing it.
Speaker 2:There well well or or yeah. Wasn't even talking about that. I mean, they're playing it. Yeah. Like, they are generating it themselves when they're playing it.
Speaker 2:Right. You're watching the screen while you play. Right. Then there's also people watching it on Twitch, which I think is what you're mentioning or watching the video game version, watching someone else play. And then there's watching real people play.
Speaker 2:And so all three markets were good to invest in oddly.
Speaker 6:100%.
Speaker 2:It wasn't one one. No. One defeated all What the about VR? Have you is there anything interesting in your world in VR?
Speaker 6:I mean, look. I okay. It's cool. I've never seen a reason why, like, we're at that place in time yet where anyone's gonna care to go and put these goggles on. I think, like, know, I think the the new Meta glasses look really cool.
Speaker 6:I'm excited to try them. But I think we're still a few years away
Speaker 2:from that. Thesis just that if you if you went, like, all in on VR today and you just waited, waited, waited, you could be like the you could be the Jake Paul.
Speaker 6:I mean, look, there's a lot of people that that have been doing that. I think these are also a lot of people that raised a shit ton of money Oh, yeah. Ten years ago. And Sundance even had a part of their festival for VR films back then. Unfortunately, think that is also where you risk sounding like someone who's just chasing the thing that people are talking about.
Speaker 2:It's like Totally.
Speaker 6:First, you're running a VR company. Now, you're running a crypto company, then an ad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:You don't wanna always chase those things. I think for for me, it's like just really what do I wanna watch Yeah. What are the things that we can go make that are like fun to be a part of.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Have you had a bunch
Speaker 6:of acquisition interests? Definitely been interesting conversations. I think, you know, it's less about
Speaker 1:I feel like the like if I a legacy think
Speaker 6:it's like an acquihire thing.
Speaker 1:You know? Yeah. It's like really Hey. We need to play here Yeah. Bad.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. This seems like somebody We
Speaker 2:didn't kill that TikTok.
Speaker 6:By the way, I do think I do think, like, that creator side of, like, building stars is where these studios can have a big impact because it does take millions of dollars if you wanna go do this correctly. And so Yeah. That's not something that like even we could do on our own. Yeah. They're just saying like, hey, we're gonna go build this star creator.
Speaker 6:It does take money. And the one thing the studios have is like decades of relationships in the licensing world and in the world and live events world that would honestly be really helpful to tap into.
Speaker 1:Have you thought about trying to launch a new startup with a show? Are you doing that at all?
Speaker 6:I think that's always been some of the the thought behind any new show. It's like how big could this get? What are the things that can kind of come out of this? Yeah. And I think you've seen a lot of, you know, tech companies now realize the importance of media and doing it the other way around.
Speaker 6:But I think, like, that's the most interesting thing on Earth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Because you could partner with Amazon on a show or you could partner with some consumer brand that's like, we'll give you 15% of our company if you can get us 200,000,000 views and kind of take us from zero to to one.
Speaker 6:And I think that's the really interesting side about what where gymnasium is going is like, is more than anything a sort of, you know, creative consultancy for the first time. Like, we can really help you build your brand in terms of taking over cultural dominance through the type of media you have.
Speaker 1:You haven't raised money either.
Speaker 6:We raised a very small we raised a $7.50 k around three years ago.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 6:And it was with a lot of just classic industry players like Jeremy Zimmer, who was the CEO of UTA and Matthew Siegel at Attention and some really interesting people, but haven't raised
Speaker 1:a dollar Smart to not raise 75,000,000 and then you're like, oh, suddenly we need 300 shows.
Speaker 6:No. It's like, what's the point? I mean, it it's we're not at that time where you would even wanna stake a bet in terms of raising that much money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:It's very pragmatic.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for It's super fun. This is all Happy to be here.
Speaker 6:Wanted to wait I can come in person.
Speaker 2:Wait. We gotta ring the gong for the for the song.
Speaker 1:How many views how many views do you think you're gonna do this year?
Speaker 6:Oh, would like to It depends if you include the speed tour. I think we're already at like 2,000,000,000 plus
Speaker 2:Congratulations. Thank you so much. Good for you. Thanks so much. My pleasure.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you in just a second. Before we move on, let me tell you about getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to now to source you. Any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
Speaker 2:Vas on x has just tried Gemini three point o. It's over. Very, very funny post. I think even if
Speaker 1:We are working on getting access.
Speaker 2:We're working on getting access. What what do you think?
Speaker 4:It seems that Warren Buffett also tried Gemini three, Berkshire, Long Google.
Speaker 2:Long Google right now?
Speaker 1:Yeah. They they just They
Speaker 2:just bought.
Speaker 1:Just revealed it. No way. Wow. Did they buy it? How what what kind of size?
Speaker 4:I think 4,300,000,000.0.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Come on. Love You can do more than that.
Speaker 4:I Toss
Speaker 1:in a 100,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Fascinating. I mean, it it just goes to show you that, like, the AI even if it's like a bubble, like, is there is no systemic there is no systemic, like, chaos all over the place. Like, there will be pockets of things that are are overvalued, pockets of things that are undervalued, opportunities all
Speaker 4:over the place.
Speaker 1:Up this video.
Speaker 2:Day, you know, you have Google trading at what? 20 x or something? What what it's called?
Speaker 1:Let's pull up this video of of, somebody breaking through the glass.
Speaker 2:Yeah. 28. Yeah. Let's watch the speed video, and then let's also tell you about wander. Find your happy place.
Speaker 2:Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade, mainstream events, top tier cleaning
Speaker 1:I'm in my happy place.
Speaker 2:I'm in a wander. It's a vacation home, but better.
Speaker 6:Also, I
Speaker 2:didn't I didn't give everyone an update on what my eight sleep score actually was. I, of course, am sleeping on my eight sleep. It's I got an 85, so I'm doing pretty well. I'd like a sound effect. Do you even have access to the old sound effects?
Speaker 2:I feel like we might have over rotated towards the night vision goggles turning on, and we no longer have access to the classics, the horse, the Ashton Hall sound effect. Are any of those still on the board, Jordy? Or have they all been replaced with oh, it's still there. Thank goodness. I thought we lost touch, and I thought we only had night vision goggles, which I do enjoy.
Speaker 2:Is there any other news that we need to talk talk through? Should we go through some mansion section? We missed the entire mansion section. We had so much to talk about today.
Speaker 1:Pull it up. Which one do you wanna do? Where should we start?
Speaker 2:With the mansion section?
Speaker 1:Donald Trump's home. His childhood home
Speaker 2:This is a big deal.
Speaker 1:Is hitting the market.
Speaker 2:This is a big deal.
Speaker 1:It's in Queens.
Speaker 2:You could buy this because you love the guy. You could buy it because you hate the guy. You wanna tear it down and build something else.
Speaker 1:Oh, we got this video first. Play this video.
Speaker 2:I need
Speaker 1:to see this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's play this. This is speed on the Speed Tours America tour. What is going on here? And someone is about to jump through the glass.
Speaker 2:He's woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 2:That is crazy. He actually bonked his head on the glass and, and broke the glass. And that seems like that's, like, at a McDonald's or something. Like, it's at a real restaurant that probably doesn't buy the cheapest glass. I don't know.
Speaker 2:That's pretty crazy.
Speaker 1:It's funny to use his head. Like, he's got his hand.
Speaker 2:He's such a great actor.
Speaker 1:Went for the heads.
Speaker 2:I I I wonder I wonder if he'll ever, transition to, like, you know, being in movies because Oh, I'm
Speaker 1:sure. All the He could
Speaker 2:It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Be in any number of movies at
Speaker 2:this Anyway, eight month renovation. Donald Trump's childhood home is hitting the market in Jamaica Estates. The house is selling for 2,300,000.0. You know, let's see what else is here. Charming Tudor style house in Queens, New York.
Speaker 2:He lived there in his earliest years of his life. Decades later, the latest in a string of owners is hoping the home's connection to Trump will help turn a healthy profit.
Speaker 1:So in 2008, it sold for 782,000. Wow. 2016, 01/2003. 2017, 02/2014. 2025, it somehow sold for 800,000, and now it's back up at two point being listed at 2.3.
Speaker 2:What happened? Something odd. Very, very bizarre. Anyway, there's another story in here. Before building their retirement home, they had to relocate 174 legless lizards.
Speaker 2:That is a bizarre headline. A pair of retirees needed to remove protected slow worms from the property before they could break ground on their $3,200,000 So
Speaker 1:I was hoping countryside. This one isn't hitting the market yet, but I could see Paul PG snapping this one up.
Speaker 2:He's gonna get it.
Speaker 1:Think This house looks absolutely lovely. You love it. Has a little pond. You can swim.
Speaker 2:Even though you even though, they had to relocate they had to painstake they had to spend weeks painstakingly capturing and relocating almost 200 of the creatures, slow worms, a legally protected reptile. They're not worms. They're harmless legless lizards. What a bizarre world. But no, catching slow worms was not something we'd ever had to do before.
Speaker 2:It was actually very hard work. But strangely, I enjoyed doing it. They did it themselves. Wow.
Speaker 1:We'll do it ourselves. Richard, can you imagine trying to catch a 170 lizards?
Speaker 2:Oh, my God. That'd be gross.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Don't like that one. Fun for a
Speaker 2:I don't like snakes. These sound like snakes. They don't have an image, thank goodness, of what the snakes look like, but I'm not into it at all. But I'm very happy for these folks out in the English countryside, who rescued a 100
Speaker 1:These are four snakes. These are some of the sketchiest looking things ever. They're they're like massive worms.
Speaker 2:I don't like these at all. This is a terrible selection. I had you I had you select the mansion section stories.
Speaker 1:I selected it because the the home looks incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The home's nice. I'm glad that it's warm free. I would be moving to Ireland. I don't like snakes.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 1:It's like only 40 miles Southwest of Central London, which means that it probably takes like three, four minutes in an Aston Martin Valkyrie.
Speaker 2:Is there any other news that we missed today? I think we have it mostly covered. I think we can, say goodbye. Have a great weekend. We will see you on Monday.
Speaker 2:And thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and, subscribe to the TBPN substack, tbpn.com. Thank you so much for tuning in. Have a great weekend.
Speaker 1:Have a fantastic weekend.
Speaker 2:Goodbye.
Speaker 1:We love you. We'll see you Monday.