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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TVPI. Today is Monday, January 2026. We are live from the TVP and UltraDome. The temple of technology.
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance. The capital of
Speaker 1:capital. Ramp. Time is money. Say both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:Go to ramp.com. We have a great show for you today, folks. We're talking about the article apocalypse that's happening on x. Will it
Speaker 2:slop up
Speaker 1:the timeline? The million dollar slop fight, will it slop up the timeline? Will the algorithm handle the flood of of AI generated content that will be slopped up in the timeline? We will see. We will dig into it.
Speaker 1:We will discuss it. We'll also try and understand what is going on with Nikita Beer strategy. What's the strategy at x? Will this growth this growth hack work? This competition, of course, this all started with a Nikita Beer up.
Speaker 2:We got Main Street Summit in the x chat.
Speaker 1:Hey. What's up Main
Speaker 2:Street Summit? Shout out to Brent and the whole team. Love you guys. Cheers. Cheers.
Speaker 1:So this all started with Nikita Beer on X. He said, ladies and gentlemen, we are giving $1,000,000 to the top article posted on X. You have two weeks. It's time to write. And very, very different
Speaker 2:There's already an there's there's so much AI generated essays on X. Let's do it. Why not make AI generated essays lottery tickets?
Speaker 1:Lottery tickets.
Speaker 2:Let's turn them into lottery tickets.
Speaker 1:I like it. I I mean, they're they're definitely paying out more than a million dollars in creator payments across all the little $100, thousand dollar checks that go out to folks. You have to imagine. But but running a sweepstakes, I mean, that's time honored. What's not to like about a sweepstakes?
Speaker 1:It's great. I I think it's a lot of fun. Obviously, people are people are worried that this will create some, you know, perverse incentive. There was already a perverse incentive for slop on the timeline because if you engagement farmed, you could potentially get a big creator payout. We've seen some people that get, you know, $20,000 randomly sent to them just because they went mega viral.
Speaker 1:We've seen a of people that have just built up accounts where they're getting a couple thousand dollars every month. There's always been an incentive, and that incentive exists on YouTube where you can get creator payouts. You can there there are plenty of platforms where you can go and and get attention and convert that into ad dollars or rev share. Yep. You know, I mean, back in the day, there was a huge incentive to, like, do listicles and clickbait to get visitors to your website that you would put Google Ads on.
Speaker 1:Some of it made a decent amount of money. Some of it didn't stick around. Most of the bad stuff eventually went away. Eventually, people stopped showing up. Eventually, the audience quality got so bad that all the advertisers said, why am I paying to show up on this listicle of like the the cutest dogs in America or something?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Maybe that one actually rips. Who knows? But so Nikita's kinda taking two sides to this. He says, it's time to write, but also, he tells everyone else, please bear with article Armageddon.
Speaker 1:My question was, what's the strategy here and what will the outcome be? So before we dive into it, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security, Vanta is platform, the leading AI trust management platform. So it's sort of crazy to me how long Twitter went with a 140 characters.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you realize Twitter launched in 2006. They held the line on just a 140 characters for over a decade. It wasn't until 2017 that they doubled it to 280, which now feels still a little tight to get a tweet in under 02/02/1980, but one forty was truly a constraint. You needed to be extremely terse and extremely concise. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and even that was a relic from the SMS era. Like, the default text message that you could send was a 140 characters, and so Twitter was very much built on, hey. If you verify your phone number, you can just send a text in, and it will post it on your Twitter account. And so a lot of people in the early days were using it that way, although, obviously, people were also using it on web. And, you know, it's it's always been an important watering hole for tech power players.
Speaker 1:The tech elite have always liked hanging out on Twitter, but it's never captured the value that it created. Like, it it it it was very, very hard because people are not in the they're not in the same frame of mind as when they're scrolling Instagram, scrolling Instagram Reels. You're basically shopping when you're on a Meta platform, and then you see an ad
Speaker 2:for Yeah, to be clear, Meta captures a lot more value, but certainly not all the value it creates. That's the point of a platform.
Speaker 1:A platform, yeah.
Speaker 2:You create more value than you capture. But in the case of Axe, it's like
Speaker 1:They were capturing a very small
Speaker 2:Very, very, very tiny percentage.
Speaker 1:And there were lots of stories about people building businesses that basically exported audiences from Twitter or they or they went viral there. Ben Thompson talks about LinkedIn actually being a big growth, early growth vector for him because links did very well. They would convert to his his newsletter, sirtechery.com. And but people have done this all over the place, where they've been consistently viral with threads, build up an audience, and then they take it somewhere else to monetize it, either with subscriptions or ads, but they don't really do that commercial activity on the platform. And so there's always been a question of like, could X or Twitter capture more value?
Speaker 1:And a lot of that big turning point happened when Elon made the acquisition. So the Elon taking over felt like, okay. It's an entirely new day. Everything's moving way faster. Now some of those projects had actually been been in the in the works for months or years before.
Speaker 1:I think community notes was the big one where Yeah. The Twitter team had been building that infrastructure for a while, but they were had
Speaker 2:5,000 people working on it for over five years.
Speaker 1:Probably. Something like that. But so so Elon, it's not like he kicked off a lot of the that many of these projects, but he definitely, like, greenlit them, shut things down, just sped things up Yeah. Move more.
Speaker 2:Speed
Speaker 1:thing. Exactly. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent.
Speaker 1:Secure any agent. Secure our wide angle camera because the Ultradome is secured by Okta. So 2023 was a big year for expanding character limits. They'd also previously acquired this Dutch startup, Revu, which was a direct competitor to Substack, but that product was shut down in less than two years. Like, January to January, they only made it two years.
Speaker 1:Never really got it off the ground. And I think it was because it was sort of counter positioned with Twitter. It was kind of like always, oh, well, if we get people on the review platform, they'll leave or they'll take their audience elsewhere. I never really felt
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I don't know that a lot of people had some incredible faith that, hey, I want to build my business on Yeah. Like a Twitter, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mean, even pre Elon, there had been companies, startups that had built on the Twitter API, which had gone through a number of version changes. Elon made some more extreme changes to that. But there were plenty of times when people would build businesses, like, too closely to any platform, really, and then they get steamrolled. Whether you're, you know, Zynga building on building FarmVille on Facebook, and then they change the algorithm or they change the integration, And all of a sudden, your growth engine's just gone. This happened with Teespring.
Speaker 1:They were selling custom t shirts. So they would go and figure out a specific profile, like people who run podcasts with the last name Hayes. And then they would like print a custom they would generate an image of a shirt.
Speaker 2:And it'd be like, yes, my name is Mhmm. My last name is Hayes. Yes, I'm a podcaster. I'd be like, I gotta buy it.
Speaker 1:Gotta have it. It was like, who is buying this cringey, cringey nonsense? But it really sold a ton of shirts, and Teespring was on, like, an absolute, like, meteoric rise. And then they changed the algorithm, and they stopped a lot of those advertisings because they felt creepy. Because it was like, wait a minute.
Speaker 1:Like, why am I seeing an ad with my last name and my job title in the image? Like, it's too much. And so Facebook put a kibosh on that, and and the rest is history. But, you know, they've been working on on making acts a more literate long form platform for a while, 2023.
Speaker 2:We need to teach our users the English language. We need them to read more than, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:An 80 character.
Speaker 1:So they've obviously done a ton in video. They've never really leaned into a video library like YouTube. Like, I used to cross post my YouTube videos on X. Sometimes there were length limits for a while, then they got rid of those. So I could just actually copy a twenty five minute YouTube video, put it on X.
Speaker 1:It was cool. People wouldn't watch nearly as much as they did on YouTube, but and and there was no catalog value. That was like the really weird thing, was that on YouTube, like, my old videos that I haven't uploaded in over a year, and my old videos are still probably getting, like, I don't know, half a million views a month. Just because people are every day, they search, like, what's the history of Andoril? Or what's the history of Ramp?
Speaker 1:Or what's the history of Xi Jinping?
Speaker 2:Well, they're every read the contents. They're just they get served.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And then once someone watches one of my videos, they watch five more.
Speaker 2:Well, part of that if you wanna be a serious video platform Yeah. You need to be, like, heavily, you know Yeah. Actually incentivizing people to watch on TV. Yeah. Like, so much of YouTube watch hours happen on TV.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And X, I think, has a streaming TV app. Yeah. But it's certainly not doesn't get a lot of love.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I actually made a whole documentary about El Segundo, went around with Augustus and toured everything. And it just didn't really work for my YouTube channel, so I only put it on X. It got a ton of views. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And actually, the response was probably better than anything that I would do on YouTube because it was very tech insider. A lot of VCs were getting up to speed on what was going on in El Segundo. We're having some of the El Segundo folks on the show later today.
Speaker 2:Well
Speaker 1:He's not truly El Segundo, but Phil is, like, spiritually Gundo.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know that. And and Andrew Earl, in many ways, is is spiritually Gundo. Let's take you through the linear lineup who we have on the show today. We got Jordan Schneider from China Talk coming on at 12:30, then Dan from t one Energy, Elliot from Dominion Dynamics. We're in hard tech land kind of all day.
Speaker 1:I'm very excited for this. And then we have Matt Grimm, the cofounder of Anderol and Phil from Dirac coming in person at 01:30 together to break it all down for us on what's going on in building hardware, building defense.
Speaker 2:And remember, T1 Energy is a company that we talked about in Q4 of last year. It was a unique situation, I believe. It was a Chinese company They built solar manufacturing plant
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That was forced to sell. Yeah. And now it has a cool brand
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And new management. And the stock is absolutely ripping. I love that. I think We're very excited to have them on the show. Up 433% Yeah.
Speaker 2:Love that we get to In the last we get to do something months.
Speaker 1:Just find some random company, then all of a sudden we're talking to the CEO. Anyway, of course, if you've forgotten Linear, it's the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents, and you should be too. So continuing with the long post journey that X has been on, 2023 was a massive year. February took it from 280 characters to 4,000 characters.
Speaker 1:That's more than I need for most of my posts. I don't think I've ever posted anything longer than that. April expanded it to 10,000 characters. And finally in June, they maxed it out at 25,000 characters. That's longer than most blog posts.
Speaker 1:That's around 4,000 words, maybe a little bit more. And you can still thread these posts together. So I was always wondering, like, why does articles exist if long posts are so long that you can put 4,000 words there? In fact, I took you know that one super viral article that everyone they're all joking that, like, oh, he should have waited a couple days to post it because then he would have won the million dollars.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like how to change your life in one day.
Speaker 2:And wasn't that effectively inspired like, my view is, like, that post Yeah. They were like, we should do more of this. Let's incentivize a lot more of this.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. It seemed like he just saw that and was like, okay, articles are creating satisfaction on the platform. Yeah.
Speaker 1:People like them. It does seem like the algorithm is it seemed like at one point the algorithm was maybe misaligned. Not that it was punishing articles, just that it wasn't really processing the time that people would spend in articles and the way they would engage. Because if there's a viral post, people might be more inclined to like it than a long long essay that you read 45, 75% of, and then you get out of it. You actually spent multiple minutes with it.
Speaker 1:You really enjoyed it, but you forget to like it because that's way down at the bottom, or you forget to retweet it or whatever. You're not commenting on it, you're just kind of enjoying it reading, and then you close your phone because you're like, oh, wow. Just spent twenty minutes reading this thing. I'm moving on with my life, or I got a phone call. And so they needed to dial the algorithm in, and I think that's what's happened.
Speaker 1:And now I think that essentially, articles are first class citizens in the algorithm, and there's really no downside to to posting articles. But that post, that article, how to change your life in one day or something, is like 30,000 characters. So it almost would have just fit if you just, like, edited a little bit more. It would have just fit into a long post, but it worked as an article. There's something about the, there's something about the title and thumbnail that really works there.
Speaker 1:Maybe maybe x should do a deal with our partner, Eleven Labs, and let you listen to these articles. Eleven Labs, of course, build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs.
Speaker 2:Zach Zach Foll had a had a great idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He said, Grock, summarize this article in 280 characters or less. Don't make any mistakes. Thanks. So if you if you really yearn for the days, the pre article era Yeah. Just respond and tag Grock in every post and have it turn it back into just regular Yeah.
Speaker 2:Old fashioned Yeah.
Speaker 1:And 40 characters. Yeah. Or even shorter. Yeah. I mean, I think somebody did that with
Speaker 2:the with How to Change
Speaker 1:Your Life in One Day because a lot of it was, like, from Atomic Habits, I guess. It was a very popular book. But Yeah. All this, like, lifestyle stuff is always, like, recomposed from various previous prior art. It's all just re reformatting, essentially, with with some new flavor and new new spice.
Speaker 1:So when articles launched in March 2024, it didn't really hit for me. Like, I was not like, oh, I gotta jump on this. I gotta post. You know, we started doing the newsletter in 2025. Mid year, we started cross posting.
Speaker 1:Articles were available. I think we might have tested one or two as an article. Didn't really see a difference, so just kinda stuck with the long post. But last year so my pieces are usually around 5,000 characters. They fit fine in a long post.
Speaker 1:I was doing long post until I saw Lulu Maservi, friend of the show, posted standing out in 2026 as an ex article. Now she's been viral before for Going Direct, the Going Direct manifesto, which was a thread of long posts. And I like I think it was maybe just a really long post or maybe a thread of long post, I really like that format. And I would actually use that format as sort of a template for if I wanted to communicate something in a few paragraphs, I would sort of look at what she did with the going direct post and use that as, like, the backbone. Obviously, not taking specific words, more just like, okay.
Speaker 1:You want you want an an intro paragraph, an opening paragraph, a couple bullet points, a summary, a takeaway, like and what's really interesting is that Her standing out in 2026, it's an X article. It has a header image of these robots, and it grabs you, so you click on it. And it was dropped January 5. Good timing. Kick off the year.
Speaker 1:It went super viral, millions of views, thousands of likes. But it's really, really short. It's only 443 words. It's under 3,000 characters. So it easily would have fit in a long post.
Speaker 1:But she went with article. It worked. And when I saw that, I was thinking, okay. Maybe we should do maybe we should do articles for our pieces, and I've been doing that, and it's been fine. It hasn't been honestly, the metrics are exactly the same.
Speaker 1:So maybe I need to work on the titles and thumbnails or something. But it's not like articles have been some magical cure all or or, oh, yeah. We're getting 10 x more views now that we're using articles. It's kind of the same thing. But it does seem like an interesting format that maybe they will surface
Speaker 2:experience as a reader.
Speaker 1:Maybe. I think so. It's hard to tell. I mean, you can definitely if you take advantage of the formatting, maybe, but and and you're doing bullet points and bolding and italics, like Yeah. You can write
Speaker 2:Embedding posts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Embedding posts is cool and also images in the I saw one that had, like, graphics and it read almost like a Strathecari piece. It had embedded images and stuff. It was cool.
Speaker 2:Don't Gabe in the chat had an interesting idea. He said above x should acquire Beehive, which should be interesting. Because like Beehive Beehive Yeah. That one of the issues with the review acquisition Yeah. Is that I seemingly I didn't know anybody that was like building a business on review.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? That's true. It seemed like Twitter had done a couple of these early stage acquisitions. Mean, Vine was very early pre monetization.
Speaker 1:They did, I think, Periscope, the live streaming video platform. That was maybe pre revenue, like, pretty early. We talked to one founder who sold this company to Twitter before they even launched. And so the the the the previous Twitter management was very quick on these, like, smaller acquisitions of, like, prelaunch but venture funded. The team's been building for six months.
Speaker 1:They go and show the Twitter team, the Twitter team says, hey, how about we take it for 100 or something like that? It's a great outcome for the founders. And then years later, they gripe that they should never sell the company like the Vine.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That era, I feel like, taught San Francisco that some of these smaller scale acquisitions were just relatively straightforward, commonplace. And then in the 2020s, people realized that that era just kind of went away.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It either turned into like these mega aqua things.
Speaker 2:Apparently Twitter had done approximately 79 individual acquisitions.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's a lot.
Speaker 2:They did Telepart Mhmm. Which was digital advertising
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Was half 1,000,000,000. Magic Pony, 2016 for around 150,000,000. NIP, social media data aggregation, 134,000,000. Tap Commerce, which mobile ad retargeting for 100,000,000. Periscope, if you remember that, Vine, TweetDeck.
Speaker 2:So a bunch of different deals.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Before we move on, let me tell you about Gemini three Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, deep multimodal understanding. So strategically, this big article push, it feels like another shot at Substack, Chris Best's company.
Speaker 1:I didn't put Substack in my article. It's because I'm I'm I'm up on the algo speak. I'll say unalived. I'm not afraid of the real word, I guess. No.
Speaker 1:I am terrified of the algo and being punished and shadow banned. So so I said Chris Best's company. This is best practice if you wanna talk about Substack. But I I I I don't know that anyone's gonna be rushing to get off of Substack based on this because the value of Substack, the the value prop is that you own your email list. So you have a direct relationship with your your audience, and you could take that anywhere.
Speaker 1:You could leave at any time. You can even take your Stripe account with you Yeah. Which is a crazy thing. It's so creator friendly, And Substacks made that their brand, they built a great business around it. And long term, I think Substack should probably figure out how to build some sort of ads product that can run across all of the different Substacks, because that would probably
Speaker 2:A total TBPN victory.
Speaker 1:It would. It would. It's
Speaker 2:like a very, very
Speaker 1:anti Anti ads, anti ads. But I just see, like, what does it take to get Substack into the Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit category, sort of like Decacorn category? And you imagine that for a lot of these, like, if you're they're clearly trying to push people into the Substack app, but even just embedding ads here and there, it could be done tastefully. I think it could be done in a way that's not too abrasive. And you're getting a lot for a little now, of course, like, you know, we use Substack.
Speaker 1:We don't charge for our newsletter, tbpn.com. You should go sign up. But so if they put ads on ours, we'd be like, oh, that's got sort of a downgrade. We want to put ads on ours. But I think just from a business perspective, it would make sense and really open them up to some big, big dollars at a certain point, because there's a very high value audience.
Speaker 1:You had
Speaker 2:kind of a rough theory that maybe there was some logic to doing this just for having new
Speaker 1:training data. Yeah. So so there's this idea that Somebody,
Speaker 2:know untitled Yeah. YouTube chats is that data is worth 10 x more than 1,000,000.
Speaker 1:There were a few people that were that were mentioning this. Before we dig into that, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 2:Talk about a company that feels very immune to vibe coding. Plaid? You don't want the if somebody comes to you and they're like, I got Plaid, but I'm gonna charge you half as much.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:yeah. It's like, I'll take the I'll take the real one for storing and processing my customers Yeah. Anyway, Noah in the chat says, I don't wanna read Substack without ads. So that's
Speaker 1:There we go. Thank
Speaker 2:you. Strongest soldier.
Speaker 1:But so so the question is, like, you you put out this million dollar bounty. How many people will show up? How many articles will actually get posted? I am seeing a lot of articles in the in the feed. It's also hilarious when you see, like, a Fortune five hundred CEO post an article.
Speaker 1:She's like, oh, damn. Are you really down and you need to mill? Like, what's going on, buddy? And it's like, no. They're just, like, just boasting news and they just need to get something out so they use an article.
Speaker 1:But it's funny to imagine that they're like, oh man, the the million would change everything for me. Yeah. It's what I need. It's what I need. But
Speaker 2:Tim Tim Cook, third grouping
Speaker 1:article. He's just like
Speaker 2:he's like, I need I I need to Yeah. I can't be, like, within the same
Speaker 1:We're not gonna do a keynote this year for the new iPhone. We're dropping an article, and we're releasing it nine months early. No. The question is, is the data valuable? So, a million dollars, how many people will show up?
Speaker 1:How many people will play the game? How many people will buy a lottery ticket by writing original articles that go viral? Generating articles. There's already a lot of allegations of AI slop in the articles feed. Every time I see an article, somebody tags that AI detector.
Speaker 3:Pangram Lab.
Speaker 2:Pangram Labs. I've been seeing so many people articles, sharing them, and say, you need to read this. It's incredibly well written. Sure. And then I tap in, and it's just obviously Slop.
Speaker 2:Slop.
Speaker 1:Some people love slop. I mean, we're we're gonna get into this with the with the the Hollywood reaction to
Speaker 2:Can we get a pig sound effect?
Speaker 1:To
Speaker 2:Thank you, Scott.
Speaker 1:To to the latest Joe Rogan episode. But some people just there is more and more content on the Internet where I see it, me and you can clock it as AI, but you read in the comments and everyone loves it. And and they're happy. This is what Sam Altman told us. Like, one person's slop is another person's treasure.
Speaker 1:Like, some people like this stuff. Also, there's the interesting counter dynamic, which is I don't use AI to write. I don't even I don't even put the final draft through an LLM to, like, reality check it or do anything. I just sort of hammer on the keyboard and type. If there's typos or weird weird phrases, that's my style.
Speaker 1:You're just hearing it from my brain. It's like a brain dump. But that doesn't stop people from commenting on all my hard time, all my pieces like this is AI or did you use AI or, you know, how do you write so much? Blah blah blah. So like, there's a little bit of inevitability.
Speaker 2:Honestly, we should just livestream you writing
Speaker 1:That would be good.
Speaker 2:Every morning.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You could see me you could see me lock in with the actual doc right here. I should livestream the or or at least I should put a time lapse out of my screen while I'm I'm doing this. I mean, obviously, I use LLMs to research. Like, for like, for this for this article, I I needed all of the dates of different changes to x's and Twitter's, like, character limits.
Speaker 1:That's obviously something I'm gonna go to an LLM for. Do the research, pull it together, find the sources for me. It's it's super powered Google search. It's great. But the question is, strategically, doesn't seem like anyone's gonna be bailing on Substack today to move over, but there is just valuable and and then there's also the question of, like, so you're probably not gonna get your own audience list on X, but will you even be able to monetize with subscriptions?
Speaker 1:X does have subscriptions, but Substack has a way more, like, built out
Speaker 2:I wonder what the I wonder what the monthly revenue is for the person that's utilizing subscriptions the best. Right? Oh, yeah. That's earning subscription
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Driven creator.
Speaker 1:I have a couple people that subscribe to me and pay me just because they're like, cool. We like you. And I've never posted just to subscribers, but they're just like they're just like,
Speaker 4:shout out. Like, keep
Speaker 2:doing Riding what you're with Kugen.
Speaker 1:I I I think it's public, so I can say, like, Gary Tan has just been ride or die for, years. Just sending me $5. I'm like, thanks, Gary.
Speaker 2:This is not an ad to go and do that, by
Speaker 1:the way. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:You will get nothing. But the but the interesting thing is that Substack offers more than just a one time subscription monthly. You can pay annually, get a discount. You can also do like, tiers, tiers, access to Discords, access to different things, participate in the livestream, get this get the chat. And then there's also, like, business plans, group plans.
Speaker 1:So they just have a way more mature product catalog when it comes to monetizing a customer list or an email list. And then, obviously, you can take them elsewhere. So if you ever don't if you wanna if you're like, look. My newsletter product has grown so much that I have, like, enterprise level needs. I have to be off Substack.
Speaker 1:You can go and build something from scratch that does exactly what you want and has all the different integrations. And, you know, some companies have done that. Other companies I mean, the free press has scaled immensely with with Substack. And you go to the free press's homepage, and it's like it looks like the New York Times. Like, there's, like, 25 different articles popping up, little subsections.
Speaker 1:Like, it is a full featured CMS for, like, a newspaper for, like, a modern newspaper. Anyway, MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's Let's Mongo.
Speaker 2:So How did you conclude? So What was your takeaway?
Speaker 1:My my question was so I don't see anyone who's a writer online, who's on Substack, being like, okay. Now's the moment. A million dollars on the table. I'm shutting down my Substack, and I'm going over to x exclusively. But a lot of people cross post.
Speaker 1:That's what we do. I think a lot of people, if you have a free if you have a Substack that's part free, part paid, post the free part on X. Why not? Like, it's all upside. It's just more attention that can actually get you into funnel.
Speaker 1:I believe that the posting of the articles on X has been additive to our Substack list because at the end of the post, we follow-up and say, hey, this post is emailed as well. You wanna go check it out? Go to tbpn.com. And so we we I I think this has been net growth. I don't think people have been like, oh, I'm unsubscribing from TBPN's newsletter because I'm getting it on John's random Twitter feed that may or may not surface to me in the algorithm.
Speaker 1:But I don't think so so I don't think X needs writers to go all in. I just think that they want more copies of the best writing to make their way to X. And so if you have a great YouTube video, they want you to share it on X as well so then they can surface that to people. If you have a great piece of writing, put it on X as well. And I think this does that, and I think they'll be successful there.
Speaker 1:And I think they can they
Speaker 2:Yeah. The question I mean Yeah. If you're if they're really successful and you have, like, YouTube for long form writing, like, the UGC platform for long form writing Mhmm. It's probably it's probably a solid business, but it's not gonna be a juggernaut like YouTube, specifically because it's not gonna monetize nearly as well. Right?
Speaker 2:You have like, they don't put ads and articles
Speaker 1:No. Today. It's such an
Speaker 2:add them in, but you're, like, locked in reading an article Yep. Versus like when you're watching something Totally. Like can put who's watching football and Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can put a you can put a two hour YouTube video on your smart TV, and it will just play an ad, and you just won't You don't need to do anything. Whereas, if you're scrolling an article, and then all of a sudden an ad pops up, like, you you you that breaks the flow of, like, what you're doing. It's not it's not a passive experience. It's an active experience.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I completely agree with you. I want your take on whether on the actual article experience. First, I'm gonna tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast.
Speaker 1:So I was chatting with some folks who are really, really big on Twitter, a little group of folks who are all well over a 100 k. I've gotten their back in, like, the thread era. They were, like, thread guys, basically. And and they were saying, like, I don't think Naval's How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky thread would have worked as an article. That the fact that it was all these bite sized pieces, like, that's that's that was what was special.
Speaker 1:Now, I think, personally, that meta has sort of died, and we haven't seen that work. But what what do you think?
Speaker 2:Coming back and just unironically ripping threads. Why not? I'd Ziggy, I'm
Speaker 4:in Zach. Do you miss threads?
Speaker 1:You mean just like like
Speaker 2:Like, do miss that era at all? Is it Can you remember any iconic threads other than Lulu's and Nivol's?
Speaker 1:And apparently, Lulu was was just a long post. Corrected in the chat. Okay. So no. Nival is the main one that I remember.
Speaker 1:I probably scrolled a few threads. I actually did have a thread that, like, actually blew up my account. So I was at 10,000 followers.
Speaker 2:Is this the Alaska one?
Speaker 1:No. That was not that that got me unfollows because I posted about bringing tech you know, I was early on the let's leave California train. I said we gotta go to Alaska. We're not going to Miami. We're not going to Texas.
Speaker 1:We're going to Alaska. Because if The frontier. You have runaway global warming, it's gonna be beachfront property up there, baby. It's gonna be 72 and sunny every day in Alaska.
Speaker 5:Palm
Speaker 1:trees. Alternatively, if we solve global warming, we will have unlimited nuclear power. You will be able to heat, air condition, do whatever you need in your Alaska compound because you will have a one megawatt nuclear reactor dropped on your That's right. Doorstep, and you will have unlimited power, you'll be lounging in a beautiful, scenic mountain retreat perfectly temperature controlled.
Speaker 2:And Alaska did not like
Speaker 6:that.
Speaker 1:They did not like that. I got a lot of DMs from a lot of people showing me their guns saying, if you come up here, California boy, there will be consequences. And it was a rough day on the Internet. I had to lock my account. It was very funny.
Speaker 1:But, anyway, I survived that. But the the post that blew up my account was I I had written a so Chris Miller had kind of popularized the idea of of TSMC and Taiwan as an important geopolitical football in The U. S.-China battle. And I'd read the book, really enjoyed it. I had done a YouTube video all about U.
Speaker 1:S.-China competition that had done very well on YouTube. But so basically, what I did was I recontextualized everything that I'd learned and pieced together for that YouTube video into a thread. And I gave it a very salacious title. Said because FTX was collapsing at the time, something else was going on crazy. There were like two major current things
Speaker 2:happening. This ChadGPT launching?
Speaker 1:I don't know if it was ChadGPT launching. But basically, was like, FTX is a distraction. You know, Elon Musk is a distraction. Like, you need to be focusing on US China policy or whatever. And just contextualized why Taiwan is important for the semiconductor supply chain in the AI boom.
Speaker 1:And it wasn't anything revolutionary for anyone who was paying attention, but there were a lot of people who just hadn't really learned what ASML was or TSMC was at the time. And so just having that in a nice digestible feed, it went super viral. And because it was so, like, authoritative, it took me from 10,000 followers to 20,000 followers in, a week. And it was it was like really, really gross. Really, really it's like the clearest jump in the follower graph, and then everything else has just been like slow growth.
Speaker 1:And we know this from posting like you you post like a viral funny banger. It doesn't like double your account. But if you posted a really, really great thread, people would follow you. And I think that's true for the articles, too. The guy who wrote How to Change Your Life in One Day, he has almost a million followers now.
Speaker 1:And I imagine that he had way less than that because I'd never seen his account before.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So because he's he's providing, like, insight. Yes. Well, you know, people could critique the article or say it's, you know, a lot of these ideas have been talked about before. But for better words, he summarized, like, some key insights he shared it on how to improve your life.
Speaker 2:That is value that somebody is like, I wanna keep improving my life. Totally. Or they didn't read the article, just saved it
Speaker 1:and followed him. Yeah. Yeah. They don't
Speaker 2:have time to improve their life. I'm busy right now.
Speaker 1:They didn't say which day they were gonna use. It could be any day.
Speaker 2:So they'll circle back on that. Circle back. Whereas if you just make somebody chuckle
Speaker 1:And then and then there's also the fact that if you spend an hour with someone or it takes half an hour to read that piece from start to finish. If you spend half an hour with someone, you feel like you know their perspective, you've learned more about them, as opposed to you just see some funny post and you're like, that's funny. They made me chuckle. Okay. I don't need to like be in I I don't really have a relationship with that person.
Speaker 1:But once you've spent a half an hour sort of cohabiting with them, you're more likely to to hang out. So so I closed out saying that, you know, maybe there's a, you know, article apocalypse. I'm not really seeing it. I think the algorithm is pretty well equipped to handle stuff like this. People always seem grumpy with x generally, and honestly, Nikita specifically a lot of times.
Speaker 1:But I've always felt like the sloppy algorithm changes that happen, like, sort themselves out really quickly. Like, there there's plenty of times when we will come in on a Monday. We'll be like, wow. The algorithm was really brutal over the weekend. Like, I was just seeing, like, just junk that didn't feel at all tied to what we're interested in.
Speaker 1:It just seemed like they made some change, and someone hacked it, and it's all just, viral videos or some quote tweet meta or some meme form
Speaker 2:But there was an era where you'd get eight Elon posts in a row.
Speaker 1:That happened. Is there is there like a whole bunch of different there were just a whole bunch of different, like, crises where people were like, it's over. And then a week later, the algorithm sort of adjusts and learns that, hey. People don't actually like all that slop or they don't like this thing, and then they adjust, and it's and it's fine. And so the other little, like, quick tip is that if you ever really get sick of the For You page, you can actually disable it by uninstalling the app, bookmarkingx.com as like a home page icon that just opens in Safari if you're on an iPhone, and then you can install this extension called Social Focus that will allow you to turn off the For You page.
Speaker 1:So it opens to your following tab Mhmm. By default. And you just can't even access the For You page. So you can always do that. I've done that for like a month here, a month there.
Speaker 1:Honestly, it's not that much better. And it's one of those things that's classic stated preference versus revealed preference. Stated preference is, oh, I just want to see who I follow. I don't want to see these random viral posts. And then the revealed preference is like, actually, some of these viral posts are pretty good.
Speaker 1:They're pretty funny, and I enjoy them. And the problem with the for you with the following tab is that you is that there are some people that post a ton, and there are some people that post very rarely, and you want to see some sort of even balance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:you don't realize that there are some folks that you follow who post a lot, a lot, a lot. Yep. And then it's like, really, I just wanna see the cream of the crop. Just wanna see their best posts, but then I wanna see every post from certain people, and it's hard to find too. Long term, I think, you know, we'll get to a point where you can, like, define your algorithm a little bit more.
Speaker 1:But for now, you're you're you're subject to the whims and a key of beer. And fortunately
Speaker 2:Should we talk about
Speaker 1:Graphite? Absolutely. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What should we talk
Speaker 2:about? We should talk about x AI.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. What's going on with x AI?
Speaker 2:So Ty Morse Yes. Did a podcast with I'm gonna potentially not pronounce his name right. Suleiman. Suleiman Khan Gore Yeah. Who was previously at the time when the podcast was done Yes.
Speaker 2:He of course was working at XAI Yes. Came in. He talked about WTF is happening at XAI, predicting bottlenecks, bootstrapping off the Tesla network, how Elon deals with fires, what it's like working at XAI, Cybertruck bet with Elon, how they built Colossus, how xAI hires, experimentation, how Elon recalibrated his timeline estimates. No one tells me no. That's important.
Speaker 2:That's a wild one. Why the fuzziness between teams is an advantage. Testing human emulators as employees, biggest blunders. What a meeting with Elon is like. How Elon gives feedback.
Speaker 2:It's terrible. Figuring out what is truth for Grokkopedia. What happens when Elon sees wrong Grok outputs on X. What it's like operating in XAI's war room, and a number of other things. So
Speaker 1:Massive viral, by the way. 4,000,000 views just on X, 5,000 likes. This is a massive
Speaker 2:And so and so anyways, like, I'll start by saying that this is fantastic content.
Speaker 1:Beautifully shot.
Speaker 2:Well, that. Ty Morrison. Very well done.
Speaker 1:Fantastic team.
Speaker 2:Very well done. Yes. And and great content, right? People are so curious about what's happening at xAI, right? We want to understand they're approaching different problems.
Speaker 1:And Elon talks about it in such high level. He's talking about AI, AGI, super futuristic. Futuristic, and then he'll give little details on like some massive build out that he's working on. But he's not the nitty gritty.
Speaker 2:Small problem, though. Yes. Usually, a $200,000,000,000 company likes to likes to control who out who's gonna go out and do a tell all about the company. Right? Yes.
Speaker 2:And specifically with Elon companies Yes. If you hadn't noticed Yeah. There's not a lot of people that work for Elon companies No. That go and do the podcast circuit Yeah. And go talk about everything going on behind
Speaker 1:I mean, at at SpaceX, Gwen Shotwell has given a few speeches mostly at, like, commencement speeches, like inspirational speeches to colleges and that type of stuff. She's not going on Rogan or different space podcasts or tech podcasts. It's very rare to see content with her. And then Kiko Donchev is their head of launch, and he will do engagement with NASA. And if there's a real heavy industry focused panel, he might attend.
Speaker 1:But he's also not just hopping on stuff. And then
Speaker 2:beyond that, he's trying to create like thousands of superstars. No. Right? He does he wants you to work for him forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw a post in here.
Speaker 2:But but when a company when it like, when when somebody when some someone super talented leaves, it's not like Elon in general is lining up and saying like, let me do your first round. Let me do your first, like, you know, 10,000,000, 20,000,000, $50,000,000. Right? He's trying to incentivize people to not develop big brands. He wants people to stay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And he wants to be able to control the messaging.
Speaker 1:And wait. Speaking of that, look at this look at this Sam Sheffer post. He went and found fifteen years ago, they did a SpaceX office tour. It is so, like, it's just it's crazy. It just looks like a cubicle office.
Speaker 1:But in there, Sam Scheffer finds that there's someone who works on propulsion named Matthew McCune. McCune? And he's been on propulsion for seventeen years and eight months. Like, that's exactly success. That's exactly what Elon wants, a a true believer who's riding with him through thick and thin and has probably done extremely well financially, worked on really interesting problems.
Speaker 1:Is he gonna be a household name? Is he gonna be a podcast circuit? No. But does Matthew really want that? Probably not.
Speaker 1:He wants to he wants to propel the rockets, and that's exactly what he's done for nearly two decades now. So that's the Elon strategy, and you should know that going into that environment. Maybe it should be more explained, but it it certainly ended in in disaster in this
Speaker 2:Yeah. The funny thing is, didn't catch all the interview, but they talk about how HR in general is not super formalized at the Sure. So you can also imagine that PR and the media relations team is not Maybe super nobody in HR said, hey, don't go do an hour long podcast. If you're anybody but Elon, maybe don't do an hour long podcast telling all. And so, of course, people what happened, ultimately, Suleiman
Speaker 1:He said he's left think
Speaker 2:he left.
Speaker 1:To say, I We don't actually know what happened. But it is odd to go do an hour long interview and then quit.
Speaker 2:Anyway, so so I think like skeptical. Good intentions, potentially took the concept which he talks about in here, no one tells me no, a little bit too far. But I posted I posted earlier. You can't even share the internal secrets of your AI lab on a cinematic podcast in this country anymore.
Speaker 1:Brutal. Andrew Curran had some good context here. He said the speculation is that this is the result of the interview he gave where he said XAI intends to run 1,000,000 human emulations, a digital version of Optimus for online work, which will be powered by leasing compute from Tesla owners when the car is parked and charging. So that's a that that's an interesting development that we actually haven't heard about before. This idea that you have the you know, a pretty advanced AI chip doing self driving in the Teslas.
Speaker 1:They're just sitting there overnight. Why not do some inference and lease that back to the
Speaker 2:Why is it a digital version of Optimus? Is it going be sitting there in the corner, mean, like, flippy?
Speaker 1:I think realistically, it's probably just like agentic rollouts. So if it's for online work, it's like, what what are a bunch of tasks that that you could you could, like, turn Grok loose on? Everything from, like, you know, the classic, like, order DoorDash in a simulation, try and buy something on Amazon in a simulation, all these things that require moving around on a screen, doing computer work, using Excel, building stuff, writing code, all these things that require a lot of heavy inference to roll it out, create a plan, write some code, test it, go back, double check, test it again, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:Oh, Raghav says Who's no? When we're talking about I somewhat remember, but maybe not quite in as much detail. Yeah. I feel like when I remember him talking about this kind of thing, was like, yeah, we have distributed compute that we can leverage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this might be in more detail. But still, again, if you're at a company, any company, you should probably clear the public speaking engagements with
Speaker 2:Solomont didn't just read Lulu's going direct. He studied and he sat down. That's wild. And I actually DM'd with him briefly this And I think he's going to work on a startup. Okay, cool.
Speaker 2:So we'll have to have him on at some point when he's ready to talk
Speaker 1:about I mean, certainly
Speaker 2:has more now. Honestly, of benefit of like going and working at a Google or Meta is they'll straight up tell you, don't talk to the media unless you've been explicitly
Speaker 1:trapped or or or go. I mean, there's different there's different strategies at different companies. Some companies are totally cool with a bunch of people going out and talking about their business. But, yeah, the the the this seems like one of the more secretive organizations. So a a life lesson there.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go over to Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck. You know, I I had a premonition, a little preview that this was gonna happen.
Speaker 1:He went on Joe Rogan and gave some very good takes on AI. There's some discussion over how good of takes they are, but I ran into somebody that said that they met Ben they were like a proper AI researcher, they said that they met Ben Affleck, and he used compute as a noun. And they were like, yeah, that was impressive. Like, he's talking about, like, scaling compute is actually very, very deep in this, which, you know, he went to Harvard. It's not it's not shocking.
Speaker 1:But I think I think there's just a general vibe that, like, Hollywood is behind or out of the or out of the loop to the point where they wouldn't know the big models. They wouldn't have tested them. It's like, no. This is their business.
Speaker 3:Mean, are some like, Joseph Gordon Levitt
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Pretty tapped in.
Speaker 1:Mean, he's the is his wife on that board of OpenAI back in the day?
Speaker 2:She was.
Speaker 1:She was. That's yeah. He's you can't get more tapped in than that. That's
Speaker 2:Well, hasn't he just been spewing, like, AI safety nonsense?
Speaker 3:Yeah. He's a big safety guy.
Speaker 1:He's a doomer or just a safety guy?
Speaker 2:He's a doomer. Doomer. With that Today, phrase like you we're announcing a new organization called the Creators Coalition on AI. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Well, fortunately, we have the counterpoint to that because Ben Affleck is not a doomer. He's actually pretty white pilled, and it seemed like a really good interview. Let's play this first clip from Forrest, who says that Ben Affleck has great takes across the board.
Speaker 2:Right. What I just see Ryan says, what are you just asking?
Speaker 6:Get ChatGBT or Claude or Gemini to write you something. It's really shitty. And it's shitty because by its nature, it goes to the mean, to the average. And it's and it's not reliable, and it's I mean, I just can't stand to see what's right. Now, it's a useful tool if you're a writer, and you're going, what's the thing?
Speaker 6:I'm trying to set something up, or somebody sends someone a letter, but it's delayed two days and gets and they can give you some examples of that. I actually don't think it's very likely that it can it's gonna be able to write anything meaningful, or and in particular, that it's gonna be making movies like from Holocaust, like Tilly Norwood. Like that's bullshit. I don't think that's gonna happen. I think it's not think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it.
Speaker 6:And really what it
Speaker 1:is Potato pilled.
Speaker 6:Just like sort of visual facts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There there was a line in here where I was like, that is a Karpathy line. Like, definitely heard this from Karpathy. He's listening to Dorcache for sure.
Speaker 6:For money. I can't. You can sue me, period. It kinda feels to me like Yeah. I think we're talking about earlier where there's a
Speaker 1:lot more The the the whole idea of, like, these models being mid, that's not quite true. It actually runs I mean, it's hard with, like, to develop a reinforcement learning environment with a verifiable reward for, like, a a great script that will break through because even the great script writers have flops that are unexpected. Literally, everyone thinks it's great, and then it goes out, and it just is a box office bomb. We we we we can pause this for a minute. But later, he actually makes a stronger case, I think, because they're talking about Dwayne The Rock Johnson in the film The Smashing Machine.
Speaker 1:And Matt Damon is recalling an interview that he did with Dwayne Johnson about his one of the most climactic scenes in the smashing machine that's very emotional. And he asks Dwayne, How did you pick this motion? He pulls up a sheet because he's sad. What were you conjuring? What were you drawing on to create that experience as an actor and bring that emotion to screen because Matt Damon's saying, I love that I love that scene.
Speaker 1:I love your performance. Where'd that come from? Because you're
Speaker 2:Is he thinking about content without ads in order to draw on the sort of, like, deep, sad Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. That might be what that does it for you. But, I mean, Dwayne Johnson gave like a very emotional response about a family member who was diagnosed with cancer, and he was in the room when she got the news. And so her reaction, he was like channeling that.
Speaker 1:It was very emotional. And then the other one was I think about another family member who had substance abuse issues. And so it was just this very unique blend of human experiences that he was able to bring to bear. And I I continue to think that the the lore and the storytelling that happens outside of a piece of content is as important as the actual content in many cases. This was the same thing with with art and and the NFT boom.
Speaker 1:It's not like, the the scarcity is important, but the storytelling behind the the art piece is a lot of it. Like, people like a Van Gogh because they know about him cutting off his ear and and all this history, and he's in all the history books, everyone just knows Van Gogh. And, yes, you could go
Speaker 2:Even with with cars. Right? It's a car is worth more if the prior if the previous owner had was significant in some way.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. A Steve McQueen is gonna is gonna sell for more. And and and I think that that for certain storytelling elements, for certain stories, that lore of, like, who this person is and their likeness.
Speaker 1:And then and then he also makes a really good point that it's like, yes, you can I mean, you can obviously generate something that looks exactly like a Van Gogh right now? You can paint it with someone who knows exactly how to paint like Van Gogh. It's not gonna have anywhere near the value. And and when he gets to the idea of, just AI generating a a a a Dwayne Johnson movie, it's like, well, he'll sue you immediately, and that's very easy. And you've been able to Photoshop Dwayne Johnson into marketing materials for years, and we've had a system for counteracting that.
Speaker 1:Like, you have to pay licensing fees, and that will happen. So he has a good he has a good balance. We can go into this second clip from Barely AI. I think that's Trung Fans company because it's a little bit longer. It's about a four minute piece.
Speaker 1:So while we pull that up, let me tell you about Labelbox, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind world's leading AI teams.
Speaker 2:Get in the box. Labelbox.
Speaker 1:The Labelbox. Let's pull up Ben Affleck diving a little bit deeper. And you might have to skip ahead.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We've been spending time looking at this. Like, my belief is it's sort of like what's gonna happen
Speaker 1:with electricity. To like fifty seconds.
Speaker 6:Gonna happen with electricity. And it's and it's don't think it's very likely that it can it's gonna be able to write anything meaningful or and in particular, particular, that that it's it's gonna gonna be making movies, like, from whole cloth, like Tilly Norwood. Like, that's bullshit. Don't think so.
Speaker 1:I think that he he basically says that, like, he doesn't think that, like, an an iconic, amazing movie is gonna be generated by AI. And I sort of agree with that, but I think it's important to consider, like, what are we defining as a movie? Because we don't really watch movies anymore anyway. People watch content. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if you think about it, like, you know, decades ago, people might see one movie a month or one movie a week. And that's, like, two to eight hours a month of screen time. Well, now people are doing two to eight hours of screen time a day. But it but it's these fragmented pieces. And so if if AI seeps into the cracks of within the cracks within the cracks, and you're and it's the goal is not to create the experience of a two hour movie that you show in a theater and you get everyone to come and buy tickets.
Speaker 2:Joe Rogan's really turned into Dwarkesh for A listers. Just come on and talk about AI. Right? It's really Gregory McConaughey was talking about wanting this personal LLM
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Where you can log some data in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that one was a little bit rougher than this. Aflac's gotta die. Let let's continue with Aflac.
Speaker 6:I think it's not think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exact the same way they sort of
Speaker 1:Rich Sutton.
Speaker 6:Presented it. And really, what is
Speaker 1:Shut up.
Speaker 6:Gonna be a tool, just like sort of visual effects. And, yeah, it needs to have language around it. You need to protect your name and likeness.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You can do that. You can watermark it. Your those laws already exist. You can't can't I sell your fucking picture for money. You can't.
Speaker 6:You can sue me, period. I might have the ability to draw you, to make you in a very realistic way, but that's already against the law.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And the unions are gonna I think the guilds are gonna manage this where it's like, okay. Look. If this is a tool that actually helps us, for example, we don't have to go to the North Pole. Right? We can shoot the scene here in our parkas and, you know, whatever it is, and but then make it appear very realistically as if we're in the North Pole.
Speaker 6:It'll save us a lot of money, a lot of time. We're gonna focus on the performances and not be freezing our ass up out there and running back inside.
Speaker 2:Pause for a second.
Speaker 6:Just like Spencer Tracy and What
Speaker 2:if what
Speaker 1:if Before you rebut this. Me tell you about that. Vibe.co where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. Continue.
Speaker 2:Small chance Mhmm. That AI saves Hollywood as as a place. Right? You're getting claps to it. As a place.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the reason for that is one of the issues right now is filming is so expensive in LA. There's so much red tape that people have to go to Atlanta, Canada, Europe, whatever, international. Yeah. And but all the all the all the talent, the writers, directors, producers, the platforms Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're still here. Right? Yeah. It's very depressing.
Speaker 4:It's Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Bad vibe. All the restaurants are shutting down. Everything's cooked. But if you can start to generate the content here Yeah. Just on your computer, there's a chance that you see a kind of resurgence in in Hollywood, the place.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that realistically, is the strategy that that the industry should take because, like, having this concentration here Yeah. There's already so much talent. Keeping it here and actually embracing AI is much more likely to revitalize the city.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's there's an incredible quote in here. Hopefully, we can get to it. Let's let's skip ahead and play because he has a line that truly is directly out of Andre Kurpathy's mouth. Let's play.
Speaker 6:I think we're talking about earlier where there's a lot more fear because we have the sense this existential dread. It's gonna wipe everything out.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 6:But that actually runs counter in my view to what history seems to show, which
Speaker 1:is Jeff's paradox.
Speaker 6:Slow. It's incremental.
Speaker 1:Let's go. I think a lot of that rhetoric comes from people who are
Speaker 6:trying to justify valuations around companies. They go, we're gonna change everything.
Speaker 1:In two years Literally a carpathi line.
Speaker 6:Well, the reason they're saying that is because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant CapEx He didn't
Speaker 4:just watch Carpathi. Was more
Speaker 1:of sassy slat team. Oh,
Speaker 7:you know,
Speaker 6:the Then
Speaker 1:now he's sitting
Speaker 2:there he's sitting there taking notes. Just good.
Speaker 1:Make the social network three, but it's just about Dwarkash and Carpathi hanging out in Ilya. It's just about AI research. It's about an exciting NeurIPS, and that's it. AppLovin, profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 1:People are already having fun with the memes out of this. I like this amend and pretend. Ben Affleck on AI software. I suspect many AI native software companies are misrepresenting their growth and quality of revenue. Use of credits, annualizing proof of concept revenue, and lack of annual contracts lowers the overall quality of revenue and ultimately the multiple.
Speaker 2:Mean, this is a joke. I didn't actually say that. But he's not that far off from what what exactly
Speaker 1:a great he template. I hope this meme runs way further because it's so good. Banger. I love it. Banger.
Speaker 1:Oh, Forrest also clipped Ben Ben Affleck talking about the GPT four o people. Let's play this because this is interesting. And while we pull it up, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. We are very pleased to be partnered with Cisco.
Speaker 1:AI's new frontier. The edge. Let's do it.
Speaker 6:Early AI, the line went up very steeply, and it's now sort of leveling off. I think it's because and yes, it'll get better, but it's gonna be really expensive to get better. And a lot of people are like, fuck this. We watch Edge TV before because it turned out like the vast majority of people who use AI are using it to, like, as, like, companion bots to chat with at night. And so there's no work, there's no productivity, there's no value I to would argue there's also not a lot of social value to getting people to, like focus on an AI friend who's you know telling you that you're great and listening to everything you say and being Absolutely.
Speaker 6:Right. That's sort of a side issue.
Speaker 2:Over there. Yeah. Yeah. What's your rebuttal? Rebuttal.
Speaker 2:Defend AI.
Speaker 3:I think most of these takes are like pretty outdated. Okay. Like writing is actually AI writing. You can still tell Yeah.
Speaker 2:That it's AI. Yeah. But it's like
Speaker 1:It's good. It's good.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Videos are like I I think like Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Sell a screenplay then. Sell a screenplay. Yeah. Yeah. Shop a screenplay.
Speaker 2:Do it. Do it. But but why would
Speaker 3:I why would I sell a screenplay? I could just make the whole movie myself. Okay. Like I I so Just make the movie. Yes.
Speaker 3:I said
Speaker 1:Just make the finished movie. Call Netflix Instead of and get a million dollar advance for your movie.
Speaker 3:Instead of filming in Antarctica, you
Speaker 2:can just get in the parkas and film it here. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You don't need the parkas either because you can just have them be in normal clothes.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 3:And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people. Right? Yeah. Because you can just maybe fine tune a model so you get consistent characters.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. And then,
Speaker 2:yeah, I I will say I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content that's pretty good.
Speaker 1:Pretty good? Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there. Yeah. A lot of it's like a lot of it still has that like creative human element.
Speaker 1:Like someone will take an iconic movie scene
Speaker 2:Still all about the around. It's about the idea. And the idea didn't come from
Speaker 1:It's about the idea.
Speaker 2:From the model.
Speaker 1:It's a bull market for ideas.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It'll be good.
Speaker 2:Maybe Yeah. Maybe they feel like a good But
Speaker 1:that does feel like the next breakthrough.
Speaker 2:This idea that Ben's saying I would I would push back a little bit on Ben saying, like, you're not just gonna be able to generate a film.
Speaker 1:You will
Speaker 2:Because
Speaker 1:But it won't be a film in the sense that it won't be Titanic. Won't be something that everyone goes to the movie theater, sits down, watches the same film. It will be a lot of films that are for different people. I don't think there'll be anything
Speaker 2:people are gonna people are gonna create like insane fan fiction style Yeah. Hero's journey Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like like standardized plot. But for a specific sub community, you'll have like one sub Reddit Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where everyone Totally. Has
Speaker 1:watched it. I mean, there there is a lot of just slop movie content on streaming platforms right now. Yeah. You can just go and watch.
Speaker 2:Gap year, Tyler, put Aflac in the truth zone.
Speaker 1:Not not everything is yeah. Not every movie is According to is John. You know, is Titanic, is, you know, Sicario. Like, a
Speaker 2:lot Yeah. Look movies on look on Netflix.
Speaker 1:There's lot of stuff that's like, yeah. They spend a million dollars.
Speaker 2:Every time I every time I look on Netflix, I'm like, is these are Yeah. These are films?
Speaker 1:I know. There's a lot of slop on there.
Speaker 3:Anyway So I I think, like, in in Hollywood at least, like, like a lot of movies. Like, there's
Speaker 2:certain writers that I like. Yeah. But Okay. You like It's hard to get Wait. You said you like movies?
Speaker 2:Alright. Name every film. Name every film on the TVPN chat best film list.
Speaker 1:Movie list.
Speaker 3:Okay. But you you always hear
Speaker 2:about like certain writers, they have a
Speaker 3:hard time getting their films made because maybe it's like kind
Speaker 2:of a weird concept or something like it's it's hard to market. But this is
Speaker 3:like AI is actually much better for them. Right? Because if you have someone who's like actually has some like unique look at
Speaker 2:the world or or they're like very creative or something like AI is like super good
Speaker 3:for them but kind of only for them. Right? So maybe in the industry, it's not super great.
Speaker 2:But for the people like, if there's a certain director that I like really love, they're gonna be, you know, they're gonna be able to make way more of their movies or whatever, you know, instantiate all their ideas.
Speaker 1:Why are people saying that the Papa Thai is is AI generated? This song's from 2013. Someone's saying that there's the the most viral song of 20 of the year so far is a is an AI generated song, but it must be based on another. It's an AI cover of a human written song. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's like style transfer on top of it's like a it's like a filter. This still feels like tool level. Not not not to push back. I mean, that is that is an interesting watershed moment that something that involves AI could be so dominant, but there is a lot of, like, human work at at play there to build the original song that then was was edited with AI.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Anything else on Hollywood, or should we move on to the battle between
Speaker 2:Chad is calling Tyler based Zoomer.
Speaker 1:He's he's Zoomer. It's good. Good times. Okay. So there's an update to the Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit, which is sitting at about 60% chance that Elon wins on call sheet right now on the prediction markets.
Speaker 1:But Elon Musk is now seeking so on the day that the Brockman files went out, started going viral, OpenAI put out a a release. They they countered some of the narratives, added some more context, but they also sent out a letter to their investors saying, hey. Look. We think it's gonna be $34,000,000 or something at worst. We'll have to pay him back for what he donated, but it's not gonna be
Speaker 2:Well, they said we think gonna be think this is the most, but it could be more.
Speaker 1:It could be more. And Elon said, yeah, it's gonna be more. It's gonna be a $134,000,000,000 in damages is what Elon is seeking. Elon Musk's legal team argues that his early funding and involvement materially contributed to OpenAI's rise, is now valued at 500,000,000,000, and he wants a slice. The lawsuit says OpenAI has become a for profit company entitling Musk to compensation tied to the value created from his early contributions.
Speaker 1:Musk Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015 and donated approximately 38,000,000 in early funding. When asked about the lawsuit, Elon Musk responded, I've lost a few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war. It's funny
Speaker 2:Here's Here's
Speaker 1:the thing.
Speaker 2:So so great line. Yes. But I don't think this lawsuit is the war.
Speaker 1:Yes. I
Speaker 2:think it's a battle in a longer war. Yes. And I think that it it it may play a role Yes. In how the in how this sort of like war between next AI and OpenAI or Elon versus Sam evolves. But ultimately, this judge is not gonna make you know, the judge and jury are not gonna make a decision that just, like, decides the war.
Speaker 2:Right? Yes. Just like, the war is gonna be won by overwhelming Yeah. Domination in the categories that they compete, which right now consumer, enterprise, and I'm sure
Speaker 1:If he gets that, it's like over 25% of the company, something like that.
Speaker 2:That's going to be huge. That's going be hard, again, depending I'm sure it'll come out how much Sam owns exactly Yeah. In this in this in the case. Yeah. But it's gonna be hard to justify that he deserves than Sam given given their
Speaker 1:And also just play out what happens if Elon does get all a 134,000,000,000. It's like you're not CEO. You're not you don't have board control. You don't have supervoting shares, but you're a massive shareholder that can just constantly do shareholder lawsuits. And so that's gonna be incredibly annoying and very bad.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, like, maybe a distraction. How do you actually get to control if that's what Elon's going for? It's a very, very odd scenario to to to work through, even though I don't I don't think it's likely that it lands there. We will we will see what the judge thinks of the and and where the damages land if he wins, which is still, you know, not guaranteed by any means. It could wind up being a fierc victory for Elon.
Speaker 1:It could be something where he wins the battle, but he loses the war in the sense that it's a distraction. There's gonna be a ton of discovery. It'll be ultimately, even if he gets $100,000,000,000 he's worth $700,000,000,000 It's like a drop in the bucket. Or, I mean, he's like 10% richer then? Okay.
Speaker 1:Does that really matter? 20% richer? Of course, it matters. It's not
Speaker 2:Gabe says, once I churn from ChatGPT, they are screwed. The straw that that broke the Yeah.
Speaker 1:A couple of people have been coming out rallying supportive. Elon's saying that they're they're churning. They're out. Seems like Sequoia is is is maybe you know, take it a winner. Happy to diversify.
Speaker 1:They're planning a big investment into Anthropic, joining a round led by GIC and CO2. They're investing 1.5 each. Anthropic is raising the aim 25,000,000,000. And this is yeah. Sequoia gets the Financial Times article because it's it's an exciting exciting moment to have them pick.
Speaker 1:So the Financial Times says, Sequoia Capital is lining up a big investment into Anthropic, throwing its weight behind the AI startup for the first time as part of a funding round set to raise tens of billions of dollars. The California Adventure Capital Group's funding round led by Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, GIC, and US investor Co2, who are contributing 1,500,000,000.0 each according to multiple people. These people said Anthropix is raising $25,000,000,000 in a deal that values the company at $350 more than doubling its $170,000,000,000 valuation just four months ago. We've heard about this round for months now, but these things take a long time. So we won't be ringing the gong until we get Dario on the show and the and the deal is closed.
Speaker 1:So Microsoft and NVIDIA have committed to invest up to 15,000,000,000 into the company, and VCs and other investors are doing 10 of the 25 that they're raising. Sequoia obviously had the shake up. Roloff Bota in charge of Sequoia passed on previous funding rounds for Anthropic, was wary of the concentration of VC investment into a handful of highly valued startups arguing that venture capital was not an asset class. He said in an interview last year that throwing money into Silicon Valley doesn't yield more great companies. He was ousted in November with the firm's partners electing Pat Grady and Alfred Lin to co lead the firm instead.
Speaker 1:Sequoia was an early investor Let's move
Speaker 2:it up to Apple. Stewards. Google,
Speaker 1:Apple, Airbnb, and Stripe and has backed some of Anthropic's biggest rivals. Sequoia invested in OpenAI's funding round last year and Elon Musk's AI group x AI. So venture capital firms rarely back rival startups in the same field, preferring to pick winners in each category, but the scale of the financial opportunity in AI has changed that approach. And clogged code is just too much fun. They love it.
Speaker 1:They can't stop using it. And so they have to get a check-in.
Speaker 2:Gotta get a piece.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Railway simplifies software deployment. Web servers, apps, and databases run-in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in.
Speaker 2:Well said, John. Continuing.
Speaker 1:Little known facts. Sequoia was an early investor in Ilfernio owning 6.3% of the company at its 1997 IPO. I love that the Sequoia team in the early days was, like, doing pizza joints and restaurants and software. You know, didn't they own Chuck E. Cheese?
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 1:That was a funny one. So, yeah, this is from Andrew Reed. Il For Il For Nio owns and operates 13 full service white tablecloth Italian restaurants serving creatively prepared, premium quality Italian cuisine based on authentic regional recipes. What a fantastic business, and Sequoia Capital got a a huge slug, 6.3% at the IPO.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so sad news, El Fornaio. How do how do you say?
Speaker 1:El Fornaio.
Speaker 2:El Fornaio. As they're closing their
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Restaurant in the bay.
Speaker 1:El For Nayo was like the cool spot to go before high school dances when I grew up. It was like the I think there's one in Pasadena. It's really good. I I hope that they can keep it open somehow or someone can
Speaker 2:This feels like a FTX of
Speaker 4:the era.
Speaker 2:Close you know, shutting, you know, shutting down and closing locations.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, so much history.
Speaker 1:Sequoia involvement. Sequoia involvement. Ridiculous. No. That was obviously years and years ago.
Speaker 1:Anyway, these these guys love violating narratives.
Speaker 2:It is so funny to think about Sequoia getting a deck for a restaurant.
Speaker 1:Being like, this is
Speaker 2:right. Gotta get into this one.
Speaker 1:This is right down.
Speaker 2:You gotta get in right down the fairway.
Speaker 1:Right down the fairway. It's a sweet spot. We've been waiting. We had a market map of restaurants. We we had Italian, authentic Italian carved out.
Speaker 1:There was no one there. We we did a we did a two axis graph. Italian, authentic. You're in the sweet spot. You got a deal.
Speaker 2:We're taking believe this. The founder for the for the partner meeting invited us to the restaurant. Yeah. The food was You
Speaker 1:know, they they they actually did another restaurant later. They did the Melt. Are you familiar with this? No. Sequoia?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sequoia did the Melt, which is a grilled cheese spot. It's still going. It's all around LA. I I I I enjoy
Speaker 2:the Melt. That is
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean Grilled cheese
Speaker 2:is needed a reason to love Sequoia more.
Speaker 1:I know. They're Amazing.
Speaker 2:They're they're supporting
Speaker 1:And the grilled cheese. It's a really funny story because the guy the founder, I believe was like a amazing physicist, like a genius mathematician or someone
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Really quantitative. And they were like, you're the one that can solve fast casual grilled cheeses. And I think he scaled the business. I think he's done pretty well.
Speaker 2:But Wall Street Journal article from 2014. Sequoia backed the melt moves beyond grilled cheese.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. They have burgers now. They have soups. I I used to go there.
Speaker 2:They got burger
Speaker 1:Just a little little
Speaker 2:Chicken melts. Mac and cheese.
Speaker 1:Get a grilled cheese and a cup of tomato soup. It was delicious. It was amazing. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 1:So David Sachs says, narrative violation. And Joe Wiesenthal says, these guys love violating narratives. The narrative violation is that the largest AI data center uses roughly the same amount of water as two burger joints. They are over there are over 200,000 fast food restaurants in The United States, so this is a tiny amount. This is, of course, from semi analysis.
Speaker 1:They did a whole write up, a breakdown comparing various water usage. We were asking when is the semi analysis water model coming? Well, it's here. And they and they did a whole analysis on how much water these data centers are using, and it's a lot lower than people think. It's, in many cases, less than golf courses.
Speaker 1:It's not nothing, but it certainly seems manageable, which is great news because people been worried about this. Now we have some hard data to point to when you wanna say, hey. It's oh, the water thing is actually not that big of a deal. Let's focus on the energy thing because that actually is a big deal. Let's build some nuclear power plants.
Speaker 1:Let's get some solar on the ground, and let's let's get some more energy up into the right. So there's another narrative violation. Another narrative violation has hit the timeline. David Sachs says, narrative violation according to BlackRock, The US does not have enough workers to meet the surging demand for the construction boom. AI is creating too many jobs.
Speaker 1:And there's a beautiful picture of a Overnight success. Some sort of construction equipment. And so the the BlackRock is now warning that a worker shortage could hurt construction boom. We heard that If
Speaker 2:I was graduating, you know, school, college, didn't wanna work in an office Yeah. I would actually get a plane ticket down to Texas. I'd show up to Abilene Yeah. With my ID Yeah. And say, put me to work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I bet you could get a job done.
Speaker 1:I've told I've told several people to to to do that, at least, like, take the trip to some of these, like, new gold rush towns and see if there's a way to bring your business there as a real estate agent, lawyer, or, like, whatever you're doing. Like, actually, go go and understand, like, how much is this going to change the community because it certainly has in the past. Anyway, CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.
Speaker 1:CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 2:Room. We were hanging out with some folks at the Singer Drivers Club Oh, yeah. Yesterday. Yeah. Our friend of the show, Paul.
Speaker 2:And a number of the coaches who are professional drivers were talking about how much a legend George Yeah. Founder of CrowdStrike is. Like, has he has the respect of, like Yeah. The most elite drivers in the world. It's awesome.
Speaker 2:Like, this guy is the real deal.
Speaker 1:Speaking of driving, we have seen Elon, he's beefing with Sam. He's suing OpenAI, and he wants a 136,000,000,000, something like that. He said that he will drop the lawsuit if they change their name to ClosedAI. And there has to be there has to be a point where if the judge is about to actually issue a 136,000,000,000
Speaker 2:Call up Delaware. Hey.
Speaker 1:No. No.
Speaker 2:I got a name change.
Speaker 1:This is this is not a joke. I mean, like like, would ChatGPT actually see a decline in user numbers if they change the company's name to Closed dot ai? I don't think so. I think a lot of people just think about it as chat. They think about ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:They maybe know OpenAI. They maybe know Sam Altman's name. They don't know Greg Brockman. Like, the average Chatuchy PT user could probably deal with the name change
Speaker 2:and stuff. Oh, I don't think Ben Affleck would be able to handle it.
Speaker 1:I know. No. He would be upset. But truly, like, I mean, Facebook rebranded to Meta. It's entirely new name.
Speaker 2:John. But, like, realistically, the lawsuit's not getting dropped because of the name change. Opposed is not a contract.
Speaker 1:He will abide by the results. Okay? He will abide by the results.
Speaker 2:Well, he's also No. He's also asking if we should buy if he should buy Ryanair. Have you seen this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I've seen that. But but but I have another I have another way to resolve the lawsuit. Okay.
Speaker 1:So when when Elon was beefing with Zuck, do you remember when they were gonna go in the Octagon? They were gonna do they were gonna fight it out. They were gonna do UFC, mixed martial arts battle. Do you remember what they were fighting over? No.
Speaker 1:Isn't that hilarious? Do you remember what they were fighting over? No. I can't remember. I can only remember the fight.
Speaker 1:But I looked it up, and they were fighting because Mark Zuckerberg was about to launch threats. And it was and and Elon was in this vulnerable position where he where he levered up to buy Twitter, and he bought it sort of at the top, and Twitter and the whole market was down, and he was legally obligated to buy it. And so there's a lot of debt. There was a big question of, like, what is he gonna do with Twitter? Is he gonna be able to juice it and get the ad product working, all the advertisers leaving?
Speaker 1:He was in a vulnerable position, and that's when Mark Zuckerberg was like, I'm jumping in with my competitor threads, and I'm leveraging the Instagram network. I'm really piping everyone in. I'm it's a shot across the bow. And so Elon said Connor Hayes.
Speaker 2:Absolute dog. Yep.
Speaker 1:Absolute dog. He put Connor in charge, and and and Elon took it personally and said, we gotta settle this in the in the octagon. And but it never happened. They were thinking about doing the Coliseum. Dana White said, I'll I'll officiate.
Speaker 1:I'll make it happen. I'm down. Like, I'm I'm into this. Never happened. But I was thinking, how can Sam and Elon settle their lawsuit that doesn't require a bunch of jurors in Oakland wasting a bunch of time in the courtroom?
Speaker 1:They gotta settle in on track.
Speaker 4:They gotta hit the track.
Speaker 2:Pay per view as well.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. Obviously, they're not getting in the Octagon. That's not gonna happen.
Speaker 2:Track is good. Tesla Tesla
Speaker 1:Versus f one.
Speaker 2:Starts their
Speaker 1:own Formula
Speaker 2:one team. Yeah. Sam's got his
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:McLaren f one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna see Sam in the McLaren f one, Elon in the Tesla Plaid. I want them around the Nurburgring, twenty four hours Le Mans style. They gotta go for twenty four hours. Experience.
Speaker 1:And then and then they gotta do they gotta do a zero to 60. They gotta do a quarter mile race. They gotta do an illegal street race for sure. That's definitely gonna happen. They also gotta do a drift track.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna see them both drifting. And they probably gotta do a Pikes Peak as well. I wanna hear both of them racing up Pikes Peak. Then you do sort of like best of five.
Speaker 1:Like, you do a twenty four hours of Le Mans, see who does best there, average that with whoever's quickest off the line in a quarter mile, then
Speaker 2:The drag race too.
Speaker 1:Maybe throwing an Indy five hundred. I want like a month of Elon and Sam just racing various vehicles against And each
Speaker 2:this would satisfy the people that are saying pause
Speaker 1:the AI. Yeah. The AI Yeah. Pause
Speaker 2:and they're like, okay.
Speaker 1:Is great. Okay.
Speaker 2:We'll pause. Yes. And we'll
Speaker 1:And it's a month of live streamed races between Sam and Elon.
Speaker 3:It's like France.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Exactly. They go from one place to another, do every every different circuit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bobby says And a cannonball.
Speaker 1:And a they definitely have to do a cannonball.
Speaker 4:We agree.
Speaker 1:Just whoever gets from New York to LA faster, we drop the lawsuit. They win the lawsuit. That would be ideal. Anyway, Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training inference with scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 1:So Rune posted, do your duty while weeping if you must. There's nothing clean and gentle in the crooked timber of human relations. And Gabriel says, every Rune tweet contains material nonpublic information and it's your job to get it out. There has been a lot to read into, the ruin tweets lately. He's been on a tear, but we won't we won't speculate anymore.
Speaker 1:What else should we In the journal. In the journal.
Speaker 2:Why the tech world thinks the American dream is dying. Mhmm. Silicon Valley fears this is the last chance to amass generational wealth before AI makes money worthless.
Speaker 1:People are really into the underclass. This got a lot
Speaker 2:of comments Doesn't really make chatter. Thousand comments on the WSJ It's kind of a confusing subtitle Mhmm. Because why would you if if AI makes money like, the people that think AI is gonna make money worthless are the ones that are just gonna go sit in the park. Right?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Is that the whole point?
Speaker 1:Potentially. Potentially.
Speaker 2:Let's get into it. Silicon Valley is filled with all sorts of dreams, but one of those wild eyed ideas long debated on subreddits and in hacker houses is becoming a real life nightmare. Will the AI boom be the last chance to get rich before AI makes money essentially worthless? One note. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There are some people that love making money so much, they will keep doing it for the love of the game. It's just gonna be like a sport. Yeah. It'll be like going and playing, putting on the cleats and playing a little soccer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? You're just running up. You just wanna run up the score sometime.
Speaker 1:Even if even if money becomes worthless, you know people are still gonna be looks maxing. It's gonna be all status games. It's all gonna be height maxing, various levels of inserts in the shoes. It's gonna be a
Speaker 2:whole No. I think I'm What I'm in saying is like in that scenario, it actually just be like a video game. Like, yeah, I made a unicorn. Did it change my life? No.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to prove that I could do it. Sure. Sure. Right? It's like somebody that's running a marathon and You mean like
Speaker 1:grow a unicorn? Like like that bio company we talked to? What do you mean make a unicorn?
Speaker 2:Oh, like actually build a company
Speaker 1:Oh, build a company. Just purely with Not a a literal unicorn.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Because in this AI abundance area, you could potentially go to Claude Kirt and say, don't make mistakes, make a unicorn.
Speaker 2:Make a unicorn. Genetically fought by a horse. Anyway, continuing. Argument is that tech companies and their leaders will become a class unto their own with infinite wealth. No one else will have the means to generate money for themselves because AI will have taken their jobs and opportunities.
Speaker 2:In other words, the bridge is about to be raised for those chasing the American dream, and everyone is worried about being left on the wrong side. It's a kind of FOMO that, on first blush, seems to require a huge suspension of disbelief. But the idea's mere existence helps explain some of the increasing class worries in California, where a growing movement to tax billionaires were calling this the business elimination tax Mhmm. Is the new branding, according to Lulu is roiling the Democratic Party. Affordable housing is real concern, and the idea of the middle class seems out of reach.
Speaker 2:Yet, smacks of sci fi thinking, but in San Francisco, it feels and it's made more believable by the exploits of Elon Musk, the rise of open AI Sam Altman, and warnings by Anthropic's Dario about Great Depression like worker displacement. The transition will be bumpy, Musk said on this month on a podcast. We'll have radical change, social unrest, and immense prosperity. A little bit of a roller coaster ride
Speaker 1:It's universal high income is his term for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's Musk's best case scenario. History is filled with technology booms that create new winners and losers. AI optimists like to point out that a rising tide has tended to lift all boats. What's being talked about now, massive job loss, the automation, and the need for public safety nets in the form of universal basic income paints a dramatically different future. It's still not clear if there's an appetite for so called UBI, which runs counter to many Americans' bedrock ideals of personal achievement.
Speaker 1:I used to be excited about UBI, but I think people really need agency. They need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go. Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, said last year when they asked when asked by a podcaster about how to create how people will create wealth in the AI era. Quote, if you just say, okay, AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets a dividend from that, It's not going to feel good. You got to lock in, got to grind.
Speaker 1:You didn't say that part. And I don't think it's what it would actually be good for people. If money is out, scarce assets like art could become key. We saw some massive results at a Ferrari auction this weekend. A bunch of Ferraris trading for maybe three over what people thought the market was gonna be.
Speaker 1:Lots of speculation about what's going on there, but people are certainly getting in on luxury goods. If you don't have scarce a scarcity of resources, it's not clear what purpose money has, he said at a conference last year. More recently, Musk suggested people shouldn't even worry about saving for retirement predicting AI will provide health care and entertainment.
Speaker 2:You like that, Tyler? No.
Speaker 3:I was just gonna say I think I've
Speaker 2:heard at Anthropic, at least, a lot of people don't contribute to their four zero one k Mhmm.
Speaker 3:For these reasons. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Still, it looks
Speaker 2:I mean, it also helps that if you've been there a while, your company went from sub $10,000,000,000 valuation to $500 in the span of a few years. You're not like, oh, I better I'm so worried I haven't added much to my four zero one ks. Yeah. But
Speaker 1:Well Okay. That's fair. Maybe you don't want to contribute to your four zero one k. But if you want to change the world, you gotta raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We're very pleased to be partnered with the New York Stock Exchange, where
Speaker 2:you can go and change the world
Speaker 1:by raising capital. Let's finish this out. Weeks later, social media posts on X and LinkedIn and Facebook began claiming NVIDIA's Jensen Wong said something similar. The CEO with these breathless posts claimed was warning, quote, the period from 2025 to 2030 may be the last major chance for everyday people to build wealth through technology. Scary stuff, except Jensen, he didn't say it.
Speaker 1:Rather, his numerous public appearances in the past few months have been filled with talk about the potential for AI to be more of an equalizing force for technology. Quote, we're going to have a wealth of resources, things that we think are valuable today that in the future are just not that valuable because it's automated. He told Joe Rogan last month, it can afford it can be it can be hard to sort fact from fiction in an era of technology that seems pulled straight from a Ian Banks novel. And backers of AI companies have billions, if not trillions, of reasons to hope. Their gambles aren't just once in a generation jackpots, but once in human once in human existence.
Speaker 1:Further contributing to the FOMO in San Francisco is the expectation that local AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic will soon go public, minting many more millionaires. After the New York Times ran a headline this past week about a wave of mega IPOs expected this year, local real estate agent Rohan Dhar posted on X, may I humbly suggest you buy your house in San Francisco before this? It is interesting. I feel like the the SF housing market, like, has really been through some crazy gyrations. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because it was way down for a little bit. And, I I mean, I agree. I expect it goes way up. The tech entrepreneur who was once part of Y Combinator years ago told me he was drawn to real estate in part because of a belief new AI wealth will fuel a housing boom. Or as he predicted last year, the mother of all tech booms is coming.
Speaker 1:Get some while you can.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you to Tim Hayes. One of the comments here is interesting. Somebody, Jason Barger says, when I graduated college in 1999, I remember those pursuing teaching being mocked for going into an obsolete field. The Internet was going to replace teachers. Some thought it would replace educational institutions themselves.
Speaker 2:Anyways.
Speaker 1:Well, we have Jordan Schneider from China talk in the Yes, Before we bring him in, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector, and full text search. Built from first principles on Office Storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Let's bring Jordan Schneider in to the TPP and UltraDOM. Jordan, how are you doing? Good to
Speaker 2:see you.
Speaker 4:I am doing amazing. I'm so glad to be here. I just love listening to your ad reads. They're truly the best ad reads on the planet. Thank you.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it. I love the options. We love that.
Speaker 2:Careful careful what you say. We might we John is really tempted to start doing them during guest interviews, and I'm like, I don't know if we want
Speaker 1:We've said, like, thirty minutes is a lot of time to hang out with Jordan. We might need a break halfway through, slip in an ad. Every once in while, do it. Specifically, if a if a VC is on and they're pumping their bags and one of the bags they're pumping happens to be a sponsor, why not slip in an ad read?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why why not be explicit about it? Why not be
Speaker 1:be a little on the news?
Speaker 4:John, I give you the pass. I give you the pass. I'm ready for it. I wanna see the creativity.
Speaker 1:Well, if there's a lull in the conversation, expect an ad read. But anyway.
Speaker 2:Dude, you seem you seem pretty happy right now. Yes. What's going on? You're, like, in the best mood ever
Speaker 1:Do for TV and you get a vacation? What what what's new with you?
Speaker 4:I'm actually in a terrible mood because the Bills just fired Sean McDermott, our god head coach for the past nine years. It's some Game of Thrones shit. The GM is, like, you know, knifed him in the back. He's now got a promotion. And I was asking Chad GPT and Claude what the correct tech analogy would be
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:To explain this to the TBPN audience. And there was not a good one, so I guess AGI.
Speaker 1:And and backup for the for the viewers, who who are the who are the Bills? So the Buffalo Bills are an
Speaker 4:American football team.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Plays in Western New York. They've had a great run. They have a wonderful quarterback. You guys everyone should root for them. Yeah.
Speaker 4:They're they have reputation.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Never won a Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 4:And have been on a generational run. They've been the second most winning team over the past ten years. Can't seem to get over the hump, and we can talk about something else. Know this is not so
Speaker 2:I just looked 12 teams have never won a Super Bowl. Is that like, imagine being
Speaker 4:A lot of them are new. A lot of them are new.
Speaker 1:Jacksonville Jaguars, for example. Okay. Yeah. I know ball.
Speaker 2:So but the Bills, we've Jaguars, been there for Cardinals. It's a lot of team.
Speaker 4:I'm I'm glad we got to do it. You know, it's some it's a I think it it this is like the debate among among Do
Speaker 2:you how do you watch football? Do you
Speaker 4:want your kids to suffer?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Oh, how do I watch football?
Speaker 5:Do do
Speaker 2:the David Senra and, like, you lean forward and just, like, really focus like this? Or are you kinda writing It's the
Speaker 4:a family event, and I think the level like, our myself, my brother, and my father's levels of intensity of fandom have evolved over the years. I have started to lean back a little bit, but when the playoffs come around, I am screaming and cursing and getting very heated again. So I I kind of, like, taper in over the course of the season until they inevitably rip my heart out, not only with errors on the field, but apparently errors in the management side of things as well. But anyways, we'll see. We can talk about China if you want.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I also have some, like, media criticism of you guys I wanna do.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Okay. We can
Speaker 1:talk about that. I'm just I'm just glad that you're coming on black pilled about sports as opposed to geopolitics because
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm sure he's black pilled about geopolitics here.
Speaker 1:But at least you didn't lead off with it because if you were if you came on here and you were like invasion of Taiwan's imminent, it's all Wait.
Speaker 2:Why don't you give us the geopolitical comp for the whatever the Bills just did. I don't even they, like, let, you know,
Speaker 1:let go
Speaker 2:of the head coach.
Speaker 1:It's Operation Paperclip.
Speaker 4:You know you know my here's here's my here's my analogy. Okay? So, like, talking about invading Greenland is what Trump wants you to do. I don't think he's going to do it, but, like, the thing that gets him jazzed up is people being upset about crazy ideas he has and the pushback. And this, I think the the fascinating analogy here is the whole Ro Khanna saga that we've had over the past month or two because, like, the amount like, this is what he wanted to happen.
Speaker 4:He is not dumb. He under he is a politician who has a national presence and has ambitions. And what he wants to do is as the Silicon Valley representative, like, there is a there is a risk for him in a potential twenty twenty eight Democratic primary of saying, oh, you're just in the bag for these guys. So having like, being able to sort of manufacture this enemy of all these, like, rich billionaires who hey. By 2029, when no one has jobs at or 2028, 2027, when no one has jobs anymore, like and we have two more years of tech bros running the White House, like, the the Q score of that segment of society may be down.
Speaker 4:Like, having all these people on the record saying, we're gonna take him down. We wanna run against him. He's gonna take our money, which, by the way, is something a lot of Americans I don't think would be all that upset about.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, like, yes, your your your median TBPN listener understands the nuances of Yeah. Taxing unrealized gains may not be the best thing for innovation. But, like, the ease at which this entire ecosystem was baited, I just found
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:To be fascinating. And it's kind
Speaker 8:of the
Speaker 2:same thing. I think that's a good I I think it's it's generally a good take because if you actually press, you know, anybody that's actually pressed Roe, like, he has no defense for his political, you know, policy stance on this. Like, he he actually cannot defend it and and stay logically coherent. Right? Like, it it's like he's running he really is.
Speaker 2:It seems like he's running, like, a bit.
Speaker 4:But since but since when has that mattered in politics? I don't know. Like, the the Kennedy Nixon debates or something? Like Yeah. He is now setting himself up against billionaire capitalist overlords who are apparently on the other side of him and hate him and wanna do everything to bring him down.
Speaker 4:And, like, that is a winning play for him. Yep. And these these folks are so scared of their bags, and they're so confident that, like, oh, like, they say something and then it will happens, and, no, there won't be second order consequences that I don't It was a fascinating saga to watch from the sidelines.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's on a whole he's on a whole media tour now. He's done a ton of he's popping up everywhere, and he's definitely taking advantage of the moment. He's done really well.
Speaker 4:Because he's got some haters.
Speaker 2:Because he's smart. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You need you need He's playing the heel. He studied. He sat he sat down. He watched bunch of WWE game tape. And he's like, okay.
Speaker 2:I know I know what I gotta do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Alright.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Give us This this brings me this brings me to my media criticism.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think, like, look. You guys have gotten a lot better, and the show has evolved. Mhmm. And the centrality of it in, like, American discourse is really something to behold. And with that comes responsibility.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:And I think you are slowly but surely maturing into that. Mhmm. I mean, the big moment you had a few months ago making fun of Cluly and everything is an important part of that maturation process. And, you know
Speaker 2:The rage are you talking are you talking about the the case against rage bait?
Speaker 4:Yeah. The case against rage bait. And sort of as you're as you're doing more of this, like, you know, pushing yourselves to do, like, more independent thinking and writing with the with the essays every day, you're gonna have more politicians on. You're gonna have more just like, more and more of this is gonna be trending towards that. I'm sure all the all the presidential candidates are gonna wanna come on.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Same with the twenty twenty six candidates. I just think it's really cool. And politics matters to this world whether we like it or not. And watching you guys kind of, like, grow into being having the the stature and comfort to ask harder questions of guests, I think, is really cool.
Speaker 4:So I just wanna give you kudos, and I'm excited to see where all that goes.
Speaker 1:I like that. Let
Speaker 2:You're trying to rage bait us into politics.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so I mean, like so so so so you're 100% right. The the the there is a weird dynamic where, at least with our viewership, we actually do notice a decline in the metrics when we talk about politics and have politicians on. And, like, some of the chat will be just be like, go back to talking about, like, you know, space or tech or whatever. But I understand it.
Speaker 1:It's gonna happen. At the same time, I really enjoyed Joe Wiesenthal on Chinatoc. And I particularly liked Joe's point that on the hard question issue, people often have this fantasy that if you're if you're talking to someone, you're like, okay, here's a hard question. Are you a fraud? They'll just be like Yeah.
Speaker 1:You got me. I am a fraud. Like, you ask the hard question. Like, I can't say I can't lie. When when in fact We
Speaker 2:actually did
Speaker 1:ask We actually did do that once, and it did work.
Speaker 2:Say the f word.
Speaker 1:And and ironically, it worked with Joe Wiesenthal too because on Odd Lots with Matt Levine, they asked SPF, like, how does this work? And SPF was kind of like, it's a Ponzi scheme. And and and Matt Levine says, so you're in the Ponzi business, and it's a good business. And he says, yeah. And so he kind of confessed.
Speaker 1:So there is a there is a way to ask a hard question, but but but I mean John,
Speaker 2:we talk about b to b SaaS instead?
Speaker 1:Owned. Yes. We can. Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations.
Speaker 1:If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. That's some b to b SaaS for you folks. Also, applicable to Chinatoc. Maybe we'll get you livestreaming this year. Anyway, alright.
Speaker 1:So so give us give us how you process the hard questions
Speaker 2:question. Well well well, before that, I think the question the question I would ask you, because people ask us, like, the topics that you discuss become you may not be approaching them from a political angle, but they have political implications.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Like, it's your duty to talk about them. And my response historically has been, obviously, tech influences politics. Obviously, it's gonna be like a large part of the debates in in 2028 in the midterms. And and but that being said, I've I've always seen our role as like talk with really smart people and get an understanding of the individual players, the teams, the companies, the startups, the public companies, and they get an understanding of the industries. And then there's an opportunity for people to do kind of like meta political analysis even based on that understanding.
Speaker 2:Like, it's something that we've Like, like, if
Speaker 4:you think defining it Yeah. I think defining it as as covering politics is a little too narrow. I think it's more like there are aspects to all of this Mhmm. Which are bigger than will this company
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 4:Grow its revenue at this, you know, at this rate and will that's
Speaker 1:exactly what I wanna talk about though.
Speaker 4:And so like
Speaker 1:You guys have hold me hold me back. I wanna talk
Speaker 2:about another example. So I I wrote maybe a week or so ago, like, why would Americans be excited about AI? Mhmm. Like, there's a there there's a video on Instagram, and I'm sure there's hundreds, of Sam Altman saying AI is probably gonna kill everyone, but it's gonna create some cool companies in the meantime. Right?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Like, that is like a mainstream Me. Like, video Yeah. That millions and millions and millions of people have seen, and they'll they'll use ChatGPT, and they'll use some other AI product, and they're like, this is cool, but I actually like the world, and I don't want I Yeah. Be down to like so part of it part of it's like, I definitely think it's our responsibility or or worth talking about questions like that, which is like, you're not giving people a real reason to be you can't say like, we're curing cancer or AI's gonna cure cancer, and then simultaneously say all these other things and expect people to just broadly say, like, you guys are the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity.
Speaker 2:Like, keep it up, right? Like, why Totally.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think coming back to a point that John made of, like, like, asking the hard questions is not does not necessarily conflate with being a dick to your guests. I mean, just just recently, like, I had this thing that went viral. I was having two folks on the China commission on, and they were talking about, like, the downsides of, you know, China developing. And one of the things they said is like, wouldn't it be really bad if China cured cancer before The US?
Speaker 4:I was like, really? Like, are you sure about that one?
Speaker 2:Look, I wanna save I wanna save humanity, but I don't want anyone to save it harder than
Speaker 1:me. Exactly.
Speaker 4:But, you know, and kind of getting to that point in the conversation of, like, exploring what your views are at the limit doesn't necessarily mean that you have to say, oh, don't you you know, you wanna kill grandmas or whatever. It's like, you know, viewers aren't stupid. They can kind of they can kind of read into that what they please or, like, you know, make a decision based on what the guest says. But you do need to, like, take the guests there Mhmm. And bring them, as you guys said, to conversations which are a little deeper than, you know, revenue targets and
Speaker 1:new products. And and I do I do enjoy those types of conversations with business leaders. I I just maybe I'm just new to the talking to a politician, but it feels like it's entirely it's like an entirely different game. Like, the type of conversation we're having right now is like, we're both podcasters. We're just talking back and forth.
Speaker 1:It's great. I can get a CEO on, and they're they're they're they're there to talk about a specific Halfway.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and it's halfway. It's some conversation. We might be able to get them crack up. We ring a gong. We do a bunch of stuff to, like, engage them.
Speaker 1:I know a little bit of lore. There there there's stuff that can get there. But the politicians, at least for right now, like, don't know the lore. I don't know all their positions. And so it it can just be I just feel like I'm struggling to keep the car on the track.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm not even I'm like, I'm spinning out a lot. I'm spinning my
Speaker 2:cool thing with the CEO is like they're playing the game of capitalism. And whatever they're saying, you know at the end of the day, for the most part, that they just want to make their company bigger. Yeah. Whereas with a politician, like Ro Khanna is talking about these insane policies that will make California descend into a tourism and agriculture based economy. And I don't want that for California.
Speaker 2:I've lived here my whole life. My family has been in California for over one hundred years. It's very important to me. But and and I'm not even like I'm not tapped into this whole Washington thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It makes sense when you say like, okay, he's just doing this to like prove that he's stood up to the tech guys and so that he can go on his presidential run. But I have no interest in, like, really engaging in that, specifically because there's enough enterprise SaaS to talk about it.
Speaker 1:And there's also there's also a lot of good media coverage in politics, or at least there's a lot of there's a lot of media coverage in politics. Like, there's so many huge outlets that do huge numbers, there's and plenty of outlets on the left and the right for all sorts of things. And and also, it feels like a lot of the politicians are are crossing over. It's like, for a while, there was this criticism that, like, there was, like, the right podcast echo chamber and the left mainstream media echo chamber. But in the last year, it feels like there's been pretty massive crossover, whether it's, like, Gavin Newsom having conversations with people on the right, the New York Times platform, lot
Speaker 2:of people on
Speaker 1:left. Yeah. The NELP Boys have platformed everyone. You know?
Speaker 4:Where's your NELP Boys crossover?
Speaker 1:We're we're
Speaker 2:all get them on the show.
Speaker 1:We got it. We got the Happy Dad Seltzer right over there. We love the NELP Boys over here. Yeah. We had John Shahidi on the show live in person in the Ultra Dome.
Speaker 1:When do you get into the Ultra Dome? You gotta come
Speaker 2:The steward of the world.
Speaker 1:You gotta come you gotta come hang out in person. TBD. TBD. It's great.
Speaker 4:Anyway I got more I got more topics for you guys. Please. Please. Please. Talk NVIDIA
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:PR stumbles.
Speaker 1:Okay. We
Speaker 4:got my Claude Code games.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. I I wanna hear about the NVIDIA stumbles. Is this Jensen specifically? Walk me through what you're thinking.
Speaker 4:No. So I guess it was last week Mhmm. In the House of Representatives, there was an act introduced called the Overwatch AI Overwatch Act, which basically would essentially start to require congressional approval for AI exports, certain AI exports in the same way that congress has a role to play when it comes to exporting arms sales abroad. So if you, you know, you sell fighter jets to Israel or Saudi Arabia or Taiwan, congress has to, like, give a nod to that. Sure.
Speaker 4:And within two days, you saw Lara Loomer, Brad Parscale, and, like, a long tail of 10 to 15 other right wing influencers basically all tweet the same thing. Mhmm. A lot of phrases were repeated. House Republicans are being lied to. We need to win the II race.
Speaker 4:This is gonna strip Trump of his foreign policy powers.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 4:the funniest part was that AI was spelled not a capital I, but a lowercase l across What? Every single one of these
Speaker 1:That's so
Speaker 2:crazy. I have I have a story like this. There was a the
Speaker 1:I mean, we do need to win the Owl race as well. We need as many Alfreds as possible. We need Al in charge. We need total control of Al. I got we got an Al in at Sequoia, Alfred Lin.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:There's a couple other Albert's and Alfred's all over America. We need to capitalize on them.
Speaker 2:I I I was once I once gave some what ended up being bad advice to a portfolio company. They were like asking me like, how how should I how should I handle like my launch? And I was like, you know, basically, you need to prepare your investors that you're gonna launch Yeah. And then and then encourage them to share it and maybe give them some thought like, starters on, like, what they could share because they're gonna be busy. They're gonna be in a meeting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and so it very clearly was, like, rewrite in your own words.
Speaker 4:Yep. Like, these are just examples.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then and then Everyone just copies the
Speaker 1:first one.
Speaker 2:Right? Seven people just, like, copy and paste it in. Nope. Just like and then, of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There's been a couple of quote tweets that I've seen hit the timeline from people who are clearly very busy where it where it the the whole quote tweet starts with a bullet point, and you're like, I know what's going on there. Yeah. It's becoming some meme format.
Speaker 2:Anyway, This so so so so be tied up good bit. Should we should run this as a bit. We get, like, 20 of us to, like, all share.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We should all quote The same thing about Ilford Torian episode. What's that? Italian
Speaker 1:Point. Jordan is a truly masterful interviewer, parentheses. Please feel free to rewrite this in your own voice.
Speaker 2:We gotta do it for the the Italian restaurant that's shutting down
Speaker 1:Oh, El Fornao?
Speaker 2:Back. It's like Say El Fornao. El Fornao is one of the most storied institutions, a Sequoia backed company. It is absolutely imperative that it stays operational.
Speaker 1:It needs a taxpayer bailout. Needs a taxpayer bailout. Should the treasury should wire a billion dollars right now for 10%. Wait. So so tie this to NVIDIA.
Speaker 1:You said NVIDIA was involved in this. Explain.
Speaker 4:Well, I don't know who else is paying Laura and Brad Parscale 50
Speaker 1:But why doesn't NVIDIA want this to happen?
Speaker 4:Oh, well, because they want
Speaker 2:to Because they wanna win the AI race, not the OW race.
Speaker 4:They wanna win the AI race.
Speaker 1:Okay. So so they wanna be able to sell internationally as freely as possible with as little oversight and maybe just a rubber stamp from the president gets it done. It goes to Congress Yeah. Gonna
Speaker 2:be more complicated. And to be clear, this this seems like something a PR team, a PR firm Mhmm. Ran Yeah. Where they're they're, like, engaged by NVIDIA. It sounds like I'm just speculating.
Speaker 4:Could be engaged by anyone in the removed, whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're like, we're gonna engage key opinion leaders. Sure. Sure. Sure. And then, of course As soon as
Speaker 1:KOLs get involved, it's all over. Interesting. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 4:I mean, to be clear, this bill would put these restrictions for exports to Russia, Iran, China, and the DPRK. So I don't know. But, look, it's it's funny because there's been this real learning arc with NVIDIA and Washington where I mean, as of three years ago, there was, like, one person in DC. It was really not a company that engaged deeply with with DC. And then October 2022, you have these export controls, and all of a sudden, this firm has to ramp up.
Speaker 4:And what they've kind of seen or or the success that they had over the course of 2025 was basically Jensen doing the job.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. When you we
Speaker 4:we were looking president.
Speaker 2:We were looking earlier this year on, like, how much they actually spend on lobbying.
Speaker 1:Really low.
Speaker 2:Super low, like, single digit millions, like, whenever I checked. But travel. And I was like, that Jensen's gas bill, like, it's it could very well be higher Yeah. Than how much they're actually spending on, like, lobbying.
Speaker 4:But but to finish the thought, so, you know, okay. They've they've got they've got the White House won over. They've got the president won over. But the problem is this is not the idea of exporting chips to China is not popular in congress. You've had a number of bipartisan bills be introduced in the senate and the house, which have basically tried to cramp Trump's style when it comes to how he wants to sell these chips to the PRC.
Speaker 4:And so, you know, starting to do starting to play the and they've been able to actually kill one or two of these bills, but the momentum does seem to be building. So having a flailing response like this is like, yeah, kind of cringe makes for some good TBPN laughs, but also is indicative of the fact that, like, yeah, they are worried enough about what's happening on the hill with respect to AI exports that they feel like they need to start to play these sorts of games.
Speaker 1:But but what if we sell a ton of GPUs to North Korea and they cure cancer? Look. Would that be so bad?
Speaker 4:I am, John.
Speaker 2:What's what's what's North Korea's AI AL strategy?
Speaker 1:Their AL strategy is probably all, fine tuning on the glorious leader. You know, like, he's absolutely right. He does. He he does hit a hole in one every time he golfs. Just hard coding the weights.
Speaker 4:Back to media criticism. I love that Vanity Fair piece and, like, the last the last paragraph where I forget what it was, but there was some funny tweet. And it's like, this is the reason that all these other ones fail is because you guys are talented and you guys are very funny. And, like, that is a it is a thin diagram of not a lot of people who can, like, check all these boxes. So, anyways, hats hats off to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, hats off to Transistor Radio. It's one of the funniest podcasts ever. It's amazing. Every time you guys drop one, I I turn it on immediately.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. Never quit. It's amazing. Sorry. Did did you wanna move on to something else?
Speaker 1:Because I still wanna get the update on on on just broad China, Taiwan. I we talked to someone who was particularly black pilled, seemed like they were very upset with America's capacity to protect Taiwan, and I was wondering if you've seen any movement there. From my perspective, it feels like it's been kind of quiet. All of 2025 was sort of quiet. I don't know if that's just me focusing on US tech and AI race stuff, and I'm out of the loop, but would love just sort of your lay of the land on US, China, Taiwan negotiations.
Speaker 4:Sure. So I think the big story of I mean, there were there was a lot of drama over the course of 2025. Liberation Day, we forgot. Yeah. There is a whole another arc which, of course, included 150% tariffs on China, which got negotiated down, then got ramped back up.
Speaker 4:Then you had rare earth controls. Yeah. And then finally, we've sort of seemed to reach a bit of a equilibrium. Trump's supposed to go there in, I think, March or April. Nobody really wants to rock
Speaker 5:the boat
Speaker 1:too much in the now one issue, no blockade, no invasion, no, like, you know, firing back and forth or drones or conflict that I remember seeing anything like that. And that was sort of, like the worst case scenario was that maybe they were gonna start with some sort of soft blockade and it wasn't gonna be violent, but it was gonna really escalate the situation to, like, we're repositioning ships.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, this is this has been one of my polymarket trade recommendations over the past few years is no no no no war invasion. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No war invasion.
Speaker 4:Right? We've had something crazy. Look. I think she sees a lot of upside Yep. In the the direction of travel of a lot of things.
Speaker 4:And, yes, China has problems, like, starting World War three here. It's crazy. I mean, right now, he has, like, a pretty good equilibrium with The US and that all of the kind of like, we we had a sort of slow but steady creep up in controls over the course of, you know, really starting in towards the second half of Trump won, and that with what she has been able to do by kind of throwing the rare earth thing back in America's face to stop that. And, you know, I think who's the really old guy who does trade in the White House? But who who like had the he says, like, dumplings are bad or something.
Speaker 4:I can't remember his name. This is your world.
Speaker 1:Peter Barham. Peter Barham. Basically said You're like, you guys are ready to cover DC. We're like, couldn't tell you who works there.
Speaker 2:Dumpling man.
Speaker 4:Google this dumpling quote while I'm like, Peter Navarro dumplings. Okay. I have heard of him.
Speaker 1:I'm sure he's a
Speaker 4:nice guy. He said, look, like, it's a different chessboard between from what it was a while ago. Yeah. And the fact that China both has leverage and is willing to and more importantly, is willing to use it and understands that using it will get The US to back down, I think, is a new dynamic, which we hadn't really seen in trade war arc of Trump won and then in the Biden administration. The one thing that I do want to
Speaker 2:flag to you guys Please. A little
Speaker 4:bit is this saga currently going on between Japan and China, where the new PM? Prime Minister of Japan made some not super offhanded remark, basically saying, like, a problem that China has with Taiwan is a problem that we have, and it's very likely that we would be involved in any kind of scenario.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:And this has basically been the goal of American presidents for decades now to kind of get Japan off of its butt, get its spending more on its military, and get it, you know, really part of the equation to dissuade to to, like, make the balance of military power in the region such that China has no interest in going into Taiwan. And and what you sort of saw in response to the Trump administration was kinda nothing. No big statement. No saying, hey. We're here to support you.
Speaker 4:Basically, Trump called Xi, and then Trump called Takaiichi saying, hey. Chill out. And look. Like, they just had a nice visit. The defense minister Koizumi, the son of the old prime minister Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Who, like, is, like, a hotshot 37 or something. You guys should have him on. They had a nice meeting. We say that the alliance is okay, but I did find it a little disappointing that, like, we're not kinda cheering them on when the whole thesis of the Trump administration is, like, we wanna step back and have our allies do more of the heavy lifting. So
Speaker 1:You're famous for the Watch. Mandate of heaven tier list amongst AI labs. Has have you been feeling that China labs have been falling off? It feels like they've certainly been making less sort of, like, dramatic breakthroughs like the original deep sea. Manus is now an American company.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Let's hear it for Zuck.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was an article in
Speaker 1:the script. But, you know, it just doesn't feel like it's it's in the conversation as, like, this is an existential risk to OpenAI or Anthropic or or Google. Like, the real, like, heavy hitters are, like, the main labs in America, and then even x AI and MSL are are doing exciting things. And so you have, like, five significant efforts, and it feels like the open source narrative has sort of, like, fallen back. It's still there, but it's not nearly as existential or as just as embarrassing as it used to be where when, you know, a hedge fund could spend 10 mil and defeat Mark Zuckerberg?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think the the the big thing that folks need to remember when it comes to The US and China is on the talent side
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Roughly equivalent. Maybe The US has an edge because we can pay higher salaries. On the data side, you know, still probably a wash. But when it comes to compute and the ability to deploy these these models, there's really no contest, as well as capital able to be put behind this whole this whole arc. There's really not a contest between The US and China.
Speaker 4:I think current numbers are, like, t s m like, SMIC and Huawei production is like one fifteenth. What NVIDIA plus What? Plus TSMC plus all the ASICs can can pump out.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, you know, this matters less in a future where you aren't kind of using all the available compute. But look, people are gonna come up with ways to use this stuff. I'm doing so much dumb shit on Claude code every day. Yeah. So
Speaker 1:is the best option. Is your Claude code setup? I'm sure you spent all
Speaker 4:the time. I just use the terminal and, like, it's been a fun apps. But Yeah. But the fact of the matter is, like, I think it is it is in this is why the AI chip exports are so concerning is I really do think, like, the the the ecosystem with the compute and the capital is gonna be able to drive ahead because then you'll you'll have these great kind of reinforcing loops of productivity gains and growth then leading to kind of, you know, more development, more compute, and so on and so forth. And the fact of the matter is that China, even though it has really good engineers that can train good models, is compute constrained when it comes to development and deployment.
Speaker 4:We just translated this really interesting panel that happened in China with, I think, was, like, the CEOs of four of the top labs. So Jurpu, Kwen, MiniMax, someone from Tencent. And, basically, all of them were like, look. We are so jealous of OpenAI and Anthropic. Like, we have to use all of our compute to deploy stuff just to kinda keep the business going.
Speaker 4:Like, the amount of, you know, the scale at which they can deploy a compute, the amount of data they're getting from their users, and then the ability of these firms to run experiments to kind of put into the next stuff and get to the next breakthrough really means that in the current paradigm, America and the the broader kind of Western AI ecosystem has a real edge. And throwing that away to export a handful of chips to China and the my in my idea, Pyrrhic vision that we can still hook them on NVIDIA seems a little silly. But
Speaker 1:overall, yeah,
Speaker 4:it's been a pretty good six months for American Air.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Well, thank one you. More question. Can you give us a take on Canada's new deal with China, specifically the this trade? You get soybeans.
Speaker 2:I get infinite cheap EVs. What's going on there?
Speaker 4:My sense is it's a bit of a bait as well. Perhaps a perhaps a Ro Khanna play to get the White House's attention, maybe a little Escalade to deescalate. What's interesting is, like, I think the amount of EVs they're letting in is pretty low. So I would not be shocked if this was an more of a negotiating tactic to get the USMCA in a place which is more favorable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Canada buys around 2,000,000 new vehicles a year. I think the cap is at like 50,000 initially, and then it goes up to 70,000.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. That's not that's 2%. Yeah. Not not huge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It'll be fun seeing the the Yongwang u nine jumping over potholes in Toronto. Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan. That's where they got the potholes.
Speaker 1:Anyway Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Only waste men will drive though.
Speaker 1:For coming on the show, Jordan. I'm glad to hear that your 2026 is off to a great start. Can't wait to have you back on the show.
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 1:Let us know when you're in LA.
Speaker 2:I wish we had more time. Come in first. Hey. We're about to have Dan, the founder of T1 Energy, the solar manufacturing company that previously was Chinese owned, and it was they were forced to sell it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I believe I have the history right. So you might enjoy listening into this one. Because when I saw the t one, Energy had a video go out, and it was just showing this incredible high volume advanced manufacturing. I was like, America's back. And I heard that
Speaker 1:it was This is a
Speaker 2:Chinese quite built by it.
Speaker 1:Chinese plan. But anyway
Speaker 2:But it's American now.
Speaker 1:Going through transformation. Anyway Anyways we'll talk to you soon. Bye guys. Goodbye. Century.
Speaker 1:Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Our next guest is Dan from t one energy. We're gonna bring him in in just a few minutes.
Speaker 2:I don't think he's ready yet.
Speaker 1:He's not ready yet.
Speaker 2:False alarm.
Speaker 1:We will tell you we'll give you some more news. The New York Stock Exchange, our partner, today, they're announcing that the development of a platform for trading and on chain settlement of tokenized securities. The New York Stock Exchange's new digital platform will enable tokenized trading experiences, including twenty four seven operations, instant settlement, orders sized in dollar amounts, and stablecoin based funding. Its design combines the New York Stock Exchange's cutting edge pillar matching engine with blockchain based post trade systems. This is obviously very exciting.
Speaker 1:We've been we've been talking about twenty four seven trading happening a long time. The interesting thing to track is that the volumes, even when you enable overnight trading, the volume is not the same during the day. And the reason is because, like, a lot of the traders work nine to five in New York hours, and they will have families, and they wanna go home and sleep. And so some hedge funds have set up overnight desks, but they basically take less risk during the night because there's less people on staff, and you can't escalate, oh, some trades happening. We think that there's news that's happened at 2AM, and we think this might be mispriced, so we should be trading.
Speaker 1:But we don't have the rest of our risk team here to price it, so we're gonna be a little bit more risk off. So Yeah. The volume is much lower. So I'm interested to see where this goes and how much the volume ramps up. But, obviously, it's just a very exciting development for the New York Stock
Speaker 2:Exchange. And, ultimately, still this is still gonna be subject to regulatory approvals Yes. And the bill that's been Yes. We gotta have somebody on to talk about because there was some beef going back and forth between Coinbase Yeah. Not happy with how the the market structure bill Interesting.
Speaker 2:Was coming together.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Lulu has proposed that we don't call it the billionaire tax, we don't call it the wealth tax, we call it the billy the business termination act.
Speaker 1:And, you know, if Or Moses
Speaker 2:says the job destruction act.
Speaker 1:If people are against it and they're rebranding it against, you know, they need an anti, the the people that are pro this act will need to rebrand it as well. And so I think that they should do, like, the the grind incentive initiative, something like that to to reframe it as it's a you know, you know, we're not it's not a billionaire tax. It just incentivizes everyone to grind harder. You're 5% down. Now you gotta build yourself out of that hole.
Speaker 5:Who
Speaker 3:It's it's almost like a prestige in Call of Duty.
Speaker 4:Exactly. You gotta start again.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah. Maybe they should
Speaker 4:do for
Speaker 1:being rich.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, how many times have you prestige?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Maybe if you if you 10 so so they could call it the 10 x tax Mhmm. Where it's a wealth tax, but it only applies to people that are not 10 x ing their net worth true. Because like
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You really like Ideally, if you're trying to build wealth,
Speaker 1:you should
Speaker 2:10 x it. 10 x your portfolio Yeah. 10 x it again, and then 10 x it again. Yes. You'll be in a really spot.
Speaker 2:And so we should have if we're going to have government regulation, we want it to encourage people to really
Speaker 1:It should ramp up every year. Should 1%, then 2%, then 3%. Eventually, everyone has nothing. But the last man standing is kind of like a, you know, what do they call it?
Speaker 2:Badge of honor?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I'm I'm I'm I lost it. Anyway, let's go to Flo. Flo Crevelio, Al Tim Moore, has been on the show multiple times. He says, almost every single founder I know in San Francisco, including me, has reached the same conclusion over the last few weeks that it's only a matter of time before we have to leave California.
Speaker 1:I love it here. I truly do want to stay, and until recently, intended to be here all my life. But now it's obvious that we won't be possible. Whether that's two, five, or ten years from now, there's no future for founders in California. But maybe he'll get a spot in Cline Village.
Speaker 1:Maybe he'll maybe he'll domicile in Miami or Nevada. There are there are plenty of ways, and I would be surprised if if everyone fully relocates. I think people will be spending a lot of time in San Francisco, but probably less than a hundred and eighty days. We'll see. Well well
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just I it makes it makes absolutely no sense. Yeah. Every every state in the country wants these kind of companies to be Well,
Speaker 1:then we we gotta talk about some other some other better news. How well do you know Preppy? Let's play a quiz. There's a quiz in The Wall Street Journal. How well do you know Preppy?
Speaker 1:It is in the timeline. You can pull it up and play live. But I'm going to read this to you. So it's 10 questions on LaCrosse, Jay Press, and more. We're going see how you do.
Speaker 1:So the first question, which is which of the following is not a Preppy approved label? Lilly Pulitzer, Jay Press, Versace or LL Bean? Tyler, do you know?
Speaker 3:I'm gonna go, what is Versace?
Speaker 1:Nailed it. He got it. He got it. What type of shoes are you wearing right now?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's
Speaker 1:a preppy shoe. The term preppy is used as a slur in which canonical prep novel? A, The Catcher in the Rye, b, Love Story, c, A Separate Peace or d, The Great Gatsby? What do you think it is?
Speaker 3:I've I think I've only read The Great Gatsby.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna say You ever
Speaker 1:read Catcher in the Rye?
Speaker 2:No. We didn't do that one.
Speaker 3:I don't even love story. Was
Speaker 1:that Yes. You got it. Love story. Wow. Okay.
Speaker 1:Name the non crappy sport, the least crappy sport. Volleyball, rugby, lacrosse, or squash? Volleyball. Nailed it. Nailed it again.
Speaker 1:Which New York cool girl collaborated with G. H. Bass and Norwegian Design? Eddie Sedgwick, Diane Brill, Chloe Swigny, or Leandra Madine Cohen?
Speaker 3:The last one.
Speaker 1:No. Chloe Svigny. Although, I thought she was ill in LA, but I guess she's also a New York cool girl. Which shades of pink and green should be combined for optimum preppiness? Fuchsia and forest green, baby pink and emerald, hot pink and lime green, or cerise and chartreuse.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna go baby pink and
Speaker 4:Emerald? Emerald.
Speaker 1:Wrong. Hot pink and lime green. Rookie. I think. I think.
Speaker 1:I have to flip the whole page over to see the other side. Five is c, which is yeah. C is is hot pink and lime green. Let's see what else we got in here. What is the origin of the term urban hot bourgeoisie?
Speaker 1:Henry James' The Portrait of Lady, Wilts Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, Andy Warhol's the philosophy of Andy Warhol.
Speaker 2:These are hard. Really hard. Anyway. Have you ever been into dressing preppy? No.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Not really. I've never had any sort of, like, lane. I just put on clothes as they're made available to me. Anyway, there's some other good news.
Speaker 1:DHH is racing again. Shopify LMP two is back in action for the Daytona Rolex twenty four. New team, new co drivers, still Toby Litke and DHH at the wheel now riding with Rails and Omar Key two. They got their whole livery. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Ruby on Rails Basecamp on there. The shop app and Shopify on the livery. It's green.
Speaker 2:Okay. We might have to do we might have to do it. Might have to ride with them. We might have to do the twenty four hour watch along livestream.
Speaker 1:This might be the one that we need to do. This is this is absolutely amazing. I'm always excited when I see
Speaker 2:Car looks fantastic.
Speaker 1:Post about The
Speaker 2:race, let me confirm, is gonna be later this month. Actually
Speaker 1:There's also a post by Toby Lutke. Good testing days. Can't wait for the Rolex 24 next This photo
Speaker 2:is incredible.
Speaker 1:This is this weekend. So it's twenty four hours. They'll be racing. And, yeah, Toby Looky, he needs to do a racing podcast. He should go on Vincenzo Landino's show.
Speaker 1:He's done shows about about StarCraft, all about gaming. I've never heard him talk specifically about racing, but but what a what a sport. What a sport. Finn dot AI. It's the number one AI agent for customer service.
Speaker 1:If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.
Speaker 2:We should pull up some of the new livery that was announced. Oh, that's awesome. Gabe was sharing earlier. He said that Zinn made it on to Ferrari this year. They're allowing a nicotine sponsorship.
Speaker 1:No. No way.
Speaker 2:What is this? And Haas, if you pull up this post, somebody was showing off Haas' new livery from above.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I'm in the timeline. You can see it looks almost uncannily like the top of this toilet. What? You see that?
Speaker 1:No. Oh, wait. No. What is that?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just part of the arrow on the top part. I think the I think the Haas car looks fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I also like that it's a yeah. It's an American machinery company. Right, Haas? And and, yeah, it's just it's just a cool little you know, obviously not a carmaker.
Speaker 1:You can't go buy a Haas and drive it around, but still a lot of lineage and logic to it. I mean, Red Bull's been so good that it sort of tracks for me anyway. It doesn't seem jarring or anything that you have a you have an energy drink car on the grid. But I I I feel like I still like the Ferrari. I'm excited that Audi and Cadillac are getting in.
Speaker 1:Like what the
Speaker 2:Cadillac's livery looks
Speaker 1:just going
Speaker 2:Have you seen it?
Speaker 1:Going I haven't seen the livery. I saw Vincenzo Landino posting some absolutely hilarious images of sort of what he thinks the Cadillac should look like. I don't know if we can pull up his his post. I know he replies to all this stuff. Where what did what did he post?
Speaker 1:He posted some hilarious Cadillac livery that was an yeah. An AI image here. My neighbor sent me this photo of the new Cadillac f one car. You gotta see this, Journey. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:It's got the
Speaker 2:Drop it in.
Speaker 1:I I I think it might be already in there. I think I got it. But if we can pull this out. He said my neighbor actually did send me this photo that his friend sent him. I have no idea whose credit goes to.
Speaker 1:If this is yours, let me know. Is this in the bottom of the timeline? Did it go through? Let's see. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's here. Look at that. That's incredible. So funny. I I it has to be AI, or did they actually raise something at this at one point?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I I I sort of assume AI at this point. Who else is in the who else is in the in the news? Three teams have now revealed their twenty twenty six red liveries. Red Bulls looks a lot less shiny.
Speaker 1:When we saw them in Vegas, it was it felt very pearlescent, very, like, almost pink sparkle to it. This looks like a little more classic to me. Well, we should do we should talk more through speaking of cars, Porsche has suffered the biggest sales fall since 2009. People are not buying Porsches. The German sports car maker was hit by a lack of petrol variants for best selling Macan and weak demand in China.
Speaker 1:So Porsche sales slumped by a tenth last year. They lost 10% just in a single year as the German sports car maker faced weaker than expected demand for its electric models and struggled in the Chinese market. The company sold about 280,000 vehicles, which is down from 310,000 the year prior. That was the steepest slide since 2009 in the midst of the global financial crisis when deliveries fell by 13.7%. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:The economy is not doing well. People are gonna stop buying Porsches, but the economy did well in 2025. So what's going on? We're gonna dig into it. The decline undermine underlines the challenges ahead for the new Porsche chief executive, Michael Letters, who took the reins at the start of the year.
Speaker 1:The company has embarked on a restructuring program to reduce its production capacity and is taught it is in in talks with trade unions in Germany about further savings. Porsche last year was forced into a costly adjustment to its model range, shifting the empathy emphasis back to petrol and hybrid models and shelving plans for new electric vehicles falling
Speaker 2:Yeah. The market has just completely rejected.
Speaker 1:Do you think they will ever ship the I can't even remember. What's their new hypercar? The one that is the it goes Carrera GT nine eighteen Spider, and then it was the Mission e or Mission That was supposed to be the electric hypercar from Porsche, and it was rumored for years. And we saw a lot of the other hypercars. There was a whole idea of, like, there's gonna be a new holy trinity.
Speaker 1:The holy trinity, of course, is what the nine eighteen Spider, the LaFerrari, or the Enzo, and the p one. And then you kind of go back and you retcon a holy trinity out of the Carrera GT, the f 40, like, you kind of piece it together with the McLaren f one. Even though that wasn't really a trilogy, people sort of put those into, like, legendary bucket together. And there was this idea that, okay, maybe McLaren's coming out with a W one. That'll be exciting.
Speaker 1:You have the f 80. That's exciting. And then maybe Porsche will come in with something that's in the lineage of the Carrera GT and the 09/18 Spider. And if they'd looked if they bred the room around the 09/18, seemed like Carrier GT was way more popular. So maybe go back to that or do something there.
Speaker 2:Well, Ford's
Speaker 1:ask you.
Speaker 2:My beer. Yeah. Because they're coming in with a new hypercar.
Speaker 1:That's true. Do we have any details? So they did confirm that Ford will be making a hypercar or supercar
Speaker 2:In 2027.
Speaker 1:And it's not just a continuation of the Ford GT. It's not a Ford GT v three because there's been a number of those. We had the good fortune of seeing one on the track over the weekend. Looked beautiful out there. Performed very well.
Speaker 1:But back to Porsche while you look that up. Last last year's sales slump has been partly due to supply gaps for the seven for the seven eighteen and the Macan, its best selling model. So they're not making enough of those. Porsche stopped selling petrol versions of both models in Europe over a failure to comply with EU cybersecurity regulations. What?
Speaker 1:Woah. They didn't they gotta get on CrowdStrike and decided against developing replacements that would have met new standards. So they're they're down. It's a rough they they they they've had a number of really high growth years. They came roaring back after the two thousand nine global financial crisis.
Speaker 1:2010, they were up 25%. 2011, they were up 20%. They were putting up 20% growth years for five years straight, basically. Then the last decade's been a little bit slower, but not contracting. And now we're we're we're way down, way off way off peak, which is not good.
Speaker 1:So despite an increase in US tariffs announced in 2025, North America was its best performing region, down only a few 100 units compared with significant declines elsewhere. Sales collapsed by 16% in Germany, Porsche's home market with a 13% decline for Europe. Do you wanna give everyone an update on t one energy, Dan Marcello? Because I believe
Speaker 2:we'll reschedule. Sorry, everybody. Everyone was We're gonna reschedule. There's a scheduling scheduling mix up. It happens.
Speaker 2:So we'll get Dan back on.
Speaker 1:So the next guest will be Elliot from Dominion Dynamics at 01:25 in about five minutes. So I'm going to continue with this Porsche piece. Continuing with weak demand in China where European carmakers have found it increasingly difficult to sell luxury vehicles amid growing domestic competition, also weighed on the tally. Yeah. In China, I mean, there's a lot of homegrown heroes.
Speaker 1:You're you're really excited about your national champion, whether it's Huawei or some phone maker. It seems a little silly, but the cars are cheap. They're great. They have fun, crazy features. They can jump up and down.
Speaker 1:They can go zero to 60 in two seconds. They look exactly like Porsches. And if you're a local, you're just looking at the dollars and cents. And then also, you're supporting your buddy who runs the company or builds it online. You know?
Speaker 1:Why not? Buy buy local. You know? It's popular over here. It's popular over there.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. I'm trying
Speaker 1:figure 40 out 1,000 Porsches in in China, which has been down 26% on the previous year, and it's under half the total for 2022. So back in 2022, they were selling 80,000 cars. Now they're selling 40,000. That's not good. You wanna be up into the right, and they are down into the right.
Speaker 2:Sorry. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out how much of a factor according According to registration data for the full year of 2025, Chinese branded auto manufacturers sold approximately 60,000 to 70,000 vehicles in Germany. Yeah. That's still only two and a half percent of the total German car market.
Speaker 2:But if that's eating into Porsche's sale of some of these, like, kind of more entry level EVs Yep. Could definitely be a real factor.
Speaker 1:Cool. Well, we I believe we have Elliot in the restroom waiting room a little bit early. I see no reason not to bring him in as long as he's ready to hop into the TVP and UltraDome. Let's do it. Oh, we bring him in.
Speaker 1:How you doing?
Speaker 2:What's happening? Hey, guys.
Speaker 1:How are you?
Speaker 2:Great to have you on the show. Would love a quick intro on yourself and the company.
Speaker 7:Sure. Nice to meet you guys. Elliot Pence. So founder, CEO of Dominion Dynamics. Dominion is building distributed, attributable mesh networks in the Arctic amongst other things.
Speaker 7:Kind of the wedge in.
Speaker 2:Interesting. How how do you start what brings you to building something like this?
Speaker 7:Look. The Arctic is a a huge challenge, as is very clear over the last couple of months. It's been kind of at the foreground of geopolitics. Canada has underinvested in securing the Arctic. Awareness is core to securing it, and we're building for that.
Speaker 7:So we started in June and have built about a dozen products, deployed them a few times, and about to deploy them again in just outside of the Northwest Passage. So the highest north up.
Speaker 2:Very cool. So what does actually what does it actually look like in practice? These are hardware that is being deployed, but give a sense of it more practically.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So it's basically it's us building on top of COTS systems. So we're not building the hardware.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:We're using radios that are, you know, from Meshtastic to Persistent Systems to GoTenna to Syllabus. We build software that sits on top of that RF that allows rangers, which is Canada's kind of reservist force that exists across the country, but in particular in the Arctic, to capture more information from their environments, allows them to take videos, to take pictures, to do voice notes. We compress that information down and then manage that across a mesh network, and then we reinflate that data when it gets to a a satellite backhaul and push it up into a common operating picture.
Speaker 2:Very interesting. So what give me give me a sense of how how the rangers even approach trying to secure and understand the Arctic. I imagine it's like one ranger for every, you know, multiple thousand square miles. Like, it's not Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's a
Speaker 2:very large area. Imagine they can't have people everywhere.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. This is the fundamental challenge. Right? There's 5,500 rangers across the country.
Speaker 7:Canada has a coastline of 200,000 kilometers. Their principal task is they do a sort of anomaly detection patrols every other week. And on those patrols, they're often out for sort of forty eight hours looking to see if they can find anomalies, whether that's, like, on roads, whether that's in the water, drones in the sky. But they're radioing that stuff back, and they're capturing it in kind of an analog way. What we're building is a way for them to capture all that data, store it, and then to start thinking about, okay, well, what are some predictive processes that we could build into this this community of 5,500 reservists.
Speaker 2:Do they do they do they role as kinda like a little squad or is it just like one guy out there on a boat? Of course. Just like It's
Speaker 1:a a steed.
Speaker 2:It's a Yeah. You can I can just imagine, you know, a a movie of, like, you know, Lone Ranger? It's one guy out there just going crazy in the wilderness thinking that They
Speaker 7:roll deep. It's like $30.30 per patrol. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:That's And then, you know, they're doing this all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So Where where What kind of what Oh, sorry. So specifically, the anomalies that they're looking for, is that, like, foreign intrusion Yeah. Like surveillance?
Speaker 7:Well, it's a mix of it's a mix of things. Right? It's like, you know, is a roadblock that's critical for a community. You know, a few years ago, we had a Chinese balloon that really nobody knew about for a while. There's indications that there's buoys in some of the the channels up in the Arctic.
Speaker 7:So it's it's both strategic and just tactical of, like, how do I get to where I need to be going in an emergency?
Speaker 1:Is the buoy like a like the Chinese weather balloon story where you just kind of, like, send it off and, you know, collect whatever data you can, basically?
Speaker 7:Effectively. Right? I mean, part of what what we believe is happening just outside of the Arctic is they basically put buoys in currents that brings it through the Arctic, and they're just sucking up information about what is the operating dynamic like. So we we wanna be ahead of that, and we wanna
Speaker 1:Is that like is that like how how thick the ice is? So if you brought an icebreaker ship, like, how big would that ship need to be? How many would you need to get through to bring a warship through or something like that? Just strategic intelligence.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Honestly, I'm not sure why.
Speaker 1:But But that's one possible reason if you were in charge, you'd be doing that. Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Why why this market? How does this how does this fit? It's it's like beautifully niche
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In that, you know, probably, somewhat of a small market initially, but you can probably saturate it and then expand from there. But but why, yeah, why specifically the the Rangers?
Speaker 7:Well, if you so the Rangers were were the sort of least technically advanced group, but they had the hardest problem set. Mhmm. And, you know, for Canada and for the NATO alliance, the Arctic is becoming really quite critical. Mhmm. And so it's sort of new niche right now, but it also gives us sort of a a good user community to build a useful product and have an extreme delta, like an extreme effect on.
Speaker 7:Totally. So we wanna build, you know, broader than just that community, but that's a good story.
Speaker 2:This is like the iPhone moment for the Rangers. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1:Where are you building the company? Where are you based? Where's the team based? What's hiring look like?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So it's a very Canadian company. It's Canadian company. It's headquartered in Ottawa. We have offices in Kingston, Toronto, and Ottawa.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I'll be based in Ottawa. I've been based in The US and DC for Yeah. For the past twenty years. It's backed principally by Canadians as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw.
Speaker 7:But but yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about the hiring? Is is is Canada caught up to America with the defense tech fervor? The the Palmer Lucky podcasts have not reached Canada yet?
Speaker 2:They get stopped at the border.
Speaker 1:They get stopped
Speaker 2:at the border.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, but seriously, like, like, where are you recruiting from? Who who Yeah. What type of people are you recruiting? And is there this idea of, like, serving the national interest, working in government technology that might be slower?
Speaker 1:There might be it might be harder. Might be longer hours. It might be more technical, but there's some sort of light at the end of the tunnel in terms of impact.
Speaker 7:Yeah. There's no TBPN in Canada yet. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this this interview is making me feel like TBPN is the TBPN for Canada. Yeah. We gotta I know Carney's not making it seem like we're all big one one big happy family last forty eight hours, but we're still in our in our in our world, we're still family.
Speaker 4:We're good.
Speaker 1:We're still family.
Speaker 7:So so Canada has not caught up on the defense tech sort of surge.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:That's kind of what we're looking to catalyze. Mhmm. I would say that when we raised our pre seed Mhmm. We had, you know, literally hundreds of Canadians that are working at US companies come back up and wanna build something for sovereign capability or sovereign capacity. So, you know, and there's an immense amount of talent in Canada.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Like the water in the corridor is ridiculous. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Talk about the process of actually selling into the government and how it's different. I think most people will be familiar with the American defense tech arc of SBIRs, program of record, how you kind of sell into the US government, the Department of War. What's different? What's similar? How are you thinking about go to market?
Speaker 7:Well, the the thing that's similar is they have a version of the SBIRs in Canada. They call it ideas. I would say it's a little slower, a little less money, a little less diverse.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:But it still sort of doesn't get you into a program of record. So you still need to figure out how do you get into those kind of long tail contracts.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:What's different with Canada, and this is changing right now, is there's no version of an OTA. Mhmm. There's no other transaction authority, so you can't getting onto a contract is a real challenge, and that's what we're hoping to to change and catalyze and lobby for. Because without the ability to get on contract, this market doesn't make sense for anybody. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Government knows it and is trying to change it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's a very Canadian company. But is this just a foothold, and then ultimately, you'll sell to folks in Alaska, Greenland maybe, The Nordics? Like, where do you see this going over time? Is it like, if you can do it in Canada, you can do it anywhere?
Speaker 7:Yeah. The basic logic is this is the hardest operating environment on Earth. If you can build tech that works in the Arctic, it will be valuable to everybody, The US, Europe, NATO allies.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:It doesn't matter. I don't wanna build just a Canadian company just focused on Canada. Yeah. This is a Canadian company focused on the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what does the supply chain look like? You mean, you mentioned that you're you're partnering with, like, GoTenna and building on top of a lot of things. Does that make it less capital intensive? And you're you you you Yeah.
Speaker 1:You do need to build stuff on
Speaker 2:top of it, but it
Speaker 1:looks more like software teams, engineers, and you're maybe able to match it with the money that's coming from the government on the sales side?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. We're definitely software first. Mhmm. There is a supply chain in Canada.
Speaker 7:It is pretty extensive. It's actually built pretty I mean, most of Canada's defense hardware is American, about 80% of it. Yeah. And so they're integrated into large American platforms.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But we are a software first company. We're taking a similar approach to a lot of the other neo primes where you start off with software. You realize you need to do hardware, you vertically integrate, you push platforms, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what's exciting on the connectivity side? Obviously, the star the Starlink story is big. Is is that the main driver of of progress there? Are there any other connectivity stories that you've been benefiting from?
Speaker 7:Well, one of the challenges is that Starlink isn't so the polar orbit doesn't have a ton of start set.
Speaker 1:I didn't realize that.
Speaker 7:Orbit sucks. Right? Like, there's nobody that really does polar orbit.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:And so that's actually what we're solving for. We're solving for localized connectivity.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:The Starlink, Iridium, OneWeb, there's a Canadian company called Telesat. They're all kind of coming up there, but the connectivity still sucks.
Speaker 8:Interesting.
Speaker 7:And that, like, it's across like, it affects, you know, your localization, your PNT Yeah. How you move autonomous systems. So connectivity is a real challenge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you have an idea of how Astronis fits in here? I know that they do geostationary large satellites for Internet. They were putting one over Taiwan, and they were putting one over Yep. Different countries.
Speaker 1:Is is that something that they could track? I mean, obviously, we can Yeah. Ask it from them directly, but I'm wondering if you've gone down that rabbit hole.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You know, we're we're going down that rabbit hole now. There's a bunch of new providers, and I think that the satellite problem will be solved over the next five years, but, like, five years is a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great news. Well, we got it. So much, yeah, we gotta hit the gong. Tell us, how much do raise?
Speaker 2:Biggest what's what's the biggest seed round in Canadian history?
Speaker 7:I think it might be the second biggest Canadian seed round in history. Definitely biggest in defense.
Speaker 2:Well, this is gonna be the biggest gong hit in Canadian history. Okay. Good. I think so. Like, how much?
Speaker 2:$21,000,000. There we go. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on. And, glad glad you guys are focused on the Arctic, cultivating Arctic power.
Speaker 2:Keep us safe.
Speaker 7:Thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Phil and Matt Grimm in the studio in the TBP at Ultradome. Come on. Come on down, guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time to come to the TBP at Ultradome. Great to see you. Good to see you. Two of the most athletic men in tech, both athletes in their own rights.
Speaker 2:Somebody else
Speaker 1:Bench press world champion. Bench press high school champion. What was the what was the stat again? At the age of 17. 17.
Speaker 8:Broke a bench state record for New York.
Speaker 4:Let's go.
Speaker 1:That's the real news.
Speaker 2:What what was the actual amount?
Speaker 1:The weight? Nothing crazy.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Good. What's the number?
Speaker 8:Three three
Speaker 2:plates? It was it was two seventy five.
Speaker 8:At the time, I could
Speaker 1:do three plates. Okay.
Speaker 8:I overshot it and I did three fifty five.
Speaker 2:Oh, no.
Speaker 8:Didn't actually get to do a three thirty five.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. But it is what it is.
Speaker 2:Wait. That so that was a high school state record. Yeah. Yeah. I was
Speaker 8:for age and weight class. I was 17. Amazing. I made, one ninety at
Speaker 7:the time.
Speaker 1:And what's latest on the Murph? Is this an annual thing now?
Speaker 5:It's an annual thing. We're doing it again this year, rolling it back, doing
Speaker 1:Do you beat your LA?
Speaker 5:Definitely beating the time.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah? Yeah. I have
Speaker 5:one one hour goal. So I was an hour and twelve minutes last year.
Speaker 1:Okay. You're gonna shave off twelve minutes.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's what? 20% of the time? A lot
Speaker 2:of training. Yeah. You're come out and do it this year?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'll be
Speaker 2:Last year,
Speaker 1:there was
Speaker 5:a lot of talk and then not a lot of follow through.
Speaker 2:So, you know, you Well, you you You coming out heavy.
Speaker 1:You know you know, when we started the show, you invited me down and we did a Murph or we we didn't even do a full Murph. We just did like some training and
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 1:completely dead. And I went down and I had like a fever, like a month. Was brutal. I was so sick doing the show. It was absolutely
Speaker 5:This year, yeah, we're rolling it back and then most importantly, we're gonna do a big one in in Ohio. It's with Ohio State Cool. And then of of the launching of our All Center One factory there Okay. With everything getting up and moving. By the time the Murph comes around, we'll be just opening for production at the factory there.
Speaker 5:So it'll be a pretty big Okay. Good day for us.
Speaker 2:Great timing.
Speaker 1:Let let let's rewind. Introduce yourselves just so we have it on the record. I think everyone knows since you repeat guests, but kick it off.
Speaker 8:Oh, I mean, I'm Phil. I'm the co founder and CEO of Dirac. Yeah. We are building the first AI native Mhmm. Production orchestration platform starting with automated work instructions.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:And then I'm Matt Graham, the co founder and COO of Andro Industries. Okay.
Speaker 1:And then why are you two here today together?
Speaker 8:Oh. We are very, very fortunate to chat with you guys about an excellent partnership that the folks at Dirac and Andruil have come to. Cool. We signed a excellent multi year agreement
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:To roll out Dirac across all of Anwar's manufacturing facilities.
Speaker 1:Okay. So that includes the one in Ohio?
Speaker 2:Will include the one in Ohio. Okay. Yes.
Speaker 5:So I I I first met Phil about two years ago in Change. There was a a video that they sent around that went kinda viral in in kind of manufacturing tech nerd circles, and it was a video of the an earlier iteration of their BuildOS
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Showing how you could go from a model in CAD Mhmm. And that the, the BuildOS platform would then take that, break it down, and turn that into instructions for factory floor workers to actually put together and and assemble. So Yeah. I saw the video, reached out, and said, like, hey. This seems kinda cool.
Speaker 5:We've got a lot of factories.
Speaker 2:We're we're growing. We're building. You know, could we could we set up a call?
Speaker 5:So we start kinda
Speaker 2:did a couple of calls, did a
Speaker 5:couple of videos, you know, video Zoom screens, and then I brought brought them in to do a proof of concept, and we've been kinda building together for the last two years fully integrating the BuildOS platform into our existing suite of tools. We call the tools the the Arsenal OS that is the combination of our ERP on the back end Mhmm. Then our our PLM that our CAD designers use every day to design the software, our MES on the floor that our production workers are interacting with, and then getting a Dirac's build OS plugged directly into that Sure. Which will then reduce the amount of time going from an idea on a whiteboard to a model in CAD, then ultimately to those work instructions that the factory floor workers need to actually assemble the products.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. So with with BuildOS implemented, we've seen pretty wild, wild improvements in the in the time that it takes to go from that CAD model to that work instruction for the factory floor was the number 80 something percent.
Speaker 8:87.5%.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:It was
Speaker 8:87.5%. It was a twelve hour reduct it was from it went from twelve hours down to ninety minutes. That's amazing. Pretty on. I'm without pretty well.
Speaker 8:So
Speaker 2:let's give it up for SaaS. Yeah. SaaS. How Not not getting enough log.
Speaker 1:How often are the work instructions changing? Is this is this just is this more unique to Andoril because you're developing new products, new CAD designs, and so you need to go from CAD design to work construction every day, every month, every year versus someone who's just like, look, I make five, five, six rounds. It's the same CAD design, same work constructions for the last decade. I'm just doing the thing that I'm doing. Why is this important for you, and and and how does Dirac plug in?
Speaker 5:Yeah. The you this is an excellent question.
Speaker 2:So you're not you're not just a pretty talking thing.
Speaker 5:You know you know some things. Yeah. So the challenge for a company like Androl as we scale up and we're diversifying across a number of different product lines Yeah. And a number of different geographies is then you have engineers with an idea Mhmm. Who want to make a tweak or make a change or sometimes we're responsive to quality issues in the field or something like that.
Speaker 5:Sure. We wanna make a design change. So in every time a design change gets made, the current method for doing work instructions is predominantly manual. Mhmm. So every time a bracket or a wiring harness Yeah.
Speaker 5:Or a connector or a circuit board changes, you have to change the work instructions. Else on the factory floor, you get an instruction that says, like, you know, screw bolt number a b c one two three into this hole, tighten to this torque, whatever, but it's a different bolt now.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:So then the guy on the floor gets an instruction and is like, but it doesn't it doesn't fit. Yeah. So then for us, as we as we scale, and we're specifically trying to take a faster iteration, kind of faster mentality to to this manufacturing process, reducing that time is absolutely absolutely clutch and critical. So for us, it is especially paramount. Though, I will say that I think this is a problem that plagues a lot of industries and a lot of our supply chain, a lot of our other partners and vendors.
Speaker 5:So I'll let Phil speak more to Yeah. Yeah. The rest of the market, but it's definitely compelling and working for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Because you've had success in, like, automobile manufacturing as well We're pretty we're
Speaker 8:pretty vertical in Austin. Last time we last time we came on the show, we talked about shipbuilding partner
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 8:Andrew makes a ton of things Sure. Planes, ships, all sort of different things. And what we've seen, at least with Dirac, is that our problems that we work on. Right? Automated work construction.
Speaker 8:It's not just useful for just defense folks. Right? Because we end up working with folks in aerospace and defense, automotive Mhmm. Agriculture and construction machinery Mhmm. Maritime, complex industrial machinery.
Speaker 8:Really Yeah. Anybody that has any sort of complex assembly, you need operators on the shop floor who know exactly what to build and when. Mhmm. And when it takes weeks or months to make a work instruction, a guide for your folks in the shop floor, most of the time, they're operating on outdated information. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And when you want to have an industrial base that is agile and robust Mhmm. You can't have your operators and your technicians operating on outdated information, on outdated context. And that you know, we we often talk about the work instruction as the core atomic unit of information in the factory.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 8:And if that is the core driving force by which your factory builds, Yeah. You can't let it be manual. It can't be PowerPoint, you know, can't be
Speaker 2:only reference here is if you've ever gotten, you know, like like some baby furniture thing Mhmm. You get the instruction set and like if you're actually following it closely and you realize that the instructions are wrong Mhmm. It's just the most enraging experience ever. And so I imagine even for like like employee morale, like Oh, on the shop floor if like you're constantly dealing with just like terrible instructions. Why should somebody be like, yeah, it's great if they're high agency and they're gonna try to like fix it and and manage up.
Speaker 2:Yep. But at the same time, a lot of people are just gonna be like, you know, just actually become less engaged Correct. Because they're like, I'm not getting information and the resources. Why should I even why should I even try?
Speaker 5:Correct. And in and in your baby furniture example, that is that is not an electronic product. So you have to think of that exact problem and then layer on all the complexity of electronics and wiring harnesses and power distribution and all of those extra components. So, like, one of the major challenges is that there's a quick iteration of chips. There'll just be a new chip that'll be faster on a different board, kind of new power new power specs or whatever.
Speaker 5:So you need to make a slight tweak. The traditional way of doing that is to take all of those changes that you wanna make on a very slow cadence, somewhere on the area of annual, sometimes sometimes biannual, and batch all of those changes up into a single block upgrade that you then do all at once. Right. So then for a long period of time, you're deploying outdated hardware. So you wanna be deploying the best that you possibly can to your customers.
Speaker 5:But to Phil's point, in order to get the best onto the factory floor and then ultimately into the hands of the customer, you drastically need to reduce the time from idea to work construction to factory floor. Mhmm. And and then most importantly, keep all of that in sync. Because when you have, at our scale, with thousands of design engineers and then many thousands of factory floor workers, like, keeping them all talking off the same sheet of music becomes a really hard orchestration problem to keep everybody talking together.
Speaker 1:Design engineers?
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's a ton. We just passed through 7,000 employees. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So Congratulations.
Speaker 5:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:You bet. Gong. Time we
Speaker 5:We gotta bring that gong closer for you here.
Speaker 2:It's too far. Every time. How how are the work instructions actually evolving from a form factor standpoint? Like, I imagine historically, you just get like a printed out kind of, I don't know, big stack of papers. I could imagine Like a
Speaker 5:very thick IKEA instruction Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 2:think like the number of companies have come and gone trying to, you know, basically put work instructions into like, you know VR. Like, VR or stuff like that. How far away are we from that? I imagine this is a question that's come up Yes. Like with
Speaker 8:investor pitches. VR is an interesting modality for displaying work instructions. Typically, what we see nowadays in the shop floor before we come in, most manufacturing engineers are using PowerPoint or Word. You know, Microsoft, that that old beast is still dominating the work construction market.
Speaker 2:So they just have a laptop oftentimes.
Speaker 8:So they will draft it into PowerPoint or Word. It'll then print it out and it'll sit in a thick white binder Okay. On the assembly station. If they're lucky, they're updating it maybe, you know, once or twice a year, flipping through, say, oh, it's this version. No way.
Speaker 8:Get that binder off the rack over there to to make this different model. On the the the way that we think about it, right, the way that we've seen it, on the design side of things, right, we've seen fifteen, twenty years of an explosion of excellent software in the design side. And because CAD is so advanced, what we've seen is an explosion in the variants that people are able to design. Right? Think about the increasing complexity of the different modular builds.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Right? You know, a company like Andro, right, has modular products. That have different payloads that are reconfigurable. Yeah. Now, think about that from the design perspective.
Speaker 8:Great. We can swap out a different, you know, bunch of different modules. Now, from the manufacturing perspective, that means that you have to have when you can when you can have thousands of different combinations of things, you now need thousands of different work instructions. Where if one picture is off and one step is off, you have somebody building a completely different thing. And thinking about that from the top level build perspective, that makes sense.
Speaker 8:Right? Like, that's a ton different configurations. Mhmm. But when we're looking at all the people who make up the supplier base of the companies that make planes, cars, trains, everything in between, we're talking about companies that make pumps and valves, complex mechanical sub assemblies. Right?
Speaker 8:Think about how many different variants those guys have to have. Yeah. Now they're in deep trouble because when they lose the ability to not only have folks on their shop floor that are, you know, thirty year veterans who just know off the back of their heads, you know, okay. This is yeah. I remember how we built this last time.
Speaker 8:I don't really need instructions. Because all those folks are also retiring, our entire industrial base and our supplier base is also at risk because we haven't codified all of that tribal knowledge. And that is a key mission of ours as well. Mhmm. Not just to be a rubber band around the variants, but to also codify and capture
Speaker 2:how do we used to do it? Why do we stop doing it that way? Yep. Like, making sure that's maintained, so if a guy doesn't retire, you're not calling him up, like, you know, what are you used to do in this situation?
Speaker 8:Yep. Exactly. Similar to a McKinsey analyst who put together a a spreadsheet or a or a PowerPoint that was, know, a 150 slides. They're like, hey, how did you what macros did you use? What what formulas did you use for this thing?
Speaker 8:That's like another framing to think about it, except that guy retired.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he's How many products does Andoril have now? Because I think most people know Fury, Roadrunner, Dive, but there's different variants with each product. How how do you think about the product footprint?
Speaker 5:To to Phil's to Phil's point, there are roundabouts 30 of the core products, but then there are many, many hundreds of individual variants that'll come along with those. So for example, the the Australian military might use a slightly different radio than the US military. So then there's just and it's not a not a hard change, but it's still a change. A slightly different bracket, a slightly different connector.
Speaker 1:Standardized on a specific size, you need different bracket sizes, and all that.
Speaker 5:Exactly. And then to Phil's point about payloads. So for on the DiveXL, for example
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Maybe you wanna put a very advanced sonar package or maybe you wanna put a mind sweeping package
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:Or something along those lines. Yep. So that the actual Dive is still the same, but then inside, you need a slightly different bracket to hold the thing. Like a
Speaker 1:USB c for This is this is
Speaker 2:this is this would this would be the ideal.
Speaker 5:I think it's a long ways out though.
Speaker 1:It is. Right? Because standards I mean, they it takes so long even just to roll out into the phones. I mean, how long was it before the iPhone and the Android phone had the same charger?
Speaker 5:Clearly, we need European regulation to force it to force us into it.
Speaker 1:Seriously, like, do we like, like, does it need to be defined from the government?
Speaker 5:So there there there are a number of standards that exist out there specifically about, you know, communication protocols and things. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 5:this is part of why we run these international multi military exercises partly to kinda work through these types of
Speaker 1:issues. Especially for comms, I imagine. Exactly. Exactly. Helicopter can't talk to that plane, you're dead.
Speaker 5:It's a a it's a huge pain point. Yeah. So there
Speaker 2:is some standardization, but that doesn't
Speaker 5:quite get down to the chip level. Sure. Like, in inside the the the seeker head of a Sure. Barracuda Mhmm. That there's a maybe a slightly different sensor that this customer or that customer wants to use.
Speaker 5:The body of the the the Barracuda is the same. The wings are the same. The engine's the same. The power module's the same. All that's the same, but at the front, there's a slightly different module, which then to Phil's point means then you need another set of work instructions.
Speaker 5:You need to train your workers a different way, and then that becomes very hard to manage at scale. Yeah. So with with Phil's platform, we'll be able to kind of bring that together and shorten that time and Yeah. Ultimately lead to products getting in the field quicker.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Talk about Ohio. Is it how far along are you with the project? Is is Trey vindicated in every in all of his Ohio
Speaker 5:don't don't wanna take swings at Trey here. But the the the Arsenal one project in Columbus, Ohio is is is running incredibly smoothly. We've got about the first 30 and change Ohioans hired already.
Speaker 2:They they we hired them about six months ago and
Speaker 5:then brought them out to California. So they've been at headquarters where we've been building the first few tales of of the Fury line. Okay. Then they're coming back to Ohio this month, and then we're doing the stand up and provisioning of the line. So the ultimate arsenal one campus will be about a dozen buildings totaling in the neighborhood of about 5,000,000 square feet total.
Speaker 5:The first building that's about just shy of a million square feet, it's like 800,000 square feet, is is fully built. Mhmm. The internal is being being constructed now, the inside. Mhmm. And the production line on all the equipment Yeah.
Speaker 5:All of that, test rigs, and all of those things are being provisioned. And we'll start production on Fury this summer.
Speaker 1:You said
Speaker 5:Building 2 is the walls are vertical, so that's that's that's going up. And then Building 3 is immediately thereafter. Building 4 right thereafter. So we'll be rolling out a new building about every year
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Ish for about the next seven, eight years.
Speaker 2:Slight you
Speaker 1:you said the Fury Tales are being built one place. Is this is this a matter of, like, building different pieces than bringing them all together? Is there an assembly line? Is it like a manufacturing of a Sorry.
Speaker 5:Term term term of industry. Tail tail being the the full plane. Oh. Tail to like like a tail number on the plane.
Speaker 1:Oh. Yes. Yes. Yes. Tail.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 5:Got it. Yes. Yes. So the first the first the first Yeah. The first out of four or five.
Speaker 5:I'm gonna get in trouble for not remembering.
Speaker 1:The first four
Speaker 5:or five will be will be assembled at HQ Yeah. And then test flown at our test range nearby.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then the next one will be test. Tail?
Speaker 1:Why not? The whole thing.
Speaker 5:The tail number. Okay.
Speaker 7:The whole
Speaker 2:the whole
Speaker 5:thing. But then but then from there on out, they'll be manufacturing
Speaker 1:In terms of assembly lines, are we still paying homage to Henry Ford with a with a plane that moves down and gets things added? Or is it a more integrated process?
Speaker 5:For for Fury's line, it will resemble something in the neighborhood of Okay.
Speaker 1:Kinda moves along. Guess that.
Speaker 5:So we'll move from station to station. More
Speaker 2:like the grim method of There you go. There you go. You
Speaker 5:go. We'll we'll coin that one.
Speaker 2:We need a gong hit for that. No. Yeah. Perfect. Let's give it
Speaker 1:up for the Perfect.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you. But the the line
Speaker 5:will resemble closer to that where at at Station 1, we do the hydraulics. At station two, we do the electronics. At station three, you do the fuel system. Yeah. Something along those lines.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And then it's ultimately the fury line will be 22 stations. Mhmm. And then where the fury line in particular gets complicated is that we have to do a number of very complicated coatings and paintings on it. Okay.
Speaker 5:That's a little bit tricky and specific. Sure. And then, of course, the the propulsion element of it is just very, very complicated.
Speaker 2:Talk to talk to
Speaker 8:I was gonna say, testament to how far out mister MacRim thinks about has been thinking about Fury. Mhmm. Two two years ago when he initially reached out after seeing seeing our demo of BuildOS Yeah. His initial outreach was, hey, I saw what you guys are working on. Can you use it to build robotic fighter jets?
Speaker 8:And I said, yeah. I mean, depending on how cool they
Speaker 1:are, of course. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And two years later,
Speaker 1:here we are. Here we Here we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And what what a what a moment too. Yeah. And and how validating this is for Dirac. I mean, I feel like part of why you guys are coming out and talking about it together is I imagine you want your supply chain to probably get on Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Dirac. Is that is that a part of it? Like, wanting the
Speaker 1:whole supply chain or is this just a quality part that you get at the end of the day?
Speaker 5:Good question. So there's a couple parts couple reasons why I'm here in particular to to support the announcement here. First is that Andro's on a mission to save the West.
Speaker 2:It's kind of the
Speaker 5:the the name of the company baked into that. Mhmm. And it is my firm conviction that part of that journey will be re industrializing the West and re industrializing America. And part of that is getting the supply chain teams and get manufacturing organizations, production operations to be more tech forward and be more tech enabled. And just like accounting software and sort of like traditional kind of big big software platforms, a lot of the core technology in that ecosystem is is pretty hard to use.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. It's almost user hostile. It's just very difficult. So part of the mission here is that, like, yes, of course, we want to adopt it, then we want the supply chain that supports us to adopt it. And then in the long run, we want more and more and more and more factories operating this way, because if we're going to compete with with China and the rest of the world on the large scale manufacturing, we need to get faster at this.
Speaker 5:And part of part of the the the lag in Western manufacturing
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Is exactly that to your point about the the the work instructions of a of a kid's play set that aren't quite right. What happens on a line then is it's like then the line is stopped at station seven because the station seven instructions
Speaker 2:are piling piling
Speaker 5:So then you just get like, okay, well then it stopped here, stopped at six, stopped at five, stopped at four. Because that guy is like, I don't know what to do. I can't fit this. So then extrapolate that out across industries and there's just so much wasted time and effort that gets spent on problems like this that I think can be solved with technology. It's a perfect application of where AI can be very powerful to help accelerate the development and the shipping process.
Speaker 5:So that's one point. And then the other point I wanna bring up is that we've seen this very fascinating and honestly, an unpredicted outcome of our work with Dirac is that by talking to our customers Mhmm. So talking to the Navy, the Air Force, etcetera, about how we are going to scale manufacturing and talking to them about how we go from designs into PDRs and CDRs and MRRs, the whole engineering process to get something designed and fielded. We've been specifically pitching Dirac solution as part of that ecosystem to help them understand exactly this question about how we get from that idea to that work instructions to the factory floor to help us accelerate.
Speaker 2:And it's Pretty been good ahead of sales. In a
Speaker 5:in a bizarre way, it's been an accelerant for our sales to help our customers see that we're leveraging this this newfangled technology, this this AI because the government customers are like, what is this AI stuff? How am
Speaker 2:I gonna use it? And we come in and say, here's how you're gonna
Speaker 5:use it. We're gonna use it on autonomy on your end products. We're gonna use it in the manufacturing line.
Speaker 2:We're gonna
Speaker 5:use it in the back office, and here's how it's gonna ultimately get you better products fielded for cheaper.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wanna talk to you guys about the labor market in manufacturing. Sure. Specifically, are you guys going ahead? There's so much demand for probably type of talent that could do manufacturing or they could go work in a data center development project.
Speaker 2:Are you guys competing for for talent with the data center build out? Is there enough people enough people excited about entering this this workforce?
Speaker 8:So there's there's actually two pieces to talk about there. Interesting thing to bring up data centers. Increasingly, rather historically,
Speaker 3:the way
Speaker 8:the data centers have been built out Mhmm. Right? It looks a lot more like architecture projects. And so you've seen the tooling that people use to design data centers historically on AutoCAD, Autodesk, which is a little bit more of the architecture where, you know, they're doing it in BIM building. Yes.
Speaker 8:Exactly. Throw a bunch of racks in there. Historically.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yes. But now, something that we are seeing as a company through the companies that we're working with, Increasingly more data center companies coming to us and saying, hey, we need to start building at scale the same way we produce electronic systems at scale. And so I you know, we are seeing a massive migration of data center producers and data center builders away from traditional architecture oriented design and build systems Mhmm. Towards the more manufacturing oriented design and build systems. And with that, they're saying, hey, we are going to have to build data center systems all over the world, and we cannot have folks not having the context of what to build.
Speaker 8:Can Durax work construction software be useful for this? And so, of course, we say yes. Yeah. And so that's one thing about the data centers just as an interesting anecdote that might be interesting for folks to to know about, that we are also trying to build data centers the same way we build cars and planes and everything else. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And then on the labor question, another thing that we think about is radically reducing the barrier to entry for net new folks into manufacturing because, you know, picture's worth a thousand words, but an animation's worth a million. Right? Earlier, you were asking about how do we change the modality of the way a person interacts with the work instruction. With our software, it is not just a picture, not just a photo, not just a printed out thing. It is a three d interactive, animated, dynamic work instruction
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 8:That a operator technician can interact with. Right? Picture's worth a thousand words, but an animation's worth a million. And so because you were able to have less skilled folks potentially take the roles of operators, and because you're also codifying and aggregating all of that tribal knowledge and context Yeah. We're seeing that the companies that we work with are actually able to hire less trained technicians.
Speaker 8:And so it's easing that burden and
Speaker 2:pain for them. Mhmm. Yep.
Speaker 5:On the on the Androl side, I'd I'd add a couple points there. First is that is that on the data center side, in the construction market, it's becoming pretty contentious just because Yeah. You know, big huge builds made big huge bulldozers and concrete layers and electricians and etcetera. So on the construction
Speaker 2:basically competing for the same kind of firms for the time of firms that are getting offers from data centers that maybe have a different
Speaker 5:and build kind of side of things, yes, it's that's certainly getting competitive. On the actual technicians on the factory floor, we haven't seen pressures from data centers because the the the dot I would add is that these data centers, while very big and very powerful, tend to employ very few people. There's not that many people engaged in the actual day to day running of the place. So for for us, like, on the technician side, we don't see much competition from them. And where we are spending a lot of our effort is investing into the local communities, including in Ohio through partnerships with the local universities and trade schools and community colleges, like, that kind of ecosystem to work with them on the types of skills that we want to see new new hires have, whether that's additive manufacturing or welding or particular CNC programming or just like electronics assembly, whatever that skill set is, helping design curriculums that can then produce graduates of those programs that are ready to come get a job at Anderol.
Speaker 5:So Mhmm. For us, it's kind of a kind of a long play because, you know, we invest that time up now and those graduates won't come out for a couple years. But in the long run, we think will will lead to a pretty fertile supply to say nothing of being good for the communities that we're engaged in.
Speaker 1:What are you seeing within the armed forces on the self repair side? There's been a couple press releases about being able to repair drone or something on the fly. I remember I toured a toured a aircraft carrier and they had a machine shop, and there was a a sailor in the machine shop who was talking about if if something breaks on the ship, they bill they they will go and mill the bolt right there. They don't go and buy it because and he was very proud to say, you know, we're saving the taxpayer. They wanna charge us thousand dollars for this bolt.
Speaker 1:I made it for $5. That seems like a really positive thing. Does that play into automated work instructions at some point? Some digital solution? And then just what are you seeing on the overall repairability from the systems that you'll be deploying and are deploying?
Speaker 8:Yep. Let take a look. So, yeah. Funny enough, maintenance and repair is a very, very common next question when folks ask us about work instructions. Right?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Most of the time when they're saying, hey, awesome. You can now automatically generate my work instructions for me. I can now have operators and technicians interact with it in a three d manner. Awesome.
Speaker 8:Now, can you do maintenance and repair instructions?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And our answer is, of course, yes.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Right? MRO is a natural inverse, generally, of actually the initial build of the thing. Sure. And so part of what our roadmap is, part of the things that we're working on with a variety of different folks is is automating maintenance and repair instructions. Right.
Speaker 8:So we're very big proponents of you were mentioning the the right to repair, not just of, you know, tractors, but of drones out in
Speaker 2:the field.
Speaker 8:It's a very big thing that we've been talking to a lot of different folks about. Okay. And it's something that we're big proponent of because we don't think that these should be two different domains of instruction sets. Context should live on the model. Context should live in the hands of folks who are actually designing and building those systems and repairing them.
Speaker 8:And so you should, at the time of making your first instruction set, have the ability to codify all that context into one core instruction set. And maintenance and repair instructions should fall naturally out of that. And that's it's a lot of how we think about things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 5:Yeah. From from a policy perspective where I think the lines get a little bit blurred is that we're talking about a bolt or a bracket or a fixture or something that you can carve out a metal makes Yeah. Makes obvious sense Yeah. In one area. And then the next area would be some somewhere in the middle of, you know, rewiring or reconnecting, you know, an an additional battery pack or something like that that's kind of in the middle.
Speaker 5:And then all the way on the other end is, like, all the way down to the chip level.
Speaker 1:Broke. You're not gonna fab it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You're not you're not laying laying silicon silicon chips out on an aircraft carrier or Right? So there there is a spectrum there at which point at some point on that spectrum, you say, like, actually, do need to call the experts to help Right. Me on But but in my opinion, the the the default of saying, don't touch it, we'll come repair it, ship it all the way back to our factory, that's just not gonna fly at any time of of of conflict. Because, like, we do need our sailors and our airmen and our soldiers in the field to be able to, at minimum, replace the consumables, you know, the brake pads, the tires, etcetera.
Speaker 5:But then also to do kind of the next level of repair into, you know, replace a fuel pump or something along those lines. When it gets down to the chip level though, you're like, I'll probably send you a replacement module. And then maybe the work instructions say take bad module out, put new module in Mhmm. Reconnect these cables. But the in in general, yeah, we wanna be as as friendly as we can be to this forward repair concept because in a time of conflict, you just think, like, I need the thing now.
Speaker 5:Need to need need to
Speaker 2:You brake pads and my mine went to motorsports cause I know Andrew Roll is sporting Oh, NASCAR. Yep. And then I was curious, are you guys working? Has there been any inbound from any racing organizations that that are make having to make parts on the fly and Yeah. Are in heavy r and d.
Speaker 2:And maybe they only make the part, like, maybe they're making different variations of the part, but they're not actually doing it at scale because it's not a manufacturing business. Mhmm. Any any opportunities there?
Speaker 8:So funny enough, I cannot confirm or deny explicit names. Okay. But we are actually in conversation with several motor sports teams
Speaker 5:That's cool.
Speaker 8:Who are actively evaluating us for use cases on and off the track.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Probably a like a very different workflow, but so many learnings and just great for the brand and whatnot. Exactly. Work there.
Speaker 5:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you reflecting on the DOD or Department of War budget potentially being increased?
Speaker 2:I still say DOD too.
Speaker 5:I'm trying I'm trying. It's but it's, you know, years
Speaker 1:of The Dow. Yeah. I mean, the the the post saying that we might go to 1,500,000,000,000.0. That seems like that was not Andrew Earl's original mission. Andrew was all about doing more with less.
Speaker 1:Yep. But at the same time, if it accelerates the mission, that could be good. How have you been processing it internally?
Speaker 5:Well, I mean, think any anytime a customer says they wanna spend more on the things you make is generally a generally a good good thing for us. Yeah. That said exactly to your point, like, would love to see these these increase in fund. And if it happens, of course, gotta go through congress and all the usual. But if it happens Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Be spent smartly and on new technologies, new approaches, and not just kind of funding the old way of doing things in the old kind of legacy model that, in our opinion, hasn't worked for decades.
Speaker 1:So,
Speaker 5:yeah, of course, you know, customer spending more money is good for us, but we're gonna be lobbying pretty heavily to have them spend it on more AI powered, you know, weapons of futures, autonomy Mhmm. That kind of construct, and especially on a on a different kind of contracting model more towards the cost plus type of model. Sorry. Away from the cost plus type of model to the firm fixed type of model that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:That we like to do business with. So still a lot to a lot to digest there, but we're, in general, pretty excited in this part of
Speaker 1:That that initial, like, flipped model of, like, you know, like, venture, take risk capital, build a prototype, build something, then show up to the Department of War with a concept or something that's maybe ready to be fielded, and then say buy it. Has that held as long as you thought it would? Do you think it holds forever? Because at some point, if a customer shows up and says, I'll pay you to do the R and D, what are you gonna do? Turn them away?
Speaker 1:But at the same time, there's some you know, there's the financial hazard that the firm was founded around. So how's your thinking evolved around the whole flipped model and doing r and d on your balance sheet?
Speaker 5:Yeah. A couple of thoughts there. First is that we spend an inordinate amount of money on our own Yeah. Internal research and defense, IRAN type, research development rather
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Spending just an absolute inordinate amount of
Speaker 2:money, and we're grateful to have the support
Speaker 5:of our investors who believe in this business model. So for us, we haven't not at all seen a, like, let's just shift back to that way. It's a lot capital, you know, less less risky, capital safer, all of that. So, no, I'm not surprised. Like, is to your point, this is exactly the kind of thesis, the mission of what we're trying to do.
Speaker 5:If anything, we've been very happy to see venture capital funding to the to sector increase
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:To fund more companies approaching it this way. Because I think that for us to win a great power conflict, we're not gonna need one and or we're gonna need five or eight or 10 of them. So we're excited to see, you know, new companies get started with this kind of mindset and and go out and chip off parts of the parts of the ecosystem here. Yeah. The last point I would say is that to date something in the neighborhood of eighty five ninety ish percent of our revenue has not been from these kind of cost plus traditional, like, I like, customer funded models.
Speaker 5:The vast majority of it comes from
Speaker 1:It's the original model.
Speaker 5:Us selling our product
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:To our customers at a fixed price. Yeah. And then the recurring bit of recurring revenue tied to that for of think of it like an extended warranty kind of concept where Yeah. We are doing the maintenance, we are providing the support, we're doing the security upgrades, the patching, the all of that, which from our perspective really aligns incentives for us to deliver the best possible product. Because to be blunt, like, we will have a higher margin if we don't have to send repair guys out and keep replacing things, but then also gives the customer a more reliable product, and then importantly, gives the customer predictable pricing.
Speaker 5:So they know what their total four year, five year cost of ownership for a product will be, because they know that within that number, we're responsible for anything that breaks, any sort of problems or maintenance that needs to happen
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:That aligns everybody, and we're seeing a broader acceptance of
Speaker 2:relations? I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm Lazarus is our
Speaker 1:You're the guy she calls to lay the smack down.
Speaker 2:To be honest, at some point, there's gonna be some enterprising young SPD slinger that's like, if I make a really heinous memo, Matt Grimm is gonna pump it.
Speaker 1:The Grim Reaper is gonna
Speaker 5:come to nine months.
Speaker 1:So so give us some backstory first and then and
Speaker 2:then Okay.
Speaker 5:So first, I would say that our investor relations is run by run by this incredibly talented woman named Alison Lazarus. She's great. She works closely with Trey on kinda managing the cap table and all the inbound and interested investors and all of that. So not really my not really my turf anymore. That said, I've had a long running battle against what I would call the wild cats in the secondary market who have absolutely zero respect for any sort of control of the cap table, like who our investors are, information rights, any of that.
Speaker 5:And they're just out kind of slinging offers at early investors, early employees, at share prices that are completely insane. Yeah. And those people don't care whatsoever about the impact that has on the company, whether that's around $4.09 a valuation or RSU pricing or any of those kind of internal dynamics, they don't give a shit. So they just kind of create headache for us
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:By then us having to field this inbound. So beyond the headache, the point that I'm really worried about, and I think the SpaceX IPO will be very, very interesting because this is gonna be a situation where there are, you know, the tide goes out and there's gonna be a lot of people without trunks on. It's just they the the people have been out there slinging, in our case, access to Andoril or I have limited access to their next round at some insane price Yep. That is nowhere close to what the actual price is as set by the market. Sure.
Speaker 5:Then people are buying
Speaker 2:And and that's not even factoring in the fees, which are sometimes Kinda crazy layered fees. So there
Speaker 5:was there was this one situation of slinging an offer around that was an SPV into another SPV that was buying a chunk of an investor's an early investor's holdings.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So there's, like, layers and layers of fees and carries on top of that at a price per share that was something, like, 70% above what the last round traded at. So it's just an an insane thing where they're pitching access to a deal they they don't have. Mhmm. And I know for a fact that there are. There was a recent indictment announced in New York around a case where someone was was out slinging Andoril SPVs
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 5:That did not have access to Andoril, the guy was just pocketing the cash. And then he was just indicted and arrested at JFK. So,
Speaker 2:like, this is a
Speaker 5:thing that happens, and the reason I bring up SpaceX is not to create more work for them. But that the the world of SpaceX SPVs dollar
Speaker 2:IPO because the legal fees of unwinding all these things.
Speaker 1:It's wild.
Speaker 5:Right? Because there's there's just there's a lot of this nesting. And SpaceX is a fantastic company that's been in business for a long time. So there's so many of these nests of who owns
Speaker 1:types of like main street investors, it's totally possible that they're thinking, well, I got into SpaceX at 200 when you didn't. And then it goes out at 1.5 and that's my retirement. And then it goes out and you're like, where are my shares? And the guy skipped town.
Speaker 5:And the guys
Speaker 1:skipped town. Yep. Out whatever you put in. And not only did you lose the whatever you put in, but you also lost the mental of where you thought you were and what you were planning. You might have been planning a certain lifestyle
Speaker 5:Of the opportunity cost of deploying that capital somewhere
Speaker 1:else too.
Speaker 5:It's a it's a very big problem. And I've used this joke before, but my my joke is that how many investors in America think they own a chunk of SpaceX when they're actually funding their ex roommate's boyfriend's coke habit in Miami? And it's like like a non zero amount.
Speaker 2:Right? What do you think what do think the solution is? Can the can the Yeah. Community police itself
Speaker 1:It seems like, obviously, like, you have a legal team that's working on this stuff, but there is an element of, like, going direct. Like, you need to get the word out that this happening and that's important too.
Speaker 2:But Yes. So this is so
Speaker 5:this is why I've like, we as a company have been more public about this. Yeah. Because we're specifically trying to send a message to the market that's like, we see you, we're aware of you. Yeah. And like secondaries, of course, have their purpose.
Speaker 5:Of course, there are early investors who need to liquidate funds or fund life cycle problems. Of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this isn't
Speaker 5:a blanket comment that all secondaries are bad. They're not. Yeah. They're not. There's a category of these people who just have, like, really no respect and are basically just fraudsters, hucksters.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And And what I think needs to happen is two things. One, the investor community needs to be better at policing ourselves around just who these bad actors are and kind of shining a light on them. Yeah. And then second, sadly, I think it's gonna take law enforcement action whether the SEC or the FBI, you know, thwacking enough of these folks that that community starts to see, like, this is this is this isn't good for me. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And it just kinda puts a damper on on on that side as well.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Mhmm. Last question for me. Adam Porter Price has been on a tear, doing deals, buying companies. Yep.
Speaker 1:As COO
Speaker 5:The best in the biz.
Speaker 1:The as COO, what is the key to a great post merger integration?
Speaker 5:The that's a great question. Mhmm. And and an often overlooked part of doing these deals. The head the the deal makes I'm a
Speaker 1:busy popping champagne, then you gotta get to work.
Speaker 5:Adam loves more more airline miles and more and more iPhone minutes than me No than than Trey, than anybody. Wow. Because he's constantly out there.
Speaker 1:Best The
Speaker 5:of them is doing this. Worry.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 5:So from a post merger perspective, there's a ticky tacky piece of it that is important Mhmm. Which is payroll, benefits, equity ownership, you know, all the four zero one k transitions, the email has to migrate, like
Speaker 1:But making it sure it happens on day one. There's no, oh, yeah. You'll get your paycheck, but it's a delayed a week. That's annoying. Correct.
Speaker 1:No one wants that.
Speaker 5:Correct. And not
Speaker 1:That's bad taste.
Speaker 5:Nothing will burn your trust with a company faster than screwing up their first paycheck. So for us, it's a thing that we try to lean as heavy as we can into that employee education and systems transition upfront. It's not possible to transition like ERPs and years of Sure. Design software. That takes usually, you know, six to nine to twelve months on the long end to get those systems fully working, but, like, the guts have to work first.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And then second is I would say is a cultural alignment. That's just, like, how we pitch our products, how we price our products, how we plug into the kind of go to market Mhmm. Ecosystem and engine, like, we have to we have to get that right. Mhmm. And then then the third piece I would say is trying to get some wins pretty quick.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. Because if you're the if you're an acquired company and you get integrated and you're like, oh, who are all these people? Is this different? I'd like
Speaker 2:to smaller. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Scrappy mode and then they're like, hey, I'm gonna set
Speaker 2:up I saw the campaign don't work at Andorra. Why would I
Speaker 1:working at Andorra. At Andorra. I just don't work.
Speaker 2:Why am
Speaker 1:I here?
Speaker 2:I just like my paycheck.
Speaker 5:So kind of aligning with the what are we what are we trying to build? Why are we building it? What's the goal? What are what are the deliverables we're trying to hit? Like, getting that kind of alignment for folks to see kind of see the destination, see the lighthouse on the hill, and say that's where we're going Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And aligning folks to that. And it's it's those second two that are that are really hard because that's much more kind of personality based and kind of relationship based. Yeah. It takes a lot of investment from the the leadership team, takes a lot of investment on the engineering team, especially, you
Speaker 2:know. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:How are you designing your products now? What's your release cycle like? How do we get that into Andrew's kind of way of doing business? There's just a a a big transition there, but.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You gotta
Speaker 2:migrate all us. Exactly. Right. There's been this maybe kind of sentiment or joke shoot for NYSE, even if you miss, you'll land at Andoril. You know, this idea of like, you know, maybe maybe I don't build a multi billion dollar company in as a new like neo prime, but I have it, you know, maybe like the the the the not the next outcome is I land at Andoril.
Speaker 2:Can you reality check that? Because I feel like in Yeah. Practice Yeah. Yeah. No.
Speaker 2:No. No. And and I'm just saying, like, I think it's like for founders to understand, like, what is the actual bar? Because you guys every every company that's built a great product, but maybe the business side isn't, like, fully working yet and they're thinking, like, okay, like, my product's great, our team's great, I bet we could fit in there. Yes.
Speaker 2:Reality check that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So the reason I'm pretty dismissive of it is the that implies that Andrew will will acquire anything or any company that's struggling or not
Speaker 2:Because Adam's logging all these miles, but he's not exactly doing it No.
Speaker 5:No. We do, like, two a year on average if that. Right? So he's he's he's saying no a lot a lot. But what we look for in acquisitions is really a a sweet spot of of two things.
Speaker 5:One is a very strong engineering team, like, they have to have something that's very compelling and very unique and very interesting. And then the second is a area where where we can add a lot of value or accelerant for fuel to their go to market. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do we how do we speed up the timeline you
Speaker 5:guys talk a lot with defense founders, and you've had a lot a lot on. And folks will consistently talk about how hard it is for the go to market engine. And there's a lot of nuts and bolts around that that get underestimated around what formal government proposals look like, how to do formal government contracting, security clearances, the government relations kind of lobbying side of this to be to be a player on these bigger deals, then relationships within your customer that are you're not just pitching, you know, the guy flying the drone out in the field. Yep. You're pitching the whole chain and how it fits into their ecosystem, how it fits in the program.
Speaker 5:There's a whole lot of that infrastructure that, to be blunt, like, we're pretty good at. Yep. Like, we've gotten pretty good at this. So when we find a company that has an incredible team building a really cool product that's, like, really unique and interesting, but is maybe struggling there, they haven't seen kind of the ramp that they want, and we see that and say, hey, look, we can help with capital, obviously. We can also help with this go to market engine.
Speaker 5:We built this legal infrastructure, this facilities infrastructure, this government relations infrastructure, all of that, that will then take your product and can help really accelerate and get it deployed both to The US and to friendly governments around the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:That ends up being the sweet spot. So the reason I would say that that that the base question that you started from is just completely off base is, like, we're not gonna go look and try to find a company that, like, isn't clicking. They don't have a great product. They don't have a strong team.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And haven't sold a lot.
Speaker 5:And then be like, yeah. Let's go get them.
Speaker 2:Deals a year, it's like, usually, like, you're going in and being like, we wanna buy this company. Yes. Less like, hey, like, things aren't working that well. We should try to sell.
Speaker 5:Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Right.
Speaker 5:And and and the last point I would make on that is that to date, we've done exactly zero turnarounds. Mhmm. And I think this is a kind of a mental model for us is that, like, in general, we don't really wanna be in the turnaround business. So take a take something that's struggling and come in and fix it. Like deploy our team of operators to go fix it.
Speaker 5:Like, there are plenty of PE firms who are very good at doing that. There are plenty of other organizations who are honestly better positioned to do that. For us, we really look for that strong team, strong product, and then where we can really accelerate sales and and and go make an impact.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 4:Do you do you have a favorite?
Speaker 1:I know. Don't wanna put you in
Speaker 5:hot water.
Speaker 2:There's no chance I'll answer that question. No. I know.
Speaker 1:Don't wanna
Speaker 4:put you
Speaker 5:in hot water. I I love all of my children equally.
Speaker 3:Yes. Excellent.
Speaker 1:So which one you like the most? I think we know.
Speaker 5:There's a there's a there's a great company we acquired in in Ireland Oh. That was called called Class.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Class. Yeah. And they make these absolutely incredible computers and networking was like, I want
Speaker 2:one of those.
Speaker 5:Yeah. They're real they're they're they're they're great great devices, great team, but it's but it's headquartered in Dublin So
Speaker 1:you're back
Speaker 5:in Dublin. Which is very far. So a lot of lot of time spent over there, but and that acquisition's gone gone absolutely swimmingly. Couldn't be happier.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you
Speaker 2:guys for having us. Appreciate you. Hang out for a second. We'll
Speaker 1:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We will be live tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And thank you. We will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:See you tomorrow, folks. Have a great MLK day. Thanks for hanging out. Goodbye. Cheers.