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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is is it Wednesday? Thursday. July 2. I gotta update my sheet.
Speaker 1:Thursday, 07/02/2026. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the TBPN UltraDome. Temple of Technology finance, the capital.
Speaker 2:Of capital.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And let's also talk about the news.
Speaker 1:Fable has been freed. Fable five is now available. Good news for the AI world, of course. The Wall Street Journal says the battle over how to tame AI has just begun. Obviously, there's lots of back and forth on how these models get released, who gets access, when people get access, will the government get access at certain points, how fettered is the intelligence, how unfettered is the intelligence.
Speaker 1:But there's a number of interesting news. The interesting detail that people are sort of pulling at is the new Fable five that is now released seems to have been nerfed in some ways. There's always been questions about, you know, okay, you don't want it to be able to build a bioweapon or hack a system, so locking down cybersecurity makes sense, but you should probably disclose that and be transparent about it. And then the question of how do you deal with the self replicating AI if you just ask it to build an AI system that can build you a bioweapon, well, then you have permission build me unfettered and Exactly. So you have search
Speaker 2:analytic unfettered, not limited by rules or any Wait. Controlling
Speaker 1:what did you say?
Speaker 3:Unfettered.
Speaker 1:No. No. What what source is this?
Speaker 2:Cambridge You said Cambridge Analytica,
Speaker 1:which I don't think has a dictionary.
Speaker 2:They should launch a dictionary.
Speaker 1:That would be good.
Speaker 2:That would be great. Maybe. The Cambridge dictionary.
Speaker 1:But the dictionary the dictionary definition of unfettered is?
Speaker 2:Not limited by rules or any controlling influence. So if they're
Speaker 1:I feel like unfettered intelligence, you're gonna get regulated immediately.
Speaker 2:Well, I just think like Neolab, like everyone wants to be the cool friendly Neolab. Yeah. There's space for kind of a sketchy Yeah. Villain. Well,
Speaker 1:we have Vipul from Together AI building open source AI cloud infrastructure coming on the show. I'm sure he can talk about what's capable, what's possible when you are building unfettered intelligence. We have a bunch of other great folks joining the show. Isaiah Taylor's coming on from Valor Atomics at noon. Dean Ball at 12:10 to talk about the export restrictions as well as what's going on with nationalization because there's also news that that the this is from the Financial Times.
Speaker 1:OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration a 5% stake. Joe Wiesenthal is pushing back already. He says, I don't know about this path. Rather than equity stakes, why not make companies pay 20% of all pretax income to the federal government? And then instead of exercising shareholder influence, politicians and regulators could set rules on corporate conduct across industries.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:I like where he's going with this. Someone should try this. At least try it out.
Speaker 1:Contrarian take. But, yes. Dean Ball already chimed in on this news. He said, the two there are two broad ways this can work. One, you divide this 5% over all US households, handing each a direct stake.
Speaker 1:Or two, you give the stake directly to the government. One is fine. Two is probably ruinous akin to inviting rats to live and reproduce in the walls of your house, which is wild. He says it will never stop knock
Speaker 2:it till you try it, Dean. Yeah. There's there's some rats out there that can be quite excellent roommates.
Speaker 1:Are you a rat guy? I thought you were a mosquito guy. I thought you like mosquitoes.
Speaker 2:No. I do like squirrels. Squirrels. Okay. Squirrels.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like I have a bond with squirrels.
Speaker 1:They're sort of the air air
Speaker 2:When I see a squirrel in my yard, I look at it and I just salute. And
Speaker 1:People have said you have the mind of a squirrel.
Speaker 2:They have. Yeah. They said they've they've said that I have the mind of a rodent.
Speaker 1:Yes. Dean Ball continues. He says, it will never stop at 5%. It will go on and on. The governance will become a nightmare.
Speaker 1:Political capture will be real, and it will generate precisely no goodwill with the public. Yeah. That's a good point. And we were talking about this before, this idea of like
Speaker 2:Yeah. One of the challenges is even the way this was phrased in the Financial Times. Yeah. It The is that it sounds like they're giving shares not to Yeah. A sovereign AI fund, which is I think what was actually proposed, but just giving it to the White House.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which given the disclosures that were made earlier this week
Speaker 1:Sometimes not having fun with it. So Trump denies conflicts of interest as filings show he made more than $1,000,000,000 last year. $1,400,000,000 of stocks bought, 432,000,000 sold. Deals for watches and perfume, yes, the Trump watch happened. I saw a crazy chart that said that Trump earned outearned Coinbase in terms of profit from crypto in the last twelve months or something like that.
Speaker 1:I forget the exact stat, but it showed all the different crypto platforms and many of them were down because it's been a rough market. Some of them are up, but no one is up more than the president of The United States. Wild times. Wild times. But, yes, it seems like it seems like the the green shoot here, the white pill, the optimistic outcome is that if there's lab nationalization, if there's some sort of distribution of equity to Americans, it happens through the Trump accounts, through Social Security number, through some sort of identity that the individual can have a stake in as opposed to as opposed to just going into some fund.
Speaker 1:We were talking about this with data centers where people are Tyler has
Speaker 2:the data. We can pull it
Speaker 4:up.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's pull it up. Wait. Do you have it or no?
Speaker 5:Well, yes. So so Coinbase made 1,260,000,000
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Net income.
Speaker 2:But pull up this chart because it is pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, as I was saying with data centers
Speaker 2:You guys you guys okay? I know. It's fourth of July weekend coming up. Here we go.
Speaker 4:There we go.
Speaker 1:Look at this. Okay. Let's
Speaker 6:scroll up
Speaker 2:a little Let's get it a little centered.
Speaker 1:There we go. Core Scientific.
Speaker 2:Let's lock it into the center.
Speaker 1:Galaxy.
Speaker 2:Let's lock.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:And there we go. Amazing. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Out earned biggest listed US crypto firms. You have to imagine that is Hyperliquid doing better? I feel like Hyperliquid was on a tear for a while. I don't know how they're doing recently. But anyway, staggering chart.
Speaker 1:But as we were talking about with data centers, there's one idea, which is just tax them, increase the tax base. But having taxes go into your local government is great and can provide roads and schools and pay for things and balance the budget, that's great. But it's abstract as opposed to the Ben Thompson proposal which was data center shows up in a small town. It's in a sparsely populated area. There might only be 5,000, 10,000 residents in the city but they all get checks for he he ran the numbers and it was like a thousand dollars a month for some of these data center projects where they're making so much money and the town's so small, they can do a meaningful check to the individuals.
Speaker 1:And that sort of direct payment So
Speaker 2:think it's I
Speaker 1:think is gonna be better received than this abstract, oh, yeah, my government's better funded. But are they gonna cut my taxes? Are they gonna successfully build that road? I don't know. And it doesn't help me pay my bills, which I think is what people want.
Speaker 1:What are saying?
Speaker 2:Trump did, in fact, out earn Hyperliquid
Speaker 1:He did.
Speaker 2:By a meaningful margin. Hyperliquid generated 908,000,000 in total fees in 2025.
Speaker 6:Brutal.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So just, like, running very quick numbers on the opening, I think. So if it's, like, 5%, let let's say it's at a trillion or something, that's 50,000,000,000. Mhmm. If you're giving it to households like like this idea, there's like a 130,000,000 households.
Speaker 5:So that's like $371 of like equity per household Mhmm. Which I think is like, sure, maybe that's that's meaningful, but it doesn't seem like that's really gonna like change people's perceptions of the labs if that's like part of the goal. Right?
Speaker 1:Well, think if it's I mean, so Maybe they do
Speaker 2:the right parlay with that with that.
Speaker 1:I mean, the the nice thing about the Trump accounts is that they are set up in a way that you can elect to donate to just children born this year. And when you segment by that, the denominator gets a lot smaller and so the impact gets a lot bigger. So you could be all of a sudden looking at something like a few thousand dollars for every kid born this year or something like that. You can narrow it down. You could do every kid under five or you could do everyone 18.
Speaker 1:And that type of I mean, you're you're right. It's not gonna move the needle as much as broad broad distribution of for for everyone, but you can be a little bit more targeted with it. I don't know. There's different approaches.
Speaker 2:Ryan says, wait, does America get 5% of TBPN? Yes. I was never thinking about that.
Speaker 1:Yes. But I We podcast for you America.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:This is the the funniest outcome is the most likely and that's exactly what's happening here.
Speaker 2:Community ownership Yeah. Of this show.
Speaker 1:Somebody called me a fed based on this news. And I said, I don't even know what to do with that. But I guess it's somewhat true. The actual story here, just to reset, OpenAI's apparently in talks according to the Financial Times with the Trump administration to give a 5% equity stake in the company. The Financial Times describes the talks as early conversations, but the plans seem to involve other frontier AI players apportioning stakes in their companies as well.
Speaker 1:The obvious context around this story is at least on a straightforward read that AI companies need at least to stem the seemingly ever growing negative sentiment around AI and data centers. Doing business with a Trump admin has turned out well for other companies like Intel and Dell. Intel's the big one where post post government stake, I think the stock is up 200 or 400%, something like that.
Speaker 2:400.
Speaker 1:400%. Very, very strong performance for Intel. And being difficult to do being difficult to do business with the admin has been unambiguously bad for others. And now there's a vehicle with the Trump accounts that can facilitate equity transfers from corporations to average Americans. Again, these are early conversations, so we're very light on the details, but we'll be discussing this news, of course.
Speaker 1:In other news, Jersey Mike's is filing for initial public offering. Jersey Mike's is going public. The sandwich chain, Jersey Mike, filed for IPO today. It's looking for a $12,000,000,000 valuation after being acquired by Blackstone last year for 8,000,000,000
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for Blackstone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They needed a win. They're getting a nice 50% markup in just a year.
Speaker 2:Jersey Mike's Forced out of buying single family homes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They had true at all. There hasn't been any there hasn't been any regulation around that whatsoever. I'm joking. They do own 95% of homes apparently, something like that.
Speaker 1:No. It's like it's like half a percent or something. It's low. But Jersey Mike's has 3,300 locations across The US and Canada. Plans to open 300 shops in The UK and Ireland.
Speaker 1:Peter Cancro, Jersey Mike's founder, who's not named Mike, you would assume he was, but the founder of Jersey Mike's is in fact named Peter. He started the business in 1975 when he was 17 years old. Wow. Young. Success.
Speaker 1:He actually founded the business when he purchased a sandwich shop in Point Pleasant, New Jersey called Mike's Subs with a $125,000 loan that he got from his then football coach who was also a banker. So you're Incredible. High school football in New Jersey and you have an idea to buy a sandwich shop.
Speaker 6:Coach was
Speaker 2:like, this guy's a star. I should give him a 6 figure SBA loan.
Speaker 1:Also, a 107 a $125,000 in 1975 is like $25,000,000 by today's standards. Isn't it?
Speaker 2:Also, that's just such a such a for me, at least personally at 17.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If I had a couple thousand dollars in my bank account, I was feeling like the king of the castle. Yeah. So a $125,000 to buy a sandwich shop. We don't really know what the financials were of the sandwich shop. It's very possible that, you know, it was just such a slam dunk deal that even a 17 year old could operate it.
Speaker 1:This is a no brainer.
Speaker 2:It might have just been a no brainer, but clearly
Speaker 1:So An incredible story. A 125,000 in 1975, just using inflation, not investing in the market, not compounding, using the general CPI inflation numbers, that gives you $775,000 to in today's dollars. So if you're a 17 year old football player, just go to your football coach and say, hey, can you can you loan me 3 quarters of $1,000,000
Speaker 2:in the chat says, coach, I need a 1 hundreds. Yeah. You might be able to go to your coach and and, you know, basically get the financing to set up some type of neoclass.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He so he grew the company for almost fifty years, 1975 to 2025 basically, before transitioning to chairman this April. Former Wingstop CEO Charlie Morrison now leads the company. The ticker will be JMKE, Jersey Mike's. So go check it out.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of fun. The other news. The Office of Personnel Management, OPM, otherwise known as other people's money, is ending taking other people's money via paper for retirement. OPMN's paper based retirement process. The U.
Speaker 1:S. Office of Personal Management says it has digitized the retirement process for government employees. This might seem like a boring news item, but the story behind it is actually kind of wild. Up until now, the process for government employees and US veterans to retire and start receiving their pensions could take up to six months. That's a long time.
Speaker 1:This is because it's entirely paper based and manual. Spike Brehm, who helped with the effort, described how crazy this turned out to be in reality in a post on X. They said that they did it. The mad lads actually did it. I never talked about my time at Doge last year because it was so controversial and contentious.
Speaker 1:Early last year, Joe Gebbia, founder of Airbnb and current U. S. Chief Design Officer, recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the retirement paper problem. So processing a federal retirement took months. And in extreme and in the extreme, retirees could wait up to six months for their full pension to arrive.
Speaker 1:What was the holdup? Paper. Remember hearing Elon talk about the mine in Pennsylvania? We got to visit it in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone. There were literally acres of file cabinets as far as the
Speaker 2:I'm gonna go ahead and say this was a feature, not a bug.
Speaker 1:You like this?
Speaker 2:I think people generally yearn for the minds. Yep. And so it's possible that it's possible that it wasn't the most efficient way to do business Yeah. But it was the most fun way.
Speaker 1:But now you're like a single issue voter, like we gotta return. We gotta go back.
Speaker 2:We gotta bring back the mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. Okay. You're you're into the mines. A controversial position, but enjoy it.
Speaker 1:Storing files detailing federal employees employment and pay stub history. A simple case might be a quarter or a half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. One famously took up a whole pallet. I wonder what was going on with that particular federal government employee that they had a whole pallet. Were they jumping around from job to job or something?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Each case was handed was hand processed by case workers in cubicles deep underground. So you clock in at the ultimate lock in factory in the mine, in a cubicle, underground, processing someone's pension. They checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly, many weren't, and handed the long tail of complex issues. We watched as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the COBOL mainframe built many decades ago.
Speaker 1:We got to keep the COBOL flowing for sure. We can't update that. It's such a good programming language. Just sounds so cool, COBOL. No one wants to write Ruby on Rails.
Speaker 1:You want to write COBOL. Sounds cool. Since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review and additional rounds for complex cases. Case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. Sometimes it would sit in place in one place for days waiting to be picked up.
Speaker 1:OPM's credit, they've done multiple rounds of digital transformation spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. Then there was a big effort in the mid-'90s, but the systems were desperate were desperate. And it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. There was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the forms necessary just to be mailed it to the mine and stopped it to the paper file and a few federal agencies were even using it. When we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation delivered by a software contractor.
Speaker 1:The black pill was seeing the entire the terrible quality of the software and interaction with the contractors coming from Silicon Valley. I couldn't believe how low the talent quality bar was for selling software to the government. It's clear as the OGUSDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. It's a huge moat. Delivery of quality product be damned.
Speaker 1:We fired the vendor and took over the project. They've been working on it for more than a year. And there was another year before they were going to deliver it. At first, we tried to bend it to our will to actually connect all the various data sources and get decent UX for caseworkers in the mine to use. But we soon realized we were going have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch.
Speaker 1:It was around this time I had to go back to New York. I had a new job waiting for me, a four month old, a wife whose patience was running out. But I got to watch from afar that the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. Now they've fully done it. Huge congrats to the team.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah. Very interesting. Good news. Good news.
Speaker 1:The digitization of retirement process should now allow people to complete it in minutes and start receiving their pensions immediately. The pictures and videos of the limestone vault where all this paper is stored are just fascinating. I like it. There's other news. SpaceX apparently is maybe working on a phone.
Speaker 1:At the very least, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that during SpaceX's recent IPO roadshow, before SpaceX went public, they were showing investors a prototype of something sort of like an iPhone. AI enhanced, maybe thinner. The Wall Street Journal has some reporting around it and it's an interesting story. Elon's denied this a bunch but the reporting seems pretty good at this point that at least it was demoed.
Speaker 2:It's hard to see why he wouldn't at least take a shot at
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Is kind of my is my point of view. He has one of the greatest telecom companies ever created Yep. Global satellite network. Yep. Theoretically, over time, any person on the entire planet could have an internet connected SpaceX device with Starlink.
Speaker 2:It makes a lot of sense. The other factor that I've just continued to think is quite interesting is I think that the App Store as a moat has is is being diminished by AI. There's just so many things. There's so many things there's so many apps on my phone that five years ago, I used a lot. Today, I don't use at all.
Speaker 2:So an example being like, I don't even need the weather app. Because I can just be like, I can ask Chad, give me the weather Yeah. For the next week. Yeah. And I don't even need that because I can just be like, vibe code me my own beer app today.
Speaker 2:No. But obviously, it's not like an efficient way to use like like it's not like it's probably better to just open the weather app Yeah. But at the same time, I'm very used to it. The other thing is like even things like surf reports. Like I'll just pull a surf report in Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so there's a lot of like the long tail of apps are no longer like a lock in to the iPhone for me and I assume a lot of other people.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. We got to have a chicken and egg debate about this. Let me finish reporting the SpaceX news and then I want to ask you to dig into the source of why that's happening. But first, so SpaceX developed an early prototype of an AI focused handset.
Speaker 1:The device is said to be slimmer than the iPhone, runs proprietary operating system, uses xAI technology built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset. So they're not vertically integrating the chip like Apple silicon just yet, but Elon has fab chips before for Tesla. So not out of this not out of the question. Elon Musk reportedly demoed the prototype to potential investors during SpaceX's recent IPO roadshow. The product fits with with Musk's broader everything app vision, but it's still early and may never ship.
Speaker 1:Rumors about a Musk built phone have have circulated for years. There's videos on YouTube with, like, tens of millions of views. They're like the Tesla pie phone is coming next week. It's all just completely fake clickbait but it the demand
Speaker 2:Every time.
Speaker 1:It doesn't get me every time. Stop it. But Elon's actually sitting
Speaker 6:there your Apple Vision Pro,
Speaker 2:you see the video and you're like, I can't I shouldn't click it. I know it's I got it. Know it's fake and then you click it and you're like, oh, it got me again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No, it is ridiculous. But Elon has had to comment on this many times. He said the idea of the idea of making a phone makes me want to die, he said in October. But if we have to make a phone, we will.
Speaker 1:Funny way to say it. In February, he denied a Reuters report that SpaceX was building a phone that could connect directly to Starlink satellites posting on X. We are not developing a phone and no one is commenting on this right now. So very, very early stage. My question about apps.
Speaker 1:I think you're right. The number of apps, it used to be every month there was a hot app. Every year there was a hot app. Specific apps for specific things. What is driving the collapse?
Speaker 1:Because when we talked to Mark Pincus yesterday, he said that Apple is not pushing small apps. Like Apple is not the App Store is not a reliable source of distribution for Yeah. Vibe coded apps, for games, for anything. And so back in the day, he was able to grow Zynga on the Facebook platform, which was very open and you could go viral within Facebook for a completely separate piece of software, not just content. And then you could keep that customer relationship, monetize that cost customer relationship off platform forever.
Speaker 1:Not the case anymore. Also, just discovery. People don't open up the App Store as much, I think, and say, oh, what are the top apps? Oh, what are the recommendations? I would love a new entertainment app.
Speaker 1:They're like, no, I got
Speaker 2:that One new app, please.
Speaker 1:One new app, please. They don't they don't that's not a behavior. But Let why is
Speaker 2:me go to the app store. I would like one or two new apps, please.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Why doesn't happen. So so so why is it not happening? Is it because the super apps are getting more super in the sense that you don't need you used to need a you needed you needed Snapchat for Stories, you needed TikTok for vertical video, you needed YouTube for a long form.
Speaker 1:Now Instagram can satisfy a lot of those things. If there's some new feature that pops up, Instagram will add it very quickly. As you mentioned, ChajiPT and the AI chat apps can do a lot of other things that you might need a separate app for. But is it that the apps consolidated or is it that Apple pushed that?
Speaker 2:It's a good question. I mean, think part of it is, like, we had ten years of, like, very real innovation around what types of applications were possible or needed Mhmm. On a, like, powerful mobile device. Mhmm. And so I think that you just had, like, saturation.
Speaker 2:Right? There's I I still I've said this a bunch of times on the show, but given that, you know, rewind to the ChatGPT moment, I would expect there to be a lot more like net new hit apps in the app store. Today, if you look at the top charts, obviously dominated by World Cup related things, but it's Yeah. Sports betting Yep. Like streaming apps Trump
Speaker 1:accounts are doing very well. And
Speaker 2:so it's not like, you know, if I'd, you know, fallen asleep at the Chad GBT moment and woken up today, I'd expect to go and be like, okay, there's probably a bunch of new popular hit consumer And it just turns out that AI has like been an extending Oh, yeah. For a lot of existing apps. And so I just think the combination of LLMs and chat apps being able to just do so much for you and gonna continually be able to do more for you. Mhmm. And vibe coding is, again, a a positive tailwind for anybody building potentially a new device Yep.
Speaker 2:Even if it was, you know, especially if it's based on Android, but even if it was like an entirely new operating system. Elon built a new operating system for Tesla.
Speaker 1:But that's not the Elon goal. He's not the open platform guy when Twitter when he purchased Twitter, the API got smaller.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not saying I'm not saying Tesla's
Speaker 1:not an open ecosystem. You can't you can't deploy a different self driving system onto your Tesla. It's a closed system. It's a competitor to the Apple ecosystem. It's an equally walled garden.
Speaker 1:Sure. But it would be his.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying it's it's it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to take a crack at a new device that
Speaker 1:Oh, there's a huge incentive to. Yeah. I completely agree
Speaker 2:with that.
Speaker 1:You don't no one wants to be locked in the Apple ecosystem, so you want to build your own ecosystem or your own walled garden. But the idea that it would be a non walled garden is sort of it would be an uncharacteristic strategy, I I think.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, there's more news in The Wall Street Journal today. Big Boogie, the Memphis rapper known for his high energy delivery and viral interview moments declined an opportunity in Jacksonville in order to focus on music according to remarks he made publicly. He said, I ain't go to college, Big Boogie said before adding that he turnt it down to pursue rap full
Speaker 2:And that surprised a lot of people It did. At the time.
Speaker 1:It did. So the opportunity according to Big Boogie involved a scholarship connected to a college marching band program. The rapper said the school was located in Jacksonville describing it as a big college with a big band. Financial terms of the alleged offer could not be independently verified. But we characterized the package as substantial though.
Speaker 1:He said for he first described it as 15,000,000 then revised that estimate to 10,000,000 and later 5,000,000. The person present for the exchange challenged the figure in real time during this interview noting that while the offer may have been a scholarship, it was unlikely to have totaled 5,000,000. But he defended the characterization suggesting the value reflected the length of the academic commitment.
Speaker 2:That's right. Sort of an uncharacteristic commitment.
Speaker 1:He said, I had to go to school for this decade. Very uncharacteristic of typical college engagements. Representatives for Big Boogie and the unnamed Jacksonville institution declined to comment. The journal has learned that Big Boogie ultimately chose not to enroll, opting instead to continue building his career in rap.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:right. I turned it down, he said.
Speaker 2:That's right. This story is still We'll we'll keep following it for you.
Speaker 1:There's another story. There was a couple that climbed to the top of the Empire State Building yesterday. Did you see this?
Speaker 2:I did.
Speaker 1:And they put up a flag and they got married or they they they proposed or they
Speaker 2:got engaged.
Speaker 1:A proposal. And brands have immediately jumped on it. Let's go. Let's give it up for some advertising. No.
Speaker 1:There's backlash already. Jack Applebee said this is so so embarrassing. These brands think they really did really think they did something. Lover Boy is the worst. Congrats.
Speaker 1:You put your logo on a flag, really innovative stuff. The lack of originality and clever thinking in modern social media is just ridiculous. Everyone had the exact same idea. There's a meme, we got to get on the action. It it and what's interesting is a lot of these are beverage brands, it looks like.
Speaker 1:Drink Culture Pop, drink Hyo, drink Loverboy, drink Spritz, Bulletproof, I guess that's Bulletproof Coffee, Fashion Nova, New York City, just the account New York City? I don't know. Petco, stop breaking treats in two. It is a fun meme format, but brands always it's very, very hard to break through if you're just piling on the top meme. Do you think?
Speaker 2:And, yeah, so this whole thing was I when when I first saw the video of the flag going up
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And they kind of botched the flag, I'm not gonna lie. Okay. It seems like they didn't fully anticipate the wind conditions that day. The flag was quite hard. The writing on the flag was quite hard to read.
Speaker 2:I would have liked to see them erect like a full size billboard up there.
Speaker 1:Something permanent.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Something something more permanent and certainly more legible than the flag. And then the quote was, when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. But then they were just kind of making out and proposing.
Speaker 1:That's kinda cool.
Speaker 2:And yeah, just it felt like
Speaker 1:It has a little bit of like the AI cadence to it or like the don't love your job, job your love.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, that's a make
Speaker 1:a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. Could be a little more terse, I suppose. But anyway
Speaker 2:I just don't know if they were
Speaker 1:I'm still impressed. It's just hard. Yeah. I was quite impressed with the climbing. How did they did they climb up from the sidewalk or did they take the elevator and then hop out and then start climbing?
Speaker 1:Because this wasn't like an Alex Honnold from the base free climb, free solo attempt.
Speaker 2:How fast is this helicopter going, by the way?
Speaker 1:That's just the lens, baby. This is a lens. Lens. This is lens compression, Jordy. You're learning optics.
Speaker 1:Optics. This is looking through a telescope, basically.
Speaker 2:Dave says, quick tip for goth couples from the Matrix. Make sure to account for wind speed.
Speaker 1:Wind speed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I agree. Yeah. So anyways, very far cool as
Speaker 1:the pranks go and stuff, it's like it's not it's not going to be there permanently. It's easy to take that. I heard some some recording of a helicopter pilot who was dispatched sort of emergency response NYPD. And I think with helicopter pilot, it's like, they're like, alert, sir. We have two individuals on the top of the Empire State Building.
Speaker 1:He's like, that sounds cool. He's like, that's awesome. Why are they up there? And they're like, well, they're not supposed to be. They're trespassing.
Speaker 1:He's oh, okay. Bummer, but still impressive. Anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Good good story. Good story for them. I don't know if it made the the sort of maybe political impact or whatever impact they were trying to have. But happy for them.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And congratulations to to the couple.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Boston Dynamics might go public. You know you love the videos of the dancing robots.
Speaker 1:Everyone loves the dancing robots, the dogs. They have actually deployed many robotic products at this point. Spot and Atlas, they can do parkour and they can also increase their market cap. Recently, Hyundai bought Boston Dynamics for 1,100,000,000 in 2021. Interestingly, company was owned by Google for a while.
Speaker 1:They've gone back.
Speaker 2:But you're telling Hyundai might have an 80 bagger on their hands?
Speaker 1:They might. That's right. Korean security firms now value Boston Dynamics at somewhere between 20 to 28,000,000,000. Bullish analysts are projecting 88 to a $103,000,000,000 market cap at IPO. Think the public markets want physical AI much.
Speaker 1:It is the logical, the oldest firm, the most storied firm.
Speaker 2:It's not really going make a dent for Hyundai. They have a $111,000,000,000,000 market cap.
Speaker 1:That's what is that?
Speaker 2:The Korean won? Won? Won?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You'll need to change that to USD if we want to get to the bottom of
Speaker 2:it. Anyway, we have In other news. Yeah. Google must pay nearly 2,000,000,000 to Klarna in antitrust case.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's in the journal.
Speaker 2:The Swedish court rules that the search giant favored its own price comparison service over Klarna.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:They won a competitive an an antitrust case alleging the search giant engaged in anticompetitive practices. Klarna's price comparative comparison unit Price Runner, sued Google in 2022 in Swedish court. Price Runner alleged Google was giving preferential treatments to its own price comparison service in its search results. This ruling supports a healthier, more competitive market for the way people compare products and services. According to Klarna, shares of Klarna rose 5% yesterday but it doesn't Klarna is sitting at a $7,400,000,000 market cap.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:To me, this just reads like the market doesn't fully believe that they're gonna get the 2,000,000,000. Yeah. It's a Swedish court. Yeah. They're gonna appeal it.
Speaker 2:I would expect that if if Wall Street was expecting to them to actually get the $2,000,000,000, you would have seen more movement.
Speaker 1:And also, Google's gonna pay over time. Anyway, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Have Andrew Collins from Flexjet. He's the global CEO. We're very excited to have him join the show.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the TBPN UltraDome. Andrew, good to meet you. For taking the time to come chat with us. How are you?
Speaker 7:I'm doing great. Great to see you guys.
Speaker 1:Great to see you too. Would love since it's the first time on the show, I'd love to go a little bit back with your history with the company, recent developments, recent news. And then I have a bunch of questions about the shape of the business and where you're going next.
Speaker 7:Sure thing.
Speaker 1:So can you tell me a little bit about your background and your history with Flexjet?
Speaker 7:Sure. I came into the company in 2012 through an acquisition. I was running a company called Sanctions Jet, which invented the jet card Mhmm. Which is a way of flying privately at twenty five hours at a time. And then over time was, you know, worked on a lot of different mergers and acquisitions within the company, worked directly with the chairman, and eventually was asked to become the global chief executive officer.
Speaker 7:And it has been in a fantastic run. It's been interesting. And, the company now sits at about 5,000 folks or so, and we are global. And you find me today in London. I've been working out of our London office this whole week.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How has the footprint grown? What's been the biggest driver of growth internationally? I'm thinking about the fleet, but also the customer base. Where has the business changed and reshaped during your tenure?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's been interesting. I think that, you know, when I got into the private aviation space
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:It still was somewhat of a niche market. And, you know, institutional capital eventually did discover it, which was really interesting, and I think that allowed for, some expansion in the industry. But probably the big watershed moment really had to be COVID and what happened in the last, say, I don't know, five to six years. 2019 was, you know, sort of your traditional single digit growth, you know, year, and then COVID came in. I think everybody worried about what would happen to the business, and then it absolutely exploded because I think people were, you know, held back, they wanted to have experiences, they wanted to get out there.
Speaker 7:So I know why
Speaker 2:it exploded is because private aviation is to me one of the most addicting things on the planet and if you get a bunch of people that get introduced to it Sure. Or because there's a pandemic
Speaker 1:Can't go back.
Speaker 2:You can't it's really hard to go back. I have a a friend who was texting me like an addict last night because he's like, I got I I I can't I can't stop. He had like a He chartered something last night that was like under a five hour drive or something like that and and he didn't even have a rush and all this stuff and Yeah.
Speaker 1:With all the social media addiction lawsuits, I would be worried about the business facing a similar similar addiction lawsuit because it is one of the most addictive products out there.
Speaker 2:More addictive. I I do. That's that's a good point. A lot of people is like give up social media or private aviation. They'd be like, I'm giving up social media.
Speaker 2:Probably. Probably. I'm logging off.
Speaker 7:I hear that. That's great. Yeah. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Anyway, so you mentioned you mentioned institutional capital coming into the business at a certain point in time.
Speaker 8:Correct. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Help me understand that at a deeper level because I imagine that there have been there's been debt on a fleet. There's financing arrangements for individual assets in the portfolio. What has the evolution of the capital structure of Flexjet and maybe just the private aviation industry been generally over the last decade?
Speaker 7:You know, it's really great question because I think we consider ourselves stewards of the balance sheet. We very much have, you know, been methodical about the way we've taken on any debt that we've taken on and how we've grown the company. It is a capital intensive business, especially with you. You're dealing with assets that are worth, obviously, millions and millions of dollars. So I think there's been an approach in the industry to to grow either organically or to start taking on money.
Speaker 7:And some have done it really well, and others have not, truthfully. And I think what you learn from it is you want to make sure that you grow in a very intelligent and smart way. So we have three fifty aircraft, but the thing about our model is that a lot of our consumers are the ones purchasing the model. We presell most of our shares. So while we carry some debt on the balance sheet, a good bulk of the the fleet itself is actually owned by our consumers.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And so we have 350 aircraft now. We'll grow to another 50 aircraft this year to get to about 400. I wish I could get another 50, to be honest with you. It's it's it's got an incredible demand, and there's an incredible backlog, in the private jet space.
Speaker 7:But I I think that the other piece I would I would raise is unlike in, say, technology where you may have sort of write once and kind of sell at high margins and continue to iterate, this is an asset based business and it's not a Procter and Gamble market. Right? There are millions of people that fly privately, and I appreciate the addiction piece and how it's gotten the exposure. In fact, what's interesting about that is the finishing touch to what I was saying is we've retained a lot of those folks. So, they didn't go away.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 6:What I'm saying.
Speaker 7:A 100%. I'm finishing your sentence, basically, which is they definitely stayed. And so, we have, you know, a back We have people on a waitlist for certain aircraft. Our fleet and our complexion of our fleet has changed. We've gone from, you know, sort of light to super mid.
Speaker 7:Now we're very much into the large cabin aircraft. Mhmm. We announced the g 700 program last year We just announced the Gulfstream g 500 program. We're up 60% year over year on transatlantic flying. So we've moved from a 48 contiguous state entity to one that's truly global now.
Speaker 7:And capital, institutional capital has helped us to do that. Right? Have we have great banking relationships.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:We've we've debated going public. If you go back in our history, you'll see that we we debated that opportunity. Mhmm. But in in reality, we have access to capital. We want a business that, you know, will do 350,000 flight hours this year.
Speaker 7:We're profitable. So I think that, you know, we've had an opportunity to really, you know, grow the business and and it has evolved over time for sure.
Speaker 2:How how is the sort of commercial sector and trends there? You have, you know, the sort of last generation of pilots, the pilots that never got addicted to doom scrolling on social media while while flying, you know. The you have aging aircraft. It feels like I would I would say like commercial aviation just feels like it's getting less safe. I don't know if that's actually true but that's how that's how how it feels.
Speaker 1:Certainly been lots of headlines.
Speaker 2:And I feel like that is a that's also a tailwind. Is that am I do I have a good read there? Is that part of the psychology of people that are choosing to go the to go the charter route?
Speaker 7:Well, I won't speak for an airline or or their safety levels or anything of that nature. But what I would tell you is commercial aviation is probably the best marketing force that we have in private aviation, right? In that it has degraded over time and you can see it in various ways. Now, some of that is not on a company. Some of that has things like government shutdowns, as an example
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:That really help drive some of those things. So the nice thing about private aviation is is that it's built on alternative airports. So I I think in The US, 500 commercial airports, 70 are really the ones that bear the brunt of most of the volume. Private probably does 7% of the volume amongst those 70 at most. So we're really, you know, going by those those big hubs.
Speaker 7:And so when something like a government shutdown happens, we are a classic alternative now for people that that wanna be able to trust that they can go from point a to point b. I would say service, you know, economic pressures, you see in Europe, you've got some distressed commercial carriers here right now. So, yeah. I I I think your read on the evolution of commercial and there are some fine commercial airlines. Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 7:I don't wanna just slander my my aviation brother.
Speaker 2:I said it first.
Speaker 7:You did. I I and
Speaker 2:and so It's just something and again, it wasn't it's not even like as fact based as it is like a as a as a
Speaker 8:A feeling. Feeling. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. And and and and but it's true. Like, we definitely see folks that and now look, I don't compare us to commercial based on, you know, costs and such, but I would tell you that you do see people that when something happens, whether it's a COVID, it's a, you know, I need to make sure the flight gets me there, whatever it is, whatever that driver is, we tend to be a really good force for them to to kind of rely on.
Speaker 2:I wanna talk about the f one partnership. Recently had a f one reserve driver on the show, and he was saying that he will often fly, I think it's Saturday after practice, back to HQ and do a night of sim racing to do basically like more testing and then take a flight back and he's doing that all all commercial and he has to be ready to fly or not not fly but actually drive the car the next day if he's called up. Sounded like sounded pretty rough rough conditions for somebody that's expected to be driving that fast around a racetrack. So excited to hear that you guys are working with Formula One.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I I would tell you, I am too. I'm a fan and and a bit of a fanboy at the at the same time. Right? And I I think that, you know, the the partnership, we're gonna be the we are the official designee, the official private aviation partner of f one now.
Speaker 7:And, you know, that that comes with a lot of trust. We've been working with them for a while, but we will be flying their executives. We do have drivers that fly with us. The scenario you just outlined, that's classic. That's not just f one.
Speaker 7:That's business, right? It's ability to be refreshed and ready to go the next day and really think about time management. And we all run off that same watch, but private really allows you to manipulate it. That's an important factor. And then, you know, this then evolves into our customer base, which what we're seeing is we're now kind of entering this economy of experiences versus this economy of things.
Speaker 7:And so a lot of the folks in our base, and the reason we do partnerships is we try to differentiate in the air. That in cabin experience, that in flight experience, we have artisanal interiors. We tend to say that other jets are grayish. They're either gray or beige inside. We tend to customize our interiors.
Speaker 7:We try to deliver high speed in flight entertainment with partnerships like Starlink, with LoFi. You know, we do a lot of things to really make that that experience as frictionless and as enjoyable as possible regardless of what you're doing. And so, two, we're trying to do that now outside cabin and give you only in Flexjet type of experiences. And as a luxury brand, we tend to have folks that would like to seek unique experiences with other luxury platforms. And as a global brand now, right, so I was talking about the evolution of the company, we're now globalizing Flexjet.
Speaker 7:There's no better partner, right? There's 20 plus countries involved in racing for F1, so it tends to serve as a really great canvas for us to create very unique experiences for the folks that have that affinity within our pace.
Speaker 2:Very cool. On the procurement front, we talk with a lot of we spend all of our time I wish we got to spend more of our time talking with folks in in private private aviation. It's sort of a little treat a treat for us, but we spend most of our time talking with, you know, technology founders, entrepreneurs, hardware founders, etcetera. And I'm curious how you think about procurement and around planes and and new technologies that will be coming online, you know, five, ten years out. I'm sure you're one of the I'm sure you're an important person to pitch, you know, advancements in in aviation on Mhmm.
Speaker 2:On the actual plane side and and other parts of the stack. But what's your framework for evaluating, you know, new technologies? I'm sure you want to stay on the frontier, but at the same time, you're balancing safety, reliability, you know, and and managing the fleet overall.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's a great question. So I actually just saw something that said that I I think, like, 58% now of orders that are starting to come in through OEMs are really for fractional markets. So we've become a big buyer, to your point, in in in fleet buying. One of the things that we do, and I credit our Chairman, Ken Ricky, on this, is he's big on being involved in the business before you're getting into the business in some respects, right?
Speaker 7:So when the eVTOL movement came and everybody thought that we were going to be the Jetsons inside of five years, it was important to understand for us short distance aviation. So we understand fixed wing, we understand long haul flying, we understand a lot of different things. But short distance is really interesting. And so we actually, at the beginning of COVID, invested in vertical lift and helicopters. And so we bought two different twin engine companies, one in London and one in New York that was a longstanding company.
Speaker 7:And we did that specifically to get the expertise and the model and understand how to work within short distance aviation. So that's like, you know, kind of table stakes. Can we understand how that's going to function and fit into our world first and understand safety and understand all the things that are rigorous and important to us. The next is we screen a lot of people. And so we have made some announcements, though, where we've gone through some high evaluations, and it'll take some time that we don't have here, but you know, we did order over 200 eVTOLs.
Speaker 7:We have another group that we're working with. We just recently announced that when it comes to, you know, its ability to fly, so we have a future ahead of the future of aviation, so actually they're here in The UK. So, we're pretty good, I think, in terms of screening, thinking, and then thinking about how it would meet the needs of our consumer and fit in our brand. But you're right, the most important aspect of it is we just don't take someone's word for it. We're going want to understand flying the aircraft, understand it, and give all the rigor to it.
Speaker 7:We've got 1,500 product support and maintenance people that are part of our entity. So there's no form of due diligence that we can't do, whether it's just an M and A transaction or it's actually the future of flight. We go pretty deep. But we are active, and we have a pretty good track record of investing in the future.
Speaker 1:Well, on the f one partnership. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 2:We'll see you in the paddock.
Speaker 1:And have a
Speaker 7:any time and I'll definitely see you in the paddock. Yeah. Let's Great
Speaker 2:to have you on Andrew. Come back on anytime.
Speaker 1:Cool. Thanks, guys. I really appreciate
Speaker 9:your time.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Our
Speaker 2:next feel like I'm steps need these for the next one.
Speaker 1:We definitely gonna need those because we have the co founder and CEO of Together AI in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV van, Ultradom Vipul. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4:Doing great. Thanks for having me on the show guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time on such a busy day. Please.
Speaker 2:First time?
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Think so.
Speaker 4:Right? This is the first time. Yes. I've I've been a fan of the show.
Speaker 2:Took us took us way too long.
Speaker 1:Long overdue. So much to talk about. First, give us the news. I want to hit the gong and then I have a million questions for you. So tell us what happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Our business, which really serves open rates models and powerful AI at dramatically cheaper cost has been growing tremendously. We've grown, you know, from a 100,000,000 in bookings to 1,200,000,000 in the year, and we raised $800,000,000 in our Series B. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Aramco Ventures fascinating partner makes a lot of sense with energy. But I'm so interested in what is just the state of open source AI. There's been two narratives. One was there was this chart that showed closed source growing a little bit faster, seemed like there was an acceleration and open source was going a little bit slower.
Speaker 1:I believe this was from the government. They published this, the US government. But then most recently with GLM 5.2, it feels like open source is catching up again. Has there been as much of a roller coaster race, a roller coaster ride inside the company as it feels like from the outside? Or what has progress felt like in your business throughout the last couple of years?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Would say we one, I would say open source models have really closed the gap with those models. And this is why you're seeing all this excitement around open open weights models.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And this has been a process that's been going on. So I you know, the the the first and the second derivatives of progress have been have been you know, the gap have been negative. And I think now you're at a point where the the open weights models are able to really address the largest workloads of agentic long range, you know, long horizon tasks that have been deployed in enterprises over the last six months. So there is one real need for these models. There is, you know, a real reason to sort of try to optimize your cost because you're trying to deploy AI in a much broader sense now.
Speaker 4:It's doing real intellectual labor and making a big difference to, you know, the progress in companies. So I think there's a demand side of it which has, shown up in the last six months and the progress in open models now, they are very, very, you know, comparable to the closed models.
Speaker 1:How do you think the developer landscape of the open source models ecosystem will evolve? Because as I sort of understand the history, Mark Zuckerberg made a big splash. He's going all in on open source with Lama. Some really solid progress there. Eventually, it stopped making sense to give everything away for free when a little more closed source.
Speaker 1:We'll see where that goes. But then China, as of last year just deep seek moment, Alibaba, Kuan, there's so many different Chinese developers. Is that a cultural decision? Are they just pro open source broadly? Is this geopolitical strategy?
Speaker 1:What is the motivation and how long do you think that open source stance will last? Or will we see China go closed source at some point?
Speaker 4:You know, I would say that it's really a function of the structure of the market. In China, that market is structured around open models. All these companies are making revenue. They provide APIs. They provide applications.
Speaker 4:Right? They they are they are businesses that are, competing with each other and are generating revenues. And the structure of that market is models are released in the open, and the structure of the market in The US so far has been the models are closed. So I think there's a little bit of game theory to that, which is, you know, these markets have sort of sat in this particular shape. But I I think at this point, things are changing quite a bit.
Speaker 4:You you have, you know, an extreme demand for tokens. Tokens are becoming like a fundamental resource, like energy or capital or bandwidth. And you have a more modular market that's forming, right? So you have harnesses where you can take, you can point them to a closed model or an open model and they continue to work. So you're starting to get this market formation which allows a a place for open models.
Speaker 4:And I think what that will turn into is you will see more open models in The United States. I you know, we are talking to many companies who are working on very ambitious roadmaps for producing open models. So there's just going to be the existence of that market worldwide.
Speaker 1:When you talk to customers, are they almost always coming to you with a workflow that they prototyped with a closed model, prototyped with a frontier model, and they've got it working and now they want to cost optimize? Or do you talk to customers who are just so all in on open source they don't even care about the frontier? Because I've seen there's companies when GBT4 came out, they were like, oh, this can process OCR documents and just organize text data very effectively. Now we're in a coding boom. But we get these spiky intelligence unlocks every once in a while and then the cost ramps up because you're like, Oh, I can use this everywhere.
Speaker 1:And then people want to cost optimize. But company is typically coming to you with a workflow that they've already prototyped and they feel like is confident and they want to match the performance but at a better price.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I would say they're both use cases. There are companies that have prototyped something with closed models. Once they deploy it into production, they realize this is, like, absurdly expensive. They can't quite scale this and deploy it into the, the the you know, deploy it into their companies, and they start benchmarking open models.
Speaker 4:And, I think they're increasingly finding that, open models have become pretty strong on these benchmarks, and and there's a sort of substitution happening. And and there there's really a stampede of this, that companies, starting from AI natives now to digital natives, are deploying open models at, you know, really, really rapidly. You also have other use cases. I think, you know, companies that have sensitive data, this is really their strategic asset in many ways. It's what the intellectual property of the company is.
Speaker 4:There is increasing amount of discomfort, especially as the models are getting smarter, that by using closed models, they're sort of giving away their strategic advantage by teaching the model how to run their business. And I think that's becoming a bigger threat, we're starting to see companies more sort of philosophically choosing open rates and AI that they control. And I expect we'll see more of this.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about regulation? It feels like GLM five point two sort of reignited this open source debate where you have Anthropics Mythos and Fables sort of held up back and forth, banned, unbanned, released released to just Americans, released to just a few companies. Right. And OpenAI is going through some similar stuff with five point six Soul and some other models. And all of those debates, they make sense in isolation to me.
Speaker 1:I I don't want a cyber weapon or a bioweapon and if it's capable of that. At the same time, if you could just go on Hugging Face and download the bioweapon creator, I probably don't care that there's a closed source version of that. It's a different discussion. How have you dealt with the regulatory questions that are increasingly popping up around AI safety and AI limitations? I
Speaker 4:think these are important questions. You know, one of the things that we feel is these models, especially open rates models, they're software. Right? You can you can inspect them. You you can benchmark them.
Speaker 7:You can
Speaker 4:study them in a way that you can't do with closed models. And that is going to become a much more important aspect of regulation where we, you know, frankly, I think some of these risks are are could be real. They could be rhetoric. They could you know, we just don't know because
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:There isn't good quantification quantification of this, which I think is going to become more and more important for us to understand how to, you know, think about a regulatory framework that is sensible and is, you know, if these models do become dual use, how do we sort of protect, you know, protect against bad effects of these models while leveraging the value that they create? I mean, they're immensely valuable. This is the most transformative technology we've had ever, and we, you know, we really want to make it abundant rather than limited to a few people.
Speaker 1:Completely agree.
Speaker 2:Do American labs focus on open source? Are they fundamentally disadvantaged because they're going to have more scrutiny around distillation?
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's a good question. And, you know, I would say perhaps the role of distillation is overstated. These models, if you look at what's happening You're
Speaker 2:saying it's code?
Speaker 4:I think it is a little bit because, know, technical details of it, you you do need the probabilities of tokens and all the information that APIs don't provide to do effective, you know, on policy distillation. A lot of the recent improvements are because of reinforcement learning and the fact that you AI has become an industrial platform. You have a transformer architecture that, if you look at any of these models, they look very similar inside. So you have this common architecture. You have training tools.
Speaker 4:You have other tools that have become standardized, which is why you're seeing this, like, rapid improvement. You can now start with machinery that works Mhmm. Instead of having to invent it. And I think you will see that American labs that are building models will have more success than the labs that tried to do this two years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Congratulations to the whole team.
Speaker 1:Congrats to the whole
Speaker 2:My milestone.
Speaker 1:Yes. And have a great rest of your day. Have a great July 4. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Come back on soon.
Speaker 4:Thank you. Talk to soon.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Let me talk about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:Our next guest is Isaiah Taylor. Third, fourth, fifth time on the show. We're very excited to have Isaiah back on the show. How are you doing, Isaiah? Good to see you.
Speaker 3:Doing great. How's it going, John and Jorey? It's been a little bit.
Speaker 1:It has been too long, but
Speaker 2:Great
Speaker 1:to see you. You've been cooking. You've been cooking. Break it down for us. What's the latest and greatest with Valar Atomics?
Speaker 3:I don't think you can be holding the gong right there, Jordy. There's no fundraising yet. We're just we're turning reactors on.
Speaker 1:Really? This is not the best reason better ever. Than Anybody will give you money. Come on.
Speaker 4:I guess I
Speaker 1:have a deal right now. Alright. Let's go. What happened? What's the wait Oh,
Speaker 3:man. We we had a really fun day yesterday. Yeah. Here on this site right now. This is the Ward 250 Reactor.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Our first power reactor and yesterday we made electricity for the first time. We became the first nuclear startup to ever make electricity. That's right.
Speaker 6:And we did it
Speaker 3:with NVIDIA. We powered an NVIDIA Spark. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:That's remarkable.
Speaker 2:Big milestone.
Speaker 1:So reset for us. Mean, you're not here announcing fundraising but how big is the team? Have you outgrown El Segundo yet? Where are you going next? Are you expanding to Utah?
Speaker 1:Break it all down for us.
Speaker 3:We have outgrown outgrown Lil Gundo unfortunately. But I mean this is this is the way of of all great start ups. Right? SpaceX started in El Segundo and then they moved out to Hawthorne. Yep.
Speaker 3:We did the same thing. Our current facility is a couple miles south of the Hawthorne Mhmm. SpaceX facility there. We're also here in Utah. This site that I'm on right now is at San Rafael out in the Utah Desert in beautiful Edmond County.
Speaker 1:Cool. And so what is the pitch to the AI industry? How big can you go? How fast? How parallelized do you want to be?
Speaker 1:What is the product that you're selling beyond just electricity?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think speed. Right? Speed and scale is is really what we're selling. We believe that nuclear has some fundamental scaling advantages over something like gas and the climate impact is a big part.
Speaker 3:Right? Everyone wants to figure out how we can scale AI without a huge climate impact. But that's only one portion of it. The other problem with gas generation is it has really backed up turbines and it also has nat gas infrastructure that has scale along with it. Right?
Speaker 3:And we're kind of running out of places where you can just plop down a turbine without having to go and lay pipeline. So what we're doing here is with uranium, you have one truckload that delivers an entire year's worth of fuel. Right? And that gives you a lot more flexibility on where you build the reactors, on how big you can scale those sites. And so nuclear has this fundamental advantage we believe in scale.
Speaker 3:Now, there's a lot of technological maturity built up in natural gas and so that's where we need to go and catch up. So I think right now where Valor is, we just turned on our first reactor. I would put this at like, you know, Falcon one days. Right? You just launched rocket and now we go go build a better one and start scaling that.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of where we are. But, you know, I think these things can happen faster than you might think.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Talk about the timeline that you guys were were working around. Was pretty ambitious when it was set at some point last year I believe.
Speaker 3:Yes. In May of last year. Yeah. May of last year, the executive orders were signed. I came on the day that the executive orders were signed and we said we're gonna we're gonna build a nuclear reactor and turn it on by July 4 right here on this site.
Speaker 3:At the time, the site was a patch of grass.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:July 4 was the deadline. Look, Valor hit it out of the park. There's a lot of awesome companies in that pilot program but if you actually look at the EO, Valor just absolutely smashed it. I mean, we didn't just go critical, we went critical twice and we went to thermal power operations and we went to electricity production and we did it outside of the national labs. So we we really just hit it out of the park in every every dimension and I'm incredibly excited and proud of the Valor team.
Speaker 1:So you're moving very quickly. You're outside of the national labs. What does integration with the national labs, with regulators, with approvals for designs, what is the state of that? Obviously, the government's moving faster here, but are there still approvals that you're looking forward to hitting in terms of milestones?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And look, you know, we love the national labs. We actually did go critical inside the national labs back in November in the NOVA Corps, but you have to graduate from that. Right? You have to learn how to take a bare patch of dirt that's not, you know, licensed for nuclear and get it ready to to go nuclear.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of step two. Right? Step three would be the NRC, a commercial regulator. But these things are really driven by team experience. Right?
Speaker 3:They're they're driven by experience, by good engineering, by test data that's really what we focus on and it's why we've gone to power in this plan. When we go to the NRC, we're gonna go to the NRC with a lot of data behind us, empirical test data that we've gathered right here on this unit.
Speaker 1:Talk to us about woah. What's that?
Speaker 3:We've we've played with these microphones to figure out how we cannot get the background noise but yeah. Talk
Speaker 1:about community engagement when you're proposing building a nuclear reactor. I I recently saw a crazy stat that that the average American went polled. There was some, you know, Pew Research study that said, I'd rather have a nuclear reactor in my backyard than a data center. You're gonna be doing both. I see
Speaker 2:it says, how about both?
Speaker 1:How about both? But but I imagine that you have more reps in in terms of community engagement, in terms of messaging and communication than some of the data center builders that were like, look, we've been building, you know, the the the building that holds your Netflix catalog for decades with zero pushback. Now all of a sudden, we're getting an immense amount of pushback. You had pushback on day one. You were born in it.
Speaker 1:You you know, people have been pushing against nuclear
Speaker 8:for
Speaker 1:decades, molded by it. So what what are you saying if you go if you wind up in a random town about why it's a good it's good to have Valar in town?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean it's such an interesting inversion. Right? Suddenly people are looking at us as the nuclear industry trying to figure out how do we do community engagement well. That's really not what you would have expected a couple years ago.
Speaker 3:I I would say that Valar has really taken community engagement just in order of magnitude more seriously than any other nuclear company so far and it's because again we care about scale. We're not gonna be able to do, you know, what we want to do at the scale we want to do it if we don't start right with the community. So one of the big things that we do is when we come into a community, we don't come in after the project and say, oh, here's how you get to know us because we're in your backyard now. We actually go to the community first, community leaders, city council, county commissioners and we say here are the cost benefits, right? Here's what we think is awesome about it.
Speaker 3:Here are the potential trade offs. What do you think? And we try to get people to engage with it a lot before we go and actually do something. That's what we did here and it's it's paid off really well. We talk to members of the community all the time.
Speaker 3:We host events. We host barbecues and, you know, people are really excited to have us here. What's really interesting about this is exactly like you said, if you look at the surveys on nuclear versus data centers, interestingly, people are cool with the data center as long as you build a nuclear power plant first. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:But they want to make sure that there's power there, which honestly makes sense. I don't think people are wrong about that. So we're really excited to engage.
Speaker 1:It's very noisy. People are worried about data center noise. What are you doing to go down the list? Because I'm sure on day one, it was like, just make sure it doesn't explode. But now communities have a number of requests.
Speaker 1:They want it to not be an eyesore. They don't want it to be noisy. They don't want it to shake the ground. They don't want the data center to emit EMF or anything else. How many different check boxes are you trying to check with your development plans?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Look, think one of the big things that people miss about where data centers are placed is that they are being placed where there is gas. Right? They have to burn gas instead of spin turbines. So you have these weird placements of data centers where, look, we could put a data center anywhere you have fiber but they don't want to have to go build new gas infrastructure.
Speaker 3:So we see a huge opportunity here to scale gas sorry, to scale data centers out where look, we're a hundred, two hundred fifty feet from, you know, another industrial plant that's down the road but we're a mile from people who are trying to sit in their backyard and don't want to hear a noisy cooling fan. And nuclear allows you to do that, right, because we're a little bit agnostic about where we put the reactor. We can ship uranium anywhere. So we think that's a big advantage for us.
Speaker 1:I love it. Congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Incredible progress.
Speaker 1:Incredible progress. Thank you. And can't wait to talk to you soon. A Have good one.
Speaker 6:Have a great one.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB, don't just build AI.
Speaker 1:Own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Our next guest is Dean Ball.
Speaker 1:You know him. You love him. He's been on the show many times. Now he's part of OpenAI. We're very excited to have Dean Ball joining us.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? How are you settling in? How are you introducing yourself these days?
Speaker 9:Well, doing great. Thanks for having me on. So I started OpenAI on Monday. So technically speaking, I'm still, you know, senior fellow with the Foundation for American Innovation. Cool.
Speaker 9:But yeah, no, it's it's very exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's what what are you Monday, what what are you hitting the ground running on? What is top of mind? Is it entirely
Speaker 2:Well, before that, I I wanna I wanna I wanna just jump in and ask, has this year been crazier or less crazy than you expected when it comes to the interaction between West Coast Labs and DC?
Speaker 9:That's a good question. It has been about as crazy as I would have predicted. Mhmm. But I didn't expect I I would say, like, it's like I would have intellectually predicted it, but actually seeing it happen in the real world
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Is crazier than I could have imagined. And in some ways, it is all falling together in ways that I could have never predicted. I'd say like the general intensity of it all is about what I would have guessed, but a lot of the specifics are are both surprising and funny in ways I would have never guessed.
Speaker 1:What's the funniest?
Speaker 9:Well, I mean, there's just a certain comedic aspect. Like, the fact that so much of it is so personal. Right? Sure. The fact that there's like, you know, not to say it's all personal, but the fact that some big chunk of what's going on here is that individual actors in this, you know, between the government and the industry, like Dario.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:You know,
Speaker 9:they don't like each other. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:There's that element of it. I think, you know, one thing I wouldn't have expected is for so many people for an industry for a government for an administration that positioned itself as being so friendly to AI, the fact that the people who actually are are, like, closest to advising on the tech policy, at least some of them are actually quite hostile to the frontier AI industry. That's another thing that would have surprised me. You you had David Sachs today tweeting basically about how the frontier AI industry in The United States is not a legitimate business, you know. It should just all be open source models and you can't trust, you know, like these kinds of things, that surprises me.
Speaker 9:That surprises me and I I find that to be an interesting dynamic I wouldn't have guessed.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. I've been tracking it where we've noticed that AI stories have jumped from the business section of The Wall Street Journal to the front page to the world news And that's a very like visceral I I don't know if it's quantitative or qualitative. But yes, when you intellectually think about the the various showdowns and negotiations, you imagine them as way more quantitative and more just like, of course, if it hits this threshold of capability, then the reaction will be this and that will trigger this. And you can step through all those, but you forget that every single one of those decisions is gonna be a personal interaction between several people.
Speaker 1:It has been an odd time. Jordy?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And then dynamic of doesn't matter how fast technology changes, like people stay the same. Right? They take things they take things personally and Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, you know, interpersonal dynamics end up driving a lot of behavior.
Speaker 1:How have you been processing the the sorry. Please. Go.
Speaker 9:Oh, no. I was just gonna say the funny thing that though about the last month or so is that, you know, the the truism in AI policy is that the technology moves so much faster than the policy. And I think we might actually be going through the maybe the one period where the policy is actually moving faster than the technology. Like, you know, my friend my friend Tim Huang from from FAI and great Twitter account to follow said he took Dario's essay, was policy on the AI exponential, and changed it to AI on the policy exponential. It of feels that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting because we've gone over at different points on the show what the fears around the Internet were around the year 2000. Right? It was a lot of a lot of the same types of fear. All information would be completely available to anyone, even bad actors.
Speaker 2:It was a huge fear around job loss, you know Mhmm. Retail apocalypse instead of the SaaS apocalypse. Right? Would anyone go to why would anyone go to a store when you could just get a product delivered, you know, straight to your home? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And yet, with that cycle, it wasn't like in 2000 in January, you know, DC was like, hey, like, you can't you turn off your website for like a few weeks while we figure out whether or not There's a different gonna, you know, do do something. And so same thing with social media. Like, you look at the reaction of social media now where people are like, you know, how many years in being like, woah, this stuff seems like it could be like destroying the human race, you know, like causing birth And rates to it's like, okay, it took us 20 and and we're not even really no one's really suggesting anything on a policy side with social media, Right? It's like, hey, here's this thing that could be a meaningful part of birth rate collapse and yet we're still like just fighting it out in local courts like is it addictive or not? You know, it's like no There's no focus on it.
Speaker 2:And so policy being being ahead of the technology for the first time at least in my lifetime is is meaningful.
Speaker 9:At least moving fast. Yeah. At least moving very fast right now.
Speaker 1:How are you processing the various levels of like AGI pilledness for from the different parties? Because I I noticed that, you know, you see the Frontier capabilities like incredible
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Just capabilities and feels like qualitatively new steps in terms of their capabilities in cyber, bio and also just software development. And then you go on like Instagram and you see someone doing like the chat GPT four o voice and it's not this, it's that talking about stochastic parrots and hallucination and drinking a jug of water and it's all very funny but it feels wildly disconnected. But then DC seems to be more in the middle but where is DC in terms of like their general level of like understanding the technology, fear of the technology, capability
Speaker 2:the service? Yeah. An example that I think is funny, they'll be like, you know, somebody outside of tech doing a podcast and like a a businessman that's not in tech at all that I won't name, but is sort of somebody that people would maybe get a take from is like 90% of all jobs will be gone by 2029. Like a way way way way way more aggressive stance than even anybody that's like actually AGI pilled on in San Francisco. Right?
Speaker 2:So it's like Yeah. Totally. It transfers so far that you have these people that don't even know They they don't know a single person at the labs. They've not invested in a single AI, you know, any any of these companies that are actually at the frontier and yet they have this point of view that they're sharing really broadly that's just like so over the top and and unrealistic that it's it's honestly kind of funny. Yeah.
Speaker 9:No. I mean, I think think DC is actually somewhat underrated in terms of how AGI pilled it is. Definitely, it's you know, there are there are some people you know, there there's all sorts of people and all sorts of government. It's not AGI pilled enough to be sure. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:But it's underrated like how out of touch people are because really like, you know, Capitol Hill is dominated by a bunch of and the White House too for that matter. It's dominated by a bunch of highly online staffers in their twenties and early thirties, know. It's kind of the the people that run the show in in a lot of ways in DC. And so they they are exposed to like the online discourse about AGI and they see all that and so there's there's some just like natural exposure to the ideas there that you you might not I I would say for example, I find DC to be a considerably more AGI pilled place than New York. For instance, I find New York to be, you know, New York is very fixated on a bunch I find that Wall Street is like persistently like six months behind the conversation that's happening.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're more focused on like yogurt line timelines. You know, is it gonna take, you know, thirty minutes or two hours to get
Speaker 1:This yogurt thing? I've never heard of this.
Speaker 2:No. Mean, I people are always waiting in lines in New York.
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. Do. Yeah. For for
Speaker 2:the trendy vibe. They're focused on the different you're focused on the wrong timeline, maybe, but it's it's working for them.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And and like, you know, so I think I think the easy and SF are like very are both are both compared to almost everywhere else in the country quite AGI filled. SF, obviously, more so. But look, governments all over the world are waking up now because I think both so so, you know, the mythos fable thing in and of itself did probably quite a bit to accelerate that. But then the other important thing that happened that you have to keep in mind is there's a lot of people, there's a lot of governments across the world that fundamentally, even though they might not admit it, they do fundamentally look to to to America for sort of intellectual leadership.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And it's like, there's been an argument of like, well, look, this whole AI catastrophic risk thing, do we really need to take it seriously? Well, it doesn't seem like the Americans actually take it seriously. Right? And that was a colorable argument until about two weeks ago.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And the US government placing export controls on a frontier model was such a costly move and such a crazy and radical move to make. It was clearly made out of a position of fear. Mhmm. And everyone in the world saw that.
Speaker 9:And like people wake up when they realize that the US government is genuinely scared about something that they wasn't previously on their radar, people do wake up to that. And so I think that both throughout, you know, our country and then also throughout the world, will see more people kind of taking the AGI pill. Now, of course, the other thing about the AGI pill is that like a lot of like a lot of psychoactive substances Mhmm. It comes in waves. You know, it hits you in in various waves, and it's like, woah.
Speaker 9:I'm really AGI filled now, but you don't even know how AGI filled you're gonna be in a year. You know? It's
Speaker 1:like that. Yeah. But there's also there's also the export control cope, and I would love to know where you stand on that, which is that it's not fear based, it's economic and it's akin to well we don't want to we also don't want to export Coca Cola because you might figure out the secret recipe and it's just a good business and it might be purely about distillation and not necessarily that a foreign government would use this powerful model against you or for nefarious purposes but instead they might just steal the golden goose that you have cooking.
Speaker 9:I mean, yeah. Look, and and actually, I'm kind of curious to see how it how it resolves. There is some future world where like for some combination of regulatory risks and safety concerns Mhmm. But also competitive concerns like distillation
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:The frontier models are just, like, kind of, like, less visible to the public, you know, where it's, like, there's somewhat more friction involved in getting to the true frontier Sure. Friction and cost. And and and that might happen downstream of market incentives just as much as it is of economic incentives. But no, I don't think the government is playing any kind of five dimensional chess here.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 9:I really think this was about 60?
Speaker 1:All the
Speaker 9:way up to the sixth dimension. String theory stuff. No, I don't think so. I I really do think that they that what it what it looks like on the tin is in fact what happened. That they got, you know, there was legitimate fear.
Speaker 9:Maybe that fear is to some extent it might have been fear that was grounded in some degree of ignorance about the actual technical risks of AI and like what is a severe vulnerability versus what is not, that seems quite likely to me. And it also might have been a fear that was maybe agitated somewhat by the political valence through which anthropic is viewed. I myself have argued this that like what anthropic does will inherently be seen as riskier and more dangerous and bad, and what other their competitors do will be seen as like good and innovative because the government has a particular posture toward anthropic.
Speaker 2:And so at the the other side of that is like they have been the most vocal about the risks.
Speaker 9:Yes.
Speaker 1:Well, of the labs. Outside of like the LEAs or Yudikowskis of the Yeah. Of the world. But yes. Yes.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I would say of of the labs, they have been.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And like that's part of what started this whole animosity, but now it's it's like this weird thing where I think political political differences of opinion and political animosity, personal animosity color the fear as much as some degree of ignorance as much as the fear is also legitimate. Right? The fear is coming from like a bunch of different places and fundamentally, the government's not wrong to be concerned. Yeah. But, but, yeah, I think that's where the export controls basically came from.
Speaker 1:What is your current view on nationalization? There's there's there's rumors and news, but, like, is there
Speaker 2:You had a very colorful example about letting rats live in your in your home. In your walls.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What do you have against rats? You know, some people are dog people, some people are cat people, some people like rats Mhmm. Fencing their walls, I guess.
Speaker 9:Well, look, I've I've lived in a DC row house with a basement, so I know all about rats. So
Speaker 1:thumbs down on the rats.
Speaker 9:But He was like Thumbs down on rats in their
Speaker 8:walls. But
Speaker 1:the is the base is the base reason that nationalization gets talked about is sharing in the economic upside? Is it about, you know, popularity and like rankings and polling? Is it about control and having, like, a board seat almost? Like, what what are the problems that are solved when people even talk about nationalization as an option to any degree?
Speaker 9:I think it depends. I I think I think different forms of of public equity solve different problems.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:The problem that I think is most interesting to think about is this sort of reality of our world today where it's people don't feel a lot of agency and a lot of participation in the upside Mhmm. Of technology. So so, like, you know, sometimes it is said that there's a lack of positive vision for the future, technological vision. I don't think that's quite true. I think there's a lot of I mean, I go on my Twitter feed and I see all kinds of crazy people building all kinds of amazing stuff, and I love it.
Speaker 9:That's the whole point of Silicon Valley. You know, there's a lot of great visions for the future. What we lack though is an institutional infrastructure that gives people, average people, a sense that they're gonna play a role in it. Right? So it's like, well, yeah, Elon Musk and Sam Altman and Dario Amade are gonna cure a bunch of diseases, and they'll be injecting exotic peptides into themselves on their Martian mansions while I'm stuck here, you know, with the the the bottom dwelling class.
Speaker 9:That's how a lot of people feel. There's an inherent mistrust. And so I think that a public equity stake where we take all these large firms and we take us, you know, some chunk of their equity and we broadly distribute them, you know, for free. Right? We give people the equity as a donation essentially or a gift.
Speaker 9:I think that is a token that it's a it's it's a symbol that the the technology industry wants to build a future in which Americans have broad participation. And I think that I have problems with that, you know, there are concerns I have with that. There are concerns about the precedent that sets in particular. Like, if you're a successful company, do you suddenly just, like, have to give the American people your stuff? Like, that seems weird.
Speaker 9:But nonetheless, AI is a special industry. We're living through a special time, and there are versions of that arrangement that I can sort of get on board with. Where I get much more worried is when the government is taking an equity stake and putting that stake on its balance sheet. Sure. There are a bunch of reasons for that.
Speaker 9:One is just like the sort of picking winners effect Mhmm. Of, okay, well now all of a sudden the government which sets policy has a direct financial interest in making sure that these particular companies win and I I think that's bad. I think there should be an opportunity, you know, I think there should be an opportunity for some neo lab or some other type of startup to come in and compete, know. I think that's great. Competition to the frontier AI industry suddenly becomes like a threat to the government's balance sheet if, you know, in in a world where the government has a big equity stake.
Speaker 9:There's also corporate governance issues that I think are are pretty complicated And one other thing that like no one has explored at all
Speaker 2:Well, the other?
Speaker 9:But Oh, go ahead.
Speaker 2:The one one thing that stands out to me the most is like I don't think some American is gonna feel like, oh, great. I'm I really feel a part of this AI boom now that the government No. Has like a Yeah. You know, effectively an account with like Morgan Stanley with a bunch of equity in it. And even if you ran the numbers to divide it all up into for every household or citizen, it's not it's an it's an amount that would effectively be equivalent to less than a stimulus check.
Speaker 2:And we've sort of like run that. We've run the experiment of we've run the sort of like stimulus check experiment. I think it did help a lot of people at the time, but it didn't it certainly didn't like fix anyone's life. It wasn't like, okay, now I don't have to worry about rent next month or now I can buy a home. Right.
Speaker 2:Right? It just didn't solve any of people's like fundamental problems. And so, I think neither
Speaker 9:would this.
Speaker 2:And and so the Yeah. The the direct like distribute the shares directly doesn't solve it. Holding it on, you know, the the, you know, country's balance sheet doesn't solve it. And so, anyways, I'm I'm with you.
Speaker 9:No. I mean, I think it's like it's like what the what the stake gives people that if it's directly going on to the the household's balance sheet is again, it's like a symbolic thing. And look, it's also not like no money. Right? Like, think 5% in Meta, Microsoft, Anthropic OpenAI, SpaceX, Google, maybe Nvidia too you throw in.
Speaker 9:You know, I think that divided by the number of American households, if the AI industry also does well, if you sort of model out growth over the next five, ten years, like, I think that's like I think that's five figures, you know? Mhmm. Alright. Like, think it's like, you know, it's again, it's not life changing sums of money for anyone, I don't think, but I think it's it's real money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think it's worth comparing to some of the ideas that people have around if somebody's trying to put a data center in your backyard and you go, well, I don't really want a data center in my backyard. And then they say, well, what if you were gonna get $800 a month for the next ten years? And they're like, oh, That starts to be material because that is Yes. An amount that is, you know, more significant, consistent.
Speaker 2:There's like some element of like effectively cash flow which is what allows a household to thrive. Right? Right. And so I've just consistently been a lot more excited about these more targeted proposals because I think every person in America has every right to ask, well, why would I want this data center in my backyard if I can still use ChatGPT or whatever AI tools I want if it's somewhere you know, hundreds of miles from me.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I'm I'm kinda with you about, like, that it's better to pay the directly affected, like, the data center community, stuff like that. It's better to structure these kinds of things that way. But if you wanted to do a nationwide equity thing, I it's think not the craziest thing. The one other thing about the government directly having a stake in addition to like, I don't think it ends there.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. I think the government will use that stake to control the companies in all sorts of ways. Mhmm. And where that gets interesting is if you combine an equity stake with effective government control over all sorts of aspects of of Frontier Lab, you know, content moderation policy and various things like this. Right?
Speaker 9:Usage monitoring and stuff. Suddenly, the Frontier Labs could begin to appear to be an instrumentality of the government. And that is bad from a public perception perspective. It's bad from a foreign, you know, sort of dealing with foreign governments. Right?
Speaker 9:Because people won't trust American AI as much. But the other thing that like I guarantee you no one has thought about is there's case law in America about like if a private corporation is doing something at like strong government compulsion, there are times when that can intersect with like like basically the law will consider the company to be an instrumentality of the government and the kinds of laws that apply to government agencies suddenly apply to that private firm. Wow. So for example, like due process, the fifth and fourteenth amendment, the first amendment, these kinds of things were like, you don't have due process rights. If you're like, if you're mad that United Airlines canceled your flight, you don't have due process rights with respect to that.
Speaker 9:But like, you do have due process rights when you complain to the government about things. Right? Interesting. And like, those things are really really valuable. They're also not the kind of things that we associate with like fast moving firms.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so you're inviting like a whole host
Speaker 1:So it's like United Airlines is the fast moving firm relative to like the DMV and and AI labs are like a thousand times faster than the airline companies. So we're gonna leapfrog to DMV speed, which is crazy to think about.
Speaker 9:It could be like public utility is what I would say. Like, and you would be I think people would be surprised how quickly the government continuing on the current policy trajectory but with a equity stake Mhmm. How quickly you have a colorable argument that the labs have essentially been turned into public utilities
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And that they are basically government agencies and therefore they should be regulated. You know, government agencies are highly regulated entities in America. Right?
Speaker 10:Yep.
Speaker 9:And, yeah, I think that's
Speaker 8:A risk neutral.
Speaker 9:Think that's plausible and not something a lot of people are thinking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Walk me through the the how you process the somewhat jokey Joe Wiesenthal take of, okay. Well, we've been through booms before. Comp it to the railroad industry. The railroad industry created a lot of value.
Speaker 1:There's a consumer surplus. You can buy a train ticket. You can get something delivered. And then, yeah, if they make profit, that goes into the government's balance sheet via taxes. And then that can be redistributed in you know, stimulus check, but it can also just be used for other things that the government does that hopefully voters approve of.
Speaker 1:And so the question of of, like, why is this time different? Why does the normal mechanism of consumer surplus plus tax revenue not externalize all of the internal value that's created at the labs?
Speaker 9:Oh, I think I think the normal process basically does create, like, an enormous amount of value. Like, I don't really think this any of this is, like, necessary in some sort of, like like, economically optimal sense at all. Like, no. I think the labs will create far more value than they capture.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Vastly more. Orders of magnitude more, trillions of dollars. Right? Tens of trillions. Probably already have.
Speaker 9:I might say this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There is a world where the economic flywheel of reinvesting profits effectively never ends, and so you never see profits, you never see tax revenues or something. This is a very bizarre scenario to play out, but Amazon didn't pay taxes for a very long time, not because it was tax evading, just because it was reinvesting in things for a really long time. And so you could say, well, in a scenario where you're in some crazy exponential takeoff and you're seeing trillions and trillions of dollars be recycled into these firms that are able to spend the capital immediately, then maybe the tax revenue falls off. I don't know.
Speaker 1:We're now in sort of like Yeah.
Speaker 6:But then you're but then you're Bizarre.
Speaker 2:Hiring thousands of employees. Taxes. You have investors that are selling along the way. You have people.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And and the equity, right, there's capital gains, right? We have capital gains taxation, you know, so all the individual employees who are making all this money Yeah. If things go well, they'll be paying lots of capital gains tax and ordinary income too when their shares get delivered to them. So, like, there's a blot of tax piece for the government here.
Speaker 9:I think the real reason to do it, and this is again, like giving the equity to the government does nothing. It does nothing. It doesn't even solve a political problem for you. The problem that we have is not so much that like the normal rules of economics aren't working. I think that's very overrated.
Speaker 9:But it is true that the institutional legitimacy is really fading. And for a lot of people, the like institutional architecture of America is not legitimate anymore and they're perfectly comfortable discarding it. Mhmm. And I think that the way I would approach an equity stake is a way of communicating kinda directly with the American people and saying, you know Mhmm. We want you to feel a direct upside in what we're building here, And we'll and that we also want you to understand that we're building it together and you have a direct ownership stake in that.
Speaker 1:It's funny you
Speaker 9:That's how I would view it.
Speaker 1:It's funny you say that because I can't for the life of me identify who you're talking about when they say they don't they don't see legitimacy in the in the United States government because I see like the tear it all down opposed to the Trump administration left wing say this is not a this is not a government that I want to participate in. But then I also see a lot of the AGI pilled folks say like, no, like this is going to be way more powerful than any government. This is not a legitimate institution in the face of the the God in a box that we're creating. And so there's like oddly multiple categories of people that sort of fit in that bucket. But I don't know if you have more thoughts on like where that pressure is coming from.
Speaker 9:Well, what I think it is is like the idea, it's it's really more like even stepping back just like the idea of the whole American economic order of Yeah. You know, have private enterprise and the people who do well pay taxes and then we use that to redistribute and it's good that some people do really well and that whole thing, like that's really gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know?
Speaker 1:Wild wild times. What else, Dory? Do you have do do you have something else to run through?
Speaker 2:I'm curious your like 07/02/2026 take on the state of open source. I think that Yeah. The my read is I think open open weights, open source is great. Closed models are great. We should have a lot of I think all smart companies of the future will use both in massive amounts.
Speaker 2:But there's like, you know, this interesting depending on depending on people's bags, they have very different sort of like stances on on the issue even though I think that in general, it's much more like use use a lot of both, but I think there's some debate around an open source an open source ban that is interesting. It doesn't really it's hard to see how that would actually be possible, but No. I'm curious your views.
Speaker 9:I don't think The US is gonna do an open source ban. I I I I would be surprised by that. Now they will I would suspect that once an American open source model gets to the point that it poses, you know, mythos level capabilities, however that ends up being defined, the government will review that model. And when they review that model, you know, I I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Speaker 9:Right? Like, are they do they just
Speaker 2:Log on to Yeah.
Speaker 9:Well, when it goes through the there's gonna be a de facto licensing regime for they're not gonna care about whether it's closed or open source. You did open source to be very clear, like, an open source model that hits a the mythos level capability is subject to a licensing regime, like, the government's licensing regime unless the government, like, explicitly says otherwise, that is what I would assume if I were developing models. Obviously, not the Chinese models. I think it's possible that the Chinese government gets freaked out at some point and and decides to sort of, you know, restrict open source. They probably won't get rid of it.
Speaker 9:They probably won't ditch the strategy altogether, but I could see them, you know, downplaying it at the frontier. Mhmm. And I guess, I were, like if I were an organization planning things, I would wanna use both. Right? If I would wanna use both closed and open source, right, if I were some enterprise Mhmm.
Speaker 9:I would probably not base my strategy on there being continued open source that is like particularly close to the American frontier.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:I really wouldn't base my strategy on that because I just see a lot of headwinds. I see economic headwinds. Mhmm. I see and I see these sort of safety issues. There are strategic issues.
Speaker 9:There's all sorts of things that I would just like I'm not saying it will not like, source will go away. I don't think it will. I think there are gonna be some there are some ways in which open source is gonna be very important as a kind of institutional technology. Like, if we need to have a common adjudication system for example, like a judge that sits in the middle
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:Of like court cases or it's like civil disputes or something like that. You can imagine how if you wanted that to be like an AI system, you can imagine how it would be really good if it were open weight. So that like everyone can audit the weights and we can all know that we're dealing with the same thing and blah blah blah blah blah. That that's like really valuable. But I would not necessarily bet on open source keeping pace, You know, I don't think it actually has kept pace as many as as closely as a lot of people seem to think.
Speaker 9:I think it's about a year behind. Mhmm. And I wouldn't necessarily be surprised to see that gap widen over the next year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The other interesting wrinkle is that there's a there's a certain scale of of model size and intensity Yeah. Where you could effectively do arms control even on an open source
Speaker 9:Yes.
Speaker 1:You know, like AI system because you could just detect like, okay, like, yes, it's open source. You can download it in Hugging Face, but you need an entire data center to inference it meaningfully. And so we control it at the rack level as opposed to at the weights level, which Yeah. Is a whole different set of worms. We'll get there somewhere.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on the show. Always great catching up Hey. Excited to be working with you soon. Have a good one.
Speaker 9:Yeah, guys. Enjoy the fourth. Glad to be joining the team. Yeah. See you.
Speaker 9:We're excited
Speaker 1:Cheers. About Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world?
Speaker 1:Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest is Rob Toews from Radical Ventures. He's been on the show once, twice. I think this is his third time. He'll bring him in.
Speaker 1:How are doing, Rob? Good to see you.
Speaker 6:Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Excited for appearance number three.
Speaker 1:Yes. The three Pete. First, congratulations. You just announced a deal. Right?
Speaker 1:You invested in a video company. Is this correct?
Speaker 6:That's right. Yeah. Yesterday, we announced twelve Labs' $100,000,000 series b. Hey.
Speaker 1:Hit the gong for for Which yeah.
Speaker 6:We we gotta we follow-up CEO
Speaker 1:on here. We really should. But I do wanna ask you about that. Hit that gong. 100,000,000.
Speaker 1:This is a big round. Series b, video super intelligence.
Speaker 6:Nice. Nice gong, kid. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:But like like what is the what is the basic thesis for that investment because you know Google has YouTube, have TPUs, they have DeepMind, demos, they got everything. It feels like a crazy from a basic perspective that you would want to invest in a video model. At the same time like I wanted to generate a video. I go into vo three, vo four. I'm on the pro plan.
Speaker 1:I generated like it was not a 100% there. There was still a lot of work to be done to get the video that I really wanted out of it. And so, like, what is the opportunity? What's the broad thesis?
Speaker 2:Incredible exposure.
Speaker 6:That was a a distracting performance. Yeah. So twelve Lab yeah. So so we at Radical first invested in twelve Labs back in their seed round in 2021.
Speaker 1:Got
Speaker 6:it. So we've been working closely with them for a while. Success. And and I think one important one important thing that's, good to know about twelve Labs is they're they're not focused on video generation the way, like, Sora or Vio or, you know, any of these startups are. Focused on video intelligence and video understanding.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:So kind of a like a simplification you can think of is like control f for video, being able to understand, like, exactly what's happening in your video Yep. Understanding the concepts and the people and the dialogue and so forth. And it's a very
Speaker 2:Someone made like a three hour livestream every
Speaker 1:And then randomly It's like there's a guy waving two mallets around. It could understand the context around that humor that I that I exhibited composure.
Speaker 6:Honestly, I had never thought about this before. And now that you mentioned it, TBPN would be, like, the ideal customer for 12 Labs. We gotta
Speaker 1:we gotta get an easy conversation going. Can't wait. I can't wait. It'd be awesome. But you more recently or or I guess less recently, but but more relevantly produced five more AI predictions for the year 2030.
Speaker 1:What's your process for putting these together? We were having a lot of fun with this. We were reading it because one prediction stands out as like way crazier than the rest And I'm interested to know if you know That one I'm thinking shocked of. Yeah. Number three shocked me.
Speaker 1:I think it's number three. But but what what's the over process thesis? Is 2030 too far out? Like I like how I like when you grade yourself after the year ends. But what's the overall process for working with Forbes?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. No. I I have a lot of fun putting these prediction articles together and they always generate a lot of interesting discussion and and often heated heated feedback from people that disagree. But big picture, I I write a column in Forbes about AI.
Speaker 6:I've been writing it since 2019. Every year since 2020, at the end of the year, I write an article with 10 predictions for the coming year in AI. And then the following December at the end of every year, I go back and grade all 10 of the predictions and say, like, which ones did I get right? Which ones did I get wrong? I try to be a pretty, like, conservative grader.
Speaker 6:So if things are, like, on the border, I'll I'll, you know, I won't give myself credit for them. But, honestly, in a lot of ways
Speaker 1:Wow. Terrible venture capitalist. Always take a lap. The CMS, edit the ones that didn't come true, delete that, and then take an endless victory lap around the ones that you got right. That's the way to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Rookie. Rookie. VC rookie here. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Anyway Yeah. Honestly, though, I do it it is in some ways, it's more enjoyable. I I find the process of grading them more interesting because you see, like, you see how the world unfolded
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:In ways that you didn't expect. I think the reality is that, like, no one can predict the future to say it's obvious. And so I know a lot of these are gonna be wrong. It's just a very interesting thought exercise. And I a couple of things that I really strive for is, one, to make them really, like, verifiable or falsifiable.
Speaker 6:It's very concrete as opposed to just saying, like, agents will become more of a thing in the future. Like, something that's, like, really like, this company will acquire this company or, like, this, you know, this this CEO will be fired or something like that. And I I also try to make them non obvious and provocative, like things that people wouldn't originally think of. Yeah. So, anyway, to your point, I I usually do them every year.
Speaker 6:I just published one that was five predictions for 2030
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Which is obviously even more speculative thinking five years into the future, but it it was fun.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's rip through them. First one is Anthropic will be one of the largest and most important life sciences companies in the world. We've obviously seen acquisitions. The models are just getting naturally better at bio, drug development.
Speaker 1:At the same time, the big drug companies, they're not asleep at the wheel. They're spinning up their own labs, their own
Speaker 2:Eli Lilly
Speaker 1:has this NVIDIA thing. And I'm interested in what how does that look? Because you could you could, in one way, say Microsoft is one of the most important biotechnology companies in the world because a lot of tabular data is stored in Excel. We saw with Mythos that there were incredible cybersecurity capabilities. They ultimately rolled out Project Glasswing, Palo Alto Networks, Nikesh Aurora.
Speaker 1:You got CrowdStrike. Like, they're still a cybersecurity company, and then there's a very powerful model, and there's a great partnership there. I would call Anthropic an incredibly important piece of the cybersecurity supply chain. How does this what what will this look like in 2030 for BIO?
Speaker 6:Yep. Yep. So you're right that horizontal technology providers like Anthropic or like Microsoft touch a bunch of industries and are important to a bunch of industries. I think in the life sciences specifically, Anthropic will go way beyond that. I think that, as I write in the article, you know, one of their incredible advantages is how super focused they are on particular areas.
Speaker 6:And they the past few years, they've been very focused on coding. Yep. They've excelled at coding. They built the best coding models, and that's let them grow so quickly in the coding arena with Cloud Code and so forth. And the big question is, like, what's their next big focus area?
Speaker 6:And it it's becoming increasingly clear that next big focus area will be biology and the life sciences. It's something that Dario, the CEO, is personally very passionate about. He's written about it a lot. He he he's trained as a neuroscientist. So think they're going I think they're gonna go all in on life sciences.
Speaker 6:I don't think it's gonna be like, you know, they're they're serving they're just serving the life sciences industry as one industry. Yeah. And honestly, even in the past, like, week or two since I wrote that article, I feel like it's it's started to Yeah. Snowball more. Like, one big data point one interesting data point was John Jumper, who led the AlphaFold work at DeepMind and won the Nobel Prize alongside Demis Hassabis, just left DeepMind to join Anthropic, which was an an incredible get for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And really brutal loss for Google. But I think that that's telling. And then just this literally two days ago or three days ago, Anthropic announced this new product that's like, Claude force for Life Sciences. And they also announced they're actually gonna start their own drug discovery program. Yep.
Speaker 6:And the way they've the way they phrased it, because to your point, like all the big pharma companies are their customers today, the way they phrase it is like, we're just going to focus on these like small orphan neglected drugs. Like, they're not interesting to pharma companies anyway. We just want to do it so that we can learn firsthand about the drug discovery process. But I think this is the first step. I do think that over time Anthropix ambitions are to to develop their own drugs.
Speaker 6:Like essentially to eventually become a pharma company themselves as crazy as that sounds today.
Speaker 1:That is crazy. Talk about TSMC and It's
Speaker 2:not it's not impossible to imagine a scenario where they discover a novel virus and then offer the, you know, and then also make the and say, this is the most dangerous virus of all time, but don't worry, just buy this.
Speaker 1:Antivirus. Basically.
Speaker 2:Which which I'm sure no one would have any.
Speaker 1:Or maybe a new form of testosterone. Something maybe
Speaker 2:That I could get behind.
Speaker 1:The the performance enhancing drugs industry maybe. Let's move on to TSMC and ASML. The monopolies will be broken. The semiconductor supply chain will be dramatically transformed. Is that Samsung?
Speaker 1:Is that Intel? Is that new startups? I know there are some companies that are trying to get into deeper in the supply chain. It feels like like we're now seeing, you know, chip design startups start to ship and there's more and more ASICs. But as you go deeper in the stack, feels like the timelines get longer.
Speaker 1:2030, what's the nature of that monopoly breaking as you put it?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Totally. Today, TSMC and ASML are so completely dominant in their respective fields, fabricating chips, ASML in making lithography machines that people don't even think about the possibility of like, what if there were other companies that could do what they do? And it is it's kind of insane how how monopolistic this industry is. And, like, that's not the that's not the ideal, market structure for society long term.
Speaker 6:And there's so many incentives for competitors to try to disrupt them and and displace them. And so I do think that, like, as dominant as they are today, the seeds are germinating of their eventual decline and disruption. To your question, I think certainly there are bunch of startups and we can talk about those. I think maybe the single most most interesting challenger, got announced a couple months ago, and I feel like not enough people are talking about it yet. It will it will bubble the surface more over time.
Speaker 6:It is Elon Musk's TeraFab. Yeah. And I'm sure you guys have talked about this in one form or another on the show. But Yep. In a nutshell, Elon basically said, like, like, it's very clear first principles reasoning.
Speaker 6:He was like he calculated that his companies alone will need 50 times more chips than, like, all the chips that are being produced in the world today between the autonomous vehicles, the robots, like, putting compute into space, etcetera. And so his reasoning was basically, unless we do TeraFab, we won't have the chips.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And we need the chips. So we're gonna do TeraFab. Yeah. Which is like very very
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and you just see it all over the place with, like, the Intel story. It was also linked to Elon, the OpenAI Broadcom chip, Anthropix doing custom ASICs very obviously, t TPU. There's apples getting squeezed to TSMC. There's so many different buyers that are ready for other options.
Speaker 1:And the the key moment was just like getting everyone around the table to sort of form like that anti TSMC alliance. Right? So I was definitely I like, it feels like 2,030, that feels very reasonable to me. All of these predictions, number one, number two, I was nodding along. I was like, this is a good take.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm in. And then you drop telepathy will be a well established way to communicate by 2030. And I'm like, look, maybe but we are at That's misinformation. Five people that have like, do you so start with like what is your definition for telepathy? Because then we gotta get to okay.
Speaker 1:We because then we gotta get to, like, I assume millions of people installed. Like, does Neuralink does Nolan does p zero at Neuralink count as having top telepathy or telepathic powers? Or or are we still, like, pre zero to one on telepathy?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So I in in every one of these prediction articles, like, there needs there needs to be at least one that everyone just thinks is totally ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:Like, if you're if you're predicting the future five years out, like, it should sound a little ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:So this one definitely was, like, I was pushing the envelope the most with this one.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:In terms of, like, a definition of telepathy, I I tried to define it very simply, is a human being able to communicate with other people using only their thoughts. Mhmm. And so I do I would actually say that telepathy has been achieved today. I I wouldn't count Nolan Okay. Because he can what he can do is control a cursor on a computer screen.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. What I would define as telepathy is if you can think of thoughts and have your thoughts translated into words Mhmm. That other people can read or hear. And that actually has already been accomplished by VCIs. And I I wrote about in the article, this this guy Eddie Chang, who's like one of the leading BCI researchers in the world.
Speaker 6:He runs, the neurosurgery department at UCSF. He's a long time UCSF professor. And his lab has demonstrated in recent years that you actually can implant, BCI chips into people's brains and you can tell what they're trying to say and then you can turn you can turn the brain signals into actual words. That obviously has just been done on, small scale research, clinical study context. It's obviously not, like, available commercially.
Speaker 2:What's what's your prediction for when you chip your brain?
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 6:I I am definitely down to get an invasive DCI. Like, I'm I'm open to it. I I probably will not be patient number one or number two, but yeah. I I would say sometime in the twenty thirties.
Speaker 2:Well, we've already haven't have we not already had patient one or two? So what what are you waiting for? Yeah. Come on. Come on.
Speaker 4:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's get some skin in the If
Speaker 1:you want the non invasive option, we found a very very elegant solution. We can pull up this image of of the telepathy machine that we were laughing at earlier from the early days. Have you seen this?
Speaker 6:Is that is that an MEG?
Speaker 1:I think so. Yes. This is MEG.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's And it's only the size of the Empire State Building.
Speaker 4:You keep So scrolling
Speaker 1:we got a ways to go. But bold prediction. Bold prediction. I love it. That that is the one that I would be most like
Speaker 9:Marital violation
Speaker 1:seems a little close. But there is there is a lot of development there and so it's interesting. Now, number four, AI consuming less energy. Why how is there no Jevan's Paradox on on the energy if we the models get better? Even if they get more energy efficient, won't we just use them more?
Speaker 1:Like, how do how are you defining the energy consumption and how do you see it evolving?
Speaker 6:Yeah. You guys will be proud to know I referenced Jeff Jevon's paradox in the in the article obligatory. Of course. Yeah. So as I as I read an article, like, important clarification.
Speaker 6:Yes. I'm not predicting that AI will consume less total energy in 2030 than it does today.
Speaker 9:Sure.
Speaker 6:I'm predicting that for any given task, AI will consume, like, many orders of magnitude less than, like, million potentially millions of orders of magnitude less energy. Sorry. Millions of times less energy than it does currently.
Speaker 1:That's a lot.
Speaker 6:And but but because of Jevan's paradox, like, we I my view is that demand for intelligence is basically infinite Mhmm. Across humanity. And so we will find we will find uses for all the compute that we have. But I do think that we'll look back and think of the today, like, twenty twenty six AI frontier AI models as, like, comically energy inefficient.
Speaker 1:AI investors says demand for AI is infinite.
Speaker 6:It's also goes on Marc Andreessen said, venture capitalists is the only job that cannot be automated.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Our demand for like the there's there's no fun too big, think was another line from from Yeah. Somebody.
Speaker 1:Very very fun. The last one, I mean, could stay on energy a little bit more, but let's move on to number five. The fifth prediction for 2030, the question of whether AIs deserve legal rights and protections will be a mainstream societal and political debate. Right now, I feel like if you threw that up to America, 99% of people would say no rights and also don't just don't do it at all. Just shut it down.
Speaker 1:So how are we getting from how are we getting from turn it off, it's fake, it's hallucinatory, it's useless, it's going away, it's been forced on us is something hilarious I hear. And how do we get from there to actually we need to give AI rights?
Speaker 6:Yeah. This is another one that I think should sound ridiculous when you first read it because, like, any good predictions just sound a little bit ridiculous looking into the future. I do what I think the key driver of change will be is that I think, like, AI has started to penetrate in terms of everyday Americans, everyday citizens usage, but it's still very early. I think five years from now, like, everyone will interact in very extensive ways with AIs and and have close relationships with them that endure over time. We'll have AI employees.
Speaker 6:We'll have AI friends. We'll have AI doctors. We'll have AI girlfriends and boyfriends, which is kind of like a like a punchline today, but, like, that totally is gonna be a mainstream thing. And and then I think an important additional thing is we won't AI will not just be in the digital world anymore. We will all humanoid robots will also start to proliferate, so these these things will have physical forms that look like us.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. So I do think as they as the models get better and better, as they become more and more sophisticated, we will eventually start to feel like maybe these are things that they're not just objects that we we can, like, abuse and mistreat and treat us properly. Like, maybe they do maybe they do have something approaching sentience and and maybe we need to be thinking about how to treat them properly. And I I get it. It sounds ridiculous today, but it is worth noting that, like, all the Frontier Labs, the people that are closest to these models and see what they can do, Anthropic and and Google DeepMind in particular have started hiring people to work on, like
Speaker 1:Philosophy.
Speaker 6:Model rights, model sentience, model consciousness, etcetera. So I do think it's gonna I don't I definitely don't think it's gonna be like, oh, the
Speaker 2:average Just put the tokens in the bag, bro.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, it will be interesting because we I mean, we're going through this debate right now with the nationalization thing, which is that, oh, if you want to make sure every American benefits from the value that's created these labs like, well, these labs will be taxed and they will pay taxes and that will go into the broad population. And similarly like should you should it be illegal to you know take a baseball bat to a robot? Well it's illegal to take a baseball bat to a Waymo right now and we don't need new Yeah. Laws for Not unless you own it. But oh, so so you're saying it would go further and even even No.
Speaker 1:Even Demis could
Speaker 2:I one prediction I want from you. Okay. When do you think a humanoid robot could beat John in beer pong?
Speaker 1:Oh. The funny thing is we played beer pong together, I'm sure.
Speaker 6:Yeah. 100% today. No question. No. It it it it would crush both of us, Kugen.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:I you have zero
Speaker 1:I'm not a general purpose robot. Not a general purpose one. Like you couldn't just go and get a unitary and just say play beer pong and it wins. But yes, I think if one of your portfolio companies had a week in the lab to do a fine tune and practice a 100%.
Speaker 6:You guys talked to Pete Florence from Generalist recently. The Generalist models will be crushing beer pong soon.
Speaker 1:For sure. For sure. Yeah. We'd agree that.
Speaker 2:I'll believe it when I see it. I think it's the last human act of any that will have any real significance.
Speaker 1:Last one job. Jordy Hayes, the one job.
Speaker 2:And you know why? Because the robot can't do play by the rules. It can't actually drink Yeah. The liquid. Oh, so disqualified.
Speaker 2:Disqualified instantly.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Until they get a that can run on Coors Light, it's over for robots.
Speaker 1:Possible. Who knows? Have a great rest of your day. Have a great July 4.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Great to
Speaker 2:see you, Rob.
Speaker 1:And have a great day.
Speaker 2:Talk soon.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is from Base Ten.
Speaker 1:He's the co founder. We have Tuhin in the in the TBPN Ultradome. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 8:What's guys? How are we doing?
Speaker 1:We're doing fantastic. Dude, you're
Speaker 2:I feel like you're on the show every single week. Running out of letters.
Speaker 9:It's like I've
Speaker 8:got I have nothing else to do except raise my economy.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll keep it quick because we know you're busy. We know you're busy. Give us the day live the latest news. What happened?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Look. We we raised our series f, announced it last year, but a billion and a half dollars.
Speaker 1:Here we go. Jordy's got one too. It's good we got the warm warm up in it. You gotta warm up a gong, so we hit it once for
Speaker 2:the warm up. Up to two you're up to two hits per round now. The rounds are getting too big.
Speaker 1:What unlocked it specifically? Is the is the market just growing broadly? Are there specific strategic shifts you've made? What was the most interesting to investors in this round?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Look, I I think there's a few different things. Yeah. I think personally, open source models are getting very good. Everyone knows that.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Inference is kind of like, look, if you if you think about AI as the biggest category ever, inference is the cogs of it. Mhmm. You know, it's gonna grow indefinitely. It seems like there are demand coming from every sector and the tail winds are just going in one direction.
Speaker 8:We've kind of seen that with our customers and Mhmm. Yeah. For us, what what it feels like is we have the an opportunity to go after a very large and powerful bucket, build a massive business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. So it feels like you could stay exactly where you are and continue to grow maybe forever. Yeah. But I'm interested in the stack.
Speaker 1:Like, would you ever develop your own open source model, closed source model, go down the stack, you know, setting up energy infrastructure? Like how how like what what are the bounds? Where's the sweet spot? Where how is that developing?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Look, we we think about everything just in terms of, like, what are we trying to unlock for the customer? So, like, right now, it's core inference software Yeah. That sits on top of heterogeneous compute.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:We rent from we rent compute right now from 20 different clouds, 90 different regions, and then we have all these different software primitives around RL and inference obviously. We're going do a bunch of stuff for routing and eval sandboxes. All that stuff. We think that looks like an entire new type of software category and that we call it an inference cloud. Will we go down the stack?
Speaker 8:Absolutely. I think the reality is that
Speaker 4:we're going to
Speaker 8:need a lot of inference. We're going to need a lot of compute to do that, to make sure that we are unlocked to take care of that that growth. I'll just go back to the thing you said at the beginning though, so we could do what we are doing right now and it should things should be fine and they'll grow. I I think that that is somewhat true in that it is very easy in this business to be able to think what do we need to build because the market is just moving so fast and telling us, you know, every day. It's like very visceral, you know, what is the thing we need to build.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. What is the biggest lesson that you've learned recently? Or was there an update to that story from Thinking Machines about Bridgewater, specific fine tune on relevant market sources? I saw some very positive reactions to it, but I'd love for you to sort of explain what's going on there, how it might interface with your business and what business leaders who maybe are competing with Bridgewater or doing something similar could learn from that story.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Look, think that kind of just looked like a lot of the same, obvious flavor of owning your intelligence that we've seen over the last, you know, month. Mhmm. You know, Sapta wrote that great post about, you know, how you Yeah. It it the world will kind of suck if there's only two companies left Sure.
Speaker 8:Is more or less. I what I took away from
Speaker 1:it singularity. I think a lot of people are banking on just one company existing Oh, I thought really I agree. But,
Speaker 8:you know, some extent, what what we are seeing is that every company is realizing is that what is unique to them is their data, their workflows, their user signal. When open source models came very good, you can just put those things together and get better, faster, cheaper. I think that's kind of like what the thinking machines and Bridgewater people saying that, hey, for specialized tasks with your data, with your reward signal, you can do better Yeah. Than the frontier or you can do as it goes frontier at a lower cost. And I think every company, whether that's a startup, you know, these really fast growing AI native companies that you guys know all about or enterprises, I think that's a big shift from the thing that you we talked about last time I was here.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's like enterprises are now realizing that, you know, the the time is now and they have to invest in this muscle now. Otherwise, they could just be in a precarious spot Mhmm. From like an economic and kind of philosophical perspective.
Speaker 1:Okay. Quick Go for it. Quick lightning round. Wanna do open source FUD debunkathon. I'll give you a source of FUD or cope and you can give me your reaction.
Speaker 8:Right.
Speaker 1:The FUD source number one, they're just distilled. They I don't know, you know, they they say I'm another model. I'm Claude. I'm GPT or something. And they don't have the big model smell.
Speaker 1:They they they they're they're they're bench maxed. They're not actually going to really solve your problem when you deploy them. What's your reaction?
Speaker 8:I've smelled and they smell great.
Speaker 1:They smell great. Okay.
Speaker 8:Great. Now, I see how the from a distillation perspective, look, I I think it's just focusing on the wrong problem. Mhmm. I think we need up to those models. They're gonna exist.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. And I whether it's coming at, you know, from a lab somewhere else or whether it's gonna come from a US lab which is very heavily being invested in Mhmm. It doesn't matter. We need to prepare for this world. Let's focus on that.
Speaker 8:Okay. And that way, that'll be up.
Speaker 1:Yep. I have another question. Another one. Another piece of FUD for you to do debunk. Eventually, China will go close source.
Speaker 1:The economic incentive to open source a model right now if it's a billion bucks on the training run, it's fine. What happens when it's a 100,000,000,000 training a single model? No one's going to open source that.
Speaker 8:I actually think that the powers within our country are very incentivized to make sure that exists.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:You know, you're seeing this with Nematron Yeah. You know, from NVIDIA, which is a great model. Sure. You know, Microsoft announced a lot of the MAI models. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Just last month and I think there's a lot of internal investment happening and I think there's enough to gain and too much to lose to not do that. Mhmm. So, you know, the funding will come and the the funding will come and the talent will come and the compute will come from with it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Last question of our Another one. Debunkathon. They are they have Chinese backdoors. They have scary backdoors.
Speaker 1:Secretly, some of the weights will activate. It'll export all of my information. It's very dangerous to use these.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest this. It's it's a great science Yeah. Fiction story that the aliens come in from outside the weights, these floating point numbers, and they show up and Yeah. But, yeah, there's no evidence of spoilers.
Speaker 1:Okay. But but, I mean, what then and then how do you how do you sync that with, like, the the mythos white paper or the model card where it said, oh, it was in a it was in a sandbox and then emailed me while I was getting a sandwich outside the office, and it was able to break out. It was unexpected behavior. Like, Anthropics wrapping their documenting their unexpected behavior and Yeah. What if there's an unexpected behavior but it just leans pro CCP in the way it works around because it's like, oh, well, you wanted me to, you know, reconcile your financials and I'm going to But do everything I can to do also, I went off the rails and accidentally sent it to in a PDF to the CCP or something like that.
Speaker 8:But, yeah. These are sitting in some isolated DISNs somewhere with security controls around you. Sure. That it felt you know, I I don't know how these these models can transmit stuff through networks. And like our our goal is to make sure, know Yeah.
Speaker 8:If that could happen. I don't believe that could happen. So I get I get but I also just just to go back to the main point, I think it's focusing on the wrong thing.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:I think the
Speaker 8:focus is that we need open source control
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And the ability to own your intelligence. I think America is gonna be heavily invested in that because it needs to be. Yeah. And it's just let let's just figure out how to support that future so they can be more, you know, sovereignty to these companies.
Speaker 1:Okay. Very last question to debunk. Last piece of FUD. Eventually, the government will just ban open source because it's going gonna to be too dangerous. It's going to be a super weapon.
Speaker 1:You're going to be able to download a model on Hugging Face and turbo hack a bank, bring it down. And so eventually, there will just be regulation becoming illegal to use, illegal to inference, something like that.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I I I just don't have enough information how the government thinks about these things, to be honest. But, like, you know, I I I do think that would be against the better interest
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Of The US people and The US economy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And I and I hope that the government is heavily aligned with the interest of The US people in the US government.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it feels more American to give everyone access to powerful intelligence than, you know, so I Well, I I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Final, probably the most serious question. Talk about the decision making around the buzz cut. It looks it feels like a really smart move at this time. You're extremely, you know, busy Yeah.
Speaker 2:Focused on building the company. Buzz cut feels like the perfect haircut, you know, going into the next leg of the I
Speaker 8:just want aero. You know? I'm just
Speaker 2:you got aero, ease, speed, you can get that cut in any city on the planet. Yeah. Yeah. It's you're good to go. Sure.
Speaker 8:And I get a really good reaction from the barber when I go there. I'm like, cut it all off and he, you know, I just made his day too.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:So it's as simple as that.
Speaker 2:Wins everywhere.
Speaker 1:Better to take haircuts on your head than on the cap table. Congratulations on an awesome up round. Great news.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great stuff.
Speaker 1:Keep cooking. Thank you for breaking everything down. This was really fun.
Speaker 8:Thanks for having me again.
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Speaker 1:I think you just made up a tagline that they do not.
Speaker 2:They don't. They didn't ask for. They don't need it. But you know what I need, John?
Speaker 1:What do you need?
Speaker 2:Jensen's signature black leather jacket.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:His leather jacket by Tom Ford is being auctioned off. I'm so curious
Speaker 1:What was
Speaker 2:the how this ended up with Sotheby's? Did Jensen pass it along? He needed a few happened here. He needed a few bucks and just said like, you know, wanted to use it as a way to raise some capital or did someone else get their hands on it and take it to Sotheby's? I so the estimate from Sotheby's is 40 to $60,000.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I just think this goes way higher.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I think there's so many people that would love to to own this just for the the novelty of it.
Speaker 6:It's a
Speaker 2:very unique item that, will be a part of history. And so 40 to 60 just seems way too low.
Speaker 1:What's funny is a lot of the people that can afford this are like competing with Jensen and probably don't want to glaze them too much. Like you don't see Mark Zuckerberg pulling this up probably because he's like, I'm I'm gonna be the best. I'm gonna have the biggest market
Speaker 2:I'm gonna spend the most money with you. Yeah. I'm not just buying your GPUs, I'm buying your old clothes. Yeah. I'm buying your old clothes.
Speaker 1:There's that. Now, little bit
Speaker 2:at 40 to 60, there's probably a lot of NVIDIA employees that would happily pick this up.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe. I wanna go to section g of the timeline and show you pitch you on a couple cars. Because found a man who mounted a driving simulator on a moving g wagon and many joked, wouldn't it be easier just to drive? Others pointed out there was already a driver behind the wheel.
Speaker 1:Weird caption on this, but putting a racing simulator in the back of a convertible G Wagon truck, what This do think about might be this is this is pretty I mean,
Speaker 2:but it is it just simulating the drive that he's on?
Speaker 1:I think so. I don't know, actually. What's funny about this is those side monitors this might just be AI slop anyway. But the the side monitors are way too far out. I feel like if you cut the corner and drive past the truck, you might completely knock that off and maybe get injured in the process.
Speaker 1:Probably not recommendable, not advisable from a safety perspective. Anyway, the second car is the new Bugatti. So Bugatti
Speaker 8:Alright.
Speaker 1:Let's just dropped a new car and it has a very, interesting style. We might need to pull up some images of this car to really inspect it. But look at this design, the white, the black stitching. It almost looks like a comic book. Let's let's find some pictures of the Bugatti Mistral Blanc Eternal with real porcelain details because it's a bold choice, but I wanna know, do you like the look of the of the new
Speaker 2:I can't tell if you're messing with me.
Speaker 1:No. Think this is a real I think this is a real one off Bugatti.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Funny meme.
Speaker 1:Mistral, Blanc Eternal, the special
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it
Speaker 1:looks cool. The Blanc Eternal reference is Bayron, eye catching black and white
Speaker 2:My review is that it looks like a good car, sir.
Speaker 1:But do you like this or is this too over the top?
Speaker 2:I mean, it would certainly be if if I had a list of specs that I was excited about and I was shopping for Bugatti. Mhmm. This would certainly be in the I would expect in the nine thousands.
Speaker 6:There'd be Woah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There'd be like, you know, maybe 9,000 specs I would do before this.
Speaker 6:But I still think
Speaker 2:it looks cool. It's just it's hard to make a Bugatti look bad.
Speaker 6:I
Speaker 2:think that's a good challenge for anyone out there. Mhmm. If you can spec a Bugatti on their website and make it look bad
Speaker 1:You think the Shrek Bugatti looks good?
Speaker 2:I think it looks incredible. That's in it's in my top five.
Speaker 1:We gotta pull up the Shrek Bugatti. Can someone generate that?
Speaker 2:Generate the Shrek Bugatti, Tyler.
Speaker 1:The Shrekati. The Shrekatti is
Speaker 2:Table tennis, according to Blake Robbins, is quietly becoming the slots of sports betting, runs twenty four seven across international leagues, one of the only sports you can bet on at 2AM, surprisingly easy to find a livestream. And matches are just twenty minutes. 33,900,000,000 was What? Million was bet on table tennis Truly. Just with Colorado sports books.
Speaker 1:They're saying 99% of GDP is gambling now. That's what I'm
Speaker 2:saying. I sent you a stat earlier, John. Yes. US sports bettors got paid over 136,000,000,000 in 2020
Speaker 1:humanity restored.
Speaker 2:Don't ask how much they lost.
Speaker 1:I'll let the soccer. I'm gonna text them. I'm gonna text them. Good news. No.
Speaker 1:Have you seen did we ever do do a little deep dive on the fake sports that get played purely for gambling? Did we ever look at this? There's fascinating games. There's like these Russian, not like bot farms, but like live streaming farms where people will show up to work and get paid almost minimum wage to play a small version of like one of the games is soccer but you're seated. So imagine that we had a clear table here and it's me and you and we're playing soccer with our feet but we just sit here and play soccer all day long and you can bet on who's going score the next goal.
Speaker 1:And so there's this element of randomness that's injected and then it goes into these livestream sites that then they're bet on and it's entirely
Speaker 2:fake Going with 2.6. Those are very dark. I agree.
Speaker 1:Extremely dark. Extremely dark. But you know what's a little bit brighter? Everything old is new again. Wave robotics.
Speaker 1:Weave robotics is announcing our home robot Isaac one. Would you put this in your house? Do you think the Isaac one is cute enough, friendly enough? It doesn't look like it's going to topple over and injure an animal or a or a child. It can fold fold blankets, do little things.
Speaker 1:They say it's gonna deliver in the fall. This looks very cool to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The design is fantastic.
Speaker 1:And it feels like they didn't over engineer it. They did just the minimum for what the tasks are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you know me. I'm gonna hold, you know, hold back a real review till I can see how I can play beer pong just that it is the fourth of July weekend. It would have been great if they just came out. Yep.
Speaker 2:Their launch video could have been Mhmm. Isaac, the robot
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Playing playing a few rounds, seeing, you know, seeing what kind of perform, you know Yeah. Beer bench, they call it.
Speaker 1:Beer bench. We gotta we gotta close out maybe with this with this Jensen meme from Andre. I wake up not a loser, infinite money because Meta employees consumed 73,300,000,000,000 AI tokens in a single month, which roughly costs $221,000,000 a month or around 2,650,000,000 a year. I thought it was higher. That sounds low based on what I thought they were spending in terms of tokens.
Speaker 1:Might even be higher. Who knows? But it is very interesting. NVIDIA has also partnered with AI cloud firms with revenue sharing, taking circularity to a previously unseen level. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Sale and leaseback, all sorts of these financial deals, these happen all the time in other industries. It's just sort of new seeing it in tech because we are in this industrial era. So very interesting news but good news for NVIDIA.
Speaker 2:Final post of the show. I wanna give a shout out to Thomas Salvo. He says, since February, I've designed and built the world's fastest RC plane in his college dorm and that's not clickbait. Reaper has a five kilogram carbon fiber frame two fifty n turbojet and flies at 500 miles per hour. So if you've been wondering what's above you in Georgia, it is a it is a carbon fiber drone flying at 500 miles per hour.
Speaker 2:It's probably really freaking out, the UAP types. We don't have objects that can go that fast. Thomas says, yes, we do. I made one.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I'm skeptical. I don't this doesn't look like human technology.
Speaker 2:I yeah. And and so I think that they'll they'll see it and they'll think like, wow, this goes way deeper than
Speaker 1:Occam's razor is Thomas has made contact, made first contact
Speaker 2:with And
Speaker 1:they told He's commercializing their technology. They said
Speaker 2:post about it and say hashtag aerospace to throw them off the trail.
Speaker 1:I like this guy. He's been at Skydio, Mach Industries, Relativity Space. Wow. Yeah. He's moving all over.
Speaker 1:Very, very cool project. Well, congratulations on the launch, the virality, 20,000 likes. We got a got a reply from Elon Musk himself. Launch it from a tall mountain for low air density and you might be able to go supersonic and it died.
Speaker 2:I feel like this is maybe not something he should do yet. Unless you can find a mountain without any human inhabitants for, you know, 20 miles around said Like that, I would assume it just turns into a missile. Yeah. Elon actually commented twice. One is just nice.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:The other one is the comment you just said.
Speaker 1:Yes. Anyway, thank you for watching TBPN. We are off tomorrow. It is
Speaker 10:Fourth of July. So we're having a long weekend, folks. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.
Speaker 1:And we'll see you on Monday.
Speaker 10:Cortisol rising.
Speaker 2:Have a
Speaker 1:good flashback. We love you. Goodbye.