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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today's Monday, 09/15/2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Oh, we got some we got some trust in the background.
Speaker 2:We got some trust. We're trust up.
Speaker 1:Trust up. We have made another improvement to the TBP and Ultradome. Gonna work on having more guests in person, more fun activities. We got a bunch more props. It's gonna be a great great week, great month, great year, great decade, great lifetime.
Speaker 2:Good to be back.
Speaker 1:It is fantastic to
Speaker 2:be It's so hard to be away from the Ultradome. It is. Good But time.
Speaker 1:We have some breaking news, of course. Gemini is at the top of the App Store channels.
Speaker 2:We have some
Speaker 3:of our
Speaker 2:own breaking news.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We're
Speaker 2:Actually, don't know if we're allowed to break this news yet. Are we Dylan, are we good to break the news?
Speaker 1:We are good to break the news.
Speaker 2:We're good to break the news.
Speaker 1:Let's tell everyone.
Speaker 2:So we are going to be having our first Mag7 CEO
Speaker 1:Magnificent CEO.
Speaker 2:VPN this week and he is none other than Mark You can see a totally real picture of him here. So we're gonna be taking the show on the road Wednesday. We're gonna be up in in The Bay Yep. Live from Meta Connect. We're very excited.
Speaker 2:There's gonna be a bunch of other guests tuning in. I will wait to share the act exact names, but they'll be going out on our x and our Yep. Sub stack over the next couple days. So very, excited for this one. They have some crazy announcements, and we'll be there on the ground Yeah.
Speaker 2:Reporting live.
Speaker 1:It's all part of the long con to get Meta on ramp.ramp.com, time to save money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started. So in other MAG seven news, Gemini surging.
Speaker 2:What about what about the mag podcasting? Okay. Gotta talk We gotta talk about the other Deck in
Speaker 1:other No. No. No. No. You're good.
Speaker 1:Doing whatever whatever
Speaker 2:This is more important.
Speaker 1:Okay. This is amazing. They didn't put us in quotes.
Speaker 2:They didn't put us in quotes.
Speaker 1:They didn't put us in quotes. We made it. Made it. We made We finally arrived.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of people have
Speaker 1:been putting
Speaker 2:TBPN in quotes. Yes. They're claiming that like, you know Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, TBPN, whatever that means. Is that really the name of the show? Or is it something else?
Speaker 2:The journalists claimed historically that it was because we were a show. Yes. But it really we were reading between
Speaker 1:I learned I learned that when you're writing in in English class back in high school, I learned that if it's a book title, you put it in italics. I thought quotes were only reserved for, you know, if you're not sure and it's a quote from somebody else saying something and you don't want to put it in your own words, you don't trust the source necessarily. I always viewed quotes as something of a point of skepticism. So it is fantastic to see that we have escaped the the the jail of quotes
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In the media.
Speaker 2:So very excited And this one
Speaker 1:So appropriate that it happened in the Wall Street Journal, one of our favorite publications.
Speaker 2:We have Our favorite ever. This is we will a lot of people like to make comments about legacy media. We will defend The Wall Street Journal with our Rand
Speaker 1:Jacoby says, keep reading, fellas. It's quote TBPN in paragraph one.
Speaker 3:I'm looking
Speaker 1:at screenshots. I see no. No. No. Paragraph one, two, three.
Speaker 1:I'm I I I don't know. I I see. I don't see any You got a
Speaker 2:different copy of the journal. Yeah. What's going on? Kobe.
Speaker 1:Brandon Kobe, putting you in the truth zone. I don't know. Maybe maybe they added they added quotes later or something. I don't know. But the copy that I have does not have it in quotes.
Speaker 1:So I'm I'm happy and I'm sticking with it. I've screenshotted it and I'm taking a pic Anyways,
Speaker 2:for those that don't know
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I hired Dylan at Party Round Yep. Back in 2021. Yep. He was my right hand man through the chaos of the Zerp era, the joy. We did a bunch of work together that was that prior to TBPN was really the highlight of my career.
Speaker 2:So very excited to have him on the team behind the scenes helping us make the show better and better every day. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very excited. Well, bigger and bigger things to
Speaker 2:You have some some news you'd like to talk about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The other tech news. Anyway, the main news is Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. Multistream, you reach your audience wherever they are.
Speaker 1:Only possible this show is made possible because of Restream. Are, of course, built on the back of Restream. But the real news is Ajni Midha over at Andreessen Horowitz says the empire strikes back and shows a screenshot of worldwide Google Trends results for the past ninety days for Gemini versus ChatGPT. And you can see that Nano Banana launched late August, and Gemini has been surging in the worldwide results. And so I dug into this.
Speaker 1:I have a bunch of thoughts on on what's going on with Google, DeepMind, and Gemini in particular. And then Ajani actually followed up a week later on September 14 and said the empire goes bananas and shows that now Gemini has crossed ChatGPT in terms of worldwide search results, which is even, you know, I I think it's an important metric to be tracking. Gemini is also at the top of the App Store charts right now. But
Speaker 2:It's such a such a funny dynamic. It's like like, you know, Google Yeah. Runs the large, you know, the largest search engine in the world and then they're trying to get their Yeah. Yeah. Alternative to search higher in the on the search rankings
Speaker 1:Rankings.
Speaker 2:Than their competitor Yes. Running the technology that they created.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. It is a it is a it is a knockout, drag out fight in the the battle for the next AI platform. So I went and tried to get the even more up to date data from Google Trends, and it's true. Gemini is absolutely surging worldwide.
Speaker 1:And and as of today, Gemini is is significantly higher than ChatGePete. Now I think some of this is momentum driven. I also needed to check, is this related to astrology? Because Gemini, of course, is Gemini it could be Gemini season. But Gemini season is in May and June, so it doesn't have anything to do with Gemini season as far as
Speaker 4:I can tell.
Speaker 2:I should ask Gemini what what the best if I were running Gemini
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:The AI application Yeah. What would be the best time of the year astrologically to to like, you know, send it on marketing?
Speaker 1:Send it on marketing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, what what are Oh, what am I most likely to
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Experience success?
Speaker 1:Well, so I I I wanted to understand a little bit more about the the the the search interest and what's actually going on here. So I went to Google Trends, and I started to segment by different regions and different time periods. And if you go to the third slide, you'll see that in The United States, Gemini is seeing an uptick, but ChatGPT is still dominant. And so, you can see so that is the worldwide data there, Jordy. You'll see.
Speaker 1:And then the next slide is this is for The United States. And so for The United States, ChatGPT is still dominant. You see this, like, up and down of of peaks and troughs. I think those are weekends, and I think that you see a lot more ChatGPT usage during the week. And then people kind of chill on the weekends, which is interesting dynamic.
Speaker 1:There's also Well school stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's in school factor.
Speaker 1:Back to work.
Speaker 2:Work factor.
Speaker 1:Yes. And so
Speaker 2:I I I do I wonder what that date I mean, you can't you can't necessarily get that data for Google Search because itself because people aren't googling Google
Speaker 1:not googling Google Search. Yeah. That's a good point.
Speaker 2:But you have to imagine, like, I probably use Google more on the weekdays.
Speaker 1:Probably. Yeah. I think most people do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I wanted to know what was driving the worldwide surge in Gemini traffic. Traffic. Scrolled around to a couple different, couple different areas. India is absolutely spiking. So if you go to the next slide, you will see right there.
Speaker 1:Look at that chart, Jordy. So Woah. Gemini is just kind of a flat line relative to ChatGPT and then just completely surged, just in the last few days. And so I think that that's what's driving the overall the overall trend in Gemini dominance. Because if you go to I on the next slide, I go to The United Kingdom, and The United Kingdom is similar similar to The US seeing a little bit of an uptick in Gemini searches, but it's not completely overtaken ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:So there's a there's a few different narratives here. One could just be Google has stronger penetration in certain international countries, and they're pushing different things there with marketing or deals. There's a whole bunch of different dynamics that can drive even just AB tests on how quickly a like, how quickly are they routing you to that particular app. Like, you forget that, when you have a billion users, billions of users, just setting the default user experience flow can route a ton of traffic to one thing all of a sudden.
Speaker 2:I got prompted. I did a Google search this morning, and I got prompted to use the AI
Speaker 1:Search overviews?
Speaker 2:Cert. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:I got prompted
Speaker 1:AI mode. AI mode does not count as Gemini. That's not what we're talking about here, which is interesting. But, yes, I I mean, it's all Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you go through the flow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So assume they were counting that as No. Under the hood.
Speaker 1:So AI mode is a is is within the Google search product. Gemini is its own product. And and to be clear, Gemini is doing really well. So, qualitatively, v o three, incredible. I've made a bunch of fun videos, everything from, monster truck videos for my son to promo ads for what, you know, we do here at TBPN.
Speaker 1:V o three, I was not a daily Gemini user. I had not paid Google any money for Gemini's pro plan. I was paying for the chat TBPN. V o three got me to fork over $250 a month, Nano Banana has also produced incredible results, and a lot of people are are citing the the massive growth as driven by Nano Banana. Now I haven't been I haven't been going bananas.
Speaker 1:Have you been going bananas lately? I've tried a little bit. I I just I don't really have something in my workflow. It feels like Nano Banana might almost be more useful if you're doing, like, professional level work. I've been sort of like interested in using it, but it hasn't become part of my daily workflow.
Speaker 2:I think when we're traveling, you have a little less time to make memes and Yeah. Maybe that's it. You probably would have.
Speaker 1:I did find that it was fantastic at that specific thing. You can Yeah. And I saw Dylan Patel post this. You can take you can take a meme template and two images and just say, nano banana, like, fill it in, and it will just do it. It'll just basically do the Photoshop of like or like, you know, the layout
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:To put the images over each other and it just does it flawlessly. And so normally, I would be going to
Speaker 2:That seems to be enough to take Google from three to 4,000,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:I I I would agree. Normally, I go to something called like image flip, and then I have to like type in the text and then put in the images. And it's this web UI that's, like, decent. It works pretty well. But being able to just do that all in a chat box, it seems really cool.
Speaker 1:Yep. Anyway, quantitatively, Gemini is crushing. It has 483,000 ratings. A little hot on the levels there. I love that.
Speaker 1:Oh, Bobby in the chat says it's Google's birthday. So happy birthday, Google. We are celebrating you today. Ben, it's like, yeah. It was a little hot.
Speaker 1:So the in the iOS App Store, Gemini is now number one on the product
Speaker 5:of the
Speaker 2:celebrates its birthday on September 27.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But September was when the google.com domain name was registered.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Domains are more important than than anything else. So I I agree. Today is today is Google's birthday in my book.
Speaker 1:So to to put to to comp Gemini and ChatGPT, Gemini, about half a million ratings. ChatGPT has almost 4,000,000 ratings. So ChatGPT is still the dominant app in The US iOS app store, but Gemini is certainly growing. And there's an open question, you know, I I I'm still noodling on, like, how much is the Gemini growth driven by Nano Banana versus back to school, back to work versus like international efforts and stuff. Tyler, do you a do have a thesis?
Speaker 4:Yes. So I'm looking back at the
Speaker 1:I don't we we don't have your mic right now. Let's turn up can we turn up Tyler's levels? Hello? Hello? Hello?
Speaker 1:Just yell.
Speaker 4:Okay. There we go. Okay. Yeah. Now you can hear me.
Speaker 4:So so I'm looking at ChatGPT
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:When four o image came out and it was March 25. Mhmm. If you look at the trends, there's like literally no spike in Google search traffic.
Speaker 1:For images in ChatGPT?
Speaker 4:For if you just look up ChatGPT Yeah. There's no like, you can't tell when Image came out. When It's, like, very surprising.
Speaker 1:Oh, and you're specifically referring to, like, the Studio Ghibli moment that went super viral on
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Got it. Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So I like, it makes me think that, like, maybe the Gemini stuff is not actually that related to
Speaker 1:Yeah. What do you think is driving the the the the, like, the massive growth on this particular chart on the Google Trends?
Speaker 4:It's probably just that, like, Google is pushing it really hard. Yeah. I don't think there's really rate limits. Yep. The models are like pretty cheap.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're good. Yeah. It might be it might be free tier in India pushing hard something.
Speaker 2:Somebody account hello in the chat says there's an Instagram trend in in India with Gemini and girls wearing saris. That could be enough to to send it.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, there there's so many ways that Google can drive
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Adoption of the product. It it always felt like they were holding back on, like, really opening the floodgates around Gemini.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And we saw some posts from from folks who work on the Gemini app saying, like, the GPUs are on fire. The TPUs are on fire this this weekend. They're trying to keep it up.
Speaker 1:I've always thought the gap in functionality was pretty narrow between ChatGPT and Gemini. Like, both have fast and free options. Both have reasoning models. Both have deep deep research modes. Both have image generation.
Speaker 1:I'm I I like, ChatGPT is still sticky for a lot of people because it's just, it's just default. Like, ChatGPT is on my home row on my phone, but Gemini is just one one app above on the homepage, so I'm kind of going back and forth. But the the the but I think I think the wake up call of, like, the Empire Strikes Back is really just, like, what does it actually mean to be an empire? And we saw a little bit of information come out from Demis, the founder and c now the CEO of DeepMind. He was talking to David Friedberg at the All In Summit.
Speaker 1:And he said something like they have 5,000 PhDs on staff, which is just an insane amount of PhDs. They're like the DocuSign of hiring PhDs. You need to put them all in a football stadium just to to talk about the plans.
Speaker 2:So OpenAI has six around 7,000 employees? Yeah. And so
Speaker 1:And dMind has like
Speaker 2:5,000.
Speaker 1:It's a similar organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah. 5,000 PhDs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and I think the reason why you see folks like Buco Capital guy being so bullish on Google is that they're they're already vertically integrated. They're already a hyperscaler. So they have their own data centers.
Speaker 2:You just had to look at their look at at at all the different parts of their business Yep. The data advantage, the distribution advantage. Yep. You know, you can go on and on and on and on.
Speaker 1:Yep. Ben Thompson had a great post about AI in the big five. So the five big tech companies that are taking AI really seriously. For Google, they have the best infrastructure. They have a good model.
Speaker 1:They have no partners. They have the best data. They have distribution on Android devices, search, Google Cloud platform, the core business. Chat chatbots are disruptive to search. This could be bad, but it also could be like, well, it's the the the whole organization needs to be awake because it's it's obviously a threat.
Speaker 1:You can't just sit back and be like, yeah. That'll probably benefit us. Like, you have to move. And scarcity risk data feedback loops diminished, disruptive or sustaining. It could be disruptive.
Speaker 1:New business potential in the cloud, says Ben Thompson. So there so I do think that the the Google bulls might have over rotated a little bit against OpenAI. I saw one quote that accused Chatuchipiti of, quote, losing at least $2 for every $1 it spends, which I just don't think makes sense from, like, an accounting perspective. You can lose $2 for every $1 you make. But if you spend a dollar as a startup and you lose two, like, what what what how does that work?
Speaker 1:Like, can you imagine? Just think about, like, the actual financials of a business and think about, like, okay. Our expenses were $1,000,000, and and our balance sheet went down by $2,000,000. Like, what what would have to happen? Like, I don't even understand how that's possible.
Speaker 1:Can you think of a way
Speaker 4:Does that just mean you're spending
Speaker 2:3,000,000 to generate a million dollars?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:Not not revenue. They're saying so losing $2 for every $1 they spend. So expenses are 1,000,000. Losses are 2,000,000. How Yeah.
Speaker 1:How do how does that happen? Like, CapEx maybe? I don't know.
Speaker 2:You're saying how can your cost be bigger than your revenue?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. It's not revenue.
Speaker 1:How can your cost be bigger than your expenses? Oh. Like like, this quote says losing two dollars for every $1 they spend they spend, not make. I understand lose $2 for every $1 you make. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:You have $3 in expenses. Very easy. Arithmetic.
Speaker 2:I do you think do you think they just
Speaker 1:I think it might have just been a typo. Yeah. I don't know. It might might have been a typo or maybe somebody that doesn't understand accounting. But it it it just, mathematically, it's very, very confusing to me.
Speaker 1:And so I think people are sort of, like, running with this a little bit too much. Also, Brian Merchant wrote that OpenAI fails to have a discernible business model, and I think that's just crazy. Like, the business model is extremely discernible. It's it's freemium. Like, there's a free tier, and then there's a paid tier.
Speaker 1:Like, you might not think that the business model is super profitable or it's gonna work or they're gonna win, but, like, their business model is not some I don't understand how they make money. It's like, it's freemium. There's a free version, and then there's a paid version. And they make money off the paid version. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they're investing a bunch, and they're losing money. And, you know, this happens a lot in companies. They lose money, and then they make money
Speaker 2:Man, discovers that a business
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and so and so I think people are like are like maybe getting over their skis. At least some people are getting over their skis. They're like, oh, like, no one even knows how OpenAI makes money or what their business
Speaker 2:model like paying to, like, train the model and they're paying all this money. They're spending money to train the model, and then they're still losing money on the model.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This was the Dario thing where he was like, we we, you know, we spend a billion dollars to train it, and then that billion dollar training run makes 2,000,000,000 over the next next two years. And so you add all those up. Those are all good. But then you wind up with this, like, endless pit of money in the short like, in in the overall business.
Speaker 1:But if each business individually was was very good and made a lot of sense. And then also just on on on the business model side, it's like it's like they hired Fiji Simo. They're doing ads. Like, semi analysis broke it all down. They're gonna take a cut of every of all the commerce that happens in OpenAI Yeah.
Speaker 1:ChatGPT queries.
Speaker 2:That account, that that that supplement brand that we were talking about Friday that's just, like, printing cash because they're ranked Yeah. Highest in in ChatGPT Yeah. It won't it it that will not continue forever.
Speaker 1:And so, like, it it it see it seems like my takeaway is, like, Google's executing well. They're they're seeing a lot of growth in Gemini. They're doing very well there. But it's not like OpenAI doesn't make any sense. Or is like, oh, no one knows how it works.
Speaker 1:Like, it's not this mystery mysterious thing. Like, OpenAI is still bigger on Google Trends than Gemini in The US. They're still making money from pro plans and and plus plans. And then they're also gonna start taking a cut of commerce that happens on top of Chattypiti Query. So I don't know.
Speaker 1:Overall, I mean, it seems that Google is in a great position to stay in the game for the next technological wave. At the very least, they'll be able to play in AI duopolies or oligopolies like they do with Android and iOS. They they they don't capture a ton of the profits there, but they capture a ton of the business value. Yeah. And and also with Google Cloud Platform, it's an oligopoly between Azure
Speaker 2:My read on Gemini doing well is not that it's bearish for OpenAI at all. No. It means that it's a extremely important market. Yep. And there's gonna be a number of players that go after it.
Speaker 2:Yep. Do I think that there's gonna be 10 different consumer AI, you know, multipurpose consumer AI applications. Yep. That are that are amazing businesses now. Yep.
Speaker 2:There's gonna be a handful.
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally. The there was another chart that was going absolutely vertical and it's the adoption of Chinese LLMs. Did you see this?
Speaker 2:So We do. We gotta give them some credit. We're
Speaker 1:We gotta give them some a
Speaker 2:light.
Speaker 1:So open open source models from China are set to overtake The US's downloads surge in use across Hugging Face. The American ecosystem has stalled in growth and the flip is happening right now. And so you can see that Hugging Face downloads for USA based open source LLM models growing, I mean, completely vertically, very exponential growth there. But then China caught up, and the flip is happening right now. And it's interesting.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's one take that's like open source AI will kind of cease to matter in the future, and it's not gonna be that big of a deal. Doesn't really matter. The the the the
Speaker 2:And what's the what's the argument there? Because The argument I could I could see while, you know, ten, twenty years ago, companies making the same case around open source software broadly. In the long run, open source is not gonna matter and yet it's still super foundational to
Speaker 1:It is. I I I think the argument goes something like just the value capture around it. So, yes, if you yes. Linux is, like, dominant, and Linux has a massive install base. But companies that have built their business around Linux, like Red Hat.
Speaker 1:Red Hat is is like a unicorn, maybe, like, worth 10,000,000,000 at various points in time. It's been, like, taken private and taken public and whatnot. But Red Hat is, like, one one hundredth the size of Android or Microsoft or Mac or iOS. Right? Like, other even even, I mean, Mac built on Unix, so there's, like, a lot of lineage there.
Speaker 1:But, a lot of the, like, the closed source operating systems have captured, like, 99% of the value. And so I think the the the the hot take on open source not being that valuable is just that there's not that much value capture that happens even if, like, there is pretty wide adoption. I don't know if there's more to it than that. Then there's just, like, the who had that take that was, like, like, the open source? I think it was just Tyler Cowen.
Speaker 1:He said, like, the the open source models, like, well, if they're distilled from American models, if they're, like, Chinese, they still, like, believe all the American things, and they they wind up, like, they wind up believing in free speech and believing in American values just because, like, they've been, like Trained on the American. G p t five. Exactly.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And trade on the American Internet. But my question is, like, how how seriously is Google taking open source right now? They have the they have the open weights Gemma line of open source models. Do you have an idea here, Tyler?
Speaker 4:I mean, yeah. Google just has Gemma. Those are mostly, like, pretty small models. They they're used a lot in, like like, mechanistic interpretability stuff. So just, like, kind of, like, toy models.
Speaker 4:Sure. But and then there's like OpenAI. They have their own. Yeah. And, I mean, Meta is really the only, like, big player in open source in The US.
Speaker 1:Yeah. My my my take on this is that it feels like there is a there is a crown in Washington DC that is waiting to land on some big tech executive's head for just dominating the American open source AI narrative. And, obviously, that was OpenAI's branding for a long time. Then they went closed source. They they have an open source model now, but they're not known as, the leading open source lab.
Speaker 1:Right? The leading open source lab is arguably DeepSeek or Alibaba with Quinn. But you could imagine that you could do a whole victory tour, whole victory lap in DC over saying, like, hey. I'm the American open source champion. And so I wonder if Google will go for that or if Mark Zuckerberg and Meta will will go for that with the next release of Lama and say, hey.
Speaker 1:I'm take I'm still taking this seriously. There's been a lot of rumblings about, oh, is is Meta backing off of open source? I think John Ludwig
Speaker 2:wrote Yeah. Was already leaked. They had a conversate. There were conversations internally Mhmm. Allegedly around, hey.
Speaker 2:Is this actually important, or do we just wanna Yeah. Deliver value for our own customers?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. So yeah. Can can they keep can they keep justifying the CapEx and then open sourcing the results and then and then handing those handing handing out the freebies. Anyway Did
Speaker 2:we wanna read through some of these this post from Zipher?
Speaker 1:These this format has been going like giga viral. Have you noticed that? Yeah. Every Okay. Every third post is this
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like four channel Google in 2017, small team drops quote unquote attention is all you need. Execs nod politely, go back to selling ads for socks. Let transformer gather dust for five years like vintage beanie baby. Be Gnome, Shazir, OG wizard, quits, builds AI boyfriend app, character AI.
Speaker 2:Millions of lonely hearts pay $9.99 to e date to be from Near. Google HR, any chance you wanna come back? Shazir, busy. My EGF is calling. I don't think this is what happened.
Speaker 2:I don't think this
Speaker 1:is what
Speaker 2:happened at all but it's funny funny It's funny wording. 2022, OpenAI drops ChatGPT. World loses its mind. Google stock does a bungee jump. Sundar holds all hands, guys.
Speaker 2:We need a response by q two. Team ships barred in three weeks using 12 interns, 2,000 TPU v fours in pure panic. Bard hallucinates. The earth is flat. Did that did that actually happen?
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:I don't remember that. I I remember there were some there were I I didn't use Bard.
Speaker 2:Kind of miss the name Bard.
Speaker 1:Bard was kind of a I great think it was hard. But there were so many. There was Palm. And and and Google was, like, sort of promoting, like, their internal research and their external stuff. So they had, like, product names and then also model names.
Speaker 1:And the model naming convention, it's it's, like, way overstated to say that OpenAI is the only one with confusing model name architectures because Google had the exact same thing going on with, like, with Palm and Bard and all these different
Speaker 4:Even now, they have there's, like, Gemini two point o Flash Lite. Yeah. And then it's like, is is Flash better than Lite? Or, like, Pro
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Point five is worse than?
Speaker 2:It's it's a rite of passage to have naming
Speaker 1:You have to go through it as a flashlight. Before you actually just release the one good product, which should probably just be google.com. Like, no. Like, I I remember a decade ago, people used to analyze, like, the updates to the google.com algorithm. There was one there was one release that was called, like, Penguin or something.
Speaker 1:I forget what it was called, but it it changed the way search results ranked, and it was, like, disastrous for a bunch of companies that had built SEO around the previous architecture. And then when Google shipped this change, it it it, like, decimated a whole bunch of businesses. But it goes back and forth. But anyway, Bard was a good name. Maybe they'll bring it back at some point.
Speaker 1:But I think Gemini's cooking. I think Gemini's gonna be around for a long time. And I and I do think those I do think they'll go model router. And I think the the the the we will not be seeing point fives very long. Realistically, all these products should probably go to an annual release cycle, and it should just be yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm using Gemini 2025, 2026, 2027, like a car. Anyway, you wanna continue with this?
Speaker 2:Shazir finally answers HR's forty seventh email. It's funny, again, of course. Yeah. This is not how it works?
Speaker 1:Not not how it works.
Speaker 2:Bard anyways, fine. But I want my own parking spot and unlimited Lacroix return. Waves hand. Gemini two and two and a half drop. Context window is so big.
Speaker 2:It can summarize the bible and your group chat. Google processing 980,000,000,000,000 tokens a month equal to 40% of human SMS traffic.
Speaker 1:That's crazy
Speaker 2:if it's real. That is wild. Someone sneezes nano banana into the Play Store overnight. It's number one app. Turns your
Speaker 1:read that last part.
Speaker 2:You're not gonna read that last part, folks.
Speaker 1:You go find it yourself.
Speaker 2:But this I I asked, how would Gemini the app do in September astrologically?
Speaker 1:To Gemini?
Speaker 2:From an astrological perspective, September is a complex and transformative month for Gemini. While it may not have seen the same effortless flow as in Gemini season, it presents a significant period of growth learning and necessary recalibration. Yeah. It's just like the most classic, like, astrological, like, generalizations. So like Gemini is generating this and then reading it and being like, wow, that's actually that's actually
Speaker 1:Very funny. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together.
Speaker 2:Great to see John Exley back in the chat. We wondering where
Speaker 1:World famous now. Famous featured in Business Insider. Thank you so much to John Exley.
Speaker 2:Is TBPN was in Business Insider this morning. Yes. John got the quote.
Speaker 1:I think everyone in this chat is
Speaker 2:Yeah. Lot of folks were featured in there. But Julia Hornstein broke down. She, I think, and described Aura Farming and a number of other
Speaker 1:I think that that was overall, great piece. I think she kind of missed the definition of aura farming. We'll get Tyler to put it in the truth zone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tyler
Speaker 1:That was the one thing where I read. I was like, I don't know if that fully fits Tyler's definition of or farming, but it it it was funny to see it printed in in the
Speaker 2:This was Business Insider. John John's best quote was I John Axley that is. John Axley. I look at TBPN as an existence of the proof of heaven.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:As existence proof of heaven.
Speaker 1:Thank you, John Axley. We appreciate you. Appreciate it. Anyway, Ajni Midhusband on an absolute tear. He posted that AI is eating software across the handful of frontier AI startups that he's a board member in.
Speaker 1:Year to date, sales have gone from 1,300,000,000.0 to 8,000,000,000. Meanwhile, publics are bleeding. The most the single most rapid reallocation of value from legacy companies to start ups in history. And that's why we're
Speaker 2:So to partner with
Speaker 1:so many of the start ups that are taking it to the to the publics.
Speaker 2:I wonder. I can't see what any of these companies are so it's hard to give that creative analysis here.
Speaker 1:One of them is Adobe. Adobe is up 33% this year. It's a $150,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I just wonder how much of these are selling off because of the overall narrative that the Gen AI, the labs are basically gonna be able to just generate these companies from scratch.
Speaker 1:It's that, but it's also that there really is significant pricing pressure. This is what we were talking to Jim Kramer about with regard to Salesforce. Like, Salesforce is a seat based model, and they need to shift to an outcomes based, value based pricing. And that is something that is hard to do in the short term. Question of are you Here's
Speaker 2:here's So this morning, Trump jumped on Truth Social. He said, subject to SEC approval, companies incorporation should no longer be forced to report to report, he put it in quotes
Speaker 1:In quotes.
Speaker 2:On a quarterly basis. He's a quote enthusiast, quarterly reporting. But rather to report on a six month basis. This will save money and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies. Did you ever hear the statement that quote, China has fifty to a hundred year view on management of a company whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis?
Speaker 2:No. Not good. They still have quarterly reporting requirements, don't they? I don't know. It's just more of like a I I imagine imagine if companies only had to report report every fifty to a hundred years though.
Speaker 1:Could be
Speaker 2:pretty Imagine waiting. It's like, you have your first Google, your first Palantir earnings as a young man. You know?
Speaker 1:Just Average hiring. Spawn and then retirement. You're like, maybe the earnings.
Speaker 2:I'm riding with Palantir. We'll see.
Speaker 1:We'll see.
Speaker 2:We'll see what, you know. Right? It's like it's like you get your that one earnings report decides whether you retire.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, at our last earnings, like, Google Google made
Speaker 2:last earnings before the Internet.
Speaker 1:Google generated a $100,000,000,000 in net income last year. Imagine imagine going from, like, the IPO prospectus. Yeah. Yeah. We generated 20,000,000 in in net income to being like, yep.
Speaker 1:We're ready to update you. It's been twenty years. $100,000,000,000 in net income. We've done very well. It's a beat.
Speaker 1:Green candle. Ugh. Anyway, regardless of what happens with the SEC, you gotta stay compliant. You gotta get on Vanta. Vanta.com.
Speaker 1:Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework
Speaker 2:like, you know, DJT has his public company
Speaker 1:He does.
Speaker 2:Truth Social. Yeah. He's just like, I'm getting really sick of this. If I could cut, you know, what if I could cut the management teams, you know, sort of I do, you know, one, you know, I I can see they're they're they're being some if this actually gets rolled out
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There could be some bad side effects. Yeah. Maybe companies get sloppier. Sure. Right?
Speaker 2:Like the quarterly cycles, forcing function for for, you know, just making, you know, continuous progress in running a tight ship and and all these things. But the if if if the burden of being public goes down Mhmm. Maybe more companies go public earlier. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe. And Maybe.
Speaker 2:That's a thing. And and maybe, yeah, CEOs that that that would just have but again, I I just I I'm not sure that Since it would be
Speaker 1:we cover earnings, we should be strongly against this because half as much content would be devastating to us.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's I mean, I don't know. There's there's plenty
Speaker 1:of really cover earnings that closely. But it does make for fun a a fun news cycle, getting new data points and and new earnings calls. But maybe the podcast world can fill in for that, you know. Do a quarterly podcast tour and chat about your business. Less quiet periods for sure.
Speaker 1:Right? So Yep. Be good on that. Anyway, in other news, The Wall Street Journal is is reporting that China has said that NVIDIA violated antitrust law. Regulators move against the chip company comes during Washington Beijing trade talks.
Speaker 1:We're gonna have Bill Bishop join the stream in seven minutes. China said an initial probe found NVIDIA violated the country's anti monopoly law, heightening pressure on Washington during the latest round of US China trade talks that ended Monday. Beijing's antitrust regulator cited the violations in connection with NVIDIA's acquisition of an Israeli company that was completed in 2020. The regulars the regulator said the investigation was continuing and didn't elaborate. Beijing approved the deal after NVIDIA agreed to conditions, including guaranteeing the supply of its chips to China in but since 2020, the US government has blocked NVIDIA and other American chip vendors from selling many of their top flight artificial intelligence chips to China.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA said it complied with law. We will continue to cooperate with all relevant government agencies as they evaluate the impact of export controls. Beijing's move came just hours before Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters in Madrid that US and Chinese negotiators had reached a framework deal on TikTok following two days of trade talks. If you're not familiar or you haven't been following it that closely, the TikTok, divestiture has been pushed a number of times. We we just we're just reaching the end of the most recent ninety day hold.
Speaker 1:Yes. I believe it's Wednesday. We have two days left. And so US and Chinese negotiators have been figuring out a framework for that. I believe Polymarket has Oracle and Larry Ellison still in the lead.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you wanna pull up the latest, data there on what will happen to TikTok, but, it is it is funny that we're hearing so much more about Larry Ellison with the OpenAI deal, which we're gonna go into tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Still still sitting at a 43% chance that a TikTok sale is announced in 2025.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Might happen. Of course, there's way more to it. What does the sale actually mean?
Speaker 1:What will so oh, the the the chart is spiking with a sale. So, yeah, unclear what exactly what piece of the business would they sell. There's always been this nervousness around what if they sell the cloud infrastructure contract and the inference, they say, yeah. You guys can run the app. We decide the algorithm.
Speaker 1:And, of course, a lot of people who are nervous about the effect that TikTok is having on the American populace think it's it's actually the training of the model that matters a lot more.
Speaker 2:If our you know, if if we were in a in a, you know, cold war with a country and they owned one of our most popular newspapers Yep. And said, hey, we don't really want you doing this. And they were like, oh, it's fine. You can deliver the news.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can take over the printing.
Speaker 2:It. Yeah. You can print it.
Speaker 1:We're still gonna decide the words that go in
Speaker 2:and content. But But you can print it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're gonna decide what's on the front page.
Speaker 2:We'll let you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll let you. Yeah. Anyone can post to this newspaper, but we're gonna decide the sorting of the articles. Like, what makes it to the front page is important.
Speaker 1:And, so control of the algorithm should be, be relevant. I know I've talked to some AI researchers who have said that, it might be possible to run, like, a secondary algorithm on top of what algorithm gets shipped over. Do like, essentially fine tuning it as it comes over. So, you know, the the the TikTok algorithm comes over and it's prioritizing one thing, and then you run a secondary feed on top. Like and this happens a lot with, like, like, different different, you know, you might have a you might have a secondary algorithm that's that's running for, does this violate the does this violate the terms of service of the app?
Speaker 1:Is this, is this adult content or something? It might still rank very high, but if it triggers the filter, it gets deprioritized after the fact. So there are different ways to go about it. And, certainly not having the data immediately exfiltrated, seems like a net win, but, it is a complex, topic. So we'll continue to follow the story as it develops.
Speaker 1:The twos the two sides, US and China, are running up against a Wednesday deadline to do a deal to allow the popular video sharing app to continue operating in The United States. And it's it's crazy how big of a story this was, what, last year, maybe the year before, Everyone was beating the drum on ban TikTok and and it's kind of just melted in the background. People don't really think about it anymore. It's just kind of like become, it's fallen out of the news cycle. Anyway, NVIDIA has become perhaps the highest profile business business caught in the crossfire of the trade dispute between the world's two biggest economies.
Speaker 1:The company sells the most powerful chips. In December, China's antitrust regulator, the state administration for market regulation, opened a probe into NVIDIA's $7,000,000,000 acquisition of the in Israeli networking gear maker Mellanox Technologies, which I believe was a fantastic acquisition. I think they made a ton of money off that based on what they wound up selling because they bought this company before the AI boom, and then networking gear became incredibly important as they built out these massive data centers with NVIDIA GPUs. And so a week earlier, the Biden administration ratcheted up controls on China to China's access to high end chips. Antitrust lawyers familiar with the case said NVIDIA was in a tough spot because it had to halt supply of its most advanced chips for to China to comply with The US export controls, but that opened it up to criticism from Beijing.
Speaker 1:We will talk to Bill Bishop who is in the Restream waiting room about everything that's going on in China with regard to NVIDIA and elsewhere. So let's bring in Bill Bishop from the Restream waiting room when we're check. How are doing, Bill? Good. How are you?
Speaker 1:I'm fantastic. How are you? Have a good weekend.
Speaker 3:I'm good. I had a great weekend. And I I have to say thank you.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 3:And I have to say, Tashi's Lububu.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And I will I will say to you you top tick the Lububu bubbles. What we're here for. Said you were sending this, I think Pop Mart stock is down, like, 20%. So good job.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Was just a
Speaker 3:I actually on secondary market, so it's awesome.
Speaker 2:We did we did say we were buying it so your dog could rip it apart. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was a huge joy.
Speaker 3:I I actually examined it and decided there might be some toxic toxic pieces, so I'm keeping it on
Speaker 1:So Oh, that is smart.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Is so smart.
Speaker 1:That's good. Anyway, we were just reading through this, the latest news on the the China, saying that NVIDIA violated antitrust law. I was wondering if you had, any thoughts, and then we can kinda go into just generally give us the update on what you've been talking about on your fantastic, blog, Cynicism, and then also Sharp China, which is your podcast, which everyone should go subscribe to. It's in the Strathecari bundle. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:But did you see this news? What was your take on the on the NVIDIA antitrust debate going on in China?
Speaker 3:So it's interesting timing. It relates to this Mellanox acquisition from a few years ago and that NVIDIA had agreed to certain terms. I think most were public. I think at least one term was not disclosed. And now, you know, the the SAMR SAMR, which is the the anti monopoly group, is saying that they violated one of the at least one of the provisions.
Speaker 3:And the timing, of course, is not coincidental. Right? It dropped just as The US and China negotiators were meeting in Madrid. It comes two days or three days after the announcement of investigation into dumping of analog chips as well as discrimination in the sort of blocking of sales of certain other chips. And so I think this is one, I think Nvidia technically could be in a lot of trouble because if they are found to be violating the their agreement, I believe they can be penalized up to 10% of their global revenue in addition and then have that be multiplied two to five times.
Speaker 3:So they could be looking at several billions of dollars several billion dollars of fines from the Chinese government if it proceeds to its conclusion and they're found to be in violation of these of the agreement. You know, my guess is that this the timing is, again, not coincidental, and it is it is part of a a way to further encourage NVIDIA and the US government to pull back on export controls.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, you know, clearly NVIDIA is already motivated to do that. This may motivate them more. And whether or not then the Chinese government uses this as part of this broader discussion around export controls, that's not clear. Now in the previous segment, you were talking about TikTok. What was interesting in these discussions was from the statement so far from The US side, they said that the Chinese tried to bring in export controls and other things, but The US side was solely focused on TikTok.
Speaker 3:And so, know, but then they're gonna keep talking and they're gonna extend the extend the deadline for the imposition of additional tariffs and they're just gonna keep negotiating. And and so I think that that this is all part of the positioning on the Chinese side to push back on the US government. The announcement last Friday of this investigation, the dumping of analog chips is probably the Chinese getting ahead of what's to be expected of this two thirty two investigation from the US trade representative's office around legacy chips from China. And so there's just a lot of moving pieces. I I don't think NVIDIA is in any trouble immediately because of this investigation, but it just makes their makes their prospects in China a little murkier.
Speaker 3:And again, I think one of the one of the sort of waypoints for investors to look at is assuming president Trump approves this modified Blackwell chip, though, I think it's the b 30 Yeah. That NVIDIA is trying to create to sell to China. It's it's much better than the h 20. It's not as good as Blackwell, it's much better than anything that the the Chinese can make anytime soon. If the Trump administration says, yes, NVIDIA will will grant you licenses, does the Chinese side actually start buying?
Speaker 3:Or do they do what they did with the h 20 and basically say, we're not gonna buy and we still don't know why they don't wanna buy the h twenties, but it certainly doesn't look if that that wasn't a good outcome for NVIDIA.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like there's definitely, like, multiparty interests here with the CCP maybe not wanting a bunch of chips to come in from NVIDIA because they wanna spur their their domestic homegrown chip manufacturing business. And then but then the companies Alibaba and DeepSeek, like, these companies just want the best chips to actually compete. And so there's there's, like, a tension there. Is is is that kind of the correct narrative?
Speaker 3:No. That certainly is how how I look at it. And I think that, you know, ultimately and that's why I said, you know, if Trump administration approves the the b 30
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And China still says no, then I think the answer will be that the party the the sort of security forces, the party forces have decided that they are going to just rip off the band aid and move try and move faster towards indigenization of the of the of chips. If it turns out that actually they start buying B30s in bulk, then maybe the H20 rejection was effectively a ploy and said, no, no, we want the better stuff, right? And so they set up this sort of made it look like there's some confusion or, you know but ultimately, it it it it's a benefit to Nvidia. We just don't know at this point. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:One of the big questions too is, you know, certainly a company that would want Nvidia to to and Chinese companies to not buy Nvidia would be Huawei. Right? Because Huawei has the Ascend series. They're the ones who are claim they have potentially the best potential ultimate competitor to Nvidia chips is whether or not Huawei has actually been over promising what they've been able to make Mhmm. Both in terms of actual capabilities and also in terms of production volume.
Speaker 1:Scope. And Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you think
Speaker 5:So there's
Speaker 3:some whispers that the Huawei was sort of blowing smoke up towards the top of the system that they're further ahead than they are.
Speaker 2:Do you think there are certain members of the CCP that and the party broadly that are extremely AGI pilled and then others that are just thinking like, you know, this is an extending technology for the Internet and it's gonna we're gonna develop, you know, valuable services and and software with it, but we're not building machine gods. So we it's okay if we get sort of set back if we set ourselves back, you know, five or so years because it's not, you you know, necessarily critical to national security.
Speaker 3:That's a that's a great and key question. And I think you look at I think it was last week or the week before, the Chinese issued this AI plus action plan, which really is more about how to bring AI into a whole bunch of different sectors, a big focus on industrial applications, not at all AGI pill. It's really basically how to
Speaker 2:make AI Business efficiency.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Business efficiency, increase governing efficiency, make it better for the police. Right? Get AI models for the police to do better predictive policing and better social governance, improve education, improve the healthcare system. Not at all.
Speaker 3:They don't need the Ferrari of AI models. They don't need the Ferrari of chips. They need good enough. And the question then is, at least on the open source models in China like like Quan, like the DeepSeek, are they good enough for what the Chinese need? And and that and and are the chips that they're now starting to make in more more capacity and more volume, are they gonna be good enough for what they need?
Speaker 3:And that ultimately, I think, is you know, if the answer is yes, then NVIDIA is probably screwed in China. If the answer is no, then they still have a bit of runway. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Give us the update on TikTok. It feels like everyone was there was, like, an odd coalition on the left and the right. Like, last year, everyone was, like, ban TikTok. It felt like it was a fever pitch. It was a rallying cry for, tech execs.
Speaker 1:And it's like everyone had a good reason to want to ban it. Like, the the, you know, a lot of the tech leaders compete with TikTok, whether YouTube reels or, you know, or X. Or or X or or shorts on Instagram. And then there were the security and the China hawks. There were so many people that were saying, like, yes.
Speaker 1:And then the narrative kinda turned to, like, well, Trump kinda liked TikTok, and it helped him get elected. And he felt like there was a groundswell of support on TikTok, and so maybe he wasn't worried about it. But now we've, like, kicked it out a couple Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then and then the the new kind of potential emerged of of the the cloud contracts which Yeah. Hands. Yeah. And felt like the example, I don't know if you heard, but the example we gave is like, if you had a a national, you know, rival, geopolitical rival and they owned a popular newspaper in your country and you didn't like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they said, well, it's okay. We'll let you print the newspaper and we'll let you do like physically distribute it. You'd be like, well, it's not really enough because I wanna control I I don't want you controlling what's in the headline and what's on the front page and how the con you
Speaker 1:know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right. And it feels like if if we end up with a scenario where like Oracle gets a big even bigger cloud contract from from ByteDance and that's the end of it, that doesn't feel like it's resolved kind of the key issues that the the real hawks were were worried about.
Speaker 3:Well, so a a few months ago, I had a conversation with one of the drafters of the of the law that effectively banned TikTok if they didn't meet certain conditions. And this person just said, you know, the only thing we didn't contemplate was a president who didn't enforce the law. And so what's been happening is the extensions that president Trump has been giving, none none of them are Right? That they are completely, blatantly in violation of the law, doesn't matter. Right?
Speaker 3:And so now though, the the question is, in this particular, you know, today we got the news that they apparently have some framework deal. Trump and and Xi Jinping are gonna talk about it on Friday, is whether or not the framework deal involves both the ByteDance share going below 20% Mhmm. Of new co or whatever they're gonna call it, and that the Chinese side, the ByteDance, has no input, no connection to the algorithm. Mhmm. And so because the law is very clear.
Speaker 3:And actually, a few months ago, some of the investors in this mooted sort of consortium that was gonna was gonna create this new code of buyout TikTok US, they were trying they were lobbying on Capitol Hill to get a sentence inserted in any bill that would take it to effectively indemnify them against breaking the law. Because they understood, you know, they're potentially putting billions of dollars at risk. They they they are smart enough that they don't want to actually do that in a deal that technically is in violation of a law on the books that survived a supreme court challenge. Right? Nine to zero.
Speaker 3:And so, you know, that that this is, I think, if what we've and we don't have really any details yet of what the Chinese and US sides agreed to today in Madrid. But if it turns out that the Chinese sides, the byte dance is gonna go below 20%, and for example, the The US, the new code is gonna have to rewrite the algorithm, then it probably and there's no data connection. There's no technical connection to China. It's complete it's logically, physically separated from anything that touches China, then that deal probably works. But then what is TikTok?
Speaker 3:Who's gonna write the new algorithm? I mean, last I heard machine language engineers are, like, expensive and hard to find these days.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. We have some of the smartest do it. Yeah. We have some of the smartest engineers in the world at YouTube and and Instagram Yeah. Like, trying to make the algorithm as good as TikTok.
Speaker 2:People report TikTok is.
Speaker 7:And Right.
Speaker 2:I think that
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wondering how much of a of an olive branch can be given on the cap table because there's a lot of American investors who invested in ByteDance or TikTok have huge stakes. Jeff Yas at sacks Susquehanna is a good example. 15% ownership.
Speaker 3:General Atlantic customer Yeah.
Speaker 1:General Atlantic. And so it like, there's a there's a very, like, neutral outcome here where you say, oh, well, like, you have this massive stake. We don't want you to take this huge write down. You can just have an even bigger stake in The US in The US entity. And and so that's probably even more valuable, and you get your money out of China, so you have more liquidity.
Speaker 1:You can IPO the company. There's a lot of things that you can do there, and it's not it's not value disruptive. Well, that's
Speaker 3:and one of the things it probably does is it probably unlocks if this deal gets done, it probably helps helps if ByteDance wants ByteDance wants to, helps them sort of clear the path to an IPO in Hong Kong. Sure. Right? Which which and again, The US have all the investors I mean, ByteDance, I think, the last probably around was valued at like 500,000,000,000. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So there's a lot of money at stake here. You mentioned Oracle. You know, to to assuage US regulators concerns, Oracle and ByteDance had gotten together. They've done this thing called Project Texas where they segment out all The US user data.
Speaker 3:They proposed that they would actually review the code, the algorithm code. Even though the algorithm would be updated from China, they would have engineers who could go through the code and make sure it wasn't being manipulated. That didn't satisfy the national security national security concerns. That's one of the reasons why the law was passed last April in April 2024. There had been talk over this year of a project access2.0 to kind of cut a deal.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But ultimately, I think there were enough people in the GOP on the hill who made it clear to the Trump administration that actually that wasn't gonna fly because it still was was in violation of the law that passed last April. Mhmm. And so so really, I think, again, we'll see what has come out of this. What's interesting too is how The US side made this TikTok the focus of the negotiations this time, not soybeans.
Speaker 3:You know, there's an article in the Washington or New York Times today about how soybean farmers are about to go bankrupt because China's not buying soybeans. That wasn't the focus. The focus was TikTok. And because, you know, think about it, there's only upside for the president. Right?
Speaker 3:And and the investors. Because now, if if TikTok is saved, TikTok has beholden to the president, it's another algorithm that probably, you know, has favorable feelings towards president Trump. He's helped a bunch of big investors, including Oracle. It's it's a it's an interesting moment when, like you said, a year and a half ago, people were going nuts on across the across the aisle about how dangerous TikTok was. And now it's like, okay.
Speaker 3:Whatever. Mhmm. As long as it abides by the law, whatever.
Speaker 1:Give me the broader update on what's happening in Beijing and Xi Jinping's, like, grip on power. There's been some rumors that maybe he's losing control. There's always rumors. Like, how are things just overall looking there? He was recently caught on a hot mic saying he's gonna live to a 150, which I think is, like, a very
Speaker 2:Watching a little too much Brian Johnson.
Speaker 1:So I'm wondering, like, what makes
Speaker 3:Honestly, I think those, mean, those rumors, from what we can see, there's nothing to them. Yeah. And and what we saw at the, you know, the big parade on September 3, some other personnel stuff, there's just people It's getting every every year there are these rumor cycles. They came a little earlier this year. Yep.
Speaker 3:But every year they turn out to be b s and so far they're looking like b s.
Speaker 1:Oh, well.
Speaker 2:Trump said this morning that he thinks that he thinks companies in The US shouldn't have to report quarterly. He referenced Chinese companies thinking on a fifty to a hundred year
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Time horizon yet Chinese public companies do have to report quarterly. Do you know if the if do you know if the or or or I mean, is it is it common for pub you know, public company management teams in China to say, like, you know, we just missed on everything this quarter, but let's look at this at a 100 year. Let's zoom out a little bit. Is that
Speaker 3:No. That's that's that's one of those true social posts that just who knows where it came from. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was saying it's probably Trump Trump has a public company. He's like realizes how how laborious quarterly reporting is for his team and he wants I don't wanna free them up to work on product.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Free them up to And and now the light the lobbyists for, like, the accounting firms and the lawyer the law firms are gonna be cycling up in DC.
Speaker 1:Wait a minute. We made one on a quarterly basis. Importantly, quarterly reporting is their business. Yeah. There's definitely some people that are indexed to that.
Speaker 1:We we were joking about that. We cover earnings. We want as many earnings reports as possible. We we like that.
Speaker 2:Let's do daily. Daily earnings.
Speaker 1:Daily earnings.
Speaker 2:So CEOs could say, you know, take that day's revenue and say we're at you multiply it by 365, and that's your run rate.
Speaker 3:Just have a public view of like your zero or or ramp or whatever your accounting system is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yep. There you go.
Speaker 2:What's the latest any updates on the export tip, donation, tax, whatever whatever it was
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:With Nvidia?
Speaker 3:It's 15%.
Speaker 1:15% for the big man.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No.
Speaker 1:It just so it's So
Speaker 3:I think but again, I think what you know, a broader perspective, there last week, a nominee for an important position at the Department of Commerce is BIS, which oversees export controls, his his nomination was was withdrawn. He he was somebody who's quite hawkish on chip, like high technology exports to China. There, right now, the Nvidia, the chip firms are, I think, feeling like they're in a pretty good position here in DC, and there's I think it'd be a lot more pressure to try and roll back a bunch of these export controls. I think that the actions from the Chinese side, maybe potentially Nvidia today, that announcement, but then the announcements last Friday, also may give ammunition here to the folks who are proponents of rolling back those those chip export controls to further push the White House to say, this is not working, we need to take a different approach. And so that ultimately would be good for for a lot of these chip companies.
Speaker 3:Again, back to the NVIDIA conversation, the question is, will the Chinese still buy the better NVIDIA chips? And I mean, I think they'd be crazy not to, but again, this is not necessarily an economic or technical decisions wholly.
Speaker 2:Totally. What are you when when will we have clarity or will we have clarity on the conversations in Madrid?
Speaker 3:So I think the call Friday should you know, the the supposedly she and she and Trump are talking Friday.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:After that, potentially, we'll get more more information. So far, there have been, you know, both both negotiating teams gave statements, and there's been a little bit of leaking to the press, but there's nothing like you specifically around TikTok. They're just very very few if any details other than there's some sort of a framework agreement. And then you guys, I mean, you guys have been in the tech world for a long time. Mean, what does a framework agreement really mean?
Speaker 3:And how is it legally binding and sort of where Yeah. And it sort of feels like you say framework when you still haven't figured out all the details.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes sense. Well, we'll be watching concepts of a plan.
Speaker 1:Don't yeah. I I don't like these private phone calls between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. I would prefer a podcast. I want them to sit down together with
Speaker 2:A Substack Live. Live Substack. TBPN.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Open invitation to Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. If you wanna come hash it out live on TBPN, we're happy to host you. You can discuss the plan, the concepts of a plan, the framework for the plan.
Speaker 1:We'd be happy to have you. And we and it has been great having you, Bill. Thanks
Speaker 2:so much for helping us.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your day, Bill. Cheers.
Speaker 3:You too. Thanks.
Speaker 1:See you. Bye. Really quickly, let me tell you that Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And, Tim Cook was on the red carpet flogging iPhones like a guy selling knockoff pocket watches from under his jacket.
Speaker 1:Let's play this video. Phone 17, tell me all about it.
Speaker 8:Oh my god. I'm so excited. Let me I'm so excited that you brought it up. This is the 17, Pro Max. Yep.
Speaker 8:And in this beautiful cosmic orange, it's a totally new design. It was reengineered from the inside out. It's the most pro phone we've ever designed. And so
Speaker 1:Sixteen's pretty good.
Speaker 8:The 16 is good, but the 17 is a must.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:That's why you
Speaker 4:gotta give him
Speaker 1:a raise.
Speaker 2:Let's give him
Speaker 1:a raise. Give raise. Him a raise. Him raise.
Speaker 6:Not taking days off.
Speaker 1:He's not being he's not underselling.
Speaker 2:The market loves it.
Speaker 1:The market loves I love it. He's he's at what is this? The Emmys? The Emmys? Which I believe is for what is the Emmys?
Speaker 1:It's for TV? Movies? I think it's a You're at the Hilton? Word show. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't follow That's good question for Oh, yeah. It's TV because we're going for a daytime Emmy. We want we want
Speaker 2:For your consideration.
Speaker 1:That is Dylan number one KPI. Get us a daytime
Speaker 2:I love to see Tim out there selling. I love Every single person
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:At a company should be selling. Yes. And it and it starts at the top.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you don't and you don't soft play it. You're not like, oh, yeah. You know, it's it's just another year. No.
Speaker 1:It's the best iPhone ever. It's the thinnest, lightest, best, biggest, fastest, awesomest iPhone in history. It's a must. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a it's You look it's what
Speaker 1:you gotta have it. It's pretty good. The last one, pretty good.
Speaker 2:But this one is
Speaker 1:a must. It's must. It's good. But, yeah, I mean, he is right. It is reengineered.
Speaker 1:They there there's that whole you heard about the vapor chamber thing, a single a single drop of water inside the iPhone. Did you hear this? Oh, it's amazing. So inside the iPhone, there's a single drop of water in a chamber and it heats up, evaporates, and moves to a different part away from the hot internals to cool the phone. And this has been one of the complaints for the last few years.
Speaker 1:I haven't had any problems with heat on this phone on the 16. But That's cool. But, yeah.
Speaker 2:My phone my phone Overheats? Overheats all the time.
Speaker 1:Is it do you do you find that it overheats when you're, like, using software on the phone Camera. Or camera? Oh, filming or video? Photos. Photos.
Speaker 1:Just taking photos. Yeah. And you you notice it overheat. Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1:That's wild.
Speaker 2:It doesn't turn off.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Definitely.
Speaker 1:It just heats up a little bit and it feels hot. Yeah. And, well, that should be a thing of the past with your new iPhone 17 Pro Max in orange.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm excited to
Speaker 1:Do you think that the orange color is a nod to YC or Strathecari? What were they going Or Bitcoin. Which one do you think they were going for?
Speaker 2:Probably nod to Ben Thompson over at
Speaker 1:Probably Ben Thompson.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Probably So a hat tip.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Ben Thompson's been covering the the the the stock for, what, almost two decades. He's done a lot of great reporting on Apple. And why not give him a little nod with the Strathecari orange iPhone.
Speaker 2:I like it.
Speaker 1:Or the McLaren orange. What else is orange? I don't know. There's a lot.
Speaker 2:Anyway. Drew Cote says, I propose a technology brother pilgrimage to Starbase to look at rockets, feel better about the world and maybe throw a giant warehouse party or something. Maybe go
Speaker 1:for new pull this off. He runs a hard tech conference in San Francisco. I didn't have a chance to go last year, but they I wait. Was it in San Francisco? It was on like a like a on an aircraft carrier or something.
Speaker 1:He he got he really pulled out all the tech bro little touches. I believe there were cyber trucks on top of a on top of a a Aircraft carrier. Aircraft carrier. Wow. And there were sponsors and stuff and
Speaker 2:everything and stuff. I would like to have a house party in a nuclear submarine.
Speaker 1:House party. Some flip cup or some beer pong? Yeah. In the in the in the nuclear sub. The nuclear sub, it's pretty tight quarters.
Speaker 1:Have you ever been on a navy ship?
Speaker 2:No. I know. It's not it's giant You could I it could be a really Yeah. You light it properly. It could be a really fun vibe, you know.
Speaker 1:But going to Starbase makes a lot of sense. I'm pretty sure I mean, imagine twenty four
Speaker 2:hour twenty four hour trip, Starbase Yeah. In the morning
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Abilene, Texas in the afternoon. Oh, yeah. Stargate. Or Stargate. Or a house set within a Crusoe
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Data center.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Something there.
Speaker 1:It'll be fun. Well, get on Julius. What analysis do you wanna run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Ask Julius to analyze your data.
Speaker 1:Over 2,000,000 users trusted by individuals
Speaker 2:It's gotta be 3,000,000.
Speaker 1:G. That's fine. Yeah. We need to update that for sure.
Speaker 2:Anyway Rahul posted yesterday
Speaker 1:It's a great
Speaker 2:on a Sunday. Bad day to be a manual workflow.
Speaker 1:I don't even know what inspired that.
Speaker 2:I guess he was just automating He's He's automating Automating workflows. Workflows.
Speaker 1:That's great. What more do you need? Base is beginning to explore a network token. We're in the early phases. This is from the official base account.
Speaker 1:That's Coinbase's new product. We're in the early phases of exploration and don't have any specifics to share around timing, design or governance. We're committed to bridging the community bringing the community along with us and building in the open. Brian Brian Armstrong, CEO and founder of Coinbase says, we're exploring a base network token. It would be it could be accelerating decentralization Yeah.
Speaker 1:Expanding creator and developer growth needs.
Speaker 2:Base is interesting. It's a blockchain without a without a native token.
Speaker 1:Yes. And we asked Brian Tom Brian Armstrong about that at the base launch event. And he said, no comments right now. No. Nothing no news to share.
Speaker 1:But that was a question that everyone was asking us to ask because it did seem like there might there might be a logical conclusion of this project is to eventually decentralize the the the project. So there's no definitive plans. Stay safe out there. Don't go buy the wrong base token. Getting get too excited, but interesting development from Brian Armstrong over at Coinbase.
Speaker 1:So congrats to them on the progress. And congrats to Fall generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop and fine tune models Go. With serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Bill Gates. Someone resurfaced Bill Gates' resume as a freshman at Harvard.
Speaker 1:The resume and experience is still probably better than ninety nine percent of college students in tech out there. And so it says his objective was to become a systems analyst and systems programmer. On his resume, he puts his height and weight, five ten, one thirty. What a what a hilarious thing to put on
Speaker 2:your resume. Interesting. Is that is that is that to make your is that to make you more, interesting from a from a, like, a health insurance standpoint. It's like, hey, my my carrying cost is not gonna be that
Speaker 1:high. Yeah. Free lunches, I'm not gonna be doing double protein. I'm I'm I'm I'm just a 100 I mean, a buck 30 when I'm wet and wearing boots. He says no dependence.
Speaker 1:He wants a $12,000 salary but he's open to whatever. He and he's open to relocating.
Speaker 2:He's at least $12. He's open to a 120,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Look at this resume, his experience. He knows Fortran. He knows COBOL. He knows BASIC. He knows machine languages for most of the above computers list.
Speaker 2:Or he even built a payroll product.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Traffic flow analysis system, school scheduling payroll. He's a systems programmer. And in partnership with Paul Allen, of course, the cofounder, designed and put together a system for traffic engineers to study traffic flow. The system is built around Intel's MCS-eight thousand and eight microcomputer.
Speaker 1:The software and hardware setup has been fully tested using a prototype. Demonstrations to customers are planned for May 1974. Wow. Information sciences. Fun.
Speaker 1:Oh, I I wonder how that surfaced. Like, when did he publish this? Did someone else did did someone else publish this? Leak this? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting. He was, working with a recruiting services firm.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Probably a good client for them. Seems like he would have had a lot of options.
Speaker 1:Indeed.
Speaker 2:Junk bond analyst, we already covered this. Yeah. Screenshot of the Truth Social post about subject to SEC approval.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:This seems with the SEC yeah. I mean, we're gonna need to see the art, like, why
Speaker 1:this Report. Reporting.
Speaker 2:Funny to say, like, put it in quotes because, like, it very much is definitely a report.
Speaker 1:It's a real reporting. On a quarterly basis. And then also in parentheses, so subject to the SEC approval, companies and corporations should no longer be forced to report on a quarterly basis, parentheses, quarterly reporting, exclamation point. Like, why are you putting this in parentheses? But rather report on a six month, six, and then six in parentheses month basis in case you couldn't read SIX.
Speaker 1:I I I really don't understand the the the texture of this. This is definitely not LLM generated. This
Speaker 3:is Yeah.
Speaker 2:Be it it it would be interesting if it ends up being like the exact same amount of work. Right? Like the report, it's the six month report just like doubles, you know, doubles in terms of how intensive it is. And the function is that the lawyers and the accountants get paid exactly
Speaker 1:the same wild post. Did you ever hear the statement that, quote, China has a fifty to one hundred year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis, question mark, question mark, question mark, not good, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. And it doesn't close the quote. Like, there's no there's no end to that quote. And also, since when have we been looking to China for best practices on anything?
Speaker 1:I thought I thought we were, like, near peer adversaries. Very, very odd. Anyway, Elon Musk has purged over 2,560,000.00 shares of Tesla worth $1,000,000,000. The purchase happened on September 12 with an average price of $389.22. This is Elon's first open market stock purchase since February 2020.
Speaker 2:He is squarely in the $11,000,000,000,000 club.
Speaker 1:What do mean?
Speaker 2:Tesla. Oh. Tesla stock. The the market cap is currently $11,280,000,000,000.00. Wow.
Speaker 2:It's crazy that only a little while ago, it feels like Meta was at, like, one Yeah. One, like, you know, just just north of that. But but yeah, I I feel like there there's there's gonna be news here. I I I especially around
Speaker 1:Robotaxi?
Speaker 2:Yeah. There there was also news x x AI terminated like 500 employees over the weekend. Yeah. Which again, I don't I don't wanna like read too much.
Speaker 1:Put on the tinfoil hat, bro. Go crazy. Give me give me the theory. He buys the stock. I think The stock goes up.
Speaker 1:Stock. Then use that to merge in XAI. That would be the the three d chess if something if something crazy happens. Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, obviously, Tesla, fantastic AI team, built self driving, like, one of the best, if not the best self driving system.
Speaker 2:That were laid off were were doing, like
Speaker 1:Like, data labeling. Right? Which which can
Speaker 2:be non equity comped
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and increasingly, there are tons yeah. It's interesting because there's there's been tons of competition in that space between scale, Merkor, Handshake.
Speaker 1:What's that other one? It's not Volt. It's like Surge. So there's a there's a few
Speaker 2:Turing, Mercor,
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there's a few companies that are outside
Speaker 2:contractors. Labelbox.
Speaker 1:Labelbox. Yeah. I've been I just heard a Labelbox ad on DwarCash. It's fantastic. The the so so so like this is a service that you can very much buy from a highly competitive market and effectively outsource that role.
Speaker 1:A few companies have brought it in in house. It seems like xAI is going from in house to outsourced. But I think not too much to read into on the xAI side. There was there was a post in here. Maybe we can pull it up.
Speaker 1:But let me see. It's deeper, deeper, deeper. The yes. So another one of those posts by Zephyr. Zephyr's really been on a tear.
Speaker 1:1,400,000 views in this post. B Elon cofound OpenAI for humanity. Watch Altman flip it into Microsoft's loot box. Quietly.exe. Launch x AI.
Speaker 1:Poach post poach the best GPU whispers from deep mind opening. Yes.
Speaker 2:Meta Yes. Bottomed at 1,230,000,000,000
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:This year. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:This year.
Speaker 2:And now this year.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And now, Zuck is sorry. Sorry. Elon is, like, is is north of that today. Mhmm. So Okay.
Speaker 2:Well says Yeah. Considering the the revenue and earnings difference between those two companies, it says a lot about Elon's ability to make people believe and and give them like optionality on so many different tech trends.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean
Speaker 2:They're making transformers. They're making chips.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a very I I I feel like the market still very much believes that self driving cars will be a thing and it'll be big. And Tesla's leading in in that market and or at the top of it. And same thing with robot, with robots. Like we grew up watching sci fi films or some of us did.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you did. But watching sci fi films of robots, if robots are a thing, Elon is going to figure out a way to make money on it. So that's always been the story in recent history of Tesla's bull case and certainly Elon's betting on that. But the bull case for xAI, this is the data that came out from OpenRouter, which I was talking to Tyler about a little bit over the weekend. So GrokCode Fast1 is now the number one ranked model on OpenRouter with 1,060,000,000,000.00 tokens generated.
Speaker 1:ClaudeSonnet four is at $343,000,000,000 tokens. GPT five is down at 72,000,000,000 tokens. And I sent this to Tyler and was like, I don't believe that Grok is four times bigger than Claude and and 10 times bigger than GPT-five. Like, this just doesn't seem right. And Tyler kind of broke it down for me what's actually happening on OpenRouter.
Speaker 1:So can you explain when people use OpenRouter, what type of data would be included in this particular data set versus the broader LLM inference market?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So is my mic on?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're
Speaker 4:good. My thesis is basically like you use OpenRider when you're doing kind of low intelligence but, like, high volume things when price matters a lot. Mhmm. Because if you look at the, like, the top models Mhmm. A lot of them, there there is, like, Claude, there is Gemini, but then you see a lot of open source models Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Which are like super cheap to to inference. Mhmm. So, like, at least for me, whenever I use I like, I do a bunch of inference on on different models. Whenever I use, like, OpenAI or Anthropic or Gemini, I'm usually hitting their, like, actual API. I'm not using OpenRouter.
Speaker 1:Directly.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Because, like, maybe there's some sense where, like, there's different params that aren't actually exposed via the the open Mhmm. OpenRouter API Yep. Or or something like that. I think that's probably generally true for a lot of people.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. But if I'm using if I just need, like, super cheap intelligence, then I just go in OpenRouter. I see, okay. This is, a pretty good model. It's, like, super cheap.
Speaker 4:I'll just hit that. And then sometimes if that if the inference is, like, super slow, I just I can really easily switch to a different open source model.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:So that's kind of my thesis. So it's also why if you look at the kind of total, like, tokens inferenced
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:It's like, okay, Claude Sonnet four is at 500,000,000,000 of the past week Mhmm. Which if you kind of map out, like, what the actual, like, revenue is from that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's like a super tiny amount of what their revenue, like, is probably if you kind of
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like, think there's some numbers leaked.
Speaker 1:The the the leaked numbers for Anthropic are it's around $4,000,000,000 a year in business, probably more now. So you you you work backwards and you get to, like they should be making, like, 250,000,000 a month. And this data only accounts for something like $12,000,000 of that $2.50. So the the the actual frame is, like, 95% of their business or something like that. 90% of their business is happening directly on their API, and then 5% of their business is happening in OpenRoute.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Or or something like that. I didn't include the the input tokens, which is, like, about it's, like, 10 x cheaper. So it it's, like, at least in that order of magnitude. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But it's significantly less than, like, what it should be. We're, like, I I've used Grok a fair amount via API. Or I've I've never used it through Grok's API. I've only used it through OpenRouter.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 4:So I think that's probably true. Also, like, one of the reasons you might see Grok code fast one being surprised that at least since it's released, I I think it's still free in Cursor and Klein. Mhmm. And I don't know if they're using OpenRouter. They're using some kind of router in the back.
Speaker 4:Right? Because you
Speaker 1:can Cursor is?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Okay. Obviously, because because you can select like Grok or Anthropic or
Speaker 1:Well, isn't that just their own router?
Speaker 2:It could
Speaker 4:be. Okay. But But
Speaker 1:they could be sitting on top of them.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it's, like, very easy to Okay.
Speaker 8:Use it.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Think those are some of reasons why you might see
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think really outperforming here. I think this this post to this is is sort of, like, you know, meme incendiary written for virality. The the default story it's telling is like, oh, yeah. Like, Grok is, you know, 10 times bigger than OpenAI, and and and that's probably not right.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:Charts are great for marketing.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And whether you're hitting number one globally in the app store Yep. Here, where you're charting matters a lot.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? It it's natural for for companies to share the charts that are that are good. Yep.
Speaker 1:When they're good.
Speaker 2:When they're good. Exactly. And they're just snapshots too. Yep. And charts yeah.
Speaker 2:Charts are
Speaker 1:And and so what is this actually what what is the actual interpretation here? Like, they're winning on OpenRouter, which means that they're like, Grok has successfully delivered a level of intelligence that is affordable and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so like, you I would almost put this model, comp yeah, it to, like, just open source models Yeah. Like coin or something Mhmm. Rather than, like, kind of the the, you know Frontier reasoning models. Frontier reasoning models.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 4:So you could say they're they're winning kind of in that field. Even though it's not open source, it's still in that similar, like, price range.
Speaker 2:Yep. There does seem to be
Speaker 1:value in in soaking up some of the demand that's further down the cost curve for maybe more price sensitive users.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It it can also be like I mean, the model is still good enough where, like, even if it's if it's worse on a single shot
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Compared to, like, cheap d five Mhmm. If you just run it 10 times Mhmm. It still will be a little bit cheaper and you're, like, kind of at a similar spot. So where you can just kind of max out on volume instead of like, your your intelligence per token is less. But if you just run way more tokens, then you're at similar intelligence Mhmm.
Speaker 4:It'll still be cheaper. Yeah. So maybe there's some kind of factor there.
Speaker 1:So, like, lightly bullish for the x AI team. They've clearly built something that people want at a specific price point.
Speaker 4:It's definitely good. Yeah. I mean, I I haven't seen like, I don't really use, like, the newest Grok model
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Like, Frontier one. Is it three? Yeah. I guess three.
Speaker 1:Three.
Speaker 4:I I almost never use it. Yeah. So this is maybe like one of the first examples of of Grok models like really being used a lot. Yeah. It'll
Speaker 1:be interesting to see what happens with the company. Yeah. The the the roll up theory is kind of interesting to to toy with. There's a bunch of imagine Axe, the everything app integrated with Tesla. That's a funny funny outcome if that's I would what be
Speaker 2:basically forced to buy a Tesla.
Speaker 1:I would definitely buy a Tesla. I mean, buy one and then take it to the shop and manual swap it and naturally aspirated b 12 in there.
Speaker 2:What they what what if they just came in and said you you you you can't use x when you're moving fast unless you're inside of Tesla. Force people to transition Yeah. Out of traditional cars.
Speaker 1:Be good.
Speaker 2:That's the next that's the next catalyst for for the next five I
Speaker 1:really hope Tesla ships the Roadster. I saw someone on the on the timeline maybe a week or two ago talking very, very sad. Like a super Tesla bull owns multiple Teslas, owns the stock, saying that they canceled their their Roadster two reservation after maybe eight years of waiting, something like that. And I'm Did I'm
Speaker 2:they have to put down like a $100?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. The the Roadster was like was like over $10.
Speaker 2:I'm pretty sure. So real real deposit.
Speaker 1:But also you hear this crazy stat where people are like, Well, if you'd put it in Tesla stock instead, it would be worth $5,000,000 And it's like, Well, that's not really like a fair comparison. The Cybertruck Reservation was like a $100. But the Roadster two was, I mean, it's, you know, I think people knew that it was gonna be several $100,000 supercar territory, but it just hasn't hasn't moved. But I think that they should do it. I think it'd be good.
Speaker 1:They need an they need a halo car. The Cybertruck's kinda working as a halo car, but the the design language is a little bit little bit too diff disparate from the core portfolio where if you see if you see an Audi r eight, you're like, oh, Audi's cool. Maybe I'll get an a four. Right? Like, because there's some styling cues that are the same.
Speaker 1:But if you walk into the Tesla dealership and you see a Cybertruck, you're not like, yeah. Model three really, like, speaks that language. Right? It's like they're they're wildly different designs. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So maybe if over time, the the three and the s and the x and the y, they all update to have a little bit more of that Cybertruck language. The Cybertruck could work as a as a halo car, but right now, it feels like a very different car from, like, a very different, like, brand world, essentially. It's cool. But I want to see. In other Elon news, Perfrock four is their smartest, The Boring Company posts.
Speaker 1:The smartest, fastest, safest tunnel boring machine in the next iterations, five five, six, and seven, are already being built at The Boring Company factory in Texas. Goal is continuous mining and zero people in tunnel, z pit. And they're they're hiring exceptional mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and software engineers.
Speaker 2:The boring The Boring Company has just not gotten really any attention for the last few years. And it's
Speaker 1:We've been grinding.
Speaker 2:It's so funny to think about a world where you're you look up and you see, you know, starships being launched. Mhmm. And if you could look down, there'd just be, you know, tunnel boring machines everywhere. But this one's a sleeper. I hope to I hope to see I hope to see more out of them
Speaker 1:Yeah. Soon. It's tough. It's heavily regulated to build stuff underground.
Speaker 2:Not going deep enough.
Speaker 1:Takes a long time.
Speaker 2:Go deep enough, nobody the regulators won't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I heard one interesting thesis that was like, it's just like the underground domain is like is like a it is a resource. It's essentially real estate if you can build stuff down there even if it's just a tunnel. And that's extremely valuable because it's it's effectively free. Like, it's a free resource.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just like space.
Speaker 2:Like, there's no cost. I'm not gonna pretend like you're supposed to know this, but can you try to figure out like who regulates once you get because I would assume like a 100 feet below your property is like probably like there's some I would traditional think property Yeah.
Speaker 1:I would think that there's nothing
Speaker 2:If I could dig a tunnel down there, I would just assume that I have some some
Speaker 1:I can imagine. Over
Speaker 2:what happens there. I think if you go deep enough, I mean, is that not like the play?
Speaker 1:Is What would you be okay with? It I'm good with if some random person was like, Jordy, hey, I got a tunnel. I'm I'm building a tunnel under your house. Don't worry. It's 500 feet.
Speaker 1:Would you be like, yeah. Cool. Or would you be like, I would prefer not
Speaker 2:Five have 100 a is fair game.
Speaker 1:500 is fair game.
Speaker 8:As long
Speaker 2:as if they can prove out safety
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? I don't I don't want any type of collapse.
Speaker 1:Okay. Like the level It's very annoying.
Speaker 2:Which my home is at Yeah. In the in the UltraDome. Yep. I don't wanna suddenly feel a jolt
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Fall through the earth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know? Yeah. I don't know. I have yet to tour the the the the the boring company tunnel.
Speaker 1:They built one in Las Vegas. This is kind of a demo. There's been a few that have that have built. But, I mean, this is one of those businesses that I think has just been building, building similar to Neuralink, like working, chopping wood, grinding grinding stone in the earth. And, yeah, maybe something happens here.
Speaker 1:Tyler, did you did you get any closer to an answer on how unregulated the underground domain, the subterranean domain
Speaker 4:So this is Chachi Biti. It says courts generally say that you can go you you own the ground beneath your land only to the extent that you can reasonably use it.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 4:So so there was a court case in 1946. The Supreme Court rejected the to the center of the earth doctrine. Yeah. So you don't just own everything below you. So usually, it's like maybe a thousand feet is kind of the extent and that below that is just I guess, it's just pre pre rain.
Speaker 1:Do you know this
Speaker 2:You're not using the you're not using more than a 10 feet below your I'm sorry, Tyler. The second you have property, I'm bear I'm burrowing a tunnel underneath it. I'm gonna be hanging out under there, and you're gonna have to prove that you can get down there.
Speaker 1:I do think that there's a massive market for bat caves. You know, it's very hard to do ADUs. ADUs are bull are are are booming now in California, but it's still hard to actually go and add real estate to a house. We have a housing crisis. Why not just have the the the tunnel company come build and just be like, hey.
Speaker 1:We we built you the perfect man cave underground your under your house. If you want us to build a little tunnel up to your to your bedroom that you can climb down and go enjoy your new movie theater.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine being like a angry teenager getting in a fight with your your parents about
Speaker 1:like I'm going to the main
Speaker 2:I don't wanna eat this for dinner. And then you just go in the tube and you go And
Speaker 1:then you're down in the back cave. Huge huge untapped market if they can They figure it
Speaker 2:don't understand me about about
Speaker 1:the Do you know the story of the the subway that goes out to Harvard University in Cambridge? I do not. This is fascinating. So the MTA, the Massachusetts, MBTA, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority built a subway that goes from Boston out to Cambridge. And when they built it, they wanted it to go through Harvard Harvard's territory, Harvard's land.
Speaker 1:And it would have been a straight shot to get from Boston to Harvard. But when you're on the actual subway, it slows to a crawl at one point and starts the the wheels screeching going as you're going around this weird curve. And I was very unclear on why the metro, the why the subway needed to take a curve when you can clearly draw a straight line between, you know, the logical places to go from Boston to Cambridge to get off and go to Harvard University. And the reason is that Harvard does own the ground underneath. And the reason that they
Speaker 4:a deal?
Speaker 1:They did a deal. And do you know who they did a deal with?
Speaker 2:Probably some baron.
Speaker 1:Close. He wasn't a king. It was our first president, George Washington.
Speaker 2:Woah.
Speaker 1:So they got in a they got in a legal battle. And the Harvard administration fights the Boston Transportation Authority and the government.
Speaker 2:The Boston Transport?
Speaker 1:And the Boston yeah. The Boston Transportation Authority says, we have eminent domain. We we, you know, we own the land. We we we govern this land. You need to let us build this this subway in a straight line.
Speaker 1:It'll be better for everyone. Harvard says, no. And we have we have proof that we actually control the land all the way down to the bedrock. And our evidence is a letter that is signed by George Washington who said, I grant you this land. And it held up.
Speaker 1:And so the the subway had to go around. Mogged. Mogged. And and honestly, super inconvenient to Harvard students. And I don't know why Harvard wasn't just like, yeah, obviously build it in the convenient way.
Speaker 1:But, there are probably other considerations. Anyway, Turbo Puffer, search every byte, serverless vector, and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Happy birthday to Casey Hanmer, friend of the show. It's been fifteen years in this incredible country. He says it's his American birthday.
Speaker 1:On September 14, fifteen years ago, 2010, he became a US citizen. He says he feels like he's still getting Incredible addition to the squad. Thank you to Casey Hanmer for all that you do for America. Let's play that American Eagle sound. Happy Love it, Casey.
Speaker 1:Casey. In other news
Speaker 2:250 more.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 250 more. In other news, debate continues to rage between Salesforce
Speaker 2:CEO, Mark This account is this account we're we're Yeah. We're featuring here.
Speaker 1:Just calling balls and strikes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. This is this is media
Speaker 1:out is that. Journalism.
Speaker 2:Not conflicted at all. So Palantir hotline with the targets. CEOs will do the math and will and would rather pay Palantir 10,000,000 to make save a 100,000,000 instead of pay CRM 5,000,000 to break even or worse. Or worse. Value creators greater than value extractors.
Speaker 2:So not conflicted at all.
Speaker 1:Not conflicted at all.
Speaker 2:Completely unbiased.
Speaker 1:And this is a post from John who is excellent at clipping our Alex Carpenter This such a great quote. Yes.
Speaker 2:He says, I'm so inspired. So
Speaker 1:I listen to this. The Mark
Speaker 2:Bedioff tried talking smack with Kramer and and saying, you know, we're winning deals. Carp fired back on TBPN and now now Benioff is taking the high road. He says, I'm so inspired by that company not just because they have a 100 x multiple on revenue which I would love to have. Dude, are you are you pulling up
Speaker 1:the I'm I'm pulling up the video.
Speaker 2:Let's pull it up.
Speaker 1:Let's go. It's in the it's in the chat now. They're going back I and mean, is a real discussion. We talked about it earlier in the show about how Salesforce positions its revenue model, how the market will treat that in the short term. Benioff and Jim Kramer had a back and forth on on Mad Money talking about how Salesforce, you know, actually makes money and and charges the customer.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, there is a question about about where both these companies go. It's a it's a big it's a big battle. Anyway, let's pull up the clip of Mark Benioff talking to CNBC about Palantir. You know, an idea out there. And you see it in the valuation of the company, Palantir.
Speaker 1:This idea that that's the future of software. It's disrupting software. And it's doing so without a marketing team.
Speaker 9:Oh my gosh. I am so inspired by that company. I mean, not just because they have a 100 times, you know, multiple in their revenue, which I would
Speaker 5:love to have that too.
Speaker 9:Or maybe you'd love to have a thousand times
Speaker 1:Thousand times.
Speaker 9:On their revenue soon. But the prices that they charge to their customers, I mean, they're it's gotta be the most expensive enterprise software I've ever seen. I've been, like, looking at their demos this week saying, my gosh. How do they get these prices? Because I thought I had analytics.
Speaker 9:I thought I had data management. I maybe I'm not charging enough.
Speaker 1:And you're competing with them?
Speaker 9:We compete with them. In fact, we just won a huge deal at the US Army against them.
Speaker 2:The decision is insane. Insane. Benioff's a legend. Yep. We're hoping to have him on the show Yeah.
Speaker 2:Think next month. We're working on it. But that is insane levels of cope.
Speaker 1:You think so?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I I I think this is guy notorious for selling expensive software. Mhmm. Salesforce. Is angry that someone else is charging more
Speaker 1:expensive software. That's a good point. Yeah.
Speaker 2:When yeah. On a long, you know, on a long enough time horizon, this is about the value that you deliver to customers. Yep. You need to deliver more value than you capture.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And Palantir's got a fantastic pitch.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They have fantastic, you know I mean, we were at we were at AIP con. Yeah. We talked on air and off air with people that are using Palantir's stack.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And and it's not I I I think in you know, they obviously compete in a real way, but there's also plenty of companies on Palantir's stack that are not even in conversations with Salesforce around a bunch of different use cases.
Speaker 1:Yep. Was about to say that. It does feel like Palantir's positioned themselves completely differently from a product perspective in terms of what they do. People think sales I mean, the ticker is CRM. And so when I hear about like an army deal, I'm like, are they are they getting a CRM?
Speaker 1:Like but I but I guess that they're just so big at this point that
Speaker 5:they can do
Speaker 1:lot of different stuff.
Speaker 2:The company c three
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know them? C three dot a I.
Speaker 2:They have the ticker AI.
Speaker 1:AI.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say, Mark Benioff should buy them just to get the AI ticker to come into the next era.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just re you just rebrand your ticker. There's been a lot of ticker foo. People I mean, Mark Zuckerberg with the meta rebrand, getting your your your core brand on the theme or defining the theme is is is, like, somewhat of an underrated strategy. It's like a good.com, a good ticker that that people can just go and say, I want I want exposure to AI.
Speaker 1:I'm getting c three AI. I want exposure to CRMs. I'm getting dollar sign CRM.
Speaker 2:That's that's a potentially new fund with the strategy of just investing based on the narrative surrounding the narrative that you construct around the ticker.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I need an AI I need an AI company.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe.
Speaker 2:I need a CRM company.
Speaker 1:Well, whatever you're building, you need to get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. You need to go to ProFound. That's Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Could've profound. Should we go through The Wall Street Journal article?
Speaker 1:We were featured in The Wall Street Journal. If you're just tuning in, Dylan Aberscato says on Axe, I'm joining TBPM as president. John Jordi and team have built something incredibly special. And after starting my career at CNBC, this feels full circle.
Speaker 2:Dylan also ran partnerships for HQ Trivia Yes. During their heyday Yes. Which is a crazy, crazy journey. He'll have to jump on the show sometime to talk about. Dylan also knows about sports which is
Speaker 1:Oh, god. This is a major unlock for
Speaker 2:us. We're gonna learn
Speaker 1:so much.
Speaker 2:Expertise sports.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:He's also very into collectibles. So he's gonna be helping us build out the
Speaker 1:We should sit down with him and ask him, like, what are all the sports? Like, what how do they work? Like
Speaker 2:What are the sports?
Speaker 1:Are popular.
Speaker 2:What are the leagues?
Speaker 1:Yep. What are the leagues?
Speaker 2:What are the plays?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The plays would be interesting. I would love for him to name every play. Get up to speed on the plays. That would be very cool.
Speaker 2:I don't know that we have to go through this.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 2:Maybe we can just maybe we can pull out some of some of the key some of the key key quotes. Yeah. What else is here?
Speaker 1:They call this podcast, but they didn't put us in quotes, at least not
Speaker 2:Total total victory.
Speaker 1:Big big shout out to the
Speaker 2:Total victory.
Speaker 1:To the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2:I I wanted to highlight one quote in here. Let me find it. I this this was my favorite part. Yes. And I hope that that doesn't sound important because it
Speaker 1:is important that that this Who quote that's your favorite quote?
Speaker 2:The quote that I have said when talking with Katie, the journalist over. I said well, we said the this is Katie's reporting. She said, the duo has a laundry list of moves they have zero interest in making, forming a content studio, creating a network of shows, pivoting to political coverage, raising capital, setting up a venture fund, and selling. And I said, we're perfectly fine with there being somewhat of a ceiling on the size of the business. Hayes said, we're not building for an exit.
Speaker 2:We wanna retire on the mics on the air. I love it. So I told Katie that, you know, some at some point decades into the future, there will be there will be a final show. Hope it I hope it is many decades from now. But we hope to retire here on the mics.
Speaker 2:I hope to see John John Exley's name in the chat for one final salute. But anyways, absolutely love the journal and fun to to be in there for the first time.
Speaker 1:Very fun.
Speaker 2:Did you see Mike Tyson drop Mr. Beast?
Speaker 1:I did. I just dropped in the timeline.
Speaker 2:That's pulling this up.
Speaker 1:Mike Isaac said, Tyson nearly Houdini'd MrBeast on camera. Are you familiar with this story?
Speaker 2:Didn't Houdini didn't he Houdini himself?
Speaker 1:I don't actually know.
Speaker 2:What what is being Houdini?
Speaker 1:Tyler, what happened with Houdini?
Speaker 4:I I mean, this is like from when I was in like fourth grade, but I was told that basically, he got punched in the stomach just like this. But he like, he didn't like clench or anything. He was prepared for it.
Speaker 5:So he had
Speaker 2:a I I remember now. So he had a whole bit of letting any any guy could just punch him. Woah. And if you if you flex in the right way Yeah. Pretty much
Speaker 1:You can
Speaker 2:take a punch. You can take a punch. Sure. But a guy, I guess, caught him when he wasn't, like, ready for it. It just took
Speaker 1:Broke a rib or something, internal bleeding, and Houdini passed away.
Speaker 2:Whenever you're ready, up.
Speaker 1:He's really
Speaker 2:Whenever you're ready, up.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. That's enough. That's enough for that.
Speaker 2:Was that do you think do you think he was doing a bit of acting there because it was such a viral moment? I don't know. Was it like a liver I don't think it was a liver shot. Yeah.
Speaker 4:There's like a longer version I saw, and he's like still down there for like another ten seconds.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's just that's just
Speaker 1:Yeah. But is he just acting?
Speaker 2:He's an entertainer.
Speaker 1:He's an entertainer. I think he knows I think he knows to entertain. But I at the same time, I think he knows that it is like, he he can talk to Tyson and say, hit me hard, but don't actually take me out entirely. And Tyson can dial it into a point where Tyson knows, yeah, I'm not gonna break your rib, but I will knock the wind out of you.
Speaker 2:The thing seeing the the Tyson Jake Paul fight Yep. Is watching Tyson all these years later with just like this incredible form Mhmm. And like movement despite being like long retired was
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was cool. It was cool to see. Yeah. He was literally like riding a bike for him. I pulled up we were about tickers earlier.
Speaker 2:People that wanted to to invest in CRM could buy
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Hashtag CRM
Speaker 1:or
Speaker 2:they could buy c three by buying AI.
Speaker 1:On public.com? Investing for those who take it seriously?
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:Because they have multi asset investing, industry leading yields
Speaker 2:Not funny.
Speaker 1:Trusted by millions.
Speaker 2:Trusted by billions soon. Yep. But I pulled up some tickers here. Mhmm. And I wanted to to I wanted to help you build a portfolio.
Speaker 1:You have more funny tickers. Okay.
Speaker 2:Start, we can do ticker cake Cake. For the Cheesecake Factory.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Five cake.
Speaker 1:That's good. Okay.
Speaker 2:It's hard not
Speaker 1:to go Yeah. Cake.
Speaker 2:Taco. Taco? This was Del Taco. It used to trade trade under that before they got acquired.
Speaker 1:What else you got?
Speaker 2:Bud, Anheuser Busch. Okay. Yeah. Boston Beer Company traded under Sam
Speaker 1:I'm still Samuel Adams. Yeah. That makes sense. But I would expect the ticker being beer. Like, I want the ticker to be generic, you know?
Speaker 1:For for for Budweiser, I would expect the ticker just to be beer.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:I would expect the ticker.
Speaker 2:I got another one. I got it.
Speaker 1:It needs to be generic. Totally generic.
Speaker 2:Which I I gotta Next up. Hog? Guess. H o d.
Speaker 1:A baking company makes bacon?
Speaker 2:Close. Harley Davidson.
Speaker 1:That's still it's still
Speaker 2:It's good. You wanna But
Speaker 1:I can't
Speaker 2:wanna invest in
Speaker 1:hogs. Funny ticker.
Speaker 2:Like it. If wanna have broad exposure to hogs
Speaker 1:Yes. No. No. No. It doesn't it doesn't actually give you exposure to hogs.
Speaker 1:What else? Anything else?
Speaker 2:There's There's a few? There's c r z y, Crazy Woman Creek
Speaker 1:c r z y. Bank for What is that?
Speaker 2:That's a tiny bank Oh. In Wyoming, OTC. Somebody made a cannabis ETF called Yolo.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:wonder how that's doing.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Probably not great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There does seem to be some alpha in in having a a unique ticker. Like aunique.com.
Speaker 2:YOLO is down 87% all time.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, you didn't actually YOLO into YOLO.
Speaker 2:Be careful. Just absolutely brutal.
Speaker 1:If it looks like
Speaker 2:You only lose you only live once.
Speaker 1:You only lose once.
Speaker 2:Go down 87%.
Speaker 1:You only lose everything once.
Speaker 2:You're only gonna be able to if if you don't lose everything once, you're you're never gonna be able to make it all back in one trade.
Speaker 1:Hey. Maybe maybe the thesis for YOLO was this is a generational opportunity to go short. You could be up 80% if you went short.
Speaker 2:Yeah. With size. What you got, Tony?
Speaker 4:Guess so I have one play. Play? Yeah. Dave and Buster's.
Speaker 1:That's that's pretty good. Yeah. Long playing. It's not as much of a pure play as as AI or CRM.
Speaker 2:There's also a Love which is Lovesac, the beanbag furniture retailer.
Speaker 1:It's a rival. The moon pods don't like it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Don't like it.
Speaker 1:Boo. Boo. Boo. Boo. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Good luck to everyone over there. Anyway, there was an incredible exchange between secretary Wright and Jason Kallikanis about solar and Elon Musk at the all in So Elon has a complete wrong. Yeah. Have the video pulled up. Let's play this.
Speaker 1:Let's play the
Speaker 10:Elon Musk has it completely wrong. He he has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. And I'd like if we could make a bet fifty years out, I'll I'll make a bet solar never gets to 10% of global energy. So Elon Musk has it
Speaker 1:completely wrong. So this is The US secretary of energy. Very clearly, like, long nuclear relative to solar. And I I it's a it's a hot debate. I I still feel like nuclear is is growing, and there's so much like, how many startups have we talked to in in the atomic world?
Speaker 1:There's something there. Elon, he he seems to be a purist about solar and purist about, you know, not using LiDAR on on the self driving cars. And Elon likes the purely elegant solutions of just, the most efficient thing. But if the if if energy capacity is like messy and you need it at night, like there's only so much that you can do. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just want more energy. Just give me more. Think that's what As much as possible.
Speaker 1:I think that's what secretary Chris White Wright is saying. It is interesting. Doug Doug from Radiant worked with Elon on a plan to power Mars and ran all the numbers on what it would take to generate enough power to create fuel out of the ice on Mars to bring a rocket back and concluded that nuclear was the best option, left SpaceX, started a nuclear company, and Elon somehow was unconvinced and went and is still super long solar. What's also what's also interesting is that for all of his Elon for as much of a a solar bull as Elon is, he doesn't seem that indexed to the trend. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, he owns SolarCity, but he's not he's he doesn't have, like, a mega production facility
Speaker 2:energy storage than he
Speaker 1:is Totally. Like Yeah. Solar production. Yeah. Certainly makes a ton of batteries, makes a ton of cars and stuff.
Speaker 1:But and it makes sense that, you know, solar is important to as a as a story that but, I mean, if you charge your Tesla in ten years off of a nuclear power plant, like, he's still a winner. Yeah. So it's not like he's he's bet his entire career or his entire
Speaker 2:I don't remember any him I'm sure he's spoken about nuclear, but I don't I never remember Elon saying that he was anti nuclear.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think he's just just he's he's he's been amplifying a bunch of posts that have been basically from like solar maxes. But anyway, if you're planning your build out of a nuclear power plant, do it on linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Need the system for modern software development.
Speaker 1:Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Internal tech emails has some Larry Ellison data information from February. We cannot remain in denial if we talk with our with our users every day. Larry Ellison says, Our top priority is to get Oracle users delighted with the quality and function of our CRM products. Until that happens, I doubt we will achieve success in the market.
Speaker 1:The biggest problem is missing features as opposed to showstopper bugs. There are a few of those as well, but they are much easier to fix. Every applications meeting now centers around representatives from our user community who report back on application quality and set priorities for development. We cannot remain in denial if we talk with our users every day. We need to work very hard to achieve a high degree of customer satisfaction for our sales and marketing products as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:We have we will have major improvements by June, but we are unlikely to deliver all we need until September. Doing it by September will require unrelenting focus and a Herculean effort. It will be done, but not unless we change our development and testing process and do a better job of listening to our user community. Larry. Pretty pretty interesting that they were taking such a run at CRM.
Speaker 1:I feel like Oracle is not particularly known for that and and has Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to figure out how what their their revenue for the CRM product is today, but they bundle it into cloud application
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Revenue, which is Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which
Speaker 2:still significant, you know, $3.83800000000.0 a a quarter. They're already reporting their 2026.
Speaker 1:I just hope we get Larry taking some shots at Marc Benioff and some putting the timeline in turmoil. That'd be fun. Anyway, did you see this did you see this app, Poke? Do you see this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We gotta get we should actually get the team on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was I was texting with the founder. We should definitely bring him on. But Austin Allred interacted with their chat. It looks like he had signed up, given their phone number, and wound up texting with their AI support rep or their AI sales rep.
Speaker 1:And Austin Alred just says, WTF is going on. And so, Poke identified that Austin is the founder of BloomTech and says, what brings you to my digital doorsteps? Trying to see how the real AI companies do it. And it's like this super sassy fine tune of an LLM, and Austin says, yeah. And the POKES bot says quotes, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's all the effort you're gonna put in. I expected more from someone who tweets about AI productivity all day. Maybe you should enroll in one of your own courses on how to convince AI bouncers to let you in. And Austin just says, too much SaaS from AI. SaaS is literally what I'm here for, Austin.
Speaker 1:But fine. Let me be more direct. Why should you get PoKay access when you're already busy running BloomTech, managing angel investments, tweeting about AI productivity? But here's the thing. Access to PoKay isn't just about follower count.
Speaker 1:We're looking for people who will actually use it, provide feedback, and help us improve. Your work training devs to leverage AI is interesting. Tell me more about what you'd actually do with Poke if I let you in. And, yes, tweeting about it would have would help your case. Think that's me depending on how good you are depending on how good you are.
Speaker 1:And so he has this like sassy exchange with pokies.
Speaker 2:This this is I I don't know if this is intentional but but letting making the screenshots of the product marketing for the user's business is Yeah. Pretty pretty smart if it were intentional. Because he has an incentive to share this because it's saying It's so ridiculous. Built an entire it's funny. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's also, look, you built an entire business around teaching devs to use AI effectively. Yeah. Respect that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so Austin kind of closes out. Look, let's get one thing straight. I know you're an AI model. You're a bunch of linear algebra running on a machine.
Speaker 1:If you can give me productivity gains, then show me how. Otherwise, I'll stop using you. I'm not here to impress you. You need to impress me. And so he has this interaction, but it wound up working.
Speaker 1:Right? Like he posted about Poke. He got a bunch of views and likes on the post. It definitely drew our attention to it. So I guess mission accomplished.
Speaker 1:I still don't fully understand what Poke does, so maybe there's a little bit more to do there. But it is it is somewhat impressive that during the onboarding flow, the system was able to identify who Austin Allred is. I mean, I guess he's enough of a a public figure at this point that if you just hit any LLM and asked who is Austin Allred, it would give you the high level summary of he's an angel investor. He's the founder of BloomTech, he tweets about AI productivity. And so maybe that's baked in.
Speaker 1:But if you could bring this level of personalization I don't know that I agree with, like, the sassy tone necessarily. But if you could bring this level of personalization to interactions, maybe that's good. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I saw somebody I saw somebody posting that that Apple should acquire Okay. Poke. I mean, which is the interaction company of California. Oh,
Speaker 1:really? That Yeah. That's their
Speaker 2:sub brand? That's their parent the parent company.
Speaker 1:Wait. No. No. No. Really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's their
Speaker 2:And they've been that they've been that way for a while. So remember, we gave a cut off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No more. But then but then they were the last one through the gate right before the cut off.
Speaker 1:Oh, well. Yeah. I would be interested to hear from the founder like what the this is at least like a teaser for what the product does. Like, clearly, it's a it'safriend.com sassy, fine tune on AI.
Speaker 2:I think it's more so the difference between this and friend, friend is not trying to be functional at all other than being a friend. And this is trying to be a functional kind of tool, assistant type thing that has more is
Speaker 1:for your
Speaker 2:friend code.
Speaker 1:I just mean that there is a world where you're a company and you want to bring an LLM into your product. And if you're trying to bring in any other tool off the technological shelf, whether it's, you know, a UI component, HTML five, the way a link looks, you will express your brand through CSS. Right? Like, you will you will you might have everyone has a button on their website, but every button looks different. It's an expression of their brand.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. And so if you're going to bring LLMs or chat interfaces to bear, it makes sense to actually try and bring your brand through in some way. And this is a more extreme brand than I think most people would go with. But there is something to the idea that even if you're just a large enterprise company, you might want your your LLM voice to actually be an extension of your brand, whether that's just being slightly friendlier or slightly more corporate or slightly, use more or less jargon.
Speaker 1:You might just not you might not wanna just show up with the default Chatuchipiti or Gemini or whatever flavor of LLM that people are used to interacting with, you might want something that's a little
Speaker 2:bit Something tells me that the Okay team could help the Apple team figure out how to summarize messages without botching them 90% of the time.
Speaker 1:That's a good take. Yeah. Anyway, interesting.
Speaker 2:400 episodes of the greatest podcast of all time in history. Future Hall of Famer, Founders Podcast, Colossal Warm It Up and give it a good hit. Great contact, John. Colossus had the write up this morning. This week, David Center has just released his four hundredth episode of Founders, a milestone that represents far more than a number.
Speaker 2:It's a testament to one of the most extraordinary learning projects in podcasting history. Over nine years, David has read and reread 400 biographies and autobiographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, distilling their wisdom into a treasure trove of timeless business principles. From episodes one to episode 400, Founders has become the ultimate master class in entrepreneurial thinking. David just doesn't just summarize books. I know what you're thinking.
Speaker 2:He excavates the core ideas that built empires, the mental models that created fort fortunes, and the philosophies that turned ordinary people into business legends.
Speaker 1:So I'll have a little syntax. It's not
Speaker 2:Do you think
Speaker 1:Bad form.
Speaker 2:Do you think that
Speaker 1:Maybe. Who knows?
Speaker 2:Who knows? It's well written.
Speaker 1:It is. It's funny how ScratchyPT has just, like, ruined that entire stylistical flourish, which was very, very useful for a long period of time. And now it's like, there was a big movement on X. You probably saw where it was like, bring back the Amdash. Like, make Amdashes legal again because ChatGPT is like so clearly like stolen the Amdash from writing that you can't use one without getting accused
Speaker 2:The of using OpenAI team doesn't seem to be laying off.
Speaker 1:The Emdashes? No. You see more than ever? I just thought
Speaker 2:I think the same amount.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I thought that the it's not this, it's that using the Emdash, that was going to be a stylistical flourish that was gonna be left behind with four o and that five would have a different flavor, different structure.
Speaker 2:Over the weekend, I kept seeing accounts commenting that were clearly running software to basically like look at the original post Yep. And write back a response automatically to it. Okay. These are people that
Speaker 1:They're bots.
Speaker 2:They can build bot accounts up or maybe it's their own account Yeah. Yeah. Just wanna grow. And I I kept wanting to just like break, you know, my phone and just slam it
Speaker 1:on the
Speaker 2:ground because it's so annoying to start reading something and then halfway through Realize it's But, yeah. Anyways, this is a very nicely written nicely written piece.
Speaker 1:And a huge congratulations to David Senora.
Speaker 2:They say Drop that the is 400 episodes down, a thousand to go. I would I would put it more in the range of 400,000 episodes That's to about right. But bet you know, if you love David Senora as much as we do, the best thing you can do to make his job, his life and his job better is to become one of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Yes. That is Get a book written about you.
Speaker 2:Yes. Get multiple books written about you.
Speaker 1:Maybe die. That helps too.
Speaker 2:Some some some of the founders featured are no longer with us. Yeah. And it will you'll give him content that he can immortalize. Yeah. And
Speaker 1:No. He does cover a live entrepreneur. He made three episodes about Larry Ellison
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In in twenty in twenty twenty. He was on a serious run. Went on a full Larry Ellison kick, read three books, wrote three episodes, made made three episodes.
Speaker 2:David's story, maybe we'll have to do Someday, we will make the founders episode on David. We will just fully we'll study for for for months. We'll just emulate his entire process. And and because his story is act is truly incredible.
Speaker 1:It's also Yeah.
Speaker 2:He was toiling Yeah. He was toiling away Yeah. For years. Nobody knew his name.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:When I I I discovered the show, I knew from like I just knew from from twenty minutes listening that he was special Yeah. Talent. And I don't know if I was I I think I was one of the first few I had to be one of the first three sponsors or something like You knew this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think you did mention that.
Speaker 2:And I said something that was totally, in hindsight, so offensive. I was like, would you consider like selling? That's funny. Because he didn't he wasn't generating like, you know, a ton of ad revenue at the time. I was like, look, you could probably make more.
Speaker 2:And he was just like
Speaker 6:No way.
Speaker 2:No. He said very nicely. He was interested, but thank you for the offer. And knowing David now, he's thinking like, I would not sell founder podcast
Speaker 1:For a $100,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It is funny how how Senra's impact and his, like, his cache in Silicon Valley and business broadly is massive and he's never written about. Like, if you were to actually try and do a founder's episode about David Senra, it would be very hard because he's not someone that people just
Speaker 2:like He's
Speaker 1:never done
Speaker 2:lot of do
Speaker 1:a lot of press, doesn't try to do press, also gets left out of, like, articles because he just exists in this in this, like, in this completely insider space where he doesn't really break out all the time. He doesn't cause a lot of controversy. He doesn't get canceled by random people. He's not out there, like, duking it out. And so I think the mainstream media just doesn't realize how big he is in the podcasting world.
Speaker 1:And so you have this you have this weird dynamic where it would be extremely hard because you wouldn't just be like, oh, yeah. Just pull up, like, one of the many profiles on him. Like, are profiles about a lot of people. There aren't that many about him.
Speaker 2:I think by this time next year, people have
Speaker 1:I think they'll pick up on it. Yeah. Woken up and
Speaker 2:and written the the proper profile.
Speaker 1:Numeralhq.com, sales tax, autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We're getting a little bit of an eras tour going on. Andrew Ross
Speaker 2:Another Sorkin friend of the show.
Speaker 1:A book tour. This is gonna be this is gonna be close to Era's tour level fervor.
Speaker 2:Think it's revenue.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be list of mania level. I think people will be shaking, crying. If you're big into financial journalism, fantastic research business histories, you're gonna wanna attend this. Andrew Ross Sorkin is on tour for his new book, 1929. It's a, like, minute by minute account of the Great Depression, how it happened, who is in the room at a very concrete level.
Speaker 1:I talked to him a little bit about it. It seems like a fantastic book. I'm very excited for this.
Speaker 2:He's been working on it for years.
Speaker 1:Yes. And and just a completely different take on the story that you've heard many times about. You've heard it at an abstract level of, like, there there was there was a financial bubble. The the person who was shining the shoes was was giving stock tips, and there were all these different accounts. And you've heard them at a very at a very high level about the the nineteen twenty nine bubble, but I don't think the story's ever been told at this level of detail.
Speaker 1:So very excited for this, obviously. It's it's one for the for the finance heads more than the the
Speaker 2:the I just think anybody that's
Speaker 1:I think this will be exciting. Period. Be. And if you are in any of these cities on these dates, I highly recommend going and checking it out and and joining Andrew Ross Sorkin for a tour of 1929, his latest book. Very
Speaker 2:Matt Palmer hit the timeline last week and said, there is insane demand for people who can understand and explain technology in a compelling way. Zephy went viral by saying sales. It's called sales. Kind of kind of a Yeah. Kind of kind of a
Speaker 1:Do think Matt was getting at that? Like, what was Matt? Because Matt is is I
Speaker 2:Gabbie Goldberg was also saying this is another word for comms. Calm. Like, comms in its in its purest form is not about just connecting you to Yeah. Like media and managing those relationships. It's about, like, figuring out how to position your position your product and generate attention in your market and drive revenue and all these other things.
Speaker 1:No. Listomania is a real phenomenon. During when Franz Liszt would play, people would shake and cry and be so excited and faint is a popular thing. Tyler, you familiar with Listomania? Oh.
Speaker 1:You got to get up to date on Franz Liszt. It's great, great music. 2,600,000 in the chat asked when will TBPN go on tour. That's a great question. We have a lot more to build here in the studio, a lot more to do with the show as it is, but live events would be fun.
Speaker 1:We want to put our own twist on them, of course. So we will be figuring that out in the future. Until then, we will be telling you about Fin dot ai, AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. You've seen their billboards all around Silicon Valley. Go check them out.
Speaker 1:Trung Fan shares. The r slash iPod subreddit is full of Gen z and Gen alpha kids recommending which m p three player to buy and bring to school after majority of US states have banned smartphones from the classrooms. Oh, that's interesting. People are reselling old iPods for $500 plus on eBay. Old is new.
Speaker 1:This is interesting. We had a viral Instagram short talking about the fact that the iPod might be coming the older iPod might be coming off of patent. And so there might be an opportunity
Speaker 2:to Well, here's
Speaker 1:here's a new version of it.
Speaker 2:Like, the play if you just wanted to generate returns
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Clearly, a play Mhmm. Would have been to go back and just buy if you could go back in time, just buy buy Apple products, hold on to hold them, don't box them, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The question is, are people going to attach incredible value to the iPhone 15?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The 16?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The 17? Are there gonna be specific generations?
Speaker 1:I think the original iPhone trades above its value, but I don't think the iPhone six does, for example.
Speaker 2:Even Really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty sure That's interesting. Most of them lose value.
Speaker 1:And even something like the original iPhone, I don't think it's outperformed the stock market. So it's very much like the collectible car market where even if you're in unless you're in the absolutely best performing car, even if you're in a car that held its value and went up in value like, believe the Carrera GT has not outperformed the stock market, even though it's maybe doubled or tripled in value. It's mid $1,500,000 car.
Speaker 2:Yes. You can buy a
Speaker 1:brand can
Speaker 2:buy a brand new iPhone six
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:16 gigabytes Yep. Silver, unlocked. How much? Oh, actually okay. This is interesting.
Speaker 2:So so the first result
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Is just new. But you can tell the box is open. Second one is the iPhone six factory sealed unopened investment grade going for $5,000
Speaker 1:$5,000 But is it going to sell? I wonder. But $5,000 that's a lot. For an iPhone six, you said? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's a good return, actually. That was a $500 product at the time.
Speaker 2:Okay. But there here's another one selling for that's sealed for $88.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. I think the market might
Speaker 2:Which one am I gonna buy? I mean, yeah.
Speaker 1:Probably Great. Well, is one of them signed by Tim Cook or Steve Jobs?
Speaker 2:I mean, a signed iPhone.
Speaker 1:Signed iPhone. Either Anyway, Antonio Garcia Martinez has an interesting anecdote here. Hyperliquid is generating more than $1,200,000,000 in net income surpassing Nasdaq's twenty twenty four net income of $1,130,000,000 Remarkably, it achieves this with a workforce 832 times smaller while directing 98% of revenue to hype token buybacks. And Antonio says, funny that the proverbial four person unicorn was achieved faster in crypto than AI.
Speaker 2:Well, and this has happened before. There was a there was a Y Combinator company called, like, Axe a
Speaker 1:I remember you yeah. You were talking about this. Were they a unicorn?
Speaker 2:Came out of a batch that we covered. I don't know if they've been valued at a Sure. Sure. Sure. Doing like hundreds of millions of revenue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I think I think comparing Hyperliquid, which is like a is a is in more of like an exchange product to an actual stock exchange? Is like that I
Speaker 1:mean, it's not the craziest comparison. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mean, it still Somewhat still sounds crazy to be like, you know, tiny company Yeah. Generating
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. It it is remarkable.
Speaker 1:I mean, you could go further. Bitcoin, it's a trillion dollar asset. It's a one person unicorn, right? Or maybe a couple contributors, but mostly, extremely tiny, extremely high revenue per employee. But yeah, wild.
Speaker 1:I still think we will probably see the four person unicorn in AI eventually. But we'll need to keep tracking it.
Speaker 2:Can we pull up this video in the timeline tab?
Speaker 1:And while we do that, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. They need a they they they need a stock ticker, CRM two. CRM AI. That could be AI CRM.
Speaker 2:Five letter stock ticker.
Speaker 1:I don't think you can do five letter stock Well, ticker
Speaker 2:we we we we've met people at NICEE.
Speaker 1:That would be a whole it it's like when the new, like dot AI domains came out or .xyz domains came out. There's like this flourishing of new domains that flood the market. If one of the exchanges went to five letter tickers, that could be bullish. Anyway, you wanted to pull up a video. What do you got for us?
Speaker 2:Rune has a post here highlighting this new humanoid demo.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's play it. Let's pull it up.
Speaker 2:I I don't We can't see it.
Speaker 1:Here we go. Woah. That is crazy.
Speaker 2:Some feature that gets it to
Speaker 1:It just pops right back up. That's remarkable. Wow. That slow mo is really insane.
Speaker 2:It gets kicked over. It drips.
Speaker 1:It slips. Pops up. That's so fast. That's so fast.
Speaker 2:I think I think a use case for humanoids that This is people aren't people always talk about humanoids, how they're gonna fold fold your laundry.
Speaker 1:Yes. They're gonna do
Speaker 2:your dishes. I just wanna be able to
Speaker 1:Box one?
Speaker 2:Huge market for shadow boxing right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Under under monetized Yeah. When you can just kinda be, you know, throwing, you know, big
Speaker 1:Paymakers. Just I mean, you can go as hard as you want, I guess.
Speaker 2:You can go as hard as you want. You can train the profitable. Robot to to alright. You can punch back but just like don't don't don't take my head off kind of thing.
Speaker 1:That is
Speaker 2:Hopefully, there's no bugs.
Speaker 1:That is that is wild video. We keep getting those. Do we know what company produces? Is unit tree?
Speaker 2:I think this is pretty cool. Let them let them go public in The US.
Speaker 1:Kidding. Then in in five years, we're like, we have seven delays in the divestiture. There's going to be there's concepts of a plan to to to get Unitree to divest in The United States. Who knows? Anyway, speaking of tech in Washington, Will Menidas has a little thread for us.
Speaker 1:The cultures of tech in Washington are fundamentally incompatible, says Will Menidas. In tech, the foundation of a good career, the foundation the foundations are reckless sharing of favors, expecting nothing in return, endorsing young ideas and people and public networks of influence. In Washington, any of these will end you, says Will. In the fullness of time, tech will end up having dramatically less influence on American politics than finance or any other industry that was once a similar size. We are used to infinite positive sum games.
Speaker 1:Tech came in like a conquering army, and we will be run out by the midterms. It will be a record year for lobbying firm profits, certainly a record year for state house lobbyists as tech learns their ABCs of government, and you should expect a lot of consolidation and retirements in this space. I'd love that. But the number of bills will be at an all time low. This too will fade.
Speaker 1:If I had to make a trade, I would be willing to bet that we have that we will have two vice presidents that spent some of their career as venture capitalists before we have a tech native lobbying firm with over $10,000,000 in durable bookings. And Taekim says, I think that this is generally true for small to medium sized startups growing rapidly. But as companies grow larger, the bureaucracy, empire building, power warfare, gaming of metrics, and internal politics creep in, tech is not immune. So interesting to see where tech is going in Washington. Will was on a tear talking
Speaker 2:about What's your major takeaway from this?
Speaker 1:I I I think Will's Will's really like breakaway take this weekend was that oh, this is an older post from August 3. I don't know how this resurfaced. But I think it was because Will was saying that the tech industry needs to focus away from the sci fi stuff, the LEAs. Like tech kind of and AI, the technology AI, the Foundation Model Labs, it does feel like they let LEAs or Yudakowsky set the agenda for what was discussed. It was like all paper clipping debunks and fast takeoffs.
Speaker 1:And Will's discussion of this has centered around this idea that the discussion needs to if you are engaging in American politics, if you are engaging in main street politics, people that actually vote in elections, you have to put it in terms that are relevant to them, which means what will the impact of AI be on your job, on your community? Will it be positive? Will it be negative? There's there's a lot of work being done right now on like what AI means for Main Street for the average American. And it's definitely an open question.
Speaker 1:Like Yep. The like the models are at a level that can displace labor for sure. And the impact of that can be positive if it's handled appropriately. It could be very negative if it was handled inappropriately. And so I think that's where I think the sci fi concerns have landed on deaf ears broadly in America.
Speaker 1:And they've been written off just as like, yeah, like, of course, I'll put that in the bucket of maybe there's unlimited fusion energy and we'll be on Mars and we'll be have faster than light travel and we'll have AI superintelligence. And all that sci fi stuff's cool. Keep it in Hollywood, folks. Like, talk to me about, like, can I get a job tomorrow?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And for a lot of technology, there's been a debate about, like, what has the effect on the labor market been? Unemployment in America is still really low, but are the jobs as satisfying as they used to be? Do people prefer being subsistence farmers, or are they cool with only 3% of the population doing farming? Like, I think that that's a net gain. I think people are happy with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People I think people actually do like their email jobs more than being on the farm. But, you know, I don't know. Some people, do, you know, it's not it's not that crazy to say, like, yeah. It was actually really rewarding to just be a hunter in a cave and go out and hunt a gazelle.
Speaker 2:I mean, look at the look at the trad movement. Right? Some people wanna return to Return. Just going out.
Speaker 1:This was the this is a
Speaker 2:off the land?
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is a transposition of the of the the the Unabomber take that that the the power process of of of having the work that you do directly relate to how you survive. So if you go out and you hunt the gazelle and you bring back the gazelle and you eat, that provides for survival. And the further you get away from that, once the point that you're doing an email job to buy food at the grocery store, that is an abstraction that that makes it harder to satisfy the the fundamental power process that every that is innate in every human. And so AI could could wind up benefiting everyone but making everyone's job more abstract because it's like, I don't even I don't even paint the painting anymore.
Speaker 1:I just prompt it. And even if I'm making the same amount of money.
Speaker 2:Did you see two people now? Like if you wanted like, the models are actually better at prompt engineering than humans.
Speaker 1:I saw this. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They used to be like, oh, the Don't worry. You're gonna be a prompt engineer. You're gonna be fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Learning. It's like, oh, actually just saying asking the model what's the best way to prompt if I want the model, if I want this kind of output.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've done that a lot. I actually go to ChatGPT and say, build me a VO3 prompt that will describe this particular scene and flesh it all out with the level of detail that will get me consistent video output. But there's still obviously a ton of value in creativity and coming up with interesting ideas. There's still a ton of value all over the place that hasn't been eroded.
Speaker 1:And at the same time, one day we'll be saying, Okay, well, the models are plateauing and the enterprise adoption isn't that high and labor productivity isn't spiking. So like the actual rollout, like we're looking at like, what, dollars 4,000,000,000 in Anthropic, 12,000,000,000 at OpenAI. There isn't that much value that's being generated.
Speaker 2:China's AI action plan is we're gonna integrate AI into manufacturing, into the workplace. We're gonna drive productivity and efficiency across the enterprise. Soham, not Soham Parikh. Soham Just soham. ETW says, My Twitter account has more MRR than most YC startups.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 2:I think that is entirely untrue in itself.
Speaker 1:It's to It's true in two ways. Or it's untrue in two ways. There are two flaws.
Speaker 2:There are, yeah, there two flaws.
Speaker 1:The the the average MRR at YC startups is certainly higher than than the X creator payouts. Like the X creator payouts are are usually I would be shocked if it was over a few thousand dollars for for some. He's kind of just taking a shot at YC startups for having like low MRRs. But when we talk to these companies, the MRRs are usually in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2:Oh, so this guy created an open source version of Cluely and called Cheating Daddy. A free and open open source app that lets you gain an unfair advantage.
Speaker 1:What you were looking for? What everyone wanted? Well, Casey Flint put SOHAM in the truth zone. Said one day, people will learn what the middle r in MRR and ARR stands for. Not today though.
Speaker 1:Tyler, do you know what the middle r in MRR stands for?
Speaker 4:Isn't it recurring?
Speaker 1:It is recurring.
Speaker 2:Why do you why did you have to take so long? Did you think it was a million and the reply says R for random? Monthly random revenue. Yeah, we had better revenue here, better revenue there. We counted this revenue that was over these four months in this month.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. There was someone No. The the the some people say, I am at a 100,000,000 ARR. You can say that can be also seen as annualized run rate.
Speaker 2:Yes. ARR. It's somewhat disingenuous if you're trying to market it as, like, contracted recurring revenue. Contracted. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, I mean, to be fair, like, there is a wild there is a wild, like, gap between the quality of ARR. Like, there are some there are some companies that have contracts that are so ironclad, they would bankrupt the customer to try and get out of them. Like, it is it is written in stone that you're paying that bill every month for the next five years.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. Elon went to war with a bunch of SaaS providers during the when he got in their Twitter, and he was like, wait. We're spending
Speaker 1:How much on this? How much on that? And just said, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm not paying
Speaker 1:And he probably was able to pull out of a lot of those that were booked as ARR as as true annual recurring revenue. Yeah. At the same time, there
Speaker 2:was But but but again, it's like if if there's a there's a degree, even if something is contracted Yep. If they have to sue Elon Yep. In order to get the money back
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's like or or get what they're owed. It's like, at a certain point, they'll spend more on the lawsuit than Yep. Than the actual value. And and Elon probably
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Ran ran the numbers.
Speaker 1:Yes. Don't miss state your MRR. Don't misstate your ARR. Just be honest and tell your investors and folks what's really going on with your business.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:How'd sleep last night?
Speaker 2:I slept fantastic.
Speaker 1:Me too. Me too.
Speaker 2:It must be why we're feeling so good. I only got an 86 but I got
Speaker 1:So I got I I I spent not the full night in the in the eighth sleep. So I got a 76. It says I only slept six hours but I got another three in the kid's bed Nice. Before. I got, like, nine hours.
Speaker 1:I'm feeling fantastic. I need to get an Eight Sleep in his room so I can, like, merge all the data together, give it the real the real picture. Anyway, you can go get an Eight Sleep at 8sleep.com. Get a podge five, five year warranty, 30 net risk free trial, free returns, free shipping, NetCap Girl. We must throwback post.
Speaker 2:From 2020 Yes.
Speaker 1:And absolutely started it all.
Speaker 2:We must return to an era of naming companies like American Computing Corporation or US Semiconductor. The days of cute and silly startup names are over. No longer is it sufficient to just drop a vowel from a word and call it a day. We must build serious companies with serious names.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And and again, this was this was the the the browser company of New York already existed. Yep. They had kind of done that.
Speaker 1:Was the start of the trend.
Speaker 2:It was the start of the trend. Yeah. But then we got the pre date. But then we got AMCO.
Speaker 1:American Manufacturing Company of America. No. Advanced Manufacturing. You have two Americas. That would be the real the real the real final boss.
Speaker 1:The the the New York browsing company of New York.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The American browsing company of America. People have
Speaker 3:been having a lot
Speaker 1:of fun with this.
Speaker 2:This meta this meta, I
Speaker 1:think Meta's over.
Speaker 2:Should be no. The American Computing Corporation or US Semiconductor. I I I still think this is wide open.
Speaker 1:No. I think it's I I think it's over. I think going forward
Speaker 2:I want I the thing that I wanted
Speaker 1:It's Kugen and Sons.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Last names.
Speaker 1:Kugen and Sons. Chris.
Speaker 2:And, Chris Amadon did this.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. He did.
Speaker 2:He did this. But it but it's an evergreen meta because no one can say, oh, you name it for the company.
Speaker 1:You can take it further. Amadon sounds like the name of a startup a little bit. It kinda works like it's not Amadon and Sons. It's not Amadon and Amadon. That's what I want.
Speaker 1:I want someone to come in with the with the Cosgrove and Cosgrove, Cosgrove, and Cosgrove LLC and build a build an AI ERP solution or something, business process out outsourcing, something like that. Anyway, whatever your startup name is, throw it on a billboard. Get on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 1:Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the
Speaker 2:I'm gonna let you run the Sure. Run through these legendary hacker news comments.
Speaker 1:So Hacker News is legendary. Tyler, are you are you a Hacker News user?
Speaker 4:Occasionally, I'll go on, I I never go into the comments anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've only I've only gotten one really solid post on Hacker News. I think I have like a 154 karma. But, I mean, when when I was your age, Hacker News was like the place. Like, it was it was the spot.
Speaker 1:Like, every single day opening up, reading threads, that was where news broke, where the discussion happened.
Speaker 4:I used to go on there a fair amount. I think I've kind of replaced it with Marginal Revolution.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 4:Tyler posts, like Yeah. Whatever, five or six links every
Speaker 1:day. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Generally pretty.
Speaker 1:Are you in the comments section?
Speaker 4:Even those, don't I don't read those.
Speaker 1:You don't comment? You're just a lurker? Yeah. Okay. Well, Hacker News is legendary for not enough lurking.
Speaker 1:These people really have some all time bad takes. These are legendary Hacker News comments that age like milk. So the first one, Dropbox, one of the greatest YC companies to come out of the early batches, posted. This is from Drew Houston, the founder. He posts on Hacker News, my YC application.
Speaker 1:Dropbox. Throw away your USB drive. Of course, Dropbox is the way to sync and share files on the Internet. And Brandon m chimes in in 02/2007, right when the company was getting started. I have a few quest I have a few qualms with this app.
Speaker 1:One, for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with cURL FTPFS, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted file system from Windows or Mac. This FPP account could be accessed through built in software. Why don't you just do that? Why don't you just build your own Dropbox? It's so obvious.
Speaker 1:And I love this because, obviously, the take was was wildly incorrect. Dropbox became a multibillion dollar company. But it's it's a beautiful bubble to live in where you assume that everyone is comfortable booting up Linux and building a Dropbox competitor on their own. Maybe with vibe coding, it's possible. But still, I think people are still using Dropbox.
Speaker 1:The company's actually been doing quite well and has not been really affected. Anyway, second, hacker news posts that age like milk. Bitcoin peer to peer network based on autonomous anonymous digital currency. This is from 02/2009. And the top comment here says, well, this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is gonna have any faith in this currency.
Speaker 1:That is a wild wild thing. I mean, was reasonable at the time. It was a crazy idea, and, and and it was it was and and the faith in the distributed system took years to build up. It was it was seen as a as a toy and then a joke and then a meme and then a bubble and then a crash and then another bubble and then a crash and then another bubble. But eventually, it became accepted.
Speaker 1:And now people have lots of faith in Bitcoin. And even with all the turmoil that we've seen in the market and turmoil in in international geopolitics, Bitcoin is now at a $115,000 a coin, from what was probably, a few cents when this post went live. What was the price of Bitcoin 05/08/2009? That is an interesting question. I imagine it was very low and now it has appreciated quite significantly.
Speaker 1:Probably enough to buy a luxury watch on Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch in the planet. Seriously, any watch. Tyler, do you have the price of Bitcoin?
Speaker 4:Everywhere I go, it just says zero.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so Zero? No. But here's here's the story. Yes.
Speaker 2:So it didn't have a market value
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:At the time. I'm I'm sure They
Speaker 1:were free.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was basically free.
Speaker 1:It was free.
Speaker 2:The first recorded real world transaction for Bitcoin Mhmm. Occurred over a year later on 05/22/2010
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:When a guy bought two pizzas
Speaker 1:That was the pizza transaction?
Speaker 2:Two pizzas for 10,000 pizzas.
Speaker 1:Wow. I didn't realize it was that old. That that is that that is crazy. Somebody was posting about this on Hacker News in 02/2009, a year before the pizza transaction. That is crazy.
Speaker 1:I I mean, the pizzas transaction is is is famous. Famous.
Speaker 2:Many think they'll be
Speaker 1:many Bitcoins was it? It was like 10,000. 10,000 Bitcoins.
Speaker 2:I wonder if there'll be another for two pizzas. I wonder if there will ever be another trade Like that? Where you could just pick up
Speaker 1:They should make a whole documentary about that trade, where that Bitcoin went, did the next person hold, did the next person hold, how the value accrued. Fantastic. Anyway, in 2020 in 2023, this is a more recent hacker news comment that aged like milk. Michael Truell from Cursor now worth, I think, in the secondary market trading almost north of 20,000,000,000, certainly north of 10,000,000,020. A massive company used by probably millions of developers at this point, posts on Hacker News Cursor, a code editor built for programming with AI.
Speaker 1:And the top comment from Yak account four on 03/24/2023, there's nothing on the official website or GitHub that indicates what the software is other than a cropped screenshot that looks like Versus code with a prompt cover with a prompt pop up over it. Edit, I still can't figure out if this is some sarcastic joke software or something. Wow. Age like milk. Not great.
Speaker 1:And the final y combinator. Hacker News comment that age like milk. Y Combinator's air bed and breakfast casts a wired a wider net for housing rentals as Airbnb from TechCrunch in 02/2009. And a hacker news commenter chimes in and says Airbnb isn't just casting a wider net. They're changing their entire business model.
Speaker 1:Hey. This is this is, what, two decades before OpenAI started using or ChatGPT started using this this syntax. Oh, oh, Airbnb isn't just casting a wider net. They're changing their entire business model because the original one is severely flawed. Renting a room or bed out of your home like a hotel most likely violates multiple tax and business laws in just about every US city, let alone the severe liability that a guest slips in your shower or breaks their collarbone.
Speaker 1:I've worked at a resort hotel. Cities have specific bed taxes. Hotels have to be inspected. They have liability insurance. Vacation rental owners pay taxes.
Speaker 1:Some cities don't even allow short term rentals. Of course, none of that mattered. Airbnb figured it all out. They paid the taxes. They fought the local governments and created new legal structures to satisfy all parties involved.
Speaker 1:And now the business is worth tens of
Speaker 2:millions They of say, if I wasn't a VC, wouldn't touch if I was VC, I wouldn't touch this site.
Speaker 1:That's what it says?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:hilarious. Well, if you're looking to go upmarket and find a vacation home with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dream events, top tier and twenty four seven concierge service, get on Wander and find your happy place. Good call cutting to Tyler on that one. It's a vacation home but better. Hayden identified exactly the trend that you were feeling.
Speaker 1:This is who you're arguing online with and it's just a picture of a neural network of course. And 31,000 people enjoyed it. It really is the bots are getting wild, wild, wild, wild. Well, I have some tips for those of you who are using X, the Everything app. I recommend going into the notification filters and you can turn off notifications from accounts that don't have a verified phone number, don't follow you, you don't follow them.
Speaker 1:And after you do that, you will basically only see notifications in the notifications tab from people who you're mutuals with, people that you can evaluate their full account to see that it is in fact a real person, maybe someone you know in in real life, maybe someone who has enough exhaust on the Internet that you can they've established themselves as as a as an interesting poster who's clearly not just a bot. And then you will only see those folks in your replies. And then you can always see who's replying to your posts if you click on the actual post. But for the most part, that has dramatically upgraded my experience. I don't get I really don't get any notifications from just random accounts.
Speaker 1:I only see I only see stuff from people on mutuals with, people who I who I actually care about. And it feels the the actual experience of being on X feels like being in a very small chat room. Even if I have a post that gets thousands of likes, I'm really only seeing, oh, Tyler liked it. Oh, Jordy liked it. Cool.
Speaker 1:Like, I I made them smile. They're my friends. It it it creates a much tighter, you know, small hometown feel.
Speaker 2:If I don't like one of your posts, it's gotta It's
Speaker 1:over. Be really bad. Yeah. Because if the what what what's the quote? If there's if there's one person liking
Speaker 2:If this there's one like, it's me.
Speaker 1:It's me. Fantastic. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show or second guest of the show because we already had Bill Bishop on the show in the restream waiting room. We'll bring in Pete from SciQuantum. Pete, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's happening? Hey, guys. How are doing?
Speaker 1:Doing fantastic. How are you? I hear you have some big news. Big news. Break it down for us.
Speaker 1:What's new? Introduce yourself and the company, please.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. Thanks thanks a lot for having us on. I really appreciate it. I'm Pete. I'm the cofounder of Psych Quantum.
Speaker 6:We are a quantum computing company based in the Bay Area. And, yeah, I moved here ten years ago to build a quantum computer and thought I'd be on the boat back six months later. And we're still here and we're really just, like, humbled to be now announcing a billion dollar fundraise for us to go ahead and actually build giant quantum computers. Incredible. There you go.
Speaker 1:It's massive. $1,000,000,000. Okay.
Speaker 2:Give us give us the ten years in two minutes.
Speaker 6:Well, I'll give you the the prior to ten year that ten years, myself and my cofounders spent about a decade in the university system doing what people think of when they think of quantum computing, which is science experiments in a research lab with single photons and chips and so on and so on. Published a ton of papers and then got fed up with that. And some of my colleagues made a bunch of breakthroughs in the architecture for optical quantum computing. And so we sort of developed a conviction that we could actually build a million qubit system. You know, Google and IBM and others are all in hot pursuit of useful quantum computing.
Speaker 6:Everyone today can make systems of tens or hundreds of qubits, but you need about a million qubits. You need a huge system. And so we sort of convinced ourselves that we could actually build that quickly through leverage of the semiconductor industry. And we moved to Silicon Valley basically to build the organization that would do that. That meant taking weird devices like single photon sources and single photon detectors that, you know, you can't find in a regular manufacturing process and putting them into a commercial fab.
Speaker 6:So we spent north of a $100,000,000 and many, many years putting superconductors and single photon devices into GlobalFoundries fab eight, which is a very big, very mature commercial semiconductor foundry in Upstate New York, last remaining bastion of pure play semiconductor manufacturing in The United States.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so yeah, like big emphasis on semiconductors basically for many years. We were doing other stuff as well, kind of architecture and algorithms and systems and so on, but really spending money on semiconductors. Now we have these wafers. We can make, like, high volume we can manufacture in pretty high volume the devices that we need. And so our emphasis is sort of switching towards building data center like machines.
Speaker 6:And so last year we announced about a billion dollar Australian deal with the Australian government for us to build our first system just outside Brisbane. A few months later we announced that we'd be the anchor tenant of a new $500,000,000 quantum computing campus on the South Side Of Chicago, former US steel site, used to make a million tons of steel a year. We are on it to be breaking ground there in a very, very short period of time. And, yeah, just thrilled to be at this level of maturity and sort of readiness now to actually realize these systems.
Speaker 1:How does the Australian government even assess something like this? I feel like the government is not known. I mean, at least the US government's not really known for having, like, tons of technical expertise internally. Famous examples of, like, the government struggling to build, like, crud a app for, you know, registering your health care information. It feels like the technical due diligence to understand how to underwrite that investment and then actually get any sort of value out of it.
Speaker 1:I mean, you you have to rewrite systems, to actually write something that's that's going to run on a quantum computer. Correct? Like, what what was that what was that deal like? What was that is Australia optimistic about in having a billion dollar facility?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, governments struggle terribly to build cred apps, but like the entire might of Silicon Valley also struggles to build a good to do list app. Like, is still no good to do list as far as I'm concerned. I have a sort of provocative thesis that building to do list is actually harder than building quantum computers. So that one will get me in trouble.
Speaker 6:But you know, governments have excelled obviously in Manhattan Projects and James Webb Space Telescope Sure. And you know, space shuttle and you name it like semiconductors, the Internet. Yeah. And and and you can also look at companies like SpaceX and Tesla and TSMC and ASML, like the pillars of our economy and our advanced society, those companies wouldn't be the companies that they are today without literally billions of non dilutive government support in every case. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so I don't think it's unusual that a government supports this. I think governments increasingly understand that hard technology and this kind of frontier technology is sovereign and strategic and dangerous if you don't pay attention to it. We see that very acutely with semiconductors and AI supercomputers. Yeah. And then you asked about the sort of diligence.
Speaker 6:So the chief scientist of Australia spent about eighteen months together with a pretty big team evaluating what we're doing. They came to our labs and held us by the scruff of the neck and made us reproduce measurements that we were claiming. There was a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed to her emails early in that process. And her emails revealed that she was highly skeptical of us when she And first met the Australian press have wrote about this in the frame of like, you know, chief scientist highly skeptical of psych quantum claims. I'm like, what do you want her to be?
Speaker 6:Do you want to be to be like highly It's
Speaker 2:her job to be Yeah.
Speaker 6:And you know, we were just like super gratified by the end of that process that obviously after speaking to a lot of different different outfits, they they they chose us. And then
Speaker 2:So so in The US So so sorry to cut you off but I I I what is No. You're good. So so the Australian government, you guys are partnering with them. What is what is the value that they're hoping to get out of this out of this project?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So I mean, I think like if you look at semiconductor fabs, if you look at the current effort to get TSMC into Arizona Mhmm. If you look at some of this sort of horse trading that's going on around the location of AI supercomputers, I think nations now understand that it it is strategically important where these systems are built. And, you know, when The US incentivizes TSMC to build in Arizona, the US government isn't buying chips from TSMC. You know, they're not owning the fabs.
Speaker 6:They're just making sure that that infrastructure is built on a piece of land that they care about. And to first order, the Australian thing is structured the same way. It's worth saying that Australia as a nation has been historically forward thinking in investing in the academic foundations of quantum computing. So a lot of the basic research, two of my co founders, a lot of the early work on optical quantum computing and error correction all came out of Australia. And so it's pretty poetic and and touching actually that it's heading back to Australia where it all started.
Speaker 1:What's the what are some of the use cases that you're excited about? People talk about, like, oh, you'll be able to break Bitcoin. That'll be, like, disruptive or crypto or cryptography. But is there Yeah.
Speaker 2:Product or or or quite profitable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man. Who It's
Speaker 2:just guys do it.
Speaker 1:It's the same as like asteroid mining gold. If you get if you bring it, you know, $10,000,000,000,000 of gold to the to America, what what happens? But in the context of AI and supercomputing, like, actually, like, delivering business value, is is there sort of, a near term scenario where quantum computing can drop the cost of inference or unlock a different scale of training? Or or will the the architecture of what we are doing with AI fundamentally change once a million qubit quantum computer comes online?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we're not gonna replace GPUs. We're not gonna replace AI supercomputers. And although there is some papers that talk about quantum machine learning, that stuff is really early at the moment. If someone tells you they know how to do quantum machine learning today you should be pretty skeptical.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:What we're excited about is, you know, the way I think about this is that language models now, I visualize them as this sort of expanding frontier that's just like eating through everything we do with computers and by the way everything we do in our lives and so on. There's a known limit to that beyond which we don't expect conventional computers will go and on the other side of that threshold is chemistry, material science, drug discovery, fuels, catalysts, fertilizers, semiconductors like the microscopic foundations of our physical world where conventional computers have a really, really hard time doing those simulations and where we don't have the training data in general to train AI models that will reach far into that virgin territory. And that's what we're really excited about with a quantum computer. A quantum computer calculates from first principles rather than making approximations from data. And through that kind of first principles calculation we think we can reach much much further into unexplored territory.
Speaker 6:The other thing that's maybe interesting is that at SiteOneNon we make the highest performing photonics in the world against a whole bunch of figures of merit And of course photonics is increasingly being viewed as a potential solution to what is otherwise maybe a difficult situation in the scale up of AI supercomputers where we run out of power, run out of space, run out of money, etcetera.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:What what were what were the key unlocks that allowed you guys to put together this billion dollar round? It's certainly the larger than most IPOs.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So we I mean, it's pretty surreal to be clear. Right? Like, this is the only job I've ever had.
Speaker 6:The only other real job I've had is working in a garden center stacking compost. So, yeah,
Speaker 1:it's
Speaker 6:nice to be clear like this isn't this doesn't feel normal. It feels pretty crazy to me. I'd put it also in context with other things that have happened in Silicon Valley where people have spent a way larger amount of money before they get to a product on things that are debatably more or less valuable than a quantum computer, you know. But the unlock, one of the biggest things that we did when we raised our series d with BlackRock and Tomasek and others, Bailey Giffords, we told them that we were gonna unlock one of the hardest problems for us, is a new material for optical switching. We had to build an enormous crazy machine here in the South Bay, biggest molecular beam epitaxy tool in the world, molten titanium inside, liquid helium inside, huge risk for us.
Speaker 6:And without that, there's no way we're building an optical quantum computer. The shipping company dropped that into the Alameda Bay and broke it. So we had some trouble during COVID. But we got it done on time. We delivered.
Speaker 6:We got it built. And then the other thing that we've done is Wait.
Speaker 1:Wait. Is it still at the bottom of the ocean? Did you
Speaker 6:get It it just like fell and cracked. Okay. You know, we were we were like We're some
Speaker 1:scuba diving equipment. Go down.
Speaker 3:Get it.
Speaker 2:Not quite. John's scuba certified.
Speaker 1:I I I like scuba diving. Know? I like treasure.
Speaker 2:Willing to help out.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 6:I mean, there's gotta be some amazing stuff down there like Yeah. Out on the on the port at Alameda. Yeah. It's gotta be some beautiful stuff. But then the other thing we did, you know the chandelier?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Like the golden chandelier that Yeah. Politicians love to take photographs with. We got rid of that.
Speaker 1:Okay. Got it. What That
Speaker 6:that's in the trash.
Speaker 1:What do the energy requirements look like over the next, like, decade if we assume that there's a million qubit quantum computer running? Are are we gonna see a similar race for just, like, intense energy production that we're seeing in the AI supercomputer build out?
Speaker 6:No. It's like it's like the same story, but told backwards is what you should expect with quantum computing. So, like, yeah, AI and conventional data cent it is pretty helpful for us given that we're talking about building big machines. Yeah. Ten years ago in Silicon Valley, if you were talking about supercomputers or HPC or like building a big computer Yeah.
Speaker 6:People would like fall asleep in the meeting and throw you out of their office. Right? It's nice that we're now surrounded by people who are sort of brave about building big machines. But we are gonna build a big machine and then the good thing is that the three months into building it, it's already gonna be out of date. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, we we're at the beginning of that sort of densification, miniaturization, power efficiency journey, whereas AI and conventional supercomputers, I think, are coming to the end of a, you know, multi decade journey of more and more efficiency and so on. So it's actually pretty exciting that we should be able to further miniaturize and densify these systems over time. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating stuff. Thank you for hopping on the stream. I learned a lot.
Speaker 6:Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1:This is, yeah, this is such a complex industry, but it it's been really fun tracking all the progress.
Speaker 2:I don't think we've had any any This is
Speaker 1:the very first.
Speaker 2:First This is the first. First quantum company on this show.
Speaker 1:I haven't put I haven't thrown out a lot of invites because I'm so out of loop on it. But thank you so much for taking us through it and actually explaining it in terms that, even I can understand.
Speaker 6:Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thanks for rest of your day. We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 7:You're the man.
Speaker 1:Next guest is already in the restream waiting room. We'll bring them in, and I will let you Go. Take the introduction.
Speaker 2:What's going on? Welcome to the show. It's a please please pronounce your name before I butcher it.
Speaker 7:Sadi Khan.
Speaker 2:Sadi, great to meet you. Great to meet you. Great meet welcome to the show. Introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I'm Sadi. I'm the cofounder and CEO of Avon. Avon is a home equity backed credit card company. We launched our home equity card about four or five years ago and it's been on a tier since then.
Speaker 7:In fifteen minutes or less, you can save 50% or more on your monthly interest rate as a homeowner in America. We just announced our Series E last week, and we're excited to be rebound. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Series E.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Hard to get into those numbers across four four years. What walk walk us through, I guess Yeah. I'd I'd love to I I think it's I think our audience will generally understand how if you have a credit card backed by your home equity, it'd be easier to be competitor competitive from a rate standpoint, but break down the the actual way that you you make this work.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So as you know, there's about traditionally, a home equity credit card take home equity, in general, takes about thirty days to originate and costs thousands of dollars. And as you know, a credit card takes a few minutes to get from Capital One or Bank of America, any great bank. And so we started with this mission of how do we make it as fast as a credit card to get HELOC. And so we got it down to as fast as fifteen minutes by machining down this process for maximal efficiency.
Speaker 7:And so whether it be, like, robot arms that do signatures to automatic income verification with the IRS to everything in between, we're able to compress this thing down to fifteen minutes so it feels as convenient as as a credit card, but you get the rates of a HELOC and the rewards and the convenience of a credit card. And so we offer 2% unlimited cashback on every single transaction that you do on on on a HELOC for the first time ever. Right. And you get it in the form factor that you can go to Home Depot and spend a thousand dollars on lumber, or you could go to Whole Foods and five spend $5 on a banana. And our customers have been able to do both.
Speaker 2:That's that's pretty incredible. What I guess, what what were kind of the key unlocks in the journey? Was there how did you how has, the interest rate environment kind of impacted the business as well? I mean, ultimately, there's always gonna be a lot of home equity that's just locked up that people aren't able to leverage, regardless of of the rate environment, but I'm curious what what trends you've seen.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I think at a very high level, our goal is to build a product which has the lowest cost of capital for consumers after your primary mortgage. So regardless of the interest rate environment, if it's high or if it's low, that's something we don't control. Jeremy Powell controls that. So regardless of what the interest rate does, our goal is to come in and offer every single consumer the lowest cost lowest cost of capital after your primary mortgage.
Speaker 7:And we've generally historically done that. And when interest rates go up, there's generally two or three things that happen. And when interest rates go down, roughly the inverse of those two or three things happen. So I think we're all expecting interest rates hopefully to come down a little bit for consumers over the next, like, few months on the next Fed meeting. And the three things that I think will happen are, a, we will expect more demand for capital.
Speaker 7:Right? More people will use more credit, generally speaking, across not just our product, across all products. We become actually more competitive in some ways. Because if you kinda think about it, the interest rates dropping, drops to a larger proportion. The drop affects a HELOC or a mortgage by a larger proportion than a traditional credit card, which is also a variable rate product.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And then finally, there is some kind of, you know, trace effects of how interest rates and mortgages kind of interact with one another where due to the very low historical interest rates, people are sitting on extremely low mortgage rates. But because of the increase in interest rates, people are not able to refinance their mortgage and get a cash out, which they've done historically. And so they're tapping HELOCs to do home improvement projects, make their home better because it's getting harder to move to a new home, and it's getting harder to do a cash out refinance.
Speaker 2:Yep. You said something about robotic arms doing signatures. Anything more to that story?
Speaker 7:What? Yeah. So, I mean, I I don't know if you guys when you guys bought your home Yeah. In San Francisco or elsewhere, when you closed your mortgage deed of trust, you had to go to a notary or you had to go to a title closing station and you had to sign a stack of papers, YAFIC. And we looked at that.
Speaker 7:And if you wanted to get this thing down to fifteen minutes, there was just zero way we can do it by having a notary show up at your house or you go into a title company. So we went, well, how can we figure out a way to be able to do a remote web signature? And so we invented this robot arm that literally you control from your phone, and you could execute what is something called an original web signature that is acceptable in every single
Speaker 2:account across United States. So
Speaker 7:we can close this thing down in fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1:That's incredible.
Speaker 7:Crazy shit
Speaker 2:to get that changed. Did did you guys ever get, I don't know if many of you I'm sure
Speaker 1:Regulators hate this one weird trick.
Speaker 2:Well, it feels like potentially it feels like potentially a workaround that how different is it for me to move a pen than it is to move an arm that that signs a doc. Right? Why do I need to be in the room? You know, why do I
Speaker 1:We love this. This is great. Probably
Speaker 7:yeah. We spent months going through every single I mean, people have tried this before, like, trying to build, like, a a a robot arm to do wet signatures. There's a lot of detail in our patent that goes down to, like, the exact amount of memory buffer we have to keep on, you know, the device versus the wire versus your phone to ensure it is always an original signature and not just a remote signature.
Speaker 5:That's well, because my my
Speaker 2:thought was, like, you could spin this out and it's probably, like, a billion dollar business by itself. Know, even though
Speaker 7:told that before.
Speaker 1:You've been told that before. There we go.
Speaker 7:We've been told that before.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 7:But we're just very focused on making sure homeowners can get access to the lowest cost of capital today.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Well, con congratulations on on the funding milestone and Thanks. Yeah. I'm you sure guys are just getting started. John How much was it?
Speaker 2:A $110,000,000.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. What's up? It's the week of the series e. Overnight success. Overnight success.
Speaker 1:Love to see it. Thank you so much for coming out.
Speaker 2:Great to meet you, Saudi.
Speaker 1:We will talk to you soon. Cheers.
Speaker 7:Awesome.
Speaker 1:And our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. Hi. Have Lucas Singer again from Divergent.
Speaker 2:I wanted him to drive one of his supercars into the ultra
Speaker 1:I know. I know. And and and I've heard, unsubstantiated rumors that he might be down for that at some point. Couldn't make it happen today. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:How are doing, Lucas? Good to see you.
Speaker 11:Great to see you. Doing great today.
Speaker 1:Kick us off. Did you raise a series what now?
Speaker 2:Series C? Series e.
Speaker 1:Series e. There you go. Yeah. How much?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Late stage $290,000,000.
Speaker 1:Boom. Congratulations. 3 triple. It's a hat trick of series e's today on the show. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:What does that unlock? What's the next phase of Divergent?
Speaker 11:Accelerating this platform that we've built. So really taking this into scale manufacturing with a focus on defense work. As you might remember, we started in automotive Yep. Or deep technology business. We've built this over a decade, but now it's really unlocking additional capacity, capacity to make the most meaningful, frankly, weapon systems primarily in the world and to supply those to our great prime customers and to the US government directly to add over 50,000 square feet to this campus in Los Angeles, but then also, to fund, the build out of our future facilities across The US.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about the footprint of that build out across The US? We've heard that famous story about, there's an there's an f 35 part that's made in every single congressional district. Maybe it's coincidence. It does seem like it's important to have a balanced footprint across The US. What's the courtship process like?
Speaker 1:Is it based on tax incentives or, local, talent? How do you think about picking a new, territory to expand to?
Speaker 11:Yeah. We think about where we can have the most impact for the nation. So where can we be closest to the customer that's making a product that we can truly be helpful with? Mhmm. And what is the greatest concentration of products and customers?
Speaker 11:Where is that in The US? And that's where we wanna be. And internationally, we think along those same lines, but also strategically, if we're gonna be near a theater, where does it really make sense to have a facility? And the beauty of these factories is, they are digitally defined. Right?
Speaker 11:You've got hardware that can go from making auto parts to defense parts back to back with no downtime in between. So you can be driving a capacity based model, and you can make almost any part, any assembly. One factory, any product, that's our marketing tagline because that quite literally is what this system unlocks. And we're not ready to say exactly what states we're going to. We've got conversations with multiple, but it's really about the government customer and the prime customer and, of course, yes, the economics and the incentive that we can get
Speaker 2:Yeah. Imagine in that. Imagine people are competing to win win you over in terms of off you know, trying to create the best environment for for a diversion. Is that is that correct?
Speaker 11:Oh, yeah. Yes. Absolutely. And the states get competitive. You also see the congressional side of this.
Speaker 11:You see the various stakeholders get involved, and, you wanna be first as well. You wanna show that your state or your exact county is on the forefront of this, and they're bringing digital manufacturing. They're bringing the next generation of that to, their location. So, yes, we're we're seeing, thankfully, a lot of demand, a lot of interest, and and a lot of support for these facilities.
Speaker 2:Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Talk about the actual integration with the customer. You said you wanna be you wanna deliver value to them. What are the considerations of actually being near a customer? Is that like they're gonna have four deployed engineers in your organization? You're gonna have four deployed engineers in their organization?
Speaker 1:Is it actually beneficial to be, like, walk across the street, or is it drive across the town? Or is it like I need to be near a a big airport that's a hub that everyone can fly in and out of? I I'm I'm not I'm not trying to do 20 questions to figure out where you're going. Yeah. I'm actually just interested in, like, the business of how you decide where to build and what you're
Speaker 11:So made my job easy. Yeah. You gave half the answer there. Sorry. I appreciate that.
Speaker 11:But, no. It's really partially logistics as well for our customers.
Speaker 1:So if
Speaker 11:you think about one of the large ones, they're gonna end up doing the integration, say, of a missile system. Integration meaning they're gonna put the avionics in it. They're gonna put the payload in it. They're gonna do whatever their end of line testing procedure is. Right?
Speaker 11:And if we, as the primary structure supplier that's making that full airframe for them, can be right adjacent to their general assembly facility, that's a huge win for them. Right? And that's almost obvious in how you want to architect your production process for a complex system like that. So as, being adjacent to these primes, right, like walking distance or very easy for a manufacturing process, potentially even being on the campus of these primes
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 11:Is in our minds. And then on the government side, you look at these depot centers and sustainment and maintenance Mhmm. And can we be right adjacent to these bases? So if you look at Oklahoma, for example, Tinker Air Base, can we be adjacent to that air base, partner with their air force sustainment organization, and supply parts directly to the base from that factory. At the same time that that factory could flex, use some of its capacity to do work for the primes that are, you know, in that locality as well.
Speaker 11:And that's also the beauty here is no one is burdened with the full cost because this is a platform and you can share the capacity. You're not asking the government to pay for a 100% of it a 100% of the time. You can actually scale and flex and have elasticity to the capital and the risk, associated with that capital.
Speaker 2:Jordy? Any updates on Singer, the on the on the automotive side, specifically the supercar that you guys built?
Speaker 11:Yeah. No. It's, it's been an amazing few weeks for us. We've got more cars on the road now. So we did our tenth delivery.
Speaker 11:As you know, we started deliveries this year. So there's now multiple
Speaker 3:Good.
Speaker 11:Multiple cars on the road in LA. It's amazing. Across The US. We actually have our first couple cars in The UK as well. So we made our way onto greater European turf with America's hypercar.
Speaker 11:So I'm very excited to keep building that business out, deliver more cars this year, and then look into actually developing variants of that hypercar. I won't announce those now and then also our next vehicle, our next model altogether. And that feedback loop, that integration with Divergent remains very, very attractive. And, frankly, when the government or a customer comes and they come to this this campus and they see the divergent facility, then they walk right next door and they see the general assembly of the 21 c, the hypercar, that shows them almost the relationship between us as a subcontractor and the prime as the prime integrator. Right?
Speaker 11:We're actually putting our own dollars in front of our statements there on how you can integrate for full product development.
Speaker 1:What's the what's the shape of the workforce going forward? Obviously, new capital comes in. You're probably hiring. You're probably always hiring. But, give me some advice for young people that wanna get into, doing work that might still be around in thirty years.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. Listen that we truly are software and hardware. Right? We built our own software design engine.
Speaker 11:We've got our own manufacturing software, but we also build hardware. We build our our three d printers. We build our assembly cell. We actually engineer those materials. So in terms of scope within one business and amount of vertical, depth in each of those pillars, is really tremendous here.
Speaker 11:When you're starting out, we're mostly hiring or I was mostly looking for talent that could bring a lot to the table day one both in terms of their connectivity, but also their knowledge and their ability to operate. We're now at a point where we're actually able to hire on some of the brightest and youngest engineers and production staff, which is an amazing position to be in somewhere where I've wanted to be for for a few years. And what we look for in that sort of more entry level role is really how scalable is that person gonna become. What are they already showing today that I can tell is gonna make them a great learner and eventually a great operator? And then we have the individuals here that can add to their expertise that they're bringing in.
Speaker 11:And within one, two, three years, I wanna see that entry level engineer have progressed to a lead engineer or have found his management, track. And pick one of the two, and that's what we're screening for is is individuals that are gonna scale to that next step.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, congratulations on
Speaker 2:Great to get that.
Speaker 1:Massive fundraising round. Always good catching up with you. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Good to see you, Lucas.
Speaker 1:To see you both. We'll talk to you soon. And we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room, Kyle Simani, coming back on the show for the third time, I believe.
Speaker 2:Talk about creating the world's leading salon and treasury company.
Speaker 1:Kyle, can you hear us? How are you doing?
Speaker 5:What's going on, gentlemen? Good to be here. Hey, Jordan and John.
Speaker 2:We're back.
Speaker 3:We're back.
Speaker 6:See you.
Speaker 1:Good to see you. Always great to
Speaker 2:You've busy.
Speaker 1:You have been busy.
Speaker 5:Oh, dude. Have I been busy? It's been crazy.
Speaker 1:Break it down. What's new?
Speaker 5:Well, I spent two weeks fundraising, and in two weeks, we raised 1,650,000,000.00. Is that good?
Speaker 2:Is that good? Two weeks, 1,600,000,000.0?
Speaker 5:Oh, congratulations.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm kidding. That's it's hard to do. It's hard to do. Wow.
Speaker 5:Definitely the most hectic fundraise I've ever done in my life, but it's been super, super fun. We've got
Speaker 2:Were you on the were you on the road, or were you holding court just like this? Did did you see
Speaker 5:Oh, Zoom Zoom in my in my office.
Speaker 2:There you go. That's the modern the modern roadshow. It's just Zoom link. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Zoom out. Give us the, give us the pitch that you gave the investors.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So, you know, we think, look, there's obviously a lot of digital asset treasury companies out there. Mhmm. And we wanna be not only the top Solana based digital asset treasury, we wanna be the top digital asset treasury in the world. Our aspirations is that this this is a publicly traded permanent capital vehicle.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And we have aspirations for this thing to become a $50,000,000,000 plus publicly traded company over the next, you know, half five to ten years. And we think the key to that is gonna be the team. The folks I'm working with at Jump and at Galaxy are incredible. I think we have the absolute all star dream team, not only of Solana Dats, but of all Dats out there. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:We bring together that mix of deep trading and technical experience, that deep experience across capital markets function, and being a very large counterparty that trades with almost everyone in crypto, and the deep VC experience in in Solana core and Solana ecosystem.
Speaker 1:How do how do people think about, digital asset treasury companies these days? There's, one world where you're like, this is a hedge fund, and I'm backing a trader who's gonna, pick good entry and exit prices, and they're and and it's almost like investing in hedge fund. Then there's another, which is just because of where my money is locked up for a variety of reasons. Maybe it's in four zero one k. I don't have access to this particular asset class, and wrapping a particular digital asset in a public ticker gives you access to that.
Speaker 1:Which are those reasonable narratives? Are there other narratives that people are talking about? Like, what what what how how do people justify underwriting an investment?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Look. I think there's a bunch of reasons you might wanna invest in Ford Industries. And and by the way, the ticker is Ford. It's f o r d, like the car company, NASDAQ listed.
Speaker 5:I think there's a few. The first is, like, you have to believe that we as as the the sponsors of this vehicle can do interesting things to deliver increasing sold per share
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:For our shareholders. And there's a number of things we can do to that effect. I think probably the most interesting is actually M and A. Mhmm. There's a there's probably gonna be 30, maybe 40 of these digital asset treasuries out there.
Speaker 5:Not only salon related, but all the other assets too. Yeah. And I don't think the market's gonna sustain 30 or 40 of these things. And so there's gonna be a ripe opportunity for m and a. And I think given the caliber of our team and and and just the the knowledge we have with banking across especially Galaxy, like, we're in a prime position to execute on that.
Speaker 5:The second, I think, really lucrative opportunity is in actually arbitraging capital market structures. Meaning, we're working on getting loans from banks, you know, hopefully in the five ish percent, maybe 6% range. And then we can deploy that in the Solana DeFi at, you know, today probably close to 15%. Sure. And arbitrage that spread.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. That's obviously a very sexy story. Shareholders love hearing stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:The particularly cool thing about that is also we can even use that to fund preferred share issuance. So MicroStrategy or or I guess Strategy Now pioneered this concept, and they're issuing these preferred perpetuals. And, you know, the problem Strategy has is they are paying a 9% coupon, but they have no cash flow off of their Bitcoin. We can actually produce cash flow both in sole terms and in dollar terms
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:By tapping into the native Solana staking and DeFi ecosystems. So it actually makes the vehicle as a whole a lot more financially congruent than something like strategy. So I think those are, the the best reasons why and, look, in the long term, we're gonna be capital allocators across the Solana ecosystem and crypto. And in the long term, it's obviously a bet on our ability to do capital allocation.
Speaker 2:Was there an alternate timeline where the groups that kind of came together into into Ford went and did their own treasury? Like, did you really have to wrangle people and say, like, look, fall in line or let's do this together? Or what what did that what did putting the team in the in the investor group look like?
Speaker 5:Yeah. The the Jump and the Galaxy guys started talking together about before Multicore and got involved. And they kinda realized they were like, hey. We really need kind of a third leg of the stool. So they they called me, and and it was pretty natural fit.
Speaker 5:I didn't have to spend too much time thinking about it. There were some legal questions that we had to work through, in terms of compliance for multicoin, but we worked through those. And we said, alright, guys. Let's do this. And they've been absolutely phenomenal partners.
Speaker 1:Take me through some of the other stories that are happening in the crypto world broadly that might be bullish or bearish or, you know, something to keep an eye on from your perspective across stablecoins. There's that new Stripe project. There's a few other, like, chains that are launching l ones, l twos. Like, what do you think is worth keeping an eye on, and and what's your interpretation of the news?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think there's a handful. So one is, Solana ETFs are coming. I think they're gonna be here in the next few weeks.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:That's obviously, like, a a watershed moment for the rest of the industry.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:Bitcoin and ETH have always been kinda, like, blessed as special assets, and and and I think Solana's about to get that same that same treatment. So that's super exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:The second one, this one's really in the weeds, but the team at Pumped. Fun has been they've got a livestream product for about a year now maybe.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:And this past weekend, it really blew up. Yeah. A handful of creators started making tons and tons of money this past weekend, and a lot of creators from Rumble and Twitch are now publicly experimenting on the pump platform. That could really snowball and gain momentum and and really kind of change the dynamics around creator monetization. That's actually funny.
Speaker 5:They they this happened over the weekend. I was at the all in summit last week, and I gave a presentation there Internet Capital Markets. I think that video is gonna drop in the next couple days. And one of the examples I actually highlighted in the presentation was the next generation I I talked about entertainment finance. And, you know, Jim Kramer was entertainment finance one point o.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And in my presentation, highlighted Rory and Kitty and Dave Port Dave Portnoy as being emblematic of Entertainment Finance two point o.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I think we're about to have this just onslaught of streamers who are gonna be Entertainment Finance three point o. Interesting. And it looks like that's a lot of that's gonna happen on pump, and all of pump is built on Solana. Yeah. Think those are
Speaker 1:Yeah. Play that out for me. Mean, that's fascinating since we're in the livestream world. We don't give financial advice, talk about specific stock prices, but I could imagine someone comes out and does something that's
Speaker 2:much price driven. Joked about Yeah. Somebody was like, how do I invest in TVPN? And we said, well, LVMH, of course, because it's the best proxy. And then somebody immediately, while we were live, created created Yeah.
Speaker 2:A Solana token.
Speaker 1:We had to kinda disavow it. But, but I am interested. Like, do you think that there's a near term world where, stocks go on chain, they get wrapped, and then and then the that livestream pump ecosystem, you have, like, a true Jim Kramer type who's, like, talking about public companies but has some sort of, like, wrapped exposure to the to the coin that's underlyingly tied to the public company or something like that. Is that is that something that could happen?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So it's already a fairly common behavior. You'll see a lot of the crypto traders. They'll just pull up their Binance screen or whatever they're trading on. They'll just livestream and, you know, trade
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And talk with their friends and stuff. There's never been a great way to follow along Yep. Like, with buy and sell button, like, built into the stream kind of a thing. I do think that I mean, that now exists with pump for the native token of that that stream. So that's already a thing.
Speaker 5:I think you're gonna see more of that kind of streaming products continue to evolve in the pretty near future. As it pertains to tokenized equities, yes. The team at Galaxy actually announced a deal with, Superstate to tokenize Galaxy's equity on Solana. It went live a week or two ago, and this is obviously something relevant for Forward Industries, for us with our our forward ticker, and, we're working on that. I hope to talk about it very soon.
Speaker 5:And once it's up, we have this tokenized equity, then you'll be able to kinda do that same configuration that you just described.
Speaker 2:Great. So what, I'm not sure this is correct. So Ford is already trading. Is that is that That's correct. That's correct.
Speaker 2:And but but what is the is it is it what like, why why is it trading at you you guys that it's saying is this correct? It's saying the current market cap is somewhere it's 67,000,000. Is that is that correct?
Speaker 5:How does Yeah.
Speaker 2:So So Yeah.
Speaker 5:So we closed on the PIPE transaction last week.
Speaker 2:But it hasn't
Speaker 5:1,650,000,000.00.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 5:Yeah. The the the SEC has so the company has issued these shares to all of the investors who came into the pipe, including MultiCoin, Jump Galaxy, and many others.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:And the SEC has a process by which you have to register new shares that are created, and that process takes roughly thirty days. Mhmm. So the Yahoo finances of the world and the other kind of major stock screeners only show registered shares.
Speaker 1:Got it. Got it. Market updated. Got
Speaker 2:it. Interesting. Awesome.
Speaker 1:What a fascinating world.
Speaker 2:Well, you are you are our resident Solana expert. So
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping on.
Speaker 2:Anytime. Congratulations on on putting this together. It's gotta be up there in in maybe I don't know, you know, top top 1,000 road shows ever. The one however much you raise in a couple weeks.
Speaker 1:Billion, two weeks. Not bad.
Speaker 2:Definitely top maybe probably top five pure Zoom road shows.
Speaker 1:It's pretty great.
Speaker 2:Anyways, great stuff, Kyle.
Speaker 5:Good to
Speaker 2:catch up.
Speaker 5:Pretty great. Hey, guys. Last thing. Yep. We are hiring at Ford Industries.
Speaker 5:You know, we're obviously building out this permanent capital salon strategy. If you're watching the show and you're looking for a full new role and opportunity, wanna work with us, please get in touch. We're looking to hire awesome people.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, good luck. We'll talk to you soon, Kyle.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Kyle.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for having on. Thanks, Kyle. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:The team they put together is pretty pretty wild.
Speaker 1:I haven't had a chance to dig into it. We'll have to
Speaker 2:Some heavy heavy hitters. In
Speaker 1:other news, Kimball Musk, he came on the show a few weeks ago. He posted that he's deeply honored to have been trusted with Vatican as a stage to bring grace to the world with his dear
Speaker 2:friend No way.
Speaker 1:Pharrell Williams, Andrea Botticelli, Bocelli, and Jennifer Hudson. I saw I saw it. You probably saw some of these photos. It's a drone show that happened over the Vatican. He says because grace for the world and some of the images and videos are, I mean, they look like AI.
Speaker 1:They look like CGI. But they are actually I realized
Speaker 2:he was behind this.
Speaker 1:Yes. No. This is this is his project.
Speaker 2:We Imagine being the the tribe in the Amazon. Kimball Musk starts flies over. Yes. That is a Yeah. Euphoric
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pretty wild. Experience. And and what what a what a fantastic, like, launch strategy to go to the Vatican, like, the biggest possible. Like it's such a striking Everyone has seen this building because when the pope is elected and the pope comes out and pope's chosen, gives a speech.
Speaker 1:And whenever there is news in the world of the Catholic church, the TV cameras descend upon the Vatican, of course. And to put your product right there is remarkable. And so I'm sure the full video is out there. We'll have to we'll have to watch the full thing and and see. And I'd love to have Kimball and the team on later.
Speaker 1:I think that there's probably more news. The company's growing and We should it's fantastic.
Speaker 2:We should cap off on this post from Barely AI Sure. Which is which is
Speaker 1:Stay safe out there, folks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Look at that. But this is a Trunk Trunk fan. Yes. Trunk company.
Speaker 2:Yes. This is an AI startup called Inception Point AI. It's flooding podcast apps. Yes. They've launched 5,000 podcasts.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Make make 3,000 episodes a week. They spend $1 to create an episode and monetize by getting programmatic ads, breakeven on most episodes if only 20 people listen. Types of podcasts go from lowest effort like weather reports, simple biographies to higher effort. It created 50 AI personalities including food expert Claire Delish, gardener and nature expert Nigel Tisseldown.
Speaker 1:Tisseldown.
Speaker 2:Tisseldown and Ollie Bennett who covers offbeat sports. The company has built a 184 custom AI agents. Let's give it up for AI agents. Using various LLM to create the podcast and occasionally spot occasionally spot checks the output. The CEO, former executive podcast studio Wondery says she wants to make thousands more AI personalities including an AI Oprah.
Speaker 2:Now, wouldn't you like wouldn't you like to create an AI Oprah? Interesting.
Speaker 1:He closes by saying, so basically an article content farm for podcasts. Well, Trung, it's not an article content farm. It's a radically new AI podcast strategy. It's sloppy.
Speaker 2:Put it
Speaker 1:in brought it in
Speaker 2:your podcast.
Speaker 1:This is actually extremely annoying. I I I searched for biographies on the Apple Podcast app every once in a while to try and get up to speed on things. And the amount of just AI generated content is overwhelming. And then I'm like, well, I could just go to Chatuchibi for that. You know?
Speaker 1:I if I wanted that, that's what I would get. Yeah. I want something
Speaker 2:There was a beautiful time where when you wanted to
Speaker 1:Do some research on something.
Speaker 2:Learn about Go. A topic and have and know that somebody like painstakingly spent hours Yep. Trying to handcraft Yep. A story.
Speaker 1:I think that the long I I think that the long the like the long term outcome here is like institutions get stronger. And so now I've noticed that if I'm searching for the history of an entrepreneur, I I just won't search for the name. I search Founders Podcast and then the name. Yeah. Because I just know that, like, if it's not that, it's not it's not worth listening to.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder where the article content farms, like how they've done. Obviously, they're getting like, you know, if I'm I'm sure some some have done quite well but are actually getting hurt by language models Yeah. Now that are just collecting the information and not actually hitting the site as a human. But Well,
Speaker 5:it's perfectly competitive. If anyone can stand
Speaker 1:up, so
Speaker 2:They're most should be low
Speaker 1:over time.
Speaker 2:They don't have like a any sort of like real technical advantage. Yep. And so on a long enough time horizon, like Hyperconsumers. Might that that they might today go, I wanna go and get I'm gonna go to Spotify to get the weather report from this Inception Point AI company. Or there's a world in the future where they're just they tell Gemini, make me a podcast Yep.
Speaker 2:Every morning about the weather today, tomorrow, and the next day. And just like have it ready for me in the morning. And that just kind of runs the
Speaker 1:kind of notebook, Ella.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's what I'm saying is
Speaker 1:is that.
Speaker 2:It's like every every consumer AI app will be able to make a podcast.
Speaker 1:What is crazy is that the CEO gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter, which is basically just like a massive target. Compete with me. Like, how many startups do you think launched after this article went out? Like, oh, it's it's easy to just But you're drop
Speaker 2:trading one doll you're you're profitable after Yeah. After 20 listens? Great.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'll do the same thing.
Speaker 2:It's like Great. Classic
Speaker 1:This is gonna be the new hustle. This is like this is something where like anyone with a
Speaker 2:People on on an open source LLO or LLO. This is the new this is the new WAP.
Speaker 1:For sure. This new drop shipping new
Speaker 2:Which will of course
Speaker 1:get competed away.
Speaker 2:Destroy the opportunity.
Speaker 1:It will. But good luck in the short term. And maybe this grows into something better.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the funny thing is is if out of this, they get one true hit. Like, if they were to make an AI personality that is that goes on an Oprah like run
Speaker 1:It would be fantastic.
Speaker 2:They would pay for all the slot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I would imagine that it's gotta be crazy fine tuned like what we're seeing with Friend, like what we're seeing with that other that other LLM where you're like, oh, this is this is an AI, but it's not just the default. So you can't get this level of reporting or this level of content out of NotebookLM because it's so NotebookLM has a very notebookLM flavor to it Yeah. Which is good. It's default.
Speaker 1:It's it's information. Tyler, you have a take? What you got?
Speaker 4:You're absolutely right, John.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Tyler. The chat was asking for more Tyler cutaways and we're working on it. Also, I love that when Lucas Singer came on the show, the chat was just series e. Series He Series did the meme. He did the meme.
Speaker 1:Thank you, chat. You guys have been fantastic today. Great to see you all. Great to see Raghav and Bobby and Dak and John Exley, of course, Elhan. So many good folks.
Speaker 1:So many names we know and love in the chat.
Speaker 2:And On that note, have a wonderful afternoon.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Thank you for being with us today. Go subscribe, to our newsletter. Brandon
Speaker 1:t b p n dot substack dot
Speaker 2:very hard on it or you can just go to tbpn.com. You can. You can subscribe there wherever you want. We'll be in your inbox And, leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple Podcasts. It goes a long way.
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Speaker 2:That's your business. So, thank you to everyone for tuning in and, we'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:See you all. Goodbye.