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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 is Monday, 12/08/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have new merch in stock. It's not Look at this.
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Speaker 2:Hi, brother. So some big news this morning.
Speaker 1:Yes. I wanted to start this off with a post from Pika Capital.
Speaker 2:They were highlighting. So Paramount is launching a hostile bid worth $108,000,000,000 to acquire WB. Pika says, this is crazy. HBO should make a show about billionaire media tycoons trying to buy other media conglomerate and highlight all the behind the scenes drama. So without further ado, let's bring in our first guest of the show Yes.
Speaker 2:Rich Greenfield, and we can ask him a bunch of questions. He's a a true expert
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:In in in the space.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. That was great. Him in from the restroom waiting room. Thank you so much for taking the time to jump on the show at last minute.
Speaker 1:We're we're also celebrating
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Speaker 3:I want some of your merch.
Speaker 1:We'll you of that merch. I'll wear.
Speaker 2:We'll overnight some to you. Thank you for joining, last minute. So I know in, what is it, twelve minutes, you have got to jump to another call. So let's, let's get right into it. Why don't you give kind of a quick intro on yourself, and then we can talk about all the news.
Speaker 4:Great.
Speaker 3:So I follow MediaStocks. Firm is LightShed. We founded it a little over six years ago. We talk all things tech media, telecom, and we have been obviously following closely what happens with Warner Brothers and, you know, we've had a three way bidding war, Comcast dropped out, so now we have a two way bidding war. The board obviously chose Netflix.
Speaker 3:Paramount is unhappy and is trying to go over the top and go directly to shareholders, to get their offer accepted.
Speaker 1:How do you think, the antitrust stuff plays into this? Is that something that we're gonna see a year from now once this, like, the the current back and forth is resolved, or does it have an effect right now?
Speaker 3:I mean, the irony is, like, think about what we're doing right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, you guys actually, what you guys are doing in your success to date Yeah. Actually is what makes this antitrust wise so difficult. Because just imagine, how do you look at this and say, oh, you can't look at YouTube. You can't compare YouTube. Right?
Speaker 3:Like, you can't compare Twitter and live video. Like, what is the market for video?
Speaker 2:There's infinite. There's infinite competition.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, so so that's the thing, like, you know, Netflix started talking about YouTube as their competition for time, you know, over a decade ago.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, if you're looking at only streaming, are we only gonna look at professional streaming? So we're only gonna look at Netflix, HBO Max, Disney plus, and Hulu. If if that was the constructs, let let's just say we'll take the narrowest, you know, sort of silo to look at this. Netflix is 24% of time spent in streaming, premium streaming today. So that's no YouTube, no linear TV.
Speaker 3:Yep. If you add on HBO Max, you get to 28%.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Still doesn't seem to violate any antitrust problem. Mhmm. It's certainly a lot, but it's certainly no 50% market share. But, you know, when you watch the NFL on Netflix, you also watch the NFL on ABC, and you watch the NFL on CBS. So how is that not part of the competitive landscape?
Speaker 3:And heck, you YouTube, I don't know if each of you have YouTube TV or have Sunday Ticket, but Sunday Ticket is on YouTube. Right? Like, so to to sort of narrowly define the market as only being premium subscription streaming seems a little crazy. And even when you think about movie theaters, some movies come out in movie theaters, some movies come out on streaming. Are we only going to look at this as sort of like what's the impact on movie theaters or are we going to think about, hey, you know, if Netflix actually owns the movie studio, they'll still do some movies in theaters, but they're gonna make a lot more movies in total.
Speaker 3:And so the antitrust side of this is so complicated, and I you know, look, I I can certainly make the argument why this is illegal. The question is, would that actually hold up in court? A court actually has to come out and say this is illegal. That's where it gets much more difficult because if you remember back not that long ago, guys, you know, the government sued AT and T Time Warner Yeah. Under the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, and they lost in court and the deal closed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it was kind of it kinda wound up being a bad deal. Right? Or or it was it like, it did maybe they should have stayed stayed separate. Is that is that the way we remember that or no?
Speaker 3:I mean, the way I certainly remember it is is when they told them they had to sell something, they should have sold something. They would have done a lot better off, you know, listening to the government, but they fought so they didn't have to sell anything. The rest is history. But my point is
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We're still a nation of laws. Yeah. Like, you actually have to have a legal basis Sure. For blocking the transaction. Have to bring a lawsuit Totally.
Speaker 3:And win in court.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And I was laughing to myself because I was looking for, like, the perfect tweet to sum up the the the fervor around, oh, this is gonna create a monopoly. This is a the the you know, Netflix is gonna face antitrust for this. And I sound I've had a bunch of tweets that were people basically saying, like, I miss when Netflix was a monopoly and they had everything.
Speaker 1:And now I have to go all over to all these six different bundles. And I'm like, that's anecdotal, but it's still a funny funny sentiment out there.
Speaker 3:I mean, reality is, like, honestly
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:How often do you turn on HBO Max? Like, honestly, like, how often are you actually watching that? I mean, the viewership is actually pretty small. Like, I love Last of Us. I like White Lotus, but I'm not just turning it on.
Speaker 3:I mean Yeah. Biggest problem HBO has is it's not a daily use yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It's it's like a Sunday night once a week when there's a show that's so big in the zeitgeist. If I'm not watching it, people will actively call me out and be like, you're not watching White Lotus? You're not watching success you're not you're not watching Game of Thrones?
Speaker 1:And I feel like I'm crazy. And so I I call it, like, FOMO TV, which is really good. It's like, if I'm not if I'm not tapped into Game of Thrones, I feel like I'm missing out. Netflix hasn't been able to cover that as much. I feel like they haven't created as much of that.
Speaker 1:Do you what do you think this says about Netflix? Is it is it an admission that they have yet to create that much IP that will be around in fifty years? Batman, I think, is gonna be around in fifty years. Squid Game, I don't know if we're gonna be able to see Squid Game Halloween costumes in fifty years. What do you think this deal says about Netflix's position?
Speaker 3:Look. I think it what it says more than anything is that, you know, I mean, Netflix has certainly had a bit more trouble growing engagement over the course of the last year.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's picking up. It's doing better. I mean, they've definitely had a very good slate in the last six months, but engagement isn't growing as much as I think investors would like it to be, especially you know, again, who is growing engagement the fastest in all of television? It's YouTube.
Speaker 1:YouTube. Yep. Which
Speaker 3:is, you know, probably obvious to a lot of people who are not senior media executives. Right? But, like, if you look at, consumers, they certainly know. I have three kids. I certainly see the growth of YouTube.
Speaker 3:Totally. There's no doubt that that is that is the the fastest growing place, and I think AI is only gonna accelerate that as it gets easier and easier to create higher quality content across the the YouTube user generated ecosystem. So I think part of this is Netflix is looking at this going, we need even more IP to play with. If we had all of this IP, we could make even more content. We could move faster.
Speaker 3:We could I mean, think about it. You were watching things like Ballers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Not on and Six Feet Under, not on HBO. People were watching it on Netflix because they licensed it to Netflix. Netflix has this incredible
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That helps content get discovered. Yeah. And I think that's a huge power to this transaction is elevating stuff that is in this Warner Brothers catalog that people just haven't been watching. And so I think that's what Netflix is looking at here is how can we take one plus one and make it equal more than two by making more content.
Speaker 1:Do you believe that in the k pop demon hunters example that if k pop demon hunters had not been on Netflix and instead been, Warner Brothers small theatrical release, you know, and then put out somewhere, that it wouldn't have been this phenomenon and the fact that stuff can kind of go viral in the Netflix algorithm. Do you do you like that, thesis?
Speaker 3:I mean, stuff does go viral. I mean, Netflix impacts culture. Right? I mean, whether it was Squid Game. Look at this show you know, this this series in The UK, Adolescent, that premiered on Netflix and blew up all around the world and started having you know, parents were having some very tough conversations with kids after that because of sort of how impactful it was and how moving.
Speaker 3:Like, content really does go viral on Netflix, and it's part of it's the algorithm, part of it's the interface, part of it's the global infrastructure. You know, again, you need a service that is used a lot. You know, think about TikTok, think about Reels. Why are those algorithms so good at finding stuff that the two of you want to watch every day? It's because they have so many inputs.
Speaker 3:It's learning. It's seeing your behaviors. The more you engage, the better the algorithm is. The problem with so many of these services, you just mentioned it with HBO, but it would be the same thing with Hulu or Disney plus or any of these other services. You don't use them that much.
Speaker 3:And so there isn't that much data to train the algorithm. That is what Netflix is really good at. And I think that's the opportunity of putting these two companies together. It's certainly what Paramount is hoping to get by trying to buy this. Paramount needs a bigger streaming service that is used more often because Paramount plus, like HBO Max, are both lightly used services.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's let's talk about the $108,000,000,000. That feels like a a crazy number. Why why do you do like, the the original Netflix bid, you know, felt felt rich, and this feels like on another level. Also, the company How do you how do you how do you
Speaker 1:think in value over the last, like, six months.
Speaker 3:Look. I think you have to step back. Remember, on the on the Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers is splitting into two companies. Paramount is trying to buy the whole thing. So, you know, you Yeah.
Speaker 3:Some of this is a little bit confusing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right. Paramount is buying everything, meaning the cable network. So they're buying CNN. Yeah. They're buying the Discovery Channel Food Network.
Speaker 3:Netflix is not. Netflix is just buying the Warner Brothers studio, which includes the gaming studio, the film, and the TV studio Yeah. As well as HBO. Whereas Paramount is buying everything. So these are a little bit apples and oranges.
Speaker 3:That's why $27.75 is actually greater than 30 at least in the if you're the Warner Brothers board, they said that twenty seven seventy five plus the spun out company is a bigger number than 30.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We can debate that, but they believe that they are getting 31 or $32 in value because of the spun off company. You know, that's the reality here. I don't think this tender offer on the face of it is going to move the board. I think the real question for all of your viewers out there is, is this going to cause Paramount to raise their bid further? Because I don't think the I doubt Warner Brothers comes back and says, you know, we like this better.
Speaker 3:My guess is they're gonna say this is still an inferior offer versus Netflix. Sorry. And then it'll be up to Paramount to say, do they wanna go to 32 or 34 or 36? Like, where do they wanna go next? Do they have more money?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. And just to be clear, I I believe that the Netflix deal leaves behind the the the cable assets, which are about $5 a share. Warner Brothers is is currently at $27 a share, so it implies, like, a $12,000,000,000 value on those assets. So you should add that to Netflix offer if you wanna get, the fair market of the full value.
Speaker 3:No. Because you have debt attached to it. So you've got debt that's being left on it. So you look, you're somewhere between let's just say in round numbers, you're probably 2 to $3. Could you be at, you know, Paramount says it's only a dollar.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Other people say it's at 4. Yeah. Let's just say it's somewhere in the middle. It's 2 to $3 a share is probably a reasonable starting point for what this asset is worth.
Speaker 3:I mean, look, hard to know. It doesn't trade yet. Yeah. So we're talking about the value of a theoretical Sure. Public That is a dangerous thing to opine on, especially when you're a levered company because very small differences in valuation have a pretty meaningful impact.
Speaker 3:And so, look, I think the reality is, the question is now, the Warner board already made their decision. The only way I think this, you know, I'd be surprised if the Warner board did anything different unless there was a notably superior offer
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:From Paramount Yeah. Which we'll see in time, you know, this you're already levering up a lot. I mean, you know, I think one of the things that was really misunderstood Mhmm. There was this story going around for weeks that, you know, Larry Ellison was writing a check himself. Like he was buying this with his, you know, he'd be selling his Oracle stock and he was basically buying this.
Speaker 3:The reality is, is Ellison is putting up a portion of the dollars, but a lot of the dollars are actually coming from capital they've raised from The Middle East. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You know,
Speaker 3:you've got 24 plus billion dollars is coming from three Basically, double their
Speaker 2:double their double the Ellison's investment.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Correct. And so the question is is is there more capital? Like, is Ellison not willing to spend more? You know, he's backstopping the whole thing, but how much money does he actually wanna put in? How much leverage will banks put on this?
Speaker 3:That is a big question. You know, you're you're probably and when you close this deal, you're probably around six times, maybe even a little bit more times levered. That's a pretty high leverage. They'll work it down quickly, but it is a pretty high leverage on media assets in 2020. I'd probably close in 2020, late twenty six, '27.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's a lot of leverage.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and and you gotta look at or Oracle itself is is is pretty levered. So they're the father son are going all in.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Look. I I don't know. I mean, look. I there are certainly regulatory issues.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's funny how Hollywood was was coming out and Hollywood was like, oh, we we don't like this Netflix transaction. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But, you know, combining two studios, I mean, Disney and Fox merged and Fox is, you know, Fox has basically, you know, been reduced to almost nothing. I mean, they don't make a lot of movies anymore. Mhmm. You know?
Speaker 3:And so, you know, putting two studios together, they can say they're gonna make 30 movies. It would be hard to imagine in three or four years anybody making 30 movies. I mean, I don't know about, you know, you guys, but, like, attendance to movie theaters
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, just actual butts in seats
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is almost 50% lower in '25 than it was in 2019. So pre and post pandemic
Speaker 1:Huge change.
Speaker 3:50% reduction
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:In in seats, you know, you know, butts in seats. Like, that's a huge change. And so the movie business I mean, the the funny thing is everyone is talking about, like, oh my god. The movie business can't change or, you know, don't hurt the movie business or don't change the theatrical experience. Consumers are voting with their feet.
Speaker 3:Consumers have pulled back dramatically on going to movie theaters. I think the movie theater business needs to change and needs to adapt to the realities of, like, unlimited content. I mean, look at what we're doing right now. Mean, you're directly competing with a service like CNBC. Like, there is competition keeps growing from this thing called the Internet, and it's not stopping anytime soon.
Speaker 2:What what should viewers be looking out for this week as the story evolves?
Speaker 3:I guess it is very little this I mean, look, who knows? I mean, Netflix is gonna speak in a few minutes, which is why I've gotta hop. Yeah. But, you know, I think investors are probably going to be trying to figure out two things. One, you know, is Paramount really willing or able to go higher than $30 a share in cash?
Speaker 3:Number one. And two, what is you know, if they do, what is Netflix's willingness to go above their current bid? I mean, it clearly seems like Netflix raised their offer a couple of times.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And so will Netflix ultimately, in order to seal this not seal this, but to to ensure that it doesn't become unsealed, will Netflix have to raise their bid? I think those are the two things. And as both of you said, the price for this is already pretty astronomical. I mean, this was an asset trading at 6 or $7 a share not that long ago. Now we're talking about effectively
Speaker 2:friend that I'm sure I'm sure you're friends with too who was like, there are no other bidders here. And he's like, could not be more connected. This was like six weeks ago. He he was just fully convinced.
Speaker 1:When there were those rumors of a bidding war emerging and people were debating
Speaker 3:People didn't think there would be one.
Speaker 2:They thought it just Paramount's wins.
Speaker 1:Paramount is running away with it. Yep. But, yeah, here we are.
Speaker 3:And no one and I think this
Speaker 8:is
Speaker 3:Netflix looking opportunistically and going, hey, can we really we see what's how the industry is changing. Can we opportunistically acquire this content and basically light a fire under it? Meaning like really, really accelerate the visibility and growth and, you know, of all of this content because there's just there is so much content inside of Warner Bros. That has been lying fallow that, like you know, think about when Disney bought Marvel and you got things like Black Panther, right? And, you know, Guardians of the Galaxy, things that you didn't know were really sitting in that library.
Speaker 3:My guess is there is so much content to play with.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's what's really going on here. I think that's why Netflix, I mean, again, I would agree. Six weeks ago, we wrote a piece. There was no way in my mind that Netflix was buying this. I was totally and utterly wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes makes a lot of sense. Well, last last last question. Who do you like, for just film and television enthusiasts, who do you think is who do you think they're better off with owning owning Warner Brothers?
Speaker 3:I think the reality is both of these companies are gonna inject I mean, they both want this asset because they wanna build with it. Mhmm. So I think, ultimately, putting either the you know, putting Netflix and their global platform behind this, putting the Ellisons with their, you know, second wealthiest family in the world behind it, either way, I think if you're a you know, if you love content, you're gonna get a lot more content out of this combined company than you are today. I mean, HBO, again, doesn't make many shows in a given year. You're gonna get a lot more content.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Thank you for
Speaker 1:Any picks for movie of the year personally? What'd you like to see? Of the year. Did you see anything, or are you also just scrolling short form? Like, honestly, I actually haven't seen a movie.
Speaker 1:I I mostly stick to analyzing the stocks.
Speaker 3:I I mean, look. I I mean, Avatar is coming out in a couple of weeks. I'm sorry to bet against. Yeah. It's always hard to bet against Jim Cameron.
Speaker 3:I mean, my guess is it probably won't all be in this calendar year, but it probably will be the biggest single dollar, you know, from a box office standpoint, probably the biggest even even if it doesn't live up to the last couple of Avatars in box office, it probably still is the biggest box office film of the year.
Speaker 1:That's a great reminder. We gotta figure out how to get everyone to see that in the biggest IMAX in Los Angeles in the theater because that's gonna be a wild experience. Yep. Well, thank you so much for taking my time to us.
Speaker 2:Text me if you learn anything.
Speaker 1:We will see you.
Speaker 2:I'm at it. I'll I'll fill people in.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of
Speaker 3:your day. Me some merch. We will. Some merch.
Speaker 2:We're on it. Guys, text your address.
Speaker 1:See you. Cheers. Bye. Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Our buddy Riley Walls was posting on the timeline, how do you search vector embeddings?
Speaker 1:Do you see this? And Jeff Dean replied, who's, like, the most legendary computer scientist, founder of Google Brain, still a DeepMind legend, and breaks down how to do it sort of, like, locally. And then everyone else in the comments was just like Turbo Puffer. Turbo Puffer. Turbo Puffer.
Speaker 1:It was awesome. It was a really funny funny exchange. Anyway, my, I I mean, that that that was very informative. My my take today was basically, like, a pretty soft take just saying, like, people who are saying that Netflix plus Warner Brothers is the worst possible outcome. I was talking to you about this on Friday.
Speaker 1:I think they're sort of overplaying that narrative because I could imagine Warner Brothers and Disney being more monopolistic or Warner Brothers going to Google and YouTube and being, like, free on YouTube, being, like, way more anticompetitive. And so this the the Netflix Warner Brothers, like, at the very least, it's like the third the third worst case scenario if you're gonna play that game. And as we as we talked, like, there just really is so much competition in media because media is
Speaker 2:Anybody can be a media company.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And there's so many free options. And then there's also video games. And, yeah, it's one
Speaker 2:of argue with how good some video models are getting and and Mhmm. Audio and voice models. Like, it's it's gonna be even like, you're gonna be able to make a cartoon as a single individual and make, like, many, many, you know, many, many episodes, seasons. Right? There's gonna be more more competition than ever at the actual, like, con in the content layer
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Even if some of the platforms consolidate.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, just a lot of people are putting on a they're they're they're straight up putting on a two hour podcast instead of a movie regularly, Except when you're on the plane flying back from New York, then you gotta watch The Fugitive with Harrison Ford. I made Jordy watch it. Give me your review.
Speaker 2:Fantastic film. We don't know we don't know how to make movies like that anymore. I would watch movies if all the movies were like that.
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 2:I think you just need to give me you need a you need a you should put together
Speaker 1:Movie list.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Your movie list.
Speaker 1:I have one.
Speaker 2:I like this Yeah. In the next week or so so people can watch them while we're, you know, between, like, you know, Christmas and New Year's when we're off the air. But absolutely fantastic movie. Yeah. Fast pace.
Speaker 2:I felt like they were hitting me with, like, you know, mister beast, like, brain rock.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I didn't
Speaker 5:think it's good.
Speaker 1:People a lot of times you go back to, like, the seventies or the eighties, and some of the films are really slow. Like, have these big long openings where they show you every person. Like, the opening credits were a thing. That's all gone now. But The Fugitive with Harrison Ford, just really fast paced the whole time.
Speaker 1:It jumps straight into the action. You're straight into the problem. It's very clear what's going on. I won't give any spoilers, but there's a lot of fun in this movie. So highly recommend it if you haven't seen it.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. Have you seen it, Tyler?
Speaker 2:I've not.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. Okay. Well, you you you treat yourself to the fugitive, this holiday season. Also, treat yourself to linear. The the the system for modern software development, linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from road map to release.
Speaker 2:Your What else do we need? Should should we read a a a a unhappy take on this take from Chris Murphy?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds good. Is Murphy,
Speaker 2:The US senator from Connecticut?
Speaker 1:I thought it was crypto Twitter. I it was Chris Murphy crypto Twitter. This is like
Speaker 2:I don't so. Chris says the Netflix purchase of Warner Bros would be a disaster. It's illegal. But there's some quietly rooting for it because a Paramount takeover that includes CNN would be worse. A short thread on why that's the dangerously wrong way to look at this.
Speaker 2:This deal is a classic antitrust violation. It will drive up prices. HBO Max is one of the few things that keeps pricing pressure on Netflix. Hundreds of movie theaters will go under. Writer writers and production workers in the content business will have terms and wages dictated to them.
Speaker 2:But some will say, well, if the Paramount and the Ellison Trump cabal gets control of Warner Brothers and the deal includes CNN, then Trump would effectively control the bulk of the mainstream media from CBS all the way to CNN. That's worse than Netflix owning Warner Bros. Yes, it is. But a, a Paramount Warner Brothers deal would be illegal too. Trump shouldn't force us to be for illegal but less corrupt things.
Speaker 2:B, why do we think Netflix won't agree to strings Trump puts on this deal? This is about making money, not protecting free speech. Five, tyrants want us to accept blurry moral lines. They want us to accept one level of corruption or illegality just because there is an alternative level that's much, much worse. But that's how democracy disappears, by rules disappearing and constant, relativity creeping in.
Speaker 1:So I have two two points. One, public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing. They're trusted by millions. And two, the Netflix deal doesn't so I felt there was a David Ellison was on CNBC this morning, he was talking and they they were asking him about c, about CNN.
Speaker 1:It's like, you're you own c CBS, sixty Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, and clearly, a lot of people are like, are you gonna put your thumb on the scale politically? Is there, like, a political angle to the way you will steward these media assets? And I don't think people are that worried about the political bias injected into Foghorn Leghorn or Wile E. Coyote or whatever or even, like, the Seinfeld catalog. It's not like they're gonna, like, reboot it, and it'll be like a right wing Seinfeld.
Speaker 1:Like, I don't I don't just don't think that's gonna happen. But people do worry about news coverage like CNN, CBS. But the weird thing is that in the Netflix scenario, CNN is left there in the in the in the in the the ghost ship. There's a it's a ghost ship.
Speaker 2:It's a ghost ship.
Speaker 1:We we know this very well from from the way tech likes to acquire companies. Yeah. And so is
Speaker 2:there a scenario where Paramount loses
Speaker 1:Loses
Speaker 2:Warner Brothers and still buys the cable business?
Speaker 1:Yes. I I think so. I think so. And they get Shark Week, and they get they get a bunch of fun stuff. HDTV, ninety Day Fiance
Speaker 2:David Ellison with Shark Week. I mean, they would I mean, putting the Ellison family behind Shark Week
Speaker 1:people think the
Speaker 2:Ellison's might be good for sharks. Indeed. Indeed. Welfare. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So here's the thing. So Yeah. We talked with Rich about how, like, more competition than ever at the content layer. It's very cheap to create and distribute content. It's relatively free.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That said, there's feels like, in some ways, more of a monopoly than ever on truth, if that makes sense. Legacy media properties have a monopoly on truth. Yes. If we say something and we have the aesthetics of television Yeah.
Speaker 2:We say this is true, it doesn't hold the same weight Yep. As CNBC or CNN or anything like that because they have they're actually running generally running It's just the brand. Yeah. It's brand.
Speaker 1:It's the brand.
Speaker 2:It's brand. So when the New York Times says something and a sub stack disagrees with it and says, no, this is what actually happened, who who are people gonna believe in? They're gonna believe New York Times Yep. 10 times out of 10. Yep.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, I think it is that that part of it is ideally, you would want a lot more kind of like distribution between the networks and these brands that that have a monopoly on the truth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But at the same time, the fact that that David Ellison is not cheering at the fact that he like, you see Warner Brothers. And if you're in the in the conspiratorial, the tinfoil hat, like, Ellison is trying to control the news narrative that is sort of bubbling up there, the flip side is is he should be cheering because he's like, wow. They bought everything I don't want. I didn't want Batman.
Speaker 1:But in fact, he does want Batman. He does. He wants Foghorn Leghorn.
Speaker 2:He wants it all.
Speaker 1:He needs Foghorn Leghorn. He wants it all. He needs Wile E. Coyote. He needs Porky Pig.
Speaker 1:The the list of as you don't know Porky Pig? No. How do you not know Porky Pig?
Speaker 2:Is that a YC startup? It should be. It should be. Oh, Porky Pig.
Speaker 1:Porky Pig. Okay. Looney Tunes. Yeah. Looney Tunes.
Speaker 1:The Looney Tunes character. The Looney Tunes cinematic universe is great.
Speaker 2:There actually was a I think there was a YC company in this batch called Piggy Robotics. Yeah. Yeah. We saw no. The YC companies need a New rule.
Speaker 1:New rule. Every pig themed When you're booking when you're booking YC, startups, if it's swine themed, they're on the show. Okay? I don't wanna miss a single swine themed company ever. Pig, post hog, piggy.
Speaker 1:We we need all these companies. They're they're
Speaker 2:all great. Red alert. What? Pig has rebranded No. The YC company called Pig.
Speaker 1:Wow. Spitting in our face.
Speaker 2:Called butter. Butter.
Speaker 1:It's still, like, animal themed. It's animal product. It's an animal product. What kind of butter?
Speaker 2:Analyzing it based on its macros.
Speaker 1:Is it goat butter?
Speaker 2:Heavy on
Speaker 1:Cow butter?
Speaker 2:Fat, low protein.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Low carb, low protein, high fat.
Speaker 1:They rebranded to butter. They stayed on the farm theme. They were like, we have churned into We've churned All all the customers churned, and churn was so bad, we churned into butter. Butter never
Speaker 2:We gotta we gotta get the update. I like the founder.
Speaker 1:I did. I did like the founder. I also like fall. Generative media platform for developers. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.
Speaker 1:We have some news from our flight back from New York. We flew JetBlue again.
Speaker 2:We did.
Speaker 1:If you if if you're new here, we a couple months ago, we flew JetBlue with the whole team, and we got into a little bit of a situation with JetBlue.
Speaker 2:To land the aircraft.
Speaker 1:They almost had to land the aircraft because we were Jordy and I were sitting in business class. We were served stakes. We tried to pass those stakes back to our friends and colleagues who were sitting in economy, and they told us not. They they said, stop. You can't.
Speaker 1:I think someone put their hand on your chest. And they didn't sit down, sir.
Speaker 2:So it
Speaker 1:was even worse. Sit down.
Speaker 2:They didn't put their hand on me, the flight attendant. Yeah. But they grabbed the dessert. Oh,
Speaker 1:they grabbed the dessert.
Speaker 2:You were
Speaker 1:trying to
Speaker 6:pass that.
Speaker 2:To the team.
Speaker 1:And and I said, we like to believe
Speaker 2:Do not own this dessert?
Speaker 1:We like property rights around here. We like the ability to move freely. And I think possession's nine tenths of the lot. You give me the ice cream. You give me
Speaker 2:I control the it.
Speaker 1:I can do what I want. But on our latest flight, we figured out the ultimate hack for how to pass food back from business class to, economy on a jet And we
Speaker 2:proved that this works twice.
Speaker 1:And we're share and we're sharing it with you today.
Speaker 2:Sharing this alpha.
Speaker 1:Alpha. Deep alpha. And so we'll we'll we'll hopefully pull up some of the photos, which so this is so in in first class, they give you headphones with a case. And so what I was able to do is I was able to take the food
Speaker 2:So my food.
Speaker 1:And put it
Speaker 6:I bring
Speaker 2:it over to So we we all had dinner before the flight.
Speaker 1:That's ice cream in the in the case.
Speaker 2:We had dinner before In the case. So I show up and I'm not hungry. Yeah. But Ben's a growing growing boy.
Speaker 1:Growing boy.
Speaker 2:And I and I'm like, we gotta get we gotta get my my dinner back to Ben. And so we put we we take the headphone case. We zip it up. I take it back. I pass
Speaker 1:You insisted on the bread roll going in there.
Speaker 2:Don't Of course, had to I wasn't gonna have it was he needed the bread.
Speaker 1:Did you eat the bread?
Speaker 2:I ate all of it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Wait. Was the bread over buttered? Or did it have the appropriate amount of butter? It had a lot
Speaker 5:of butter.
Speaker 1:Right? You were loading me up. Jordy insisted insisted on giving you the full pat of butter,
Speaker 5:and I thought maybe half a pat would
Speaker 2:be wanted you to have optionality.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, you yeah. Yeah. I guess you had optionality. You could have taken it What would you have done with it?
Speaker 2:I didn't have anybody sitting next
Speaker 6:to me.
Speaker 1:Oh, you didn't?
Speaker 2:So I No. But the guy there was a guy across the aisle from you. He was giving me the dirtiest
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:I I thought he was I had headphones in there. I thought he was gonna say, like, if you don't bring me back food too.
Speaker 1:Oh. You wanted you just gotta telltale. That is a risk.
Speaker 2:No. But the real the real risk when when you're running a strategy like this and you need to be highly coordinated Yeah. Is that the flight attendant in in the business Yes. Class section says, where is your cutlery?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Because your your your Because You're it's in your knife and fork are gonna be missing. So the the real yeah.
Speaker 1:You can see Jordy going back to drop it off. I took that photo. We were running
Speaker 2:running plays.
Speaker 1:And so no. No. So so there's another tip here that, that that you you don't wanna jump the gun. So the the the the food service, the dinner service, it takes place over a couple minutes. All the plates get just, get, passed out, and people eat pretty quickly.
Speaker 1:So, typically, the flight attendant, by the time they finish delivering the last plate, they will go and start picking up the plate from the beginning because it only takes a couple people a couple minutes to eat the food on the plane. But what you you wanna wait them out. You wanna you need a couple rounds of them coming by and the and you and you have the full meal there. And they're like, are you done with that? And you say, no.
Speaker 1:No. I'm still working. I'm still working. So you gotta say I'm still working a couple times, and then they will go back and sit down at the front of the plane. They'll kind of relax the post meal break.
Speaker 1:They might be gearing up for, oh, maybe I'll I'll get everyone a a new glass of wine in twenty minutes. But I'm chilling. That's your opportunity because that's when they're at their weakest. That's when they're not gonna be paying attention. You
Speaker 2:almost got caught at one point. I got caught? The flight is in a lovely, lovely moment. She came up and said, do you want any tea?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you had Missing company.
Speaker 2:There was food in the headset.
Speaker 1:Headset case. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You close the I had
Speaker 1:to close the headset case because you don't wanna get caught with the crew. Yes. Yes. Yes. We do need the whole crew on on business, and and we will be doing that.
Speaker 2:We're working on it.
Speaker 1:We're working on it. Yeah. We we we we got a ton of we got a ton of machinations, but in the meantime, well, we're having fun. We're also on ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in chat GPT.
Speaker 1:Meet millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. And people were having fun with the
Speaker 2:I don't know if this is real. Saw this post This is a joke. This account just posts, Annalee Choppa submitted a last minute bid to buy Warner Brothers for 45,000.
Speaker 1:In 45 k in cash. In cash. It's like, it actually is relevant because the other the other offers are heavily debt laden. And so if you care about that, if you want an all cash offer, this might be your
Speaker 2:best get. It's a pretty good offer.
Speaker 1:This is the best option if you're if you only
Speaker 2:want a guy. Andy, who's been on an absolute role lately says, you're laughing at him, but how much did you put up to buy Warner Brothers? Exactly. Can we pull up Andy? Andy launched, did a has had a launch video, like, yesterday.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah? Andy, of course, is the founder of two cents dot money. He's been on the show. He has a he has a social an anonymous social network that links with your bank account, and so you just your username is just your financial net worth.
Speaker 2:The video is at the bottom of the of the stack, guys, if you can pull it
Speaker 1:up. He's he's big on financializing everything. He's a he's a financial
Speaker 2:He was kind of early early to the trend.
Speaker 1:Early to the trend. But but he's always
Speaker 2:Let's play this.
Speaker 1:In sort of a fun what are we doing here? I can't read that, so I don't know. We need to go full screen on this. Okay. Let while they're pulling that up, let me tell you about Fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service.
Speaker 1:Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel with Fin dot ai. Are we able to play this for it is two minutes, and we only have so many minutes. Yeah. Let's play it. Hi.
Speaker 1:This is Osma. We make films. Two Cents founder Andy Durham raised 3,000,000 for his startup and paid us 2,500,000.0. The this was the only direction he gave us.
Speaker 5:I need this to look like the most expensive launch video ever made. It has to look like
Speaker 1:Why is he in Albania? Albania. The day before our shoot, Andy was still on his investors boat chasing a series a. Is this rage bait? I feel like this is giving me, like, I'm going to be enraged.
Speaker 1:We were under contract to spend the entire production.
Speaker 5:Here's what need montage in a mansion.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 5:Show off our in house coding models. Coding models. And they should be coding in Rust. Not just tiny apps, but full scale system architecture.
Speaker 1:And then The cinematography here is wild.
Speaker 5:Like this one. It's And I want the bathtub scene from The Big Short, but add more models. And like, have one of them explaining the value prop of two cents.
Speaker 2:So basically, you know how everyone on social media pretends to be rich? The problem is it's all fake.
Speaker 5:Then we should have the models reenact that scene from the Wolf of Wall Street. You know, the one where Leo's boat gets seized by the FBI?
Speaker 9:Yo. Some lobster for the ride home, you fucking miserable pricks. I know you can't afford them.
Speaker 1:What was
Speaker 5:the bid? He said he he
Speaker 1:he spent 2 and a half million on this? Is that what is that what you're saying?
Speaker 2:Alright. This is not PG enough, but it is funny. Okay. It's funny to basically run through every single launch video bit that there is. Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yes. Narrate and and just be narrating. Yeah. Just do that one.
Speaker 1:Just do that. And then do that one. And then do that one. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Ridiculous. Well, Bucco is saying the more he reads about the Netflix deal, the more it seems like, one, this is bad for everyone that isn't Netflix. Two, this would be very good for Netflix. And three, it should be blocked if our system still works. So he is a block the deal guy.
Speaker 1:Ernest says it's extremely pro consumer. New price is going to be lower than the current standalone Netflix plus max price with superior UX for subscribers. And Buco says, I don't think you can say it's extremely pro consumer with any sort of confidence. Yeah. This is the one give them tremendous pricing power.
Speaker 2:A few people have said, oh, yeah. Like, it's gonna be cheaper. And it's like, okay. Is it gonna be cheap it's gonna be cheaper, like, right away? Is it gonna be cheaper Yeah.
Speaker 2:In
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Ten years? No way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Because you own a company. I mean, if there's nothing there's nothing more long term pill than a public company. Like, they love thinking in decades.
Speaker 1:And, like, no. I mean, the They're like Like, a company like Netflix truly can be like, yes.
Speaker 2:Like It's the price
Speaker 1:is gonna be like
Speaker 2:$99 a month Yeah. By 2035.
Speaker 1:And it might be a steal. It might be a steal at 99 if you're getting Seinfeld and Foghorn Leghorn and Porky Big.
Speaker 2:This is a good walk through history.
Speaker 1:John
Speaker 2:Ehrlichman says, December 2010, Time Warner views this is a New York Times article. Time Warner views Netflix as a fading star. For the past year, executives of big media companies have watched Netflix with growing resentment for its success and delivering movies and television shows via the Internet for its stock price nearly quadrupling, for its chief executive being named Businessperson of the Year by Fortune magazine. I imagine at that time, they were thinking, well, it's cool that they can deliver movies, but they'll never be able to make they'll never be able to make content. And Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of course, now, recently, Netflix to buy Warner Bros.
Speaker 1:It it it is such a such a big deal. Like, 83,000,000,000, it it it's almost it almost feels, like small compared to, like, all the AI valuations and stuff and the and the and the hyperscaler valuations. But Netflix is only a 400,000,000,000 business by comparison. So, like, this is 20% of their market cap, essentially. Like, it's a it's a serious merger and would be and would be huge, huge integration.
Speaker 1:I I I I do wonder about that question of, like, how many movies they would be making per year. Would they would they try and still make 30 big movies or something like that? I feel like you if you don't make those big movies, you don't get the you don't you don't develop the new IP. Like, if you look at what Avatar is, Avatar has been, you know, this, like, incredible undertaking from a fin like, just so much money poured into the production there. But it's probably the best chance of getting something that's actually, like, an enduring legacy, where it's like, yeah, people are still talking about the the Avatar multiverse or cinematic universe in five decades, ten decades, you know, in a long, long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very, very hard to to be to be sticky if you're not taking big swings and doing things that are, like, actually really, really bold. Anyway, while we move on, let me tell you about Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vodka coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Oh, there was this hilarious clip where, apparently, in 2013 this is from Matthew Ball. Everyone's forgetting Netflix q four twenty thirteen earnings
Speaker 2:Do call you know Ball?
Speaker 1:When Yes. Which ball? All. Do you know do you know Ball.
Speaker 2:All Ball. All Ball.
Speaker 1:Wait. But do you actually know Matthew Ball? Oh, here we go. He doesn't know Ball. Woah.
Speaker 1:Gotta know every every analyst with the last name Ball. I wonder if they're related. Anyway, Reed Hastings is asked about the HBO CEO's thoughts on password sharing, and he replies, I guess he doesn't mind me then sharing his account info. It's Peppler@HBO.com, and his password is Netflix, BITCH. What a weird thing to do.
Speaker 1:Was that actually his password? It's such a weird meme. Here, let yeah. Let's play the actual video. Is is that the is that the clip?
Speaker 1:I know Trung fan clipped the actual
Speaker 10:I guess Peppler's the CEO of HBO doesn't mind me then sharing his account information. So it's, plepler at, h b o dot com, and his password is, Netflix bitch.
Speaker 1:Is like an insane he must be joking, but it's like such a weird sense of humor. Maybe it's just out of context. Maybe maybe if you watch the whole thing or you understand the conversation that was happening in 2013 around the two companies. But, like, even if that's even if that's not his password, it's, like, it's annoying to share someone's email publicly. Right?
Speaker 1:Because they just get a bunch of spam, I think. But maybe this earnings call was, like, so narrowly watched, that no one really, you know, would would spam him. But I don't know. I would imagine it'd be really annoying to have your email leak on a on an earnings call. Anyway.
Speaker 2:People really want Lena Khan back in the driver's seat. Sammy Gould says, Lena Khan, you can have this one this one time. Don't I
Speaker 1:don't really understand why people are so against this. It doesn't The
Speaker 2:idea of Netflix owning Succession, The Soprano, and The Wire.
Speaker 1:Well, the TV stuff doesn't seem that bad because that was never in theaters. I I I I guess I do understand people who are saying, like like like, they're gonna own Lord of the Rings. Seeing Lord of the Rings in theaters was a special thing, and that special thing might not happen anymore because it's incompatible with the modern business model. And so if you're if you're a Lord of the Rings fan and you really like movies and you did not like the show, well, then it's like, get ready for more shows and less movies probably.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think anybody who's upset because of the impact on traditional cinema Mhmm. And movie theaters
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I wanna see every sing I wanna see proof of how many movies they've gone to in the last
Speaker 1:The revealed preference is crazy.
Speaker 2:Last year. Right. They're like, oh, I've seen one movie. Yeah. It's like, okay.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Well, we should move on. Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 1:Nice shot at Tyler before that ad comes in. Apple is changing of the guard. It it feels like a ton of executives are leaving, ton of executives are turning over, and everyone's kind of speculating that potentially, this is the beginning of the next major major, you know, executive leadership team coming in, that there'll be some sort of, you know, before and after. Maybe we're exiting the Tim Cook era. I don't think so.
Speaker 1:I think I think you just gotta double, triple, maybe 10 x Tim Cook's pay, you're good. But if they wind up, turning the entire team over, maybe that's what happens too. So John Giordano
Speaker 2:Super out of pocket to include Steve Jobs on this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's very odd. But the interesting thing is John Ternis. He is, of course, leading. He's there's been a bunch of leaks about John Turnis, the head of hardware, potentially stepping up to the CEO role.
Speaker 1:That would be very exciting. And, there's been rumors swirling. Unclear if it's like one of those things where he's leaking or someone else is leaking things. It's you know, you never really know, until the actual news drops, but, I I remain I remain positive on Tim Cook's leadership. I think he got the big things right.
Speaker 1:And I think he missed the hot things, but missing the hot trend that's actually not that, existential to the business.
Speaker 2:That you could argue they haven't missed yet.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could
Speaker 1:argue they haven't missed it, and you could argue that AI was not existential to them, at least in the short term. But we'll see. But this Justin Bieber post is insane because you read me this, and I and I didn't hear you say, this is from Justin Bieber's account. And I was like, oh, that's funny. There's someone who's mad at Apple, but it's way funnier coming from Justin Bieber.
Speaker 2:Put Justin Bieber as a product manager at Apple, and I genuinely believe Yeah. The products across
Speaker 1:Get better.
Speaker 2:Would improve.
Speaker 1:Get get them in Figma. Think bigger. Build faster.
Speaker 2:Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. So without further ado, Justin says, if I hit this dictation button after sending a text and it beeps and stops my music one more time, I'm gonna find everyone at Apple and put them in a rear naked chokehold. Even if I turn off dictation, I somehow hit the voice note thing. The send button should not have multiple functions in the same spot. I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 2:This is so I mean, it's just absolutely insane. Because because the issue is yeah. One one, this happens a lot. This happens to me. And then it's always nerve wracking because if you have somebody pulled up on text and you happen let's say I'm like, hey.
Speaker 2:This hey. This person is wanting to change the the time of this meeting to this other point. I'm actually I'm like, what do you think? What should we do? And then it's just like happens to be like recording and then you're like, woah, woah, woah.
Speaker 2:I don't wanna
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:Wanna So yeah. I'm not a I'm not a dictation max. Yeah. I find it I think it's very offensive to send people voice notes of any And so I don't do it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't appreciate when
Speaker 1:Apparently, have to issue a correction. Taylor's over there putting us in the truth zone. Apple doesn't have product managers?
Speaker 2:That makes sense. There's so many there's this new software. Every time I open an app made by Apple, there's a new bug. The software is a lot of it. I mean, yeah, I'm now living with the new iOS iOS 1,700 for 17.
Speaker 2:For a month or so
Speaker 1:It's '26. They're on the car release schedule now, right?
Speaker 2:Living with it for a while, I can I feel like they made every app worse with the new update?
Speaker 1:Are you still upset about it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I still I'm fine. I I it's not the end of the world. Yeah. Every app is designed I think I think worse.
Speaker 2:I expected to just I expected to, like, get used
Speaker 5:to some
Speaker 2:of the new stuff, and I'm still like, oh, the photo app.
Speaker 1:Skill issue. Just get used to it. I'm getting used to it. I feel like a lot of these apps Branded
Speaker 2:a code.
Speaker 1:Truth zone to the truth zone.
Speaker 2:It says in the X chat, truth zone to the truth zone, they historically have not had PMs, but that recently
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. OTP agrees.
Speaker 1:Wow. Apple does have have PMs. Taylor, bro, I'm incorrect. Oh, well, I'm glad we have a debate in the chat going. Well, I know for a fact that Apple does have data analysts.
Speaker 1:I don't know if they use Julius AI, but they should because Julius is the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data. Ask questions in plain English and get answers in seconds.
Speaker 2:Mark Gurman says
Speaker 1:The germanator.
Speaker 2:The germanator. The Gurmanator. Mark Gurmanator himself says Apple executives have floated the idea of combining hardware engineering and hardware technologies divisions as one combined group under Shrogy in order to retain him.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So this is, of course, Apple's chip chief, John Johnny Shoji. Hopefully, I'm pronouncing that correctly.
Speaker 1:Chip chief.
Speaker 2:The chip chief Yeah. Informed CEO Tim Cookie is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains, at least for now, according to the Gurminator. The Gurminator says, again, they're floating the idea of combining hardware engineering and hardware technologies as one combined group under Shrogy in order to retain him.
Speaker 2:But that couldn't happen until and if John Turnis becomes CEO. This would make Shrogy the clear number two. Mhmm. In more important news, Mark Newsome, app the designer of the Apple Watch just released a new, watch himself. Woah.
Speaker 2:And, it is mechanical and costs, only $60,000.
Speaker 1:By the way, play the play this this is a crazy video. Look at this. The the dial is spinning and yeah. Wow. It really looks like UFO inspired.
Speaker 1:It's $60,000 jumping straight into the the holy trinity tier, I suppose. What's your what's your honest review on this?
Speaker 2:I think it looks very cool. I've never thought I want a watch that looks like it's in the same universe as the Apple Watch. Sure. But at the same time, I can really respect. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I really I think this looks very cool, and I think there's a consumer out there where they were like, finally, somebody made a watch for me. I love this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Should it be sold by Apple? Apple the Apple Store has a number of products that are not created by Apple. You can go and get I mean, they were at a partnership with Beats for a while. They wind up acquiring Beats.
Speaker 1:They also will sell different, you know, stands and USB hubs and cases and all sorts of different, you know, accessories that sort of live in the Apple world but aren't directly Apple products or made by Apple. Should this be sold at the Apple Store? What do you think? 60 k feels like a different tier, but I feel like if I'm trying to sell something for 60 k, I'd I'd go to the Apple Store and say, hey. You know, a lot of people with 60 k to spend on a watch walk into the Apple Store and pick up a couple laptops.
Speaker 2:Nick, new challenge. Yeah. Get Mark Newsome on the show. Okay. Let's do it.
Speaker 2:And we will talk with him about it.
Speaker 1:Also, get on graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Well, let's keep moving on in the timeline.
Speaker 2:Theo agrees with, with Justin Bieber. He is entirely correct here. Agree with Theo. Well We gotta pull this
Speaker 1:Which one?
Speaker 2:Video up of Bill Ackman
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:In Japan.
Speaker 1:This is an incredible aura farm. There's something so interesting about being caught on, you know, another country's television, it looks like. So this is I
Speaker 2:couldn't tell if this was actual TV or or streamers.
Speaker 1:Who knows? It just has an incredible vibe to it. So it's a Japanese show. Is that man's face blurred out? Why is his face blurred out like that?
Speaker 2:It's very I mean, that's a respectful thing to do if you didn't wanna be
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I guess they didn't sign a release, so they can't Yes. Have him play.
Speaker 2:Here. Can you turn it up a little bit?
Speaker 1:I like that. She's such a fan. Me twenty four hours in She's such a fan of Bill Ackman.
Speaker 6:Can you
Speaker 2:start it over? She missed the beginning.
Speaker 1:And these graphics.
Speaker 2:Is that Bill Ackman? Bill Ackman?
Speaker 1:Hold on. Japanese TV. See? TV. Graphics package is electric.
Speaker 1:You saw the little you saw the you see the the stars and the and, yeah, right there. And if you go back a little bit, there's like it's like a puff of smoke that comes off of the text. We don't know how to make text like that. We don't know how to make Chirons like that in America. Look at our Chirons just getting mocked by the by the Japanese TV channel with
Speaker 2:Somebody in the text says, did that woman just pull a Japanese may I meet you on him?
Speaker 1:Yes. I 100%. That's exactly what happened. Why did Andy Post all quiet on the frontal lobe? That's very funny.
Speaker 1:That just cracks me up. Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, spin up secure white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Prediction markets are absolutely tearing up the timeline. They are the current thing every every day.
Speaker 1:The debate rages. This one's hilarious from Aaron Mars. He says prediction markets will replace buying stuff. I want someone to bring kiwis to my house. I make a prediction market about whether someone will deliver four kiwis to my doorstep and load $15 into no.
Speaker 1:A guy with an ebike sees it and picks up some kiwis. Before dropping them off on my doorstep, he bets yes. Drops them off. The market resolves to yes, and he gets $15. Rest in peace.
Speaker 1:Amazon, DoorDash, Uber Eats, etcetera.
Speaker 2:Sailor comes in and says, prediction markets will replace relationships. I have a crush on your girlfriend. I make a prediction market about whether she will leave you for me and load 50 to know. She sees this and drives over to my place. Before texting me, she's here.
Speaker 2:She bets yes. She comes inside. The market resolves to yes, and she gets $15. Rest in peace, Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Dry Up Bars, restaurants, etcetera.
Speaker 1:It's so insane. Yeah. The the the the mood the prediction markets are fighting an uphill battle right now. They're on they're on life support. Prediction it's such a good such a good such a good copy pasta.
Speaker 1:And I and I I I can only imagine the quote tweets on this post just being, like, an endless an endless stream of of iterations of this exact template because it truly is so, so, so funny, the the financialization of everything. Well, Robin Hanson, who's sort of known as the creator of the prediction market, do you do you know a little bit more about his background? He's an economist.
Speaker 2:I mean, he he was writing about prediction markets or like decision markets
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Since like the nineties. Yeah. And he has this whole idea of like futarky where you like run the government based off prediction markets.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Wow. He basically Brian John Brian Armstrong was like suggesting that poly maker policymakers could one day just ask people, how should we grow the economy? And then let prediction markets decide. Sorry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway Joking on this. I will read Robin Hanson's post while Jordy recovers. He might need a little bit of a break. A little bit of holiday spirit.
Speaker 1:Getting to know this is his note. Robin says
Speaker 2:on this podcast in a can. I I've
Speaker 1:been asked what do I think of call sheet and polymarket. These are still very early days. My vision, which I started to articulate in the nineties, is of a is a world, is of a world very different from both the world then and the world of today, a world where markets are accepted as offering more accurate estimates on far more useful topics. So I'm mostly interested in the potential of stuff today to enable and cause that future vision. The politics policy questions on polymarket and call sheet trending now seem plausibly like topics where some people might find their estimates useful in making personal or collective choices, but I don't have great confidence in that or know who these people are.
Speaker 1:So I think that the like, we saw a glimmer of this in the sense that if you were running a business that stood to benefit from the Trump administration or or hurt be because of the Trump administration, maybe tariffs or something like if you were manufacturing T shirts in China and you were like, okay. If Trump wins, there'll probably be more tariffs, probably another trade war. What's the probability that Trump wins? What's the probability that I have to do a red the fire drill, a code red to
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To move my manufacturing to Singapore or something. You could make a business decision based on that. I agree with him. Like, I don't really know how many people were doing that seriously. And, also, the prediction markets were, like, 55%.
Speaker 1:You know? It wasn't it wasn't, like, 90%. It wasn't, like, that clear. Yeah. It wasn't like, oh, everyone just knows what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:It was like, oh, yeah. Like, you know, slight edge this way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I feel like people remember when they think of prediction markets on the election night. They remember, like, actually on election night when it did start to go to Totally. Like 90% and beyond. Totally.
Speaker 1:And But, yeah, I mean, if you're trying to plan for, like, a a a forthcoming Trump administration, it's not like you could go to prediction markets four months earlier and get, like, a definitive correct answer. Like, that's just not the way that that's not not just not the way it played out. But he continues. He says, but if these systems continue to grow in size and to attract users and competitors, they could lower many of the costs of creating and managing such markets, allowing a lot more experimentation with markets like those I find more promising. Read my long term vision.
Speaker 1:Of course, if these systems induce a backlash that gets them outlawed or drastically shrunk, that may plausibly block or at least long delay my vision. I don't personally mind people having fun knowingly betting on sports, on actions that celebrities can influence, or on topics where insiders have big info advantages, like mentioned markets. But I see many people complaining about these things, and I fear a new prudish temperance movement may shut them down and as a side effect shut down the more promising markets that I've envisioned. It's an interesting take. I I I think it's a really big it's a really big question on the prediction markets.
Speaker 1:It's not like, there's there's the there's a positive and a normative side of these things. So in economics, there's positive questions. Normative normative is like what should happen. Yep. And positive is what will happen.
Speaker 1:And so there's a question. I think a lot of people on the timeline are debating or they're debating prediction markets on moral grounds, on what should happen. They they they have a thesis on, I believe that that that this is great, and and this is good, and it should it should proliferate. Or or I think it's bad, and and it should be shut down immediately. There aren't that many people that are actually thinking clearly right now about, like, what will happen?
Speaker 1:Like, where how how big will these markets be? How prevalent will they be? You know, sports betting has gotten a lot easier, but, you know, it hasn't taken over everyone. Like, I know a lot of people that don't sports bet. I don't personally sports bet.
Speaker 1:Even though it's now available probably on my phone, I I'm sure I could figure out how to do it without needing to go to Las Vegas. It hasn't come for me. It hasn't just it hasn't it hasn't just, like, come and suck me in. And so we have Sucker and Jetty coming on the show on Friday to debate some of this more in more detail. But I think that there's an interesting separation to just try and understand what will happen.
Speaker 1:And he's so he's saying, you know, he fears a new prudish temperance movement, which is very clearly real, lots of people dunking on this stuff, may shut them down. I don't know. It's unclear. Like, will there actually be action related to the prudish temperance movement, or will the prudish temperance movement be confined to spicy quote tweets? Right?
Speaker 1:And and Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's it's also it's also possible to get to the future that he's envisioned since the nineties. You need to have sports markets.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that, again, is not necessarily maybe how he would want things to evolve, but it might be a necessary step to bring enough users to some of these applications Yeah. To have the durability and the attention necessary to to create some of these other markets. But I think I think so many people are just absolutely sick of the marketing from and and just the feuding between Cal Cauchy and Polymarket that part of part of people's prediction
Speaker 1:Insiders are. Insiders are. Outsiders don't know the difference.
Speaker 2:For sure. Just they
Speaker 1:just think, like, oh, financialization of everything is bad.
Speaker 2:Ex specifically. Yeah. Like, if we were on x and, like, FanDuel and DraftKings were just constantly going at each other all long, everyone would just be like, please leave.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. No. No. I I I think they are. Like, I think I think I I well, we have the CEO of DraftKings coming on the show tomorrow, but but I I I do think that that that the the the traditional sports betting world is is also just very cutthroat.
Speaker 11:And I think though? I mean, it's such a Dude, go
Speaker 2:back and
Speaker 1:go back and read some of the
Speaker 2:No. No. I'm not I'm not denying that.
Speaker 1:The development of Las Vegas. Like, Cesar
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:Versus MGM. Like, these were knockout drag out fights. These were not like, oh, yeah. Everyone was, like, positive some building.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying I I would be surprised if you have, like, a marketing manager at DraftKings, like, take like, saying, like, hateful things to a marketing manager at FanDuel in the year 2025 on
Speaker 1:the internet. We we need to watch Casino because I I believe in Casino they did things much worse than that. And and not that Casino is a documentary, but I do Gabe and the Jets
Speaker 2:as I talked to the presidents of the National Hockey League and an MLB team about how mad the prediction market marketing was. They agree pure slop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's a crazy time. Time time to study the greats. Time to study history.
Speaker 1:Time to study Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. And the next level of this show is Deleon Asperuhov, partner at Founders Fund, cofounder of Varda Space Industries in the restroom waiting room. Now he's in the TVPN UltraDome. And if I'm not in In the sun.
Speaker 1:Are you in Miami?
Speaker 6:You know, there's, you know, sort of sunshine in California as well. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm just Sometimes
Speaker 2:It's great.
Speaker 1:I think it's actually, I think it's actually adjusting, so you look great.
Speaker 6:Thank I feel great.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Take us through, take take us through the it's been a while since we caught up. Thank you for hopping on the show after a a hiatus and breaking your silence. I I I want, you know, the quick update on Jerich Isaacman first. What's the status of things there?
Speaker 1:What are the implications? What's the mood in the in the space economy? What's the mood amongst your team? Are people excited? Are people thinking that that's gonna move forward?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Look. I think I can't imagine, you know, sort of a better you know, sort of leader for NASA, than, you know, sort of Jared. Right? Somebody that, like, literally is, like, willing to put their life on the line and actually do some of the, like, I mean, he did literally the first commercial spacewalk that's ever been done in human history.
Speaker 6:Right? So he's, you know, putting his neck on the line, but then also somebody that's obviously built a phenomenal business and understands, you know, how to think about ROI, how to manage a workforce, you know, how to think about connection into, you know, your capital markets. And so, yeah, generally j generally say, like, across the entire commercial space industry, like, you know, ecstatic mood, you know, my, like, you know, various moles in the US Senate, etcetera. They could seem that, you know, things are all, you know, sort of, you know, tracking on plan and, you know, going going well there. He's definitely gotta, you know, sort of pay the piper and, you know, shake hands and everything, but he's, you know, you know, done that.
Speaker 6:And then in some ways, it's like likelihood that they pull it for a second time. It's like, man, you already, you know, shot the guy down to the ground once. Like, you know, can't can't do it again. So feel highly likely. I think, like, there's a ton of implications, you know, for that.
Speaker 6:Probably the one that I, you know, get excited for the most, you know, just as an American is the likelihood that we make sure that we, you know, should beat the Chinese user back to the moon. I think just, you know, sort of increase significantly, you know, sort of through room. You you there's already, you know, some rumors starting to, you know, you know, come out of his interest in starting to get, you know, more and more options to the table in terms of how we, you know, sort of get to the moon beyond what's been, you know, sort of currently contracted. And so Mhmm. I like that, and I like you know, I think we talked about this in some of, like, our prior, you know, sort of discussions, but I really like this program called clips, within the Lunar program where, basically, rather than trying to set a budget and say, here's how I want you to build x y z thing.
Speaker 6:The way that they basically pay contractors is just a flat fee for each kilogram of down mass down to the lunar surface, basically. It's just like, you know, you get something onto the moon. We basically give you I forgot. I think it's, like, basically a $100,000, basically, a kilogram. Wow.
Speaker 6:But, like, you get margin on that. You figure out how to do it cheaper. Great. That's all on you. But that's, like, to me where NASA should be.
Speaker 6:It's, for these, like, things that aren't yet really commercial don't make sense, be the first buyer, establish the market, and then that's what kickstarts, basically, the commercial, you know, sort of economy side of it. So that's obviously been, like, a ton of activity. Obviously, there's a whole set of SpaceX things, you know, that have been, you know, sort of happening over the past few sort of months.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's let's pause on this on the SpaceX stuff. I wanna stay on, on NASA. The the way I was thinking about, Jared Isaacman and and just kind of framing, like, the broader discussion of the lunar economy, the the the the the orbital economy was, this idea of, like, are you a Mars guy or a moon guy in the short term? And and I don't know if this is, like, too simplistic, so maybe you can just bring a bunch of nuance, but it does feel like, you know, Elon has been beating the drum on, like, Mars, Mars, Mars, and, like, maybe the moon is, like, you know, a pit stop along the way.
Speaker 1:And then some other folks, some of the more legacy spaceflight providers are a little bit more focused on the tractable get to the moon. But then you have different folks breaking different ways, like Casey Hanmer's really obsessed with beating China to the moon. Obviously, Mike Salana at Founders Fund is moon should be a state. And and and and and there's a whole bunch of different things. But is there do you think that there's a real trade off between, like or should we be prioritizing moon or Mars in the short term?
Speaker 1:How how do you think about that?
Speaker 6:You know, when I think about, like, why Elon was so dead set on this, like, know, call it, you know, five years ago, ten years ago, I think it had more to do with the fact that the moon can be seen as a distraction if our capabilities as a species are limited because the moon is not the place where you can send up a, you know, sort of permanent colony that is, you know, sustainable and independent of Earth. Right? Yeah. So no atmosphere terraforming is impossible in some ways, like, you know, because that likely to be highly highly dependent on Earth. So it's not really like a backup, you know, sort of function, you know, we are relative to, you know, sort of Mars.
Speaker 6:And so when I think about, like, Elon about ten years ago, it was basically like, look. We're so decrepit as a industry in The United States or, you know, across the globe that if we, like, set a goal, we need to, like, really keep the goal very, very focused, and so you have to go straight to Mars. I think just like the world today is fundamentally very different where we're just, like, much more capable of an industry in terms of just, like you know, I don't know if you guys saw this, but I tweeted that, you know, in November was the first time in human history where there were more orbital rocket launches than there were days in the month.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 6:That's the first time that's ever happened, you know, basically human history. And so that obviously gives a point to, like, we just, like, are much more capable as a species. And so in that world of more call, like, space abundance, I don't worry as much. And I admit that I've always been more on the, like, the moon is absolutely the right pit stop on the way to Mars and, you know, advocate for that for a long time. And I think in this world of abundance, it's a lot easier to see that.
Speaker 6:And now you even have Elon, you know, in some ways, has totally reversed course of, like, yeah, he talked about, making a mass driver on the moon. So you make, like, huge amounts of solar panels and data centers there and then are shipping them up, you know, basically, you know, to orbit. Sorry.
Speaker 1:Mass driver defined that.
Speaker 6:Yes. What exactly? We just shut the blinds
Speaker 1:real quick. Yeah. No worries. While he's shutting the blinds, let me do an ad read for Cognition. Cognition is the team behind the AI software engineer, Devin.
Speaker 1:Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. He's also an investor, so I don't feel bad doing an ad read for his
Speaker 2:own company. Yeah. To the
Speaker 6:face. Just kinda got paid for that
Speaker 8:a little
Speaker 6:bit too.
Speaker 1:There you go. Yeah. Know, Ron
Speaker 6:Ross got blue, baby. So
Speaker 5:If it was a if
Speaker 1:it was a competitor, wouldn't do it, but I I gotta sneak these things in. Gotta pay the bills over here. Anyway, so take us through what is a mass driver on the moon.
Speaker 6:So on Earth, there's been a variety of ways that we've hypothesized, basically, you know, sort of getting things up to orbit. Only one that is you know, sort of really worked, right, which is basically, you know, chemical combustion, you know, put, you know, liquid fuel and oxidizer, you know, basically, you know, in a rocket and launch up space. There's people that have tried to work on other alternatives. So if you guys remember Spinlaunch, the company that would spin things up really, really fast
Speaker 1:Yeet aerospace. They would yeet it out into the aerospace. So
Speaker 6:that's the spin version.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 6:You could also imagine the, like, rocket sled or, like, you know, sled version. It's like an electromagnetic sled that is super super long. So rather than, spinning fast, you basically, like, you know, have, like, a maglev train effectively, but just, like, many, many miles long to get it up to space and shoot it up. Now the reason that that's difficult on Earth is down here on the surface where the spin launches or the maglev sled thing would be are still in the atmosphere. And so by the time you're getting to, you know, call it if you got to orbital velocity, you're still, like, in this thick atmosphere.
Speaker 6:It's just, like, crazy heat, crazy drag, etcetera. It's a really difficult, you know, basically to do. So it's basically why we effectively use rockets. It's it's just like they have a way of starting off slowly while they're in the atmosphere, getting out of it, and then going more quickly once you're out of the atmosphere. On the moon, there is no atmosphere.
Speaker 6:And so the advantage there is you can basically set up effectively like a, you know, bag left track. You also don't have to go that fast because the moon's gravity well is way less. And so it's super easy to basically, like, imagine a world where we, you know, mine a bunch of, like, very simple metals and things like that on the moon, make this, like, magnet train, and now all a sudden, you just have something on the moon that you can, like, point towards Earth if you wanna like send something into like lower Earth orbit. But also now if you wanna like point it out to Jupiter or Mars, etcetera, it's just like a phenomenal effectively, can think of it as like train station effectively where we're like, I wouldn't be surprised that even if we are going to Mars, there's a world where, like, you know, yeah, maybe the humans are just going straight from Earth to Mars, but I wouldn't be surprised if, like, a lot of the materials or metals or, like, you know, produce things, especially if we have, like, an industrial outpost on the moon. The moon is the one that is, like, sending the solar panels to Mars or is sending the bioreactors or, like, the, like, agricultural equipment, etcetera.
Speaker 6:That stuff's all coming from the moon because it's, like, literally, basically, like, free to effectively, like, send it send it to Mars. Yeah. And so yeah. That's that's an idea that we talked about in sci fi for a long time. Partially, in some ways, it's also, like, it's the best weapon in the world in that, like, you can just shoot a rock, you know, at the Earth really fast and then hit, you know, anybody that you want, and you basically can't stop it.
Speaker 6:But yeah. Speaking
Speaker 1:of space weapons, is there any movement on Golden Dome?
Speaker 6:So I don't know if you guys saw, but MDA basically put out this shield IDIQ for where they're gonna do a lot of the Golden Dome work, not all of it. They I wanna say it was, like, now two Wednesdays ago. Maybe it was a little earlier than that. Maybe it was last week. But they basically announced that about I think it was 3,000 people had applied to be a part of the program.
Speaker 6:You know, about a a thousand contractors basically got awarded to be on contract and to, you know, sort of, you know, acknowledge my colleagues. Thank you to the US of BARDA team for putting together a great proposal technology, and we got to be a part of that. Still would say all the stuff is, you know, sort of, you know, early in that. There's definitely some you know, the Space Force actually announced that they, you know, gave out their first space based intercept contracts. They didn't name who won those contracts because of national security reasons.
Speaker 6:Okay. But, yeah, you're starting to see stuff that was, you know, sort of theorized early on in the admin, And now Space Force has obviously handed out those first contracts. Missile events agency has handed out those first contracts. And so becoming real, I'd say, in terms of, like, first demos, field of capabilities, you're still a little ways away. I think by, like, end of next year, you'll probably start to see some of the first stuff really, you know, sort of happening.
Speaker 6:And then in 2027 is where I think you'll just have a bunch of, like, you know, demonstrations across everything from, like, space radar or space space intercept, you know, space to ground stuff, you know, you know, advanced ground radar systems, advanced hypersonic interceptors that come from the ground from all these, you know, sort of new you know, both, you know, traditional, you know, sub primes and some of these, like, neo primes, you know, coming to the table for Golden Dome. So, yeah, becoming real. I think the important thing for something like Golden Dome is, you wanna make sure that if there's a change in administration, you get to keep some of the advancement capabilities, and the best way to ensure that happens is, like, make sure that they're fielded. Like, if a new admin comes in and it's still, an r and d land, it's easier for them to cancel it
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 6:Versus, like, if it's something that, like, the warfighter literally, like, has access to and is using, well, then it's, you know, sort of much more likely that, you know, much more likely that they're gonna be able to keep it keep it around because the warfighter will insist on, like, hey. We, like, built this, and we use it, and this helps us deter China. Why would we, like, unfunded, basically?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you have any idea how Jared thinks about the NASA budget? It was about $25,000,000,000 last year. I could see one stance where it's like, $25,000,000,000 is a lot of money, and it's enough. We can do a lot with it.
Speaker 2:There's another. Could also imagine him being like, we gotta get those numbers up.
Speaker 6:I think, politically, right now, the you know, White House's budget was actually less than, you 25,000,000,000. And so the likelihood of him, you know, coming up publicly and saying, I want more probably doesn't totally jive with, like, you know, hey. Trump just reappointed you. But I think keeping it flat but using it far more efficiently
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 6:That I can see him being, like, a huge advocate for. And, like, yeah, he's made it pretty damn clear. We've talked about this before, but, like, I mean, especially now with, you know, one thing oh, one thing that we haven't talked about, you know, New Glenn. Right? Like, you
Speaker 5:know, for
Speaker 6:the first time, we have a second, you know, orbital rocket that is reusable in United States. And by the way, that thing is, like, really big. Right? Like, know, much larger than a Falcon nine. And so at this point, when you've got both Starship flying regularly and you have New Glenn flying regularly, the idea of, like, NASA still building rockets through the, like, SLS program is, like, even more crazy because it's, like, you have multiple commercial providers.
Speaker 6:And by the way, like, Neutron from, you know, Rocket Lab will probably be online next year, and Stokespace will be online. So I think the exciting, you know, thing about, you know, Jared is just, like, a strong willingness to go slash out budgets that are things that the commercial industry is already doing more effectively, more cheaply
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And then go assign that to things like clips, lunar landings, etcetera Yep. That, like, are where, you know, the strategic focus needs to be. So I think Jared is gonna be the advocate of, like, you know, keep it at 25,000,000,000, but we're gonna do a heck of a lot more with that 25,000,000,000 than we were before because there's just, a bunch of things that, like, are very large programs that now can effectively just be cut to zero.
Speaker 2:Yep. Do you know what's going on with asteroid Bennu? They discovered some some, like, sugars Really? Sugar stardust. This was, like, last week it got announced, but we we didn't really get a chance to cover it.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So, you know, funny story of this. So if you remember the first part I mentioned where we got stuck up up in orbit. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:We launched in June 2023. The original goal was to land in August, September 2023. Part of why we chose where we were going to land was because there had been some early, like, cosmic, you know, sort of dust and both sorry. Solar dust and cause and asteroid dust missions that have landed in that same range. But the other reason that we chose it was because in it was gonna be Halloween of, I believe, '23, Osiris Rex, the asteroid sample mission from Venue, was also going to land there.
Speaker 6:Obviously, we ultimately ended up getting delayed, and so rather than Varda being first in the asteroid, you know, mission coming in and said it was the other order, asteroid mission came in. But point being, our team paid a lot of attention to that asteroid sample coming in given that, like, that was sort of the precedent for Varda being able to, you know, basically come back from space. And that mission was the one that had the venue samples on board.
Speaker 2:Okay. So it's just now it's just now getting, like, disclosed or or talked about?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Basically, you know, obviously, with something this material and significant, like, you wanna make sure that you, you know, dot of the i's and cross the t's. And, also, like, it takes time to go analyze these samples and, like, handle it, etcetera. So, yeah, the astroid sample, yeah, landed, like, honestly, October, November 2023.
Speaker 6:And now, obviously, this is all starting to get published two years later. What they effectively, you know, sort of showed was that on the asteroid, you have effectively, like, the building blocks of, you know, life, which, you know, which and this is my favorite, you know, term in the world, build more data for the panspermia hypothesis. So the panspermia hypothesis is that the early building blocks of life are plentiful in the universe. Mhmm. And a part of how they get distributed in the universe is through, you know, basically collisions that end up you know, you have, like, you know, some early proper planet.
Speaker 6:It collides with some other big planet, and then there's crazy asteroids that get sent out at high speed. But those asteroids have a little bit of, sugars and ribose, etcetera, and that's what actually, like, basically, like, insets planet on a future or insets life on a future, basically, planet. One of my favorite graphs that I saw and I you know, I wish that I could, you know, pull this up right now. But if you look at the average length of a genome on Earth over various periods of time, right, if we look at, like, old fossils, etcetera, the most complex genome basically has a perfect linear relationship between, basically, the age of Earth and the, you know, sort of genomic length. Oh.
Speaker 6:The thing though is if you were to extrapolate that line downwards, if you go to when the start of Earth is, it was already at a relatively complex genome. Like, if you look at, like, the length of a human genome, the length of bacteria, length of virus, etcetera, it would predict that Earth has not been around long enough to have the level of complexity of genomes that we have given this linear relationship. And so it strongly supports the idea that, like, the reason we have life on Earth is actually, like, there were some earlier solar system, planet, etcetera, that did the early building blocks then got kicked us off. Stage and then kicked us off because, like, it collided with something, some asteroid then went and landed on Earth, and the building blocks sort of started us, you know, a little further in that, like, you know, trajectory of life.
Speaker 1:So basically the plot of Prometheus.
Speaker 6:Exactly. Yeah. So if you look at sort of the, like, Fermi's, you know, sort of paradox Yeah. What this implies is that highly likely, the great filter is actually basically behind humanity. And that, like, given that this likely suggests that there is, you know, sort of the building blocks of life all over Earth, but that we do not yet see signals, it means that there is probably some filter that makes it difficult to go from, like, early building blocks to intelligence more so than, you know, basically, like, being, you know, you know, you know, risky for, you know, being able to, like, spread out into the stars.
Speaker 6:And so it is there's this graph that showed, like, all the potential, you know, basically, like, answers to the Fermi's paradox. But this one basically shifted it significantly towards the world of, like, there is abundant nonintelligent life in the universe Mhmm. And we just happen to be the first intelligent one. And as we go out, we will probably see lots of early building blocks. And as we spread, we may start to see other very early, you know, sort of life, you know, sort of planets that maybe are just getting into bacteria or, like, early mammals and things like that.
Speaker 6:So Yeah. Yeah. It's really Interesting. Exact time. Means the universe is plentiful in terms of life.
Speaker 1:That's fast fascinating. Polymarket just skyrocketing on the odds of UFO disclosure. Are you are you long or short aliens being real?
Speaker 6:I mean, especially with this panspermia hypothesis, like, you know, very, you know, sort of, you know, long. Think there's obviously some sort of insider gov info that is coming out. Like, when you see a polymark market like that spike so much, somebody knows something and has driven on it. So, you know, what I love about Polymark, it's like we're like, is it insider trading? And it's like, yes.
Speaker 6:That's the point.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Finally, someone saying saying it out loud.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. That's wild.
Speaker 1:What about, I mean, I I wanna go through a bunch of stuff. I We got SpaceX stuff? Yeah. I mean, I imagine that you can't comment on the actual, like, IPO rumors, but, I would be interested to hear about, like, what, you know, key like, looking back on 2025 for that company, looking forward to '26, what are you excited about? And then also, like, what do you think people might misunderstand about SpaceX that that that, you know, is the story that we start seeing told maybe if they hypothetically go public one day?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Let's see. You know, to me, it feels like the company is, like, you know, sort of very on track in that, you know, when people started talking about Starship in, like, twenty twenty, twenty one Mhmm. I remember telling people, like, look. This is, like, super exciting.
Speaker 6:But if you just look at the complexity of that vehicle relative Falcon nine, it's a huge step up in complexity, but that's also roughly the step up in terms of, like, size of company that SpaceX is and complexity that they can take on. Sure. And so then my, like, quick math is, well, then it'll probably take about just as time as Falcon nine to get to, like, you know, true production rate. And so there are people that were like, no. They'll be, like, you know, like, fully online by '25, commercial flights regularly.
Speaker 6:And I always remember saying in, like, 2020, I was like, I don't think
Speaker 10:that that's gonna, you know, sort of
Speaker 6:be the case. I think it'll be closer to, like, end of decade because that's, you know, roughly the time frame that Falcon nine, you know, sort of took.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And so that's where I kinda see them where it's like, yeah, they, like, are obviously making phenomenal progress, you know, sort of with Starship. I don't think that we're gonna be seeing, like, you know, you know, this year, it's gonna be on the order of, I forgot, think, like, 200, you know, sort of Falcon nine, you know, sort of rocket launches. Yeah. I don't think they were gonna see 200 Starship launches until, yeah, probably end of decade would still be my, like, you know, sort of rough bet. But I still think it's, a really phenomenal outcome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're going they're going similarly on on timing and speed, but they're blowing up more rockets than Falcon nine. Because I think the third Falcon nine rocket was successful, something like that. And
Speaker 6:Yes. But they had a bunch of landings that they blew up. Oh, sure. Sure. Complex More relevant.
Speaker 6:Like, you know, people forget that, like, yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, Starship is already functional and online. It's just, not, you know, fully reusable.
Speaker 1:I I I think a lot of people I I think a lot of people misunderstand that, like, when it's blowing up, it's usually blowing up, like, on the way down. Like, it's not it it very quickly was like, okay. It takes off successfully. It gets up to the top, and then it and then it starts blowing up all the way down.
Speaker 2:It bounces off the
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's not bouncing off anything. It is, in fact, going to space. Is going is going space.
Speaker 1:Real space is real here on this show.
Speaker 2:It glances off the
Speaker 1:Plances off. That's very funny. Okay. Are are you yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 1:Continue.
Speaker 6:I was gonna say, people underappreciated, like, Starship is actually a very successful rocket already. Yeah. It could take things up to orbit at, like, very large scale at very cheap prices. Literally today, it just happens to be that, like, yeah, they're still figuring out the landing thing.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:But, obviously, they wanna figure that out before they get to, like, supermass production rate. I think the other story that is really gonna start to be told is just their shift to, like, more things that are, you know, extraterrestrial and that, like, you are going to see SpaceX do, I think, some very impressive things that are way beyond the bounds of low Earth orbit over the coming, you know, sort of couple years. Obviously, they have a huge contract with NASA to, like, figure out how to land things, use it on the moon, and that type of activity is something that they, like, are spending a lot of resources on Yeah. Sort of internally. But I don't think it's, like, that public of a story relative to the, like, StarCave, Starlink, etcetera.
Speaker 1:I saw something, I saw I saw this, like, article that had, like, all these motion graphics. Very cool. And it was explaining star how Starship will take stuff to the moon. And it was something like they're gonna do, like, 26 refuelings in space and then get that just feels like we in the sixties, we could just go straight there. Now we gotta stop for gas 26 times.
Speaker 1:Like, why should I not be black billed on this? Is this, like, this is crazy. Start, John. It just seems crazy to me, but break it down. What's actually going on?
Speaker 6:So funny historical fact from the, like, up holidays. There was actually a huge debate internally at NASA whether or not to take the, like, fuel stop approach versus the, like, shoot straight for the moon approach. Okay. There was a significant chunk of NASA led by it was, like, Pete something, I wanna say, that really wanted to do the gas station approach. The reason being that they saw that as what would make it so that going to the moon was just much more long term sustainable because you have these, like, pieces of infrastructure and it's easy to, like, send things mission by mission without each individual mission basically being super risky.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And the other, you know, side of the approach, which was just shoot straight for the moon, was largely led by Wernher von Braun. A part of why he liked the shoot straight for the moon thing is because it allowed him to just make one really, really big rocket rather than launching lots of small rockets. Yeah. And I think he was just addicted to rockets, basically. And, you know, that was ultimately what won out.
Speaker 6:I do think probably that was the right call for the time and allowed us, like, to get new skis, etcetera. Yeah. But counterintuitively, the, like, refueling and, you know, sort of fuel stations approach is actually the just, like, the much more long term sustainable one. Then, like, as we think about, like, you know, going to Mars, very regularly going to the moon Sure. You don't wanna necessarily have to take on the risk of, you know, just like on a car trip, you don't take all your fuel literally with you, like, gas on the way, and that makes it so that the vehicle that is moving things is much simpler.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Same thing. If wanna set up a more stable logistics and supply chain, you actually do want, you know, basically, these types of fuel stops. But, yeah, that's a part of what SpaceX needs to prove is, like, you know, think that number that you're signing in terms of number of refuels is more for a full Mars mission. For the moon, I think it's more like three refuels.
Speaker 6:Okay. So it is definitely, you know, sort of simpler by, going going to
Speaker 1:the moon. Also, it does seem like we've rebuilt the capacity to just yeet stuff directly to the moon because didn't Firefly land something up there? Like like like and China's going up and stuff direct. Like like, we we we we seriously have checked that box, like, several times. It's not even like humans on the moon once.
Speaker 1:Like, I think we were sent six manned missions. Right?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But I think we wanna get that to, like, 600. It's gonna be, like, through the fuel stop, you know, approach probably.
Speaker 6:And what I like is that we're parallel tracking, which, like, the things that Firefly and China have done, Those things are just amplified by the fuel stop, you know, basically approach when, like, that, you know, comes online. So I like that we're parallel tracking it. And this goes back to a little bit of the Jared Isaacman thing. We're like, man, if I were in Jared Isaacman shoes right now, I would basically just go to, like, you know, NASA and just be like, hey. Fireflies is, like, figuring out how to land on the moon.
Speaker 6:I don't understand why we wouldn't just jam a bunch of funding down their throats and tell them, like, don't just do it once a year, but I want you, like, doing it on a quarterly basis. And I want you to basically now establish, like, a regular supply chain there. So now I can go fund a bunch of companies that are, like, making lunar humanoids and lunar robots and pavers and solar panel assemblers, etcetera. So, like, while we're in parallel doing the, like, fuel stop human architecture, we also just, like, have these direct approaches that are landing robots there. We're So just, like, landing equipment there nonstop and figuring out how to, like, you know, basically make sure that by the time the humans are there, we actually have, like, a bunch of, like, robotic infrastructure that's, like, you know, autonomous and basically set up.
Speaker 6:And so Super cool. Yeah. I think, like, that that that parallel approach should That
Speaker 1:that is super sci fi. I love that. But that feels like if we can do that, we can certainly put some data centers in space. What's your how's everything evolving on that? Because, Casey Hanmer just came out pro data center in space.
Speaker 1:Like, you had you had us in the first half.
Speaker 2:Elon's been been posting about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Elon yeah. I mean, you really kicked the hornet because it's like, Elon Sundar, like, this YC company seems to be doing pretty well. There's, like, there's, like, four different attack vectors on you. And I love it.
Speaker 1:It's contrarian position, but are you maintaining it, or is your thinking evolving?
Speaker 6:Look. I'm gonna, you know, maintain my position because not no information has changed. Okay. You know, people, you know, have said words, but they have not presented compelling, you know, sort of arguments. Okay.
Speaker 6:Where I think there's a little bit of, like, a gray area is, look. I currently have two data centers that are in space.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:I'm not doing, like, AI compute on them, but I have, like, a bunch of computers up in space that could go do inference and, training, etcetera. Starlink, each of the satellites has compute, etcetera, on board. They could be, you know, basically, either sort of data centers in space. So I think the the question more is like
Speaker 2:You change up your you change up your tune, Dalian. You're looking at the next $20,000,000,000 public company.
Speaker 1:I think so. Can we smack this? I saw you hanging out with with Chawan.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you're doing your duty to shareholders in the way that you're spinning Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just stop being so realistic.
Speaker 2:Too modest. Too modest. Too much of
Speaker 1:a realist. Putting a quantum computer on it too. It's gonna be
Speaker 6:I literally have, like, multiple shareholders that ping me be like, okay. Like, I know you don't like the data center space thing, but, what if we use the space factories to make things that go into the data
Speaker 5:center space?
Speaker 1:Exactly. Fab in space.
Speaker 6:Fab in a space. Little bit. I'm just like, love you guys. Like, you know, I my job is to build a business that, like, you delivers revenue and shareholder returns, not just, you know, pure pure hype. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But, yeah, I think it's where it's like it's on the margin where it's like, look, do I think that, like, the SpaceX, like, economics are gonna beat out, like, nuclear power data centers run by Crusoe in Texas? No, man.
Speaker 2:Come on.
Speaker 6:Like, I just like that you're in order for that to work, have to be, like, short nuclear, short, you know, optical fiber on the ground, short the ability to, like, you know, build buildings, short solar panels, short batteries. It's just like all of those things are making incredible progress super rapidly, and in space, those things are more complex. Are there going to be, you know, sort of marginal, you know, sort of areas and use cases and more broadly as we just, like, have more and more of, like, Internet of connectivity where there there are real benefits to being in space? And so then you, by default, just have more infrastructure up there.
Speaker 10:And so, yes, some of
Speaker 6:those things may be dedicated to compute. But, like, yeah, is Crusoe almost certainly gonna have, like, better economics than, like, a space based data center in 2030? Yeah. I think that's going to be the case. And so that might mean that, like, 98.5% of data centers, you know, are on the ground.
Speaker 6:If some small sliver for certain use cases or you're doing, like, compute on things that are calculated in orbit or, like, you know Yeah. You know, there's, you know, cameras, you know, that are up there and you're trying to you guys would do things or it's like there's people that are up in orbit and, you know, they wanna chat GBT in orbit, then, yeah, again, there might be these, like, slivers, but it's gonna be yeah. Feel very confident that it's going to be slivers. Who knows? Maybe we'll look at this recording in 2032 and, like, you know, I'll been, like
Speaker 2:People will be mocking you. People will be dunking on you. The young the young Delian will literally be saying, like, Delian's been a like, the next Delian, you know,
Speaker 1:the young guy that loves
Speaker 2:yeah. He'll be like, oh, he's chopped D cell.
Speaker 6:D baby. D Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He only predicted humanoids assembling pavers on the moon, not data centers. Anyway Big detail guy. Big detail you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Always always great to chat. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas.
Speaker 1:We'll see you soon.
Speaker 6:Merry Christmas. See you soon, boys. Bye.
Speaker 1:We're tell you about 8sleep.com. Deli is an investor. Exceptional sleep without exception. Get an Eight Sleep for Christmas. Gifted for Christmas.
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Speaker 1:a 92, but I'm in a terrible sleep debt, which is rough. I'm on like a four hour, five hour
Speaker 2:I don't care that you won because I'm in such a good mood because of this Christmas music. Like it. It's really Morgan Housel. In.
Speaker 1:This is the
Speaker 2:longest Right now.
Speaker 1:We have yes. We have Morgan Housel, author, friend of the show. Welcome to the show. This is the longest on queue. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
Speaker 1:How are doing?
Speaker 2:Welcome back.
Speaker 4:Good to see you guys. Doing well. I like your shirts. Looking good.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Yes. We'll one Should be in the mail for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hopefully, already.
Speaker 4:Love it.
Speaker 1:We'll work
Speaker 3:on it.
Speaker 4:Can't wait.
Speaker 1:Let's let's get into it. What is new in your world? Take us through the latest, and then I wanna go into some psychology of the holiday, psychology of shopping. We have a bunch of things that we wanna run run through. But is there anything Yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, not not that much going on right now. I'm not writing a book right now, which is kind of the most enjoyable part of my career because it lets you just spend all day reading and thinking about what's next, which is always the most enjoyable part of it. So I I guess to answer your question, I don't know what's next, but I love this area of my life of just doing a bunch of reading and talking to people and thinking about different topics to try to figure out what might be next.
Speaker 2:How how how much have you kind of keyed in on what you wanna write about next? Or is it
Speaker 4:I think I have a pretty good idea of what it would be
Speaker 2:Well, what about the next book? What about the next book after that? Is that is that starting to come into focus? I'm curious.
Speaker 4:I think that's not Yeah. I think what what is true that I I have an idea for a distant book. I don't know when this is gonna be, but there are so many topics that are worth exploring, but not in a full book. And I I do think there is an idea. It's hard to do right, but there's an idea for a book that is a huge hodgepodge of, like, 80 different ideas, all of which are worth exploring in three or four pages.
Speaker 4:And, obviously, the issue with most non fiction books, particularly business books, is you have a topic that is worth exploring, but not in 250 pages. But then the author has to stretch it out and just keep on rambling about the same topic over and over again. And that's what's why business books are so difficult. So if you can get around that by just going shallow, or not not even shallow, but giving the treatment that they deserve on a bunch of small disparate topics, I think that's something I'm interested in.
Speaker 2:Have you have you ever been tempted into trying to build a subscription, like, newsletter and and really focusing on that by saying, like, hey, there's a bunch of you know, instead of the next three or four books, I'm gonna basically just write the chapters and publish them as I have them. I'm sure you've had I mean, you've had every opportunity to do that and you haven't, it hasn't been the focus so far. But I'm curious if that would ever change.
Speaker 4:I think the reason I have not is because I think you have to be very careful as a content creator, for lack of a better word, that you don't become beholden to your audience. That you say, look, my audience is paying me a $100 a month, and I have to feed the ducks because they're quacking. That's a very dangerous spot to be in for a content creator. Like, being forced to say stuff when you have nothing to say is a bad spot.
Speaker 1:You're saying that to the guys that go live three hours every day. And if we don't
Speaker 4:Yeah. But but but you're talking differently. Like, nobody expects you to do your c your PhD thesis every day.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. The bar is
Speaker 4:like So it's a
Speaker 2:it's And we're not we don't necessarily need to generate the content. The world generates the content and we figure out Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:We're kind of like
Speaker 2:What about have you been have you seen some there's some I feel like I've seen some authors, like, that are writing fiction instead of just writing a book, like releasing the book as a subscription product. That seems somewhat interesting, almost like treating it like a you're subscribing to Netflix and Netflix is releasing a show and then sort of dripping it out over time. Do you think that's a model that that authors could like, how powerful is the book industrial complex? Is there enough incentives to keep people from not doing that and not, you know, self publishing and kind of dripping out content and just staying true to the traditional path?
Speaker 4:I think it's true that books are and this is true for podcasts as well, that they are the ultimate tale driven content. 99% of books that are published don't work. But the ones that do really, really work. Same for podcasts and whatnot. So I think it's true that if you're an author, you need particularly if you haven't had that hit yet, you need to figure out your business model in a different way.
Speaker 4:It's very difficult to say, I'm a talented writer. I'm gonna go write books and try to make a living out of it. So for every writer who does that, there are ten thousand who have stumbled and tripped and ultimately failed doing it. It's a it's a tough model to make it work. And I've I've seen a much higher success rate in the people that go on Substack or whatever it might be and have that that level of of subscription.
Speaker 4:I think people are more willing to pay $30 a month for your consistent content, your daily or your weekly newsletter, than they are to pay $30 for a book that took you two years to write. And so it's it's a more stable model, I think, with a higher hit rate to have that paid subscription.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Even if the rewards for a book that works can be higher, it's just so much more difficult to make it work.
Speaker 1:What do think about, like, consumer churn or, like, conversion to actually consuming the content fully? Because I know that there's this there there's, like, this odd, you know, a lot of people buy physical books. They gift them, and then they sit on bookshelves, and, they wind up being props in many cases that people don't just have enough time to read all the books that they acquire. I actually did subscribe to one of those new books as a newsletter fiction. And it was odd because I wound up paying for it for a very long time, but I didn't wind up reading it.
Speaker 2:As they were as the
Speaker 1:chapters Yeah. And I and I thought I when when I first when I first subscribed, I was oh, this is going to be even easier because it's so bite sized. It's gonna be easier. I'm more likely to get through this than if this was just another book that I had added to my Audible.
Speaker 2:It it also creates a weird tension where there's an incentive to have, like, crazy cliffhangers because Yeah. So that people
Speaker 1:will churn.
Speaker 2:Like, if you get a little bit if you get a little bit bored with a book and you have the ability to churn from the book, you know Well, he's a thing here. I I I I'll start a book, and if I'm not, you know, I'll get three chapters in.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm not, like, really engaged with it. I'll just say like, cool. I'm not necessarily Yeah. Hopefully, I learned something, but I'm not gonna just read it just to see it all the way through.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think what's true too for every good non fiction book is that people don't remember books so much as they remember a couple sentences from those books. So most nonfiction books are about 50,000 words. Yeah. If you read to the end, which is rare, but if you read all 50,000 words and you come away having remembered two or three banger lines
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Of the 50,000 words, you remember 50 of them, that can be great. And it's true. Like, some books that I know changed my life, books that I recommend that are so good. If you actually if you ask me about them, I can tell you two or three sentences, maybe that I remember verbatim, that were fantastic, and the rest kinda drifts away over time. So I think that's true even for the absolute best books
Speaker 6:Totally.
Speaker 4:That can change your life. It's just very small snippets that you're gonna remember from them. And so one takeaway in that, is that you can remember two or three banger lines from a blog post as well. And so all the books that I've written, most of the ideas started as blog posts. And then I can I can take that idea, oh, okay?
Speaker 4:That idea worked. People like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:How can I kinda transform that into a chapter in a book? But the core idea is, like, if you can remember one sentence from this idea, from this chapter, I've done my job. That's that's that's the goal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I wonder if I actually read this book, but there's a book that left a really, really long, like, impression on me of all about immortality. It was this very interesting way of of, like, framework of thinking about immortality from different cultures. And I don't even know if I actually read the book, but it stuck with me because, like, the actual idea was so powerful. And then there's other books where I've read the whole thing.
Speaker 1:There's been a lot of interesting anecdotes, but, like, it didn't, like, change my whole world view. And yeah. It's just it's just fascinating. Wait. Sorry.
Speaker 1:What were gonna say?
Speaker 2:Well, I was talking about I I wrote an essay called Rage Bait Is For Losers. Yeah. And I what I wanted people to remember was the title. Yeah. Because it it it in itself I
Speaker 1:wasn't important.
Speaker 2:Well, it was it was rage bait Yeah. Itself. Because if you've been rage baiting and and you've then are are thinking, well, I'm not. I I like, you kinda wanna defend it as, like, a strategy. And and some people
Speaker 1:This is interesting. So how do you think about rage bait in the context of picking a title for a book that might jump off the shelf in a store because I can imagine there's a world where a book is called, you know, like, if you don't read this, you'll be poor forever or something like that. You know? Then and then it's like, all of a sudden, well, I I I I'm not gonna let them get the best of me. I gotta read that book.
Speaker 1:But I think it's it's
Speaker 4:no different than any product where you overpromise and under deliver. You're just gonna piss off your customers. And if you're just trying to get a quick hit and then disappear Yeah. Maybe that's the right way. If you're trying
Speaker 2:to build
Speaker 4:a long term brand
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Your title has to be very honest. Yeah. And so my first book, The Psychology of Money
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's it's a pretty boring title. Yeah. A lot of the people who are involved in it said, we should not use that as a title. It sounds like an academic textbook.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's it's a textbook.
Speaker 4:But it's an honest but it's an honest title. Yeah. The what is the book about?
Speaker 6:Do think
Speaker 2:you would have
Speaker 4:psychology of
Speaker 2:It doesn't have a prose doesn't say Do you think you would have sold more copies if if you just changed the title to how to get rich and stay rich or something.
Speaker 1:Well, it's it's not even that. It it it it's like it's like how to make sure that you have a good psychology of money. How how to make sure you have a good relationship
Speaker 2:with money. Think I think you clearly care about You didn't set that in the clearly care about NPS. Maybe more than other writers or publishers might.
Speaker 4:I heard Rory Sutherland say this on a podcast recently. He said, if you are like a family business, and you're in it for the long run, you're trying to build a generational business, by and large, you don't care about metrics. You're not tracking how much your gross profit margin shifted last quarter. What you care about is customer satisfaction and brand. And it's only when you're a private equity owned business, where you're like, we're just trying to flip this thing in the next quarter, that you become very metric driven, and you want to measure everything down.
Speaker 4:So I think to answer your question, if I was very metric driven, and it was just like, my goal is to sell as many books as I can next quarter, you can use something bombastic that's gonna overpromise. That'll probably work in the short run. If your if your goal is to have a long tail sales cycle and be like, I want this book to sell for years or even generations if I'm lucky, it has to be honest. It has to be brand driven, where people are like, I enjoyed this book. I'm going to recommend it to my friends and family.
Speaker 2:Emily Herrera in the chat says, books are just titles and thumbnails. So same experience on YouTube. You might have a crazy title and thumbnail. And then if it's not very truthful, then all the comments are just like, congrats on Yeah. Baiting, you know, baiting people into watching this.
Speaker 2:And and again, the sort of NPS is is quite low. Should you write a book on gambling? I
Speaker 4:think it's all embedded in behavioral finance. And I think the proliferation of gambling, whether it's crypto or sports betting or whatever it might be, I think by and large, this is not a unique take. Many people have talked about this. But Daniel Kahneman wrote about, when all of your options are bad or perceived to be bad, people become very risk taking. And so if you feel like if a young person feels like, if I work hard excuse me.
Speaker 4:If I work hard and work my way up the corporate ladder and save my money and buy a house and start a family, that's what you'll do if you perceive that option is available to you. If you don't, then you're like, who cares? Like like, I I have no vested stake in the system. Might as well throw it all on black and see what happens. And I think that that comes down to it.
Speaker 4:So I think the psychology of gambling is a pretty deep social issue, and I think you could probably accurately summarize it as youth pessimism. When people are pessimistic, they're much more likely to just throw it all down and see what happens. They have nothing to lose.
Speaker 2:I I I I have more
Speaker 1:on that. So do how do you think about the level of risk that people were taking at the time of the American dream? Like, because there's one world where we where we go back and we say, like, oh, yeah. It was, like, the 1950s, and you could just get a job at this law firm, and it would just be massively successful. Or even if you were coal miner, you'd have a job in health care forever, and you you go to the auto plant to be an autoworker and work your way up from, you know, the person sweeping up the floor at night to the manager at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering if there's, like, well, like, we remember that as not risky because America was successful. But, like, there was an emerging new new order where, you know, like, The USSR could have steamrolled in the in the Cold War, and America could have been a disaster. And so, in fact, like, it was risky, but it just worked out well. But I don't know if that's like am I thinking about that even in the right realm at all? What do think?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think a lot of that narrative of what the job market used to be and kind of the 1950s Americana nostalgia that we have is is just that. It's it's kind of false nostalgia. Yeah. It's this idea that, you know, the narrative that you just described of you could go get a job at a at an auto factory and work your way up and stay there for thirty years.
Speaker 4:I mean, if you understand the history of The US economy in the 1950s, particularly the 1970s, there were huge recessions. There were huge job losses. And so I think it's easy to put together a charming Norman Rockwell picture of what it used to be. By and large, it's not
Speaker 1:the case. But on the flip side,
Speaker 2:I absolutely agree. Everyone had this idea of if you were employed, you had a very good shot of owning a home. But the homes were 750 square feet. Right? And they were like
Speaker 4:That's a true. Yeah. But I think it's also true that you can throw around a lot of statistics, and I have, about how the median American family earns more, is wealthier, is better off today than they were in the 1950s, in the 1960s. It's also true, indisputably, that homeownership was more accessible and cheaper back then. And I've been thinking a lot about the topic that I think almost every societal problem that we have today is downstream of housing of housing affordability.
Speaker 4:It's the single biggest issue that we have, even back to the gambling issue that we were just talking about.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 4:If you are 28 and you feel, whether it's true or not, you feel like you will never own a home. It's impossible for you to get there to save the down payment. You become much more likely to be like, I have nothing vested in this system. Might as well throw it all away. I have nothing to lose.
Speaker 4:I might as well throw it all away. Yeah. And so so even if median incomes adjusted for inflation were lower back in the 1950s, if owning a home was more accessible, and by and large, it was for most people, that just gave you more of a vested sense in the system, caused you to take, I think, smarter risks, not betting everything on on the spread on tonight's game, but taking a risk of I'm gonna move to a new town and try to get a job at an auto factory. That was a risk, but it's more calculated risk than today's gambling mentality. I think there's something to be said too of just access, which we're seeing in the gambling world today.
Speaker 4:If you gave a 19 year old boy, Kashi and and all the sports betting apps in 1955, they would have latched right onto it. There's nothing unique about today's young generation by and large. It's just that we didn't have those tools
Speaker 2:to make sure that we do today. I encourage people to look up John and I were going back and forth on on this on our on our flight on Friday. We were looking at the the how popular gambling was during the fall of the Roman Empire. It was all social classes. We're doing it on Everywhere.
Speaker 2:The exact same levels that we're seeing today. Sure, they weren't on a mobile device, but it was like everywhere that you would be eating and drinking and it was in private and public and it was illegal and and legal in some areas like at certain festivals, would be legal and then it would be ill like illegal otherwise, but, you know, it was kind of seen as okay. So there's nothing there's nothing new. These things just are going in in waves, but it certainly was I think people were, like, somewhat nihilistic, and they were just like, sure. Like, things are we're experiencing a collapse.
Speaker 2:We may as well put it all on black.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so I I think it's easy to look at the issues of today and and frame it as we have degraded, particularly the younger generation. I don't think that's the case. I think any other previous generation would have become degenerate gamblets gamblers and crypto traders if they had the option to like today's generation does.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder how much of it is is just memetic, just, like like like, the myth that we tell ourselves, like, if we can yeah. I don't know. Somehow steer away. I also I also wonder, like, you know, there there is the, like, the paternalistic, the the the puritanical, like, ban the bad thing.
Speaker 1:But there's also the op the more optimistic view of just, like, maybe just do more of the good thing. Like, if we if we have, a national project to build something meaningful
Speaker 2:Well, I think I think the thing that that makes you wanna put your hand through a wall is people having their in their brokerage account, the ability to one click, you know, sell Apple stock and in another click buy trade on sports contracts. Yeah. Because, I mean, that again, at least there was historically some separation where there was at least some friction of getting out of maybe a higher quality investment and getting into something that's just rolling the dice. And I think that's very clearly going going you know, has gone away in some cases and probably will just continue to erode.
Speaker 1:Also, I mean Yeah. I I think it's I think
Speaker 4:it's important to point out too that Vanguard has $12,000,000,000,000 AUM. You know, Fidelity has $10,000,000,000,000 AUM. The vast majority of capital these days are people saving in their four zero one k's Sure. Dollar cost averaging. They don't even know their password.
Speaker 4:It's being invested into good, stable businesses, diversified, low cost. So it's easy to to point out around all the the crazy speculation that goes on. And look, I'm a free markets person. People wanna speculate and do whatever they want their money. You're allowed to set your financial life on fire.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But the vast, vast majority of capital is still being invested in what I would consider to be a pretty smart, conservative long term The
Speaker 1:the chat has a little bit of a counterpoint. They said that we we we might not be considering the fact that 99% of gamblers quit just before they hit it big. And so that is a little bit of a counterpoint to a lot of the arguments that we're making here, and I just wanna make sure we we consider that.
Speaker 4:Fair enough. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We should
Speaker 4:have just done one more bet.
Speaker 1:One more Good.
Speaker 2:Wanted wanted to go back, get your thoughts on on startup launches, kind of random. I think everyone has launch launch video fatigue. I know we did. We were doing a lot of, like, launch style videos earlier this year and we pretty much stopped completely just because we felt like the the meta was kind of dead. It wasn't actually a way to, like, truly breakthrough anymore.
Speaker 2:And wanted to get your if you think that writing is underutilized as like a launch as a launch strategy, there's been some viral PDFs. I think situational awareness is a is a good example of like just if you can put together a good enough document, you can attract, you know, Bill. I mean, obviously, Leopold is in a unique situation, but it feels like writing is super underutilized. My first company
Speaker 1:went viral on a blog post on Hacker News and drove 10,000 sign ups, a ton of interest, and people were starting a conversation around that. It was just a blog on some random random person's website, basically, and it actually broke out massively. But, yeah, it's tricky, but I'd love to know your thoughts.
Speaker 4:I think it tends to be true. And this is not black and white, but it tends to be true that if you can explain your value proposition in a paragraph of text, you will do it. And if you can't, you're much more likely to say, well, we need some glossy pictures. If you can't do it with that, then you kind of work your way down to like, can we just create a movie out of this kind of thing? That's not always the case.
Speaker 4:But I I do think it's a case that like, if your idea is so obvious and so good, you can just explain it with crayons on a piece of paper, and you're good. You're good from there. And so I think look. When I started writing books, somebody told me advice that I thought was great for books, but true for almost any product. And it was, if the book is good, you don't need to market it.
Speaker 4:And if the book is bad, no amount of marketing will help.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:I think you can apply that to a lot of different things. If your product is good, you don't need to market. That's not true. I'm being I'm being very generalized here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Marketing's important. But if your product is good, then it it can kinda sell itself. If the product is bad, no amount of marketing will help, particularly in the longer term. And so, look, I like good design. I like flashy videos.
Speaker 4:I like all that kind of stuff. But good ideas are very obvious. I think that's one of the keys to good writing, is that you don't need to spend a lot of mental horsepower to understand what the author's saying. You can just kind of glance your eyes over a paragraph and be like, yeah, I got it. Make makes perfect sense.
Speaker 4:I don't need any more flashy video. That one sentence explained everything I need to know. Let's move on from there. I think that tends to be true. Do you have
Speaker 1:a book of the year? Do you do you like looking back and creating, like, a list of the things that you most enjoyed this year? I know that you don't this is this is like a total newsletter fodder, and we already talked about how you're not, you know, you know, in service to people that demand the the end of the year review. But has anything stuck out to you this year?
Speaker 4:I thought the the best book that I read was probably Andrew Ross Orkin's 1929.
Speaker 2:Just phenomenal. Book launch ever? Or is
Speaker 6:it Yes.
Speaker 4:That's I I think that's I think that's probably He a And
Speaker 1:then also, like, absolute masterclass. I was taking screenshots of you. If you search Andrew Ross Sorkin 1929 on YouTube, you can see that he just did every single podcast. Like, he did
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 1:20 or 30 shows. And he was so good. And and I didn't realize, like, he's someone that everyone knows, but he's not constantly on a tour. So he had a lot of built up energy to, like, go full tilt, and it worked really well. It was
Speaker 4:And it's such a fascinating period of American history that, to my surprise, has not there's not a lot of books written about the Great Depression. There's not like like, what's the classic book on the Great Depression? Not many there's not many of them. There are 10,000 books written about World War two.
Speaker 1:World War two. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But but the Great Depression, which was so monumental in the history of this country, there's not a lot written about it. So I thought he did a great job.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Somebody brought this up when they were reviewing 1929. I thought it was such a fascinating point that all of the big characters in the book, except for maybe Jesse Livermore, are pretty much forgotten today. All of the titans of industry, of banking, the Jamie Dimons of their day Mhmm. Are all forgotten now. Unless you're a, like, a history buff.
Speaker 4:Charlie Mitchell, all those people, we don't remember them anymore. And and I think there's something to be said that if your only accomplishment in life is that you made a lot of money, you're gonna be forgotten very quickly. And that was true for a lot of the bankers back then. It's probably true for a lot of the private equity hedge fund people today. Nothing wrong with
Speaker 2:I will remember all the private credit legends. Wall Street's new I will remember them. I'm gonna keep this episode or this edition of Barron's. Bring it to the grave.
Speaker 1:No. No. What you need to do is you need to wait a hundred years. You need to write an amazing book about it. Then you need to turn that book into a movie and a TV show, and then cast an iconic actor.
Speaker 1:And then we'll remember. And then that's what's happening.
Speaker 2:Processing the AI trade in the in the context of history?
Speaker 4:I think I think historically, the gap between a product changing the world and people making a lot of money off of it can be 20 miles apart. Yeah. The railroads are probably the most transformational technology ever, way more transformational than anything we've had over the last 100 And a few people made ungodly fortunes from it. 99% of railroad investors lost everything. And and that was true for the airplane.
Speaker 4:Completely changed the world. A lot of people lost huge fortunes on automobiles. There were 2,000 car companies in the early nineteen hundreds. Three of them remained by by the nineteen thirties or so. And so you can go on down the list of, like, change the world, and 99% of people lost everything.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Of course, was true of the the .com bubble. Everyone's thesis by and large in the late nineteen nineties of what the Internet would become was right, but it it didn't mean that you were gonna make any money from it. Fact, you're lose everything.
Speaker 2:Webvan, I think, is such a good example because it's like DoorDash. Just Yeah. Fifteen
Speaker 1:years I started com. Chewy is a banger company. Mp3.com. Spotify is the company you wanna own. Like, there's just so many every every current company, there was some .com that was doing the basic idea and just didn't get to didn't get to scale at all.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think so I think I think that I think you could easily imagine just based off of history that in twenty years, of course, AI completely changed everything. Nothing is the same. And when we talk about the businesses that have been involved over the previous twenty years, there's two or three unbelievable winners. 99% of companies went to zero.
Speaker 4:And the three companies that won are either not around today or not the obvious ones today. So if you're talking about the internet in 1998, Google was in a garage. Obviously, Facebook didn't exist There that that tends to be the story Yeah. Of what it was. The the the Wright brothers themselves didn't make very much money from the airplane, if anything.
Speaker 4:It wasn't until you had someone named William Boeing who came along, and he was like, I'm just gonna copy your idea, but do it way better than you guys could do it. And that that that tends to be the idea. It's what Google did with Yahoo and X and HotBot and all the other search engines who were the actual front runners. You just took someone else coming along to be like, great idea. Hold my beer and watch me do it a 100 times better than you could.
Speaker 1:Speaking of AI, we we've talked about this before. Obviously, AI is not ready or equipped to write a book or
Speaker 2:No. It'll write it, John. Happily.
Speaker 1:It will write it, but it won't write it. But what what do you think about AI generated voices? Do you think that those are past the uncanny valley? Would you listen to an Audible book that was, where the where the voice was AI generated?
Speaker 4:I'm I'm not much of an audiobook guy, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask for that. What I will say is one of the most amazing AI products that I've seen in the last two years I think a lot of people have had this experience is Google's Notebook LM, where you go in and you say, here's a topic. Make me a ten minute podcast. And it spits it out, and it's unbelievable. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So when I first saw that, I was like, this is this I I this is magic. I can't believe it. And how many Notebook LM podcasts have I listened to since then?
Speaker 1:Zero. I I was about to ask.
Speaker 4:I think none. None. None. I think there's something to be said. And of course, I am literally talking
Speaker 2:I actually think it's I think I think the use case there where they probably have traction is students that have not studied for an exam and they have an hour to try to figure it out. Yeah. So it's not for enjoyment at all. It's pure function, which is that I need to listen to something for an hour that is like hyper specific to a topic. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's boring, so nobody necessarily made the like definitive podcast episode on it. Yes. Yes. But I just need it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then it in terms of like the way that most people listen to audio to get to be entertained, even if it's like educational. And so they're gonna go to people that are good entertainers that are opinionated.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think that's true. And of course, am I am such a a biased person to say this as an author myself. I think what I like about reading books, whether it's fiction or non fiction, is the idea that a fellow human wrote this thing. I could never write this.
Speaker 4:My brain doesn't work this way, but some other authors did. And I feel like that connection is amazing, and it breaks down as soon as you have AI generated content. And I think that's why I have no interest in a NotebookLM podcast. I'd much rather listen to David Senra and his even with all of his quirks and his stumbles and whatnot. But I'm like, yeah, but David read that.
Speaker 4:He did this. He's thinking that. And I love that.
Speaker 2:I listened to an hour of OG Senra, the PT Barnum episode yesterday, And then I got to hang out with David for a couple hours last night for dinner at my house. One of
Speaker 4:the best guys around. I love him.
Speaker 2:Truly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Truly. Yeah. The the I I I think I I need to listen to the the James Dyson episode today, but he released that. And and for Senra OGs, you know how significant that episode is is to him. Like, the the full circle moment of, you know, studying Dyson to being able to to interview him live.
Speaker 2:It's very cool.
Speaker 1:Love it. Yeah. Wild. Well
Speaker 2:Great having you on the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you
Speaker 2:so We hope you have an incredible end end to the year. America's best. And thank you for being a part of this this year. You're somebody that we one of our favorite guests. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I can't wait for next year.
Speaker 4:Thanks so much for having me. Always an honor to be on. Looking forward to my shirt.
Speaker 2:Yes. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of your day. Numeral.comcompliancehandled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth and, putting presents into the Christmas tree.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:right. Speaking of presents under the Christmas tree, the Google team is cooking up a present for me in 2026. They're gonna put ads in Gemini. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Hit the gong. Finally. For We've been asking for it. I hear the sleigh bells ringing.
Speaker 1:We've been asking for it. Ads in LMs. We talked to the founder of Perplexity about it. We asked Arvind, why are you gonna put ads? We want ads in Perplexity.
Speaker 1:And he said, maybe. And the tech rep wrote a whole article on that, and they got really bad.
Speaker 2:I'll let Google jump first.
Speaker 1:I'll let Google jump first. We talked to Sarah Fryer. We've talked to the OpenAI team about how badly we want ads in ChatGPT, how badly we want ads in LLMs. They said maybe we're gonna do it, maybe we're not. They've been sitting on their hands.
Speaker 1:But now
Speaker 6:don't know
Speaker 1:how you I can
Speaker 2:I love listening to your voice? It's good. It's like
Speaker 1:we need a backtrack.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This this is interesting. Okay. There there's this feels like very Google to just be like, yeah, we're we're the ad business. We're gonna do ads.
Speaker 2:We're gonna do them first. We're probably gonna do them, better than than anybody else at least initially. Yeah. But some people were pushing back just being like, hey, you could've like, you easily could've, Crushed. Just Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You easily could've just, like, kept the product cheap.
Speaker 1:Lot of people are excited about or or a lot of people are are are are wondering, like, hey. There's a there's a world where Gemini doesn't have ads and is free for two years, and it just completely puts the screws to every other, you know, LLM provider.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I've I mean
Speaker 1:What would you do if you were them? Would you would would you monetize earlier? Like, it can't
Speaker 2:be that expensive.
Speaker 1:Right? I mean, it would definitely hurt hurt cash flow. Like, it would show up in in the financials for sure. Just mean Pro Plus is not cheap. But
Speaker 2:Turning on ads for I mean, I I always look back to what what would the Instagram business look like if they were forced to monetize it independently because it's it's an amazing ad. Like, it's an amazing platform that's perfectly suited for to monetize with ads.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And yet, you can imagine Meta ramped ad spend on the platform ten, twenty times faster than maybe an independent operator would have because they just had been, they had all the customer relationships. They had all the they had a strong sense of who the person was already because they were probably on Facebook as well. So
Speaker 1:I I don't think I don't think ads cause failure to adopt a new product. I would be I I I don't know. We'd have to look through the the the product graveyard. But I feel like of of things that die, they rarely die
Speaker 6:because Yeah.
Speaker 2:People are people are acting like ads and LMs are gonna be, like, the biggest deal No. And are gonna be the biggest issue. And I just don't think it's gonna be I think they're gonna
Speaker 1:In many ways, they could make the product better or more, like, sticky in the sense that you're, like, looking at stuff, doing shopping in there.
Speaker 2:Personally, I want every LM to have a lot of ads so that I can swap between all of the best models without feeling like I need to sign up. Like, I actually like, for me, I'm like, there's there's models that I just don't use because I'm like, okay. I'm not I don't I don't wanna sign. I have not that much in I'll let Tyler sign up Totally. On our ramp card.
Speaker 2:Totally. But
Speaker 1:Well, you do you think XAI is gonna run ads? Do you think they're gonna do ads in Grok or ads in in in Yeah.
Speaker 2:Romantic mode? I'm sure they will at some point. I doubt it's a a huge a huge priority for them. There's this company Halftime, which won the Grok hackathon that happened over the weekend. Yes.
Speaker 2:I DM with the founder. He's down to he's down to come on.
Speaker 1:What this is we need to pull this up because when I saw this, I was like, woah. Like, x AI? I didn't realize that it was from a hackathon. I thought it was just this actual company. So it says halftime dynamically weaves AI generated ads into the scenes that you're watching so breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions.
Speaker 1:So, there's some
Speaker 2:really Cybrex in the chat says it just makes you second guess every output you get from the model. Totally. I agree that's the bad case. There's a world where they just give you the the real response, and then there's an ad.
Speaker 1:Yes. But so so so there is a different there is a different flip. So so to Cybex's point, you second guess every output you get from the model because you're worried the ad is is influencing it. If you go to, you know, your favorite chat app and you say, what are the best headphones? And and it says Apple AirPod Pros.
Speaker 1:And you're like, ugh. Is it sponsored? Is it not? Are they being objective? Are they not?
Speaker 1:Yes. That is something that you'd worry about. But there's also the other flip side, which is that if they're not monetizing well, they might be putting you on the cheapest model that's just guessing. And it's just like, oh, yeah. Like, I guess it's this product because they didn't they didn't cook.
Speaker 1:They didn't give you the the the reasoning model because they can't afford to because they're not monetizing you well.
Speaker 2:I think I think, yeah, one reality is somebody types, what is the best cell phone that I can get for a thousand dollars? And it gives you the iPhone. Mhmm. And then there's an ad for an Android phone right below it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's still worth advertising on because it's a high intent query. And it's very you know, and it's likely ends up being profitable for Yep. For the Android man you know, device manufacturer to advertise against it. But let's pull up halftime. They're dynamically weaving AI generated ads into scenes you're watching, so breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions.
Speaker 1:Watching. Wrong. Boo. Did they say?
Speaker 6:Harvard trivia, the lightning round. Go. Pulitzer prizes. 46, Nobel Peace Prizes.
Speaker 5:Jessica, what are you doing here?
Speaker 3:I was just a
Speaker 1:That is so weird. It is
Speaker 2:I got that sound.
Speaker 1:So bad.
Speaker 2:I'm sold. Now I want a I want a Coca Cola.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Okay. McDonald's. You wanna if you wanna see how ads are done well in in in in in video integration like this, we have to pull up the video that's at the bottom of the timeline.
Speaker 1:They just reinvented the Star Wars Cerveza Cristal ads. Have you seen these? You've barely seen Star Wars. But at one point, there was a at one point, there was a there was an international showing of the original Star Wars. And for some reason, they needed to cut ads into the actual footage.
Speaker 1:And so we gotta play this with sound. It's one of my favorite things. Let's play it.
Speaker 11:You fought in the Clone Wars?
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 8:Yes. I was once a Jedi knight the same as your father.
Speaker 7:I wish I'd known him.
Speaker 8:He was the best star pilot in the galaxy and a cunning warrior. I understand you've become quite a good pilot yourself, and he was a good friend, which reminds me, I have something here for you. Please. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough.
Speaker 1:It's the best. It's like pure art. AI could never. It's so good. It's absolutely genius.
Speaker 1:And they do that two or three other times throughout the movie. And so you're just watching, and and and it's always when they go to grab something, and then they just do, like, insert shots. So, like so, like, if you're watching the Cerveza Cristal version of Star Wars, by the end of the movie, Obi Wan Kenobi has had, like, five beers.
Speaker 2:Woah. More
Speaker 1:than cheeky pine. Yeah. Yeah. No. He's definitely he's definitely his buzz going.
Speaker 1:But, that's one of my favorite little little bit.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Pantone really quick. Bantone, automate compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Continue, Jordan.
Speaker 2:So with halftime Yes. We're gonna have the founder, Krish Krish on. He's Cool. Studying CS at Waterloo.
Speaker 1:What a great
Speaker 2:hack project. And then he he's only 20. So we're gonna have him on.
Speaker 1:So much fun.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to have him on. That said, I I wonder if he could work with a movie like, go work with someone like a Netflix early on and say, like, basically, us inventory Yeah. And then we will, like, work with a bunch of different there will be a beverage scene, and then we'll generate a bunch of random versions of the scene for different types of people in the audience.
Speaker 1:So Well, so this this already happens where ads in the background so if you're walking around New York City in some romantic comedy, they might actually go in VFX out the billboards that are in the back, and they might put new ads in the background. And that's just a traditional VFX pipeline. Just cut it out and put a different ad in. And so that type of that type of editing can be made a lot more dynamic by through AI, and that's probably how this instantiates itself realistically as opposed to just the most aggressive, the most aggressive. Like, all of a sudden, they're talking about the ad.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a it's a little bit of a wild wild move. Anyway, apparently, Ryan Macintosh predicted this. He said it's coming. He's quoting semi analysis. He says, how much would Starbucks pay to haunt the background of every mid journey cafe render a Tesla idling in every AI generated traffic scene?
Speaker 1:If you're you're thinking small, this is the this is the ambient brand singularity.
Speaker 2:Dan in the chat says, you know, after you've seen that Cervesa Cristal ad once or twice, you actually are think are thinking about the beer for the rest of time. For wondering when it's gonna come next.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it comes randomly.
Speaker 2:It might come right now. It might come in five minutes. Just be ready.
Speaker 1:Should we be good? Should we get yeah. Let's get to Tyler. You needed to grab something off his desk. Right?
Speaker 2:Okay. So this is incredibly bullish. What is bullish? They're putting ads in Ayahuasca trips. What?
Speaker 2:Somebody on somebody on Reddit.
Speaker 1:This is something we would do. This is something we would joke about. Remember
Speaker 2:our joke about bit.
Speaker 1:Going to Peru with helicopters with massive speakers and playing corporate finance tutorials to people who are tripping in the jungle. That's the the to to to get them to come back to corporate America and lock in. What what exactly happened here? Break it down, Jordy.
Speaker 2:Anyone so somebody on the r/dmt subreddit says, anyone else getting Amazon ads when breaking through? It's happened to me on my last three trips. Second was Ayahuasca. Right as I break through, my trip is paused for Vivid's five second ad featuring Jeff Bezos. Am I am I the only one?
Speaker 1:How is this happening? Is that just like their their their their brain is fried and so they're imagining an ad? Or is it like they happen to be listening
Speaker 2:to something or watching I think Jeff figured this out a long time ago and he realized there's a lot of people that are using psychedelics and he he thought I could productize this and make it available to other merchants on Amazon or I could just keep it for myself and just have all the inventory for myself. No. Of course, joking. But anyways, very, very funny.
Speaker 1:In other ads news, get bezel.com. Shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated, in house by Bezel's team of experts. But also, apparently, Anthropic bought every stack trace that gets no results. So if you go to Google and you and you type in your stack trace, your error while you're programming, and nothing comes up, Claude somehow just went to Google and said, hey. We'll we'll we'll buy that ad inventory.
Speaker 1:Genius feels like Google should be buying this this their own ad results, or they should actually just have an integration with for Gemini so that if it if if you go and you type in a stack trace that no one has no one's ever run into that particular technical problem before, shouldn't they just have a button there that says, like, fix it with Gemini right now? Like, we'll do it. It should just do that. This is like a case study in AI mode. Like, they should they should compete.
Speaker 1:But honestly, incredibly creative, from the Claude team. Very,
Speaker 2:The chat is going off on the on the Ayahuasca ads.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:AB says CPMs would be through the work roof. Imagine getting one shotted by a GEICO ad. Two point six says Jeff Bezos is now monetizing the astral plane.
Speaker 1:Making your whole
Speaker 2:personality GEICO after Nick Turley says, I'm seeing lots of confusion about ad rumors in ChatGPT. There are no live tests for ads. Any screenshots you've seen are not real or not ads. If we do pursue ads, we'll take a thoughtful approach. People trust ChatGPT Yeah.
Speaker 2:And anything we do will be designed to respect that.
Speaker 1:This was because of a viral post that showed a screenshot of, I think, Target down at the bottom. But that was just like an embedded link. That was like an app that someone built. It was not an advertisement.
Speaker 2:Own GPT. Was core. That's crazy. Who would do that? It sounds like he might have been.
Speaker 1:I I love Eric Souffert. He's he's clearly, you know, one of us, an ad supporter, an ad lover. And and he he is quote tweeting somebody that's saying that's mentioning that Airbnb still has no advertising business. Of course, Uber has an advertising business that's great. DoorDash has figured out how to do promoted content very well.
Speaker 1:And those businesses have grown a lot. And Eric Souffert's standing there saying, start an ad network. I didn't we ask Chesky about this when he was on the show? I think we talked to him about about doing ads. And and he he mentioned that it is somewhat of a unique product.
Speaker 1:It's it's a little bit less frequent than an Uber. It's less frequently
Speaker 2:hyper local advertising. So you if you're staying somewhere, they could be sent giving you ads for, hey, look at this kayaking trip Yeah. You could do in a couple days or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're laughing at what I'm laughing at. Now we're into the attractive people of the show section, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have this from We have a post here. Apparently, we we now have a national lux maxing strategy of The United States now.
Speaker 1:Look at Jacob He looks fantastic.
Speaker 2:Jacob stuns.
Speaker 1:Fun of of he's former guest on the show. He's been We
Speaker 2:need to ask Jacob bone smashing. Yeah. Apparently, it's it's gaining quite quite a lot of popularity up Great.
Speaker 1:Donald Boat is also apparently very attractive. People have been talking about that on the timeline.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I Was this his first Tyler, don't didn't you know? Is this a doctor boat? Or I think this is the first doc, Spy.
Speaker 1:This is the first doc of Donald Boat. People people people are fans. People are fans of of Donald Boat. There's also Sean Frank is getting jacked. We're really in like the true category of just like, here here are attractive people now.
Speaker 2:The look the look maxing the look maxing zone of the show.
Speaker 1:It's really yeah. Yeah. Three for three on the look maxing segment. Sean Frank says hit these right after doing about 10 sets of 50 straight. What is this?
Speaker 1:One armed pull ups? He can do one arm pull ups?
Speaker 2:Well, he's holding the other one, so you're using
Speaker 6:it Yeah.
Speaker 2:More like training One arm. That's correct. Yeah. But still, you're training like grip strength. That's impressive.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well Come do that in the UltraDome.
Speaker 1:You know John. Know Black Friday went well when you're banging out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He is on a on a high after Black Friday.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. And our next guest, believe, is in the restream waiting room. We have Sarah from Cultured Magazine.
Speaker 1:She's the founder and the editor in chief of Cultured Magazine. Let's bring her in.
Speaker 2:Welcome. I hope you don't mind the holiday music. We're having a lot of fun here today.
Speaker 1:We're in the holiday spirit.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 9:Thank you. Thank you for having me. There's a bit of a lag. It's a bit disorienting.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm sorry. Well, hopefully, we can hopefully, you can hear us okay. I would love to just kick
Speaker 9:off hear me with Can okay?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. We can hear you just fine. Hopefully Okay. You could kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself.
Speaker 1:Since it's the first time on your show, tell us about, Cultured and, and kind of your journey a little bit. That'd be great.
Speaker 9:Gosh. Where should I start? So Cultured is a media company. Mhmm. We cover kind of everything under the creative umbrella with a with a strong focus on the contemporary arts.
Speaker 1:-Yeah.
Speaker 9:-So cover, you know, film and theater and literature, and kind of look at everything through the lens of, Does it intersect with contemporary art? And, you know, if so, how? And kind of try to have a holistic approach to all of the content.
Speaker 1:And, I mean, I I I would love to know your take on, on Netflix and Warner Brothers, if you have one. We we've just been going through all the different, all the different IP there. I don't know if anything sticks out to you.
Speaker 9:I don't know. I was in LA over the weekend. Yeah. And, of course, everyone was talking about it. You know?
Speaker 9:I I don't know. I mean, it's Yeah. It's concerning on on many levels. Mhmm. Do you think it's gonna do think you it's gonna go through fully?
Speaker 9:Or
Speaker 1:I mean, Warner Brothers Discovery is definitely going somewhere. That seems clear. We're I don't know. Where do you stand on it? I think it probably lands with Netflix because Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's just so much competition from YouTube, much so competition
Speaker 9:from Disney. What, like, 300,000,000 subscribers now? I mean, they're the clear streaming winner.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so even though, yes, it is consolidation, it's not a monopoly because people watch YouTube. They watch Instagram. They watch shows like this. We're not we're not on a network, and we don't need to be.
Speaker 1:And so, it still feels like, no one's gonna look you know, a year or two from now, no one's gonna be like, oh, yeah. Hollywood isn't competitive anymore. Like, no. Hollywood's extremely cutthroat. It's gonna remain cutthroat.
Speaker 1:It's gonna remain
Speaker 9:even more cutthroat.
Speaker 1:Potentially.
Speaker 6:Well, which means I
Speaker 1:think means it's hard to block.
Speaker 11:I think a lot of Yeah.
Speaker 2:People are so latched on to the past. Mhmm. And we've, yeah. It it feels like I mean, we're we're we're based in Hollywood.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so there's a lot of people that are that are still have tied their careers to, like, the old Hollywood and the way things were were done in the past. Mhmm. And it's just notable that, like, it's never been easier to just create content and create like, when I when I think about Warner Warner Warner Brothers, it's like there's a bunch of, like, cartoon IP.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's like, if you're mad about consolidation and you're a creative person, just make more make a cartoon. Make a new cartoon. Just make make make things. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I the the frustration that people have when they're like, oh, this is gonna this is gonna hurt. I Theaters? Yeah. The the theater thing I the theater
Speaker 9:thing I think are already hurt. Right? Yeah. Exactly. That sense of nostalgia, and I think there is that slice of Hollywood that is rooted in that.
Speaker 9:But I agree. Of course, there's no there's never been a time where there's been more channels, but it's still it's almost like there are certainly more channels to reach people, but it's also harder to reach people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The there's something there's some interesting, like, ratio if you're trying to quantify it of, like, how much attention something gets relative to the the the revenue or the market cap or the value. Like, theaters are they feel so culturally important. They feel such so everyone has a story or a memory of their childhood going to the theater, such an experience.
Speaker 1:And yet I think the actual total revenue of of, you know, all the movie theaters in America is, like, a fraction of what video games make in a month. You know? Like, video the video game industry is, like, way, way bigger, or, like, the social media industry will be so, so much bigger, like, a thousand times bigger. And so but but there's something where just just the legacy has broken through to such a degree that even though it hasn't been a big business in decades and it's smaller than ever, it's still culturally extremely relevant. And so it's hard
Speaker 9:And I to think creatively extremely relevant.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 9:Totally. I think think filmmakers want us to see their movies mostly on the big screen.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So, I mean, I think, if you look at it just from a revenue standpoint, of I course mean, like you said, it's probably been decades since there's been a shift. But I do think that there is still something nostalgic and important about seeing certain things in theaters. I mean, there's still movies that people say. And, I mean, obviously, you know the filmmakers are often fighting for it to have the release first in a theater. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Granted, they're all over 40, but still.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I do wonder I mean, I I wonder what the next generation will even look like if they'll they'll wanna go to theaters. Like, we have a friend, Jason Carmen, who's very much of the young and of the new new age, new creative organization makes movies, but also makes short films and documentaries and all sorts of stuff. And he still definitely wants to release his films in theaters. He has.
Speaker 1:He's figured out ways to do that. But I I I wonder I wonder how much that's at the same time, we're friends with, like, Adam Faze.
Speaker 2:I think we need new I was thinking about it at all. Such an interesting time because, like, theater the theater business has been in decline Yeah. And yet, I think we need new theaters. Like, we need
Speaker 9:trying that, I think. I don't know if that's working. You mean kind of like Yeah. I don't emphasizing it as certain experience
Speaker 6:Well, or
Speaker 2:if I I think last time I went and saw a movie was with John, and we got, like, 20 of our friends together to go see Dune. I think
Speaker 9:I don't
Speaker 2:see Dune. Like the actual experience of being in a theater under these, like you go from being under like bright LEDs in a mall, which I don't go to malls. Mhmm. And I'm in bright LEDs, And I don't like the smell of movie theater popcorn personally. It just I'm like, that smells like poison.
Speaker 2:I don't want it. And then you go It tastes good though. And and so the whole experience for me is like, yeah, I'm I'm never gonna I'm never gonna do that. But if you if you built a theater from the ground up as in an opinionated way, like, some type of like, almost treating it like a true hospitality experience, there's probably a much better chance that I would go. Not not certain that there's a real business there yet, but maybe there hasn't been enough attempts there.
Speaker 1:Maybe Ammangiri of theaters. It's like $2 per ticket.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Exactly. Do it. Yeah. The Ammangiri to take over.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, mean, that somewhat happened in my town. In my town, there's there used to be two theaters where you'd sit, like, shoulder to shoulder with everyone, and now both of those theaters have way downscoped the number of seats. The seats are huge. They serve you dinner. There's wine.
Speaker 1:There's drinks. And, like, they're trying to get $500 out of you or $200 out of you. You're not going in on a matinee $10 with, like, cheap popcorn and getting out of there. They they want to monetize it like it's a restaurant because it's a lot of physical space. Like, the square footage is a lot.
Speaker 9:But basically, I mean, someone was just telling me that the theaters really are only still in New York and LA. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, I was thinking the opposite, frankly. I thought, But someone said, no.
Speaker 9:You can't even go to a movie theater in a small town
Speaker 1:in LA. They've all closed. Wow. Wow. It's rough.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 9:this is someone told me.
Speaker 2:What Let's, I I'd love to I'd love to talk about the the art just the art market. Obviously, Miami, has gotten a lot of attention over the last week or so.
Speaker 9:Other people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and He's going viral again. He's still got
Speaker 1:He went viral a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. I'm I'm particularly excited to get your opinion because every now you keep I I've been seeing some headlines recently where it's like the art market is back. And then I talk to people that are actually working in art, they're like, it's absolutely not back. And so I think there's somewhat of a a disconnect where maybe there's like a effort to like tell people that it's back, but I don't I don't know if the sales velocity is really there. But, how are you processing things?
Speaker 9:Of course. We we have to believe around hype. I mean, I think that there's been a fundamental shift in the art world. Call it, you know, since 2024 or you know, I think I think that there's been so many factors that have changed the landscape of the art world, certainly, as it as it's been in the last twenty or thirty years. I think that look.
Speaker 9:I think, sure, it it's better. Right? Like, we had Art Basel Paris. Everyone said, okay. The art market's back.
Speaker 9:It's better. I think Fries London had reported strong sales. I spoke to a big gallery, recently that said that 2025, every single Basel this year was a record for them. Now, of course, like anything, if you take a fair like Art Basel, there's 300 galleries. So you can take a really strong year where everyone says the market's on fire, and you can find a dealer who didn't do well that year.
Speaker 9:I think that I think the statistic that someone was throwing around, and I'm not sure if this is accurate, is something like, you know, total volume of sales is down 10%. I don't know exactly where the art market is. I think that there's definitely been a very serious correction. I think that a correction ultimately yields a lot of positive things in an art market. So I don't think it's back to the kind of frenzy 800 person waiting list for, you know, a painter two years out of Yale that we were in.
Speaker 9:But I do think that there's some momentum. I think that there's been, speaking of, some consolidation. There's been, you know, some mid tier or even some bigger galleries closing And just, you know, I think a lot of shifts in the market. But I think that Miami was, you know, net positive for the most people I talked to in sales. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And I think that you still have I mean, look, I Call me optimistic, but you still have these collectors who are, you know, they're not the speculative part of the market. They're not buying an artist because they think that they're gonna get a multiple of, you know, 10 or a 100. I think I do think, however, that even if the the collector isn't looking to ever sell, there that kind of data sometimes does kind of feed a little bit of a sparkle and an energy. But I do think that there there are collectors who buy in good markets and bad markets. And I think the the last, you know, call it since fall, it's definitely gotten better.
Speaker 9:Are we back? No. But is it better? Yes.
Speaker 1:What's the secret to successfully participating in Art Basel if you're a company or a brand? I I've seen a bunch of news.
Speaker 9:Just selling.
Speaker 1:Just selling?
Speaker 9:Just selling. I mean, you know, as you as you know, it costs them it's a significant investment. Right? They're buying the space. They're shipping the artwork.
Speaker 9:They're having their team come. You know, they they put, you know, lots of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars behind the fair. So selling the art, which often can be up to $20,000,000 of art, is success.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Makes sense. Jordan?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been
Speaker 9:We did an interesting story on the economics of a mid tier gallery. Okay. That published last week that talks a little bit about how when you're not selling $20,000,000 of art, how you get through Miami or how you get through a fair and make the economics work. Because there's certainly a tipping point in which it works and a tipping point in which sometimes dealers are trying to meet new collectors, show new work, and it's financially not viable.
Speaker 1:What are yeah. What are the highest leverage things that a mid tier gallery can do? Is that stuff like leave some of the art at home and, you know, more digital representations of the art? And is is that the cost structure or the cost savings?
Speaker 2:Part of it is that a certain gallery might represent like, if you represent 20 artists Yeah. It's possible that there's ton of demand for two of the artists Oh, okay. And almost zero, Like, negative demand. Like, have to pay people that take Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. Some of the other stuff. So that that's that's a factor, I I think. But Yeah. Tell me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 9:I mean, it depends. Look, I think that not every dealer is just, you know, market driven, and there's maybe work that they haven't shown that they wanna see how the reaction is or, you know, there's always a surprise of some interest. But, yeah. No. It's it's it's it's financially difficult.
Speaker 9:I mean, a lot of these a lot of the galleries, you know, it's it's kind of like I I kind of equate it to emerging artists. You know, there's we all know so many artists who are so successful and so financially successful, but there is that point where, you know, you're just so close to losing money or not quite making it. And that's like a very fine line between the other side and and and leaving, you know, at a loss.
Speaker 2:What, what what tech billionaires or tech elite are doing the most for the arts right now? Because I feel like there's historically been a criticism of the tech industry where you have people that make a lot of money, and then they're just like, I'm just gonna spend, you know, a $100,000,000 on antiaging. I'm not gonna fund the next, you know, or or build a castle or or wanna do?
Speaker 9:I don't know if that's entirely true. I think what
Speaker 2:they're I'm not saying I I'm not saying I I believe it's true, I'm just saying historically, that's like one So criticism.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, I think what a lot of the tech billionaires that I know that have built unbelievable collections have done is not shown their work.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Not shown their collections. So I think a lot of people aren't aware of the level in which some of these tech billionaires are, a, interested in art, and, b, collect so deeply. So in terms of, you know, underwriting museums or programs, I don't I don't I don't know. I mean, do we need more tech billionaires to buy more art? Of course.
Speaker 9:And then yeah. Definitely.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 9:do We're you need putting the word out.
Speaker 2:I'm sure I'm sure that will actually that should catalyze at least at least a few million of of new art purchases for people in our audience that are kind of maybe on the fence about buying
Speaker 9:Not sure. Not sure. Should I should
Speaker 2:I not? What do you think about what do you think about the sphere? Because we we have a general belief that it is
Speaker 9:In Vegas?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. It just feels like it it it there was again a criticism that we we forgot how to make beautiful massive we forgot how to make cathedrals.
Speaker 1:Great pitch.
Speaker 2:And yet, the sphere feels like a it it is the most commercial piece of art maybe ever, but when you look at it on the skyline in Vegas, like, this is this is a modern
Speaker 1:It's America's Mona Lisa.
Speaker 9:Okay. Let me say, I have never been to the sphere.
Speaker 1:Wow. But Uncultured. Uncultured.
Speaker 2:This is uncultured. These are uncultured magazine.
Speaker 9:Know. That's what I should really name my magazine. But I have to tell you that I do know a few artists
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Who have been to the sphere who says pretty incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is wild. Yeah. No worries. I mean, it's it's it's it's remarkable in, a cyberpunk way.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 9:Not necessarily in, like,
Speaker 1:a beautiful way. Absolutely. You should absolutely go, to to experience the new canvas that is the sphere. No. Obviously, it is a it is a it's a it's a it's a capitalist model.
Speaker 2:How do you rate how do you how are you processing LA as of late? To me, it's starting to feel like Detroit of the West. It feels like It's so embarrassing. No. It just feels like this was the center for art and culture and entertainment.
Speaker 2:And traditional Hollywood has been so battered that it's all like, the beauty the buildings are less beautiful. It it I I think the streets were always dirty, but the restaurants are less full. There's not as many, like, new great restaurants as I think there there may have once been. It feels somewhat kind of Heartbroken. In secular decline.
Speaker 2:Heartbroken too.
Speaker 9:I mean, look, I I did open an office in New York this year, and I've been mostly in New York this year. I I think look. LA is a great city. It's in a downturn. I think that's you know, I think most people that I know that could leave left.
Speaker 9:Someone was saying to me the other day that we're like, we're kind of, like, just post COVID now with LA. Mhmm. And how out of COVID, kind of LA was really all of the sectors and all of the things that you just mentioned were kind of growing on the up and up. There was a lot of energy around it. And then after the fires last January, things kind of leveled out.
Speaker 9:And I think that, you know, look, we all know it's a great city. The energy moves. I think the energy is not there right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I'm sure it'll come back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I asked a good a friend of mine, a very controversial figure in the in the art world, Stefan Simkowitz.
Speaker 9:Oh, know him well.
Speaker 2:I was like, give me
Speaker 9:What did he say? He probably said LA is great.
Speaker 2:No. No. The example, I was like, hey. We're we we our lease expires next year. We're looking for a new space.
Speaker 2:And I was like, are there any, like, massive amazing art galleries that you think are gonna shut down? And he was like, I can he immediately was like, here's four. And, and so again,
Speaker 1:you texting him right now?
Speaker 9:No. I didn't text him. They're not four. He's he's exaggerating, but that's funny.
Speaker 2:Well, I think there there's there's a handful because I got offered to tour them. But, any anyways.
Speaker 9:I mean, look, LA is not known for its collectors.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:There was a great experiment. I mean, look how many galleries opened in LA post 2020.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I mean, I know some dealers who said, I'm just I'm opening in LA to show great work, not to cultivate more collectors. A lot of the great collectors in LA sometimes buy in New York. So I think the fact that LA is having a, let's just say, a more challenging moment and some of the galleries there are closing, I I talked to a few of my friends who have, great galleries in LA, and they said, let's not even talk about sales. Foot traffic is down. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. And some of the places we've looked at, like, you're spending a $100,000 a month for a place that doesn't get any foot traffic that is, like I mean, when we're when we're visiting, it's, like, during normal hours, and they're just empty. So anyways, definitely correction in in the works. But as you said, it it can be healthy. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyways, I wish we had more time. This was super fun. Any any time much.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Merry Christmas. Our next guest is from the General Intelligence Company of New York. He's waiting in the Restream waiting room. We have Andrew Hagnanelli.
Speaker 1:I hope I'm saying that correctly. Andrew, sorry to keep you waiting. How are you?
Speaker 2:What's up
Speaker 3:again, Joe?
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping on. Please introduce yourself, introduce the company, and give us the news.
Speaker 5:What's
Speaker 11:Yeah. So my name is
Speaker 2:Andrew Kidman, The flow. The flow. Can we get a side profile of the flow real quick?
Speaker 4:Oh. It's it's kinda nice.
Speaker 1:Right? Oh, there we go.
Speaker 2:Hit the gong for the flow. Hit the gong for the flow. There we go.
Speaker 11:Nice. Nice.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry to interrupt.
Speaker 11:They they do like the hair. They definitely like the hair.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 11:That's great. Yeah. Mean, I sorry. I think it's a little bit of a delay here. My name is Andrew.
Speaker 11:I run General Intelligence. Today, we just announced our $8,700,000 seed round, which
Speaker 2:Send it, John, again.
Speaker 11:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Incredible. Who led it?
Speaker 11:It was led by USB. So, you know, we're a New York based company. We love New York City. We wanted someone who was right here at home. And I only have to walk two blocks for the board meeting, which is really nice.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Us the history. I mean, first time on the show, obviously True. Followed you for probably, I don't know, a year close to a year now. But what yeah.
Speaker 2:Give us kind of the origins, what you guys are working on, all that good stuff.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So we started working on this about a year ago with this kind of crazy idea of like, what if we could get agents to run companies?
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And we really worked backwards from that. We, like, we we picked let's go with the craziest thing we can do because I bet that there's a way for us to get resources for it. And if
Speaker 6:the idea is a little
Speaker 11:bit crazier, they'll give us more resources. And so we picked that, me and my cofounder, Avi, and we started working on it. We started working on a demo. We worked on it for about two months. And then in March, we were like, let's turn this into a company.
Speaker 11:So the initial demo was just an agent that could call some tools, and then we did a small round in March led by Compound. Ran the company for about six months before launching cofounder in September, and we were able to make that launch go very, very well. And so, you know, we we got viral with that. People loved it. People really liked using the product.
Speaker 11:We went viral through the sweaters too. The sweaters actually helped us promote our product more than probably the product itself.
Speaker 2:Wait. So what was cofounder, and what was the sweater? Was cofounder wearing the sweater?
Speaker 11:You know, cofounder's a plant. So oh, I I have a bunch of them right here. That's that's cofounder. And it's like this AI chief of staff. So it will let you hook stuff up and do automations, and we've built it into this very proactive, like, assistant feeling thing.
Speaker 11:So you're not just really telling it what to do. It will actually prompt you instead of you having to prompt it. And we wanted to figure out how do we how do we promote this? And so I went and I got these sweaters made, and they're, like, very rainbowy. Like, they have all the all the different colors in them.
Speaker 1:Logo name on there too. That's cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's like utilized merch format.
Speaker 1:Yes. I never
Speaker 2:see a song.
Speaker 1:Cozy sweater. That's cool. Very cool.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. And we posted about them. We've like, we just got our first shipment of them.
Speaker 10:I just
Speaker 11:posted a photo. That's cool. And it goes by. It gets, like, a million plus views. And I I go from having, like, 300 followers to a couple thousand.
Speaker 11:And we were gonna launch three days later, and so this made it really easy for us to launch and and have cofounder do well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, I mean, how how do you think the the the business actually evolves? Do you think that there's a world where the, you know, the the product is plugging into all of the enterprise tools? It seems like with even just the cofounder branding, it feels like this is an early stage product, or that's at least, like, the the the early adopter would be a small company. You're not coming into a company where it's like, yeah.
Speaker 1:We already have a data lake, and they have 5,000 employees, and we need you to go around and find stuff. It's much more of a, you know, an early stage tool. Is is that correct, or you think it'll grow? Like, how do you think the the use case will change over the next few years as you build out the business?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So it's definitely early stage. Yeah. We we want people who are, let's say, between, like, three and and fifty people Sure. On smaller companies.
Speaker 11:But we're really going from cofounder to this full stack AI business.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 11:So our goal is to get agents to run companies. And we've decided, you know, we're not gonna be able to do that by adding one piece to an assistant until it gets really far. We're actually working on a full stack AI business. We realized while while building ourselves that we had this ability to make these workflows internally where you're taking like a customer support ticket, and you can directly plug that into an agent that writes some code and plug it into an agent that that reviews and QAs the feature and then ships it to prod without any people involved. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And so we're sprinting towards this entire business with with just agents, and we think we can get there by March.
Speaker 2:What what kind of businesses do you think are most the name implies you're trying to build a general intelligence. I imagine that means an AI that could run any business. But have you thought about specific types of businesses that are best suited to be run by an agent? And how are you testing the product? I understand you probably test it internally with your own team.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, when you talk about like timeline to an agent running an entire business by March, like what kind of business is that? What it like how do you make that more concrete?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So some
Speaker 6:of
Speaker 11:the things that we test are the ability to actually do something end to end. Right? So this whole write a piece of code that can get shipped to prod without any people involved. That's something you can test. Right?
Speaker 11:If it breaks prod, it it's going to, you know, be a failure there. But we're working on this with a couple of businesses, smaller businesses internally, and, like, they're just not public yet. But the way that the business looks is very similar to ourselves. So it's a software company in b to b, and it also relies a lot on how the agent market develops. So we rely on other agents by other companies, like like a coding agent where we're gonna be using, looks like, or Tembo or something like that.
Speaker 11:Customer support agents by companies like Sierra and Decagon. And then sales market agents like like Rocks.
Speaker 1:Rocks.
Speaker 11:Right. We're gonna be building this in a way that, like, leans on those agents, and those are conducive to a b to b software company. Mhmm. And that's really what we're building first.
Speaker 1:That's very cool. Are you AGI pilled?
Speaker 11:Very AGI pilled. You know, we all have different definitions. Right? And so my personal definition, it's in my Twitter bio. I keep it the the timeline that I think we're gonna have to AGI, and it's much faster than everybody else's.
Speaker 11:But my definition is, like
Speaker 1:It's tomorrow.
Speaker 6:It's tomorrow.
Speaker 1:My timeline is
Speaker 11:tomorrow. Really? No. 5.2? No.
Speaker 2:We'll see.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 5.2 is my is my AGI, for sure.
Speaker 11:We're we're thinking about it like like, you know, Her, the movie Her?
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 11:My personal definition is when do we get that? A, we already have people falling in
Speaker 1:love So Just with some of the population.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I mean, we're kinda close. Right? Like like, some of the stuff that you can do today is 90% of what you can
Speaker 8:do in that movie.
Speaker 11:And I bet within the next twelve months, it'll be a 100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's sort of like a diffusion question because, like, smartphones have arrived. There are Amish people that don't use smartphones. Right? Like, there are plenty of people that that don't.
Speaker 1:There's probably millions of people that don't use smartphones for a variety of reasons. There will I I believe, like, for, you know, a hundred years, there will be people that will be like, I don't talk to clankers. Right? But at the same time, like, we are pretty close. Anyway, we we can talk about AGI for the next two hours, but we have to move on.
Speaker 1:So thank you so much for the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the progress.
Speaker 2:Wonderful keep we should we should add, like, something to our ticker, like, is Andrew's AGI time? Yeah. We'll the we'll we'll get the update daily. But, yeah, congrats on congrats on the progress.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you, sir. Have a good one, dude. Goodbye. Let me tell you about wander.com. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service.
Speaker 1:It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Our next guest is Brian Miller from Stable. He's the CEO, and we have some big news from them. Let's bring him in. How are you doing, Brian?
Speaker 5:Ho ho ho
Speaker 1:ho ho. Merry Christmas.
Speaker 2:Welcome.
Speaker 1:Good to see you.
Speaker 12:We're focused on, you know, redefining the payment rails that money moves through, whether it's cross borders or cross country. So, you know, we launched earlier today. It was a big big event for us. We have the big net launch. Thank you.
Speaker 12:And that was a
Speaker 1:yeah. That's good. It's been great. Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 2:Okay. So
Speaker 1:every The obvious question is why another stablecoin. Right?
Speaker 2:Well well, no. No. No. I mean, not not necessarily Okay. You're so you're building an out a new l one
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For payments. It seems like every single every single layer one blockchain maybe not every single one. Some some are more obviously, like, hyper liquid Mhmm. More trading focused, and there's others. But everybody's going after the payment opportunity for obvious reasons.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Like, do different layer ones differentiate? What's gonna separate stable from other players? Mhmm. Like, how how is Stable kind of more opinionated?
Speaker 2:I'm sure it's opinionated, in ways that maybe, like, you know, Tempo isn't or Solana isn't it, etcetera. And so, yeah. Curious how you're differentiating.
Speaker 12:Yeah. It's a great question, and we get it a lot. And I
Speaker 6:think the way that we're
Speaker 12:able to answer it best is by talking about, you know, whether it's the team that's backed us. So we have PayPal Ventures. We have, you know, we adviser. Was like Paulo from CEO of Tether. Yeah.
Speaker 12:You know, we we're partnered with Anchorage. So we have, like, a a very good, tool set that we're playing with that's able to help us launch. But in addition to that, like, getting a little bit more of the technical side of things is our gas token, which is usually a complication of other chains, is USDT. So for that, you know, when people are moving money, the 70 to 80% of the, stable coins out there in the world right now is being used as a USDT, and that's what you use to pay your fees on our network rather than having a complication about buying another token and worrying about other chains. For us, you're able to just use USDT and spend USDT.
Speaker 12:So that's, I think, our biggest differentiator that we
Speaker 10:have right now. And then in addition to that, it's
Speaker 12:also the speed. So when you wanna use a traditional layer one, let's say, Ethereum, you wanna move USDT there. You know, it's slow, and it's expensive, and it's volatile in gas. And, you know,
Speaker 6:we got tired of that.
Speaker 12:So we just ripped it out and put in USDT, which everyone knows and is already using as our gas token.
Speaker 2:So sounds like you have some awesome partners lined up already. How does this market shape out? Is it is it kind of a land grab right now where you're trying to sign up as many, institutions to, support stable or or make you their preferred l one for moving stablecoins between them and other institutions or or internally? How how does that look?
Speaker 12:Yeah. I mean, you're you're definitely right there. It's definitely busy. There's a lot of people wanting to to get out the picks and shovels and start digging, and we I think we're we're ahead of that. So we already launched as we said today, and that's kind of, like, a big milestone for us.
Speaker 12:So we got into the build phase and got into the launch phase. But I would say in terms of, like, why it's an attractive market is that everyone uses money, and there's a frustration of using it, whether you're using traditional credit cards or checks or whatever if you're still using cash. That's just a complication that people are kinda tired of dealing with, and they don't understand why you know, if you're if you're trying to buy something on the weekend and you need to, like, wire some over, like, $2,000 that you can't go get on Zelle or Venmo, like, you gotta wait till Monday. And that's just a weird complication that I think a lot of people are getting tired of. And so using stablecoins in the in an easy sense is kinda how we're solving that problem.
Speaker 2:Go for it.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I I'm just, wondering more of, like, help me understand what folks are using Tether directly for versus how do you like, what value prop you build? Obviously, you're, you know, friendly, and, and partnered in many ways. But how how does that relationship evolve over the next few years with with Tethr?
Speaker 12:Look. I mean, I would say Tethr is just on a on a growth, growth trajectory that is pretty unmatched. Yeah. So we're happy to be part of that ride, and help facilitate it. I think, you know, Tethr exists on a number of chains, and that's one of the facilities that we're able to provide is a chain that it runs faster, easier, and less expensive.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 12:That's really what we're doing to help amplify their message.
Speaker 1:Okay. Cool. Yeah. That makes sense. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come explain that to us. Appreciate having you on the show, and Merry Christmas.
Speaker 2:Sure you'll be back on soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Congrats on congrats on the launch. Super exciting.
Speaker 1:Have a good one.
Speaker 12:Appreciate it. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Bye. Thanks.
Speaker 1:Up next, we have Will Wilson from Antithesis on December 3. Jane Street led Antithesis, their 105,000,000 series a to make deterministic simulation. The new testing standard, they have an incredibly stacked list of investors. Dwarkish Patel, Shelton Douglas Woah. And Patrick Hollison.
Speaker 2:Woah. Two out of the two out of the three roommates.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What happened? Dylan. What happened? You didn't do a road show where you go from bedroom to bedroom showing off on your belt, and they're like, do you wanna invest?
Speaker 1:Sharks. I imagine you sit down and you say, sharks. Sharks. Here's what I'm building.
Speaker 7:You know, it's it's funny. I think I think they all ended up coming in for very different reasons, but we're certainly very
Speaker 2:Oh, you got you got Dylan. He just wasn't he wasn't big enough to get
Speaker 5:to the press release.
Speaker 1:Get out to the press release.
Speaker 2:Brutal. Brutal.
Speaker 7:I cannot comment on investors who may or may not be in our press release.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, well,
Speaker 2:thanks so much. Please
Speaker 1:explain this to me. Like, I'm not DoorDash, and I'm not a researcher at Anthropic. What what are you what what are you building at at at, like, a very, very basic level? Who's the customer? What's the problem you're solving?
Speaker 1:And then I do want you to walk me through some of the technology as much as we can, but I'd like to start with just, like, the the high level problem description if possible.
Speaker 7:Sure. Okay. So the super basic problem description is, like, Marc Andreessen once said that software is eating the world. I think that's true. I think AI has made that more true.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And the thing is that's actually kind of a bad thing in some ways because software doesn't work very well. Like like, we I feel like we all have Stockholm syndrome about this. Like, when I when I walk into a building, I don't wonder in the back of my head, is this building gonna collapse on me? Yeah. And yet every time I use a software product, I know there's some random chance that it's just gonna totally fail.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And if you think about it, that's that's really not okay. And that's what we're that's what we're trying to fix. We don't think it has to be that Yeah.
Speaker 6:We think
Speaker 7:the reason it is that way is because people have been building and testing software wrong Yeah. For the last seventy years Yep. Which is, like, maybe a slightly hubristic and crazy thing to say, but we think we've got a better way to do it.
Speaker 1:I have an ongoing war with Rune about whether or not the United app has gotten better or worse over the past few years because I use it as a heuristic for, like, AI diffusion. Because he'll he'll tell he'll say, hey. The AI models are amazing. Like, you you just you just yell at the codex model. It'll do exactly what you want.
Speaker 1:I'm like, oh, really? Well, then why did I have a bug in my United app when I was trying to fly across the country?
Speaker 2:Well, maybe they haven't adopted
Speaker 1:It's actually way better. It's actually they actually are improving their software. But walk me through deterministic simulation. Like, what does that look like in practice if I have a piece of software? I have some some Vibe coded slop app that I'm worried about completely blowing up and leaking all my users' data and, you know, and failing to work in a bunch of different scenarios.
Speaker 1:Like like, how am I actually using your product? Am I plugging in? What's going on? What's the workflow?
Speaker 7:So so so here's the basic idea. So, like, the traditional way people test software is you have your app, and you sit down and you think really hard and you use your big brain, and you're like, what are all the situations that this thing could run-in? What are all the things that people could do? What are all the situations it has to handle? And then I sit down, I, the developer, right, and I write a bunch of manual test cases for each of those things Yep.
Speaker 7:And make sure that they run-in my CI system or whatever. Yep. And that's like, hooray. I've tested my software. Yep.
Speaker 7:Except you've totally not tested your software. Right? Because the thing that's actually gonna blow up and totally screw you and and be a disaster is not something that you thought of. It's something that you didn't think of. Right?
Speaker 7:It's like an unknown unknown. And so Sure. We have the exact opposite approach. We say instead, we're just gonna take your actual software, and we're gonna run it in a simulation
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 7:Of the real world. And we're gonna throw the kitchen sink at it. We're gonna, like, have the worst users ever doing the worst things ever, and it's gonna be running in the worst data center ever. And, like, computers are gonna be crashing, and, like, hackers gonna be trying to break it, whatever. Like, it's just gonna be really awful.
Speaker 7:And then we're gonna see what actually happens empirically.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:And you can tell us, hey. Here's the stuff I promise my software will never do. Yeah. And we're gonna see if we can find a way to make it do that.
Speaker 1:Why why are you framing this as deterministic simulation? That sounds like a whole lot of nondeterministic stuff going on.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So the key is we have the the slightly crazy computer science thing we've done well, no. One of one of the slightly crazy things we've done is we've basically built a way to run any computer program fully deterministically, which is which is a little nuts. But it's really, really important because it gets rid of the, like, works on my machine thing forever. So if we find some really weird, really rare software problem, which only manifests one a billion times, but, like, you know, it launches the nuclear missiles, and so you really don't want it to happen even one a billion times.
Speaker 7:We can perfectly reproduce that. So if we find it once, you can just replay it over and over and over again until you're able to fix it.
Speaker 1:Interesting. What's the What
Speaker 2:is the what is the like sci fi scenario that you're building against? Like, is this is part of this tie in? Like, I'm trying to understand why, like, specifically why you got the roommate three p because software testing is cool. But I imagine there's like kind of this like, you know, ten year vision, like, AGI vision where we need to test for that, you know, one out of a billion times that the nuclear missile codes get launched or the whole surface of the planet is blanketed with solar.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, you know, I think I think if you believe that we're about to go into, like, a very exciting AI future, then I think there's probably gonna be a whole lot more software written. Mhmm. And probably some of it's gonna be written by entities that are not like you and me. They're like some kind of AI agent.
Speaker 7:Maybe we don't fully understand them. Maybe we don't fully understand their incentives or their motivations or their failure modes or whatever. Seems like having a really, really good way of telling if software does what you think it does would be handy in that scenario.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. So somebody makes an an AI agent that that, like, processes, like, things that were faxed in, and there's, like, some you know, fax into a doctor's office, and there's some edge case where it it hires a private army and like tries to kill the fax machine company and you're like, well, an agent wrote this agent, so we need to actually test to make sure it's not like secretly like completely insane.
Speaker 7:Right. You've got that. And then you've also just got more prosaic and boring situations. Right? Like, I hired an AI agent to, like, write the next version of the United app and, like, oops.
Speaker 7:Like, I'm if I'm in the middle of booking a ticket when my subway train goes into a tunnel, it books, like, 10,000,000 tickets. Like, I don't I don't want that. United doesn't want that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2:No. I I like I like this opportunity. You can sell you can sell the product against like very real problems today and also get the and still like, you know, have the this, like, bigger, very, like, real kind of, like, sci fi outlet to it.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I I I have the interpretation of Roommate Ventures coming in. I don't have the interpretation of the implications of Jane Street coming in. Is this is this relevant to high frequency trading software, or are they just purely financial investors? Like, how strategic are they as a partner?
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah. So the the way we got Jane Street in this actually is just that they're they it started out as them being a customer. Okay. Wow. They've been one of our best and largest customers for, you know, a little under a year
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 7:And have really put the system through its paces and are using it to do some really, really cool stuff. Yeah. And, basically, what initially happened was we were raising a round. We planned to go the standard Silicon Valley route, you know, and and we were just gonna have Jane Street put in, like, a small amount of money as a strategic. And then they offered to lead the round, which we were not expecting.
Speaker 7:And, you know, we sort of thought about it, we were like, wait a minute. That's actually the coolest thing ever. Mhmm. Like, you know, what a what an endorsement and you know, from one of the greatest names in software, like, how can we not do this?
Speaker 1:Have you considered writing your code base in OCaml?
Speaker 7:I think I think it's likely that there's gonna be excellent OCaml support in our platform.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. That's the best news I've heard all day.
Speaker 2:Hit the gong for that. Very, very cool. That's great news. One of one of the more one of the more unique fundraising announcements we've had this year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is a fun fun project. I really like Well well well, congratulations, and and thank you so much for taking
Speaker 5:the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 2:This is I'm sure you'll be back on soon. Indeed. Sure. Thank you. I'm sure you're already getting unwanted term sheets, you know, hurled at you.
Speaker 1:I believe it.
Speaker 2:Enjoy enjoy processing those.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Awesome.
Speaker 7:Have a good one, guys.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Good to meet you.
Speaker 1:Have good And that brings us towards the end of our show. Perfectly timed 2PM on the dot. We are in fighting form. We're gonna play you out with some Christmas music, I suppose. In other news, markets are predicting that the time person of the year will either be the pope who's concerned about AI, the biggest promoter of AI, Sam Altman, the supplier of the hardware behind AI, Jensen, or just AI.
Speaker 1:It seems almost certain it's a lock that time 2025 person of the year will have something to do with AI. In other news where where else is oh oh, we didn't get to SpaceX news, but, it was rumored that SpaceX, told or is reported actually in the information by Katie Roof that SpaceX told their investors, we're aiming for a p IPO late twenty twenty six. Late twenty twenty six, we're gonna be a public company. But a lot of people are interpreting this, reading the tea leaves. You have Ken Kirtland saying, I'm not exaggerating.
Speaker 1:It's not doom posting to say this, but this is the end. They are not serious. They are not serious about any part of Mars if this is done. There's no world where shareholders will let you spend tens of billions of dollars with the express intent of no return, which is what Mars settlement is. In fact, it would be illegal, literally illegal to do so.
Speaker 1:Not true at all. Look at the metaverse. Look at what Meta did. If you have control over the company, you can you can spend what he said, $86,000,000,000 is what Zuck spent
Speaker 2:expecting SpaceX's telecom business Yes. To do tens of billions of profits Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. If you get big enough. I mean, SpaceX, I think, date has burnt something like 10,000,000,000 across all the fundraising. And a lot of that's been, like, secondary stuff. So, like, they haven't burnt that much.
Speaker 1:And, of course, people are dunking on Zuck right now for pulling back on the metaverse. Austin Allred had a good post here. He said, fire Mark Zuckerberg, fired you kinda botched this, he said, Mark Zuckerberg fired because he lost the company 77,000,000,000. Should probably consider that he also made his company 1,600,000,000,000.0. And so, the same thing could definitely be true.
Speaker 1:So I I believe if SpaceX went public, that would not necessarily take the foot off the gas of the Mars mission. I don't think that that's necessarily what would happen. But Dan Primak has a little bit more nuance of a take here talking about what might be happening behind the scenes. He says SpaceX prepping late twenty twenty six IPO per the information, not just Starlink, which is what people were rumoring. They'd spin out Starlink.
Speaker 1:I don't think that makes any sense. But this comes just after just comes just days after reports that OpenAI was weighing an entry into space. So maybe it's a bit of PR maneuvering given that Elon Musk doesn't seem to like having a public company. He took Twitter private, and then he wanted to take Tesla private too. And then, and then Katie Roof says, does he even have PR people?
Speaker 1:LOL. Dan Primak says, don't need PR people to have a PR strategy. And, yeah, he might have he might have he might have directly emailed all the investors that he knew would leak, you know, and that doesn't require a PR person. And so Elon actually chimed in. He said, there's been a lot of press claiming that SpaceX is raising money at $800,000,000,000, which is not accurate.
Speaker 1:SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many years and does periodic stock buybacks twice a year to provide liquidity for employees and investors. Valuation increments are a function of progress with Starship and Starlink, and securing global direct to sell spectrum greatly increases our addressable market. And one thing that and one other thing that is arguably most significant thus far. Blah blah blah blah blah. Anyway, ridiculous.
Speaker 2:John, I gotta say I'm bummed that we gotta end the show right now.
Speaker 1:We do. We do.
Speaker 2:You gotta get on with Pasadena.
Speaker 1:I do.
Speaker 2:You got some celebrating to do over in that in that area.
Speaker 1:Neck of the woods.
Speaker 2:I can't wait for tomorrow. I'm so happy to be back in the Ultradome. Yeah. Glad we don't have to travel for the rest of the year.
Speaker 1:No travel for
Speaker 2:the We're rest the hanging out.
Speaker 1:We're hanging out.
Speaker 2:We're in podcasting. The team is thrilled. We're thrilled. Thank you for hanging out with us today. Thank you, everyone.
Speaker 2:We love you all dearly.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Have an amazing evening. We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers. Bye.