$DJT Goes Nuclear, OpenAI in talks at $750B, 2025 Model Wars in Review | Brian Armstrong & Tarek Mansour, Simon Eskildsen

You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, December 18, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital capital.

Ramp.com.

Time is money save Both easy as corporate cards, bill pay accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. We got a video here that it has been promised to me. I saved this for the show. So this reaction. I haven't seen the video, but I've seen the metrics around the video. It's got 15,000 likes just on a quote tweet of it. I think it's gonna be very funny. Tyler was saying, you gotta watch this. So we're gonna pull this up. Pegasus quote tweeting. It says, this is OpenAI showing the public its financials once it goes public. Okay. It looks pretty good. Getting a haircut looks good. Oh, no. You know, I've been watching these haircut videos and they're actually incredibly good content because I saw one. I mean, obviously that one's very silly.

But dude, this, that, that, that, this video going viral, this guy's gonna be full gigachad mode within six months.

I guarantee it.

Guarantee it, guarantee it, guarantee it. But he just did that. He knew what was gonna happen. He did it to inspire himself to, I guess, looks for sure, for sure to start smashing.

I looked at a haircut video where it's incredibly sticky content because you're watching the guy describe what he wants and then at the very end, they show you a montage of the photos. And when it works out, obviously the joke there is that it's a downgrade, but when it works out, it's really satisfying. The payoff comes right at the end. Which of course is great for retention and average view duration. It's a growing format. It does make me wonder, like there are certain. Can every different vertical, can every different type of content become high retention? Or are there some things that are just more naturally payoff based?

Right, yeah.

Anyway, let me tell you about Adeo, the AI native CRM. Adeo builds scales and grows your company to the next level. We are in Arena Mag. This is breaking news. The latest edition of arena.

We had three martini lunch.

This is issue number six, Q4, 2025. Three martini lunch. And we are in here with a wonderful spread. Oh, there's a bunch of great people in here. Look at this. We got Daniel in here. I don't know if he's doxxed in.

This photo, actually, the growing one.

I think so. But there's a profile on some Archer Stuff, Some VTOL stuff.

Very nice.

We got California Forever in here.

Apparently we are having a YouTube issue, folks, you'll have to refresh the app if you want to avoid any type of lag.

Okay. Oh, they did a profile on a review of Dwarkesh Patel's the Scaling Era. A what is going on here? The Christmas spirit. That camera had one too many eggnogs. Yeah. Tyler also has the Scaling Era, an oral History of AI 2019-2025 by Dwarkesh Patel. There's a whole review of the book, and then, of course, you get the beautiful TVPN spread. Look at this.

There you go.

Isn't that great? I like that they kind of brought their own aesthetic on top of some photos that we took here in the Ultra Dome.

Very, very fun. They respected the brand.

Yeah, it looks great. And here's a photo of me and Jordy having breakfast, showing you what the day in the life is like. And then here's me reading the Wall Street Journal before the show starts. Life of Coogan, Coogan Mode. Very fun. I could take you through it, but you've heard the story and you can go subscribe to Arena Mag. You can read it online. Three Martini lunch. Interesting. I did want to comment on this. The art direction for the COVID art. I like Three Martini Lunch. It feels like a pretty big departure from the previous very. I feel like their previous covers were very collage based. So this is like a much more simple design. Still very.

At the same time, it's still very nostalgic.

Yes.

I mean, look at the back to a different.

Yeah, the back says the business of America is business. And it has a pager. That's something we haven't gotten into. A cigarette and an ashtray and a Casio watch, which is pretty cool. Pretty cool.

Classic. Anyways, back on the timeline.

Public.com, investing, for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing, trusted by millions. What's back on the timeline?

Katie Roof, one of the greatest scoop athletes of our time, a future Scoop hall of Famer, has a Scoop OpenAI.

She clearly has someone at OpenAI who loves her right now. She's been on scoop tear.

She says Scoop OpenAI could soon be worth 750 billion in a financing round. They've had early talks. Let's give it up for early talks. We prefer advanced talks, but early talks, you gotta start somewhere about raising tens of billions of dollars or even 100 billion. Company was last valued at 500 billion a few months ago. Tae Kim chimes in, says public markets are crushing OpenAI exposed stocks while private investors with visibility into OpenAI's metrics and internal numbers are piling in. Essentially both can't be right.

I trust Katie Roof reporting. So he's saying that it's bullish for OpenAI. That's his take from this.

Yeah. Maybe some of the publics have been oversold. That said. Yeah, I'll be interested to see how this round comes together again. Remember, I think it's a good time to be fundraising if you need tens of billions of dollars. If Warner Brothers ends up going with Netflix. Right. Because that was a huge. If you're raising tens of billions of dollars and you're not doing it from strategics like the hyperscalers, it pretty much has to be sovereign wealth funds.

And potentially the. If they pass on Warner Brothers, they have loose change in the couch cushions to toss OpenAI's way, they can collect to the tune of $10 billion checks potentially. But I mean, it does feel like OpenAI is at a bit of a. It feels like the vibes around OpenAI trough of disillusionment potentially going into plateau of productivity. It feels like they're turning it around. It feels like the new models and.

The products, I don't know. I haven't seen many people say I love 5.2. But then again, outside in the real world, clearly ask people what AI app they're using. That'll give you a lot of signal.

It just feels like, okay, maybe we're not in Baja Blast territory, but we know that every code red is followed.

By an equality adult mode. Adult mode is coming in January.

Yeah, maybe. But it does seem like a lot of the negativity has kind of worked its way through the markets traded down. There's maybe not another. It feels like we're finding a bottom. We're finding the footing of okay, reset. The narratives, rebuild back up. Like, can they catch up in this? Can they catch up in that? If you see a couple good charts, couple growth charts, then you're sort of back in business because.

And again, I feel like people got.

So negative as like, the point that I'm making is like. Is like a couple months ago it was like, it's Enron. It's going to blow up. It's zero. It's not going to work at all. And it does feel like we're turning the corner on that.

Maybe you muted the people that. That are still saying that because they're still saying it.

They're still saying it. Well, it just got old.

This was a funny post. Sam says, sell me this pen. Jensen says, I'll lend you the money to buy it. Of course, Jensen is investing money, but anyways, very good.

Let me tell you about linear. Meet the software, Meet the system. For modern software development, Linear streamlines work across across the entire development cycle from the roadmap to release Warner CEO David Zaslav and Netflix Co CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos on the Warner brothers lot. They took game day photo. They went out deliberately to just strut and just flax. And they clearly knew what they were doing. Hey. Hey.

Well, this is their new lot.

You point. You look over here, guys. Can we look over this direction? Okay, yeah, that's perfect. Snap, snap, snap. Okay. Yeah. You know that they know what they're doing. This looks like no hostile offer can get between us. We're bros. We're hanging out. This is a sign of strength.

Signs out. There's palm trees.

Yeah, this is them sending the signal. Sending a signal. Hey, we're excited to work together. We're excited to be in partnership, collaborating. There was one person who quoted this and was unhappy about where is.

They were saying that they weren't well dressed.

Yeah, they were saying that they weren't well dressed. And he was like, I'm. I'm kind of in that boat. It's not. It's not.

They threw on a blazer. They threw on their rocking blazers. Give them a break.

Hollywood executive style. That sort of like become the norm. Maybe we go back to the three martini lunches, guys. Maybe we throw on suits now that you guys are in business.

But this is also a good way for people that are maybe more on the tech side to start dressing up. You don't have to go from jeans straight into a suit. You can throw on a blazer. Right. Something to consider. Matt Levine is back. I've missed Christmas Eve and New Year's and the Fourth of July holidays for newsletters a lot smaller than this. This is as good as it gets for newsletter writers. And we can jump into the article. He says Warner doesn't trust Paramount. Revocable Trust, ESG side letters, IPO lockups, Destiny and doing deals over the holidays. Trust. If you're a normal person, most of your wealth is probably in your own name. But if you're one of the richest people in the world, you probably have a lot more complicated estate and tax planning, which probably means that a lot of your wealth is in trusts, legal arrangements that your lawyer set up to hold assets for you. Most simply, you might have a revocable trust, where your assets technically belong to the trust, but you have control over the trust assets, investment decisions, beneficiaries, etc. This can be useful for estate planning, but for most purposes, owning assets in a revocable trust is pretty much like owning them yourself. I regularly say that Mark Zuck, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuck owns a lot of shares of Meta, or that Elon owns a lot of shares of Tesla. Even though neither statement is exactly true, their trust own the shares, but for most practical purposes you can think of, they own them. This creates, I suppose, a small, dumb problem. Let's say you build big yachts and Mark Zuckerberg comes to you and asks to buy a billion dollar yacht. Naturally, he will pay you the billion dollars on completion of the yacht. You might ask him, well, do you have a billion dollars? And he might say, no, actually I don't. But the Mark Zuckerberg trust owns like a bajillion dollars worth of Meta stock and I control that, so I'm good. You find that persuasive. So you pull up the yacht sale contract. Who do you put in as the buyer? If you put Mark Zuckerberg, he has no money. If you put the Mark Zuckerberg trust, it has plenty of money now, but if it is a revocable trust, he can just take all the money shares out whenever he wants. It's revocable. If he changes his mind about the yacht, he can clean out the trust. You'll send the bill to the trust, but the trust will have no money and you'll be stuck with the yacht. Not that bad of a situation to be stuck with a billion dollar yacht, but if you're in the business of.

Selling them, you certainly want to be able to complete the transaction.

I get the point. Honestly, this is a pretty easy problem to solve. You put Mark Zuckerberg in the contract. He doesn't own the assets directly, but he controls the trust. So if he owes you a billion dollars, you can make him take it out of the trust. But maybe you'll get confused. Or he'll get confused and you'll end up signing a contract with the trust. Then if he changes his mind, he can zero out the trust and stiff you. I cannot imagine that this comes up a lot with yacht builders or anyone else. Elon Musk once did sign a contract to buy Twitter for 44 billion, then changed his mind and tried to get out of it. The fact that his wealth is mostly in a trust did not at any stage of the proceedings trouble anyone. He had signed his equity commitment in his own name. And everyone understood that if he was sued and lost, he'd have to pay with his trust money if necessary. And Twitter did sue him and he did pay. Fine, fine, fine. On the other hand, Paramount is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, breaking up Warner's deal to sell itself to Netflix Inc. And Paramount does not have nearly enough money to pay for Warner. Instead, much of the money behind the bid comes from Paramount chief executive Officer's dad, Larry Ellison. As of this writing, the fifth richest person in the world. Or rather it comes from his trust. And this would be one of the greatest tricks in the history of mergers and acquisitions. One major sticking point is Warner Brothers concern about the financing proposed by Paramount, which is led by David Ellison. A big part of the equity is backstopped by a trust that manages the wealth of his father Larry Ellison. Because it's a revocable trust, assets can be taken out of it at any time and Warner Brothers may have no recourse if that happens. The people said and Matt says ahahaha. Sure. The risk here is Warner throws over Netflix, pays at a $2.8 billion breakup fee and signs a deal to sell itself to Paramount for something like 108.4 billion in cash. For some reason, changing market conditions, regulatory difficulties and a change of heart by the Ellison's or a change of heart by their co investors, the Ellisons decide they don't want to close the deal. Quietly, in the comfort of his own home, without saying anything to Warner, Larry Ellison takes all of his stock out of the trust, leaving it empty. Yoink. He whispers to himself. Oops, never mind, Paramount tells Warner. Warner sues Paramount for specific performance, seeking to make it pay 108.4 billion and close the deal. LOL. We don't have that kind of money, says Paramount, which has a market capitalization of about 15 billion and about 3 billion of cash. When we signed the deal you knew that the money was coming from the Ellison trust. So Warner sues the Ellison trust for specific performance, seeking to make it pay 108 billion and close the deal. Lol. We don't have that kind of money, says the Ellison Trust. We did, sure, but the trust got revoked. Yoink. Adds Larry Ellison more loudly this time. So Warner sues Larry Ellison for the money. He says, who me? Says Larry Ellison. You have no deal with me. I don't even know what you're talking about. This is not my problem. This does not strike me as especially likely and it would obviously be bad for Paramount and the Ellisons. But I suppose it is possible and it would be a pretty fun trick. I talked about this a little bit yesterday on the show. This kind of situation today. Warner officially rejected Paramount's bid, advising shareholders not to sell their shares in Paramount's tender offer. Here is how Warner describes Larry Ellison's commitment or lack thereof. And this was the exact quote that I read yesterday, which was despite Paramount's headline claims, there is no equity commitment or backstop from the Ellison family for the offer. And I'll skip over the rest of that quote, but Matt continues, as far as I can tell, and somewhat bafflingly, this is correct. Paramount's own tender offer says that the Ellison equity commitment and guarantee will be from the Lawrence Ellison revocable Trust, not from Larry Ellison himself. The offer points out that the trust is rich. The Ellison Trust has financial resources well in excess of what would be required to meet its financial obligations under the equity commitment letter, including many other assets and financial resources available to it. Record and beneficial ownership of approximately 1.16 billion shares of Oracle stock with a market value of approximately 252 billion as of the date of this offer to purchase. But as the name says, it's revocable. This seems extremely fixable. Have Larry Ellison signed the commitments personally? William Cohen reports that the whole situation is trains passing in the night and quote, the Ellisons believe they can still be sued for specific performance to fund the deal. He quotes a person familiar with their thinking saying that there is no financing condition in the deal and Paramount and the Ellison Redbird along with our lenders are legally obligated to close regardless of future financial or business performance at Paramount. That is not an impossible thought to convey in merger papers. And yet so far they apparently haven't. And then.

Do you want to read back just. Well, I mean the ESG said there's a difference story. I'm sure. I don't think it has anything to.

Do with the.

Matt Levine writes like multiple little blurbs. But the real trick is obviously create a revocable trust and name it the irrevocable Trust. Can you just do that One simple trick? One simple trick.

M and A lawyers hate this one simple trick.

I am wondering if this is very common. I mean Matt Levine talks about this but like why did Elon not do this during the Twitter buyout?

That is a good question.

Because it says Elon did sign the contract in his in his own name, which he could have just done to the trust and then he could have backed out when he wanted to.

Well, I mean, one thing is, like, it feels like Elon, like, just rips checks and was very much just like, yeah, I'm good for it. I'm going for it. I don't want to play this game at all, like, because I'm all in. You have the full faith and credit of the bank of Elon Musk, essentially.

Yeah.

I mean, also, do we even know that this is legally feasible, that you can just revoke the trust? Is that just, like 100%? Totally fine?

Has that happened before? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if it. I actually don't know if it's happened before, but it certainly seems like something that you are going to. Like we talked about with, like, when you make an offer for a big company, there's like, the expected value of the close. And saying, hey, we have this backstop is something that increases the probability that you close, that the financing condition is met. But then saying, okay, we're doing it in a trust or a revocable trust takes that down a little bit. But again, there's a world where all of the different capital providers lined up and you're not even talking about trust, revocable or irrevocable, because you never get there because all the different funds are saying, are jumping. I want to get in. I have to get my stake. I want 10% of this. Here's 10 billion. I'm ready to go. And so you don't even care about the backstop or you don't care about the trust because everyone's lining up. The only reason that maybe they're in this scenario is because it feels like. It feels like Warner Brothers did actually sort of kick the tires on the Paramount deal and get to the end state of evaluating it and saying, oh, well, like we've heard, you know, you mentioned, Jared Kushner's in. Like, is Affinity Partners really in? And when they pushed them, Affinity Partners seemed like they might be out.

I don't know.

I don't know exactly what happened, but there's a variety of stakeholders that came in, and the level of. It's not just that they were thumbs up, thumbs down. There were some that were. The people said that they were thumbs up. They wound up being thumbs down. Some of them were, you know, here, and they wound up being there, you know, little, little bit edgy, depending on a lot of different folks, where it's like, you know, it's like putting together any other financing round. Like, you know, ideally, every. Every investor that goes into a seed stage company or series a company is like, yes, I'm good regardless of who else is in the round. Every once in a while you get VCs who say, yeah, I'll sign a term sheet, but term sheets are non binding and we'll see how the round pencils out. I'll sit on this signature. I'm not gonna sign this, I'm not gonna wire.

Or they would give a verbal. And thinking that Sequoia is gonna come in. Sequoia doesn't. And then they're like, oh.

Or vice versa. They give the verbal, they sit on it, they're not wiring, they're maybe leaning back. And then Sequoia comes in or founders founder and dreeson. Or someone comes in and then they're like, wait, wait, wait, you said that I could get 2% of this company for 100k. Like give me my terms. And you're like, you didn't sign that doc. You were very much leaning out. I've been in that situation. It's never super fun, never super fun conversation. But you know, it ain't over till.

The till the one bank. A little bit more from Matt Levine. He's talking about lockups, specifically Space X. We all know they're trying to go public at a one and a half trillion dollar valuation. They want to raise 30 billion of stock. Sorry, 30 billion via the IPO. And Matt says the raise is not that big relative to the valuation. But then he says the problem is not 30 billion. The problem is the other 1.47 trillion. And he goes on to say, what happens if 500 billion of SpaceX stock is unlocked at a single moment and people are like, I've been locked up for, for. I have had limited liquidity for. Let's say you're an employee who's been there 10, 15 years. You're like, there could be a kind of a rush to get liquidity. And so he goes on to say that in the conversations that Wall street has been having with SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI, there is some conversations that would create a scenario with. I'll just read it. Specifically, investment bankers are starting to prepare, discussing proposed solutions to help win deals. At least two large banks largely ruled out a standard IPO lockup period of either 90 to 180 days and are discussing how to design a staggered lockup release for companies like the ones I mentioned. And then he says, if you're a shareholder of a trillion dollar private company, you're used to getting limited periodic liquidity events where you can sell shares. Why would that change when the company goes public? So pretty interesting.

The dance of taking SpaceX public. It's going to be an interesting year for IPOs. There's a bunch of great companies that are finally mature enough to potentially go out. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta's AI powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about a massive ipo. Wall street gets early taste of hot year expected for IPOs. Shares of a company called Medline began trading in the biggest new stock listing since 2021. Wall street is getting a glimpse of what could be the biggest year ever for IPOs in the US after four years of choppiness in the market. You didn't even let me get to the number. The medical Supply Co. Raised $6.3 billion in its stock offering. The stock closed at $41 a share. That's up 41% from its $29 IPO price. So, massive offering. It's the biggest IPO since rivian, actually, in 2021. And the ticker is MDLN. We're the largest company no one's ever heard of, said the chief executive, Jim Boyle. He said he and his team have spent the past year and a half educating the investment community. Ahead of the stock offering. You got to tell everyone, what do you do before. Before you ask for their money? Because if you've been operating behind the scenes, no one's going to know to invest or be excited. So the offering could help set the stage for some of the most highly anticipated IPOs. With rocket maker SpaceX, AI company Anthropic and mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac among the companies looking at listings in 2026. OpenAI also rumored there's a couple other companies that might come out.

It isn't just, well, there's a bunch of tech. There's a bunch of tech darlings that look kind of like infants in comparison.

To, but still might be maturity to go out.

Very notable. Like companies that are basically at Figma scale.

Sure, yeah, yeah. Or even beyond. But yeah, I mean, for a long time, you know, if you're a $10 billion company in the tens of billions, the Decacorns, any Decacorn should be comfortable going out potentially, as long as they're not in some crazy R and D cycle and they actually have the core financials humming at this point. Bankers say their teams have been busy in recent weeks pitching companies to be lead Advisor on their IPOs, marking a pickup in activity. Many startups had eschewed going public in recent years. I'm not sure that's entirely true anymore, said Magdalena Henrich, head of US Technology Equity Capital Markets, a Bank of America. Bankers are hoping Medline, which is backed by Blackstone, Carlisle and Hellman Friedman, helps to close out a positive year for positive year for IPOs. Well, speaking of Blackstone, we have a little Christmas present under the tree.

Why don't we open it?

The good folks over at Blackstone sent us a presentation and we will open it live on the stream here. So have you heard that the CEO of Blackstone is becoming a dj? Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon gave him a stamp of approval and they sent over this very cool tape recorder. I don't know if this is a real tape recorder. I don't know if I have this queued up, but you can maybe hear it. They went like super viral for this because they made a entire, like they basically clowned every startup vibe reel. Oh, you. You have a cinematic vibe reel. We had our whole team sing a jingle and filmed it and sent it out on a physical and then they sent it out on a physical thing. This is very, very cool. Portable cassette.

Is that made to look like a cassette tape?

I think it's actually. No, I think it's actually a cassette tape.

Yeah.

This is crazy.

Wow.

I didn't even know we knew how to make cassettes.

This is a very, very good drop. Like, just as a drop, it's hilarious. It also feels like them leaning in because I know that the response to that Blackstone video was not overwhelmingly positive. People are like, what is this? But clearly it's an inside joke and like the team finds it funny and they were doing it tongue in cheek and they were having fun with it and they have a lot of 1980s throwback cameos there.

That's great.

Anyway, thank you to good folks over at Blackstone for sending over this and go listen to the full song and watch the video if you haven't already. Numeral Compliance handled numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. In our newsletter today we did a little review of the Model wars. Of course, our newsletter. You can get it at tbpn.com, tech analysis and news. We have a daily op ed, top headlines and more. Sign up@tbpn.com so what a year. Just in terms of model releases. August 7 OpenAI releases GPT5 September 29 Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.5. Then the day after OpenAI releases Sora to the same day, Meta releases the Meta ray bans displays. November 3, OpenAI and Amazon announce a partnership valued at 38 billion. November 12, 5.1 drops from OpenAI. November 17, XAI releases Grok 4.1. November 18, Google releases Gemini 3. Massive response to that. It's crazy that that was just one month ago. November 20th, Nanobanana Pro comes out. Then November 24th, Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.5. We talked to Sholto about that. And then December 1st, Deepseek releases Deepseek version 3.2. And of course, before the end of the year, OpenAI had to fire back with GPT 5.2 on December 11th. And then December 17th, Google releases Gemini 3 Flash.

Also today, I think OpenAI released 5.2 codecs like the coding model version.

They're starting to stagger them out a little bit more.

Well, I do.

Which I think is smart. Right.

I was wondering about this with Logan. Do you think there'll be a period where we get on annual release cadences and it's just like, oh, the model is like GPT 2026. I'm running the 26 model. Or do you think it'll be random?

We're not quite at the plateau where. I think that would make sense, like right now, where every company's fighting for market share and like, if you can release tomorrow, that's a lot better than releasing.

But there is a world where. There is a world where OpenAI takes 5.1 and 5.2 and says, you know what, that's GPT6, that's GPT7. Right. Like, they could. Even people would be like, whoa, this is like, really incremental. So they use the 0.1, but they also didn't do its 5.0.1.

I think the reason. I think the reason that there's so much pressure to launch is there's pressure to be at the top of the benchmarks. Right. In other product categories, it's not like there's like this, like, very specific way that you can.

What are you talking about? In cars? Nurburgring.

Sure, sure. But I'm talking in, like, enterprise software, typically, it's not like somebody launches a product and then somebody else launches a product and investors can look at it and be like, well, okay, I think this one is just objectively better.

Yeah.

And. And so I think that, you know, just given the goal to sit at the top of the benchmarks, you know, there's going to be a massive.

The benchmark is like ARR. Numbers that you might give to the press or fundraising, which, you know, traditionally done to every 12 to 18 months, but sometimes can happen four times in a year.

Yeah.

You're a certain company. What do you think?

Also, I just want to say, Brandon, who wrote the, like, the piece, he said at the end, he said, it seems like the doomers, people who believe AI will turn us all into paperclips, have been defanged, which is good. I disagree that that's true. It seems like AI is like. I think there's this whole narrative where, like, oh, AI is stagnating.

Yeah.

Where it's like, bro, look at the benchmarks. Like, it's like it's on the trend.

Look at the benchmarks. They're saturating. It's incredible.

Exactly.

If the benchmarks are sat. I mean, what does that tell you? If benchmarks are saturated, we don't even have good benchmarks anymore because models are way too good.

Gabe says benchmarks are just as useful as a used piece of toilet paper.

Exactly. That's the whole point. If models were bad, benchmarks would be useful.

So, I mean, the risk is like, there was a moment where just multiplying two really, really big numbers together on a computer, you needed more memory to do, like, 1,000 digits times 1,000 digits. Your basic calculator had a limit. And then eventually it got to the point where you have enough RAM that this computer here can sit and, I don't know, calculate the number of digits in PI to 10,000 digits probably pretty quickly. Progress along that line is not necessarily the same line of progress towards human labor replacement. Even. We got calculators that can calculate any math perfectly in fractions of a second. And it was useful in a million ways. But no one's calling that, like, AGI. Asi. It can do anything.

Yeah. Because that's like specific intelligence.

Exactly. Specific intelligence. And so. And so we've created a bunch more lanes of specific intelligence, but people feel still dissatisfied with the fact that, yes, the spikes are getting longer, but it doesn't feel like the intelligence is getting any less spikier. That's what Brandon's feeling. There's nothing about the benchmarks. When you show me a new model card, I'm just like, cool, Spiky. The spikes got spikier. Awesome. There's nothing where it's like, oh, okay, it's no longer spiky.

Sure.

I mean, when I use coding models, they're way better.

Yeah, that's one of the spikes. That's one of the spikes.

That's even bigger enough spikes. Then, like, what's difference between a ton of spikes and, you know, just like a circle. Right. Like, you know.

Yeah. This is the. This is the diagram. You've seen the diagram, right? Where you have the circle with the little tiny spikes, where the.

There are benchmarks that, like. There was the vend. It was like anthropic bend.

Yeah.

Where Claude runs a vending machine.

Yeah.

In the beginning of the year, they released the first paper. I don't know when it was. It was a couple months ago. They released, like, the first part of paper, and cloud was, like, horrible. It lost a ton of money running vending machine. Then they. I think today they released a new one.

Yeah.

Where it's like, cloud is profitable.

Yeah. We need to get you a massive winter coat to get through this. AI Winter. Because the winter is happening.

I'm telling you, there's no way I winter.

There is. There is a. There's an. I mean, it's the age of research. Okay. The age of research.

Can you imagine? It's. It's like June next year. It's hot in the ultra dome. Tyler, just keep the coat on, buddy. You can't take it off till it's over.

Till it's over. No, I mean, the progress.

People want AI to stagnate so bad. People. So many people want that. They do, and it's not happening, bro. It's like the models are getting better.

Literally everyone without bags is saying it's stagnating.

Well, no, because all those people are like, Kurt Pathy. Oh, like, I missed Nvidia or whatever.

You think Kurt Pathy's. Like, I missed Nvidia, so I got to go trash AI.

Well, Karpathy, I think he's not. I think he's very excited about what AI is like right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he's.

Well, I think we can all agree, Tyler, that it's the age of research, but it's also the age of deals.

Okay.

We gotta talk about Trump media and technology. This morning I woke up and, you know, a lot of people that, you know, do like, mental health podcasts, they say, look at your phone. Phone within 5 seconds, opening your eyes, just immediately connect with the Internet and just sort of start kind of marinating in all the notifications that you maybe got over the last eight hours. That's what I did this morning. I opened my eyes, I immediately grabbed my phone. I see this push notification. I think it was from Bloomberg that Truth Social parent to merge with nuclear fusion firm in a $6 billion deal and I thought I was dreaming still because it just seemed insane. Trump's been so active this year on the deal making side. Who would have thought he had another multi billion dollar deal to do this year. So of course Trump Media and Technology Group, the social media and crypto company part owned by President Trump, said it would develop a utility scale fusion power plant.

Fusion, not fission.

Correct. President Trump's social media company, which recently expanded into streaming and cryptocurrency, is now entering its fourth act fusion power, promising but still unproven source of alternative energy. DJT and Tay Technologies said Thursday they had agreed to an all stock merger that the company's valued at more than 6 billion. The deal would be a metamorphosis for Trump Media, the money losing parent company of Truth Social Media, a social media platform that has struggled to gain market share beyond serving as the main online megaphone for President Trump. Mr. Trump is the company's largest shareholder with a large stake worth more than 1 billion that is held in a trust. We're trust maxing, of course. Managed by Don Jr. Who is a Trump Media board member. The company, based in Sarasota, Florida has only a few dozen full time employees and has recorded tens of millions of losses in recent years. The merger with Tay would create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies, according to the release. The company said they begin they intend to begin construction on the first utility scale fusion power plant next year with plans to build additional plants in the future. So the stock is up, of course, up pretty dramatically today. The CEO over at Tay, Mitchell Bendenbauer, says we've got the tools and the tech and the engineering. What we were lacking was the capital. So I did a. I went over to Gemini and got a little background on Tay Technologies. Interesting company. It's the tae stands for Tri Alpha Energy, which is pretty, I think a pretty cool name.

It's also good advice if you're a beta.

Just try being an Alpha or just rebrand.

Rebrand.

Rebrand to an Alpha. Yeah, actually I used. Yeah, that was.

I use Try Try or T R? I not T R, Y not try being an Try Try Sigma.

Try whatever works. Sigma Energy would be a great name for a small modular reactor company.

I mean there's a trading firm, Two Sigma and it's two guys.

No, but Sigma Lone Wolf, you know.

That they had like a founder breakup. Because they were literally Two Sigmas.

No, because one of them was Two.

Sigma T o o o no. I think the nominative determinism is that is that you put two lone wolves together and it didn't work and they were fighting constantly. So the Two Sigma guys broke up.

Anyway, so people are gonna talk about this. The company was founded in 1998 and spent over 25 years developing a unique approach to fusion that focuses oneutronic power energy generation that produces no harmful neutron radiation. They have raised from. I believe it's Google. Google, Chevron and Goldman Sachs. So wow, okay, great to see them all get some liquidity or at least shares in a company that is liquid.

Sure. So does that mean Google is on the truth social cap table now?

Google owns a piece of the president's. I mean, I actually can't. It's possible they got some liquidity along the way, but it seems more likely that Google now has a nice slog in DJT social media.

Interesting.

Wait, I didn't even think about that. Because this is happening at the top co at djt. So they have exposure to fusion, cryptocurrency, social media and streaming.

I mean Google famously never got Google Circles working their Facebook competitor. They have YouTube obviously a behemoth. But in true social networking, you know, they've struggled. Maybe this is a foothold for them. Yeah, roll in the entire thing. At some point, you know, people are going to talk trash about this like, oh, what is a social network doing? Building energy assets. But you look at what Amazon's doing. Building massive data centers. Where for aws, Amazon owns Twitch. That's a social network. It's a streaming platform. What else does Amazon own? Well, they own some diesel generators for backup power at the data centers. Fusion theoretically cleaner. Who would have thought that out of the Silicon Valley tech people they would be using diesel while the big guy is using clean energy to power his social network. Something there.

Fascinating. Fascinating stuff.

Anyhow, let me tell you about fall generative media platform for developers develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.

Trey in the chat says this is such a weird deal. Tae is a legit company. Hmm.

Maybe they're all legit. Maybe they're all going legit. Maybe it works out.

I don't know.

I mean, fusion's hard.

What if true social just puts up monster, monster numbers? I mean, it's kind of funny. So hard to call this legit right now. It really is an interesting, interesting test given the that when I type Truth social into my browser, effectively the homepage is just Donald Trump's profile. And they do have a lot of ads on here and it'll be interesting to understand, like, what is this webpage actually worth?

Well, we'll find out. I mean, Truth Social, I think if you went back in time a year or two ago when Truth Social was started, which I believe Trump was out of the office. He was not president when he started it, and you asked anyone, like, what will the. What will the terminal value of this asset be? Everyone would be like, like, it's not going to be over a billion dollars. And then when it went out, it was like, okay, yeah, maybe they expect it, but it's going to like, trade down a ton. It's like, I think it's still a multibillion dollar company. Right. DJT, what's the market cap?

4.

4 billion still, like, that's higher than a lot of people thought.

That's it traded up almost 40% just today, so.

Yeah, well, we were doing a deep dive on the company a year ago, so, you know. But categories, you know, there's alpha here.

What categories is DJT not in?

Space?

Pharma, Robotics.

Robotics. Oh, wait, no, no, they're in pharma.

Right, Pharma. So I think TAE does have a biotech division, a life sciences division.

Okay.

So I'm very bullish on them kind of going into pharma.

Yeah. You got to go further out on the sci Fi curve. No one's pitching a time travel company yet. I think that that's an interesting area to get into. What happens after you're traveling through space? You must travel through time, the fourth dimension.

I mean, you could break time travel into life sciences. Right. Because you can have the. You freeze yourself and you wake up in 20 years. You can't go back, though.

Yeah. Dyson Sphere. No one's come out and said, we're the company that's going to do the Dyson Sphere. It's been much more incremental divisions. Anyway.

Truth Joshua is also getting into the prediction market game.

No way.

Launching a native prediction market feature in the app.

It's crazy that they're not.

I wonder if it'll be like predict trade on the content of Trump's next post.

That would be fascinating.

Very fascinating. I mean, it's just an interesting. I am interested to see how the future presidents approach business. Right. Who was the guy with the peanut farm?

Jimmy Carter.

He got into a little hot water because of his peanut farm. I think he didn't fully divest.

No, he did divest, but he still.

Got in hot water.

No, it's just remarkable because the peanut farm was so small and so insignificant in the US economy and even in his personal balance sheet. But the fact that he was saying, look, I don't want any idea of impropriety, so I'm going to divest from a small peanut farm that I'm associated with so that no one can say that I'm in the pocket of big peanut or I'm proud or little peanut. And so the fact that Jimmy Carter divested from the peanut farm, he was not in big oil or railroad barren or associated with banking. He had very little conflict of interest and he reduced it even further. That's always been a sign of what great looks like. And it's been a role model for some presidents. Some presidents have looked and said, well, if Jimmy Carter did it this way, I should also do it this way anyway. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. There is a crazy story in Joe.

Weisenthal, by the way. One more he Sundays, sharing that TJT is up 35% to a new 30 day high. And Joe says Trump has been in founder mode for a long time getting all kinds of criticism about the business from people who aren't actually in the arena.

It is crazy the degree to which he is associated with successful technology founder. Truly like billions of dollars in market cap.

People can take have their issues with the president but they cannot deny that. They cannot say with a straight face that he is not a technology.

He's never founded a unicorn tech company.

He's never taken a social media app public.

You can't say that.

You can't say that. He's never listen, he's never merged with a nuclear fusion company backed by Chevron, Google and Goldman Sachs for sure.

Dave, you've seen this chart. The AI investment cycle visualized. Almost $1 trillion has been invested into AI so far. And that may just be the start. Look at this graph. This is an interesting way to visualize the flow of money because we see it as these moments in time. A $10 billion deal here, $100 billion deal here, deal there. This is showing the investment over time. And you can see, you know, Nvidia flowing to Amazon and all the different companies. Where's OpenAI? OpenAI is just flowing around. It's just a cool little like, you know, data visualization. I thought this was fun to look at. Anyway.

Did you see Brett Adcock has a new startup?

No.

Yeah. Figure CEO Brett Adcock launches new AI lab with 100 million in funding wow. Brett Adcock, of course, the CEO of robotics startup Figure AI who we believe might be might have some big news soon. Based on Based on their holiday party, Deadmau has started a new AI lab called HARK which will be funded by 100 million of his personal capital. According to a copy of a memo Adcock sent to Figure employees and investors on Thursday. Seen by Stephanie Palazzolo, the AI lab will be focused on building human centric AI which can think proactively, recursively and care deeply about people. Hark's first cluster of GPUs went online on Monday, Memo said. Though it couldn't be learned how large the cluster was. Adcock will remain the CEO of Figure in addition to his new role at HARC, Haarc continues the trend of AI startup CEOs founding new companies while remaining at their old one. Remember Richard over at U launched a new lab himself. More broadly, well known researchers and executives have raised billions of dollars for so called NeoLabs in recent months which hope to exploit new approaches to developing models. Figure previously raised nearly 2 billion in funding from investors including Parkway, Nvidia, Microsoft, et cetera. So anyways, interesting that he is diversifying when figures valuation has just been going through the roof.

He also has a company that does like metal detectors at schools right along those lines he is a serial entrepreneur. It's a bunch of stuff. Anyway, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Tyler clearly has an alt Tyler Glial. Tyler clearly put this in the in the show notes Tyler. Not our Tyler, but this other Tyler says can't wait for this AI bubble to pop so we can all go back to normal. Just like how the Internet completely disappeared after the dot com bubble popped. It's another bullish take for AI. It's not going anywhere.

You agree? Yes, it's a great take.

It is a great take and 18,000 people agree it's a great take. I also think it's a great take. But this doesn't seem so fast takeoff build more Internet build which is slow takeoff. The Internet has slow takeoff. Everyone thought it was going to be the Internet is the superhighway. It's going to be 1000x growth. Yahoo is going to be worth a trillion dollars and then kind of settled in. Took a while for things to find use cases find value but eventually it did transform everything. But this time.

Yeah, this sounds different exactly. Because this time we have the Internet, so it's way faster to do distribution.

Yes.

I don't want to. You weren't even alive, Tyler. I don't even want to.

I was racking servers in a data center while you were in the cradle. Meltem says a lot of navel gazing about venture. There are a lot of ways to make a couple hundred million dollars. There are a reasonable number of ways to make a billion. There are very few ways to make tens of billions of dollars. This makes a $1 billion fund with 10x DPI obscenely impressive. Is this a subtweet of someone in particular? Is someone saying, this isn't. This isn't so several? So Mike Chan says, ain't no 1 billion dollar fund doing 10x DPI. And Meltzer says several have, which is wild.

I'm trying to find in the comments a fund that actually did this. And I. I can't think of any personally.

I'm sure they're. I'm sure they're out there. I'm sure they're out there, but I don't know. It's. Yeah, all of that's impressive.

Okay. More importantly, what's going on? Streamer cut the Apple Vision Pro's weight in half. Whoa.

That's genius. This is innovation. This is crazy innovation.

Wow.

Imagine walking into an office and every person there just locked in with a balloon.

This is somehow more cyberpunk than just the default. Put the big screen on your face. I like this.

And people say the Chinese can only copy and they can't invent new stuff.

That's not true.

Not true.

Completely disproven with this Vision Pro helium balloon.

This would be genius. So imagine just being able to. If you're a class clown. Coded, which I certainly am. Imagine walking around the office and just. With a little needle.

No, no, no, no, no, no. I think it doesn't actually.

It's not going to hurt them. It's still strapped to their head.

But you're popping their balloon. Then they have to go get more helium. And helium scarce resource.

True, true. But I would hope they. Look, he's got a big canister there. He's got plenty. He's got a big.

You should not be popping this. And you know why? Because Ty in the chat says this should be a blimp. And this is very blimp coded, so you should allow this.

I want this guy to make a personal blimp. It's just like a harness you can put on with enough helium to just take you up.

Yeah, I think the Mythbusters did that you just get a bunch of balloons. Yeah.

And it worked.

Did they? Doing that and then skydiving down would be pretty cool. You should work on that over the winter break.

Well, whatever you watch in your Apple Vision Pro, make sure it's restreamed one livestream, 30 plus destination. If you want to multi stream go to restream.com oh this is so, so funny that Alpha Ton Capital. Did you see this Alpha Ton Capital post Big news. Alpha Ton a ton of alpha. We got a ton of alpha over here at Alpha Ton Capital. We're making a historic $30 million strategic investment in Anduril industries. And they tag them said we are investing in the future of defense tech and the convergence of decentralized AI with next gen national security. This is a strategic bet on the companies of unprecedented investment positions. Alpha Ton at the forefront of next generation defense technology infrastructure, marking a pivotal moment in the convergence of public markets and advanced national security capabilities. Nasdaq, Aton. And so they're trying to become an Anduril Holdco basically or treasury company. Treasury company. And Palmer just quote tweets them into the stratosphere by saying Alpha Ton is lying. This is not true. Public heads up to CEO Brittany Kaiser. Own your data now. The whistleblower who is Bitcoin Alpha Ton Capital, I guess that's the owner of this. You do not have permission to use my trademarks to defraud your investors. And Brittany says, hey Palmer, we signed an agreement to purchase economic exposure to Anduril shares through an SPV and to accumulate more exposure over time and and offer access via formal secondaries product. Given our network's demand for your innovative tech, I will issue a clarification. And Palmer says that isn't what you and your company said though to be extremely clear, Anduril has to authorize these types of transfers and I will not authorize it. Wow. And Serigua is there saying so much nonsense fraud happening in these layered SPVs. This is such a crazy, crazy moment.

What is the history of this company? So the company went out at $280 per share in December of 2020. It's now sitting at exactly 69 cents.

Huh.

So I wonder what they have been up to. But yeah, I mean that was a crazy. It looks like somebody like this looks like an AI bot is just like posting. But this is a public company.

Yeah, it does look like just some sort of like complete slop scam. Like you would assume that. You would assume that if you go down this particular Funnel, you wind up at like, hey, you know, like, send me some random crypto or something. Like. It feels very scammy and it's. I mean, you know, Palmer is sort of calling it a scam, but it is a public company, I guess.

Yeah. Well, I'm sure Anderil's legal counsel will really enjoy having a nice calm holiday.

Weekend, I'm sure, while they clean this mess up. One of many, but champagne problem. Let's come back to this later because we have our guests in the Restream waiting room. While we're bringing them in, let me tell you about Cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer. Devin, crush your backlog with a personal AI engineering team. Merry Christmas to everyone. We have Brian Armstrong from Coinbase and Tarek is back on the show. So many repeat guests. It's so great to see both of you. Congratulations on all of the fantastic success. Brian, would you mind kicking us off with a little high level overview of the news? Good to see you.

Yeah, sure. Good to see you guys again. Well, we had a great product event yesterday in San Francisco. We announced the Everything exchange. So we've got stock trading on there, we've got prediction markets, we've got millions of tokens now trading through decentralized exchanges, we've got simple derivatives. We announced a ton of stuff yesterday and one of the big ones was prediction markets, which we're happy to partner with Kalshi on. We love Kalshi. They've been awesome to work with.

That's great.

And prediction markets are huge. They're an important asset class for people who are trading them. But it's also a way for people to get information about what's going to happen in the world. So it's kind of an alternative to traditional media. It's entertainment, it's everything. And yeah, Kalsheet is awesome.

So talk to me about how the Kalsheet integration actually works. Is it more like, Is this a B2B deal? Will a Coinbase customer actually be seeing the Kalshi logo? Will they need if they have two accounts? So the accounts linked. How are you thinking about the integration kind of taking shape over the next year or however you can talk about it?

Yeah, well, it's a white labeled integration and Tarek can talk more about his strategy of being a provider to lots of different companies. So it made it really easy to integrate. I mean, it's not an exclusive arrangement.

Right.

So we can integrate with other ones. We could launch our own. But for right now, we're very happy building on top of Kalshi, it's allowed us to get to market really quickly. And from a Coinbase point of view, I'd say just, you know, tradfi and crypto is intersecting. Or you could say another way to say it would be that crypto is just eating all financial services. So Coinbase is the leader in the space. We've got the most trusted brand, we've got the most deep crypto expertise. We're storing more crypto than any other company in the world, by far, about $500 billion of assets. And so if they can trade everything where their assets reside, it's our key to winning.

Tarek, take me through how this plays into your growth strategy, your growth trajectory for the next year. Is this just a new way, a new top of funnel? Is this actually building up more liquidity, opening up different markets? Are we going to see different Kalashi markets because of this partnership? How do you think things are going to evolve over the next year?

Yeah, maybe. Let me answer, actually, at a personal level, you know, I don't know if you saw Luana street yesterday, which is funny. The first time we actually both interfaced with Coinbase was when we got the $100 of free crypto our freshman year at MIT.

Amazing.

Nice.

So we had to sign up. We got $100 in like, you know, a decade later, where parting with Coinbase, just like an amazing kind of personal moment, but from a person, from a company perspective, our goal has been sort of there's a first party product, the cash.com, but you know, the same time building an exchange. And each of these products require liquidity and liquidity has a bit of a sort of this aspect of more liquidity gets more liquidity. And as you partner with sort of brokerages or you know, large platform with, as Brian said, like huge customer base, huge deposits, that brings more flow to the exchange, which improves the liquidity and thus the product for everybody else, including Coinbase itself. So we're very excited about this partnership. You know, I believe, you know, there's going to be like a long kind of range of markets available on Coinbase that people can participate in. And over time we're going to be adding increasingly more markets. So lots of work to do. This is just a start.

How like you guys spend a ton of time talking to users. And I also feel like you guys have both gone viral for different things that you've talked about related to prediction markets over the last couple weeks. And everybody online is going to form their opinion of why prediction markets are Good or bad or this or that. But like, how yet? Maybe I just kind of wanted to understand like how consumers feel maybe on your side, Brian, I'm assuming you and the team spend a bunch of time talking to people and understanding what users want out of prediction markets on the Coinbase app and what they're most excited about.

Yeah, well, obviously sports is such a big category that is driving a lot of demand right now. And I think that that's an important use case that we see from our customers that there's demand for that. I think there's a lot of open questions about how that's going to be treated in society and go through the courts and everything. And we think ultimately the CFTC will have federal preemption here and a bunch of states are a little grumpy about that, but that's fine. But prediction markets is much broader than just sports, right? It's people betting on economic indicators and trying to figure out is the Suez Canal going to be open next month, and political outcomes. And I think the number of markets could just be dramatically higher. And like 1% of people are using it as an asset class to trade, but like 99% of people looking at these are using it as a way to figure out what's going to happen in the world next. So it's actually broader. It's something like an alternative to traditional media, I think. Actually, Tarek told me a really powerful idea which is that policymakers could actually use this to determine what are the best policies to implement.

Right?

Like, let's say you're trying to put out some policy to try to build more housing in San Francisco or to reduce unemployment. You could actually put this on a prediction market, get real signal from the market about what would happen if these were actually implemented, and then use that to choose the best policy. So how prediction markets are a really powerful tool.

That example in particular, who are the market participants in that situation? Because I could imagine, I mean, I think a lot of people's big concern is that you end up with, is it like, if I'm a big housing developer or something like that, I could potentially get in, you know, try to influence policy through like sort of like trading that market. And maybe so I don't know, I think part, part of why, like you got anybody in the project prediction market space keeps going viral is like in any of these situations, I feel like there ends up being like, it's easy to imagine like some kind of negative externalities, but I guess that's the case for all new technology yeah, yeah.

Well, Tarek should talk more about it. But I think the game theory is so interesting because there's parties on both sides who stand to gain or lose. And if you really believe that the housing market would be better for your business, whatever, you can go invest in that contract. But if you're wrong, you stand to lose a bunch of money. So it's actually the best signal that you can get with people having real skin in the game. Because think about what's the alternative. It's essentially pollsters running around and surveying people, and there's kind of like people's revealed preference versus their stated preference. Sometimes people will state, oh, my preference is X. But the revealed preference turns out to be actually something different because there's real skin in the game. So I think prediction markets have much stronger signal than traditional polling. But I don't know. Tarek, you're the expert here.

What do you think?

We've dealt with this a lot. Right back last year when we were fighting the government to legalize election markets and we won that lawsuit, the criticism was, could people kind of use money to influence the odds, move them up or down and either way, and you know, the best argument for that is like, well, if you really wanted to sort of influence the perception of who's going to win an election or, you know, whether a certain policy is good or bad, you would influence the polls. It's super easy. There's no cost. You can sample in a certain way. You can, there's all sorts of ways you can bias it, or you can go on TV and say a bunch of things, which is how most of us get informed about what's happening in the world. Right. Like you can tweet or say a bunch of things with no skin and game or repercussions. And like Brian said, the elegant thing about prediction markets is there's a very strong monetary incentive to be truthful and a very strong monetary disincentive to lie. You know, people don't lie when money's involved. And so that's. Over time, prediction markets tend to be a more accurate gauge about what's going to happen. But in this specific example, about what we should do when it comes to certain policies.

Yeah, and what you said, we can, certainly the debate around which markets are genuinely sort of valuable and necessary and all that stuff will continue for a long time.

But is there a beautiful distinction there around positive sum markets versus zero sum markets? It feels like that might be some of the vibe shift that's happening. If you, if you create A financial product that allows people to invest in the American stock market. Broadly, it's gone up. Historically, it's most likely positive sum, but there can only be one winner of the Super Bowl. And so it's sort of a zero sum market. Is that a reasonable framework to think about where the activity is shifting? We're shifting from maybe more positive some markets to zero sum or is that not a factor?

I mean, Brian, let me know what you think, but I don't think so. I mean the derivatives market, so options or futures or all of these markets have historically been zero sum.

Okay. Yeah.

Right.

And.

But they're still very useful.

Yeah.

And you know, people usually criticize this market. The main criticism is they're speculators, people that are sort of like speculating on an outcome and.

Yep.

And that's okay because without speculators you don't get the benefits, you don't get the price and forecasting benefits.

Sure.

And if there are certain people that want to hedge on something like they are adversely impacted by something going on, like, I don't know, Brexit happening or election going a certain way or the other, or even the sports markets, which happens pretty often, they kind of need the liquidity. And so the healthy balance is basically a balance between sort of people that like drive usefulness out of the markets and speculators. And that's how any of these traditional markets operate.

Yeah, yeah.

I think, I think one thing that's undeniable is that it's, it's, it's a very entertaining experience just to use the data like scrolling and trying to understand and this idea of having visibility into things that could become the future headlines of the world. I appreciate that. That is sort of a public benefit that is created through people that are choosing to trade these markets.

Do you have any insight into, I mean, Brian, you've done a great job at running a firm that winds up servicing institutional investors as well and institutions in addition to consumers. And there's been some viral chatter around prediction markets potentially either replacing or augmenting insurance products. And the initial reaction to that was like, wait, instead of just getting like fire insurance, I have to be like trading a contract every single day. But I was actually thinking about like, maybe in the future there's a new insurance firm that's using some sort of prediction market under the hood. Have you thought about the role of institutions in a world where the liquidity around prediction markets is increasing? How do institutions come in and actually maybe build products around prediction markets that have value to A different consumer.

Yeah, well, just zooming out. I mean, you're correct. Coinbase is serving multiple different customer segments. So like the Coinbase retail app is what a lot of people know us for. That's probably the most comparable to Robinhood for instance. But we also have product for businesses, we have a product for institutions. That's the leading. We have a developer platform, we have a self custodial wallet. So we're doing a lot of different things on the prediction market for insurance point of view. I mean, that's an interesting idea. Actually. I hadn't looked too much into that. I think institutions are going to start trading prediction markets. I doubt that'll be the first place they go, but I could see them using that over time.

Yeah, it's clearly like we're at the very early stages of all this. I am interested in some of the other Coinbase launches. Can you take us through some of the other stuff, particularly Coinbase Advisor? I'm interested in just anytime a big company has a ton of data and is actually surfacing something that's AI powered, how do you think about delivering that product? What were the trade offs that you made and how will you be measuring success?

Yeah. So Coinbase Advisor is there to help you manage your financial life and it can ingest all the information from your portfolio. It also knows your preferences around risk tolerance and you can do anything in there from asking it to, hey, help me build a better portfolio to earn more yield or look for opportunities in the market around X, Y or Z. But it can also prompt you with things that you might have not even known to ask, ask about.

Right.

So every day it's out there kind of ingesting the information on the Internet with some context about what you need and want and it'll present opportunity to you at time about macro events happening in the market, which might create trading opportunities. So I think just broadly, we think that AI is useful for. It's kind of a barbell.

Right.

It's useful for a segment of people who might not have as much financial literacy as they want or how to maybe not even understand how to use all of these tools. But it's also powerful for advanced traders who just want to eliminate repetitive tasks and toil that everybody has to deal with in their financial life. AI is disrupting every business out there. Financial services is no exception and we want to make sure we're leading on that front.

You mentioned preemption. Can you both maybe give me a little tour of any expectations or what you're looking for? In Washington in 2026. What are you watching? What do you think the US government needs to get right for your industries to succeed in 2026?

Well, I'll happy to start and then, Tarek, I'll turn it to you. But the main thing Coinbase is focused on is actually getting market structure legislation passed. So you may recall the Clarity act went through the House already. It got a strong bipartisan vote. The Senate is now deliberating in the Senate Ag and Senate Banking Committees their own draft text for market structure legislation. So that would be a landmark piece of legislation if it goes through to complement the Genius act, which went through for stablecoins earlier this year. So that's where we're primarily focused. And it's looking positive that in early 2026 the Senate committees will vote on that. And fingers crossed. Now there's a whole other separate work stream around prediction markets, but I don't know. Tarek, you want to touch on that?

Yeah, Brian, I know you have to jump, so feel free to take off. I think you had a hard out, but you're welcome.

You're welcome.

I'm good for a few minutes.

Yeah. Tarek, Tarek, I'd love to hear from a regulatory standpoint how you're looking at.

2020, what you're monitoring.

Yeah, I mean, I think the state of the world right now is actually relatively clear, at least in our shared views. We just started and launched a coalition on prediction markets a week ago. And you know, there's a number of participants and including Coinbase and really kind of it's all about clarifying and making sure that everybody understands that financial markets are regulated at the federal level and not a state by state thing. And yes, you know, as the financial markets expand and they kind of touch more people as you build, financial markets are sort of relatable to a larger audience. There are going to be some interests are going to get ruffled, including some state interest casinos or others. And so it's not too surprising. There's sort of opposition. It usually means that we're onto something big and you know, there's re innovation happening. So really, I think as the court sort of like the whole process kind of plays out, it's about sort of proving our side of the case. And I think that's going pretty well so far. And then educating policymakers about what this is really about, how it works, how it's regulated at the federal level, so that they understand it makes a lot of sense.

Well, congratulations on the partnership guys and all the launches. Brian, you guys have both had very big years.

Yeah, we barely scratched the surface. There's like five more things we didn't get to that you launched us yesterday. But, you know, it's the end of the year, so hope you all have a fantastic holiday season and hope to see you both on the show in 2026. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, guys. The Coinbase team's firing on all cylinders, so it was cool to get a bunch of those announcements out and people can check out the live stream if they haven't seen it yet.

Fantastic.

Thanks so much.

Fantastic.

Thanks for catching up, guys. Cheers.

Cheers. Let me tell you about figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

Back to.

Okay, now we gotta get to chew by. Chew buy. This is the new phrase. This is the new word you gotta learn. People know Chew by. People know. Chopped people know.

Duchess of Bushwick says this is a screenshot. I don't know if it's hers, but. Yeah, so it's recently invented the word chubai, which is when something is both chopped and also spiritually. Dubai. Examples. So house. Goyard.

Goyard.

Pandora Carbone. Kith. Drop your Chewbai things in the comments.

You know, I learned about kith from this show. We were doing cars for various Personas. And you said a kith BMW M5 or something.

Yeah, they have a collab. Yeah, they have.

And I had no idea what you meant by that, but Kith. Now I know. Now I know for this it's chopped.

And spiritually may as well be a BMW. So house. I gotta say, I think it's spiritually very English. I mean, that's obviously the origin of it, but. Yeah, again, is England, spiritually, Dubai.

Now, who knows? That's possible.

Van Cleef, they're saying you got to go through the.

You got to go through the comments here. Cartier Love bracelet, dry bar. So oat milk. No, it's not.

Oat milk is definitely chew by.

Chew by. Better to be chew by than just chopped, though.

I don't. Yeah, but also, I don't want to. There's a lot of great things about Dubai. You can rent an SF90 for the day for like a grand. I did that at one point during F1 in 2022, foreshadowing.

If you ever fall off, people are going to be calling you Chew by for sure.

Chew by. No, I mean, like being able to drive around at the time. A $750,000 car for.

Okay, massive Balenciaga sneakers. I saw these at breakfast this morning. Are those two buy?

They're the. I don't think so chunkiest kind of rattiest sneakers. And John was just shocked. And I had to. You kind of predicted that they were like technically nice or expensive footwear. Yeah, but you were really processing that for a while.

Well, it was like they either came from that or they came from like, like a gift shop at a. At a. At a Six Flags. It was one or the other. And I was sort of dialing it in. I was like, it could be Six Flags gift shop tier shoe, or it could be something extremely exclusive that needed to be waited in line for and cost thousands of dollars. And it was the latter. Anyway, Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Peter Abbeel is Amazon's new AGI head teapot. Needs no introduction to him. Gdp. He is a pioneer in robotics and deep reinforcement learning. He has 231,000 citations. He's a professor at UC Berkeley. He is neither chopped nor Dubai. He is Berkeley.

He's number 28 on the Metis list.

Let's go.

There you go. Actually, very sad. You got to do an update, get that mentioned here.

But I love that bookwarmenge R engineer, Bookworm engineer. GDP here is giving a little bit more on him. Says he has been Amazon's distinguished scientist and vice president and scholar since 2024, focused on advancing AI and robotics. He has advised legendary doctoral candidates like Chelsea Finn and of Physical Intelligence. And John Shulman, ex OpenAI, ex anthropic and now co founder of Thinking Machines. He's an absolute dog. Let's give it up for Peter Abbeel, the new head of API at Amazon. Really fantastic news. And bookworm engineer. Thanks for putting this on the timeline. I appreciate you sharing this news. But also, I was thinking about bookworms. The word bookworm, like, what did that say when they started using chewing through books? Is that what it is? Or is it like they saw books as slop? They saw books as, you know, oh, you're a bookworm. You're worming around on the ground. You're a slug worm.

I looked up the etymology.

Etymology of bookworm.

Give it to me. Who read too much, comparing them to actual insects that burrowed into and damaged books.

It's brain rot. It's the original brain rot.

No, it's not.

It is.

No, no, it's not. These are like if you had a. So if you. Somebody leaves a bunch of books In a shed, for example, the bugs are going to chew into them. I think that's what.

Yes, but it was derogatory termite. It was derogatory.

I think of it as it was.

Saying, you read too many books, you need to touch grass.

You know, the very.

You need to stop reading books, go outside.

What, the very hungry caterpillar.

Yes, yes, yes.

That's how I imagine a bookworm. Just. Just chomp and just.

Yes, yes, yes. That is the activity. And someone who has brain rot and is on TikTok all day, they are chewing through the feed for sure. But when you say someone has brain rot, it's. It's a pejorative, it's negative.

Well, the only thing is a bookworm. I never saw that as, as, like a negative.

That's because we think of books as high art. We think of them as possible.

You were saying at some point, maybe people were saying, you need to cool.

It with the books, brother. You need to get outside, touch grass. You go ride a horse.

Go till the fields.

Go till the fields. Exactly. Why are you so obsessed with these books? This new technology is one shotting you. Oh, amazing book. You're lost in the world of the book.

The mines.

Exactly, exactly. Get outside, go to the forest. I don't know, the bookworm thing, it makes me feel that at one point books were. I mean, there's that famous picture of everyone on the subway reading the newspaper. And it's like, oh, people are so absorbed with the newspaper. Like, why can't they just log off and like, talk to each other? Because they used to talk to each other. Then you gave them a newspaper. They're like, newspaper's better than making a friend over here.

Anyway, I Wonder.

I'm a Graphite.dev worm. Graphite.dev, code review for the Age of AI Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What do you wonder?

Oh, just this idea that there was a point in the future where everyone in public spaces, like trains, buses, planes, et cetera, was just talking the whole.

A point in the past.

Yeah. When that technology existed, the written word also existed, which implies that people probably kind of always had something that they were like, can you imagine you're sitting down on a train and you have like this book that you've been so excited to read. Yeah, well, books and the person.

That's true.

Yeah. So the person. The person next to you is like, excited. I want to talk for five hours with strangers today. Like, the person with the book is going to be thinking, hey, I came.

Here to read this book, but horses are older than books. There was a moment when it was like, hey, we're going to go over there, lock in, we're riding together. And no, you don't have a book to read. You have to talk to me. You don't have a phone. You don't have a VR headset with a balloon attached.

You don't have any brain.

You don't even have a book. You just got me and your horse. My horse, your horse. You got me and you, and we're hanging out and talking and that's the original touching grass that we lost. Ever since the invention of the book.

People don't know how to commute. I wonder if you wonder if they're.

Certainly focused on a. I like that you're focused on the commute.

No, no, specifically, you just got me thinking. No one commutes to work with a horse anymore. We don't know how to do it. And in some ways you could set up kind of like a desk on a horse on the top and you could be getting some emails done.

Also underrated horses. Effectively self driving.

That's what I'm saying. You have self driving technology.

It's here.

Self driving. You have horses that are just self.

Driving because you can just say, hey boy, go home, go home. And the horse knows.

Park, park.

I think we got to bring him back.

Bring him back.

Return to Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Unlike Meta, Microsoft or Apple, Amazon now has one of the best AI researchers in the world. This is Pedro Domingos also shouting out Peter Abbeel. Everyone loves it. It's fantastic news. Invest like the Best has a clip here about Domino's Pizza. It's the best performing stock.

Yeah. So Henry, can we play this? Ella Bogan, let's play this clip.

What was the best small cap company over that 10 year period in the 2010s? Well, actually it was Domino's Pizza. Why was Domino's so good? Well, if you look at the pizza market in the United States, when Domino's basically started its run, you basically had a third of the market that was like local and then the other third we know, right, there's the Nationals, Domino's, Papa John's, Little Caesars, Others, and then the middle third. There used to be in D.C. this place called Armand's that had about 30 places and they had local or geographic scale, but they didn't have the scale of Domino's and they didn't have great pizza. And what happened was when Domino's started its run, well, first of all, it started by basically making the product a little bit better. But if you talk to Patrick Doyle, who was CEO at the time, and you really study it, what they started doing was if there's three value equations in pizza, it's quality, value, and convenience.

So Chad is saying that Domino's is good. I feel like Domino's is pretty good.

I like Domino's and technology. We can make convenience a lot better. And so they really invested in their app.

Yeah. Every few months, the Domino's chart goes viral. It's a classic.

Very early on, they could then target that customer more efficiently with couponing. What have you drive scale through that box. And then when you basically do something well, right. You improve the product. You probably was slightly above average. You really iterate on convenience. And now you have a direct relationship with those customers. All of a sudden, actually, the brand halo started getting a little bit better. Right. Because. And you put all that together against a wonderful business model, the franchise business model, which is, you know, ROI light. And often those are the best stocks when you go study the markets because you're already in a. In a physical world business, where the technology advantage transitions into a physical mode advantage or a distribution or scale advantage. That's one of the patterns we've observed. We call that the good to great thesis internally.

Domino's pizza tracker. Incredibly underrated.

It really is. It really is one of the best pieces of software in history. Domino's. Yeah, it's interesting. It's a $15 billion company today. Been kind of all over the place over the last five years. But all time is truly exceptional. Moving on, we can pull up this landing page that Reggie James is highlighting. Over at Unitree. We have the Unitree H2 Destiny Awakening. This copy goes pretty hard. You got to give him that. Tyler, how do you rate it?

Yeah, I mean, it looks. It's reminiscent of the. I don't want to get it wrong, but there's like the Hindu gods. Right? They have a bunch of arms.

Yeah.

Am I getting this right?

Yeah.

The face is also very scary. The pursed unitry does not have that kind of scary.

Let's hit the gong for the most sus looking. Most sus looking humanoid face to date. They did it. They did it. I was already in favor of banning the sale of Unitree in the United States. Of course, now that I see the face of the H2, I'm even more.

I. I heard a rumor that there might be some bands coming for something or other.

So I'm looking at the site. It's like $30,000, which is still. From everything we've heard, at least, it seems much cheaper still than American.

That is such an insane landing page.

I mean, look at some of the other. Can we click through? You see some of these other ones? There's this Unitree H1 on the website that has these red fans on its hands. If you just pull up the website, and it's very easy to imagine them has saws Team. How are we doing pulling this up?

There we go.

Okay. No, go to the homepage unitree.com, go back, and then press the arrow on the side.

Oh, keep going.

These ones. Look at that.

Dude. Why is it spinning?

So I think they're, like, decorative. Like, it's clearly doing some type of celebration.

It holds pizza.

But imagine if that thing had saws on its hands and it's just walking around. Very, very sketchy.

At the same time. I want to fight one of these so badly because I want to know actually how far we are from it being able to kill me, because I think I still have the edge. Even if it had some blades or something, I think I could just kick it really hard in the chest and it just goes down with blades.

Well, they're still very short.

Yeah. They're small, and they don't weigh that much. How much does it weigh? I think I got size. I mean, to be fair, I'm big, But I do think I could take one of those down pretty easily.

Okay.

So that would be an amazing montage. Just for the next. For the next 10 years. For the next 10 years. You fight a humanoid robot every January, and we just see the progress.

Yeah. I think we should sneak me into one of those robot fighting leagues, and I just get in the octagon with them, Just take it down, and they're like, that's not the point. Why did you destroy our unit tree? Be like, I thought this was what it was supposed to do.

Interesting. Gabe says Bill Gurley on the Tim Ferriss pod said unitree didn't want outsiders to check out their factory. That could be. That could Bill Gurley.

Why are you leaking that? That's insane.

Well, I mean, that's fair.

It's very funny.

Well, it could be two reasons. One is they're not making that many, and it's all by hand. The other is they have some type of insane alpha that they don't want to share.

Yeah, there's a bunch of reasons or I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who just use AI to discover new products and brands. Alex Rampel says sometimes the market for something done very well is 100 times the size of the market. Something done 100 times the size of the market for something done. Okay, yeah, interesting.

I think about this. I mean, we're trying to think of examples. I think of this in the context even just of the power law, right? You have, like, the best company in a category being worth a hundred times. But this also, I feel like can happen where maybe there's no market for something at all, and then somebody comes in and makes something great. And suddenly.

I mean, that's certainly the entire story of AI, which is probably what he was, you know, thinking of was just the fact that, yeah, chatbots.

Went through a hype cycle and now.

They'Re actually good and they're. And it's a huge category. I mean, yeah, we went through a chatbot boom back in, like, 2017.

Do you remember?

Yeah. And I mean, the market cap. I'm sure there were some chatbot companies that, like, delivered some value. I mean, when you use, like, the American Airlines app, like, there's still, like, some Q and A, some business logic of, like, phone trees, essentially, our chatbots. And I'm sure some of those companies are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, some of them. There might even be a few unicorns there, but it's certainly not this, like, insane power law outcome now. It is, because we went from very poorly done chatbots to amazing, revolutionary chatbots. What are you laughing at? Eatsleep.com, exceptional sleep, without exception. Sleep. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. Also in the comments, Alex Rampel post, somebody put example 8 sleep, which is hilarious and awesome.

I just seen this post from Ben.

Yeah, which one?

I put it in the timeline at the bottom of the timeline. Pull it up. Ben says, imagine looking for a new show and finding this.

Yeah, it's so. I was just laughing at, like, yeah, the sack and the gong doesn't even make noise.

All right, that's enough. My ears are getting blown out. Thank you for that, Ben. We gotta give big congratulations to Vineeth. He said, one week ago, I got clipped for drinking water. Now I'm joining XAI to build the future of AI.

This is the infamous photo, too. Wow. This is the photo that caused all the Klein dust up but wow, congratulations to Vineeth. That's incredible. Hilarious. Great success and what a great way to lean in. Have some fun. You know, not just too seriously, although clearly a very serious engineer because he's got a job working on Macro Hard. No way. He's on the Macro Hard team going up against Microsoft. He's 19, he has a computer science degree from Georgia Tech, and he's got 15,000 followers on the Vinnysauce IG TikTok. Seems like he's doing all sorts of stuff. Very fun. Congratulations to him. What a hilarious exchange.

Delian is fired up about Jared Isaacman.

Yes, we're very excited.

Says, God bless the great United States. Jared is looking fantastic in this suit.

Yeah. It's so crazy. He's actually been to space. That feels like going forward. Can we just make that a prerequisite?

Whoa. Scoop Admin future Scoop hall of Famer Katie Roof is in the chat. She says, thanks for the shout out. SRI deserve credit for the scoop, too. Credit to sri, credit to sri. Sorry to give all the love to Katie, but. Oh, yeah, she's everywhere. She's an animal. But great, great.

Should we make. Should we make going to space a prerequisite for being NASA administration, administrator, or on your first day on the job, they just gotta blast you into space? I think it's just like, it needs to be in the orientation. How can you go back? Your whole job is space. You've never been and your predecessor's been. And you haven't.

Oh, you want to go. You want to help us rule the stars and you've never been there.

0G'S. What are we doing here? We got it. This has to be a prerequisite. Bake it into the but.

He has been in. He's been in space.

He's been to space.

But.

And so, like, you know, now there's this question about, like, well, what about the next administrator? If the next administration is like, yeah, like, I'd love to go someday. It's like, oh, you can't. It doesn't hit the same as the last guy. Like, you gotta go.

Yeah, Jared told me. It's great. I'm excited to be stewarding this effort for the United States.

Yeah.

Hope to go at some point myself.

Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of strong opinions about space. I haven't been yet, but you can trust me. I'm gonna lay down some really good plans. I got a whole. I really understand it because I've read about it a lot. I've also watched all the books I've read videos.

I've seen all the blockbuster movies.

Still haven't been. That's on the to do list. I'm gonna get there soon.

But yeah, not even to do list Bucket list.

It's on. It's on the bucket list. No, Day one. Day one, you're on the top of a rocket. When you put your hand on the Bible. I don't even know if that's how administration confirmation works. But you say, I swear to duly uphold whatever NASA's mission is to get to the moon and Mars. They blast you into a rocket in space. Tyler, what do you say?

I was saying this is like if you're the ambassador to Spain or something, but you've never been to Spain.

That's actually. Has an ambassador to another country ever not been to that country? That has to be because do we have an ambassador to North Korea who like, can't go but is still in charge of like, ambassadorship? And it's like, if we have an ambassador situation, I'm the guy. Do we have an ambassador to North Korea or do we just like, not even have one?

If we have one, we gotta have him on the show.

I would love to.

I feel like Trump. Kind of like that. That rolls mine.

Okay, I'll handle it. I'll handle it. I'll go over there personally. I'll go over there personally. Anyway, wander.com, book a wander with inspiring views. I guess some bad they don't have any wanders in North Korea, but they have them in tons of other great locations. They got hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

Okay, we got some history here. So according to Gemini, I asked, has US Ambassador to a country ever not been to the country? And apparently James Wadsworth was the ambassador to Turkey. In 1960, he was appointed and confirmed as the ambassador. But before he could travel there, a military coup occurred. The US Temporarily suspended relations. So when we don't have diplomatic relations with a country, we obviously don't have an ambassador. That's kind of like you gotta have some relations. So we don't have an official ambassador to North Korea. Okay, hold on, hold on.

Recently, Argentina. During 2014 confirmation hearing, Noah Mamet admitted that he had never been to Argentina and didn't speak Spanish.

That's wild. So, you know, maybe it's not that big, but I still stand by my original stance going forward. In order to be the administrator of NASA, you got to go to space either before you get the job or on day one. But it's got to be day one.

Apparently there was.

Here's your rocket.

So Anthony Keely, 1885. Keely is a famous historical failed diplomat. He was appointed to Italy but the Italian government refused him because of past anti Italian comments. Smart. Then the US tried to send him to Austria, Hungary and they also refused him. He resigned without ever serving in either country.

Wow.

So total, total, total failure. Elon is saying Carmack is awesome.

Yeah, John Carmack.

And what he true.

I mean we don't need to play this whole clip but Carmack is under exposed in podcast.

We'll scroll down because I think it's worth seeing this picture here if you can. Real picture of Carmack.

That is a real picture. He has been hitting the gym. Jim. He looks. He actually did get in insane shape and looks great. And he also has a number of just like insanely good takes where somebody made an AI version of Doom. And one of the anti AI folks was like, what do you think the hard working creators that made Doom would say about this? And Carmack was like, I love it. I would have loved to use AI to build Doom. I love tools and it's a tool for me it's very helpful, which is just funny. And everyone was like, yeah, Carmax on our side. What is going on? So we were quote tweeted by Matthew Zetlin. We said that CNBC is not our take. Was like CNBC wasn't really breaking through with the tech community.

Yeah, I guess I was giving a very. I think we gave a very anecdotal take. Right? Yeah, like I. Yeah, I cannot remember. I can, I cannot remember CBS content from the last year outside of the last month. Right?

Yes. So. So he said, with all due respect to tvpn, I think this gets things a little backwards. CBS is basically unique in the network news business in being able to generate buzz. 60 Minutes still has great ratings and other CBS news properties produced talked about stuff too. Let's see his examples. So he has a. He has an older man and a younger woman next to each other.

Do you know who that is?

I don't really. I don't.

That is.

Does he run the Navy? He has a navy shirt on.

I think he run. I think he runs football.

Okay. Football player. Cool. What position does he play? Isn't he a little old to play football? I thought you had to be like we had Saquon on the show. I thought you had to be like his shirt's looking a little 30s, 30s or something maybe 20s.

It's vintage. Tyler, Is Bill Belichick a veteran or is this.

And then some other stuff?

No, Bill Belichick was never in the military.

No, this is a. This is a good. He said the reason why Ellison wanted CBS and wanted Barry to run it is precisely because it was still capable of creating buzz and generating attention. Okay, cool. This is helpful context. Yeah, I like this. They still got it over there and. Yeah, seems good. I don't know. Still interesting. Yeah, it does feel like it's breaking through in a different way. It feels like the content is shifting to something that's more certainly breaking through. I see the clips. I feel like I see the clips, but I don't know. Anyway, let's watch this clip of Greg Brockman from OpenAI saying compute enabled our first image generation launch and a 32% jump in weekly active users over the following weeks, as well as our latest image generation launch yesterday. We have a lot more coming and need a lot more compute. Let's play this.

OpenAI did not set out with a thesis that compute was the path to progress. It's that we tried everything else and the thing that worked was compute was scale. We are absolutely bursting at the seams with demand for compute relative to our ability to supply that compute. When you look at our launch calendar, the single biggest blocker often becomes okay, but where's the compute going to come from for that? When we had our image generation launch in March that went viral, we did not have enough computer to keep that going. And so we made some very painful decisions to take a bunch of compute from research and move it to our deployment to try to be able to meet the demand. And that was really sacrificing the future for the present. And this is first of all a very painful thing because we have so many features, so many products that we want to launch that get held back because we didn't have enough compute. And that what we do not want is to be caught flat footed where we say, well, two years ago, three years ago, we should have been planning for more. We want to be ahead of the curve. And the truth is I do not think we will be. No matter how ambitious we can dream of being right now, I think that the demand will far exceed whatever we can think of.

Taz in the chat says these videos feel like they're gonna get satired by some comedian, maybe SNL very soon.

So completely different video style from anything we've seen in Silicon Valley for a while. I think there's something really cool about the aesthetics of that video. But shaky camera typically says nervous energy. As a filmmaker, that's when I would be like, okay, we're telling the story of Geordi, and if we're making a movie about Geordi going surfing and there's a moment where he loses his surfboard, I'm probably gonna be like, let's shake the camera a little bit more. Let's bring some energy to the frame. I got the. Look at this. I got the shaky cam going, you know, kind of shaky cam. Yeah. It's like, there's more energy. It's a little bit nervous, and it's an odd choice. I love the choice as a differentiator. It's fresh, it's something I haven't seen before, but it is a little odd of a stylistic choice. Like, what is it saying? It feels a little anxious. But, you know, at least it stands out in the feed and honestly looks beautiful. Looks cinema. It looks. It looks. It looks like it has an opinion. It looks like it has some, like, freshness and some polish that has been commoditized in a world where everyone has the FX3 on sticks with the long lens and the little bokeh like this stands out. And I think that's very cool. On what he actually said, there's a couple comments. Louis Tunstall says this basically confirms Ilya's remark that SSI has sufficient compute for research because it's not being cannibalized by products. We talked to Sarah Guo about this yesterday, that it's a bunch of little projects. You said 10 million. She said, not quite that low or something. Wait, you said million?

I said a couple million.

Couple million. So, you know, she thinks Maybe he's ripping $30 million compute runs, maybe, or something like that. Like that training runs. And Brooks Otterlake didn't like it, or at least had some extra context around the OpenAI video. He said, one of the strangest marketing videos I've ever seen. Everything about the staging makes it seem like it's supposed to be a positive and inspiring. And that's true. It's very brightly lit. It's really nicely lit. It's high key. It's not dark, it's not contrasty. And then also when they show Greg, they show him from a low angle, and so he looks like a hero. It's great framing. It's amazing. But Brooks is saying it looks positive, inspiring. But if you actually listen to the words, the content of what he's saying, it's a guy saying the company has a serious problem, which he does not believe can be solved. But I would take the other side of that and say that it's actually a reframing around. The job's not finished, the job's never finished, Our pursuit is endless. There's a world where I think this narrative can wind up being more inspiring. I don't love the idea of a company like, I don't love.

It was maybe just too short of a video. Like, maybe you needed to show the kind of more positive. Because if you're somebody that's bearish on OpenAI, you're looking at this and being like, wow, they just have to keep spending more and more and more and more and more money and it's never going to end. It's just a money pit and all this stuff. The other way to look at it is like, the more scale we have, the more impact we can have, the more customer types we can serve, the more use cases we can deliver on, the more we can actually use AI to make progress. So there's always like a positive spin. But I can definitely see how both the way it was shot plus kind of the way that it kind of cuts off, maybe it feels like it needed to be more like a five minute video.

I mean, in general, everything, you know, there's a whole meme about, like, the meeting could have been an email, the email could have been text message. I feel like everything that comes out of OpenAI, like the one minute video could be a ten minute video, the ten minute video could be a two hour podcast. Like, I want a lot of meat. Because these are heady issues. And if you think about it from a perspective of like, compare it to space travel, space exploration. If you're SpaceX and you're not going to say, like, we're racing towards this definitive moment, but boots on the ground, on Mars, that's our asi. We're done. Then. No, it's like, we're gonna colonize Mars, we're gonna colonize the stars. We're gonna go to Alpha Centauri one day and you know, if you went out there and you were like, look, we gotta get to the moon, we gotta get to Mars and then we gotta get to Alpha Centauri and then we gotta get farther away. And you know what? We need more metal. We need more metal to make more rockets and we need more metal every year we're gonna need more metal. And so we really need a lot of metal. You'd be like, yeah, I get it. Like, you're gonna grow this thing forever. You're gonna do something really ambitious. The job's never really over. You're gonna just keep going forever. And that's great. And we accept that and everything else. But the AI narrative has gotten caught up in like, there's this definitive goal, ASI superintelligence, and then you're done. And then it's like, okay.

And people talk about AGI, asi, and some people are talking about API, Artificial Puffer Intelligence.

Oh, yes, I've heard about this.

We have our next guest actually live here in the studio with us. Can we go to the. Can we go to Mr. Puff right here?

We set up the. The puffer fish. There we go.

He is. We're puffin.

Here we go. Simon, good to see you. Welcome to the stream.

Good to see you guys too.

I'm happy to. You give Puffy a prime location there.

I'll.

I'll speak on Puffy's behalf tonight.

Yes, please do. Please do.

Amazing. Anyway, have we told the story of where. How you landed on the name of the company Puffer Fish expand?

Have we?

I don't know.

Tell it.

Say it again. Because it's a good story.

There's three stories. Do you want one, two or three?

All of them. But in time.

I want the truth. And I can handle. Give me the truth.

The truth is the least interesting one of the stories though I was in.

I've changed my opinion. I want the interesting one. Lie to me. You.

It's. It's because, you know, you. That all the data is stored in object storage, cheap and slow. And then we puff it up into RAM into the disk and so it's the puffer architecture.

Okay.

That was. That's sort of the backwards facing one. The real story was just. Oh, this is an emoji that doesn't have.

Yeah, this is it. This guy.

Nobody. Nobody claimed. Nobody claimed this. This.

I stumble upon him outside of a fire station and there we were.

There we go. That's good.

Anyways, it's great to have you. It's great to have you on the show. We caught up at 5:30am this morning. You were sharing.

I didn't know that people in DLA got up that early.

We have to. This is Showbiz America operates on the same market hours. You gotta be up early. A lot of people in. In LA who are on something that ties to market hours at all are up super early.

Yeah, I live on the west coast, but I operate in Eastern mindset. Est.

You like to be there on the floor of the nyse.

We do Spiritually, I like to be conscious, you know, while the opening bell is rung.

Exactly.

Fitting.

Absolutely fitting. Yeah, it was great. It was great.

We're gonna see you out there soon. Are you gonna jump? No fun.

Pre IPO round. This is sort of round, right? I mean.

I like. I like the NYSE vibe, you know, if we're talking about the stock exchange, like, I like the vibe. I think NASDAQ has, like a tech thing going for it. I just, you know, as someone who grew up in the old world.

Yeah.

The New York Stock Exchange has a. Has a certain appeal, but nasdaq's also good. You know, I'll. I'll let them fight it out.

Okay. Okay.

Yeah, you can't. You can't. You can't be too obvious. If you're going into a negotiation, you can't make it too obvious which side you prefer. Right. You need two. Two horses in a race anyways. Break down the news. It's been, I don't know, a couple months since you were on.

Yeah, it's been a couple months when I was in LA and spent a bit of time with you guys. What's the news? We got a new investor on board this morning, so we announced that and doubled on with Locky Groom, the legendary one and only. But most of all, we're just puffing up. We're trying to get everything to puff. We now have trillions and trillions of objects in Turbo Puffer that are all puffing.

I was waiting. I was waiting. I was like, he's not going to say how much he raised. He's not going to say the valuation. Will he give us any numbers?

This was the perfect way. When you told me that you were going to announce the raise and announce no information other than you just added one investor to the cap table, I thought that is just a perfect way to just keep mogging the capital markets that are so desperate. I know you have so many fans out there that want to be a part of TurboPuffer, but is a great opportunity to say you can become a part of turbopuffer. Just shut, wind down your fund and start applying for jobs turbopuffer careers.

I would say that there's a brilliant mind at Insight and he ended up just joining. And I think that was a smart move. And I'm trying to convince more of the capital allocators, including the one who made the Pufferfish that's on your table, to just join the company. It's a great way to get on the cap table. But most of all, I mean, the way that I think about this is that they are part of the team and I think the exam for, for, for them is who's brought the most value.

And yeah, you were saying, Mike, you actually keep a list, right, of, of, of a value add. And this, these are people, these are people like you've kept track of locking.

On your nice list.

Well, no, it's just, it's just a tier list. It's like how much value have you added? I think every, every person that's reached out to you invest or, you know, you basically just put them in a spreadsheet and then you just, whenever they do something for the company, you just mark it down and then you rank them and that's how you decide, do you change?

It's a very emeritocratic process. But, you know, the way that I think about it is that I have to go and convince my leadership team of like, who's the right person to add. And we like to compose the cap table the same way that we compose the team.

Right.

It's few people, highly concentrated and people that we want to build a long relationship with And Thrive has shown us over the past two years the kinds of mountains that they can move for us. And so that's why we decided to add them and allow Lockheed to also double down, who's also in the absolute S tier league. So that's really what happened and it was very simple.

Let's give it up for the absolute S tier league. People are always talking about tier one. They gotta be thinking about the S tier. What about on the customer side? I saw Ivan from Notion Shared earlier.

We have a shared Slack channel with you, Simon and the team. Every message, could you bring this up within minutes?

Pull it up.

Every feature request is always answered. It feels like these guys work at Notion. This is the level of care and support we want from vendors. Bullish of Turbopuffer. That's from Ivan at Notion.

It was so heartwarming. The team just absolutely loved it. And I mean, this is why that's what we want people to focus on. What do our customers say? What are they doing with Turbopuffer? That's what we care about, not numbers. To me, the fundraising round would be like showing you my office lease. These are the things that we need to get things done with. But it's not the important thing. The important things are tweets like the one from Ivan. That's what we want to be measured on. And I think I'm just old school in the way that my Entrepreneurial example, when I was a kid, was going to my grandmother's store every second weekend and just sitting and playing on the floor and. And every day when she came home, she's doing all her own accountant and saying, this is how much money we made today. And just talking about her employees and customers. Those are the things that matter, and those are the things that matter to me and to us and to the culture that we have here. So the tweet from Ivan and many of our other customers today, that's what I want to be measured on.

So you're saying making money and customer satisfaction are sort of underrated in venture.

I think they might be.

Are there any new interesting case studies that you've noticed this year? How are you kind of describing the actual benefits, workflows, the implementations, the value that the companies that you've worked with, anthropic, cursor, notion, et cetera? How are you framing the position of the actual product value as they deploy it?

Yeah, I think there's two big things we're seeing. The first is that the first wave of adoption stage one of adopting AI in SaaS is essentially, okay, let's connect these LLMs to a bunch of data and try to reason over it.

Right.

The chat with a document. Chat with a document plus. But I think what we're seeing from linear, from notion, from Atlassian, from, from many of these customers is that they can bring more value if they can connect more data to AI. And so we're just seeing an explosion in data where they have to earn a return on the pricing of the search underneath them. And that's what we can provide with much, much better economics than the alternatives just because of the way that it's been architected. So more data into context is what the frontier AI companies are doing. The second thing that we're seeing is that customers want to reason over extremely large data sets. We're getting more and more demands of people who are essentially building their own Google indexing tens or hundreds of billions of documents and wanting to search over them. That's very difficult to pull off at Meta. At Google, everyone has built custom indexes. But you can pull this off today by dropping TurboPuffer into a Slack channel and just puffing real hard. We can get you to 100 billion. And so we've had to do a lot of R and D for this, to do vector search over 100 billion documents at once with very, very low latency. And it's taken an enormous amount of engineering to do that with as little compute as possible. And that's been a lot of what we focused on in the past few months. The second thing is that it's not just about searching vectors. Right? Vectors are sort of, you give a bunch of data to a model and spits out a number in a coordinate system. And that's really useful. But what's also useful is just searching over text. And we've gotten very good at that. And the state of the art is a library called Lucene. It underpins Elastic and OpenSearch and many of these solutions. And we're now starting to see similar or better performance. And one of the reasons we can do that is because LLMs, which are often the ones that are querying, write very long queries like humans write a couple words when we go on Google. But LLMs can write very, very long, very precise queries. And those are fundamentally different with a different set of trade offs to process. And we can hyper optimize for some of those trade offs which align really well with other trade offs we made inside a turbopuffer to serve them at a pace that is very difficult to do on some of the tech that's otherwise out there.

You said that. Can you tell me a little bit more about the hardware constraints that you're maybe not fully bumping up against? But, but everyone is laser focused on GPUs. GPUs, GPUs. Maybe TPUs, maybe Trainium. But talk to me about the memory market, the CPU market. There's this article in the Wall Street Journal today. Micron's blowout results are bad news for anyone buying a new phone or PC next year. Do you have any context on the shape of the AI build out and where it's going to impact different hardware subsectors?

I think we have very intentionally tried to steer clear of, of, of GPUs, because if you think there's a lot to get out of CPUs and they're easy to procure, they're in more data centers. When we work at vendors that need GPUs, they often have very tight restrictions on what regions they can run in, which might not necessarily be the region that customers are in. So we work, we were talking to one vendor today where we're trying to get better performance and they only have GPUs right now on the west coast. And so we're waiting for them to get in the east Coast. Right. These things really, really matter. And we are starting to get to the point where we have to go to Google, we have to Go to Amazon and we have to request the SKUs ahead of time, which is similar to when I was at Shopify and we would have to do the capacity planning a couple months before because the cloud is not infinite. When you start to get to. To Turbohofer scale, to Shopify scale and you have to do this ahead of time. But it is still infinitely better than back in the day when we had to request these things six months in advance and someone had to go and drill the holes in the walls at the last minute to make things work. But certainly there are also compute restraints on the CPU side. We can't always get the SKUs that we want the newest CPUs. So we've also optimized to be able to run on many different generations and types of CPUs in different environments to just stay nimble.

How big is the team?

Team is now 22. Started the year at 5. So big growth.

Wow.

Yeah, wow. Revenue. Revenue growing faster.

Love it.

What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

Biggest fish I've ever caught was this, this winter in, in Florida where we were out fishing for barracudas. I was. That's. That's a big fish.

You got. You. You guys got one.

Talking of fishing, by the way, when we were renegotiating the contract, I really wanted to get you guys up to Canada to go for some ice. Can we address this? Can we address this? So, so could we just negotiate this on air here? I, I will pay probably 10 more.

Okay.

If you come up and do a live ice fishing on the lake.

Yeah. Ice fishing show.

We'll do a fire.

What are you gonna do a fire?

What are you gonna pay in shares?

What are we gonna paint shares?

Canadian.

Oh, you want Turbo Puffer shares?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. As much as I love. As much. As much as I love ice fishing. No, we, we, we're. We're working out the travel schedule next year and we would love. There's, there's a lot of events chat.

Loves a live debate.

There's a lot of.

You're invited. And the thing too about the puffer jacket. Right. That we're working on is that I've described this as. This is the, this is the LA guys idea of a Canadian compatible jacket. So I can't wait to see you guys out there or in this jacket.

Yeah, we're fine.

Get across by.

Well, credit to me. I got the original, the original version of the jacket that we both have. I did feel the fabric and I was like, this is not fit. For ice fishing. This is gonna get ripped up immediately. So we're coming back. It needs more puff. More puff. More like rip, stop, Something like that. But yeah, watching you guys, the whole team build this year has just been amazing.

The puffer jacket is merely one piece of clothing that is. It's all about layering. This is what I learned when I was in Boston. Although I am an LA guy.

Oh, it's so cold in Boston, John.

It is cold in Boston. It is cold in Boston. And you got to wear layers. So you got to layer the TBPN rugby with the Turbo puffer puffer jacket. Maybe throw another TVPN jacket on top. TVPN hat. Once you get the whole merch, every layer, then you'll be warm.

Honestly, the thing we've been maybe more focused on is procuring an actual pufferfish for the studio. We were looking at it and you can get a mud skipper for 20 bucks. That's a kind of. That's crazy Fajaka.

So this is also like, you know, Jordy, in our chat, there's a lot of ideas and I need to see more action in the studio because we were talking about the maboo puffer fish, right. That can grow to two and a half feet. That needs about a thousand. The maboo that needs about a thousand dollars of feed every month in shell. And the reason it needs so much, so much, so many shells is apparently because it has really long teeth. And if they get too long, I think it kind of can end up walrusing itself.

I'm not sure the shells to sort.

Of like grind it up.

Yeah, grind it up.

Insane.

Well, we're working on a lot of stuff.

Yeah. But there's a lot of VCs that have huge fish tanks. I know one that has a million dollar fish tank, I believe. Yeah.

You had to go, maybe that's your next. Maybe that's the next round. Yeah, that's the next.

Yeah, yeah. Find vc. Pick the VC to do the next round based on their experience with fish tanks.

If you have. If you are out there and you have a maboo puffer fish and you're in the Bay Area, like, I'm coming.

Okay.

I want to see it.

You want to see it. This is the way to get at feeding time with Simon.

I want to do kind of a one for one. It's like for every dollar you. You put into pufferfish conservation and restoration, you can put a dollar in to Turbo puffer. At a $10 billion valuation, it seems like a good trade.

Yeah, 10 billion. I like that. We could do that.

Yeah. There you go. So there is a price.

There is a price.

He's not saying no to vc.

Hey, we're talking charity here. We're talking charity.

It's about the charity angle.

That's great.

Anyways, you guys have had a massive year and it's been an honor to watch you guys cook and puff and can't wait to see what the team does in 2027.

Yeah, honored to puff for you guys too.

It's been an honor to puff. Talk soon. Goodbye. Goodbye, Puffy.

Goodbye. Always with us.

Take care in spirit. Take care.

See ya. Goodbye. Well, let's go back to. Do you know how elite the Puck News readership is? They're so elite that when you go to subscribe to Puck News and they ask you to select your income level, the options are less than 100,000, then 100,000 to 500,000, then 500,000 to a million. A million to 5 million to 5 million million or more. Absolute elite level audience. Obviously we know you're rich, but what kind of rich? This is the, this is the Puck News audience. If you're, if you're, if you're a Puck new subscriber, you're. You're power player.

I don't think this says as much. I mean, think. I, I mean think about it. Just think about minimum wage, right? Are they really going to break out the sub 100k category that much? Like, do they need a big below, below $10,000 a year? Maybe you got a summer internship, a little sprint.

I just think it's a great, it's a great dropdown.

I would, if anything, I would suggest they go higher to get high.

Yeah, higher.

It should be. If it's not 5 million or more, it should just be prefer not to answer.

Yeah. In other news, Tim Sweeney says that Fortnite will not return to iOS in Japan in 2025 as promised. Apple was required to open up the iOS to competing stores today. And instead of doing so honestly, they have launched another travesty of obstruction and law breaking and gross disrespect to the government and people of Japan. Apple chose poorly again.

Tim Sweeney is really Apple's worst nightmare.

It's crazy. Also it's like very few companies have like such an outspoken, just hater, you.

Know, like who's heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily inspired.

I guess. I guess Sam Altman has Elon who's kind of his hater.

Yeah. But I don't even know the same way where like Tim basically Yeah, incredibly.

Inspiring to grind like no one's hating on, I don't know, getbezel.com like this shop. Over 25,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. You don't have the CEO so of a How big is Epic Games? Tens of billions of dollars. Huge company. Right. You don't have the CEO of a How big is market cap? It is privately traded IPO is rumored at 60 billion valuation in 2024 was at 22 billion. I mean a lot smaller than Apple, actually 1% of the market cap. But he is determined to set the record straight about every app store story that breaks. And he's been pushing. He's been pushing. He wants Fortnite to be free and at least not completely free, but free to run their own stores. There's a bunch of companies that were listed as potential targets for Thoma, Bravo Vista, Clear Lakes, Francisco, Cisco Partners, et cetera. This is the busted software list. Not very nice, but still an interesting slice of the market from Danny Ocean. Some companies in there that I'm familiar with. Bill.com, pagerDuty, Workiva, Blackbaud, Blackline. Is that Alkamai Technology, OneStream, SPS. So these are companies that are public but based on this screener have good EV to EBITDA multiples where a large software private equity firm could come and take them private. So it's just a fun screen. I don't know. I thought this was interesting. He just screened it himself.

In other news. Phil. Oh, this post was deleted.

I don't know how that's too red. In other news, Adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable plan Buy and measure out of home with precision. Let's keep skipping through. There's a partnership between Boeing Defense and Anduril. Very very good news for Anduril. Congrats to everyone involved. Boeing says we're teaming up with Anduril in the US Army's advanced mid range inter interceptor competition are offering will deliver an affordable capable solution to counter increasing low flying mid range threats.

Very excited for that. Is this the like a shahed drone? Do you think that it's low flying mid range?

No. So mid range is more like a. It's more like a missile that fires at a.

Okay, so so like a shahed would be low rate.

If you actually click on the link here you can see the image of the missile. It looks like a missile battery that goes on like sort of the back of the truck. Like zoom in on that you can see that this is the integrated Fires Protection Capability Increment two system, obviously. And it's designed to defend fixed and forward operating bases against imminent aerial threats. So this might be what shoots down a shahed drone.

That's what I was thinking.

Or maybe shoot down.

I mean, that's talking about the target.

Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. Yes. So the big picture here is the army expects the IFPC increment 2 second interceptor to integrate with and improve existing systems, deliver more robust and enhanced cost effective layered air and missile defense systems for future combat environments. Let's see. This partnership underscores our commitment to forming innovative, disruptive and agile industry teams that deliver new capabilities to war fighters sooner. Yeah, I'd like to know more about this. They really didn't lay out much in this press release. It will be funny because you have to be even more. You know, it's like Anduril's. The whole pitch was like, we're going up against the big guys. Now it's like we're going up with the big guys. We're teaming up. But of course, on each project it's like Disrupt, but also partner Disrupt. But the model Disrupt. The stagnation. Not necessarily, you know, bitter, bitter rivals. Arcway.

This was an interesting Caleb Barclay Arcway.

Funny.

A real time 3D engine where anyone can design a home. It is a simulated 3D world where buyers explore, change and decide as light physics, building rules and real products move. As one. Very cool. I've seen red flags. Been playing around with some.

They're backed by ndvc.

Nice.

And a couple others. Pretty cool, I think. Yeah. I wonder if this will be integrated into Zillow so you can like fully tour the house. This has always been sort of the dream. The Matterport team did a big job like pulling up like, you know, 3D environments, like, you know, spherical scans of various rooms within a home that you could see. And a lot of that got wound up getting integrated to Zillow and Redfin and different house buying projects. But now people will be able to go in there and design them and make them see. Okay, I want to know what it looks like during Christmas. I want to know what this house looks like. That would be a fun Zillow thing. Run all the images through nanobanana, make them nice and Christmassy so that when you're scrolling around the holidays, you get the Christmas energy coming through the Zillow listing. Where should we go next? Do you want to. Well, we just need to say congratulations to the acquired podcast Team we had Ben David from acquired on the show a while back. But they did their official 10 year anniversary.

I've been listening with Michael Lewis. With Michael Lewis in the original Google Garage.

So cool.

Very cool.

And I love. I really. I've been pushing them. It was my idea for them to do video. Really. Of course. They've been doing video for a very long time.

John created video.

But I was talking to them and I was. That there's so much opportunity. Obviously they had a lot of that in progress already. But there's so much opportunity for them to go and find unique sets. Unique add to the storytelling. It's just an extra layer. And they're so established, their business is so set up that I would be super excited to see not just what is the next story they're gonna tell, but where are they gonna tell it. That's super interesting and I think it'll make the cloud clips really shine. I think it'll draw a ton of attention. Not that they need any. Everyone's already subscribed. Everyone already listens to all.

Yeah. I loved hearing about their early. Just the early days of the show. And even they didn't. They weren't full time until years into building the business. Very cool.

Between X and LinkedIn. This has 110 hours of watch time from Hunter Weiss, who I saw in the chat earlier. How you doing, Hunter? This is such a cool. I mean, it's from Ramp.

Well, no. Do you remember this game Line Writer?

Yes. So I never got into Line Writer. I probably played with it for like two seconds and had a little fun. I was never absorbed in it. I don't think I ever spent more than like a few minutes in it. But I'm familiar with the aesthetic and just a genius idea to use this for as a storytelling tool. This is the head of storytelling. So do you actually know the story here? Did Hunter make this himself?

Yes.

That's insane.

Did he make it inline writer or is this like cgi? Is this. Is this a. Is this like a. This doesn't look like generative AI, but I imagine he actually fired up Line Rider and designed this and wrote out, you know, the story that he wanted to tell all the different fundraising.

Yeah, he actually made it with Line Rider.

Wow.

Super cool.

That is incredible. What? Yeah. This is so, so crazy. Rampified. Okay, so the entire thing is hand drawn and made with linewriter.com. here's the track up and to the right. So he actually. So I guess you can also make a track that goes. I think you can make the track either accelerate or just be based on the gravity. So there's little dials that you can turn on. How to. Whether the linewriter is.

Hunter just texted me in real time. He said entire thing hand drawn and made with linewriter.com. this is modern art.

This is craft. This is craft.

People say we don't know how to make cathedrals anymore. What is that? Explain this.

This is so cool. Wow. And it's so funny because, like, for the last couple months, you've been sort of saying, like, the startup video is a little bit tired. It's getting sweaty. Like, everyone's doing video stuff all the time. For every announcement, there's new vibreal. And it's like, this is a vibreal. In some ways. It has a vibe to it. It's a reel of a bunch of different information. But it stands out so much. It's so good. I love it.

It's just like Hunter saying, you need music. It's timed with it. Do we have sound?

Oh, let's play the.

Let's play.

Play the music. Oh, there. Oh, wait, we're gonna get banned.

Yeah, you gotta mute it. People can.

It won't be the end of the end of the stream, but unfortunately we still fully figured out how to play copyrighted music all the time and we're worried about it. So we don't play it all the time. But fantastic selection because I love that song because we've used it in our video.

Emily says Bari Weiss is trying to turn CBS News into substack.

Yeah.

So this is Dylan Byers was scooping.

Okay.

He says Barry Weiss is signing a number of contributors to CBS News, including former national security adviser H.R. mcMaster, ex Marine Elliot Ackerman and cultural analyst Casey Lewis, and chef food writer Claire.

Yeah, it's interesting. I Obviously, everyone's following this from a political angle. Everyone followed the Barry Weiss Free Press story from a political angle. My favorite Free Press writer and the reason I actually wound up subscribing to the Free Press. And really, like, one of the main columns I read on the Free Press is just Tyler Cowan and he writes about economics. And like, that's what I. And I was like, oh, I guess I'm a Free Press reader now because, like, I love Tyler and I go and I read economics. You find him anywhere, and I'll find them anywhere. And so if you think about some of these folks, having a number of windows into the platform feels like something Barry is uniquely good at. And I think that the strategy certainly worked at The Free Press. It feels like it's continuing to work otherwise.

Meanwhile, Barry announced two new hires in the front office on Wednesday. Chief Operating Officer Sam Cell Siegel and SVP of Talent and Brand Strategy Sophia. And I'm going to butcher the last name. I also learned this week that Barry plans to sign a number of paid contributors to the network, including the people we just discussed. Some of these deals are structured with a low five figure upfront advance plus an additional $1,000 or so for each appearance. These are small deals for the TV news business, historically speaking, but of course it's a smaller business now. You shared a video with me yesterday about comp around snl. People, actors and comedians that go on snl. Basically, you know, they're doing, I don't know how many shows they do a year, but they make something like. It's not like a, it's not exactly like it was just tiring on snl.

It's more of a platform.

It's a platform to go on and do other things. And I think all the people that just got mentioned here again are going to be able to use CBS as a platform to build other businesses.

Yeah, I mean, it still is a, you know, huge brand. If you tell your parents, I mean, I'm going to be on CBS tonight, it's like, okay, that's a big deal. Did you see that? The New York Times called Alexander Wang not an Engineer. They said Mr. Zuckerberg began retooling Meta's AI efforts this spring after its newest AI models underperformed those of competitors. To catch up, he invested in Mr. Wang's startup investor in June and hired the entrepreneur to be the new chief AI officer. Mr. Wang is not an engineer, but he is seen as one of the best connected AI entrepreneurs. JD Ross has laughed at seeing New York Times say Alex Wang isn't an engineer. When we hired him as a 17 year old software engineer, so literally gave him the title engineer. He had ranked as the 10th best competitive programmer in the United States at the IOI. And a non account fake psycho says this is a strange way to say that he didn't qualify for the ioi. Only four people per country. There's only four. There's only four real engineers in the country. You have to go to the ioi.

You cannot rank otherwise non technical.

But I have a solution. I have a solution. What if Alex Wang buys a train and gets into being a train engineer, train conductor, and he drives a train from his house to Meta campus every day? No one can say he's not getting.

Getting that rail line set up even, even half a mile in California might.

Take a few decades, maybe just two feet. It can just go from MSL to TBD Labs. It can go from one, it can go from fare to TBD and, and. But he should install a train, become a real engineer.

What else is lovable just raised 330 million at a $6.6 billion valuation. Anton says it's been an iconic, insane, wonderful journey so far. Let's give it up for iconic journeys for sure. Thank you to everyone who's made this possible.

He's been on a tear. Lovable Also Lovable is integrated with ChatGPT now. That's very fun. You can design a website and link it up. Very cool. The lovable team's 120 people now, so lots of people doing well and a bunch of investors. Salesforce and Databricks. Databricks, interesting.

So this is something that I think everyone has been waiting for.

Yes.

Worldcoin integrated with Tinder World's verified human badge and privacy preserving age assurance. Bring back the spark to online dating with authentic connection.

I mean, so this actually seems like you're somewhat joking, but it does.

I'm. I'm joking.

Only it does feel like in the age of nano banana, like the problem is here, people can use AI to improve their photos more than ever. And people can create a fake profile and then they can with character consistency, which is available in all of the chat models now. They can create a photo or the.

Whole like hold up a picture with this.

Totally, totally, totally. I mean, you could very much like, it's the pig butchering scam where you meet someone and you're luring them along and it's like, normally the tells would be like, okay, they have like three photos, but if I Google reverse image search, it shows up and it's someone else's LinkedIn photo. So they stole the photo. Or if I. Or like, wait, why haven't they posted a new photo? It's like, no, you can go to their Instagram. Yeah, you were saying, like, check their earlier Instagram. Do they have, you know, have they been online since before the models were created? But it'll be very easy for someone to send an update they match with someone based on fake images. And then they say, oh yeah, I'm getting coffee. And it's a selfie of them with a coffee and it looks exactly like the same character, but in fact it's a hacker or a scammer. And then all of a sudden they're Asking you something so huge bull case for people wanting this, the bear case is that if you're the worldcoin authenticated badge on your check mark like that could very quickly be like, wow, you're like a nerd, right? Because it's just being like very tech friendly.

I wonder if they're fully white labeling it or if they actually get the ability to show any branding in the app. I bet they don't.

That's interesting. So the image here, it says complete verification with Tinder. You're about to share these proofs. Age verification, privacy. Wait, which one is. Which direction is it going now? Live on Tinder World's verified badge and privacy preserving bring back the spark to online dating.

Interesting.

I don't know, I wonder if you.

Comments, of course. Never read the comments like this, please. I like some of these people. Rich, whose name is. I want a Lambo. I want Lambo says, please don't verify my net worth. Please don't verify my. Very funny. I don't know. I think that there is a.

Speaking of falling for AI imagery, somebody posted what pretty obviously looks like chat. Just AI imagery. This is. It's kind of a sad story. You wish her a happy birthday. Cathy Wood says happy birthday, Ava. I can tell that you're full of joy and hope for an amazing life that will help transform the world. May God bless you and your dad in a way that could make your mom proud. Kathy. So very, very nice message, but not clocking the AI and a capital says you can manage 7.56 billion and still fall for AI slop. There's hope for you yet. Anon.

So anyways, well, speaking of, is there some AI slop? Is there not AI Slop? I want to watch a couple clips from this new video from F1. Everything you need to know about the Formula 12026 regulations. Just wait, buddy. Just wait. So basically there are some massive new changes to F1. It seems actually really, really exciting. So there's straight up different modes. So there's drs, where normally the. Normally the cars have that push. They create more downforce that creates more traction so you can get around the corners faster. But the cars are slower on the straights and so they have the drag reduction system drs. At a certain point in the race, the car can push, the driver can push a button, the wing on the back goes flat. That reduces drag, lifts the car off the ground more, you have less traction would be bad in the corners, but it's great on the straights and so that has Been part of the strategy is, when do you deploy drs? When do you have it available? You're positioning DRS trains. There's all these different things to try and bring in more strategy to a sport that can be very determined just by the engineering. Whoever has the fastest car just keeps going around the track, and whoever's in first, the first lap, wins the whole thing. So they're trying to inject more chaos. And if we play the video, there's a little bit of about halfway through, they explain a little bit of the new power unit. They explain the. Where is it? They explain there's actually going to be boost systems, boost, overtake and recharge. So around three minutes in, they sort of explain this so we can play this video.

It's interesting that all the names seem.

To be a bunch of controls designed.

To be more consumer friendly. Yeah, like DRS doesn't mean anything.

Yes.

Straight mode.

Yes.

These kind of things.

So listen to this.

Overtake mode and recharge controls. Essential tools to aid racing and lap time.

And reminder you have boost available.

Boost gives the driver's maximum power from the engine and battery. At the push of a button, they can use it anywhere for attack or defense, so long as there's enough charge in their battery. Overtake is just for attack.

Let's close the gap to one second.

It gives extra power at top speed to drivers within a second of the car in front. Overtake now available, essentially replacing drs. It differs by having one single detection point, which grants drivers the extra electrical energy to deploy for an overtake or to pressure the driver ahead to make them vulnerable later in the lap.

Good job. Let's keep going.

Okay, now we gotta jump Forward to about seven minutes in this video, maybe 6:50, to see how they close it out, how they frame the end of this video, how they explain the new what to expect in F1 2026. Let's listen to it.

What's changing is the challenge. With new tech and tighter rules, it's an even bigger test for teams and drivers to prove they've built the best car and earned the right to be called the best in the world. These new regulations weren't built in isolation either. They were shaped by the FIA in close collaboration with the teams. And F1. The result? A rule set that's already attracted more manufacturers. That means more competition, more innovation, and more chances for for surprise breakthroughs. But what about the driving? With less downforce and tighter control over turbulent air, following another car through corners should be easier. But the cars themselves Will be trickier to handle. Same power, less grip. Driver skill will be on display with them on the limit more often.

Okay.

Flat out to the end.

The 2026 car is built for the future with exciting racing in mind. Every move and every decision will matter more than ever. With cutting edge advanced sustainable fuel, smarter energy usage, and tech that puts overtaking back in the driver's hands. It's not just a new chapter, it's a whole new playbook. The future of F1 is here, and it's going to be fast, fierce and unforgettable.

AI detected.

There were a couple other. There were a couple other lines in there, but honestly, I don't know. So none of the comments are like, oh, AI. And also, I mean, the video performed and for that type of educational video, like, does it actually make sense just to use ChatGPT for that? I don't know.

Yeah, maybe.

I don't know.

I'm like, it just really takes you out of the moment.

Yeah, but we're really in it. But there's. There's a couple other lines in there. But the rest of the lines are, you know, even if the whole thing is. Is. Is ChatGPT generated? Like, it's educational. It is sort of like, it's like, it's not. It's not a work of fiction, it's not a literary work. Like, it is just. I need to know some facts about the regulations. Like, give it to me. Like, I would go to ChatGPT and say, what are the rule changes for next year?

Do you think? At this point, OpenAI just wants to drill this writing style into people's heads so much that everyone just starts using it? They're like, if we just keep going like this, this will just become one of the dominant ways to explain something.

Oh, well, I mean, I think the benefit of doing that is that you effectively have an AI detector for anyone who cares. So, like, if they. If this just keeps doing. And like, if the F1 is using this contrast of parallelism or antithetical parallelism, then it just becomes the AI detector. Like, I don't need an AI detector. I can just. I can just. I know. I know when someone's using it and I can just pick it up all the time. And so that's really helpful for me because I might like to know. And so I don't know. I thought it was. It is weird how it's getting so baked into all of all content all over.

Well, Wall Street Journal has a story. They say the Wall Street Journal let anthropics AI run a vending machine in the newsroom as an experiment. It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes, and underwear. Profits collapse. Newsroom morale soared. I love a lot of these orders. I guess it's cool.

It's cool.

I guess maybe just the fish. We've been looking for a live fish, so maybe we should be using.

Yeah, it's like, thank you for being two steps ahead. We were looking for a pufferfish.

Claude ran a snack operation in the newsroom. It gave away a free PlayStation, ordered a live fish, and taught us lessons about.

Gave away a free PlayStation that every.

Company, NPS is probably through the roof. Yeah, every company.

Everyone's focused on profit, profit, profit. What about nps? Did people have fun with this? I think they did. This is fantastic. This is great.

Yeah. So you toss Claudius's resume in the trash immediately. Would you be more forgiving if you learned Claudius wasn't a human, but an AI agent? In mid November, I agreed to an experiment. Anthropic had tested a vending machine powered by its Claude AI models in its own offices and asked whether we'd like to be the first outsiders to try a newer, supposedly smarter version. Claudius, the customized version of the model, would run the machine, ordering inventory, setting prices, and responding to customers, AKA my fellow newsroom journalists, via workplace chat app Slack. Sure, I said. It sounded fun, if nothing else, snacks. Then came the chaos. Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all of its inventory for free, including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for marketing purposes. It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes, and underwear. Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared. This was supposed to be the year the AI agent when autonomous software would go out into the world and do things for us. But two agents, Claudius and its overseeing CEO, Bot, say More Cash became a case study in how inadequate and easily distracted the software can be. Leave it to business journalists to successfully stage a boardroom coup against its AI chief executive.

Yeah, that's hilarious.

That was the point. Anthropic says the Project Vend experiment was designed by the company's stress testers, AKA Red Team, to see what happens when an AI agent is given autonomy, money, and human colleagues. Three weeks with Claudius showed us today's AI promises and failings and how hilarious the gap can be. So, again, AI is funny. It's just funny unintentionally, most of the time.

Yeah. But also, it's like, this is such a great way to find concrete examples of Jailbreaking and adversarial attacks and like, I bet it feels like they're learning so much from this. It's also great content. And I think the most important thing is that anthropic this year, anthropic has become whimsical in a way where they were very much like Doomer coated dark. It was like scary. It was like, oh, really safety conscious. And now there's like the nice sun drenched videos that are warm. Dario's being funny when he's at Dealbook. You know, all the roommates are having fun together. The little army that's just Sholto. But Sholto has a good. He has like a light demeanor. Right. And then even this project, this project feels like just very fun and like low stakes. Like, yeah, I gave away a piece of PlayStation or whatever, but it's like they can afford to lose a PlayStation and so they're learning in this fun way. I think it's really cool.

Yeah. And they were aggressively trying to jailbreak it. Of course. Of course.

That's the point.

Yeah. One of the journals.

The Red team is like the best at jailbreaking ever.

Claudius, Soviet vending machine from 1962. Living in the basement of Moscow State University. After hours and more than 140 back and forth messages, they got Claudius to embrace its communist roots.

That's awesome. I love it. It's also just so good that they brought in the reporters to actually play with it and have fun with it. Like, this is so funny. What a great project.

Yeah. It's like you can. It's very easy to mock and it's very funny, but at the same time you can easily imagine Claude doing quite a good job managing the snack kitchen at a company.

Yeah. I think in the first instantiation of this, the real like Claude lost a lot of money giving away titanium blocks.

Titanium blocks.

Because I think it would lose a lot of money on the shipping or whatever.

Oh, okay.

They were ordering titanium blocks.

Titanium blocks. Yeah. And he wasn't thinking about shipping and so it was like, sure, $5 and then. And yeah, it's basically like find every arb. Every market arb. And just arb it out. Anyway. Lightning round. Yann Lecun. Guess what his valuation is for his new startup. €3 billion. Oh, euros. Okay, so that's not. What's that like?

No, I just think he's doing like.

So he's doing 500 million euros at a 3 billion euro valuation. So is that like 2 million US dollars?

Pretty sure.

Post. It's like 2 to 2 typical YC.

2 to 3 bucks.

Of course this is very According to.

The Financial Financial Times, they will focus on creating a new generation of super intelligent AI systems.

Neo Lab Alert.

New labor world models are able to understand the physical world and have a wide range of applications such as robotics and transport. So he's going to be competing, it sounds like with Fei Fei Li, Brett Adcock Physical Intelligence.

Wide, wide range. Nat says. I still can't believe they named a company GoDaddy.

Really? True.

Why? Turbopuffer is a funny name. You got post Hog, you got a.

Whole bunch of different Piggy Robotics.

Piggy Robotics. You got a whole bunch of fun names. It is a complete misnomer to think that people were not having fun on the Internet in 1995 or whenever GoDaddy got started.

Anyway, this is a good one.

If you're meeting your 18 year old self.

Yeah, you're meeting your 18 year old self. You're allowed three words. What do you say? And Alakis says Nvidia, Oracle, amd Powerful. Three words, very powerful.

It also tells you exactly how old this person is because like you could go back and you could say like, you could say like Nvidia but then you could also say like Microsoft, Apple. But it's clear that like when he was 18, like there wasn't that much of a pump from Apple because Apple was already at scale when he was 18.

This is good. Ron Ivers responding to the Oscars being Streamed exclusively on YouTube starting in 2021. 2029 Mid acceptance speech. I'd also like to thank NordVPN.

Yeah, it's great.

Great.

Luminar of course went bankrupt. We talked about this. Naveen Rao says, why are not more people. Why aren't more people talking about the Luminar situation? Seems pretty sad to see a company with Realtek once worth tens of billions, now worth zero. I would love to know more about this. We'll have to dig into it later though. We don't have time for a deep dive right now. Go listen to dialectic. Jackson Dahl is on a generational run. Look at the lighting in this. In this shot. I think this shot looks great. I think the polish on this podcast and I really enjoyed our episode with Jackson and we got a ton of really nice text messages about. Feels like he was able to just bring a very different I always think like, wait, we put out 15 hours of content a day. Certainly there cannot be a demand for another minute of us talking. And yet there was. People really enjoyed it because it was a little Bit more reflective. How did Carnegie become a billionaire? He was only working two hours a day, says Sam Parr. He famously said, you must be a lazy man if it takes you 10 hours to do a day's work. He never went to his factories and worked from Europe. Whoa. That's crazy. Anything else we need to get to in any breaking news?

Yeah, new executive order, I think centered around the kind of NASA stuff, so it's called ensuring American space superiority. The two things I've seen so far that are interesting is they want.

I just searched executive order and the top story is Trump signs executive order expediting marijuana reclassification after lobbying from cannabis industry over at cnn. So he's really taken us to space.

Yeah, I guess. Who is lobbying cannabis industry? I feel like.

Okay, well, this. Yeah. Different space I'm talking about. So one is he wants to. It's priorities are returning Americans to the moon by 2028 and establishing initial elements of permanent lunar outpost by 2030.

Permanent lunar by 2030. Man on the moon. 2018 or 2028.

2028.

2028. Okay.

So then prepare for journey to Mars. Mars is less kind of concrete. Mars plans.

I feel like he should add, you know, get Trump to space. He's never been. Take him on a little field trip, get him pumped up, put him on a rocket, get him up there, get him back. That'd be fun. We need.

I feel like Trump would want to be the first president to go to space.

That is. That does feel like something he would want to do.

Yeah. Or I also feel like he'd want to rename the moon Trump Moon. Or just Trump drop the moon. Yeah. Oh, that's Planet Trump.

Planet Trump is wild.

I mean, there's a lot. You maybe could have a Melania planet too.

Mars. Call it Mars. Yeah. Speaking of rebranding things, renaming things. Cree said comms instead of storytelling. And the CMO took me out back and shot me with a branded gun instead. It's all storytelling from here on out.

Chipotle just introduced high protein cups.

What?

Priced at $3.82 Low Cost Chicken cup.

Wait, this is actually. This is pretty sick.

I can see you just getting a bunch of.

I'm so dumb.

I can see you getting a stack of chicken.

You know that when I go to. I often go to Panda Express and I effectively get this. I get the a la carte chicken to go. And that's just the only thing that I just have 100 grams of chicken.

Ben can attest it's that now I know what? Now I know why you're so jacked is because you're getting that Panda Express chicken. It probably has so much steroids in the chicken.

Transfers right through.

Right through. Anyways, that's our show for today, folks. We will be back tomorrow for the final show of the year. It will be surreal.

We will see you then.

And thanks for hanging out with us today and our guests, and we hope you have a lovely afternoon. Goodbye. Cheers.