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You're watching TBPN.

Today is Monday, June 30, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We got a great show for you today, folks. It's summer. Every venture capitalist is on France.

They're celebrating the fourth in France.

We're not. Yes, literally everyone is abroad, but we're here in Hollywood, California, the future center of media and entertainment. If we play our cards right. We're gonna take you through the five most important stories in technology and business from our perspective, kicking it off with a dramatic. Yeah, get that gasp ready because there's a dramatic story in Wired. OpenAI leadership responds to Meta's offers. Someone has broken into our home. That's the title of the article.

It was written, but you could hear the pain in Mark Chen's friend of the show.

I would call him a personal friend. He's a great guy.

We've had people try to poach our team members with, I wouldn't say similarly sized offers, but meaningful offers.

Meaningful offers. But, yeah, I mean, certainly a high stakes situation. People think of OpenAI as a $350 billion juggernaut. 90% market share in consumer AI. They're doing great. They are the steamroller. But you forget that Zuck's built different. He has $100 billion in free cash flow every year to play with.

And the vibe shift from two weeks ago where everyone was like, oh, okay, Zuck acquired scale. And then, oh, he's got Nat and, oh, he's got dg. And then Sam's like, well, they don't have any of our. They're not recruiting any of. They're not able to get any of our best people to. It feels like somebody has broken into our house and stolen something. Is very significant.

So Bill Gurley has the post that defined the story. He says the company that was already planning to lose $7 billion this year, that's OpenAI is reevaluating comp to be more aggressive. Put that in perspective. And he's got the yeehaw cowboy hat emoji on. I love it.

I love post retirement. Bill. It's just like before. He would be much more concerned about this now. He's got the cowboy hat on. He's just.

He's just watching.

Riding into the sunset.

Riding in the sunset. Talking about the drama.

We're gonna have him on soon. Yeah, I saw there. There was someone else posted that, and I thought this was accurate. People forget that zuck yeeted like $20 billion. You know, he's willing to lose tens of billions of dollars and he can.

Lose on this, the Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition. Oh, I don't think he would. I don't think he yeeted 20 billion on this. I think it was worth every penny. We're gonna be put on the show today. Stay tuned. Tyler Cosgrove, our intern, is going to be trying to beat the first level of Halo in virtual reality.

But OpenAI has incredible access to capital, but they are losing obscene amount of money. Meta has incredible access to capital and can deploy it and still generate tens of billions of dollars of net income.

And uniquely, Zuckerberg has incredible control over the board and shareholders and, and, and so he controls enough of the vote that he can't, that he can't be. He's also just so big, but he can't be the subject of activist shareholder attacks saying, hey, we want earnings per share to go up by a little bit more. We'd like our dividends to be a little bit bigger. He's in that early Bezos era where he has the full faith of the shareholders and also the legal control. To actually go and spend, you know, tens of billions of dollars on a project that might prevent disrupt is absolutely in the long term best interest of.

He's not thinking quarter by quarter.

Exactly. He's fulfilling his fiduciary duty just on a different timeline. And so the only reason that an investor would be upset if they're like, yeah, well, I just want the stock to pop this quarter. But he can tell those people that I'm not, I'm not building with you in mind. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's getting spicy. It's a mark on Mark violence. Mark Chen, Mark Zuckerberg. Pull it up.

I'm sure half a point. The market loves it. No, clearly.

What is that, 5 billion?

Yeah, something like that.

I mean, 5 billion. That'll pay for what, 50 researchers. That's exactly how many you need, right?

Yeah. Who is telling us the Perfectly priced in.

Yeah, yeah, perfectly priced in. Nikita Beer. We got a trade deal, baby.

Trade deal.

Nikita Beer has joined X as the hawk of priority. You probably know him from his vice viral social apps. He's been. He sold one to Discord. He sold one to Facebook back in the day. Now he didn't even have to sell one. He just going directly to. He's going direct. He's joining as the head of product.

He's cutting out the middleman which were his startups.

Basically, he says X is the most important social network in the world. Fully agree. Fantastic app. I'm obsessed. It's where we built this company. It's where Internet culture originates and where the world's most influential people convene. Finding my community and building an audience on X has impacted my life more than any single thing. It's unlocked friendships, professional opportunities, and it's even where I met my girlfriend. While I already spent every waking hour on this app, I'll now be spending that time helping others unlock the same value and will certainly be leveraging the power of Grok to create hyper relevant timelines and help people understand everything that's happening. Thanks Elon Musk and the X team for inviting me to work on the product that I live had every product.

But also poster and residence. Right? They lost. Yep. Scene.

Yes, they did.

Or fired him. But they're bringing back a new poster and residents who's going to be absolutely dominating the timeline.

Yeah. And I think, I don't know, it's interesting, like Nikita's had success iterating very quickly on product and developing viral apps. He's also spent enough time in large tech companies like Meta and Discord to probably be able to play. There's probably some overhead that still exists even in the leaner X. So I wouldn't be surprised that he's actually kind of the perfect person there. And then obviously the fact that he's so dominant on the platform and obsessed with it and really he's a power user, that's probably exactly what you want in the head of product. So I'm bullish. Are you ringing the gong for.

You know why I have this out?

Why do you have that out?

Because the rumor is that X backed up the truck. Brink's truck.

No way.

This one.

Okay.

So I'm gonna hit the gong for Nikita.

Hit the gong. Congratulations to Nikita. Beer. He's been on a generational run and it continues as X's head of product.

I'm gonna start texting him now. When there's bugs.

Yeah.

Head of product. That means.

I actually don't experience that many bugs. Everyone says that there's a ton of bugs. I haven't had that many bugs. I've been having great. But there are a bunch of things that could be improved with the product and so I'm sure he'll come up with some interesting ideas and it'll be a lot of fun to follow. Anyway, in other news, you gotta also ring the gong for Apple. Our boy Tim Cook, he Pulled in, he paid for half of his annual salary just by selling a sponsorship in Apple's F1 movie for a fictional team. APX GP Expensify paid an eight figure sum to become the title sponsor. They also sold sponsorships. Shark Ninja, iwc, the Watch brand. They really built it out. And it makes it look better. I think it makes it look better than.

It's legit.

No, it looks super legit. Yeah.

This was interesting. I, I knew that I don't have a lot of insight into how entertainment companies sell sponsorships in shows. I know it's super prevalent. Right. You'll see. Like, okay, why is this character driving a Hyundai?

Yep.

It doesn't actually make sense in the context of their life. But like, clearly it's Hyundai.

It's all over the place. So sometimes like when I was running Soylent, there were people who would come to us and just like, they would just be like, we had it on the set that day and we wanted to throw it in the fridge. And so we did. So you got a spot in this. We were in a Super bowl ad once because they needed to. The cars in the Fast and Furious movie were driving through Times Square and they needed a, they needed like some billboard in the background. So they just put up an ad for our product, virtual billboard. So sometimes it's like we need something, we need a product that we can clear. Like, you know, Andrew Huberman is going to be fine with us, with us promoting, you know, Mata Ina Yerba Mate on here. But if we were at a really, really Hollywood level, like we would have. If we were going to drink like Monster or Red Bull.

We're at a Hollywood level.

I know. But yes, we are in Hollywood. But there is a level above where like you would have to get clearance to use the thing in the actual, in the actual film. And so a lot of times it's like, can we just get quick approval and not have to pay or not have to do any legal stuff? Other times it's more complicated where they're actually going out and selling it. It sounds like they sold this for this. But anyway.

And Poly Market of the day, they.

Didn'T just make money on the sponsorships.

Yeah. The box office was it 140 million?

They crushed it. 140.

Blew it out. Poly Market had it. If you were talking. They clocked it last week. It was. The market was. Hasn't. I guess it's.

The predictions were. I mean the, the core predictions were around like 55 million. I guess was kind of the middle band here, 50 million and double, blew that out. I mean, F1's popular, and it's. It's. So have you seen the other F1 movies? Of course not. Why am I even asking? Ford versus Ferrari. You haven't seen that drive. You haven't seen that, right? No, no. But big news. I saw my first UFC event, so I'm catching up. Jordy's going to see his first movie. I'm going to see my first UFC event.

It'll be great, John. Yeah, I love it.

We had a good crew. It was a lot of fun.

UFC with. With Senra Rob Moore. It's great, and we had a great time. John. John asked, who's playing tonight.

Yeah.

On Saturday? I said, well, John, I don't think they're gonna be playing. They're gonna be fighting, punching each other in the face. And the knockout on Saturday was spectacular.

My wife was like, oh, you know how, like, when guys go watch the football game, they, like, toss around the football beforehand. Like, are you guys gonna be, like, punching each other before you watch the punching? And I was wondering if you guys are gonna be like, yeah, let's just go, like, spar a little bit before we sit down and watch ufc. Let's roll. Maybe we should do that next time. Anyway, this is actually massive news. Toby Luckey has summed it up well, but. So Tesla has the first. The world's first autonomous delivery of a car. So this Tesla, I believe it's a Model Y, drove itself from the Gigafactory in Texas to its new owner's home, 30 minutes away, crossing parking lots, highways, and the city to reach its new owner. And Toby Loki says, put it on the front page of all the newspapers. Well, we printed it. It's in the front page of tvpn. What else do you need? Toby, come on the show.

No, this is significant. It's costly to get a car delivered. Obviously, if you're getting a car delivered from hundreds of miles away, the gas fees are going to be high, but it costs money. The other thing, you just got a car recently, and the shipper damaged the car while it was being shipped. It should just driven itself now. Needs to be repaired.

Yes. And so I'm very interested in what this actually means for, like, structurally, for the business of Tesla. We'll have to dig into this, but I wouldn't be surprised if, like, that, like. So Tesla's famously, like, cut out the middlemen of, like, dealerships, and I think that's really improved their margins. And I imagine that that Delivery is not an insignificant line item for Tesla right now. Like you order them, they have to put them on trucks, they have to deliver them. There's all this extra, all this extra step. And I, I feel like delivery fees are around 1000 bucks. Maybe it depends on how far you're going. But like you have to have multiple people securing the car, traveling with it. It not just.

Every time I've bought a car, hundreds of dollars at least outside of a few hundred miles away, it ends up somewhere 1,000.

1,000 bucks. And so, yeah, you assume that there's like a 50% margin tacked on that and it's a high margin app.

The other thing here is it's effectively passing on the delivery cost to the consumer because it's really just mileage, right?

Yeah, mileage and energy. And then you get a half charged car and you're like, okay, I got to charge it up, but who cares about that? Nobody cares. Nobody cares about that. And so I wonder, I mean this, this should be, you know, somewhat material. I just wonder how material it might be. Like, okay, it drops their cogs by 0.001%. But it certainly is exciting. And you can imagine we're one step closer to like push a button and buy a car and it just arrives, which is very, very cool. Yeah. Finger hovering over the button with that one. Get one just. But I'll be waiting for the, for naturally. The naturally aspirated V8 or V12 version as soon as they roll.

That is coming.

Yeah, it'd be fantastic. Anyway, in other news, your, your Natural.

Naturally aspirated V12 Tesla is getting delivered.

Yes.

And it's just getting noise complaints along the way because AI is just joyriding it, pulling over to do burnouts.

I mean, if you hear Doug Demiro's riff on electric cars, he says that they're technically naturally aspirated. They don't have turbochargers, they don't have superchargers. How are the batteries cooled? Naturally, all the air flows through the car. Naturally. There's no turbochargers, therefore it is a naturally car.

Yeah. Xiaomi is not far right. I posted a picture today. Their new car is just almost a one to one copy for a sangue.

Yeah.

The news is apparently it's selling very well. They've got over 200,000 non refundable orders.

Not just over 200,000 for the. This is the electric SUV, the new Xiaomi, 289,000. And that's not just so far. That's in the first hour.

Okay, that's a lot solid potential that we respect. Business. I'm going to hit the size gong.

Congratulations to the folks over at Xiaomi for ripping off the Purosangue success so successfully. That's on B3. Anyway, the last top story we have today is from Luke Metro. He says, I know a 409 evaluator hates to see this coming because Robinhood has tokenized stocks and everything else. And so now there are private company stock tokens and they're shouting out OpenAI and SpaceX. But Luke Metro works at Anduril, obviously has some stock options and he's getting ready to. Anduril is to trade them on Robinhood potentially, who knows? In the pipeline.

Yeah, in the pipeline, I would imagine. Yeah. This is interesting. I mean we had Ken from Republican last week also building his.

He must have known that this was coming or something. Or maybe there's some underlying market structure Bill. But this feels like it's a wave that's everyone's doing it all once. Right.

Part of it is that this administration has been extremely crypto friendly. Seems like everything. Not everything, but most things are fair game now. And so I think a lot of companies saw this coming and have just been racing to deliver new product experiences. It is funny to think about, I guess the SpaceX and OpenAI tokens are going to be available to European Robinhood users only. And so it is funny to think.

About when is European European liberal day trading.

OpenAI and SpaceX shares could be the.

Best place for them to earn yield.

Apparently rolling out on the. The Robinhood chain. So they're launching their own L2.

Interesting.

With Arbitrum.

Yeah.

And I'm interested to see.

I saw they cleared. Yeah, they cleared an exchange of OpenAI tokens today or open a stock like, like the first transaction. Yeah, the first. The first transaction has gone through. Luke Metro had another funny post that was like, I just hope that my Anduril stock is valued like the Robinhood Degen retail trader valuation and not the price that FoundersWeb pays. This is very funny.

That's good.

Anyway. Oh, sorry, are we blocking the camera? Anyway, let's go through some, some of the deep dives. I want to, I want to dig into that Wired article that was burning up the timeline over the weekend and then we'll, we'll read through some of the Wall Street Journal coverage of the list AI's secret file of geniuses. But first we have our first intern challenge of the day. We.

The first. Yeah, there might be even when you finish this. Tyler, you're not. You're not safe.

We were. We purchased and received a Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition. Very nice foil. Look at that foil. This is a nice product. So this is the latest and greatest out of Meta for their virtual reality headsets. And the challenge is to beat the first level of Halo Complete Edition Halo CE. This is Halo 1. Tyler, you've never played Halo at all.

I've never played Halo.

Okay, but you've played complete first person shooters.

Yeah.

Okay, so you should be able to do it. You think?

Yeah.

Okay. So I asked ChatGPT. The speedrun world record for Pillar of Autumn, which is the first level in the first Halo game is like three minutes. But you have to like cheat and go through the walls and stuff. An experienced player can do it in like 15 minutes. First time person ever playing should be able to do it in between 20 and 30 minutes. So for this, let's give you an hour. If you can do.

I was thinking like 12 minutes.

Okay, let's.

Best of luck.

Let's give you 45 minutes. If you can do it in under 45 minutes, you will get to keep this. Let's go. Okay. Okay, so can we get a timer?

Yeah, start the timer.

So it is 11:20. Let's give you 40 minutes. So if you can do it before noon. So go get it and start. Okay, Time starts now.

He's hustling. He's hustling for good reason. All right, have fun, Tyler.

So the problem is that the level takes like five minutes. But unboxing and setting that thing up I think is going to take like 40 minutes. So that's the real challenge. But Tyler will be working on that during the. During the show and good luck to him.

Anyways, back to the timeline. A poster by the name of Toucan says nerds is quoting. On the left is Ronaldo. Another post Real Madrid spent 80 million to sign him from Man United. On the right is J. Hugh you, which I struggling to pronounce. Meta paid 100 million to sign him from OpenAI. And Toucan says nerds have been complaining that athletes are overpaid for decades. Finally, the nine figure nerd trading market has emerged. Take that, LeBron Jameson.

Jameson doesn't even know his name. It's fantastic. Well, you know, if you're, if you're on a hiring spree, you got to get everyone in your organization. Corporate cards. Head over ramp.com Time is money save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Anyway, let's dig into this OpenAI leadership. The Open.

This was all this news was kind of coming out.

Yep.

Over the weekend. There's no, there's no decency anymore. You can't even take a summer, you.

Can'T even send an email to a 3,000 person organization without it leaking to Wired. Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday promising to go head to head with social giant in the war for top research talent. This memo, which was sent to OpenAI employees in Slack and obtained by Wired, came days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg successfully recruited four senior researchers from the company to join Meta's super intelligence lab. I have a visceral feeling right now as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something, chen wrote. Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by. I mean, this makes sense. Like you need to, you need to tell the troops that like, you know, we're prepared to go on the counter attack. Like we got attacked, but we're ready to go back. What's interesting is like, is like, I don't think that, I don't think that Meta is necessarily going to try and go eat chatgpt's lunch. Like I was revisiting that conversation that we had with Jeff Huber and he was saying like, you know, he was kind of reiterating like, never bet against Zuck, like he's working on an open source model. But a lot of it is more of this like B2B applied AI necessarily than trying to go and disrupt ChatGPT because Google's already running that playbook. Mark can see that and see that what happens when you're a trillion dollar company and you roll out basically a direct clone of the ChatGPT App?

App.

It's like, yeah, you can get a decent amount of users in a num. In a notional terms. Like, I'm pretty sure the Gemini app has like 100,000 user or 100 million users and like lots of five star reviews, but it just doesn't have anywhere near the penetration of ChatGPT. And so when you pull someone off the street and you say, what do.

You use for AI?

They say chat. They don't even say chatgpt anymore. So dominant. And so I think Mark knows that he shouldn't necessarily try and go after that, but he should be going after the next thing and the next next thing and have a model that he can pipe into all sorts of different features within the Meta ecosystem.

But yeah, the crazy thing is there's not, it doesn't seem like there's clear precedent for a raid of a talent raid of this magnitude. Right. We covered Ken Griffin raiding Enron, but it was after post the collapse, right?

Yep.

Apple heavily recruited out of Xerox Parc in 1979 in the early 80s.

But like it was kind of a downswing.

Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't anything of this magnitude. Nor, nor was it, hey, we're gonna come in and just give you these like nine figure off, you know, totally packages and things like that.

Yeah. And it's very common for a startup to, to be able to pull people from the big legacy company. That's kind of sclerotic. And you know, we've seen a lot of people that were at Apple or Goo or Microsoft or Xerox and then they went to Google and then they went to Meta and then they went to OpenAI. I mean Brett Taylor, who's the, who's the chairman of the board at OpenAI was the CTO of Meta. Right. And it's like, okay, he clearly just wants to be in like the hot thing and he's like a startup guy almost. And I believe he was at Google before because he worked. Yeah, yeah. He redid Google Maps. And so like the, like the story of Brett Taylor is really like the default I think for most like startup people. It's like he's at, he's, he's early at Google, he works with Paul Buchite on Gmail, he works on Google Maps. Then he goes over to Meta CTO there, then he goes to OpenAI as chairman of the board there. And it's like he's a startup guy and so he's always riding like the new wave. You usually can't poach them back into the older company. That's rare.

Yeah. Some other precedent here. In 2010 and 2011, Zuck and Facebook went super aggressive poaching from Google. So Facebook had crossed half a billion users. They were in that period of transitioning from a super scrappy startup and they went heavy into Google. So they went and got high performers from ads, search mobile on the Android side and some of the social product people from Google. And Zuck did something similar, not to the same scale, but just went in with these sort of heavy, heavy, heavy comp packages and was very successful. Google had to respond and increase comp in, in a number of different roles.

Did they poach any designers, any people that use figma.com, any people that think bigger Build faster. Anyone that you know? Because Figma helps design and development teams build great products together, it would be a different place. But fortunately, you can go to figma.com.

You can think faster.

Anyway, what do you think of the buzzword superintelligence? This whole, like, they've really rebranded it. Is it a goalpost shifting?

I think it's smart. I think he poached the. The. The word super intelligence. It's mine now because. And he's not saying. And he's not saying the safe Super Intelligence team. He's just saying super intelligence. Reckless implies reckless.

Reckless super intelligence. I like that. But it's funny because, you know, everyone was focused on, like, AI as a buzzword. Then it was AGI, then it was. Now it's super Intelligence. But, like, you know, within our group, like, we all think, like, super intelligence is kind of the old thing. Like, everyone, like me and you, we know the secrets to this stuff. Like, like, it's kind of. It's kind of already priced in. The real killers, they're focused on the next thing. You know what I'm talking about, right? Giga intelligence, that's the one that people are getting really, like, the real killers are like, yeah, well, like, AGI is basically here. Super intelligence is basically here. But Giga intelligence, that's the one we're working on because we're going to need a new buzzword, because we're burning through buzzwords and increasing rate and so we're just. We just steamrolled the Turing test. Completely blasted through AGI. No one talks about AGI anymore. AGI is here. Yeah, but you got, you know, super intelligence. We're going to solve this buzzword. We're going to churn through this in a year or two. We got to start working on Giga intelligence now.

Yeah, this is the way anyway, start adopting it.

Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and other leaders of the company around the clock to talk to those with offers, adding, we've been more proactive than ever before. We're recalibrating comp and we're scooping out and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent. Still, Even as open AI, even, even as OpenAI leadership appears desperate to retain its staff, Chen said that he has high personal standards of fairness and wants to retain top talent. With that in mind, while I'll fight for to keep every one of you, I won't do it at the price of fairness to others, he wrote.

It's Such a brutal dynamic. If you're Mark Chen, if you're Sam. Because not everybody at OpenAI is getting poached. But presumably Zuck is working with all the people he's poached already to identify who are the best people at OpenAI. Who do we really want? And then going to them and making the maxed out offers. Meanwhile, you can't like the team dynamic. If you have a few researchers on a team and somebody gets, you know, somebody's potentially getting poached by Meta, and you say to retain them, you're like, okay, we're gonna give you this sort of massive incremental grant and the other people on their team are gonna be like, wait, well, is that my market value? I didn't go talk to Facebook, or I didn't, I turned down, I never took the meeting, or whatever. So you should pay me the same thing too.

Yeah, right.

I'm loyal. Don't you want to pay?

I'm a missionary.

Yeah, I'm a missionary.

Why are you paying the mercenaries more? You should pay the missionaries the same price just because they're missionaries. Rough for sure.

Brutal.

Anyway, let me talk about.

No, the other thing is it creates this really nasty incentive to basically be like, oh, yeah, you maybe got hit up by a Meta recruiter many months ago. And you can be like, yeah, I mean, they reached out to me and suddenly they're hovering around you being, all right, what's it going to take? We really don't want to lose you.

It is a. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. Game theory, like every single conversation in a company is like this constant game theory.

And then timing that with this summer break that I guess OpenAI was saying like, hey, everybody should take the week of the 4th off. Or not the week of the 4th. But anyways, you wanted to say something more important.

Well, I mean, you know, if you want to see who your high performers are, just look in the linear. Right. Linear's purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

If Zuck were able to gain access to OpenAI's linear, it would be illegal, but it would also tell them a lot.

Yeah, you don't want to do anything illegal, Zuck. You want to be on Vanta. Automate compliance. Manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So the News comes as competition for, for top AI researchers heating up in Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg has been particularly aggressive in his approach, offering $100 million signing bonuses to some OpenAI staffers, according to comments Altman made on a podcast with his brother Jack Altman. So this, this hundred million dollar signing bonus, this just got baked into the lexicon. But I was listening to Dylan Patel on Jordan Schneider's ChinaTalk podcast. It's actually transistor radio, but it goes out on Chinatalk anyway. And Dylan Patel was saying that that might be, that might be a kind of a game of telephone a little bit in the sense that it's possible that you could maybe be making $100 million over a number of years in stock based on appreciation. But he was very skeptical that Anyone was getting 100 million on day one without any sort of strings attached for like a true signing bonus. So I don't know how real that.

Yeah, and remember that the Zurich team came out and said. The Zurich team explicitly said they didn't get it.

But I know, I know the way.

That he phrased it could have been more clearly we're getting.

No, no, no. I do think that the round numbers are easy to latch onto. Like why is Mamdani talking about billionaires specifically? He doesn't have a problem with 999 millionaires because like that, that's not easy to grasp. Like people latch on to round numbers. 100 million is so much. A billionaire is so much. And it's easy to, it's easy to quantify. And so the hundred million, if it was 80 million, it wouldn't be going nearly as viral as 100 million. And so I don't know how real that is. Maybe that was thrown out as a total package and then it got kind of telephoned into. Well, you know, they, it's basically a signing bonus because they, they got the deal on the, on the, as soon as they signed. But they do have some sort of earn out or the shares are locked up in some way. But there's a bunch of creative accounting that can go into basically delivering someone what feels like $100 million of value, which is not far off from. Okay, what, what would it take? You know, Johnny, I've got, you know, a huge offer to go to OpenAI and it was structured in an interesting way with like an acquisition and you know, but he got a few points. Yeah, it was a few, it was a few percentage points. And when you think about the scale of OpenAI and the scale of Jony, I've's legacy. Like, yeah, like what would it take to get someone like that to join your. He's a founding designer, basically. So it's a couple, couple percentage points. So multiple sources. OpenAI with direct knowledge of the offers confirmed the number two wires. So I don't know because they kind of benefits like both sides to, to have that number out there. It's kind of unclear who would, who would really want to confirm that and then what the nature of.

Yeah, these were. The other thing that's interesting though, the other thing that's interesting is if you're working at OpenAI and let's say their top researchers have on average $100 million in OpenAI shares, that they're like the truly top people. And then you get an offer that's like a $20 million signing bonus, but it's, you know, it's kind of paid out over time and that or they can claw it back. If you don't stay past a certain date and you're kind of looking at it and be like, okay, I'm already a centi and I'm getting an offer to like go to a new team that I don't know if I'm going to like. And it's, and it's unclear, like the vision is not quite as clear at Meta. Right. I'm joining the superintelligence team. It's going to be an incredible group of people with a ton of resources. That's exciting. But it is a big switch if you're already happily vesting out tens of millions of dollars. So it would make sense that these 20 million dollar, you know, if it's $20 million, I can see that. If it's $100 million for the top, top, top people, it makes total sense.

Yeah, I mean like, what was the, I mean the, the deal to bring on Alex Wang was probably like way over a hundred million dollars to him personally based on his ownership in that company which was acquired. And so like that number doesn't feel impossible. I would just be surprised if there's not some structure around it based on, based on what Dylan was talking.

There's just enough precedent here that. But again, going back to Zuck rating Google in 2010, 2011, he was offering tens of millions of dollars in stock packages to mid level engineers just because he was like, I need a really good ad product. I want to make my ad product great.

Yeah. I mean, have you seen the. Why am I even asking this? Have you seen the BlackBerry movie? Of course not. But in the BlackBerry movie, there's this whole story about they go and they try and poach someone and then it was controversial because they backdated some stock options for someone to basically give them more like cash, but without having like the, the, the initial impact of that cash. It's kind of interesting. But, yeah, I mean, to poach top talent, it's expensive. It kind of benefits both. Maybe, I mean, I don't know, like on, on the Meta side, do they want, Does Zuck want the idea that he's willing to pay up to $100 million out there? Like, maybe. Because that, that certainly leads to more people taking the phone call of like, oh, wow, Mark is really taking this seriously. I should, I should talk to Meta's recruiting team. I should actually hear them out and then if they wind up coming back to me with a 50 million dollar offer or $10 million offer, like, you know, we can discuss that and I can see and they can evaluate how much I'm worth. They can make an offer. But at least it got the conversation started. But I don't know. There was also the theory that Sam Altman put that $100 million number out in order to kind of like poison the well. Because if, if Mark comes to you and says, hey, you're a top AI researcher. Come over here, and then the top AI researcher says, like, yeah, great, I hear, I hear $100 million at the going rate. And Mark's like, no, no, no, that's like fake news that Sam was spreading. Like, we're actually paying 15. Then you're like, well, no, I was hoping over 100.

But it kind of benefits both Machiavellian people.

And yeah, you see, it could be like 40 chess on both sides. I don't know.

Yeah.

Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort and has repeatedly and most unsuccessfully tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with. With comp focused packages. Chen wrote on Slack. A source close to the efforts at Meta confirmed the company has been significantly ramping up its research recruiting with a particular eye toward talent from OpenAI, Google OpenAI and Google. Anthropic, while also a top rival, is thought to be less of a culture fit at Meta. One source tells Wired they haven't necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky's the limit. Which is funny because, yeah, of course, like, Anthropic is so missionary driven. Like, it's going to be very hard to go to anthropic research scientists and be like, ads, better ads. They're like, we're building God here.

Anyway, $100 million is $100 million.

Not for anthropic guys. Anthropic guys are true believers. They don't care. What's $100 million in a post scarcity world? Doesn't matter. You want to be on the, on the, on the post scarcity train.

Chen's no, it is so, it is so telling though. Like how you sort of like try to pinpoint Zuck's views on AI. He's like, I'm not even going to bother with those people. Anthropic, not a culture fit two AGI.

Pilled yeah, that's great, Senator.

We sell ads anyway.

If you're looking for sales tax super intelligence, go to numeral HQ.com, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance with Superintelligence for Sales Tax.

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Yes, that's true. Chen's note included messages from seven other research leaders at the company where they wrote notes to staffers in an apparent effort to encourage them to stay. One leader on the research team encouraged staff to reach out if they received an offer for Meta. If they pressure you or make ridiculous exploding offers, just tell them to back off. It's not nice to pressure people. And potentially the most important decision Wired is not naming the leader as they are not a C suite executive. This is weird. Where's the, where's the end of this quote? That's odd. I'd like to be able to talk you through it and I know all about their offers. The remarks come as OpenAI staff grapple with an intense workload that has many staffers grinding 80 hours a week. OpenAI is largely shutting down next week as the company tries to give employees time to recharge.

Let's give it up for OpenAI's Grind set.

It's really fantastic. Also extremely American to give a full week off right around July 4th. Like I'm normally pretty anti taking time off, but if you're gonna go really hard on a particular holiday, make it July 4th. You know, give a week off around July 4th. I love it. I was, I was posting, you know, the over I need a poly market on whether or not we get a Zuck American flag video on July 4th. Do you think it'll happen?

I actually think there's 100% should be a poly market on that.

Right? It's kind of 50 50. Right? Like he is definitely locked in, very busy, probably not a lot of time off. He sees that. He knows from this that OpenAI is down this week, so that's probably like really encouraging to be like, I want to go harder this week. They're off.

Yeah, My, my.

At the same time, one of the greatest pieces of content he puts out.

Think about how hard Zuck is going right now, the week of July 4th, and just don't get outworked by him.

Yes.

Just don't get outworked by Zuck this week. It's gonna be tough.

He's in year 20. What excuses do you have? You're three months into your startup.

Come on, go harder, go harder.

I love it.

Yeah. Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and we'll take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation. Another leader at the company wrote, if you're feeling that pressure, don't be afraid to reach out. I and Mark are around and want to support you.

So while opening eyes, leadership is taking Meta's efforts seriously. Chen also said that the company is getting too caught up in the cadence of regular product launches and in short term comparison with the competition. The sentiment is backed by a former OpenAI staffer who worked closely with Altman and this and said the CEO wanted to see buzzy announcements. Announcements every few months. This was a really, this was key to their strategy, was like always have.

A buzzy announcement ready if the competition does anything.

Just drop a. Oh, Google IO is happening. Wouldn't it be crazy if we acquired a company called I.O. the day before or something like that? Like, or like, oh, Google's announcing the new Gemini. Let's just steamroll them in the timeline that 24 hours.

Yeah, I'd love to introduce you. Deep research.

I mean it's masterful and like, but that's the game you got to play. That's the game on the field. Like, I think he's being aggressive, but he's not doing anything wrong.

He, he is up there with Elon in terms of creating and riding hype and constantly delivering enough real product value.

Yes.

To justify the hype that that was being sold.

Yep.

You know, six months ago, basically. So like staying on the bleeding edge.

And this is why the anti tech people hate, hate him and Elon so much because they're like, they're like, it's overhyped, it's not useful. And then like a year later it's like there's Tesla cars everywhere, the rockets are landing and like 90% of people are eating chatgpt every day. Okay, so it was real. But also he was over promising, but he delivered at a. At a higher level than anyone in human history. And that's just like it's. Those two things are in conflict. Someone said this like, Elon is both Thomas Edison and Barnum and bailey or whatever. P.T. barnum, he's a circus man who can put on a show and put a robot in a human in a suit acting like a robot, but then he can actually go and deliver the thing, which is just. It just breaks people's brains anyway. We need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to compute. A lot more supercomputers are coming on later this year. Into intelligence, Chen wrote. This is the main quest, and it's important to remember that skirmishes with meta are the side quest. Last but not least, I'll be around this week recharged and ready to go. Pound for pound. DM me anytime. I love it. He's ready to go.

He's fired up.

Get him in the ring.

I love talking with Mark. Yeah, that was a fun conversation also.

I mean, guys in shape. Let's get him in the. Let's get him in the octagon with Zuck. Mark on mark, violence. Let's see it.

I mean, if there was a pound for pound list for the top AI researcher in the world. He's in the conversation.

He's in the conversation. It's amazing. It's really been amazing to watch Mark's leadership and integrity through this process, especially when he has had to make tough decisions. Altman wrote on Slack in response to Chen's message. Very grateful we have him as our leader.

I mean, it can't be overstated making these decisions. Right?

Yeah.

One of your best people comes to you and says, hey, I'm really happy here at OpenAI. I have $80 million of stock and I was just offered 150 over the next year. And it's highly liquid. Over the next few years, it's highly liquid, meaning that I can market, sell it quarterly forever. And meanwhile, you're going through this for profit conversion.

Do you think the liquidity thing is real at all?

I mean, obviously.

What are you. I mean, like, if you want to. Let's say you want to buy a $50 million house and you have $100 million in, like, illiquid open AI. Like, is that going to be hard at all? I feel like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management are going to be beating down your doors to give you a loan that's backed by the shares. Sure. You're only gonna have to put down 10%. Sure.

But. But meanwhile there's so many failing to go through a for profit conversion.

Yeah, but I mean, so that Satya.

Has taken 20% off the top.

I mean that applies. I'm just, I'm just like a small haircut, I would say.

I'm just saying there, there is always. Yeah, there's always going to be a tension of somebody having massive wealth but not having greenbacks. Yeah, there's always going to be that tension.

Yeah.

And people seeing that, that meta is one of the most liquid stocks in the world can constantly trade in and out of it and it's ultimately just, it's stable.

I mean, if you're interested in liquid stocks, go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing. Industry leading yields. Old fashioned stocks trusted by millions. And who knows, maybe they'll have OpenAI soon. Anything?

Barely you.

Yeah, we should, we should. You know, Robinhood has, you know, the, the tokens around private companies. Maybe we should tokenize nonprofits. I want to be able to trade, you know, PETA. You know, let me, let me, let me go long PETA. Let me get some, let me get some leverage on that. I want some leverage.

Please.

Levered options on PETA. Look at Tyler right now. Cam, how are we doing?

I think I'm in the right mission.

Oh, you did it. No way. 15 minutes left. Let's see it.

Okay.

Okay. I can't believe you got it set up so fast. That's amazing. Okay, he's sitting at. He's sitting at 26 minutes so far.

All right, well, have fun in there. Tyler, just look over.

I just didn't realize he was on VR. It's amazing. I think he's actually playing it the. This is crazy because my number one complaint with the quest was that it just takes a long time to set up and I think that it costs a lot of money.

You intentionally did this challenge and made it seem like, oh, I'm going to happily give away my new VR Xbox thinking that there's no way he could finish it in. But now he's.

I think he's going to do it.

He's speedrunning.

Speedrunning. Pillar of autumn. It's happening. Anyway, Swigs has the story. He's breaking it down.

Yeah. Some good highlights here. The mark. The mark war has resulted in going from oh, the good people don't leave to someone has broken into our home and stolen something. One week. Company shutdown. Question mark. Question mark. I mean I, I was going back and forth here I wouldn't be surprised if the shutdown was somewhat strategic. Yeah, in that, hey, people already need a break. We shouldn't have them walking around the office.

The way they were writing it. It felt like this had been on the table for months because the company has been working really hard, launching a ton of stuff. And it seems like if. It just seems like an odd, an odd choice to. If you're in the middle of this Mark v Mark war that that would be what you choose to do would be a one week company shut down. But I don't know, maybe I'm just. I'm not 100% that like the AI talent war has resulted in the shutdown. It's more just like the shutdown is happening at a weird time. Anyway, this third point is very interesting. Pivoting product launch calendar to AGI race, especially when Stargate comes online. Dylan Patel says December is when Stargate's coming online and that should be a big like the biggest, the biggest cluster ever and unlock even more maybe pre training scale. But there's a question about how important that is and maybe you can do more reinforcement learning in a more distributed way. So I don't know. Also like it's not exactly like Zuck is GPU poor. So I don't know. I don't know how big of a deal it is the Stargate thing, we'll see. But number four, for some reason Meta is ignoring anthropic don't care about safety. If this is true, of course the anthropic point was very funny. Anyway, there's other posts in here that we should cover. Satwik Singh says what Sam never understood was that Zuckerberg torched 20 billion over VR headsets with Nintendo Wii graphics and didn't even flinch.

Didn't even flinch.

You know what's so funny? Like those, the, the Nintendo Wii graphics thing that was like that was like three months and then after that it was. He was doing that, that Lex interview in the Metaverse. Did you ever see that? Where it's like. It is like photoreal.

Immediately we got a wild demo at Meta HQ of all the new products and we were blown away. I'm not even sure. I don't think we can say much.

About it in like the abstract. But. But yeah, I mean none of that was like Nintendo Wii level graphics but, but, but I mean that, that was, that one picture was like iconic and kind of like it felt like oh, this is kind of a step back.

In terms of, of well, many more people saw that picture than actually use the product.

Yeah. And so yeah, because there were plenty of, there were plenty of VR games that didn't have Nintendo Wii graphics. Like the hero game for the, for the Quest when it came out was Robo Recall which looked super sci fi and just looked awesome. And it was, it was great. And there were a bunch of other games. But yes, I mean the point is, is that like Mark is totally ready to spend $20 billion on a big project if you think thinks it's valuable and here he clearly does and so he's going after it anyway. Similar founder led company that's building amazing AI stuff. Fin the number one AI agent for customer service. We've had Owen on the show before. He's been on number one in performance.

Benchmarks, number one in Bake Offs. Number one on G2.

Ranking on G2. Let's go. So if you're looking to do customer service, head over to Finn.

I'm saying this, they're not saying this, but I'm going to say this is the official AICX tool of both AI safety and being AGI pilled because Anthropic uses really?

No way. There we go. Okay. Awesome. Yeah, I'm sure Anthropic will love that. We said you could put our logo on your website. We, we didn't say these. The technologies go way over their skis on this endorsement.

The official CX agent.

Anyway, Rune had an interesting take here diving into the why these trade deals are so not really trade deals with these poachings can be so damaging and he's trying to put it in broader consumer terms. We're going to debate whether or not his point is well taken. He of course works at OpenAI and has for a number of years. Rune says intellectual property by default is a market failure. Single well informed talented defectors can walk away from organizations with billions of dollars of tacit value of knowing what works and what doesn't. The athlete metaphor is somewhat wrong. In industries where patents and such aren't viable market participant aren't viable market participants will drastically underinvest in R and D efforts due to IP seepage. Just like the I drink your milkshake effect of oil seepage and land rights. There is a compelling pro consumer case for non competes. Interesting. Very rare that you hear a tech person argue in favor of non competes. Interesting. I mean the, the, the immediate impact of non competes in this context would be dramatically lower wages for AI researchers like Rune. Which is interesting. The other question is.

Yeah, it's interesting. You'd have to move AI out of California.

Oh, people would then maybe. Or they, or they.

I'm just saying, I'm saying if you really want to use non computers, go where they can be enforced, right?

Yes, but then as historically. Yeah, but then as an AI researcher, you'd say, I definitely don't want to leave California. I'm going to get a much better deal here. Yeah. My question is like, I've always been interested in like why can, you know, like the consumer packaged goods industry, like patent like a tab on a can for 25 years and like Walt Disney can own like the shape of mouse ears for like 80 years but like Google can't own the transformer for like even a minute. Like I get that it's like some sort of fundamental discovery, but I've always been interested in how little IP works in technology. So that's, I think it just is.

Is a byproduct of hacker culture culture, sort of like positive sum culture of Silicon Valley.

Yeah, but you think that would change. There's so much on the table, right?

Yeah, I mean there's a culture of, you know.

So I agree with you and I'll give you an example. So Pull to Refresh on the iPhone was created by a Twitter employee. Like a Twitter UX UI developer built that, built that user interaction and then Twitter had a patent on it.

Lauren Brichter.

Yes.

American software developer best known for creating Pull to Refresh the Pull to Refresh interaction.

So he created that design pattern and then he had a patent on it. Twitter owned the patent on. And Jack Dorsey and the Twitter crew were libertarian and said, you know, we're not going to enforce this. And then it got baked into Instagram and it's now natively in iOS and it's in all of, you know, it's basically like one button to like if.

You'Re, if you're true. If you're truly terminally online, you're using it hundreds of times a day.

True. Now we've actually moved past that. We've moved into Endless scroll where you actually don't need like if you're on TikTok, you're never pulling to refresh. You're just keep, you just keep scrolling to the bottom. So, so we're actually post Pull to Refresh and now we're in the Endless Scroll. But Endless Scroll I believe was developed by Pinterest and they had a patent on it for a while. I think it might be wrong here, but. Yeah, but, but Endless scroll was also something that was not able to be owned, which is just odd to me. And then, and then there's the other question of like Coca Cola has been able to keep the, you know, the formula as a trade secret for like 100 years or something. And it's just odd that tech companies can't seem to do either. They can't keep the secret.

You can have trade secrets, right. It's not like an OpenAI researcher can go over and say, here's a bunch of code, let's roll it out, right?

Yep.

It's basically the sort of way of doing things that they've internalized from being at a company for a certain amount.

Tacit value of knowing what works and what doesn't. And so my naive read on this is that if you had had a top tier OpenAI researcher at Meta during the Llama 4 build out, that researcher would have said, hey, don't focus on pre training scale as much. We need to get a reasoning model out and we need to focus on RL and post training much more. And when you talk to Dylan Patel, I was asking him about Deep SEQ and how Deep Seek was, was doing all these innovations and like moving to floating point eight, like smaller, basically smaller numbers, storing the weights. And he was like, oh yeah. But OpenAI was doing that like two years ago. Deepseek just open sourced it. And so it's like the world found out if you found out the best practices from Deep Seq because they open sourced it. Like you were not on the cutting edge and you should have been poaching AI researchers from the top labs earlier.

So two things could be, could be happening here. One, Zuck is right to just go and overpay and try to recreate some of the magic and get a leading model or set of models out of it that he can use in a bunch of different ways that we've discussed. Or none of this matters. And Rune is baiting Zuck into just overpaying the 4D chess is like, oh yeah, this is. They're getting everything. They're taking everything.

Yeah, no, I don't, I don't necessarily believe that because I did talk to Roon like years ago and I was like, but like, is this gonna commoditize? Like is the foundation model layer gonna commoditize? And he was like, they're like, there are like, the secret to OpenAI in many ways is like the Tealian secrets. Like they understand things at a lower level that other, that other people just don't. And so that will compound and stay advantage. And he hadn't even predicted the, the, the dominance of the consumer and like the aggregation theory that happens when you're the front end to consumer AI, that's incredibly valuable. But just on the research side, just on the research side, like they can stay ahead just by understanding like the secrets of what works and what doesn't. But it's interesting. Anyway, let's tell you about Adeo Customer relationship Magic. Adeo is the new is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.

Next level.

Next level. It well, I mean, you know, we have a light guest booking today, but you know, we're spending an hour talking about one story because it's fun stuff. We can continue. We can go over to the Wall Street Journal because in the exchange section there is a fantastic article related to this says it's known as the List and it's a secret file of geniuses. And I'm looking at this, it says Mishka Belenko, Yu Zhong. Mark Zuckerberg's been reviewing this list. Lucas Byers on this, the new guy says Jordy Hayes, John Coogan, Tyler Cosgrove, Ben Kohler, a couple other folks. But you know, it's just the usual people that we know. Anyway, it's known as the List and it's a secret file of geniuses. Only select AI researchers have the skills for the hottest area in tech. Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals want to hire them even if it costs ungodly sums. We love ungodly sums. We should be ringing the gong. More to this episode. All over Silicon Valley, the brightest minds in AI are buzzing about the List, a compilation of the most talented researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence that Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together. Lucas Beyer works in multimodal vision research, which Kyla broke down for us.

Can you imagine? It's if Zuck spun up basically like a hot or not style tool that's just like pins two researchers together. He makes other researchers just do the test and then just puts out a list of like this is the top 50 people.

Yep. This is so good. So Lucas Beyer describes himself as a scientist dedicated to the creation creation of awesomeness. Yujang is very Reddit coded, but he's a poster on X as well. Yujiang specializes in automatic speech recognition and barely has an online presence. Besides his influential papers, Misha Balenko is an expert in large scale machine learning who also enjoys hiking and hill climb, hiking and skiing or as he puts it on his website, applying hill climbing, search and gradient Descent algorithms to real world domains. That's very cute. The recruits on the list typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They also have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco or Google DeepMind in London. They're usually in their 20s and 30s, and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power. And their previously obscure talents have never been so highly valued. The chief executives of tech goliaths and heavyweight venture capitalists are cozying up with a few dozen nerdy researchers because their specialized knowledge is the key to cashing in on the artificial intelligence.

It is funny, some of the, you know, some of the losers out of this talent war are just VCs, because how do you compete? How do you compete when, you know, historically, you could have gone to some of these and really overpaid to invest? You could have come to them with a ridiculous. What would be very ridiculous for a vc, which is, I will spin up a new company. Not ridiculous. It happens, but it is kind of ridiculous in some ways. Spin up a new company, I'll give you 200 on a billion, and you can take 10 million personally and secondary immediately. And that is no longer even that compelling of an offer if the odds of actually winning are low and you just want the most access to compute and be traded. Absolute, absolute banger ripping. This was. This was Tyler's handy.

Oh, Tyler, how we doing?

I. I'm in, like, some kind of maze right now.

Oh, no. You lost. No, I lost already. I think he lost. It's past noon. It's past noon. Wait, Ben, what you got on the timer?

I've got four minutes still on the table.

Four minutes still. Okay, let's give him another four minutes. You better finish this. I'm surprised, but I bet you. I bet you if we roll the tape. It took him 30 minutes to set up, and he's. And he's actually on track. I bet he's gonna. I bet he's gonna finish the Pillar of Autumn the level in normal time, like 20 to 30 minutes. But the setup, because I only gave him 10 minutes for the setup.

Mogged.

Anyway.

This is the reality of pledging podcast. Pledging to be a technology brother.

Nobody is in. This escalating arms race, is chasing the prize recruits quite like Zuckerberg, who has tried to raid Silicon Valley's top research labs, dangling $100 million pay packages. We're hearing it again to a select few superstars in hopes of poaching them. The billionaire CEO of Meta wants them to join his new company's new lab, focused on super intelligence. One recruit who has spoken with Zuckerberg, who is personally courting his dream team of potential hires, describes the company's goal as nothing less than a transfusion from the country's top AI labs.

That's all it is. It's a transfusion.

Blood transfusion.

It's a blood transfusion.

It is wild. Yeah. We got to talk to some more VCs about how they're coping. We got to get some coping VCs on here to hear them cope about. Yeah, yeah. It's actually a fine time to invest in AI. Hey, what do we got here? Tyler?

I'm done. I'm done.

You're done? No way. What's the clock? What's the clock?

2 minutes, 45 seconds.

What? No way. He did it. Let's go. Oh, that's amazing. Let's go. Congratulations, Tyler.

Did you even get to play your new.

No, no, he had to unbox it. I did. I wanted the unboxing to be part of the experience.

Wow. He just ate your lunch, Sean.

He did. Congratulations. That's amazing. Okay, so break it down. How long did it actually take you to get set up and get the game running?

Yeah. Well, okay, for the first, like, five minutes, there was just, like, a software update.

Okay. I was worried about.

Yeah.

And then I had to connect to my phone. There's, like, the Meta Horizon app.

Yep.

And then it was probably, like, another couple minutes. I had to create a new Microsoft account and then get Xbox Game Pass.

Yeah.

And then I wasn't sure which Halo it was. It took me like, a minute or two there.

Yeah.

And then the first, like, probably five or six minutes of playing the game was just cut scene. It wouldn't let me skip. It's like, the tutorial of how to play the game. And then finally. And then I just crushed through it.

Okay, so how long do you think it actually took you to go from, like, I gave you the box to you were playing the game?

I actually have no idea. I mean, I was pretty locked in. I don't know how long I was playing.

Okay. We should have had splits because. Because my big pushback on VR right now is that if you get an N64 or you get, like, the old. If you got an Xbox for Christmas with Halo, the dvd, like, you would put that thing in, plug it into the tv, and you would be playing in two minutes. Like, it was so fast to get up and running. And I've always been upset with how many things you have to. You have to link it to your phone, take it off, log in, create a password. Like all. All of that I've always been really annoyed with. I think that they should make you do the account creation after the fact, after they let you get hooked on playing and be like, this is fun. Okay, cool. Yeah. Now I want to create a social profile because I'm having fun anyway.

Yeah.

I mean, the app seems very unnecessary. I don't know what the app is for.

Odd.

It wasn't like to sign in. I still to sign in on the. Using the joysticks.

I mean, at one point I counted. I had like six different passwords that were relevant to play Oculus games because I had. I had a PIN code that was like, you draw it. I had a. An Oculus password, but then Oculus got rolled into Meta and so I had a meta password, but then I also had a Facebook password that was different. And then I had like a PIN for paying with things and it was just like so many different things. And it's not that hard when you're on your phone and you get 1Password and you just kind of like auto fill passwords all day long and two factor codes. But when you're in VR, it's super hard to type everything out. So. Wow. I'm very, very impressed that you pulled that off. I thought that that was going to be a failure. So congratulations. Enjoy it. So break down the experience of actually playing. Were you playing on a big, big 2D screen and you were sitting there in like a theater basically?

Yeah. Yeah.

So the screen was probably like 6ft in front of me. I was like in front of this light. It was like great experience. Yeah. I didn't find it to be like, like the refresh rate was like totally fine. I'm not motion sick at all.

No screen door effect or anything?

No, it was totally fine.

And then. And then also break down. So you were you technically streaming the game over WI Fi?

I believe so.

I'll look.

But I think it was like cloud gaming.

Yeah. So I think the actual Xbox like, like frame rendering is happening in the cloud and they're playing and they're streaming that to you and then rendering in VR and then the headsets, just pinning that to the world, which is really, really cool. So I have this thesis and you'll have to play with the headset more and let me know if it plays out that I think that, you know, Palmer Luckey has that Take that's like soldiers will be wearing VR headsets on a daily basis before consumers are because the military can underwrite like a $5,000 VR headset. And so he's betting on augmented reality glasses for the warfighter being the first real use case. I have this thesis that before people were using the iPhone for dedicated iPhone apps like TikTok and Uber, people were using to make phone calls like it was a phone first. And I think that that will be basically a TV first. And people will be playing traditional video games and watching traditional movies before we get VR GTA 6, people will just be playing GTA 5. And so I think all the VR companies should focus on making the, the movie watching experience and the traditional video game experience like super, super smooth so that you just get in, you can actually chill in that thing for two hours. Actually beat Halo maybe, maybe, you know, the whole game only takes three hours to beat. Maybe you got.

Okay gamers. Okay gamers. Anyway, let's get back back to the news.

Let's get back to the sleep scores. How did you sleep last night, Jordan, before we.

I was absolutely mogged.

No, what happened?

I'm get a pod 5 rough.

I got a 92 baby. Let's go. Generational run. Hit me with the Ashton Hall. You know the rule. If I beat you, I get that sound effect. Ashton Hall 92 get go to 8sleep.com tbpn I am get a popcorn.

I am worried to think about how I would have slept if I didn't have an eight sleep.

And you know, the only thing that I got penalized on was I went to bed too early, 9:30. And they're like, you don't usually go to bed at 9:30. And so I pulled it off.

I was penalized by.

Screaming children in.

The middle of the night.

Brutal. Inside the secretive world.

Now we have some breaking news. I'm dive into this. So this morning Zuckerberg announced his super intelligence.

We got 4,000 likes on this traded post. No way. Tyler. Oh, you're on a generational run today.

That is amazing.

Okay. Wow. 4K likes.

Okay.

It's awesome.

Back to the breaking news.

Yeah, yeah, please, please.

So Zuckerberg sent a message this morning in a memoir introducing the new superintelligence team. So we were just covering his list. Yep, he got a seemingly a lot of people from his list. So Zuckerberg introduced Wang, who will be the company's chief AI officer and leader of MSL as well as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Friedman will co lead the new lab with Wang with a focus on AI products and applied research. Here's the list of all the new hires as seen in Zuckerberg's memo. It notably doesn't include the employees who joined from OpenAI Zurich office so this is Kylie Robinson's reporting over at Wired so trap it Bonsal pioneered RL on chain of thought and co creator of O series models at OpenAI cracked Xu Chao B co creator of GPT4 voice mode and O4 mini previously led multimodal post training at OpenAI Hua Wen Chang co creator of GPT4O's image generation and previously invented Maskit and Muse text to image architectures at Google Research. G Lin helped build 0304 mini GPT4O, GPT 4.1, GPT 4.5, GPT 4.0 ImageGen and Operator Reasoning Stack Joel Pobar Inference at Anthropic previously at meta for 11 years @hhvm hackflow Redux performance tooling and machine learning. Jack Ray pre training tech lead for Gemini and Reasoning for Gemini 2.5 led Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind. Hong Yu Ren co creator of GPT4O and this just goes on and on and on. But the big takeaway here is that these seem to be some important people and not not what Sam had originally messaged as as none of our best people.

Wow, that is a big but obviously.

Things have changed since since I think.

We need some more trade deal posters. Except it's not much of a trade deal, just full poaching. It's pretty pretty crazy.

No this there will whenever whoever writes the book on this era AI Ashley Vance obviously will have at least a chapter dedicated to this talent raid. Yep, this is pretty unprecedented. But yeah I think the difference the difference when Facebook was raiding Google in 2010 it was just spread out over a much longer period of time and it wasn't. It wasn't. I mean this is unique because in that situation Zuck was poaching from Google. Zuck poaching from a company that still is like many people view as a startup. Right. Even though it's worth hundreds of billions.

Yeah, this is pretty remarkable, Turner Novak said.

Is it true they poached Matthew McConaughey from Salesforce?

I like that one.

Anyways, so we could go back to this list, but clearly he made a list. He checked it twice and he got.

A very meaningful it's time for Zach to head over to Bezel and get him something get himself something to remember this moment By. Because his bezel concierge is available to source him any watch on the planet. Seriously, Any watch. He could get a new Richard Mille. He could get a new Vacheron or a new Patek. He has a cubitus. Maybe he needs to fill out the, fill out the stable a little bit after this. Pretty remarkable.

Yeah.

The other thing that's, that's interesting here. Daniel Gross is not anywhere in this memo.

Oh, interesting.

Who was rumored?

Is the full memo listed or is it just like. They just didn't include this because it's just wired reporting and they don't realize how big of a deal DG is.

I think, I think they would have.

They would have included it. Yeah, maybe. Like the negotiation is still like ongoing. Like it is a more complicated, complex situation because it's like a CEO leaving an active company. And so it's not, it's not like a full like free agent or acquisition or, you know, going from W2 to W2. It's. It's a little bit more complicated than that, so. Fascinating. Well, the AI talent wars are the current thing and we have been enjoying following them. It's a great time to be an AI researcher. Even better time to be a podcast.

Yeah. Incredible. Overnight success, success for all these researchers. It's not like they spent, you know, 10 to getting PhDs, 15 to 20 years.

You know, also in a field where people were like, oh, that will never happen. Like that. Like, like this is crazy sci fi. This is not like going to ever be real. Like, you just. You're doing like complex math.

Cute chat bot.

Yeah. Doesn't work.

Picture.

No way. Yeah.

Cute picture. That makes a morphed hand.

Yeah.

Look at that hand with six fingers.

Yeah. That'll never be.

You, bozo. Oh, you're working on Imagegen.

Yeah. Why does that person have deep dream? The thing that puts dogs in every picture. Oh, yeah, that'll work. Yeah. Right. Cat detector.

Hot. Hot. What is it? Hot dog.

Hot dog. Not hot dog. Now it's the most valuable technology in the world. Yeah. I'm super interested in seeing like what they build. Obviously, like, it's going to be like a good model. Like we know that they're going to try and build like a big good model.

It's going to be open source.

Maybe it might not be.

Maybe not.

There's like Mark hasn't actually that he'll be open source.

Actually. The model is really good now we're going to, we're going to charge for it.

No, but he could, he could. I Mean like open source? Yeah, I mean it could be, it could be closed source, there could be open source variations. It could be, you know, a chat driven product that directly competes with ChatGPT. It could be something that just lives behind the scenes. It could be a tab, it could be a new tab.

You know what I actually like? I would like to own a piece of search too. I got a bunch of daus, they're searching stuff all the time. I kind of like that market. I think people might want to discover products that way. I think you could build a pretty good ad product on top of that. It is interesting though. I mean it feels like LLMs right now are so single player and meta products are so social and communication and entertainment oriented. Launching a consumer and the social thing.

Is like it's right around the corner. It's right around the corner already. I've done this with you where I will go and generate an O3 Pro response, let it cook for 10 minutes, have 4O generate some charts or graphs or images off of it and I will just share the chat with you and then you can trace through the whole thing as you like. And that workflow back and forth is amazing. Ben Thompson wrote about it, how he has a research assistant who isn't at the level of him in terms of analysis but can ask a bunch of questions and then he can go back and see. Okay, he asked this question slightly the wrong way. So he got slightly the wrong answer. Let me just continue chatting with the same interaction in GPT 4 or 4.0 and actually improve and get the answer that he wants. So it's fantastic. Are you about to hit the gong for something?

I mean, there's like 20 researchers that just signed a meta do it and I'm just gonna do it.

Why did you throw it?

We're just experimenting here.

Yeah.

It's funny, Dan Ratcliffe in the chat says every researcher hire I see. I think of Jordy's tweet on companies doing NBA style trade deals. OpenAI trademark researchers with anthropic throwing in a couple 20, 26 Waterloo grads. The only thing here is it's very one way. So I called it, but I kind of didn't call it. And that Zuck's just, just, just absorbing, you know, he's not saying he's not.

Turns out in tech, everyone's in free agency.

Yeah.

At all times.

At all times.

Yes. There are no binding contracts that can keep someone at a company, at a company for free. Five years. It would be. Yeah, it would be. Very interesting. If sports shifted to that model where there was no long term contracts and you could just mid season be like, oh, I guess Tom Brady's going to the Eagles. Like Saquon Barkley is being traded mid game. Like at halftime he switches teams because there's, there's a team that paid more. Like that would be possible, I guess. Like, and that's, and that's what we're going through here. I don't know. We'll have to, we'll have to get Tyler to give us a breakdown of these folks on tomorrow's show. Maybe we could go through these folks and talk about some of their history, what they've actually done. Who's, who's the most legit? I wonder how important the, what's that called? The Dunbar. Is it Dunbar's number? No, I forget there's a quantitative way to assess how powerful. How, why can't I. Jixer's number. I forget. Bench press, yes. Bench press, no. Basically you look at the papers that they, that they authored and then you look at how many citations that paper has. And so if really great researchers are citing your research, then you are a great research researcher. That type of thing. It's kind of like a six degrees of separation. Like the Kevin Bacon thing. Anyway, should we go to Apple F1? You know it's also in the Wall Street.

Yeah, let's cover this. Journey Journal.

Yes.

Can Brad Pitt's F1 movie finally deliver Apple a big screen hit?

It did. It did. This is old news. Also it's funny because the paper version says Apple is now trying to make people make movies people actually watch. Did you see how brutal the written, the written headline is compared to the online one? So the online one is. Can Brad Pitt's F1 movie finally deliver Apple a big screen hit? Like, okay, that's like kind of shade at Apple. Like they haven't really had a big screen hit but then this one is just like, oh yeah, they haven't even been trying before and now they're trying to make movies people actually watch. Brutal. Well, you probably, if you, if you're familiar with F1, you're probably familiar with with it some from some billboard ads you saw. So if you're trying to run billboard ads, go to adquick.com out of them. Advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable seamless, efficient ad buying.

It's crazy. How so the, the I was off Earlier. This is Apple's first box office hit. It's a $55.6 million debut and the poly market had it. There was under 43 million. 43 to 47, 47 to 51, 51 to 55 and then over 55 million. So it had it at 80, 71% just about a week ago. And that ended up being true by half a million. So close, but accurate.

Oh, interesting. I thought it was like 140 million. What was that number? That's different. I think I actually clocked it pretty well with the. Okay, anyway, we'll get the details here. So in the Wall Street Journal, it was so.

So it was domestic.

Oh, the domestic box office versus international. Yeah, those are the numbers. Okay. Well, Ben Fritz and Joe Flint over at the Wall Street Journal have the story. They say when the team behind this weekend's Brad Pitt movie F1 first pitch their idea around Hollywood, nearly every major entertainment company wanted in. And a bidding war quickly erupted. Then Apple bigfooted them all. Tech companies, they love bigfooting. The tech giant agreed to spend nearly $250 million, more than two AI researchers. More than any other studio thought the drama about an aging driver's last shot at glory was worse, said people with knowledge of the matter. Pitt was paid more than 20 million standard, more than the $20 million standard for a list movie stars and will get a cut of the film's revenue if It's a hit. F1 is one of Apple's biggest entertainment bets since it since it leapt into Hollywood in 2019 and embodies the unusually lavish and meticulous approach to the business which has brought little commercial success. People who have worked at or with if the company say Apple executives crave hits but only want to produce content they believe reflects the high end aspirational qualities of the iPhone and MacBook. There's little chance, in other words, that Apple would make a critically reviled blockbuster like a Minecraft movie. Yeah, I talked to a very successful Hollywood producer about this dynamic with Apple that so much of being a movie studio is. It's a hits driven business. You gotta slop it up sometimes. You gotta do the kids movie like.

Shrek hallucinate a little bit.

Yeah. Shrek is not, is not an Oscar winning film, but it's a hugely valuable franchise. Franchise. Yeah. And so he was basically saying that Apple had one hand tied behind its back because of the brand standard and that it would only want to do things that had a polish and a prestige and that were expensive. Expensive. And if you're if you're only doing like half of the surface area of what a movie studio can do, you. You're just gonna get eaten by Netflix. That's gonna say like, yeah, let's put the reality show on this show. Let's do this, let's try this. Let's try some prestige. Let's try stuff. Yeah, yeah, let's do Love island, whatever. And Apple just wouldn't do that because it's not the brand. But it seems like they're figuring it out. And F1's a good example of that. So with sleek production values and strong reviews, F1 is exactly the kind of movie Apple wants. It was made by Top Gun maverick director Joseph Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. And Apple executives have privately said they hope it will be the land based version of the airborne blockbuster, which grossed 1.5 billion in 2022. Wow. You think it could get up there? That would be fantastic. But pre Release surveys indicate F1 is struggling to generate interest among audiences beyond older men. Its success or failure will be a referendum on Apple's ability to meld Carefully curated and I gotta go to B4. Carefully curated content with broad appeal after six years in which it hasn't released a single box office hit to date. Worldwide box office of Apple original films. Killers of the Flower Moon. I did not see that one. 2023. 160 million. Napoleon. That was an Apple movie. Oh, 221 million. I saw that. Did you see that? People didn't like it. I thought it was pretty good. It was long, but it was fun. Argyle. 96 million. That one didn't do too well. Fly Me to the moon. 2024 did. 42 million. You have not seen any of those, correct?

No.

Fantastic. F1 will be available. It's okay. I haven't seen UFC 7. 24. Who cares? To each their own. F1 will be available on Apple TV, the company's streaming service after its run on the big screen. Apple's tv.

You know, I knew this. I knew this movie would be somewhat significant.

Yep.

I felt inclined to watch it.

Yes.

And so knowing that it was releasing, I thought it was releasing. I was like, okay, great, I'll watch it on Sunday. There's no hbo. I'll watch it on Sunday.

Okay. And what happened?

And it wasn't on Apple tv. It was.

Yeah.

It was at the movie theaters.

Yep.

And I didn't want to go to the movies.

You're allergic to movie theaters. When was the last time you were in a movie theater physically?

When we. Oh, when we saw Dune 2 with.

An absolute squad, this is the movie to take the boys to. We got to do it. It's hard to do it. This is a call to action for all the fans.

Many podcasters are descending on Malibu for the month of July.

This is the thing to.

Maybe we'll get it done together.

So, yeah, and Ben Thompson's been beating the drum on this. This idea of, like, Taylor Swift understands windowing better than Netflix executives. Have you seen this thing? So, basically, windowing is the concept that when you have a valuable media property, you should monetize it at increasing rates of cost based on time. And so when Taylor Swift comes out with a new tour, you can first go and see it live in person at Sofi Stadium. And tickets are like a hundred dollars, maybe more like a couple hundred bucks. It's expensive to go see it. Then months later, you can see the movie version of her tour in movie theaters, but it's not on streaming. And so then you're paying $20 instead of $200. Then after a couple months of it being exclusively in theaters, then you can stream it for free if you're subscribed. So it's like, let's call it like, an average cost of like, $2. So you went from like, 200 bucks to see it live in person, 20 bucks to see it in the theaters, $2 equivalent to, like, streaming on Netflix for, like, you know, 10% of your Netflix spend that month or whatever. And then eventually it'll be, like, free on TV or whatever. Free. It'll be even free. Or maybe she'll put it on YouTube. And so it's this very. It's this very good way to price discriminate and get the maximum amount of value out of a piece of content. And Hollywood had been very good at this for a very long time. Like, you would come out in the movie theaters, then there'd be a big gap for, like, three months. You just couldn't see the movie at all, no matter what it was. Like, you got to go see it in the theater because if you don't see it now, you won't be able.

To see it for months.

Six months.

Yeah.

And then. And then the DVD comes out or the Blu Ray comes out, and it's like, exclusive, just. And you have to buy it. And then. And then after that, it goes to Blockbuster. You can rent it, and then it goes on TV or HBO later. And, like, it might not be. It might be a year or two until you can actually go and See the movie for free. And so Hollywood was really good at that. And they were printing money and then, then the streamers came and disrupted all this and the binge era started. And you can just watch everything for free constantly. But Ben Thompson's point is that they kind of went too far and they started giving away things that people would actually go see in theaters for free on streaming. And so even this, I think there's going to be a lot of people who are like, okay, it's an Apple TV exclusive. How long do I have to wait to just watch it at home? Oh, like two weeks. Like, okay, I'm not gonna go see it in theaters. But if they window it hardcore and they say, look, yeah, it'll be on Apple TV plus in seven months, then people will be like, well, it's worth it for me to go see it now anyway.

Well, we have some notes in the chat. One, Michael Ginsburg says community note. Shrek won two Oscars. Owned. Owned. Shrek apologist.

Apologist.

Not only a cult classic, but it's an award winning.

It won. It won. We did win Best Animated. No way. Because that's actually hard, actually. Music or something.

And then Blake, Blake Dreyer says, just got back from F1 IMAX. Incredible. As a fan of the sport.

Very well. I think you got to see it. I think it's also the type of movie that you want to see.

Turner says it wasn't a bad film.

Cool.

Nick Kotov says it was just too long.

F1. Too long. How long is it? Two hours. Over two hours. Gotta be 90 minutes. Get me in, get me out.

Two hours, 36 minutes.

That's so long.

Anyone that would put out content.

Yes.

More than two hours a day is just completely out of line and unhinged. We would never put out three to four hours.

This is a pot calling the kettle black situation. But we're doing it.

Yeah. So Shrek, according to Michael says best Animated feature and best adaptation.

Okay, okay, I stand corrected.

Let's give it up for Shrek.

Do we really think Shrek meets the brand standard of Apple? Like, no way. Right. My point holds. I don't think Apple Tim Cook would.

Kill to be able to put out a film of that caliber.

You think so? Well, the Wall Street Journal disagrees with you. They say that they wouldn't put out the Minecraft movie anyway. Apple TV plus has earned a reputation for content that excites critics more than audiences, including the Leonardo DiCaprio Robert De.

Niro that excites critics.

Yeah.

Apple TV.

There's a lot of examples of that in media. There's a lot of tech media. That's just for the insider. For the media folks, it's journo on journo content. Killers of the Flower Moon, Oscars best picture winner Coda, literary adaptation Pachinko and the spy drama Slow Horses. Yeah, I tried to watch Slow Horses. It was pretty good. Its few mainstream successes include sports comedy Ted Lasso, sci fi, workplace drama Severance, and straight to streaming film the George or the Gorge. We're into entertainment to tell great stories and we want it to be a great business as well, says Tim Cook. He told Variety. An Apple TV plus spokeswoman declined to comment. Analysts have questioned why Apple spends billions annually on a business so far afield from its core consumer electronics operation. Even if it's barely a blip for the company worth more than 3 trillion, the strategic value it brings is sufficiently mysterious for people not to talk about it very much, says Craig Moffitt at Moffitt Nathanson, good buddy of Ben Thompson's. Apple TV plus cost $10 a month. And yeah, so a lot of people think that the Apple TV plus like production team is to like take, take pressure off of the like the 30% Apple tax discussion. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show. Will is in the studio. Welcome back to tvpn. How are you doing? How's it going? Congratulations on the trade deal. So what supercar did you buy? Did you go Bugatti Chiron or you go F80? I mean we, we hear that the, the numbers are huge right now for folks like you.

I mean, I'm picking a plane more.

So like okay, that was. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. People say, you know, fly, you know, we wanted flying cars. We got.

The fact that you would imply that Will drives himself is offensive.

I mean, yeah, Waymo, for the first time recently I'd like I'd been to like sf, but like I haven't been around SF proper that much since the, the Waymo craze took off. And so like that's been like the, the car experience really.

Just like sure.

Self driving cars. Damn.

Yeah. So are you in SF full time now still?

Back and forth New York. I'm like kind of slowly starting to spend more time in sf.

It's on brand. You're decentralized, you're decentralized. It's a perfect fit. Perfect fit.

Anyway, did you touch grass at all this weekend or were you locked into the timeline?

A lot of stuff was happening on the timeline. I did. I mean I'm in New York right now. I did some New York stuff on Saturday, but yeah, I mean it's been good. Lots of drama, intrigue as usual. The trade deals. I know I've been tuning in earlier. I know you guys have gone over all the major roster updates, but yeah, it's exciting times. OpenAI open model soon hopefully, but not this week. Yeah.

So yeah, I mean the first place I want to start with is the actual trade deals. Do any of these people jump out to you as particularly interesting had they been on your radar? Have you met any of these folks? Can you give us more context on how academic are they? How product oriented are they? It feels like this is purely research beefing up of the research team and Meta kind of has products solved. Is that the right model to think about this? How can you characterize the shape of.

The team that Zuck's building even there's thousands of really great software engineers that work in AI.

Sure.

But what, you know, even kind of getting a sense of like how many people was Zuck really going after? Was it 250? Was it 100? The list that came out today is, you know, somewhere. Somewhere. I don't know, there's like 20 people on it. Something like that, right?

Yeah, I mean it's a great list. It's a lot of like very senior, senior researchers who know who have like been through some like real product cycles who like I think the goal is people who can bridge the gap from research to product. Because like, like one thing Meta has a strength of but I think doesn't translate in like this era is they have a lot of really good like academic researchers like Yann Lecun's whole org has a lot of very talented, very capable researchers who write important papers. But it's the kind of stuff that doesn't really turn into exciting products. It's like more betting 5 or 10 years out how do we want to do things eventually versus like going through a pre training cycle for a Gemini or a Claude or an opening eye model like that has a different set of considerations. And so this to me looks like they want like 10, 15 great people who have been through those research to product cycles in terms of the model being the product. And it seems like they probably, they got Alex and then supposedly Nat and or Daniel to kind of handle a little more of the, not the business side but producty business stuff.

Yeah, it's a management role.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What, what is your take on Yann Lecun right now? How should we think about his position in the AI world. There's I, you know, I see these memes of like he's a non believer, he doesn't believe in like super intelligence and like AI God, he's a little more practical. It seems like he's been, he's been right about some things in the sense that like we haven't had. We're not feeling a fast takeoff right now. So I think you got to give him some credit for that. At the same time, like there's Ben Thompson's been criticizing on Lecun a little bit for not driving the, the product side of the business. It's like it's one thing to say that hey, we're not going to go straight shot to AGI God, but then the, the downstream implication of that is that if you believe that we're going to be living in like B2B SaaS world of AI implementation and productization. Productization, then like go do that and like make sure that the models work really well for business. And so I don't know what is your take? How would you describe Yann Lecun in his history and kind of where he sits in the organization to like a layman?

Sure. Yeah. So I think people over index on thinking of Jan as the Meta guy. Like too much.

Sure.

I think it's a shame that they didn't necessarily have someone in the llama org who was as visible as him because he was not involved with llama at all. Like fair fundamentally our research is like a whole other group that they mostly write papers and do very academic work. Yann Lecun's work is very academic and it's really like, it's. I think he's like, I think on one hand he like is right in the sense of like we don't have the full picture yet. We don't have full on AGI that can do a human's job forever. And I think that's kind of the drum he's beating is there's more work to do, there's more science to do. It's not just productize the current set of techniques in terms of the end of AI forever. But his goal is not to do the productization. The org he's in at Meta is really isolated from product. He's there to kind of boost the reputation of the org academically as well as to be able to potentially advise on other stuff that's more productive. But his job is not to like go train a business model, to train a model that is going to be Used by businesses. And like, I think people like that org fair. The friends I have who are there, like, are there because they essentially wanted to be a professor, but they want tech company resources and not have to teach. And that is essentially what that org is.

Yeah. Does that lead to better recruiting on campus? Essentially? Like you can go get researchers because Yann Lecun can come do a really powerful lecture.

Maybe. But I think of it more as like the same way that Zuck did Metaverse stuff. Zuck is very willing to make 10 year bets. And so that org for meta is not about what product are releasing next quarter. It's what are our ten year bets.

Yeah, okay. I want to.

What about.

Sorry, yeah, you can go.

Meta shares just hit an all time high really. So the stocks, the stocks performing. I'm curious from your time at Morgan Stanley. Thank you for that, John.

It's incredible. That is incredible.

But generally up 5% over the last week. What, what? How did Wall street generally sort of like process the like meta AI story? Because now obviously at least the market seems generally excited. It may get to the point where we did with VR, where people are like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, cool it on the Metaverse, you know?

Well, it's funny because like, like, like you add all, you add all this up. Even if the $100 million offer number is real, it's like, okay, so now we're at like $1 billion in spend. It's 5% of the metaverse hole that was burning. And it's like, you know, from a Wall street perspective, you're like, I don't care about, I don't care about $1 billion. I care about $20 billion because that was what was weighing on the stock during the Metaverse build out. But this is like AI is so much more productizable. You can make so much more money from it upfront. And it seems like even though it's a big number, $100 million offer, it feels like the spend is maybe less. But I don't know. What do you think, Will?

Right. Yeah. I mean, I think the, I don't know the context fully of the hundred million people have all these theories, but like the scale AI numbers we do know, and that's a big chunk of their, like, I don't know, they don't do those every day, but they've done a handful in the past at that scale. Like WhatsApp was 20 billion or something like that. And I mean, it's hard to read into like the charts. Like, I think people are generally Expecting that Meta will take AI seriously and are kind of happy to see change. Whether that is like justified or not. I mean, we'll see.

Yeah, it was interesting, George.

The product side is going to be interesting because like they're not a B2B SaaS company.

Well, so I want to push back on that content.

They're an entertainment company and I think that, I don't think that people fully understand the potential of Gen AI around entertainment. Like it gets talked a lot around. Oh, you're going to be able to generate an entire movie or generate video games or things like that. And I think that we haven't seen. We've seen some fantastic examples so far, but nothing, nothing that is, I think like George Hotz was on our show and he was talking about how like basically AI is going to be like having five CIA agents follow you around all the time convincing you to buy products. And like that is like one kind of dark bowl case for dark bull case. Dark bull case for Meta in the context of AI. Because it's like it's possible that, that Facebook is already the best ad advertising product in human history. Like period, hands down. There's nothing better. And then could you make it like two, three times better? It's very possible.

Yeah. I want to push back on the B2B thing because yes, they don't sell B2B software, but I was thinking about it in this terms, like if you were running a company where your entire you only had one client and that client was Meta and you sold them CRM and infrastructure and LLMs to improve the back office and do censorship and reality checking and looking for bad words and looking for improper posts and recommendation algorithms. How much would that company be worth and how much revenue would they be making just from that one client? And I think it's in the billions because it's just such a large organization that it's potent. It's potentially like just the B2B applications of AI inside of meta are like it's a multi billion dollar like cost center or revenue driver or something like that. I don't know.

I think a company at Metascale has already rewritten all that stuff themselves for the most. Like they probably have some services that they're using but like they like they could they rebuild their own cloud like because they use AWS for a while.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can.

They're not a compute company though. And in terms of like platform stuff.

Yeah.

I feel like those companies, once you hit a certain size and you just like have so many Engineers that you want everything. Like Google rewrites all their own stuff.

Yeah.

Microsoft rewrites all their own stuff. And can they. Is there another, like a tale of end of that that has not been done yet that they can squeeze some more money out of? Sure. Entertainment will be interesting. So one thing that just, I was just reminded of. Have you seen the Italian Brain Rot videos?

Oh yeah, love them.

Yeah. Yeah. So like, I know people, it's like silly, it's stupid, but there is something there in terms of this like communal narrative storytelling with a level of vibrancy that we haven't seen so far. It's like Looney Tunes. But people just like come up with these. Where you could imagine meta kind of eating a good chunk of the like video gen market if they have an answer to like VO3, where that becomes part of the platform. It ties into the whole metaverse thing of like creating stories and sharing these stories with your friends. But instead of like Instagram stories, it's like, okay, what's, what's the evolution of stories?

Yeah. Have you, have you seen Higgs Field? Higgs Field AI? I think it's an ex Snapchat team.

Yeah.

Their new image model is basically already at a point where it's creating images that are photorealistic, but in the scent photorealistic, it looks like Instagram photo full time influencer generated it after spending hours trying to create it. And you can't tell that it's not real. And so it feels like, it feels like meta integrating, that kind of thing where it's like, it'll be interesting to see how this actually plays out because everybody will be able to be a super tasteful creator or like generate these sort of of unique styles. And I'm sure at that point it'll switch. Everybody will be like, well, I only follow organic farm to table influencers.

Who knows? Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like their AI integrations so far have all been kind of weird. Like there's these like Instagram accounts you can chat with. And then there was the whole Meta AI homepage disaster where old people were like leaking personal info without realizing it. But I guess Facebook's always had that. Yeah, I think it'll. They'll have to thread the needle on product in a way that they'll have to get creative because they haven't like, it's been a while since they had a product innovation that was homegrown that really stuck. Like.

Yeah, it is interesting that they haven't tried to create a Studio Ghibli moment by you're like going, I was saying.

This, they should just pre render everyone's profile picture as a Ghibli. And just when you open the Instagram app, it's just like, here, we did this for you. It would be incredibly expensive from an inference cost. But then it's just like you could share it and it's just more virality around it, but I don't know. And like even baking that down into a filter, no, it can't be.

So like OpenAI branded now they have.

To go, yeah, I'm saying like an entire.

But yeah, yeah, basically, like the filters in the Instagram app should be like style transfer or like fully generative instead of just like color grades. That's clearly the next thing and they should just do that. But what do you think of Sam Altman's ability to get through this? Like, he's had a series of exoduses and seem to continue to march on the anthropic departures. Then SSI and thinking machines like xai. Like, this is not the first.

Not his first rodeo.

It's not his first rodeo. And so there's this whole narrative like, never bet against Zuck. He's been down on the metaverse, came back, he's been down on mobile with the HTML5 thing. And he came back from that, went native and super dominant and bought Instagram WhatsApp super dominant in mobile. And so never bet against Zuck. But then also maybe never get better get Sam. Maybe they both win. And maybe like the real loser is like, I don't know, some other company or something. I don't know.

I think as long as OpenAI doesn't totally drop the ball on product or research, they have the center of gravity for the AI world. In the same way that no matter what Android ships, people are not going to switch from their iPhones. Something that have to go very wrong for people to not see OpenAI as the winner, I think. Or there's the kind of the default.

Yeah. I mean, the other thing is the average ChatGPT user is not waking up today being like, oh, I can't believe OpenAI lost a handful of its top researchers. Right. They're just still using ChatGPT as a Google replacement or they're talking with it as a companion. So, yeah, I think the lead is still very, very real. And again, it's going to create opportunities for people to say, hey, I want to go work on this product that hundreds of millions and soon billions of people use every single day.

Right. And I do think it'll get to a point, especially with like 2025 into 26, where there's a lot of product stuff that people seem like. I think we're early on products and we'll keep getting better versions of the same things in a way that's kind of predictable. The image models will keep getting better, the agents will mess up less, but we can already use those things and we can start building proof of concepts around that. And the question is, okay, what are the winning apps? I imagine that the real time Cluleague kind of thing, OpenAI is going to do their version of that at some point. Other people probably will too. Does that become modality that people really want live overview on their screen, on their phone? What's the way that people are going to be interacting with AI Generally because a lot of those use cases, they're already smart enough. It's not about making the models way smarter at whatever. It's like how do you have the model be useful or fun engaging.

There's a bunch of paths here going back to the Cluley thing where one, Roy is right about the UX and wins the market and the other option is he's right about the UX but doesn't win the market and then it's just not the right form factor or whatever. But any, at least the first two outcomes are hilarious in that Roy Lee ushers in the new paradigm for engaging with language models. I'm curious, is all the stuff around every B2B SAS player descending on this sort of like single interface, like a chat interface that generates software, Was that predictable to you? Do you think that's, do you think that that's like part of a multi year trend or is that just FOMO?

I mean like copilot was early, it was like 20, 20, 21, the first GPT3 copilot came out and that was already one of the early LLM applications that people were interested in at all. And then it took until Cursor for it to really like. I think cursor + 3.5 sonnet was when it became a thing that was good enough that people were excited about it. And it really ushered in the trend because people were starting to find it more useful than a toy and like a thing that actually want to use day to day. And so I think that's one path is like. And then the more background agent kind of things are like starting to take off now, which I imagine those will get reliable enough that they're like useful for cranking stuff out. They already are kind of depending on what you're doing.

Yeah, like, I think, yeah, we're about halfway through the year. What, what are, what are kind of like the big moments that you're kind of tracking? The, the OpenAI open source model could be one whatever meta launches next. Right. I'm assuming they're going to be dark until this new team can, can really cook and bring something great. Maybe they don't do anything this year, but I would assume they, they come come with something. What else are you tracking?

Yeah, I mean, for me the O3 release in ChatGPT was like a pretty game changer kind of thing where it was like we saw with Deep Research that, okay, they kind of figured out how to make agents work, but it was also just like this one version of an agent and O3, you can kind of get it to be a pretty general agent where it can do some pretty complex stuff. That was kind of new to see. Like the geoguessr thing was crazy. And having that as a vision of what AGI starts to look like I think is pretty cool. Of course, from the research open source world there was the Deep SEQ as the RL craze taking off. But I work on rl, so I obsess over it and think about it a lot. But I do think we're really starting to see these recipes, at least in the broad strokes of, okay, here's how the LLM thing can go. We figure out what we want it to do, we give it some tools, we set up these environments, we figure out how to evaluate it and then we can just kind of like let it go. And these things get better at doing those things via trial and error. And so like, I think that is one way to kind of forecast where things are going is just like, what are the plausible use cases that people want to use LLMs for? They want an agent to do XYZ and then how do you make this a thing that you can help climb? And I think like you see a lot like there's been a lot of news about OpenAI trying to like sell their RFT service. There's these startups popping up. There was a, was the RFC service reinforcement.

Okay. Yeah.

And so like they're pushing this pretty hard.

You're spending over $10 million like Palantir. OpenAI will also customize a model for you.

So they have like a serious heavy, like a heavy paying customer one, but they also have like a more like in the thousands of dollars service where you are getting to essentially do fine tuning on opor Mini and that is a little more self serve but they're also doing consulting around that. The forward deployed thing around that.

Is that an important strategy for OpenAI to kind of stay in the game against open source models like Llama?

Yeah, but I think also against other thinking machines there was some report that this is a version of the strategy they're taking is like go to enterprises, talk to them about their problems, turn these problems into things where you can create really good customized agent models. And that's one potential roadmap towards having more AI everywhere is just like, like having services that were, whose job is to like come in whether or not it's fine tuning or not. Just like make them into agent shaped.

Tasks.

Where you can then optimize the model and have someone craft the model experience like for you. Because like I think a lot of enterprises are still like in the spot where they don't really like there's, there's nothing as you see by the like the talent war, there's just not that many people in the world or in the market who really understand this stuff at a level where they can go make it happen. And so like the open source thing on one hand it's cool that you in theory can go do it, but it's also like there's not that many hands who can, who are equipped to like go make the thing happen actually.

Fine tune llama 4 or whatever.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. We actually talked to a startup that's doing basically that like small models for specific business use cases like okay, you just have a ton of CSVs that need to be turned into JSON and we build you an LLM that just does that or whatever. Interesting.

How do you hear about after the scale news and then there's a bunch of players popping up or you know, everyone from Merkor to Label Box to Handshake, a lot of different people competing for that market. How do you see that market evolving over the next one to two years? I think there were certain people saying scale got out at the perfect time in many ways but clearly there's a lot of at least gross revenue up for grabs right now in the near term.

Yeah, I mean I think like the, the broader sphere of like creating stuff to train models on with humans in the loop to do that. Curation is going to be important especially for these domain specific applications. I think it's going to be less like oh we just need more tokens and it's more about we need curation of goals and objectives because like tokens you kind of hit diminishing returns pretty quick in terms of just more Internet text or more human written math solution examples. And it doesn't scale super well. But the nice thing about the task specification is you can kind of pour in more compute without necessarily needing more data. It scales much better with computer, whereas we don't really have a great way of spending 100x more compute per prechain token other than make a giant model.

Yeah. Do you think Llama will stay open source for the foreseeable future?

We'll see. It wouldn't surprise me if they go kind of the Google route where like they are still, they still do open source, they still have the Llama brand, but it isn't like their flagship thing where they start doing, whether it's for internal products or it's. They really want to show that they're the winner. Releasing closed models via API or other services where.

Yeah, do they have the infrastructure to serve a closed model? I mean, you mentioned that they use aws, so it'd be kind of awkward, right?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know that they really want to that much. I think that it'd be something that comes in a product.

Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

Or maybe they partner with like you could see them partnering with someone like a Core Weaver or Nvidia directly. Nvidia is hoping to get into the inference serving game, it sounds like.

Yeah. Do you think so? One of swix's takeaways from the Wired article was that one big development that's coming is when Stargate comes online. OpenAI will have the largest single cluster for pre training. But it feels like we might be at the end of that game and we might be doing more compute intensive work in a distributed fashion. And so maybe having it all in one place is a little bit less relevant to just, you know, oh, trump card, Stargate, boom. I win. I have the best model by far. How do you think about the impact of Stargate on like the AGI race?

I mean, I think the biggest experiment that they're definitely going to do is take a pretty big model. I don't know if it'll be like quite as big as like a 4.5, but like a big model and do way more RL on it than anyone's done the app. Like what does like an OH5 level of RL look like? Okay, see how good that is?

See what new types of gate do that though? Or could you do that just across a bunch of data centers? Because I've heard like A lot of RL is like you're generating, you're doing, doing verifiable rewards. You're generating in a bunch of different data centers. You could do it completely distributed and you don't necessarily need a Stargate to do that.

You can do it distributed. It is very inference heavy. There is still a lot of weight updating. You have to sync the model across. You have to keep sending the training model to your inference workers. And so having it co located certainly makes it easier. It's easier to do it in a distributed way if you want to versus pre training but it's not trivial. But I think a lot of this is just people are building the data centers without necessarily knowing exactly what experiments they're going to run. They just know more stuff is coming. But also a lot of this is going to be inference where they want to be able to do. Meta has a ton of GPUs that they just use for Instagram ads, recommendations. A lot of Stargate will probably be serving Ghibli.

I mean that makes a ton of sense. Like I'm running into rate limits.

I haven't seen one.

Literally everything like Google, it's like how do they run out of TVs? They spend 60 billion on capex every year. At least an O3 Pro too. I mean I get timeouts on this stuff.

Last question. I'm guessing you weren't surprised to see OpenAI leveraging the TPU for. For inference or reporting to be starting to use it was. Was that kind of.

I mean it makes sense that they are considering all options given the friction with Microsoft. Like they don't have a core cloud that they're super close with. They're not like there's. They need to both try to lower their cost for inference as well. Like that maybe was a factor behind the. Because the O3 had a big price drop. That might have been TP related. I don't know. Pure speculation. But like Google has TPUs and they can serve Gemini really cheap and really well, really fast. If OpenAI wants to compete at that level, they kind of have to consider all options.

Yep, makes sense. Well, great day to have you pop on.

Yeah, thanks so much for helping out.

Knowing how things are unfolding will probably, will probably ping you to jump on again later this week. Stay ready. Great to have you, Will. Cheers.

Yeah, bye.

I'll be right back.

And we got another Will coming in the studio. It's Will Day on tvpn. We got Will from Ulysses coming in. Not talking about AI, talking about the ocean, talking about boats, talking about the Gundo military. Who knows what we'll talk about. But we will talk about the origin of his company. How you doing, Will? Will?

I'm good, John. How are you getting on?

I'm great. Good to have you on the show finally. Would you mind kicking us off with just an introduction on yourself and your company?

Yeah, absolutely.

My name's Will o' Brien, one of the founders of Ulysses. We are building autonomous vehicles to solve the most critical tasks in the oceans. So in practicality, what that looks like, we build an autonomous surface vehicle. It's a 30 foot vessel that launches and recovers swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles. These underwater vehicles can read as well as write. They can sense, they can take maps, they can take images, collect data, but they can also do physical manipulation as well. And robotics, they can, they can do kind of whatever you want, whatever you want to task them to. And we make both these vehicles probably about 10 times cheaper than anyone else in the world. So while some people are building maybe humanoid robots as a general purpose robotics platform for land, we're building the maritime equivalent to that. Humans obviously are not evolved for land, so for the ocean, so we need something for that. So that's a bit about us. We're based in San Francisco. As you can tell, I'm not an American, I'm Irish. And some of our founders finding team are Irish and Scottish and yeah, that's a bit about us.

How do you settle? Yeah, yeah. What was the inciting like problem set? Like how did you land on this industry to work on what got you in the industry?

Yeah, good question. So two years ago, one of my co founders, a crazy Scottish man called Jamie Wedderburn, was on a surf trip and he got talking to a biologist working on this plant called seagrass. He'd never heard about seagrass before. I had never heard about seagrass really before, despite growing up by the seaside. And he became captivated by it. And then he like, you know, like any good autistic engineer does, he goes down a rabbit hole learning about it and telling all his friends about it and telling us about it. Seagrass is this wonder plant in the Oceans that supports 20% of the world's fish stocks. It holds about 20% of the carbon in the ocean as well. Underneath it, it's 35 times better than rainforest removing carbon. But it wasn't in Finding Nemo. So nobody knows about it really. So we kind of discovered this. And you know, in learning about it, he realized like, it's dying off all around the world. And it's basically very timing intensive and expensive to bring it back to restore it. And basically the methods people are doing to restore it are manual. Their divers going down with their hands and they're manually planting seeds and takes a lot of time, takes a lot of money and it's, it's not really working. And he kind of had, we kind of had this insight then that while we've mechanized nearly every kind of form of large scale outdoor work on land, that really hasn't happened in the oceans yet. Nobody's built the tractor equivalent for the oceans. And that really a lot of the kind of tasks in the ocean, whether it be in this narrow, weird, wonderful domain of seagrass restoration or in the world of defense, or in the commercial industry, if you're building infrastructure, we're still sending down tons of divers to do like manual tasks that really just like make absolutely no sense. They're dangerous, they're expensive. So we kind of started in this like world of seagrass, Got very obsessed with that and had a very successful kind of first year just doing autonomous seagrass restoration services for different governments around the world, working with governments in Australia and the US we did a million dollars in revenue last year and we're on track for over two this year.

Congratulations. Yeah.

When I met Will and I heard this like initial wedge, I was like, this is so fascinating. Interesting find the most weird obscure market that no one would ever think of and just absolutely dominate it and then use that to earn the right to do many other things. And I think I introduced will to like 10 seed funds in like 30 minutes at one point without getting the opt in from Will. Just like people need to meet you. And then within a few days people were committing.

So that's awesome. Yeah. Good to see you on the show. I learned to scuba dive off the coast of Catalina island. And when I was, I was like 15 when I was doing it and it was, had all this amazing tall California kelp. And I went back, yeah, a couple years ago and you've heard the story. There's like an invasive kelp ski species that came over from Japan, I believe on like a shipping container. Shipping. Shipping tanker. And it completely wiped it out. And look, looks completely different. And I don't know if it's particularly important to restore the original California kelp. I imagine it probably is in some abstract sense, but it was just a bummer as a scuba diver to be like, it's not what I remember, which was like swimming through this beautiful forest. It's just kind of these tumbleweeds now.

Yeah, it's. Man, it's those fucking purple urchins.

That's right.

That's it. What happens a big way of like that invasive species are transmitted in the ocean is like a, like a, a ship will like, you know, be in, in the, in the, in Tokyo and in the port and then it'll fill up its, its like it's ballast. So it'll pull in water and when it's pulling in water, it'll take in fish or urchins in this instance and fill up and then it'll go out to sea and then it'll land in San Diego or San Francisco in the port and then it'll release them all. So this happened as well with lionfish in the Caribbean, in Miami. And yeah, those lionfish are gnarly. They're just like chewing up the coral. Everywhere I, I went, I went calling them once you get. I was in, in the, in the Cayman Islands working there one summer and we were getting paid to like spearfish.

Yes, I've heard this. Yeah. I mean that tastes great. Yeah, they taste great. That is the good side of the lionfish is that you can just hunt them relentlessly because no one cares about them because they're so invasive and they're like pretty fun to shoot. And you shoot them.

You can make leather wallets with them.

Yeah, making lionfish leather wallets. And you're like, I'm actually, I'm hunting but I'm saving the world. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's like pigs in Texas.

Yeah, it's like pigs in Texas. I mean it's actually a problem and it needs to be like really dealt with. But as a, as a consumer of hunting, it's fantastic.

Oh, it's great.

But yeah, these are, these are good examples of tasks again that are just like still today. It's like Irish dudes with spears going down just like.

Yeah. Realistically, there aren't that many people that want to go spend spearfishing lion fishing all day, every day, forever, because a couple tourists doing it once a weekend is not going to do the job. So yeah, you need automation 100%.

Yeah.

And like we've. Yeah. So that's the kind of. These are the types of. This is like, you know, the same platform that we built for Seagrass. It's a service vehicle. It's underwater vehicle with a different robotic payload and a different model on board. Fine tuned. On finding urchins or finding lionfish, you could, you know, we could have like A service that just like solving this problem for someone.

What's the origin of the name?

Yeah, it was, there was, there was kind of a few things. I mean as most great ideas, it was conceived in the midst of drinking a rake of pints. But we were, me and my co founders were out. We were just like thinking about different names for the business. And then we were thinking about that 1997 animated movie, the called Treasure Planet where these people, they go on this quest and the submarine to kind of save the world. And we looked it up and it was called the submarine in that movie was called Ulysses. And then interestingly when we got our first office, we got our first office in Dublin just after we raised the Pre seed in October 24 or 23 and we got our first office. And to the left of us was the house that James Joyce grew up in. I would say Ulysses have the Irish connection as well, which is, you know, another reason we chose it. But to the left of us there was a house, that house that James Joyce grew up in. To the right of us was the house or the Museum of Literature, Ireland, where the first copy of Ulysses is kept. And in the, in the park opposite our street, just there's a big huge statue of James Joyce with a quote from Ulysses there. And that also like about a week later my mom found a photo of me at home next to like a picture or next to like a James Joyce quote and there's a Ulysses quote underneath it. All this kind of happened in the same week. So it's kind of like, okay, we're keeping it now.

Yeah, because the nominative determinism here is that, I mean the story of Ulysses Odysseus is like a 10 year grind and it's like absolutely miserable. Like facing the Cyclops and the getting enchanted by Cersei and the sirens and. And I imagine that if things, if nominative determinism holds, the sirens for you aren't getting a quick buck in an aqua hire at Meta anytime soon. You're going to be at this for a very long time. I'm rooting for you and I think you will ultimately be successful. But buckle up. You're going to go on an entrepreneurial journey. If the name holds.

Who are your biggest Irish. Irish tech heroes? What makes the Irish so infatuated with technology?

I mean, what makes Irish people so infatuated? I mean, you guys are well aware of the Hibernian conspiracy, of course. I don't know what you guys have to say about your, the accusations that you know that Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hayes are at the core of this cabal of Irish people in technology or.

Irish never beating, never beating the allegations.

What about Paki McCormick? What about Molly O' Shea? What about all these people with Irish surnames?

What are they doing?

Why do they all suddenly have media programs?

Why they all follow each other?

Why does Apple domicile all of their cash there? It's a good question.

Yeah.

You think, you think it's the Rothschilds, you know, running the money Sprite action Collisons.

Exactly.

Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto is actually an Irish name. The old father on, on Nakamoto.

So there's.

Oh, interesting, all these connections.

Here it goes. It goes deeper.

My, my favorite Irish technologist probably be George Buell, the inventor of Boolean algebra.

Oh, there you go.

Foundation for modern computing.

Yeah, I didn't realize he was deep cut.

Yeah. And then modern, modern ones. Owen McCabe is a good friend as well. Big fan of Owen and everything they're doing under comm. It's very, very inspiring to see, to see someone like that. And obviously the Collisons as well. But I feel, I feel the Carlson's. Everyone appreciates the Carlson's. I don't think enough people appreciate the great business that the guys at Intercom are building. And I know you had him on the show recently and we just partner with him.

Yeah, he's a sponsor now. Ring the bell. Ring the bell.

Yeah. Yeah. You can have in your tinfoil hat conspiracy. There's definitely a line between us and Own and then us and Intercom and Own a of piece.

He just happens to pay us through stripe, you know. Yeah.

I had a random question for you that I'm sure you have strong opinions on. Every now and then I'll see a video that's off the like coast of Chile and there's just like just fleets of fishing vehicles as far as the eye can see what's going on down there. Is there any solution to it? I'm sure you've gotten asked that. Is your guys's tech something that could help address that?

It is, yeah. We're speaking to some partners about kind of supporting on this problem right now. I think there's like two aspects to the problem.

So.

Yeah, like characterizing the problem. The Chinese are, you know, destroying many oceans around the world, particularly in countries where they basically just don't have the money to monitor their, their season enforced marine protected areas and these sorts of things. So up and down the coastlines of South America. This is like the single biggest thing that like say the American navies are spending time on right now, West Africa as well, is just being completely, the fisheries there have been completely decimated in and around the Antarctic as well. There's massive krill populations and krill populations are, they're this kind of foundational species for a lot of other marine life in the ocean. You take away the krill, which is the kind of bottom of the food chain. You know, it knocks all the way up to the, to the whales and then you lose the whales as well. And nobody wants to lose the whales. So that's kind of like characterizing the problem.

Okay.

The reason the problem exists is, okay, two reasons. Navies that basically just can't cover enough area and get maritime domain awareness, they just can't, they don't have enough assets. That's part of the problem. And there's like a governance aspect to the problem as well.

Right.

So, okay, how does China get away with it? Well, so you know, the, the people responsible for kind of looking after, you know, law on the high seas quite often is what you'd call the flag state. So where the boat is registered. All these boats are registered Chinese. Chinese kind of like knows this is their kind of this, they use this as what you know, you'd call like gray warfare. And it's kind of similar with the critical undersea infrastructure. You know, it's not really officially the Chinese state, but it may as well be because they're not like prosecuting on it. So on the technical side, I suppose the problem here is again, the paradigm of maritime operations is kind of stuck and it's broken. You could probably characterize it, we call it the heavy tech bottleneck.

Right.

So basically any mission you want to do in the ocean kind of has a few features around, generally relies on these expensive manned assets. So these could be airplanes, like P3 Orions, or they could be, you know, expensive national security quarters, these big coast guard quarters, these 100 foot, 200 foot long vehicles. And these costs like tens of millions to, you know, in capex. And then the running cost for them on a day is like tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to run daily. And then you use these things as like a platform on which you put sensors, or you use it like an unmanned system. And that's kind of like what it relies on. So it's like small numbers of very expensive assets. Whereas the way we're seeing autonomy going around the world, whether it be like self driving transport networks, like self driving cars, or drones in Ukraine is like, we're moving away from these small networks of exclusive vehicles to large networks of small autonomous vehicles. Right? So it's like going from buses and trains to like a network of Waymos or Tesla Robo taxis. You know, on the battlefield, it's moving away from fighter jets to like, like a bajillion near us drones. You know, it's like. It's like this is like just the way we're going. But that hasn't really happened yet in the ocean. And the limiting factor we think is that basically drones are still like crazy expensive in the ocean. Unmanned systems are crazy expensive. Even if you want to buy, you know, the. The sexiest unmanned surface vehicle, you're still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars. Underwater vehicles, you're spending hundreds and thousands, if not millions of dollars. But we haven't had like a DJI yet for the ocean. Right. We haven't had someone that really completely collapsed costs to the degree that you can buy fleets instead of single units. So again, that's kind of like what we're trying to position ourselves as is like this person who you can buy. If you're like the Argentinian Navy and your fisheries just getting obliterated, you can buy like a swarm of surface and subsea vehicles to kind of solve the problem for the fraction of a cost you purchase a manned asset for that works 247 with zero opex. How much was controlled over sat com?

How much is the problem that these governments don't know something is happening? Or they know, but it's 30 boats that have showed up somewhere and they're just going to fish and basically decimate all life until they're maybe pushed away by a boat. Like, what is. I can see the technology angle of getting just like more coverage and knowing more about what's happening in these different areas. But it feels like there needs to be more will from the government as well to just say, like, we're not going to let this happen.

Yeah, I mean, the will is like, certainly there. It's just they do. They don't have the budget on current assets. Like it, like, you know, like some of these, like, if you want to buy more of these, like, like boats that they would need or these planes that they need to like, survey or get like, awareness on the area. These are like tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions for some of these assets. And the Argentinian Navy just doesn't have that kind of money. So they know that in general there's a problem there, but they just don't have enough assets out there. I mean, it's crazy that like most of the Argentinian Air Force's time is now spent on looking for Chinese ships over their waters. It's, it's so, it's like they just, yeah, they don't have the money. So yeah, you really do need cheaper solutions for these types of folks.

What other stories are you tracking or kind of problems globally that you think you're.

I want to hear about like this big shipbuilding bill, like how does the new budget fit in? What are you tracking in dc? I know you're still an early stage company, but I imagine that the long term has to be. Figure out a way to get to program of record, work with the DoD, but break it down. How are you actually thinking about that? Because it feels like there's a lot of different applications. You got to stay dual use, you got to stay agile while you're building the underlying tech. But what are you looking at in dc?

Yeah, for us on the kind of government BD side, there's kind of three plates that we're always spinning, right? There's like the DC plate, there's the operator or war fighter end user state and then there's the acquisition teams, it's the met plate. So we're always just in constant dialogue and with like, you know, different members of these, the three, these bodies. So yeah, the, the, the most recent, you know, appropriation for, for defense is very interesting. There's many, many billions going to maritime unmanned systems, particularly surface vehicles and underwater vehicles. I think there's a general recognition on the Hill right now that like, you know, you know, the Chinese are producing like hundreds of ships per year and us is producing one ship per year and that trying to beat them on shipbuilding is probably not feasible. We're not going to ramp up that production that quickly. We need to just play a different game. And I think they're seeing unmanned systems is the way to that. So yeah, just this week it was announced again another 9 billion. A few months ago as well, there was another 4 billion allocated to this line item. So yeah, they're the things that we're tracking. There's some existing programmer records that are already set up that we're in the kind of running to challenge for and get a position on. And there's also talk of some new ones being set up for some of these newer categories of vehicles that haven't been developed yet. But yeah, out of the three plates that we're spinning right now, it's generally that you do Want to have a presence in D.C. kind of like at this early stage. It's not the main focus. The main focus is refining our product with the end user understanding what their needs are and building, building to spec. So that's kind of like our main focus right now. And spoken to speak to some, some folks in Navy about that and members of DHS and Department of Homeland Security and other other groups as well on this. So they're kind of our main focus right now. In.

Probability P Atlantis, what's the probability that you guys find it?

I think, I think very high. I think it's probably very high.

You think that Atlantis exists?

Yes, I think there's like two very good candidates for Atlantis. There is one structure in Mauritania, in modern, modern day Mauritania, I call the recap structure. So the recast structure is basically three concentric rings in the middle of the desert with salt deposits between each of them. It looks man made. You can see it from space. You can look up the recat structure Rich. And the only description we have of Atlantis is actually from Plato. Plato describes it as being this walled city full of gold built with city hall being at the middle of three concentric rings. The ring, you know the rings were each filled with seawater. And modern day Mauritania is also where the richest, the richest man that ever lived existed. So there was this Mauritanian king who had more gold. He would have been the, I think the, you know, the first trillionaire.

And yeah, that's here for.

And, and he. And so that's the gold part of it, the reconstruction, the three rings of that part of it. And then there's also these, all these like salt striations all the way from the coastline in West Africa to this location. So it's kind of the theory that there was this, there was this apocalyptic event about 11,500 years ago called the related to the comet hitting the earth and Atlantis was there. There was a great flood and this, this city was lost. So that's one location. The other one is in the Atlantic Ocean which then would lead to some of the first survivors potentially leaving the Atlantis and going to Ireland to set up the next modern day civilization.

Okay, okay. We're bringing back next time we're getting to the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle. But thanks so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Will.

Great having you on. Will.

Thanks.

Have a good one.

Cheers.

Bye. Really quickly, let me when we find Atlantis, you know what we're doing, the.

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A video dropping with wander. This week we do wait to release.

But we have a new guest dropping on the stream.

We are surrounded by journalists.

Hold your position.

We're gonna bring in Kylie. Kylie did the reporting that we covered for Wired covering the leaked. The leaked memo.

Very cool.

So let's bring her on in. There she is. What's happening?

Welcome to the stream. Hello. Hello.

My first time. Thanks for having me.

First of many, hopefully. How's the day going? You've been scooping, scooping up a storm.

Yeah, it's been busy. Just that this morning and tweeting nonstop. And now you guys.

Fantastic.

Awesome. So what did your weekend look like?

Oh, God.

Break down like a weekend of scoops.

It's pushing Signal messenger to the max.

Well, it was Pride weekend here in San Francisco, so that wasn't fun to combine. I helped a friend move and then I got the first scoop and ran to Pride and Dolores drank a bunch of white claws, ran home, slept for 12 hours and my editor started scooping again. Then we're scooping again Monday, first thing in the morning. Scooping such as the vet.

Everything's been moving quickly. What was the first scoop? And maybe like break that down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that was Friday. I reported on a research paper that's not being released at OpenAI because it talks about the definition of AGI. And sources have said that allegedly managers were saying that the Microsoft deal and those negotiations were a reason for not releasing that paper. And it's really, really tense as the Journal and Reuters have reported those negotiations. Then Saturday for OpenAI, researchers went to Meta's new lab. Sunday, Mark Chen, an executive at OpenAI, sent out a memo saying they're basically. Meta's basically robbing our home. My editor published that one. And this morning, Mark Zuckerberg sent out a list of all his new hires.

It's been fun.

Huge. So we got to ask, who's your source? No, I'm kidding.

Not you.

You're not going on the record as you guys.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. So. So, yeah. I'm curious what you expect next in this saga. Do you expect. I mean, clearly OpenAI is not seeing. Zuck announced his current list and being like, okay, we're safe now, we don't have to worry. But at the same time it's very possible that the worst behind them.

Yeah, my question I talked to Will about this was just like, were you surprised that the memo didn't lean more on the fact that this has happened like three or four times at OpenAI and they've gotten through it every time. Like I would be leaning on the fact that like yeah, Dario left, Elon started XAI thinking machines exists, SSI exists. We still have 90% penetration in consumer AI. Walk down the street, ask someone what they use for AI, they're not even going to say OpenAI or ChatGPT, they're just going to say chat and just leaning into that, hey, we are this compounding dominant force in consumer AI. This is the place that you want to stay and be as opposed to getting I think a little bit more in the weeds of like the nature of the deal. It felt like an appeal. Maybe not recently.

Yeah, it was just very defensive, I don't know. And came across, I mean they were clearly scared.

Yeah, yeah. It seemed very focused on like the actual dynamics of like how, how one of these offers comes together as opposed to just reiterating the strengths that like here you get to work on the consumer product in AI.

Yeah, it was like a lot of messaging around. Please talk to us if you're, if you're getting offers versus let's rally, let's Robbie, let's ride.

Yeah, I think it's, you know, a big part of it came over the weekends. Like these people are just, these executives are scrambling to tell staff like for the love of God, do not talk to anyone at Meta and sign any offers. And they're going on this like week long break next week. So I think they're just trying to get ahead of that. But I think that your guys argument. That's right. I think it's just like a very emotional high stress time. They're trying to ship to very large models and Mark Zuckerberg's coming in, calling employees directly and offering millions and millions and millions of dollars. So I think like their response is emotional and defensive because it's like just so high stress. But that would have been a good tactic and I don't doubt it's coming eventually.

How, how solid do you think you are on the hundred million dollar offer that's been floated multiple times and yeah, and we were kind of digging through the game theory of it. Like in, in one way it benefits Sam to get that Number out because if someone, if Mark tries to poach the someone for 50, they might be like, I've been hearing that everyone's getting 100. Like, come on.

Thought I was one of your top guys. I was near the top of your list.

And then, and then, you know, in some ways it benefits Mark because at Meta, because if you're hearing about these hundred million dollar offers, you might be more willing to take that preliminary phone call because you know that they are ready to put money where their mouth is. And so it kind of benefits both sides. Dylan Patel was on a podcast a couple days ago talking about how they're not really sending 100 million dollar wire with cash on day one, that there's earnouts to these structures and they can collide back if you don't stay. And so how much nuance do you think there is on that number specifically? Because it's certainly headline grabbing. The Wall Street Journal, I mean they put it in the special infographic right here because 100 million is a nice round number and it reads very well and it works in a headline. But I'm just wondering if you think, if you think it's 100% real or 50, 50 or there's more nuance to it.

Yeah. So my take is the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both printed that number and they have really, really rigorous editorial standards to get, get to print. So they must have seen something, some high level sources that proved to them that that number is real. I for one have not seen that number. And for me, I would have to see an offer letter with that number. But knowing how tech salaries work, I don't think it's just like a wire transfer. It's going to be golden handcuffs. It's going to be over a certain amount of time and the information had a really good story breaking down researcher salaries. And just imagine if you came to OpenAI a couple years ago at 80 billion, 40 billion valuation and what that is. Now they don't really need all this crazy money from Meta, but it is attention grabbing, attention grabbing for sure.

It's also just funny when you, when you say $100 million for one person, it sounds like a lot, but if you were to say we're going to spend $5 billion to put together a team that is super core to our entire business and win, it doesn't feel nearly as significant for a company that is a multi trillion dollar company.

So I'm looking at the WhatsApp acquisition price and number of employees. I'm pretty sure they paid more than $100 million per person because it was $19 billion. 4 billion in cash, 14 billion in Facebook shares, which are probably worth like 120 billion now because this is in 2014. And at the time, WhatsApp was a remarkably lean team with around 50 employees. So, I mean, not far off. I mean, what if they had slightly.

Different comp, though, just given that they were buying a product with totally.

Yeah, yeah, the product super valuable. But, you know, the, the. The researchers that can build the next model and bring Llama to the frontier. Makes a lot of sense. What, what else should we dig into here?

I think that was it. Any. Yeah. I don't know if you touched on this specifically, but any, any. Any, like, specific predictions about what, what comes next or are you just waiting, waiting for one of your little birdies to send you a note?

Well, if you're watching birdies, my signal is one. I will be impressed if they get someone of Ilya's. Ilya Suskavur's capabilities. I think that the people who want to build super intelligence are true believers and you're giving them a value proposition of we will give you so much money. But you're making super intelligent for Mark Zuckerberg. And I think that some of the best brains that really believe in AGI is this prosperous future or perhaps the end of humanity don't necessarily want to do that for Mark Zuckerberg. So I will be impressed if he gets one of those minds. He still has about 50 people he wants to hire for this team, so it's just going to keep coming. I think a lot of them are going to continue coming from the top labs, but what the vision is, what Mark's vision is, I'm waiting to see.

So what about. Last question. What about Daniel Gross? That had been initially reported, but he wasn't on the list that you released earlier.

Yeah, yeah, I noticed that. Neither was the team from Switzerland. I'm going to guess this is pure speculation. For Switzerland, they have EU laws that make it strange to employ them right away. But for Daniel Gross, I'm not sure what happened. I saw that was reported by the information with Nat Friedman. I've tried to be in touch with anyone who could tell me if Daniel's going, but he wasn't on the list. So I guess we'll see.

Yep.

Very cool.

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if you start getting some major offers. I could see that the AI researcher space is hitting, heating up the AI journalist. It might be the next domino to fall. So yeah.

Oh, God.

We're here. We're here to help talk you through any. Any sort of offers that you might get from.

Perfect. You guys can take a percent. We'll work it out.

Fantastic.

Awesome. Well, great having you on and yeah, excited to follow the rest of your reporting this week.

Thanks, y' all.

Cheers.

Bye.

Next we have Joshua from Chai Discovery with a big launch this week. It's always tough to launch when the biggest trade deal in tech history is going down. Not even a trade deal. The biggest is poaching.

We keep calling it a trade deal.

It was non consensual.

Not much on the other side of the trade.

It was a non consensual trade deal.

It's more of like a draft. And Zuck is just drafting from the entire league.

I take 12 of your best people for nothing.

Yeah, he's kind of just building an All Star roster. It's like All Star weekend over at Meta this week. Anyway, Joshua, welcome to the stream. How you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Of course.

Great to have you Kick us off. Great work launching on such a wild day in tech history.

Is the time run really getting completely steamrolled by this story or.

I don't know, it feels like that maybe.

I feel like there's also people on vacation and stuff. But break it down for us. What is the big news?

Well, the big news is We've just announced Chai 2, which is our latest foundation model at Chai Discovery. Chai 2 is actually allowing us to now generate antibody sequences with a success rate that's high enough for us to skip the usual high throughput lab testing. This means that you can go take a target, put that into our model, go generate a set of potential protein sequences and then test them in the lab. And they tend to work with extremely high hit rates. Previous methods were like 0.1% or so, so you'd have to screen, you know, hundreds of thousands to potentially find something. But here, the hit rates are actually upwards of 15%, approaching 20% of success.

Amazing. Break down some immediate applications of that tech across maybe different types of categories.

You want to ask about making more potent testosterone.

Maybe we get to that next.

Okay, yeah, maybe that's the right spin out tpp.

We said we would never incubate any.

One thing that we're really passionate about is going after areas that are really hard to do today. So, you know, like, this allows us to do things faster and cheaper potentially. But I think what's really Going to be game changing is just opening up new kinds of biology that wasn't possible before. So we've got scientists that are like, you know, maybe working for years trying to enable a certain class of drug program and if we can now use machine learning to jump to, to potential solutions that could really just really kind of push up the bar of what people need to do. I think it's take a step back. Like look at what happened with alarms. Everyone has to be an AI company now to compete, right? What's that going to look like in biotech where if you don't have access to a technology like this and then you start to have these certain areas that are closed out to you, like what is that going to look like? So I think that that's something that we are really excited to figure out.

If we benchmark it to the LLM market. Do you see yourself taking more of an anthropic path or an open AI path? And what I mean by that is, or do you develop the drugs? Do you wind up being the front end to this and kind of being full stack or do you go more like B2B and you have a bunch of pharma companies or you know, traditional biotech companies that are buying a product or service from you?

Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think if we take any lesson from the LLM market, it's that the winners are going to be the ones who are most agile. The technology is evolving at a faster clip than we ever expected. Our company goal for this entire year was to get to a 1% success rate on this task. And you know, we're halfway into the year and we're already past 15%. When you have progress like that, it is really hard to predict like how the market is going to evolve. And that's why I think just like being flexible, making sure that we have the best technology, making sure that we have the best way to use that technology as well. You know, it's not just throwing a model over the wall and you get a drug. We really have to make the models work well for the specific applications where they're most important. And we also have to make them much easier to use. We have to get them into the right people's hands. There's a lot of scientists that if we can bring their creativity and ingenuity together with these new models, that's where the magic's going to happen.

What's the state of the art in like actual, the actual impact of antibodies? Like the last time I heard antibodies in the news was when Joe Rogan was taking monoclonal antibodies for COVID infection. And that was one of those weird things where it felt like a very.

Totally not controversial.

Yeah, it felt like a very modern piece of science. And the narrative around him was that he was not adopting the modern science, but he was kind of on the cutting edge of that fork of the tech tree. And so are monoclonal antibodies like the most like the latest and greatest or are there other applications that are particularly interesting or just driving value? Even if they're, even if they're. There are indeed like the traditional way.

Yeah. So about half of drug approvals these days are actually biologics, protein drugs. So antibodies, monoclonal antibodies are actually just one type that's closer to what we've been exploring in this paper. But I actually think what's going to happen is that people have now started to push beyond that. They're basically bispecifics are all the rage rates now. That's basically, you can think of it as two antibodies that are kind of stuck together. So you can actually go after multiple targets at the same time or you can actually get like a more potent behavior for single target. You know, it's kind of just like two things in one. So if we can make, you know, the first, if we can make each one of those chains like easier to design, then you know, bringing them together is going to be, going to be even easier as well. So I think it just like raises the bar for the kinds of therapies that you have to work on because it becomes easier to make those drugs. So that's a. Monoclonal antibodies are, they were really important in Covid. Right. They can neutralize viruses. The way that people, people found them during COVID was actually one to patients who had Covid. They just like, you know, you would go and just like take someone's blood for example and try to find antibodies that are in there and then try to develop that into a therapy. But now we can just make it on the computer in 24 hours and then go test it in the lab and have some results in a few weeks. So there's a lot more work to do to make sure that these molecules will actually work in, in the clinic and will work well in patients. We have early signs that, that they have drug like properties which is really nice have to, to see. But we've got a lot of work ahead of us in order to really bring that to production, if you will. There's still some more engineering that you might want to do on the molecules that are coming out of the platform today.

Yeah. What is your sci fi vision for the state of drug development 50 years from now? And how would the FDA have to adapt regulations to enable that? Because I can imagine my vision is you come in to some type of doctor clinic setting, you have some set of conditions and they're just sort of like auto generating drugs on the fly specifically to your current conditions. But that obviously wouldn't work in, in the current paradigm.

Yeah, I mean that, that would be the dream. The North Star that we have for this space is something that we think of as like zero shot drug candidates. Right now we have these zero shot proteins, right. So we specify target, we get some protein that binds it. But the fact that this is possible makes us believe that someday we'll be able to actually just have the models think about all the other properties that we need for a drug. And it's possible that the first sequences that come out of the model will actually be good enough to eventually move into patients. And yeah, if you can do that, then maybe the next stretch is like can we actually do hyper personalized medicine? Right. Maybe there's something where we take some sample from a patient, we figure out what exact target we need to go after, then we go and generate the drug. I mean there's multiple leaps that need to happen. But I can't predict what's going to happen 50 years from like honestly I failed in predicting what's going to happen in six months.

I thought you're going to be at 1%.

Do you use Alphafold or is it just a separate tech that is kind of complementary but not in your direct supply chain?

Yeah, the foundation models are built in house here. So we don't use Alphafold and we actually can't use Alpha Fold. The latest one isn't available to companies. So we built our own. We have a state of the art model for predicting protein, protein structure and its interactions with molecules. We actually open source that. So we started the company a little over a year ago and then six months in, that was the first thing we did because you really need like an atomic level microscope if you're going to design drugs. That was our thesis when we got started. But we realized that, you know, that kind of level of the technology we thought would get out there any anyway, so we open source that. It's being used in most of the major pharmaceuticals today. I think the community has gotten a lot of engagement around that. But now the models are becoming even more complicated. So that's why we're starting to invest in not just the model layer, but how we actually make those models useful. They're really starting to look more like pipelines. It's kind of like ChatGPT03. It's not just a single inference. There's actually a bunch of complex tricks that you need to run if you're going to get the best results. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it right now.

Very cool. Well, congrats on the launch. I'll have to have you back soon. This is fantastic.

Yeah. With the rate that you guys are moving, I'm sure you'll be back on in a couple weeks. So thank you. Congrats to you and the whole team.

We'll talk to you soon.

Really appreciate it.

Cheers.

Up next, we have John from Campfire coming on the show. Welcome to the Stream. John, how are you doing? I missed this. You haven't been hitting the soundboard enough. I love it.

Boom. Welcome to the Stream.

How you doing, John?

Can you hear us?

Yes, I can. Thank you so much for having me on today.

Fantastic. Do you want to kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company?

Absolutely. I'm the founder CEO at Campfire. We're based in San Francisco and I was a finance exec for about 15 years and just live the pain.

Thank you.

Software don't get the unsung heroes.

The unsung heroes never featured in the all hands, but we're working on changing that here. And lived in spreadsheets my whole life and just helping, I don't think they're going anywhere anytime soon, but helping folks take all the transactional accounting, all the financial reporting and get it into software. And so Campfire is the modern ERP for high growth companies to just help them move to an AI powered platform.

And so that's.

How young were you when you realized you wanted to build the modern erp?

I would say it's not something you think of growing up. It's not like, well, I'm sure kids.

I'm sure some ambitious kids these days think, I'm going to build, I'm going to build the next gen erp.

But you'd be surprised. So going into Y Combinator, there's about 4,000 companies that have gone through it, but they had hundreds of thousands apply. They're like, you know, no one came to us and said, we want to build a new erp. They're like, you're, you're like the only one excited about the category So I would say this was in 2020, 2021 when I really was feeling the pain at a mid sized company that I'm like, this is the largest category in software. Why is nobody disrupting it? And that was a critical moment for me.

It's interesting because it's not going to fit the pro. Like you need to have lived and breathed the problem to know what to build. And I think that YC has like the sort of default type of founder that does that. Maybe they have a few years as an engineer Palantir or they were a product manager at Coinbase or something like that is very different than being like, you know, being in, being in the C suite, actually living and breathing and having that ability to go and figure out what to build.

Give us the latest on the fundraising side.

Yeah. We announced today Excel is leading our $35 million series ad.

Here we go.

I want, I want to talk to you. You said high growth. I remember I was running a company and there's a big debate over like, oh like, you know, like thank goodness we don't need to implement Oracle, we get to implement NetSuite. And it was like still a lot of work. It was a big, big erp. And so it seems like the playbook is start with high growth startups, be the first ERP and then scale into that and then eventually you'll be able to service the really, really large Fortune 500 companies. But it's fair to say that you're not ready to go into a Fortune 500 company today, is that right? And how do you think about actually growing the business long term?

You said it well. We're hiring on the sales team so we would love to have you. But in all seriousness, we are not ready for the Fortune 500 yet. We do have customers with hundreds of millions in ARR that have ripped out SAP, they've ripped out NAT suite, they ripped out everything below that. So we are filling the pull up market quickly and one of the reasons for the raise is to go make us enterprise ready.

Sure.

And our customers are saying I don't want to be on an ERP for a few years. Right. I want to be on it for 10 plus. I talked to the CFO at a 10,000 employee company still on NetSuite. They really scaled into $100 billion plus market cap on NetSuite and they bought it at 100 employees. And so like how do we go, how do we get them at 100 and scale with them to 10,000? And that's really where we're going, going.

Yeah, I mean, pretty sharp guy running the company over at Oracle. So it is a competitive market, but it does seem like there's, there's lots of pockets of opportunity because the, the, I mean I remember just like the implementation bill for netsuite was going to be like half a million dollars in consulting or something like that. It was, it was pretty staggering. How do you think about pricing and getting a growth stage company to actually match the value that you're delivering with the money that you make? It's obviously great if you get a big contract up front and they're locked in for a long time and they're paying this massive implementation bill. There's real cost to you if you have to implement stuff. How are you thinking about ramping a customer into a great profit center for you long term?

Yeah.

First off, like we rethought the whole implementation process for the reasons you've stated. Like you tell your accounting team we bought an erp, like everyone's ready to quit. Nobody wants to go through a one year implementation. And so we've made it where like you give us a log into your old system, we go do all of the work because everybody says I just don't have time. Our team is way too lean to do this. So a lot of the switching costs, to your point, a lot of it is just like dollars, but a lot of it is just time. So we have solved for both. But to your point on like how do we get them into a profit center, we're just very focused on getting them in the door and making people super happy because we know like customers drive customers like referenceable. And one of your sponsors, Ramp, has done a great job at driving referenceability. And customer love has really been, I think the virality within the finance and accounting community, it's been a huge driver of their growth and so we're focused on the same.

How are you guys leveraging AI internally and then in the, in the product itself?

Never heard of it. Irrelevant.

Don't need it. Don't need it.

What it stands for. I'm not familiar.

Yeah, yeah, don't need it. Built different.

Yeah, we're doing it all. Everything's if statements over here.

Yeah, I know. You know, I found, I forgot what it was. But Excel's if statement limit, I like over.

Yeah.

That'S the final boss of erp. You have to build an ERP after you hit the elite limit on Excel. You just unlock like Satya Nadella just comes through the computer and says, good, you've broken out of the matrix. Welcome to the big leagues. Writes you a check.

Anyway, our very first version of Campfire was I built a three statement model that was iframed into like a login and it was me on the back end running a Google sheet, a three statement Google sheets for customers. Wow, you got to start somewhere. But yeah, we're super excited about AI. So obviously one thing about us relative to the incumbents is like we are investing and putting AI everywhere. But whether it's Meta winning the AI talent war or OpenAI, we're always going to be on the latest models and we're always going to be multimodal. And so we're going to be inheriting all of the amazing work of all of these amazing AI engineers. And we're of course building out our own proprietary AI models. But the gap between us and the incumbents is growing every time a new model ships, irrespective of vendor because we're always putting in the latest models. A few examples, customers are uploading their board minutes from the last meeting and saying take all of our every row and Campfire of every financial data and come up with a story narrative for the next board meeting. And it's reading the board minutes, it's going through and it's like here's the five things you should focus on based on all of it. On the accounting side, it's automating a lot of the accounting, but we've built like a chatgpt for your finance and accounting data. It'll write to the ledger, it'll report for you. Customers are saying like, kind of feels like we got a promotion. I'm not in there doing formatting my Y and X axis anymore. You know, the charts are coming out through AI and that, that's been exciting to me because I, I live that pain. Guys. I had a diligence report I had to build the day of my wedding.

Wow, that's pretty.

Because we were, we were in a bad erp. So don't be me, you know? Enjoy your wedding day.

Enjoy your wedding day.

Last question for me. In the news. Zero acquired the US the American B2B payments company Melio for 3 billion. I think this was announced last week. Two and a half. Who's counting this point? Can you explain to me like what the rationale you think was behind that? Why? And Xero feels like a different tier of product. Not full erp, more accounting suite for small businesses. Why would they need a payments product? Are you thinking about payments as a potential revenue generator in the Future, whether it's through Stripe or stablecoins or maybe you're going to buy a payments firm at one point, I don't know.

Yeah, so I can go really deep on this one. So as deep as you guys want to go. But at Invoice to Go, we were an AR company, 250,000 businesses. We were powering their invoicing globally in 150 countries. We competed with Melio. We sold to Bill.com, obviously they're a titan in AP, a billion in AP revenue. And so I know Xero and Melia well. I'll say Xero was really looking to be stronger in the US market. They're very strong in Australia, New Zealand, very strong in Western Europe and other parts of the world. QuickBooks, unsurprisingly given their headquarters is here, is dominant in the U.S. melio brings a strong footprint. QuickBooks also launched their own AP products and Xero needed a response to that. And so getting into the payments game, getting into APAR in that solo entrepreneur category where I came from, an invoice to go is where Zero and Melio have a lot of strength. We don't compete with either at all. So we're really like a cut above. So no competitive angle for campfire. But I think one that actually no one has really covered is Melio is very strong and indirect. So fiserv and others, and this is public, fiserv and others are selling Melio through their channel. So Clover and other systems are out. And so this is a new go to market that's becoming really popular. We saw Brex launch embedded, Bill is embedded. Embedded go to market is really a way to solve for really efficient go to markets. And I think this is a new one for Xero. That is a great play.

That's really helpful. Thank you for that context. I appreciate it. I always like when you break down.

Other stuff and congratulations.

Yeah, congratulations. Thanks. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Bye.

Cheers, John.

Up next we have Tom Lee from bitmine, the first new treasury crypto treasury company, this time on the New York Stock Exchange, not the nasdaq. We're going to talk to him about crypto.

Really? Really Stock exchange it is.

It's the New York of stock exchanges in many ways. Totally the city that never sleeps the the Big Apple.

Totally, totally.

If it was a stock exchange, it would be the New York Stock Exchange. Very excited to talk to him.

Yeah.

So Today they announced a 250 million private placement to implement buying Ethereum for their ETH treasury.

Yes. The stock eth has been one of.

These was up 48% in the pre market.

Yes. So welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

Good.

Good to meet you. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and some of the news today?

Glad to. My name is Tom Lee. I'm the founder of fundstrat which is a research firm and many of those might know me from that role where I periodically appear on CNBC and talk about markets. I'm also the Chief Investment officer of fundstrat Capital which is the asset manager and we have an ETF called Granny Shots. That's 1.4 billion of assets now. And Fundstrat as a research firm has 300 hedge fund clients and 10,000 RIAs. And our and today it was announced that I'm taking a role separately from Fundstret as chairman of Bitmine Immersion Technologies. And the ticker is BMNR and that's to help the company transform its existing treasury strategy to be one that is focused on Ethereum.

What was the decision to go with Ethereum? We've seen a lot of Bitcoin treasury stories happening over the past year I would say, I mean even going back further with MicroStrategy but Ethereum is one.

That we have would highlight that bit. Mine is up 679% today. The market is excited about what you're doing.

Congratulations.

Back to John's question.

Well, to me one of the things that caught my eye is that stablecoins are the chatgpt of fintech right now. Now because it's seen rapid adoption by consumers, merchants and banks and now Visa and credit card providers. It's because it really does have a, a log function benefit over traditional dollars or over, you know, the credit card system. And it's $250 billion today. Treasury Secretary Besent estimated or said it's reasonable it could go to 2 trillion. That's a 10x market, you know, addressable market change which means it's an exponential opportunity. Stable coins have to transact on a layer one blockchain and the, the blockchain that is considered the biggest and the most secure and the most commonly used for stable coins is Ethereum. So we saw an opportunity to say listen, let's think about more tokenization. You know stablecoins is the chat GPT but it's opening doors to other ways to tokenize assets. And so we thought it would make sense to do some a Treasury strategy around Ethereum and it, it plays a role that the Bigger we become, the more important we are to the Ethereum ecosystem. So I think we're actually playing a role in stabilizing Ethereum because we essentially act as a staking entity. And if we sort of think forward a few years, sorry if I'm rambling. Goldman and JP Morgan, as they get into the stablecoin business and Walmart and Amazon, they're going to realize that they need to really secure the layer one that they're operating on. So they want it to be a big blockchain, a lot of validators. Ethereum is the biggest. And then the opportunity is that we're kind of like the plumbing of what banks will look like in the future because they'll be staking Ethereum on their balance sheet or crypto in order to fund and operate their stablecoin.

Can you talk about the differences between the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ and what it means to be listed on one or the other?

Yes. If you look at our press release, what we announced and we put prominently in the headlines was New York Stock Exchange listed and we listed all of our partners. The reason for that is that most people know me as a traditional finance world person that also is trafficking in crypto. We've written about Bitcoin for eight years. We first recommended it when it was under a thousand to our clients. But it's been a slow road. This project, the Bit Mine Immersions treasury strategy is really a convergence between traditional finance and crypto. Right. That's where stablecoins are intersecting. And the partners we brought on, you know, Founders Fund, Pantera, Kraken, Falcon, X, Galaxy Digital are companies that are really straddling the crossover world and we want it to be on a prestigious exchange. Most of these treasury strategies are trading on the NASDAQ cm, which is like a sort of a junior league of nasdaq. We want it to be on something prestigious because we want our traditional clients to come in and say, look Tom, if we're going to be interested in this treasury and learning about why this might be a new bank model, we don't want to be buying stocks that are on a bulletin board. So it was really important to be on a prestigious exchange like the New York Stock Exchange. So I think that that's a real, you know, one of the advantages of bit mine immersion is that they invested the time to be uplifted and so that they are on the New York Stock Exchange.

What is liquidity like different on the stock exchange versus like, I mean, as someone who's younger and more I guess Internet native. Like the idea of needing to buy a stock on a stock exchange is a little bit foreign compared to just like, like self custodying crypto directly and then you have access to buy the major cryptocurrencies on pretty much any app in the app Store these days. Like it, it feels very accessible. And yet, and yet in the, in, in the past we've seen the ETF as a catalyst for price movements in the major L1s. So talk to me about like what's actually going on in the market in and characterize some of the different buyers and market participants and why they choose one way to get exposure over another.

Yes, yeah. And so let's say I'll take it in two parts. The first is like in terms of a product to buy as New York Stock Exchange listed stock, which is what BMNR is has market makers. It's almost like you have like this invisible hand protecting price and the exchange will halt the stock if it's, if it feels one sided. That's really important because it protects investors. And these treasury strategies need to get institutional investors to sort of back the back this and become essentially create a two way market so people can combine and sell these with, with real little price erosion. Now a second part though is someone say well Tom, why don't I just buy Ethereum ETF or I'll just layer one and I think the treasury, the Ethereum treasury strategy. Now there's another one which is Sharplink which was led by Joe Lubin and Consensus and that ticker's S bet. I think the treasury strategies especially for Ethereum can actually deliver better returns for holders because let's say the metric for a Treasury strategy is Ethereum per share. Now if you buy an ETF your Ethereum per share is going to always be fixed because it's, you're just buying a unit of Ethereum. So you only benefit of Ethereum price goes up. Whereas a Treasury strategy let's say has a Ethereum per share value. Then there's three ways that that price of that treasury stock goes up. One is that the company generates staking yield so you're getting a little income. The second way that you benefit is if the company can capitalize on volatility and Ethereum has twice the volatility of Bitcoin which means the stock's twice as volatile. That means you're, you're going to be able to fund transactions like convertible instruments or sell stock in the open market and people are buying it for the liquidity and then you can increase the net asset value of Ethereum per share. So you're kind of like growing someone's. Actually if you own a share of a Treasury stock, someone's working to get you more Ethereum per share for every share you hold. So they're actually like growing it. And the third, of course is the price of Ethereum goes up. And that's where I think it's really interesting because like Circle, which is a, the second largest stablecoin issuer and it's been a, it's probably the most successful IPO in like several years. It trades at around 100 times enterprise value to EBITDA. So for every dollar of EBITDA it's like a hundred dollars of market cap. Ethereum has a network yield of 4. So in other words, Ethereum's four times cheaper than Circle, even though Circle runs on Ethereum. So if usually the more you get into the infrastructure layer, the higher the multiple is. That's why software has a higher multiple than a, a retailer. So that means like it. But if you just said Ethereum should be a 1% yield, then Ethereum should be like 12,000 per unit and it's only like, you know, 2500 now. So I think that there's, the third way is of course Ethereum could go up a lot.

What, what do you see as kind of the important milestones in Ethereum over the next few years? We went through kind of the NFT boom. We're now in the stablecoin era. People have been still talking about store value. They're also starting to talk more about prediction markets. What is interesting to you about maybe crypto broadly over the next few years?

Yeah, glad to. Well, you know, the, I'd say the story arcs that we see is one, the regulatory landscape has become very friendly for Crypto, huge deal. The second is that institutional fiat money traditional is getting into crypto. 95% of institutions don't own crypto. So that's a huge addressable market. But then there's technological innovation as you're pointing out, and that, and there's a lot of great projects because of that. So Bitcoin, it's still our favorite layer one. And so you know, but that to us is digital gold. You know, it's really the best way to measure trust. And if it ever traded at the value of gold above ground value, it's, it's over a million dollars. So we still see a lot of upside. Ethereum unique feature is the smart contract. And we know that the Majority of real world assets, tokenized things including tokenized dollars and tokenized real estate and equities etc, they're actually being minted on the Ethereum are created on the Ethereum blockchain. So I think as the world starts to tokenize and experiment and remember there's a lot more equities and real world assets to tokenize onto layer ones. Then the other way is the traditional financial world is trying to equitize crypto right through ETFs. It's, there's more to move into to tokenizing on layer ones. And the third of course is things like solving some of the risks of AI. You know the whole idea of a decentralized blockchain. I mean look, let's face it, there is a, a non insignificant risk that AI is going to be malevolent, like there'll be a catastrophe. Because every innovation has always led to a catastrophe in the short term. Like consumer credit was a technical innovation on, for consumer access to money and on nearly every country that rolled out a credit card, whether it was Asia or Latin America has had a credit crisis. And then in 2008 we had a mortgage innovation with the securitization of mortgages and it boomed for a while but then we had the gfc. So I think AI is obviously going to be innovative and there's a lot of opportunities but it's inevitably going to lead to a catastrophe. And I think that's when decentralized market blockchains are going to be one answer to sort of managing the risk around AI. And so I mean I don't know if bittensor is a solution but I can see something running off Ethereum and validators, human validators is one way too interesting.

Yeah, talk to me around about that.

Any reactions to. There's been a couple announcements in the last week. Republic came out creating their mirror tokens products which are bringing private company stocks on chain. And then Robinhood had an announcement, I believe it was this morning, bringing OpenAI and SpaceX on chain. Any kind of predictions around private company assets coming on chain?

I love all these experiments because they're trying to provide a hybrid form of liquidity to things that are illiquid, you know and so it, it makes sense. And you know the, the answer to that is it is a big deal that Republic and then Robinhood are doing this because you, you're going to create the probability of a more healthy market. You know, this has to become a two way market because if someone's just tokenizing assets but then Very few people use it. And the way what I mean by is it, someone may want to own it, but someone might want to hedge something. So like an OpenAI token isn't just someone's long bet on OpenAI. They might be invested in, you know, grok or something and then they need to hedge it by shorting the token. Like if you can create a two way market, then it's definitely going to work. But if the, if the market is purely on, like let's just tokenize it, you buy it and hodl it, then it's going to have the same liquidity problem that it originally had. And then they might even trade it at discount and then you, you create other risk because now you're putting it on a blockchain. So now you have the actual risk of the physical asset being missing and then the blockchain being broken. So I think it'll be important for two way markets to develop around it.

Very cool.

Well, congratulations. Yeah, congratulations on the announcement and we're excited to follow along, hopefully have you on again soon.

Yeah, fantastic.

Thanks for having me.

We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Bye.

Well, Drew, what else is going on?

There's all of our ads. We are out of ads. We need, we need more sponsors. But more on that soon because we have a new one coming.

There's a story on Apple Wang from Mark Gurman. Wang using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri and a man. Major reversal. But let's save it for tomorrow.

Save it for tomorrow. We do have some other news. Cursor is now available on your phone and on the web. Spin off dozens of agents and review them later in. Your editor, Andrew says, I joined Cursor to build the future of coding. And yes, as of today, you can code from anywhere with a coding assistant on every web browser and phone. Very, very cool. We'll have to see how to give Tyler over there in the VR headset a challenge.

Oh, he's back in. He's back in. There he is.

What are you doing over there, Tyler?

I'm just chilling in the metaverse.

Oh, yeah. But what specifically are you doing? Are you.

I'm not playing video games.

No, you're grinding.

No.

Yeah, yeah.

How is the. Now that you've had this headset for a few hours, it's sick.

It's way better. So I have the Quest 2 at home and I think it's just all the Quest 3s, but they have the this like back strap. I don't know.

Sure, yeah, I see It.

It's way more comfortable.

It's way more like.

I'm not.

It's, like, totally comfortable to wear this right now.

That's awesome. So are you doing pass through? Are you using your computer?

I can see you guys right now.

You can see me? How many fingers?

Or.

No way. Got it. How many fingers?

Two.

Oh, wow. You can see right through. It's amazing. I don't. I didn't realize the pass through was that good.

Challenge. Don't take it off for 24 hours. Starts now. Go on a date with it. Use Cluli with it.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, this is the clue. This is the Cluly device right here. We need a Cluly app in there asap. Asap for sure. Yeah. You show up there. Why don't you take off your meta quest 3s for the interview? Actually, I'd prefer to leave it on. Anyway, this is my other good posts we should go through. Apparently, Xfinity is allowing people to use WI FI signals to detect motion in your home at no extra cost. And this five Seconds account says, I apologize to all my local schizophrenics. I owe you an apology. I wasn't really familiar with your game because it's.

Remember, there was a super. There was a video that came out, it was probably a year ago, where somebody was showing how you can use WI FI signals to detect people. Yeah. To get a very accurate map 3D render of what's happening in space.

Yeah. And this is 160.

It was almost hard to believe. And then now Xfinity for free. No extra cost.

Crazy. Crazy.

The concerning thing here is introducing this technology to more people. They're going to realize, oh, I can. If they have. If they're in an apartment building, they're like, oh, I can see when my neighbor's home. Or a thief could set up a WI FI router outside of somebody's home and start mapping it, see what's this person's schedule.

When are you gonna put this on an assault rifle and give the. Give the Special forces wall hacks?

I bet they're. No, no. Somebody was saying the CIA and other law enforcement groups use this already to understand when there's like, an active shooter scenario, understand where they are, positioning of everything. They gotta fly on the set.

Yeah. This disaster's going after you. But anyways, in other news, Christoph Thulene futurist says, I am developing an LLM benchmark test that I believe is truly the first of its kind. Very excited to launch this soon and hopefully partner with some of the Frontier Labs on it. Congratulations. We'd love to check it out. When it goes is live. Kristoff, so thanks for the legend. You're going up against ARC AGI, so, you know, it's, it's, it's not an easy easy. The benchmark battle is hot, but good luck to you. And Delian reflects on the progress of AI he says, Imagine gathering Alan Turing of 1942, Marvin Minsky of 1992 and Nick Bostrom of 2012 and explaining to them that we have passed the Turing test several, several years ago and yes, there are some changes to society, but largely day to day life is the same would be a funny conversation. It is. It is crazy. The soft singularity is real. Everyone's feeling the, the soft acceleration anyway. Any other, I mean, it's just like, yeah, there's just like, yeah, we beat the Turing test and now we're on to super intelligence and then eventually giga intelligence. But that's a great place to end the show. Thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify and have a great Monday. See you soon.

See ya.

Bye.

Have a great evening.