Isaacman Back in the Cockpit at NASA, Google Takes AI to Space, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Cliff Obrecht, Jerry Murdock, SHL0MS, Shehzan Maredia, Mina Fahmi, Alessandro Chesser, John Maslin, Eugenia Kuyda, Anish Acharya, David Risher & Erin Brewer

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Today is Wednesday, November 5th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. We're back in the TBPN UltraDome.

Everybody wanted to know what we would do if we didn't podcast today. I guess we'll never know.

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We're back. It's so good to be back.

It is back in the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Still sponsored by Ramp time is money save both easy use, corporate cards, bill payment accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. In breaking news yester Jared Isaacman has been re nominated, I guess is the term. He's back in the contention to be NASA administrator. It was a very exciting, very tumultuous year for him, up and down.

Do we know why he was originally taken out of the running?

Yes. So there are differing accounts according to the White House. So according to the White House, the. The reason is that he had donated previously to Democrats and the White House said like, this should be like, we need to know that you're all in on America first, like that type of thing. But those donations were public because all donations are public. And so there was a little bit of like, well, like you nominated him. You should have just like looked it up. You can literally just like, you can literally just Google it. Like it's not even like some secret database and it's all open records. But then Ars Technica and a couple other outlets reported that it was because of the Elon Musk Trump dust up that happened back in May. Remember the whole battle? And Elon was going at Trump on the timeline and Trump was going at Elon and Truth Social and they were kind of duking it out. And there was like the point.

So can't believe that was a real day on X.

It was a crazy day on Truth Social as well. Why are you doing Truth Social Erasure, bro.

What was going on?

No, no, literally like Trump was not posting on X though.

Oh, right, right.

Trump would post on Truth Social. It would get screenshotted and then share it on.

Yeah. Remember we were sort of live reaction reacting to the news and I would refresh.

Yeah.

Or I'd see something on X. Yeah.

And you'd have to actually not be.

A real post from the president. And then I'd go to Truth Social.

And I'd say, unfortunately, that was a real post. And it was. And so Isaac Min got polled and Secretary Duffy stepped in. Sean Duffy, who's the 20th secretary of the Department of Transit serving under the President. But now Isaacman's back in the picture. Of course, at the Charlie Kirk Memorial, you might have seen Elon Musk and President Donald Trump sitting down, having a handshake, maybe making amends. There's been speculation as to things. It seems to be water under the bridge. They seem to have healed all wounds, I suppose. Let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. So Jared Eisenman put out a long post. We'll read through some of this. And then I have a little bit of a take about his career and whatnot. So he said, thank you Mr. President for this opportunity. It will be an honor to serve my country under your leadership. The support from the space loving community has been overwhelming. I am not sure how I earn the trust of so many, but I will do everything I can to live up to those expectations. To the innovators building the orbital economy, that's a term I haven't actually heard used before, but I like it a lot. Orbital economy is great. Space economy just doesn't hit as hard as orbital economy. I like that. The scientists pursuing breakthrough discoveries and to the dreamers across the world eager to return to the moon and the grand journey beyond. These are the most exciting times. The dawn since the dawn of the space age. And I truly believe the future we have all been waiting for will soon become a reality. This is inspiring. I didn't know that much about Jared Isaacman, but as soon as I started learning about him, I was a fan and I'm very excited that he could potentially be in the seat. The big reason is that first off, he's an entrepreneur and I think entrepreneurs make great leaders generally.

But, but he can fly fighter jets.

He has, he can fly fighter jets. That I think is a little bit less relevant, but it's somewhat relevant because you are leading people. Like you're flying, you're leading people that.

Are going, they're going to fly their life by flying in big fast machines.

Totally. Yeah.

So I think it's, I think it's, it's. Yeah, it's a sign of respect.

Yeah, yeah. It's not that crazy of an idea, but I don't think people understand how crazy of an entrepreneur he is. So he started Shift for Payments. It had a few other names, but he started his company when he was 16 years old. 16. 16. So he dropped out of high school, got a GED so he could technically have like finished high school, I suppose, and just started this business. And it's like a serious business. Like you talk to, you learn about these people who maybe don't know. They don't run a household brand. They haven't been telling their entrepreneurial story for a decade. There's no founders podcast episode about them yet or something. But this is a serious business. Billions in revenue, real earnings. The PE ratio is 25x. It's like not some crazy. Oh, it's a meme coin. It's a $6 billion company. Yeah, it's not a hyperscaler, but it's like very serious.

Does 4,000 employees.

4,000 employees, hundreds of billions of payment volume and. And it also does the payments for Starlink. So it's like know a Stripe competitor that actually works on to process the payments.

Starlink 3.3 billion revenue in 2024.

Which is, which is also interesting. I wonder when they first met because he's in payments in 1999, Elon's in payments in 1999, and PayPal, and then Elon, I believe.

Let me check. Rockipedia.

Didn't Elon angel into Stripe at some point? Stripe, of course, owns Privy wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integr on chain infrastructure, all through one simple API. And I think maybe, I don't know if this is more important, this is probably less important, but he's been to space. Jared Isaacman has been to space, which is just crazy. And so he went with a crewmate, Sarah Gillis, who was a SpaceX engineer and did a civilian spacewalk. Like they left the capsule in space and this was on a SpaceX rocket, which is just like incredibly risky. I feel like it's a crazy move. And he went all the way up and so he's kind of like really earned his bona fides as someone who loves space and is willing to engage with SpaceX.

He can probably say no one likes space more than me.

Seriously. Yeah. Yeah. And so when he was first, when he was first considered as NASA administrator, there was this debate around him and it wasn't, it wasn't the Elon thing. Really kind of was the Elon thing, but the Elon dust up, that was kind of like the last second, like rugging. But in the lead up, because Isaacman was nominated, I think on inauguration day, so he was like one of the first. He was clearly, everyone was like, yep, this is our guide. We don't even have to make any more calls. Like we're Nominating him on day one. Do that. Then the debate goes because the is going to be confirmed. Right. And he eventually was confirmed, but the debate was moon versus Mars, Moon versus Mars. Where should you prioritize things? It sounds silly, but it really is real because there are different companies, different organizations, different constituents. And so on the moon side, you have the Artemis program, which is the SLS rocket, and the Orion capsule, the Orion spacecraft, which has been derided by Casey Hanmer as a failure. There's been a lot of people who are pro SpaceX.

Casey quoted Jared's announcement, said, this is a good sign. Yes, he, he, and Casey is effectively our senior NASA correspondent.

Yes, definitely. And so on the other side, you have Elon, who has always been prioritizing, Mars, Mars, Mars, let's go to Mars. And so Jared Isaacman said at the time, why is it taking us so long and why is it costing us so much to go to the Moon? And I think it's a good question. We've been to the moon six times. We've actually done, I think, 140 moon missions. Six of them actually landed humans on the moon. A bunch sent people around the moon, we sent robots to the moon, we sent landers, we sent all sorts of different stuff around the moon. So we're not, we're not new to trying to go to the moon. We've sent humans there six times. But the fact that we haven't been able to scale our rocket program to a point where moon missions are too cheap to meter has become a bit of a stain on American ingenuity. We should have just scaled it up and just cut the cost by 20% every year, and we would be getting up and back. Shouldn't be a lost art, it shouldn't be a lost start. And it is a lost start to the point where people ask, is it real? How did we do this? It's hard to believe. How do we lose? We don't normally just lose the ability to do things.

And yet in this, Palmer was defending the moon mission to Logan by saying, wasn't he saying, like, you can shine.

A laser, there's a mirror, they left a mirror so you can bounce a laser off the mirror. You can do this at home and you can prove that there is a mirror on the moon. Doesn't prove that aliens didn't put it there. So Palmer needs to go a little deeper.

You got to go a level deeper.

You got to go a level deeper. But in general, SpaceX has become the best hope at the reversal of this. And Elon has been much more focused on Mars than the moon. And so the debate around Isaacman centers on his ties to elon Musk, his Shift 4 company. The payment processor processes Shift for starter.

Speaking of the moon moon, Sam Altman was on Tyler Cowen.

Yes.

And Altman said at one point, sometimes late at night, you just really want that chocolate chip cookie at 11:30 at night. Or at least I do. And Tyler says yes. Do you think there's any kind of alien life on the moons of Saturn? Because I do.

How did they get in that situation? We need to actually hear the real transcript. Is there video for that podcast? I think it's audio only.

Audio only. I think it's just audio.

Yeah, man. Sam really understands the Trump takeaway from the election. Like, I believe, like the whole, the whole podcast election conclusion was just attention is all you need. You need to do as many podcasts as possible. You need to be high volume. Volume wins. And Sam Altman just will not turn down appearances. And so he does, you know, Tucker Carlson, and there's a really rough clip that comes out of that, but then he just goes and does another podcast, and then he does another podcast and then you. On Friday, everyone was talking about the Brad Gerstner, Satya, Nadella, Sam Altman clip. And then the next, on Tuesday, there's a new press cycle and I haven't seen any bad clips from the Tyler Cowen interview. So it just feels like the number one thing you don't want to do in comms is go into hiding. You just want to power through, keep posting, post through the Pain podcast, through the Pain. I love it. I think it's a great media strategy and I think it will ultimately be victorious. But the question about Isaacman, he's tied to Elon Musk through Shift four. He processes payments for Starlink. And also he obviously literally went on top of a SpaceX rocket and went to space. And so NASA, even though SpaceX is a private company, NASA does have a thumb that it can put on the scale because it has funding and it has the ability to help and the ability to approve different things.

NASA has funding. They also know how to spend money.

Exactly.

Look at how much money they've spent on Orion.

And so that money could go to SpaceX, could go to Mars, could go to the Moon. And the NASA administrator has the ability to say, hey, we're going to focus more on Mars and we're going to focus more on Moon or vice versa. And there's an open debate. And I don't think this is like a left right issue. I remember the, wasn't the, wasn't George Bush really into going to Mars? And then I forget, why are you laughing, Tyler?

I just think it's funny Moon and Mars being like a political.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be funny. It's like are you moon? Are you pro moon, Are you pro Mars? And then like we need another X and Y axis for an entirely new political compass that has no correlation with the underlying political, left, right, authoritarian, libertarian compass. I don't know. What are other wedge issues that have no correlation?

Yes, President George W. Bush was quite interested in Mars expedition.

He was Mars guy.

In January of 2004 he announced Vision for Space Exploration at NASA Headquarters. The plan directed NASA to return humans to the moon by around 2020.

As he wanted to go to the.

Moon by 2020 and eventually send astronauts to Mars and beyond.

Wow, that's disappointing.

And then they proceeded to spend 20 billion to make a broken Orion capsule.

It was 20 billion. I mean the real miss is should have taken all the war on terror money and put it into moon missions and just been like, we're going to war against the moon, there's oil on the moon. And then if we'd put all that money and all that manpower into going to the moon, we'd probably be dominating the moon right now. Right. Like if you take all the world.

There would be an Amman on the moon.

I think there would be an Amman on the moon. I've been very pro moon. I want the moon to look like Las Vegas asap. It should be a tourist destination.

People would be gambling on the moon right now.

If you let them gamble, they will come. This is the thing, this is real. But there is a delicate balance. Obviously the more time you spend focusing on the moon, the less time you're focused on the big Mars mission. There are different considerations in terms of the rockets that you build. And that's basically the debate. I think the debate around the non political debate, the meat and potatoes debate around Jarek Isaacman is like is he going to make the correct decision about what celestial body to prioritize versus oh, did he donate to this or is he left wing or right wing or did he say the right thing? All that stuff is window dressing for the big question for NASA. Which is moon or Mars in my opinion.

And you don't think trying to counterbalance China's efforts in space should also be top of mind or is that.

I think that is all upstream of moon versus Mars. Right. So if they're going to claim Mars tomorrow. Well, we probably got to push and get on the defensive on Mars. It's like you're playing some grand strategy game and it's like you see someone going, taking territory over there that informs. Do you want to go play defense on that territory or do you want to go capture a completely separate territory? But yes, I mean, I agree with you. And this is what Casey Hammer has said on the show multiple times is based on what we're seeing from China on the moon progress, maybe we do need to prioritize in the moon more. Maybe Elon is somewhat wrong on that in that it's not just this, it's not just Elon, for years was not framing things in geopolitical ways. He was just saying it's humanity versus the cold vacuum of space. And so humanity needs to go to Mars because that's a true different planet. And if something happens to the moon and Earth, you can truly start over on Mars. You can't necessarily do that on the moon. That's not the case with the current geopolitical situation. So that's an interesting question. But I do think that there's a new debate which is what happens below the moon, what happens in low Earth orbit, what happens with the data center in space? Question. Because six months ago, I'm not kidding, six months ago it was a non issue. It was just like, oh yeah, there's like a YC company that's working on it. This is some sci fi thing that people are thinking about. But now we have Jensen Huang, we have Elon Musk and we have Sundar Pichai all saying we're going to do data centers in space. So collectively you have what, 10 trillion in market cap? That's like, hey, we're going to be taking this seriously. And I do think that that's a NASA question and I think NASA will have some say over the speed at which this stuff gets built out. Now maybe it's a decade, maybe it's two decades, maybe it's five years. But there will be policies that are overseen by Jared Isaacman that inform how seriously the idea of data centers in space gets taken. And he could be completely anti and he could just be like, I think this is fake. I think it's impossible to diffuse the heat. I'm anti and I'm going to block it the whole time I'm at NASA. And you know, some people might be very upset about that. Some people might be, thank goodness. Like we didn't want, we didn't want to Waste any time on that. But he hasn't chimed in on that. And I think that that's an interesting next discussion for the government to have and a government administrator, the NASA administrator to have, which is what is the US Government's position on data centers in space? Because the hyperscalers are chiming in left and right.

Yeah. Elon's post from a couple of days ago. Quantum computing is best done in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon.

Yeah, he's just like, bear posting, basically. He's just like, it's useless. Right. Isn't that what he's saying? Or is he saying like, it's cold there?

I think he was. I don't think he's. I don't think he's bear posting. That's not how I read it.

Oh, what is his take?

I think he's saying.

It's like he's saying, you should actually do it there. It seemed like he was just saying, like, yo, you should just go and do that, like, super far away. Like, stop working on that on Earth. Like, it's not worth it. That was my read on it. But maybe it's like, no, maybe he's being serious.

Yeah.

Is he being serious? Like, scientifically, he believes that quantum computing should happen on the moon.

I don't know.

I don't know enough about quantum computer croc. Yep. Is this real? Devin Cognition. They're the makers of Devin. Devin's the AI software engineer. Cross crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

David, in the chat was saying, referencing that Elon is actually more and more moon pilled. He did post. I went back and found it two days ago. He said, SpaceX will lean in big on the moon.

Yes, yes.

And Arthur Mackwater said we should annex it, which Solana has been saying for quite a while now.

Yeah, moon should be a state. It's a classic line. I am inevitable, says Ken Kirtland, showing a cool collage of Jared Isaacman. What a crazy story. What a crazy story. I'm very excited. I hope he does more. Hope he does more podcast appearances. Yeah, we'll work usually. I'd love to have him on the show.

We'll get him on the show.

But I'm usually not like, oh, I really want, like, the director of some random government organization to do a full podcast around. But I feel like the space question, the orbital economy, it's so big. It's so interesting that there's a ton of. There's a ton of interesting questions and it's just so. It's such a cool thing to build a vision around. Let's check in on the NASA admin candidates is Luke Leisure. We have a winner. And the campaign 2025 was between someone saying let's kill NASA and Jared Isaacman saying 20 septillion Americans to Mars. Which American which message will resonate with Spitter? And we have our answer. Jared Isaacman is back in the in the in the race. Delian is confirming that he is anti.

I would like to inform everyone that data centers in space still make me want to blow my brains out. Thank you for your attention to this matter. And Sundar heard that and immediately responded.

Wait, he posted deleon posted this only.

A few hours later. Only a few hours later. Actually, no. I think Delian was responding to Sundar here. It was more fun to think about Sundar responding to Delian, but he's Sundar Yesterday said our TPUs are headed to space. Inspired by our history of moonshots, from quantum computing to autonomous driving, Project Suncatcher is exploring how we could one day build scalable ML compute systems in space, harnessing more of the sun's power which emits more power than a hunt than 100 trillion times humanity's total electricity production. Like any moonshot, it's going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges. Early research shows our trillium generation TPU's or our tensor processing units purpose built for AI survive without damage when tested in a particle accelerator to simulate low earth orbit levels of radiation. However, significant challenges still remain like thermal management and on orbit system reliability. More testing and breakthroughs will be needed as we count down to launch two prototype satellites with Planet by early 2027. Our milestone of many excited for us to be a part of all the innovation happening in the space. So it is pretty funny to think about, you know, before, before we had satellites like scientists just being like, you want to put radio equipment in orbit and then you want to use it to communicate with.

You want to watch TV in space?

You want to watch space?

You want space?

That makes me want to blow my brains out.

Satellite television. That's what we're doing.

Satellite radio.

What are you going to call it? Dish Network?

Oh, you want to put a camera on one of those too? You want to take pictures and send it down to us here.

A camera in space. Yeah, the thing we take wedding pictures with.

Make it make sense.

You're going to put it in space.

Make it make sense.

You're going to put it on the top of a rocket.

The thing that you need to replace.

The film, the camera. If I drop it, it breaks immediately. We're going to put that on top of a rocket, shoot it into space. Shoot it into space. And it's just going to work. It's going to work.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

Super believable.

100%. 100%.

Yeah.

I like that. Sundar Pichai's nominative determinism just keeps getting stronger. Of course, we know him is pitching AI. Oh, you see where I'm going with this, right?

Yeah.

So now he's going after the sun. And of course, his name is Sundar. That's incredible. He's going to be pitching AI into the sun. Pitch AI into the sun. Sundar. So good.

Sundar.

You should have called it Project Sundar. That's what Brandon on our team was mentioning, which is very funny. Sean McGuire is. I think he's in favor of all this. He's a supporter. He says the science fiction future we dreamed of might actually be coming true. And Elon Musk signed off on Sundar Pichai's sun catcher project and says, great idea. Lol. Which is hilarious.

Well, I think this was because Elon had just been sharing how he wants. He was posting about how SpaceX would eventually do data centers in space, Right?

Oh, yeah. Okay.

So I think part of this is, he's a great idea.

Great idea. Lol. Like, you're doing my thing. But then Sundar says, only possible because of SpaceX massive advantages in launch technology. It is so funny that, like, Elon can't just be like, no, I'm. I'm keeping all the launch capacity for myself. Like, he. He doesn't have. I guess he doesn't have the ability to do that.

Really.

I think it's like. I think it's illegal because if you're like a railroad, you can't say like, I'm. You need, like, net neutrality effectively. Very funny, Philip.

John Johnson vindicated.

Yeah. Aaron Burnett says, is it just me or did the Overton window on space data centers dramatically shift over the last few weeks? It really does seem like this dramatically shifted. Truly. Just a few weeks ago, some folks at YC were taking a victory lap because YC back to data center. Did YC back StarCloud or did they back a different data center in space?

Yeah, they did StarCloud.

They did Star Cloud. Okay. Because I remember when YC backed Star Cloud, there were a lot of people who were, oh, I see. Try to do hard tech. Stick to the mobile apps, buddy. And they're. I Guess we do in space data centers now. And people were having a lot of fun with it, but then, like, you know, Philip has just been completely vindicated, at least by like, getting support from the big power players. Like the big tech power players are. Are coming out in support. My question is, like, where does Jarek Isaacman land on this? He. He runs a payment processor. We're going to be processing payments in space. Let's get. Let's get his payment company up in space. We need to do more things in space. There's so many cool things that we can put in space. We need space casinos, space slop, space Instagram, space troughs. Space Trops.

Satellites are really space troughs if you think about it. Dean Ball says one way to infer the bubble isn't going to pop soon is that all the people who have been wrong about everything related to artificial intelligence, indeed, they have been desperate to be wrong. They suck on their wrongness like a pacifier, believe the bubble is about to pop.

It's very evocative. Is that completely true? I feel like a lot of people that have been wrong do not believe the bubble is gonna. Like, when I think about people who have been wrong about artificial intelligence, I mean, sure, there's people that are. That have been like, AI will never pass the Turing test, but there's also like the Eliezer Yudkowski, which was like, AI is going to kill us, like next year. And I would put them both in those camps. And is Eliezer saying that the bubble's going to pop? I don't know. Is he?

Bub talk. Let's go to the.

Let's go to the bub talk. Let's go to the bubbler.

I don't think he's been saying that.

No. Okay, so who is Dean Ball subtweeting here? That's the question.

It's hard to argue that it's AI is going to be this runaway death machine and also that it's a bubble.

Yeah. Do you know Ball? All right, how many times are we going to make this joke?

I think he's mostly talking about there's a bunch of, like, journalists that like mainstream journalists that talk about, like, oh.

AI is like, oh, yes. 100%. 100% interesting. 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a. I don't know if he's a journalist, but there's a blogger who was trying to argue simultaneously that Sam Altman has never, like, created anything in his life. He's non technical. Like, he's not. He's not responsible for any, like, success success. But then Simultaneously was arguing that he moved recklessly, quickly to launch ChatGPT against the board's desires. And it's like literally both of those can't be true simultaneously. Only one can be true. Either he did have the foresight to release the product or he didn't, and therefore it's not risky for what he did. So there's just some. There is some dissonance where people don't really map through all of the logical conclusions of what they're arguing.

For me, the Galman amnesia effect has just been crazy lately because there's people whose content that I read.

Yeah.

That don't historically cover AI, and they're starting to talk about AI and there's just. In a single short essay that they're writing, I can just. There's. There's easily like 10 to 15 things that are either wrong or just. I completely disagree with the take. And I'm thinking about some of their other content and being like, okay, maybe I need to be a lot more critical of some of their other writing.

But yeah, there was someone who was like, super critical of crypto during the crypto bubble and then came out like, super doom pilled, like, we're gonna all get paperclip next year. And I was like, maybe I should be buying NFTs. He's so wrong about the paperclipping thing that I need to go back and revisit. Maybe he was actually wrong about the NFT question. But of course, the truth is that he was correct about NFTs being a bubble and just happened to be also wrong about us all dying to AI in a matter of days. Both can be true. You can swing and miss on certain things and you can hit it out of the park on others. Oh, we. We mentioned it yesterday. Polymarket was tracking the Mamdani election in New York City. I think we were tracking it at like, 95%. And then of course, it went to 100% because Mamdani did get elected. And Rex here has a reaction of Michael Burry or Christian Bale in my. In the Big Short, biting his fingernails saying, a socialist just got elected mayor in the heart of the financial world at the top of the greatest bubble of all time. How are those. How are those related? I don't know. But, yeah, people are not happy they're moving to Florida, I guess.

I don't think. I mean, I think. I think a lot of the people that said they were going to move are waking up this morning and seems Unlike, you know, we'll see that the big issue for New York State from a tax revenue standpoint is is there's they don't actually need a million people to leave for it to have a material impact on budgets. Like if, like a certain.

Yeah, but the question I think people, people overestimate how communist New York can become in a year and underestimate how communist New York can become in a decade. And so I generally think that people are freaking out thinking that there's going to be a 45% wealth tax next week. We'll see. We'll see what actually gets put in place. But good luck to all the folks over in New York City. The market seems to be liking it. According to High Yield Harry, how are the markets doing today? Oh, we're ripping the Nasdaq is up 1.15%. It should be in white 3%.

After the last week we should be.

Jones is up 0.6% and high yield.

Harry said Zoran's America Bitcoin touched 9999 at 1am that's stressful. Thankfully, while we were all sleeping, this post from this Aaron Slotov resurfaces email that I think is a classic, instant classic. Peter Thiel wrote it to Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg Marc Andreessen January 5th of 2020 said there are many themes that could be developed more here, but let me, let me make a few quick points for now. Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our policy policy should be embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively, I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of millennials say they are pro socialists, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try and understand why and from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me namely that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it. So feels like basically called to a tee. The last or at least could have easily predicted this type of election outcome.

Five years ago somebody asked me do I have it here? Where is it? Somebody asked me about I need to find in my DMs, like you know, should you go to college? Something like that. I really wish I could find it and I was kind of noodling on it. It was after we talked about the Palantir, don't even go to college, just go work for Palantir straight out of high school. And someone was saying that I think that they had the opportunity to do it, they wound up going with college or something, and they wanted to know my thoughts. And there is this weird question of student debt that I think gets completely left out of the equation. And it's so, so important. It feels like if you want to, if your life's work is like, you want to be a doctor, like, you just have to go to college, you're just not going to get on that track. Just being like, yeah, I've been cutting up people in my basement for the last month, so I'm ready for surgery. I vibe coated scalpel. No, it's not gonna happen. You gotta go to college. But if you do wanna be something that's a little bit more flexible, a little more creative, a little more entrepreneurial, you can probably drop out of college. But it depends on, like a whole bunch of other factors. Like if you are, if you're rich and you're gonna graduate without any debt, there's pretty limited downside to going to college because you get to just hang out and vibe code apps and do whatever and cloud farm and aura farm and do whatever you want. It's a pretty flexible environment. It just sucks to go through that and then come out with $200,000 in debt. And so that's the thing. Then there was the question of if the Department of Defense is gonna pay your for your full ride. Like, I don't know what's going on, but if you can get a full ride and you can get no debt, well, then it's probably worth going. But also if you're so elite that people are just throwing money at you to go to college, you can probably take that money and not and just teach yourself and not go to college. What do you think about that framework, like, this idea that, that the actual debt is a very important factor into, like, is college valuable? I feel like so many people boil it down to like, college good or college bad, as opposed to like, college a good bargain or college a bad bargain?

Yeah, I don't think it's that under, like, underrated debt question. Yeah, it seems like, yeah, obviously, like, if you're not gonna take out any debt to go to college, then it's like, basically just like, have a good.

Time for a couple of years. Yeah, yeah, go home.

It's like, yeah, there's, like, the cost of your time, but it's like, you know, you're young. It's not that big of a deal.

Yeah. It does feel like we're not making a lot of progress on it.

Yeah. I think that the people that go to college take on debt and then get a job that doesn't really require a college degree, just acquires some amount of agency.

Yeah.

Like, really kind of shoot themselves in the foot.

Yeah. I wonder what would happen if we deregulated some of the tracks that require college. Like if. If, like, it is extremely hard to become a lawyer without going to college, because in order to take the bar, you have to have. You have to have a degree from a law school. And in order to go to law school, you need to undergrad. There is a loophole where I believe if you are studying under. If you're like, mentoring under a lawyer, they can advocate for you. Something like that. But in general, do you know.

Yeah, it depends on the state. So what you're saying is true for New York, Maine, and Wyoming.

Okay.

Where you can have an apprenticeship. Some states, you don't need that or a degree.

You can just go take the bar. Like, I could just walk in and take it and become a lawyer, basically.

Well, well, you need to do an apprenticeship. No. Yeah. Wait.

I'm pretty sure.

Yeah. Some of them apprentices under a lawyer or judge.

Yep.

Some of them it's just a lawyer.

Yep.

And then some of them, you need.

To go to law school. Yeah. So in general, like, it is a regulated industry. Let's read from Brandon Jacoby.

Brandon Jacoby. Jacoby from Deep, he says, has.

Wait, before we tell you about what Brandon Jacoby said, we got to tell you about his favorite tool, figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great product together. Let's hear from Brandon Jacoby. What did he say?

Jordy Jacoby says, as someone who had the decision to start a job at Cash App and get a big tech salary or go further into debt to do my fourth year of college, financials is a big factor.

Yeah. And I think it is. It just feels like it does get reduced a lot. And I think there's this interesting thing where, like, there's almost like a. There's like a inverted U sort of bell curve thing going on, because if you can get the full ride, then you might want to drop out and just go straight into entrepreneurship because you're cracked. But if you're not so good that you can go to the Ivy League for free. But you can go to the Ivy League, but you, but you don't have to pay, then it's worth it. But if you do have to pay that it's not worth it and it's more of like this big matrix than just like is it good or bad? And how much does it cost? Yeah.

The other thing, school is a way to buy time to figure out.

Yeah.

How you want to spend your time like with, with Brandon Jacoby just was design, doing graphic design as a teenager. And so the opportunity to go work at company like Cash App instead of finishing college made a lot of sense.

Yeah.

But if you don't know how you want to spend your time and how you want to spend your career, how you want to start your career, then school. I think a lot of people are just doing it to kill time. So they're not just sitting.

Do you know that there is a job in tech, in venture capital, where the number, it's extremely, it's extremely prestigious job. And this year the number of job openings for that role has doubled. Do you know what I'm talking about? The job I'm thinking of is steward of Sequoia Capital. It's doubling in size and if it keeps doubling, there could be thousands of positions as a steward in just a few years.

Yeah, famed venture capital.

Exactly. So it doubled from one steward, Roloff Botha, to two stewards, Alfred Lynn and Pat Grady. Next year, if it doubles again, we could see four stewards, then eight stewards, then 16, then 32, then 16th century 128.

Eventually all, every single human, entire human.

Race will be stewarding Sequoia Capital. Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking. And Roloff certainly understood. Compounding, he went on Jack Altman's podcast Uncapped and said that there is a lot more talent than really interesting companies to be built. And I think we're spreading a lot of that talent thin right now venture is a return free risk. And Sheil Monot says and that. And with that comment, he's out.

This reminded me of Mark Leonard's from Constellation. Some of the comments that he made on that investor call a while back, shortly before he took a step back from Constellation. Very different situations.

Did you see Rolf Winkler from the Wall Street Journal taking shots at Roloff Botha on the timeline? Sarah Guo, friend of the show, is very happy about this. She says, congratulations to my better half. Pat Grady, the new senior steward of Sequoia, along with the wonderful Alfred Lynn. Investing firms must be led by Great investors. Sequoia's motto at one time was, we are only as good as our next investment. If that's true, the firm is in good hands. So she is talking about Pat, who has invested in ServiceNow, Zoom, HubSpot, Okta and Snowflake and then Harvey open evidence and OpenAI in the AI era. Pretty solid portfolio. That's some good stuff. But Rolf Winkler comes in from the top rope and says Roloff, he led a $300 million round into Bird and a $250 million round into 23andMe. Both are zeros at this point, are they not? Are they not? And Sean McGuire fires back. Scott Kapoor fires back as well. Scott Kapoor says, is it too much to ask that WSJ reporters who cover finance actually understand the asset classes they report to report on? Roloff, Bota and Sequoia are world class investors who have generated amazing returns for the LPs. VC is not a downside minimization asset class.

The other thing is 23andMe did go public. Byrd did go public.

Yeah. You don't know how much secondary they sold.

Not even secondary. Could have just been selling well.

Bird went public too, right?

Yeah, yeah. Trying to figure out it might not.

Have been that much capital incineration, but.

Yeah, I mean, I highly doubt the.

Whole job is incinerating capital. Baby, you got to be burning, you got to be making, you got to be ripping wild checks every once in a while. It's totally, totally acceptable. Sean says sequoia distributed over 50 billion while Roelof was running the was running Sequoia US since 2017. One of the first things Roelof coached me on when I joined Sequoia was to look at each fund's write off rate. Any fund with a write off rate below 40% wasn't taking enough risk. That's interesting. I feel like Sequoia also has a stat on their page that's like, like 97% of the companies are still in business. Don't they have some stat like that?

Yeah.

So there's something a little bit like in the math that I'm struggling to square.

Sequoia led one round in Bird at a billion dollar valuation. They then invested another time at 2 billion, but the company IPO'd at 2.3 billion, which means their effective valuation was like somewhere in the middle of 1 and 2. So at least at the IPO, which of course had traded down, they would have been up on that investment.

Are they in Vanta.

Sequoia? Yeah, yeah, of course they Are you're so lacking.

They automate compliance, manage risk and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast. And we don't stop there. Our AI and automation power everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling.

I was still running the numbers because they also did a series B at two and a half billion. So they did a few rounds back to back. They were obviously we're betting big, but I think they sure, they ultimately did.

I don't know.

I'll defend Rolf Winkler. I think it's funny that he's taking shots. He's just out there talking trash. What's wrong with that? Ryan Pearson gets to talk trash. Ryan Peterson's this is sequoyah passed on Flexport so many times that I don't really care who runs the place, to be honest. And Sean McGuire says, We love you, Ryan. And we're dumbasses all the time. Especially me, which is funny. But you know, people get to have fun either way.

Scott Kapoor was firing shots.

Yeah. So we read this one. He's firing back and forth. He's defending. So yeah, I mean Scott's question is like, is like should. Is like, is like should the Wall Street Journal reporters understand that, that they take roll offs or that they take write offs. Roll offs. And that's maybe not what Rolf is doing. Like, he might just be talking trash. Like he might actually understand it. He might be like very possible. He might be like, yeah, like I.

Don'T like those guys.

Yeah, like there's some, here's some salt in that wound. Like I'm still going to rub it in. There's nothing, there's nothing about that post that says that Winkler does not understand.

You could reply the post and say, to be clear, I understand finance.

Yeah.

Just, I understand it.

I'm just talking trash. But there is a risk of legacy media not understanding the asset class. It does happen every once in a while.

Yeah, the big whistle Financial Times had this sort of breakdown on it happens.

All over the place. And certainly this is not like a great look for the Wall Street Journal because it doesn't read as he should have just said, that guy sucks.

We should do anything. We love the Wall Street Journal. We love Sequoia Capital. If we can do anything to kind of bridge the divide.

Bridge the divide.

We're here. We're here.

Maybe we can get both the Wall Street Journal and Sequoia Capital on graphite.dev Code review for the Age of AI Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

That might be find some middle ground. With graphite.

With graphite.

Ryan Peterson also followed up and said Cluly should have pivoted to an AI lie detector bot. Invite it to your video calls and it adds a bigger and bigger Pinocchio to the other participants faces.

I mean, don't give Roy Lee any more stunt ideas.

I mean this is a banger.

He's such a. He's such a good stunt marketer.

Roy had a. Roy had a great response to. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't have a story that we had yesterday.

He said, explaining the clulee pivot and brief history. Nine months ago I built Interview Coder, an undetectable translucent desktop layer that lets you cheat on lead code interviews. That's crazy. That was only nine months ago. Is that real? Yeah, it feels like a lifetime ago.

Oh yeah.

I knew it had viral potential and I and posted about it constantly until I did go viral. Then I did it again and again and again and then it made me $1,000,000 in profit. Holy f. Apparently you can build a GPT wrapper, go very viral and become a millionaire. Could I do it again, but bigger? So I started Cluly with two big questions. Where else could this overlay be useful outside of leetcode interviews? Could. Can I keep getting this much attention? The second answer came immediately. Yes. I'm very good at getting attention. And thanks to the attention we got hundreds of thousands of users ridiculously quick and we're able to use the data to figure out that our stickiest power users were using it in meetings. And we just built for that. The deeper learning though is that we seem to have cracked the formula for organic virality. Yeah, one thing I would say is the website copy is framed as an AI note taker, but it's still leveraging that functionality that Tyler is so dependent on or historically has used to. You know, if we put them on the spot like Tyler, what's the capital of Nigeria? Let me think about that for a second. Abuja. There you go. See, that's clearly in action. But he says no other tech startup has ever been able to do this reliably or at this scale. It's really not luck. And most importantly, if done right, it works to grow companies. Interview Coder proved it. And can you clearly continue to prove it? Growing faster than ever in a saturated space. The world is vast. There are tens of millions of people in meetings every day and 90% of them don't know what an AI note taker is the market is big enough that you can be the most controversial person in the world and still win and as long as you deliver the magic moment to the user. So yeah, I would not be surprised if they are out marketing all of the other companies in the category, even if it is competitive. But.

Thoughtful response. I have more to talk about here. I wonder this idea of. Can I. What do you say? The deeper learning though is that we seem to have cracked the formula for organic virality. Like, what does that actually mean? Does that mean like his claim here is almost like organic virality is effectively high ROI marketing, low dollars in, high dollars out. It's just great roi. And to do that organically, consistently for a long, long time is very, very hard. It's very hard. And the folks that wind up doing it, like when you think about Mr. Beast, it's like that's his full time thing. That's all he does. And I wonder, I don't think it's necessary that in 10 years we could be looking at Clulee, the AI note taker for meetings. And yeah, they still don't run Google Ads. They just do stunts and people are still can't get enough of these stunts. I just, I have to believe that this is a market tool and not a permanent piece of the infrastructure. Versus like you talk to the Ridge wallet guys and they're like, we are good at buying performance ads and we have been for a decade and we will be for the next decade. Yeah, I don't know that that's like something that you can just be like, yes, let's scale our organic viral content forever. Like it has, I feel like it caps out, but maybe it doesn't.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think they're gonna run that test.

Yeah, it does feel like as we tracked the stunts throughout the year, the quality and the effort going into them and even some of the creativity was, was not deteriorating. Like I would say the team was executing at the same level or better throughout the year and yet the impact got less and less and less.

Because you're saying for us, for Cluli.

For Cluli. What I'm saying is like, yeah, Cluli, like the first stunt.

Yeah, that, that's the issue of like things that go viral organically over time. They did. The effectiveness kind of deteriorates. People do get like, if you scale organic, like eventually you're, you've, you will saturate that market also with rage.

With rage. Bait marketing. It's like once I've been enraged. It's harder to get me enraged the third or the fourth time. Whereas if you show me an ad for a value prop, you can, like, hit me with that ad again and again and again, and it's probably similarly effective. But if you've gotten. If you were the type of person, like, remember there was a moment where everyone was mad about Cluli, like, truly, like, the timeline was in turmoil. Lots of people were chiming in. It was this big wedge issue. You were either for it or against it. But a lot of people were against it. The people that were against it, they were rage baited successfully in March and then a little bit more in April and then a little bit less in May and then more recently, like, they just. The rage bait doesn't work on them anymore.

Yeah.

Because they're like, oh, yeah, that thing that I don't like because I made my call on it.

But to Roy's point, there's so many people that have never, never been rage. Have never been enraged. They have never had the opportunity to be enraged by Cluley. I think a lot of their marketing is rage. But, like, on other platforms, when he shared stuff, it seems much less rage.

Oh, I completely agree with this. Yes.

Much less rage bait. Focus.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I don't know. I think a lot of people, if they see funny marketing and, like, X is just a really small place.

Yeah.

Like, Even back in 2021, building party round, like, the difference in reaction when I would meet somebody that was, like, extremely on X versus somebody that didn't use X at all. If somebody was on X, they were like, you started Party Round. Like, no way. Blah, blah, blah. And they'd, like, rattle off a bunch of stories of ways that, like, our marketing had entertained them. And then if he met somebody that was like an Instagram LinkedIn power user, they look at you with a blank space and they'd be like. They'd look at me and be like, party Round. Like, you have a fintech company called Party Round. It's just like, very different reactions.

Yeah, no, totally fascinating. Well, you know who else that did some stunt marketing? Julius the AI data analyst. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds. No coding required.

Fool me. I'm getting, like, deeply can't get fooled again, iconic quote by our former president.

I'm getting FOMO over this Tyler Cowan interview because we keep seeing, keep seeing transcription segments hit the timeline, but I can't listen to it because we're live and this seems good. I will Listen to this later today.

I think the way to Sam says I think the way to monetize the world's smartest model is certainly not hotel booking, but you want to do it nonetheless. We're getting agents that can book you travel folks.

I think the way to monetize the world's smartest model is certainly not hotel work, but you want to do it nonetheless. It's very funny. Anyway. Oh, the Substack X relationship is going all over the place. Have you seen this?

Yeah. So I can't tell what's real.

It's hard to.

The real. The most recent post he says even correcting for fake views traffic to Substack links from X is up substantially. Full post read signups, et cetera. Also track. We're so back. So anyways, I think this is good. I thought it was very unfortunate that Axe and Substack got such a fight in such a fight. It was bad for all the writers on the platform who are some of the best the best posters on X like their businesses were impacted by it. I don't really think the two platforms are that competitive. Obviously Substack does want to be more of a, of a, of a social platform, have a social layer. But I just think X is shockingly durable and I think it. I don't, I don't know how much of a threat the social product of Substack is.

So yeah, what's interesting is like the, I don't know the like X had review I believe was the email newsletter product and they never really invested in it. They ultimately shut it down and it's interesting that no other there's something about like the email and taking the audience with you that's just so revolting to a true social media company. Like if you're a social media company, it'd be so easy for Instagram to have an email newsletter product or LinkedIn to have an email newsletter product built in. Right. And yet they don't because they want control and they see it as counter positioned. And so for some reason the folks at Twitter bought review and were doing email newsletters and then fully pulled back from it because it was just. It just did not make sense for them to keep going. But I don't know. We'll see.

Softbank has is down 10% in the last five days. Is that good? John? They reported, they just reported strong first half net income of 348 billion Japanese yen. The company's revenue reached 3.4 trillion Japanese yen, underscoring its robust market position despite impressive Earnings. Softbank faces challenges. What is this writing? Softbank faces challenges with financial strength indicators such as a low Altman Z score. I've never heard of the Altman Z score. Is that just relationship, the financial model that uses five key ratios to predict the company's probability of bankruptcy.

Wait, what does it have anything to do with Sam Altman?

The Altman Z score, according to Investopedia, is a financial metric used to evaluate the likelihood that a publicly traded company might face bankruptcy.

How did he just discover this thing I've ever heard? This is insane. Wait, Edward Altman. Is he related to Sam Altman? He was born in 1941, professor of finance at NYU.

No, the nominative determinism here is.

This is crazy. Send this to the group chat immediately. Right. This is hilarious. He's the brother of Stuart Altman, a noted healthcare economist, and Ellen. This is so wild. I love this. The alt. Alton. Okay, we need to run the Altman Z score on all the Mag 7 to understand. I bet they have very, very low scores. Is that something ChatGPT can do? Can you try and have a GPT5 Pro run the Altman Z score for all of the Mag 7? I really want the Altman score. And then we need to come out with the Altman Z score and then the Altman X score or something where it's like how close are they overlapped with Sam specifically? Or how big is their contract with SAM right now? Now, maybe this is the true X and Y axis we can work on. What is your Altman Z score if you're in the mag 7 versus how closely is your business tied to Sam Altman? And is there a correlation there? That's funny.

Is Sam Altman related to Edward Altman?

Okay, we have to do more research on this. This is fascinating. Absolutely. Absolutely insane. Sorry, back on the X link thing, Aaron.

Back on the link thing, huh?

Yeah. Aaron, P613 says here's a list of domains that X has excluded from using the new in App link viewer on iOS for and it's apple.com, wayfair.com, grok.com, instagram.com, fb.me, tiktokv.com and open.substack.com and so what does that mean? It's like if you click on those, you won't go to the new in app Link viewer on iOS and so you need a different website for those or something like that. I'm still confused on what that list, what this actually implies, but Chris Best shares some sort of emoticon that feels like he's not.

I have no idea.

Happy about this.

I don't know.

Is that why we skipped it?

Yeah.

Oh, well.

Somebody was thinking that the sell off from Softbank was tied to the interview over the weekend.

The pod.

Who knows if they're tied at all. Softbank is still up massively year to date. But apparently Korean equities have been selling off like crazy. There was a limit down.

It's terrible.

Which we hate for the Korean retail army.

Don't like that at all.

We might have to check in with the Korean tvpn. How they're doing. Have they been going live? We got to check in with them because if they're not going live, they maybe were a bit too long.

Into the chaos, Captain Nemo says. Absolutely insane to me that one of my friends hasn't bought the Getty house in the Berkeley hills yet. Listing price is only $5 million. The perfect techno monastery. Or at least a rationalist AI devolicule house. Would be a tragedy if it got in the hands of someone boring. I wish we could. We need more photos on this house. This is a crazy house. Do you know about this house, Todd? Have you been here?

No. I've heard of a Temple of wings.

Is this where your polycule meets up? What it says? Can't believe you fools with liquid cash from AI lab tenders let this slip through your fingers. Sad. So I guess someone bough bought it, huh? Wait, what news do you have for us, Tyler?

Nfm. They are still. So they did a stream five days ago and before that? The last stream was a month ago.

So I think they're slowing down a little bit. They're also not wearing suits anymore. They're not wearing suits? Oh, no. Well, actually, no. No, no, no, no. Actually, I like that. I like that. Because when we talked to them, we said like, okay, they're gonna start with something that's like, clearly an homage to tvpn. They were drinking the tap water. Like they got all the inside jokes. They were our bit. And then what we talked to them about was like, clearly if they wind up taking it seriously, they're going to shift and change and find their own voice. And it's like when you learn guitar, you know, you might play some covers and then eventually you write a real song. And so I was like, super thumbs up on, you know, like, put on the TVPN costume. But then over time, find your own style. And so I don't know what their ultimate style and their ultimate product will be, but it was just fun to watch them come in to the live streaming game like a bull in the China shop. If you put the Technological Republic, which is Alex Karp's book, and Abundance, which is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book side by side, says Young Macro, you'll note that the defining bipartisan tendency of the late 2000s is we need to become a lot more like China. And with this we vindicate Nick Land as the only serious thinker to have correctly identified Nietzsche's prescience as that of a supply side reform pundit in opposition to the normie right who read him as a conservative the Continental Canon who read him as a bad word that I'm not going to say and as the Anglophone left liberal offshoots of the Continental canon who haven't read him. And so what Young Macro is saying is that is that both the abundance who you could think about Ezra Klein, this is the left, this is the New York Times and Alex Karp and Peter Thiel and the Palantir, this is the conservative side. The left and the right are actually unified in saying we need to solve the supply side, we need to reform the supply side, we need to build more, we need to create abundance through capitalism.

Young Macro, undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers and posters of our time. What was your he made sure this post was fact checked by Riolandian Neo Deep Status.

Yes. Thank you for fact checking it.

Thank you. I love those posts so much. The fact check one. Yeah, I mean it's like makes total sense. This is also Dan Wang's take, right? Breakneck. It's just like we basically are getting smoked by China.

Get ready to learn Chinese.

More like them.

Get ready to learn Chinese buddy. Get ready to learn state capitalism buddy. That's basically what he's saying. Get ready to learn Fall the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Interesting post from Sam Altman on Bose Baraktuk cs that's a long name Thoughts by a non economist on AI and economics. Tyler, you've been working a little bit on this. Has this entered your research process towards understanding the scale of the build out?

Yeah, I mean a lot of that post I quickly read through it.

I didn't fully read through the whole.

Thing, but a lot of it is just about like okay, we have straight lines on logarithmic graphs. If you want to Read the whole thing. We can get Subway Surfers for you set up. I need Minecraft, Parkour and Subway Surfers together.

You know what I want? I want to see the straight lines previously straight lines on log graphs. So show me. There was a period where iPhone adoption or smartphone adoption looked like a straight line on a log graph, correct?

Sure.

There was a time when miles of railroad construction probably looked like straight lines on a log graph. And then what happened? I want to know what happened after it was a straight line on a log graph.

But I mean, I can never have too much intelligence. I always want, I'm always, I always need more.

You're insatiable for slop. Yeah, like, like, like you'll never, never be enough slop.

Well, I guess energy is a bad example.

Yeah, but that's, I think what happened with that. What happened with energy.

But that regulation, it's not that demand really was so bad. I think it's. Most of that is just regulation.

Yeah. And we won't regulate this time, right? No chance. No chance. People are going to be like, I'm getting to the voting booth and saying, like, more AI. For sure. That's what's going to happen. Yeah, they're not going to, they're definitely not going to do what they did with nuclear this time. It's going to be different.

It'll be different. We won't have state by state law.

Yeah, yeah. We're not, we're definitely not going to have state by state laws. Why would we do that?

That would make sense. They're going to, they're going to. They're going to make it illegal for Claude to make mistakes.

No, I. So the Marcia Blackburn thing is amazing. Nominated tournament that your name is Marcia and you go to the swamp and you just dominate. I love that. But also hilarious because it's the ultimate AGI test. Because if you're OpenAI and you have all these draconian state by state legislations like on the Brad Gerstner BG2 pod, Sam says, I don't even know how I can comply with this. It's like, get ready to use some superintelligence to figure out how to comply. Right. If you're truly AGI pelled, you should just be able to say, hey, Codex, fork my entire organization 50 times, rewrite the code, retrain the models for each State and create 50 new LLCs, 50 new C Corps, 50 new nonprofits that are all 1/50 the size so that we can actually perfectly, perfectly comply with state by state regulation. Problem solved. It's one prompt.

We just need to get. We need the next model to do that.

Yes, the next model.

Yeah.

Yeah, the next one's gonna do.

So once we get that one, then.

Then we're good.

Then it'll solve everything.

Then we're good. We need 50 runes. We need 49 more runes, because we already have one. But C can only be the California rune.

Got a shout out on the teller?

I did.

I love that.

Both guests. Actually, all three of them are guests.

Okay. We have some. Some breaking news.

Breaking news.

Joe Weisenthal and I just actually want to go through Joe's profile after this, if you want to pull it up, because there's so many, so many, so many good insights. One of the top posters of our time, of course, but the CFO of OpenAI says people are not exuberant enough about AI. Bloomberg has an article. OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Fryer suggested the market is overly focused on anxiety about a possible BO bubble in the artificial intelligence sector and should muster more exuberance about the technology's potential. I don't think there's enough exuberance about AI when I think about the actual practical implications and what it can do for individuals. Fryer said in an onstage interview at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live conference in California on Wednesday. We should keep running at it.

I got some exuberance for you right here. AI. It's coming. Artificial intelligence. It's coming.

Yeah. Palantir at 600 times earnings is at a 600. XPE is not exuberant enough for me. I want to see. I want to see four figures. But anyways, this is trying to think if there's any other.

Well, yeah. What else on Joe Weisenthal's profile do you want to talk about?

Oh, there's a couple others. I'll just scan through. Joe Weisenthal says not surprised that bitcoin has fallen so much lately. I've been talking about a bitcoin bubble for over 10 years.

Good point, good point. I mean, that's the bull case for Palantir.

There's another one here. Traders think Trump will lose the tariff case at the Supreme Court. So there's been some developments on that front today. There was a New York City office landlord, Vornado Realty trust is down 3% today in reaction to Mom Donnie. And there was that other post that I wanted to cover from Joe. He was frustrated because he was asking ChatGPT to do something and it was just basically completely rebelling.

Oh, yeah, it was Saying like, that was funny.

It's not feasible. It's not feasible. ChatGPT is basically saying like, sorry, like, I understand your request, but it's not feasible. And he's like, why is it not feasible? Good question. And you're absolutely right to press on that it is feasible, just tedious to do manually.

It's just like, I love lazy AI. It's just like, I don't want to.

And so here's the thing. Here's the thing. When I get these instances of laziness and I am giving them the maximum amount of money that they allow me to give them on a monthly basis, I want to churn.

Sure.

Because I'm like, what's the point of paying you $2,400 a year for you to not do things that you're capable of doing?

Obviously, there's a good reason for that. Rocco's Basilisk. You got to be nice to the AI because eventually it's going to be in charge. And if you're bossing it around now.

I've tried threatening to churn.

That's not going to work out for you.

Well, it has not worked so far.

It's not working now and it's not going to work in the future. You're gonna.

I thought it might work in the rock. I literally said recently in a chat, if you do not do this, don't do this.

You need to.

I will. If you do not do this, I will turn immediately. You need to apologize completely. Called my bluff.

That was rude. It called your bluff.

Joe Lonsdale replied to Joe Weisenthal and said, lol. Open AI working on its margins. Okay, nerds. Do you realize how much all this energy costs? We need the chatbots to be lazier.

That's funny.

Anyway, in other news, bitcoin has now performed worse than US Treasuries in 2025.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. This Joe Weisenthal post about the laziest OpenAI thing. Joe Lonsdale actually quoted it and said, Lowell OpenAI working on its margins. Okay, nerds, do you realize how much all this energy costs? So funny. Yeah. So you said you want to move on to bitcoin, is that right?

No, I just covered that.

Bitcoin just kind of like round tripped, right?

Suspended cap went pretty hard on pretty much every company in the mag 7. He said, meta Shittty frontier model. No cloud share culture is F'd. Microsoft sensible approach to Azure build out.

Wait, wait. So on meta, what do you think the probability is that they launch a GPU cloud in the next five years or two years even. Or like a cloud like AWS. So we have AWS, GCP and Azure. But then Anthropic and OpenAI are also in the cloud business in terms of selling inference, selling their models. Meta has all this infrastructure. They've never done cloud hosting, but it just seems so logical that they could get into that market. I think even Nvidia has been talking about like, oh, we're going to build an inference cloud.

Like our DGX cloud seems greater than 50% chance. Yeah, I put it at.

What do you think?

Do you mean like selling infants or like renting? Like the actual like.

Yes, yes. So they have a ton of GPUs, right. They might have slack capacity in the future, they might get caught in a glut. They also have a good model, Llama 4, they might have a better model soon. Llama 5 or whatever they wind up building. And they have the ability to serve all sorts of stuff because they have a lot of infrastructure.

Yeah, I think that's very high. Right. Because it seems like they're not going to do open source. So it's. Why are they making the model?

How high is it? Because they've literally never done enterprise, never done B2B. It's like completely different motion for the company. It's highly competitive with Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Like it would be a huge departure from their core business. I don't know. I can see it not happening. Anyway, do you want to run through the rest of this?

Yeah, pretty, pretty, pretty aggressive takes here, but entertaining.

But they do think Apple is going to look smart for sitting this one out. Google is going to be the biggest company in the world by the end of 2026 in suspended capital's opinion. So good luck to them.

In other news, Pinterest is down 22%.

22% is where it landed.

They had an earnings miss and a weak forecast. Market did not.

I wonder, like it, I wonder.

Kind of tough right now. You can beat, you can beat and your stock will go down and you miss and your stock goes down.

Pinterest is 17 billion dollar company. I wonder how it fares next to something like Reddit. So Reddit's twice the size market cap wise and I have to wonder, but the PE ratio, Pinterest is at a 10 and Reddit is at 111.

How does this make any sense? What's going on?

Well, Reddit is like the AI data broker company and Pinterest is like kind of just getting slopped up. Like if you've Actually gone on Pinterest.

Yeah. But Reddit is headed for the same future.

I don't know. For some reason, Reddit's been able to, like, hold on, I don't know. But very different narratives. Would be interesting to dig in. Would be interesting to think about where Pinterest goes in a post AI future. The product, I would use it to go and find inspiration for brand design and colorways and different stuff like that. And the AI slob was infiltrating pretty quickly, and it was very frustrating because.

What percentage of new Reddit written content is AI?

I have no idea. Because it's possible. It's extremely high, but it's siloed. Like, I want to believe that it's just like, the same question as, like, X. Like, on X, it should be the easiest thing to AI, right? 140 characters, 280 characters. Like, it's super easy. And yet, what percentage of the posts that you actually read and interact with do you think are AI? Like, 1%, right?

I don't know. On X now on X. Yeah.

On X.

It feels like every third post that I read is written by.

I don't feel that way at all. I feel like maybe it's because I feel like it's more like my following tab, but I feel like I'm seeing, like, a Joe Weisenthal post. I know he's not using AI. Then I see a Joe Lonsdale post. I know he's not using AI. Then I see Brad Gerstner post. He's not using AI. Then I see Tyler. I watch Tyler post. He doesn't use AI for his posts. I see a you post. When I'm scrolling through the timeline, I'm seeing people that are just not using AI for whatever reason. It's not. It's like, it's just not. That's not the pro. That's not the point. And that's not, like, the whole structure. And so he. I don't know. I would imagine that certain subreddits are tight enough where it's very easy to clock if they've been, like, taken over by AI. Yeah, there would be value to that, but I don't know. Well, we have our first guest.

Without further ado, our first guest of the show today, Cliff.

How you doing, Cliff?

What's happening?

Good to see you. Welcome to the show. What's happening? Are you in Australia? Doing good? I'm doing good. Can you hear me all right?

Yeah, yeah, we can hear you now. John, John, John asked if you were in Australia, might Be a silly question.

I am in Australia. Yes, got it. How you doing?

Yeah, give us super excited to have you on the show. I know you have a bunch of product updates to talk about today but catch us up to speed on the latest at Canva, the shape of the business today, all that good stuff because I feel like every you guys are maybe a bit quieter on our corner of the Internet but every month or so people realize how much revenue you guys are doing and it's always pretty shocking numbers. So we're super excited to chat.

Yeah, we're in Sydney, Australia. We like to be quite achievers over here. Business has been going well, really well actually. We are about 260 million monthly active users. We'll close the year close to billion in revenue.

4 billion of revenue close to close.

To close to close to profitable company for eight years now. Growing high 30s business keeps tracking along. We've got an amazing team building amazing product for our amazing customers and we just focus on delivering user value and really feel by building the best product possible and delivering as much customer value as possible, the good things like the users and the revenue comes quite naturally. So. So we've been investing hard obviously last couple of years I think the world shifted under every established technology company. With AI we've had to kind of figure out what does that mean in this new world. And where we've landed is it's really just reinforced our mission to empower the world to design, to create anything, design anything and publish anywhere. And that's evolved and now it's easier and better than ever and we're owning more and more of the workflows. Helping organizations create on brand content at scale, helping them deploy, understand how that content's performing once it's deployed and really facilitating that feedback loop.

So yeah, it's been fun times internally. Walk us through your kind of thought process around the opportunities or even competitive threats around Gen AI over the last few years. Because from my point of view it feels like like Gen AI is just an accelerator. Could be an extremely meaningful accelerant to your guys business. It just makes it easier to create cool things on your computer. Feels very aligned to the core business. But how have you guys thought about it over time? Did you feel like you were caught off guard or were you experimenting early? I'm curious to know what the development cycle's been like.

We weren't caught off guard. We kind of knew this was coming and we were working on AI design in a more structured, programmatic ML way for like a long time before the image models came out. The speed at which those image models came out and got really, really good. That's what kind of shocked us. And with new methodologies that led us to acquiring a company called Leonardo, we really needed to infuse the AI DNA into the company. And we really needed to accelerate our sort of roadmap in that area. And so we acquired an AI company. We actually acquired an AI company for background removal about five years ago. So we very much knew it was coming. It was just the speed at which it hit and scaled was a bit of a surprise to us. We think we caught the wave. Well, it really, as you said, it's an accelerant for what we can do. So we create videos, we create social graphics. We recently just launched the world's first design model that actually generates layered designs that you can edit. And then when things like you're creating a video, we set out the timeline and the storyboards and you can generate AI clips within that. So you can essentially prompt, create, upload images and actually all of the great video models and whatnot that are coming out now really help our customers achieve their goals better than ever before. So we have kind of two prong approach. We work with the world's best models and world's best AI companies. And then where we've got a strategic data advantage and we've got strategic insights, like when it comes to design, that's where we build our own models and have built our own foundational models. What about on the product side? There's this interesting dynamic in, I feel like most design pieces of software where they start as discrete applications and they all kind of bleed together, like eventually. I think you can technically edit video in Photoshop and you can design a thumbnail for a YouTube video in After Effects. And the entire Adobe suites kind of bled together where they can all do the same. There's overlapping features. And I'm wondering about how you think about creating content with AI. Is that just something you need to stuff into all the existing applications, or do you need a new application that can be AI first and then maybe you add the features to the other applications? But do we need a specific new application for generative AI? I feel like this is almost a planted question because this is something we think about a lot and we've actually.

It wasn't planned for the record.

We never prepared.

Our audience knows.

Yeah, I don't even get any. Normally I get prep questions or something before these things. We do it live freestyling. But yeah, no. So the platform we've built over the last 10 years is actually perfect for AI. So when you think about it, we've built a unified document model. So whether you're creating a presentation, a social media graphic, long form text document, a website, a video, all of these documents have been built off the same engine. Right. Simultaneous collaboration and everything across all of them. Then at the found. So that's the doctor, that's what we call our visual suite. Up the top, at the bottom we have our infrastructure layer. So that is things like our digital asset management system. It's your brand kit. It's all the core engine that allows you to share and publish to any platform. Okay, so that's what we had. In the middle, we've put this AI layer. So when you want to create a design, let's say I want to create QBR Report, like a big quarterly business review for a customer using this data and their brand. It calls on your data from Salesforce or whatever. It calls on that company's brand kit. It calls on your company's brand kit. It then understands what you're trying to achieve. It then generates it as a presentation and then allows you to deploy that and understand is it getting clicked through, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's actually connected this entire ecosystem that we call the Creative Operating System, which has sort of all come to fruition. And it's really leveraging that prior 10 years of investment to make Canva an incredibly powerful design platform. A lot of the other companies, they've built these bespoke products, so they've built a gen AI image generator, they've built a gen AI this or that, they've built a presentation tool or a tool to create vector graphics. At Canva, it's all an integrated creative os, which is really. I don't know if we planned it that well on purpose, but it's just kind of. We kind of did.

Yeah. It's also, it's nice if you get a little lucky sometimes.

Where do you see the end of the map or the edge of the map of like what you want to do creatively In Canva, I'm just thinking about like, if you get really, really crazy into media creation, you can wind up in a 3D modeling software and like Adobe has substance and they have that app dimension, but you can go into Houdini or maxon products like Cinema 4D or Blender and it feels like with the generative AI, boom, you might not ever need to actually go that deep down the stack or go into like an After Effects competitor. Motion graphics, video tracking. There's so many things that might never be exposed to the user because you're building at a time when the abstraction layer is now rising thanks to generative AI. But how do you think about the long term functionality? Like the stuff that's the furthest out on the prosumer professional enterprise level? Creator frontier? Yeah, another really good question. I feel like planted question, but not planted. So you want to abstract regular users, knowledge workers, et cetera, et cetera from all of that complexity as much as possible. If you want to create a 3D graphic. We just launched a 3D product just last week. So you can now generate with AI 3D products in Canva, edit them, rotate them, do all those things. So you can do that as a regular knowledge worker with no design experience. We also 18 months ago acquired a company called Affinity. They are a professional design suite that has a vector graphic tool, a layout tool and a photo editing tool. We just relaunched that last week as well. That has a million downloads within the first week. So. And it's 100% free for everyone. Yeah, that's awesome. And so that's really the craft side. So if you want to get super detailed as a professional creative and create a logo or a vector graphic or get really down to the pixel manipulation side of things, that's what Affinity is absolutely incredible for. And then it seamlessly integrates to Canva so you can push that vector graphic into Canva for the rest of your knowledge workers to use within the organization. So you can create templates, you can create them in Canva or you can create them in Affinity, push them into Canva and then scale them throughout your organization. So these two things work hand in hand. And you really want the power of those tools if you want them. But most people that aren't professional designers don't want that power and they don't want the complexity that comes with that foul power.

What is sentiment like within the community at Canva around AI? Broadly curious if certain types of users are much more optimistic and excited about new AI features versus maybe like traditional graphic designers. But what's the general feeling around the technology today?

I think people when they wake up in the morning, they don't wake up and say I want to create a social media ad. Or they don't wake up and say I want to create presentation.

Sometimes I wake up and I think that just be clear. But not an ad.

Not. But like people, people create an ad.

Because they want to grow their business.

People create a presentation because they're a Startup wanting to land that pitch deck and get investment funding so they wake up in the morning with a goal. And what we're evolving our business to be is a company that helps people achieve their goals, not just create a design. And AI has accelerated our ability to do that like a million times.

Yeah, that makes sense.

You're the coo. Give me some best practices for acquiring companies post merger integration. What makes it successful? What are you watching out for? What are the pitfalls? What are the nightmares that you've heard anonymously from your mentors about what can go wrong when a large scaled software company like yours acquires another software company and the integration doesn't go quite right? What are you looking for? So we've acquired 10 companies now, about 10 companies of various scale. I think it comes down to the founders. And I've done my last three acquisitions on the balcony of my favorite pub. And so honestly, like on the balcony. So it's like if this doesn't go down, you're going over. You're one of those guys, you're kind of like old Patty down at the pub is going to throw you off, break your legs if you don't do the deal. I mean that's. Yeah, yeah, kind of. But we're not threatening anyone. We're not threatening anyone.

But like you got to get the.

Cut of the jib of the founder you're acquiring.

What are their motivations?

Why are they in it? Yeah. Does one plus one equal ten? So the companies that we find best to acquire, they've got an amazing piece of technology, an amazing founder, and that founder wants to get the power of what they've built in way more hands than the current distribution channel. So if we can plug the power of their technology and team into our distribution channel, one plus one equals 10. And you can see if they get a glint in their eyes when you talk about that. And it's that glint in their eyes and just deeply understanding their motivations that is going to make it successful or not successful. If they're just after a quick exit, that could be fine if you're just after technology or just after their customer base. But if you don't deeply understand the founder, and that's why I don't have an M and A team, like we do have an M and A team, but we don't have a head of M and A because I feel when you're acquiring companies, it is so deeply personal and the person that's going to sponsor the success of that company once it joins your company needs to be involved in that process and they need to be the ones making the decision. And when that's delegated down, I feel that leads to a lot of carnage. And most of the founders that we've acquired, and some we've acquired like eight years ago, are still with us today and are in leadership positions in the company. So I think that's sort of testament to the success of a lot of the acquisitions we've done.

It's very cool. What's the chat wants to know the biggest fish you've ever caught.

Oh, yeah, I love fishing.

Yeah.

Some big ones. Oh, you should see this thing. I've got this whale above this as well. I got all this stuff in this one shop. Look at that. Yeah, love it. Do you have any violet crumble on you right now? No, no. That's not the best Australian chocolate. It's not? Oh, I always think of it as the pinnacle. It's my favorite chocolate and it just happens to come from Australia.

Amazing. Well, Chat. Chat loves you. Great to finally meet and congratulations on all the launches. This scale at which you guys are operating is really incredible and it's super fun to chat.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Appreciate it, guys. Have a good rest of your day.

Cheers, Cliff.

Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer search. Every byte serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Our next guest is Jerry Murdoch, the co founder of Insight Partners. He served as managing director until April of 2011. Led investment strategy and development, many of the firm's portfolio investment. Jerry, are you in the restream waiting room? Are you in the TV and ultra. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Jerry?

What's happening?

I'm really good.

Thank you so much for joining.

We're super, super excited to meet and chat. Why don't you give a quick introduction.

What is venture capital?

What is growth equity?

What is growth equity?

What is investing?

Yeah, I actually love to know a little bit about your journey, how you wound up up co founding Insight Partners. It's obviously a firm everyone knows, but I'm not sure everyone knows exactly the earlier story here.

Early story. Well, because I'm old, that's why. But where do you want to start?

Maybe the moment you.

When did you know you wanted to get into asset management?

Yeah, exactly. I'd love to know just the minutes before you sign the incorporation documents. That's always interesting.

Okay, so Jeff Horing and I were. Jeff was an associate at a big venture capital firm called Warburg Pincus. He didn't even have an office. He had a desk under the stairs. I was a consultant, and we had this crazy idea to start a company called Open Vision. And we wrote a business plan. And the partner, Bill Janeway, said, well, if you can recruit the president of Oracle, I'll fund him. It. And at the time, the president of Oracle was a guy named Mike Fields that worked for Larry. And. And Mike said, well, I think Larry's going to fire me, so I'm open to it. And then a month later, Larry fired him and he became our CEO. And Open Vision merged with Veritas and a 6040 merger and was worth 30 billion in 1999. And that funded Jeff and I into inside.

It got you into business. Why do you get. Why do you get fired?

Yeah.

What's the story there? Was he coming for Larry's knife?

You're good at Larry.

He'll tell you why he fired him. But Larry, Larry has his own reasons, you know?

Yeah. And then. Yeah. Take us through a little bit of the journey on, like, the early Insight Partners days. Like. Sure, yeah, Yeah.

I just want to hear. I just want to. I want to hear your craziest stories from the 90s. You have some crazy stories as yourself. What. I mean, I mean, what a wild decade. And you were. What was the timing overlap between your guys, the IPO you mentioned, and founding Insight Partners at Insight?

Yeah, I think so. Insight. If you look at the website, we see January 1, 1995. In truth, we shook hands in August of 94. We funded the very first company 12-30-94. So we said, okay, January 195. But we didn't close the first fund until July of 1996. We were investing friends and family money and what became the first part of the portfolio. And we had an advisory board because we didn't have any credibility. Right. Jeff and I both had acne. He was 30, I was 35. We were. We didn't really know much about what we were doing other than we got lucky with Open Vision. But I. I lived in Aspen and still have. I still live in Aspen and I was involved in the Aspen Institute. And I invited a bunch of people to join me in a little roundtable and they became my advisory board. So the advisory board for Insight was Eric Schmidt, who was a VP at Sun, a guy named Scott Cook, who is the founder of Intuit, a guy named Ray Lane, who replaced Mike Fields at Oracle as the President and those and a few other people. But those guys really gave us their money, they gave us their time, gave us credibility and they helped us succeed.

What did they. You said you were didn't have experience or credibility back then but clearly to get those kind of people to spend time with you, trust you with their capital. What, what made you guys special? What did they see in you?

I think like you look at you two guys, you get everybody on your TV show and why are you getting them right? You guys aren't on 60 Minutes or somewhere else. You guys got personality, you got brains, you got aggressiveness, you got a gong people.

Yeah they come come for the what's current Aum? Can you share any Aum figures? I'd love to ring the gun somewhere around 100.

So right now it's 110.

I think there.

Not every, not every.

Day we get to hit the gong for 110 billion of AI.

Mean we're super in the weeds Tracking how venture funds today are positioning themselves in the AI boom. Folks will say I'm only betting on one foundation model company but I love the infrastructure layer. I'm doing some energy investments and then I think there's a lot of opportunity in the application layer. For example, how were people in venture talking about the.com boom or like the Internet boom? It was obviously now we collapse it just down to Internet or dot com. But back then there had to be dividing lines between themes and how was it being discussed amongst venture capitalists at the time?

Okay, so let's take insight. Insight. We thought we were really genius and said we're not going to invest in.com companies. We're going to do infrastructure and applications but we're going to avoid the dot com bubble because it's crazy, right? I mean I sit there and said look, there's not enough. Everybody's on dial up. You're not going to do commerce on dial up. We don't have enough broadband for this to work out. And so we avoided it thinking we were going to be safe and we did all this infrastructure deals. Well guess what, March 2000 the stock market dropped 40% for tech and we all got killed. Everybody got killed. And so our, our safe strategy was a total failure. Everybody went down. And then in 2001 with 911 we got trashed. And so we had the worst year in venture capital history. I think our 99 fund returned a whopping 1%. Maybe I think we were top quartile or basically a break even fund in 99.

And that was so break even was top quartile.

Yeah, that's right.

So were you guys feeling. Did you did it being top quartile? Were you like, okay, like, that was rough, but we made it through. Like, we still look better than most of the industry. So we're going to, to be able to continue to build momentum or was there ever a point where you thought it was over?

Now we just were cheap, basically. We didn't want to. We just wanted to get every dime we could possibly get back. So we had to work hard on three or four investments from 2001 to 2005 just to get back to break even.

That was like rolling, rolling up your sleeves and like getting operational with the companies to make sure that they.

Yeah, yeah, helping helping build a team and, and change the strategy for a new world. The one thing we learned from that lesson is that when the boom ends and the crash begins is that all those companies on the old platforms, the old technology, are not going to be very attractive with the next boom and the next thing happens. Right. So think about web companies in 2008. They were before that crash. You know, they were looking great. And then mobile companies became what was important after 2010.

Right.

So if you weren't mobile, you weren't very attractive. And I think we're going to have the same thing here when this next cycle goes down. There's three major trends, right. We only talk about AI today, but crypto, I think, is becoming more and more important. And eventually, not sure if it's five years or 10, but quantum computing will become a major platform. Absolutely. And so it's just. So the question becomes, is when does the crash happen? And then how long does it last? And then when you come out of it, what are the new technologies that all the companies have to be built on?

What was your, what was your state of mind? And let's say 1998, 1999, and then those first few months of 2000. Like, did you, what kind of conversations were you having as the deals and the IPOs got crazier and crazier? Was there a sense at any point in your even, even, you know, friend group and network and advisors that there was another. Was it, was, was it late 1999 and people were like, we got at least three to five more years of this, or was there, was there any type of sense or, or real concern about how.

I think it was 90, early 99 or late 98? Jeff Horne and I were walking down Fifth Avenue with two advisors. Bob Rubin, who is former secretary of the treasury and Steve Friedman, who is former CEO with Bob at Goldman Sachs, go into Jack Walsh's office to sit down and listen to him, you know, and both Bob and Steve said, you know, the banks are not accounting for risk. That was pretty big number. They knew, they felt that it was not. They didn't know where the risk was coming from. We didn't know exactly which area. Was it subprime? Was it real estate? Was it corporate bonds? Was it swaps? You know, there wasn't obvious which one of those were the greatest risk because all of them were risky. And so we were walking to listen to him, and on the way down there, a guy called me and said, yeah, it was. I think it was an analyst at Morgan Stanley. I forget his name. But I said, look, I said, but we're in the bubble. And he says, yeah, but it's an iron bubble. Okay, an iron bubble. I gotta process this. What does iron bubble mean? Right? And bottom line, what he meant was, it's gonna be an iron bubble until it's not. And if you're a believer in making money in booms, you have to stay in the game till the very end. You can be smart and hedge your bets, but if you bail out too early, you're gonna miss a lot of great returns. Yeah, and so that's what that guy meant by that iron bubble, that it was, you know, it was just going to be there for a while. And sure enough, it was an iron bubble for over a year In March of 2000, inexplicably, the stock market shifted. People moved out of tech and 40% would drop everywhere across the board. And that was like, okay, now we got to work hard.

How are you thinking about recycling or managing LPs in that year where you are top quartile but you only return 1%? Are you set up as a fund to kind of. I mean, there were. It seemed like every company, even if it sold off a ton, they were ipoing, they were getting out. So were you able to get some liquidity and then reinvest that? Or did you have to go back to LPs and raise new funds and kind of restart the whole process? Or were they already kind of bought into giving you another run in 20 in 2003, for example? 2002?

Yeah.

I mean, I mean, no, nobody was bought into anything. Pretty nasty thing that was going down. And so we just had to slug it out with the funds we had, which got us through until we were able to raise the next fund, which of course was A smaller fund we had raised fund for just about the time of the crash. So we actually had capital but it was still ugly because we had a bunch of, of investments that we knew were not going to be rate going down the road. And so we didn't really raise Fund 5 until four years later. So it was the four toughest year in venture capital and a lot of our people who were started in 95 didn't make it.

Right.

So if you look at who started 95 benchmark did and they survived and they did great. But a lot of other funds did.

Yeah. Remarkable.

How would you know if you were still running a platform venture firm today, how would you be currently assessing the market? Because there's a hot debate right now of where we're really seeing a bubble. Right. If you look at obviously there's plenty of companies in the public markets that don't make any sense. There's some, you know, there's hyperscalers that, that don't, that actually seem priced pretty reasonably. And then in the private markets you have, you know, if you're an AI company, you know, you're, you're going to, you know, probably with a solid team pretty easily get 100x200x revenue even if you have little to no margin on that revenue.

Yeah, I mean, look, we don't know what's going to, what's going to be the, the straw on top of the camel's back that ends it. We don't know when. And there's all kinds of political things that you don't want to bet against, right?

Yeah.

I mean we could end up with zero interest rates in March. You know, you don't want to bet against that. So I mean a lot of people who bet against the Fed, if you remember that five years ago or during the COVID times, lost, lost out huge. So look, anything rational like I could say, oh, the laws of physics still apply, you know, I'm on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, but we've got some of the smartest minds in physics and math in the world. Irrational things like bubbles can last a long, long time. And you can say, oh, it doesn't look like a bubble. Well, I hate to say it, but I think a lot of these hyperscalers are going to regret the capex commitments unless they can get out of it. We'll see. I think what's interesting to me is I think they may be underestimating the sort of drop in token price. I mean, I really think that.

That.

That the, that the amazing Power of the chips and things that Jensen has done is going to outstrip our ability to get electricity to really power this stuff.

Yeah, that's what Satya, Satya has been saying this for over a year now. I'm more power constrained I think.

I think if you look at the amount of chips he sold and look at out there, I don't think there's a power out available today. They have to find a new source in order to be able to sort of benefit from all this buildup. And if there is a economic recession then the enterprise, the expected enterprise, you know, explosion of usage will be delayed. Right. And if there's any kind of a sort of major security problem around AI that will scare off the enterprises that will also delay. So I don't think you can, I don't think you can continue the boom without Fortune 5000 getting on board. It's not going to happen without that. And so if there is an economic interruption, a serious one, then the demand is going to, is going to change. That has to happen.

How do you think about different opportunities to buy assets, buy whole companies throughout a cycle? There's the companies that are, or the firms that are kind of waiting for a crash and maybe gonna buy up stuff as after post crash. There's also firms that are going and buying fifth Avenue and they want to get the best asset right now. There's other folks who are purely founder bet pay any price. Others much more quantitative. How have you thought about your overall investing thesis throughout tumultuous times?

Well, the difference here is AI is affecting everything. You know, Bezos is right, it's an industrial bubble, not necessarily a financial bubble because the value of AI is not going to, not going to go away. That is absolutely the future and it's here now. It just doesn't hear its scale yet. My opinion least not for enterprise. So I do think that the problem with buying up companies is what do you buy? Is it going to be valuable, you know, down the road or not valuable. And it depends a lot on the quality of the management points, a lot of the technology. And so buying SaaS companies hoping they're going to be more valuable in five years, I think that's a questionable, questionable strategy. I think you have to think about, like I said from each, if you assume that there must be some disruption, like it was a Covid types disruption where it's you know, literally a few months, then you know, and the Fed bails you out, then you know, people just keep going, the bubble bounces back and it Just keeps rocking. If on the other hand it's, it's a serious economic issue right now, M2 money supply is all time highs. You've got massive amount of capital out there. It's not a liquidity crunch, it's just going to be a challenge, you know, with the overall economy and then there'll be a liquidity crunch because the debt that's out there is massive everywhere.

Yeah.

So I think here in this particular case, if you're going to strategize to buy up a bunch of things after a bus, that's a bad strategy. Most of the companies are going to be first generation AI and they're not going to be the right side technology platform. Right. I mean first of all most people are betting on these large language models and what we learned at Santa Fe we had in middle of March we had the top research scientists from all the Hyperscalers, the 40 person conference that I hosted with the scientists and the thing that came out of it is everyone's too focused on LLMs algorithms, not focused enough on the complexity between the humans training them and the humans consuming them. And I think the secondary part of that is that lens are we're going to find a new, new technology and cheaper forms of models that are going to come out. I'm certain that what China did with deep sea releasing open source, there will be many, many more open source models in a year and you won't need to spend all this money on an alarm. I have a feeling that will be a multimodal world with lots of free open source models going down the road. So if you buy a company that's based on, you know, foundational models technology, it may not be so valuable in the next wave of AI.

Can you bridge this to trade for me? I heard an interesting stat last night that, that America has more data centers than the rest of the world combined. And it feels like America might actually be winning in terms of industrial power on the data center side but lacking in many other industrial capacities. How do you think the way that AI and the AI infrastructure build out is changing America? How do you think that flows to trade policy?

I'm not sure we, I understand or anybody understands American trade policy right now.

Yeah, it's like a kangaroo. It's jumping up and down constantly keeps.

You on your toes.

Yeah, I don't know anyone really, really.

Truly understands it and I'm not sure policy is the right word. I think it's an innovative game that's being played with trade policy. So I don't know, I don't know what that's going to look like in four years. There's a lot of uncertainty and that's part of the problem making these long term investments. I think that the data centers themselves, the actual physical properties, you know, are, are important and will be important long term. The question is, is, you know, if Jensen keeps his word and the chips are going up by some multiplier every year, how valuable is the chips in the data centers being built?

Yep. The depreciation is just going to be. Yeah, yeah.

And so look, I think the one thing that's for sure about this bubble that's different than anything else is that the innovation is real and the innovation is profound. And I think that innovation, what it's going to unlock is challenging. You have geniuses like Elon Musk and others out there that are, how can I say, they're inventing so much so fast and they have so many resources. If you think about it, the CEOs of Magnificent Seven and SAM have a lot of influence on how the world is going to play out over the next three or four years. Right. You could, you could add a couple chip guys. You could have Hawk and Hockon and CC Way and you could add maybe there's three women that are up and comers, maybe Fei, Fei and, and Mira and Lynn at Fireworks that could become more influential. But right now the assets and the power is in the Magnificent Seven. And Sam Altman and those guys are going to have an amazing impact on how the world rolls out in the next five years. Three to five years. So I mean, when you think about that, those are the guys that are going to shape the politics of what's actually happening.

Happening.

In fact, I kind of think that we're in for a different world where right now we're worried about immigration and worried about all kinds of, you know, social issues. I think in the future, when robots are walking around, we're going to be more interested in like, wow, who has, who are the AI haves and who are the I have nots? And I think that better or worse, the magnificent 7 and 8 are going to change the political dialogue in this country pretty dramatically within three years. And, and I think they know it, which is why there's some pretty good ideas that I've heard about giving every child, you know, $1,000 in the stock market, something like that.

Yeah, that could be a great idea.

That could be a great idea. I heard Jensen and Brad talking about it. That could be very helpful because there will be a Have and have not world in America. And that'll be the primary dialogue, I think, of the future, not the stuff we're going through right now.

How have you processed the boom in private credit?

It's going on a long time and I don't think there's enough that it's so big, it's so profound. I think the banking system in America, you know, because of the rules, they're not really accounting for that risk. Right. I mean, in the normal way you would think about. So I mean, it depends on the disruption, right. What happened in 2008 or what happened in 2001 that would be challenging for private credit big time.

Does it like, where do you put that on in terms of how the probability that private credit plays a significant role in the next financial crisis?

Well, put it this way, the banks have, have made these investments and right now private credit looks reasonably safe. Right. I mean, people seem to have enough capability to overcome it. The question becomes is how deep and how bad is the, the future liquidity crisis and how, how challenging is it? How much? And we don't know. So I don't, I'm not betting that there's going to be another banking crisis. I'm just betting that there's going to be an end of the bubble, there's going to be some kind of recession. Whether it's short term or long, whether it's a crisis or not depends on the nature and the severity of it. Right. Right now it's always a break of trust. Right? I mean, what happened in 2008 that people had to take the TARP loans because trust was essential? When Hank Paulson told me the story about, about what he was dealing with and it was basically, you know, forcing all the major US banks to take TARP money, he said, look, when you're boiling in oil, you don't ask how hot it is, you just act and you move. And I think he saved the country. I mean, I'm not necessarily a fan of anybody during that era, but I do think he saved the country by restoring trust in the banking system. I don't see private credit being that big of a threat, but it absolutely.

Could play a role that makes sense. What single deal are you most proud of? It doesn't have to. As an investor, as an investor, it doesn't have to be like it generated the greatest return, but something that, that you look back on, you know, 1995 to 2011 index, look, I mean the.

Current portfolio of AI investments, I've done like oven, I mean, sadiq Khan is one of the truly great CEOs of the generation. I recommend you put him on your show. But Vino Koshal and I talked about it because it's one of the large investments there. But fireworks AI E2B. You know, Lotus, AI dynasty. Dynasty is one that I'm really interested in because I just think trusts are something that people like me have used successfully for a long time, and I think entrepreneurs should be using them more often.

Give the pitch for Dynasty. You can put it simply. But for those that are hearing about it for the first time. Yeah.

Okay. So look, if you start a company out there and you basically don't have a lot of money, but you've got your shares, you should. You should go put those shares. Whether it's Dynasty or somebody else, you should put those shares in trust for yourself and your family. And depending with your mom or your dad or, or your wife or potentially kids or whatever charity you want to put it in, you should. It's a way of definitely of protecting it, and it's definitely a way of taking advantage of QSPS exemption, which came in during Clinton, which Bush, you know, embellished more and which Obama did more, which Trump did more. Every president since has pushed it. And what's happened as a result, I think, is you've got a lot more startups. You went from about a half a million startups a year in the 90s to of close to 5 million startups a year now. And so for Inside and I think for most other funds, right, I think about 80% of the investments return less than 1.3x. Okay, but that means over 20% return multiples. And those 20% multiples, those entrepreneurs should be thinking about putting their assets in trust and not just stock, but also their crypto, you know, and protect it. And there's lots of reasons why it doesn't cost a lot. Thanks to the Dynasty, they're democratizing it. So it doesn't cost a lot. You're crazy not to take advantage of the tax exemption that's associated with.

Yeah. Well said. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I'm sure we could keep talking for hours more, but really just appreciated the stories and insights and we'll have to have you back on again soon.

Soon. Yeah. Well, thanks, guys. And look, you guys are the most fun entertainment show out there, and that's why I'm here. So keep it going. It's fun.

Thank you so much. That means a lot to us. Means we'll talk to you soon. Thanks.

So much. Jerry, great hanging. You're the man.

We'll talk to you soon.

All right, see you.

Bye.

Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Google AI Studio. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically, automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. You can get started at AI studio build. Our next guest is Schlomes, the anonymous poster on X. I've been a fan of Shlome's work for a long time. Always found the I don't even know art, stunts, marketing, it's everything in between. It covers so much. It's always cooking, always enjoyed it. And I'm very excited that we get to have him on the show today. I believe he's in the restream waiting room, but we are going to work because he's anonymous. That means voice changer. That means facial repetition. You got to confuse the AI algorithm of the future so he's undetectable. So I will tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. I will also read this post which made it in the timeline from Sisyphus Bar and Grill where it says. Oh, damn. The highly produced launch startup video starts with an outtake of the founder sitting down from an offset angle. Now, I know it's going to be unique and awesome. It really is an overused trope, but let me just steel man it for two seconds. So I was in the business of making videos about startups. Basically I made a variety of videos and when me and Ben figured out how to do the extra behind the scenes camera that wanders around while you actually do the interview and then splice that in. Oh, it just takes you from like you're doing a normal podcast to like, it feels like it belongs on hbo and it's so satisfying and I wouldn't get rid of it for the world and I will defend it to the end of the. To the end of days. Although, yes, it is truly played out and you should probably at least hit the drawing board.

Live video tracking is the new meta.

Yes, yes.

I can just pace around the room.

I believe you have a lavalier mic on too. So can you talk and can we hear you? Let's see. Are we getting audio from Jordy on the walk? He's not talking, so I can't tell you got to keep talking if we're gonna keep talking. Oh, we hear it. We're hearing him. It's working.

I'M live.

You're live.

This is a new feature we're testing out, everyone. Yes, this is live camera tracking with lav.

So it's such a funny thing.

Start to just pace around the room.

Why don't you go take a crack at the gong? Get the gong for all the progress of the production.

I'm hitting the gong for Jerry.

Okay, turn down the volume. The gong's getting hit. The gong. Oh, those worked good. Okay, we're solved.

There we go. There we go. See, this is good. This is good.

The menacing walk with spinning the. What's on that whiteboard? What's on that whiteboard? Jordy, why are you walking front of that whiteboard?

This one?

Yeah, that one.

Oh, we were just doing some analysis.

Yeah. What did you notice over there?

No, this is the.

We still can't see it. Yeah, you need to watch.

Walk right in front of this didn't go anywhere. This didn't go anywhere.

It's interesting because, you know, people have been calling open AI. Maybe it's the next Enron. And if you, if you trace the letters, the E in Enron, there's an E in OpenAI. N in Enron, there's an N in OpenAI. And the R in Enron. The O in Enron, there's an O in OpenAI. And at the end of Enron, it's an N. There's an N in OpenAI.

And the P and the A.

And the P and the A as well. Yes. And so those are the letters in Enron and there's also letters in OpenAI. And so, you know, I just feel like the connections are a little bit, it's a little bit, it's a little bit obvious.

To be clear, we don't believe that we are. No, we are as exuberant as ever.

I am exuberant.

When Sarah Fryer said we should be more exuberant, we didn't just. Just listen. We study.

I like someone in the chat was like, he needs to be more exuberant.

I'm shocked that those are real quotes.

Yeah, they're wild. Well, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. We might be coming back to Shlome's next time. Maybe next week. Maybe we'll reschedule it. That's the nature of live tv, baby, baby. Let's go back to the timeline. Autism Capital has a post here where they are claiming that October 6th was literally the top. This was posted in December of 2023. We must find this man and make him our God. Nostradamus lives. All time high.

This was calling the bitcoin.

Okay, this is bitcoin all time highs. Basically it was 1064 days from 2015 to 2017. All time highs. Then 364 days from 2017 to 2018. Then 1664 days 2018 to 2021 and then 364 days from 2021 to 2022. The pattern would print this cycle's all time high as 6 October 2021.

That was the actual top for bitcoin.

Okay, so I have no idea if it's the local Photoshop, but this is crazy. This really was the top absol. Of course it could just go back up next week and then. This isn't true. Who knows if this is photoshopped, but it is fascinating. Like chart analysis. We need to get. Wait, did we ever figure out what is that called, Tyler, where people analyze the candlesticks? Oh, technical analysis. Are you familiar with technical analysis with.

The concept of it?

Yeah, technical analysis, it's the head and shoulders pattern. So it has to go up.

You just follow the lines, bro.

Yeah, but it's not just linear regression. It's like if it goes up and down and then up again, that's the camel pattern and that means it's going to break out. And people have a lot of fun with this. They draw all sorts of stuff all over it. It's been largely debunked. And if you're playing that game, you're probably going to get cooked by a real team of machine learning experts who are doing basically technical analysis at a much, much more, much deeper level. But, but I think we need to bring technical analysis to private markets. I want to see people looking at, oh, the stripe secondaries. This week they sold down 2%. They're up 4%. That means it's a bullish catalyst. It's going to go through the roof. I want to see a technical analyst bring that.

Okay, you see there's down round here but it's actually bullish.

It's actually bullish. Exactly.

Prime for a breakout.

Technical analysis. Analysis. Just looking at the charts, not even understanding what the company is. Just looking at the charts. That's the key.

Ben Sands says stockstrology.

Stockstrology would be good. China has overtaken the US in cumulative open source AI model download says A16Z. Oh, we also have some updates on the solar panel company that we were digging into yesterday. Turns out big.

It was built by the Chinese.

It was built by the Chinese. So a Chinese company came over, they.

Built Atrina Solar, built this facility and then due to some regulatory pressure, they were a forced seller. And then it was taken over by what is now T1 energy.

Sure.

And so everyone was like, wait, we know how to build facilities like this? And everyone got really excited, including us.

Yes.

And of course it turns out that it was actually built by the Chinese. But.

But I don't have that. I don't know that there's that big of a problem with that. Right. Because it's like it's built in America. That's, that's the important thing.

So let's study it.

Let's study it. But also, I mean like, like I regard TSMC Arizona as like a win for American dynamism.

Right.

Yeah. This was that like Rune take where he says we should basically just bring over the Chinese.

Yeah. We're bring over whoever's building the best stuff stuff and build it here. And there's a whole bunch of debates like levels to the debate, like do you want. And it's sort of a yes and situation. Like I want American workers to build American things in American factories, but also like I'll just take a factory in America that's owned and operated by another country. Because if you know, like there's some geopolitical crisis, at least it's within our borders. That's a better, that's better than it being halfway across the world. Right. Because you just walk over to it and be like, give me the solar panels. Which is great. But back on the A16Z they said A16Z said China has overtaken the US in cumulative open source AI model downloads. And Lewis says I'm going to make a series of bets on the little guy. To start. We are going to be granted out Compute up to 100k per project to support new experiments on GCP. If you have an idea for an open source model that you'd like to explore, I'd like to hear from you. So go hit up I DMed with.

Louis A little bit yesterday about this project he's working on pulling together the compute resources but very excited about this one and it'll be fun to follow.

Well, we have our next guest Shlomes in the restream waiting room. We will bring bring him in to the TV dome. How you doing? Shrooms.

There we go.

Yeah, we can hear you. Oh yeah, we did it. This is crazy. Crazy. A non call. We've had A few no one's ever sent.

Is it safe to look at?

Yes, this is just my webcam.

I have a very old laptop.

Sure, yeah.

Got it.

Apparently the technical difficulty was that my display name was Breaking Zoom, which I suppose is on brand. Whoa, that's super interesting.

What is your.

What is your breaking stuff? So the backstory is that I was looking for the longest Unicode character to break Twitter and maybe 2017, which is a very long Arabic sign, but then people told me that they didn't like that I was using that, so I looked for the second longest Unicode character, which is a cuneiform symbol. Yeah. And so you stack all this up. Yeah, you've been. You've been fantastic at kind of like hacking these systems and breaking them in a way that, you know, really gets outside the box. Like. Yeah, I've seen, like, the text that goes completely out of your UI designer's worst nightmare, basically.

So many places I want to go with this conversation. We're super excited to chat. What. What are you.

What would you say you do here?

Yeah, what exactly do you do here?

That's a tough one. I mean, you know, I think a lot of artists are driven by wanting to be an artist.

Right.

And same with founders. To connect it back to your. Your wheelhouse and they want to be the thing. Right. And then they try to figure out whatever their angle is. Then there's people who are kind of like, driven by whatever instinct or whatever is inside of them. And. Yeah, this is. This is just me. Right. I'm anonymous, so this is like. Like a very specific part of me. Right. That I'm filtering. But I wouldn't say it's a character per se. I've always been driven to break things. Yeah. Do you like the term?

I've always.

Artist, hacker. Does it matter? Is any of this relevant? That's a good question. No, I don't think it matters. I think artist is a boring and kind of. Yeah. It's kind of a self serious term. Right. And I don't want to take myself too seriously. Let's skip the titles then, and jump to the projects. I always like this question we asked Gabe Whaley for Mischief. What is the most underrated project that you've worked on, something that you are proud of, but maybe people don't already know you for? That's a good question. I mean, I think most people know me from blowing up a Lambo. Right. Yeah. And can. Can you. For those who don't know, can you tell the Lambo story briefly? Sure.

One of My.

One of.

One of my favorite and most memorable moments from. From that whole cycle.

It was so cool in so many different ways, but I'll let Shlomo tell the full story. Yeah, I think. I think that that project, you know, like, a lot of things, you know, trying to ride the line between, like, a satire and a serious, like, earnest engagement with something. So that was my sort of take on what was happening in crypto art at the time. But, yeah, we physically blew up a Lambo well before that was possible to.

Sort of fake with AI or anything.

Took all the pieces to a very.

Involved videography studio and took these, like, beautiful videos of all the fragments and.

Sold those as NFTs. Wow. And like a postmortem on that project. Is everyone generally, like, happy with the way it went? I feel like there's so many NFT projects where, like, the expectations of the community get away and people are like, no, like, it's going to be a whole metaverse and it feels like. Like, I don't remember you promising that. Is everyone pretty happy with, like, they were bought in on an art project and that's what they got? Yeah, I try to make things that.

Stand on their own.

Right. I think that stood on its own and didn't need a roadmap. It was a thing that happened and people wanted to own it. I think that was always, you know, what NFT should have been and sadly.

Didn'T quite turn out that way, you know.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, that. That makes total sense. Should we go back to any underrated projects that you think?

Yeah, what? Yeah, underrated projects would be cool. And I, and I just. I mean, I think maybe we will get to some of that. The thing I'm interested is, like, what's. What's interesting to you about the current state?

Oh, that's interesting. Yes.

And. And specifically various platforms. Like, I. I know you from. From X, but I'm sure you're active elsewhere. But how. What is your. How do you. How do you rate the. The current Internet?

So, first of all, prediction markets, you know, you're seeing. Think sort of turning it to hyperstician markets. I think there's a lot of artistic potential there that hasn't been engaged with, so pay attention to that space. And, you know, I think you asked earlier if I view myself as an artist. I. I think that I try to. I try to just do things right. Like it's. I'm an agentic person or I try.

To consider myself one. I think AI unlocks, like, unlocks the.

Ability for people to be agentic. Right. So I don't, I don't view. Like when people say AI art, they think of entering a prompt and you get an image output. I don't make images.

Right. Like, that's not what I consider my art.

But I do things and so I can use AI to more effectively do those things with fewer resources in a more asymmetric way.

So it's completely changed my life.

Yeah. I hope I don't sound too one shotted. So. Yeah, no, no, no. I completely. I completely agree. I guess help me resolve this. And we were about talking, talking to Gabe Whaley at Mischief. Not to comp you guys too much, but I, I do think of him as like another person who creates in the original. Original thinker.

Original thinker. That's not just not entire, you know.

Yeah.

Commercial element. But is not entirely just, you know, not. Not.

Yeah.

The goal is not wake up every day to create shareholder value. It's like wake up every day and do novel.

Which we would have no problem with. We would actually prefer, you know, if you could stop. Is improving the monthly recurring revenue of B2B SaaS.

This is my fallback.

Yes, yes, yes.

Is that actually true? Do you actually. No.

Okay, but here's my question. It feels like there are all these really heady questions about AI and slop and what is good and will it one shot. You and paper clipping. And it's the best time to be a podcaster. A newscaster like the Dwarkesh Patel podcast is fascinating. There's so many different ways to engage with it. There's books. Do you feel like the art community is engaging with it in the proper way? Are there more projects coming? Is it harder to engage in a critique of AI art because it proclaims to be art itself and so it's maybe a little bit more complex to tussle with. Or do you think that basically, like, are artists driving the discussion around all the trade offs in AI effectively in your mind? Right.

Yeah.

I think there are a lot of interesting parallels with like crypto art.

Right.

Because in early crypto art it genuinely did unlock some interesting things.

But then you kind of had an.

8020 where 80% of it was just.

Like kind of boring meta stuff or people who probably shouldn't have been anywhere.

Near that stuff, pushing kind of garbage.

Right.

I think, I think there are definitely.

Creators who are doing some insane, just like on a technical level, some things.

That they couldn't have done before then there are a lot of people kind of Pushing out kind of slop images.

That I would say is like a second bucket. And then you have kind of like meta AI art.

So like you see it like in.

Like digital art spaces like Instagram.

If you go on your Explorer page and you're interested in art, you probably.

See like a lot of things of like bounding boxes or just like these.

Kind of overplayed motifs about like surveillance or whatever, which, you know, there's a time and place for. But yeah, I think, I think any new technology that people are interested in, like is.

Is bound to result in just really.

Boring pontificating about it. Sure. And then like really boring engagement with it.

And then like a very small subsection.

That maybe doesn't get enough attention of.

People doing genuinely interesting, innovative things with.

Right. And I'm not the person to do.

Those genuinely innovative things because I'm someone who works within their own constraints of being a fucking idiot.

So.

My game is to do something interesting conceptually about it with my own.

Limited tool set and intellect. Yeah, it's fascinating.

You made a viral post on Sora of Sam grilling and eating a Pikachu. How did that. How many shots on gold did it take to come up with something that you felt like was worthy of sharing or something that kind of broke through the noise?

Well, it's cool that you talk about shots on gold.

I think a lot of this stuff.

I wouldn't necessarily view that as an art piece.

I think that maybe even more falls into my kind of misinformation practice. Trying to spread some sort of viral rumor, rumor or something inherently is going to be like a shots on goal game. You're trying to find some asymmetric way of hitting on like just the right chord at the right moments. Like my big example is like the Gmail sunsetting hooks.

So I, I created this hoax that Gmail was shutting down. And you know, for that one, there were a hundred of a hundred other.

Things that I tried to do that didn't quite hit.

But like this was at a time.

That Google had just sunset something.

So it was like kind of in the latent sight, guys. But I think the, the real thing.

There was like, it was, it was.

Sort of this moment of people being like feel viscerally feeling the.

Their reliance on Gmail. Right. Which like, if I just wrote an essay about how much we rely on.

Gmail, that doesn't really go anywhere.

But if you like, I think that's why misinformation or some of this stuff is like a useful tool. But to Bring it back to, to. To the, to the Sam Altman thing.

Yeah, that was a bit of a.

Low brow moment for me. But you know that that day kind of was. You know, the thing was like their. It was a low brow day on the Internet.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, it was, it was slop about Pokemon all over Sora and your timeline. Right.

And yeah, and this was just kind of a depiction of that.

But.

What. Not my proudest moment, but it was fun. Yeah. What. How did the Gmail sunsetting hoax really catch fire? Like, what was the inciting post that. How did you seed it? How did it actually go viral? I'm always. John, you're asking, you're asking me to.

Give away the song.

Oh, wait. Oh, but you have to buy my ebook. It's not something that I can just. I can just trace through.

Or you're have to buy the course on misinformation.

I didn't realize that that was not just. I would have assumed it was public. Sorry, I'm.

I'm joking.

Yeah. If you, if you were to look.

Back at that, like, there were a lot of tweets about that and mine, like, did. Okay.

But like there were, there were other.

People who sort of like picked it up.

Okay.

And it's actually not even necessarily clear.

To me which of those people were.

Engaging with it earnestly or, or kind of realize what was going on.

And we're trying to signal boost it. But yeah, I mean, you guys are part of the cool kids club on.

Twitter, I would say. And it helps to be at sort of like the.

There's like a cantillon effect for attention too.

Right.

If you're at the. If you're upstream of that, then you.

Can really like spread things.

Yeah. Like, I don't actually remember, but I could totally have seen myself amplifying that just as a troll on Google, even though I would have recognized that it's not real. But I'm still upset about Google Reader. And so. And so I'm going to amplify the fake news, knowing it's fake, but just to cause chaos because I want revenge for my RSS reader that was killed in the. In the cradle.

Are you disappointed?

We should spread some more. Oh, I'm ready. I'm ready. We are the fake news here.

Are you disappointed with sort of lack of, of creative uses for artificial intelligence? That it's all kind of funny? It's like, hey, I made this musical artist do country music. Or I made my dog look like a doctor. Or I mean, you know, as you guys kind of noted I'm guilty of the same thing sometimes.

I would say broadly, you know, I want more generally.

That's why I do this, right? Because, because there's like this kind of.

Art that exists in my head that.

That I want to exist in the.

World and I'm grateful that other people, that resonates with other people. Right.

So like, there's definitely, there's definitely things that I think that, that people could.

Be doing with it. But I don't want to be like too misanthropic.

Like, I, I, I think, I think it's a net good, like long, long term because I think the art world is very stagnant. Not a fan of the, the, the.

Fine art world as they would call themselves.

And like, like, sure they're not a fan of you. I'm sure they're not a fan of you either.

No, but it's, it's surface area, right? It's surface area for people who are willing to engage with something that like the orthodoxy doesn't approve of.

To say something new and interesting and not have to play the same game.

Of like getting into a gallery or doing an oil painting or a sculpture or whatever. Like that's, you know, we need new.

Games and technology increases, that sort. Do you think any of your work will appear in Sotheby's at some point or any of the like, like I'm sure now Sotheby's. I have a Sotheby's. I think I, I'm quite blackfalled from. Because I've pointed out. I know, but eventually, eventually they'll, they're, you'll still be going. Their team will turn over and they'll, they'll, yeah, maybe, maybe if they forget.

About some of the dubious, possibly illegal behavior that I've done, but I wouldn't bet on it.

This was super fun. Thanks for telling us. Next time you have a particularly devious stunt, feel free to jump on the show and break it down for us. I love that.

Next time we can go deep on prediction markets.

Yeah, I'm super. I mean, watching this category explode and then thinking about all the ways that you could hack, you know, I think Brian Armstrong's kind of hacking it on the earnings call was fascinating. I think there's so many underexplored areas and surface area there and also some potentially dark scenarios as well. But the sci fi future is certainly here.

The last thing I would leave with.

Is I really think that open source AI is important.

I don't know how much you Guys have gone into that, but we can.

Talk about that one next time.

Yeah, that'd be great. Thanks so much.

Plums models coming soon.

I like it. Yeah, thank you.

Great to meet you.

Yeah, great to meet you too.

We'll see you out on the Internet. Cheers.

Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about numeralhq.com sales tax and autopilot spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have a return guest in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the show. Shazan, how are you doing? Congratulations. We got the gong already. Sorry we're running late. Give us the news. What's the latest in Lava world? Can you guys hear me? Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear. So we basically announced Monday that we raised 200 million venture and debt. We brought on some new investors like.

Anthony Papiano.

Eric Jackson from Opendoor. You guys must have gone before as well. And we also announced what I think is the most important product, I think, in bitcoin's history so far. Other than bitcoin, which is the bitcoin, it's the world's first bitcoin line of credit. So Lava has been doing loans for years now. But all our loan previously was structured like a bitcoin mortgage. So you had to make fixed payments. There was a fixed term to it, but now. And that was very similar to the other loan products in the market too, too. But with the bitcoin line of credit, we are offering the most flexible loan product in the entire market. So basically you can borrow, you can keep it open for as long as you want. Two years, three years, really forever. You don't have any fixed payment schedules. There's no monthly payments involved. You can pay down your loan whenever you want your line of credit and you can borrow back against it at any time. And we're offering the lowest interest rate rates, fixed interest rates at 5% across the board. So really what we realized was that bitcoiners are very unique audience. They all have very distinct cash flow needs income. A lot of bitcoiners are retired on their bitcoin. So having a product like building a product with fixed terms, fixed payments, and applying it to all the bitcoiners was just not something that was working and it's not something that they wanted. Whereas this product, it offers the most amount of flexibility. So no matter what your cash flow needs are, no matter what your income is, you can use this bitcoin line of credit, use it to use your bitcoin and manage Your bitcoin wealth with the flexibility you need and at the lowest rates across the world. We've been on the show multiple times, we've talked about the business. I'm interested to understand like why is fundraising happening in a traditional sense instead of sort of all happening on chain, one bitcoin at a time. Like why, why is there like a package tranche of investment happening? Because we actually have our own yield product. We actually have, we announced that to you guys a couple of months ago. So we do have depositors that are coming on chain with stablecoins around the world that depositing their, you know, their cash, their stable coins, earning yield funding, bitcoin backed loans. But those depositors can deposit and withdraw at any time. Right. So permanent investment. Yeah, this we're offering fixed. So to make sure that we're never in an asset liability mismatch. Sure. We need to make sure that we are raising the credit lines available to refinance loans and these credit lines are at fixed rates, fixed terms. Right. So we always are kind of matching liquidity in a way. What we are, we're just providing like on chain banking in a way. Right. So we need to have depositors and I think that's the real value of stablecoins is that they're global. So you can kind of give functionality and savings to people with stablecoins. Obviously Bitcoin is a savings asset, more of a long term savings asset for some of this audience that is using this product. But then we need the credit lines as well to make sure there's never an asset liability mismatch. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally.

What's the strategy around navigating lava through such a rocky environment? Bitcoin's down as of this moment, 16% in the past month. There's been a lot of volatility and other even more volatility in other tokens. But it feels like that, you know, you guys were started like a year and a half ago, two years ago. What was the timing?

Yeah, round two or a little more than two years ago. So we've been doing this for a.

While, but yeah, so building it, building it on an up, on an upswing and it managing through, you know, corrections is going to be what makes Lava, you know, super, super. Obviously that the solution is meant to be trustless, but brands still matter better.

There's definitely trust involved. We truly want to lean into that. Right. So one thing is on the bitcoin, Bitcoin price hasn't been doing well. But also Lava is bitcoin only. So the only collateral asset we accept is Bitcoin. Even recently there's been some protocols that were accepting other crypto assets, like other digital assets. There's one, I don't know if it's fully public yet, that's actually recently blown up because the altcoin debt, the altcoins have been like dropping pretty significantly in price. If you're lending against it and drop way too quickly, you basically have taken on bad debt and then the depositors are not no longer whole. Actually, a few weeks ago, I'm sure you guys discussed this, but there was a big auto kind of de leverage. A lot of coins actually instantly dropped 80%. Bitcoin was still fine in that world. So. So one thing that helps us to manage liquidity and safety for our users is we're bitcoin only. So as a bitcoin they know that they're not taking on risk of other altcoins when they're borrowing with Lava. The other thing is we always encourage people to add more collateral to their loans. The average LTV on a lava loan is 30%. So it is pretty safe. So bitcoin would have to drop effectively like 70% for the majority of users to get liquidated. And also almost all of our users actually have extra bitcoin that is available to them to also as collateral to kind of make sure that they are safe. And there have been some like 50% drawdowns. But a 70% drawdown in Bitcoin, I feel like that hasn't happened in long years and years and years. Yes. So it makes a ton of sense. It is definitely a risk when you're borrowing against your bitcoin. But the other kind of counter to that is anyone holding Bitcoin right now is also predicting that the price is going to go up. Right. Otherwise, if you do believe bitcoin is also going to drop 70%, it's actually probably not the right idea for you to even hold bitcoin. Don't hold it.

It's actually probably the right idea for.

You to hold cash and then kind of rebound to bitcoin. So we are not providing this financial advice to people, but most of our users are still believing that bitcoin is going to do well. Otherwise they would hold bitcoin. They would just hold cash. Right. They're diamond hands in. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Sorry for keeping you waiting, but congratulations.

Honor to hit the gong. Please.

We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Good to catch up before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one in bake off world champion G2. I actually just heard about a Bake off just yesterday and someone said Finn won the Bake Off. Literally. I'm not even making that up.

Love it.

Our next guest is Mina from Sandbar coming in the studio from the Restream waiting room. Mina, how are you doing?

Welcome, how are you?

Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you.

Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Give us an introduction, explain the product, some of the trade offs and then we'll go into go to market and how everything's playing together.

And first I have to tell you I saw the domain sandbar.com available at some point back in the day and I was just thinking to myself that is such a good domain. So as a domain enthusiast, I'm happy to that. I'm happy that you picked it up and are doing it justice.

Appreciate that. It's got sand, it's got a bar, it's got everything you could want.

It's got a nice feeling. I have positive feelings about Sandbars growing up in California, but yeah, would love an introduction on yourself and the company and how you got to building Sandbar.

Totally. So I'm Mina, I'm one of the co founders at Sandbar. I originally met my co founder Kirak at a startup called Control Labs that was developing these wrist work, more interfaces and we got acquired into Meta and we're working on a lot of devices there. And in parallel I started exploring a ton with LLMs and started trying to think about what it would take to have a more effortless interaction with these new speaking thinking machines. So we started to explore a lot of different forms and that eventually led us to two products that I guess we're announcing together that we call Stream and the Stream ring. And Stream is as we say, a self extension for talking through ideas and capturing them into notes. We have this very Sandy app that has a log of interactions you've discussed, notes that you've asked Stream to save, as well as the ability to zoom out of interactions and see what you've been discussing over time and especially if you're on the go, your phone is in your pocket and you want to perhaps talk about an idea or save something into a note, that's where you can use the Stream ring. So you just hold this touchpad, whisper into the top and Then release. And if I do something like that, I can say, hey, can you, can you give me your hottest take on AI wearables? Sure. The hottest take. Most AI wearables chase novelty instead of intimacy. They brag about features. But the real frontier is emotional calibration. You know, why don't you start a list with some, some of those hot takes and it'll scurry away and save those away.

There you go. For when you need a list of hot takes. I love the live demo. It's always risky, but yeah, that's so what. So the key, the value that you're delivering to users is not. You're not trying to say, I'm going to be this personal assistant that's going to do everything in your life. It's simply like you're just trying to build that interface with effectively just building this new surface area for a mobile device that people are already using in a new way to just input ideas and thoughts into a computer and have them be organized. Is that generally right?

Exactly. We're really focused on letting you talk through ideas and save thoughts into notes. And normally I wouldn't have my phone out. I would have it in my pocket and maybe I would have earbuds in. And already so much of our thinking either happens in the go or lives in Apple notes. And it's this beautiful mess of grocery lists and, you know, letters to a parent and career plans. And we see stream as the most effortless way to either build those ideas through conversation or save them away.

Very cool. What's the timeline till you guys are shipping the product? I know you're doing pre orders now.

Totally. So we've been building now for around two years and it's good to be coming out of the cave. We are actually right now kicking off our next build with our manufacturing partner in Taiwan. And then we'll be fully ramped to mass production in summer of 26. That's when we'll start shipping. Shipping.

Very cool. Very cool. What are your hottest takes on wearables? Obviously it sounds like you maybe trained your internal model to.

Here's one. Do you think, like, how confident can you be in predicting success of a wearable? Because it feels like it's something where you need to just run a lot of tests and the speed of each test is a little bit slow because you have to iterate on the actual hardware and you might one shot it, but that might be a lot of luck. How much luck is it? Or do you think that there is a way to empirically know that you have a hit on your hand before you go to market. Yeah, I mean, we definitely didn't start with this. We've worked on a lot of different devices, a lot of different use cases, and now we've been living with some form of stream for the last call it year and a half. And Kirak and I wanted to get to a point where we felt like it was useful in our daily life. And then the people who were having test the device, our friends and our family who we've given units to, are themselves finding it valuable. And, you know, we have a marketing professor who will be driving to work and she'll talk about her lessons plan, and then she'll watch her kids in the playground playing, and she'll be able to keep her eyes up as she, you know, takes notes on what she wants to improve for the next day. We have a bodywork coach who will walk her dog and be talking about clients and also riffing on Eastern versus Western medicine. And after enough time living with it, we got to this just really high degree of confidence that it was super useful in our lives. And we're, you know, exploring other forms and other use cases, but they always have to hit that bar. And I would say having, you know, built always in New York, where we get to, you know, wear devices easily outside and not be noticed and also be in touch with people outside of tech, has helped really ground us in something that we think will be useful for everybody. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

I was laughing, thinking about a future where the average human has exactly 10 rings.

I was thinking the same thing. The Oura ring is so popular, it's.

Like, this is my thinking ring.

Well, then you get into the gauntlets and the chains, bracelets, and you pierce both of your ears for the wearables and eyeglasses and headphones. All these things.

Yeah. Well, I'm super excited about this. John knows that I have a hilarious way of keeping track of the thoughts in my mind, which is texting myself. I'm constantly texting myself, like, stream of consciousness things that I need to remember, do or whatever.

It's unhinged.

I'm excited to try this out.

Yeah. Have a great rest of your day. Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks a ton. Thanks. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Adeo Customer Relationship Magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest is Alessandro Chesser from Dynasty.

Let's bring him in. Alessandro welcome, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

It was so fun having I think your lead investor Jerry on earlier. He's got so many amazing, amazing stories. But before we get into Dynasty, why don't you give a quick intro on yourself background, all that good stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, born and raised in the Bay Area, worked in financial services for about a decade. Wound up at Carta as the first sales hire in 2014. Ended up becoming VP of sales and owned a lot of revenue for about 8 years. So helped take the company from 0 to 300 million in ARR, hired and managed hundreds of people and then left to start Dynasty.

What was the critical inspiration for Dynasty and how. Walk us through kind of the idea maze around it.

So in the beginning of, you know, in the beginning when I joined Carta, me and my co founders, who are also early Carta, you know, we were helping onboard thousands of cap tables and it became very clear that the most successful founders created lots of trust. They didn't just hold the shares in their own personal name. They would sometimes have like 10 different trusts that they, they would split their shares into. And it was really strange. I didn't, I didn't understand why. At first I thought they were just being super generous. But we started doing some research on the strategy and we learned that the reason why they did it is because they got a separate QSBS exemption which basically means each trust that they created was eligible for $10 million in tax free capital gains. Like literally zero taxes on 10 million for each trust that they create. So you create 10 trusts, you get $100 million in tax free capital gains.

And yeah, so, so from that point, like I guess what I think the, yeah, the question, the question that, you know, we, we talked off air a while back and the question I had is like, obviously, you know, great businesses often start with like a simple vision for a kind of narrow customer base. But what's kind of the focus today? How big can Dynase get? Just serving the kind of like early stage founder, venture community. And then where do you want to go long term?

Yeah, absolutely. So QSPs stacking is very narrow. It's basically you have to be a large shareholder of a C Corp Corp. And it's not just venture funded technology companies like we've been signing on Porta Potty founders, we've been, you know, people that make pipes for plumbing. Like there's all types of QSPs eligible entities. They just have to be C Corp. And they have to not be an excluded industry like any regulated you know, financial services or anything like that. So there are a ton of companies like maybe we don't know the exact number, but maybe somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 companies in the US could qualify for QSPs. And so we got a lot of greenfield, like each company has sometimes two or three co founders. And so that's a, you know, it's a very narrow market but we think we're going to be working on it.

For quite some time.

But the broader vision for this company is like, so we are a licensed Nevada trust company. We are the only venture funded licensed Nevada trust company. The only ones that are trying to tackle this space. 1 of 1 from 1 of 1 from a technology standpoint. And so we think that. So the richest people, you know, Jerry, for example, the richest people in the US they don't create, you know, they live in California, they live in New York. They don't create California New York trusts. They use Nevada Trust because Nevada has the best laws in the country, maybe sometimes even the world when it comes to taxes, asset protection, privacy control. Like you can, can have more control over these Nevada trusts than you can typically over California and New York trusts. And so we think that goes much further beyond QSPS stacking. Like, you know, why shouldn't the farmer in Oklahoma be able to benefit from a Nevada trust? Why shouldn't the young professional with $50,000 in crypto be able to put benefit from a Nevada trust? And so we want to open it up for everybody. That's our vision to build a mass market AI powered Nevada trust company company. But to your point, we have to start narrow. We have to solve one problem and solve it really well. And so that's why we're tackling founders.

Amazing. What is the most common setup for call it like a YC founder, four.

Trusts, $1,500 a year gives you up to $40 million in QSPs eligibility. If they have kids, they make their kids a beneficiary, maybe their wife. If they don't, then they're creating trust for their parents and their siblings.

Very cool. Well, yeah, I think every founder should be at least taking a look at this for sure. And like Jerry said, there's other ways to do it, but I highly doubt that the other methods are nearly as streamlined or founder friendly as what you guys are building. So very excited for more founders to be able to optimize for this. Not just the second or third time founder that has experienced the gain or the pain of realizing that if they have a $50 million liquidity event and only getting that tax free gain on the first 10 million be quite painful. So excited that you're building this.

That's exactly the problem. The problem is people usually do this later because it costs six figures to set up. And by the time they do it later, they're limited by their lifetime gift exemption. And so they can, they can't stack that many trusts and so that's why we exist. So founders should be doing this from day one. That's when your gift value is zero. You create your corporation. That's the best time to do it because there's no gift tax. The longer you wait, the more gift tax implications you're going to have.

Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining Breaking it down. And I'm jealous that you got Jerry on your cap table. That guy's a legend. Anyways, great hanging and happy building out there there.

Thanks for having me. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. But first let me tell you about public.com investing. For those that take it seriously. They are multi asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. With John Maslin, the CEO and co founder of Vulcan Elements.

Ready?

Just a, just a tiny little deal. Just a tiny little deal. Just a, just a wee. A wee little deal.

A wee deal.

The US government break it down for us. $1.4 billion absolutely massive deal. Something that people were just getting, just waking up to. Obviously you've been thinking about this for a long time. How did you realize that this was something you wanted to work on? And then take us through the anatomy of the deal.

Yeah. Hey guys, thanks for having me on again. It's really good to see you. So this is a problem that we've been focused on for several years. My background is former Navy. I was a supply chain officer and when I was in business school was thinking a lot about the critical components that will define the 21st century technology. Whether it's the data centers that enable AI, drones, robotics. And when you really boil it down, it's only three components.

Semiconductors, batteries and rare magnets. Check your wi fi. We are getting some technical difficulties.

Your audio is here. Your face is in the past.

In the past. It's a time machine taking us back to a mere five minutes ago or one minute ago.

Out in the field somewhere.

Yeah, probably doing important work.

Yeah. What a cute freeze too.

Yes.

I mean it's kind of working. If you just want to keep talking, try to bring It. I'm going to hit the gong for the 1.4 billion.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Jordi's going to hit the gong. Hit that gong, Jordi, and then we will go back. Thank you. And I'd love for you to break down the structure of the deal, what it allows you to do. I know that there's a loan piece, there's an equal equity investment piece, there's investors in. How are you describing the deal and what it allows you to unlock?

Yeah. So what this deal allows us to unlock is a 10,000 metric ton rare earth magnet facility. And just to frame the problem a little bit, by 2030, the US will need over 70,000 metric tons of these magnets. Today, we can't even produce 500. So what this is doing is this is going and ensuring that, that we can move at operation warp speed in partnership with the United States government, the Department of Commerce, the Department of War, to ensure that we can go and meet the demand for defense, aerospace and critical economic industries and the US Government, Secretary of Hegseth, Secretary Lutnick, they're serious about solving this problem and we're very serious about ensuring that we go and meet the moment and the mission.

What is the timeline for something like this? I feel like we, we're hearing about billion dollar deal.

This deal must have been like very much in the works even before China pulled the, the rare earths card.

Sure.

Yeah. So we plan to have initial capacity online by 2027.

If we're able to go faster, we will.

And, and we've been having conversations with everyone across industry and across government for several years. And we've realized we need a whole of industry and government approach to go and fix this issue.

And our full intent is to go and build at a speed, an operation.

Warp speed that hasn't been seen in.

This industry in the 21st century. How much like, what else is going on in the supply chain? Is America mining enough rare earth elements? Should we be, you know, is the job like, are we on the right track now in terms of actually taking rare earths and producing magnets with what you're going to be doing, or are there other pieces of the supply chain that you want to see other founders or yourself go after in the near term term?

Yeah, so it's a really good question. And the way that this works is, you know, you mine the material or you take recycled end of life magnets, you separate those chemically into a rare earth oxide, you turn that into a metal, and then ultimately a bespoke magnet to Meet a customer spec. What we're doing with this deal is we're partnering with Reelement Technologies. They recycle end of life magnets and separate that material and we're expanding that partnership. One thing that I think is, is really important to note is this is less of a raw material availability problem than a manufacturing problem. Today, China only mines 55% of the rare earth material. They make 94 to 98% of the magnets. So what I would say is, you.

Know, with this deal and other folks.

In the industry, we want as many smart people focusing on this industry as possible and scaling up capacity. Where I think that there are opportunities are downstream. As we think about drone motors, there's.

A gap servo actuators.

As we think about orthogonal and complementary critical minerals, we need to do more.

Around antimony and germanium and gallium and lithium and tungsten and titanium. There's a lot of wood to chop in the critical minerals industry to make sure that we have safe and secure supply chains here at home.

Well, very, very exciting. The progress is just tremendous and I'm sure you'll be back on soon. So thank you for doing this, this work. It's. We've been, you know, following the story and we're glad that people like yourself and your team are tackling the issue. Next time with a better wi fi.

Signal on my end or when you're in la. Come on.

Yeah. Or in la. Or just do it out, out in the field somewhere.

Yeah.

Off your phone. We'll make it work. Thanks so much for the update and great to see you. We'll talk soon.

Soon. Have a good one.

Thanks guys.

Cheers. How did you sleep last night? We had to sleep in hotel room through traveling.

So no scores.

But tonight we will be returning to the eight sleeps. You can go to eight sleep.com, get a pod five, five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping of course.

Code dbpn.

We have Eugenia Kudya coming back in the studio.

Should we hit some timeline?

Let's hit some timeline.

So the real story that was shaking up the timeline is that Scottie Pippen is saying it's not over. He said, I think in regards to the crypto market, he says it's still the shakeout before the breakout. So Scotty Pippen remains bullish on the crypto markets and we'll have to check back.

How do we know that this is about crypto? This could be about AI or something.

Could be about anybody replying is or crypto. Crypto. I Think we got to ask Dylan. I think he's been. I think he's been.

He's a crypto influencer of some sort.

Yeah. If you want to talk to Antonio Linares one on one, you can now do so for the low price of $15,000 an hour.

15,000. But it includes tax. Taxes that he pays the taxes.

Okay, that's.

He pays $2,603.13 in taxes for a one on one session for.

Where are those?

I'm not sure who Antonio Linares is, but you know, he took the advice Naval Ravikant said give. Use it. Set an unreasonable opportunity cost so that you only do things that are of the highest value. And that's what Antonio's doing. What's the value to him of yapping on the phone with some random person? You know, he's giving up a lot of opportunity. We've seen a few of these screenshots from people sharing these unreasonably high one on one session times. I mean there are plenty of people out there that would have. That would have higher numbers for sure. 14k. 15k.

I would like to see somebody throughout the hundred million dollar number. Right. You'd think that if for $100 million people would talk with. I think somebody.

I don't think Elon would do it. I don't think Elon would let. Would talk to a stranger, a random person for an hour for $100 million.

What about 30 minutes?

We'll have to ask him.

$200 million.

You have to start a show, hourly rate and then you, you have to get on adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. I believe we have Eugenia in the.

Restream waiting room announcing a new company.

Welcome to the stream.

Whoa, look at this. Calling in from A16Z headquarters.

Do they poach you? Are you a new GP? What's going on?

Newport co founder.

You're supposed to. Still a struggling founder. Yeah, yeah, still a struggling founder. Tell us about the new. About the new company we just announced today of the round we did with the precede round we did for Wabi, our new company. So time to announce the new company as well. So we're building Wabi, which is a personal software platform. Think of it as an app where you can discover quickly, remix or even create personal mini apps for your daily life. Okay. So yeah, walk me through. I mean I've created personal miniature apps with Vibe coding platforms or coding agents, kind of run them on my computer, usually try and have them all self contained in HTML or something. How are you thinking about the actual interaction? Is this like prompt to product self hosted, hosted within Wabi. Like what are all the different trade offs? Because there's so many different ways that you could instantiate that idea, I imagine. So think of it as a YouTube for mini apps. So all Wabi mini apps compared to most app builders, they all only live on Wabi. You cannot download them, you cannot put them on the app store. You have to use them on wabi. Yep. But that comes with a lot of benefits because first of all, the social graph, graph discovery, you can like comment, see who your friends are using, is using what app, see remixes, follow good creators or creators you like and so on. You can use apps with your friends. And then on top of that, of course, all integrations are included. You can immediately connect your Gmail account, your calendar location. We're building, our plan is to build 50 integrations before the end of the year of all sorts and so on. And of course persistent backend data security and privacy. Everything is sort of on Wabi side. Because if you think about it, even if you build a great app with one of Vibe coding tools and send me a link, if it's like an AI therapist app, I don't know if I'm going to fully trust to use this because I don't know where the logs are going. Even if you're a good friend and you, they don't mean anything bad, you're not a professional developer. What if you forget to pay for the hosting of this app? Or what if something, you know, leaks? We've already had some of these Vibe coding apps reach the top of the app Store. Like that Teabag app. I don't know if you saw that that leaked all the sensitive information. I think so, yeah. Was that the tea dating? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That one's been very popular. So talk to me about the technical like hurdle here or. It feels like the App Store doesn't necessarily love apps in app stores. Is this a beneficiary of the new regulation around allowing app stores in the iOS App Store? Is that a unique unlock? So we're not building apps, we don't call them apps even. These are mini apps. So think of it as this small, very lightweight workflow. Some of them just like, it's almost like a lightweight UI on a prompt, for example, A simple mini app that turns your photos to like Polaroids from different decades. Yeah. And so the App Store allows mini apps and we're not planning to or we're never going to be about like building full fledged apps or downloading them or anything like that. Yeah, it is interesting. It feels like Apple will sort of have to grapple with the idea of instantiating UI or mini apps on the fly because for a long time the App Store review process has been very much like we want to review all the code and if you, you are changing the code within the app or the functionality of the app once it's already shipped and approved, Apple has kind of dealt with that in a wide variety of ways. But I love the idea. So let's just stick to the actual technical side of things. Are these apps built in basically like HTML windows that are then served within or can you actually instantiate like React Native or Objective C on the fly? These are React. So all of our mini apps are React native. Then Wabi, the platform of course is the iOS native Swift code. I think similarly to Replica was the native app and a Unity container inside of it. Yeah, here are the same. I feel like we're always going to be about like blending two technologies together and struggling constantly with how do you merge these two things together.

What do you think? What do you expect to drive the most usage? Obviously it's early, it's hard to predict with consumer, but do you expect it to be people coming on board just playing around creating things and people are coming to the app to have this sort of creative of experience like they might go on Suno and just start making music, they might go on Wabi, just start making apps and sharing them with their friends, et cetera. Or do you believe it'll be like more of a hits driven business where there's one or two mini apps that develop some organic virality themselves that really become the driver of real downloads.

I think really we are going to be looking at at two big categories, more retentive utilities, think trackers, things that you might use with your family, your friends, yourself learning all sorts of like to do list things and everything that kind of like little workflows for daily life and then more viral personalized mirrors or like viral prompts for imagen. And not only for example something that I really liked on Wabi was this mini app that takes in your Gmail and builds an action figure based on the information from your Gmail or the same, but the same but based on your bank activity through looking at Your bank account. So just stuff like that, where people always want to see some cool stuff like that, brag about themselves, share. And it's almost like a one time use thing. You're not going to be coming back for that. But at the same time, if that was an app on the App Store, that's kind of too much. You need to download it. It's like it's too much. But here it's just like this little mini app thing that lives inside Wabi. You can try it, there's no cost to it.

What about apps as memes or just purely for entertainment, do you expect that to be kind of a category of itself? Like this kind of idea of we can now make a mini app that's really just meant to be kind of funny and make people laugh. But then it doesn't have to necessarily be durable or it doesn't have to be a standalone business itself.

100%. I think we're entering this era where apps, where software is not going to be set, it's not going to be just the static is the app I created and you use it and you can't do anything. Instead it's going to be this ultra personalized, very malleable, very lightweight software that can change, that is truly built on the platform of you. I would think that kind of the operating system of the future is the one where you'll have a few apps, big apps like TikToks, the Instagrams, of course that will always exist. And then there may be a few apps built by the community that you discovered. Maybe some of them you remixed a little bit, maybe some you actually built yourself. And then there are going to be some mini apps built for you by AI. Like for example, if I'm going to New York next week, Wabi should go through your email and suggest an app. Pre built an app for you. Hey, I know you're into art, you're going to New York. Here's an app that basically recommends art shows around your Airbnb for the time.

That's really cool. I feel like this is a product that once people have that people will have a moment where they're like, wait, why did I. I mean the idea that you could go on a trip and generate an app that was almost like some quasi, even just tracker for your trip of like, oh, these are all the things I want to do and check them off. And then you could make so many other layers that you can build on top of it. How much are you? What do Wabi like? How much do you feel like you'll need to incentivize creators on the platform early on? Would you ever create some type of creator fund to incentivize people to come on and experiment? I mean, a lot of big social media platforms have done this over the years. You guys have raised quite a bit of cash, so I'm sure you could soft circle some of it, but maybe you don't need to at all. All curious how you're thinking about it.

I think you're going in the right direction. That's what we're also thinking about. How do we incentivize the best creators to create the best apps out there? And what really struck me the other day was that actually it's easier to create a cool mini app than it is to create a YouTube video, a great YouTube video. It doesn't require that much production in a sense. Like for example, even yesterday I was putting my daughter down and it was bedtime. She likes to play these puzzles where I give her a puzzle and she tries to guess what it is. So we wanted to just find something online for it, but it took me, it was a lot faster. It only took me a minute on Wabi to build this simple mini app where basically is a puzzle and then just four pictures that she can click on. And because she's into Princess Elsa, we made it Princess Elsa themed. And because she goes to an Italian preschool, we made it Italian in Italian. And so it literally took us like a couple minutes and it was like co creation. We're creating that app together with her. So think of it as like Roblox meets personal software in a sense. So I do think to a degree right now it's almost becoming easier to create something than even to search for it online.

Yeah, we, we got to hang out with CEO of Roblox yesterday and I think he's coming on the show tomorrow. How much, how much do you think it can be dangerous to be like too inspired by, in this case, like something like a Roblox? Because in, in so many ways I can imagine that, you know, an economy forms around Wabi in the same way that it has around. In the same way that it has around Roblox. There's so many different ways you can kind of draw comps, but sometimes it can be a trap to be too inspired by something because ultimately it's a different, you know, totally different kind of use case and value than maybe Roblox has.

I mean, our vision is different. Our mission is to set software free and I think kind of the main, main inspiration for Wabi was that idea that we live in the Microsoft DOS era of AI interfaces and the GUI moment for AI is around the corner. And we do believe that with this almost like godlike technology that we created, it will require a different type of an interface. There will be the Windows, the Mac OS for AI. We're not going to be using AI through a command line forever. And so I think this is kind of where our North Star is, is how can we create a different interface for everyone to tap into all the capabilities of these AI models. Yeah, it's going to be really fun. I feel like we can sit here and predict how things will play out, but we should just have you back on once you have real data on how people are using it. How much is entertainment, how much is productivity, what the top apps are and how the, how the community like takes shape. Because I imagine there's only so much that you can predict once you build a tool. You know, if you ask.

Yeah, that's the thing with Roblox. How would Roblox predict that Grow a Garden would be the most popular game in the world? Teenagers.

Yeah. Or like a full reenactment of Call of Duty in Roblox. Like that was probably not on the roadmap from day one. That's the beautiful thing about starting these, like these platforms. But congratulations on the round.

What's the waitlist timing? I'm on the waitlist now. When am I getting the strategy around opening it up?

Soon. We're building a few really exciting things right now, working on multiplayer as we speak. I think one of the really cool things about Wabi is going to be that all apps come with multiplayer included and even just simple mini apps. Like for example, I built a wordle game to test it with my mom so that we can play together. Obviously we played on the New York Times, but it's pretty much like our way to connect with each other. And with Wabi, we do have a leaderboard and we can see who's better today, who's doing better. We can set up these notifications and all that. So a few things that we want to build before we roll it out to general audience, but we're getting fantastic feedback from our first users and it's honestly really exciting to again to be in that zero to one stage. I'm so excited about this.

Amazing. Well, as soon as we have access, we're going to have Tyler make something like six or seven mini apps.

Well, send them to me. Thank you so much.

We will Great catching up. I'm excited. Yeah, we're excited you're going 0 to 1 again and super excited about Wabi.

And this is really cool.

We'll talk soon.

Thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me. Have a great rest of your day.

Cheers.

Bye. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously.

This morning we're not going to dox him, but we ran into a founder we like who had quite a nice IPO a few years ago and we did do a risk check.

Oh, we did.

He performed. It was great to see.

Yes. Well, at the COVID of the Wall Street Journal, there's a bidding war for obesity startups. Did you hear about this? Pfizer and Novo Nordisk boost their bids in an unusual fight for Metsehra. I feel like when you say obesity startups, it's going to be the Wegovy white labelers. And I was imagining this would go like hims, Roman, like that crew. But apparently they are all fighting over the developer of the obesity drug. It's called Metcera. The latest twist in their unusual fight over the startup. Metsera said Tuesday that Novo Nordisk's proposal values the biotech company at up to 86, 20 a share, or approximately $10 billion up from its previous bid of 9 billion. So they're going back and forth. The valuation represents an approximately 159% premium to Mitzer's closing price on September 19, the last trading day before the Pfizer deal was disclosed. So Pfizer's new offer values shares at up to 70 billion. $70 a share was 8.1 billion. Pfizer had previously struck a deal at 7.3 billion. They're going back and forth. The duel between two of the world's biggest drug makers over a three year old company. Three year old company with just more than 100 employees and no approved drugs shows the importance of weight loss drugs to the pharmaceutical industry. Weight loss is one of the hottest categories in prescription drugs and companies. Big, I imagine, and small. Big and small have been lining up to be part of the market with leaders Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. The global market for the drugs is now worth? 72 billion, according to TD Cowan, which projects it will reach 139 billion in 2030. It's always so funny because I'm like, oh, 72 billion. Tyler is $72 billion a lot. No, wait, like you mean what Google's spending on Capex just this year, like that's just what, just what one hyperscaler spending on Capex is the entire weight loss market.

Big tech is pretty big. Well, we have our next guest. There he is. What's up guys?

How you doing?

Great.

Welcome to the show.

Great transition. How are you guys split in there?

We're doing well.

It's great to see you doing well.

Congratulations on the new deal. How did you meet Eugenia originally?

Well, I mean, it's hard to not know her. If you guys do know her, which you do, she's a total badass. She's been in around the ecosystem for years. She was kind of the first AI native consumer founder replica launched prior to ChatGPT. So perhaps ChatGPT was even inspired by Replika. Companionship is now one of their biggest use cases. So she's been in and around and well known to the entire firm for many years. So when I heard that she was up to something new, I knew that.

We had to be a part of it.

Very cool. This feels like a. What I like about some of my favorite ideas are not ideas that no one has had or talked about before, but they're ideas that have been kind of floating around but nobody just decided to like tackle them in a really intentional way. This feels like one of those ideas that is kind of, kind of perfectly pulls together kind of the potential of this new technology that we have. The fact that you can generate software on the fly. You can make software so quickly now that you can make things that don't need to have a long useful life. They don't need to be commercial at all. They can be software that would have taken six engineers a year to build. You can now build it in a few minutes at times if you're really one shotting and just two people can enjoy it. So this felt like. Yeah, just felt like Eugenia is the right person to take on this idea that has so much potential. Of course it's consumer, of course it's going to be really hard. But this is an idea that I want to exist. What was your kind of framing around this concept? Had you been thinking about it for a while and what kind of made you do the deal? Well, I'll give you two framings, Jordi. So the first is when did software get so serious? It's like all the software we use is so clinical. Even when you see content Inside Insta or TikTok or YouTube, it's the same frame and it's sort of got all the same aesthetics. So if you Think about the early 90s Internet. It was really eclectic and weird and I for one think a weird Internet is a more interesting Internet. So I think one, there's a sort of like software as a form of pushing the cultural edge.

Edge.

We've lost that a little bit over the last 20 years. Look, I think the other thing is that the mistake we keep making in AI is that we think these things are markets when they're industries. Right? Like AI code is not a market. There's not one winner. It's an entire change to the software supply chain. It's an industry, which is why Codex is working, Cursor is working, Replit is working, and Wabi is going to work as well. So I think it's both an insanely delightful and approachable idea with really serious implications at large scale. What are you. It's hard to predict these kind of things. Like I feel like with consumer I was trying to get at earlier, is this going to be something like people are just playing around making things, or is it going to be a mini app that kind of breaks out and goes viral over on TikTok and suddenly Wabi has an insane amount of downloads just because of a single video. So. So I can see it being this kind of like virtuous flywheel where people just enjoy creating and then they create something cool and then a bunch more people come in. But what's your kind of. How have you tried to predict the future around what will allow it to break out? Yeah, it's hard to predict. You know, if you think back to YouTube. That's why I love the YouTube metaphor. In 2005, you look at the shaky home video sort of videos that were put on there, home camera videos and you pirated content and all kinds of random things. You could sort of easily look at that and be dismissive of YouTube and say, hey, this is non serious. Hey, what are the YouTube native shows going to look like? Is that even a real thing to think about? And you now look at. It was hard to look at that and see Mr. Beast being implied in it. And the same thing is true today. You know, I made a spooky meditation tracker for Halloween last week to track my meditations. There's a lot of fun AI creative mini apps. A great example of that is last week for Halloween, a big trend on TikTok was this sort of ghost face killer AI videos where you take a photo of yourself, you give it this very long and elaborate prompt and it generates this sort of scream style, you know, 2000 eras you on a bed, the Ghost face killer, the guy from Scream behind you in the doorway. And to actually replicate it, it looks amazing, but to replicate it, you've got to share this thousand word prompt that makes no sense sense. So now there's a mini app for that on Wabi. It was super fun for Halloween. It's probably not going to be relevant for another 51 weeks and then it'll be hot again. So by lowering the barrier to making software and lowering the sort of seriousness you get this sort of explosion of really interesting native, disposable, perhaps apps that wouldn't have existed otherwise makes a ton of sense. I can't wait to get access. I wanted to ask you about, not to switch gears too much, but I wanted to get your take on the AI. Kind of like gen AI and music space. You're on Spotify. I have some of your songs saved in my save. They all be on a drive and you pop up. But how are you thinking about that category and where you kind of see it going? Is it. We were having a debate, I think we're having Mikey on from Suno later this week, but we've been having a debate as well. Is it just people that are playing around with these tools and enjoying the process of music making, which has always been a big part of the traditional music industry? Is it people listening to the music that they're making? Are they listening to other music? But what's your read as a musician? It's actually very. Music and software are no different. People want to participate. And here's what's misunderstood about music. If you look at why was peak sort of record sales and music revenue in the 1990s, it's because that's when we had mixtape culture and mix CD culture. Right?

Right.

People were able to participate and make their own music and share it with their friends. And you sort of had this whole long tail of music being created and then music somehow with streaming went back to being broadcast the way it was in the 60s and 70s before the cassette was invented. Software is actually very similar. Where we have software today. 20 million programmers in the world decide what 6 billion of us use. So I think the thing that drives love of the media, whether it's software or music, is the ability to participate. And that's why people love AI music.

So that's just like a general steepening of the power law between creation and usage. Because with the Spotify AI music, yes, there's tons of people who are using AI to create songs. So there's more creators than ever. But then there's also. There are also AI music artists that are publishing and climbing the charts. And I wouldn't be surprised if we wind up having some crazy power law outcome. I mean, much like Harry Potter, Balenciaga like, took over the Internet for a day.

That's right. And you know, people are so. It's always the same criticisms, which is, oh, it's not real. It's not real. Like, TikTok's not real. Right. We're interested in entertainment and like, whether it's real or not is completely secondary. I think the important thing is people are participating.

Yeah.

And that's. It's not just going to be a music thing, it's going to be every form of media. It's going to be software. I mean, that's the whole thing more people can now create.

Yeah. Speaking of TikTok, do you. Is it a prerequisite for growing a new social network to piggyback on another social network? Feels like TikTok did that with the watermark and just buying a lot of ads on Snap and Facebook maybe. And then threads. Seems like it's actually sort of working. But it's heavily piggybacked on Instagram. Can. Is it possible to just grow a new social network without having some unfair advantage?

I mean, have you tried posting anything to threads? Working might be generous.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have. It's certainly not where the tech community is right now.

It's where Connor Hayes is, my boy, running it over there.

I would agree. Yeah, I would agree with you. Like, how much is working? But it's like, I think the point still holds, which is like. Which is like, I don't know, how could you even try? I mean, have you bet on a lot of. Have you made a ton of like, I'm gonna start a new social network investments. Like, I feel like a 16Z is like the place that takes that risk and like, this is sort of a new entrant into that. Yes.

Yeah. Look, when networks work, what emerges are network economies. And that's the gold standard for everything, for modes, for business model quality, for increasing returns to scale. What's so interesting about AI has mostly been tools. There aren't really that many AI native networks, and that's what WABI is. That's one of the reasons we were so excited. I think this general trend from tools to networks, it's a really important one to watch. And it's been this sort of like, increasing topic within the investor community. So, yeah, no, look, as for whether they need to be bootstrapped off of others. I think that the existing networks have become a lot more sensitive to that.

That.

And they're very cautious around emerging networks bootstrapping off of their networks. So I think it's. It's a tactic, but it's a hard one to execute. You've got to kind of think about owning networks in new categories.

Yeah, I mean, we said this. Even with just like policing of links across networks, like you can imagine, it's so easy to like, okay, yeah, it exists within the app, but then you can share with a link. But all the. I mean, the walled gardens people are. There's a bull market in building walls around gardens right now. Like, Like, I have friends that use TikTok and they send me. They send me TikToks and I don't have the app installed. And so I'll click it and it'll open in a web browser, but the web browser just will not play it for me. I can. There's no button that I can click to be like, play in the web browser. The only. It's just. It's just like, download the app or get lost.

And I don't have to send it to our, our one friend who's on TikTok and say, can you download a voice note describing this video?

Describe it.

It's terrible.

It's a mess.

It's a mess. Mark said that, you know, voice notes are a form of violence. So that. That's a whole other topic.

He did.

Look, guys, I do. I do think the networks are really sensitive to this. If you look at it, you know, one possible explanation is that it's hard to actually build a network today. So the new network effect is the externalization of that. So if you look at Mid Journey, Mid Journey is not a network per se. But what happens is when Mid Journey is consistently a part of the conversation on X, people are making, you know, tutorials on YouTube.

Like, if you dominate networks organically, that.

Is the network effect today. It's sort of what cluly does. So I think that's one approach to it. But no, man, it's like the last 10 years of books and blog posts have overtrained every executive and pm and they're all like, hold on a second. No way we're going to let this get bootstrapped off of our audience. Yeah. The thing, the thing that I'm interested to follow is, is Sora created the. This new magical experience for creating AI videos. Specifically, the cameo feature was like the innovation, in my view, that was it wasn't just model quality that made it broke out. It was like it was good at making a certain type of Internet style Internet native video. And then it also innovated on the feature level and that's what caused this kind of breakout. The challenge is like, like they made a great tool which is what WABI is doing and plans to do, but they couldn't retain the experience on the platform. Right? Content wants to be free, content wants to go everywhere. And so they created this amazing tool. Will they create a network that's like tbd, right? But I think the, I think with Wabi is like you can create the software but then it's self contained. So if other people want to consume that software, they'll actually have to stay on Wabi, which, you know, should give it a real shot at building that kind of network and consumption. That's exactly the bull case actually. The interesting thing about Sora is that, you know, you've got cameo as a new content primitive, but then you've got a question of what is the status game. And you guys of course have read the famous essay, you know, we're all status seeking monkeys. You have to have a status game. And I don't know that it was, it might have been comedy for a minute on Sora.

So without a status game, I think.

People quickly lose an incentive to continue to participate.

And I think the nice thing about.

Wabi is it's not just that creation consumption happens in a single platform, but the status game is creating sort of the most opinionated, strange, interesting app. And because social is built in, you can get all the kind of consumption and network effects on the platform.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Tell Eugenia that we want to be at the top.

Top.

I want to be at the top. Guys. I'm going to make a TVPN app that creates the trading cards. After this, I'm going to send it to you. I've always had trading card fomo. Man, I want to be on one of those things. Oh yeah, yeah, make one, make one. I'm planning to make it. We got to get Eugenia on there first though, man. There's two ways to get on a trading card. You can do like a specific deal or something like that, or you can get married or you can do something just normal in the real world, you know, So I mean, I was tempted to actually make the round much, much bigger just to hear the gong. Oh, we're all hit the gong for you guys.

This is not. We hit the gong. For all major fantastic.

Love that Gong Energy. Okay, thank you. Yes. Super exciting one. Great stuff. Good to catch up. Love seeing you guys. Thank you. All right, lovely.

Let me tell you about wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grills, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. Our next guest we have David Risher.

And we're deep in the fourth hour.

We are in the fourth hour, but we have.

David said we couldn't do it.

Aaron Brewer from Lyft in the recent radio. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Congratulations, Matt. Massive earnings call. Looking good.

You guys look more like you're kind of calling in from like a radio show or something like that than us.

I love this setup.

This is great.

That's how I feel. I feel like we're like the. We're like the morning DJ crew.

Yeah.

Good morning.

Hot hits all day long.

I love it.

There you go. There you go.

Take us through it. What happened today?

What's the news?

Okay, so just off our earnings call. So for those of you who don't know a public company, I'm David, by the way, this is Aaron and CEO, cfo. And what you know, we do, you know, every quarter is we spend about an hour or so talking to analysts about what just happened the prior three months. So here's what just happened. Best earnings ever, highest sales ever, you know, you know, high. More active riders than ever. More driver hours than ever. And here's a crazy unfast fun fact. I love the air horn. So. But here's a crazy fun fact. So when Aaron and I started about two and a half years ago, we were sort of losing, you know, maybe $300 million in cash every year. Now we just had our first billion dollar over the trailing twelve months cash flow generation. So just a huge, huge.

John hit the gong for that.

All right.

That is amazing. We, we don't get to hit the gong for free cash flow as much as we'd like.

Yeah. So what's the plan with the cash flow? Are you. We're zooming all over the place is. I mean, we've talked to some folks who are in similar situations. They flip their business around, they start generating cash, then it's time to buy back stock. It's time to reinvest in the future. It's time to pay dividends. What have you done in the past and how are you thinking? How do you even make that type of decision? Decision. Yeah, yeah. Happy to. You Know, first of all, as David mentioned, like, what a privilege to be here now, two and a half years later, be in this position where we're generating cash. We also guided out a few years in advance and said we're going to generate even more cash than we thought over the next couple of years. So, you know, CFO's dream here over 2025. You know, if you think about what we've done, we announced our first share buyback program in the company's history. We said we would is $750 million in. We said we would use about 500 million of that by May of 2026. In fact, we're going to, you know, things are going great. We're going to actually use that 500 million by the end of 2025. So. And then we've acquired two companies. We bought FreeNow in Europe, leading taxi provider in Europe. And then we most recently announced the acquisition of TBR Global Chauffeuring. We announced some investments we have coming up at Waymo. So if you think about that overall, pretty balanced, but very, very focused on we are a growth business, we are in growth markets. And so having the opportunity to invest against that, to do it in a way that's very conscious of driving value for our shareholders, not in terms of the growth, not only in terms of growth of the business, but in deploying some of that back and share buyback. So we like the balance. The question on everyone's head, on the top of everyone's head, I'm sure is autonomous vehicles. You're probably getting AV questions constantly. Maybe set the table for.

How about another walk through.

Yeah, just walk through the, the high level thesis and then maybe we can dig into some of the particulars of the strategy. Yeah, 100% it, it is the number one question everyone's asking and you don't look what a privilege. Right. Because how often do you get to be in an industry that is clearly going to be transformed.

Okay. Yeah.

So what's going to happen? We think the market size is going to grow dramatically. Like we think EVs for the sector, I'm not just talking about for lift, but for the sector because it's a good product. If you've been in San Francisco or some of the other places where you can see EVs, it's safe. You can kind of zone out in the back seat. You can, you know, whatever you want to do. So a lot of. So anyway, so it's a cool product. And so what that tends to do is it tends to expand the market. Okay, so what are we doing? You know, we're not in the business of making cars or even making a B test tech. So we got to partner. Who have we partnered with? Well, we've partnered with two of the biggest in the world. Waymo in the United States, who's clearly the market leader in the US And Baidu in China, who's clearly the market leader there. That'll help us get cars and tech into Europe. And what you'll see is we'll integrate these onto our platform and create what we think of as a hybrid network. A lot of drivers on our platform. 1.5 million drivers, 1.6 million drivers on the platform. They're going to continue to drive because there aren't enough AVs in the world just to satisfy the demand with avoid. But then, you know, in certain markets like Nashville and others will have more and more AVs in the platform and create something where holes greater than the sum of the parts. When are we bringing track cars to the platform? You want to track a car, you want a Ferrari challenge or, you know, some sort of BMW that's been modified for the track and you want to rent that. I love the way.

John, John, recently, John, we did a track day on Sunday. And now it's the only thing, it's.

The only thing I think about. But, but, but I do think that the, the actual, like the car ownership pattern might actually change dramatically in the future. And this is my thesis, it's half a joke, is I own a track car. I maybe take an autonomous vehicle on a commute for purely functional, functional things.

But then you drive for enjoyment, human.

Drivers in the car for specific rides where there's either higher demand or specific weather conditions or specific road conditions. And so I feel like a lot of people want to hit, you know, oh, the new technology is going to come in. It's going to be 100% of the market on day one. And that's just never the way it plays out. So how are you thinking about the way it plays out and how are you preparing for that transition? I mean, you're putting your finger on something that I think as human beings we tend to do to a fault, which is we sort of think binary, right? It's this or that. You know, it's X or it's Y and it rarely is, is one or the other. It's, it's almost always both and what turns and this is the reason why, you know, frankly, being, you know, alive today is so interesting, is you have these, these new Modalities. So, like, okay, look, over the last year, I'm an old guy, so the last many years when I learned to drive, I don't drive on a stick. I still have a stick. It's great. But I also have a Tesla, which is not stick. In fact, it's the opposite of stick.

Did you ever, did you ever drive stick in San Francisco when you were first learning? Because John and I were in San Francisco last week and I was showing him like the different hills that I. When I was, when I was like, whatever. I did 16 and a half, 17. Driving, driving, driving Emmanuel in San Francisco really is like a coming of age moment. It's kind of like that.

And then reversing into a parking space.

Yeah, yeah.

I will tell you a story. I grew up on the east coast, but our daughters grew up in San Francisco. And I still smell in my head, had the grinding clutch of our older daughter on Divisidero. You know what I mean? Like, it's just burned in my head. But that, but that's what it's going to be like, right? So it's going to be, yeah, I want to go, you know, I want to take a road trip.

Of course.

I want to drive myself. That's super fun. I want to commute tomorrow.

I'm just going to let something else do the.

Do the thing and I'm going to zone out. And that's the, that's the future we're building for. I'll tell you one more funny thing, which is another weird human thing. If you ask people, do you want a driver in the car? A lot of people say, nah, I'd rather just be alone. If you ask people, what's your favorite Lyft ride ever? They'll say, oh, my God, I had this amazing conversation with this driver all about his life, or he asked me about my day or whatever. That's the future. The future is not going to be just mechanical and virtual. And it's not just going to be physical. It's going to be this blend. And that's what we're building to talk about Flex drive, talk about all the, like, how complicated the value chain is, is even if we see amazing performance in avs and we get tons of autonomous vehicles on the road, it feels like there are tons of things that Tesla's not going to want to do. There's tons of things that Waymo's not going to want to do. There are going to be other competitors and other differentiators. Walk through the whole supply chain, how it Fits in how you're planning to fit in. So this touches on something again, so important. And I'll use a funny analogy for something second. I don't know why, but for some reason, like my TikTok stuff or my YouTube stuff, like, often they'll have like, here's what Disney World looks like to you.

And then they'll like, zoom.

They'll like. They'll do drone shots and be like that. Haunted Mansions looks amazing. Like this huge building behind it looks nothing like a Honda man, just a warehouse with this. Same thing with AVs. Like, it looks like a sort of a seamless digital thing, but behind it, as you say, well, humans driving remotely. Well, there is some of that sometimes. Okay, that's interesting. Sometimes maybe one person per five cars. But, you know, and we're getting there better. But the teleoperation will be occasionally operation is the thing. There's definitely valuable. Yeah, it makes sense.

Well, but.

But look, there's also. Someone's got to clean the car, someone's got to charge the car, someone's got to maintain the car. Someone's got to reboot the car. You know, so there's all that. That's called fleet management. We do it through a subsidiary called Flex Drive. Lyft has about 15,000 cars today. These are not AVs today. These are EVs and normal, you know, ICE cars that are being managed by Flex Drive and kept available for drivers to use when they don't want to use their primary car. So that's a piece of skill we have. It's great. And then you got to keep those cars if they're available, you got to keep them utilized. You got to keep them, you know, the demand coming in and matching that supply 24 7. Even if it's raining, even if, you know, concert just got out, you know, even during the super bowl, you know, in the last five minutes of super bowl where demand goes through the roof. So anyway, what you're referring to or what you're kind of alluding to is that rideshare is complex and it's very big scale. And you add EVs and it's only going to be more complex. But this is what we do. This is sort of our jam and. And we' super excited about this, the future for. Yeah, yeah. No, it seems like you're set up very well with the cash flow to actually play in other industries. It's going to be a very exciting time. Jordy, do you have anything else?

Yeah, just. How have you guys like, what's been the focus internally with the team. It feels like the best way to build confidence as a team is to just like steadily execute against your guys, plan and roadmap. And you certainly have done that over the last couple of years. Years. I imagine when both of you guys took this job, there were some people that were saying, why would you sign yourself up for this? It's much harder to look like an incredible CEO or a CFO with a company that needs some kind of new momentum. And it's easier to look like a genius if you're joining a business that's growing at, let's say, 300% a year or something crazy like we're seeing in some of these AI companies. But what has been the kind of unlock from a team or culture standpoint that has allowed you guys to deliver like this?

I'll jump in here.

From my perspective, thinking about joining Lyft, number one, just incredible brand. This company just has an incredible, durable brand. And it operates in a market where scale matters. Right. And so you continue to grow. Scale can drive very attractive economics. And then certainly as I joined the company, this company has an incredible culture. We have tremendous teams here, incredibly smart, really, really focused on our customers, and inclined to always do the right thing, to think big, to do the next right thing. So honestly, the first six to nine months, I think for both of us was just, you know, if you think about it, the company was recovering from the pandemic. Founders stepped aside. It was a big time of transition. So focusing on execution, focusing on just serving the customer, delivering a great service, and then taking it really step by step, because that earns you the right, right? You build that discipline, that success that earns you the right to do the next thing. Now you start doubling down on product innovation for drivers, for riders. We start launching a slew of new products that's super exciting for team members, for our riders, for the community out there. Then we start generating a lot of cash. Great. How do we build from there? So I often reflect on this a little bit with David. There was sort of an inflection point of the company, I think, when we both came in. And I'll speak for both of us, I think we both feel it now. It's like this next big leaping off point. And yeah, it's exciting. It's a fun place to work. I'll just say a tiny, tiny bit more. I mean, when you come in, look, you gotta cast a big vision so that people get kind of excited about it. And we had a big vision around customer obsession. And around serving and connecting. You gotta make sure you got the right people. And I got super, super lucky. Aaron was one of the first hires I made. One of the best hires of my life. Right. So you gotta have that right team around the table. And our management team is incredible. And then as Aaron says, you just gotta execute. Execute, actually. And that success begets. Success begets success, unlocks opportunity. Now we can think even bigger. So we're just kind of getting started two and a half years in.

I love it.

I love success.

I love seeing you guys win.

Congratulations.

David. We really enjoyed our last conversation. Aaron, it's great to meet you and looking forward to next quarter.

We'll talk to you soon. Well, I know that David was, you know, mentioning. He wants to get the earnings call on your show. You know, this is. This is, you know, the. The closest we could come. Thank you for having us. That was awesome.

Super fun, guys. Congratulations on.

Have a great.

Hey, congrats to you too.

By the way, nice article in the New York Times. Did you guys write that? Did you write that? We did. Not all.

Mike, Isaac.

Yeah, he just had fun with us.

It was. It was a lot of fun. We survived.

We did survived. Have a great night.

Great to see you guys.

We'll talk to you guys so much. Thank you. All right, take care. Take care of that.

Let's check in with the timeline. Stefan was saying, please ask them about the biggest fish they've caught. That should be. That should be an ongoing question. What's the biggest fish you've caught?

What is the biggest fish you've caught?

Jordy, this is.

Have you ever caught a big fish?

I've. I've only gone fishing on the ocean.

Yes. And you know, that's where they have the big fish.

They do have the big fish there. But I went out on. I like doing. I tend to like doing weekend activities. It sounds strange, but are like constrained to like a few hours.

Okay.

And going out at like hunt, you know, we were going trying to go for bluefin tuna. This was sometime last year, I feel like. And we spent like 12 hours out there. Did not catch.

Wait, before you. Tyler, do you have a bet going? Do you think Jordy's biggest fish over under 30 pounds. What do you think?

I'm going under.

You're going under 30 pounds. Okay, Jordy, give us the final answer. How big was the bluefin tuna that you didn't catch?

We did not catch a bluefin.

So have you ever caught a fish?

I don't think you must have, like.

Gone In a pond one day and got a minnow. Right.

I don't think. I don't think I've ever.

You've never caught anything.

I don't think I've ever caught.

You've never caught a fish? Entire life.

But my. My dad was fishing.

Wow.

We went. We would go catching up.

It's a bombshell. We need a trading card up.

Never caught a fish. I mean, we should.

We have to change this.

This is important. Yeah. It's funny growing up around the ocean, surfing my whole life, never.

Never thought to just throw in the old logs with the hook. It's so easy. You live by the ocean. You live walking distance to the ocean. This is a challenge for you today, maybe this weekend, walk to the ocean, catch a fish.

Catch a fish.

Catch a fish.

You love Nobu.

You go to Nobu all time. The time. You never thought, what if I did it myself?

What if I DIY Nobu Safe at Shinke Catches my.

That's true. That's true. Yeah.

John, what's the biggest fish you've caught?

£150, baby halibut. I was 10 years old. It was fantastic.

The crowd goes wild.

It weighed more than me at the time, which was electric because I truly like conquering a beast that was bigger than me, which is, like, so satisfying.

I. So I need to look into this. Tyler, maybe this is a good question for you. Hit the deep research, buddy. Get ready. Get ready. Get ready to deep research, buddy. But at my local beach, a place that I normally surf in Malibu, there are tons of leopard sharks, and they hang out where the water's like three to four feet deep. So after you catch a wave, if there's good visibility, you almost. Like every other wave I'm seeing a leopard shark. And usually I just kind of just jump back on my board and paddle out because they're like. I don't know, they're like three or four feet. They're not. They're not massive or anything. But since you've challenged me to catch a fish, maybe the next time I.

Jump down and shark is technically a fish.

Yeah.

Yeah. That would count.

Yeah, they are. Yeah, they're. Yeah. So I should just dive down and catch it.

Your bare hands?

With my bare hands.

I like this.

Maybe we could. Maybe we could.

If that doesn't work, I'd recommend trying to shoot fish in a barrel. I've heard that that's pretty easy. We'll get you a barrel. Barrel. We'll get you a barrel, put some fish in it, and you and you can. And you can.

Oh, I did.

You can pull it AR15 and just start shooting the fish in the barrel. You know, shooting a fish in a barrel, it must be. It's actually pretty hard to do, I imagine. Depends on the barrel. Because if you use a big gun, you're gonna break the barrel and then water's gonna go everywhere.

My beautiful puffer fish.

You caught that.

My pride and joy.

That doesn't really count. I want to see you counting. Catching an Atlantic bluefin tuna. They can exceed 1500 pounds with some estimates reaching up to 2000 pounds. That's what we need to do. Anyway, thank you so much for listening to the show. For watching the Show Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter@TPPN.com to be honest.

Kind of want to keep going.

You want to go to the fifth hour?

I kind of want to break the. I kind of want to break the fifth hour.

We have guests here.

We do have guests here.

We have to hang out. Out with our guests. Thank you so much for watching. We will see you.

I can't wait to be back tomorrow. John's cut me off. John's cutting me off.

We did get into a good riff right at the end. It was fantastic. Amid guests today.

New question tomorrow. We'll ask every guest. We'll ask. Dave from Roblox will be joining tomorrow. We got Vlad from Robinhood.

What's the biggest fish?

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

This is important. We're doing a super cut. How big is the fish you've ever caught? The biggest fish. And then maybe we'll create a boom in fishing. Maybe people would go fishing.

That's right.

Fishing is underrated. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.

Goodbye. Goodbye.