Netflix's Size is Not Size, Ads in Google Gemini, Prediction Markets on a Tear | Rich Greenfield, Delian Asparouhov, Sarah Harrelson, Morgan Housel, Andrew Pignanelli, Brian Mehler, Will Wilson

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And so we wanted to show it up. Even Tyler's in it. Tyler's in it as well.

So some big news this morning.

Yes.

I wanted to start this off with a post from Pika Capital. They were highlighting. So Paramount is launching a hostile bid worth $108 billion to acquire WB. Pika says this is crazy. HBO should make a show about billionaire media tycoons trying to buy other media conglomerate and highlight all the behind the scenes drama. So without further ado, let's bring in our first guest of the show, Rich Greenfield and we can ask him a bunch of questions. He's a true expert.

In the space.

Yes, yes. Let's bring him in from the Restream waiting room. Thank you so much for taking the time to jump on the show at last minute. We're also celebrating Christmas theme today.

I want some of your merch. Some of that merch I'll wear.

We'll overnight some to you. Thank you for joining last minute. So I know in what is it, 12 minutes you have got to jump to another call. So let's, let's get right into it. Why don't you give kind of a quick intro on yourself and then we can talk about all the news.

So I follow media stocks firm is lightshed. We founded it a little over six years ago. We talk all things tech, media, telecom. And we have been obviously following closely what happens with Warner Brothers. And we've had a three way bidding war coming. Comcast dropped out, so now we have a two way bidding war. The board obviously chose Netflix. Paramount is unhappy and is trying to go over the top and go directly to shareholders to get their offer accepted.

How do you think the antitrust stuff plays into this? Is that something that we're going to see a year from now once this like the current back and forth is resolved, or does it have an effect right now?

I mean the irony is like, think about what we're doing right now. Yeah, like you guys actually what you guys are doing and your success to date actually is what makes this antitrust wise so difficult. Because just imagine how do you look at this and say, oh, you can't look at YouTube. You can't compare YouTube. Right. Like you can't compare Twitter and live video. Like, what is the market for?

Infinite. There's infinite competition.

Well, I mean, so that's the thing, like, you know, Netflix started talking about YouTube as their competition for time, you know, over a decade ago.

Yeah.

You know, if you're looking at only streaming, are we only going to look at professional streaming? So we're only going to look at Netflix, hbo, Max, Disney plus and Hulu. If that was the constructs, let's just say we'll take the narrowest, you know, sort of silo to look at this. Netflix is 24% of time spent in streaming, premium streaming today. So that's no YouTube, no linear TV. If you add on HBO Max, you get to 28%. Still, it doesn't seem to violate any antitrust problem. It's certainly a lot, but it's certainly no 40, 50% market share. But you know, when you watch the NFL on Netflix, you also watch the NFL on ABC and you watch the NFL on cbs. So how is that not part of the competitive landscape? And heck, you know, you too. I don't know if each of you have YouTube TV or have Sunday Ticket, but Sunday Ticket is on YouTube. Right. Like, so to sort of narrowly define the market as only being premium subscription streaming seems a little crazy. And even when you think about movie theaters, like some movies come out in movie theaters, some movies come out on streaming, are we only going to look at this as sort of like, what's the impact on movie theaters? Or are we going to think about, hey, you know, if Netflix actually owns the movie studio, they'll still do some movies in theaters, but they're going to make a lot more movies in total. And so the antitrust side of this is so complicated. And look, I can certainly make the argument why this is illegal, but the question is, would that actually hold up in court? A court actually has to come out and say that this is illegal. That's where it gets much more difficult. Cuz if you remember back not that long ago, guys, you know, the government sued ATT Time Warner under the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, and they lost in court and the deal closed.

Yeah. And it was kind of. It kind of wound up being a bad deal.

Right.

Or it was like, maybe they should have stayed separate. Is that the way we remember that or. No?

I mean, the way I certainly remember it is, is when they told them they had to sell something, they should have sold something. They would have done a lot better off listening to the government. But they fought so they didn't have to sell anything. The rest is history. But my point is, we're still a nation of laws. Like, you actually have to have a legal basis for blocking the transaction. You have to bring a lawsuit and win in court.

Yeah, yeah. I was laughing to myself because I was looking for, like, the perfect tweet to sum up the fervor around, oh, this is gonna create a monopoly. This is. Netflix is gonna face antitrust for this. And I found a bunch of tweets. There were people basically saying, like, I miss when Netflix was a monopoly and they had everything, and now I have to go all over to all these six different bundles. And I'm like, that's anecdotal, but it's still a funny, funny sentiment out there.

I mean, the reality is, like, honestly, how often do you turn on hbo, Max? Like, honestly, like, how often are you actually watching that? I mean, the viewership is actually pretty small. Like, I love Last of Us. I like White Lotus, but I'm not just turning it on. I mean. Yeah, the biggest problem HBO has is it's not a daily use.

Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah, no, it's like a Sunday night once a week when there's a show that's so big in the Zeitgeist, if I'm not watching it, people will actively call me out and be like, you're not watching White Lotus, you're not watching Success, you're not watching Game of Thrones. And I feel like I'm crazy. And so I call it like FOMO tv, which is really good. It's like, if I'm not tapped into Game of Thrones, I feel like I'm missing out. Netflix hasn't been able to cover that as much. I feel like they haven't created as much of that. What do you think this says about Netflix? Is it, is it an admission that they have yet to create that much IP that will be around in 50 years? Batman, I think is gonna be around in 50 years. Squid game, I don't know if we're gonna be able to see Squid Game, Halloween costumes in 50 years. What do you think this deal says about Netflix's position?

Look, I think what it says more than anything is that Netflix has certainly had a bit more trouble growing engagement over the course of the last year. It's picking up, it's doing better. I mean, they've definitely had a very good slate in the last six months, but engagement isn't growing as much as I think investors would like it to be. Especially, you know, again, who's growing engagement the fastest in all of television? It's YouTube. YouTube, which is, you know, probably obvious to a lot of people who are not senior media executives. Right. But like, if you look at, like consumers, they certainly know I have three kids. I certainly see the growth of YouTube. There's no doubt that that is, that is the fastest growing place. And I think AI is only going to accelerate that as it gets easier and easier to create higher quality content across the YouTube user generated ecosystem. So I think part of this is Netflix is looking at this going, we need even more IP to play with. If we had all of this ip, we could make even more content. We could move faster. We could mean, think about it, you were watching things like Ballers.

Yeah.

Not on Six Feet under, not on hbo. People are watching it on Netflix because they license it to Netflix. Netflix has this incredible algorithm that helps content get discovered.

Yeah.

And I think that's a huge power to this transaction is elevating stuff that is in this Warner Brothers catalog that people just haven't been watching. And so I think that's what Netflix is looking at here, is how can we take one plus one and make it equal more than two by making more content.

Do you believe that in the K Pop Demon Hunters example, that if K Pop Demon Hunters had not been on Netflix and instead been Warner Brothers small theatrical release, you know, and then put out somewhere, that it wouldn't have been this phenomenon? And the fact that Stuff can kind of go viral in the Netflix algorithm. Do you, do you like that thesis?

I mean, stuff does go viral. I mean Netflix impacts culture, right? I mean whether it was Squid Game. Look at this show, you know, this, this series in the UK adolescent that premiered on Netflix and blew up all around the world and started having, you know, parents were having some very tough conversations with kids after that because of sort of how impactful it was and how moving. Like content really does go viral on Netflix. And it's part of, it's the algorithm, part of it's the interface, part of it's the global infrastructure. And you know, again, you need a service that is used a lot. You know, think about TikTok, think about Reels. Why are those algorithms so good at finding stuff that the two of you want to watch every day? It's because they have so many inputs. It's learning, it's seeing your behaviors. The more you engage, the better the algorithm is the problem with so many of these services. You just mentioned it with hbo, but it would be the same thing with Hulu or Disney plus or any of these other services. You don't use them that much. And so there isn't that much data to train the algorithm. That is what Netflix is really good at. And I think that's the opportunity of putting these two companies together. It's certainly what Paramount is hoping to get by trying to buy this. Paramount needs a bigger streaming service that is used more often because Paramount plus like HBO Max are both lightly used services.

Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

Okay, let's talk about the $108 billion. That feels like a crazy number. Why do you like the original Netflix bid? Felt rich. And this feels like on another level also the company. How do you tripled in value over.

The last like six months?

Look, I think you have to step back. Remember on the.

On the Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers is splitting into two companies. Paramount is trying to buy the whole thing. So you know, some of this is a little bit confusing. Yeah, this right. Paramount is buying everything, meaning the cable network. So they're buying cnn, they're buying the Discovery Channel, Food Network. Netflix is not. Netflix is just buying the Warner Brothers studio, which includes the gaming studio, the film and the TV studio and as well as hbo. Whereas Paramount is buying everything. And so these are a little bit apples and oranges. That's why 2775 is actually greater than 30 at least in the. If you're the Warner Brothers board, they said that 2775 plus the spun out company is a bigger number than 30. Yeah, we can debate that, but they believe that they are getting $31 or $32 in value because of the spun off company. You know, that's the reality here. I don't think this tender offer, on the face of it, is going to move the board. I think the real question for all of your viewers out there is is this going to cause Paramount to raise their bid further? Cause I don't think. I doubt Warner Brothers comes back and says, you know, we like this better. My guess is they're gonna say this is still an inferior offer versus Netflix. Sorry. And then it'll be up to Paramount to say do they want to go to 32 or 34 or 36? Like where do they want to go next? Do they have more money?

Yeah.

And just to be clear, I believe that the Netflix deal leaves behind the cable assets, which are about $5 a share. Warner Brothers is currently at $27 a share. So it implies like a $12 billion value on those assets. So you should add that to Netflix offer if you want to get like the fair market of the full value.

No, because you have, you have debt attached to it. You've got it. So you've got debt that's being left on. You're somewhere between, let's just say in round numbers, you're probably two to three dollars. Could you be at, you know, Paramount says it's only a dollar. Other people say it's at four. Let's just say it's somewhere in the middle. It's two to three dollars a share is probably a reasonable starting point for what this asset is worth. I mean, look, it's hard to know. It doesn't trade yet. So we're talking about the value of a theoretical public company. That is a dangerous thing to opine on, especially when you're a levered company because very small differences in valuation have a pretty meaningful impact. And so look, I think the reality is, the question is now, the Warner board already made their decision. The only way I think this, you know, I'd be surprised if the Warner board did anything different. Unless there was a notably superior offer from Paramount. Yeah, which we'll see in time. You know, this like you're already levering up a lot. I mean, you know, I think one of the things that was really misunderstood, there was this story going around for weeks that, you know, Larry Ellison was writing a check himself. Like he was buying this with his, you know, he'd be selling his Oracle stock and he was basically buying this the reality is, is Ellison is putting up a portion of the dollars, but a lot of the dollars are actually coming from capital they've raised from the Middle East. You know, you've got 24/billion dollars is.

Coming from three double their, double their double the Ellison's investment. Right.

Yeah, correct. And so the question is, is, is there more capital? Like is Ellison not willing to spend more money? You know, he's backstopping the whole thing. But how much money does he actually want to put in? How much leverage will banks put on this? That is a big question. You know, you're probably. And when you close this deal, you're probably around six times, maybe even a little bit more times levered. That's a pretty high leverage. They'll work it down quickly. But it is a pretty high leverage on media assets. In 2020. I probably close in 2020, late 26, 27. That's a lot of leverage.

Yeah, well, and, and you gotta look at Oracle itself is, is, is pretty levered. So they're the father son are going all in.

Yeah, look, I don't know. I mean, look, there are certainly regulatory issues. I mean, it's funny how Hollywood was, was coming out and Hollywood was like, oh, we don't like this Netflix transaction. But you know, combining two studios. I mean, Disney and Fox merged and Fox is, you know, Fox has basically, you know, been reduced to almost nothing. I mean, they don't make a lot of movies anymore, you know. And so, you know, putting two studios together, they can say they're going to make 30 movies. It would be hard to imagine in three or four years anybody making 30 movies. I mean, I don't know about, you know, you guys, but like attendance to movie theaters.

Yeah.

Like just actual butts in seats.

Yeah.

Is almost 50% lower in 25 than it was in 2019. So pre and post pandemic, huge change. 50% reduction.

Yeah.

In, in seats, you know, you know, butts in seats. Like, that's a huge change. And so the movie business, I mean, the funny thing is everyone is talking about like, oh my God, the movie business can't change or you know, don't hurt the movie business or don't change the theatrical experience. Consumers are voting with their feet. Consumers have pulled back dramatically on going to movie theaters. I think the movie theater business needs to change and needs to adapt to the realities of like unlimited content. I mean, look at what we're doing right now. I mean, you're directly competing with a service like cnbc. Like there is competition, keeps Growing from this thing called the Internet. And it's not stopping anytime soon.

What. What should viewers be looking out for this week as the story evolves?

I guess it is very little. This. I mean, look, who knows? I mean, Netflix is going to speak in a few minutes, which is why I've got to hop. But, you know, I think investors are probably going to be trying to figure out two things. One, you know, is Paramount really willing or able to go higher than $30 a share in cash, number one? And two, what is. You know, if they do, what is Netflix's willingness to go above their current bid? I mean, it clearly seems like Netflix raised their offer a couple of times, and so will Netflix, ultimately, in order to seal this. Not seal this, but to ensure that it doesn't become unsealed, will Netflix have to raise their bid? I think those are the two things. And as both of you said, the price for this is already pretty astronomical. I mean, this was an asset trading at 6 or $7 a share not that long ago. Now we're talking about, effectively, we have.

A friend that I'm sure, I'm sure you're friends with, too, who is like, there are no other bidders here. And he's like, could not be more connected. This was like, six weeks ago. He was just fully convinced when there.

Were those rumors of a bidding war emerging and people were debating.

People didn't think there would be one.

Paramount just running away with it. Yep. But, yeah, here we are.

And, oh, and I think this is Netflix looking opportunistically and going, hey, you know, can we really. We see what's. How the industry is changing? Can we opportunistically acquire this content and, you know, basically light a fire under it, meaning, like, really, really accelerate the visibility and growth and of all of this content? Because there's just. There is so much content inside of Warner Brothers that has been lying fallow that, like, you know, think about when Disney bought Marvel and you got things like Black Panther. Right. And, you know, Guardians of the Galaxy, things that you didn't know were really sitting in that library. My guess is there is so much content to play with. That's what's really going on here. And I think that's why Netflix. I mean, again, I would agree. Six weeks ago, we wrote a piece. There was no way in my mind that Netflix was buying this. I was totally and utterly wrong.

Yeah, makes.

Makes a lot of sense. Last, last, last, last question. Who do you like for just film and television enthusiasts? Who do you think is. Who do you think they're better off with owning, owning Warner Brothers?

I think the reality is both of these companies are going to inject. I mean, they both want this asset because they want to build with it. So I think ultimately putting either the, you know, putting Netflix and their global platform behind this, putting the Ellisons with their, you know, second wealthiest family in the world behind it. Either way, I think if you're, you know, if you love content, you're going to get a lot more content out of this combined company than you are today. I mean, HBO again doesn't make many shows in a given year. You're going to get a lot more content.

Fantastic. Thank you for any picks for movie of the year. Personally, would you like to see? Did you see anything or are you also just scrolling short form? Actually, I haven't seen a movie. I, I mostly stick to analyzing the stocks.

I mean, look, I mean, Avatar is coming out in a couple of weeks. It's always hard to bet against. Yeah, it's always hard to bet against Jim Cameron. I mean, my guess is it probably won't all be in this calendar year, but it probably will be the biggest single dollar, you know, from a box office standpoint. Probably the biggest. Even, even if it doesn't live up to the last couple of avatars in box office, it probably still is the biggest box office film of the year.

That's a great reminder. We got to figure out how to get everyone to see that in the biggest IMAX in Los Angeles in the theater because that's going to be a wild experience. Well, thank you so much for taking.

The time for joining us. Text me if you learn anything.

We will see you at it.

I'll fill people in.

Have a great rest of your day.

And get me some merch.

We will.

We're on it, guys.

Text me your address.

See ya.

Cheers.

Turbo Puffer. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Our buddy Riley Walls was posting on the timeline, how do you search vector embeddings? Did you see this? And Jeff Dean replied, who's like the most legendary computer scientist, founder of Google brain, still a DeepMind legend and breaks down how to do it sort of like locally. And then everyone else in the comments was just like, Turbo Puffer. Turbo Puffer. Turbo Puffer. Turbo Puffer. It was awesome. It was a really funny, funny exchange. Anyway, I mean, that was very informative. My take today was basically like pretty soft take. Just saying, like people who are saying that Netflix plus Warner Brothers is the worst possible outcome. I was talking to you about this on Friday. I think they're sort of overplaying that narrative because I could imagine Warner Brothers and Disney being more monopolistic or Warner Brothers going to Google and YouTube and being free on YouTube being way more anti competitive. And so the Netflix, Warner Brothers, at the very least, it's like the third worst case scenario if you're gonna play that game. And as we talked, there just really is so much competition in media because media is.

Anybody can be a media company.

Exactly. And there's so many free options and then there's also video games and. Yeah.

And I think you can argue with how good some video models are getting and you know, audio and voice models. Like it's going to be even like you're going to be able to make a cartoon as a single individual and make like many, many, you know, many, many episodes, Seasons. Right. There's going to be more competition than ever at the actual, like in the content layer. Even if some of the platforms consolidate.

I mean, yeah, just a lot of people are putting on a. They are straight up putting on a two hour podcast instead of a movie regularly. Except when you're on the plane flying back from New York. Then you got to watch the Fugitive with Harrison Ford. I made Jordi watch it. Give me your review.

Fantastic film. We don't know. We don't know how to make movies like that anymore. I would watch movies if all the movies were like that.

It's amazing.

I think you just need to give me. You need a. You need a. You should put together movie list. Yeah, your movie list. I have one like this in the next week or so so people can watch them while we're, you know, between like, you know, Christmas and New Year's when we're off the air. But absolutely fantastic movie. Fast pace. I felt like they were hitting me with like, you know, Mr. Beast, like brain editing is good people.

A lot of times you go back to like the 70s or the 80s and some of the films are really slow. Like they have these big long openings where they show you every person. Like the opening credits were a thing that's all gone now. But the Fugitive with Harrison Ford just really fast paced the whole time. It jumps straight into the action. You're straight into the problem. It's very clear what's going on. I won't give any spoilers, but there's a lot of fun in this movie. So highly recommend it. If you haven't seen it, it's Fantastic. Have you seen it, Tyler?

I have not.

Oh, wow.

Okay, well, treat yourself to the fugitive this holiday season. Also treat yourself to linear, the system for modern software development. LINEAR streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release.

What else do we need?

Should we read.

An unhappy take on this take from Chris Murphy?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Murphy, U.S. senator from Connecticut.

I thought that was crypto Twitter. Chris Murphy, Crypto Twitter.

This is like, I don't think so. Chris says the Netflix purchase of Warner Bros. Would be a disaster. It's illegal, but there are some quietly rooting for it because a Paramount takeover that includes CNN would be worse. A short thread on why that's the dangerously wrong way to look at this. This deal is a classic antitrust violation. It will drive up prices. HBO Max is one of the few things that keeps pricing pressure on Netflix. Hundreds of movie theaters will go under. Writer, writers and production workers in the content business will have terms and wages dictated to them. But some will say, well, if the Paramount and Ellison Trump cabal gets control of Warner Brothers and the deal includes cnn, then Trump would effectively control the bulk of the mainstream media from C way to cnn. That's worse than Netflix owning Warner Bros. Yes, it is. But A, a Paramount Warner Brothers deal would be illegal too. Trump shouldn't force us to be for illegal but less corrupt things. B, why do we think Netflix won't agree to the strings Trump puts on this deal? This is about making money, not protecting free speech. Five tyrants want us to accept blurry moral lines. They want us to accept one level of corruption or illegality just because there is an alternative level that's much, much worse. But that's how democracy disappears. By rules, dis and constant relativity creeping in.

So I have two points. One, public.com, investing, for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing. They're trusted by millions. And two, the Netflix deal doesn't. So there was David Ellison was on CNBC this morning and he was talking and they were asking him about CNN. It's like you own CBS, 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning. And clearly a lot of people are like, are you gonna put your thumb on the scale politically? Is there like a political angle to the way you will steward these media assets? And I don't think people are that worried about the political bias injected into Foghorn Leghorn or Wile E. Coyote or whatever, or even like the Seinfeld catalog. It's not like they're gonna like reboot it and it'll be like a Right wing Seinfeld. Like, I don't. I just don't think that's gonna happen. But people do worry about news coverage like cnn, cbs. But the weird thing is that in the Netflix scenario, CNN is left there. In the, in the, in the, in the. In the ghost ship. There's a. It's a ghost ship.

It's a ghost ship.

We know this very well from, from the way tech likes to acquire companies.

Yeah. And so there's a scenario where Paramount loses Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers still buys the cable business.

Yes, I think so. I think so. And they get Shark Week. And they get. They get a bunch of fun stuff. HGTV, 90 Day Fiance David Ellison.

With Shark Week, I mean, they would. I mean, putting the Allison family behind Shark Week.

People think the Allison.

That might be good for sharks.

Indeed.

Welfare. Yeah. So here's the thing. So we talked with Rich about how, like, more competition than ever at the content layer. It's very cheap to create and distribute content. It's relatively free.

Yeah.

That said, there feels like in some ways more of a monopoly than ever on truth, if that makes sense. Legacy media properties have a monopoly on truth.

Yes.

If we say something and we have the aesthetics of television, we say, this is true. It doesn't hold the same weight as CNBC or CNN or anything like that, because they have. They're actually running. Generally running.

It's just the brand.

Yeah, it's brand. It's brand. So when the New York Times says something and a substack disagrees with it and says, no, this is what actually happened, who are people gonna believe? They're gonna believe New York Times 10 times out of 10. And so, yeah, I think it is.

That part of it is. Ideally you would want a lot more kind of like distribution between the networks and these brands that have a monopoly on the truth.

Yeah. But at the same time, the fact that David Ellison is not cheering at the fact that he, like you see Warner Brothers. And if you're in the conspiratorial, the tinfoil hat, like David Ellison is trying to control the news narrative that is sort of bubbling up there. The flip side is he should be cheering because he's like, wow, they bought everything. I don't want. I didn't want Batman. But in fact, he does want Batman. He does. He wants Foghorn Leghorn.

He wants it all.

He needs Foghorn Leghorn.

He wants it all.

He needs Wile E. Coyote. He needs Porky Pig.

The list of asks. You don't know Porky Pig?

No.

How do you not know Porky Pig.

Is that a YC startup?

It should be. It should be.

Oh, Porky Pig.

Porky Pig.

Okay.

Looney Tunes. Yeah, Looney Tunes. The Looney Tunes character. The Looney Tunes cinematic universe is great.

There actually was a. I think there was a YC company in this batch called Piggy Robotics. Yeah, yeah, we saw. No, the YC companies needed.

New rule.

New rule. Every Piggy needs.

When you're booking. When you're booking YC startups. If it's swine themed, they're on the show. Okay. I don't want to miss a single swine themed company ever. Pig post. Hog. Piggy. We need all these companies. They're great.

Red alert. Pig has rebranded. No, the YC company called Pig.

Wow. Spitting in our face.

Called Butter.

Butter.

It's still like themed. It's like animal product. It's an animal product. What kind of butter?

Analyzing it based on its macros.

Is it goat butter?

Very heavy on cow butter fat, low protein.

Okay.

Low carb, low protein, high fat.

They rebranded to butter. They stayed on the farm theme. They were like, we have churned into.

We've churned.

All the customers churned. And churn was so bad. We churned into butter. Butter never.

We gotta get.

Always churn. I don't know.

We gotta get the update. I like the founder.

I did. I did like the founder. I also like falling generative media platform for developers. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.

We have some news from our flight back from New York. We flew JetBlue again.

We did.

If you're new here. A couple months ago, we flew JetBlue with the whole team and we got into a little bit of a situation with JetBlue.

They almost had to land the aircraft.

They almost had to land the aircraft because we were. Jordy and I were sitting in business class. We were served stakes. We tried to pass those stakes back to our friends and colleagues who were sitting in economy. And they told us not. They said, stop. You can't. I think someone put their hand on your chest. They didn't. Sit down, sir.

So it was even worse.

Sit down.

They didn't put their hand on me, the flight attendant, but they grabbed the dessert.

Oh, they grabbed the dessert.

You were trying to pass that to the team.

And I said, we like to believe.

I own this dessert.

We like property rights around here. We like the ability to move freely. And I think possession's 9/10 of the law. You give me the ice cream, you Give me the steak. I control it. I can do what I want. But on our latest flight, we figured out the ultimate hack for how to pass food back from business class to economy on a JetBlue flight.

And prove that this works twice.

And we're sharing it with you today. We're sharing this Alpha Deep Alpha. Deep Alpha. And so we'll hopefully pull up some of the photos. So in first class, they give you headphones with a case. And so what I was able to do is I was able to take the food.

So my food and put it. I bring it over to John case. So we all had dinner before the flight.

That's ice cream in the bone case.

We had dinner before in the headphone case. So I show up and I'm not hungry, but Ben's a growing boy. And I'm like, we gotta get my dinner back to Ben. And so we put. We take the headphone case, we zip it up, I take it back, I pass it.

You insisted on the bread roll going in there.

I don't know. Of course I had to. I wasn't gonna have. He needed the bread.

Did you eat the bread? I ate all of it. Okay, wait, was the bread over buttered or did it have the appropriate amount of butter? It had a lot of butter. It had a lot of butter, right? Jordy insisted on giving you the full pad of butter and I thought maybe.

Half a pat of butter. I just wanted you to have optionality.

Okay, well, yeah, I guess you had optionality. You could have taken it out, but what would you have done with it?

I didn't have anybody sitting next to me.

Oh, you didn't? Okay.

There was a guy across the aisle from you. He was giving me the dirtiest.

No way.

I thought he was like headphones. I thought he was going to say, like, if you don't bring me back food too.

Oh, you wanted to tell tale. That is a risk.

No, but the real.

The real risk when you're running a strategy like this and you need to be highly coordinated, is that the flight attendant in the business class section says, where's your cutlery?

Yes, yes, yes.

Because it's.

Your knife and fork are going to be missing. So the real. Yeah, you can see Jordy going back to drop it off. I took that photo.

We were running plays and so.

No, no. So there's another tip here that you don't want to jump the gun. So the food service, the dinner service, it takes place over a couple minutes. All the plates get passed out and people eat pretty quickly. So typically the flight attendant, by the time they finish delivering the last plate, they will go and start picking up the plate from the beginning because it only takes a couple minutes to eat the food on the plane. But what you, you want to wait them out? You want to, you need a couple rounds of them coming by and you have the full meal there. And they're like, are you done with that? And you say, no, no, I'm still working, I'm still working. So you got to say, I'm still working a couple times. And then they will go back and sit down at the front of the plane. They'll kind of relax. The post meal break they might be gearing up for. Oh, maybe I'll get everyone a new glass of wine in 20 minutes. But I'm chilling. That's your opportunity because that's when they're at their weakest. That's when they're not gonna be paying attention.

You almost got caught at one point.

I got caught.

The flight is a lovely, lovely woman. She came over and said, she came up and said, do you want any tea?

Yeah. And you had.

Missing cover.

There was food in the headset case.

I had to close the headset case because you don't want to get caught with. With the crew. Yes, yes, yes. We do need the whole crew on business and we will be doing that.

We're working on it. We're working on it.

Yeah. We got a ton of machinations, but in the meantime, we're having fun. We're also on profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT meets millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. And.

People were having fun with the.

I don't know if this is real. I saw this posted.

This is a joke.

This account just post Nle Choppa submitted a last minute bid to buy Warner Brothers for 45,000.

45K in cash. In cash. It actually is relevant because the other offers are heavily debt laden. And so if you care about that, if you want an all cash offer, this might be your best guess.

It's a pretty good offer.

This is the best option if you only want a cash.

Andy, who's been on an absolute roll lately, says you're laughing at him, but how much did you put up to buy Warner Brothers exactly? Can we pull up Andy? Andy launched, had a launch video like yesterday.

Oh, yeah. Andy, of course, is the founder of two Cents Money. He's been on the show.

He has a.

Social, an anonymous social network that links with your bank account and so you just. Your username is just your financial net worth.

The video is at the bottom of the stack, guys, if you can pull it up.

He's big on financializing everything. He's a financial.

He was kind of early. Early to the trend.

Early to the trend. But he's always done it in sort of a fun way. What are we doing here? I can't read that. So I don't know. We need to go full screen on this. Okay. While they're pulling that up, let me tell you about FIN AI. The number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel with FIN AI.

Are we able to play this? It is two minutes and we only have so many minutes. Yeah, let's play it. Hi, this is Osmo. We make films. 2 cents. Founder Andy Duro raised 3 million for his startup and paid us 2.5 million. This was the only direction he gave us. We need this to look like the most expensive launch video ever made.

It has to look like.

Why is he in Albania? Albania. The day before our shoot, Andy was still on his investor's boat chasing a Series A.

Is this rage bait? I feel like this is giving me like I'm going to be enraged. We were under contract to spend the entire production. Here's. I want a Scarface montage in a mansion.

There we go. Show off our in house coding models.

Coding models.

And they should be coding in rust. Not just tiny apps, but full scale system architecture.

The cinematography here is wild. Like this one, it's. I want the bathtub scene from the Big Short, but add more models and like have one of them explaining the value prop of $0.02. So basically, you know how everyone on.

Social media pretends to be rich.

The problem is it's all fake.

Then we should have the models reenact that scene from the Wolf of Wall Street. You know, the one where Leo's boat gets seized by the FBI.

Y' all want some lobster for the ride home, you fucking miserable pricks?

I know you can't afford them.

What was the bid? He said he spent two and a half million on this. Is that. Is that what you're saying?

All right, this is not PG enough. But it's funny. It's funny to basically run through every single launch video bit that there is.

Okay. Yes.

And just be narrating. Yeah, just do that one.

Just do that and then do that one and then that one.

Yeah, okay.

Ridiculous. Well, Buko is saying the more he reads about the Netflix deal, the more it seems like 1. This is bad. For everyone that isn't Netflix. 2, this would be very good for Netflix and 3, it should be blocked if our system still works. So he is a block the deal guy. Ernest says it's extremely pro consumer. New price is going to be lower than the current standalone Netflix plus max price with superior UX for subscribers. And Buco says, I don't think you can say it's extremely pro consumer with any sort of confidence. Yeah, this is when give them tremendous pricing power.

A few people have said, oh yeah, like it's gonna be cheaper. And it's like, okay, is it gonna be cheap? It's gonna be cheaper like right away. Is it gonna be cheaper in 10 years? No way.

Yeah, yeah. I mean there's nothing more long term pilled than a public company like they love thinking in decades and like no, I mean they're like, like a company like Netflix truly can be like, yes.

Like the price is going to be like $99 a month by 2035.

It might be a steal. It might be a steal at 99 if you're getting Seinfeld and Foghorn Leghorn and Porky Pig.

This is a good walk through history. John Ehrlichman says. December 2010 Time Warner views. This is a New York Times article. Time Warner views Netflix as a fading star. For the past year, executives at big media companies have watched Netflix with growing resentment for its success and delivering movies and television shows via the Internet. For its stock price nearly quadrupling. For its chief executive being named Business Person of the Year by Fortune magazine. I imagine at that time they were thinking, well, it's cool that they can deliver movies, but they'll never be able to make, they'll never be able to make content. And of course now recently Netflix to buy Warner Bros.

It is such a big deal. 83 billion. It almost feels small compared to all the AI valuations and stuff and the hyperscaler valuations. But Netflix is only a $400 billion business by comparison. So this is 20% of their market cap. Essentially. It's a serious merger and would be huge, huge integration.

I do wonder about that question of how many movies they would be making per year. Would they try and still make 30 big movies or something like that? I feel like you, if you don't make those big movies, you don't get the, you don't, you don't develop the new ip. Like if you look at what Avatar is, Avatar has been, you know, this like incredible undertaking from a, like just so much money poured into the production there. But it's probably the best chance of getting something that's actually like an enduring legacy, where it's like, yeah, people are still talking about the, the Avata multiverse or cinematic universe in five decades, 10 decades, you know, in a long, long time. It's very, very hard to be sticky if you're not taking big swings and doing things that are like, actually really, really bold. Anyway, while we move on, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level VOD coding and deep multimodal understanding.

Oh, there was this hilarious clip where apparently in 2013. This is from Matthew Ball. Everyone's forgetting Netflix Q4 2013 earnings call.

You know Ball?

When?

Yes.

Which Ball all do you know? Do you know All Ball? Do you actually know Matthew Ball? Oh, here we go. He doesn't know Ball.

Whoa.

You got to know every analyst with the last name Ball. I wonder if they're related. Anyway, Reed Hastings is asked about the HBO CEO's thoughts on password sharing, and he replies, I guess he doesn't mind me then sharing his account info. It's pepplerbo.com and his password is Netflix. B, I T, C, H. What a weird thing to do. Was that actually his password? It's such a weird meme here. Let's play the actual video. Is that the clip? I know Trung fan clipped the actual.

I guess Plepler's the CEO of hbo.

Doesn'T mind me then sharing his account information.

So it's pleplerbo.com and his password is Netflix.

Bitch. This is like an insane. He must be joking. But it's like such a weird sense of humor. Maybe it's just out of context. Maybe if you watch the full thing or you understand the conversation that was happening in 2013 around the two companies. But like, even if that's. Even if that's not his password, it's like it's annoying to share someone's email publicly, right? Because they just get a bunch of spam, I think. But maybe this earnings call was like, so narrowly watched that no one really, you know, would spam him. But I don't know. I would imagine it'd be really annoying to have your email leak on an earnings call. Anyway.

People really want Lina Khan back in the driver's seat. Sammy Gold says, Lina Khan, you can have this one. This one time.

I don't really understand why people are so against this. It doesn't.

The idea of Netflix owning succession, the Soprano and the Wire.

Well, the TV stuff Doesn't seem that bad because that was never in theaters. I guess I do understand people who are saying, like, they're gonna own Lord of the Rings. Seeing Lord of the Rings in theaters was a special thing. And that special thing might not happen anymore because it's incompatible with the modern business model. And so if you're. If you're a Lord of the Rings fan and you really like movies and you did not like the show, well, then it's like, get ready for more shows and less movies. Probably, yeah.

I think anybody who's upset because of the impact on traditional cinema and movie theaters, I want to see every single. I want to see proof of how many movies they've gone to in the last.

The reveal preference is crazy. No one cares.

But they're like, oh, I've seen one movie and it's like, okay, I don't know.

Well, we should move on. Let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com. nice shot of Tyler before that ad comes in. Apple is changing of the guard. It feels like a ton of executives are leaving, ton of executives are turning over. And everyone's kind of speculating that potentially this is the beginning of the next major, major, you know, executive leadership team coming in, that there'll be some sort of, you know, before and after. Maybe we're exiting the Tim Cook era. I don't think so. I think. I think you just got a double, triple, maybe 10x Tim Cook's pay and you're good. But if they wind up turning the entire team over, maybe that's what happens too. So John G. Andreas, super out of.

Pocket to include Steve Jobs on this.

Yeah, that's very odd.

But the interesting thing is John Ternus, he is of course leading. There's been a bunch of leaks about John Ternus, the head of hardware, potentially stepping up to the CEO role. That would be very exciting. And there's been rumors swirling. Unclear if it's like one of those things where he's leaking or someone else is leaking things.

You never really know until the actual news drops. But.

I remain positive on Tim Cook's leadership. I think he got the big things right and I think he missed the hot things. But missing the hot trend, that's actually not that existential to the business that.

You could argue they haven't missed yet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could argue they haven't missed it and you could argue that AI was not existential to them, at least in the short Term, but we'll see. But this Justin Bieber post is insane because you read me this and I didn't hear you say this is from Justin Bieber's account. And I was like, oh, that's funny. There's someone who's mad at Apple. But it's way funnier coming from Justin Bieber.

Put Justin Bieber as a product manager at Apple and I genuinely believe the products across the board would improve.

Get him in figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

So without further ado, Justin says if I hit this dictation button after sending a text and it beeps and stops my music one more time, I'm gonna find everyone at Apple and put them in a rear naked chokehold. Even if I turn off dictation, I somehow hit the voice note thing. The send button should not have multiple functions in the same spot. I couldn't agree more. This is so, I mean it's just absolutely insane. Cause the issue is, yeah, one, this happens a lot. This happens to me. And then it's always nerve wracking because if you have somebody pulled up on text and you happen, let's say I'm like, hey, this, hey, this person is wanting to change the time of this meeting to this other point. And I'm actually, I'm like, what do you think? What should we do? And then it just like happens to be like recording and then you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't want to. Sure, sure. So yeah, I'm not a dictation maxi. I find it, I think it's very offensive to send people voice notes of any sort of. And so I don't do it. I don't appreciate when people.

Apparently we have to issue a correction. Taylor's over there putting us in the truth zone. Apple doesn't have product managers.

That makes sense. There's so many. There's this new software every. Every time I open an app made by Apple, there's a new, there's a new bug. It is. The software is a lot of it. I mean, yeah, I'm now living with the new iOS. IOS 1700 for.

A month or so.

Now it's 26. They're on the car release schedule now. Right.

Living with it for a while. I feel like they made every app worse with the new update.

You're still upset about it?

Yeah, I'm fine. It's not the end of the world. Every app.

Is worse. I expected to just. I expected to like get used to some of the new stuff and I'm still like, oh, the photo app skill issue.

Just get used to it. I'm getting used to it. I feel like a lot of these apps. Truth Zone to the Truth Zone says.

In the X chat. Truth Zone to the Truth Zone. They historically have not had PMs, but that recently. Whoa.

Okay.

Yeah.

OTP agrees. Wow.

Apple does have.

FPMs. Taylor, bro, I'm incorrect. Well, I'm glad we have a debate in the chat going well. I know for a fact that Apple does have data analysts. I don't know if they use Julius AI, but they should because Julius is the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get answers in seconds.

Mark Gurman says the Germinator. The Germinator. Mark Gurminator himself says Apple executives have floated the idea of combining hardware engineering and hardware technologies divisions as one combined group under Shrogy in order to retain him. So this is of course Apple's chip chief, John Johnny Shrogy. Hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly, Chip chief. The chip chief informed CEO Tim Cook he is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains, at least for now, according to the Germinator. The Germinator says again, they're floating the idea of combining hardware engineering and hardware technologies as one combined group under Shrogy in order to retain him. But that couldn't happen until and if John Ternus becomes CEO. This would make Shrogy the clear number two.

In more important news, Mark Newsom, the designer of the Apple Watch, just released a new watch himself and it is mechanical and costs only 60,000.

That's a video, by the way. Play this. This is a crazy video. Look at this. The dial is spinning and yeah, wow, it really looks like UFO inspired. It's $60,000 jumping straight into the holy trinity tier, I suppose. What's your honest review on this?

I think it looks very cool. I've never thought I want a watch that looks like it's in the same universe as the Apple watch.

Sure.

But at the same time I can really respect.

I think this looks very cool and I think there's a consumer out there where they were like, finally somebody made a watch for me. I love this.

Yeah. Should it be sold by Apple? Apple? The Apple Store has a number of products that are not created by Apple. You can go and get. I mean, they had a partnership with Beats for a while. They wound up acquiring Beats they also will sell different, you know, stands and USB hubs and cases and all sorts of different, you know, accessories that sort of live in the Apple world but aren't directly Apple products or made by Apple. Should this be sold at the Apple store? What do you think? 60k feels like a different tier, but I feel like if I'm trying to sell something for 60k, I'd go to the Apple store and say, you know, a lot of people with 60k to spend on a watch. Walk into the Apple store and pick up a couple laptops.

Nick, new challenge. Get Mark Newsom on the show.

Okay.

And we will talk with him about it.

Also get on graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

Well, let's keep moving on in the timeline.

Theo agrees with Justin Bieber. He is entirely correct here. I agree with Theo.

Well, we gotta pull this video up of Bill Ackman in Japan.

This is an incredible aura farm. There's something so interesting about being caught on another country's television. It looks like.

I couldn't tell if this was actual TV or streamers.

Who knows? It just has an incredible vibe to it. So it's a Japanese show. Is that that man's face blurred out? Why is his face blurred out like that?

Maybe. I mean, that's a respectful thing to do if he didn't want to be.

Oh, yeah, I guess they didn't sign a release, so they can't have him quit.

Here, can you turn it up a little bit?

I like that. She's such a fan.

She's such a fan of Bill Ackman.

Can you start it over? You missed the beginning.

And these graphics.

Yes.

Is that Bill Ackman?

Japanese tv? See tv?

The graphics package is electric. You saw that little. You saw the. You see the stars and the. And. Yeah, right there. And if you go back a little bit, there's like. It's like a puff of smoke that comes off of the text. We don't know how to make text like that. We don't know how to make chirons like that in America. Look at our chirons just getting mogged by the Japanese TV channel with somebody.

Says, did that woman just pull a Japanese may I meet you on him?

Yes, 100%. That's exactly what happened. Why did Andy post all quiet on the frontal lobe?

That's very funny. That just cracks me up. Privy. Privy. Makes it easy to build on crypto rails, spin up secure white label wallets, sign Transactions integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

Prediction markets are absolutely tearing up the timeline. They are the current thing. Every day the debate rages. This one's hilarious from Aaron Mars. He says prediction markets will replace buying stuff. I want someone to bring kiwis to my house. I make a prediction market about whether someone will deliver four kiwis to my doorstep and load $15 into no. A guy with an E bike sees it and picks up some kiwis before dropping them off on my doorstep. He bets yes, drops them off, the market resolves to yes, and he gets $15. Rest in peace, Amazon doordash, Uber eats, et cetera.

Salah comes in and says prediction markets will replace relationships. I have a crush on your girlfriend. I make a prediction market about whether she will leave you for me and load 15 to know. She sees this and drives over to my place before texting me. She's here. She bets yes. She comes inside. The market resolves to yes and she gets $15. Rest in peace. Tinder, bumble, hinge, dry at bars, restaurants, etc.

It's so insane.

Yeah.

The mood, the production markets are fighting an uphill battle right now. They're on life support prediction. It's such a good, such a good, such a good copy. Pasta. And I can only imagine the quote tweets on this post just being like an endless stream of iterations of this exact template, because it truly is so, so, so funny. The financialization of everything. Well, Robin Hanson, who's sort of known as the creator of the prediction market.

Do you know a little bit more about his background? He's an economist.

Yeah.

I mean, he was writing about prediction.

Markets or like decision markets since, like the 90s.

Yeah.

And he has this whole idea of.

Like, few Turkey, where you, like, run the government based off prediction markets.

Interesting.

Wow.

Brian Armstrong was like, suggesting that policymakers could one day just ask people, how should we grow the economy? And then let prediction markets decide.

Sorry.

Yeah. Anyway, I will read Robin Hansen's post while Jordi recovers. He might need a little bit of a break, a little bit of holiday spirit. Getting.

On this podcast in a can.

I've been asked, what do I think of Kalshi and Polymarket? These are still very early days. My vision, which I started to articulate in the 90s.

Is of a world very different from both the world then and the world of today. A world where markets are accepted as offering more accurate estimates on far more useful topics. So I'm mostly interested in the potential of stuff today to enable and cause that future vision. The politics, policy questions on polymarket and Kalshi trending now seem plausibly like topics where some people might find their estimates useful in making personal or collective choices. But I don't have great confidence in that or know who these people are. So I think that like we saw a glimmer of this in the sense that if you were running a business that stood to benefit from the Trump administration or hurt because of the Trump administration, maybe tariffs or something. Like if you were manufacturing T shirts in China and you were like, okay, if Trump wins, there'll probably be more tariffs, probably another trade war, what's the probability that Trump wins? What's the probability that I have to do a red, the fire drill, a code red to, to move my manufacturing to Singapore or something? You could make a business decision based on that. I agree with him. Like I don't really know how many people were doing that. Seriously. And also the prediction markets were like 55%. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't like 90%. It wasn't like that clear. Yeah. It wasn't like, oh, everyone just knows what's going to happen. It was like, oh yeah, like, you know, slight edge this way.

Yeah. I feel like people remember when they think of prediction markets on the election night, they remember like actually on election night when it did start to go totally like 90% and beyond.

But yeah, I mean, if you're trying to plan for like a forthcoming Trump administration, it's not like you could go to prediction markets four months earlier and get like a definitive correct answer like that's just not the way that, that's not just not the way it played out. But he continues, he says, but if these systems continue to grow in size and to attract users and competitors, they could lower many of the costs of creating and managing such markets, allowing a lot more experimentation with markets like those I find more promising. Re my long term vision. Of course, if these systems induce a backlash that gets them outlawed or drastically shrunk, that may possibly block or at least long delay my vision. I don't personally mind people having fun, knowingly betting on sports, on actions that celebrities can influence, or on topics where insiders have big info advantages like mention markets. But I see many people complaining about these things and I fear a new prudish temperance movement may shut them down and as a side effect shut down the more promising markets that I've envisioned. It's an interesting take. I think it's a really big question on the prediction markets. It's not like there's a positive and a normative side of these things. So in economics, there's positive questions. Normative. Normative is like what should happen, and positive is what will happen. And so there's a question. I think a lot of people on the timeline are debating, they're debating prediction markets on moral grounds on what should happen. They have a thesis on, I believe that this is great and this is good and it should proliferate, or I think it's bad and it should be shut down immediately. There aren't that many people that are actually thinking clearly right now about what will happen.

How big will these markets be? How prevalent will they be? Sports betting has gotten a lot easier, but it hasn't taken over everyone. I know a lot of people that don't sports bet. I don't personally sports bet. Even though it's now available probably on my phone, I'm sure I could figure out how to do it without needing to go to Las Vegas. It hasn't come for me. It hasn't just come and sucked me in. And so we have Sucker and Jetty coming on the show on Friday to debate some of this more in more detail. But I think that there's an interesting separation to just try and understand what will happen. So he's saying.

He fears a new prudish temperance movement, which is very clearly real. Lots of people dunking on this stuff may shut them down. I don't know. It's unclear. Will there actually be action related to the prudish temperance movement, or will the prudish temperance movement be confined to spicy quote tweets? Right.

Yeah. It's also possible to get to the future that he's envisioned since the 90s. You need to have sports markets. And that again, is not necessarily maybe how he would want things to evolve, but it might be a necessary step to bring enough users to some of these applications to have the durability and the attention necessarily to create some of these other markets. But I think so many people are just absolutely sick of the marketing.

And just the feuding between Kalshi and polymarket. That part of people's prediction.

Insiders are. Insiders are outsiders, don't know the difference for sure.

They're talking about on Access.

They just think like, oh, financialization of everything is bad.

X specifically.

Yeah.

Like if we were on X and like FanDuel and DraftKings were just constantly going at each other all day long, everyone would just be like, please leave.

Oh, no, no, no. I think they are like, I Think. I think we have the CEO of DraftKings coming on the show tomorrow. But I do think that.

The traditional sports betting world is also just very cutthroat.

Are they though? I mean, it's such a dude. Go back and.

Go back and read some of the.

No, no, I'm not. I'm not.

Go back and read about the development of Las Vegas. Like Caesar versus mgm. Like these were knockout drag out fights. These were not like, oh yeah, everyone was like positive sum building.

I'm just saying I would be surprised if you have like a marketing manager at DraftKings. Like, like saying like hateful things to a marketing manager at FanDuel in the year 2025 on the Internet.

We need to watch Casino because I believe in Casino. They did things much worse than that. Not that Casino's a documentary, but I.

Do think Dave in the chat says, I talked to the presidents of the National Hockey League and an MLB team about how mad the prediction marketing was. They agree. Pure slop.

Yeah, it's a crazy time. Time to study the greats. Time to study history. Time to study Adeo, the AI native CRM. Adeo builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And the next level of this show is Delian Asperuhov, partner at Founders Fund, co founder of Varda Space Industries. In the Restream waiting room now he's in the TVPN Ultradome. And if I'm not in the sun. Are you in Miami?

You know there's sunshine in California as well.

Okay, okay.

Sometimes it does feel like it.

I'm just wondering about your backdrop. Is this San Francisco? Where are we? Where are we? Take us. I mean, you're so used to seeing you in the Varda office.

It's true.

True.

Today you're catching me in the Presidio.

It's too bright.

Let me know.

But I need to turn down the blinds. But I like just getting blasted with sunshine whenever I can.

I think it's actually adjusting. So. You look great.

I feel great.

Fantastic.

Take us through the. It's been a while since we caught up. Thank you for hopping on the show after a hiatus and breaking your silence.

I want you know the quick update on Jarek Isaacman first. What's the status of things there? What are the implications? What's the mood in the space economy? What's the mood amongst your team? Are people excited? Are people thinking that that's going to move forward?

Yeah, look, I think. I can't imagine you're sort of a better leader for NASA. Than Jared. Right. Somebody that literally is willing to put their life on the line and actually do some of the. He did literally the first commercial spacewalk what's ever been done in, in history.

Right.

So he's like, you know, putting his neck on the line. But then also somebody that has obviously built a phenomenal business and understands, you know, how to think about roi, how to manage a workforce, you know, how to think about connection into capital markets. And so, yeah, generally, generally say like across the entire commercial space industry, like, you know, ecstatic mood. My, like, you know, various moles in the Senate, et cetera, make it seem that, you know, things are all, you know, sort of tracking on plane and you know, going, going well, there's. He's definitely got to pay the piper and shake hands and everything, but he's.

Done that. And in some ways it's like the likelihood that they pull it for a second time. It's like, man, you already shot the guy down to the ground once, can't do it again. So feel highly likely. I think there's a ton of implications for that. Probably the one that I get excited for the most, just as an American, is the likelihood that we make sure that we beat the Chinese back to the moon, I think just increased significantly through room. And there's already some rumors starting to come out of his interest in starting to get more and more options to the table in terms of how we get to the moon beyond what's been currently contracted. And so I like that, and I think we talked about this in some of our prior discussions, but I really like this program called Clips within the Lunar Program, where basically rather than trying to set a budget and say, here's how I want you to build XYZ thing. The way that they basically pay contractors is just a flat fee for each kilogram of down mass down to the lunar surface. Basically it's just like you get something onto the moon, we basically give you. I forget, I think it's like basically $100,000, basically a kilogram, but you get margin on that. You figure out how to do it cheaper. Great, that's on you. But that's like to me, where NASA should be. It's like for these things that aren't yet really commercial and don't make sense, be the first buyer, establish the market and then that's what kickstarts, basically the commercial sort of economy side of it. So that's obviously been like a ton of activity. Obviously there's a whole set of SpaceX things that have been happening over the past year, sort of month.

Yeah, let's pause on this on the SpaceX stuff. I want to stay on.

NASA. The way I was thinking about Jared Isaacman and just kind of framing the broader discussion of the lunar economy, the orbital economy was this idea of are you a Mars guy or a moon guy in the short term? And I don't know if this is like too simplistic, so maybe you can just bring a bunch of nuance. But it does feel like Elon has been beating the drum on like Mars, Mars, Mars and like maybe the moon is like, you know, a pit stop along the way. And then some other folks, some of the more legacy space flight providers are a little bit more focused on the tractable get to the Moon. But then you have different folks breaking different ways. Like Casey Hanmer's really obsessed with beating China to the Moon. Obviously Mike Solana at foundersplant has moved. Moon should be a state and there's a whole bunch of different things. But do you think that there's a real trade off between should we be prioritizing Moon or Mars in the short term? How do you think about that?

When I think about why Elon was so dead set on this five years ago, ten years ago, I think it had more to do with the fact that the moon can be seen as a distraction if our capabilities as a species are limited. Because the moon is not a place where you can send up a sort of permanent colony that is sustainable and independent of Earth. No atmosphere, terraforming is impossible in some ways because that likely to be highly, highly dependent on Earth. So it's not really a backup function relative to Mars. And so when I think about Elon of 10 years ago, it was basically like, look, we're so decrepit as a industry in the United States or across the globe that if we set a goal, we need to really keep the goal very, very focused. And so you have to go straight to mar. I think just like the world today is fundamentally very different where we're just like much more capable of an industry in terms of just like, you know, I don't know if you guys saw this, but I tweeted that, you know, in November was the first time in human history where there were more orbital rocket launches than there were days in the month.

That's right.

That's the first time that's ever happened in human history. And so that obviously points to like, we just like are much more capable as a species. And so in that world of more call like space abundance, I Don't worry as much. And I admit that I've always been more on the like, the moon is absolutely the right pit stop on the way to Mars and advocate for that for a long time. And I think in this world of abundance, it's a lot easier to see that. And now you even have Elon in some ways, his totally reverse course of like. Yeah, he talked about like making a mass driver on the moon. So you make like huge amounts of solar panels and data centers there and then are shipping them up, you know, basically, you know, to orbit.

Sorry, mass driver. Define that.

Yes. We just said shut the blinds real quick.

No worries. While he's shutting the blinds, let me do an ad read for Cognition. Cognition is the team behind the AI software engineer Devin. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. He's also an investor, so I don't feel bad. Doing an ad read for his own company.

I just kind of got paid for that a little bit too.

There you go.

Rob Ross got Woo, baby.

If it was a competitor to ff, I wouldn't do it. But I got to sneak these things in. Got to pay the bills over here anyway, so take us through what is a mass driver on the moon.

So on Earth, there's been a variety of ways that we've hypothesized basically sort of getting things up to orbit. Only one that has sort of really worked right, which is basically chemical combustion. Put liquid fuel and an oxidizer basically in a rocket and launch up to space. There's people that have tried to work on other alternatives. So if you guys remember SpinLaunch, the company that would basically spin things up really, really fast.

Yeet Aerospace. They would yeet it out into the aerospace.

So that's the spin version.

I love that.

You can also imagine the like rocket or like, you know, sled version. It's like an electromagnetic sled that is super, super long. So rather than like spinning fast, you basically like, you have like a maglev train effectively, but just like many, many miles long to get it up space and shoot it up. Now the reason that that's difficult on Earth is down here on the surface where the spin launches or the maglev sled thing would be, are still in the atmosphere. And so by the time you're getting to like, you know, if you got to orbital velocity, you're still like in this thick atmosphere. And so it's just like crazy heat, crazy drag, et cetera. It's a really difficult basically to do. So it's basically why we effectively use Rockets is like, they have a way of starting off slowly while they're in the atmosphere, getting out of it, and then going more quickly once you're out of the atmosphere. On the Moon, there is no atmosphere. And so the advantage there is you can basically set up effectively like a, you know, maglev track. You also don't have to go that fast because the Moon's gravity well is way less. And so it's super easy to basically imagine a world where we mine a bunch of very simple metals and things like that on the moon, make this magnet train, and now all of a sudden you just have something on the moon that you can point towards Earth if you want to send something into low Earth orbit, but also now if you want to point it out to Jupiter or Mars, et cetera. It's just a phenomenal. Effectively, you think of it as train station effectively, where I wouldn't be surprised that even if we are going to Mars, there's a world where, yeah, maybe the humans are just going straight from Earth to Mars. But I wouldn't be surprised if, like, a lot of the materials or metals or like, you know, produce things, especially if we have like an industrial outpost on the moon. The Moon is the one that is like, sending the solar panels to Mars or is sending the bioreactors or like the, like, agricultural equipment, et cetera. That stuff's all coming from the Moon because it's like, literally, basically, like, free to effectively, like, send it. Send it to Mars.

Yeah.

And so that's an idea that's been talked about in sci fi for a long time, partially in some ways. It's also like, it's the best weapon in the world in that, like, you can just shoot a rock at the Earth really fast and then hit anybody that you want and you basically can't stop it.

But yeah, speaking of space weapons, is there any movement on Golden Dome?

So I don't know if you guys saw, but MDA basically put out this shield idiq for where they're going to do a lot of the Golden Dome work. Not all of it.

I want to say it was like now two Wednesdays ago. Maybe it was a little earlier than that, maybe it was last week, but they basically announced that about, I think it was 3,000 people had applied to be a part of the program. About 1,000 contractors basically got awarded to be on contract and to sort of acknowledge my colleagues. Thank you to the Sir Varda team for putting together a great proposal on technology. And we got to be a part of that still would Say all this stuff is sort of early in that there's definitely some. The Space Force actually announced that they gave out their first space based intercept contracts. They didn't name who won those contracts because of national security reasons. But yeah, you're starting to see stuff that was like sort of theorized early on in the admin. And now Space Force has obviously handed out those first contracts. Missile Defense Agency has handed out those first contracts. And so becoming real, I'd say in terms of like first demos, fielded capabilities, you're still a little ways away. I think by like end of next year you'll probably start to see some of the first stuff really sort of happening. And then in 2027 is where I think you'll just have a bunch of demonstrations across everything from like space radar, space based intercept space to ground stuff, advanced ground radar systems, advanced hypersonic interceptors that come from the ground, from all these sort of new, both traditional primes and some of these neoprimes coming to the table for Golden Dome. So yeah, becoming real. I think the important thing for something like Golden Dome is you want to make sure that if there's a change in administration, you get to keep some of the advancement capabilities. And the best way to ensure that happens is make sure that they're fielding it. Like if a new admin comes in and it's still like an R and D land, it's easier for them to cancel it versus like, if it's something that like the war fighter literally like has access to and is using, well, then it's like, you know, sort of much more likely that, you know, much more likely that they're going to keep it, keep it around because the war fighter will insist on like, hey, we built this and we use it. This helps us deter China. Why would we like unfunded? Basically, yeah.

Do you have any idea how Jared thinks about the NASA budget? It was about $25 billion last year. I could see one stance where it's like $25 billion is a lot of money and it' we can do a lot with it. There's another. I could also imagine him being like, we got to get those numbers up.

I think politically right now the White House's budget was actually less than 25 billion. And so the likelihood of him coming out politically and saying I want more probably doesn't totally jive with like, you know, hey, Trump just reappointed you. But I think keeping it flat but using it far more efficiently that I can see him being like a huge advocate for and like, yeah, he's made it pretty damn clear we've talked about this before, but like, like, I mean, especially now with, you know, one thing. Oh, one thing that we haven't talked about, you know, is New Glenn.

Right.

Like for the first time, we have a second, you know, orbital rocket that is reusable in the United States. And by the way, that thing is like really big.

Right.

Like, you know, much larger than a Falcon 9. And so at this point, when you've got both starship flying regularly and you have new Glenn flying regularly, the idea of like NASA still building rockets through the like, SLS program is like, even more crazy because it's like you have multiple commercial providers. And by the way, like, Neutron from, you know, Rocket Lab will probably be online next year. Stokespace will be online. So I think the exciting thing about, you know, Jared is just like, like a strong willingness to go slash out budgets that are things that the commercial industry is already doing more effectively, more cheaply, and then go assign that to things like clips, lunar landings, et cetera, that like, are where the strategic focus needs to be. So I think Jared is going to be the advocate of like, you know, keep it at 25 billion, but we're going to do a heck of a lot more with that 25 billion than we were before because there's just like a bunch of things that like, are very large programs that now can effectively just be cut to zero.

Yeah.

Do you know what's going on with asteroid Bennu? They discovered some.

Sugar Stardust. This was like last week. It got announced, but we didn't really get a chance to cover it.

Yeah. So funny story of this. So if you remember the first Varda mentioned where we got stuck up in orbit, Right.

Yeah.

We launched in June of 2023. The original goal was to land in August, September of 2023. Part of why we chose where we were going to land was because there had been some early cosmic sort of dust and, sorry, solar dust and asteroid dust missions that had landed in that same range. But the other reason that we chose it was because it was going to be Halloween of, I believe, 23 Osiris Rex, the asteroid sample mission from Bennu was also going to land there. Obviously we ultimately ended up getting delayed. And so rather than Varda being first in the asteroid mission coming in, instead it was the other order asteroid mission came in. But point being, our team paid a lot of attention to that asteroid sample coming in, given that that was sort of the precedent for Varda being able to basically Come back from space. And that mission was the one that had the venue samples on board.

Okay, so it's just now getting disclosed or talked about?

Yeah, yeah, basically, obviously, with something this material and significant, like, you want to make sure that you dotted the I's and crossed the T's. And also it takes time to go analyze these samples and like, handle it, et cetera. So, yeah, the asteroid sample, yeah, landed like, I want to say, October, November of 2023. And now obviously this is all starting to get published two years later. What they effectively sort of showed was that on the asteroid you have effectively, like the building blocks of life, which.

And this is my favorite term in the world.

Build more data for the panspermia hypothesis. So the panspermia hypothesis is that the early building blocks of life are plentif in the universe. And a part of how they get distributed in the universe is through, you know, basically collisions that end up, you know, you have like, you know, some early protoplanet, it collides with some other big planet and then there's crazy asteroids that get sent out at high speed. But those asteroids have a little bit of like Sugars and Ribose, etc. And that's what actually like, basically like incepts planet on a future, or life on a future basically planet. One of my favorite graphs that I saw, you know, which I could pull this up right now, but. But if you look at the average length of a genome on Earth over various periods of time, right? If we look at like old fossils, et cetera, the most complex genome basically has a perfect linear relationship between basically the age of Earth and the sort of genomic length. The thing though is if you were to extrapolate that line downwards, if you go to when the start of Earth is, it was already at a relatively complex genome. Like, if you look at like the length of a human genome, the length of bacteria, length of virus, et cetera, it would predict that Earth has not been around long enough to have the level of complexity of genomes that we have given this linear relationship. And so it strongly supports the idea that, like, the reason we have life on Earth is actually like, there was some earlier solar system planet, et cetera, that did the early building blocks and then got kicked us off, and then kicked us off because, like, it collided with something, some asteroid then went and landed on Earth. And the building blocks sort of started us a little further in that trajectory of life.

It's basically the plot of Prometheus. Exactly.

So if you look at sort of the Fermi's paradox. What this implies is that highly likely the Great Filter is actually basically behind humanity in that given that this likely suggests that there is the building blocks of life all over Earth, but that we do not yet see signals. It means that there is probably some filter that makes it difficult to go from early building blocks to intelligence, more so than basically intelligence being risky for being able to spread out into the stars. And so there's this great graph that showed all the potential basically answers to the Fermi's paradox, but this one basically shifted it significantly towards the world of like there is abundant non intelligent life in the universe and we just happen to be the first intelligent one. And as we go out we will probably see lots of early building blocks and as we spread we may start to see other very early sort of life, sort of planets that maybe are just getting into bacteria or like early mammals and things like that. So yeah, it's really interesting. The universe is plentiful in terms of life.

That's fascinating. Polymarket just skyrocketing on the odds of UFO disclosure. Are you long or short? Aliens being real?

I mean, especially with this panspermia hypothesis, like you know, very sort of long. I think there's obviously some sort of insider gov info that is coming out. Like when you see a polymarked market like that spike so much, somebody knows something and is driven on it. So what I love about polymarket it's like people are like, is it insider trading? And it's like, yes, that's the point.

Finally saying it out loud.

Yeah, yeah, it's wild. What about? I mean I want to go through a bunch of stuff regarding SpaceX stuff. Yeah, I mean I imagine that you can't comment on the actual like IPO rumors, but I would be interested to hear about like what, you know, key like looking back on 2025 for that company, looking forward to 26. What are you excited about? And then also, what do you think people might misunderstand about SpaceX?

That is the story that we start seeing told. Maybe if they hypothetically go public one day.

Yeah, let's see.

To me.

It feels like the company's very on track in that.

When people started talking About Starship in 2020 21, I remember telling people like, look, this is super exciting, but if you just look at the complexity of that vehicle relative Falcon 9, it's a huge step up in complexity. But that's also roughly the step up in terms of size of company that SpaceX is and complexity that they can take on. And so then My quick math is like, well then it'll probably take about as much time as Falcon 9 to get to true production rate. And so there are people that were like, no, they'll be like, like fully online by 25. Commercial flying super. And I always remember saying in like 2020, I was like, I don't think that that's going to sort of be the case. I think it'll be closer to like end of decade because that's, you know, roughly the time frame that Falcon 9, you know, sort of took.

Yep.

And so that's where I kind of see them, where it's like, yeah, they like are obviously making phenomenal progress with Starship. I don't think that we're going to be seeing like, you know, this year. It's going to be on the order of, I forget, I think like 200 sort of Falcon 9, you know, sort of rocket launches. Yeah, I don't think that we're going to see 200 Starship launches until. Yeah, probably end of decade would still be my like, you know, sort of rough bet, but I still think it's like a really phenomenal outcome.

Yeah, they're going similarly on timing and speed, but they're blowing up more rockets than Falcon 9 because I think the third Falcon 9 rocket was successful. Something like that.

Yes.

But they had a bunch of landings that they blew up.

Oh, sure.

The more relevant people forget that, like. Yeah, I mean, for what it's worth, Starship is already functional and online. It's just like not fully reusable.

Yeah.

I think a lot of people, I think a lot of people misunderstand that when it's blowing up, it's usually blowing up on the way down. Like it's not. It very quickly was like, okay, it takes off successfully, it gets up to the top and then it. And then it starts blowing up on the way down.

It bounces off the.

No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not bouncing off anything. It is in fact going to space. It is going to space is real. Space is real here on this show.

It glances off the glasses.

That's very funny. Okay, Are, are you. Yeah, sorry, continue.

Oh, seriously? Yeah. People under appreciate that like Starship is actually a very successful rocket already. Yeah. It can take things up to orbit at like very large scale at very cheap prices. Literally today it just happens to be that like. Yeah, they're still figuring out the landing thing.

Sure.

But obviously they want to figure that out before they get to like, super mass production rate. I think the other story that is really going to start to be told is just their shift to like more things that are, you know, extraterrestrial and that like you are going to see SpaceX do, I think some very important impressive things that are way beyond the bounds of low Earth orbit over the coming sort of couple years. Obviously they have a huge contract with NASA to figure out how to land things on the moon. And that type of activity is something that they are spending a lot of resources on internally. But I don't think it's that public of a story relative to Starship, Starlink, et cetera.

I saw this article that had all these motion graphics, very cool. And it was explaining how starship will take stuff to the moon. And it was something like they're gonna do like 26 refuelings in space. And then that just feels like in the 60s we could just go straight there. Now we gotta stop for gas 26 times. Like why should I not be blackpilled on this? Is this like, this is a lost start. It just seems crazy to me. But break it down. What's actually going on?

So funny historical fact from the Apollo days. There was actually a huge debate internally at NASA whether or not to take the fuel stop approach versus the like shoot straight for the moon approach.

Okay.

There was a significant chunk of NASA led by, it was like Pete, something I want to say that really wanted to do the gas station approach. The reason being that they saw that as what would make it so that going to the moon was just much more long term sustainable because you have these like pieces of infrastructure and it's easy to like send things mission by mission without each individual mission basically being super risky.

Yeah.

And the other side of the approach which was just shoot straight for the moon was largely led by Wernher von Braun. A part of why he liked the shoot straight for the moon thing is because it allowed him to just make one really, really big rocket rather than launching lots of small rockets. And I think he was just addicted to rockets basically. And that was ultimately what won out. I do think probably that was the right call for the time and allowed us skis, et cetera. But counterintuitively, the refueling and sort of fuel stations approach is actually just the much more long term sustainable one. And that as we think about going to Mars very regularly going to the moon, you don't want to necessarily have to take on the risk of just on a car trip. You don't take all your fuel literally with you, like your gas along the way. And that makes it so that the vehicle that is moving things is much simpler. Same thing. Want to set up a more stable logistics and supply chain. You actually do want basically these types of fuel stops. But yeah, that's a part of what SpaceX needs to prove is like you, I think that number that you're citing in terms of number of refuels is more for a full Mars mission. For the moon, I think it's more like three refuels. So it is definitely sort of simpler by going to the moon.

Also, it does seem like we've rebuilt the capacity to just yeet, stuff directly to the moon because didn't Firefly land something up there like, and China's going up and stuff direct like, like we seriously have checked that box like several times. It's not even like humans on the moon once. Like I think we sent six manned missions, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I think we want to get that to like 600. It's going to be like through the fuel stop, you know, approach probably. And what I like is that we're parallel tracking which like the things that Firefly and China have done, those things are just amplified by the fuel stop, you know, basically approach when like that comes online. So I like that we're parallel tracking it. And this goes back to a little bit of the Jared Isaacman thing where like, man, if I were in Jared Isaacsman shoes right now, I would basically just go to like, you know, NASA and just be like, hey, Fireflies, like figured out how to land on the moon. I don't understand why we wouldn't just jam a bunch of funding down their throats and tell them like, don't just do it once a year, but I want you like doing it on a quarterly basis and I want you to basically now establish like a regular supply chain there. So now I can go fund a bunch of companies that are like making lunar humanoids and lunar robots in pavers and solar panel assemblers, et cetera, etc. So while we're in parallel doing the fuel stop human architecture, we also just have these direct approaches that are landing robots there. So we're just like landing equipment there nonstop and figuring out how to basically make sure that by the time the humans are there, we actually have a bunch of robotic infrastructure that's autonomous and basically set up.

Super cool.

Yeah, I think that parallel approach that.

Is super sci fi. I love that. But that feels like if we can do that, we can certainly put some data set in space. How's your thinking evolving on that? Because Casey Hanmer just came out pro data center in space. Like you had. You had us in the.

Elon's been posting about it.

Yeah, Elon. I mean you really kicked the hornets because it was like Elon Sundarhar. This YC company seems to be doing pretty well. There's like four different attack vectors on you and I love it. It's contrarian position, but are you maintaining it or is your thinking of evolving?

Look, I'm going to maintain my position because no information has changed. People have said words, but they have not presented compelling arguments.

Where I think there's a little bit of a gray area is look, I currently have two data centers that are in space. Sure, I'm not doing AI compute on them, but I have a bunch of computers up in space that could go do inference and training, et cetera.

Etc.

Starlink. Each of the satellites has compute, etc.

On board.

They could be basically sort of data centers in space. So I think the question more is.

Like, you change up your, you change up your tune, Delian. You're looking at the next $20 billion public company.

I think so. Can we smack this? I saw you hanging out with Chamal.

I don't know if you're doing your duty to shareholders in the way that you're spinning this.

Yeah, just stop being so realistic.

Too modest, too modest.

Too much of a real.

We're putting a quantum computer on it too. It's going to be.

I literally have like multiple shareholders. That opinion being like, okay, like I know that you don't like the data center space thing, but like what if we use the space factories to make things that go into the data center?

Exactly.

Fab.

A little bit.

I'm just like, love you guys. My job is to build a business that delivers revenue and shareholder returns. Not just pure, pure hype. But yeah, I think it's where it's like, it's on the margin where it's like, look, do I think that like the space X, like economics are going to beat out like nuclear powered data centers run by Crusoe in Texas? No, man, come on. Like, I just like in order for that to work you have to be like short nuclear, short, you know, optical fiber on the ground, short, the ability to like, you know, build buildings, short solar panels, short batteries. It's just like all of those things are making incredible progress super rapidly. And in space those things are more complex. Are there going to be marginal areas and use cases and more broadly as we just have more and more of Internet and connectivity where there are real benefits to being in space. And so Then you by default just have more infrastructure up there. And so, yes, some of those things may be dedicated to compute, but yeah, is Crusoe almost certainly going to have better economics than a space based Data center in 2030? Yeah, I think that's going to be the case. And so that might mean that 98.5% of data centers, you know, are on the ground. If some small sliver for certain use cases or you're doing like compute on things that are calculated in orbit or like, you know, there's, you know, cameras, you know, that are up there and you're trying to, you guys do things or it's like there's people that are up in orbit and you know, they want ChatGPT in orbit. Then yeah, again, there might be these like slivers, but it's going to be. Yeah, feel very confident that it's going to be slivers. Who knows, maybe we'll look at this recording in 2032 and like, you know.

I'll have been like, people will be mocking you. People will be dunking on you. The young, the young Delian will literally be saying like, Delian's been like the next Delian.

You know, the young guy that loves yap.

He'll be like, oh, he's chopped D cell.

I'm D cell.

Maybe.

He only predicted humanoids assembling pavers on the moon, not data centers. Anyway, big detail, guy. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is a lot of fun.

Always, always great to chat.

Happy holidays. Merry Christmas. We'll see you soon. Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas. See you soon, boys.

Bye.

We're gonna tell you about eight sleep dot com. Delian's an investor. Exceptional sleep, without exception. Get an eight sleep for Christmas. Gift it for Christmas. Get a good night's sleep this Christmas. With eight sleep, I got a 92. Jordy, how'd you do?

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I got a 92. But I'm in a terrible sleep debt, which is rough. I'm on like a four hour, five hour.

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Of this Christmas I like.

Morgan's going in.

This is the longest.

Now we have.

Yes, we have Morgan Housel author, friend of the show. Welcome to the show. This is the longest sound cue. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. How you doing?

Welcome back.

Good to see you guys doing well. I like your shirts. Looking good.

Thank you.

Yes.

It should be in the mail for you. Yeah, hopefully.

Already love it. We'll work on it.

Can't wait.

Let's get into it. What is new in your world? Take us through the latest, and then I want to go into some psychology of the holiday, psychology of shopping. We have a bunch of things that we want to run through.

But is there anything, I mean, not that much going on right now. I'm not writing a book right now, which is kind of the most enjoyable part of my career, because it lets you just spend all day reading and thinking about what's next, which is always the most enjoyable part of it. So I guess to answer your question, I don't know what's next, but I love this area of my life of just doing a bunch of reading and talking to people and thinking about different topics to try to figure out what might be next.

How, how. How much have you kind of keyed in on what you want to write about next? Is it.

I think I have a pretty good idea of what it would be.

Well, what about the next book? What about the next book after that? Is that starting to come into focus?

I think that's not. Yeah. I think what is true that I have an idea for a distant book. I don't know when this is going to be, but there are so many topics that are worth exploring, but not in a full book. And I do think there is an idea. It's hard to do. Right. But there's an idea for a book that is a huge hodgepodge of, like, 80 different ideas, all of which are worth exploring in three or four pages. And obviously, the issue with most nonfiction books, particularly business books, is you have a topic that is worth exploring, but not in 250 pages, but then the author has to stretch it out and just keep on rambling about the same topic over and over again. And that's why business books are so difficult. So if you can get around that by just going shallow, or not even shallow, but giving the treatment that they deserve on a bunch of small, disparate topics, I think that's something I'm interested in.

Have you ever been tempted into trying to build a subscription, like, newsletter and really focus in on that by saying, like, hey, there's a bunch of, you know, instead of the next three or four books, I'm going to basically just write the chapters and publish them as I have them? I'm sure you've had. I mean, you've had every opportunity to do that, and you haven't. It hasn't been, like, the focus so Far. But I'm curious if that would ever change.

I think the reason I have not is because I think you have to be very careful as a, as a content creator, for lack of a better word, that you don't become beholden to your audience that you say, look, my audience is paying me 100 bucks a month and I have to feed the ducks because they're quacking. That's a very dangerous spot to be in for a content creator of like, being forced to say stuff when you have nothing to say is a bad spot.

You're saying that to the guys that go live for three hours every day if we don't.

Yeah, but, but, but you're talking differently. Like, nobody expects you to do your, your PhD thesis every day.

Totally, totally. The bar is like, so it's, it's.

And we're not, we don't necessarily need to generate the content. The world generates the content and we figure out. Yeah, yeah, you want to talk about.

Yeah, we're kind of like, what about.

Have you been, have you seen some. There's some. I feel like I've seen some authors like that are writing fiction instead of just writing a book. Like releasing the book as a subscription product. That seems somewhat interesting. Almost like treating it like you're subscribing to Netflix and Netflix is releasing a show and they're sort of dripping it out over time. Do you think that's a model that authors could like, how powerful is the book industrial complex? Is there enough incentives to keep people from not doing that and not self publishing and kind of dripping out content and just staying true to the traditional path?

I think it's true that books are, and this is true for podcasts as well, that they are the ultimate tail driven content. 99% of books that are published don't work, but the ones that do really, really work. Same for podcasts and whatnot. And so I think it's true that if you're an author, you need, particularly if you haven't had that hit yet, you need to figure out your business model in a different way. It's very difficult to say, I'm a talented writer, I'm going to go write books and try to make a living out of it. For every writer who does that, there are 10,000 who have stumbled and tripped and ultimately failed doing it. It's a tough model to make it work. And I've seen a much higher success rate in the people that go on Substack or whatever it might be and have that, that that level of Subscription. I think people are more willing to pay 30 bucks a month for your consistent content, your daily or your weekly newsletter than they are to pay $30 for a book that took you two years to write. And so it's. It's a more stable model, I think, with a higher hit rate to have that paid subscription. Even if the rewards for a book that works can be higher, it's just so much more difficult to make it work.

What do you think about, like, consumer churn or like conversion to actually consuming the content fully? Because I know that there's like this odd. You know, a lot of people buy physical books, they gift them, and then they sit on bookshelves and they wind up being props in many cases that people don't just have enough time to read all the books that they acquire. I actually did subscribe to one of those new books as a newsletter, fiction. And it was odd because I wound up paying for it for a very long time, but I didn't wind up.

Reading it as they were, as the chapters.

Yeah. And I thought when I first subscribed, I was like, oh, this is going to be even easier because it's so bite sized. It's gonna be easier. I'm more likely to get through this than if this was just another book that I had added to my audible.

It also creates a weird tension where there's an incentive to have, like, crazy cliffhangers so that people don't turn. Like, if you get a little bit. If you get a little bit bored with a book and you have the ability to churn from the book, think about how often I'll start a book, and if I'm not, I'll get three chapters in. I'm not really engaged with it. I'll just say, cool. I'm not necessarily. Hopefully I learned something, but I'm not gonna just read it just to see it all the way through.

Sure, yeah.

I think what's true too, for every good nonfiction book is that people don't remember books so much as they remember a couple sentences from those books. So most nonfiction books are about 50,000 words if you read to the end, which is rare. But if you read all 50,000 words and you come away having remembered two or three banger lines of the 50,000 words you remember 50 of them, that can be great. And it's true, like some books that I know changed my life, books that I recommend that are so good, if you actually, if you ask me about them, I can tell you two or three sentences maybe that I remember Verbatim, that were fantastic. And the rest kind of drifts away over time.

Time.

So I think that's true even for the absolute best books that can change your life. It's just very small snippets that you're going to remember from them. And so one takeaway in that too is that you can remember two or three banger lines from a blog post as well. And so all the books that I've written, most of the ideas started as blog posts and then I could take that idea. Okay, that idea worked. People like that. How can I transform that into a chapter in a book? But the core idea is like, if you can remember one sentence from this idea from this chapter, I've done my job. That's the goal.

Yeah, I wonder if I actually read this book. But there's a book that left a really long impression on me all about immortality. It was this very interesting way of framework of thinking about immortality from different cultures. And I don't even know if I actually read the book, but. But it stuck with me because the actual idea was so powerful. And then there's other books where I've read the whole thing. There's been a lot of interesting anecdotes, but it didn't change my whole worldview. And yeah, it's just fascinating. Wait, sorry, what were you gonna say?

Well, I was talking about, I wrote an essay called Rage Bait is for Losers. And what I wanted people to remember was the title in itself.

Titles are important.

Well, it was Rage Bait itself. Because if you've been rage baiting and you then are thinking, well, I'm not, you kind of want to defend it as like a strategy. And some people.

This is interesting. So how do you think about Rage Bait in the context of picking a title for a book that might jump off the shelf in a store? Because I can imagine there's a world where a book is called, you know, like if you don't read this, you'll be poor forever or something like that, you know, and then it's like all of a sudden, I'm not gonna let them get the best of me. I gotta read that book.

Book.

But I think it's no different than any product where you over promise and under deliver. You're just going to piss off your customers. And if you're just trying to get a quick hit and then disappear, maybe that's the right way. If you're trying to build a long term brand, your title has to be very honest.

Yeah.

And so my first book, the Psychology of Money, yeah, it's a pretty boring title. A lot of the people who are involved in it said we should not use that as a title. It sounds like an academic textbook.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a textbook, but it's an honest.

This, but it's an honest title.

Yeah.

What is the book about? The psychology of.

Do you think you would have sold more copies if, if you just changed the title to how to Get Rich and Stay Rich or something?

Well, it's not even that. It, it, it, it's like, it's like how to make sure that you have a good psychology of money. How, how to make sure you have a good relationship.

Well, I think, I think you clearly care about.

You didn't set that.

You clearly care about nps. Yeah, maybe more than other writers or publishers might.

I heard Rory Sutherland say this on a podcast recently. He said, if you are like a family business and you're in it for the long run, you're trying to build a generational business. By and large, you don't care about metrics. You're not tracking how much your gross profit margin shifted last quarter. What you care about is customer satisfaction and brand. And it's only when you're like a private equity owned business where you're like, we're just trying to flip this thing in the next quarter that you become very metric driven and you, and you want to measure everything down. So I think to answer your question, if I was very metric driven and it was just like, my goal is to sell as many books as I can next quarter, you can use something bombastic that's going to over promise that will probably work in the short run. If your book, if your goal is to have a long tail sales cycle and being like, I want this book to sell for years or even generations if I'm lucky, it has to be honest, it has to be brand driven where people are like, I enjoyed this book. I'm going to recommend it to my friends and family.

Emily Herrera in the chat says, books are just titles and thumbnails. So same experience on YouTube. You might have a crazy title and thumbnail. And then if it's not very truthful, then all the comments are just like, congrats on baiting people into watching this. And again, the sort of NPS is quite lush. Should you write a book on gambling?

I think it's all kind of embedded in behavioral finance. And I think the idea that the proliferation of gambling, whether it's crypto or sports betting or whatever it might be, I think by and large this is not a unique take. Many people have talked about this, but Daniel Kahneman wrote about, when all of your options are bad or perceived to be bad, people become very risk taking. And so if you feel like. If a young person feels like, if I work hard. Excuse me, if I work hard and work my way up the. The corporate ladder and save my money and buy a house and start a family, that's what you'll do. If you perceive that option is available to you. If you don't, then you're like, who cares? Like, like, I. I have no vested stake in this system. Might as well throw it all on black and see what happens. And I think that comes down to it. So I think the psychology of gambling is a pretty deep social issue, and I think you could probably accurately summarize it as youth pessimism. When people are pessimistic, they're much more likely to just throw it all down and see what happens. They have nothing to lose.

I have more on that. So how do you think about the level of risk that people were taking at the time of the American dream? Like, because there's one world where we go back and we say, like, oh, yeah, it was like the 1950s and you could just get a job at this law firm and it would just be massively successful. Or even if you were coal miner, you'd have a job in healthcare forever. And you go to the auto plant and be an auto worker and work your way up from the person sweeping up the floor at night to the manager at the end of the day. And I'm wondering if there's like, well, we remember that as not risky because America was successful, but, like, there was an emerging new order where the USSR could have steamrolled in the Cold War and America could have been a disaster. And so, in fact, it was risky, but it just worked out well. But I don't know if that's like, am I thinking about that even in the right realm at all? What do you think?

Yeah, I think a lot of that narrative of what the job market used to be and kind of the 1950s Americana nostalgia that we have is just that it's. It's kind of false nostalgia. Yeah, it's this idea that, you know, the narrative that you just described of you could go get a job at an auto factory and work your way up and stay there for 30 years. I mean, if you understand the history of the US economy in the 1950s, particularly the 1970s, there were huge recessions, there were huge job losses. And so I think it's easy to put together a charming, you know.

Norman Rockwell picture of what it used to be. By and large it's not the case.

But on the flip side, it was.

Like everyone had this idea of like if you were employed, you had a very good shot of owning a home. But the homes were like 750 square feet, right? And they were like, that's true.

But I think it's also true that, you know, you can throw around a lot of statistics and I have about how the median American family earns more, is wealthier, is better off today than they were in the 1950s, in the 1960s. It's also true, indisputably that homeownership was, was more accessible and cheaper back then. And I've been thinking a lot about the topic that I think almost every societal problem that we have today is downstream of housing, of housing affordability. It's the single biggest issue that we have. Even back to the gambling issue that we were just talking about. If you are 28 and you feel whether it's true or not, you feel like you will never own a home, it's impossible for you to get there to save the down payment. You become much more likely to be like, I have nothing vested in this system, might as well throw it all away, I have nothing to lose, I might as well throw it all away. And so, so even if median incomes adjusted for inflation were lower back in the 1950s, if owning a home was more accessible and by and large it was for most people, that just gave you more of a vested sense in the system, caused you to take, I think, smarter risks. Not betting everything on the spread on tonight's game, but taking a risk of I'm going to move to a new town and try to get a job at an auto factory. That was a risk, but it's a more calculated risk than today's gambling mentality. I think there's something to be said too of just access that which we're seeing in the gambling world today. If you gave a 19 year old boy Kalshee and all the sports bettings apps in 1955, they would have latched right onto it. There's nothing unique about today's young generation, by and large. It's just that we didn't have those tools.

Yeah, look up. I encourage people to look up. John and I were going back and forth on this. On our flight on Friday, we were looking at how popular gambling was during the fall of the Roman Empire. It was all social classes. We're doing it on the exact same levels that we're seeing today. Sure, they weren't on a mobile device, but it was like everywhere that you would be eating and drinking and it was in private and public and it was illegal and legal in some areas. Like at certain festivals it would be legal and then it would be like illegal otherwise. But you know, it was kind of seen as okay. So there's nothing, there's nothing new. These things just are going in waves. But it certainly was, I think people were like somewhat nihilistic and they were just like, sure. Like things are, we're experiencing a collapse. We may as well put it all on block.

Yeah. And so I think it's easy to look at the issues of today and frame it as we have degraded, particularly the younger generation. I don't think that's the case. I think any other previous generation would have become degenerate gamblers, gamblers and crypto traders if they had the option to like today's generation does. Does.

Yeah. I wonder how much of it is just memetic, just like the myth that we tell ourselves, like if we can. Yeah, I don't know, somehow steer away. I also wonder like, you know, there is the like the paternalistic, the puritanical, like ban the bad thing. But there's also the more optimistic view of just like maybe just do more, more of the good thing if we have a national project to build something meaningful.

Well, I think the thing that makes you want to put your hand through a wall is people having in their brokerage account the ability to one click sell Apple stock and in another click, buy, trade on sports contracts.

Because again, at least there was historically some separation where there was at least some friction of getting out of maybe a higher quality investment and getting into something that's just rolling the dice. And I think that's very clearly has gone away in some cases and probably will just continue to erode also.

I mean, yeah, I think it's important to point out too that Vanguard has $12 trillion AUM.

Fidelity has $10 trillion AUM. The vast majority of capital these days are people saving in their 401ks dollar cost averaging. They don't even know their password. It's being invested into good, stable businesses, diversified, low cost. So it's easy to point out around all the crazy speculation that goes on. And look, I'm a free markets person. People want to speculate and do whatever they want their money you're allowed to, to set your financial life on fire. But the vast, vast majority of capital is still Being invested in what I would consider to be a pretty smart, conservative, long term way.

The chat has a little bit of a counterpoint. They said that we might not be considering the fact that 99% of gamblers quit just before they hit it big. And so that is a little bit of a counterpoint to a lot of the arguments that were making here. And I just want to make sure we consider that. Fair enough.

One more bet. One more.

Just one more bet. You're good.

Wanted to go back, get your thoughts on startup launches. Kind of random. I think everyone has launch video fatigue. I know we did. We were doing a lot of launch style videos earlier this year and we pretty much stopped completely just because we felt like the, the meta was kind of dead. It wasn't actually a way to like truly break through anymore. And wanted to get your. If you think that writing is underutilized as like a launch, as a launch strategy. There's been some viral PDFs. I think situational awareness is a good example of like just if you can put together a good enough document, you can attract, you know, Bill. I mean, obviously, obviously Leopold is in a unique situation, but it feels like writing is super underutilized.

Went viral on a blog post on Hacker News and drove 10,000 signups. A ton of interest. And people were starting a conversation around that. It was just a blog on some random person's website basically. And it actually broke out massively. But yeah, it's tricky. But I'd love to know your thoughts.

I think it tends to be true, and this is not black and white, but it tends to be true that if you can explain your value proposition in a paragraph of text, you will do it. And if you can't, you're much more likely to say, well, we need some glossy pictures. And if you can do it with that, then you kind of work your way down to like, can we just create a movie out of this kind of thing? That's not always the case, but I do think it's the case. Like if your idea is so obvious and so good, you can just explain it with crayons on a piece of paper and you're good, you're good from there. And so I think, look, look, when I started writing books, somebody told me advice that I thought was great for books but true for almost any product. And it was, if the book is good, you don't need to market it and if the book is bad, no amount of marketing will help. Sure, I think you could apply that to a lot of different things. If your product is good, you don't need to market it. That's not true. I'm being very generalized here. Marketing is important, but if your product is good, then it can kind of sell itself. If the product is bad, no amount of marketing will help, particularly in the longer term. And so look, I. I like good design, I like flashy videos, I like. I like all that kind of stuff. But good ideas are very obvious. I think that's one of the keys to good writing, is that you don't need to spend a lot of mental horsepower to understand what the author's saying. You can just kind of glance your eyes over a paragraph and be like, yeah, I got it. Makes perfect sense. I don't need any more flashy video. That one sentence explained everything I need to know. Let's move on from there. I think that tends to be true.

Do you have a book of the year? Do you like looking back and creating a list of the things that you most enjoyed this year? I know that you don't. This is like total newsletter fodder. And we already talked about how you're not.

In service to people that demand the end of the year review. But has anything stuck out to you this year?

I thought the best book that I read was probably Andrew Ross Sorkin's 1929. Just absolutely.

Also the best book launch ever.

Yes, I think that's probably a great book.

And then also, like, absolute masterclass. I was taking screenshots of. If you search Andrew Ross Sorkin 1929 on YouTube, you can see that he just did every single podcast like he did. Yes, 20 shows. And it was so good. And I didn't realize, like, he's someone that everyone knows, but he's not constantly on a tour. So he had a lot of built up energy to like, go full tilt. And it worked really well.

And it's such a fascinating period of American history that, to my surprise, has not. There's not a lot of books written about the Great Depression. There's not like, what's the classic book on the Great Depression? There's not many of them. There are 10,000 books written about World War II.

World War II, yeah, there should be.

But the Great Depression, which was so monumental in the history of this country, there's not a lot written about it. So I thought he did a great job. Somebody brought this up when they were reviewing 1929. I thought it was such a fascinating point that all of the big characters in the book, except for maybe Jesse Livermore, are pretty much forgotten today. All of the titans of industry, of banking, the Jamie Dimons of their day, are all forgotten now. Unless you're like a history buff. Charlie Mitchell, all those people, we don't remember them anymore. And I think there's something to be said that if your only accomplishment in life is that you made a lot of money, you're going to be forgotten very quickly. And that was true for a lot of the bankers back then. It's probably true for a lot of the private equity, hedge fund people today. Nothing wrong with that.

I will remember all the private credit legends, Wall Street's new rich. I will remember them. I'm going to keep this episode or this edition of Barron's bring it to the grave.

No, what you need to do is you need to wait 100 years, you need to write an amazing book about it, then you need to turn that book into a movie and a TV show and then cast an iconic actor and then won't remember. And then that's what.

How are you processing the AI trade in the, in the context of history?

I think, I think historically the gap between a product changing the world and people making a lot of money off of it can be 20 miles apart. The railroads are probably the most transformational technology ever, way more transformational than anything we've had over the last hundred years. And a few people made ungodly fortunes from it. 99% of railroad investors lost everything. And, and that was true for the airplane. Completely changed the world. A lot of people lost huge fortunes on Automobiles. There were 2,000 car companies in the early 1900s. Three of them remained by, by the 1930s or so. And so you can go on down the list of like, like change the world. And 99% of people lost everything. Of course that was true of the, the dot com bubble. Everyone's thesis by and large in the late 1990s of what the Internet would become was right. But it didn't mean that you were going to make any money from it.

In fact, you were going to try to lose everything. Webvan I think is such a good example because it's like DoorDash just yeah, 15years.com.

Chewy's a banger company. MP3.com Spotify is the company you want to own. Like there's just so many, Every, every current company there was some.com that was doing the basic idea and just didn't get to, didn't get to scale at all.

Yeah, I think so. I think, I think that, I think you could easily imagine just based off of history that in 20 years. Of course, AI completely changed everything. Nothing is the same. And when we talk about the businesses that have been involved over the previous 20 years, there's two or three unbelievable winners. 99% of companies went to zero. And the three companies that won are either not around today or not the obvious ones today. So if you're talking about the Internet, in 1998, Google was in a garage. Obviously Facebook didn't exist yet. That tends to be the story of what it was. The Wright brothers themselves didn't make very much money from the airplane. If anything, it wasn't until you had someone named William Boeing who came along and he was like, I'm just going to copy your idea, but do it way better than you guys could do it. And that tends to be the idea. It's what Google did with Yahoo and Hotbot and all the other search engines who were the actual front runners. It just took someone else coming along to be like, great idea. Hold my beer and watch me do it 100 times better than you could.

Speaking of AI, we've talked about this before. Obviously AI is not ready or equipped to write a book or.

Oh, it'll write it, John.

Happily, it will write it, but it won't write it. But what do you think about AI generated voices? Do you think that those are past the uncanny valley? Would you listen to an audible book.

Where the voice was AI generated?

I'm not much of an audiobook guy, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask for that. What I will say is one of the most amazing AI products that I've seen in the last two years. I think a lot of people have had this experience is Google's Notebook lm.

Yeah.

Where you go in and you say, here's a topic, make me a 10 minute podcast and it spits it out and it's unbelievable.

Yeah.

So when I first saw that, I was like, this is this. I. This is magic. I can't believe it. And how many Notebook LM podcasts have I listened to since then? Zero.

I was about to ask.

I think none. None, None. I think there's something to be said. And of course I am literally, actually.

I actually think, I think the use case there, where they probably have traction is students that have not studied for an exam and they have an hour to try to figure it out. So it's not for enjoyment at all. It's pure function, which is that I need to listen to something for an hour that is like hyper specific to a topic and it's boring. So nobody necessarily made the definitive podcast episode on it, but I just need it. And then in terms of the way that most people. People, People listen to audio to get to be entertained, even if it's, like, educational. And so they're going to go to people that are good entertainers that are opinionated.

Yeah, I think that's true. And of course, I am such a biased person to say this as an author myself, but I think what I like about reading books, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is the idea that a fellow human wrote this thing. I could never write this. My brain doesn't work this way, but some other authors did. And I feel like that connection is amazing and it breaks down as soon as you have AI generated content. And I think that's why I have no interest in a Notebook LM podcast. I'd much rather listen to David Senra and his, you know, even with all of his quirks and his stumbles and whatnot. But I'm like, yeah, but David read that. He did this. He's thinking that. And like, I love that. And so I, you know, I listened.

To an hour of OG Senra the PT T. Barnum episode yesterday, and then I got to hang out with David for a couple hours last night for dinner at my house.

One of the best guys around.

I love him, truly. Yeah, truly. Yeah. I think I need to listen to the James Dyson episode today, but he released that and for Senra OGs, you know how significant that episode is to him. Like the full circle moment of, you know, studying Dyson to being able to interview him live. It's very cool.

Love it. Yeah. Wild.

Well, great having you on the show. We hope you have an incredible end to the year and thank you for being a part of this this year. You're somebody that one of our favorite guests and can't wait for next year.

Thanks so much for having me. Always an honor to be on. Looking forward to my shirt.

Yes.

We'll talk to you soon.

Talk soon.

Have a good rest of your day. Numeral compliance handled numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth and.

Putting presents into the Christmas tree.

That's right.

Speaking of presents under the Christmas tree, the Google team is cooking up a present for me in 2026. They're gonna put ads in Gemini.

Let's go.

Hit the gong.

Finally. Finally.

We've been asking for it.

I hear the sleigh bells ringing for it.

We've been asking for it. Ads in LLMs. We talked to the founder of Perplexity about it. We asked Arvid, why are you going to put ads. We want ads in perplexity? And he said, maybe. And the tech wrote a whole article. They got really bad.

I like Google. Just jump first.

I'll let Google jump first. We talked to Sarah Fryer. We've Talked to the OpenAI team about how badly we want ads in chat GPT, how badly we want ads and LLMs. They said, maybe we're going to do it, maybe we're not. They've been sitting on their hands, but now.

I don't know how. I love listening to your voice.

It's good, it's good. We need a backup track.

Yeah. This is interesting.

This feels like, like very Google to just be like, yeah, we're, we're the ad business. We're gonna do ads. We're gonna do them first. We're probably gonna do them better than anybody else, at least initially. But some people were pushing back, just being like, hey, you could have, like, you easily could have just crushed.

Right?

Yeah, you easily could have just kept the product.

A lot of people are excited about or a lot of people are, Are, are, are wondering, like, hey, there's a world where Gemini doesn't have ads and is free for two years and it just completely puts the screws to every other LLM provider.

Yeah.

I mean, what would you do if you were them?

Would you monetize earlier?

I don't know. That's so hard to.

I mean, it would definitely hurt cash flow. Like, it would show up in the financials for sure.

I just.

Pro plus is not cheap, but turning on ads for.

I mean, I always look back to what, what would the Instagram business look like if they were forced to monetize it independently? Because it's, it's an amazing ad. Like, it's an amazing platform that's perfectly suited for. To monetize with ads.

Yep.

And yet you can imagine Meta ramped ad spend on the platform 10, 20 times faster than maybe an independent operator would have because they just had been. They had all the customer relationships, they had all the. They had a strong sense of who the person was already because they were probably on Facebook as well.

I don't think ads cause failure to adopt a new product. I don't know. We'd have to look through the product graveyard. But I feel like of things that die, they rarely die because, yeah, people.

Are acting like ads and LLMs are going to be the biggest deal and are going to be the biggest issue. And I just don't think it's going to be. I think they're going to.

In many ways, they could make the product better or more like sticky in the sense that you're, like, looking at stuff, doing shopping.

And personally, I want every LLM to have a lot of ads so that I can swap between all of the best models without feeling like I need to sign up. Like, I actually like, for me, I'm like, there's models that I just don't use because I'm like, okay, I don't want to sign up. I have not that much. I'll let Tyler sign up totally. On our ramp cart.

Do you think Xai is going to run run ads? Do you think they're going to put ads in Grok or ads in Romantic?

Yeah, I'm sure they will at some point. I doubt it's a huge priority for them. There's this company, Halftime, which won the Grok hackathon that happened over the weekend.

Yes.

I DM with the founder. He's down to.

Come on, we need to pull this up. Because when I saw this, I was like, whoa. Like, Xai, I didn't realize that it was from a hackathon. I thought it was just this actual company. So it says Halftime dynamically weaves AI generated into the scenes that you're watching. So breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions.

Cybrex in the chat says it just makes you second guess every output you get from the model. I agree. That's the bad case. There's a world where they just give you the real response and then there's an ad.

Yes. So there is a different flip.

So to Cybex's point, you second guess every output you get from the model because you're worried the ad is influencing it. If you go to your favorite chat app and you say, what are the best headphones? And it says Apple AirPod Pros, and you're like, is it sponsored? Is it not? Are they being objective? Are they not? Yes, that is something that you'd worry about. But there's also the other flip side, which is that if they're not monetizing well, they might be putting you on the cheapest model. That's just guessing. And it's just like, oh, yeah, Like, I guess it's this product because they didn't cook. They didn't give you the reasoning model because they can't afford to, because they're not monetizing you.

Well, I think, yeah. One reality is somebody types, what is the best cell phone that I can get for $1,000, and it gives you the iPhone, and then there's an ad for an Android phone right below it. And that's still worth advertising on because it's a high intensity query and it's very, you know, and it's likely ends up being profitable for the Android, you know, device manufacturer to advertise against it. But let's pull up Halftime. They're dynamically weaving AI generated ads into scenes you're watching so breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions.

Watching.

Wrong.

Boo.

What did he say?

Harvard trivia.

The lightning round.

Go. Pulitzer Prizes. 46 Nobel Peace Prizes.

Jessica, what are you doing here?

I was just.

That is so weird.

So bad.

I'm sold now. I want to. I want a Coca Cola.

Okay, okay, okay. If you want to see. If you want to see how ads are done, well, in. In. In an in video integration like this, we have to pull up the video that's at the bottom of the timeline. They just reinvented the Star Wars Cerveza Cristal ads. Have you seen these? You've barely seen Star wars, but at one point, there was a. At one point, there was an international showing of the original Star wars, and for some reason, they needed to cut ads into the actual footage. And so we got to play this with sound. It's one of my favorites things. Let's play it.

You fought in the Clone Wars.

Look at this.

Yes. I was once a Jedi Knight, the same as your father.

I wish I'd known him.

He was the best star pilot in the galaxy.

And a cunning warrior.

I understand you've become quite a good pilot yourself.

And he was a good friend.

Which reminds me, ma', am, I have something here for you.

Look at this.

Your father wanted you to have this.

When you were old enough.

It's the best.

It's like pure art. AI could never. It's so good. It's absolutely genius. And they do that two or three other times throughout the movie. And so you're just watching, and it's always when they go to grab something and then they just do the insert shot.

So if you're watching the cerveza crystal version of Star wars, by the end of the movie, Obi Wan Kenobi has had, like, five beers.

Whoa. More than cheeky pint.

Yeah, yeah. No, he definitely has buzz going, but that's one of my favorite little bits.

That's great.

Great. Really quick. Automated compliance and security AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Continue, Jordy.

So with Halftime, we're going to have the founder Chris on. He's studying CS at Waterloo. What a great hack project. And then he, he's only 20, so we're going to have him on. I'm excited to have him on. That said, I, I wonder if he could work with movie, like go work with someone like a Netflix early on and say like basically give us inventory and then we will like work with a bunch of different. There will be a beverage scene and then we'll generate a bunch of random versions of the scene for different types of people in the audience.

So this already happens where ads in the background. So if you're walking around New York City in some romantic comedy, they might actually go and VFX out the billboards that are in the back and they might put new ads in the background. And that's just a traditional VFX pipeline. Just cut it out and put a different ad in. And so that type of editing can be made a lot more dynamic through AI and that's probably how this instantiates itself realistically as opposed to just the most aggressive. The most aggressive. Like all of a sudden they're talking about the ad. It's a, it's a little bit of a wild, wild move. Anyway, apparently Ryan McIntosh predicted this. He said it's coming. He's quoting semi analysis says how much would Starbucks pay to haunt the background of every mid journey cafe, render a Tesla idling in every AI generated traffic scene? If you're, you're thinking small, this is the, this is the ambient brand singularity.

Dan in the chat says, you know, after you've seen that cerveza Cristal ad once or twice, you actually are thinking, are thinking about the beer for the rest of time, wondering when it's gonna come next.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it comes randomly.

It might come right now, it might come in five minutes. Just be ready.

Yeah. Let's get to Tyler. You needed to grab something off his desk, right?

Okay. So this is incredibly bullish.

What is bullish?

They are putting ads in Ayahuasca trips.

What?

Somebody on Reddit.

This is something we would do. This is something we would joke about.

Remember our jokes? This is one of our bits.

Going to Peru with helicopters with massive speakers and playing corporate finance tutorials to people who are tripping in the jungle.

To get them to come back to corporate America and lock in. What exactly happened here? Break it down, Jordy.

So somebody on the R DMT subreddit says, anyone else getting Amazon ads When breaking through, it's happened to me on my last three trips. Second was Ayahuasca, right As I break through, my trip is paused for a vivid 5 second ad featuring Jeff Bezos.

What?

Am I the only one?

How is this happening? Is that just like their brain is fried and so they're imagining an ad, or is it like they happen to be listening to something or watching?

I think Jeff figured this out a long time ago and he realized there's a lot of people that are using psychedelics and he thought, I could productize this and make it available to other merchants on Amazon or I could just keep it for myself and just have all the inventory for myself. No, of course joking, but anyways, very, very funny.

In other ads news, getbezel.com, shop over 26,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts, but also apparently anthropic. Bought every stack trace that gets no results. So if you go to Google and you type in your stack trace your error while you're programming and nothing comes up, Claude somehow just went to Google and said, hey, we'll buy that ad inventory. Genius. Feels like Google should be buying their own ad result or they should actually just have an integration for Gemini so that if you go and you type in a stack trace that no one's ever ran into that particular technical problem before. Shouldn't they just have a button there that says fix it with Gemini right now we'll do it. It should just do that. This is like a case study in AI mode. They should compete, but honestly, incredibly creative from the Claude team.

The chat is going off on the Ayahuasca ads. AB says CPMs would be through the roof. Imagine getting one shotted by a Geico ad.

2.6 says Jeff Bezos is now monetizing.

The astral plane, making your whole personality.

Nick Turley says, I'm seeing lots of confusion about ad rumors in ChatGPT. There are no live tests for ads. Any screenshots you've seen are not real or not ads. If we do pursue ads, we'll take a thoughtful approach. People trust ChatGPT and anything we do will be designed to respect that.

This was because of a viral post that showed a screenshot of I think Target down at the bottom. But that was just like an embedded link that was like an app that someone built. It was not an advertising.

That was core. That's crazy. Who would do that? Sounds like he might have been.

I love Eric S. He's, he's clearly, you know, one of us, an ad supporter, an ad lover and, and he, he is quote, tweeting somebody that's saying, that's mentioning that Airbnb still has no advertising business. Of course Uber has an advertising business. That's great. Doordash has figured out how to do promoted content very well and those businesses have grown a lot. And Eric Seufert's standing there saying, start an ad network. Didn't we ask Jesky about this when he was on the show? I think we talked to him about doing ads and he mentioned that it is somewhat of a unique product. It's a little bit less frequent than an Uber. It's less frequently used.

Yeah, but you can do hyperlocal advertising. So if you're staying somewhere, they could be sent giving you ads for, hey, look at this kayaking trip you could do in a couple days or whatever.

Yeah.

You're laughing at what I'm laughing at.

Now we're into the attractive people of the show section, I suppose.

We have this post from.

We have a post here. Apparently we now have a national looks maxing strategy of the United States.

Now look at Jacob Helberg's fantastic.

Jacob stunt fun.

He's former guest on the show.

We need to ask Jacob about bone smashing. Apparently it's gaining quite a lot of popularity out there.

That's great. Donald Boat is also apparently very attractive. People have been talking about that on the timeline.

Was this his first Tyler, don't you know, is this a deal or.

I think this is the first docs, Buck. This is the first docs of Donald Boat. People, people, people are fans. People are fans of Donald Boat. There's also. Sean Frank is getting jacked. We're really in like the true category of just like here. Here are attractive people now.

The looks maxing. The looks maxing zone of the show.

It's really. Yeah, yeah. Three for three. On the looks maxing segment. Sean Frank says hit these right after doing about 10 sets of 50 straight. What is this one? Armed pull ups. He can do one arm pull ups.

Well, he's holding the other one. So you're using it or like training. Yeah, but still you're training like grip strength.

That's impressive.

Very cool. Come do that in the ultra dome.

You know, Black Friday went well when you're banging out.

Yeah. He is on on a high after Black Friday.

Well, let me tell you about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable plan. Buy and measure out of home. Home with precision. And our next guest, I Believe is in the Restream waiting room. We have Sarah from Cultured magazine. She's the founder and the editor in chief of Cultured magazine. Let's bring her in to the TV show.

Welcome. I hope you don't mind the holiday music. We're having a lot of fun here today.

We're in the holiday spirit.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. There's a bit of a lag. It's a bit disorienting.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Sorry.

Well, hopefully we can. Hopefully you can hear us. Okay, I would love to just kick off.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes, yes, we can hear you just fine. Hopefully you could kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself since it's the first time on your show. Tell us about Cultured and kind of your journey a little bit. That'd be great.

Gosh, where should I start? So Cultured is a media company. We cover everything under the creative umbrella.

With a strong focus on the contemporary arts. So cover film and theater and literature.

And kind of look at everything through the lens of does it intersect with contemporary art? And if so, how. And kind of try to have a holistic approach to all of the content.

And I mean.

I would love to know your take on. On Netflix and Warner Brothers, if you have one. We've just been going through all the different IP there. I don't know if anything sticks out to you.

I don't know. I was in LA over the weekend and of course everyone was talking about it. I don't know. I mean, it's concerning on many levels. Do you think it's gonna go through fully or.

I mean, Warner Bros. Discovery is definitely going somewhere. That seems clear.

I don't know. Where do you stand on it? I think it probably lands with Netflix. There's just so much competition from YouTube. So much competition from YouTube.

And Fitz has, what, like 300 million subscribers now? I mean, they're the clear streaming winner.

Yeah. And so even though, yes, it is consolidation, it's not a monopoly because people watch YouTube, they watch Instagram, they watch shows like this. We're not on a network and we don't need to be. And so it still feels like no one's gonna look a year or two from now. No one's gonna be like, oh, yeah, Hollywood isn't competitive anymore. Like, no, Hollywood's extremely cutthroat. It's gonna remain cutthroat. It's gonna remain more cutthroat potentially.

Well, yeah.

Which means it's Hard to block.

I think a lot of people are so latched on to the past, and we've.

Yeah, it feels like. I mean, we're based in Hollywood, and so there's a lot of people that are. That are still have tied their careers to, like, the old Hollywood and the way way things were. Were done in the past. And it's just notable that, like, it's never been easier to just create content and create. Like, when I. When I think about Warner, Warner, Warner Brothers, it's like there's a bunch of, like, cartoon ip. It's like, if you're mad about consolidation and you're a creative person, just make more. Make a cartoon. Make a new cartoon. Just make. Make. Make things right.

The frustration that people have when they're like, oh, this is gonna hurt.

Theaters.

Yeah, the theater thing. The theater thing.

The theaters, I think, are already hurt.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

That sense of nostalgia. And I think there is that slice of Hollywood that is rooted in that. But I agree. Of course, there's never been a time where there's been more channels, but it still is almost like there are certainly more channels to reach people, but it's also harder to reach people.

Yeah, yeah. There's something. There's some interesting, like, ratio, if you're trying to quantify it, of, like, how much attention something gets relative to the revenue or the market cap or the value, like theaters are. They feel so culturally important. They feel such. So everyone has a story or a memory of their childhood going to the theater. Such an experience. And yet I think the actual total revenue of all the movie theaters in America is a fraction of what video games make. In a month. The video game industry is way, way bigger. Or the social media industry will be so, so much bigger, 1,000 times bigger. But there's something where just the legacy has broken through to such a degree that even though it hasn't been a big business in decades and it's smaller than ever, it's still culturally extremely relevant. And so it's hard to.

And I think, creatively extremely relevant.

Totally.

I think filmmakers want us to see their movies mostly on the big screen.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think if you look at it just from a revenue standpoint, of course, I mean, like you said, it's probably been decades since there's been a shift, but I do think that there is still something nostalgic and important about seeing certain things in theaters. I mean, there's still movies that people say. And I mean, obviously, you know, the filmmakers are often fighting for it to have the release first in a theater. Granted maybe they're all over 40, but still.

Yeah, I do wonder, I mean, I wonder what the next generation will even look like, if they'll want to go to theaters. Like we have a friend, Jason Carmen, who's very much of the young and of the new age, new creative organization, makes movies, but also makes short films and documentaries and all sorts of stuff.

Stuff.

And he still definitely wants to release his films in theaters. He has, he's figured out ways to do that, but.

I wonder how much that's. At the same time we're friends with like Adam Faze.

I think we need new. It's such an interesting time because like theater, the theater business has been in decline and yet I think we need new theaters. Like we need.

They're trying that I think. I don't know if that's working. You mean kind of like. Yeah, I don't get a certain experience or something?

Well, if I. I think last time I went and saw a movie was with John and we got like 20 of our friends together to go see Dune, I think and like the actual experience of being in a theater under these like you go from being under like bright LEDs in a mall, which I don't go to malls and I'm in bright LEDs and I don't like the smell of movie theater popcorn personally. It just, I'm like, that smells like porn poison. I don't want it. And then you go into. And so the whole experience for me is like, yeah, I'm never going to do that. But if you built a theater from the ground up, as in an opinionated way, like some type of like almost treating it like a true hospitality experience, there's probably a much better chance that I would go. Not certain that there's a real business there yet, but maybe there hasn't been enough attempts there.

The Amman Giri of theaters, it's like two grand per ticket. That's the way to do it.

Yeah, the iman needs to take over.

Yeah, I mean that somewhat happened in my town. In my town there used to be two theaters where you'd sit like shoulder to shoulder with everyone. And now both of those theaters have way down scoped the number of seats. The seats are huge. They serve you dinner, there's wine, there's drinks. And like they're trying to get 500 bucks out of you or 200 bucks out of you. You're not going in on a matinee, $10 with like cheap popcorn and getting out of there. They want to monetize it like it's a restaurant, because it's a lot of physical space. Like, the square footage is a lot.

But basically, I mean, someone was just telling me that the theaters really are only still in New York and la.

Oh, really?

Yeah. I mean, I was thinking the opposite, frankly. I thought, okay, but someone said, no, you can't even go to a movie theater in a small town.

They've all closed. Wow, it's rough.

This is what someone told me.

I'd love to talk about the art.

Art.

Just the art market. Obviously. Miami has gotten a lot of attention over the last week or so.

Yeah.

And he's still got. He went viral a couple of years ago.

Well, yeah, I'm particularly excited to get your opinion because every now you keep. I've been seeing some headlines recently where it's like, the art market is back. And then I talk to people that are actually working in art and they're like, it's absolutely not back. And so I think there's somewhat of a disconnect where maybe there's a effort to tell people that it's back, but I don't know if the sales velocity is really there. But how are you processing things?

Of course, we have to believe our own hype. I mean, I think that there's been a fundamental shift in the art world.

Call it, since 2024.

I think that there's been so many factors that have changed the landscape of the art world, certainly as it's been in the last 20 or 30 years. I think that. Look, I think, sure, it's better, right? Like we had Art Basel Paris. Everyone said, okay, the art market's back, it's better. I think Frieze London had reported strong sales. I spoke to a big gallery recently that said that 2025, every single Basel this year was a record for the them. Now, of course, like anything you take a fair like art Basel, there's 300 galleries. So you can take a really strong year where everyone says the market's on fire and you can find a dealer who didn't do well that year. I think that. I think the statistic that someone was throwing around, and I'm not sure if this is accurate, is something like, you know, total volume of sales is down 10%.

I don't know exactly where the art market is. I think that there's definitely been a very serious correction. I think that a correction ultimately yields a lot of positive things in an art market. So I don't think it's back to the kind of frenzy. 800 person waiting list for a painter two years out of Yale that we were in. But I do think that there's some momentum. I think that there's been, speaking of some consolidation, there's been some mid tier, even some bigger galleries closing and just I think, think a lot of shifts in the market. But I think that Miami was net positive for the most people I talked to in sales. And I think that you still have, I mean, look, call me optimistic, but you still have these collectors who are, you know, they're not the speculative part of the market. They're not buying an artist because they think that they're going to get a multiple of, you know, 10 or 100. I think, I do think, however, that even if the collector isn't looking to ever sell, that kind of data sometimes does kind of feed a little bit of a sparkle and an energy. But I do think that there are collectors who buy in good markets and bad markets. And I think.

The last call it since fall, it's definitely gotten better. Are we back? No. But is it better? Yes.

What's the secret to successfully participating in Art Basel if you're a company or a brand? I've seen a bunch of just selling.

Just selling, just selling. I mean, you know, as, you know, it costs them. It's a significant investment. Right. They're buying the space, they're shipping the artwork, they're having their team come, you know, they put, you know, lots of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars behind the fair. So selling the art, which often can be up to $20 million of art, is success.

Makes sense.

Yeah.

It's been.

We did an interesting story on the economics of a mid tier gallery.

Okay.

That published last week, that talks a little bit about how when you're not selling $20 million of art, how you get through Miami or how you get through a fair and make the economics work. Because there's certainly a tipping point in which it works and a tipping point in which sometimes dealers are trying to meet new collectors, show new work, and it's financially not viable.

What are the highest leverage things that a mid tier gallery can do is that stuff like leave some of the art at home and, you know, more digital representations of the art. And is that the cost structure or the cost savings?

Yeah, part of it is that a certain gallery might represent, like if you represent 20 artists, it's possible that there's ton of demand for two of the artists and almost zero, like negative demand. You have to pay people to take some of the other stuff. So that's a factor, I think. But tell me if I'm wrong.

I mean, it depends. Look, I think that not every dealer is just market driven and there's maybe work that they haven't shown that they want to see how the reaction is. Or there's always a surprise of some interest. But yeah, no, it's financially difficult. I mean, a lot of the galleries, it's kind of like I kind of equate it to emerging artists. We all know so many artists who are so successful and so financially successful, but there is that point where you're just so close to losing money or not quite making it, and that's like a very fine line between the other side and leaving at a loss.

What tech billionaires or tech elite are doing the most for the arts right now? Because I feel like there's historically been a criticism of the tech industry where you have people that make a lot of money and then they're just like, I'm just gonna spend $100 million on anti aging. I'm not gonna fund the next.

Museum museum or build a castle or etc.

I don't know if that's entirely true. I think what the truth.

I'm not saying I believe it's true, but I'm just saying historically, that's like one criticism.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. I mean, I think what a lot of the tech billionaires that I know that have built unbelievable collections have done is not shown their work, not shown their collections. So I think a lot of people aren't aware of the level in which some of these tech billionaires are A, interested in art and B, collect so deeply. So in terms of, you know, underwriting museums or programs.

I don't know. I mean, do we need more tech billionaires to buy more art? Of course. And then, yeah, definitely.

This is putting the word out. I'm sure that will actually. That should catalyze at least. At least a few million of new art purchases for people in our audience that are kind of maybe on the fence about buying.

Not sure.

Should I, Should I not? What do you think about. What do you think about. About the sphere? Because we have.

A general belief that.

It is in Vegas.

Yeah, yeah. No, it just feels like there was again a criticism that we forgot how to make beautiful, massive. We forgot how to make cathedrals. And yet the sphere feels like it is the most commercial piece of art maybe ever. But when you look at it on the skyline in Venice, Vegas, like, this is a modern.

It's America's Mona Lisa.

Okay, let me say I have never been to the Sphere.

Wow. Uncultured. Uncultured.

Is this uncultured? Did you start Uncultured?

Uncultured magazine?

I know that's what I should really name my magazine. But I have to tell you that I do know a few artists who have been to the Sphere who said it's pretty incredible.

Yeah, it is wild. I mean, it's remarkable in, like a cyberpunk way.

Totally, totally.

Not necessarily.

Can I.

In a beautiful way. Absolutely. You should absolutely go. To experience the new canvas that is the Sphere. No, obviously.

It is a. It's a capitalist monument.

How do you rate? How do you. How are you processing LA as of late? To me, it's starting to feel like Detroit of the West. It feels like.

No, it just feels like this was a center for art and culture and entertainment, and traditional Hollywood has been so battered that it's like the buildings are less beautiful. I think the streets were always dirty, but the restaurants are less full. There's not as many new great restaurants as I think there may have once been. It feels somewhat kind of heartbroken in secular decline. Heartbroken, too.

I mean, look, I did open an office in New York this year, and I've been mostly in New York this year. I think, Look, L.A. is a great city. It's at a downturn. I think that's, you know, I think most people that I know that could leave, left. Someone was saying to me the other day that we're like. We're kind of like just post Covid now with la and how out of COVID kind of LA was really all of the sectors and all of the things that you just mentioned were kind of growing on the up and up. There was a lot of energy around it. And then after the fires last January, things kind of leveled out. And I think that, look, we all know it's a great city. The energy moves. I think the energy's not there right now. I'm sure it'll come back.

Yeah. I asked a good friend of mine, very controversial figure in the art world, Stefan Simcoet.

Oh, I know him well.

I was like, give me.

What did he say?

He probably said, ellie's great.

No, no, the example. I was like, hey, our lease expires next year. We're looking for a new space. And I was like, are there any, like, massive, amazing art galleries that you think are going to shut down? And he was like, I can. He immediately was like, here's four. And so again.

Are you texting him right now?

No, I didn't text him, they're not four. He's exaggerating, but that's funny.

Well, I think there's a handful because I got offered to tour them. But.

Anyways, I mean, look, LA is.

Not known for its collectors. Sure, there was a great experiment. I mean, look how many galleries opened in LA Post2020. I mean, I know some dealers who said, I'm just. I'm opening in LA to show great work, not to cultivate more collectors. A lot of the great collectors in LA sometimes buy in New York. So I think the fact that LA is having a, let's just say a more challenging moment and some of the galleries there are closing. I talked to a few of my friends who have great galleries in LA and they said, let's not even talk about sales. Foot traffic is down.

So.

Yeah, and some of the places we've looked at. Mike, you're spending $100,000 a month for a place that doesn't get any foot traffic. That is like. I mean, when we're visiting, it's like during normal hours and they're just empty. So anyways, definitely correction in the works. But as you said, it can be healthy. So anyways, I wish we had more time. This was super fun.

Anytime.

Thanks for coming on.

Anytime you want the tech industry to do something like buy more art, come on the show.

But it was great to meet you.

Yeah, nice to meet you.

Thanks.

Forward to talking again soon.

We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks so much.

Cheers.

Merry Christmas. Our next guest is from the General Intelligence Company of New York. He's waiting in the Restream waiting room. We have Andrew Pagnanelli. I hope I'm saying that correctly. Andrew, sorry to keep you waiting. How are you?

What's happening?

Thanks so much for hopping on. Please introduce yourself, introduce the company and give us the news. What's.

Yeah, so my name's Andrew, actually.

The Flow. The flow. Can we get a side profile of the flow real quick?

Hit the gong for the flow. Hit the gong for the flow. For the flow. There we go.

Nice, nice.

Sorry to interrupt.

They do like the hair. They definitely like the hair.

That's great. That's.

Yeah, I mean, I.

Sorry, I think it's a little bit of a delay here. My name is Andrew, I run General Intelligence. Today we just announced our $8.7 million seed round which.

Send it. John again.

Let's go.

Incredible. Who led?

Was led by usv. So, you know, we're a New York based company. We love New York City. We wanted someone who was right here at home. And I only have to walk two blocks for the board meeting, which is really nice.

That's amazing.

Give us the history. I mean, first time on the show obviously followed you for probably, I don't know, a year, close to a year now. But what, yeah, give us kind of the origins what you guys are working on, all that good stuff.

Yeah. So we started working on this about a year ago with this kind of crazy idea of like what if we could get agents to run companies. And we really worked backwards from that. We picked let's go with the craziest thing we can do because I bet that there's a way for us to get resources for it. And if the idea is a little bit crazier, they'll give us more resources, sources. And so we picked that, me and my co founder abhi, and we started working on it. We started working on a demo. We worked on it for about two months and then in March we were like, let's turn this into a company. So the initial demo was just an agent that could call some tools. And then we did a small round in March led by Compound, ran the company for about six months before launching co founder in September. And we were able to make that launch go very, very well.

Well.

And so, you know, we, we got viral with that. People loved it. People really liked using the product. We went viral through the sweaters too. The sweaters actually helped us promote our product more than probably the product itself.

Wait, so what was co founder and what was the sweater was co founder wearing? The sweater.

You know, co founder is a plant. So I have a bunch of them right here. That's, that's co founder and it's like this AI chief of staff. So it will let you hook stuff up and do automations. And we've built it into this very proactive assistant feeling thing. So you're not just really telling it what to do. It will actually prompt you instead of you having to prompt it. And we wanted to figure out how do we promote this. And so I went and I got these sweaters made and they're like very rainbowy. They have all the different colors on them.

They have a logo name on there too. That's cool.

Yeah, it's like underutilized merch format.

Yes. I never see cozy sweater. Cozy sweater. That's cool. Very cool.

Yeah.

And we posted about them like we just got our first shipment of them. I just posted a photo and it goes VI. It gets like a million plus views. And I, I go from having like 300 followers to a couple thousand and we were gonna launch three days later. And so this made it really easy for us to launch and, and have co founder do.

Yeah. So I mean how do you think the business actually evolves? Do you think that there's a world where the product is plugging into all of the enterprise tools? It seems like with even just the co founder branding, it feels like this is an early stage product or that's at least the early adopter would be a small company. You're not coming into a company where it's like, yeah, we already have a data LAKE and they 5,000 employees and we need you to go around and find stuff. It's much more of a, you know, an early stage tool. Is that correct or you think it'll grow? Like how do you think the use case will change over the next few years as you build out the business?

Yeah, so it's definitely early stage. We want people who are, let's say between like 3 and 50 people on smaller companies. But we're really going from, from co founder to this full stack AI business. So our goal is to get agents to run companies and we've decided, you know, we're not going to be able to do that by adding one piece to an assistant until it gets really far. We're actually working on a full stack AI business. We realized while building this ourselves that we had this ability to make these workflows internally where you're taking like a customer support ticket and you can directly plug that into an agent that writes some code and plug it into an agent that reviews and QAs the feature and then ships it to Prod without any people involved. And so we're sprinting towards this entire business.

With just agents and we think we can get there by March.

What kind of businesses do you think are most.

The name implies you're trying to build a general intelligence. I imagine that means an AI that could run any business. But have you thought about specific types of businesses that are best suited to be run by an agent? And, and how are, how are you like testing the product? I understand you probably tested internally with your own team, but yeah, when you talk about like timeline to an agent running an entire business by March, like what kind of business is that? What, like how do you make that more concrete?

Yeah, so.

Some of the things that we test are the ability to actually do something end to end. Right. So this whole write a piece of code that can get shipped to Prod without any people involved, that's something you can test. Right. If it breaks prod, it's going to be a failure there. But we're working on this with a couple of businesses, smaller businesses internally, and like, there's not public yet, but the way that the business looks is very similar to ourselves. So it's a software company in B2B, and it also relies a lot on how the agent market develops. So we rely on other agents by other companies, like a coding agent where we're going to be using looks like Factory or Tembo or something like that. Customer support agents by companies like Sierra and decagon, and then sales market agents like Rocks.

Rocks.

We're going to be building this in a way that, like, leans on those agents, and those are conducive to a B2B software company. And that's really what we're building first.

That's very cool. Are you AGI pilled?

Very AGI pilled. You know, we all have different definitions, right? And so my personal definition, it's in my Twitter bio. I keep it the. The timeline that I think we're going to have to AGI, and it's much faster than everybody else's. But my definition is like, tomorrow.

It's tomorrow.

Tomorrow. My timeline is tomorrow.

Really?

5.2.

We'll see.

Yeah, 5.2 is my AGI for sure.

We're thinking about it. You know her, the movie Her?

Yeah.

My personal definition is, when do we get that A. We already have people falling in love with.

Don't we already have that just with some of the population?

Yeah. I mean, we're kind of close. Right? Like, some of the stuff that you could do today is 90% of what you can do in that movie. And I bet within the next 12 months it'll be 100%.

Yeah, it's sort of like a diffusion question because, like, smartphones have arrived. They're Amish people. They don't use smartphones. Right. Like, there are plenty of people that don't. There's probably millions of people that don't use smartphones for a variety of reasons.

I believe, like, for, you know, 100 years, there will be people that will be like, I don't talk to clankers. Right. But at the same time, like, we are pretty close. Anyway, we can talk about AGI for the next two hours, but we have to move on. So thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations. Yeah.

Great to meet finally. Congrats on the progress we're gonna keep. We should. We should add, like, something to our ticker. Like, what is Andrew's AGI time. Yeah, get the, we'll, we'll get the update daily. But yeah, congrats on. Congrats on progress.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye.

Cheers.

Let me tell you about wander.com, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amazing dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Folks. Our next guest is Brian Meller from Stable. He's the CEO and we have some big news from them. Let's bring him in. How are you doing, Brian?

Merry Christmas. Good to see you. How are you doing? Please, since you're new on the show, introduce yourself, introduce the company. Love to hear about what you're building. Sure.

Well, thanks for having me. I'm Brian Mailer. I'm the Stable CEO of Stable. For those that don't know we're a layer one blockchain. We're focused on, you know, redefining the payment rails that money moves through whether it's cross borders or across country. So you know, we launched earlier today, was a big, big event for us.

We have the Mainet launch.

Thank you.

And.

Relaunch. That's good.

Okay, so.

The obvious question is why another stablecoin, right?

Well, no, I mean, not necessarily. So you're building a new L1 for payments. It seems like.

Every single layer one blockchain, maybe not every single one. Some are more obviously like hyper liquid, more trading focus. And there's other. But everybody's going after the payment opportunity for obvious reasons like how do different layer ones differentiate what's going to separate Stable from other players? Like how. How is Stable kind of more opinionated? I'm sure it's opinionated in ways that maybe like, you know, Tempo isn't or Solana isn't it, et cetera. And so yeah. Curious how you're differentiating.

Yeah, it's a great question and we get it a lot. And I think the way that we're able to answer it best best is by talking about whether it's the team that's backed us. So we have PayPal Ventures, we have We Advisors like Paolo from CEO of Tether. We're partnered with Anchorage. So we have a very good tool set that we're playing with that's able to help us launch. But in addition to that, getting a little bit more of the technical side of things is our gas token which is usually a complication of other chains is USDT. So for that when people are moving money, the 70 to 80% of the stablecoins out there in the world right now is being used as usdt. And that's what you use to pay your fees on our network, Rather than having a complication about buying another token and worrying about other chains for us, you're able to just use USDT and spend usdt. So that's, I think, our biggest differentiator that we have right now. And then in addition to that is also the speed. So when you want to use a traditional layer one, let's say Ethereum, you want to move USDT there.

You know, it's slow and, and it's.

Expensive and it's volatile in gas, and we got tired of that, so we just ripped it out and put in usdt, which everyone knows and is already using as our gas token.

So sounds like you have some awesome partners lined up already. How does this market shape out? Is it kind of a land grab right now where you're trying to sign up as many institutions to support Stable or make you their preferred L1 for moving stablecoins between them and other institutions or internally? How does that. That look?

Yeah, I mean, you're definitely right there. It's definitely busy. There's a lot of people wanting to, to get out the picks and shovels and start digging. And we, I think we're, we're ahead of that. So we're already launched, as we said today, and that's kind of like a big milestone for us. So we got into the build phase and got into the launch phase. But I would say in terms of, like, why it's an attractive market is that everyone uses money and there's a frustration of using it. Whether you're using traditional credit cards or checks or whatever, if you're still using cash, that's just a complication that people are kind of tired of dealing with and they don't understand why, you know, if you're, if you're trying to buy something on the weekend and you need to like, wire some over, like $2,000 that you can't go get on Zelle or Venmo, like, you got to wait till Monday. And that's just a weird complication that I think a lot of people are getting tired of. And so using stablecoins in an easy sense is kind of how we're solving that problem.

Go for it.

So, yeah, I'm just wondering more of, like, help me understand.

What folks are using tether directly for versus what value prop you build. Obviously you're friendly and partnered in many ways, but how does that relationship evolve over the next few years with tether?

Look, I would say tether is just on a growth trajectory that is pretty unmatched, matched. So we're happy to be part of that ride and help facilitate it. I think Heather exists on a number of chains, and that's one of the facilities that we're able to provide, is a chain that it runs faster, easier, and less expensive. That's really what we're doing. Find their message.

Okay, cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come explain that to us. Appreciate having you on the show, and Merry Christmas.

Sure you'll be back on soon.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

Congrats on. Congrats on the launch. Super excited. Exciting.

Have a good one.

Appreciate it.

Goodbye.

Thanks.

Up next, we have Will Wilson from antithesis. On December 3, Jane street led antithesis, their $105 million Series A to make deterministic simulation the new testing standard. They have an incredibly stacked list of investors. Dwarkesh Patel, Shelto Douglas, and Patrick Collison.

Whoa. Two out of the. Two out of the three roommates.

Yeah. Well, what happened? What happened? You didn't do a roadshow where you go from bedroom to bedroom showing off what you built. And they're like, do you want to invest? Sharks. I imagine you sit down and you say, sharks.

Sharks.

Here's what I'm building.

You know, it's funny. I think they all ended up coming in for very different reasons, but we're certainly very.

You got Dylan. He just wasn't. He wasn't big enough to get up.

To the press release.

Brutal. Brutal.

I cannot comment on investors who may or may not be in our press release.

Okay, well, thank you so much. Please explain this to me. Like, I'm not Dwarkash and I'm not a researcher at Anthropic. What are you building at? Like, a very, very basic level. Who's the customer? What's the problem you're solving? And then I do want you to walk me through some of the technology as much as we can, but I'd like to start with just like the high level problem description, if possible. Sure.

Okay. So the super basic problem description is like Marc Andreessen once said that software is eating the world. And I think that's true. I think AI has made that more true. And the thing is, that's actually kind of a bad thing in some ways because software doesn't work very well. I feel like we all have Stockholm syndrome about this. When I walk into a building, I don't wonder in the back of my head, is this building going to collapse on me? And yet every time I use a software product, I know there's some random chance that it's just going to totally fail. And if you think about it, that's really not okay. And that's what we're trying to fix. We don't think it has to be that way. We think the reason it is that way is because people have been building and testing software wrong for the last 70 years. Which is like, maybe a slightly hubristic and crazy thing to say, but we think we've got a better way to do it.

I have an ongoing war with Rune about whether or not the United app has gotten better or worse over the past few years because I use it as a heuristic for like AI diffusion. Because he'll say, hey, the AI models are amazing. You just yell at the Codex model, it'll do exactly what you want. I'm like, oh really? Well then why did I have a bug in my United app when I was trying to fly across the country?

Well, maybe they haven't adopted it.

And then he'll tell me it's actually way better. They actually are improving their software. But walk me through deterministic simulation. What does that look like in practice? If I have a piece of software, I have some vibe coded slop app that I'm worried about completely blowing up and leaking all my users data and you know, and failing to work in a bunch of different scenarios. Like how am I actually using your product? Am I plugging in what's going on? What's the workflow? Yeah.

Okay, so here's the basic idea. So like the traditional way people test software is you have your app and you sit down and you think really hard and you use your big brain and you're like, what are all the situations that this thing could run in? What are all the things that people could do? What are all the situations has to handle? And then I sit down, I the developer, right, And I write a bunch of manual test cases for each of those things and make sure that they run in my CI system or whatever. And that's like, hooray, I've tested my software. Except you've totally not tested your software, right? Because the thing that's actually going to blow up and totally screw you and be a disaster is not something that you thought of, it's something that you didn't think of, right? It's like an unknown unknown. And so we have the exact opposite approach. We say instead we're just going to take your actual software and we're going to run it in a simulation of the real world and we're going to throw the kitchen sink at it. We're going to have the worst users ever doing the worst things ever and it's going to be running in the worst data center ever and computers are going to be crashing and hackers are.

Going to be trying to break it.

Whatever, it's just going to be really awful. And then we're going to see what actually happens empirically. You can tell us, hey, here's the stuff I promise my software will never do do. And we're going to see if we can find a way to make it do that.

Why are you framing this as deterministic simulation? That sounds like a whole lot of non deterministic stuff going on.

Yeah, so the key is we have the slightly crazy computer science thing we've done. Well, no, one of the slightly crazy things we've done is we've basically built a way to run any computer program fully, deterministically, which is a little nuts, but it's really, really important because it gets rid of the works on my machine thing for forever. So if we find some really weird, really rare software problem which only manifests one a billion times, but like, you know, it launches the nuclear missiles and so you really don't want it to happen even 1 billion times, we can perfectly reproduce that. So if we find it once, you can just replay it over and over and over again until you're able to fix it.

Interesting.

What's the, what is the, what is the like sci fi scenario that you're building against, like is this is part of this tie in? Like I'm trying to understand why like specifically why you got the roommate 3 Pete. Because software testing is cool, but I imagine there's like kind of this like, you know, 10 year vision, like AGI vision, where we need to test for that, you know, one out of a billion.

Times that the nuclear missile codes get launched or the whole surface of the planet is blanketed with solar.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think, I think if you believe that we're about to go into like a very exciting AI future, then I think there's probably going to be a whole lot more software written and probably some of it's going to be written by entities that are not like you and me. They're like some kind of AI agent. Maybe we don't fully understand them, maybe we don't fully understand their incentives or their motivations or their failure modes or whatever. Seems like having a really, really good way of telling if software does what you think it does would be handy in that scenario.

That makes sense. So somebody makes an AI agent.

That processes things that were faxed in and there's some faxed into a doctor's office and there's some edge case where it hires a private army and tries to kill the fax machine company. And you're like, well, an agent wrote this agent. So we need to actually, actually has to make sure it's not like secretly, like completely insane.

Right.

You've got that. And then you've also just got more prosaic and boring situations.

Right.

Like I hired an AI agent to like write the next version of the United app and like, oops, like if I'm, if I'm in the middle of booking a ticket when my subway train goes into a tunnel, it books like 10 million tickets. Like, I don't, I don't want that. United doesn't want that. You know.

No, I like, I like this opportunity. You can sell, you can sell the product against like very real problems today and also get the, and still like, you know, have the this like, bigger, very like real, kind of like sci fi element to it.

Okay. So I have the interpretation of roommate ventures coming in. I don't have the interpretation of the implications of Jane street coming in.

Is this relevant to high frequency trading software or are they just purely financial investors? Like, how strategic are they as a partner?

Oh, yeah. So the way we got Jane street in this actually is just that it started out as them being a customer.

Okay, wow.

They've been one of our best and largest customers for a little under a year and have really put the system through its paces and are using it to do some really, really cool stuff.

Yeah.

And basically what initially happened was we were raising around, we planned to go the standard Silicon Valley route.

And we were just going to have Jane street put in a small amount of money as a strategic. And then they offered to lead the round, which we were not expecting. And we sort of thought about it and we were like, wait a minute, that's actually the coolest thing ever.

What?

An endorsement from one of the greatest names in software. How can we not do this?

Have you considered writing your code base in OCaml?

I think it's likely that there's going be to be excellent ocaml support in our platform.

Fantastic. That's the best news I've heard all day.

Hit the gong. For that.

Very, very cool.

That's great news.

One of the more unique fundraising announcements we've had this year.

Yeah, this is a fun, fun project. I really like it. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

I'm sure you'll be back on soon.

Indeed.

Thank you.

I'm sure you're already getting unwanted term sheets, you know, hurled at you.

I believe it.

Enjoy. Enjoy processing those.

Yeah, awesome.

Have a good one, guys.

Thank you.

We'll talk to you soon.

Good to meet.

Well, have a good one. And that brings us towards the end of our show. Perfectly timed 2:00pm on the dot. We are in fighting form.

We're gonna play you out with some Christmas music. I saw. Suppose. In other news, markets are predicting that the time Person of the Year will either be the Pope. Who's concerned about AI the biggest promoter of AI, Sam Altman, the supplier of the hardware behind AI Jensen. Or just AI. It seems almost certain it's a lock that time 2025 person of the Year will have something to do with AI.

In other news. Where. Where else is. Oh. Oh. We didn't get to SpaceX news, but it was rumored that SpaceX told, or is reported, actually, in the information by Katie Roof that SpaceX told their investors we're aiming for IPO late 2026. Late 2026. We're going to be a public company, but a lot of people are interpreting this, reading the tea leaves you have Ken Kirtland saying. I'm not exaggerating, it's not doomposting to say this, but this is the end. They are not serious. They are not serious about any part of Mars if this is done. There's no world where shareholders will let you spend tens of billions of dollars with the express intent of no return, which is what Mars settlement is. In fact, it would be illegal, literally illegal to do so. Not true at all. Look at the Metaverse. Look at what Meta did. If you have control over the company, you can, you can see, spend what he said. $86 billion is what Zuckerberg.

I'm just expecting SpaceX's telecom business to do tens of billions of profits.

Yes, if you get big enough. I mean, SpaceX, I think, to date has burned something like 10 billion across all the fundraising. And a lot of that's been like secondary stuff, so they haven't burnt that much. And of course, people are dunking on Zuck right now for pulling back on the Metaverse. Austin Allred had a good post here. He said fire Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuck. Zuckerberg fired. You kind of botched this. But said Mark Zuckerberg fired because he lost the company 77 billion should probably consider that he also made his company 1.6 trillion. And so the same thing could definitely be true. So I believe if SpaceX went public, that would not necessarily take the foot off the gas of the Mars mission. I don't think that's necessarily what would happen. But Dan Primack has a little bit more nuance of a take here talking about what might be happening behind the scenes. Says SpaceX prepping late 2026 IPO per the information. Not just Starlink, which is what people were rumoring they'd spin out. Starlink. I don't think that makes any sense. But this comes just after. Just comes just days after reports that OpenAI was weighing an entry into space. So maybe it's a bit of PR maneuvering, given that Elon Musk doesn't seem to like having a public company. He took Twitter private and then he wanted to take Tesla private too.

And then Katie Roof says, does he even have PR people?

Lol.

Dan Primack says don't need PR people to have a PR strategy. And yeah, he might have directly emailed all the investors that he knew would leak. And that doesn't require a PR person. And so Elon actually chimed in and he said there's been a lot of press claiming that SpaceX is raising money at $800 billion, which is not accurate. SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many years and does periodic stock buybacks twice a year to provide liquidity for employees and investors. Valuation increments are a function of progress with Starship and Starlink. And securing Global Direct to sell Spectrum greatly increases our addressable market. And one thing, that one other thing that is arguably most significant thus far, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway.

Ridiculous.

John, I gotta say, I'm bummed that we gotta end the show right now.

We do. We do.

You gotta get on with Pasadena.

I do.

You got some celebrating to do over in that. In that area.

Neck of the wood.

I can't wait for tomorrow. I'm so happy to be back in the Ultra Dome. I'm glad we don't have to travel for the rest of the year.

No travel for the rest of the year.

We're hanging out.

We're hanging out.

We're podcasting. The team is thrilled. We're thrilled. Thank you for hanging out with us today.

Thank you, everyone.

We love you all dearly.

We'll talk to you soon.

Have an amazing evening. We will see you tomorrow.

Goodbye.

Cheers.

Bye.