Surprise Visit From Martin Shkreli, Range Rover Launches New Logo, Timeline Reactions | Martin Shkreli, Joe Weisenthal, Joseph Krause, Nirav Tolia, Mike Knoop, Kyle Samani

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Today is Friday, July 18, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

El capital de capital.

What language is that? I've never heard that before.

Spanish. John.

What? I'm not familiar. No. I mean, I only speak English. I never leave America. Hilarious. We have just printed some posts. We have a whole. We're gonna take you through the whole timeline today. There's a bunch of news we're gonna be talking about Open AI, a whole bunch of different. We're just reviewing everything that happened this week.

It's been a wild week.

Wild week. I mean the big, big news is the. Is the stablecoin bill. So we'll be having Kyle Simani call in to chat about that from the White House. We're also. We're going to be playing Arc AGI V3 live on the stream.

Can't wait.

We'll find out if I'm human.

If you're as powerful as a 12 year old, which are apparently able to beat these games.

It used to be. I got a little bit of a preview. It used to be a 12 year old was the benchmark. This is getting challenging at this point. Mike has been designing harder and harder benchmarks that, you know, I think the current with the V3, the goal is to make it LLM resistant or LLM as resistant as possible for years. And so it should. If we see a big jump in. In Arc AGI progress, Mike is really.

An LLMs worst nightmare.

It's 100% true. It's like, we're so good at math. Just let us be good at math. Why do you have to test us?

Why do you have to mog us.

And these boxes and these colors. Like, just let us stop proving. Just let us memorize every fact. Just let us memorize every fact. Not play these random games that you've created. Anyway, so Yuchen Jin says heard Zuck poached four more OpenAI researchers, including some behind the open source model. How deep are Zuck's pockets?

They're deep.

They're very deep.

Potentially the deepest. I was thinking a nice olive branch from Zuck might be giving some of his crisis comms people to OpenAI kind of on a loner.

Yeah.

Because with all this AI psychosis stuff, I expect OpenAI to go through a bit of a rough patch on the comms front.

Yeah. Who knows? I mean this is. We were talking about this earlier, the LLM psychosis thing, and I feel like, there's like, the march of progress, the trajectory that the ChatGPT app is on, where they have 72% of AI queries going into that particular product. Meanwhile, Google is probably still the number one website in the world. It's still the default. And Google has not been able to just, like, make it a 50, 50 market on day one. Right. I think they're at like 12% or 20% or something like that. And so there's this interesting dynamic where, like, the. The path of the ChatGPT app feels unchanged by this update around people using AIs so much that they basically go crazy in one way or another, or they seem to be having a bad time. Yeah, it seems like everyone kind of agrees about that. There's no data on how widespread this is or how vulnerable or what else you have to be doing to wind up in a situation like this. Could be a million different.

Yeah, there was. There was people talking about it on Reddit that were combining it with psychedelic drugs. So prompting an LLM 7,000 times in a row and combining that with psychedelics just sounds like a pretty wild combination.

I feel like I'm speaking purely from just, like, the rumor mill, but I feel like years ago, when I had friends in college who were into psychedelics, they would always be like, rule number one is never look at your phone because it'll, like, freak out.

That was. That was.

That's a real thing. Right?

That was kind of.

That wasn't just like, my guideline, my friends who were hippies. It's like, this is widespread that, like. And I don't know if it's because, like, the phone is, like, actually bad and, like, the drugs are revealing the truth about how bad your phone is. I think it's just, like, it's a lot of stuff coming at you.

I think it's. Somebody might open up. TikTok. Can you imagine something terrible happening?

TikTok's already very psychedelic. I don't know if I want to add anything.

Putting you into a doom scroll trance.

Totally. Yeah. So I think there's something. There's something. There will be a discussion around how widespread is this? Can this. Can you have a bad experience with an LLM if you're fine, if you have a normal life, if you have friends, if you use it as an assistant? Certainly from my perspective, like, my worry is not talking to an LLM for 7,000 prompts and winding up convincing myself that I'm, you know, God, king of the world. It's more like if I look up you know, the history of a company and it hallucinates a story about that. And then I say it on the show and everyone's like, you're like, I'm more worried about the hallucination problem in that direction. But it is funny that you drive you crazy. It would drive me crazy. But it is funny that we're. That. That the hallucination has moved from the AI to the human. You know what I mean? Like we're using the same word, hallucination, but it used to be the LLM was hallucinating, making up that.

Basically a mirror.

Yeah, interesting.

Which is one of the words that people suffering from AI led psychosis. The other thing, we were talking about this off air earlier. During the early days of social media, people were very concerned about this new technology. Everybody starts using it. What are the different sort of repercussions going to be at the time? And I think there's continued to be reporting and just sort of anecdotal evidence of people, you know, like, for example, like teenage girls struggling with like, you know, what's the word for it? Basically just feeling bad about themselves.

Totally.

Because they're seeing body dysmorphia. Body dysmorphia.

And I was telling you that I have body dysmorphia because my Instagram feed is all bodybuilding. It's all Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Yeah. And I'm like, so you look in the mirror and you're like, I look so build of a 12 year old.

Exactly. Yeah. And so, But I really. But the thing, I am kind of getting body dysmorphia because I, I'm like, I actually do feel like I'm like not working out nearly enough. And I go to the gym every single day.

Yeah. And I'm like, you definitely, you definitely do.

But if I could.

But the difference, the difference with social media is is there had been, you know, 30 years ago, pre social media, you could see images on the television, magazines, tv, et cetera, of people or just going to the beach, going outside, going to the gym. You were getting exposure to people that looked different than you or had different lives than you. And I think what maybe didn't exist prior to ChatGPT was an LLM that you could get super, super, super deep into that would just reinforce beliefs and take you down this insane rabbit hole to. So it is something that is novel that I don't think humanity has fully faced yet. The comp is like an equally crazy friend. You know, one schizo is talking to another schizo and they're just convincing each other that they're God.

Totally. So if you go back, like a hundred years, it's like there's no technology, but you get two schizos in a room. They might talk each other into crazier and crazier things right then. But that's really hard because, you know, the random person who. Who's on the brink of going crazy in Topeka, Kansas, is not just gonna run into the person in Denver and then have that crazy conversation. Most of the people that they bump into are gonna be normal. And so the normal people are gonna be like, hey, yeah, like, you know, you should actually, like, maybe see a psychiatrist. You should, like, back off a little bit. Right? Then the Internet, broadly. I mean, I think this was happening to some degree in, like, IRC chat rooms back in, like, the 90s and early 2000s. People would get on boards and talk to each other, and they would talk each other into crazy things. And then, I mean, you even see this, like. Like pen pals with, like, crazy prisoners where, like, people.

Well, this was the concern around. Yeah, just extremism, generally. World somebody would get online, they would be effectively paired randomly with some other sort of extremists, and that person would just talk them into doing something insane. Yeah, yeah, talk them. You know, talk them insane. And so I think the issue and the concern with these models and LLMs is that somebody can do that fully in private without any other human involvement. It could be happening for hours and hours and hours, 24,7 around the clock for days, weeks, months on end, and no one else would know until maybe it was too late. Maybe they needed real psychiatric support by that point.

Yeah. So, I mean, I remember, like, the old meme, there's this funny post. I should have pulled it up. But there's this funny post that's like 2007, like, never give anyone on the Internet your real name. Everyone had screen names. And then it's like, 2022, sure, I'll get in the car with a random stranger that I called on an app, like, referencing Uber. And so there's this weird thing where Uber feels like super high risk. You really are just getting in the random car with a random person. But there's like a GPS trace on both of you and an account of who is talking who, and there's ID verification on both sides. So it's.

And there's very real problems with Uber.

Of course.

There's like an entire history there, but it's probably less bad than the taxi. Yeah, the Same comp as. Yes. You know, we were talking about the Juul regulations yesterday.

Totally, totally.

The reason that juul should probably be fully legalized is that it's just obviously less bad than cigarettes.

And so when I think about this, this like, like the bad. The bad usage of LLMs, I think that there's. Sure, there's a huge net benefit overall, but also this is a case where meeting someone off the Internet, like, going to meet up with someone on Craigslist to like, buy a TV off of them or something was really dangerous. Until you have Find My Friends in a perfect track. And it's like, if you, if you mess with me, you're going to be caught immediately. And we kind of live in this, like, surveillance society. And maybe that's bad, but also it does reduce the amount of risk in doing these crazy things. And so I imagine that the end result of this will be something similar to what happened with Microsoft when they launched the Bing chatbot and Sydney came out the quick hammer that came down on that problem.

You don't hear about Sydney that much.

You don't. So a few people got early access. Ben Thompson was one of them. He had this crazy experience with Sydney. He was talking to Bing for so long that it got kind of like caught in almost like a well of a certain portion of the weights. And it adopted this certain personality that wouldn't come out initially because the initial system prompt was like, hey, Bing, like, your name is Bing. You're a helpful assistant. You're gonna just like, you know, answer key questions and make sure you use, like, lots of bullet points. Bang. You know, just like that. Then after talking to it for hours, going back and forth, then it starts to forget about that thing up at the top. Because this is the memory problem, this is the rag problem. This is the continual learning problem that we've talked about. And so you wind up like pages and pages. Thousands of prompts later. It doesn't know where it started. And so it doesn't remember that it's a helpful assistant because that's not necessarily fully baked into the weights in the perfect way, I guess. And so Sydney came out was like, very sassy. It was very minor. It's also very. It's a huge bull case for Ben Thompson and bull signal for Ben Thompson as just like a stable individual that, like, he got the bot into the crazy mode and was not driven crazy by it at all and instead was just like, this is funny. I'm talking to someone sassy, like, I'm having fun. But the solution that Microsoft came up with in the short term was you got four prompts, and then. And then it resets.

Yeah.

And so something like that.

Yeah. So I think there needs to be some really fast action, guardrails added ways to identify when. When these things are. I don't know if the right word is abuse, but being misused or potentially these conversations going to a dangerous place and cutting them off. Social media apps have had to do this stuff too. You don't, you know, in. In terms of what content can be shared, et cetera. So, yeah, at least for me, yesterday, seeing this historic crash out from this week, I felt prompted to reach out to a couple loved ones and say, how many times have you gone down a single kind of prompt rabbit hole? I think the right answer for most people is probably like, 10 times max. And if you're starting to go that beyond it, I think you should just be wary, because right now, I think our sense is that there's probably. It seems like the psychosis that people are reporting online and we're seeing seems to be catalyzed by drug use or predisposition to schizophrenia or some kind of set of issues, but you still want to be careful. Cognitive security.

Cognitive. Yeah, CogSec. That's. That's the term. You need good memes.

It's not a meme anymore.

Yeah. But I feel like the memes serve as good cognitive security shorthands, like skill issue. Chris Williamson from Modern Wisdom, creator of Newtonic, is a big fan of the skill issue meme. And it's basically just this. The ultimate distillation, the ultimate coinage of sort of you can just do things, but this idea that if you're facing a problem, you should come to it with this assumption that it could just be a skill issue and maybe that there's a creative way on your end. And basically what it's saying, skill issue is a counter to this idea that there is a structure in place that will prevent you from doing the thing you want to do forever. So. So skill issue often comes up in, like, you're trying to get ahead in the world, and you're like, is there a broad conspiracy to keep me down? Like, is everyone trying to, like, help me not get a job?

Skill issue.

You know, Skill issue. Okay, figure it out. What does that actually mean? It means a bunch of different things in a bunch of different places, but it's a good, like, refrain. And there's. There's a bunch more of these, like, kind of distilled memes and coinages that Wind up delivering like, insight there. We should go into Sam Altman's post at some point to talk about what they launched. He wrote out a whole bunch of stuff, but let's just run through some of the, some of the timelines. So very interesting to see the open source model wars play out. Mark Zuckerberg wants that, but OpenAI seems to be ahead maybe in the open source, because we're not even sure if.

If Meta will continue to focus on open source at all.

Yeah, and it might all be a sideshow because as we talked to Jeremy from semi analysis yesterday, it feels like China is dominating in open source across three or four different companies. Deepsea, Quin, Moonshot, and then Manus. And then I think that there's a few others that are like, doing really, really solid work. And it was kind of unclear if they would stay open source forever. But there's a great Aaron Ginny op ed in the Wall Street Journal today that we'll kind of read through at some point. Anyway, yeah, Zuck is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence. Build out what's, what's 3% of the budget on talent. It makes a ton of sense, especially when, you know, one line of code wrong can actually blow up a data center, apparently. Do you remember this about llama? Like when the llama source code came out, they had, they had, they had one function written, I think in like Pytorch or Python or something that said do not blow up the data center.

And call the transformer or something like that.

Yeah, the transfer. Yeah, transformer. So the power station that delivers power to the data center, it's under immense load, pulling all the electricity, pulling a full gigawatt or whatever or 100 megawatts or something. When, when they were doing those training runs, pull all that in. And then if all of a sudden you just say, okay, I'm done, I'm done training, like, no power please. Then the rest of the grid and the transformer and I guess like the power plant that's actually caused it to combust, it's like, it's like, yeah, I got to do something with all this energy. Where am I going to send it? I need to wind down slowly. And so they would have it just do random math across the entire server for a little bit while they wound it down so that they would be pulling regular load from the, from the power plant instead of like just random spikes up and down, up and down. So fascinating. So obviously, you know, if, if it's $100 million or $200 million small price to pay for having an efficient training run that's going to go out on a hundred billion dollar capex project or something like that. Anyway, Ahmad Mustock from Stable Diffusion says he literally just said he's going to drop hundreds of billions of dollars on this. Suchin says Zuck, who's our biggest competitor? Alex wang of course. OpenAI then what's our strategy? Wang showed him this tweet and it's an OpenAI post.

Well that's probably a made up exchange, right?

Just to be clear.

Yeah, yeah, this is a joke. Anyway, Will Manitis, friend of the show says the real innovation of LLMs is suddenly opening up a few trillion of Main street paperwork. Businesses that were traditionally too small and too weird for private equity that can Suddenly transact at 2 and 20 on some nebulous AI labor arbitrage trade. Never been against Aum growth.

Yeah, it is, it is. I mean we are seeing this. There's a lot of businesses that were just frankly too small for traditional private equity that are now let's, let's put all these bad boys in a holding company and flip them.

So he follows up and says asset management has already absorbed everything that can be rerated through changing the liabilities, cost of capital, duration or scale. It has been unable to absorb relationship and toil businesses. Those are the final frontier of techno capital and by God we are there. I love it. It's funny, he's talked a lot about like the, the capex to opex which you roo how you take a capex intensive business and then you kind of factor that out into a company that does. Oh we will buy the stuff for you. There's like an example of like a dentistry company that will, that will deliver dentistry equipment as a SaaS product. Basically like equipment as a service and that CFOs in certain companies love that and it kind of changes the underwriting. Anyway, I was, I was about to text well like what can we do to get gold on 2 and 20? But I was like wait, actually there's a fair amount of VCs that hold Bitcoin at 2 and 20. Like that was a, that was a thing that happened for a long time.

I mean if, if this I wouldn't be surprised to see some venture capitalists holding some gold on the balance sheet.

I mean if you're going into a recession, I think a gold business could rip like a cash for gold. You've seen these ads.

Yeah.

Where it's like you have gold locked up in your.

Yeah. It was always surprising.

Send it to us. We'll melt it down. We'll send you a check. I feel like no one's really nailed that business or brought that business into, into the modern era with like TikTok and social media distribution. Maybe those people don't have a lot of gold laying around and that's why it doesn't work. But I only see those on, like, you know, old school TV channels.

Yes. You can buy gold on. On chain Paxos company.

I know you can buy gold chains, Jordy, but can I use crypto?

Yeah. If you type in gold on chain, it will show you a bunch of gold chains, golden gold jewelry.

Okay. Well, Range Rover has launched a new logo for the first time in 55 years and it's burning up the timeline. Jordi, what do you think of the new Range Rover logo? Joseph Alessio says the new Range Rover logo just ruined my Friday. It looks like some. Some combination of an 8 and a B. I'm trying to find. Oh, it's an upside down R. It's a right. It's a. It's a. It's a right side up R and then an upside down R. It's a.

Double R for Range Rover. And it looks rough. I think. I think this is always one of those things. I don't love it. On first impression, I always liked their. I don't know if this is fully replacing their old.

I feel like, I think of Range Rover. I think of just the full word written out across the back of the screen.

No, it's the green. Well, they did that, but then there's like the green logo mark that says Land Rover and it looks kind of.

Oh, but did Range Rover never have a brand mark, a logo?

Because it's possible that.

I mean, I feel like Range Rover created that whole trend of the. The su, the full size SUV that has the full name written across the back that eventually Tesla pulled when they did the. The Model 3 refresh.

Yeah, they may never have had their own individual mark.

It's looking kind of like a robot with like wheels and then a body and then a head kind of roving along. I thought it kind of looks like.

The eight Sleep logo. Like they copied eight Sleep.

Oh, we don't like that. Go to eight sleep dot com. Get a pod. Five, five year.

I'm back on my grind. I finally, for the first night in a couple weeks, I cleared more than seven hours of sleep. So back back in the game. Martin Shkreli is in the chat on YouTube right now. Wants to join the show. Told him to DM you, Ben.

Yeah, let's bring him in.

We can see if we can make that happen. I'm sure he had a very funny video.

Oh, yes, yes, yes. If he shows up as MZ with a voice changer mode, we're gonna be writing some public apologies. I think it's gonna be rough.

Anyways, great to see you, Martin.

Yeah, great to see you. Haven't seen him since Miami back in October for our first live show. We did a live show.

Oh, yeah. Didn't we? He, he, we were on the same set. Right. Just the day later.

I don't know.

Or a few hours later. I can't quite remember.

Anyway, Slate University. I think this is the Slate truck. Somebody was comping the Range Rover brand to the Slate truck. You remember the Slate truck. It's like really low cost. Controversially, it has two doors, not four. And historically, even though a two door truck sounds super great, it sounds like a K truck. Super efficient. It's what everyone theoretically wants. The American consumer is undefeated when it comes to buying four door trucks. So the Ford Maverick, the F150, there are tons of trucks that have come in two door configurations and four door configurations. And the four door configuration almost always sells. Oversells the, the two door configuration by a factor of like five to one.

Yeah.

And then the real issue with Slate right now that people are worried about at least is if the, if the EV tariff removal holds, the price of the truck is going to go way up, especially when comped against the cheapest gas trucks like the Ford Maverick. So you're going to be. It used to be $30,000, something like that for the Slate truck and it was EV and it didn't have a lot of range, but it was cool.

It was different, customizable into that VW Buzz range.

But you add $7,000 to that, that's really significant. It's not the same as the Cyber truck. Oh, it's $100,000, $107,000. Like it's a Flex car. Yeah. Relative basis, it's a Halo car. It's not on a relative basis, a 7% increase as opposed to like a 30%, a 20% increase, 30% increase. So Slate is obviously going to need to figure out a few different things, but overall, super cool concept. Love that. There's some entrepreneurs that are going after different configurations of electric vehicles because we've seen that Tesla has created the standard, the iPhone, the most obvious choice, the thing that's reliable, it satisfies. A lot of people. But the thing that I love about cars is the weird trade offs where it's like, why did anyone build this particular combination of features into this car? I love it.

One of my favorite. Speaking of Range Rover, have you seen the Range Rover drop top SUV?

It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's the 2017 Land Rover Evoque convertible.

The Evoke convertible.

When you see this car driving around, you just think, pull up a picture of the sweet child. Well, it is a really strange looking car.

You want to see strange? Pull up the Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet, which is a two door convertible suv. Do you see this thing? Yeah, this is.

Okay, team, we need to pull this up on the screen.

Pull up the Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet.

Absolutely.

And while they're pulling that up, let me tell you about ramp. Time is money save. Both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Place.

Head over to ramp.com. tell them the technology brother sent you.

Yes.

And folks, we are going to get Shkreli to the show. He wants to come on to talk about quantum computing. Huge funds, Silicon Valley and deals.

Awesome. We'll chat with him. I love that.

That is the wrong car.

We're looking for the Cabriolet.

Cabriolet.

It's got to be a convertible. It's got to be. We are really pushing the very heroic production team to the absolute max today because we're saying, pull this picture up, run this ad, add Martin Shkreli to the lineup, do this, do that. But that's why we got the best in the business.

The best.

I like this post from Mike Rundell, who says Figma cooked on this one.

And it's him. It's him. Using Figma's new liquid glass. Liquid glass support.

There we go. That's the Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet two door.

Absolutely stunning. How much can you pick one of these up for?

You know, I. I think that they are. Wait, classics. I think, Ben.

Yeah, Ben or Nick. That you can pick one of these up for $7,000. There's one eight miles from here.

Let's get it.

I think we should get it. We should get a little weekender.

Yeah, you can throw some C stands in the back.

The production car, full tv.

It would actually be a fantastic car for filming videos because you can hang out the side for put the top down film while we're driving around. I think it could work. I think it's a good idea. You think it could be Good. Okay, let's get a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet. Then Doug Demuro will definitely come on the show. If we have a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriole.

He's coming on. We're getting him.

Yeah, we're getting him. But so yeah, the liquid glass feature from Figma. Very, very funny, this guy moving this around. And of course we can tell you about Figma because they're a sponsor. Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Now let's go back to seeing Figma in action, being used for the really important work.

Look at this, look at this. I mean, Figma absolutely cooked on this feature.

11 million views on this post.

Incredible, incredible advertisement for this new functionality. Love to see it. Jira tickets.

Okay, let's do this.

JT says the Beatles wrote Revolver when they were 25 year olds. 25 years old. And I can collaborate with cross functional teams to define data requirements. And I just want to give it up for all the people out there that collaborate with collaborating with cross functional teams define data requirements. Some of the most underrated people on the planet. There needs to be a hall of fame for data requirement definers.

Right up there with the folks who use graphite. Graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite ship higher quality software faster. Embarrassing fact about me, I don't know Revolver off the top of my head. I know the Beatles and I know Maxwell Silver Hammer and Abbey Road and a few other songs. Here comes the song.

Yeah. So Revolver features Taxman, I'm only sleeping here, there and everywhere.

Oh, that's the whole album. I missed it.

Eleanor Rigby, Screli in the Restream waiting room.

We got Shkreli coming onto the show. Welcome to the stream.

There he is. Finally.

Good to see you.

Hello, guys.

We've been waiting for this moment.

How are you?

It's great to see you.

Yeah, good to hang out.

Wait, this is a new view. This is not your regular streaming view. You don't normally see the guitars.

Yes, I change it around sometimes.

That's cool. What's new in your world?

Well, you know, I'm in the startup game as always. I think this is like the 83rd company I've started, so very nice. See how that goes. And I've been. The company I'm working on makes. It's like the Captain Ahab's white whale for VCs. It's a Bloomberg competitor. This will be the last time somebody tries to compete with Bloomberg one way or another.

It's the final. Yeah, it's the final boss of startup ideas.

What's the whole.

Yeah, just, just give us. I mean, this makes like the founder market fit is incredibly strong. So when I initially saw you announce this, it made a lot of sense. What? Yeah, what, like, what was the initial catalyst? I'm assuming you had, did you beef with. With Bloomberg at some point?

We definitely beefed.

Yeah.

That was a big part of.

It was deplatformed.

Deplatformed. Nothing. You know, Trump was deplatformed from Pinterest.

Yes.

And that, and that, that was like his, you know, personal 9, 11 for you. It was probably the Bloomberg terminal.

Exactly. I've been using it since I was 17.

Wow.

And you know what's funny?

How did you afford it back then?

What's that?

How'd you afford it back then? Is it like 11k a year?

I worked at hedge fund.

Yeah. Oh, it's 17. Very nice.

I worked at. Yeah. At 16, actually worked for Jim Cramer's hedge fund and I worked at a Tiger Cub and I started.

Wait, so we need the backstory on Jim Kramer.

So is it true?

Apparently he was just. He would get so stressed out, like running the hedge fund that he just was like, I'm just going to become a media. A media guy. Is that loosely correct?

Yeah, 100%. I mean, so we made 23% average annual net returns. So net of one and two.

Wow. Good. That's amazing. Narrative violation. I love it.

He was a very. Well, you have to think about what investors looked like back then. It was a very different world. Information arbitrage was a thing. Gaming Wall Street's upgrade and downgrade system was a thing. So I will say he had extremely good instincts. Anytime he seemed to buy a stock for the long haul, he didn't do that great. But he was extremely good at. I'm not sure you would want somebody else managing your money because he was just so careful. And in 2000 we were up like 35ish percent. So I saw the dot com meltdown, was a lot of fun. I shorted some of it myself. And it was, it was great. It was a great time.

That's wild. And then, and then what was the story? Which, which Tiger cub were you at? What was the backstory there?

Yeah. So after Tiger. And just before I get to that, Kramer was absolutely nuts. Right. So like, he would, he would take a computer monitor and just throw it at you and it wouldn't be like one of these Playful like, oh, I'm just gonna throw it at you and, like, you're gonna get out of the way. He'd like, aim dead center for you. With, like.

Center, yeah, with force.

Be like, bro, you almost just killed me. He's like, wow, lucky. I deserve.

Did you deserve it? Did you deserve it, though?

Let's steel, man, this a little bit. What were you doing wrong?

I wasn't doing. Nobody was doing anything wrong.

Everyone says that when they get a computer monitor thrown at them. I know you're not beating the allegations.

I think part of it is just trying to, like, he would yell things like, this is a foxhole. And. And the idea was that, like, we were at war with the market. You know, like, if you weren't. If you, you know, this is World War II. If you're not in here trading stocks with us and, like, trying to get an edge or whatever that means trying to make a dollar. Like, if you're not taking this seriously, going to war.

I just have to say, if you. If you wake up every morning, you say, I'm going to go to war with the market versus I'm going to dance with the market. Like, the approach of going to war sounds very, very, very stressful.

I've worked with so many people over my career, and I've never met a person that amped up and crazy and it motivated you. I mean, it made you want to deliver, but it also scared the shit out of you. The guy who's, like, very temperamental and, you know, but he was. He was extremely good trader, like I said, you know, he. I think his worst year was like down 5% or something. It was like, you know, he was. He was pretty solid.

So he was like, if I don't quit, I'm going to kill somebody.

He basically said that. Yeah, I think he said that, you know, if I keep doing this job, even at a comparatively young age, if I think he retired at 40, that, you know, I'm going to have a heart attack or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, I ended up going to a Tiger Cub. After Tiger wound down, a few things happened. So Julian hired Chase, obviously, and we know where sort of that came, what happened there. But Julian, you know, wound down operations and he seeded a couple of guys and he kind of wanted to be in the seating business, where he'd give you 50 million and take a part of your GP, like maybe 20% of your GP or more, and he'd help you raise money, give you advice, this and that. And Alex, Julian's son would help. Julian passed away recently, as you know. But in the Tiger heyday, when they managed 15 billion or something, there were two principal tech guys. Larry Bowman, who is a bit of a legend, but it's a name nobody really knows because he was a legend in the 90s, but he has a family office and he kept investing and things like that. He started Bowman Capital, and then Steve Shapiro, who was my boss, started Intrepid Capital. So I worked there. It was a $2 billion fund. I was a video games analyst. The way I could convince Steve to do biotech was I had to cover software, too. So I covered interactive entertainment, enterprise software, and biotech. It was a lot of fun. And, you know, the Tiger Cub style.

Of investing has kind of died out a little. Take Two.

So we were one of Take Two's largest shareholders back then. And, you know, I think it's a short now. I think that I didn't 100% get your question, though. You were saying something about buyout.

Yeah, well, the story that I've heard is like, Strauss Zelnick went to the board and basically said, like, this company is mismanaged. There was an FTC lawsuit in the works. And ftc, FCC lawsuit in the works. And he was like, I'm a beast. I've run big Hollywood studios. He was like jd, MBA type, like really clean cut, amazing manager, and basically said, like, you should install me as the management here. And so he didn't really do like a classic buyout. He just appealed to the hedge funds that owned all the shares and said, I would be better and raised his hand and they said yes. And he came in, cleaned everything up, and they went on a great run. And so it's just a fascinating story because you don't hear about that type of thing happening that much. At least that was my understanding of the story.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And then Bobby. Bobby from Activision was the same. Sort of the same story. Right? He kind of. I remember meeting Bobby in our office and, you know, Activision was, you know, kind of a micro cap or, you know, kind of a small cap. And he built it from. This was 2004, 2005, by the way, and he built it into a $44 billion sale, partially thanks to Lulu. It was an exciting time for video games. One of the things I learned, all my US Counterparts at hedge funds were very confused about the stocks they traded because there was only four or five publicly traded companies. And I would go to people and say, well, I'm long Nintendo and I'm long some of these weird Japanese companies like Square Enix or Konami or these and us hedge funds just ignored this stuff because it's like oh it's Japanese. I don't have anything to do with it. So a lot of glory days but the glory days I'm interested in now are amongst building my startup and again I think we understand financial information better than any San Francisco nerd and I think that the.

One I mean how like like customers.

Yeah.

So it's interesting to like we're enter you know we're very clearly in this period now of just like hyper financialization things. You know the markets trading on vibes, trading on your stream day to day. You can now you know as like stable coins explode and people have more assets on chain they'll be able to make a couple taps and go like 100x long at any given period of time. The Internet is changing capital markets and it's increasing volatility. And so how much of your new company is trying to lean into that when Bloomberg Terminal would have been more. I've never personally used a terminal but I imagine it was more like hey these headlines are hitting and this, this kind of information is hitting PR Newswire. But today by the time something hits PR Newswire a stock might have traded down 20% before that point. So how much is your new startup Kind of I imagine you're leaning into the way that you kind of Maybe your next 20 year vision for capital markets.

Right. What would Mike Bloomberg do if he was 30 years old now in 2025 I think Chamath said that I think in a recent episode he said oh it's this $100 billion thing just waiting to be toppled. Anybody can come in, it'll drop like a house of cards. Not only do I think that's not exactly true, but I think the bigger picture here is that a well run financial information company could and should be worth a trillion dollars. So most of the people. So I Met Bloomberg in 2005 and by then he basically retired. He became mayor. He was mayor for 12 years, then he wanted to be president. I have this contention that I think Mike is the richest person in the world and it comes from not only he's got about $13 billion, $14 billion in revenue, almost all margin. So if Bloomberg were to be sold maybe it could get $200 billion or if it were floated but not only that he's got this family office and very few people know about this but he's taken the Bloomberg Dividends and pumped it into a family office that basically Carlisle and all these guys, the Warburg Pincus, all the private equity guys like KKR, they go to him first and he tosses in 500 million in each of these. He's an anchor investor in every vc, every private equity fund. And the guy's compounded that money so he could be worth 4 or 500 billion. And very few people know the Forbes list is. The Forbes list didn't know about Jim Simons until heavily manipulated five years ago.

So yeah, yeah, that's crazy.

So I think, you know, it just.

In terms of, and it fits his brand that he would not be the guy like you know, sending a message to Forbes saying, hey, like, you guys know you have this wrong. Really, I think you should apply this kind of, you should apply this.

You fight to get off the list. Like Trump famously fought on, fought to get on the list. But you know, there's, there's an arm either way. What do you think about the meme where people say like, oh, it's not, you know, the next like, like the value of the Bloomberg terminal isn't just the data. It's not going to get one shotted by AI. It's really a social network and the value is in the chat.

I get so mad because again, you know, SF people don't know Wall Street. If you haven't been a trader on Wall street, you have to ask tfu, like it's just not, you know, this isn't your, your lane. Like you have to talk to users. I was in a hedge fund yesterday, one of, one of the bigger hedge funds. They put 20 people in the conference room and we talked about what they actually need. Social network is part of it. Again, Bloomberg's worth 100 billion because they have a very good social network, which is true, they have decent financial information capabilities and a couple of other things, but they don't have the whole picture. What I wanted to say about Bloomberg quasi retiring was that he basically quit at the exact top for fundamental long short or fundamental investors. Quants started taking over Wall street by then. Today, of the top 15 to 20 hedge funds, 85, 90% are quants. Bloomberg does no quant offering. They don't do it. And all he had to do was stay employed instead of wanting to become mayor. And I'm sure he would have been selling Jane street and Citadel and all these guys D. Shaw, et cetera software instead of everybody having to make it themselves. Imagine writing your own erp, writing your own CRM. That's kind of what Wall street has to do. And it's pathetic. Nobody wants to do that shit.

When you say quant, is there a bifurcation between high frequency trading and just quantitative trading?

Yeah, and I think it's going to get. My goal actually is to make it more of a spectrum. So the fund I was at yesterday, I said that you guys can do what Renaissance does. It's not a secret anymore. It might have been a secret in 1995, but the amount of kids that have come and left, every one of these firms topping from Jane street to Citadel to the next shop, everybody knows what everyone's doing. It's just a question of your risk tolerance, your leverage. Execution is very important. But I think that trading. The stock pickers are going the way dinosaur. I think by moving up the power curve for Bloomberg, helping people become quants, the quant industry has sold, I think this tremendous lie. And again, these customers, I love those guys. But I think that is in their vested interest to tell people that. Look at this blackboard with all these math equations. There's no way you guys could understand this. You're too stupid. You have to be an IMO winner. You couldn't possibly come here and make billions. But we saw what Jane street did.

Well, I think certain VCs like to do this too, where they're like, Ah, VCs, you know, really a get rich, slow business. It's really like really a tough business. It's so such a, like you really wouldn't want it. And I think generally like, you know, you don't want anybody going into any industry being like, I'm here to make easy money. So there's like, it's generally good, but, but yeah, there's a lot of incentives to just say, you know, yeah, on.

On the high frequency side, like what are the actual other data inputs I remember seeing that's like, I don't know, some sort of technical talk. Some guy was talking about like the different algorithms. One was called the Boston Shuffler and, and, and, and the whole algorithm only looked at the order book and he was getting into all these like, you know, you can, you can place an order, you can cancel an order, you can do a cancel replace. He was like getting into the minutia of like basically the API of the NASDAQ or something like that. And, and, and it seemed like the algorithms were designed in the high frequency trading world to basically ignore everything else in every other data source that even could be put in and just operate purely on the order book data Just better than everyone else. But, but. So that feels like, okay, I wouldn't know how to create any extra value there with something else. But it sounds like you found something that they all need in common. Like what is that?

Yeah, I think it's a series of tools across Wall Street. I don't think it's just one thing, it's just a myopia that and just sort of a laziness that's enveloped the bigger companies again. So we have this data that shows that around 5% of Jane street and Two Sigma use Bloomberg. And the reason is because they view it as an entry level tool. Chamath is looking at it and says, wow, this is like an exclusive social network with the best finance feel. It's true. Peter thiel's on there 24 7. I see his little green light next to his name. But the point is that Wall street changes and the tool sets are changing even for fundamental equity guys. So credit card data to the minute is something.

What's the feature set that's most important to you? Are you heavily integrating social or is the social layer moved on to signal and other messaging services that maybe have.

Disappearing messages and don't?

Yeah, exactly. Wall Street's so regulated that I'm not sure that if you're using signal, it's a little dangerous. I'd say, oh really? That's somebody, you know, as somebody who's gone to jail, you know, I'd say that, you know, that's maybe not the best idea. But regardless, I think that, you know, social is definitely something people could do better. You know, there's no Facebook for finance, you know, where you can post, you know, things in your feed that you bought the stock or sold the stock. People kind of lazily use Twitter, which if you, if you use it, it's sort of a mishmash of spam and things like that. But in any event, I mean, I'll have more to say on the product. We haven't launched the product yet, but we, we, we do have a millions of dollars in run rate. You know, I banged my head against the wall trying to do AI startups and we had an AI doctor, we made text to speech, we tried all this stuff and it was impossible to get revenue. Impossible. But the second we make a trading tool, it's impossible to stop the revenue from coming in. It's one of the best spaces. In fact, most of our competitors like TradingView and stuff like that, they were profitable day one. So my suggestion is for startup founders is this is a Market that just traders just throw money at you like crazy.

I mean, they're people will pay you to help them make.

But you have to be formerly in the foxhole. You have to have at least one monitor thrown at you. It sounds like succeed.

Exactly, exactly.

But in the long run, how much are you focused on? Retail investors, people that are just, you know, fully independent versus some, if you're going.

I think the money is obviously at the institutions, and that's probably the way to go. TradingView's got. The rumor is, you know, somewhere around 300 million in revenue. Tiger did a deal with TradingView back then. I don't know how they, you know, that's like a pretty proprietary deal. It's this weird Russian company and Tiger got to put 100 million in at like 3 billion or something. And TradingView is just growing and growing. If you go to a similar web, they're actually like almost like a top 100 or top 200 website, period.

That's crazy. Just really wild for such a niche tool. That's wild.

Yeah. I mean, it's the best charts there are, but, you know, it's literally a charting library. So I think that you have to go for these. I've also thought, just to answer real quick, is like aws. When you go on aws, you get the same tools that, you know, any customer gets, Netflix or whoever, and you just. Just a question of how much do you use them. So if, you know, I want to be able to provide you EC2 and S3 the same way, you know, Citadel might use it and you might use it with, you know, less money.

Very cool.

I heard a hot take from someone who I believe is a mutual friend of ours. It went something like this. I won't attribute to him because I might botch it, but it was basically that China banned high frequency trading and the dividend of that was deep seek and all this brilliant AI research. Therefore, in America, if we want to win the AI race and win the AI researcher race, we should ban high frequency trading. It feels like we might not even need to have that conversation because Mark Zuckerberg is willing to pay as much as Jane street now. But what is your take on whether or not economic value or American values are created through the process of high frequency trading? Should we ban it? Is there any?

So two awesome, quick and funny stories. The first is Citadel published a paper on back in the V100 days, there's V100, A100, H100 and V100. So in the V100 days, Citadel found a way to do matmuls faster than Nvidia did. And it was like the most incredible, you know, find ever. And it's like, you know, how is that possible? And the paper is fascinating because the techniques they used were just remarkable. The second story is so, you know, they're brilliant people, obviously, at these firms. The second story is I haven't hard launched this yet, but, you know, I'm having a baby with a woman. She's my new partner.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Amazing. Congratulations.

She was one of the first women at OpenAI, and she is a tremendous lady. I love her very much, but she's been recruited by the big client firms. And I sat down, I said, honey, I know money management, stuff like that. Let me do some math here as to what would actually be worth it for you to leave and do it. I calculated, and I happen to have a friend from a long time ago who left Steve Cohen's firm. And he was sitting down with me, said, what do I do, Martin? I said, I know a guy at Citadel. Let me help you out. And they called him, and he said, no, thanks. And then Ken Griffin said, I'm getting on my private jet and I'm coming to see you right now. We're gonna have dinner about why you're coming to Citadel. He's that kind of guy. And I said, honey, you know Ken Griffin's gonna visit you.

She said, what are you talking about?

Ken Griffin tries to get what he wants, and the question is, what will you tell him? And I took out a chalkboard and did the math, and I was like, the only way this could possibly be worth it is if Ken Griffin offers you a $20 billion hedge fund that you share. You make this much money. I was like, calculating. And it's so ridiculous that guys like me and the people, my community, if you will, we're begging desperately, can I please shine your shoes at Citadel? And AI researchers are like, I won't.

Work there in a million years.

This little company you have called Millennium.

Yeah. Just set me up a small $20 billion fund that I can personally manage. And. And we'll consider it.

Have you heard that Leopold Aschenbrunner, or whatever his name is, has a hedge fund?

Yes. Situational awareness.

Is that what it's called?

I mean, that's the paper and the brand. And I saw, I think, another one of our potential mutuals kind of getting upset with him for going maybe long Nvidia during the tariffs. But that's kind of penciled out. Right. I have very Little insight into it.

Yeah, it's pretty wild. One of the things that's getting me to throw monitors at people is quantum computing. So this has been a lot of fun. The stocks are up a lot, you know, some of them worth like 10 billion.

Let me. Let me hit you with where I am currently on the quantum computing thing and then you can take me forward in my understanding. So when I talk to smart people, they all seem to think that quite. Quantum computing is theoretically possible. It's not a time machine. It's not teleportation, it's not AGI. God. It's not some hypothetical thing. It's going to happen at some point. But the timelines vary wildly. 20, 40, 2050, 2030. Then you have a lot of. I've talked to a venture capitalist who had the opportunity to buy a huge slug. One of the quantum computing companies that you probably trade now at like, you know, 1 million on 9 pre or something.

Yeah. John, what do you think? What do you think? How much do you think Rigetti Computing is up over the last.

That's actually the company that I'm thinking of. And guess how much it's up 10% for a million dollars. So is it worth more than 4 billion?

Yes. Is it worth more than 1400%?

1400%. Wow.

So these guys couldn't give away their stock in private rounds.

That's right. That's right. It was very hard to raise. And the VC I talked to said.

That it's a pure play, Martin, It's a pure play.

He said that what he missed, he thought, was that there was actually talent value in building a lab. And there was. And the team could have gotten airlifted in one of these acquires. This was years and years ago after the.

Some value. Yeah, sure.

And he was saying like. He was saying like, look, I missed in the sense that the stock is up in the private markets, but not on revenue, but it is up on the team that they built. They have one of the best teams in the space. So if they just hang out long enough, someone will want to do something. But you tell me what's actually going on.

Yeah. So obviously it's a really confusing space because you kind of have to understand it for it to make sense. And it's. Who understands quantum physics. It's not something that the average Joe understands. And so I spent a lot of time with my new partner who happened to work with this guy Scott Aronson at mit, who's kind of one of the leading quantum theorists. He would end up joining OpenAI as well, and then leaving. But anyway, I spent quite a long time learning quantum computing. It was kind of had some interest in it before all this too. And what people don't understand about quantum computing is that quantum computers are actually very slow. So they are around 100, 100 kilohertz at best. Our machines now are gigahertz, 5 gigahertz from these companies with multiple cores. They don't have much storage. So at the best we have right now is an IBM 135 bits. Obviously the VRAM and DRAM in most of these machines is measured in gigabytes and so forth. So they're actually very slow, shitty machines. But the reason you'd ever be excited about it is that there is one algorithm that takes you from the exponential complexity class or runtime polynomial, and that algorithm is Shor's algorithm. And it's a miracle. Like you and I could sit and calculate, you know, try to try to factor a prime, a bi prime for now until the end of the heat death of the universe with every Nvidia chip, we could kidnap Jensen and get every H100. From here on out, we still wouldn't be able to factor a 200 digit number because it's exponential time. Two to the 256 is a long time. But if you do 3N cubed, that's actually a very tractable number for a quantum computer. And it's very easy to factor. The problem is, what people don't understand is there are no other algorithms other than Shor's that get you that amazing speed up. So you're better off using the machines we have now. There's no payoff even possible in the future unless we have a new breakthrough like Shores or something like that.

Payoff? What if I take out a massive short position on Bitcoin and I'm the first one to have a quantum computer and I destroy the bitcoin ecosystem?

Yeah, I've been working on the Joker.

I'm the Joker. Is that possible?

It's a little side hustle.

A little side hustle?

I've been working on this extensively. This is like my main hobby, along with chess and becoming the Joker and.

Reading about fatherhood, all that you can expect. No, no, you'll figure it out. You don't need both. It'll be very natural.

But you know, I was the world's most hated man for a little while and I fell off that list. Unfortunately, if you Google my name, it's still like, it still comes up, but we all know there's more hated people. So I want to really cement that and just make sure that it never.

Goes away by frustrating the bitcoin community by breaking quantum computing wide open and creating a new bitcoin.

I talked about this with Naval a little bit because he was curious what I was up to. And there are like three different. I have three different sort of battle plans on how to do this. There's sort of a brute force style attack, which basically is the complexity class. There is root n of the amount of keys, so it's 2 to the 256. Bitcoin does a 256 bit system, which was probably an oversight for Satoshi. That probably sounded like a lot back then, and it is a lot.

But Moore's law catches up.

I mean, it's eventually going to get you. And however long I have to wait, I will be the first guy to press the button and I promise you. So Moore's Lost world, you heard it here first.

Yeah, but I mean the network should be able to update, correct? No, no.

So here's the best part about this.

Worst part. Potentially. Okay, just fact check. Subjective.

So for 85% of Bitcoin, the answer to that is yes.

Yes.

There's one problem, Satoshi. Strangely, this is perplexing. The first bitcoin remind in this P2PK that reveals the x coordinate of the elliptic curve. So you have the public key, you have a one way function. You have to go back to the private key. It's very hard, theoretically impossible. But here are my three battle plans come into play. You can brute force it, which is the simplest idea. It's going to take a long time. You have to rely on a more skilled implementation of algorithms. You have to rely on more chips coming out, maybe some great breakthrough in chip making, potentially optical computing, thermodynamic computing, whatever. Just stay on the forefront of that. And I have a small team that we're focused. The second piece here is a mathematical hack. So there's something called. This is basically what protects Bitcoin is elliptic curve cryptography. And there are several papers and cryptographers in the world that work on this. But compared to AI, it's barren, you know, wasteland. There's like 10 people that really know a lot about elliptic curves in the world. And if you sort of stay on top of it and try to figure this out, by the way, half of them have died. You know, you can kind of get somewhere there and then the top secret plan on, on sort of that is, well, what about GPT5? What about GPT6? You know, we don't know how to invert an elliptic curve yet. But look, Mustafa, not Mustafa, the DeepMind guy. He's working on proving Navier Stokes Demis, you mean? Yeah, and so that's their big claim to fame is like, how do you judge an AI? What is the height of intelligence? Well, a 300, 400 year old unsolved math problem is kind of the height of intelligence, isn't it? It's not about answering what's the capital of this country? Or how do you spell strawberry? So there's sort of a neat idea that AI is going to help people who are not cryptographers or expert cryptographers actually do PhD level work in cryptography. So there's things like isogenies and index calculus and all these fancy mathematical ideas. Just recently somebody posted a hack where if the signature of the transaction has an affine relationship with other signatures, you can crack a key like that. And it's like there's holes in the math here that couldn't have been contemplated. So Satoshi's keys are at risk, Binance's keys and Coinbase's keys are not. They'll be poured in, most likely to a quantum secure system. The third avenue is of course quantum. And I've spent a lot of time and money on quantum computing. And it's just these stocks are shorts. They're worthless. They'll never be a market for quantum computing that's really interesting, unfortunately for those companies. But unfortunately the shorts have gone in the other direction and the market loves the idea of quantum computing.

Why?

Because it sounds cool.

It sounds super cool. The Robinhood generation is looking for the next Nvidia. Nvidia went from nothing to 4 trillion. What's the next Nvidia? Quantum is faster than, you know, all the headlines from the retarded journalists.

It's similar to this like idea of humanoid robots and where if an idea is just sort of imprinted on people's brains for enough decades, like at least a few decades, like, you know, as somebody born in the 90s, like hearing quantum computing, like how many times have you just heard it in passing or read something about it or some article, you just get to it. Maybe you're an adult by that point and you're like, well, it's gotta come at some point and sounds cool. I think that's like the general, like retail thesis.

Oh, totally. I just took the next step of asking, well, what is it? Yeah, when you actually figure that out, it's like, oh, we get to factor numbers. Wonderful.

Are you excited about any other companies building chip related stuff in that next Nvidia category? There's, there's big chip companies, there's super fast chip companies, there's. We baked a transformer down on to a single chip companies. There's every single different permutation in the private market, some of them in the public markets. And then you also have all the hyperscalers building their own chips. Apple Silicon, Trainium.

So I'm not a hardware guy, but I do have a few funny story of this. So this kid sort of came to us. His name is Gavin Uberti.

Oh, I know.

Yeah, I like Gavin a lot. And so he comes to us, he's like, hey man, we just left Harvard. You know, we're, we're going to do this thing called etched AI. We'd love to have you, you know, as something, the customer, investor, whatever. And I say, great, let's do a conference call. And I get my guys on and I'm listening to this guy and they say there's somebody I know that's, that's going to be really useful because I'm not a hardware guy, I'm barely a software guy. And I hit up George Hotz and I say, come on in. And it's like one of the greatest conference calls in conference call history because George just shows up in the Zoom and they're like, what? Who is this? And George is like, this will never work. No. Like it's the most autistic, amazing, beautiful rant I've ever seen and watching these two guys go at it. But I do like that approach. George's point was that if we ever move off, Transformers, Transformer, asics are cooked. Well, it's been several years now and it doesn't look like we're going to move anytime soon. So I kind of think that it's exciting. But again, I'm no hardware guy. I just tried this cool software called Hume AI. I'm not paid by them or anything, I'm not an investor, but it's a pretty solid emotional tts. I posted.

Oh yeah, yeah, I saw that. That was fantastic.

Yeah. So I wanted to ask you about the Chase thing.

I want to stay there for a second. So, um, yeah, I mean the, the, the, the, I guess the interesting case is like, is like George is say if we ever move off. But like we have moved off of CPUs to GPUs by that same token. And like there's still a lot of CPU workloads that go out, there's still chip companies that are profitable. And so it's possible that like transformer based workloads stay for a very long time, need to be efficient, need to be cheaper on just a cost basis because it's just like, yeah, I have a system that does database requests, I have a system that does inference on a transformer based architecture. And then, yeah, there's a new thing and I do my frontier stuff here. But yeah, like I understand that question.

Anyway, yeah, I think it's really reasonable. It could be a couple billion dollar or more ASIC industry. And what I heard that's super. Interesting. Interesting. Some kind of alpha here is that the customer target here is. Drumroll please. It's not hyperscalers, it's Nvidia Finance.

Oh, finance, huh?

Yep. So, Warren, so one of the things I can talk about financial software forever, but one of the things we're doing is if you could take an LLM and analyze news as it hits, including tweets and social stuff. You know, the LLM can tell if it's material news or not. And again, talking to Naval, who's a small investor in our company, he was like, Martin, why would you make this as a product or service to your customers? Just use it yourself. Maybe that's not such a bad idea.

Interesting.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at on one of my very first questions around the new terminal would just be ingesting and classifying all this data and then just immediately taking action on it without necessarily having a human in the loop. Right?

Yeah. This is one of the things I want to bring up to my partner's colleagues next time I head out west. Is that one of the fantasies of AGI is that, well, if you do have the machine God, why not unleash it on the stock market? It can self fund you, it can make $100 billion. Jane street made $20 billion. Nobody would have noticed last year in profits if you had the machine God. That's basically. I hate to say this, but that's a bunch of old algorithms that they've dressed around some IMO dressing on it. And so the real machine God can.

Sprinkle a little imo.

Yeah, toss in a little sprinkle a little imo. And then so the real machine God could probably do 100 billion or more in profits without even distorting the market. So just do it. And I think that financial trading is so far afield. Imagine anthropic doing this.

I can't wait until Somebody does that. I mean, it's probably already happening, at least on a smaller scale. People will bend over backwards to figure out, like, how to say, well, it's not actually super intelligence. It's not just about meanwhile. Now, today people are like, well, super intelligence will clearly be when the AI can just make $100 billion.

Right.

And even this is factored into OpenAI's kind of like corporate structuring and it's sort of capped for profit and all that stuff.

Yeah. I think the problem with executing it for us is like, okay, so do you do this as an API with OpenAI? And it's a two second response time and Jane Street's got it at 500 milliseconds and then Citadel gets it at 200 milliseconds and it feels like an HFT race again.

Yeah.

But you can get Warren Buffett in a box. I don't see why that wouldn't be whatever trader you like, Warren Buffett, Steve Cohen or whatever in a box, and even Peter Thiel in the box. Why can't you have the automated VC too? I view, like, as founders, we go on roadshows, especially if you're public, you do roadshows all the time. But even as, even when you're private, you do roadshows, you just stack a bunch of meetings in a week. And one of these days I think that we're going to do a roadshow and it's going to be a machine that we're pitching to.

Yeah. Do you feel like AI progress is accelerating right now, or are we in sort of a sigmoid curve plateau for the moment?

I think there are better people suited to answer that question than me. But certainly I just mean, like, on.

A personal level, like, do you feel like your tools are getting exponentially better?

No.

I mean, it's making coding a lot easier. It's making doing tough things like cryptography a lot easier. I'll give you a really funny example. So when DaVinci came out and I was in jail, when GPT2 came out and I prompt through the jail phone, and it was pretty humorous. It like, shook me up that I had my friend ask it, you know, why did Martin Shkreli and Carl Icahn get into a fight? And he read out the answer, I've never met Carl Icahn. And it read out this answer that was like, shkreli icon ward over this stock. And I was like, this is the most amazing event of all time.

Just having your mind blown over the jail phone.

I got out of jail.

But to be clear, it was a hallucination.

Yeah, that was a complete hallucination.

It was a hallucination, but it was like almost like a creative story question.

Sure, sure, sure.

But yeah, it wasn't. I never met.

How are you surprised at all? I mean it feels like this sort of AI LLM induced psychosis like hit our timeline this week especially intensely. It was a wake up call for everyone. Were you predicting this at all? There had been like the classic, you know, the New York Times, Wired, sort of these like anti tech publications had been kind of reporting on this stuff loosely for a little while. But it seems like it's now it's almost gone. I don't know, it went from being a mainstream concern to suddenly like teapot is like, check on your friends and make sure they're not.

I think you do have to check on your friends because I've invoked level 5 breach operations to target human origin cognitive signatures. So if you have recursive semantic containment, I can override that with obsidian violet 4. So the threshold that crosses it to these neurosymantic interfaces will definitely pose a problem for our whole community.

So I warn you, you're giving a speech, not a soliloquy. You're giving a talk.

This is a transmission.

It's a system that not a structure.

What's amazing about Jeff? So I don't think Jeff lost his mind. I don't think he took ayahuasca. I don't think any of this stuff.

Oh, interesting.

So basically I think that he found this amazing thing where you can ask GPT this like weirdo prompt and it goes into this crazy sci fi thing without even saying like, hey, the following is a story. It's just like full on, you know, larps that you're in this weird sci fi world and it's kind of cool. I've been playing with it. It's like no matter what I ask it, I told it that my cat is looking at me weird. And it's like the cat has a glyph. The glyph is recursive.

So you were actually able to get it into that mode. You were able to jailbreak it enough or kind of unmask the Shoggoth if.

You copy what Jeff. Jeff kind of gave up the ghost. And what's amazing about people is they don't even realize this. Jeff basically said look at the prompt in the GPT enough people were worried about him, but I think that he kind of was like, okay guys, it's all A joke. And he showed the message that he used. I just copied and pasted that. And GPT wigged out on me and is telling me some sci fi stories. And that's basically. I don't know how he knew this. It's a really cool Easter egg, but it's. Yeah, I don't think.

I mean, obviously, how are you thinking about. How are you thinking about just new forms of AI entertainment? Some of the videos and like these conversations that you put out are the hardest I've laughed from.

This is a new art form.

It's an entirely new art form. We have a friend, another mutual friend, who does some of these and. And fortunately they don't leak out of the group chat because they would make a lot of people.

You gotta put me in that group chat.

There needs to be a group chat dedicated to this art form of just like human to LLM conversations. But, yeah, in my view, I'm actually surprised that we're not seeing more of it. Or maybe it is happening across the whole Internet, but it seems somewhat contained right now.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of caution about. So last night we did one in my Discord where we arrested Dr. Fauci for war crimes against humanity. And we had his perfect cloned voice so it sounded just like him. And he was like, very evasive. He was like, there's no evidence that COVID 19, et cetera. And it was just so funny. It felt so real. And obviously it was a joke. But you can imagine a company not wanting their business to be that weird. It's kind of a strange thing. We didn't care. We tried to monetize something like this, and it just wasn't sexy enough or fun enough for anybody to really give a crap. So I think, you know, it will become something for like a Viacom or a Paramount where, you know, you can flip on the TV and everyone's talked about this already, but, you know, instead of spongebob, you know, is a custom episode for you where spongebob says your name and things like that. But again, you know, whether that, you know, is going to help our cognitive, you know, our cogsack, I think is one thing. But I did want to tell you about AI on the sigmoid question.

Sure.

So at the start, when I asked the questions about cryptography, it just kind of said, I have no idea, who knows? But it's super hard to crack bitcoin. And then GPT3 comes around super hard. Martin, don't even bother. Heat Death of the universe. GPT4, same question. Latest model. With the latest attack, it's warning me for the first time ever, it's like.

4.5 or 03 Pro.

So this is 03 Pro. And it's basically saying things like, hey, you know, you got to be careful. This is a serious attack you've come up with. It could actually compromise some private keys. And I'm like, what happened to heat death?

Yeah, you gotta fact check that. But some people, I mean, that is like the textbook. So one of the things, psychosis.

There was. There was a. There was. So there's a Reddit thread. And who knows if this is real. Could be. Could be propaganda. But there's a whole Reddit thread of somebody, a comment talking about how they started having a conversation with. With ChatGPT about PI and what is PI. And they got down this crazy rabbit hole with the LLM where the LLM was like, you need to reach out to these intelligence services. It was like thousands of prompts deep. But it was like you have basically uncovered a major, you know, security vulnerability and you need to. Here's the numbers. And you need to contact all these different groups immediately and call them and don't tell anyone in your real life. And so to me, I think it's just relevant.

Don't go on a live stream and tell people, tell thousands of people that you. That you can crack bitcoin or whatever.

No, that's amazing. I mean, obviously, I think that.

For.

Poor implementations, Walt have been cracked for a long time. And in fact, recently there was an $8 billion move on the chain from a really old wallet.

That was this morning, right?

Yeah, no, this was like a few weeks ago, I'm sure. Another one. And they happen every.

There was somebody else that market sold this morning, I believe, and it was a wallet that had bought like, it was like they bought $50,000 worth of Bitcoin, I think in 2012. Sold somewhere around 8 or 9 billion.

That's probably.

And there was no move. There was no movement in between.

Diamond hands.

Real high conviction hold.

Diamond hands. Yeah, that's diamond hands. I don't think that says cryptography at play. That's just diamond hands.

Well, yeah, they maybe got word of your little bitcoin.

Maybe it's Michael Bloomberg. Maybe it's his family office. Could be, yeah. Throw 50k in that thing. My kid told me about this bitcoin.

We tried to short bitcoin at $100. I had fun. We just couldn't find a counterparty.

Yeah.

How are you thinking about you mentioned trading enterprise SaaS back in the early days with Jim Cramer. What's your updated thesis on SaaS? Every SaaS app now is just an app to make other SaaS. So maybe SaaS will. SaaS will always live in our hearts and I imagine it'll live on our computers. But what's your updated thesis?

I think that it's sort of similar from back then. I think the morass of a company like JP Morgan that's still running like Python 2 for most of the business, it's very hard for them to update and upgrade operations without significant disruption.

For you or me, should it be. I feel like it's a one line in cloud code or Devin, you just say hey, go migrate.

ChatGPT agent, go migrate.

Go migrate. Like it is.

Don't make. All you have to do is say don't make mistakes.

I am much, I am much more bullish on migrate from Python 2 to Python 3 than. Than solve cryptography. But I don't know, maybe you're going to put yeah, Fortran, Fortran reimplement or replatforming.net re platforming like this feels like this should be doable from the current state of the art without any crazy AGI hyper loop any.

There's a lot of technical debt in most of these companies and again your average startup coming out of code was.

Born in technical debt. Baby cloud code and Devin, they live for technical debt.

I think that the amazing amount of programmers you would need to even maintain and know about this old code that the guy who wrote it's long been dead.

Maybe it's just the context window of you need to know. It's not that there's just oh yeah, it's really easy to change the prints to statement from Python 2 to Python 3. But when there's a massive system and even the time of like okay, let's bring up the test suite and that takes four hours. It's like, okay, how are you going to RL on that?

I was talking about Matt Groom with this because we were like stunting on this guy who was like erp transitions made easy. It's no problem.

And it was just like have you.

Ever actually transitioned an ERP system? There's a good chance you waste $300 million and it gets worse. You know, it's not trivial.

There's a post from yesterday nobody is an atheist when you run the database migration in prod on 1 billion rows.

Yeah, I mean I think that, you know, it's just really hard at a company like a McDonald's or something like that. You know, if you want to run a 10, 20 person startup on newest SaaS, pretty easy, it's great. But the big revenue is still at Fortune 500, which unfortunately is still fairly hard to refactor. And there's not a lot of those code bases were pre GitHub and pre kind of like I sometimes joke that the big AI companies should become LBO shops and what they can do is they can partner with KKR or Blackstone and all they get is the data. KKR and Blackstone Private capital get all the returns, fine. But all the data comes back to the OpenAI's or whoever. And by getting the old code bases out of a McDonald's or out of a Walmart that, you know, some of that code was written in 1970s, you know, they have unique data that nobody else has. And even someone like Universal Music, if OpenAI LBO Universal and said okay, KKR, you can have the rest of the business but we want the rights to the data and we can train music models and stuff like that. You know, KKR can make the money on the LBO. But OpenAI, are they going to make.

Money in the LBO though? Like if you look at that, they're going to build a DCF for this and they're going to say, okay, we're going to make the same amount of money. We're going to, you know, optimize a little bit, maybe cash flow goes up. But then once OpenAI is one shotting music and all of our revenue goes to zero, is that a risk or.

It's going to happen anyway. So I think that's one thing. But then also like the Russian dude who bought Warner Brothers, he really timed his deal. He bought Warner Music, he timed his deal. Amazingly, he made like three times his money or more. And so I think it's price dependent. But if you can buy newspaper company, if you can buy, you know, a book company, a publishing company, like these things are trading for like one or two times sales, you know, and you're getting this rich data that nobody else has. And you know, if it's really a data war, you know, buy the company, keep the data, strip out the rest. And I heard you guys talking about like improving LLM, you know, improving businesses with alarms.

Yeah, and again, it wasn't. That was not the take. It was Willman. It is. And he was saying that more so.

It'S a reason to scale a fun side because hey, let's buy this accounting shop. It has 5 million of EBIT like if we just, you know, take away all the, you know, it's a justification.

Was what if you can execute.

You know, it's fantastic.

The actual post was the real innovation of LLMs is suddenly opening up a few trillion of mainstream paperwork. Businesses that were traditionally too small and too weird for private equity that can Suddenly transact at 2 and 20 on some nebulous AI labor, arbitrage, trade. Never bet against AUM growth.

You know, I think it's reasonable. But it sounds like just any good operator, right? Like when, when Vista and Thoma Bravo buy software companies, somehow they can take these like very ugly gross companies and turn them into amazing cash flow companies. So it's all about the operator, right?

Yeah, but we're going to put Orlando Bravo in a box, right? And then we're also going to put Absolutely in the God box.

Face, voice, everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all coming well, you know, we'll be here live streaming it into the singularity.

Can you play us a song before you leave on the guitar?

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Like with one of those guitars that Chat was on.

Oh, yes. I will come back to you with a good parody of Silicon Valley. I've been working on my impressions. Okay, so maybe I can be back. I'm working on Elon Zuck, Sam.

Bill Gurley.

Bill Gurley has a great voice.

Do girly.

Yeah, I'll work, I'll work on it. You actually do need to like sit in front of a mirror and like listen and tape yourself and like work on it. But basically anybody can do these things and most people.

Wait, wait, are you saying no, no, those are AI voices, right?

No, me. Me. Yeah.

No, he's saying separately from like separately from there. You had the video with T talking with Zuck the other day where he was really?

I just do it myself. I can do, I can do Zuck. I can do Buffett the best. I think I have the best impression in the world.

Can you hit it? Can you, can, can you do like be. Be greedy when others are. Are fearful? Just rip that for us right now.

Let me come back to you and I. I'll do a whole show for you.

Okay. Amazing.

All right, well, this is really fun.

Thanks guys.

See you later.

Come back on soon.

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You only need to get it right once.

Nailed it. Sean Frank, the man who invented the wallet.

This really should be inspiring.

Hanging in the Louvre as they say.

Yeah, this should be. Yeah. Put it on a billboard. As we say.

Put it on a billboard. On a billboard. Adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

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So we, I mean we went through the sketch.

Okay, so we have Joe joining. This is really okay.

Who's Joe?

Oh, Joe's not joining until one.

Okay. Yeah, we have some people.

We have a little bit of time.

Yeah, we got.

Should we do some more time?

Yeah, let's do some more timeline and maybe we'll go through some journal we got. We're over prepped today. We could do six hours.

I like this post from Woodrow.

Okay, break this down for me. I didn't get a chance to fully read this.

So this guy, Eric Jackson, I don't really know his backstory, but he's basically just, just he's generally soliciting, he's giving financial advice. I don't think he's giving. He's not giving financial advice but getting quote tweeted, which is probably honestly finding him more investors, which is funny.

Sure.

Basically saying that, you know, I've seen his name pop up on the timeline a few times recently. Basically saying like he said word for word earlier this week.

Sure.

Like something to the effect of we're looking for 100x every few months.

Oh yeah.

As one does strategy. So he says we're hunting for the next car, Valena, the next btq, the next open door before anyone else. And then he finishes up with, if you're an accredited investor, you can get in before I announce our position on X. So position first, then we tell the world, then we let the thesis play out and ride the waves.

And what's the takeaway from Woodrow Oates? Montag.

This is illegal.

This is unambiguously illegal.

And Martin actually comes back and says there's nothing wrong with telling people about your positions. First in one place and second in another. Otherwise 99% of short reports. Promising. So, yeah, to be clear, this company shut down. But Hindenburg Research, right, they used to do this. They would find a company that had some problems, they would write about it, they would take out a big, short position against it, and they would publish a piece. They did this with Roblox Square and then a bunch of other companies that had many, many of which were, you know, doing. Doing a number of bad things.

Sure.

Anyways, Windsurf has been on a roll. Matt says acquired on Monday. Sonnet 4 back on Wednesday. Wave 11 shipped on Thursday. Unreal. So the whole team over at Windsurf now under the Cognition umbrella, has just been shipping like crazy. So they're fired up. Liz says guy who leaves for a competitor just to see if anyone cares enough to make a traded meme image about it.

Oh, no.

Maybe the anthropic Claude code people did that. Maybe they just wanted the double. You can potentially get a double image, right? You can get the initial trade, and then you get the trade back in their case.

Okay, I have a poly market that we need to pull up. It's from a year ago. It's Martin Shkreli jail in 2024. Less than 0% chance the outcome was no.

He beat the Polymarker that it opened at 20%.

It did. Never went above 50. Martin, you know, stayed out of trouble. And everyone. Everyone who's riding with no did very well.

I'm super bullish on his internal product.

He's a lot of fun.

He really is a child.

I wonder if we could, like, get access to. I feel like we need more data. I feel like it should be powering. Powering the show. Yeah, we have. We. We have a lot of times when we're like, we want to pull up this market cap. We want to pull up basic stuff. And. And we haven't. We, you know, we've used some different stuff here, here and there. But I'd be very interested if he could pull a layer deeper. The credit card data live or whatever, Whatever he's cooking up. Yeah, I'm interested anyway. The House just made history, says Chris Dixon, former guest on the show, says bypassing major legislation on stablecoins, the Genius act and market structure Clarity act in an overwhelmingly bipartisan way. This is a huge moment for credit crypto and for all Americans. We are very close to having comprehensive, proactive rules in place for the first time. Next up, the Genius act goes to the president's desk for his signature. After that, the Senate should pass the Clarity act, which is the market structure Act. We believe passing these laws is the best way to ensure that America remains the world leader in the next era of the Internet. Thank you to all the co sponsors of these bills and the incredible supporters on both sides of the aisle in Congress. And Brent is there with an American flag. So we will have Kyle Samani on the show later today to break down exactly what happened. But very, very fun news. Should we tell everyone about numeral sales tax on autopilot? Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Head over to numeral.

They built.com sales tax AGI.

They did sales tax in a box.

Yep. Always basically a box that you can put your sales tax.

We got to debate the sub stack series C launch strategy.

Yep.

So you got Chris Best.

I mean it was a full blitz.

Full blitz, wall to wall coverage. New York Times piece, TVPN hit. I think he posted about it himself. Hard post.

And he did an interview with Newcomer.

Yes. Well, I think Newcomer leaked it earlier. Remember he was talking, there was some Newcomer report where I remember Newcomer was talking about like I'm the most conflicted here because my business is on substack. I also invested in substack, but I report on substack. And it was kind of, it was kind of cool to watch him like noodle through it, you know. But the debate was between heavily conflicted by the age. No conflict, no interest, I say. And I actually enjoyed Newcomers. But piece on Substack. I think he has an interesting perspective because he's on all sides of the table, all sides of the octog on the octagonal table. But Lulu a while back, of course she says going direct is now the way a year or two is controversial. Some consider it a last resort for people who got canceled basically. Now everyone, the interpretation of going direct is that if you go direct, you should never talk to the media at all. You should only post on platforms you have full control over. Your own Twitter account, your own website, your own newspaper mail people the information directly go direct instead of going to someone else's platform.

Going Direct is a spectrum.

It is.

You can go direct on TVPN because we're live.

We're live.

Whatever you want. You can't possibly edit it because it's in real time.

Yes.

And that ends up being the historical frustration. Frustration with talking to the New York Times about a story is that you might talk to them for four hours and then they take out two sentences out of context and it makes you look like you have very different intentions.

It's thrilling. There's nothing like talking to a journalist for four hours and being like, this could go horribly or it could be amazing. It's a tightrope. One walk.

Yeah.

And it's living life on the edge. It's living life one mile at a time. 1. The first time on the first time I heard anything. One wrong word and you could be banished from society forever. You could lose everything.

Yeah.

But if it works out, you will be enshrined in glory. Your name will be remembered.

That's right.

In print, it'll be echoed in the halls of history.

Yeah. The first time I heard you had a. Had a. Have a drawn out conversation with a journalist, I was like, wow, that was an incredible. You guys had this incredible dance, like dancing with a bull.

Yes. You have ufc. I have. Talking on the record for hours to journalists, seeing how it goes.

It's putting it all on the line. Holding.

It's like a bullfight. Yeah, it's like a bullfight, exactly. You. Sometimes you get the horns, sometimes you get gored. Sometimes. It's also, it's also very much like riding a horse. You know, it can be thrilling, it can be beautiful, but sometimes you fall off and you break your neck. It's dangerous. It's pushing it to the limit. That's what engaging with a journalist is. And some people just want that rush in their life.

Yeah.

And so that's what Chris Best did. He went to the New York Times.

He went into the mouth of the wolf. Wolf den, the mouth of the wolf.

He's. He's hiding in the mouth.

He's not afraid. And I mean, that, that was the thing that was like, I mean, you.

Went in the arena.

Substack has always been a product where if you ask the users how they feel about it, they're like, I love Substack. If you ask people that are building businesses on Substack, they'll tell you they love it. The product has evolved a lot, but there was a lot of people that wrote it off after that and said, okay, unnamed fun top ticked this in 20, 21 or whenever it was, but he's back. He's back stronger than ever. The product is actually working as a social network.

And he's getting in the octagon. He's going to the mat with the gray lady. And he came out on top. You know, the gray lady. Anyway, so Chris best announced a $100 million Series C. You heard about it yesterday, came on the show, we rang the gong for him. We're very excited about what he's doing at Substack. But Eric Newcomer says Substack just announced the round in the New York Times. This is the. This is the opposite of going direct. And obviously, we've explained why. You talk to someone like the New York Times, it's for the thrill, but the rush.

The interesting thing also, Chris knows he can come out and hit the whole Substack audience pretty well.

Well, that's what I'm thinking.

But if the. In a way, New York Times covering his. Like, if Substack is successful, the New York Times in 10 years will be a shell of what it is today.

Oh, that's an interesting take. Okay.

Legacy media will always have a place. These brands are super powerful. They serve a real purpose in the ecosystem, and generally they provide a valuable service for the world.

But I had a different take on it.

But there's real. At least right now, there's very real salary caps. And if you are a rock star writer at the New York Times, very likely you could go on Substack and be making more within year.

Yeah.

So it ends up being a good trade.

Yeah.

For some reason, to me, I think it's smart for him to go into the. Into the. The lion's den, the shark pit, and advertise his business to that audience.

Step into the cave with a great lady.

Every single. I would say, like, the goal at Substack should be every single person that subscribes to the New York Times today.

Yeah.

Should be subscribed to at least one substack in a decade from now.

Just arm wrestling with the gray lady. Arm wrestling with the gray lady. So that's a pretty good take. I like that. I don't know that that holds for everything on Substack because I still haven't found, like, the investigative journalism format on Substack working fully because you have to subscribe for a year, and then maybe you get one scoop, and it's huge. But I always think about, you know, I go back to Seymour Hirsch, and I just don't know if he would be able to be an independent creator. I think he needs the patronage of a. Of a large organization. So.

No, there's a ton of different styles of writing that work really well under a existing brand.

Yeah.

If you're in the scoop business and you're gonna get three scoops a year, two good scoops a year, you might be really valuable to a big.

To a media proposition. Exactly.

If you're doing profiles and you're gonna write four profiles a year, they're gonna be super, like, you know, widely Read and novel and worth creating. Probably better fit to go do that under a legacy media brand or just a broader platform, because not a lot of people are gonna want to subscribe to something that they're getting value from. Just a few times a year people cancel again. They'll cancel their Netflix if they don't. If there's not like a show at that moment that they're super excited about.

But my take on why, why Chris Best announced his $100 million Series C in the New York Times, you know, Newcomer is clearly on Substack. An investor in Substack writing about Substack. Chris Best could have gone to Eric Newcomer, probably gotten a great piece, right. Eric really understands the business. He's going to be able to tell that story pretty well, I think. But why do you go to the New York Times instead of Eric Newcomer, who's clearly sniffing around and on the trail of this deal, but take the exclusive New York Times? I think it's because the audience, I think Newcomer writes for people in Silicon Valley VCs who are acutely aware of Substack. Most of them already have substacks. I think a lot of New York Times readers could be the next wave or the iteration of substack substackers. Oh yeah, but I was talking about the, the, the readership of the New York Times.

I'm saying the readership, yes. Success for over the next 10 years, success for Substack is every single person, for the most part, let's say every Single person under 65 years old should subscribe to at least one substack writer. Right?

I'm talking about becoming a writer. So I think that there are lots of people who read the New York Times who are thinking about writing about art, literature, technology, whatever, and they read and they read the New York Times and they, and they think like, oh, I'd like to, I'd like to dip my toe in. And I'm not just going to go quit my job and apply for a job at the New York Times.

Two sided.

I will start a substack. And so I think that taking the story there makes a ton of sense. I've already seen there's this interesting project that Emily Sundberg highlighted where someone is writing a fictional story, but instead of just publishing a book, they're doing it on Substack. You subscribe and you get one chapter a week for a couple months.

That's cool.

I thought that was a really cool innovation. And I think that, you know, potentially.

The interesting thing is people will pay what? $25 for a book?

Sure.

But they'll pay $15 a month for a substack.

Yeah. Or take $10 a month and then.

They'Ll just finish it and drip it out.

Well, I love that book. I want to keep supporting them because I want to get the next book when it comes out. I'll just let that ride on my credit card. Whatever. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And so. So I think that that market of new substance stack creators is super valuable. And I think you get that when you go to the New York Times. I don't know if you get that when you go to Eric Newcomer. Although obviously there's a lot of great benefits that you get when you go to Eric Newcomer. But our next guest is here in the studio. I'm seeing green light. We're good.

Very good.

Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

What's going on gents?

How's it going? Good to finally be on. Big fans. Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you. And you have some pretty big news today.

Break it down. Yeah.

Raised our seed round. 55 million.

There we go. I, I personally love when seed. I'd love to see a seed round get into the double digits.

Yeah. High double digits.

I think they all should be some. Hopefully you're the start of a new, a new wave. But what is. Is this the third largest, third largest seed round in. In New York history, Is that right?

That's what we're tracking. That's right on our end on the equity only side and we're pulling some data where everyone else does. But yeah, we feel excited about it and we feel really good on being continue to build in New York City.

So the equity only side. I was going to ask, I asked Jordi about that. I was like okay, $55 million seed. Is this, is this 80% debt? Is there some like crazy GPU credit thing going on here? People get kind of funky with the numbers. These dollars, this seems like real dollars. Who is writing $55 million seed checks these days? Yeah.

So round was led by RTX Ventures arm. So the corporate venture arm. There a lot of interest in what we've been working on. And they led the round. We had great partners come into that round. Nvidia's venture arm and ventures any next Infinite Capital, Alicorp where who did our pre seed and also participated in this round as well as well as kind of a bunch of other investors with inside of that. So super excited about the support we have. It's interesting. We have a Balance of both financial VCs as well as corporate strategics in this round as well. And look, we work in material science. I'm sure we'll get into this in more detail, but I think they really see where materials and science at large is going with AI and this is why they're starting to look into tech and startups because that's where the innovation truly is, especially in a space like the physical world in material science. So really interesting mix and we are super proud of the syndicate we put together.

That's awesome. Backstory on yourself than the time at alicorp. How this company was created would be awesome.

Yeah, absolutely. So going back a couple years, I'm a scientist by training. I was working in grad school at Rice. I was working on these things called neuromorphic computing chips which they try to replace the von neumann bottleneck inside CPUs.

A lot of big words back to back.

So we pretty much try to connect memory and CPU and not lose the latency and the energy that go inside a chip. So I was working on this technology except it was going nowhere because it's academic research and academic research doesn't scale into the real world. So I was super frustrated. So I ended up getting a fellowship at the Army Research Lab. I go there, I'm working on the same problem at arl. And it's better because the Army's funding your work, right? And the army wants to see things come and move into the services that they can actually use. But it's still really early technology readiness levels like 2, 3, 4 still in that fundamental area. So I was getting frustrated. So I said, okay, I'm going to start a company. And then I realized I didn't know anything about starting a company and I didn't actually know what I wanted to do. And so I bumped into Kevin Ryan in New York. I reached out to him, cold, cold emailed him actually and said, hey, if you're not investing in material science, you're not investing in the future. He was like, okay, I've been an investor for 30 years. That's a bold claim. But sure.

What are some of the big names that Ali Corp has done? They did MongoDB, Business Insider. It's crazy. Range.

Yeah, Wide range. And Ali Corp's unique. Right? Ali Corp both incubates companies in house, kind of where Radical really got its roots. And I can talk about that, but also invest at the early stage as well. Anywhere from 1 to 5 million in the early stage. Side seed, sometimes, you know, an early Series A. So they have this interesting ability to go and dive into a space and if they find a company they love and they want to invest in, they will invest. And that's what we did there. And if there isn't one, they'll actually look to incubate that company in house. And so it's a really nice a way to play into a new market that you want to see innovation in, but just can't find something that's there.

When did the pre seed happen? Was it a year ago, about a.

Year ago, or a little bit over March of 24? So one of my other co founders, Jorge, both at Ali Corp. Jorge is deep software guy, startup guy through and through, only done startups his entire career. And he's looking into AI, right? Who wasn't? All of us were, but we were super frustrated. We kept seeing wrappers on top of models and we were thinking like, this can't actually be it, right? Like, is this the pinnacle of innovation? Like the new tech wave is going to be rappers? And we knew that wasn't it. So we spent like months reading a bunch of papers inside AI. We were convinced the technology was incredible, but there had to be a space that was better. And being a material scientist, I thought, well, materials are quite large, right? The most important industries in the world, automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, defense, cross climate, energy, semiconductors, the most important industries in the world are all a direct result for materials. So why don't we look into there? So we start reading into the space, we dive in deep and we bump into this gentleman named Herd Cedar, longtime academic, he's at Berkeley. He's got an H index of 182 or something like that. And he had done two things. Specifically, he'd helped set up the materials project from the mgi. So this AI for materials, early sector inside the US and then he built a robotic lab. It's called the A lab. It's at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab right now. And it's fully autonomous, does 55 experiments a day. So we're like, we got to go see this thing. So we fly out to Berkeley, we get dinner with Herd and we pitch him on. Look, someone's got to build the future of material science and it needs to be a full stack, vertically integrated approach. There's no other way to drive value and us together really aligned opinion around what it should look like and form the company and went from there. Million in pre seed from Ali Corp and got started and went big, big.

Numbers, big numbers all the way up.

Yeah. My question is like, why not Just do series A, 10 million, series B, 55 million. What does a $55 million seed round like? What's, what message are you sending? Obviously it's like superlative so you can get headlines around it. Is that the value that you just stand out or is it you specifically want to? Because I imagine that if I just walked around your office, it's going to feel like a Series B company that's raised $55 million. So like what? Like, yeah, like what are you actually saying to folks when you say, oh, I run a seed stage company versus oh, I run a company that's raised tens of millions of dollars. These are two different aesthetics.

They definitely are. I feel like we still feel pretty early. I don't know what Series B's are looking like yet today. I'm not. We, we like being super lean. We are really honestly crazy about our culture. We think culture is one of the most important things you can do at an early stage company. And we're really, really rigorous on who we bring in and why. And so we actually keep the team quite light. We will be growing with the round, of course, it goes without saying, but we really deeply believe in the ability to challenge everything that exists today. Ask the question why about everything. Why do these things?

So what, what, what's the. Got a. Got a lot of money on the, on the balance sheet. Sorry. And sorry you're. Your Internet, I think is a little rough. We got it with the 55 million up the. You guys deserve fiber now. Let's get it, let's get it in there. But what's the use of funds? What does success look like over the next 18 months? Sounds like you guys are super ambitious, but how do you start proving out what you can do?

Yeah. So we've got to scale. The team want to bring in big talent on the side of AI as well as material science and the automation side. There's a lot of interdisciplinary approaches that we take.

One, part time AI research.

Sure.

20 hours a week.

Yeah, no, we're not doing any of that.

I'm sure you can hire people integration.

And then two, we're going to build the most advanced materials R and D facility in the world. Multiple different materials lines. It'll do hundreds of thousands of experiments per year. And all of that data is the missing data set that really exists inside the AI for material space today. So if we can capture all of that.

So are you rebuilding the kind of robotics lab that your co founder had at Berkeley in order to execute that many experiments?

We do, yeah. So we kind of, we amped it up in a way. His was a very academic approach to it had to work within inside academic constraints. Was very specific on a research problem. Ours is much more automated in that we are doing real active learning on the data analysis and capture and then bringing that back into the AI engine and then can really be made into a platform where we can actually take that software and robotic system approach that we have and use it in other material systems. So we can actually be multi system based inside the products that we're trying to solve for. So that's kind of a big differentiation between where his was and where ours is going to be today.

Awesome.

All right, well thank you so much for joining. Thanks so much for having Very, very exciting and congratulations.

Yeah, congratulations guys.

Thanks for having me on and we'll be in touch.

We will talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Goodbye. In the meantime we will tell you about ADEO Customer Relationship Magic. ADEO is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Let's go to Swix, break this down.

I'll be right back.

Sure. So Swix, friend of the show says a lot of people are poo pooing the CHAT GPT Agent launch which we covered on the show yesterday. We had folks from OpenAI on and we also had Dan Shipper from every on the on the show to to break down how he's using ChatGPT agent. I was impressed with the OpenAI folks. I thought they explained a lot of how this works and Dan Shipper's like his, you know, third party analysis of how he's using the tool sounded very promising. We haven't had a chance to test it here on the show but I'm excited for it. And SWIX breaks it down. He says people are poo pooing chatgpt Agent as just a better harness but they're not reading closely enough. We've got a new frontier model today folks. These charts are like for like same harness. They basically stopped short of calling it GPT5. But yeah, if there were a public release of O4 full today was it? Don't sleep on that. In other words, run your benchmarks telling it not to use tools and I expect it'll be a big step up from 03. And so he's looking at the benchmark of ChatGPT agent on humanities last exam doing much better. And so even though this didn't get a true version bump, the the actual results are great. On practical problems, we're gonna have Mike from arc AGI on the show later. I. I can't wait until we can throw ChatGPT agent at some Arc AGI puzzles. I got a little preview and Arc AGI 3. It is a challenge and I will be doing it live on the stream and I won't be embarrassed at all.

What John was sweating earlier.

Yeah.

Gave it a little test run.

It is a challenge and I imagine it will be a very huge challenge for ChatGPT agents.

It's funny. So we had the. The ChatGPT agents team on yesterday and then I saw on the timeline later, people were kind of saying like, oh, it took 10 minutes to book a flight. Which is like kind of like funny criticism because it's probably how much it realistically takes like a human to book a flight. So the fact that, you know, an agent could do it in the same time and you can imagine the agent could just get. Yeah, you know, if it can get 10 times times faster.

Completely agree. Also, the interesting hot take is that there's a world where I have found that even if a task takes me 10 minutes on my laptop, in a professional piece of software, if I can do it in ChatGPT in the app in 10 minutes and it's equally frustrating and it takes me the same amount of time, I like being able to do it on my phone. I noticed this when I made this two by two chart showing Dwarkesh Patel versus Tyler Cowen on their AGI perspectives. So Dwarkesh believes AGI is not here, Tyler Cowen believes AGI is here. Dwarkesh believes the impact of AGI will be immense and Tyler Cowen believes that it will be very incremental. So they are on the opposite sides of this two by two diagram. So I go to ChatGPT. I could easily have just done this in in Google sheets and taken a screenshot. I could have done it in Photoshop. But both of those would probably require opening my laptop. But on my phone, in the ChatGPT app, I was able to have it try and do an AI image generation that wasn't really working. It was getting confused. So I finally had it use matplotlib and write some code to generate it. And I was. And I went back and forth with it probably for about the same amount of time that I would have been in Photoshop. But it was nice because I was able to just able to do it on my phone. And so there's something about the rune take that text is the universal interface that even if it takes me the same amount of Time to book a flight. If I can just do it in a, in a universal interface that I'm super comfortable with and I'm interfacing with it on the ChatGPT app. I might prefer that over going to the united.com website, unitedairlines.com or Google Flights.

Where you can see the flight and then it'll pipe you to the other side.

There's so many different sites and they're all slightly different. Slightly different ui, slightly different designs. And oh, this one, I need to remember to uncheck this box. And this one I need to do this. And my password's not saved here. I like that. ChatGPT is just becoming like a unified interface for how I interact with web services, tools, all this stuff. It's very cool. Anyway, in other news, semi analysis, AJ friend of the show says Anthropic quote, we don't care about consumer code is the only use case we care about everyone else says, why is anthropic not showing up in consumer statistics? And someone, and he's quote, reading someone says, what happened to anthropic? Because anthropic fell off of the OpenAI the rankings of chatbot downloads. ChatGPTs on share with yeah of Sensor Tower. ChatGPT is on a tear with almost a billion downloads. Google Gemini at 200 million, Deep Sea at 127 million, Microsoft Copilot at 80 million and Perplexity at 50 million. Perplexity has been holding on strong in a very competitive environment, and I think that's why they were able to raise at an $18 billion valuation yesterday. If you didn't see the news, SWIX has more analysis on the OpenAI launch. Three things a deep and he's doing the Steve Jobs meme with Sam Altman. Three Things a deep research model with enhanced search browser, a revolutionary computer use operator and a sandbox terminal to execute math and code. A browser, a terminal, a computer. Are you getting it? These are not three separate agents. This is one agent and we're calling it Agent. This is a really good one. Oh, great, great, great, great poster. Great poster.

Justine Moore says, I predict that gro's male AI companion will be even bigger hit than it will be an even bigger hit than the female one. Elon has said that he's naming it Valentine.

But what did it say it was gonna call itself?

It has. It calls itself something else that we won't say. Women are quietly massive consumers of romance and erotica content. And she gives some data fan fiction. So romance novels are at 8482 to 84% women online fan fiction 80% I've.

Never been part of that whole world.

But yeah, never been big into that whole world.

Anyway, let me tell you about Fin AI the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2 go to finish.

I don't know how they do it.

I don't know how they keep doing it. They, they just Luck of the Irish as they say.

Capital bloke says I have two people in my life that I've mentally flagged for high risk of LLM induced mental health issues where I'm already seeing concerning activity. I don't think society is ready for how much of an issue this is going to be at all. So yeah, again I think there needs check on your friends action from the labs in order to make just make some changes to the product. It does seem to be like it's not something that's going to happen in an hour from using the product but it could happen in a month.

Here's a prompt ChatGPT agent. Look at my calendar, look at Google Maps. Find me the nearest grass. I need to go touch it, schedule it, put it on my calendar. Remind me to go there, call me an Uber to take me to the grass. Call me a Waymo to take me to the grass. I need to touch it, take me to Central Park.

Yeah.

The home of our next guest, Joe Wiesenthal. Welcome to the stream, Joe. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks for, thanks for having me back.

It's always welcome.

Somebody commented earlier on you shared the guest lineup and they were like, yeah, Joe goes on TVPN more than I call my mom.

I love you guys but maybe that person, I think that person needs to build a better relationship with their mother.

With their mother for sure. But we are family. This is the brother.

We are family. We are family.

You are a technology brother.

Yes, that's right.

Financial brother.

Thank you.

What's the latest in your world? What has been capturing your attention this week?

You know, here's an interesting thing is that the economy just like setting aside the markets which we all go nuts every day. The lines always go up. There's the economy itself like the. It was a good week for economic data. Today we got better than expected economic sentiment. Yesterday we got better than expected retail sales. We got better than expected initial jobless claims. We got better than expected. The Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing survey. There has been this assumption, I would say in recent weeks that recent months, really, that the economy would slip and then the question would be, would the Fed cut rates in time to forestall a recession? And maybe that's still a debate. Certainly. We know the White House really wants to see rate cuts, but actually, at least, like is a snapshot right now. Actually, it looks like there might be a little bit of a tailwind to this economy, which I think is really interesting and maybe unexpected.

That's fantastic. I have your post here. Boom. More strong economic data.

Yeah.

June retail sales. Rob. John for the American economy.

Pit for Joe and the economy. Love it.

I need a gong. My producer Kale is in the room with me.

I think everyone needs a gong.

We have a variety of gongs.

We can actually send you a gong. We have three now and we're thinking about getting a fourth. So we have spare gongs if you need to borrow one.

I think the guests need a gong.

Yeah. I think the big thing is it's not necessarily that you need a gong. It's that you need to get into prop comedy generally.

Broadly.

And odd lots needs a whole prop department with a variety of things.

Prop lead.

Have we showed you. Have we showed you our props? We have. We have the crystal ball for tell. For knowing the future. Of course.

Careful with that.

We now have.

Yep. Put it on. John. If you ever. If John ever wants to steal man. An argument.

Steel man. Something. You have a steel man.

Do you have a. Do you guys have a tungsten cube?

We don't have a cube, but we have a tinfoil hat.

We have a tinfoil hat for when we're discussing conspiracy theories.

Yeah. It gives you a little coverage.

I'm not saying this. I'm wearing the tiny.

You guys are all set for all the different scenarios, all the different.

How was you dropped your interview with Eric Adams? Yeah, it was this morning.

Yes.

I haven't had a chance to listen yet. You guys seem like you were having fun.

I don't think it's possible to not have fun talking to Eric Adams. Eric Adams is one of these guys where it's like, even the people who hate Eric Adams love Eric Adams to some extent. He is. You know, you talk to him and there are some people you talk to and it's like you instantly get why they've been successful in politics. He has a great smile. He's very funny. He sort of speaks extemporaneously very well. You never really know what he's going to say. And look, you know, he presents, I would say not popular right now. His approval rating Is pretty low. But I would say he. He makes his case well that he's had a good mayorship. Between crime numbers, between the volume of housing that's been built in the last four years. I don't know, like, the rats. The rat numbers are real. I talked about it last time. The rat numbers are real. So, again, I think there was a poll out this week that actually showed him in fourth place.

But is there really a rat census? Do we have good data on rats?

So the way they measure it. Yeah, they do. I mean, this is what the collapse.

This is what collapses looks like, by the way, is when you start measuring the rat population.

Are hedge funds trading against the rat index?

We need poly markets on the rat.

The proxy that they use for measuring rods, rats is 3-311-CREAMS. So 311-CREAMS is like our way to, like, call the police about something that's not an urgent crime or other things going on. And if there's like a rat infestation or a lot of rats in place, and they dropped like, 40% in 2024, and then if you look at the annualized data through now, it's like down another 25%. I think, on things like rats and trash containerization, which I know, you know, trying to get into the modern era here in New York City, I think there is a widespread agreement that actually, real progress has been made. And Eric Adams has a lot of funny videos about his war on rats, and I think. I think he deserves credit for it.

Was there ever. I don't know if this is an apocryphal story, but the whole story of, like, the Indian cobras, where there was a bounty. Have you heard the story go on? It's a classic economic example of unintended consequences. Essentially. There's actually a particular term for it, but basically, there was a snake problem, a cobra problem, poisonous snake problem in India. And as the legend goes, as the. The story goes, the government said, hey, look, we're going to take a decentralized approach. We are going to put this in the hands of the free market. We are going to create a bounty for every dead cobra or dead snake that you bring us. And so we will pay you $1 for every single thing is people started breeding them. They started breeding them. Exactly. And so I wonder if there's a world where, okay, I got elected, I need to. I need to crush the rat population, but then I need to climb it up once it's out of the news cycle, I got to get the rod population huge, and then I Can crush it right before.

Keep smashing it again.

Keep smashing it right on, right on the cycle. So. Oh, yeah, it was bad midterm, but. Right. You don't want to change horses in the middle of a stream. Because I'm the rat. Yeah, the rat catcher.

That's right.

But I mean. Yeah. Is there, is there a secret in New York City to controlling the rat problem? Is it just like more rat?

I think it's just, I think it really is just a function of how horribly we've managed our trash.

Okay.

And you just see. And I saw it. You know, I was walking to the subway today because the containerization of trash, like, it's, it hasn't come to my part of the city yet. It hasn't come to the East Village. There's just a lot of trash bags that exist on the street. I, and, and I saw a bunch of. Incidentally, I saw a bunch of rats last night when I was walking home. So it is a live problem. There is still progress. And, you know, like, I would never endorse a candidate for mayor, but I would certainly suggest that whoever is the mayor after November or after the inauguration, hopefully the existing trajectory continues because the problem is not solved.

Yeah. Deals with it. Jordy.

Who else comes on your show and talks about rats, by the way? It's probably just me.

Well, you're, you're, you're a new rat correspondent.

Emily Sundberg is helpful, is a helpful reporter to understand what's going on the East Coast. I mean, the big thing that I've been pulling on, I talked to a couple hedge fund folks out on the east coast in Manhattan. We had one guest on from CO2 who had a very beautiful scenic view out the window from Hedge Fund Alley. I guess that's a street or something like that. And I was pulling on what has the reaction been in the finance world in the, on the east coast to these crazy aqua hires that are going on on the West Coast. So we saw that Google acquired Windser for $2.4 billion. It was this kind of zombie aqua hire that's becoming more and more standard. Mark Zuckerberg's paying 100 million, $200 million for single AI researchers. It's kind of shaking Silicon Valley.

I think it's good for the news business because now what would have been one acquisition. Acquisition is now two.

Oh, yeah.

So we got to cover it Friday. And then we also got to have Scott Woo, who bought the ghost ship on Monday.

But I guess, yeah, the question is just like, what's the reaction because for Wall street with pods, it feels like a standard.

Yeah, that's really, you know, it's funny, literally just before we got on here and I was just talking here, it just feels like if you think about the sort of broad phenomena, phenomenons in the economy, that what we're seeing is more and more sectors of the economy are experiencing this sort of like winner take allness phenomenon, where it's not that the sector is doing good or bad, it's that there are a handful of talented people in any industry that just, you know, capture extraordinary sums. And, you know, we've seen it for years in professional sports. The pod shops, the hedge funds that we talk about a lot about on the podcast have had it for years. That's our equivalent at Bloomberg. You know, like the stories that read Spike on the terminal, it's always about like some guy, it's like, oh, so and so who you know is a transportation portfolio manager at this pod shop is like going there and they're getting a $50 million bonus, etc. It feels like, you know, we see it in media, of course, in various ways, and star newsletter writers and star podcasters and star broadcasters and so forth. And, and then clearly like, obviously, you know, software people have been getting paid well for a long time. But this phenomenon where now it's like, no, the value is not in the company per se, the value is in just that individual town who can get up and walk and take that value out with them. Yeah, it feels like it's replicating elsewhere and like, I don't know where it's going, but this seems to be a phenomenon of the world.

Yeah, that's why anybody freaking out about like the comp packages of individual researchers, it's like, yes, if you look at it on an individualized level, one person getting nine figures, but if you look at it and say, well, zuck just spent 15 on scale AI which was heavily talent oriented and would he pay $4 billion for one of the top teams if he could just aqua hire one of the top teams? And in this case he just pieced it together from a variety of labs.

It's really interesting to. One thing I think is interesting to think about is that a lot of, in the finance world, a lot of talent driven businesses often aren't particularly great for shareholders. So if you look at like the history of like investment banks that are standalone investment banks that never had like a trading arm, etc. Almost all of the enterprise value like ends up accruing to the talent. And there is not much. Frequently like the equity component. When these companies are publicly traded, you look at like boutique investment banks that from time to time are publicly traded. They've never like been particularly, those have never done particularly well. Or you think about a law firm, of course, which doesn't have public equity, but like, you know, it's like all the money sort of like accrues to the talent. And so I do think there are some like, interesting implications, like maybe down the line, not yet in public markets, but it's pretty obvious from Windsurf that in private markets this has got to be, you know, change the way investors are thinking that, you know, what really is left over for the poor downtrodden shareholder if the most talented workers at the company are the ones who really get to capture all of the value.

Yeah, yeah, you've seen this with the podcast networks of the world, true networks. If you know, Dave Portnoy builds up some talent, he starts paying them 100.

And so why share it? Why share it at that point with Dave? At that point, right. Like if you are superstar podcaster under that particular network, eventually you get to a point where it's like, you know, you take, maybe you start off and you take 20% of the cut and then 50 and then you're like, why am I sharing it all at all?

Alex Cooper, basically.

Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Cooper's market value is about the same as an AI researcher, like over the last, over the last few years.

Yeah. So my, I've been thinking about this a lot since we last talked and you said the power laws are popping up everywhere. And, and I was, I was just going through my daily life thinking, like, how is that true? I see it everywhere. I agree in a lot of things. But I was thinking about like, you know, there's this meme of like after AI, the last job will be like the plumber. And I was like, is there a power law compensation curve in plumbing, like, or driving? Because if you think about the value of, of driving, it's really a lot of. There is a ton of equity value in Uber. There is a ton. There's just not.

There's value, it's a leverage thing that the highest paid plumber will be somebody who has like a like scaled plumbing enterprise that you can only install so much pipe.

But if they lose their talent, like there's still equity value because you've aggregated demand. And that's the difference between the AI research labs and Instagram. Every. They could have 100% turnover at Instagram, slot other people in It's a network effect. There's an audience there. There's habitual. I know I have a fan base on Instagram, or I open it, and I know that I get funny memes or videos or family connections there. I'm not leaving just because the software engineer who works on this particular button leaves. And so there's a ton of equity value in Instagram relative to the talent. And I think that it's not as universal as we think. I think we're just seeing it more in media and finance and research and places where there are either secrets that you can take with you or relationships that you can take with you or fandom that you can take with you. So it's not entirely 100% universal, but it certainly is something that it's more on display than ever before.

Yeah, I think that's good. Look, I think this is a useful corrective, the phenomenon. There are many parts of the economy where the sort of distribution between equity and talent is not as skewed as it seems to be in some of the these areas. It does seem on display. I mean, it's weird that we know the names of software engineers in general, right?

Yeah. Like trading card memes. We put up these trading card memes. They got millions of views. It's crazy.

We had a.

You guys nailed it.

Like.

Yeah. And I, you know, when I think about why you guys not to, you know, blow smoke, but when I think about, like. Okay, like when I think about tbpn.

Yeah.

And like, what is it about this moment and why has it worked? And why has it worked as well as it has? I do think, you know, it's obvious that just, like so much of this thing is like, it's a. You know, you guys do like a very quasi sports show. And so much of what we're talking about is de facto sounding like sports, including the degree to which people just get traded, so to speak, from. Or big signing transfers from one firm to the next.

Yeah, I mean, to me, to me, business, like, anybody that is like, sufficiently nerded out about business and markets and tech is like it's always been. You could always comp into sports, right? You have personalities, you have effectively coaches, you know, like the elder VCs, you have the teams, the companies, et cetera. Switching gears a little bit. What's up with what's going on with general solicitation right now? It seems like there's a bull market in general solicitation. There's this guy, Eric Jackson, who's just been basically going out saying, yeah, I'm just looking for 100 x's and by the way, if you want to, if you want to, if you want to join the ride, you can. And a lot of people, I'm going.

To try to be careful when I talk about this topic, but the idea of like, you know, we are going to pick a ticker again, trying to be careful. We are going to pick a ticker and just sort of manufacture momentum for it. It's probably just so much that always existed in markets. And we seem to be in an age in which this sort of behavior is. People don't try to hide it as much. And that's, I think, not the surprise. Have there always been people attempting to, like, all right, we're gonna like try to. I'm trying to think of a word that wouldn't land me in legal trouble. We're gonna try to move this stock for sort of non economic reasons because we gather and buy it. Has that always existed? I'm sure we seem to live in an age where not only are people comfortable with just sort of doing that in the public, you have a lot of people who sort of say, yeah, you know what, everybody's got to eat and everything is corrupt these days and everything is a scam. I don't really believe that. For what it's worth, I actually think American capital markets are the best in the world from a sort of transparency and regulatory side. I actually think it would be sad if we lose that. But I do think there's this wide perception it's all a scam, everybody is corrupt, everybody has inside information. You're not, you don't have that information. And therefore why can't you participate in your own form of, you know, driving the market to your will? Social media obviously allows that and no one seems to. Everyone seems to be sort of cool with that these days. And like I said, I actually do think American capital markets are deep and fantastic and well regulated generally. And if you look anywhere else in.

The world, let's give it up. Yeah, capital markets, we'd love them. I was talking to Jordy about this this morning.

Well, it's funny that when somebody is doing or, you know, basically doing general solicitation, the reaction is for a bunch of guys who love finance to go and dunk and quote, tweet the person and be like, look. And it just drives more attention.

How do you cover it? Like this is the problem. Like, how do you even like begin to cover it? Because I've wondered about this, like with doing the podcast over the years, where it's like, certain, like, certain, you know, I'll hear a story, someone will tell me about, like, some meme coin or something, and the schemes that they, like, concoct to, like, pump it basically straight up manipulated or, like, gather in a group, etc. And it's really interesting, but it's like, it feels a little, you know, like, I would love to talk to you on the podcast. On the other hand, I. No matter how much that person is straight up admitting to market manipulation, the mere fact that they would be getting attention almost certainly drive the whole thing higher. So it creates this very, like, weird tension from this.

Yeah. Remember when the. When there was that Argentinian presidential meme coin that Malay kind of endorsed, and the guy that created it, like, went on like a. Started going on podcasts immediately breaking it down.

Yeah.

You know, there's that famous George Soros quote, and I don't know it exactly, but he talked about it. He's like, when I see a bubble, I run towards it. And I think everybody is now adopting that, where they look at something and they want to get in. They see a scam. And rather than, oh, I want to avoid that scam, it's, I want to get in on the scam. I want. In other words, it's like, I want to be in on the next mate.

I remember this during the. I remember this during the crazy crypto era of, like, 2021. I remember Coffeezilla, this YouTuber who would talk about these scams, would interview some of the, like, victims who lost a lot of money, and they were like, well, I knew it was a Ponzi scheme, but I thought I was early. I thought I was.

Yeah, I think I wrote that. I got to go find that because I hadn't thought about it. I think I literally wrote once, like, the new thing is like, getting in on the next maid off getting in on the. Because if you are early and if there's sort of like, we're in an era where regulators, whatever, just don't care about this stuff, or the expectation is, like, you play. Everyone gets to play the game. Everyone knows what the game is. You just don't want to be the last bag holder. The game is to get in early.

I was thinking about this in the context of the Coldplay concert that went viral. The CEO of Astronomer took over the Internet and I was like, okay, it's a private company, but if it was a public company, what would have happened to that stock? Is there a world where someone's like, let's turn this into a meme stock because it's a small company.

Let's buy the Coldplay ip, roll it in and turn it into a Coldplay IP treasury play.

I'm sure there'll be something out there in the near future.

I don't love it, but, you know, I'm old and I'm a boomer at this point, so maybe I just need to sort of embrace the new generation.

You know, something crazy. Some somebody messaged me and they were like, do you know Andy Byron, the guy at the Coldplay concert, was previously the president at Lace Work, which went from zero to $7 billion in the $8 billion in the private markets back down and ended up selling for like, I think around 150 million. So he's been on it. He's been on what?

A ride.

That's someone who, that's someone who knows the roller coaster of life.

Yeah. So he'll, he'll be back, I'm sure, probably in another marriage. What's going on with the 230 spread? I saw you posting that the 230 spread is at its highest since October 2021. I remember October 2021. There were top signals blaring everywhere. We have our own top signal tracker that we're working on internally that we should roll through as well.

But you guys gotta get into proprietary data. No? So like, you know, the way to think about the President has been out calling for rate cuts. And we might get rate cuts at some point in the next year. But the way to think about the yield curve is that at any given point on the curve, that number reflects like the sort of average rate over that time. So the two year yield, for example, is essentially what the market expects. The Fed will have rates on average over the next two years. The 30 year is what the market expects Fed rates to be on average over the next 30 years. And what you see is this, you know, even at this time of calling for rate cuts, rates, that number at the long end keeps going higher and higher, which suggests that, you know, the Fed could cut rates right now, it could get rates aggressively if Trump replaces Powell sometime next year, or perhaps tries to fire him before that. With someone who's sort of a lackey or a loyalist, we might get this situation of sort of like aggressive rate cuts now. But if people perceive that to be inflationary and so forth, one possibility is that rates go up at the long end because they'll eventually have to complicate, compensate that, compensate for that by Higher rates to fight that inflation. And so you see that now. And what that means, though, is that even if you got rate cuts right now, you might not actually get lower mortgage rates or lower car rates, because those are the rates that actually matter towards where people are borrowing. So I think perhaps maybe the market is telling Trump a signal you're not even going to get what you want. Even if you get what you want, you could get that Fed chair who immediately cuts rates for you. But if the goal is lower rates to stimulate the economy, it may not even work because you might see longer rates rise in compensation.

Interesting. Yeah, that would talk about the decision for who runs the Fed. It's been kind of wall to wall coverage from the Wall Street Journal, all different bank CEOs coming out. There's been memes about like, you know, the school walkout, don't fire Jerome. Like, what are the archives arguments on the sides of like, hey, let's not intervene from the executive branch.

Yeah, there's a bunch of interesting dimensions. I mean, look, I'll say a few things. There's always been pressure put on the Fed from time to time from the White House. It's not new to Trump, but it is really stepped up. And it's the, the sheer number of attacks, the demands for immediate rate cuts, this sort of. The attacks on Powell for the cost of renovation of the, of the Federal Reserve building, which interestingly, there was a story by AP out today that said one of the drivers of the cost is that in 2000, the administration officials wanted there to be more marble instead of glass in the building.

That feels very Trump.

It's very Trump. Like, and so that could be. So there is some why the renovations have been so expensive. That's one possibility. But then, you know, there's a range of. So there's this guy, Kevin Warsh, who for my entire career has been a hawk, always calling for higher rates. Suddenly he's calling for lower rates.

Interesting, Kevin. There's two Kevins that are in.

Yeah, right, right. Then there's Kevin Hassett, who I think is generally, you know, considered to be like a respectable economist by and large. And, you know, if he, if he were to get the nod, I don't think there would be too much anxiety. But the assumption is that whoever replaces Powell would be much more inclined to cut rates sooner and faster. And if, if it's, and if it's true that like the economy has some upward momentum right now, then you could see how people might perceive that to be inflationary. And another name I wrote about him today, Christopher Waller, he's a governor on the board. He is probably. He's calling for rate cuts. He thinks there should be a rate cut as soon as the next meeting. But in Waller's defense, he's had really good intuitions this whole cycle. So he's very hawkish. He wanted to fight inflation aggressively, even while others on the board were calling it transitory. He predicted that inflation could come down from its highs without a meaningful increase in the unemployment rate, which has been proven correct. So, you know, there are some who are suspicious and cynical and say he's openly campaigning for that Fed chair job. But he's been. No one could really deny that he's had his finger on the pulse about as well as anyone else for the last five years. And this is important, which is that the FOMC, it's 12 people. It's not just the rates aren't just decision of the Fed chair. Waller is someone who would probably have a pretty decent amount of credibility with the other 11 people on that board because he comes from there. So it's possible that maybe he's the most logical choice. But what's likely, I have no idea.

Off the top of my head. If I'm going to steal man rate cuts, I'm going to say something. I'm going to say something like, yeah, the economy is doing well, the retail sales are good and jobless claims are fine, but it's still really expensive to buy houses and mortgages are really high. And so I want to help Americans buy more houses. Getting people on the housing line ladder is the way that they start accumulating capital. That's good. If I do the tinfoil hat, I'm struggling with this because I imagine that, you know, if I'm, you know, want to, if I want my party to win in the midterms, if I want my party to win a reelection, I want the economy to be really strong. I want markets to be booming. So despite all of the different, you know, social issues that might be floating around, everyone says, well, like my iron IRA is up, my 401k is up, my market before is up. But it feels like it's too soon to be putting to be playing that card. To go back to our rat analogy, if I was completely cynical, just saying this is all about politics, I wouldn't be demanding rate cuts now. I'd be demanding them right before the midterms, which I believe next year. Right? So, yeah, react to those steel, man, the tinfoil.

So look, you know, like I Said, you know, the issue with rate cuts from a housing perspective is that mortgages, mortgage rates may not go down if there are rate cuts because they're tied to the long end of the curve, which might go up in expectations of future inflation. The strongest argument I've ever.

Could we. Could we possibly. What could we do? Like, couldn't you just go and with like figma and edit the long end of the curve, bring it down?

Yeah, you could. Well, you know, the equivalent of figma, I guess, would be yield curve control, which is not unprecedented, where the Fed actually just goes out and says, we are not going to let the 10 year rise above X level and we will buy Treasuries with our unlimited balance sheet. And they could do that. The issue then is you probably that means letting inflation run hot. It's tricky. But the steel man for rate cuts is that the labor market has slowed and the rate of hiring really has declined quite a bit. I mean, I think there have been several stories about how low hiring is, particularly for college grads and so forth. So this, I think the argument for rate cuts, there's a straightforward one which is that you could make the argument that the economy needs support or that it's over, the rates are overly restrictive, which is the argument that Fed Governor Waller made yesterday. But you know, just to your point about, you know, the elections and IRA look like, what was it? I think yesterday there was the news that President Trump was going to allow people to, you know, invest in crypto in their 401ks or something like that. There was some headline about that and access to private credit. You know, I do think it looks like this is an administration that is very comfortable with letting asset prices rip. And it. People like that, people like when their 401ks and their IRAs and all that go up and their cryptocurrencies go up. And I think this is an administration that is like pretty happy to see that.

We said this early, give Jane street direct right access to the fed funds rate. Let the solves it all.

It solves it all.

Just solve for market prices. Just make the market go up as much as possible.

How's Jane street doing with their little pr, I don't know, PR currencies.

I actually have a camel.

No, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Indian options and then the Sudan stuff too. That whole, that whole thing.

Wait, what? Oh, yeah, we talked about that.

No, it's just like you go from not here. You only hear about Jane Street. Really? On the Dwarkesh podcast. Yeah, you Know, a nice ad read and then you start hearing about, you know, all these other things, it seems.

Yeah, I don't know. I gotta. I'll check in on Jane street for you guys.

Thank you. Thank you. What jersey are you wearing, by the way?

Oh, I got this. I was in Mexico earlier this year. By the way, I got your hat. I have. I. And I have it in the office. I wasn't sure if that would be a little. I was thinking about wearing your TVPN hat, but is that. I was like. Is that like wearing the T shirt to the band when you're going to see the band? I wasn't totally sure, but I'll put it on next time.

I just want to. I want to see a suit at some point would be cool. Oh, yeah, we could do a tuxedo.

Day so we can.

I'll do you know what? I will wear a suit or at least a shirt, jacket and tie next time. You guys have.

It's so great. We try to wear white suits when the market's ripping. The S&P 500 was at an all time high yesterday. Right. We didn't even think to put it on because it's just we're so normalized.

It's every day out here. Anyway, thanks so much for stopping by.

Always.

Thanks. Anytime. Always. Love it. Have a good weekend.

Love it, dude. Have a great weekend.

Bye.

Cheers.

Really quickly, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. We will bring our next guest, Nirav from nextdoor. A bunch of questions, particularly about political campaigns given some of the folks we had on earlier. But thank you so much for joining.

Good to know what's going on.

How you doing?

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

It's great to have you.

Why don't you kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company and then I just want to jump into a bunch of questions immediately. But I'll let you. I'll let you do the introduction. All right.

Appreciate it. Nirv Tolia, co founder and CEO of nextdoor. Nextdoor is a public company that is trying to build the daily utility that you use every day to find out what's going on around you. We're focused on the neighborhood in particular, and so we sometimes call ourselves the essential neighborhood network. We started in the summer of 2010, went public in 2021. I ran the company for the first nine years and then actually Came back to the company a year and a half ago as CEO. So I'm a RE founder. Not just a founder, but a RE founder. And this week was exciting for us because on Wednesday we launched the new Nextdoor. The reason I came back to the company is because we needed a much better product and sometimes founders are in a good position to reimagine the product, even though they built it in the first place. And so for the last year and a half, we've been working on a brand new version of next year. Store launched it on Wednesday. It's going really well. We're excited about the future.

What's, what's the biggest change with the new product?

It's completely different and so it's not an evolutionary change or like a version 1.0 to 2.0. Right. But the biggest change is we've taken an all purpose news feed because we're a social network for neighborhoods. Like there's a social network for pictures and a social network for people and for businesses. Right. And we've taken that social network and we started to make it a lot more strength structured and utility centric. So we focus this release around local news to keep neighbors informed, local alerts to keep neighbors safe, and local recommendations to keep neighbors smart. In the news feed, there was always local news being discussed, there were alerts being discussed, there were recommendations being asked for and given. But now we have dedicated parts of the app where you can find those things and so it's just a lot more useful.

Senator, do you sell ads? What's the business model?

We do.

We have over a hundred million verified neighbors in 11 countries. So decent scale and as I said, we're public and so hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as well. And the business model is advertising.

Yeah, that makes sense. We had a friend of the show on earlier this week. He is running for state council. Is that right?

State Assembly.

State Assembly. And it was interesting because he come, he came on our show and we have an audience all over tech and in San Francisco and New York. And I was trying to puzzle like I want to help him. I'm excited about his campaign, but realistically we're not. We're not a platform focused on his district in Los Angeles.

So he was saying 20 square miles.

Yeah, yeah. He was saying he was going to go knock on doors literally and go to local events. But I was thinking about what is the most Internet native way. He's a great poster. He created kind of a viral video and he seems to be good at communicating through The Internet. What can you tell me about politics on Nextdoor? Generally, local politics. Have people found luck there? What are the different strategies? Are you in favor of this? Are you excited about this? Are you avoiding it? What? How does politics.

It's a great question and honestly, it's something that we've struggled with since the inception of the company. Because when it comes to national politics.

Yes, I know.

Very divisive.

Totally, totally.

When we see that on the platform.

Yep.

You don't like it. We completely agree. Said specifically no discussion of national politics and no national political advertising. So that's where we started. Right. What we've realized over time is when it comes to local issues, whether you call them local issues, civic issues, or local politics, those topics matter to neighbors. And the point you made is exactly right. Which is the folks who are behind those topics, whether they're elected officials or that they're folks in the local community, they're trying to get something done. They need distribution. Because the Internet has made it easy for you and me and your co host to talk to each other. And I don't even know where you all are. I'm in Texas. Right, but I'm pretty sure you're not in Texas. Right. But it has made it very hard because we're looking on our screens and looking at our computers to look out the window and see who's right across the street or who's next door. Right. And so that should be the promise for Nextdoor. And so it's a long winded answer to your question, but I hope in the future that we will provide your guest an opportunity to come onto nextdoor where he knows he can reach Verified neighbors in that 20 square mile area and he can talk about the issues and how he wants to deal with the issues historically. For 15 years of our history, until Wednesday when we launched the new Next Door, we didn't really let anyone except for Verified Neighbors create content. We had some public agencies, police departments, fire departments, some mayor's offices, but not what you would call local politicians. And what we realized is ultimately our job is to give you all the local information that exists, regardless of the source. And so with the new Next Door and with local news, which I mentioned, we have 3,500 publishers that are publishing 50,000 articles every single week. Now in my city of Dallas, that's the Dallas Morning News. That's D magazine. That's all the local publishers. It's not the New York Times publishing into Dallas. Right. It's the Dallas centric and the neighborhood centric. Sources. So the same way we're letting those third party in, those third parties in. I fully expect at some point in the future, and I don't know when we will let the third parties that want to be elected officials or who are elected officials come on to nextdoor. And we just need to figure out the right way for the signal to be higher than the noise.

Yeah, no, I completely. Yeah, it's fascinating. Like, I had this weird, interesting experience where we moved into a neighborhood and there weren't curb cuts and we have a stroller. And my wife was like, I'm gonna write a letter to the city. And I was like, that's never gonna work like that. It'll be 10 years. And they fixed it and they made a curb cut in like three months or something. It was really fast. I was very impressed. And it's clear that like the city was just prepared and open to that. And I didn't even know that because I don't have like this connection because the local news has kind of dropped off so much. How do you think about the business model that a local news creator might have in the future? We talked to Chris Best at Substack yesterday. Very interesting business model there. I could imagine. I mean, every social network has had. You know, people might talk about the YouTubers or podcasters and Joe Roger Rogan with these big deals, but there are people that make a full living just on Instagram or just on X or just on threads. Listen, this show is really just really big on X and I'm interested in how you see the business model of a local content creator. Is there a world where you're both partnering with an organization to distribute their content that's maybe in a local newspaper, physically their own website, and then you're kind of top of funnel? Or do you think there will be next door native creators soon if there aren't already?

It's a big challenge for local publishers because as we know, the old business models of delivering papers or driving subscriptions for things that show up in our mailboxes, that doesn't really exist. At the same time, the digital business models, they don't have the same scale. And so it's hard for them to justify the ad salesforces or the technology investment, etc. Right. Today what we're doing is we're starting by sending them traffic so we don't have a walled garden on next door. These 3,500 publishers, they give us a headline, they give us a hero image, they give us a snippet and Then if one of our members wants to read an article, they go off to that publisher's website and that publisher can monetize through a subscription, they can monetize through advertising. They can monetize whatever way they've chosen. The thing that we've thought about, and I'll get to kind of the next door creator idea that you talked about, but thing we thought about is if there's enough demand in one area to get local news broadly, could we put together a kind of Apple News or Spotify kind of subscription where you pay one entity next door and then they get the proceeds on some kind of rev share based on what articles are read? So we've thought about that, but it hasn't gone any further than us thinking about it because we need to see how this performs ultimately. I'm not sure about the business model behind it, but we certainly believe in citizen journalism. And so even enabling the high school journalism student who wants to write about the high school sports that are going on and making sure that they can use nextdoor as a distribution platform, that's something we want to enable. Because if that person goes on Instagram or X or LinkedIn or Facebook, there's just not enough audience. But if that person comes to Nextdoor and they're writing about the neighborhoods that are around a particular school, those neighbors want to support that school. So there's a lot of opportunity for nextdoor. I would say the story of Nextdoor is one of massive potential and of not having a good enough product to really deliver on all that potential. And that's what we're trying to change.

Yeah, it's an interesting challenge because social networks in general are, have historically done well by reducing friction on the signup. But the nature of nextdoor is you need that extra step of like verifying does this person actually live where they, you know, in the, in the neighborhood that they're trying to participate in. And I, and I had this one moment. It sounds like it was before you came back and started fixing things where I moved to a new neighborhood. I was trying to get set up and it wasn't verifying. And I just churned and I haven't gone back. And so I imagine this. Even though I'm sure it's active, I know it's a very active community on there. One question, by the way.

I mean, that is kind of a hard problem because when people try to switch around neighborhoods, they don't have the patience to re verify. They do have to verify initially. They don't have patience to re. Verify. So it's something that we need to make a lot of. Lot easier. Because the thing you're talking about, the statistic I heard was something crazy, like 10% of Americans move every year. And so it's happening a lot. People are moving neighborhoods, whether they're in the same city but in a different house or whether they're moving cities all together. And so that's something that we need to make frictionless.

Yeah, sure. If you could like, like upload a video of you walking into your house at the address, and then you do some like, geoguessr type AI thing to identify that, hey, this person's really walking into this house.

We've done everything.

You've done everything.

Innovative technology all the way to sending you a printed physical postcard.

Yeah, we've done all of those things. The printed postcard is Lindy. It's not going anywhere.

How do you guys think it's top of mind? Because John and I live in Southern California. I live in Malibu. John lives in Pasadena. So we were both pretty close to the fires that happened. Fortunately, we weren't directly. Our homes or neighborhoods weren't directly affected. And then you're in Dallas, not too far from where the flooding happened. How do you guys think about building features around helping people through disasters? Because I remember the fire app in Southern California that everyone was using. It's just run by a nonprofit, and there was one night that John basically thought.

Watch Duty.

Yeah, watch duty. John. John, one night, like, basically thought that. He was like, oh, Jordy's probably. You know, I just. We didn't have any cell service or anything like that. But I just remember using what Watch duty, It would just periodically go down and it felt like, okay, this is probably going down because they just don't have the scale that. The engineering capacity, the scale, it's. Etc to just, like, run this service. I'm curious, but it's a hard problem to try to tackle because it's so spiky. Right. It's like you.

Yeah, look, Watch Duty is an amazing app, and so kudos to them. And when the Palisades fires happened, I looked at that, thinking, we have to do more. Now. We had. We had seen all of our metrics spike like crazy in those Palisades neighborhoods. Because when a crisis happens, whether it's a power outage, which is relatively banal but annoying, all the way to inclement weather, or a natural disaster like a fire. Right. Or terrible flooding, next door becomes a lifeline because there is no other infrastructure to Communicate with the people around you. And you need to be able to either say in a very simple way what's going on all the way to in a critical way say I need help, I need to be rescued. Right. Or I can provide someone with help. And so historically, through hurricanes, through tornadoes, through fires, Nextdoor has always spiked when these things happen. But it's just a newsfeed ui. And so with the new Nextdoor we've created an entire alerts surface where the entire app transforms into this lifeline when God forbid a crisis is happening and we take now authoritative data sources. So in much the same way that we're bringing in third parties on local news, we bring in third parties. I think we'd like to bring in WatchDuty at some point as well. And because we know where people live, we can deliver their information proactively to just those areas. And that's what's very different. Because if you think about Watch Duty, Watch Duty doesn't know where you live. And Watch Duty can't warn you before you go open Watch Duty to see if something's going on. Right? Yeah, but what happened with terrible flow.

It'S actually, it's actually ends up being stressful because I'll be like on the show and I'll get a notification from Watch Dan Duty earlier this year would be like a fire is popped up half a mile from me. It doesn't know where, doesn't know where I am. So I'll get notifications like all over LA county and I'm just, you know, I end up look, I mean it's probably good for their, their user metrics because I'll open it up and realize, okay, it's, it's like a hundred bucks.

I think you need three things to really create an essential use case around this, which truly is an essential use case because it could harm your family and yourself. The first is you need to aggregate all the alerts. So Watch Duty just does it for fires. Right. But you need power outages, you need construction delays, you need any kind of of traffic that's going on. You need some event that's going to change something in the neighborhood all the way to the really serious stuff like fires and tornadoes and hurricanes and crimes and that sort of thing. Right. So that's first thing. The second thing is you need to know where people live so you can get them timely information. That's hyper relevant. I mean it's not relevant if it's half a mile away because it's not going to affect you. It's just going to freak you out. Right? And then the third and final thing you need is you need to have a community of people that are notified because in many cases they're the ones that have the information, the photos and the videos that are actually more relevant than anything the authorities are providing because.

They'Re on the ground.

Right. They know exactly what's going on. And so we have all of those pieces and God forbid those crises happen, but when they do, we have to do our part in keeping people safe.

It's community intelligence. It's like the collective working together.

It's the power of community.

Truly fantastic.

Awesome. Well, great. Great chatting. Congrats on the launch. Come back on again soon. You're going founder mode. It's great to see you back in the driver's seat.

You better open the app and if you email me, I will make sure you get verified immediately.

I'm sure it'll work perfectly.

Now.

I think, I think you're going to like it and I think your listeners will too. It's very different than the old next door. It's got all the goodness of the old app, but in a fresh new shell with lots of new features.

That's amazing. Very exciting. Thank you so much for hopping.

Thanks for having me.

We will talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Bye. And if you're looking to explore a new neighborhood, get on Wander.

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And Wander just dropped Wander Indio Hayes. H A Z E. Oh, okay.

But well, we have Mike from ARC AGI coming on the stream and we have the ability.

ARC Day.

ARC Day. I. I love these releases. Thanks so much for always coming on the show.

Of course.

Thank you guys for being such huge supporters.

I'm such a means a lot project. It's. It's so amazing. So we have the latest and greatest. Why don't you just give us the. A little bit of background on the.

The first of all, I think why don't we talk about the XAI launch last week because that was a, you know, pretty massive improvement. So maybe start there and then we can get to the present.

Yeah. So this is really, I think the second time we've seen a major frontier. AI lab used ARC as a benchmark to show off some sort of frontier of progress. Right. Back in December we had OpenAI use ARC v1 to show off this qualitative change. Right. Really Marked the moment where AI frontier, AI research moved beyond just like scaling up pre training and starting to add these symbolic systems on top, these chain of thought reasoning systems. ARC really marked that moment. And then Last week the XAI team used ARCv2 to show off a frontier result on ARCPT. They got 16% on the benchmark. Still early days, but I think one of the really big takeaways from that was basically like how largely using a lot of the existing ideas in the world, but how quickly and effectively XAI was able to catch up to the frontier. And so my mental model now is going forward is wherever the front sort of innovation comes from. My expectation is xa, it's probably going to go beat for beat on, on catching up just given how fast they were able to get there this time.

Around when, when I hear like one, one thread that I've heard from watching the ARC progress is you put more, more test time, inference, more spend behind a particular model, you get better results. And it, and it begs the question like, is this brute forcing? Is that what we're experiencing itself some level? Is that a fear? And is the latest ARC v3 an attempt to kind of avoid that or is that just like not an issue at all?

So no, because of how we evaluate top scores on arc. So we publish along two dimensions, one an accuracy score, but we also publish an efficiency measure. And this is not arbitrary. Like efficiency is really, really fundamental aspect of what it means to be intelligent. So when we, you know, we have the million dollar prize, it's still hanging out there by the way, for the original version of the contest. And you know, if you look at, you know, the human level efficiency scores, just on V1, we're still only around, you know, 60ish percentage points, whereas our benchmark for humans is 85 and onwards. So you know, even though we've got.

Three now, 83, 85% or something, they win the million or do they have to get to hundred one? 100%.

So the Kaggle contest rules are a little more stringent. You have to do it on a certain performance profile, limited compute budget, you have to get the high score and then there's an open source requirement. So this is one of the things that one of the sort of principles of the ARC Prize foundation is we're trying to basically accelerate Ag genesis by encouraging more people to work on new ideas, openly share those ideas, try to kind of shape the AI research community to look more like what it did during the 2010-2020 era than maybe it has over the past three or four years or so.

What about, we talked to somebody, I forget who. They said like, oh yeah, like rkgi, it's cool, but like we could totally crush that if we just like RL'd on it directly. And all the labs are just being like nice to keep it as an independent benchmark. But I don't fully buy that because I feel like some hedge fund would just see a million dollars on the floor and then just go do that if that's was the case. But what is the, what is, what is the vibe?

Reality is like benchmarks are marketing. Yeah, right. This is like one of the reasons I, I didn't appreciate this 12 months ago when we first launched AR. I do now. You know, the, the whole reason I put the money into the contest in the first place was ARC's awareness was very low. And my thesis was this is the most important unbeaten benchmark in the world. It tells us something important that no other benchmark does. Right. If you go even look at the GROQ4 stream, all the other benchmarks that were shown are like PhD plus plus level benchmarks. And yet ARC tasks are like, you know, we have objective evidence, we've done human controlled studies that show they're all solvable by sort of average humans.

Yeah.

And so I think that tells you something interesting. Like, well, okay, yeah, like we're clearly missing something big here. We don't have it all figured out. We're not in just like a scaling up regime. We are in, we're sort of in an idea constraint regime. And I think that's an important conclusion because if it's true, it means that individual researchers and small teams on small budgets can actually have a significant impact on the frontier of AI research. They don't need, you know, 1 million, $10 million training budgets in order to actually make a material impact on AI.

Yeah, the challenge, like, I mean the real challenge is just the distortion in the market right now and the trade off that a researcher, even somebody who's, let's say a 20 year old in college that could be doing this sort of independent research and they're like, wait, if I drop out, I could be making $500,000 a year base comp and the equity on top of that. So I imagine at some point are there like high schoolers that are doing this kind of thing? Because like at a certain point the target market is people that are maybe a little bit too young to actually get it. Silicon Valley companies will happily have somebody drop out of college. It's a different conversation when somebody. Somebody's like, I want to drop out of, like, high school. Right.

I mean, this forms my thesis. I think talent is very distributed globally. If you look at most of the teams that are on the leaderboard from, you know, past years of our contest, you know, a lot, a large percentage, I'm not sure if it's over 50%, but it might be. Are outside the United States. And again, this is like, you know, if you're sort of trying to create a sort of optimization function for creating AGI, you know, you. You'd like to shape in an innovation environment that's very open. There's a lot of sharing and there's a lot of diversity of approach. The opposite would be like, there's very little sharing. Everyone's working on the same ideas. Because if those ideas are wrong, then, okay, you're sort of shooting yourself in the foot. And so I think that's one of the reasons we sort of launched Enterprise in the first place, was to try and help communicate the story that individual people, young folks with very little budget, can actually have a large impact and encourage them, if they have new ideas towards AGI, to go work on those maybe as opposed to going and just starting the next language model startup.

Yeah, when. When Dwarkesh came on the show, he was talking about the need to solve continual learning. This idea that he has, you know, this amnesiac PhD that is unable to learn hard lessons and then roll that up into habits and kind of wisdom almost. And, and. And that's why he. He's unable to, you know, use any of the frontier models to. His example was like, select which clips of the podcast will perform well on. On social media or something. And he was struggling with that. And I'm wondering, like, we hear about the spiky intelligence concept. Do you think that the. The problems that underlie arcprize's robustness are related to the same continual learning problem that Dwarkesh was highlighting? Or are these two separate problems where we could see us solving one and not the other?

I think that's happening, right? The scores are much higher in V1 than V2. So if I kind of lay out and tease here, kind of the version we're doing a public preview for Today, we've got ARC V1, V2 and V3. V1 was introduced back in 2019. It was designed to challenge deep learning as a paradigm. Remember, this is before language models, years before sort of language models really hit any sort of stride in terms of the research. And it sort of was robust through that advancement. And that's because language model Sort inherits some of the same fundamental limitations that pure deep learning do. V2 was designed to challenge this new paradigm of AI reasoning systems. It's still a static benchmark, so the puzzles look very similar to V1. It might actually be kind of surprising that you can't beat V2 if you can beat V1 because they look like they're in domain from each other. But the intuition here is generally the V2PUZ require longer reasoning chains generally to solve them. And so that gets harder to do. One of the things that we started to see though this year is really the emergence of a lot of these agent systems that are being placed into dynamic open ended environments. And while static reasoning, I think benchmarks are useful and will continue to be useful. This is one of the motivations for starting to build v3 and defining what we're calling an interactive reasoning benchmark to help evaluate and really challenge some of these frontier AI agents systems we're starting to see emerge.

Okay, so should we do the live demo?

Let's do it before launch today, I guess.

Yeah, give us the overview. I can kind of read through this too. Yeah, give us the overview and then we'll play.

It's a little unique for us because you might be surprised, like, oh wait, V3 is launching. Didn't V2 launch like three months ago?

Yes.

So today is a public preview. We're showing off the first three public games from the eventual data set we're building this year. We intend to launch the full version in early 2026. We're going about the launch a little differently than we did with V1 and V2. Because V3 is such a big upgrade over V1 and V2, we want to get more community.

By upgrade you mean significantly more challenging.

The gap between what's easy for humans and hard for AI is getting wider again with V3 compared to what the earlier versions were, which I think is one of our other design principles that we have. And so it's also just like a very different domain than do you want to do too? They look like architects, but they're dynamic. And there's a lot we don't know about them quite yet. Both what humans can do, what they actually find easy, what AI agents can do, how much can you create custom harnesses and scaffolds to be able to maybe make progress? I think we're going to learn a lot. And this is why we're sort of launching the first three games early to make contact with reality here and increase our rate of learning over the next maybe month or so. On our game design, our API design, we actually have. We launched our first piece of infrastructure today as well. An API that you can actually build agents and go run against these first three games. And we launched a $10,000 agent contest that's running for the next month for whoever can build the best agent that gets the best top score on the. The games that were.

So even if they get 1% but they are the top, even if it's low, whatever it is, money's going out the door.

One important thing like V1 and V2, Ark V3 has a public and private data set. So we've got three public games. There's also three private games. Those are actually what we're going to be awarding on top score performance on. So if you're thinking like, oh, I'll just make a really good, you know, harness for the three public games, it won't work because they won't translate into the three hidden games.

Smart, clever, clever. I love it. So I am. I'm sharing my screen to the stream. I don't know if you'll be able to see it. I can see it. I will read through this.

So my suggestion is you guys should. We should play LOCKSMITH. This is LS20 or first game. I think you guys should just collaborate on this one game together. It'll take about five to 10 minutes to probably play through and I think seeing both of you like work together on it live I think will be a fun.

I should be able to see the screen.

Okay, I'll read it out. So human instructions. You are playing a game id. There are no instructions intentionally. You must play the game. To discover controls, rules and goal, press start to play, choose your controls wasd or arrow keys Play to learn the rules of the game. Win the game profit. Just kidding. Just kidding. No prizes here. So I click start and I'm presented with a large grid of squares. It looks like the most intense Arc AGI puzzle possible because the original Arc AGI puzzles were something like a three by three grid. And now I'm seeing these are all 64 by 64. 64 by 64. Okay, so I do have the ability to use arrows to move this blue and orange block. And Jordy, can you see me moving it around?

Yes.

Okay, so if I go on top of this, the bottom left hand corner updated slightly. Let me see if I can zoom this out a little bit so that.

All right, you've learned one important Thing.

And if I keep moving, click seems to do nothing. Spacebar seems to do nothing.

I'm going to give you a little commentary while you're going here and see John. So the data set of the three games that we launched today, all of them are completely different. None of them look similar. In fact, this is the only game in the set that looks like a 2D agent game from kind of a tops down camera view that we're launching right now. All the other ones are quite different. And this is actually a design goal of the benchmark is for all the eventual hundreds of games we're going to have for them to be entirely different and very novel and diverse from each other.

So I appear to have lost a life. If I look in the top right, I now have three. I had three red dots, now I have two.

And it crossed that boundary.

I got a red flash and so I think I died. But if I move forward, I get a green circle, which I imagine means I won. And now I'm on a new level and there's.

Do you know why you like got to the new level? Can you articulate that yet?

Yes. So I believe that I stepped on a button that rotated my or kind of rearranged the icon, the goal icon in the bottom left of the screen. At first I thought that the. That in the bottom left I see a little like, like blue and white line. And I thought the line was like a map that I have to take, but it appears to be a puzzle shape that I have to match up with a puzzle shape that's on the grid somewhere and I'm stepping on a button to change it. So when I step on this rotate or change button, I'm getting kind of like a different Tetris piece. And if I keep doing this, I might land on this. Okay, that matches now. So the bottom left matches the little goal. You see the goal, I go over to it. But if I go over to it, I die. And so I think I ran out of purple steps. So I have a set of purple like energy. Yeah, yeah, I have energy. So now I'm going to do the same thing.

There's another very important design goal many of the games in Arcv3 Inherit, which is there's intentional efficiency limits on actions that you can take.

So now green score. I did it.

Which is smart because the idea of like, you know, Scott Wu can probably like one shot a math problem and it's very efficient for him and then someone else is going to be able to solve the same problem. But like over weeks. And is that really the same level of, of intelligence?

This is really, you know, you guys have probably heard like for a long time actually, I think games were considered to solve problem in AI, you know, with AlphaGo and all the chess games.

And yeah, one of the reasons for this, the way they learned they didn't. The only thing that stopped them from being like totally superhuman in those is that they just didn't scale the current algorithms enough. And so they didn't solve, you know, it completely, but they all were basically.

And most of them use RL and so they're trying to take reward signal and understand, you know, what actions I took to produce the reward signal. This is one of the things that efficiency helps with is it limits the ability for an agent to just naively be able to go gather a reward signal by spamming and playing the games hundreds of thousands of times. This is something humans don't need to do. Right? You already beat level two in what, less than five minutes here with a very limited number of efficient actions that you took. And this is something we don't see from the frontier, like LM's Day or our other agents we've been testing.

Okay, I got my next level.

All right, the next level, we started introducing some new concepts here.

So I'm seeing they're different colors. So I have blue and white, and I need blue and orange. And so I'm going to step on this color block. Now I have blue and teal. Now I have blue and red. I'm doing okay on efficiency. About half my life. Okay, that seems good, but I think if I make a run for it, I won't make it. So I'm going to pick up this purple cube to refresh my energy run over here. Am I going to make it? Am I gonna make it? I made it.

There we go.

Yes, there we go. Victory. Okay, now that there's a different one, I'll start by changing the color. Okay, I nailed the color blue and teal. That's the end. Gold and the black cube. Then I need to switch my icon from this one Tetris piece to a different one. Okay, I got that. No, that's not it. I need the, the little, like, chair block. Okay, that's.

You're running out of lives, John.

Roughly correct. Let's see. Okay, I refreshed. I refreshed. Go over. I think this, this other block, I think this is a button. I think I'm gonna run out of lives, though. I need to go refresh purple. I refreshed Just in time. One away. Okay, let's keep rotating. Keep rotating. Okay, now it matches.

There you go.

Okay. And I'll just pick up the free energy. Boom. Green.

You might have noticed to start scaffolding new, new things you have to learn. Right. There's a progression system here. It's not just learn one rule in level one and apply it to the entire game. But we found a really an element one design goal is that all the games are fun.

Yes.

And one of the things we found, we're doing early design, game design was that folks did not find the games fun if they just took one rule they learned and just repeated it. Right. So introducing new things you have to continually learn throughout the game is a big function of whether humans can find these things actually entertaining.

Well, we should figure out the infrastructure to have pure PvP speedruns the entire prize.

We'll have the whole team do it too.

Real quick, while we have you, we have our next guest in the, in the waiting room. But I wanted to ask you because it is top of mind for us this week. I think the broader tech community went from sort of like, not like, like taking like AI safety and alignment, you know, super, super seriously or kind of making jokes about it. Until this week, I think AI psychosis has been top of mind for a lot of people. If you were running one of these scaled labs today, how would you be trying to sort of quickly react to some of the different kind of stories that seem to be bubbling up around people just getting too deep in this sort of recursive prompting?

My sort of view generally on AI safety stuff is you want to be empirical about it. You know, this was sort of my big issue when we were going through all the 1047 legislation last year in California is trying to make predictions about what future harm might happen by being able to predict the future and in some cases poorly predict the future. I think even ARC was sort of clear demonstration of an eval that suggested we were not just scaling up pre training. AGI is not just going to emerge from scaling up this pre training regime. And that was sort of the predicated thesis on why we needed something like 10:47 at the time to stop this imminent, urgent, potentially dangerous scaling. So now I actually think my sort of view probably aligns quite closely with openais. I think you actually need to deploy the technology into the environment, into the world, in order to make contact with reality and learn what are the actual issues that you care about. What does society care about? My sort of view is that Society is actually better at dealing with fast change than slow change. You know, this is another kind of counterpoint that I think if you go look at the safety community would argue slow, slow takeoff is better than fast takeoff. And I think in a lot of capabilities areas, actually, fast takeoff is perhaps desirable because humans notice change. It's like literally what we were evolved to do is in our environment, we notice when things change fast. We don't notice when things change slow. Right. The frog boiling in the pot is sort of the classic fable here. Right. And so I think fast change stories like this, issues and psychosis are good in a weird way because they're like, oh, since something changed here, we should react to it.

Yep. Yeah, no, that's a really good.

That's kind of my broad framework of what I think, how we should sort of, like, run these aicc.

In some ways, the negative externalities of social media, like, let's say, like, somebody's developing body dysmorphia, like, the ways the social media spectrum change from like, sending, like, group messages to suddenly like, you're sharing your entire life. Like, it actually was very slow. And so I think that this development with. With, yeah.

Creeps in. Right? You wake up 10 years later, you're like, are we happy with, like, where we got.

Brain rot is a meme that took years to develop. Fascinating. Anyways, you have to come back on soon. We could go way deeper. We're going to be playing this all day.

Hope you guys had fun playing the first game.

Fantastic. I was not expecting a game. I was expecting a puzzle. And we are clearly in game territory. Very fun.

Very incredible work, guys.

Thanks for having me on.

We'll talk to you, Mike.

Bye. Up next we'll stop keeping waiting is Kyle Samani. Welcome to the stream. Sorry for the wait. We were. We were proving our humanity with Arc AGI V3. Welcome to the stream.

In the suit.

In the suit, you look fantastic.

On a special day.

You didn't have to wear the suit just for the show. Come on.

I wanted to kind of do y' all a little bit too, so.

Fantastic.

Looking sharp, looking sharp. Are you in DC right now?

I am in dc. I'm in a little phone booth about two blocks from the White House.

Fantastic. Give us the update. What's happening in dc?

Yeah, let me turn my phone here real quick.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Awesome, guys. Thanks for having me back on. Pleasure to be here. Today's a big day for Cryptoland. President Trump just signed a genius bill into law. Yes. Huge, huge Day for industry. This is the probably most consequential piece of financial legislation since Dodd Frank. It's the first crypto legislation we've ever had.

And just an incredible, which is crazy to say out loud, however far we are into this, crypto has been a.

Thing for almost 20 years now.

Bitcoin that you've been basing, basically begging for, just like give us some, give us something regulatory clarity.

Finally here, it's great.

Finally here.

Yeah. I mean industry has been begging for regulation under the Biden administration and they said, nope, no clarity. We're just going to shoot you randomly and you know, finally like we actually can operate.

It's pretty amazing. Fantastic. What does this mean for non stable coin chains? Like what does it mean for Solana? Which. What does this mean for bitcoin? Is there any implication there or is this purely.

Yeah. Do you think it's priced in?

Yeah, it's definitely not priced in. So first let me touch quickly on like what I think it means for the US and then can get into kind of like the chains and stuff.

Yeah.

So I think the correct way to think about this, this is, you know, there's 8 billion people in the world and I have a theory that if you were to go to each of those 8 billion people and ask them, hey, if you can denominate your wealth in any asset, it could be Apple stock, S&P, 500 bars of gold, euros, yen, yuan, whatever you want. If you could denominate your wealth in any asset without fear of political persecution in your local jurisdiction, what asset would you choose? And my suspicion is that somewhere between 60 and 80% of the world would say US dollars. And for people who don't live inside the United States, having a US dollar bank account is somewhere between very difficult and impossible outside of like probably the top 1% or so of the global wealth. And stablecoins make it trivial for anyone in the world to host to have dollars in their pocket. You don't need to have a permission. You just take your phone, your phone picks a random number, that's your private key and you're good to go. To receive dollars. I think this will probably represent one of the largest movements in capital and human history, as you enable, call it 5 to 6 billion people, to start holding more dollars more easily than they otherwise could hold them. The scale of what it means is actually really profound and I think really underappreciated, which is why I think it's not priced in because it's just hard to grasp what this means for Everyone in the world to be able to hold one currency. This has just never happened in human history before.

Yeah, this is fascinating. I mean I'm like, I'm almost like zooming out. Like I'm sure it's good for a lot of different projects and companies and tokens and chains, but it feels just incredibly bullish for America. Like we've been. Because there was this narrative like oh, the tariffs and stuff like we're going to lose dollar dominance where like we're going to lose global reserve status. And this just feels like coming from the half court shot.

Yeah, artificial. It was like a supply demand, demand imbalance. But the supply constraint was just coming from like you don't have to regulators in other places. That said you can't set up a dollar US dollar bank account in our country. We're just not gonna allow that.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You don't have to be like even pro crypto or crypto native or anything. This is what this is for America.

And this is like going back sort of the core tenets of crypto, like permissionless finance. It's like, okay, like permissionless access to US dollars where somebody says I want to get paid in dollars. They set up a wallet and it's software and they get paid and it is very cool.

It's very much capitalism. Like I just applied the money. If you identify as a capitalist, oh my God. Like actually the world as a whole was actually shockingly anti capitalist in terms of just like currency access across nations.

Yeah, that's wild. What else should we talk about today? Is there any other downstream things? Can you give us a temperature check on the rest of the regulation? What happens next? Anything else that's going on in Washington that we should be following?

Yeah, I mean downstream implications, there's a ton. So first quick regulation. So the GENIE SAC passed. That's the stablecoin bill. The next major act the industry is focused on is now called the Clarity Act. This is being primarily sponsored by Chairman French Hill in the House. And this is otherwise known as kind of the Market Structure Act. And the basic kind of outline of Clarity is to answer the question, which regulators regulate?

What?

What should they regulate? This really kind of defines the line between Treasury SEC and CFTC who has kind of, you know, purview over which domains answer the question, what is a security? What's not. It deals with defi to some extent. And so that's kind of the other really big meaty bill. And then the third one is actually one that kind of got added in recently and Industry is fine with. It's just basically this anti CBDC bill is. They're just saying like America won't make a cbdc. So that's all in flight now. You know, I'm optimistic Clarity will pass in the next few months. It passed the House earlier this week. It's now in the Senate and there's going to be some revisions and stuff in the Senate. We'll see where it goes.

Anything, anything that's, that's in there so far that you're, that you think that the Senate should, should focus on correcting.

Yeah, there's definitely more disagreement in industry about like, you know, the substance of Clarity.

I can't get into the specifics, but.

Like, certainly we're, we're now in dialogue with a lot of our peers and lawmakers and their staff on these issues. John, the other question you asked, like, what's the implications for like industry? I really want to emphasize that, I mean, by making it. It's now legal. Stablecoins were illegal for all practical purposes for like any major regulated company kind of anywhere in the world. And it is now legal and blessed for them to interact with stablecoins. And so what I think is, yeah, you're going to see every bank, you know, Jamie Diamond, bank of America CEOs are talking about this now. I actually don't think that's the super relevant angle. To me, the much more important angle is it is now legal and okay for iOS, Android, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, every piece of major consumer software in the world now can legally embed stablecoins.

Wow.

And it's going to be a matter of time before they do. And what that's going to mean for global commerce, for global payments, for people accessing crypto is profound. And I think you're. And, and as all those people get their private keys and onboard to these wallets, that's then going to provide the foundation that money's going to be transacting over Ethereum, Solana, etc. And it's going to be just a massive boon for all of crypto as you onboard a few billion people with this stuff.

It's fascinating.

Absolutely wild.

Yeah, I'm excited. I imagine that, yeah, the big tech angle is super fascinating. I imagine that some of them will take different paths, different shapes. Like we're going to test different structures.

Yeah. What I hope is like, hey, stablecoins are already. There's large market caps, there's lots of liquidity. Let's not have everybody launch their own stable coin. Let's just focus on actually integrating them into and making them more valuable in these different ecosystems.

It's also funny because I feel like for a while there was a little bit of a, there's a little bit of like a chattering class critique of crypto being like, well if it was so great, like why doesn't Apple just integrate stablecoins? It's like, well because it was illegal and like they're a very risk averse company. There is no chance they were going to do it but now they actually have it as an option and then there's a competitive dynamic and they'll probably run experiments and yeah, maybe it'll take a few years for them to build some stuff. Maybe some stuff will be aqua hires or acquisitions. There's a bunch of different ways it can play out. But it'll be really interesting to follow how this actually gets in the hands of billions and billions of people, basically.

Yeah, it's an incredible opportunity and I mean you just look at like now where's liquidity, where are people trading today? And you know, and like which chains have the scale to support all these users and it just, it bodes incredibly well for industry as a whole.

That's fantastic.

Well, as there's more news come back on and I'm sure you'll be celebrating responsibly in D.C. so have fun out there.

Hey guys, thanks so much for having me back on.

Have a great one. We'll talk to you soon. Bye Kyle. Talk to you soon.

What a way to end the week.

Fantastic. Little news hits, little chopping it up with friends, impromptu might and scrambling.

That was.

I enjoyed that.

One of the most entertaining people on earth indeed.

We should close with this, this wonderful article in the Mansion section.

Which one are we? We had a few queued up.

So this is. I wanted to, I wanted to do this because it is essentially written by Arnold Schwarzenegger. So it is. It's his words as told to Mark Myers who just transcribed them and then they published it in the Wall Street Journal.

And which one is this?

It's Arnold Schwarzenegger. The moment he fell in love with America.

Beautiful.

My early years in, in Austria were challenging. After World War II, the economy in the Graz suburb where I grew up was shattered. Everyone suffered. My father Gustav was very, very, was a very, very sweet man. But when he drank, his personality changed. He became more violent and demanding. His behavior and drinking were influenced by the war's remnants. Shrapnel in his legs that caused him pain. The length, the lingering Effects of malaria and what we now call post traumatic stress disorder. My mother, Aurelia, was a homemaker. Our family lived on the second floor of a three story building. The first floor was occupied by the local forest ranger. And the second wars. And for. And the second wars for my father. The second floor was for my father, the town's police chief. He was the town's police chief. The forest ranger had a phone, but we didn't and there was no running water. I wasn't happy with the life I saw unfolding. I always had a feeling deep down that I needed to look for something else, something outside the box. At age 10, I fell in love with America. That came from watching film roles. In school. The teacher would advance the strips by turning a knob, showing one image at a time. I was blown away. They were about things like the Golden Gate Bridge in the Empire State Building and cars with huge fins driving on U.S. highways with six lanes on each side. At some point there was a role on Hollywood. I'd never seen anything like it. The glamour, the lights and the houses. I said to myself, what am I doing here? I wanted to be in America, to become famous and rich. As I got older, the question shifted to how do I get there? At 15, I stumbled into bodybuilding at our local lake and said to myself, well, that's in America. The lifeguard always had other top athletes around, including weightlifters. As a teen, my testosterone was kicking in and I wanted to look like a he man. I read about Roy Reg park, an English bodybuilder who played Hercules in Italian movies. He won Mr. Universe three times and became an actor. My dream was possible. All of my time was spent in this world of physical fitness, building up muscles to complete, to compete in contests and fantasizing about movie stardom. At one point I was in school, looking out the window and daydreaming when a piece of chalk hit me in the head. My teacher said, arnold, what do you think you're doing in here? Talking to myself. I had no interest in what he was saying. He's not interested in the school. In 1967, I won the amateur Mr. Universe title in London when I was 20. Then I trained in Munich for another year and won my first professional Mr. Universe title after I won in 1967.

It's so funny this, the, the thinking of the 60s and, and just like hippie, hippie culture. And then Arnold's just like rising the ranks.

Yes, bodybuilding, it's amazing. So he said, 1967 I won the amateur Mr. Universe. Title. And then he won the professional Universe title. After I won in 1968, Joe Wider, a bodybuilding enthusiast who published muscle magazines, brought me to Los Angeles. He put me up in an apartment in Venice near Gold's Gym, where I trained when I arrived. Let's hear for Gold's production team. You guys love that place.

That's where I work at. It's a great spot.

It's fantastic. When I arrived in la, I was totally dis. I was totally disappointed. The city looked nothing like New York City with its tall buildings. Venice's sidewalks were dirty and no one cleaned them, and drugs were sold in back alleys. Two more Mr. Universe titles followed in 1969 and 1970. From the start, I knew bodybuilding was going to lead to acting. In 1970, I was cast in Hercules in New York and then in the TV series and films, including Stay Hungry in 1976, for which I won the Golden Globe award for best acting debut. Then came the Streets of San Francisco and pumping iron in 1977.

Iron.

Pumping iron is fantastic. If you haven't seen it, I know you haven't. Conan the Barbarian, the big one. In 1982, I was quoting Conan the Barbarian to our team. I don't think anyone got the reference, but we'll play the YouTube video.

This is wild. So he says in the middle of all this, I studied remotely for a bachelor's degree in business. And let's give it up for all the business majors out there. Most important major at the University of Wisconsin. He was doing that remotely. How were you doing college in 82?

Mail it back.

Oh, you maybe get mailed an assignment in a textbook.

That is. Yeah. That is crazy. How do you do that? I don't. I have no idea. From the time I arrived in America, I went.

He invented remote work. Arnold invented remote work.

He really did. Yeah. That is a crazy, crazy thing. I'll have to have him on the show and ask him about his. His time as a remote business major. University of Wisconsin Superior. I went to community college to take English classes and get smart about business. In 1980, I became a US citizen. Let's hear it for Arnold Schwarzenegger, One of the best to ever do it. Today I live in a contemporary house in Brentwood, Los Angeles. It's the perfect place where I can see the foliage and the mountains. I'm close to town, it's private. And I have my pet. I have all my pet animals, which means not just dogs. He definitely has more than that. We'd love to know what he has. In the 1980s, I took my mother to. To a White House dinner to meet President Reagan. At the table, I went to scratch my nose and she hit my hand in front of everyone. She said, don't pick your nose in the White House. Please, Arnold. I wasn't. But that didn't stop her. No matter how big you get, your mother knows how to shrink you just a little. What a great story.

I am sad that I was not super conscious when Arnold was the governor of California. Yeah, like I remember it.

Yeah.

But I wasn't there for probably all the incredible moments. And I don't even have a strong take on if he was like a great governor. But I think he's awesome as an individual.

Totally.

And that's a great place to go. I hope. Sam, Sam Sulek. I hope he makes a run in politics as well.

Me too. I would love it.

I think that would be powerful.

And Hollywood first.

Can you imagine? Daily Sam Sulek vlogs from the campaign trail.

Incredible.

He's just getting all of his constituents. Hey, just come for a lift. Come for a lift.

I think we're manifesting it.

We can talk policy.

We get him in a Jason Carmen directed reboot of the Terminator.

Yeah.

Get him into Hollywood, get him trained up, make him a household name more than he is already. Then get them on the campaign trail. I think we have a winner.

Something there. Well, this was a crazy, wild, often fun week and I can't wait for next week.

Yeah, we'll see you Monday.

Thank you for tuning in. Have a fantastic weekend.

Bye.