Ukraine Minerals, LIVE Ryan Peterson Interview, Trump Pentagon Reform, $200B Meta AI Build

You're watching TVPN live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the dojo of the dollar. Today is Wednesday, February 26, 2025. And this show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We're covering Nvidia earnings that are dropping later today. There's a rare minerals deal that's going on in Ukraine. We're going to dig into the companies that might make money from that deal. Stay away from the politics, stay in the business world, the technology world. There's also an article in the Economist about DoD procurement reform. They're calling it the Battle for the Pentagon, folks. The Battle for the Pentagon. Check it out. Very cool graphic docs. My address. It's a live stream. Hopefully no one shows up in my house. And Meta Zuck is is going to spend $200 billion on a data center, potentially. We're going to break it down for you. And we have Ryan Peterson calling in from Flexport in just about 15 minutes. And so we're going to run through the Nvidia stuff first. Our first article of the day comes from the Wall Street Journal. Nvidia earnings. What time do results come out and what to expect? Nvidia's chips are the computational workhorses of artificial intelligence. And the company's quarterly reports have become gauges of health of the AI boom. Nvidia is due to report fourth quarter results Wednesday after market close about 4:20pm Eastern time. So 1:20 our time.

And if you aren't stressed about this, you're not heavily invested enough, not just in Nvidia, but the entirety of the market. Everything's, everything's riding on it.

I was talking to somebody who's thinking about going to a global economy changing from one fund to another. And I was like, you should probably wait until Nvidia earnings drop to make that decision because if Nvidia rips might be a good time to lever up.

Yeah. And it's interesting because you have people earlier this week, Steve Cohen was on record flipping bearish, saying, this is the first time I've been bearish. There's all these cyclical sort of forces. Austerity. Right. Reducing spend in the government, which sort of trickles down, anti immigration, which, you know, reduces some economic activity.

That's happening.

Yeah. And tariffs are taxes. And so, you know, there is a case that tariffs make sense in the long term, but in the short term there could be some financial pain. And so plenty of investors are sounding alarm bells. We see this on the timeline. And Warren Buffett is also sitting on a historically large cash pile of hundreds of billions of dollars in cash now. And he's looking at the fundamentals and saying, I don't get it. But we will find out more when Nvidia drops their earnings. Analysts expect to see strong sales growth in today's report, even after about two years of unprecedented expansion. They point to capital expenditures by Nvidia's largest customers. Amaz, Meta Alphabet, Microsoft. These are the hyperscalers. They all plan record spending this year driven by AI. But as we covered earlier in this week, some of the hyperscalers are getting a little bit of cold feet. Satya saying, hey, maybe I want a lease. Maybe I want to, you know, not really sign that many leases. And so I'm sure Dylan Patel and Ben Thompson will have great analyses out tomorrow or later this week breaking it all down. And we will bring that to you. Much of the money that goes directly into Nvidia's pocket, which has helped elevate its market cap above 3 trillion and make it one of the most valuable, valuable companies in the world. There's no shortage of challenges. Nvidia's dominance in AI chips has made it a target for disruptive startups and other chip makers who want in on the action. Nvidia's chips have also been caught up in a geopolitical standoff between the US and China. And, and any concerning signal about the future could worry investors, much like China's Deep SEQ did last month when it claimed it could create advanced AI models with fewer chips.

I'm interested to see what Jensen has to say around earnings, specifically in regards to deep seek, because the easy answer is to say, look, Jevons paradox, right? Everybody that's heavily invested in AI, that was their immediate reaction, and I think it's a fair one. But I think he'll need to go a little bit deeper than that on earnings because everybody sort of heard that already. If he just sort of doubles down, it's like if I was an analyst, I'd be pressing him. Okay, what does that actually.

Where does this actually go?

Yeah, where does this actually go?

Yeah. Well, if you're looking to make investments in Nvidia or any other asset, why not go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com so let's talk about the US and Ukraine deal. There's been a deal that's been reached, but details remain unresolved. This also comes from the Wall Street Journal.

Was this Trump giving in to the, you know, he just was feeling the pressure from the true social ban in Ukraine. Yeah, that's over the weekend, or it was Friday. Zelensky was feeling the pressure from Trump, so he hit him where it hurts. Truth social ban. The truth social. If you don't know, they've got about $1 million in revenue globally. And I'm going to, I'm going to go out on a limb and say maybe five grand of that was generated in Ukraine. So not exactly hitting Trump that hard, but it was a statement. He's letting him know, letting him know, you're not welcome. Me?

Yeah, yeah, don't mess with me. But something happened. I mean, earlier they were talking about a $500 billion mineral deal, but it's since become much more vague in terms of what this deal actually means. The text of the deal, which has been viewed by the Wall Street Journal, includes the creation of a fund co owned by the two countries with the details of the financial arrangement to be determined later. So they're basically just saying, hey, we know that America has spent a lot of money on, on supporting Ukraine. It's $100 billion investment overall over the last few years. 70 billion of that was in military hardware specifically. And you know, typically there is some sort of repayment plan when these military activities happen, like even in World War II, you know, it's probably like the most noble war that America has fought. Right. But Americans who footed the bill for those tanks and bombs and everything, they got war bonds and then they got paid back and it was actually a good investment for people that were supporting America at the time. And there's no wonder why.

I hope we never see war bonds on public.

But I mean, now, now it's just Treasuries, right? Just issue a ton of Treasuries and then we do whatever we want with the money. It's one big pool of capital and it's not necessarily allocated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very specifically, but, but it can happen. There can be a war bond drive if there's like, hey, we need, you know, a trillion dollars right now or, or 100 billion or something. And so how are they going to pay this back? Trump wants to get the deal done and make sure America comes out on top. And so he's saying, hey, you got these assets in the ground, these minerals. And these minerals have been very hotly contested because China has so many of them. And there's a desire to shore up our access to rare earth elements and other minerals as well. So the deal is part of a broader, of broader arrangements with the United States. Zelensky said this deal can be part of future security guarantees. And so initially, essentially the thought was give us all 500 billion and we will guarantee your safety. We will do anything to protect you. Because 40% of the minerals that are targeted in this deal are in war torn areas that are contested regions that Russia's actively active in. And so America would have this massive financial incentive to go and protect those areas. But it's since kind of downgraded to a, like a, I don't know, a more, more vague deal at this point.

Yeah. And just an interesting data point. So mining actually only contributes 6% of Ukraine's towards Ukraine's GDP. So it's not, it's not, you know, it's significant. But when you think about Ukraine's.

Well, it's balance sheet versus cash flow, essentially.

Yeah.

Like I believe it's generating a lot of money, but they have a lot on their balance sheet.

Yeah, exactly.

Theory.

Yeah, yeah. So in 2021, Ukraine GDP was just under 60 billion. So by Trump going out and saying we want the value of the next $500 billion of your minerals, like that's pretty, you know, it's not an insignificant ask. Even though there was this hundred billion dollar investment.

Yeah. Zelensky said he specifically didn't want to strike a deal where Ukrainians would be paying for it for multiple generations. Like the great grandchildren of the Ukrainians now would still be paying it back. So they want something a little more.

And we've seen how throughout history, if you saddle a nation with, with extreme levels of debt, it can create chaos. Create chaos, absolutely.

And so this agreement can have a major success or quietly pass by. Zelensky said. And I believe that a major success depends on our conversation with President Trump. He said that he would have several questions for Trump whenever they meet, including whether the United States would cut off aid to Ukraine, and if so, whether Ukraine would be able to buy weapons from the United States. He also would ask whether sanctions on Russia would be lifted. He said, we will draw conclusions after my dialogue with President Trump. And so the mineral rights agreement has been a major sticking point in the relationship between Kiev and Washington, which has deteriorated, deteriorated rapidly. This month. At the Munich Security Conference, Zelensky refused to sign a version of the deal presented to him by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant. At the time, he said he couldn't sign an agreement that didn't include a security guarantee for Ukraine. Officials across Europe also expressed shock at some of the Demands the US had made in their offer, including, including the right to up to 500 billion in revenue from mineral development. And so they've been going back and forth. Trump called Zelinsky a dictator. The relationship is deteriorating, but the end result might be that some sort of.

Deal gets done here where they don't quote this, but they say that Trump accused Ukraine of starting the war.

Yeah.

Which seems.

Yeah. Anything to get a deal done here.

Yeah.

Today. Zelinsky said today it's important not to lose the US as one of the guarantors, whether it's the main guarantor or one of the guarantors of security guarantees for Ukraine. And we are working on it. And so I wanted to dig in, so I had, I pulled up some data on the companies that might be involved in actually going and extracting these, these and you can see a sheet here going, extracting these, these minerals. So MP Materials, Albert Marie and Uranium Energy Corp could benefit from the deal given their focus on rare earths, linium, lithium and uranium, respectively. The deal was agreed to, involves Ukraine sharing revenue from critical minerals. But these aren't developed yet. And so you need companies that come in and do survey surveys to actually understand what's in the ground. Even Caterpillar was cited as a potential beneficiary here because they make a lot of mining equipment, a lot of construction equipment.

Yeah. How much, what is the total value of the equipment needed to mine $500 billion worth of rare minerals?

It's a lot. And this is, this is a multi.

Double digit percentage of the end value.

Yeah, yeah, it's a, I mean, it's a.

That's what I don't understand. So the United States is not going out and saying we're going to come mine your rare earth minerals. It's that we want a, like a massive royalty on the value of whatever is mined within the country.

Yes.

And so at some point there needs to be. These private companies need the ability to capture margin as well if they're going to go do the work. And so I'd be interesting to see a diagram specifically around how that, where the sort of like actual margin is being allocated to. Because the US can't just take the actual retail, you know, market value of, you know, a piece of titanium. Right. It has to take. Otherwise the economic. What's the incentive for the mining company to actually pull that out of the ground?

Yeah, totally. It's, it's that there's 500 billion allegedly in the ground on the balance sheet of Ukraine. That's Going to get turned into cash. At some point over the next few decades, a number of companies could come in and buy those rights and they could pay for them upfront and then they reap the benefit. But at some point the money from that deal is going to go into this. Formerly it would just go into Ukraine's treasury because they own the materials, the minerals, but under this agreement it will go into a, like a collective fund. Interesting split.

Yeah, it's interesting too because presumably much of these deposits are on private land. And so if you're private citizen, who owns the land and then the United, this foreign government is making a claim to it and they're making that claim because, you know, we provided capital to fund the war. You're like, well, I, you know, I didn't ask you to do that. My, my mineral deposit isn't even anywhere near the front lines, you know. Yep, there's a bunch of crazy dynamics here and I think these are essentially on like Stargate is on the line.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a big deal. And so digging into some of these companies. MP Materials Corporation, headquartered in Las Vegas, they're the largest United States producer of rare earth elements, operating the Mountain Pass mine in California. Given the deal stipulation that U.S. companies must hold 50% ownership of Ukraine's rare earth deposit, MP Materials, as a prime candidate to expand its operations. Now this is all like super hypothetical. This is just, you know, you could bring in any company to do this deal, but the question is like, is Ukraine even like, they're not currently mining these, Are they set up to, or will they partner with an American company? They could partner with a Chinese company. For all, for all we know, there's actually a Chinese company that's, that's that like the largest rare earth mining company in the world is a Chinese company because that's where a lot of these rare earths come from.

Yeah. And you can imagine China is doing many of these same deals with the Belt and Road Initiative where they say, cool, we're going to give you, you know, this funding for infrastructure. If you can't, you know, actually pay for it over time, we're going to claim the infrastructure and also, you know, secured by underlying mineral.

I don't know if you have the market caps there, but I was kind of shocked by how small some of these companies are.

Yeah, I just think it's, it's many of them are sort of low margin businesses. Yeah, right. So they're, you know, getting a fairly low multiple on.

Yeah, I think most of These companies are in the single digit billions if they're public. There's a couple here that are in just the hundreds of millions. There's not a huge like, you know, moat around these businesses. It's just a lot of hard work digging. Digging in the mines basically.

Yeah. And there's been some, a lot of talk recently of Durin Mining which is out of El Segundo and I have just appreciated pretty much every graphic that they've put out. It makes me yearn for the mines. I've never set foot in one but, but their visuals are fantastic. It's just durin.com d u r I n.com unfortunately I'm not an investor but I am very excited to see what they do and maybe we'll look to invest in the future.

Yeah. So we should have Ryan Peterson joining us in just a few minutes. We're figuring out our second live call in of all time. We're trying to do it a little bit more professional this time with a real zoom. You should be able to see his.

I think people appreciated the Senra. Colin Senra was Monday. Yeah.

And if we can just wire this, the phone in, we can just make some phone calls while we're on stream, that'd be fantastic. But I'm sure we'll follow more as that deal rolls out. I'm super interested. I mean we've seen Ukraine as an opportunity for hard tech companies. Nero's is probably one that took the most advantage. But Andrew certainly had a Ukraine narrative for a. In the sense that Palmer Luckey was saying, hey, we've been talking about the return of great power competition, we've been talking about the importance of drones and Anduril was very countercultural, very contrarian. And now it's super consensus because everyone all through 2020 through 2024 was basically like we need to defend Ukraine. I'm not exactly sure when the, I think the Ukrainian war broke up in 2021, 2022, a couple of years ago. But at that point everyone, you know, not just right wing, obviously left wing was, was very important, very in support of, of defending Ukraine and that led to a lot of energy and possibly.

24Th of February in 2022. Exactly two years. Three years ago.

Three years ago. Yeah. And so, and then Neros has a similar thing. I think they just struck a deal to send a few thousand drones over there and they were kind of scared.

That manufacture was wild. It was, I don't think, I'm sure even their investors didn't feel like it was Feasible to get Nero's product onto the front lines of this war. And bravo to them for. For making it happen.

Cool. Well, let's. Let's move on to something that is a great place to express your rare mineral collection on your watch.

God.

Bezel. Go to get Bezel to a shop for over 22,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. And they have a great post here. Pov you say you're full but then they roll out the six foot Rolex cake. Have you seen this photo? And they did a little giveaway. You got to follow these guys on X because they said and Connor, can you let Ryan in? He is in the waiting room. Let's see.

First ever video guest.

This is in the waiting room. Here we go. Ryan, how you doing?

Stop got man. I'm traveling. I'd wear a tuxedo to join you guys. You're looking good.

You look good too.

Fantastic.

I like the zip up. It looks comfy. Where are you right now?

I'm in Dallas, Texas.

Nice. Can you give me the breakdown on the announcement? Kind of the cadence, what this means for the company? Just break it down.

Yeah. So we launched earlier this week. We launched about 20 AI products. Basically stuff that we built over the last six months. We moved to this model where we every six months just do a big drop. Try to kind of drop a little bomb. It comes from a principle in physics where the maximum energy transfer happens when you take something really, really hot and you put it in a place that's really, really cold. And we feel like freight industry in general is like that. So you want to just gather a whole bunch of hotness and drop it all at once.

Was there any pushback when you kind of pitched this to the team or was everyone kind of like, oh yeah, we already know the Brian Chesky kind of like talk that you were referencing. And. And we. We're in. We're bought in.

People liked it a lot.

No.

No pushback. Because I think a lot of our tech teams feel a little frustrated that they don't get enough support from marketing or they build this thing and people don't pay attention. It never gets. And it all feels a little incremental when you look at it a little bit by bit. The pushback that I was expecting to get would have happened over the last month because there's. There's nothing like a deadline to get people to work hard. I remember. Yeah. Like some good business advice actually is the way to get people to Work on nights and weekends is not to ask them to work nights and weekends. It's just give them a deadline that can only be met if they work on nights and weekends. So seem really bad. I think some of the stuff we shipped over the weekend, like right before the launch.

Yeah, yeah, I was going to say it's the same thing with sales. Like it's hard to know if a sales rep is actually good unless they're competing on a team with other people, their other peers. Right. One of the things I thought was interesting, I think that early stage companies can struggle sometimes when they end up dropping three major announcements on one day. Because if you're just like starting to build that brand and audience, I think it can be you can end up wasting a handful of announcements by dropping them all at once versus spreading them out. But I think at the scale that Flex ported at, it makes a ton of sense to do this sort of keynote approach.

It could be that it could be also earlier stage companies don't know what's going to work and need to iterate more and be more evolutionary. And at our scale, we sort of know what the thing needs to be and ship it. The business itself works as is.

Customers ask for these and you're basically just paying down a backlog of the most common requests. Right? Yeah.

And we're not really holding much back. A few of these things kind of soft launched or already in production and live over the last couple months. But we never did any fanfare or marketing or packaging of it up. But definitely a bunch of stuff was like barely shipped on time. Kind of team grinded out over the last few weekends and working, you know, burning the midnight oil.

That's great though. It's got to feel like very inspiring to the team and very like just like everyone's on the same page now. Everyone's on the same cadence. Everyone has the same like popping champagne at the same time because like we all hit the same goal basically.

Yeah. I recommend it to companies, I think. Yeah, it's an interesting caveat. Maybe some early stage companies want to like build more of a success. Compounding motion of little wins and constant launches and stuff. There's a lot of. There's a lot. There's probably something to that as well. But we saw such good results from packaging. It's definitely our new rhythm going forward.

How are you pitching Flexport now? Kind of at the highest level in terms of like the long term vision. And how do these new releases kind of like fit into that narrative or like the high level story you're telling about Flexport.

It's always been a really challenging thing because we can do a lot of things for a lot of different use cases for different audiences. At its core, what we're trying to do is run this full end to end from factory floor all the way to customers doors and retail stores. I like that. It rhymes. Being able to everything on that full end to end transaction and then including placing orders back to those factories to replenish. We want to make that as as simple and reliable as a light switch like that. Your logistics just kind of works. You take it for granted. You go back to focusing on your brand or focusing on your product, which is what you should spend all your time on as a product company. And like the logistics piece is just automatic. It's pretty automated, it's reliable, it's cheap and lots of options to get the products where they need to go. And we're also. Flexport Capital has become a really instrumental part of our business where we do inventory financing for people. So you're like, you also shouldn't have to worry about that compliance capital insurance for the products. Yeah, it's a very big, ambitious vision because the world's big. We got to be able to. We shipped product to and from 147 countries last year. That's a lot of different surface area.

You mentioned trying to get to a place where an E commerce business can basically with one click get on Flexport and then be fulfilling through Nordstrom's France E commerce system. Can you break down a little bit more of what that will look like and what, what are the barriers like? Why is that difficult?

Yeah, and that is a big part of the vision too is like logistics right now is your cost center. We want to make it a growth engine. We want to be like, hey, you've got this awesome logistics platform. You can sell in more markets, whether that's geographies or more channels, different retailers, marketplaces. And yeah, it's hard because these retailers all have their own very specific requirements for how you label the goods. Like Nordstrom wants it appear as a Nordstrom package even. Even if it's shipped by Flexport or the brand. So yeah, you've got to get that custom. They want it to run on a Nordstrom shipping label.

Yep, makes sense.

Not a Flexport shipping label. They want some cases, they want special hang tags that say Nordstrom.com or whatever. And it's slip stuff. So you've got to do for each retailer onboard them in that way. And then when that's on the digital side where what we call drop shipping, where you're selling on Nordstrom.com if you're selling to Nordstrom or really any of the big box retailers. They also have huge requirements for how you deliver pallets to them. Like the label has to be a certain number of inches above the ground and has to arrive at this time. And if you miss those things, they have a call chargeback they like thousands of dollars for.

And the other challenge is compliance across all these different product categories. Right. Which is a whole other beast in terms of. I understand. I've invested in a number of consumer brands and just dealing with that level of complexity and especially a lot of 3 pls are not super sophisticated and there's real, you know, fines associated with sort of not doing these things correctly. One question I had is around, you know, entering sort of fulfillment and being a player there. From every. My sense is that nobody loves their, their three PL or their fulfillment provider. And so that's a huge challenge. I'm sure you've been super intentional coming into that. How are you sort of focused on, you know, making is it. Is it possible to make a fulfillment product that brands like truly, truly love? Right. Because everything could be going great for years and you have a small issue and it's so critical to the business that it can. It can be very challenging. What's been your approach there?

Definitely our goal is to become the most loved vendor you have in all your logistics stack. We've done that on the freight forwarding side. Although we've had our ups and downs lately, our NPS score has been through the roof. So 72 NPS last time. We measured it last month. So we definitely know what to do. What Flexport did differently than the fulfillment business we acquired from Shopify Logistics. We were very enterprise focused. Our tech teams meet with customers constantly and solve tech problems. And then we are also more than a tech company. We're a service provider. And so if the tech can't do it like, we're still going to get it done. And I think that's something that we've had to kind of learn, teach new tricks to this business that we acquired. Now I'm really proud of them. For the last nine months at least, they've just been like our tech teams have been meeting with the customers nonstop, closing gaps like taking feedback, solving the problems. We definitely still have work to go. But the cycle time of like taking their feedback, implementing it is really good. These customers feel like they have a custom dev shop, even though we don't build custom software for people. It's been a mess lately. So I don't know how close you guys have followed, but a huge amount of E commerce is fulfilled from Mexico duty free into the U.S. if it's under $800, there's no taxes. That was 30% of all the big Shopify merchants were doing that and it went away. The Mexican government shut that program down on December 19th and then like totally no one saw that coming. Everyone thought Trump was going to shut it down. No one thought Mexico was going to shut it down. Didn't make any sense. They kind of brought it back, but then they like haven't given the importer licenses to these companies, so it's not really brought back. So Flexport Fulfillment, we doubled our revenue in the first, what is today? February, late February. So the first two months of this year we've already doubled the revenue of that big business unit that we acquired from Shopify. But it's not been without hang up. Like we, our team, my whole leadership team, I was there last weekend working, whole leadership team is basically living at our warehouse in San Bernardino right now because we're taking all this inventory out of fulfillment centers in Tijuana and trying to inbound it and none of it's proper. A lot of it's not properly labeled. Imagine, right. You're like taking it all out of this Mexican fulfillment center, throwing it in boxes and shipping it to us. And like the people labeling these boxes didn't care that much about the, you know, labeling and compliance.

Well, so many, there's so many landmines. If this is like one of the most crisis prone borders in the entire world, right. Between Mexico and the United States. You gotta be so careful around so many different things to make sure that, you know, everything that you're doing is, you know, not, not. And there's the whole, you know, dynamics with the cartels down there that try to get involved in some of these more traditional businesses. So, so is.

So that Mexico thing that you just mentioned, that's separate from the temu de minimis change that's going on.

Yeah, Mexico get its own color on.

That.

And like it's possible that it's related. It's possible that Trump, they were trying to do Trump a favor or something and close this down. Not really clear to me why they would do this because they say on the surface it's to protect Mexican textile workers jobs and kind of create a barrier to entry so that like you would source in Mexico instead of in Vietnam or Something, but bit of a mess. China separately. Trump actually first Biden's CBP did this Customs and Border Protection back in September, I want to say announced they previewed, hey, this 321 de minimis program for goods made in China is going to go away. But it was very vague. It was sort of when that would be implemented or how. Trump in his first week made the executive order to shut the program down. And then in his second week he brought it back, but no one thinks it's back for good. We're sort of in this limbo stage right now, but it's making it really hard for companies to plan. And now that is just targeting goods made in China. But I don't know, everyone's like, oh, I'm fine. I produce my goods in Vietnam. I just don't know that the Trump administration is going to see the world that way. I think that you. I would predict, and I don't have any evidence for this, but my intuition tells me I would predict some tariffs on other countries besides just Vietnam, that a lot of these people think they have a safe haven for their products. But maybe we'll wake up to a rude awakening.

What is the global footprint of Flexport look like now? I mean, it's a big company, said 146, 147 countries or something. Do you have offices, people, warehouses in all these places?

No, not in all of them. We have offices in 15 countries and then adding five more in the next 12 months as fast as we can. We're launching. So it's a big.

So that's why you're traveling all the time.

Yeah, I went to 19 countries last year and some of them twice.

I don't think I left the United States last year.

The world's a big place, John. You got to get out there. It's not that bad. I enjoy it.

Yeah.

Talk about the news. This morning there was some news around the port deal and specifically around automation. What can you speak to on that front? What should. There was a lot of pushback, people being obviously a wage increase. And then on top of that, banning some of these companies from rolling out automation that would threaten jobs. What's going on there? What's your take on the most recent news?

Pretty ridiculous to ban automation in a port, just putting America at a competitive disadvantage. The reality is at this table, you have carriers, the port operators and the ocean carriers. On one side of the table, these are the employers, and then you have the union on the other side and they're negotiating neither of them cares that much about automation because if there's no automation, it's sort of like a non proliferation treaty. Hey cool. We don't have to spend money on automation as long as our competitors don't either. We're all level playing field here. The people who lose are you. And all of us who use the ports, who ship stuff, consumers will have to pay more for everything. And I don't know by the same logic like we, we should all be farming with, with sticks instead of, you know, just dig a hole with a stick and put a seed in the ground. So I think it's very stupid. I'm sure the union will want to come after me for that. They're doing the right thing for themselves by the way. They should represent their interest. That's their job as a union. So I don't criticize what they're doing, but my stance is very pro robotics and automation. Obviously we're technology company.

Yeah, broadly. I mean there's been a lot of heat around the humanoid robotics space and just robotics broadly. Where do you see Flexport itself leveraging some of this tech? And I'd love to get your take on just the humanoid form factor generally. Is that something that you see being integrated across all the different physical touch points of the Flexport business or do you think there's a better, you know, form factor? You know, it's not obvious to me that humanoids are going to be the right form factor for like 3 PL and fulfillment for example.

Definitely not obvious. The whole thing is it's. I'm very much wait and see. It's the humanoids are making enough progress that it's really causing me to second guess how much I want to spend on capex and a big automated system right now in a fulfillment center. Because you know, three years from now I don't want to have this. The life cycle on that investment. They probably like 10, 15 years at least. Right? Not hopefully it can pay back faster than that. It would have to before we invested. But it's got to last that long. I'm not going to replace it. And I could just totally imagine I have this giant expensive system that three years from now is just obsolete because progress in humanoids or other types of robotics. So it's interesting one of these cycles where you're like if it's improving that fast then you definitely can't invest in it. It.

Yeah, it's crazy.

The future one is going to be way better.

Yeah, well it's 11 humanoids are good.

In that sense because they're modular. You can buy one at a time instead of, like, having.

Well, the concern. We've talked about this before. The concern with humanoids is just if humanoids depreciate at the rate that the Model 3 does, are they viable investments? Right. You're just, like, sinking dollars into these things. And then the next year it's like, well, you know, I could have invested 50 grand into training this human who's going to be, like, better at their job and all this stuff. And I invested in this robot, and now it's like, just not even, you know, effective.

Or for them to clear is so high, too. I mean, workers are very, like, on an IQ basis, like, they're pretty smart. They got amazing dexterity in their fingers.

They run around, they've got agency.

It's not that expensive. There's a lot. That bar is going to be really high for them to clear.

Yep, for sure.

So we're still, like, pretty manual in our fulfillment. So now we're digital in the sense that, like, we scan everything in and out. And, like, a lot of you can't screw this up technology. But the actual pick pack and parcel, you know, putting this, putting it in the box is pretty manual. And the bar is so high to clear. So we're kind of happy with that.

Well, it's 11. We'll let you get out of here, unless you want to lecture us on jfk. Otherwise. Hope you have a great day.

Did you see that? I did a TV interview yesterday and I was on the air to talk about ports, and they were, like in the back room, waiting in the green room or whatever, and they're like, our next story is JFK assassination. But first we got to talk about ports. The end of my interview, I'm like, can I just stay? Let's talk jfk.

Where can the listeners. What's a good starting point to get into the JFK lore?

Okay, great. Well, I'm here in Dallas, okay? Which obviously is Dealey Plaza is where he got shot. And if you are ever in Dallas, you got to go down to Dealey Plaza right at the scene of the crime. There's this guy, this fat guy in sweatpants. He sits right there all day, every day, and he will tell you everything. You give him 20 bucks. He sells, like, this little magazine. Give him 20 bucks, he'll give you a tour. Going behind the bushes and be like, oh, the mafia was right here on this bridge. And, like, he will give you the whole layout of how it all went down. So I highly recommend Dallas, you Just.

Gotta go to the source. You're not even recommending a movie or a book. It's just go to Dallas and get the tour. I like it.

Correct. This guy will tell you everything.

That's great. Okay.

That's amazing.

Have a great rest of your day. Safe travels. Enjoy Dallas and let us know.

Congrats on the launch.

Congratulations. Crack the case on the jfk. Talk to you soon. Bye.

See ya.

Well, let's move on.

That was great.

That was great.

Always candid. Always.

We do need to do a JFK deep dive. That's how we really blow the show up. Go into the conspiracy realm. No politics, just straight up tinfoil hat.

The hat is right here.

We need permanent tinfoil hats. Ready? Constantly. Well, let's stay with the politics stuff. The Economist has an article on will Donald Trump and Elon Musk wreck or reform the Pentagon? I don't know if you want to read from this. Jordy.

You got a copy?

I got a copy for you. I got a hard copy. The. The Battle for the Pentagon. They got some nice docs. Your address I got here too. I'll kick it off in the Pentagon. They must surely be on high alert. On February 9, President Donald Trump declared that it would soon become the target for Elon Musk's Doge, accusing it of hundreds of billions of fraud and abuse. Mr. Trump will unleash his insurgents fresh from the feeding foreign aid into the wood chipper. Their work could not be more important or more risky. And yeah, I mean, we've heard this for a while. Like, oh, the Pentagon wasn't able to pass an audit.

Now it's been like decade in a row of being unable to. I don't even know if it's really the issue is the audit, but it seems like they just don't use ramp. They don't have. They don't have a good grasp on you. Remember last week you were like, how do we spend so much money this month? And I was like, look in Ramp. And you were able, in like, literally 10 seconds to see exactly where everything was spent. But, yeah, they couldn't even hit that bar, which is.

We will definitely be passing our audits here at this podcast. Yeah, you don't become the most profitable podcast in the world without passing an audit. But I mean, to kind of put on the steel hat and take off the tinfoil hat, the steel man hat. You know, I am okay with the idea of a. Of a black budget. I'm okay with paying my taxes, and the Pentagon does stuff that I don't.

Need it to be all on chain.

No, I don't need it to be all on chain because I don't want the adversaries to know and I don't want to the average citizen who does pay their taxes to just be able to say, hey, it's my right as an American. You know exactly where the CIA is spending money. And then I can just immediately text that to someone in Russia or China. Like, I'm fine with not knowing, but I don't want there to be just massive money stolen. Like that doesn't make sense. I want it to be, you know, some, some sort of accountability and checks and balance internally. And so this is, this is a big debate here. So that is because America's armed forces face a real problem. Not since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and built huge tank formations at the height of the Cold War have Americans have America's military vulnerabilities been so glaring in, in the killing fields of Ukraine. America is being out innovated by drone designers in the seas and skies off China. It is losing its ability to deter a blockade or an invasion of Taiwan.

And one thing interesting from this morning, I saw Chris from Amazon Heavy Industries. They're, they're building maritime defense products. And he shared something earlier about how China was caught, I guess in the last 24, 48 hours, cutting undersea cables off the west of Taiwan. So they had come sort of around the other side. And so there's that. The other thing that's, that's relevant to the defense side, which is a whole front that people don't even really talk about. But a Texas rancher was killed by an improvised explosive device yesterday morning. Saw that, which is just insane. And many people are saying that should be considered an act of, you know, basically, yeah, that's a terrorist activity. If, if on American soil an American citizen was killed by a cartel, which you could easily. You know, Trump has already paved the way for basically labeling them as, as terror. I think he did label them as terrorists.

Interesting. And so the problems are clearest in the struggle to turn technology into military advantage. The drones over Ukraine are upgraded every few weeks, a pace that is beyond the Pentagon's budgeting process, which takes years. And this is what we're seeing with Neros and Anduril equipment going out. It gets revised much faster than the Pentagon can even update a requirements document. And so there's been a big push for updating the, the way procurement happens. We talked about this on a previous show. I have a good post here From Eliano. Over at Palantir, there's an article in Breaking Defense. Pentagon leaders are crafting a plan to shake up how they buy and field technology, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth starting things off by potentially directing that the Department adopt soft the software acquisition pathway as the preferred method for software development. In a draft memo obtained by Breaking Defense, Hegseth calls on the Department to adopt the software acquisition pathway, a practice created in 2020 to accelerate software development by implementing best practices from the private sector. At its core, SWP is a streamlined method for procuring software programs bespoke to Dodd requirements, DoD requirements. Although the SWP organizations can deploy capabilities into platforms within six months or less, DoD has previously stated that the goal is to speed this process up into hours or just days, which makes a ton of sense, so that companies like Palantir and other software providers to the DoD can push updates much faster than having all this back and forth. And so there's a lot going on there. But of course, a lot of people are, are worried that the DOGE stuff will just result in smaller budgets and then, you know, defense tech companies will be on their back foot because they're expecting an expansion and they can't get that if, if things are, are pulling back. But at the same time, there's, you know, the actual budget will be passed not by the executive branch, but by Congress. And it all looks like there's a continuing resolution and then maybe even an increase in, in defense spending. And so we can read more of this. I don't know if there's anything else you want to say.

Not on that specifically. I'm sure there's other stuff in here. But, but yeah, I mean, we, we joked about this yesterday too. Every, it's sort of what's interesting right now is every department feels like they are, knows they're under threat because to them, you know, if you're running a department or, or, you know, even if you're just employee, generally everybody that's worked at a startup that has a massive, it's way more fun to have massive budgets that are sort of like, you don't really have to, you know, it's, you know, and this is the issue when startups raise too much money, they just start, you know, spending them or, you know, and so regardless, bloat is more fun than austerity and being, you know, and running, you know, highly efficiently and questioning every spending decision and cutting back and saying, oh, we can't do, you know, this idea is good, but we're not Going to do it because we have somewhere better to spend that money or it's just not good enough. It doesn't meet the bar. And so no, historically these departments have just sort of said every year we need more and more money. We give them more and more money. They're not being evaluated purely on. They're certainly not being evaluated on efficiency.

You had that tinfoil hat conspiracy theory about NASA, NASA saying that they might be talking about the asteroid that's going to destroy Earth to keep it was.

Just too conveniently timed. This thing's hitting in 2030 apparently, or might hit in 2032. And your math is so bad that every other day the odds go up by 1%.

I don't know.

No, the odds don't go up 1%. They were like doubling every two days.

Who knows? Who knows? But I heard a similar conspiracy theory about the hypersonic missile stuff. It was always hard to tell when there would be a Chinese demonstration like these undersea cables. Like on one hand, yes, it might be China's more dangerous than ever, so we need to increase military budgets. Or it could just be, I want an increased military budget so I have an incentive to make China look more dangerous than ever. And so it's always really hard to figure out what, what is driving the narrative. And you know, in the China case, I am a little worried. In the NASA case, I don't know how much I buy that conspiracy theory, but it is interesting and I'm glad.

I'm not betting the farm on it.

But, but it is, it is. It's a good important question to ask. You know, this is an interesting line. From here, behind this is the nightmare of budgets. Two year delays are aggravated by congressional squabbling, pork barreling politicians waste money by vetoing the end of programs. They guard their control over spending so jealously that without congressional permission, the Pentagon cannot as a rule shift more than $15 million from one line to another. So if it's over $15 million, it has to go to Congress. And Congress has to say, okay, yeah, we'll take not even, not even taxing more, spending more. It's just reallocating. And they, and they put it in context here. It says 15 million is too little to buy even four Patriot missiles. When the Pentagon proposed diverting just 0.5% of the defense budget to buy thousands of drones under its replicator initiative. So in August, winning approval took over almost 40 congressional meetings.

So Mitch, so the idea that Mitch McConnell should have a say in, in this sort of individual line, items of the Pentagon's budget is insane. Especially when you consider that he goes, you know, any time he does an interview, he, he, you know, sort of, there's like a bug, you know, poor guy. But there's a bug in the system that just causes him to just like, you know, you got to restart the computer. Basically. He did just announce his retirement in 2026, or he's not going to run again in 2026. But unfortunately, that means for the foreseeable future, he will still have a say in things that generally this level of micromanagement should be done. Almost like looking back to say, we gave you this budget. Did you spend it efficiently? If not, and then we're enforcing changes versus the, the micromanagement at the.

And I'm sure, I mean, I need to look this up, but it feels like this $15 million number is one of those uninflation adjusted numbers where, yeah, when they passed that rule, they were like, sounded. They were like, well, yeah, we don't want the Pentagon to just randomly move $15 million and be able to create a new Manhattan Project. Like, you know, oh, $15 million, that's all of our aircraft carriers. And now $15 million is like four missiles. And so the Pentagon can't shift it around. Pentagon angst is as old as the military industrial complex. Past secretaries of defense, including Bob Gates and the late Ash Carter, were philosopher kings next to their new and manifestly unqualified successor, Pete Hegseth, who was a Fox News host but has military experience. I don't buy the unqualified narrative as much as some people, but. But he definitely has a different background from. From previous secretaries of defense.

Yeah, it's more. It's more. So do we need a leader who's highly experienced as a war fighter and highly pragmatic and has deep relationships within the active, you know, actively enlisted military? Or do we want the philosopher king who's going to sort of sit and, you know, tell everybody else how. How things should be done without the sort of boots on the ground?

Yeah, it's almost like we need both. You know, we need the guy like Pete Hegseth X needs both.

Right. We need our. We need our operators and we need our philosopher king.

Absolutely.

Sometimes they end up intersecting.

Yeah. A lot of times the philosopher king usually would write, you know, the book that then goes viral and becomes the tome that everyone's marching to the same drum of. But then you see what Pete Hegseth is doing with some of those photos where he's like, working out with the guys and like really like leading from the front. And I think that that could be good. There was a great op ed in the Journal yesterday about army recruiting falling off a cliff and now starting to climb back up and what they can do about this. And they actually mentioned the JFK proposed a 50 mile march like nationally to like encourage men to like go and work out and like potentially join the Army. And so he was like proposing this. It was very cool. Anyway, there are two reasons why this moment may be different. One is the time is ripe. Not only is the threat to American security becoming clear, but a new generation of military technology firms, including and or Palantir Shield AI is banging on the Pentagon doors. Indeed, Palantir is now worth more than any of the five prime contractors. More controversially, Mr. Musk is eager to crack heads together. An enthusiasm which stems partly from the second reason to hope his experience elsewhere in the 2010s. To escape the ignominity of paying, of paying for rides to the International Space Station on Russian spacecraft, NASA put fixed price contracts to provide such services out to tender. Boeing offered something called Starliner. Mr. Musk's SpaceX offered Crew Dragon at a much lower cost. Crew Dragon has been a huge success. Starliner has yet to fly a successful mission and has left Boeing having to absorb billions of dollars of budget overruns, as they should. Yeah, and that's the nature of the free market. Like that is a good outcome. I think from the 60s to 2010, the cost of getting a kilogram to orbit hovered around $12,000. SpaceX rockets have cut that in by a factor of ten already. It's a thousand or twelve hundred per kilogram and promise much more. Very, very fascinating. Mr. Musk's task is big and complex. American weapons need more AI autonomy and lower costs where possible. They should be made from cheap off the shelf parts that ride on advances in consumer tech. This is a lot of what Andrew is doing. The Pentagon should foster competition, risk taking, knowing that some schemes will fail.

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, part of the reasons why these decisions end up being so contentious is that the individual senators have, you know, their constituents back home that are oftentimes dependent on jobs from specific programs. Right. So it ends up getting into this position where we're not. We want to keep this program going because 300 people in this small town that voted for me rely on this program for their livelihood. And so it's a very, very complicated issue. And yeah, I'm interested to see. I would love to hear as this sort of Pentagon Doge, you know, collision happens. It'd be really fascinating to hear what our analysts in China and Russia and any of our adversaries saying, because they might be, you know, they might be actually concerned about it because, hey, we have the biggest military budget in the world. And if we keep the budget the same but spend it three times better, it'll actually be very bad for adversaries. But if we just cut, you know, and hack across the board, they might be, you know, rubbing their hands together saying like, this is. This is great. Right. It makes us able to be more competitive. But any. This is one of those things every single American should want. If your tax dollars are being spent anywhere, you should want them to be spent. Right. And I don't think that that's a political issue at all. That's just called being pragmatic.

Yeah. So if you're at the Pentagon and you're working, if you're burning the midnight oil, trying to figure out where the budget is going, figuring out how to optimize our military spend, there's no better mattress to sleep on than an eight sleep.

Boom.

Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to eight Sleep to purchase one. Big fan of eight Sleep.

Go to tvpn. You can compete. You can compete with John and I. Oh, yeah. Sleep scores. We should get. Just get like a group chat going and we can.

I did not do well last night. I think I got like an 80 something. It was rough.

Why was it rough?

I don't know. Couldn't. I think I went to bed too.

I was the one 83.

Only six hours and 41 minutes. Not good.

I had a 96.

Oh.

And the thing that just keeps dinging me is I'm not getting quite. I'm barely getting more than seven, but I'm in the range.

Yeah. But I've reflected on it. I think that choice of shirt and suit. Phenomenal. Yeah, it's great.

Risky one today. I wasn't sure if this sort of off white shirt could go with the suit, but it's working.

I think. I think it looks great. And you know who needs to put on a suit one of these days?

Who's that?

Mark Zuckerberg.

That is true.

He's a hype. He's looked good.

He put on a suit. It's a shame when a man only puts on a suit when they're in trouble.

Exactly.

Don't. You don't want to be the guy that only is wearing a suit when. When people are trying to Come down on you. Because if you're wearing a suit all the time when you are, you know, in the shit. Yeah, sorry, swear jar. Sorry, swear jar. But, you know, if Zuckerberg wore a suit every single day, and then he goes in front of Senate and he's wearing a suit, he doesn't look guilty.

I don't think he needs to wear it every day. I just think we know he can pull off the cool T shirt with the. The graphic tee. We know he can look good walking into ufc, but I want to see more versatility, more range in the outfit.

The New York Times actually has an article in 2018 called Mr. Zuckerberg's. I'm sorry, suit. Oh, yeah, and another one from the Hollywood Reporter. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg wore a suit at the Senate hearing. So he's got to the guy who had the sort of, you know, daily uniform. What was it like, the gray shirt?

It was the gray sweatshirt. The hoodie.

Yeah.

And there was this famous interview with Kerri Swisher where Keri Swisher's really putting the screws to him.

Here's another one. These headlines are amazing. Washington Post, 2018. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the suits. Now. He'd better learn to get comfortable in one. And so they're all just dunking on him from wearing a suit. But if he'd been wearing it, you know, even once a week prior to that, nobody would have been able to see it.

And I'm sure he's. I mean, his suits looked great, but I'm. But he could take it a step further. Now that he's so into fashion. He could really find something that's a standout suit and even blend in some of the hypebeast. He could take some creative risks with the suits that he chooses and how he puts them together and just throw it in every once in a while. I'm not saying, I'm not saying get rid of the T shirt entirely. I'm just saying, yeah, every once in a while, show up in a suit. Show up in a button down. Let's see a polo. Let's see you be able to style, you know.

A former Facebook employee, Chamath was recently on his podcast talking about his Laura Piano addiction. And he looked fantastic.

He looks fantastic.

I thought, you know, he was getting memed for it, but it, you know, I think he's got good taste and, yeah, it's hard to argue with that.

It is, it is. Well, the reason we're talking about Zuck is because Meta has is discussing an AI data center project that could cost $200 billion. And for reference, they are spending something between 60 and 80 billion on capex per year. Not all of that is for artificial intelligence. A lot of that's just for serving reels, which is obviously AI driven as well, but it's not for, for specifically for LLM training. But he's all in on AI and is now thinking, I'm sure this 200 billion is over a series of years. He's not just ramping up the capex by a factor of three or four overnight. But it is an exciting story and it's interesting given that Nvidia earnings are happening later today we'll see if this is something that moves the needle for Nvidia because if they really do want to spend $200 billion, that's going to be a lot of GPUs. So I'll kick it off and then I want to get your take. Meta Platforms is in talks to build a new data center campus for its artificial intelligence endeavors that would dwarf anything the company has done to date and would be among the biggest of its kind. It would cost more than $200 billion. The proposed campus, which hasn't been previously reported this is in the information, would be several times larger than a new data AI data center in Louisiana that Mark Zuckerberg discussed last month, which he implied would be about 4 miles long. That data center would cost 10 billion and so now we're going up 20x. The discussions suggest Meta is preparing for a multi year surge in demand for generative AI among its billions of users through an AI chatbot available in all of its apps. It also shows the lengths that to which Zuckerberg may go to keep up with its rival OpenAI, which has embarked on a joint venture with SoftBank to spend 500 billion over four years on new data centers for its AI like Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Meta has outlined plans to massively increase capex largely for AI development. Meta said it will lift its capex between to between 60 and 65 billion. That's the actual number up nearly 70% on last year. So there are.

He's never been afraid to roll a dice on CapEx.

Yes. And he's founder mode.

He can just, well just generally making big bets obviously around, you know, he, he, he re. You know it's funny at the time Meta, yeah the rebrand seemed so silly to me. And in the fullness of time, Facebook is like 50% of the metaverse that we experience. Right. When you look at everything from Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp. It's actually a perfect name.

I agree, I agree. I think it's aged very, very well. And I think, but like it did get away from the blue app. Like people use Instagram, they use WhatsApp. Like everyone uses a meta product even if they don't use Facebook specifically. And I think that Zuck realized that.

And, and he actually needed, so, so what, what we're seeing now is that every single one of Zuck's apps will eventually like become somewhat irrelevant with the youth. And so he needed a sort of, he needed this sort of parent level brand to say like you're investing in meta and my leadership and this sort of collection of digital and you know, now physical products. Some of them will, you know, they're going to have their time. But, but many people have reported, you know, we talked about this probably a month ago at this point, a lot of people feeling like I don't use Instagram as much anymore, I don't post there. I'm, you know, my, my attention is being spread elsewhere. And so he needs to, I think it was really smart to not be the blue, the blue company, you know, the Facebook company.

Totally.

And yeah, yeah.

And there's something about Capex spending like this that's somehow less risky than spending on a specific app or specific platform. Like when he, they, when they went to build out the last data center build the last big data center plan, they, they got kind of caught flat footed with reels because TikTok came out and the main, you know, TikTok was, oh, it's vertical video that scrolls. But the real thing that made TikTok take off was that it is able to with AI, essentially personalize a feed.

Very, very scale AI esque.

Yeah, I'm sure. But, but even, even then like it's clearly like, like a very robust algorithm in terms of understanding what is this content and how is it linked to other content in the feedback. And this person spent 45 seconds watching this 1 minute clip and 15 seconds watching this other clip. So they like cars and not trucks or whatever. And so bringing that to bear in reels on Instagram was something that required a new data center. Like it wasn't just something that they could just spin up on AWS or on their own servers because it required new AI, new AI data centers. And so Zuck famously, when that happened, he said, I don't just want one reels sized data center, I want two. And because then if we get caught again, we'll just have one ready to go. And then of course the LLM boom happened and he was ready and he was able to train Llama really quickly. And then they have been not dependent on any other LLM provider and they've been able to just open source that, but also use it internally for their chatbots. And so you can, so you can imagine that, you know this. It's like he spends $200 billion on this. Is it just to serve LLMs in all of their apps? They're probably looking at the data of how many people are chatting with Llama across all of their apps. It's looking really good. But even if that doesn't happen, maybe people start generating a lot more video and that's really intense or people start doing something else and it still requires a lot of hardware, a lot of AI chips, a lot of GPUs.

And so it's also, you have to imagine that, that we're in this sort of more pro business administration. If M and A gets back on the menu in a big way, Zuck is going to get extremely aggressive acquiring these sort of breakout consumer AI products and being able to go to the founder of an AI company that has product market fit. But it's losing a billion dollars a year and saying, why don't you join Meta? I'll still let you run the business and you're going to have access to this $200 billion of, you know, data center.

I mean, you can see character you.

Would never be able to get on your own.

Yeah, you could see character AI having like a very natural home and fit within that metaverse.

And so I think my read on this is, is broadly that he wants Meta to be independently competitive in AI, have, you know, you know, not be held back by, by, you know, GPUs and just raw computing power and, and ultimately create, you know, allow Meta to be a place where other companies can land and get, and be competitive with Stargates and Elon's and things like that. The other thing from this article that stood out to me is that this line leaders at Meta and OpenAI grew concerned about the speed with which XAI stood up a data center to develop AI in Memphis, Tennessee last year. So every single person that wasn't at XAI watch what the XAI team did in Memphis and that became the bar. And so if Zuck is paying some executive team specifically around data centers combined, I'm sure it's like $50 million, like some absurd amount of comp. He's looking at them and saying this is the bar, you should be able to achieve this because I know it's possible and there's some sort of. We've talked about this yesterday but, but some constraints around potentially promises that were made around ESG and stuff like that. I don't know where Meta lands with that, but ultimately that's the bar now. And if Zuck is certainly going to be intense around that and say actually I would want you to do it even faster because that's him as a leader saying he was wanting to really set the pace. But, but that's a bar now and yeah.

And when you launch a new LLM, like, because the landscape is somewhat commoditizing, like you have to be superlative in some way. And so essentially like OpenAI seems to still be on the frontier of the frontier. They are the leading. But every other company when they launch something they always have some differentiator. Maybe they beat them by just a couple points on Chatbot arena or mmlu or they're slightly bigger context window with Google or you know, oh, it's, you know, it's, it's open source and that's enough to be like, well, it's a GPT4 class model and it's open source. So now it's, it's, it's in the conversation. Whereas if you're just launching a clone, that's exactly like, like, you know, OpenAI but like Deep seq. It's like, oh, they had this, oh, it's so cheap and it's really cheap to use and it was trained really small and you can run it, you know, you can inference it so cheaply. It's like it didn't matter that they, they weren't an order of magnitude better than ChatGPT or GPT4. What mattered was that it was at the same level roughly, but then also had a little bonus. And I think that Zuck is, is thinking about that right now as XAI spun this up. Is like can their llama 4 drop outdo Xai's Grok 3? Because if it can't, then they need a new twist on it. They need something else that, that will really. Otherwise it's just, you know, it's not going to become some popular product.

Yeah, one interesting thing is Meta has not been nearly as aggressive of forcing LLAMA down people's throats as XAI and Grok have. Right.

It does feel right.

So most people are using Grok within X. Makes sense. It's already there. They have the standalone app now I think people are starting to use that more. But meta, with how much they're investing in AI, how much Zuck cares about this. Why is it that you go to your home, you know, why have they not slammed this on the home row of Instagram, which is a, you know, an app that, I don't know do. They must have.

So I, I would push back on that in some ways because they do shove. It's more just that there's a conversation about AI that's happening on X that we are very much a part of. And so we see that integration. I don't know if, you know, basketball Twitter is using Grok in the same way that tech Twitter is. But if you go to Instagram and you type in a search term, there's an icon right here to click. You know, put this in a chat and all of a sudden I'm talking dilemma. And so it. It pulls it up right here. And.

And by the way, guys, John's Explore page is cars, watches and weightlifting. Very, very pure.

Yeah, most expensive Lambo. Let's do this. And like, very quickly it will insert me in a. In a chat. It used to be really aggressive where it was actually hard to. To pull this up. But, like, you can see that, like, this is like, you know, it's like if you search in Instagram, you will get pipelined into a flow. They've gotten less aggressive about it, but they are definitely slipping the AI in. I think they're trying to do it tastefully because there's. There's often really big pushbacks to any changes in Instagram. Even when they change to like, hey, we're gonna put more reels in your main feed. There was a big backlash to that becoming more algorithmic people. Hey, I built up a following of 5 million followers. Now every post has to go viral or it's just a flop. That's not fun. Yeah.

Weez in the chat says, didn't meta add artificially generated profiles? I'd argue that's way worse than X.

They did, but those never broke through in the same way that the Grok narrative has on.

It's very different to be like, I still use Instagram search to search for specific things. I don't go there with the intention at all of. I'm going to ask this LLM a question that I have, and certainly they.

Certainly haven't been pushing like a deep research comparable product in any meta products that I'm aware of. It would be cool. I mean, one of the favorite parts of Axe and Xai is that you're on A post and you just click the button and then it just gives you more context and you can say, hey, write a whole report about this. There'd be a lot more.

That's a really good point. There could be so much more like research, like using Instagram for research of I want to. It would be very cool to be able to. And maybe, maybe this is possible and we're just not engaged enough with Llama, but being able to say who do I follow or who have I engaged with in the past that has talked about intermittent fasting and then get, you know, a bunch of. Of, you know, get a return.

Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about this just on X. Like, I really hope that XAI gets more access to my X profile. So I could actually say of the people I follow, who are the experts in this.

Yeah, because right now it's a little bit random.

It's really hard to search right now for what's happening. Sometimes I'll just do filter follows and then the topic. So I'll say, okay, I want to see, you know, anyone who's talked about Meta's. I'll search like Meta Data center, filter follows and then it filters out all the junk accounts that I don't follow and I'll just see. Okay, Dylan Patel posted about it, someone else posted about it, et cetera. There's some interesting scale here we should go over. The Meta executives discussed eventually needing between 5 and 7 gigawatts of power for the site. By comparison, OpenAI has planned to acquire 8 gigawatts of power for its proposed array of data centers known as Stargate by 2030. Each gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes. To put OpenAI and Metis projects in perspective. At the end of 2023, Microsoft's entire Azure cloud business had around 5 gigawatts of capacity. And that's across the entire world. So getting, getting up there, getting up there. Big, big data centers, training, and we.

Use around 1 GW to run the show.

Yeah, that's great. Anyway, so everyone is. Is focused on this drastically more or drastically less as Meta Charts. As Meta charts plans for a major expansion. It is waiting on some of the Nvidia chip orders placed last year, Instagram head Adam Mosseri told his staff in a note this month. Meta is also contending with uncertainty over how many AI chips it needs to train and run in AI. We may need drastically more or drastically less capacity than we thought to build frontier models. That's of course about Deep Seek.

That thing I Mean that to me is relevant to Nvidia earnings later because it's possible that companies are just. The risk right now for Nvidia is that companies massively overspend and then flood the secondary market, end up having to offload some of these chips that are depreciating because the chips are actually getting better. And then it gets into a situation where you can go on the secondary market, not from Nvidia and buy however many H1 hundreds and that revenue no longer goes directly to Nvidia and Nvidia nukes. That's a risk. And so to see the head, basically the CEO of Instagram, he operates very much as in sort of founder mode. He still makes great videos about the platform and helping creators there. To say to see him, you know, it sounds like he wasn't intending this for, to be, to be publicized, but we may need drastically more, drastically less capacity than we thought to build frontier models that just says we don't know what's going on. We're not, you know, that's not a high. You would prefer him to say we think we're going to need, you know, we're pretty confident in our projections. It's possible we might need more or less is very different than saying we may need drastically more or drastically less.

We have no idea.

No idea. We're going to find out.

I tend to think we. I'm still pretty scale pilled. I still think we need a lot more. I think that the Deep SEQ optimizations maybe, maybe we'll see but I think the Deep SEQ optimizations, you get those and it's kind of like a one time algorithmic benefit. Just like RLHF was kind of like an algorithmic benefit but then you'd want to apply scale to it. And so, so I look at Deep SEQ and I say, cool, let's do all of the optimizations that DeepSeek did around memory bandwidth and int4 or int8 instead of int32, all the different optimizations that they did, let's take those and run at 100x scale and we'll probably get better models.

So the wild thing is right now this is the interesting question and we're not going to go Kramer and start making predictions. But. But Nvidia is worth almost twice what META is today.

Wow.

What does that look like in a decade from now? It's hard for me to, it's hard to imagine. It's easier for me to imagine Meta as a $10 trillion company than it is for me to Imagine especially than it is for me to imagine Nvidia as a $10 trillion company. And that's a primarily Vibes based analysis. But it anyways, yeah, I mean when.

You think about like potential platform shifts, like post gpu maybe you go TPU takes off. That's rough for Nvidia potentially if you're cutting. I mean Apple Silicon is a non Nvidia product. Right. It goes directly from Apple design to tsmc, kind of cutting out the middleman and then quantum computing. Nvidia doesn't really have a piece in that. At the same time, like, you know, everyone's using these GPUs right now and continues to versus the Facebook narrative and the meta narrative of like if VR is a big platform. Well, they're really well positioned for that. If you know this social stuff is really, really sticky. People, you know, can't really go rebuild their social graphs everywhere else. There's just all these different elements where Zuck seems to have his finger in so many different pies that could potentially be huge over a very long period of time. But it's fun to figure it out. But Jordy, if you had $200 billion to spend, how would you track it all?

I would use ramp.

Oh, ramp. Save time. Time is money save. Both easy to use. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com and we will move on.

Wait, quick note. A ramp SDR is in the chat under the account. Ramp sdr.

That's fantastic.

And they say, when are you interviewing a ramp sdr?

Oh, there we go. We got to bring them.

I would say that we have a nightly interview where I just call him up and we just chitchat.

That's fantastic.

We should start bringing him on the show.

Yeah, I love it. That's great. Did you see this? This Alex Jones post? Exactly what we want to be covering. But it is funny. Yeah, this is. This is funny because you need to put it on anytime you interact with Alex Jones because he's tinfoil hat city. But he said major scandal breaking Apple iPhones now replace the word racist with Trump. So you would use the dictation, you would say racist and it would just autocorrect to Trump. Obviously that was very controversial. And what's interesting is that there's a proposed community note here that says this is false. The only way this happens is if you set up personalized autocorrect in Apple's settings. This was staged for engagement farming and I believed that. But then I opened the Wall Street Journal. And the Wall Street Journal has an article here saying Apple has pledged to fix transcription glitch that replaces racist with Trump. And so what's interesting is that like, I guess it was a problem. I have no idea how this happened.

I just. I'm going to text you right now.

Yeah, yeah, test it out and see, and see what it does. If it autofills, it needs to be the dictation. So you have to say it, you have to say, you have to say racist to the, to the dictation button and see if it replaces it. Let's test this now live. We'll get to the bottom of this. Alex Jones, you're in the truth zone. No misinformation allowed here. Let's see.

Racist.

What does it say?

It says racist.

Okay, well, debunked. Alex Jones, you're on notice. But for some reason Apple did actually address this and they said they would fix the bug occurring on some iPhones in which its text to speech transcription software is sometimes replacing certain words with an R consonant, including racist with Trump. And I'm sure the words rampant and rampage at all at times also appear to be replaced with Trump. And I bet you that's just something in the. They're updating the transcription algorithm which we've talked about. We wanted them to do this. There are always hallucinations whenever you build these deep learning models, they're very hard to validate. And I'm sure just somewhere, you know, there's so much in the corpus of like YouTube videos that they're probably scraping to train these models of people saying Trump and racist in the same section or in the same sentence that some bit got flipped and all of a sudden it thinks that they're similar.

Yeah. I mean, what Alex Jones, I'm sure would suggest is that it was an activist employee.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Oh, yeah, I hard coded this in.

Yeah.

And I don't think that's what's. What's happening. Did you notice that with some of the transcription models, if you, if you just triggered them and had it transcribed, nothing like you didn't say anything and you said thanks, like transcribe that. Basically it would say like, thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe because it was clearly trained on YouTube videos and it was like the most, the most popular thing humans say ever is please subscribe. Isn't that hilarious?

That's hilarious.

And so I would say that I would open. No, no, we don't. We got it. But yeah, I would open it. Up. And I would just push this and then this. And it would, and it would just say like, you know, oh, thanks for subscribing, or please subscribe. And so these, these errors happen all the time. People blow them out of, out of proportion. There was the, the, there was the Gemini image debacle. People said, oh, Chachi PT can do all these things. Grok is, is advocating for, you know, giving Trump the death penalty. It's all, it's all over the place. And people read into it whatever they want, whatever their political ideology. They're like, I gotta get, I gotta score the points. And so it does seem like there was an error. It does seem like Apple's working on it. But it also seems like, you know, Alex Jones was engagement farming a little bit, but, you know, he's gotta get that creator payout.

You know, done that before.

Done that before. This is crazy. A TikTok user who goes by the handle David Media PDX said on a post in the platform, you say racist and it blurts out Trump. The software correctly renders racist or rampage several times, but occasionally when it is replaced, it will dictate the word Trump instead of racist. And so artificial intelligence has been known to generate unexpected results. The current excitement around general artificial intelligence, which is able to produce text and images, has attracted controversy over its propensity for presenting erroneous, fake or harmful content. And this is why Apple's been so conservative with the generative AI stuff like the Genmoji. Why is it restricted to the just cartoons? Well, if you tell the model, never create anything photoreal ever. It's very hard to say. Someone used Genmoji to create a fake image of the President going to prison and it swung the election. And so that was the narrative of the election. And I had a prediction that I think I posted this. I need to take a. Take a victory lap on this one. But I said that After Effects would be more Adobe After Effects Photoshop, the Adobe Creative Suite, that would be more impactful in the election than generative AI, because generative AI was still very clockable. Like you could see, okay, that's clearly an AI rendering of, of Biden doing something stupid or Trump doing something stupid. Like, not many people are falling for that and then voting based on that. But, but the, but the, but the video editing stuff was much easier to see. And we actually saw a lawsuit about this where, you know, I think it was, oh, I'm going to get this wrong. One of the major networks did an interview with Kamala Harris and then they edited it down and they took out some pieces and Trump sued and said you edited out the bad parts which swung voters to vote for Kamala. That wasn't Generative AI, that was just the razor tool in. Yeah. In Premiere, basically. And, and that those types of edits, even, even just doing little things like you're, you're watching a clip of Biden, you, you cut it and then you add some extra sound and it sounds like he's taking an extra long amount of time to answer the question. Something like that can be misinformation more than. You don't need Generative AI to do that. And so Apple has been really on top of this stuff and playing it very safe. I think that they should be more aggressive. And I actually don't think this is that big of a deal. And I don't care. What's your take?

Yeah, it's just another moment that you can imagine. The Apple execs are just deeply frustrated with all things AI summarization and AI dictation decoding. So anyways.

Well, I'm sure Apple will need to clean up their reputation. They'll need to put up some new billboards. Those Genmoji billboards aren't doing a good job. And when they run their next billboard campaign, who should they use? Jordy Ad Quick. Let's go. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the out of. Of the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And I wanted to highlight a cool billboard from Northrop Grumman, who, you know, company's not doing as well. Palantir is bigger now. We love Anduril on this show, but hey, it's a cool billboard and it looks nice. It's a little B20.

Yeah, you have Raider, right. You have to imagine Anduril has been, been very, I think, effective with their out of home strategy. And in all the places that Northrop Grumman execs are also, you know, commuting around, you have to imagine that they felt a little bit of a fire.

Look at where this, this billboard is. It's truly in the middle of nowhere.

No, I, I think that's in probably.

Outside California, outside of their testing facility, which is cool. And yeah, I mean if you're building hard tech, take a picture of the hard tech, make it look great and throw it on a billboard. What a great way to get the message out there. If you have a striking product and that's really where, where the, the ad quick stuff and the out of home really hits its stride is when you can come up with, with great copy, great visuals that when they're put in the real world they make people stop. They make people take a picture of it. They make people post the picture of your ad for free on the Internet because it's so cool.

And the opportunity for Apple is to look back at, you know, they're decades of incredible marketing and just run, run back, play the hits, play the hits, play the hits, play the hits. They're more of a luxury brand today than anything and that's okay.

And Genmoji doesn't feel like a luxury brand.

Exactly.

It doesn't. And I mean I hear you that they're a luxury brand and a lot of their products feel like the AirPods Max. Those feel very like you wear them as a status symbol. And the phones certainly feel this way. But they did have like the fun color, the see through plastic imacs back in the day. They've always had a little bit of.

Doing a see through phone. You can imagine almost like an acrylic phone would be harder to break into place.

But good luck to them. Hopefully we'll see some cool stuff from Apple. And we wanted to move on to a new term we know we talk about Deca Millionaires, Centi Millionaires, Centis Billionaires, Deca billionaires. And now there's the super billionaires. And the Wall Street Journal wants to introduce you to the world's 24 super billionaires. The ultra rich are growing in numbers and changing wealth as we know it. In 1987, Forbes published its first billionaire list. There were 140 people on it with a combined wealth of 295 billion. At the time, the richest person was Japan's Yoshiaki Tsutomi, a real estate tycoon worth 20 billion. Today, the world's richest person is Elon Musk with a net worth of 400.

Billion lost 20 billion yesterday.

It's a moment of silence for the capital erosion going on. Roughly 21 times as much as the previous peak. And so as the ranks of global billionaires have swelled dramatically in recent years, a new category of ultra rich has emerged. The super billionaire Musk is just one of 24 people worldwide who qualify for that distinction, which is defined as individuals worth 50 billion or more. As of February, these super billion, imagine.

You'Re, you're sitting at 48, you thought you're ready to retire and they come out with this new definition. Yeah, yeah, and you're going to be thinking to yourself, I'm so embarrassed to go to Davos this year. I'm so embarrassed for Sun Valley. I'm not getting invited to the super beer dinner.

Totally. I mean, if I meet someone who's sitting at 48, 47 billion, you got. I'm not even giving them the time of day. Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm kind of.

Oh, you want to be on the show? Oh, you want to be on the show? Why don't you.

Yeah, those numbers up. Yeah, why don't you go turbo long something right now and try and pump those numbers up. Well, they have a very interesting list. Tons of people worth deep diving. A lot of these people have been featured on David Senra's founders podcast. And let's go through them. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Larry Ellison Zuck, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffett, James Walton from Walmart. Samuel Walton as well from Walmart. Although they used to have the exact same net worth. James is pulling away with 117 billion. His brother billion. Yeah, something's going on there. Amancio Ortego Ortega is at 113 billion. Alice Walton is at 110. Jensen Wong at a hundred. Man, he's up there now. That's doing well.

Generational run.

It has been, it's, it's fantastic. He's been founder CEO of that company for what, 30 years now?

Yeah.

Deserved. Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Lori Larry Page, Mukesh Ambani, Charles Koch, Julia Koch, Francois Betancourt Myers from L'. Oreal Gautamandani from the Andani Group is at 60 billion. Michael Dell is also at 60 billion. Zhong Shan Shan from Nong Fu Spring.

No idea for having to pronounce all these.

And Prajogo Prang Etsu is Nongfu Spring.

The water?

I have no idea.

It is. It's the dominant bottled water brand in China.

Wow, that's fascinating.

Obviously there's actually. I want to know about that company. I have a book on this guy. You do? That's just been sitting there in my office at home. Maybe I got to pull it out. Nongfu Spring mode.

Yeah, that sounds great. In major luxury real estate markets like New York, Miami, Palm beach and Los Angeles and Aspen, new super tall towers and spec mansions have popped up, geared specifically to the billionaire set. And there has been an explosion of nine figure home sales across the country. You remember the one in Beverly Hills?

That was a rough one.

Yeah, but that was built on spec they wanted to sell it for $500 million, would be the most expensive home ever sold in America. And it was basically just like billionaire bait. It was like, yeah, we'll build this and somebody will come pick it up. Nobody really did. The market kind of crashed. It was kind of a disaster. I think the bank wound up selling it to the guy who started that fashion company, Fashion Nova.

Yeah, but, but it may be their cost or maybe something like that lost money on it.

Yeah, I think, I think the house is 100,000 square feet. It has a 50 car garage. It has full club.

That makes sense.

It has a full club, like the club for like DJ and like you can host, you can host thousands of people there.

The LA fires are kicking off. You've got your 50 car garage at one house.

Like I need to move all of these tonight.

Yeah, very, very difficult.

Did you see the video tour with the guy who built the one? It's fascinating.

So maybe it's worth.

Oh, we should definitely dive this. So he basically made his money in direct to digital DVD movies. So he made a ton of money in like the 80s and 90s taking like cheaply made movies and then distributing them into like grocery stores. And people would pick up a new vhs, oh some Jog Klein Van Damme movie or something, and they'd, and they'd pay for it. So he made a bunch of money doing that in film production, then got into real estate. He built a home for the Winklevoss twins, I believe. And then as the deal was kind of going south and he realized like, hey, maybe no one's gonna buy this $500 million house. He was like, well, now I'm pitching it as a reality show to Netflix. I'm gonna live here and we're gonna have concerts. And he wanted to have like UFC fights there and stuff. And he was really like scrapping it, like any way to make this deal work. And I think it. Eventually the bank said, hey, you owe us too much interest, you gotta pay up.

I wonder what the appetite. I mean a lot of these homes, once you get into the $100 million plus range, are, are very much trophy homes. And for the people that are buying them, they could burn to the ground without having making really a dent. Right. Like if you look at any of this list, if they lost $135 million home, it'd be a basically annoyance, but almost a minor one at that compared to the sort of day to day or year to year fluctuations in the stock. The one out of the LA fires that was wild was the $135 million home that was in succession. Oh yeah, that burned down. And the issue with these is they're just not like you can get insurance on them, but not actually insurance that will cover any sort of, you know, even the rebuild on it. So anyways, let me keep reading.

The rise of the super billionaire marks a transformation in the composition of the world's ultra wealthy. Experts said in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, the richest men were industrialists. John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil into a monopoly. Andrew Carnegie dominated the steel industry. And Cornelius Vanderbilt amassed a fortune through railroads. Their wealth, while vast, was spread across industries that defined an era of physical infrastructure and manufacturing. Through Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller became the world's first confirmed billionaire in 1916. During that period, a company valued a. The company's value accounted for physical assets like property and machinery, more so than the types of intellectual property and promise of future scale and earnings that push up values today. Today's tech billionaires make up a significant portion of the super billionaire pool. In addition to Musk, there's Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer. Their wealth is linked almost entirely to the stock prices and therefore future cash flows of the companies they started. And there's an interesting kind of narrative violation in here. Steve Ballmer is at 157 billion. Bill Gates is at 106.

Ballmer, Ballmer.

People don't like the Ballmer era. For Microsoft, like the stock didn't do as well. Satya kind of brought it back. She pivoted to cloud.

The only thing I remember is the video, you know, oh, yeah, he was a salesman. That was great.

But the wild thing held on.

The wild thing here. This has been discussed a lot, but it's worth bringing up. While we're on the subject, there's only one investor on the entire top 10 list, which is Warren Buffett. Every single other person on the list was a founder or CEO, you know, or part of the family that started one of these companies. And so, yeah, so when you're pitching vc, I would argue that they're flexing.

On you and they're like, oh, yeah, I'm a vc. I make so much money. Be like, oh, I'll see you on.

The super BN Air list.

Yeah, good luck trying to make it.

Good luck cracking the top 20.

Yeah, good luck.

No, but you could also argue though that Elon, you know, people like Bernard Bezos, Elon, are actually the world's best capital allocators. They just sort of Keep reinvesting into the machine.

And so unlike past generations where fortunes were built over decades, today's tech driven economy has also enabled founders to amass enormous sums in a matter of just a few years before his arrest in 2022, Sam Bankman Fried, the now disgraced founder of cryptocurrency exchange ftx, who we covered on the Monday show because he did a interview from prison, he was worth 26 billion before the age of 30, for instance. That is so much money. Wow.

Well, I mean Sam is actually not. There's a world where if Sam gets another markup, he cracks his list because at the current I would imagine so at the current he got 7ish percent of OpenAI.

Oh, you're talking about Sam Altman. I'm pretty sure Sam Bankman Fried has no equity in anything right now. He is destitute.

You have to imagine that in all has hidden away some coins, but no Altman specifically. I think he did he get 10? It was 7 to 10%.

So he's climbing up. Could be in 10, 20 they get.

The 350 billion dollar round down and then they get it a nice 2x. You know, just a simple 2x on that simple boom. He's in the territory.

I mean he's certainly shooting for a trillion dollar company. And you know, consumer, consumer tech companies seem to be the ones that pretty big trillion dollar valuations. Certainly not in the rare mineral mining business over here.

Correct.

The great American fortunes of today are new money, not old. Said a 2024 report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, which noted the absence of names like Astor, Carnegie Mellon, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt on lists like the Forbes 400. Of the approximately 97 still living billionaires on the 2005 Forbes 400 list who inherited fortunes less than half are still on the list today. The minority of heirs and heiresses who remain on the list today were three times more likely to have fallen in the Forbes rankings than have written prison and so bad day to be old.

Did you know that Speaking of old money and television hosts, Anderson. Do you know that Anderson Cooper was a descendant of the Vanderbilt family?

I did know that, yeah.

But his, his mom balled out too hard.

Really?

So he didn't actually inherit much money?

No way. Well, he's done quite well.

But he's done well. Yeah. Self made.

This, this is hilarious.

Yeah. So he, he only inherited 1.5 million which is actually very common. Right. And in some of these families for over time, a couple of generations down, there's really nothing left.

So so they, so they go to this. Economist Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winning economist, a professor at Columbia University, said he attributes some of the rise of the super wealthy to the inability of antitrust laws to contend with monopoly power in the tech sector. We've covered this before because a lot of these tech companies, they do essentially have monopolies, but, but not because they are sequestering a particular resource. They're not cornering a resource. They have created aggregation platforms. Like Tesla is not a monopoly on cars. You can just go buy another car. And yet the company is worth a ton of money. And so the antitrust laws are not really set up to bust these companies up.

Yeah. Which is why Tesla's down, however, 30% specifically because they, they don't, they're not a tech company in many ways.

Yeah.

And so we have antitrust laws that were well adapted to Standard Oil, but that don't work well here in the tech sphere. Monopoly power has given rise to the potential of enormous amounts of wealth. These guys have, both at the corporate level and at the individual level, been even better at avoiding taxes than in making good products. Stiglitz says he's a little bit of a hater. The level of taxes they pay as a share of their profits should be an embarrassment to them. He's, he's wagging the finger, but this is my favorite line in here. Wall Street Journal. They called for comment and they said the 24 super billionaires declined to comment or didn't respond for requests for comment. They sent, they sent this article to all 24 people in the list and everybody, everyone was like, nah, I don't want to be in this article. I don't want to comment on my.

On, on the, on the tax subjects. I mean, Berkshire and specifically Warren have been smart about advertising how much taxes they pay. Berkshire paid $28.5 billion of 2024 taxes. And I think at that scale, when you're, you know, I think they, you know, making a good argument that they're paying their fair share there.

There's also the argument that, like, yes.

Like Elon's, that was the biggest tax bill, single tax bill in history.

Yeah.

And so a lot of these guys, they own, you know, 50% doubles in value. They make a hundred billion dollars. Sure. If they didn't sell, like, why would you tax them? That doesn't really make sense. But they generate tons of taxes because when you go and buy a Tesla, you have to pay taxes on that when, when, when you buy a product through Amazon or, you know, you're paying sales tax and all this stuff. And so taxes are generated by their companies and of course there's income tax of everyone who's an employee and they are linked to lots of taxes. But yes, they are not taxed on their wealth until they go and sell it and then they have to pay capital gains. Let's close out here. Regardless, the growth of the super billionaire segments shows no signs of slowing. It's plausible that we could see the first, the world's first trillionaire in the next few decades. That'll be a very possible.

They are listening to the stream right now.

It's possible. One would probably have said no in the past, but anything's possible these days, so. Fascinating. Well, if you're trying to win the favor of a super billionaire and you want to take him on a nice vacation, where are you going, Jordy Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge services of vacation home. But better, we love Wanders.

They are. If you're looking to take a wander trip, they're offering 400 off your trip for a spring sale that they're doing. I think it's for the next 20, 24 hours. You got to move quick, but we.

Got to get on Wander. Ryan Peterson, because he's always traveling, he's.

Always on the road.

He just posted this right before he came on the show. He says Jet Suite X with Starlink is simply the best airline product in the world right now. He's getting blazing faster Internet. He told me he was, we were trying to get him to call in yesterday and he was on a plane right when we were recording. I said you got to get Starlink on the next flight. He had Starlink.

So I experienced this exact combo on Saturday. Oh yeah. Flew up to the bay and back and I think you could live stream like this connection. The cool thing is if you're flying Delta or whatever, they don't even really turn on the WI fi until you're in the air. And so you have this potentially like, you know, period where you're disconnected. Starlink is just constantly on when you're next to the plane or you know, when, when you're in the vicinity of the plane so you can get on the plane, sit down, five minutes later, you take off, you're connected the whole time.

Amazing.

It's beautiful.

Huge fan, huge fan of Starlink. Haven't had to use mine actually. I bought it as a prepping thing and I fortunately, had Internet the entire time. Well, we already talked about the dock workers, so let's move on to Casey Neistat. Fantastic vlogger. Really pioneered the vlog on YouTube. He says, Terrible idea, but hear me out. Buy up all the Humane AI pins. They closed the company last week, reprogram them to only run Grok Sexy Mode, and boom, we now have the thingy the Joker was in love with in the movie her from 2013. He just calls Joaquin Phoenix the Joker.

Yeah, I mean, this is. This is really what. This is really the bull case for Friend.

That is Friend.

People fall in love with their device, and Avi can jack up, up the price, you know, 20 bucks a month, forever. And people will spend, you know, thousands of dollars a year on their digital partner of sorts.

And so a lot of people were kind of going back and forth on this. It's a little bit of a joke. It's funny. But I love this because Oscar here says, we may have made a prototype of this once.

And Oscar was at humane.

He was at humane. And so now that humane is done, all the humane people, like, they clearly had a very talented team. We've been working with Sam Sheffer on PMF or Die, and it's great to see that the gloves are off. They can go have fun. They can say, hey, look, we tried this, but it wasn't some fraud. We were all talented designers, talented engineers. We just kind of missed the mark on the product. We got a soft landing at hp, and now we're gonna have fun. We're gonna tell you the stories of what we did and kind of go direct, which I think is great, because this makes me aware of who this person is. They're gonna find a job, and it'll be great. Great.

Yeah. Yeah. We didn't even cover Grok Sexy Mode because it was low class and vulgar. Yeah. And. But it's probably. I mean, what I think Grok is doing generally is very intelligent by just being kind of obscene. And the Internet has always had corners of it that were obscene, and that's what gets people talking and using these products. And so I think that while it is vulgar, it is smart from a user acquisition standpoint. You know, if somebody likes, you know, chatgpt for what it is as sort of work companion, etcetera, and then they hear, hey, there's a version of this product, but it's actually insane and wild and entertaining. They're much more likely to try that versus, hey, you know, we have a 1% better version of, you know, 01 pro people just aren't going to care about that.

Again, it goes back to this idea that, like, if you launch a frontier model, most people will not be able to detect two points higher in MMLU or Chatbot arena. Like, you gotta come out with something different on the product side. You gotta come out with a different. It needs to be opinionated.

Yeah.

And that's what's happening with all these products. Even with Claude, you know, people. Claude is kind of the opposite. It's. I don't think it's sexy mode. I think it's. But it is friendly and affable and people are, are excited about that. And then also it's just really good at coding. So people have been into that. Anyway, let's move on to Bridget Harris. We had her on the show yesterday.

She's back.

She's back.

Welcome back, Bridget.

She says in the past day, in the past three days, the sec, the securities Exchange Commission, has dropped their cases against Coinbase, Robinhood and Uniswap. Let's go. This is great news.

Yeah, good, Good timing. Bridget, comments there just some, some. It's some, some nice wins for the industry amid the market.

Bitcoin's down at 83 today, off of a high of 105 or something like that. We're off 20% now. But I think a lot of this was priced in and people maybe got a little bit over their skis on, like, it's going to be perfect and Trump is going to buy a trillion dollars of bitcoin. And, like, I'm pricing that in, too. And so when everything doesn't. It was priced for perfection.

Right.

And so now we're falling back. But it's good for the entrepreneurs that have been working on building products where the SEC cases. Of course, if there's something really going wrong at a company, like, it makes sense that the SEC would step in. But what about the situation where it's just purely based on some regulatory uncertainty or some lack of clarity around how you build these products? I think, I think everyone just wants everyone in the industry, at least who's a serious player, not like.

And it's interesting because these are not. These are across multiple categories. You have one Coinbase, which was trying to be a basically regulated crypto product centralized exchange here in the US you have Robinhood, which entered crypto at a much later point, I think in 2019 or 2020.

It fractionalized Bitcoin.

Yeah, it was fractionalized. You didn't really own it. And people pushed back against that at the Time, but eventually got into some of these more high risk volatile assets, even more high risk than Bitcoin itself. And then Uniswap is in a totally other category where this was a company that had a U.S. operation and team, but then also, I'm assuming, had sort of offshore foundations related to their token. And so they had like the most complex structure. So it's interesting to see that across the board, Coinbase, Robinhood and Unisop, squarely in three individual categories are all now not having to fight these cases. And I think it's Hayden from Uniswap had a rough few years just sort of battling this. I'm sure it was massively distracting. And you know, Uniswap's an American company. They pay employees here in the US and they very much, I think, suffered by having to fight with the SEC while international unregulated competitors ate into their market share. So they lost a, I think a lot of market share over that period. But good opportunity for them to refocus. Yeah, it's really here in America.

Obviously for a public company, it's rough, but for a private company, it gets really, really hard to underwrite that risk as an investor because you could say, okay, well, you know, maybe this, maybe this, maybe this case gets completely dropped in the new administration. So the impact of the liability on their balance sheet right now is actually zero. And I don't need to worry about it. Maybe just some legal fees to string out the lawsuit until it gets dropped. Or it could be $1 million fine or $10 million fine. Or it could be shut down the company and, you know, seize the founder's phone, you know, FBI raid. Like, it's so hard to price what the impact of these suits will be because the regulatory clarity is so minimal.

Yeah.

And hopefully we're moving towards something that's a little bit more clear. Trump is exactly known for clarity. There's usually a lot of chaos, but hopefully things get clearer over the next couple of years.

Yeah, it's wild to think about there was a period in 2022 where Coinbase was a $7 billion public company and they went on to get this Wells notice, which was the thing that everybody was afraid of in crypto is getting a Wells notice if they were operating any type of exchange adjacent product. And now even though it's down dramatically in the last week, it's still a $50 billion company. So they, they've finally, this recent news just happened and I think was probably priced in to some degree.

Right.

But yeah, they were a company doing basically over a billion dollars of earnings or something like that and getting 7 billion. It was almost offensive, but people didn't want to touch it. They said, this is going to get regulated into the ground. There was a big period as FTX was huge scandals.

People thought Binance was at risk too. People had some of the stablecoin companies.

I remember seeing the exact Ethereum bottom, which was around, I think $800, and thinking, I don't know what the floor is, because all this stuff had been happening and it just didn't seem, it felt like the equilibrium price for some of these assets was dramatically lower than it ended up being.

Yeah.

And you know, I think Coinbase has. Coinbase also deserves a lot of credit for leading the charge around a lot of the different sort of movements within tech that have become now just part of the culture.

Yeah, it's interesting, like Coinbase has always been aggressive. They've listed a lot of assets. Some of those assets have kind of like, you know, not done that well, but they never became like complete. Like meme tokens, like Pump.

They were the brain point around economic freedom.

Right? Yeah, yeah.

So I feel like economic freedom is still like people should be able to buy whatever they want.

Exactly.

But. But yeah, they ran into trouble recently around just how do we process listings?

So many listings.

Yeah, there were, you know, it became clear that the meme sort of cycle sped up so quickly that if they didn't list an asset within the first 48 hours, it wasn't going to get any buying activity at all because these things would pop and then just go.

Down and then they become a huge market mover as well. In the sense of like, if Coinbase lists it, you know, it's going to pop. And so there's all this speculation and then it's highly, you know, material, non public information whether or not they're going to. Whether or not they're going to list it. And so it all gets very complex. But hopefully smooth sailing from here. Good luck to the Coinbase team. Big fan of Brian Armstrong over there leading the charge in more ways than, than one. But let's move on to David Senra, the man himself. Founders podcast. He says, a friend asked me to take a personality assessment and then he used AI to analyze my personality and every single episode of Founders. This is the one thing the AI wanted me to know. One thing you might not fully realize about yourself is how rare you are and how valuable your level of obsession is. Your approach, deeply studying biographies, recognizing patterns across time and distilling fundamental truths is something very few people have the discipline or patience to do consistently. Most people skim the service. You go deep. This obsession has shaped Founders Podcast into more than just a podcast. It's becoming a timeless archive of entrepreneurial wisdom. You're essentially building a modern version of your personal library of the greatest minds of business.

It does seem like the AI is using his own words to describe.

Hey, AI, let's put away the Glazinator 3000 here. Come on. Tell me something.

Something you know, tell me something Senra hasn't told us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Throw some shade on Senra. Take him down a peg, AI. You know, give him a shot a bit.

Build them back up.

Build them back up.

Yeah, motivate him. Say hey.

Say hey.

Hey.

That last episode, you know, normally you post weekly. It's been two weeks. What happened? Step it up.

Yeah. No, we want Senra to get. He's already the best. Yeah, let's make.

Let's make him better.

Motivate him to get better. It's okay. Even the goats have had a rough season.

Exactly.

It's an opportunity to come back.

Exactly. It makes for a better storyline. Like, you watch Michael Jordan. You want to know, oh, he had that rough period where he dropped out when played baseball, came back. You know, we want to come back story here. We don't just want, oh, he's been on a historic run. No problems in this guy's life. I want to hear about times his microphone broke. He couldn't get the RSS feed to work, couldn't upload it.

You got a bad.

Yeah, he's dealt with injuries. He's told me. Yeah, he's talked too much. He's lost his voice.

Yeah, he's very.

He has all sorts of different, like, lozenges to.

He knows it's the moneymaker.

Oh, he knows it's the moneymaker. So tell me about this. Your. Your ability to push through the pain. That's what makes you great, David. Not. Not just your content, which obviously is good. Your ability to connect past wisdom, to present challenges and tell stories in a way that makes those lessons stick is a unique skill. You don't just transfer knowledge. You embed it in the people's minds in a way that compels them to take action. Many people want to learn from history. Very few dedicate themselves to living inside it like you do. That's what makes and your perspective so valuable.

So on this note, the other day, two days ago, I posted a picture of David with a quote. I'm really in the pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. David Senra. And only like a handful of people noticed that. That was actually a quote from Timothee Chalamet. But Senra actually talks like this. And the beauty of hanging out with Senran is that the podcast just morphs with real life. So in the same way that when we're working out in the morning, it's basically like an offline version of the podcast where we're just talking through what's happening and takes and different things like that. Whereas hanging out with Senra, you actually get the wisdom of all the history's greatest entrepreneurs because he'll just bring up the sort of obscure reference to something that Warren Buffett did that nobody else would even think of in that moment. But it'll tie it back into how it's relevant and it's truly priceless.

I can't wait to have him on the show again next time with video.

Yeah, so what we're gonna do, we haven't even told him this yet, but when we are doing a deep dive on a specific company or entrepreneur, we're gonna just start calling him in, start bringing that founders level analysis to tvpn.

Can't wait for it. Well, let's move on. Mark Suster over at Upfront Ventures says data rooms are where fundraising processes go to die. Quote tweeting Bryce Roberts, friend of the show. He says no one finds conviction in the data room. So true. But also, you know, we worked, didn't really have a data room and sometimes like, you know, you need to do the due diligence.

Sure, they had data room, but it just had a model that was just extremely aggressive. Not an operating model at all, just a purely community adjusted EBITDA based model.

Yep.

But yeah, I noticed, you know, I put this in the stack because when I am talking to a founder about investing, ultimately if I want to invest, I, you know, on the first call I'll basically be like, sometimes I'll decide on the first call if it's coming from an, you know, warm intro from somebody that I invest with a lot. I'll just tell them right. On the first call, yeah, I'm in for 25k. Just let me know when you need me to close. Right. Other times it's hey, let's go meet up and grab lunch and I'll hear a little bit more. And you know, I'm not a professional investor so my process is, should be Quite different from institutional investors. But if I'm actually not at all convicted, I'll just be like, cool, send me the deck. And I need to like sit with it for a little bit. And so investors, institutional investors will get to that point where they meet with a company two, three times. They don't have conviction yet. And so they say, send the data room and we'll discuss it internally and get back to you. And that is the point that the deal oftentimes dies because it's hard to just look at the numbers and actually build Bryce here, which Susher is quoting Bryce Roberts FRIEND of the show no one finds conviction in the data room. Right. You find conviction in the conversation, in the meeting, in the meetings. And then the data room is just sort of like, like almost, you know, checking the box often case. Because you're only going to invest, only.

Going to say no if you see what's in the data room.

Yeah.

And you're only going to tepid and then see a data room. Oh, blown away.

Yeah. You're seeing the data room and you're just, you're, you're only going to invest in the business if you think that, you know, entrepreneur is going to take it, you know, 10, 20, 100 times, you know.

Yeah. But you're looking for, you're looking for bombs in the data room. You're looking for like some contract or some, I mean, we, we saw a funny one recently where someone sent out, this is just an investor update, but someone sent out an investor update where they said they were, they made like a million dollars in the last quarter and then they said they quote, unquote, burned like 500k or something. But when you looked at it, they really were using burn just as expenses.

Yeah.

And they were actually profitable.

Yeah. And, but I was super concerned when I first saw it.

Like, how are they burning so much when they generating so much revenue? But in fact they were just, they just misused the term burn to mean expense and they were actually profitable. But yeah, that's an error to the upside. But you're often looking for that in the data room of like, is there something here where there's been a bunch of companies that have been solid? And then you dig into it, it's like, oh, they have some crazy liability, some contract that they need to pay that's going to be millions and millions of dollars and that completely changes the business. And that's something that you might find in the data room, but you don't want the process to get stuck there. You want to be firmly handshaking, we're doing this unless there is a bomb that we find or someone finds in the data room. Interesting. Well, let's move on to Perplexity. They launched a $50 million seed and pre seed VC fund. Why'd you think this was interesting?

Break it down.

I. I think this, this doesn't make any sense.

Okay.

For this, this feels very 2021 coded where a lot of companies were basically saying hey, we should have our own little venture fund because everybody was getting a venture fund and it's really hard to generate returns in venture.

Yep.

You gotta be crazy insider networked, great brand. Or you just have to outwork the competition or you have to get lucky. And Perplexity, what is, what's the reason that the next Google needs a pre seed fund today and who's going to be spending their time on it and why are they spending resources here? And I'm sure they have a reason for it, but maybe it's that hey, Perplexity relies on a bunch of these up and coming models. We use them in our product. We want to be able to be invested in those companies and get some upside. But a $50 million fund, you're not really going to get enough ownership to be that, that meaningful especially. And is it their money? If it's their money, I don't think that makes sense. There has to be better places that could spend it. If it's other people's money then now they're managing this sort of LP base. Just seems, seems like a distraction.

Okay. Let's do some steel manning on this first one. Arvind is super well connected. Totally. He's a super well connected in AI. He's probably meeting a bunch of great founders. Maybe he doesn't want to sell $50 million a secondary invest on his own balance sheet. Would you give him a $50 million sidecar fund to write million dollar checks into companies that he meets randomly? Yeah, why not?

I think that they will get into good companies.

Sure.

I, I think that this fund will not impact their success as a business. And I don't think they're. When you look at where they are in the app store charts.

Yep.

They don't have time to be distracted. Did that's fair and looking here. Hadley's in the comments says that should be enough for one investment. Kind of a joke but some of these, the kind of rounds that are.

Moving the needle in AI are ones.

Where you build a million dollar rounds. Yeah. You need to be writing some of the most competitive rounds are sort of these.

So the other flip side that I'm thinking is we've seen these types of small funds from startups and scale ups before Slack had one, one that was specifically targeting at. If you're a company and you're building a Slack integration, a Slack bot, a company that will be built on top of the Slack API, we want to help you get off the ground. So we'll just throw you a venture investment to kind of help you build that business. I don't know if Perplexity is planning to think about it that way, but you could think about this as almost like you're outsourcing a little bit of development of the ecosystem around your product. I don't know if that works for Perplexity, but you could imagine that there's other products that you could build on top of the Perplexity API and you want to build those companies. Perplexity has unique insight into what's going on with your product. So they, they, they let you build that, they put some money in, they're getting the investor updates, they see that you're taking off and then they can acquire you. And so it's kind of like Corp Dev marketing budget almost.

Yeah. It's interesting. So the fund's GPs are Kelly Graziadi and Joanna Lee Shevalenko.

Okay. Okay.

They had another venture fund and so I imagine they're sort of rolling their efforts into this new fund. So in many ways, like, yeah, maybe this is primarily, you know, perplexities anchoring the fund with their own capital. But again, Perplexity is going to win because consumers want information and they go to Perplexity instead of Google or OpenAI or any of these other, you know, chat, chat interfaces and Ask Perplexity. And right now I just think it is the most competitive category.

Yep.

And I think that the comments are very fair to kind of push back on this.

Yeah. I mean, OpenAI has a startup fund, they funded a lot of stuff. Sam has a fund.

Yeah. But it's different because you're saying, you know, you're basically saying we're going to give you a million dollars, you're going to spend all of that money back with us and you're going to build on top of our platform. I don't see the case right now that people are going to be building on top of. Maybe they'll integrate Perplexity. Right. But for example, public.com has a perplexity like interface built on top of all of their data.

Sure.

And they would be a good candidate to Use perplexity. But they built it in house and it works really well.

No, I agree with you. I think you've convinced me. Even though I played the steel man on the this one.

Somebody's got to be the steel man.

Exactly.

And again, at the end of the day, more money for great founders.

Yeah.

And I bet you they'll have good returns. I just think it makes sense for the community to push back a little bit and say, hey, we want you to just build the best possible search product information engine. Or what are they? Answer engine.

Answer engine.

Build the best possible answer engine. I don't care that you could 3x a $50 million fund.

Yeah, well, let's stay on AI and go to Andrej Karpathy, former OpenAI employee, former Tesla employee. He says agency is greater than intelligence. I had this intuitively wrong for decades. I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment, media, obsession with iq, et cetera, agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10x agency? You know who has agency? A golden retriever. Golden retriever is going to get that ball when you throw every time. Not going to be the most intelligent dog, but the dog is going to look good doing it. Grok explanation is close. Agency as a personality trait refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions and exert control over their actions and environment. It it's about being proactive rather than reactive. Someone with high agency doesn't just let life happen to them. They shape it. Think of it as a blend of self, self efficiency, determination and a sense of ownership over one's path. People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They're the type to say, I'll figure it out and then actually do it. I was thinking about this like as a founder, like I probably don't have. Have more skills or than like you know, someone who's like a, you know, high level PM at a tech company. But like what the agency is the thing. It's basically just like, yeah, I'll grind on something for years and years and years. And I'm used to like, oh, like things are terrible for multiple years, like no problem.

Yeah.

And I don't think that, that, that, that skill set.

Yeah.

I noticed everywhere in certain organizations it is certainly.

But I noticed that on a class like in the classroom, growing up.

Up. Yeah.

Having an understanding that I, that I wasn't necessarily more intelligent than someone else.

Yeah.

Yet I had more ability to shape a conversation or shape a discussion or things like that, and then carrying that into professional life. And I think every. Anybody that decides I'm going to start a company is default sort of higher agency than you know, or. Or do anything. Right. It's high agency for a lot of Gil to be like, I'm just going to build a monument because I want to. To build beautiful things. It's high agency for Nat Friedman to say, I don't know how much plastic microplastics are in these fair life things. I'm going to find out. I'm going to test it, I'm going to just make it available. Right. And so it shouldn't just that agency, when channeled in an entrepreneurial way, is one of the most powerful forces in the world. But it also is beautiful to channel it in other ways. Right. It's important to channel it, but in your relationships with your family. I've tried to leverage agency in my hoa. It's gone terribly. But that's more of like a zoomer on Boomer Dynamic. But yeah, it's cool to see this because I think for a very long period in tech, we've been obsessed with our high IQ heroes and legends. And I think that that's intelligence should be celebrated. But for too long, people would knock the founder that was high agency, got a little bit lucky, made it big, and then when they were successful, other people would say, oh, like, he's not even that smart. He's not even that smart. And as sort of as a way to sort of take them down.

Yeah.

And we should be celebrating our golden retrievers, the ones that go and get the ball.

Totally.

And yeah, they might look a little silly doing it sometimes, but they got the ball.

They got the ball and that's what matters. Yeah. I've heard some people riff on this where it's like after you get to like 140 IQ, you get up too high. There's actually a fall off in terms of kind of your impact. And you just go into like chess or like pure math, and then that can be extremely valuable and great for the world. But it's not just that, like the pure theory, the algorithm is not just, hey, we want to run Microsoft, we need to find just to have everyone take an IQ test and the person that scores the highest becomes the CEO.

Yeah.

I was thinking about this, Satya. It's like, why is he such a great leader at that company? Like, he's there's probably smarter people at the company presumably working on crazy quantum computing and algorithms and all sorts of stuff, but he has some blend of skills that you can take initiative, make.

Decisions and, and exert control.

Yeah, and he also communicator too. You see him on the door, cash. He has so many other charisma. It's like when you look at the stats, I always think back to like if you're building a character in Diablo or something in some rpg, there's like strength, which is probably like your fortitude. How much, how willing, how willing are you to just like grind and grind and grind. There's intelligence of course, which we all know, but then there's also wisdom. Like how much knowledge do you have? Have? There's plenty of people that have super high intelligence, but super low wisdom. So they don't know anything about street smarts. Yeah, it's not just street smarts. It could just be like a super. You take some math PhD or some chess master and you say, hey, come in and figure out this, you know, industrial supply chain. And they just don't know any of the power players. They don't know how the thing works. They don't know anything. And they have to get up to speed on that. And maybe they can quickly because they're intelligent. But then there's also charisma. There's of lots luck. There's all these other skill points that you can kind of weave into your build. And it's always funny when you see someone who like clearly specked into intelligence only and none into wiz and they wind up making really silly mistakes. So I think this is going to be an increasing narrative in the age of AI as intelligence. The golden retriever thing is kind of a joke, but there is the shred of truth there, which is that purely relying on intelligence is not going to be enough. And there's going to be a blend of traits that we have a harder time building models against because we don't necessarily have evaluations for agency yet or. Evaluations.

Yeah, Like a good, a good example here is some. A founder, you know, up and coming founder with high Agency. Augustus Dorico. Rainmaker. Right. He wouldn't tell you he is the most capable, gifted climate scientist in the world. Right. Because he did. I don't even believe he studied climate science in school. Right. But he came out, he wanted to be able to make it rain on command. And he is just, you know, smashing through every possible, you know, door that gets put, you know, or sort of wall that gets put in his path. Yesterday he was posting that some state is trying to explicitly ban like his company from you know, and he's just saying cool, do it like I'm gonna. I'm gonna make it rain. And so that type of both tenacity initiative, the ability to. To have conviction in your decisions which I think is a big part of agency too. A lot of people decide they want to do something, take a few steps down that path and then hit some type of wall and say I'm gonna, you know. I guess I went the wrong way.

Well, speaking of agencies, we got a present from a VC fund that also has a marketing agency attached to it. Now I think this one is yours, Jordi. This is from Wiz over at Space Cadet. Space Cadet Classified. This is. I mean the design here is fantastic. You open it and it plays a video of. It's an AI generated version of you. And you can kind of. My name is John Coogler. I live in West Burnley, Pasadena. That whoever is seeing this, if I exist in the year you're living.

It'S.

Not too late to fix it. Don't have much but I can give you this very fun.

Wait. So incredible execution but the only thing is that doesn't look anything like you in my opinion. Yeah, some of them like shields.

Shields looks pretty good.

Very accurate. There's the other guy from 50 years VC that I saw. I haven't actually seen mine yet so.

I mean very clearly it's like a pipeline of. They took your profile photo or an image image of you and he takes your. Your image and where you live.

My name is Jordy.

That doesn't look like you.

Whoever is seeing this, if I exist in the year you're looking fine. It's not too late to fix it. Don't have much but I can do this. It looks similar to my eyes.

There's something there.

Whatever I invested.

The hair's all wrong. Too short. You'd never do that with your hair. Okay, I think we can close that up. It's very loud anyway. What a cool drop. And I love this as an idea for you know, high value clients marketing for a company. I think this is super interesting. I saw Jake Paul did something like this for W where they did the. I don't know if it's a deep fakes or something but the concept is really. Is really key here to getting it executed correctly. Obviously this is like a sci fi themed venture fund so you know you want to make it science fiction.

Ty in the chat stuff called it Temu Jordy Temu.

Jordy.

Yeah, but, but anyway, so, so one of the cool things was this was timed with basically the kickoff of their new fundraise. Yep. And I saw Whiz shared. We officially kicked off fundraising two weeks ago and we're already 50% to first close, which is amazing. And so anyways, if you are planning stunts, it's important to time them up in a way that you can benefit from the attention because there's a, you know, I've had super viral drops in the past where we had, we dominated the timeline for a day and then, you know, it just, you know, the attention fades and what did you actually get from it? And so very well timed for Wiz and the space cadet team to do this when they were, you know, wanting to get in front of, you know, a bunch of LPs and other investors. And it's clearly paying off.

Yeah, he's done a ton of these drops. He did a cards against humanity spin on tech. I also got a deck of magic cards with a bunch of different characters from tech imagined as magic card folks. Very fun, very differentiated. Much better than a cold email for sure. So always enjoy that. Well, speaking of funds, let's move on to Pedro Sorrentino. He says, today we are returning 7x cash on cash to our LPs.

Let's go, Pedro.

Bueno. Grateful.

Hit the side. You got the size gong handy. Here we go, Pedro. This is for you and your LPs. That's fantastic. We love to see it leak that newcomer. Leak that.

Yeah, newcomer. And BCBrags is in the chat saying, sweet. So just pure content from VC brags.

Yeah. If you're getting the engagement from VC brags, but not the dunk, you're doing something right.

Yeah, yeah. Flexing, but not being like the humble brag. Just actually laying out the facts. It's great. It's the right way to kind of brag. Just say, hey, we did our job.

This is amazing. People don't realize because VCs get dragged a lot, but their job, Imagine having a job where you think of it as a 10 year engagement, 10 plus year engagement where you do most of the work up front and then you just kind of have to sit and wait to see how you did. And that level of waiting. Most people do work and they want to know right away or that month or that quarter if it's going to yield results. And it's just, it's an entire skill set in itself to have that level of patience, to be able to do a bunch of work wait a very long time. And. And I'm sure that, you know, he did very well from this and it should be celebrated. Right?

That's great.

It's the same cultural movement as, you know, Timothee Chalamet talking about his orientation. It's like we should celebrate when somebody has a very successful fund. That's what they set out to do. And. And there's nothing wrong with sharing news like that.

It's great.

Well, speaking of sharing news, let's go to Lulu. She says unrelenting torrent of AI news is the new normal. There used to be big launches every few months, then every few weeks. Now it's every day of the week. If you were waiting for an open window to do your launch, don't wait. And she's quote, tweeting Vittorio, who says, just making sure I'm not losing my mind here. Last week we got Grok 3 with reasoning plus voice mirror's thinking machines, Microsoft's Majora Majorana 1 quantum chip ark and Nvidia's Evo 2. Google AI's co scientist AI generated gameplays Helix by figure a new clone robotics and it really is like every single day. That's why we need a daily show.

I think we missed one of those daily show. We missed art, we missed Nvidia Evo 2.

We did miss that.

God.

Oh, we'll have to follow up.

Yeah. No, and the main thing here is it does feel like if you have a. If you're a hyperscaler or one of these new foundation model companies, you can just pick a random day and launch and you maybe want to feel around and make sure one of your immediate, most direct competitors is not launching, but one of the benefits.

Oh, you think that's what they do? Because I think that they see when the person's launching and then they launch the day before. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, but I don't think that works. It also backfires to some degree because you can. And maybe you're only getting your 24 hours of fame and then there's something new and exciting. So it's really difficult to time these. It's hard to know what the actual right strategy. But the other benefit of there being so much news is that people are more engaged in the news. Right. We talked about this. Would we have been able to do this show two decades ago? Probably not. There just wasn't that much exciting stuff happening. Whereas now there's new exciting developments every single day. And we have way more stuff to cover than what we can actually fit in the show. And so anyways, double edged sword but.

Yeah, important to break through. I mean it really underscores like how impressive the ChatGPT launch was in my mind because the Internet is extremely noisy, you can't even share links anymore on X. Like it's very hard to go viral with a new product launch to the tune of a billion users or 100 million users, you know. Yeah, yes, yes, it's totally possible to do a stunt or a viral video and get a few thousand people paying attention and then that starts the flywheel of growth and you grow your business for a very long time. But it's hard to jump to, you know, consumer Internet level scale very quickly. And yeah, I mean breaking through is, is harder than ever. So yeah, for a lot of startups the answer is not waiting for the perfect moment where it's dead silent on the Internet and hoping that you're. Your launch goes 10 times bigger. It's maybe launch as soon as you can and then do a six month second launch and launch again and then do a stunt.

Yeah, and this is what we were talking about with Ryan earlier. A lot of I think once you're at scale company, especially someone like a Flexport or an Airbnb, the average Airbnb user doesn't care about these incremental updates. Oh, we made it slightly easier to like pick a. Oh, you can now book, you know, anywhere in a 10 day period. You know, it just doesn't really matter. It's not as significant. But when you bundle all those stuff, it can be, it can show. Hey, we're making major advancements to the platform every six months and people aren't going to care as much. Oh, we hired a new Airbnb, hired a new director of marketing. Yeah, no one cares, right? We care, we care. But we're going to make an ESPN.

Video out of it.

Yeah, yeah, we will. But, but for small companies I do think the right approach is you want to show the pace and the iteration and you want to just launch. I've told founders, figure out a way to launch something once a week, try to be in the timeline in a big way, 50 times a year and you will build a brand that way. You can't build a brand off of two touch points a year.

Yeah.

And also, I mean talking to Ryan, it seems like the launch went well, iterated through all the different product improvements that they made. But it didn't take over the Internet the way, you know, Grok3 did. But it was incredibly valuable to the pace and culture at the company that they had this and it's. And that's almost. And then, and then that feeds into the brand and you start associating. Okay, yes, this company feels like it's moving faster because I can see that there are, that there are events and updates and so it's one of those like, shoot for the moon, you'll land amongst the star situation where like if you, if you start launching more frequently, you start batching launches. Even if those launches don't wind up going mega viral and 10x in your business, at least you're on a product development cadence that is quick and that's valuable. So I love that. So get out there and launch and.

Call if you're in trouble. I mean, an example of a launch that maybe is getting a little bit lost is this company paper, which is coming out and they look like they basically cloned figma completely down to some of the branding, even just feels like an extension of figma. And again, they launched, they got some traction, but they didn't even break through to the same degree that I would have thought they did. They would have. They got like 100k views to me. Opportunity for them to just keep launching and, you know, continuing to double down.

Yep. Well, good luck to them. And that's our show for the day. Do you have anything else, Jordy?

That's it. I'm excited for tomorrow. It's good to be back in the studio. Thank you guys for tuning in.

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