Google Doubles Down on Cloud AI, Hulk Hogan Passes Away at 71, Hill and Valley Forum Reactions | Casey Neistat, Chris Samra, Zak Kukoff, Vineeta Agarwala, Micky Malka, Alex Hawkinson

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Today is Thursday, July 24, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra.

Dome, the temple of technology, the fortune.

Fortress of finance, the capital of capital. It's Google earnings. Earnings season, baby. Big tech earnings are happening now. Google reported earnings last night. Ben Thompson has a breakdown. It's in the. It's in the Wall Street Journal. There's a bunch of good posts. We're going to break it down for you today. So Buco Capital bloke says many queries that moved to OpenAI will move back to Google AI overviews are good now. Less hallucinations. I've experienced that for some of those quick answers. Google still really fast 2 can move to AI mode for follow up. I haven't really played around with that yet. Have you bounced into AI mode very much? Of course you have. Of course in Google searches you've actually done that.

Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

And the main thing missing from Google search and the reason why ChatGPT has been so good is you can search something, get information and then chat with that information. And now you can do that before typical, you know, you're going down a search query, you click onto a page, you can't really chat with the page. Or you could maybe search for information on that page. So that was the key innovation.

Yeah. Type into Toolbar v Open new app. That is a huge advantage a lot of people have. You know, the primary app on their laptop is that's open is a Chrome browser for most people. And so, you know, command T and you're already searching. That is a huge advantage. And that's probably why ChatGPT is starting an open AI thinking about a browser because if they can replace that, they can get way more queries into ChatGPT. 4. Google's models are better. They search the web better. I don't know that their models are that much better. I haven't noticed that specifically. I know that they're better on like some benchmarks and they're certainly dominating on that Pareto frontier graph that SWIX puts out. It feels pretty compelling, comparable to me. But yeah, it makes sense that they would search the web better because they have, you know what, two, three.

Well and I think, I think they try to obfuscate it. But to my knowledge ChatGPT will leverage Google search.

It does in their own search. That's kind of happening. And then Cloudflare just gave them a massive structural advantage. That of course is because Cloudflare by default now. They used to have like the big Easy button for blocking all AI crawlers. Pretty previously if you had a website and you didn't want to be crawled, you could put that in your robots txt. So whatever your website was, robot TXT crawlers should go there and out of the goodness of their own heart they would respect that. But it was not legally binding. So you could still scrape a website legally if you were using it in a fair use context, transforming it like for search. Now Google famously did respect robots. They did for a long time. They still do. But now Cloudflare has disabled AI crawlers by default. The problem is, is that Google has two crawlers. They have googlebot which crawls for Google search, which you definitely want to be in for sure for the SEO who doesn't want to be findable in Google. And then they have Gemini crawler separate crawler that you can disable with Cloudflare. But the there is still AI sort of crawling happening with the googlebot because if the googlebot goes and and crawls all your web pages for search that your data will show up in the, in the AI overviews. Which feels like they're not maybe training the foundation model, but they're still summarizing it and they still might be, they still might be reducing traffic. Now for publishers and content creators that's harmful potentially, but for E commerce people, it's great.

So there was a post on R SEO5 5 days ago titled ChatGPT plus is secretly Google powered. My hidden page experiment proves it. So he created a dummy page index only in Google and got it to show up in ChatGPT+results within hours. The same query in Bing, DuckDuckGo et cetera still returned zero results.

Interesting.

And he did this by coining a nonsense word, put it on a page that was not linked anywhere, force Google to index it via the search console and then ask ChatGPT plus to define the term which he invented and it quoted the hidden page verbatim.

Interesting. So yeah, I wonder what that relationship's like. I mean OpenAI has, you know, I felt like they were always be there would always be some relationship with Microsoft because Bing has really solid search infrastructure. Like for a while people were saying like Bing has as robust of a crawling infrastructure as Google. Like they built the technology, they just weren't able to actually transform, you know, customer behavior to the degree that people would by default go to Bing. They ran this big campaign, Bing it and go and all this and it never really happened. But the tech was always good because they were, they knew what to build and they went and built it. They just couldn't change people's behaviors. So Interesting. I wonder if Google will be bringing out the sharp elbows anytime soon for open AI. Anyway, let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money save. Both easy corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com so Tane who's been on the show before, says Sundar Pichai on Google capex with this strong and growing demand for our cloud products and services, we are increasing our investment in capital expenditures in 2025 to approximately 85 billion and are excited by the opportunity ahead. We gotta hit the gong.

Hit the gong for Sundar. Well deserved. Sundar pitch AI.

He's pitching AI and he's pitching it. He's pitching it successfully. The Google earnings are staggering. So 14% jump in year over year revenue. Guess their ARR. Their annualized revenue.

Wow. I don't even. Oh, run.

They're run rating 400 billion almost.

Okay.

They did. They put up 96.4 billion in the second quarter and said CapEx, it's like it would be a lot if it was in millions. It's in billions. They said that capex would increase 13% to 85 billion and that compares with 52 billion last year. So that's a big, big increase even above expectations. Ben Thompson has a great analysis of this and is. It came away from my reading pretty excited about it. So Andrew Curran also has a post here. Says Sundar Pichai on the earnings call. The growth in usage has been incredible at IO. In May we announced that we processed 480 trillion monthly tokens across our surfaces. So that's both AI search features in Google search, AI mode, Gemini also API stuff. So overall tokens. We're going to have Mickey Malka on the show later. He's going to talk about token factories. The demand for tokens is immense and, and it's, and it's really just weaving its way into all these different nooks and crannies. It's certainly going mainstream. If you just ask a friend who's not, you know, in the horse race of who's going to win, just a, just a normal friend. Look at, let's look at your screen time. How much time are you Looking on chat GPT? You're going to see 10 minutes, you're going to wait 30 minutes a day.

This was buried not in the main post because Andrew follows up and said, he said there will be over 70 million user videos made with VO3, which is, which is impressive. Especially considering that they massively rate limit everyone. Yeah, you pay 500amonth and you get a measly couple videos a day.

It's hard, it's hard to actually somebody.

Made a great, made a great, very cool intro video using VO3.

So they doubled tokens since May and then. Yeah, totally.

The more interesting thing here is that safe super intelligence, Ilya's small $32 billion AI upstart is going to exclusively use Google TPUs.

That's exciting.

That seems like a bombshell maybe.

I mean you got to get big infrastructure somewhere and if everyone's optimizing against Nvidia, maybe there's like slack capacity in TPUs. I mean you' certainly, if you are trying to bet on a hyperscaler to hit your horse too and you see that Google's increasing their capex pretty significantly to 85 billion, you know that they are going to have like enough capacity to service you to the tune of one gigawatt or something like that if you want to do some massive training run. I do wonder how compute constrained SSI is in the sense like how much is Ilya feeling the scaling wall? Because for a long time it was scale is all you need. Just go bigger, bigger, bigger. And that's certainly the playbook that we've seen Sam Altman run with with the Stargate project and with the bringing in Masayoshi Sohn, bringing in Donald Trump and Crusoe and putting together this like team that can actually marshal half a quadrillion dollars. Is that right? It's 500. No, no, half a trillion. It's 500 billion they want to spend.

They haven't marshaled it yet.

It's a lot of money. Yeah, it's half a trillion. But, but, but ssi at least, at least like the rumors or the memes around it have been very much have been more focused on let's advance the research and maybe that next phase of research is not purely compute bound. It's not, it's not purely, hey, we're in this scaling race, we're going to build a bigger transformer. That's, that's honestly a little bit of what Elon's been doing is saying like we have the transformer architecture, we're going to scale this up a ton. And where we are great is building a massive cluster, the Colossus, 100,000 GPUs. We'll build it faster and we'll get it up to speed and we'll train it and in three months when most people would think it would take a year. We haven't been seeing that from SSI. We haven't seen. Oh, SSI has tents with GPUs in it. That's their, that's their edge. The edge with SSI as it's been pitched at least has always been foundational research progress. Just making, making progress on, on the underlying research. That might be an elegant solution that increases the efficiency and you get a better model with even less GPUs. But if they need a ton, Google will have them because they're investing more in capex more than ever before. While talking, while taking a question on agentic capabilities. It sounds like Sundar said this when we built our series of 2.5 Pro models, it's the direction where we are investing the most. That's the definitely exciting progress, including in the models we haven't fully released yet. Long answer on agentic progress. The good news here is that we are making robust progress. We think we are at the frontier here. He said that they, he said they have projects running internally, but now they are slow and expensive. They see the potential and are making progress on both. Gemini has a deep research product which I would call an agentic product. The question is, are they going to try and match what ChatGPT launched with agent mode sooner than later? Is there a security or a risk thing? Google's been a little bit more hesitant to just throw stuff out in the wild, but they're moving very quickly and I think they will probably be able to get something up. There's certainly Nothing on the CapEx or model capability side that would stop them. And Elon Musk just says, wow.

Well Elon is playing the enemy of my enemy as my friend.

I love these guys.

Yeah, love to see it.

It's not a, it's not a knockout drag out fight. So let's go over to. Oh, this is interesting. So Moffatt Nathanson, Michael Nathanson, who's been on stratecherie a few times in the Wall Street Journal was quoted, what people worry about is just the math around search. Isn't AI going to be negative to search? And they went out of the way many times on the call to say that's not what we're seeing. And so there's this big question on can, can Google avoid disruption by integrating the new disruptive technology, artificial intelligence, in a way that doesn't destroy their core business, which is search ads? They're putting up 80 billion in revenue a year on it.

My personal feelings that Chrome specifically is just so unbelievably. Sticky.

Yeah.

And as long as it takes the average person to, you know, hitting two buttons to get to the point where they can do any type of search, Google will continue to dominate. Because right now I can hit command T. Yep, search something quickly. Yes. I'm sure I could update the default like search to something else, but I haven't. I love the models.

There was a time when I bounced around. I remember having Opera installed and Firefox installed for a while and then for the last decade it's just been.

I used to love. There was a moment like probably five years ago that I was loving Safari. It was just so snappy and fast and simple.

I believe it's also built on Chromium, but. Yes, but it's not a Google product. So they, so they could in theory reroute. Reroute.

Now Safari is not built. Oh, it's not on Chromium.

Interesting.

Uses Apple's own WebKit.

Okay, I do, I do like. So it's weird. I use, I use Safari on my phone and Chrome on my desktop, which feels like it totally breaks the continuity. Right. But I've just, I've just kind of stuck with that and it's been fine. And I don't have like tabs that float in between. They're kind of separate, but it's fine. Really quickly. This show is brought to you by Restream. 1 stream, 30 destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. We love restream. You can sign up for free. So let's go over to Ben Thompson talking about Google earnings. He has said, I've repeatedly laid out the theoretical case for why AI is potentially disruptive to Google. And we asked him about this when he came on the show. My question was like, is there a world where, where revenue and profit from, from generative AI products is actually not as counter positioned against Google in the sense that like if they had launched the Gemini app first and become the ChatGPT, they'd probably be seeing a drop in search volume but then also seeing revenue spike from an even more popular Gemini. That's even better. And was it a question of them just like not being able to take that pill or was it more about like the risk and PR nervousness?

The thing that Ben said that stood out the most to me and I'll probably butcher it a little bit, but he effectively was saying like, it's really hard for companies to change who they are. When you look at Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. And useful that is so deeply aligned with AI. It's like what does ChatGPT do? Like organizes information and makes it useful. Right. Agents like ChatGPT agent is making that information useful. And so it just feels like again like generative AI is like deeply aligned with the core mission and so it's easy to see them continuing to win here.

Yeah, I think the problem is the like disruption comes when you create a product that is not as good, but the financials are structurally different. So the idea of like if AI disrupts like a law firm, you look at this product or even like I don't know what's the classic example of, of, of disruption that people go through? I don't know. But like this idea of like yeah.

The big thing was innovators dilemma.

Right in the, in the innovator's dilemma. The example is like a new product comes to market that does something 90% as well. And so it's like unacceptable to the people that are buying the current product. But then over time it gets better and better and better until it replaces the current product. And so there is a world where if they had just changed the Google search bar to just be like this is just an LLM now, people would have been really, really disappointed with that shift and they would have been like, I want to go back and ripping that band aid off to the tune of what, $300 billion a year in search revenue would be really painful. So they had to take a more, a more iterative like step wise improvements. But it seems like they're doing well. And Ben Thompson is kind of echoing this. He says once again, and however I have to come to Google's defense, all available metrics suggest that the company is doing quite well indeed. I would go further. You can make the case that the company's biggest mistake is not going harder. And so they flip the switch. On Cloud, their infrastructure spending is through the roof as we mentioned. So after the Q4 2024 earnings and their announcement they were spending 75 billion on capex, then Google Google Cloud's revenue numbers disappointed. But this was because they didn't have enough GPUs and they were actually constrained. So they, they missed on top line. Like they didn't bring in enough revenue, but their margins actually improved. And so what that means is that there was so much demand, they had pricing power and they could say no, we're not giving you any discounts because everyone wants these GPUs right now or the TPUs. They want our infrastructure. So we don't need to, we don't need to sell them at a discount. And so their margins were really good. And what that revealed was that they were, they were capacity constrained and that justifies the bigger capex spend that they're going into right now.

And Google is still the poly market. Which company has the best AI model? End of 2025. So December 31st there's been one and a half million in volume and Google is still sitting comfortably at 46% chance of, of being at the top of LM arena at the end of the year.

Yeah, this is such a crazy supply constraint metric. So the Google CFO Anat Ashkenazi said on the earnings call in Cloud, as I mentioned, the demand for our products is high as evidenced by the continued revenue growth and the cloud backlog. Guess how big their cloud backlog is. Just the demand for Google cloud products that they can't fulfill because they haven't built the data centers like but if they had more capacity they think that they could deliver this $106 billion that is so much money.

Great. Honestly, Honestly more businesses should try to put themselves in the position 160 billion of demand.

106 billion.

We try to not give business advice. So yeah, well it's just, it's just like every business is different, every founder is different. But in general if you can develop a demand, it's a good call for.

Like a YC company. Like if you go on stage, a demo day and you say like yeah, we have alloys and we have some.

Demand backlog, we have $106 of demand that we're unable. There was actually a YC company yesterday or two days ago that was getting a little bit roasted because they were like, they launched a product and they were like wow, today was insane. Our servers, our servers went down immediately and you could see the user chart and they had like 250 users. And so people are like wait, like your entire product went down on 250 users? That's ridiculous anyways. But happy, happy for their success.

Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free@figma.com and so this, so he keeps going into the capex.

Wait, before we do that. Figma make is generally available today. You can go to figma.com make and just start building various products. Tyler has been using Figma make to make a product that we'll be releasing very soon.

Very excited for that. We will announce that soon. So from the earnings call. Given the strong demand for our cloud products and services, we now expect to invest 85 billion in capex from 2025, up from a previous estimate of 75 billion. Just a 10 billion incremental investment. Absolutely massive. Our updated outlook reflects additional investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers and an acceleration of the pace of data center construction, primarily to. To meet cloud customer demand. The challenge, Pichai cautioned in an answer to an analyst question, is that it takes a while for these investments to come on board. So of course the, the risk is like you overbuild, but there's certainly no evidence of that given the massive backlog. So the other interesting thing that Ben dips his toe into. So Ben Thompson, Mr. Techery famously does not get caught up in trade deals and non CEO employee shifts.

They're below his line.

They are below his line. They're below his line. But he had to chime in on the CFO change that happened at Google. So he says, I'm always hesitant to delve too much. I like that he's throwing in a delve. You know, it's not written by. But he's baiting. Yeah, he's baiting for sure.

He's like, how dare you accuse. Yeah, he's like, you can go back and look at how many times I've used.

I created Dell, I coined that word.

There's, there's a, there's a, there's a YC company called Dell as well. It's doing well.

So he says. But it's interesting that the Google that the earnings call was Ruth Peratt's Last1. As CFO Porat earned a lot of plaudits for getting Google spending under control in the late 2010s. But what seems clear in retrospect, that is that 52.5 billion that Google spent on CapEx in 2024 was too little. And so he's kind of like, you know, noodling on this idea that maybe the CFO was too cautious going into an AI boom.

Could lose your job over that called.

Maybe Ruth Perrott was calling top signals like us. It looks terrible. Fortunately, we don't lose our job.

There's nothing wrong with calling top signals.

There's something wrong under investing water if.

You'Re specifically calling the top.

Yes.

Trying to identify top signals is more of a meta game.

Yeah, yeah. So basically Google. It does seem like Google underinvested in capex in 2024 based on demand, wound up with that backlog missed on top Line, couldn't couldn't make enough money, couldn't generate enough revenue, had higher margins. That's great but. But didn't deliver on the cloud side on, on the actual scale. So Ashkenazi's. Ashkenazi's calls meanwhile have repeatedly reiterated that Google cloud is particularly supply constrained. They don't have enough servers and the company has now surprised investors twice in six months with the scale of its capex plans. Let's go says this in my opinion is incredibly bullish for Google. Go back to the disruption lens which we were kind of noodling on earlier. The exact avenue from which you would expect management resistance to a disruptive innovation to flow is from the CFO office. Like the CFO should be resistant to disruptive innovation. And when you look at the history of companies that got disrupted, the CFO is saying we have a good business, let's just keep printing cash. Like this new thing does not worry about it.

Let's not Nokia exactly. Are you guys seeing the numbers?

Yeah, but like for a lot of those companies that got disrupted, it's like they were printing cash high dividends for decades even after the disruption happened. The next the iPhone comes out and in order to actually do something to compete, they have to completely go into startup mode. They have to burn a ton of cash, cut their dividend stock, stop stockpiling cash, issue debt, do a ton, raise more equity maybe like they have to become a new product development company. And it would be very, very difficult.

Usually but BlackBerry's annual revenue in 2005 1.9 billion Blackberries they completely annual revenue in 2024, 580 million.

It's a cyber security company now. They bought a couple cybersecurity assets with while they were valuable, while they were like, you know, while the stock was up and then eventually they wound down the phone business and just kind of became a cybersecurity company because obviously they had a ton of enterprise contracts because BlackBerrys were sold into like large enterprises as, you know, work phones. Very few people had blackberries as like everyday phones, but so they had all those. They had like solid sales team, solid connections, bought a new asset and we're able to continue the business even though obviously it's not the company that it once was. So Ben Thompson goes on to say there's a, there does seem to be a major shift in mindset in terms of the company's willingness to lean into AI, particularly for a segment Google cloud that even in the best case scenarios is significantly lower margin than the company's core business. What's interesting about that margin point however is that it too is another reason to be bullish on Google's prospects. But Google is the only company we talked about the TPU thing. They're the only company with an at scale asic alternative to Nvidia's GPUs which should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end, to the extent that.

Cloud computers scale to a point where they're gonna be able to support ssi. Ssi, which is crazy, not just their own needs.

And then there's also a question.

The dynamic that's interesting is like OpenAI needs to massively scale infrastructure and as we covered earlier this week, commit to spending tens of billions of dollars with with Oracle and their revenue today doesn't support that. Obviously their growth trajectory is absolutely insane. But OpenAI being in a position where they are competing head on with Google for this very very critical consumer use, case search, knowledge retrieval and ultimately usefulness, it is a extremely tough position for OpenAI to be in.

Yeah, so the other hyperscalers are working on ASICs that are alternative to Nvidia GPUs but they all seem to be following the similar path trying to get line time at TSMC not fully at scale. Then there's also the question and I think a lot of people's mind is like is this the end of history? Is there something that's coming down the pipe that could disrupt the Nvidia GPU monopoly, the CUDA ecosystem or even the Google tpu? And Semi Analysis has a funny meme here, way down in the stack about the next generation of chips that were that have been pitched from startups like Etched and a few others. So semi analysis says although baking transformers into silicon may sound cool, it's mostly just a marketing slogan. 90% of transformers flops are just GEMMs and 256 by 256 or 128 by 128. Systolic arrays in TPU Trainium are already optimized for these. Even modern GP GPUs with tensor cores are optimized well for GEMMs. Even if you bake transformers into silicon aka just create a giant systolic array, most of your die area will still be taken up with SRAM cells. That's the memory. And you will still face the memory wall since your HBM memory bandwidth will be the same as GPGPUs, TPUs and Trainium. And so the meme is transformers are just 90% matmules. George Hots had a similar analysis or Take just saying that if you look at the actual energy use of GPUs right now, there isn't that much opportunity to squeeze more value out of them. They're pretty efficient and most of the, most of the energy that goes in goes into these very, very specific math calculations that are already pretty optimized. We did hear from someone, something about the. This is from Martin Shkreli that Jane street, or was it, Was it Jane Street? One of the high frequency trading firms figured out how to run one of those very, very basic matmul calculations on a GPU more efficiently and I guess kind of open sourced it or something or got out into the, into the research world. So it doesn't feel like at this moment I still think that there's a interesting bull case for the etch crew in some ways, in some niches or something, some specific models, but it doesn't seem like there's some new disruptive chip architecture that's going to come out and obviate the need for both Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs. And so Google's very well positioned, as Ben Thompson is writing. So he says this should give them their position that they have an at scale ASIC alternative to Nvidia GPUs should give them a meaningful cost advantage. To that end, to the extent that cloud compute becomes commoditized, is the extent to which Google actually has a margin advantage. Because if all of the clouds are commoditized but all of them are on Nvidia and then Google is taking the Nvidia margin basically for their tpu, they should be in a very good spot. This is, to be sure, a bit weird. Perat gained these plaudits, those plaudits, because there was so much waste in Google to cut, which was downstream of the company's amazing monopoly in margins and search, which hardly seems like the recipe for a structural cost advantage. But here we are.

Sundar is going to tell every employee we're cutting your daily massage allowance from three massages down to one. We're deeply sorry, but we need to get fit.

Gotta get fit and you gotta get on. Vanta automate compliance. Manage risk, Improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a compliance.

It was great talking with Christina yesterday. She's an absolute dog.

Boardroom general.

Boardroom general.

She put the KPIs in orbit.

She really has.

She really has. Did you see that she has reed shirt?

Yeah, she says Andrew said Christina often talks about stacking rice on the channel chessboard. And I didn't see this until after the show, but I was like, it seems like you guys are just chopping wood, like just out there, like that's what it is, putting in the work.

Just. Yeah, a couple percent here, couple percent here. Just very consistent growth, very consistent growth, very smooth growth curve into a monster of business. So congrats to everyone over at Vanta on the new round and we will go back to Google. So more broadly, the way in which Google seems to have flipped the switch in terms of going all in on AI, along with Meta's spending on AI talent, really does strongly suggest that AI in the end is a sustaining technology that favors the incumbents. Most of all, both see a line of sight to new revenue streams. And critically, both can fund AI from profits, not speculative investment or debt. And of course, both have distribution, including search. Sometimes the empire strikes back. I love that. So there were other takes from Search. You'll have to subscribe to Search Hickory to get the full analysis. You gotta go and subscribe to Search Hickory. If you're not subscribed, what are you doing? But the interesting takeaway from, from Search is that there it seems like Google's being a little squishy about, hey, we don't want to report certain KPIs anymore. So they used to report paid clicks. And now the Chief Business Officer, Philip Schindler is saying, and on your paid click question, look, to be very clear, I think we said this before, we manage the business to drive great outcomes for our users and attract our attractive ROI for our advertisers. We don't, we actually don't manage to pay clicks or CPC targets, which is fair and good. But it's funny because Ben Thompson's like, but I want that data. That would be helpful to me.

I mean, when a business has a metric that they tell you is important for a long time and then they suddenly tell you it's not important, don't worry, you got to.

But it does make sense. They're a huge business. They've moved on to bigger and like higher levels of abstraction.

Just look at the growth in tokens. Yeah, yeah, but don't worry about anything else.

What he says is that there are, there are product changes and policy changes that actually drive better monetization, but at the expense of paid clicks. And that's probably AI searches and stuff like that. You'll see in the 10Q paid clicks, we're up 4% year on year. But a number of factors affecting this, these metrics from quarter to quarter, such as advertiser spending, product changes, policy changes, user engagement. So it's really important when it comes to pay clicks and CPC to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions solely based on these metrics. Don't put me in the truth zone on this, he says. So Ben Thompson, this is exactly what you said. I don't even think you, you pre read this, but you basically have Ben Thompson working in your head.

Because this is what I said when Ben Thompson came on the show, I was like, I think your way of thinking has been so ingrained into my mind that I think that I have an original thought. And you've already thought it.

Okay, so this is what he says and it's literally I haven't read the article. The more that management tells me not to pay attention to paid click rates, the more I want to pay attention. Which is exactly what you just said. Regardless, once again, the fact that paid clips, paid click pay clicks were up 4% and search revenue was up 12% makes it clear that search growth is primarily being driven by higher prices. And so the actual number of clicks is up 4%, but revenue's up 12%. That means that they're monetizing each click better. But people are obviously going to read into, oh, paid clicks aren't growing that fast. Like the actual pie isn't growing that fast. They're just getting like, it's basically like, you know, once Instagram reels is popular, everyone's watching it, then you just got to put more ads in the feed. Right. And that's kind of, that seems like what they're doing and that's what's driving search revenue. Up 12%. AI overviews is another question. This is a funny one where basically the, the Chief Business Officer Philip Schindler, Google says, basically says that AI overviews are monetizing as well as other Google searches. And Ben Thompson says, given the fact that the vast majority of Google searches don't monetize at all because people just click on a link.

That's what I said. Oftentimes the if you're searching for information, you can have very low purchase intent. How many times a day do I search for a specific fact and never would have. You could show me the best ad in the world and I wouldn't click through because I'm just looking for a fact.

Yep. So if you're looking for something like, you know, Hulk Hogan's age, that's Not a, that's not a purchase intent. If that comes from an AI overview or it comes from a, you know how they used to have those like knowledge boxes or like it would pull from Wikipedia or if you click on Wikipedia. None of that is making Google any money. So it really doesn't matter the UI or the actual underlying technology to get you that answer. And then Gemini is on absolute tear. Really remarkable. How many monthly active users do you think the Gemini app has? These are maus, not daus on the.

Mobile app, web app, Gemini app combined.

Think this is probably across mobile, web and desktop, but I would assume mobile. 70 million, 450 million big right.

And it doubles like I guess I get, I mean they kind of get the, it's kind of a cheat code because everybody already has a Google account. So they're like signed in.

Yep.

But in terms, I don't know, they're monthly.

And what we know from semi analysis is that they're not taking share of queries that much. But 450 million downloads on an app and monthly active users is pretty, pretty high. And so if there's, if there's a world where Google can build a business around, if they can bring in ads faster and keep the Gemini app cheaper and offer better, better products and like you get deep research, you get agent, you get the $200 tier, the ad free. If OpenAI and ChatGPT has a $200 tier, that's ad free. And then Google's giving you the same product and the same experience, but with ads for free like that feels like an Android iOS battle going on. That feels like something that could actually be pretty sustainable and kind of drive this like little bit of a duopoly. I don't know, we'll have to see how it goes. But daily requests grew over 50% from Q1 to Q2. And I think everyone, everyone is pretty surprised by that. And I was also surprised when I went and pulled up the, the Gemini app when I went to go download it. The number of five star reviews is like hundreds of thousands. And I was like okay, this is very serious. And that reflects the actual number that they shared. 450 million monthly active users. So still a lot of work to be done. I was very frustrated when I went to go get VO3, I got the Gemini app and they were already having access.

Is Gemini frustrations default in Android yet?

I don't know. I imagine that it has to be pre installed in the next round of Android phones that go out. Why would you not want that pre installed and there. But I would be surprised if that's what's driving it because I mean how many Samsung Galaxies have they sold in the last quarter? Probably not 200 million, right? I doubt that that's what's driving the growth, but maybe that might be an interesting thing. How many of them are pre installs, preloads. But even then you have to open it to become a, to become an MAU. But yeah, maybe, maybe they're testing. Maybe people will churn and go back to OpenAI and ChatGPT.

Android users have had access to Google Assistant for a long time. That's getting phased out. It's just going to be Gemini Yep.

Well, let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started from free graphite.dev.

I don't know if people can hear, but anytime we do a an ad read, the entire team breaks out in applause in the studio.

So it's really let's hear for some advertisements. There we go. In other very, very sad news, Hulk Hogan has passed away at age 71. Cardiac arrest was what you said, right Jordy? I didn't actually that I looked a little bit more into some of the history. I wanted to know a little bit more about his his story. There's a whole bunch of different profiles. There was at one point going to be a biopic about him. In a recent interview with Variety, director Todd Phillips revealed that his long gestating Hulk Hogan biopic will not progress. Unfortunately it got canned. This was back in about a year ago today. I love what we were trying to do, but that's not going to come together for me. Chris Hemsworth had signed on to play Hogan in early 2019 with the Joker writer and director duo Todd Phillips and Scott Silver attached to lead the Charge Films producers you got Phillips, Hogan, Hemsworth, Bradley Cooper, Michael Sugar, Sugar, Sugar. I don't know. Stacked and Hogan's long, long Time palace and and New World Order stablemate Eric Bischoff. In a July 2020 interview with Total Film, Helmsworth described the training he'd have to undergo to transform into the 80s WWE icon. As you can imagine, the preparation for the role will be insanely physical. I will have to put on more size than I ever have before, even more than I put on for Thor. There is this accent as well as the physicality and the attitude. Hemsworth said the Hogan biopic would explore his rise to stardom in the early 1980s his WWF World Heavyweight Championship win over the Iron Sheik in 1980.

It's a good role. You know that Hemsworth has a personal fitness training app called Center.

I have heard of that. Is it good?

Like, I'm really gonna have to use my app a lot for this role.

Maybe we should start using his app. Get on the Hulk train, become Hulkamaniacs, as they call them.

Did you grow up watching wrestling at all?

I didn't, but I was aware of Hulk Hogan through the lore because it was so dull.

Even I feel like I would hear more about Hulk Hogan in the context of the Gawker.

Oh, yeah, we should go into that. I want to pull up this Hulk Hogan video. I'll send it to the team. There's some like, great, like, rants. Where is it? There's one where he's. Where he's talking trash about something. Wow. Everything's just like Rip. But he was. He was legendary at like, I don't know, what do they call in UFC where you like our pre show Pump up. Talking about the competition. I guess it's like a promo. Is that what it is?

That makes sense.

Yeah. This one. Seek and destroy. We got to watch this. I will put it in the tab so we can watch this and then, yeah, we should talk about the Gawker fallout a little bit. Let me put that in there. The best promos. Hulk Hogan, Seek and Destroy. Let's pull that up.

Hulk Hogan has recently been a founder. He has Real American beer.

Oh, yeah.

Which he did with the Budweiser family.

This is what we need to channel. We need to bring this energy to the show every day. Fully defending. But there are those right now that are questioning whether you can withstand the big man. Well, care about those people, man. I don't care about those people that aren't star craven Hulkamaniacs. I could care less what they think.

I'm fighting for life, brother.

I'm fighting for all those people that have remolded their lives, man.

Mono left or Hulkamania.

Get their priorities in order, man. Walk around with a lot of pride. As far as those people that are on Andre the Giant side, I wish they'd come on down too. I like to slap them around just for a warm up. But I've already gone through my transformation, man. I'm ready for Pontiac, Michigan. I'm not the Hulk anymore. I'm the Hulkster, man. Looking through my eyes, man. Oh, come on that mountain top. Back off, little man. I'm on that mountaintop and I'm waiting for you, Andre. And I'm guarding that mountain. And the Hulkster that's garden has got a 32 inch neck, a 64 inch chest, the largest arms in the world. And I'm geared to seek and destroy. Seek and destroy the cancer of Andre the Giant. Seek and destroy the weasel's empire. And what you gonna do Andre in Pontiac, Michigan when Hawkermania destroys you? He is indeed absolutely livid going against the man at one time he looked up to and respected Hulk Hogan to defend. That's the energy I want Sundar Pichai to bring to bring to Google. I got 85 billion of capex. I grew 15% top line and I'm coming for Sam Altman. They're coming for me. I'm coming for. I'm coming for. They're coming for me. I'm coming for them. I got 450 million MAUs on the Gemini app. The search overviews are going great. They're monetizing just as well as regular search results. Come here to Mountain View. Got your get down to Mountain View. And if you're riding with. If you're riding with the Andre the Giant like you got to be a star. Craven Hulkamaniac. I love it. Chris Hemsworth signed on to play Thor from Thor. Signed on to play Hogan in early 2019. Said he had to put on a lot of size. The biopic would have explored his rise to stardom in the early 1980s and then Hulkamania takeover that ruled the wrestling world well into the 1990s. Philip's take on Hulkamania was going to stay away from Hogan's recent controversies, instead focus solely on the early years. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are currently developing a film titled Killing Gawker that will explore Hogan's campaign against the media empire in the wake of an explosive home video.

Hogan was 6 foot 7, which is why pretty close. You'd be able to height mog him.

Pretty close to me. It is crazy.

Got you on next.

Got me on conference for sure. For sure. And I think I will be staying away from his supplement stack hopefully hoping. Hoping to make it longer.

Really sad though.

Yeah, very sad. What a. What a career and what a fantastic. The Hulk. The Hulk Hogan theme song. I am a real American. Such a good song. Such a great rallying crowd.

That's the name of his beer. Real American beer.

Yeah. Fight for the rights of every man. Such a good song.

Light, crisp, crushable.

So there is a. There is a reflective piece in the New Yorker about Hulk Hogan's gawker lawsuit that we can go through. But first let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the modern meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Go to Linear Apple homepage And you know if Hogan's selling beer you got to get on numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

Friend of mine is was business partners with with Hogan on that.

That's crazy. So we have Zach Kukoff joining at noon to break down the AI day yesterday in Washington D.C. the besties met up with the Hill and Valley crew. Honestly crushed it. We have a bunch of great posts that we can run through. First, let's go through a little bit of the Hulk Hogan loss Gawker lawsuit. This is from 2016, well before we actually saw the, the results from all this. But on Monday afternoon, a Florida jury added $25 million in punitive damages to the $115 million it had awarded Hulk Hogan. On Friday in his invasion of privacy case against Gawker Media, Hogan sued Gawker for posting portions of a sex tape it received from an anonymous sender. It's a shocking amount, not least because it's $40 million more than Hogan, whose real name is had demanded. Verdicts of this size can pose an existential risk to media, to a media company. That's what happened to Gawker. Gawker has reported that it earned $44 million in revenue in 2014. In January, Gawker's owner, Nick Denton announced that he had sold a portion of his company to investors in order to fund this case. Gawker will certainly appeal the verdict, as it should after it pays a bond of up to $50 million, arguing that the jury was unreasonable in finding that Hogan's right to privacy outweighed Gawker's right to publish the material which it believes was of public interest. Which is a very.

Yeah, it's a strange defense.

It is, it is. It is hard to, to argue he is a public figure, but this is a very personal thing.

Yeah, I mean they just posted that it existed and they had seen it.

That's true. And that's kind of what's happening with the Wall Street Journal. They're not posting everything all the time with the regards to the Trump Epstein stuff, but they're referencing that it exists, that they verified it. And that seems to be a safer path for media companies to kind of report that they've confirmed that something exists without actually putting everything out necessarily. So the publication of the videotape of consensual sex between adults is not the most appealing place to plant a First Amendment flag, but is worth considering the possible effects on publishers if a judgment of this magnitude is allowed to stand. And so the fallout from Gawker was certainly celebrated in tech because they also had Valley Wag, which was very annoying to a lot of people in tech because it was basically like TMZ for tech. I don't know if you were aware of Valleywag back before my time, before your time, but it did have like a chilling effect. I remember being at south by Southwest and a friend of mine who's a venture backed founder at the time was, was really into doing handstand push ups and was doing handstand push ups at a, at like a party that was being thrown that where people just kind of hanging out and he was just doing some handstand push ups.

As one does.

As one does. And, and there was a Value Ag reporter there and wrote about it as a characterization of like how bro y the situation was, but didn't include his name. And he was like, I dodged a bullet because like it could have been.

Forever outed as I mean in many ways, in many ways it could have built his aura.

I agree. If he was named in the modern era it would have been incredibly bullish, but at that time it did feel like something that could destroy you. It was, it was a very tense time. Very, very tense time.

Roy Lee would not have done well during that era. Yeah, maybe he would have, maybe he would have changed the meta though, because he's making, he's making shirtless posts on the timeline. Yeah, bring them into the modern era.

Yeah, it is, it is. It is an interesting, interesting thing. Like Value Ag would probably be writing about Clulee a lot and framing it in a different way. There's already probably folks out there who are framing Cluly as particularly bad on the other side of the aisle or in the anti tech category, but it just doesn't seem to have the same effect. It certainly doesn't stop venture funding or customers or any of that. It seems to be that we're in a different era where people in tech were. Were clearly was controversial in tech. People were definitely divided.

I think it would be good if there was some law that required if a media company wanted to write about someone's physique, they should have to post Physique.

Oh, their own physique. Yes.

So that should Just be in the footnotes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's important context.

Anyway, another. In other news, Fin AI, the number one customer, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one in ranking on G2. Go check out Fin AI.

And own is apparently helping launch a media company. And so if you want to go work for OWN or this new company, which I believe is called Cool Tech News, go check it out.

They're looking for a producer, the founder of Nikola, the electric vehicle company that went bankrupt and landed its CEO founder in prison. For a brief time he was in jail for life. Then he got pardoned. Just did a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson and Nate Anderson from Hindenburg Hindenburg Research had a lengthy rebuttal to this that I thought was pretty interesting. So Nate says, I am Nate Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg Research Reference.

Okay. And just for context, if people haven't seen this yet, Tucker is basically positioning the takedown of Nicola as a woke witch hunt. Is that, is that, is that an accurate summary?

It's, it's kind of unclear. I think he's, I think he's more just really, really open and digging into like, hey, Trevor Milton, like, tell your side of the story. And it seemed like, it seemed like Tucker didn't come with really strong opinions, at least for the part that I saw. It didn't seem like he was taking a super strong stance on like, whether hydrogen is a good strategy or what happened. I haven't dug in. Dug in. But a lot of it, a lot of those claims, I think don't come from Tucker. I think they come from, from Trevor Milton. And so the real debate, it seems like, is between Nate Anderson and Trevor Milton side of the story. I wouldn't say that in this podcast interview. Tucker has a particular, like, thesis that he's advancing. He's more just asking Trevor Milton to tell his side of the story.

And people are not.

People are not happy with this for sure.

Saying, pitiful. Someone else is saying, Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster and pathological liar. Another guy's saying, terrible take scam artist platformed. Anyways, another person just says, seriously, question mark. And even TikTok investors is memeing it just being like, wow, this is a.

Lot of people got burned. Right.

The funny thing too is he was, Wasn't he initially prosecuted during the Trump admin?

Yes. So Nate goes into this. He says, I'm the founder of Hindenburg Research, referenced repeatedly in this bizarre and fantastical interview. During my career I helped expose numerous financial scams, including over a decade dozen Ponzi schemes and numerous instances of public companies lying to and stealing from investors. Of course he's talking about Hindenburg Research his firm. I am immensely proud of the career of that career, including our work on Nikola Motors referenced in this interview. Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster held criminally responsible for the incineration of hundreds of millions of dollars in retail investors hard earned money and should and as should be unsurprising, Milton in this interview seems just to fabricate key events and information out of thin air, unfortunately with zero critical questioning or pushback from Tucker. For starters, contrary to Trevor Milton's implications that his prosecution was some sort of Biden administration conspiracy, conveniently, neither Milton nor Tucker share that the investigation into Milton was started and disclosed in September 2020 under the first Trump admin, as well as before the 2020 election. There were numerous inaccuracies that throughout this interview. The claim that Hindenburg paid employees for inside information is patently absurd. The key whistleblower discussed in the interview was only briefly a contractor for Milton. He was so horrified by what he viewed as Milton's repeated false claims that he did a tremendous amount of research on his own, unraveling numerous additional suspected lies that Milton peddled to the investing public. Further, Hindenburg didn't coordinate anything with media or the doj. Such entities ran their own investigations for the for their own purposes, unconnected to us. There was ample evidence that Milton misstated numerous aspects of his business and as, as the company later itself acknowledged. What's interesting is like I feel like when we talked about the Marques Brownlee Escobar phone, like MKBHD kind of broke that story and did some investigative journalism, wound up getting his hands on the phone. And then the DOJ or the FBI came and said hey, we want that phone as evidence. We'll find give it back to you maybe in five years. And so it's interesting that that it seems like the doj, according to Nate Anderson, did not coordinate with Hindenburg. Maybe that's just because Hindenburg was doing public research or just doing like informational research and didn't have any like hard physical evidence. But I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the DOJ reached out to Hindenburg, but it seems like they didn't coordinate. According to Nate Anderson, it would take hours to write out. All the other observities have truth innuendos and false statements in this interview. But in the interest of correcting some of the record here's a handful. Milton waxes on about his pardon, but no one mentions that Milton's lawyer was Brad Bondi, the brother of AG Pam Bondi. Nor did anyone mention that Milton donated $900,000 to Trump in October 2024, less than a month before the recent election. Strategically timed well after his criminal conviction and immediately prior to the presidential election. What's interesting is like, like, you know, you take a company to bankruptcy, you wind up in prison for life. You would think that you get zeroed pretty hard to the degree that you don't have $900,000 sitting around to make a political donation. So I'm very curious about how the money flowed around post bankruptcy, post, post, post indictment and conviction, because I think that will change the calculus of people that are thinking about doing crazy stuff in the public markets. Because if you're like, okay, yes, I might get thrown in jail, but then I can squirrel away some money, donate it, get pardoned, and then have half left over to hang out, like, that's a pretty good deal. So certainly not the functioning of the system that we want. Very, very odd.

Yeah. The other thing that Nate calls out, he says, waxing poetic about hydrogen in the interview, echoes Nikola's lies to retail investors that it successfully produced hydrogen at a cost 81% lower than anyone on earth, a feat that would have upended the entire energy industry had it been remotely true. Nikola's head of hydrogen production, presumably in charge of this world. World changing scientific breakthrough, turned out to be Milton's own brother, who had no scientific background and previously did odd construction jobs in Hawaii.

So, see, I want to push back on that because last night I was like 7,000 prompts deep and I feel like I cracked the code to finding the, the energy market chat.

GPT had you pretty convinced that it was. Yeah, you could produce hydrogen.

It was like, John, you're. You're onto something.

You're onto something here.

Go public. Go public.

It does not matter that you were just a mere podcaster.

You cracked it. You cracked the code.

Yeah, I mean, you know, one thing you can kind of Tucker could have pushed on was you rolled a truck downhill and you. And you marketed it as though it was a functioning vehicle.

Yep. That was a big one.

And doesn't seem to be something that he pushed back on.

Yeah, big questions about short selling. And he makes the case that short selling is good because it creates a financial incentive to expose companies that lie and engage in fraud. I think I agree with that. I think, I think I'm pro short sellers. Although of course, they can be very frustrating if you're on the other side and you're being shorted. Fortunately, TVPN is a privately held company, so we don't have to deal with short attacks, at least not now.

But who knows? Well, with that, let's bring in Washington correspondent Zach Kukoff. Zach, how you doing? What was your reaction? What was your reaction to Trevor Milton going on Tuck Tuck Radio?

I just think terrible choice of network to go on first. The clear answer was tvpn.

I don't know if I'm ready. I don't know. That's a tough one.

We'd come with a fact sheet of just fact by fact and say, did you roll the truck down the hill?

You're telling me you wouldn't have coddled him the way that soccer did?

I don't know.

I don't know. When we had Sohan Perihk on people, people were saying we went too easy. But clearly we got him to just admit to having multiple jobs.

Was, are you working multiple jobs? That was my first question. He just said yes. And then, you know, from there it's like, okay, he's admitted it. Like, let's talk about redemption. Is there a possibility?

What else did people want him to admit? Like five other made up things he hadn't.

I think, I think the critique that was fair was that he's clearly a pathological liar and, yeah, fairly charismatic. And we probably just should have said, hey, seems like you're still lying. But at the same time, we got to check in with the company he just joined. He said he's going. What did he say? He said he's going exclusive, exclusive, exclusive. He said, I'm going exclusive, going exclusive.

Just one job now. So I don't know. I still want to believe in redemption. Not many people believe in redemption. That's where it was interesting. But yeah, I mean, like, I suppose that if I was interviewing Trevor Milton, the first question would be, did you roll the truck down the hill and did you, did you actually do that? Because that is the fraud claim mainly. And if it's like, okay, yeah, I did that. I made a mistake. Now I'm on the redemption path as opposed to, you know, like, you know, waffling around it.

But as opposed to, no, I didn't roll it downhill. The truck was just built that way and the hill was just built.

I mean, this has been a big. We got to call out. This has been a big week for podcasting. You have Sam Altman on the Yvonne, you have Netanyahu on the Nalcoys. And you have Trevor Melton on Tucker Carlson. I mean, what a week. What a week. But Zach Kukoff, four figures of equal.

Equal stature.

Correct.

Thank you very much.

I think, I think higher stature than some of them.

Yeah, well, higher than some, lower than others.

Correct. Exactly.

What's going on in your world? How was yesterday? It looked like total. Total. Also total podcast victory.

Total podcast victory for sure.

Yeah, yeah. Yesterday I think somebody said all in is now state media, which I loved. I was like, yesterday literally was total podcast dominance, which was wild. It was very well done. Major props to frequent TPPN guest Del, who did an amazing job. You know, they hold Christian, the whole thing together and like Christian and Dalian. Yeah, they put the whole thing together in like 10 days. You guys know this. The whole thing came from nothing.

Yeah, yeah, 10 days.

When you get a 20 minute block on the president's schedule, you got to move quick.

Yep, that is exactly, exactly true.

So they started Hilling Valley a couple of years ago just as a dinner, but now there's like enough of an organization, I think it is like a company at this point that's doing these events and they have playbook and they every time they execute, it's better than the last one.

So really my understanding is they have like 30 something people who help put these things together. It's a serious, surreal operation that really staffs it up. Where was was at the Mellon Auditorium, which funnily enough is like next door or maybe even part of the Environmental Protection Agency, the epa. So it's a nice. It was very funny because I would not say it was a particularly environmentally focused group in the audience, but beautiful space nonetheless. Honestly, a highlight of the day for me and probably for everybody there. A very funny, very well done POTUS speech at the end of the day keynote. Real red meat for us and for tech on a lot of the key questions on AI development. Also a lot of very funny crowd work, like really talented crowd work bits on Jensen and on Doug Burgum. I was like, wow, it's going to be a really talented Netflix special. This all gets packaged up.

Did he have a. Did he have, did, did Trump have a good line on Jason too, or. I couldn't tell if that was fake news or it was real.

No, it was. It was real. Trump gets up, first thing he says is thanks to the all in podcast. Chamath and David and yes, even Jason. And there was a huge pause for laughter and he goes, yes, we're even thanking Jason today. A Lot of Jason Calcanis jokes. I will say one interesting dynamic at the thing that I don't know if, I don't know it was streamed online. What wasn't. But one interesting dynamic. I don't know if folks saw the. Jason was doing the voice of the liberal in the, in the questioning. He was like trying to really put a little bit of the heat on some of the Trump admin guests and it was an interesting departure from everybody else who was asking questions.

That's good, that's. People will find a way to hate that, but it's good.

Yeah, no, it's good to get the diversity of voices. I will say. Clearly some people that I don't think necessarily expected it, but yeah, it was good to get the diversity of voices. That's fine up there.

Yeah.

What was the best line then? The best, the best line to me was somebody asked Jensen to talk about America's AI advantage and he said the one thing that no other country has is President Trump.

That's right. That's why Jensen gets to. Jensen gets to export age 20s, because he's had good lines like that, you know, wild, amazing. It was a well done speech, honestly. Was well done event. I would say highlights for me from like a serious way. The big one for me was fair use training of copyright material for AIs. This is the one we've been asking about for a while and a lot of companies have been talking about it. In fact, there was a recent anthropic court case that ruled on this, said, look, if it's trained on legally procured, legally purchased copyright material, that's fair use. That's in scope. If it's stuff that you're pirating, which allegedly Anthropic and Meta and others have done to build their corpus of data, that's when you get into legal trouble. This was the first time that I've heard the admin come out and codify that, which is really nice. So I love that. I love the energy permitting stuff. There was a lot of stuff for all the abundance boys on permitting, a lot of permitting reform questions, a lot of accelerating data center build outs, a lot of trying to streamline getting new sources of energy online. And then yes, there were some talk about how do you try to tighten even while we're still letting folks like China by age 20s. Some talk about things like location tracking for export controls too. So there was a lot to like in the speech. I actually thought it was a very, very well done speech. And it was funny because there was actually A live. I know is who's. Who's your partner? Is it Kalshi or Polymarket?

Polymorket.

Okay. So there was probably a Polymarket. I saw it on Kalshi. There's probably a polymarket market going at the same time where people were betting on things like will Trump say David Sacks name the speech? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before it gets resolved. So I thought it was really, really well done. Vance spoke super well. Burgum and Chris Wright had a very funny panel, the two of them together, where Chris Wright and Jason got into it mano a mano a little bit, which was interesting to hear too, but great and really good energy in the space. A lot of good companies. Hadrian did a very good. Almost like a sermon on the enthusiasm of re industrialization. I love Chris from Hadrian did that.

Yeah, he's been on the roadshow with that because he was probably giving some similar version of that at Reindustrialized.

Yes.

Worked out the bit. Took the tight five to dc. Love to see it.

It was a tight five. It was great.

That's great. What. How should I think about this AI plan? This document, the website that's been floating around is this. Is this more of like. Like laws aren't changing, but this is just. These are. This is the plan for the laws that we will eventually change? Is that the idea?

So think about it in two ways. One way is this is the White House using its bully pulpit to call for a series of changes that. Yes. Would need Congress to enact them or would need agencies to change their policy. Right now, agencies changing their policy is something the White House can do.

Yeah.

The other side is, look, there are two EOs that were signed live on stage yesterday that Trump did a very theatrical signing office is beautiful. And those are things that the admin can do directly. So there are some things. For example, some of the energy permitting stuff, it's, you know, there's certain things like doing categorical exclusions from NEPA that are a little bit warm within the realm of things that can be done. My understanding is vao. But there are also things, as you guys know, a lot of permitting is done at the state and local level. Right. So the White House can't necessarily say we're going to overrule what state and local government does on permitting as a fiat. They have to work with partners all up and down the stack of government to get what the AI action plan calls for actually implemented.

Yeah. So how big are those EOs? Like, what were people tracking on those? And Then.

What was the specifics? There was one of the EOs around making it so that states can't enact AI safety laws for the next 10 years. Do you have specifics on that? That felt super significant.

So there were 3 aieos. Said 2 earlier I was on there 3 aios. Sometimes. Why 1 was on bias free AI, which is something I would instead frame as transparency. There was a lot of talk woke AI and removing things like DEI from AI implementation. The actually specific version of that, the instantiated version of that, is that model providers that they want to be used in government procurement have to attest to the values to be transparent about the values that go into their models. That's AIEO number one. AIO number two is trying to fast track some of the development work we did. So it's fast tracking some of the data center permitting stuff that we did. And the third AIO that we talked about is the export expansion. It's funny, Jordy, the thing that you're asking about, which we talked about last time, right, this idea of a moratorium on AI regulation for 10 years, the big challenge is to actually get that done. That's something that has to be now done. Actually beyond my understanding, is beyond the scope of just what can be done in an eo. Right. Something that can be started has to actually transcend that as well. And some of the challenge, like you saw today, California is already starting to push back on the idea that the federal government has preemption ability over California's ability to regulate it. And the truth is there are powerful senators like Marsha Blackburn, who we discussed last time, whose job it is to protect their local industries, like the music industry in Nashville, Tennessee.

Right.

Her home state. We're not going to be thrilled about what I think is a pretty reasonable but ultimately controversial idea of trying to create a standard set of regulations that aren't 50 patchwork states. Because the default, and Trump mentioned this in his speech, is that in 50 different states, whoever's the most restrictive is who people end up falling.

Yeah.

Because if you're a product company or a foundation model lab, you want to be available everywhere. So the default is like basically be allowed under the most restrictive regulations.

That's right. That's right. One kind of funny framing I was kicking around was the idea of no paperclips. So this kind of marks a shift away from worrying about AI doom. We're not worried about getting paperclip clipped. We're not worried about fast takeoff, this crazy doom scenario. So we're pulling Back on safety, pulling more, pushing more into geopolitics. Let's actually scale up infrastructure, get these products out into the world, because we think that by and large they're safe. And now the game is to win on more or less like industrial capacity. Like if we're just producing way more tokens than every other country that will help our gdp, we will grow that way. The flip side of the no paperclips is that there's no move to do a new operation paperclip where we, where we pulled scientists from Germany to America to build the bomb. And the, and the, and the reference point there is that something like, something like 75% of AI researchers on Meta Superintelligence team are I think on oh, ones or they're not American citizens. And, and we've seen the Deep Sea Team and Manus and you know, there's some venture capital firms that are investing in Chinese AI and kind of the bull case is like, okay, well get them from China, Singapore and then get them to Silicon Valley and then we have the team on our side. And so it feels like that's the one area that wasn't really discussed. I know immigration is obviously just a broadly hot topic, but in terms of like brain drain of the ultimate top AI scientists, is there any movement or people thinking about that? Is there any nuance coming up between, okay, maybe that's a different, maybe that's a different problem set or different question than like dealing with like fentanyl dealers coming across the border.

So I don't know that that was super within scope for the AI action plan. I'll tell you personally, there are definitely people who are thinking about an operation paperclip or how do we get the world's best and brightest, the truly, truly elites.

Right.

Even above people who might qualify for ones to come and build in America. AI with their families. That's the first thing. Second thing is, listen, the question you're getting to, the question of soft power is a question the admin is thinking about. Right. And so the reason that the aio, sorry, the action plan is so supportive of open source and open weight models is because the admin views it as a national security imperative to get American soft power, that is American models to become the most widely used in the world. So the soft power lever the admin's pulling. I would like to see more and I'm hugely supportive of getting people here on a really targeted basis, ultra elite talent to come here and build, as opposed to building for adversaries.

Yeah, I mean we're talking about like 50 people. It's like, it's super.

Yeah, exactly like 20 people.

It should be a completely different, different discussion than like, you know, border wall or anything like that. Like no AI researcher has ever been impacted by a wall like that. Not. Maybe the pre training scaling wall is their problem.

I know you have to run.

Yeah, sorry.

There was a post yesterday going viral. Somebody realized you could Venmo the government to help reduce the national debt. What's the right amount to start Venmoing Uncle Sam? If you want to do your part.

Listen on a daily basis on tips now. So we should all be tipping. The government help them, they should be tipping. We should be getting tips. Paid in tips, no tax on that. And then we could turn around and tip the government in Venmo as well. Yeah, I would say as much as you can.

Economy, as much as you can do.

As much as you can do. But every day, really quickly, every day.

Last question for me. We'll let you go. That point on open source is really interesting. It feels like Mark Zuckerberg could be the national champion. He could be the hero of American open source with the Llama project. We don't know if Llama 5 is going to be open source. Behemoth had trouble getting out. He hasn't really given clear guidance on how hard he's going into, how, how hard he's going to stay in open source. But what, how do you think the mood is around Mark Zuckerberg in dc? Is he a winner or loser? The Wall Street Journal had this article on, you know, how much people have donated. Obviously Jensen feels ascendant. Elon feels like he was at the top and then kind of dial back a little bit, but is still doing okay. The other hyperscaler CEOs are like, none of them are in bad, bad positions. But Zuck is like the interesting one where you could see a really interesting partnership form. But I don't know where we are on that.

Zuck I think is interesting. He took a big swing. I said, listen, I want to go do the cultural work. I want to enmesh myself really deeply. And we've learned is this is an admin that really respects power and success. Right. Success is its own ability to attract more success. The virtuous cycle. Jensen does well in part because he's tremendously gifted interpersonally, but also because he's the CEO of the most valuable company in the world and the admin respects that. Right. And when he comes to town, we know this is an Admin that loves talking about things are number one. Things are the biggest and the best and most important. And Jensen has that Zuck. Zuck tried to. Or a farm a little bit.

You know what I mean?

He tried to get in here and do a little bit of that and I don't know that it's fully landed for him. I agree. Listen, I Hope he keeps llama 5 open source predominantly because I think it would be a great bite at the apple for him with national priority here. But part of that's going to also be his ability to invest and do some of the interpersonal retail stuff that Jensen's done so well.

Yeah.

Yeah. With OpenAI launching the open source model, you have to wonder if, if, if like national Open Source Champion of America is a title that Sam Altman is like, I'd like that. Yeah, exactly. Even if it doesn't have. Even if it doesn't have like direct economic value, if it comes with political power, that could be incredibly valuable. So interesting to see how it breaks down. Thank you so much for joining. We'll let you get to your question.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Sorry after watching. Thanks guys.

Making you miss your next one. Cheers.

Talk to you soon. And we will tell you about Adeo Customer Relationship Magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to.

The next level of CRM.

It's the next gen of CRM. And speaking of gens, Gen Z has a particular nihilism I call get my bag culture, says Jasmine's son. The mentality of everyone's grifting, so I better get my own. This ties into the Trevor Milton debate that we were having earlier. They've never voted without Trump on the ballot. All content is sponsored content unless proved otherwise. Post truth politics is all they know the President's been scamming for the last 10 years. So don't be meek and virtuous or else you're going to lose. So no wonder why you end up with Cluley. Bit of a hot take. Interesting. But I do think that there's this, there is this.

The interesting thing though, just to call out that the. The Clulee haters will be in shambles over this. But Roy was posting yesterday that he set up a 20% employee option pool. So he's paying a lot and people are pushing back, being like, your burns got to be crazy. And his pushback was basically, we're way more efficient. You know, you can get to 10 million of with a small team. I pay people a lot and I also, you can also give them a lot of equity.

So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. I do, I do worry a little bit about, about just as we see more meme stocks, it gets more tempting. So for like, like and that, that meme about like you have five years to get the bag before the permanent underclass. Like, and if you're just seeing people get away with things that feel crazy and you're like, well they like everyone else got away with it. Maybe I should get away with it too. It is, it is sad. We need Gen Z founders building permanent structures, institutions, products that will outlive them and there hasn't been a ton of those. Alex Wang was certainly the, the leading candidate as kind of all star Gen Z company People.

People were pissed when, I mean a lot of people were super happy when Ross Ulbricht was pardoned. A lot of people were upset. They were like he was dealing drugs on the Internet and tried to kill someone. So I think there's allegedly he. Allegedly.

Is it alleged?

No, I think, I think he did order the hit, but it didn't work.

Okay.

Like it didn't go through because he was talking with a, with a undercover agent.

Happens to the best of us sometimes, Sometimes you put something on the screen.

Who hasn't ordered a hit.

Yeah, sometimes you put.

You never ordered one hit?

Not even one. Sometimes you put something on an underlings to do list and they just forget about it. It happens. And you're like, ah, they dropped the ball. It happens. Anyway, in other better news, there's a profile in Colossus of Rompton. Naomi boy, who you, you, you've worked with, you've met. And he says, dear friend, we, we've been quietly building Abstract for nine years. He's your friend. He hasn't been on the show.

Well, he's never done any media. Literally never. So this is like the first significant media that he's ever done.

Interesting.

He's been very, very under the radar. We don't have to list out his full portfolio, but if you look at, you can go to abstract.vc and check it out. He's backed a lot of incredible companies. He backed my last company. He was, was an incredible partner and has been a true friend throughout as long as I've known him. And I'm excited for him to talk about it. It's a crazy story. He had a fund blew up, went bankrupt when he was 24 and he's 34 now, has, has 1.8 billion under management.

Wow. That's.

And he's an absolute dog. I can't wait to see him at the top of the Midas list.

For sure.

It's gonna happen.

So that will be in the next edition of Colossus magazine, which you should of course subscribe to. Yeah, you can read this article free. The man with the subscribe to get the print edition. The man with the hot hand needs to link up with the man with the hot leather jacket, Jensen Wong. Apparently dropping a bombshell at the AI summit that we were just talking to Zach Kukoff about. I have 60 plus leather jackets. My wife picks them. That is the scoop that I need to hear. Beth, thank you for reporting on the ground. Jensen Wong says I have 60 plus leather jackets. That's a lot. One for every week of the year. I love it. Anyway, another quote from which you mentioned Jensen Wong America's unique advantage is that no country could no country could possibly have is President Trump. He is happy to be partnering with the President, the Commander in Chief. Also a reconciliation of sorts between Delian Asproojov and chamath Palihapitiya in D.C. they're comparing anacondas and irrs. Delian and Chamath of course to put the timeline in turmoil a couple weeks ago. Talking trash to each other. All friendly. All's fair and love and war. All up on the timeline. Taking a friendly picture together. You'll love to see it. I love a reconciliation, even if the the language is a little vulgar for my taste. But great to see two capital allocators hanging out in D.C. together. Christian Garrett also broke it down, man.

Behind this behind the scenes pulling all the strings. Pulling all the strings.

Last night was truly something special. David Sacks and the all in pod brought Jacob Helberg and Delian and I in to something that we'll all never forget. The business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said. And it was never more important than last night. Friedberg stressed the importance of showing how the everyday American and those who the system has not worked for are already experiencing job creation and transformation due to AI. Winning the AI race will be a bigger will be part of a bigger story that benefits us all. There were members of Congress from both sides of the event showing how there is a unified front that's bipartisan around techno industrial policy and the opportunity AI presents itself. Jacob Helberg and those in the admin now have to get to work. Amazing work, dude. Congrats. As Will o', Brien, Bobby Goodlotte says, saw some of the post. Looks absolutely epic. So all three former guests. Yes, you love to see It. So President Trump said he had planned to break Nvidia up until he learned who Jensen Huang was. What's funny is I don't. I don't even know how you would break up Nvidia. Like, it's. It's just, Just a. It's a fabless semiconductor company. Like, it's not like the intel thing where you have. You have a fab and then you also have a design company. I mean, I guess you could break down, like, gaming and AI training or something. Or. I, I just. I. I don't know where the. The dividing line would be. Would be. It's really just like, they haven't. The story of Nvidia isn't. They don't have an Instagram. It's not. They don't have a story of, oh, they acquired this company and it got really big and it saved them from disruption.

Break it up and say, okay, you're gonna have an AI division and a gaming. You know, maybe. But gaming's like a rounding area.

Yeah. I mean, they have some other stuff that's in there. I mean, I don't know, you break out cuda or something.

I don't know how you force Jensen to sell off the majority of his jackets.

Yeah, yeah, break up the jackets, pay.

Down the national debt.

But anyway, Jensen's been in D.C. we saw him there a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago, and he's been doing the work to get to know Donald Trump, and it has worked out spectacularly. And now Jensen is the biggest.

I have a. This will go unmentioned. But I had. We have a friend of the show, and Jensen walked up to us and the friend introduced himself and his company, and Jensen didn't know the company. And he's like, oh, it's so bearish for me.

Wait, that was Jensen. That he was. Oh, okay. I know the other side of the story. I didn't realize.

I thought it was like. Like he really took it personally.

Yeah, well.

But he's been on a generational run since.

You want to be known by the greats, the. The folks who only worked at Denny's and then started a generational company.

Ignore.

Anywhere else. This is an interesting thread by Kevin Bryan talking about how the New York Times is reporting on the AI action plan. Kevin says, come on, man. There's no way you can read the AI action plan and think this is the first order thing that. The first order thing that New York Times readers should know about it. Anthropic is positive. AI has huge implications for the national economy, defense, future of science. Half this article is about copyright. It is wild how much tech journalism comes from a place of extreme hostility towards the technology. It often reads like RFK writing articles about new pharmaceutical breakthroughs. No wonder the Silicon Valley set completely ignores this. And then he closes with A post about 90% of mainstream writing on AI is one encoded bias 2. Theft of copyright 3. Wasting water and electricity ad nauseam. Gangs gang folks in these labs think they're curing cancer. Honestly, who gives anything about 1, 2 and 3 given that even if those worries were true, they aren't. If you think those three things are the most important policy issues or even the biggest downside risks of AI And I mean this in a let's be real not yeah, it's hard.

It's hard to argue that energy energy use by itself is a bad thing. Yeah, and it is true that data centers require an obscene amount of energy. We talked earlier this week about how Oracle's partnership with OpenAI, where OpenAI will be spending $30 billion a year with Oracle by 2027. At least how it was reported will require two Hoover dams worth of energy, which is an exceptional amount. But as energy production has gone up, so has human prosperity.

Water production there's plenty of water for the data centers. There's plenty of water to fill your eight sleep. You can go to eight sleep.com get a pod five back five year old.

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I've been ill. I finally put up seven seven and a half hours last night. I'm back in range my hrv. I'm no longer looking dead and I got over two hours of REM sleep last night.

So we have been feeling a lot better. From Andreessen Horowitz joining in just a few minutes. In the meantime, let's do some timeline. I want to dig into this Financial Times.

I think we're gonna need more time.

Do that later. The headline, of course, just to keep you up to speed, is that Nvidia chips worth $1 billion were smuggled into China after Trump export controls. We've heard about this black market. We've heard about people stuffing suitcases full of them and flying around the country. They're not the biggest thing in the world, so it's easy to route them around. There's always a question, could the government have done more? Could Nvidia have done more? What are. Who are. Who are the truly the bad actors.

Is the crazy graphic right there.

Good graphic. Love it. But we will. We will cover this later in the show.

Danish is throwing some shade at Elia. He says how you got 32 billion? He doesn't have 32 billion. And don't take the turkey flight to restore the hairline. I would have paveled Durovs myself into a Greek God the instant it was financially feasible. Dude does not give an F about anything but the mission. Incredibly bullish.

Okay.

I think super intelligence is going to be able to cure hair loss. Like that's going to be the single.

Prompt right before cancer probably.

It does seem more tractable. It doesn't seem that crazy. Very rude. Anyway, people having fun on the timeline. Oh well, we have Andreessen Horowitz partner Vanita joining in just a few minutes and there's a post about Andreessen Horowitz. So James Lynn says a 16Z in Sutter Hill Ventures context here.

Oh yes, Avedon Radonsky says recently got asked which VC firm changed the game like Steph Curry did.

Lots of sports metaphors in tech these days. You'd love to see it.

It's tough when you know nothing about.

And so the two examples of VC firms that changed the game like Steph Curry did for the NBA Andreessen Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures, but in completely different ways. James Lynn here says a16z realized that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbidden 10x what other people were offering. I don't know if that's actually happened that often that you go get a term sheet and Andreessen comes in at 10x the price, but they've certainly been aggressive on pricing and it's worked out in many cases for early rounds, 50% higher, but yeah, but so it got them Twitter, Instagram, Coinbase, GitHub, Anduril, Airbnb. Slack round sizes went up after that. Sutter Hill saw trends in cloud computing and incubated Snowflake from idea to ipo. They made Mike Spicer a partner, the interim CEO hire. The technical co founders funded the entire Series a. They had 20% stake in Snowflake at IPO at a $33 billion.

That was worth 12. It was a $12 billion position. So pretty much the best incubation of all time.

So a 16Z finds talent and makes several outsized bets. Sutter Hill sees a trend and operationalizes one to two companies completely in house. Now larger rounds are the norm and the venture studio model is much more common. That makes a ton of sense. We'll have to ask Vanita about that when she joins. What else do we have here in the timeline?

I also think you can't. You can't leave YC out of that group. Right.

Who else changed the game is an.

Entirely different model, but highly, highly, highly effective.

Yeah. I think the initial yc, the way it changed the game was that it made it completely possible for college new grads to go and start a company without getting any experience in enterprise or in business. And so that was the initial arb, like Sandhill Road existed, Sequoia Capital existed, Kleiner Perkins existed. But if the Airbnb guys had gone.

Family around to get a friends and family round done.

Exactly. So if the Airbnb guys, I think had showed up to Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia, who actually, I think wound up doing the Airbnb deal later, I think Sequoia did pre yc, that might have been like, this is a little weird company. This is a little bit out of our sweet spot. But then you go through yc, you get coached by Paul Graham at the time, and you polish things up such that you're ready to go and ready to talk to the big firms. And Paul Graham, I think, famously told the Sequoia partner, like, you should do the Airbnb deal, even as weird as it is, like, think about ebay for space. And it worked out. Fantastic story. Anyway, we have Vanita from Andreessen Horowitz in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

Good to meet you.

How are you doing?

An Airbnb fan?

Yes. What's your take on this? A16Z changing the game by recognizing that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbidding for early rounds. Do you think that resonates? Do you feel like Andreessen Horowitz has changed the game in venture?

Totally unbiased.

Take two, coming up.

Totally unbiased. I do believe my partners are changing the game. No. And part of what's amazing about A16Z is our willingness to bet in every sector, every vertical, every part of the economy, really, every part of the economy, both locally, domestically, and globally. So my corner of the world, it's a big corner of the world. It's a $5 trillion corner of the world is health care. And one of the things I love about our firm is that we've really established a dedicated strategy here, too. And hopefully changing the game here, too.

Yeah. How has bio investing, healthcare investing changed? We were talking about the Airbnb example. It feels like it's easy for a couple folks with Just a hope and a dream. They don't need to do a friends and family round, they can just go to Sandhill Road, they can go to a place, places like YC that can go to Andreas and Horowitz directly and raise a seed round and have enough to actually pay the bills, hire a couple people, do a couple tests, launch a consumer app, launch an enterprise app. Has there been a meaningful change in the way healthcare and bio companies get started? For a long time it felt like the only way to do a company in that space was you're at MIT and you do some partnership with flagship pioneering and then you IPO and then you're living and dying by your FDA trials. The traditional venture path felt very, just like a completely separate track. But how has it evolved from your experience?

Yeah, great question. I mean, I think we're absolutely, we're absolutely part of the agentic wave. I've never seen so much interest in the role of AI agents in transforming how science is done, how research is done, how discoveries are made, how drugs could be developed. The FDA launched an AI agent called Elsa. Cute name but you know, potentially signaling, you know, a transformative role for AI even in the regulatory agency, which is kind of a mind blowing, mind blowing thing to think about, right? You would have thought that it would have been the innovators and the startups kind of pushing AI first and then waiting for the regulator to say yes, we believe these predictive tools are going to help us make drugs. So I think we are seeing a really different market pull than ever before. At the same time, the business models in health care, you know, are still similar and the core products that drive value are still similar. So we're in the business of making new medicines. So are the startups that we back in large part or making the practice of medicine way better and transforming the practice of medicine. And both have some really established business models around them. Drugs that work, that have an impact on patients get paid for, for. They get paid for because they save the system money. Services we pay for because people need services on time at, you know, from the right specialist for the right disease. And so those are all, you know, great business models in which to, in which to invest and in which startups can run. But certainly startups are now running in a much more capital, efficient way, in a much more AI powered way than they ever were before. We need agents in the game in our space too.

Where is Silicon Valley? So sweet spot or like strike zone in bio? Because I was reading the Wall Street Journal today about A company that does, they're developing robotics for lab testing equipment. So basically like pipetting, you know, famously, it's like a PhD student just going like this all day long. Bunch of robots doing that. Makes a ton of sense. That feels like Silicon Valley all the way. Same.

How many, how many cursor for bio pitches have you got? Is it, is it in the hundreds?

But that feels like more in the sweet spot. When I think about like an ERP system for, for biotech companies, that feels a lot easier than saying I'm going to take a cancer drug through the FDA trials and I'm never going to go public. I'm going to raise growth rounds at every stage. Like we haven't seen that that much, but maybe we're still just early in that trend changing.

Yeah, and I think part of that, the trend is changing in part because of the same trends we're seeing in other verticals that AI is getting, getting paid for through labor budgets. And AI is not necessarily replacing but augmenting labor. Right. 90%, 90 plus percent of all chemical screens for new drugs fail. No drug comes out of it. 10% of all nurse positions across the healthcare system are vacant. We can't find the nurses to fill the positions. Right. So we're living in a world where actually we need agentic resources to come in as labor. And that is different than the world we were living in before where we were trying to squeeze out it budget from, you know, let's say a large pharma company or let's say a hospital system to deploy the types of Silicon Valley technologies that could have been transformative for the industries. And so now that there's a lot more, you know, autonomous task completion as well as augmentation, well beyond what humans could do in those fields. I do think some of those Silicon Valley technologies, you know, obviously, yes, they are being formed. Yes, we are absolutely being pitched the cursor for bio right now. And we think it's very credible. We think it absolutely is the case that if you have a lot of data, you're a company that's, let's say, run clinical trials before managed many, many drugs through development. You should have agents crawling through that data, learning what humans might have missed, learning why things failed, why things succeed, succeeded, and then bringing that knowledge to your next set of, set of endeavors. And so absolutely, you know, this kind of regime of a fully virtual agentic lab that for every one human scientist, you know, has hundreds of agentic scientists is a really, really interesting, interesting vision. At the same time, Making the drug is really valuable. So we really do think that great innovation can take it all the way and can, you know, great startups can actually develop their own.

Yeah. How often a company comes to you that wants to be more on the picks and shovels side kind of infrastructure, maybe more B2B. How often do you find yourself encouraging them to try to take it all the way and actually like use whatever innovation or insight they have to not just make that product available to other bio or pharma companies, but actually deliver the end value?

I think it really depends on the founders and exactly where the innovation sits. We've backed both, we're long on both infrastructure for the industry and SaaS. Forward deployed SaaS. SaaS plus agentic implementations. We think a lot of that has a ton of value and will fundamentally change how every organization operates. And not, not every organization is going to build their own cursor like tools for research. At the same time, sometimes the innovators who are closest. I'll give you a real example. Autoimmune disease is horrible. 10% of people have an autoimmune disease and sounds like science fiction, but recently we tried car T therapy, take my T cells out of my body, engineer them and instead of attacking a tumor cell, attack bad autoimmune cells. Okay, well that's interesting. And what if I could deliver it in the same type of vaccine type format that you got your Covid jab in an LNP and an RNA that.

I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine. I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine a jab, but maybe that's just a comment.

It's like reclaiming tech.

Yeah, reclaim it. We reclaim tech. Tech bro. Technology brothers.

Yeah, the pharmaceutical industry definitely needs to.

Change the name of this thing to tech nerds.

What about.

To finish that story out to make that requires a lot of engineering and a lot of optimization and a lot of so called Silicon Valley style optimization. And so we're seeing that a company in our portfolio called Orbital Therapeutics announced really exciting data in monkeys demonstrating that that might be possible for autoimmune disease. So I think it goes both ways. Silicon Valley tech is going to permeate every company, whether they're based here or not and whether they're making drugs or not.

Do you, do you think that these sort of early IPOs that, that drug companies have done historically is a feature or a bug? Like if we have more developed private capital markets, do you think that like is it even right that effectively Retail, uneducated retail could just be taking these like, you know, gambling in the public markets on effectively FDA trials, or is there a better way?

There is a huge public market for biotech. The stage at which companies access those markets in the last few years was miscalibrated. And so that's why you see the headlines. You're seeing with respect to public biotech stock performance, with respect to public fundraising challenges for companies, because they were very far from the clinic, they were very far from generating commercial value, they were very far from demonstrating hard data that they were close to developing a product of value. So I do think the private markets continue to be to have massive pools of capital in them and biotech companies will stay private for longer. But at the same time, we're seeing huge demand and appetite for technologies that work from pharma companies that have a really rich ability to continue to back biotech companies, partner with biotech companies, fund biotech companies, buy biotech companies. So we partnered up with Eli Lilly on that front and started a whole dedicated fund focused on supporting the biotech ecosystem. And that serves pharma and it serves the biotech ecosystem too. Right. And so there are lots of ways for companies to, to continue to make progress on those technologies while private until they, until they have the metrics that justify going public.

That makes sense. You said something earlier around nursing job vacancies. How do you, what's your thesis on how that market evolves in four years? Are we still going to see, you know, hospital systems unable and various groups unable to get the nurses that they want, or do you think that agentic systems can kind of backfill those roles and there will be more kind of balance in the market.

Yeah, I hope we also project needing fewer roles. I mean, we are projecting that we're going to be short over 3 million healthcare workers just in the United States alone over the next year.

Right.

So it's a huge.

And the people, and the people making those projections, are they AGI pilled, Are they humanoid robot pilled? Like I. It's cool that the FDA has a chief AI officer. That feels important, but anytime I'm like reading into projections, it's more interesting to get a projection or insight from you given that you're backing all these companies that understand that reality and want to.

Right. That's a big number. That's based on, you know, the job jobs that health systems and providers are opening but unable to fill based on the projected increase in healthcare demand as our population ages. But absolutely, I hope it's not really that high because there's only like 8 million total job vacancies in the U.S. that's like almost half our total job vacancies in healthcare alone. So we have to actually decrease our need for those jobs. And we could redirect some of our extremely skilled healthcare existing workers workforce from answering phone calls, dropping up, pick, you know, picking up, drop balls, recommunicating the same information to patients, recommunicating the same information between providers who are trying to coordinate. There are a million ways in which our system does not work today. And so I hope that number goes down. But the reality is that the willingness to try out the agentic solution, whether it's for documentation, whether it's for getting prior auth from an insurance company or whether it's for actually providing a clinical consult has never been higher. Because the reality is today we don't have the humans to fill those jobs. Wait times are long. 30% of Americans skip care. Like they skip or delay prescribed care. We're developed country in which that's happening. And 60, 70% of Americans say I will see an AI doctor. Like just I will see one, like at least I will engage with one. And in fact I'm probably going to engage with one before I engage with a human doctor now.

Right.

We've all changed our consumer behavior that way almost overnight. So it's a pretty remarkable shift that's happening that will I hope make us need a lot fewer than those, you know, that number of open jobs.

I remember what was it in like 2008 there was a boom in electronic medical records. Startups like Athena Health was one of them. And there was kind of like two waves going on that were kind of adding together and making those businesses work. One is like a technological wave obviously like we had access to cloud databases and cloud infrastructure and better software and so you could actually like put medical records securely in a cloud. And so that was obviously like a great business. But then there was also an EHR mandate from the Obamacare led legislation I believe. Are there any regulatory tailwinds that are adding on top of like the AI technology tailwinds right now in bio or healthcare broadly?

Yeah, absolutely. So there are, first of all, I will say historically, historically a lot of healthcare software and technology was adopted because of regulatory incentives and payment incentives. But for the first time we are seeing bottoms up adoption of tools and technologies and an extraordinary NPS of healthcare software with scribing tools like those developed by companies like Ambience and a bridge, you know, you know you know, evidence access tools like what, what Open Evidence has built. And so for the first time we're also seeing pull that's just like, hey, this is better. I don't need the government to give me a, you know, a kickback to tell me it's better, but it is better. So that's a separate trend that we're very excited about. But huge regulations are also going to incentivize a better technology infrastructure. So price transparency is a good example. There are clear incentives and penalties for not being able to share transparently your pricing cards as a provider, as a payer and to create that type of open access for patients. And so building that infrastructure layer is going to be super important. The administration's talked a lot about patient choice. That could be patient choice with respect to how you use your benefit doll, patient choice with respect to what plan coverage you select. And Ichra is a good example of a potentially big change in the employer sponsored healthcare space. So these are all financial rails and incentives. CMMI continues to advance value based initiatives that basically prioritize preventive care and say, hey, at the end of the year, if you save the government a dollar, if you save CMS money, dear smart provider who is using technology, you'll make money. Right? So that's a clear financial incentive. It's good for patients generally being out of the healthcare system. Preventing something before it costs a lot of money is good for patients. But the financial incentives and policy incentives do need to, you know, do provide a huge accelerate in our space and that will continue to be the case.

Can you give us the update on the drug pricing EO from? I don't know. Is it six weeks ago, eight weeks ago? It feels like a year ago at this point. There's been a lot that that happened. We had a bunch of people on the day of, and a lot of people were kind of saying that it wasn't going to be as impactful as it kind of felt in the moment. But what's the update there?

I don't think there's been a policy update like, you know, nothing has been enacted yet. That's still an eo. The concept of it of course was to say was to use international trade as a backdrop for holistic negotiations, inclusive of drug pricing, to say, you know, as part of an overall tariff negotiation. Why is it the case that the US pays two or three times or more for the same exact drug that another, that another country pays? And so it is a logical question to ask and we know that CMS is continuing to ask that question. But the actual policy is going to depend on quite a bit of, you know, there are a number of moving parts in a holistic policy with respect to every other, every other country. So it's important for us to retain huge incentives and it's not going to be as simple as cut the price, get great drugs. That's not how the market works. But should the price be more equitably shared across countries? It's an absolutely reasonable perspective to have.

How popular is open source in the bio world? I feel like the cursor for bio thing is very interesting, but when I think about the electronic lab notebooks that folks are using, if it's not open source you can't fork it. And it feels like part of cursor's ability to grow really fast is that they sit on top of your code base and you can change IDEs very quickly. But if a researcher is using a closed source lab notebook that has a database built in, that company is going to be like no, no, no, like I do not want you just stealing all my customers or like migrating off. But is open source popular? Are there opportunities like what's the VS code equivalent? I guess would be the question.

Yeah, I think there's a lot, you know, in bio research there's a lot more informatics and less organized software. I think that will change. But historically, historically there is a lot of bespoke informatics which is why some of the agentic adoption like for exploratory informatics research is happening on its own and people are adopting open source agents for resources like that. You know the structure, the protein structure models like AlphaFold Sure. Were followed by a number of models that were open sourced and, and within a period of weeks thousands of scientists, thousands of companies adopted additional structure prediction models. Boltz 2 was a popular one, the CHAI model. A number of startups put out open source models and we saw really fast adoption which is kind of cool, right? It's like it's a scientist sitting in a company who says I want to try that, you know, and see if it would help my workflow. And actually I want to benchmark it and I want to try three at the same time. So we didn't have that many great open source resources like that before we had data sets but not necessarily models and APIs to those models that made them easy to use. So I think that whole ecosystem is in its square one infancy of growing and exploding. But you're going to need a library of models. You want to be able to try all the models. You want your agents to be able to use the models without even a human interface. Suddenly the same thing that's happening in enterprise software in every vertical is going to happen here too. Agents on behalf of scientists will be able to select which models to use, try five models at once, and then incorporate the results and predictions of those models into a workflow that is deeply integrated with other agentic automation. None of that's built, I would say, for the, for the vast majority of the industry. And so it's a huge, huge opportunity for, for startups to build.

Yeah.

Last quick question. Maybe if you could answer in 60 seconds. That's the challenge. What, what is the, what's the vibe on the Stanford campus right now? Are people dropping out of, you know, PhD programs to start companies in bio? I'm sure we're seeing people dropping out of PhD to join Meta and other AI research orgs broadly. But I'm curious if that's happening in bio.

There are a number of fast growing AI biotech startups, right, that are bringing AI and computational tools to model training. So we are seeing that. If you're asking, you know, is it a response to federal funding changes, I think the, you know, that's always been the case that a large fraction of trainees from university campuses end up in biotech and pharma companies. And that's great. It's a great outcome. I don't think. I do think there's probably in the near term going to be continued exploration of industry alternatives to federally funded research. And I really hope that the federal grant funding is clarified and that there's more stability on university campuses for federally funded research because some of that infrastructure is absolutely, has been behind a huge number of these, of these innovations.

Makes sense. Thank you so much for joining.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Great to chat.

Talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Up next we have Mickey Malka, the founder of Ribbit Capital. Really quickly I will tell you about Ad Quick out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only. Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we hopefully have Mickey Malka. How you doing, Mickey? Good to meet you.

Hi guys, good to see you. John and Jordy, how are you guys?

Welcome to the stream.

Great background, great background. What's going on?

Break it down for us.

Those are some NFTs.

Wonderful.

There we go.

From an artist called Bright Moments. They did an exhibition all over the world and these are crypto citizens from the 10 cities around the world where they had their exhibition.

Amazing. Amazing. It's great to have you on the show. We've been excited for this. You guys have been on a absolutely crazy run and it's awesome that you're starting to talk about it a bit more.

Yeah. I want to start with like your background. I think that you might actually have a non traditional path to venture or at least a very interesting entrepreneurial journey prior to launching a venture firm. So can you just give us a little bit of background on your history and how you went up running?

So I'm an entrepreneur and I'm still an entrepreneur. It just happens that I started when I was 17 years old and that's all I know how to do. And I started in financial services growing up in Venezuela in the early 90s. It was inflation crisis, bank failures. All the things that you need to learn in your life. I had them by the time I was 22 years old.

Speedrun.

Oh my God, Yes. Lightspeed through all of that. So I started four different companies around the world before the word fintech or crypto even existed. Always trying to do something around the Internet and making money better. Simply, that was the whole thing.

What did some of those first companies look like? Were they specific to problems that you were having in Venezuela or were they global by nature?

The first one was. It was the first online trading platform for Latin America. A little bit what Robinhood is today. But imagine that in 1998 in the beginning of the Internet and you could trade online stocks of every local Latin American market. Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile. We had a Brazil. We bought it. Stock exchange seats in all of them. And we were able to allow people to trade. So that was the first one of the first ones. And then I.

You were. You were. You were like 20 at this time?

I was 23, 24 when I started. Yes.

Wow.

That company. And. And there were no venture capitalists in Latin America. There was nobody. We had to convince some people in the US and New York to fund us and headquartered in Miami to avoid any kind of problem with choosing a place in Latin America. And. And that company became the largest online broker dealer in South America.

Wow. Insane. And then where do you go from there?

I went to Spain because my first company was acquired by a big Spanish bank and the Internet had blown up a little bit. Like when they think it was all hype, it will happen to AI eventually. When people will think it was all wrong. Eventually the future. And I started the first online bank in Europe, there was no online banks. It was a bank called Open bank because it was supposed to be open 24 7, 365. It still runs in Spain. And it was.

Were you. Were you the was was adding open to the start of a word. Were you the first person to do that?

Because.

Open Store, we're taking over the open worlds these days.

Yeah.

Pay me my fee. I coined that. Yeah. That's wild. Who is the first LP to kick you off? Like, what was the story?

Well, first I have to ask. I'm assuming there wasn't bank. There wasn't like 20 banking as a service platforms back then. How did you get it? How did you convince a bank to in Europe to bank?

Well, I had to become regulated. By the time I was 25 or 26, I was regulated by eight central banks to go through the whole KYC bank approval process myself.

What was the very earliest learn. Is it more just like you filled out the forms perfectly, you sent the right messages or were you like kind of knocking on doors, trying to grease palms to make it happen?

All of the above. Depending on the country, you had to do a lot more. Some were a lot more technical than others, but definitely you had to. They had to see that I was not just this kid who didn't know anything about finance. And then I had to pretend I knew a lot about finance.

So. Yeah, you want to continue with that.

Now from where did that go? I don't want to leave a cliffhanger.

So that business grew to the fastest bank in Europe. I sold it back to the bank that we were partnered with and then I moved to Brazil. I got approval by the president of Brazil back then, Lula was which is again president now to approve a new banking license granted so we could start a bank to serve the unbanked with financial services. So I lived in Sao Pablo, did that for three years, became the largest retail bank in the country, serving almost 15 million customers.

I'm seeing a trend. I'm seeing a trend. Well, no, no, I was gonna say you seem to like being the fast, fastest growing or the number one in your category.

You know what I like is making. Allowing people to. When. When people have access to better money, it makes their life better. It's not about having more money or less money. It's just making money better. And better money means you should be able to invest the same way I can anywhere in the world. You should be able to get the best loan and not get your knees beaten up if you don't Pay back a credit. You should be able to get a good insurance product no matter where you are or what you're trying to do. That's what I call better money. So I think the journey of my life has been one of pursuing that better money makes life better. And moved to Silicon Valley 18 years ago to start a company in payments. Before the iPhone came out, I had a feeling people were gonna tap and pay with their phones. So we were one of the first companies tapping on NFC stickers, putting them on back of the phones you could pay for merchants. And that when the App Store came out with the iPhone, we were the first wallet in the phone. So that moment was like an aha moment when you saw mobile and you saw the App Store. This is like this is what I had been waiting for 20 years as an entrepreneur. That moment in time when suddenly you can compete with incumbents in a playing field that they were not looking at. So that's where Rivet Capital started. Instead of building one more company because I always consider myself, even though we always move the ball forward, I was a failed entrepreneur because the best entrepreneurs never sell their companies. So I decided to start Rivet as a way to say, this is the one I'm going to run until the last day I want to run it.

That's fantastic. Sorry, now we're. Now I'm going backwards. Can you talk to me about some of the wedges that you used in the previous companies to actually drive adoption of a new banking product or a new bank online? Yeah, so many different.

I have to imagine. I have to imagine starting in markets like, you know, Spain, Brazil, etc. Help helped you many. It's been the narrative violation over the last 20 years has been that developing countries adopted fintech faster. They adopted new methods of payments much faster than developing countries in many ways because there just wasn't that legacy infrastructure. So I'm curious if you even think you would have been successful if you had just tried to comment only crack, you know, the US market.

No, I will have been a failure. I would not understand the world. I was never the best student at school, but I was a student of life. And walking through the streets of all these countries and seeing how people behave with money was the best class and the best master class I could have gotten. Because at the end, everything you do is building a brand. And brand means trust. And it's very underrated to understand how long it takes to build trust and how fast can you make it shake or disappear or fracture and then how long it takes to bring it back. So if you see a pattern in. Everything that we've done is working with teams that we believe can build a brand and working with them, because that is the only moat that you can build that gives you the chance to succeed in financial services. Because every financial product at the end, it's a commodity, it can be copied. You can start with free commissions, it will be copied. You can start with free credit scores, it will be copied. You can start with free interest rate lendings or tipping, it will be copied. So it has to be the brand. And that's a special DNA that I got to understand from working in markets where people's level of trust was even lower than in developed markets.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you actually build that trust and build that brand in some of those markets? Is it different in Brazil than other countries? Are you talking about the feel of the product or actually just the marketing and telling people what your brand stands for, or does it infuse through the interaction with, with a bank teller in the virtual environment? Probably, I think it's all of the above.

It's the little things. It's really telling a story in a way that people believe and consistently see that you're doing that. And everyone, every company does it in a different way. So there was a story I remember from nubank in Brazil when we backed them super early in Sao Pablo. They are 18 million people, but there's, I think there's like 4 million dogs. It's almost like one dog for. And so whenever they saw that you, you had a transaction on your credit card for a, a vet, you, you. They will send you cookies to your home.

Wow.

Right. Because it meant that your dog was sick or something was happening. So imagine. But those are little things that you do that with consistency. And if the message is we care about you and we're paying attention to what's going on in your life, that's how you build that trust. It's a bunch of little details. There's never a big thing, but it has to be genuine. And you can see when CEOs or teams are not genuine, you can see it 10 miles away.

How do you feel about. So you did the first institutional round of Coinbase and Robinhood, correct?

Yes.

And did you think at the time that those companies. Did you have a feeling that if they were successful, they would end up ultimately competing with each other? Because it's not exactly head to head yet, but you can imagine 10 years from today, these companies will just be going at it and maybe that's just because of the trends around bundling in fintech. Right. If you can create one product, you can add a of bunch of others. If you can earn someone's trust in one category, you can expand out. But I think we're at this really interesting moment where the last 10 years were about. You had traditional fintech and you had crypto and they were these distinct categories, but it seems very obvious now that they will be massively overlapped in ultimately just one category, which is money.

Yes. So we were the first institutional round to Coinbase and Robinhood, but also to Revolut, which is in the same camp, and also to NuVank. Also we were super early and we built with Mercado Libre, Mercado Pago, which is a competitor of NuVank. So if you had told me back then that all these companies were going to be competing for this, we will have never guessed it, ever. And the reality is.

Well, I'm surprised you say that because it seems like you have a bit of a. You got a secret crystal ball or something. If you were going to.

Well, five years ago we told our LPs, our investors in one of our investor day meetings that the rails of crypto and financial services were actually starting to blend and it was going to be indifferent. And then companies that didn't do both were going to be completely spaced out or lost the window of chance to build. So five years ago we started to see it, but it wasn't obvious before that because there were different geographies and all of that. But now they're competing globally to each other.

Other.

The way I think about it is the first decade of all of this momentum was the few companies that will have the right to win and they've earned it by building brand, by building teams, by delivering on services, by getting licenses, by doing all these things that they need to do. So now we have a call it 30 or 40 players worldwide that we call the compounders, the one that will deliver and compound for the next decade. Now, this second decade of those 40 names or 30 names, is the decade where they steal market share from every single incumbent, because so far they haven't that much. But this decade with AI, with crypto, with the way they're building new products, with the way they're using their own brands, with the trust they have, with the government regulators, leverage they have today versus five years ago, buckle up, because what's coming is going to be really fun if you're in combat and really tough if you're in combat.

What lessons do you think the company, the Coinbases, the Robinhoods, et cetera, of the world learned in 2020, in 2021, during that sort of chaotic market cycle that it, it feels good in that many of them learn various lessons. I was also told to ask you.

About, are you talking about COVID era or.

Yeah, just the whole like, you know, like Robinhood that felt like, you know, the Robinhood Gamestop saga, those moments, it feels like there was a lot of hard ones lessons and then we've started this new cycle, this new bubble, whatever you want to call it. And hopefully a lot of them have taken those taken learnings from that and are implementing it, whether it's around risk management, things like that.

Yeah. So I think the lessons from that time was when Covid started, most of these companies were not ready to turbocharge. And what happened during COVID if you look back, is that you probably fast track four or five years of customers and growth into 12 months and none of these teams were prepared for it. Being at home, not being able to do much more. It just supercharged all of these companies and they overhire and they were working remote and they didn't have capital frameworks in place because the growth was unexpected. We remember getting a bunch of calls during that time in the beginning, like this is amazing and then this is getting tough and this is going to be problematic and it can crack here or there. And when we got the phone call at 3, 4 or 5 in the morning from Robinhood saying the Gamestop day and what needed to be done and we funded them in four hours, almost half a billion dollars that we didn't have, that we asked a bank to lend us to do it.

We called it a favor from an old friend.

Yes, literally a favor from. Literally a favor from an old friend. And that's what it takes to build relationships in banking. You need to decades of that so you can call in that favor when it's needed in that day. And look at how long it took for the brand to regain the trust of the market. It was almost two and a half years from that moment. And you gotta be a special leader and a special team to go through that turf and come back out of it. And now they're hitting their cylinders, but they got their story right. So you can see it in the Brian Armstrongs, in the Nikolai Swaronsky's, in the Vlad Tene, David Velez. They have that now. They went through that and they're on the other side and they're all between 38 and 41. So they got the best decade of their life coming, coming their way.

Yeah. What does that mean for competition at the early stage? It feels like it's, it was really, it was. In retrospect, it seems like a no brainer to, to back disruptive technologies in this huge market finance. But now you have. If you're starting a company that's going to carve out a little slice of oh, Robinhood's not touching this yet, or Coinbase isn't touching this yet, it's like, well, those companies are incredibly well capitalized and they're run by founders who are not about to retire anytime soon. Seems kind of dangerous. So where are you seeing pockets of opportunity in the early stage? What are you seeing in the next generation of founders that might actually, actually go and be able to carve out enough of a slice to grow into a generational company?

Yeah, I think what's coming for. I'm more excited for what's coming this next decade than the last decade. If you ask me. The last decade was just a setup for this decade. And there will be a bunch of new teams and companies. And we have been spending time with the young generation, like kids who are between founders who are between 19 and 25.

Yeah. And.

Or 19 and 27. Call it their brains are just faster. Their ways of thinking about how to build products is just different. They are, they, they spend the best years, the year of COVID learning and learning how to think really fast. And I've been blown away on how quick they are understanding and how quick they are to build. So we have this thesis that we, we wrote, it took us almost a year to write, which we call it token factories. And it's this world where forget about crypto, Rails or fintech or AI. All of these things are blending. If before it was fintech here and crypto here and we said that they blended, now we have financial services with crypto, rails with AIs. And the thing between all of them is that they're all tokens. Tokens. Everything is a token. So we call it the token factory Token revolution era and tokenizing information, tokenizing money and tokenizing power. And how those three things combine is where we're seeing some of the best entrepreneurs working. So that's what got us really excited. So we found a bunch of young teams who are building what we call now token factories. Companies that are building either access tokens that give you abilities to connect anywhere they want in the world to do anything. There's expert tokens These are companies that are generating knowledge or expert information that is solely unique. That is going to change the way you manage wealth management, wealth advisory, the way you manage insurance products, insurance agents. And then you have what we call assets, asset tokens. And stablecoins is the first of the asset tokens outside of bitcoins, the first of the, of the true asset tokens.

Talk to me about real estate. I feel like that's the, that was something in the. At the peak of the crypto boom, 2022, we were starting to hear about mortgages on chain, physical assets on chain. We're now starting to see stocks get on chain and obviously US dollars which are much more tangible than artworks, for example. But it feels like most of this generation's entrepreneurs probably learned a hard lesson during the global financial crisis of like the risks of over financialization in the real estate markets. But maybe like how do you see things developing or real estate assets playing out generally over the next decade.

So I think you said something was really important. If you look this wall behind me.

Yeah.

Artists always tell you where the future is going before we get there.

Sure.

And NFTS was, it wasn't about just about the beauty of the art and the tokenization and the provenance and the transferability and the democratic. It was the first asset that was truly put on chain that you trusted, that you knew there was only one of each, that you knew who had it and you know when it was minted and you could finance, you can lean against it, you can pledge it, you can do whatever. So guess what? Artists did their job. They showed us where the world was going. So to me, I'm very grateful because that's how we learn what was going on. And then we found companies like Figure who tokenize most of the mortgages that you get. HELOCs right now, they're the biggest tokenizer in America. Then you had the circles of the world and the tethers tokenizing dollars and there's like 10 more coming behind them. Now you have Robinhood tokenizing stocks. So I think the problem with mortgages is that they don't move that much. Out of all the financial assets, they probably transfer themselves 10 times in your lifetime, maybe five, maybe you buy a home, you have it for. So it's not the lowest hanging fruit need of a tokenized asset, even though it's a great asset to tokenize. But I think we're going to get there because right now the SEC and the other regulators have put the real rules in place to see tokenization and the best organizations you're not going to see, you're not going to realize their tokens. But suddenly you're going to be able to click, make two clicks and get a mortgage against this and you're going to be able to do one more click and swap to another mortgage issuer and not miss a beep on your payments or in your servicing those. That's what the consumer is going to see. That's what the consumer is going to see with Robinhood talking about his stocks. You're going to have the same UX experience and just trade stocks anywhere in the world not knowing that they're tokenized. And that's where we get super excited because we're just at the beginning of that ecosystem, which is probably like growing up again in the 1970s when you're about to create electronic payment traffic source.

How, how have you thought about the investability of stablecoins as a category when it feels like a feature for so many of the companies that you've already backed? I know you, I know you guys did Privy, which recently sold to Stripe, but that bet.

That bet, yeah, he did both.

What was the other one?

Bridge.

Oh, there you go.

It sounds like we don't told the Stripe that we're shareholders, we love them. We're good friends with Patrick and John and the whole team and Will. We told them that we felt that we were their core dev team because the two investments we did in stablecoin infrastructure, they took out of our plates in less than a year.

Yeah, Wild.

But yeah. So you made some infrastructure bets. Are there consumer bets that you see going forward? I know there's a bunch of different potential use cases, but again, it's so easy for an existing company to add stablecoins and they already have the distribution and the customer network to quickly service.

Yeah. So it's a great question, Jordy. We've been trying to find, we've been looking worldwide for consumer applications that start with stablecoins first. As a user experience, we haven't found one that will say this is the way it's going to work to scale globally at a scale that matters. So that's why we have back in much more the infrastructure providers of all these schemes because they feel like they have a lot more growth potential than the consumer side. But I think we're just starting, I think now we're starting to see the beginning of agentic experiences with crypto, Rails and AI with agents. And I think in that intersection we're going to find native stablecoin Retail brands that are going to provide services that you don't expect. So we've been investing a lot there in learning. We've been testing ourselves a lot there. We have our own thesis on how it's going to work so we're actually building some of them and learning. But we expect to see entrepreneurs worldwide working around them in the very near future. My guess is in the next year we will be surprised to find a few already.

Well, when we. When you come back on, and hopefully you'll come back on many more times between now and then. But I'm assuming in 2030 we'll have the same conversation again. And you got every single new stablecoin pure play that mattered. What about on the issuer side? I feel like the big now that stablecoins have clear regulation, it seems like we'll see a lot more people start to issue them. Is that needed? Do you see use cases or are USDC and the tethers like providing kind of enough value right now?

I think people underestimate how important the Tether brand is worldwide. I think when you, when you are in Argentina or in Venezuela or you're in Indonesia, they don't even say usdt, they just call it Tether. Right. And I think Tether has a chance to be a really global brand that most people will under imagine the scale of it. Circle has a great reputation, institutional side, but we're super early. I mean, think about it. We're only $250 billion into stablecoins. We should be in $2 trillion in the next year or a year and a half or two. And if we're not there, something's off. So for that we'll probably need like 5, 7, 10 more names. Now you're not going to care as a user, to be honest. You may have a preference. I remember growing up, my parents and us, to save money from inflation in Venezuela, every Friday we walked to the bank branch and we bought travel checks. And it was a way of saving, which is literally the same as stablecoins today. And those travel checks in the era you could buy American Express travel checks, you can buy Thomas cook, which were MasterCard travel checks. And there was another third brand, I forget, I didn't care which one we got. All I care was getting the dollars and being able to save. So I think but over time I remember my family's cue to American Express travel checks. For whatever reason, it had like a better recognition brand. So I think we're still in the early days of that and that's going to happen and I think we're going to see 5 to 10 and we're going to see the incumbents issuing their own token and stable coins. And now the bridges of the world are going to be super important because they're going to be the bridges to connect all of them, no matter what what, what you're doing and it's going to be very simple to solve. So my guess is five brands in the next five years.

Wow.

Great, Great.

Very exciting.

This was awesome.

Yeah, thanks so much.

You're a legend.

Hopping on.

Come back on again soon.

Guys are doing amazing job. We've been following your show and congratulations. It's really fun and you bring super fresh content and news and people to the show.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Mickey. Talk again soon. Looking forward to it.

Bye. Up next, we have Casey neistat, recently.

The YouTuber, the creator.

He's retro now, working on the Chromatic, which we've been playing in the studio, working on the M64. How you doing, Casey?

There he is.

Gentlemen, good to see you.

Welcome to the stream. What's new in your world? How did the. Are those the nothing Year one. So give us a little review.

Oh, yeah, these are fantastic. I had to take them off because the noise canceling on these is, it's, it's like too good. And I'm at home right now and my kids were screaming two seconds ago. But yeah, these things are fantastic.

Yeah, we had Carl pay on the show a week ago and he put them down and I was like, I was too afraid to ask, like, oh, are those for me? Like, are you going to leave those for me? I kind of want those. I need a new pair. I'll have to pick.

You know what it is? I'm not enough of an audio file to know what if something sounds good or not. Like it's either good or it's not good.

Yep.

But physical switches, like buttons you can touch.

Yeah.

I really like. And the, like the apple. I don't know what they're called. What are their AirPod AirPod Maxes.

Yeah, AirPod Maxes.

There's no on off switch.

Yeah. Like I change digital crown.

I need an on off switch and you have that.

I like your tactile key. Yeah. Are you, are you big teenage engineering guy? It feels like kind of like that they're almost coining like a trend that's like becoming more mainstream now.

Teenage engineering is the only company whose products I buy religiously, even though I have no idea how to use any of them.

The Same thing happened to me. I bought the little kids. Like, I'm a musician now. Couldn't figure out how to make a song.

I use it.

I love it. It's amazing.

Looks good on a desk.

Beautiful.

It's so beautiful.

Like, someone that cares that much about the craft, I want to be part of that.

Support them unconditionally. Yeah. So tell me about mod retro. How'd that come together? What is the news in your world?

You know, the mod retro thing is really funny because my video says all this, but, like, I'm a big retro gamer. I'm guilty of sometimes playing Call of Duty on my Xbox, but it doesn't work out. When you got a wife who kids.

You'Re not being guilty. Every man should have an allocation of time daily for Call of Duty. You know, getting on rust. Getting on rust with your boys.

Yeah.

So close to that W. And then the door comes flying open, the children come running in. It's challenging. But I'm 44, so, like, apex of video games for me was, like, 1989, I think, getting a Game Boy. The first year they came out for my grandmother for Christmas. And, like, you guys are younger than me. But before that, all we had were those, like, LED LCD games that were, like, really janky, like the Tiger games, and they were terrible. And the first time I turned on the Game Boy and, like, saw the Nintendo come down, I was like, holy, this is such a moment. And then Nintendo 64 came out. When I was. I was, like, just getting into high school as a freshman. We used to sneak out of high school, get on the city bus, like, the regular bus, and then drive two towns across and then walk a mile and a half to Toys R Us to sit in Toys R Us, play the demo of Mario 64. When that thing came out, I think it was in 94. So I was 12 or 13 years old.

Yeah.

So I love that stuff. And mod retro. When I first learned about it, when I first learned about the Chromatic, their Game Boy, I thought it was really stupid. I didn't understand because you can get those Chinese ones off of Amazon for 50 bucks. And a friend of mine was like, no, this is great. They're doing great things. Do you want to talked to Palmer about it? And I'm a huge Palmer lucky fan. And I was like, I'd love to. And I don't know that I've ever been evangelized so much in my life. Like, by the end of that call, he didn't just convince me, but I was like, I felt like an idiot for not seeing what Mod Retro was. And then as I got to know Torin, who. Who is the. The CEO of Mod Retro and understand the vision for the company, I was just so, like, overwhelmed. I was like, this is the most, like, beautiful vision ever. I don't understand the business of it. It makes no sense to me. But the fact that these guys have the guts to do this, like, can I be a part of it? And I think I pitched back to them what I understood the company was. And they're like, that's it. That's what we want to say. And I was like, all right, give me a job. And my job will be to figure out how to communicate that. And we'll make videos and stuff. And they're like, sure, but we're not going to pay you. And I was like, great, I'll take a business card. And it's been great working with it. I'm also. I'm an investor in Mod Retro. I have a vested interest in them succeeding, but, I mean, that's not the. That's not where the passion to be a part of what they're up to comes from, for me.

Yeah. So many places we can go with this. This is fantastic. What? Yeah. Do you think that there's a world. I mean, that. I love the handheld gaming stuff. My experience having kids was I stop playing console games. The N64 was actually my first console ever. And. But once I started kids, what was your game? Super Mario 64, for sure. GoldenEye was big, big head, Golden Gun. You got to do that. And then a couple other Donkey Kong and was never really into the Mario Kart Racers, but then Smash Brothers kind of took over, and that was the real competition with everyone. Eventually.

I think what's exciting to me is, like, building new, new consumer hardware that will still turn on and work and bring joy 20 years from now. I had. I had the. The game. I have, like, my Game Boy Pikachu edition from growing up, and I. When Mod Retro came out, I went and found it and I turned it on and it worked.

Yeah.

And that was, like, such an amazing moment for me because, like, when, like, I haven't. I've got old iPhones lying around. I've never been like, not one. I've never been like, oh, I should turn that on. It's going to be fun, right? Because it's like, it's not evergreen. It was of the moment, and you just move on. And so I think if Mod Retro can do anything, which is like, make Consumer hardware, which is so disposable today across all these different categories and make it so that, yeah, you're going to get your mod retro or your M64 this year and then you're going to turn it on in 30 years and bridge generations.

Yeah, you know, it's, I think there's, there's, it's easy to sort of shit on planned obsolescence because it is real. I think of that like we woke up, my house woke up this morning at 7:30am because the refrigerator repairman finally showed up and was banging on our door at 7:30 in the morning. The dog was freaking out because our two year old refrigerator doesn't work. And this is a refrigerator that has WI fi.

There we go. And let's give it up for WI Fi.

Everybody's always doesn't work.

It doesn't work. And when I think about that, it's like the refrigerator that we had as kids with the one big heavy aluminum door, like it just worked. It worked forever. But in order to keep selling, you have to keep coming out with new things. And I think that's the negative of planned obsolescence. But I think when it comes to consumer technology there is an argument for having to keep up with the rate of innovation. You know, like new phones that come out. Every time you get a new phone it does do something that your other phone didn't. So there's maybe a reason for that. But I think with that sort of tidal wave of innovation that feels faster now than it ever felt when I was young, I think we lose some great things. And you know, my understanding of mod retro, at least what I want it to be. And I think what Palmer and what Torin also want it to be is like let's identify consumer electronics that people just love, like had an unbelievable relationship with. They really like the love I had for my Game Boy. I don't know that there was another thing that I owned through my adolescence that I treasured more than my Game Boy. And let's bring them back and let's do them justice. Let's build them so they last forever. I think Palmer's quote when I was interviewing him was, we don't want to build another Game Boy. We want to build the last Game Boy, like the last one that ever needs to be built. And that's the vision with M64 as well. Like you can get emulators that kind of, they kind of work. But let's, let's build the thing that you and I had, John, when we were kids and let's have it last forever. And I just think there's so much romance in that. When you start digging deep, you can start to see products everywhere. And Mod Retro's tiny. A couple people working out of a small office. But the list of products that we want to build, the list of ideas that we have, is endless. And that's a really exciting thing to take on.

It's also such an interesting company because you're trying to recreate things of the past that were good products and you want to improve on them, but you need to stay true to the original product. Otherwise, what do you. I mean, it's not to say that Mod Retro couldn't one day create, you know, novel, totally novel products, but it is like an interesting constraint and challenge and you actually have to. It's really. In some ways it's easy because you know exactly what you need to build, but in other ways it's harder because you're taking a product that was almost perfect in its original form and still like, you need to make should be better. Otherwise, you know, what are you doing?

Yeah, you know, like one interesting challenge and I'm not the right person to speak to this, I'm not the technical guy, but to make the screen match the old Game Boy screen was an exhaustive process. So when you buy one of those handheld emulators that looks like a Game Boy, the Chinese made ones, they have fairly high pixel density screens on them. So in order for them to give the look of an old Game Boy, you're using multiple pixels to emulate a single pixel. So it's inaccurate. And real psychopaths, I'm not one of them, but I appreciate it. Real psychopaths on Twitter have done this super zoom into a pixel and you realize that Mario is like jumping a half a pixel too low or a half a pixel too high within the frame. Because of the limitation of the screen and Torin and Palmer's like, religious obsession with matching that screen was one of the hardest things to overcome. So it was actually harder to build something that matched the quality of a product that's 20 years old than it would be to actually get the latest and greatest screen and just plug it in there.

Yeah, I remember Palmer saying something about, like, a couple of the companies, the screen is actually rotated 90 degrees. So instead of the scan lines coming down this way, they go across this way and then they just transform it at the last second. But it's like this bizarre, bizarre thing that you would never really notice of, but it's this craftsmanship that actually you feel. I feel like. And it feels like something that's just, like, been lost in this. Like, everything's disposable, everything's junk, everything's a knob knockoff culture. And it feels like. I don't know, like, it just feels like it's worth it to have stuff that exhibits craft and taste. And even if I don't, even if I'm not the one that can tell that Mario's one pixel too low when I do the jump, like, the fact that the Craftsman worked on the product means something. It's hard to put an exact quantitative value on it, but you feel it, right?

That is the gamble. That is the company. Palmer said that in my video, but he's like, you know, maybe nobody cares about this, but. But weirdos like you and me, but that's enough. And I think it's like there is an argument that's like, well, who cares if it's off by half a pixel? And if you're one of those people, totally cool, You're. Well, there's plenty of products in the market for you. But if you're someone who does care, if you're that weirdo that buys teenage engineering products because you just value the integrity of the product so much you want to have it, then you know there's a place in this world for companies like Mod Retro.

Yeah. What do you think about the temptation to just make one small change? The Chromatic has a USB C port on it. That's a huge upgrade. But you could easily turn this into. Well, we have the technology to make the M64 handheld, and then you're in Switch territory, and all of a sudden it's a completely different product. Right.

Look that's ever present. And that's the problem with sort of limitless. When Nintendo was building this, what was almost 40 years ago, 35 years ago now, they were so limited by what the technology enabled them to do. Like, when you think about the SEGA game Gear, I don't know if you ever had one of those great product this big, but it was the first one that had really great color screen on it, and it took six AA batteries instead of four, like the Game Boy, but the battery life on it was like 40 minutes.

Yeah. Do you remember the N64, like, expansion pack that you put in to like double the memory?

Yeah, dude, I remember. That was. What about the Rumble pack that shipped Star Fox? That was like the greatest innovation ever. Mind exploded when the controller shook.

Yeah. Do these, like. Like these add ons because, like, they couldn't bake it all into the first product. And.

And that's. That's indicative of the limitations of what tech can do.

Totally.

And when you look at, like, you know, I don't know what. What Samsung announced last week, two weeks ago, it unpacked, and you're looking at what the limitations are today of, like, a folding screen that's as thick as 10 sheets of paper. You realize how far we've come. But when you go in the other direction, but there's kind of no limits, and you're looking to make something that was made 30 years ago. The problem is, like, where do you draw the line? And I think that's a really. It's a really interesting thing to try to overcome and confront.

Yeah. What can you teach me about the lore of. In the video camera world? I was looking at a cool new music video, and it had this fisheye lens and this grain, and I was kind of digging in. It seemed like they shot it on, like, a. A Sony skate camera with mini DV tapes. This feels like something that I was looking like, maybe I could buy one on ebay. But it's probably broken and I want someone to go remake it. But then, of course, you always have, like, oh, you could just throw the filter on there in premiere or whatever. But what are some of the iconic video cameras or just, like, creative tools that might be worth revisiting at some point?

It's such an interesting examination, and your question's great because my family and I are out. We're in Massachusetts for summer vacation, and there's a lot of kids around. Like, we went and got ice cream last night. A lot of teenagers around, and a lot of these kids come up and they ask me for selfies. And the amount of teenagers that come up to me and ask me for selfies, and they're carrying the point and shoots that we had in, like, the 2010s. Like, before your phone camera was good enough. They all carry them. No one makes that camera anymore. Which means if you have one, you have an old one. And every one of these kids has it. And when I ask them, because I'm curious, why do you carry that? They're like, I love the way it looks. And I think we've reached this point. Like, iPhone, cell phone photography, it all looks so perfect in a way that it almost becomes artificial. Like, I think the iPhone5 was the last iPhone where when you took a picture, it just sort of took a picture. And then after that, every time you take A picture. Now, on any modern smartphone, it takes a picture and then runs it through an algorithm to make the picture sweeter and cleaner and sharper and better for you.

You.

And I think there's sort of this yearning for something that feels more real and authentic.

It's like you look at a. You're at a store looking at a picture. You know, a camera from a Picture from. From 2010 or a camera or a picture from an iPhone today is like you're at. You're at the grocery store and there's the organic apples. And they look. They look good, but, like, they're a little fucked up. And, you know, they may be like, whatever part of it's kind of rotten. And then you look over and you see the perfect apple. And like, intuitively you know that you're like, it's a little bit too good to be true, that apple over there, you know? And I think. I don't know. The other thing that's real is removing the camera. Like, adding the camera to the phone has been one of the greatest innovations of this century. Right. In many ways. But now removing it, removing the camera from the phone and being able to leave your phone and just bring a camera around is also an innovation. Right. Going backwards. And I think that's the other thing that kids like. And I found that's nice. If I'm going to the beach with my kids. It's nice to be able to bring a camera but not have my phone.

Yeah. My daughter is 10. This is the first summer she's allowed to walk around with her friends without a parent, and she has a flip phone. And she had this whole argument for getting an iPhone that has nothing on it but the phone and messaging. And my wife and I have this discussion, and the reason why we said, no, it has to be the flip phone is because of the camera. Like, it introduces a new level of sort of attention and why you're in purpose. And the reason why I wanted to have a phone is simply to stay in touch with us. No other reason. But the minute you introduce this other sort of. Of novel aspect of it, it becomes much more of a social dynamic and a social consideration in the way that you're trying to get away from that. But I think just going back to the camera things is such an obsession of mine. I think that we are quick to. Quick to ignore or look past the relationship we have with the aesthetic that a camera yields. And when you see those pictures off those old point and shoots, they look like something specific. Like when you Were talking about that old skateboard fish IDV look. It looks like something specific. You have a relationship with that. When we see stuff that looks like it's VHS, we think of the 80s or the 90s. And I think now there's just sort of this generic aesthetic across the board. This like crispy flat 4k phone thing. And there's this desire to have something that has some sense of identity attached to it. And that's why we're seeing these sort of Gen Z types, you know, looking for older tech that's that reflects more of who they are, more individuality. And I think that's a trend that we're going to see continue.

Yes, this generation's vinyl.

Yeah, I've joked that I want to film, I want to film the first podcast on Panavision film or something. Just spend fortune developing the film.

What other, what other, what other consumer tech categories are you excited about? We're having, we're having the foundation, founder of Wave on and I and I in 20 minutes and they got like 12 million views yesterday for launching like sunglasses that will just live stream constantly.

Do you have a, do you have a ratio of positive to negative mentions in those 12 million views?

I mean I think everybody, people had a viscerally negative reaction to it.

That's my take on it as well. And it makes me think, you know, my software development company, Beam, my startup, we started that company in 2014 and a little known aspect of that company is initially it was built around Google Glass and we actually, you know, we rewrote the code, we rewrote the software that Google Glass ran. So it had a singular function which was you push a button like this, it captures 10 seconds and immediately shares it to your feed. That's where we started with that. And I remember meeting with Google and they were excited about it and they showed us what Google Glass 2 was going to look like and we're like, fuck yeah. We started raising money based on that and then a week later they announced they were killing the entire Google Glass program and we backed off. We're all just doing on the phone now. But I think when you ask about sort of the social impact of being on the live stream all the time or the negative reaction that we're seeing based on Waves video they posted yesterday. I think the social dynamic is something that is often overlooked in the hardware startup world. I think of the humane AI pin. You know, a really good friend of mine worked for, for humane and obviously super excited about new technology. Yeah, Sam, which parenthetically you joke about Panavision for a podcast Sam Sheffer has in his studio for his live streaming setup a VHS camera hardwired into his deck so he can be live streamed from vhs.

That's amazing.

But Sam would be around.

I tried to hire Sam, by the way. We worked with him on a project and I was like, he's way too hot. He's got to be. He's got to be sold.

He's way too big of a deal.

Yeah, Sam's the best.

But when I'd be around him and he had his AI pin on, I was always sort of looking down at that or like, thinking about what I'm saying and uncomfortable about, you know, speaking openly to him. And I think, like, that's what I mean by social implications. Like, you know, my phone is on my couch right here, but if we're sitting together and I'm holding my phone like this the whole time we're talking, you're uneasy about that. And so when I think of a pair of glasses that are live streaming, or at least have the capability of live streaming, the whole time when I look at them, I'm uneasy. And I think of this, maybe the most extreme example of this is Apple Vision Pro, which blew my mind when I got that thing. I made the most glowing video about it because it was the greatest technology I've ever used. But later that night, because I made the video the same day I got them, I'm at home using them and my wife is like, casey, take those fucking things off your face and pay attention to your kids. And I was like, oh, you can't wear these around other people.

Yeah.

And I was like, how did they not see that? And so I think about that because, like, we're sort of accustomed to people using their phones and it's kind of okay. Like, we're used to this. This is not okay. And so when I think about wearables, I think that that is going to be a gigantic thing to overcome, which.

Is, well, the crazy. So Amazon acquired a company, it got announced this week called be, which is a brace. After. After all, everything they face with Siri, Siri's listening to me. The B band just listens to you all day long, Every single conversation. And it. And it's cool. Like, I think all new tech, for the most part is cool. Do I want my team to be wearing a bee bracelet? Are we gonna allow people to wear B bands? This might be a bee free zone.

You know, I'm not gonna have any friends that wear bees. I Don't have any friends anyways. But if you have a bee, it just means, like, we can't hang out.

Yeah.

Because it makes. It makes me uncomfortable. And look, I think there's an argument. It's like, get over it. Like, you fucking Luddite. Like, this is the direction everything's headed and you're being recorded all the time anyway.

Sure.

But in the interim, I do think, like, there is a. There's a learning curve. I think that Meta's decision to put wearable glasses with a camera on them in Ray Bans, the most common sunglasses in the world, was brilliant because we're all familiar with this pair of sunglasses. Like, there was no learning curve. There was no, like, what's that thing on your face? We know what it is. I think how emphatic they are about having the indicator light. There's no way you can turn it off. If you cover it. They don't record. There's some degree at least.

There's my question. My question for the Wave founder in 20 minutes is, should your glasses be bright red and have, like, you know, a circle in the middle of your head that's flashing that says, I'm recording?

Yeah. I mean, if you.

So that people can.

Someone shows up with a TV camera. Like, I don't feel like, oh, this is in violation of my privacy. I'm like, I know exactly what's going on. The news is here, and if I step in front of the camera, I'm on the news. Like, it. We have a social understanding of that.

And still might not want to be around it. Yeah.

Actually, I'm going to turn around and walk the other way because I don't want to be seen on this camera or whatever. I don't know.

But there's an understanding there. Yeah. And look on Waves website in the Q and A, there's a question like, is there an indicator light? And their answer is, yeah, but you can turn it off. And so, like, I, you know, I don't know that I read that. And it makes me a little bit queasy as a guy who has a camera on him all the time. And so much of the videos that I've made is about filming everyone in the whole world around me. I still think there's something honest about having that camera on your shoulder, pointing a camera at someone, versus, like, you know, the glass hole movement of the, you know, Google Glass, which, like, by having this on your face, everyone was uneasy around you. I think it's gonna be a big hurdle to overcome as we eventually, like, figure out what this hardware AI future is going to look like.

Yeah. What do you think about, like, airplane demos? It feels like all. There's so much tactics where the demo is like, you'll love this on an airplane. The Apple Vision Pro is a great example a lot of the. A lot of the handheld, but it.

Doesn'T work when it's dark.

It's not too dark on planes. It does work very well on planes, but it's this, like, weird niche use case that feels like killer application. And then you actually get out into. Most of your life is not spent on airplanes usually.

And so, yeah, look, if that's the best you've got, like, I travel more than most people I know, and we're still talking about, you know, maybe double digits, maybe. Maybe 10 hours a month. Month tops.

Yeah.

So, you know, 4,000 bucks for a face computer that I use 10 hours a month on an airplane. Which, by the way, doesn't work for me on an airplane. Like, I didn't like it at all.

Okay.

No, no. When you're on an airplane, you're surrounded by strangers.

Yeah. Yeah.

So the idea that, like, I'm just gonna go like that and watch Avatar with all these people around me, you know, I don't fly Spirit that often, but I have flown Spirit, and I know it goes on and on flights. Like, it just.

Again, you live to tell the tale.

Yeah. The social implication of it, you know, I think if that's the best you've got, then maybe, you know, maybe you're not thinking holistically enough about your. About your hardware.

Yeah.

How do you. How do you spot talent? You. You discovered Sam. Someone in the chat was asking. That's a great question. You have a framework for it.

It's a difficult question, but, you know, it's the same. I approach it the same way that I approach investments. And it's seldom the work, and it's almost always the individual, you know? Like, I think Sam is brilliant, but he's brilliant at everything that he does. He's brilliant with the work that. Humane. He's brilliant. The work that he did at the Verge before that. He's brilliant with his own YouTube channel. I've got a dear friend of mine, a kid named Hunter, who works in the building with me, but Hunter's a.

Friend and we invest here together. So Hunter's.

Hunter's fantastic. And, like, I don't know what Hunter does, because every time I have a conversation with him, he's starting some new business or some new endeavor, like the work is almost irrelevant. It's the individual. And I think it's like it's that mentality that you have or you don't have. Not everyone has it. I do think maybe you can get it if you don't have it. But when I see that in people, I. I have a tendency to sort of gravitate towards those people.

People.

And when I look at the. When I look around at the friends of mine that I have some sort of professional relationship with, a professional admiration for, they all have that thing that. That sort of desire to. To see it through, whatever the it may be. So, you know, I guess the short answer is like, it's always the person, never the. Never the product.

That's great. Hunter's in the chat, by the way. He says hello. The. Another question I have is we've been thinking about AI generated images. Video, et cetera, is getting so good. If it stays at this pace, you're going to be able to generate characters consistently. You're already seeing this on Instagram, people just creating entire personalities for influencers in different verticals. Do you have any type of strong thesis around how. How that will play out? If we're going to have sort of organic influencers, regular humans, and then, you know, these synthetic pros and cons I've been thinking about in the context of, you know, an example is like, I don't want the AI Andrew Huberman. I want Andrew Huberman to get health advice from. Because I know Andrew and I trust that he's making the best decisions and studying, you know, and making, you know, these recommendations and understands the weight of that. And you have like a synthetic Andrew Huberman in five years doesn't care if he convinces a million people to do something dumb with their health because he can just shut the account down and turn a new one on. But I'm curious how you think.

Yeah, okay. My cynical take on it, which is. Which I believe is accurate, I'd wager that this is accurate, is that it's a tidal wave that none of us will. We'll be able to overcome. We can hold our breath for a while. It is a tidal wave. And I wish I had a better analogy, but it's a little bit like, you know, when Toy Story came out in 1999, it was the first computer animated feature film. And it was great. I loved it. But then five, six years later, there was just this, you know, onslaught of computer animated films. And I was like, you know what? The hand drawn stuff is better. I miss that. When CGI first started getting introduced into films, I was like, no, practical is better. I like practical better. That's going to be the thing. And it's like, no, you're going to lose. And I think AI is probably the most existential version of that. I think that it's just going to be so good that it's going to become irrelevant. And old people like us might appreciate real human things and we might keep it alive. But the generation behind us, my children, when they see hand drawn animation, they're like, what is this? They don't care. It means nothing to them. So I think it's just going to get so good that it really doesn't matter. And that that tidal wave is going to consume everything. And I think that we're, it's the progress that we've seen in the last couple of years of how good it is and how quickly it's developing is incredible. But when you look at the capabilities of, you know, the latest GROK and the latest GPT, you look at how smart these things are, you look at the sort of conversations you can have with any of agents and then you look at how good the images that can be spit out by, you know, Google's video or whichever, whichever AI you might be fond of. It's like they're just going to marry really, really quickly. And I think five or six years from now we're going to start to see real sort of erosion in the space because what they're delivering is going to be so good. You know, like another example is like, we haven't had a number one song yet that's completely AI generated, but it's going to come out of nowhere. It's going to feel like Gangnam Style, which like, the novelty of it allows us to dismiss the lack of humanity that this song has. The first AI song that's going to be a number one hit is not going to be a Bob Dylan esque song that comes from the soul. It's going to be something fun and outrageous and we're going to forgive that AI made it. And then slowly it's going to start to chip away. But I think it is a losing battle. And the optimistic take on that is I think that there is going to be an extreme premium but on the humans that are able to sustain because of what they represent uniquely. Maybe another bad analogy is it's like, I love Marvel movies, they're fucking fantastic. But as far as cinema goes, there's an argument that said was like those kind of artistry that we saw in the 70s or 80s, like the apex of cinema, where it comes from one. When you think of a Tarantino movie, you think of, you know, a truly great filmmaker with a voice. Marvel movies are something else. Yeah, they're fucking great and we love them. We all show up to see them and we're okay with that. And I think that's going to happen with AI but it's going to happen at a rate of acceleration that we've never encountered before. And it's going to be so good that we're willing to forgive it. And I think it's going to leave a handful of people out there. Maybe Andrew Hueman will be one of them. I hope so. I'm a fan of his as well. But it will put an extreme premium on the sort of human voices that are distinctly human, that distinctly represents something that AI could never. When you look at the landscape of media, a lot of that shit could be replaced by AI.

So the power law gets steeper.

Yeah, absolutely.

Makes sense.

Well, that's like a five hour conversation, by the way.

Well, we'll have you back on again soon and congrats on your new, your new fake but very real role at Mod Retro.

I appreciate it. Thanks for the time, guys.

Yeah, have fun in Massachusetts. We'll talk soon.

We'll talk soon.

Take care.

Bye.

Air horn for Casey.

Up next, we have Alex from Bright AI coming in the studio. But let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions, folks. Interesting, interesting. What else do we need to cover today? There are a bunch of posts we've been through, but we have our next guest here in the studio. We will welcome him in. How you doing?

Welcome, Alex. What's happening?

Hey, guys, thanks for having me on.

Yeah, thanks for hopping on. Give us an intro. Break down who you are, what you do for everyone who's listening.

Yeah, so I'm CEO and founder of brightai. We build physical AI AI solutions for all the sort of essential services that society can't live without. So things like energy grid, power supply, water infrastructure, H Vac, pest control and all those things. So we have a platform that lets you kind of real time observe this distributed physical infrastructure in the world and solves a bunch of the problems that people have in those industries in terms of like labor shortages, break down in the aging infrastructure, sustainability challenges, all those things.

Is the customer more government focused or private companies?

They're private companies now. It sort of touches everything, you know, these These services, obviously every, everybody alive is a consumer of these things, you know. And as a result of that there's plenty of government involvement, but they tend to be owned privately in the US So big utility companies, service providers, you know, pest control operators, like all different sorts of companies. And then you've got this crossover interest with the national interests and so on as well.

Where's the strain? The worst right now across those different areas or like where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain?

It's pretty severe everywhere. So like the US has got a, you know, if you grade the infrastructure, it's like a C minus or a D. So most of the critical infrastructure was built, you know, just before and after World War II. And it's like of course, like typical American plan with a 20 year lifespan. We'll figure it out afterwards. And now it's just, you know, in a lot of places it's like really held together with duct tape and wire. And so if you look at all those industries, you have this aging infrastructure and then you have labor force, like a systemic labor problems because older technicians are aging out and sort of it's a bigger economy now, I guess. You know, it's still cool work to do, but younger workers are just not signing up for the journey to be a, you know, 25 year time horizon, to be a master technician in these spaces. So all of it's crushing. I mean to give one example would be like water infrastructure. Like 30% of the water we clean up leaches back out into the environment due to leaks in the pipes everywhere. Like my town has wooden pipes, if you could believe that.

It's crazy.

I mean it's, I know about, I know about all the lights, lead pipe that, that our country depends upon to deliver water to, to homes, which is concerning. But wood pipes a good thing.

It feels like an aqueduct. I'm, I'm down. Give me a wood pipe. It's probably safer. I don't know, it's like something, a beef, I don't know.

But it's, it's bad. It like the fresh water's leaching out and the bad stuff is leaching in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, so you're active in a bunch of different industries. What is like, like what does it go to market been? What does even the sales cycle look like? Is this you coming to these owners of these various assets and saying like we're going to help you leverage AI and it. And it's looks like, you know, kind of Palantir's forward deployed model. Are you doing something different?

Yeah, it's in that zone. I mean we bootstrapped through the first 100 million in revenue. So it was like I was trying to figure out that path.

Path through path to we need a word for bootstrapping to $100 million run rate and then, and then raising some capital later. But it needs its own. Maybe it's Hawkinson's. Hawkinson's model, something like that.

There you go.

Well, I've raised too early a bunch of times before so I can like give warnings to other founders but believe you should raise capital when you got the pattern figured out. But I had to figure out that go to market. All the beginning stuff was through private equity firms. So it turns out that they're you know, private equity kind of sits and, and basically owns all the service companies that service this infrastructure and so and they're also very aligned with like five to seven year cycles where they want to drive change like big EBITDA growth and change these in these industries. And so that's where all of our first customers have come from. So we work with a lot of the biggest private equity firms as sort of their, their secret weapon for physical AI.

Yeah, yeah. What's the latest news on the fundraising side?

Yeah, so we, we just raised a 51 million dollar a.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Co led by Khosla Ventures and inspired capital and we picked those guys because you know, cosmic coastal super badass. They were the first and earliest check in OpenAI big lean forward into sort of the future of abundance Erie there and then inspired as a lot of people don't know about. But a New York based firm, they're deep in infrastructure specifically and super great founder operators and all that. So it's good.

Do you think the company will always be a software. More of a software provider. Is there a world in the future where you guys would just, just actually buy and operate the underlying asset if you felt like you could do it better than other players in the market?

It's a good question. We provide a lot of software and hardware today. So our platform combines IoT devices, we have sensors and robots and these wearables that you put on the frontline workers and it ties all this crazy distributed infrastructure into one big physical AI learning loop, if that makes sense. We found some industries like are more efficient than others. But like the most efficient one we found, like give you an example is like 50% of the time they send a technician out, there's nothing to see.

That's the most, the Most efficient, we.

Found a lot of them are like 90% of the time you send somebody out, there's nothing to, there's nothing to do, but you still keep going in case it goes really bad. And so, you know, I think in some of those industries where you get. We're seeing 90 plus percent productivity gain that might be so disruptive that we actually have to come in and just buy and operate assets directly to sort of make the value unlock happen in the biggest way. But we'll see. Right now we partner deeply with these operators. It's a great way to go fast.

I was actually a customer of your previous company, SmartThings. What's the through line? What are the lessons that you Learned from the first IoT company to new IoT devices? What are the biggest learning lessons from that story, man?

Well, you're, you're welcome. And sorry, I guess that where it landed for you, but SmartThings was amazing. It was, you know, we grew it to. Today it's like 500 million households. It's, you know, more than 2 billion connected devices. Pretty big platform all over the world. I guess what I learned. So I learned a lot about scaling and sort of making IoT work. You know, it's, it's matured a lot since then. And so, you know, those things are good. I think I, I feel like I was solving the wrong problem, though. So my wife hated the. Not to say this in a bad way, but she like progressively hated the company more the more time went on. Like, like wants regular light switches and stuff. Like, she doesn't stop.

That was my, that was my experience. Like, I, it was like magical. And then slowly, like little like, like hiccups creep in and those like the expertise, expectations of software and hardware or modern technology are that it's perfect because it's a computer and it's a robot.

I had to market.

Wrong market.

You know, it's not a big enough problem.

Yeah, exactly. I'd love your take on Sonos. We've been talking about Sonos a ton. What do you think they need to do to make the app open faster? I opened the Sonos app. It takes me 90 seconds to adjust the volume and I'm like, I don't know how I haven't churned. Maybe I should, but I'll be negative on Sonos.

But I've gone through two, like, hopeful waves of buying it completely in my house, and then eventually, same thing, and it's in the orphan stage right now. I think I just donated a bunch of like, great Gear.

Okay. Yeah.

It's the most. They have like the best sound and all that stuff. But talk about, like missing the software opportunity, like every stage in the company.

Totally.

And you know, I just don't see, you know, it's sort of. Alexis sort of faded out in a way. Apple home, it's not going anywhere. The Google home stuff hasn't really. Like, Sonos has this opportunity to like, own. They could be the thing that like unlocks things like chat GPT.

Well, yeah, John's idea.

My idea was Sonos is trading at what, like 1 billion market cap or something? Yeah, my idea was OpenAI literally buys.

They ship like 5 million devices.

They ship a tiny device. Devices. And OpenAI has fantastic engineers. Whatever the engineering problem is, they can fix it. I believe. I don't know. It's a while. It's a wild theory.

License Scarlet's voice this time and like, you know.

Properly.

Not the dumbest crackpot theory we've ever come up with, but we will leave the wild riffing to the next one. Thank you so much for hopping on.

Congratulations to you and the team. Really, really tremendous progress.

Great news. Good luck out there again in the future. We'll talk to you soon.

Talk soon.

Have a good one. And up next, we have Chris from Waves coming in the studio.

Some phonic labs went viral yesterday. We should play his video maybe before he joins.

Let's try to pull up the video that went viral about Waves. The. The glasses. Okay, I'm hearing it. Let's bring it up. Let's see it.

This is a spot.

The cinematography on the startup ads is getting insane. It feels like noise cancellation. It sounds like the audio's switching a banana. Get the out. So when he's tapping, it is he's starting a live stream or just taking a clipping. Clipping. Oh, clipping. I'm not late, am I? Wait, this is. This is beam. This is what Casey neistat was describing. 10 seconds or.

Yeah. The bar for startup launch videos is concept 10x.

It's insane.

Getting Project X vibes. You remember that movie?

Yeah, yeah. Your average, like, public company has trouble producing marketing videos at this level. Whoops. Like, this is remarkable. There we go. Whoa. Now we're getting into FPV hardcore.

Henry, somebody just pulled a gun at a house party. I guess.

Wild. Yeah. If you have a life like that, maybe you do need to be recording all the time. Does she have it on too? Is it recording me? Oh, there you go. Okay. Oh, records. Okay, cool. Well, let's bring him in. I'M excited to talk to him about waves. Welcome.

What's going on? The man, the man that kicked the hornet's nest. How you doing?

How's the last foot?

How's the last 24 hours?

I mean, a lot wild, man. Yeah, it's amazing. It's really, really awesome.

Just before we start. Sorry, are you recording this?

No, no, no.

Okay, you can, you're live.

We're recording, we're recording it.

Yeah.

No, these are cosmetic. They, they, they're not, not, not live.

So, yeah, this is kind of like a typical hardware pre launch vision statement, collect pre orders and then start manufacturing, I assume.

Yep.

Very cool. What, what was the key takeaway? What was the good response? What was the stuff that you think you need to address? How has the overall response been? What have you, like, learned? What did you expect? Versus surprised you?

So I'll talk about the good and the bad. I think, you know, we have hundreds of creators in our inbox right now. It is really popping off. I mean, I think, you know, Twitter is very much like a tech forward audience, but even with that, I think with the virality, we were really able to lock in our ICP here. We have some of the biggest names in IRL that want to work with us. I can't name names right now, but it is very exciting. The downside, I mean, like, I think, I think we got a lot of feedback about privacy and, you know, I think we're, we're still pretty set on our stance here. Like, we're going to ship with an indicator light, but in the conversations that we had with content creators, a lot of them emphasize the fact that, like, you know, they, they want something that allows them to capture candid, authentic moments because those go the most viral. And if in certain situations that means them being able to disable the light, we want to give that option to them.

So.

Yeah, and that's distinctly. We were just talking with Casey Neistat. He said that if you try to cover the indicator light on the meta ray bans, that stops filming. Yeah. And so do you think part of your opportunity is that you're willing to go and do something that Zuck. Zuck won't counter positioned?

I think so. Like, I mean, I don't think meta realizes where the puck is going. I think they're, they're way too focused on like adding AI and waveguide displays and trying to go after a bigger market that we don't really know is going to fully adopt just yet. What we're seeing now is like the Most retentive Ray Bans users are content creators. And what are they doing? They're posting social content on Reels and TikTok. They're posting prank videos, Riz videos, like social interactions, interviews, things like that. Right. And all of them that we talk to are just like, we want to take this and we want to go live. Like, instead of me flirting with somebody on a short clip, I want to actually live stream a date and have chat tell me what to say and what to do. Right. So we just want to be able to enable those kinds of content to exist.

How is the actual live streaming infrastructure. I assume this pairs with your iPhone somehow passed to some sort of stream key to Twitch or whatever? Yeah, exactly.

It's just rtmp. So we stream to the phone and then phone streams to either the streamer's back end and then to Twitch or kick or just straight to the streaming service.

Yeah. Is there any, like, pushback from Apple on this type of thing? Are they pretty open with those particular APIs?

It's effectively just a camera.

Yeah.

There are apps that exist already that let you do this just.

Yeah. Which is a different camera. Yeah.

What about the. How do you evaluate, like, the technical risk? The glasses look great and they look really tiny. You're trying to pack a lot in there. Maybe the actual quality of the video matters less early than just the ability to have that FPV view.

So I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to hit a pretty similar quality to a meta Ray Bans or a meta Oakley. We have good connects in Shenzhen that have set us up with some really good, good suppliers. And, you know, I think, like, if. If the issue is like, can we fit it in these frames? The answer is yes. Like, the way we've sized it is. Is kind of unique in that I almost call these like the hockey stick temples because we keep it thin in the front and then like thicker in the back. So PCB internal battery and then swappable battery.

So yeah, two different batteries. You can swap one and then swap the other and then swap the one and then swap the other.

So there's only one swappable battery, but we'll pack it with two. So like, while. While you're using one, the other one's charging. So you can just flip flop and it's hot swappable. So you don't have to stop your stream.

You don't have to stop your stream because there's enough battery juice in the actual glasses that when you take the battery out, you have A minute to swap the next one or something.

Exactly.

That makes a ton of sense.

What were you doing before this?

So I originally started this company with my co founder to do sub vocal speech recognition. We did a lot of stuff with like Neurotab and just like ML research. And I think we were caught in this loop where like we wanted to make a cool gadget, but we were way too research focused and not market focused and we just decided to do a full 180. And just like, you know, I'm very inspired by what Roy Lee has done and what Avi has done with their products and I just think that like you know, really focusing on a retentive user so ie a content creator, but then also making a gadget that's just cool and nice to wear and doesn't look like a super bulky thing and just, I think that's, that's the goal for me.

So sub vocal. So you were thinking like hardware device that I can whisper and it picks up what I'm saying or just mouth out words. Yeah, just mouth out words. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Interesting.

How much did you spend on the launch video? That is very well produced.

That thing looks amazing.

So I mean we have a, we have the next Spielberg on our team, man. Donald is, is an amazing individual. We, we actually filmed it in Canada. So for context, my co founder and I were both Canadian. We filmed it in Vancouver. It was around, I'd say USD, like maybe 50, 60.

Okay. Wow.

Solid.

Yeah, I mean it looks like super bowl quality.

Well, yeah. And there's so many different actors. I'm assuming you just like actually had to hire a bunch of people.

Now none of the footage is from the same sensor that will be in the actual camera. So there'll probably be some sort of disconnect there. But hopefully people are happy with the final sensor. Do you have any goals? Like, you know, we shoot on FX3s. I like the full frame look. I like a 12 megapixel, you know, 4K. Obviously can't stuff all that into, you know, something the size of a little smartphone camera. Where are the breakpoints in terms of quantitative metrics for a camera to get good enough that people will actually share it? Because even with the meta Ray bans, the pictures and images I was taking and videos, they weren't jumping out to me as like, yeah, these are really great to post right now.

Yeah, I think a big thing with the metas is just image stabilization. Like if you're like walking around while you're taking the Video. There's almost like a bobbing effect and I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. Low light is another thing. I mean you're kind of working against the volume that you have to fit the sensor. So you're already constrained with how much light that you can actually capture.

But you know that dark party scene you filmed, that would be extremely rough, dude. Kind of a wild choice. Not the sunny day, but it tells a better story. So I get why you did it and obviously this stuff will get better. But there are like laws of physics around. Like you just can't fit a medium format sensor in a pair of glasses unless it's an eye patch. Maybe, maybe that's the future. Maybe put the full sensor right there.

What. How do you expect the. What do you expect the go to market to look like? I imagine you could partner with a bunch of just big streamers and really focus on delivering value for them. And then if it working well for them, then you would have like the next hundred thousand people ready to go. Is that how you're thinking?

That's exactly what we're doing. So we're already talking to big IRL streamers about partnerships. We're going to Shenzhen in a couple of weeks just to get the beta device ready and then we're gonna test it on 100 different creators and just get their feedback iterate improve the user experience. And then we were trying to do mass production Q1 next year and I think there's kind of just an infinite marketing glitch here. It's like if we give these streamers early access to just show what this kind of content can look like, it'll just inspire other creators and wannabe creators to buy this product.

Yeah. Is there.

I feel like there's like gonna be a whole new, like you could create a whole new class of IRL creators. I could imagine somebody that's high, they just do hiking or they just ski or they, you know, they. And I'm sure people do that already. But if you make it really truly seamless. And I can imagine creators that yeah. Are more like the like, like these like ambient videos and music on YouTube.

Where there's not really Study with me.

Yeah.

Type of thing. Yeah, yeah. Kind of crossover.

We'll get it set up. We'll get glasses on Ben, our producer. We'll have a Ben Cam feed.

Awesome.

Hey, would love to send you a.

Pair when we have one.

Yeah, for sure. On. On kind of like pricing and technology. One thing that I thought was Interesting about the Vision Pro was that it was like almost an order of magnitude more expensive than the Quest. But it was very clear that Apple was able to spare no expense, get the best screen and they jumped forward a lot in terms of just quality. Didn't really hit the mark in terms of retention but when I think about a streamer, most people who are doing it professionally, spending $3,000 on a Sony camera is totally reasonable. Is there a world where instead of metas, Ray Bans are in the couple hundred dollar mark, you go to a couple thousand dollars and you're buying and you're providing a more prosumer, more professional level product and that actually acts as differentiation and then maybe you go down the price ladder over time. Are you looking into that? Is that, is that even something you could do? Oh absolutely.

Like I think right now we're going to stay sort of like in the mid market but we, we would ideally want to find like bigger like creator groups and like, I mean like imagine like I could almost imagine having like a super Pro version that's like 1500 $2000 and like Mr. Beast uses it for beast games. You get the POV of like every single contestant in Beast Games. Dude, that would go crazy. And like I, I, that's something I would really want to see.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean people do that with like the head mounted GoPros. It's a little bit awkward and just a little land as well but, but you can get great footage out of a, out of a GoPro bounded to your forehead if you're racing around. Interesting. Anything else Jordy?

No, this is great. Thanks. Thanks for jumping on. Congrats on the launch. I think a lot of the people, a lot of people's like concerns are real but I think there's ways around it and it ultimately will just come down to how individual people choose to use the tech, the technology. Like there's going to be people that use this to live stream privately for their grandma grandma so they, the grandma can feel like they're hanging out with the grandkids and there's a bunch, there's so many like use cases that are.

Really, there are people right now who use the cameras in their iPhones to violate people's privacy at Coldplay concerts. Yeah, like that happens. So we have to deal with that again.

Yes, it's not a device problem. I think it's more of an actor problem. You have people that are gonna do weird shit and we, we don't condone that. I think we're just Going to focus on creators that want to make. Make genuinely good content. I didn't. I didn't get to see what Casey was saying because I was in another call. But I would love to just pull up to New York this weekend and have a chat with him and show him the frames and get his thoughts if that's something he's interested in. If he still likes the original vision of Beam, I would be more than happy to have a conversation.

Yeah, I'm sure he'd have a ton of interesting feedback that you could incorporate and twist around. Just. It'd be a great meeting of the minds.

There's no question.

Quick, John, just want to say, loved your videos on startups. Like, I would. I would always watch your, like, startup history videos while eating dinner. Like, I. I love a meal in YouTube. So just like, that was. That was.

You should.

You should go back to that at some point. I think it would be really cool.

Yeah.

TVPN is awesome, man.

I love this show.

This is great.

Yeah, we're having a lot of fun.

Thanks, Chris. Well, awesome having you on and good luck with everything. I'm sure. I'm sure your round will be done by the end. End of the week. Knowing how the Valley moves these days. Have fun out there.

Okay, take care, guys.

Talk to you soon. Bye.

Yeah, it all comes down to the device itself is not bad. It's how it gets used. And I think there's a bunch of really cool use cases here. Awesome.

Well, if you want another wearable, go to bezel. GetBezel.com, your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. You know why? You know who needs the original camera on their face? And they can have a Patek Philippe Nautilus condo on the wrist. Condo on the wrist.

An rm, for sure.

For sure. Dude. Brandon Jacoby. We got some trade deal news. He's starting a new decade today. More focused and motivated than ever. It's time to build.

I'm an idiot. I. I was like, you're 30. He's like, no, I'm 29. I'm starting the. I'm starting the 30th year. What he texted me is his birthday. Yeah, no, this is. This was him announcing his birthday.

Okay. I thought he was going. I thought he was going to a different job or something.

I was also very confused. Everybody's confused about your post. Stick to Figma, Brandon. Stick to Figma. We got a post here from Put.

The pixels in the bag.

Just put the pixels in the bag, bro. We got it. We got a shout out. Amrita Block officially joined the s and P500 yesterday. She says it's not the finish line. It's a signal that what we're building has staying power. Inclusion brings broader exposure. Proud of our team focused on what's next. Hit the gong. Jack Dorsey, coo, CFO over at Block. Very cool. Awesome. Liquidity says, incredible work, fellas. Sydney Sweeney had a campaign with American Eagle that went live yesterday. Of course, American Eagle was up 6% on the day and then 17 after hours. Makes total sense.

But aren't I heard all, like, the big. The big LPs are pouring in. Andreessen Horowitz right now because just on the rumor that Sidney Sweeney might be joining Andreessen as a partner. Is that true?

Yeah. I mean, the fund has to be. The new. The new raise.

Completely oversubscribed.

I did have somebody smart text me and say, is this real?

I heard the news and I was like, I think it's real. I think it's real. I thought it was that Andreessen was investing in a company that had done a marketing deal with Sydney. I didn't realize that the rumor was joining as a partner.

She kind of has the Midas touch right now. She did. Dr. Squatch. $2 billion exit. We got a post here. We got a post here from Nat Eliason. Fantastic post. He says Waymo is a godsend for working parents. Need to hand off the baby between meetings. Put them in a Waymo and send them to your partner across town. Impossible before now. Really grateful we have this technology. This went super viral. I'm sure Waymo was, like, trying to get it community noted because I don't think this is definitely not allowed against the terms of use. Probably illegal in multiple ways.

But he was clearly Waymo Bombshell.

He was clearly joking. I was thinking about this, though. I do think it's a game changer that, you know, how much time do parents spend every day, just, like, commuting their kids to and from school. I think AVs are going to be great for families. For example, like, I remember, like, as a kid, my brother's school would start at a different time than mine. And, like, one of us would have to wake up earlier than the other. I think we're gonna be living in a world where you don't have to.

Hang out with your kids at all.

No, it's like, more quality time and less, you know, commuting.

Yeah, but who says the commute isn't quality Time. It can be.

That's true.

It can be. It can be a moment to, you know, actually have a conversation. Kind of unplugged from all I've literally.

Listened to hundreds of hours of dinosaur content driving.

You gotta give a lecture, you gotta show up to the commute ready to give a sermon on the T Rex.

Today is the first day of the rest of first grade. Just pump up speech in the car.

Just lock in, buddy. Get in there. I want you to win. I want you to win on the playground. Build the biggest sandcastle.

We have another post from Tweet Davidson. He says in your 20s, you get sorted into one of these four houses like Harry Potter.

I got both of them here. Celsius. Celsius is out.

I'm a big fan of three out of the four of these. I'm not big into the green one.

What's the green one?

Are you joking?

I don't know what that is.

It's a Matcha.

Matcha?

Yeah.

What's that white part?

Probably oat milk with a bunch of canola oil in it.

We can do a Matcha taste test test live, see if you like it.

We're absolutely not. I mean I, I. Matcha has never been for me and never will be.

Yeah, I clearly just like, just never.

Been big into that world.

No Diet Coke for sure, but three.

Out of the four Celsius?

Yeah, for sure.

I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. I'll. I'll have a Celsius.

That's mid. I, I do drink one every, every day though.

And we got to give it up for Satya Nadella. Today we're releasing GitHub Spark, a tool in Copilot that turns your ideas into full stack apps entirely in natural language. They're getting into the game.

Interesting positioning. This is a Claude Code competitor. More is like a Figma make.

It's definitely not a Claude Code competitor. This is more of like a. Yeah, Figma make. Lovable competitor.

Interesting Bolt competitor. It's going to be a knockout drag out fight.

Every. In the future, every SAS company will have a little text box that lets you generate more SaaS. And this is how SaaS will live. The SAS industrial big SaaS wants you to think that. Big SAS wants you to think that you can get in the game too. But on their infrastructure you can, you can.

We have a vibe coated project that was very handcrafted as well from Tyler. Soon dropping soon.

I'm very excited about that, Jack.

Wait, wait. Let's go to Tyler. Any news in your world before you're taking tomorrow off?

I'm just.

I'm remote.

I'm not taking it off. Oh sure. Oh yeah. The. You're gonna work so hard tomorrow when you're remote. I have some breaking news.

I'll bring this up. Is not working, but I'll. Okay. Yeah. Bring up the breaking news. We got some breaking news.

We got. We got a lot Gill Scoop a lot. Gill is raising a one and a half billion dollar fund which if closed, would be one of the largest hauls for Sola gp. Love to see it. Natasha's got the scoop. Hit it. I'm sure this will be oversubscribed.

We got the wipe. I like the wipe. Good job, production team. That's fun.

Very, very.

Fun.

I could see a lot at some point with it. With a $10 billion.

Yeah.

The real. The real story that the investigative journalists have to dig into. Is there anyone else on his payroll? Because if there's even one assistant.

No. He's got a fantastic team.

Jacob.

He's got a fantastic.

He's not a solo gp. I mean I think, oh, he's the only guy around. He's got other people on his team.

He's got a team. But I.

But I maybe doesn't have another gp.

Is probably. I would.

He's the only gp, but he has.

The entire management company.

What if he had like 500 associates, 300 principals, 200 parts and he's the only GP. He's like, I'm a solo GP. I'm a solo GP. I have a bigger infrastructure team, bigger back office than Andreessen. But I'm still. You call me a solo gp. I'm not a platform fund. He's getting the platform fund territory. But congratulations. Absolutely insane investor.

Yeah. We covered his post yesterday because basically saying these are the early winners and of course he's in all the number one. He's in the number one company in all of those categories. We got a post here from Jack.

Crazy run entrepreneur for a long time. Color this. This DNA company.

His book too is. Is. Oh yeah.

High growth handbook.

Legend is fantastic.

Everything he does, he hits out of the park.

Jack Corbett.

Yeah.

Has a post here. Went super viral. I was referencing this with Zach earlier. He says you can Venmo the United States to pay off the national debt. And so they have a website. You can go to gifts to reduce the public debt and you can just make contributions. You can use ACH, PayPal, Venmo debit or a credit card. So if you're Really a patriot. Go max out your credit card for Uncle Sam and make it make a gift to this country.

Is it a tax write off?

That's a good question.

Does it count as taxes? Can I just venmo my taxes now? If I'm like, I owe this much, send it in and then be like, take that as a deduction. If this is not tax deductible, that would be the most annoying thing ever. Very funny.

Jamie Cuff has launched Pace, the agentic process outsourcer APO for the insurance industry. Jamie is an absolute dog. I think I met him in 2021. He was at Retool at the time. So excited to see him back in the game with his own startup. Brian Norgaard. He says a rating system for men in the dating marketplace was inevitable and so is one for women. That's interesting.

Signal says there will never be one for women. In his humble opinion, the market dynamics are skewed because every woman is going to for the same guy. West Elm Caleb effect. Oh, that's an old story. I remember West Elm Caleb. That was interesting. For dudes. It's an adverse effect. Yeah. I don't know. Reviewing women that feels like that would get disapproved by the app Store for some reason. It just feels odd. I don't know, we'll see where it goes. But it is odd that I don't. I haven't heard rumblings about like there's a Reddit out there that already exists because like the whole idea of like the rating system app, what was it called? T T that app. Like that, like what was new about that? Wasn't that that it was an app? It's that it was a trend on Reddit. I think Reddit or some sort of community, some sort of web based community beforehand. But anyway, weird times. I was talking to a friend of the show about tea and she said it's what she say something like it's a Stalinist ritual or something like that. And I kind of went over my head but I thought it was funny.

Yeah, I don't know how I feel about it. We're trying to get the founder on. You can imagine he's been pretty busy at the top of the app Store and getting a massive amount of hate constantly. Yeah, I don't think.

But also probably doing a lot of project management. It's in his blood.

It really is. Yeah. Product management.

Let's. Let's go through this fun story from Charlie Munger. Very interesting to dig into. In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old, he was hired at the law firm Wright and Garrett for $3,300 per year, or $29,851 in inflation adjusted dollars. As of 2010, he had $1,500 in savings equal to about $13,570 now. A few years later, in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced. He had been married since he was 21. Charlie lost everything in the divorce, his wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena, not far from where I live. Munger moved into dreadful conditions at the University Club and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac which his children said had a horrible paint job. According to the biography written by Janet Lowe, Molly Munger asked her father, daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it? The broke Munger replied to discourage gold diggers. Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his, his son Teddy had leukemia. Heartbreaking. In those days there was no health insurance. You just paid everything out of pocket and the death rate was near 100%. Since there was nothing doctors could do. Rick, Rick Garon. Rick Garon, Charlie's friend, said Munger would go to the hospital, hold his young son and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying. One year after the diagnosis, in 1955, Teddy Munger died. Charlie was 31 years old, divorced, bride broke, burying his nine year old son. Later in life, he faced a horrific operation that left him blind in one eye with pain so terrible that he eventually had his eye removed. Incredibly, incredibly rough. And then to go on an absolutely generational run after that man really speaks to resiliency and perseverance. What a wild story. Anyway, we need something to cheer us up. We need to go to Howard Lutnick Investment his but his investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald is offering to buy the right to businesses tariff refunds, basically betting that the courts will overturn the tariffs. From Ryan Peterson.

What does Lutnick know?

Financialize everything. This is why. Yeah, I mean if you're, maybe if you, if you have, if you paid a bunch of tariffs and you're expecting some refunds or thinking that there might be there you could get the cash flow. Now if your business is in trouble, that's obviously relevant to Flexport's customers. In other news, SpaceX direct to cell phone coverage is growing fast. Elon posted a chart that's not quite going hyperbolic, but certainly growing exponentially. I didn't realize that direct to cell was, was, was growing as fast as it was. I didn't even realize it was that available I see the. I see the. The generic satellite service show up on my phone every once in a while and it's usually a harbinger of. Of very bad connection. But Starlink should be much faster.

Well, that is a great place to end the show today. This has been a fun one. Lots of range. Leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps. The show does and we were charting today.

We're climbing the rankings on Spotify. You can help us listening to the show on Spotify, giving us five star.

If you're on Apple Podcasts, I do recommend switching over to Spotify. We got video. Pretty awesome.

That does make sense. That would make a big difference.

We hope you have a fantastic day. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow. Bye.

Cheers.