Mark Cuban, Vlad Tenev & MORE | Larry Ellison's Cloud Scores Big, Silicon Valley's Family Life, Qasar Younis, Minna Song

Today is Wednesday, August 20, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The template technology, the force of finance, the capital of capital, the fortress of finance is not in good shape today. Holy bearish back to back tech sell offs.

The QQ having its worst two days since April 7th.

I thought April 7th was Liberation Day. It wasn't. Liberation Day was shortly after Liberation Day. But the Nasdaq did slide 1.5% on Tuesday. Some sort of correction was probably overdue and we certainly aren't in any sort of unprecedented territory. But public markets seem to be starting to react to some of the big top signal memes that have been flying around the timeline for the past few weeks. So we need to continue to monitor the situation. Joe Weisenthal has a great newsletter today that we're going to be reading through. We'll be taking a tour of the timeline, of course, digging into what, what else is driving the narrative, what else is driving the news, what else is driving the markets? This feels very different than the Liberation, than the Liberation Day sell off. Not just because the Liberation Day sell off was. I remember there were multiple days we were in the gym and we checked the market and it's like down 5%, which is huge for a single day. But Liberation Day to me always felt like there weren't that many tech considerations. Yes, Apple's in China. Yes. There were semiconductor considerations, Taiwan and AI supply chains generally.

But it was scared about tariffs.

Yep.

For good reason.

Yep.

And people can debate that. But now the market is just effectively scared that AI hype is over, you know, overblown.

Yes. But there's, yeah, there's some sort of difference there. Where tariffs affect the real economy. The price of food, the price of gas, the price of, you know, like if there's going to be a tariff on lumber, that's going to drive up housing costs. That's all the real economy that we're talking about, computer money, the money that's in the computer, that's the AI bubble. That's what people try to get out of their laptop.

They've been trying to hit the keys all of a sudden to get.

If you had $100 million in your laptop and you were trying to get it out, well, today it's only $98 million because we're down 2%.

I thought this post from the account Negative Alpha was funny. This is a quote, this is an Anon account, but he says it's from his pm. He says if your stocks are green today, you literally own dog S h I t if your stocks are red today, you own AI. Basically you're an idiot either way.

Not true though. One stock that's green, of course, Home Depot. You heard it here on the show. If you were interested in going long the Amish. Our pick was Home Depot. And Home Depot beat earnings and I believe is doing well, up 11% over the last month. Yes. And hello to everyone in the chat. Thanks for tuning in. We're glad to have you here and thank you for the feedback on the new soundboard sound. The Eagle, I think is is a perfect.

Fantastic.

Anyway, when the market's down, what do you got to do to save time and money? Jordi, you got to go to easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Get your house in one place@ramp.com let's read through Joe Wiesenthal's latest newsletter, AI Orality and the golden age of grift. We live in an. We live in an age of extreme grift.

Graphic here too.

Y what is this graphic? Come in. It's viral. This is the Dubai Chocolate thing. He breaks down some of the different viral products. And there's another article in the New Yorker that I put in the deck today that talked about IRL brain rot, the labubu ification of the world and Dubai Chocolate and these ideas that are things that are designed to go viral but then instantiate themselves in the physical world. I think that that's interesting.

We like when the slop stays on various corners of the Internet.

Yeah. And you can just hit. I'm not interested in that post. As opposed to when you're walking around and you don't really have that option when you're at a store and it's stuffed to the gills with IRL brain rot. Anyway, Joe Wiesenthal says we live in an age of extreme grift. This is obvious. There are people out there publicly organizing pump and dump schemes. Right now someone is trying to sell you a dollar worth of cryptocurrency for 5 DOL. These are of course, the bitcoin treasury companies that are trading above net asset value. They're trading above the book value of the cryptocurrency that they have on the balance sheet. Celebrities scam their fans by selling them garbage. It's all over the place. But that alone isn't particularly interesting. Grift has been around since day one and there might even be a cyclical element to it. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith famously talked about the bezel not Bezel, which is the bezel on a watch which you can go to getbezel.com your bezel concierge is of course waiting for you to help you source. Any watch in the world. Seriously, any watch. But the bezel is about embezzling, not the bezels of luxury watches.

Bad faith business practices that produce an illusory wealth effect which only gets exposed after the bust.

Yes.

Once everybody realizes that everybody else is. Or at least some people are swimming naked.

Yes, yes, yes.

Joe says, the interesting part to me is the total lack of shame. Nobody bothers to try to hide it and nobody really judges it either. It's all just right out in the open. The world is awash in economic nihilism. We've talked about, you know, this sort of get. Get your bag culture.

Get your bag culture.

Jim Chanos calls it the golden age of fraud. Anyway, I know I haven't provided any hard evidence that things have become more deranged. This is just my sense from looking around. If you disagree with the premise, it's fine if you want to stop reading, or in our case, listening. But that being said, before going further, I want to take a brief detour. In the middle of the 20th century, when the television really emerged, it was probably seen as the polar opposite of the book.

So the television emerged in the middle of the century, 20th century. That was before Restream, Correct?

Yes.

So they couldn't do one livestream with 30 plus destinations.

Not a chance.

They couldn't multi stream and reach their audience wherever they were.

Certainly not a chance.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Anyway, go to restream.com but now you can. Now you can.

So highly literate people look down on the idiot quote, unquote, idiot box and so forth. However. However, two dots on a plane that initially seem very far apart will start to appear closer as you look from a distance. And that's how it is with books and tv, which actually have a lot in common. As media types, both engage the eyes and actually with subtitles, both can be consumed in silence.

Growing up, my parents were into film and they would routinely say that TV rots your brain. That was. Brain rot was a term that was used for just television generally. And. And now we are so far beyond that. Yeah, anyway.

Yeah, now it. Now it's algo feeds rot your brain. The TVs.

The TV's great, Lindy.

Yeah, it's fine.

Yeah, turn it on and enjoy. It's. It's for. It's for the. The Pooh bear wearing a tuxedo.

Yes.

Yes, the Winnie the Pooh.

And both are passive. One directional media forms that that can be consumed alone. Both are very costly to produce and distribute at scale, which has a gating mechanism in terms of who can get involved. Moreover, television definitely has more in common with the book than radio does. Radio has a long history of bidirectionality. Whether we're Talking about trucker CBs, call in shows or amateur ham radio that can be broadcast on a shoestring budget from your basement.

That's interesting.

I was thinking about this the other day when I saw that Amazon is investing in a company that will allow viewers of TV shows to use AI to create their own scripts of shows they like and somehow insert themselves into the show itself. The company has a vision of making TV a playable medium a la video games. We'll see if anyone's into it, but it's yet another assault on passive media. There's also. Netflix had that one show that really hit that was like a choose your own adventure type show. But you haven't heard of any of those formats since then. I feel like it's been years.

Bandersnatch is the one that you're thinking of? Yes. It was a cool idea. It was sort of difficult to consume because my experience going through it was like I wanted to actually be told the creator's vision the best. And I wanted to. I wanted to give you the best story. Give me the best story.

I don't have time to watch this 10 times. Yeah.

And then if you go back and you watch it again, then you're watching repeated things. There are some movies that do this really well. Run. One is called Run Lola Run and it's this story of a. A woman who has to deliver, I think like drugs to a drug dealer or something. She has to run across town or something like that in a German city. And the movie is three scenarios of how they play out differently. And so you watch the same thing happen three times. And there was another. There was a music video that did a similar thing. I forget what it's called, but it's a cool storytelling technique when the. When the. When the creator of the art decides to take you on this like multi forked path. But they do it intentionally as opposed to putting it in your. In your seat. It feels like you might just be better off just going full video game. If you want a true choose your adventure. Like we have the technology to just let you choose. Yeah, we have video games. And so do we really need something like in between or do we need Something that's more like the barbell strategy where it's a. It's a GFA online anything or choose.

Your own adventure movie feels somewhat NPC coded, right? Where there's distinct paths, you're not actually able to have real effect on the world that you're in. Joe says this means TV may soon become another back and forth media. Everything's back and forth media these days. People comment, people fave, people share, people repost, people quote, tweet and dunk. This is what people like the author Audrey Mir and sometimes Joe mean when we say society is becoming more oral. It's not so much about speaking and listening and sounds per se. It's about everything becoming this rolling conversation that appears and disappears in the exact same instant. I mean, TVPN is a good example of this. We get a lot of alpha from the chat over here and it makes the show.

Siraj told us to bring Vlad Tenev from Robinhood on the show and boom, here he is today. So thank you for Jon Exley calling that out.

The constraints of oral communication impose certain distinct conditions on the mind. A premium is placed on one upmanship, one upmanship and combativeness. Per Walter, thought is less analytical and more grounded in the here and now real world. In his famous book Orality and Literacy and oral culture simply does not deal in such items as geometrical figures, abstract categorization, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, and even comprehensive descriptions or articulated self analysis, all of which derive not simply from thought itself, but from text form. Thought prior to the written word, there was no reference material for people to look things up. So in order for society to preserve important information, it had to be packaged in ways that are memorable, repeatable and viral. This is all totally obvious and familiar to us now in 2025. The irony here of Joe writing this long form written piece and then us evolving into back and forth media which he's describing, is not lost on you. In his book Preface to Plato, the British classicist Eric Havelock tries to unpack why it is that in his republic, Plato takes shots at poets and poetry. Plato's attacks on poetry is something that apparently bothers me.

Shots. Jordy. Do we have a sound effect for that? Taking shots.

Still working on that sound effect. It's getting dialed in. But per Havelock, Plato wasn't really concerned with the lyrical art form that today we call poetry. Instead, he was criticizing this world in which the Homeric epic was the primary vehicle of moral instruction. Education via Homer was becoming outdated in the emerging world of written word. Because the oral world finds it difficult to define and discuss why abstract analytical categories like moral behavior and hard work are good in their own right. Moral instruction has to take the form of children's stories where good behavior leads to better personal outcomes.

Here Havelock identifies the problem. What Greece has hitherto enjoyed, says Adeimantus in a passage of great force and sincerity, is a tradition of half morality, a sort of Twilight Zone. At best a compromise, at worst, a cyclical conspiracy according to which the younger generation is continually indoctrinated. In the view of that what is vital is not so much morality, a social prestige and material reward. This sounds familiar, which may flow from a moral reputation. Whether or not this is deserved or else, and this is not inconsistent. The young are insensibly warned that virtue is the ideal, of course, but it is difficult and often unrewarding. For the most part, a lack of principle proves more profitable. Do not the gods so often reward the unrighteous and immoral conduct, in any case, can be expiated quite easily by religious rites. The overall result is that the Greek adolescent is continually conditioned to an attitude at which. Which at bottom is cynical. So he's calling the Greek adolescence the adolescence. The get your bag culture identified it back then. It is more important to keep up appearances than to practice the reality. Decorum and behavior are not obviously violated, but the inner principle of morality is. Cynical is the key word here, says Joe. If the point of good behavior is to achieve good personal outcomes, then what's wrong with bad behavior if that can also achieve good personal outcomes? It's all about outcomes these days. Everywhere you look, you find evidence that success per se is seen as a stand in for quality. For example, wealthy people are always being asked for their opinions on all sorts of things, regardless of their domain expertise. The moment someone becomes a billionaire, they apparently become an expert on everything from interest rates to geopolitics to the electricity grid. There is something to this where once you become a billionaire, you can just convene like, you can snap your fingers and just be like, I want to have dinner with all the geopolitical experts. And then you can kind of recycle their takes or process their takes. There is something to this, but I agree with Joe's take. It's a good one. The whole concept of selling out, this notion that an artist might sometimes have to choose between making a lot of money and producing the highest quality art feels completely over as a concept. Incidentally, if you look at this chart of the term selling out in books, it peaked right in 2008, soon after the introduction of the iPhone and the birth of social media and the web and mobile, annoyingly, there was a major financial crisis right around the same time. And there are all kinds of cultural turning points that show up on charts around then. And we are doomed to be arguing for eternity about whether it was the phones or the foreclosures that changed the trajectory of history. I think that's a great take. Maybe discussions about selling out were just a luxury of a time when the economy felt less precarious. My favorite thing has to be how products get marketed for having gone viral. There are viral handbags. There are viral sandwiches, though this place in the East Village closed down and I never got to try it. Says Joe. The viral chopped Italian sandwich. Not familiar with that one. There are viral chocolate bars that say it on the label. The original gourmet Dubai Chocolate. And then it just has a seal, a stamp that just says viral.

Viral.

Fact check viral. Well, if you're designing a new package for your next chocolate bar, do it on figma.com. think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figma.

It's also funny because viral is something that, that, you know, happens to a thing for a specific moment in time, but it's not an enduring trait.

Sure, it burns.

So the right stamp would be. This went viral.

Yes. Yes.

Certified viral.

Yes. This was the COVID virality take. Covid was viral. It had a positive viral coefficient. COVID infections were growing exponentially. But by definition, Covid must be. Must have a sigmoid function, not an exponential function. And what I mean by that is it's an S curve, meaning that there can never be more than 7 billion, 8 billion Covid victims at the same time. It's impossible. It can never be 100 billion cases of COVID because we don't have 100 billion people. So by definition, it has to peter out. And then also, like once you have, if you're actively sick with a virus, you can't get the virus again. And if everyone has has it, then, then the viral coefficient drops. And so we were always going to see this sigmoid function pop up. And we did, and we saw, you know, very, very fast exponential growth and then. And then declining.

So Joe says, this is funny to me because in theory, viral is a neutral adjective. It doesn't speak to any inherent quality of the good itself. Things can go viral for bad reasons. Are the handbags well designed? Does the sandwich taste good? It doesn't really matter. The benchmark of a sandwich is that people are posting about it. Everything else is an abstraction that we don't have the energy, time, or language to discuss.

I mean, this ties to Cluli. Like at some point they will be weighted by like their G2 rating and their churn. But right now it's like it is viral. They have viral market entry. And I would imagine at some point people ask, is the product well designed? Does the sandwich taste good?

Yeah.

And we'll see.

Yeah. And I mean, I went through this with party round, right? We went viral over and over and over. Eventually I realized it doesn't matter how many times we keep going viral. Our product inherently has massive churn. And it was valuable for a brief moment in time where companies were raising these crazy party rounds. And then I was kind of well aware that we were seeing a broader tech correction. I didn't think that.

And then comp that to branded native. Yeah, never been viral. Never been viral. I've never seen it go viral on the timeline. I've never seen a stunt for it.

But it's grown every quarter my entire adult life.

It's crazy. Yeah. Underrated. Underrated. And potentially a better way to get your bag in decades, not mere days.

Slowly, slowly. And of course, this gets us back to the golden age of grift or the golden age of fraud. And why it's all right out in the open. What exactly is the difference between a company that finds a way to sell a dollar's worth of crypto for $5 versus a company that designs the world's most advanced semiconduct? You or I might be able to come up with some story about how well, you see one is productive and one actually and actually contributes something material in some way to society. And so the entrepreneurs and investors deserve some reward and so forth. And then someone else will poke holes in this. Are we really better off for semiconductors that make the AI that is breaking the brains of Facebook addicted boomers have quality graphics and video games? Really made society better off?

Yes, absolutely.

Haven't you heard about all the people sitting on their couches addicted to looking at their screenshots? Did that company really do something better for society than the company that made a bunch of people rich with the magic crypto box? I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted just at the thought of having to engage in these arguments. Life is much easier if we just say that the semiconductor company made a lot of money for investors and so did the crypto pump and dump. And so they're both equally valid as business ventures disagree.

I understand what he's saying, but I will engage in this all day long.

Everybody has to eat, right? Who are we to judge.

Anyway? New and different media forms don't just give us new means of expressing the same ideas. They change the internal logic of the human brain. And with the return to orality, this endless back and forth as a pervasive modern condition, that's it for the idea that certain modes of profit are more shameful and ought to be covered up and obfuscated. I don't know about that. I think we are in a special time. I think we are more in a. I'm more pendulum pilled on this issue and I do think that Warren Buffett will return as a hero and people will be quoting Warren Buffett could be Chamath. And I think that getting back to. Getting back to understanding the fundamental value that businesses are delivering will be lauded more. And this is, this is inevitable. It is a product of. Maybe it's more of a product of the kangaroo market of the faster cycles. Like in my early life the cycle was dot com and then eight years later housing bubble and then 12 years later interest rate and Covid and the craziness then. But then since then we've had every two years a cycle instead of every 10 years. It used to be really these long drawn out 10 year market cycles. But I do think that we will be going back. Yeah.

So relevant to this article you have Michael Saylor's strategy down 20% in the past month. This is at the time when there's a bunch of new crypto treasury companies coming to market. And then yeah, I think that there's a lot of people that will defend Saylor and his strategy. But ultimately there's a number of reasons to think that that strategy might be too good to be true, at least if it's done too aggressively. And then we covered Chamath's back history the other day and I think that Joe, you know, I don't want to put words in his mouth but he might look at Chamath coming back to market with us back and say that it's shameless given the past performance. But at the same time every new investment is an opportunity to redeem. Redeem oneself. So even though that, you know, sofi has, has experienced a real return. Open door, not so much Clover Health, not so much Virgin Galactic down 99% Pro Kidney down 75% I didn't realize Healy down 96% that some of these.

Spacs were with Hido Sofia and some of them were with Cerveta. I'm not exactly sure the difference. The Delta there. And then he also did pipe investments. Seems like MP Materials did very well. Yeah, 622%. That's pretty cool. But a lot of this other stuff is down a bunch. Some bankruptcies, some acquisitions. Berkshire Gray got acquired by SoftBank. Actually I didn't realize that.

But at 86% decline from the initial. Initial IPO price.

Yeah. So I mean you were saying earlier your take is that you look at this. It looks rough but he probably learned his lesson and he might be set up for success this time around. Is that the idea?

He could have learned his lesson.

I wonder.

He also might not. Again. Again. And trying to analyze why he is coming back with a SPAC. The Buco Capital take is the guy loves SPACs. He's just having fun.

I mean it is not easy to just set up a spac. If it was easy, everyone would just do it. But marshaling $250 million in capital for an acquisition or taking a company public is the domain of investment bankers. It's the domain of the, the high finance. It's not something that you can like whip together over a handshake deal at demo day. It requires a special set of skills, special set of connections and Chamath has those. But yeah, I don't know. There. There clearly is another SOFI out there. There's another MP Materials out there. There are good companies out there. The trick is just finding them with more than like 1 in 10 accuracy. Yeah, because ideally every, every SPAC should be at least some, some growth anyway.

Stacy Razgon says I'm good with the government taking equity stakes for chips act money. As long as we get to hear Trump asking questions on the earnings calls. Totally agree. Let's. Let's turn it into entertainment. You know, let's make the most of it.

That would be hilarious. Yeah, I mean I guess he would be in a, in a place to do that if he's a major shareholder. It would be. I don't think it would satisfy the semi analysis folks to have more government involvement on the earnings calls.

Certainly not.

Let's get Dylan Patel. Let's get Doug o' Laughlin on the, on the, on the earnings calls. That's who I want in there. Anyway, if you're looking to automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously, go to vanta.com Vantage 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 complex program.

Thank you Davanta. Andre says miss the AI train. AI turns out to be fake. Watch your enemies and adversaries pour billions into a bottle.

Trillions.

Trillions.

This is Europe, I guess.

Yes.

Okay. It says do nothing win. I think this is a reaction to this idea that the EU had higher GDP than all of China, but I think they already had higher GDP or something. Did you see this?

I just assumed this was general AI bearishness.

Yeah, I don't know. It seems like you would still rather like the net present value of all of AI is still extremely positive and you would rather have an extra trillion dollars in market cap in your domestic markets if you could. So a little bit of silly post.

In a non fast takeoff scenario, Europeans can use some version of ChatGPT.

They'll probably literally use ChatGPT. I think that the aggregation layer and the application layer matters a lot more than the data center layer. It's great to build data centers all over the world. You need to have local inference and low latency. But like if you can't get your populace to go to letchat.com instead of chat.com, like you have lost control over the LLM and you will and you will not win. I mean you might be able to regulate and put cookie pop ups and all sorts of different stuff, but you won't have true control over the platform. Like platform control in the modern era and the Internet era comes from aggregation of demand and consumer habits. And that's why Google is dominant in Europe and has not been displaced by the Google of Europe.

Yep. Well speaking of data centers.

Yep.

Oracle will spend over 1 billion per year to power a single data center with gas generators. Let's give it up for big Oil oci.

Deeply underrated Larry Ellison.

Absolute goat diving in here. Oracle's Larry Ellison used to scoff at the idea of cloud computing, saying in 2008 that it was complete gibberish.

That's crazy. I don't remember him saying that.

Now the success of Oracle's cloud infrastructure unit is why the company's stock price has soared and made Ellison its chairman and co founder, the second richest person in the world. Oracle sitting at 654 billion at this. On, on this. Lovely.

He's catching up to Tesla.

Yeah, we're going to need, we're going.

To need to add an eighth to the Mag 7. Mag 8.

Mag 8.

Put Oracle in there. I mean founder led company Good luck. He's been on an absolute run and he's. I mean, it's crazy, the, like, where Oracle started and how they're still. Still conquering in essentially the same market. Obviously very different technology, but have done quite well. Yeah.

So Oracle, a software company that had long struggled to find its niche in this market, gained a foothold through scoring some major customers. Today, it's helping power. Elon Musk Xai from a data center in Utah, assembling a cluster of tens of thousands of AI chips for Nvidia near Singapore. And recently inked what is likely the second the largest single cloud deal ever with OpenAI. We talked about this a few weeks ago. This is OpenAI effectively committing to these sort of massive inference bills years in advance. We're talking tens of billions of dollars.

Is this inference or training? I thought this was training. News models will be trained. There is what Brody Ford says.

I was talking about the OpenAI deal specifically.

Yeah, It's a move away from Microsoft, which is the underlying, the undercurrent here.

Oracle is on the hook for tens of billions of dollars to develop unprecedentedly large data centers amid energy and material shortages. That includes a plan to spend more than 1 billion a year just to power one new megasite in West Texas with gas generators rather than wait for utility connection. With all this spending, Oracle recorded a negative annual cash flow for the first time since 1990. That's absolutely wild.

Wow.

And questions remain about the longevity and margins of offering infrastructure to train AI models. Oracle, founded in the 1970s, had long faded from tech prominence. Certainly hadn't faded from prominence in Things that Matter.

Exactly.

I was about to say racing.

Racing.

So I won't accept that having a.

Founder that looks 40 despite being closer to 80.

Yeah. On the road to its return in the era were internal battles to convince Chief Executive Officer Safra Katz to invest in the cloud recruitment of key customers like TikTok. And the rise of a brash executive named Clay Magoric McGork. McGork. Bloomberg spoke with more than 30 current or former employees and customers to understand how Oracle can deliver on its towering promises. They detailed spiraling costs, accelerated timelines to satisfy OpenAI regulatory roadblocks, and the hiring of hundreds of former Amazon cloud staffers speaking anonymously to discuss the inner workings of a famously private and litigious company. Oracle declined to comment. So as cloud computing picked up Steam in the late 2000s, Ellison had little reason to be excited. Oracle's namesake database, which is purchased outright and installed directly on customer servers, is One of the world's great cash businesses. Adopting a cloud sales model where users rent access to software would almost certainly come with lower profits and a need to collaborate with rivals. After years of writing off the cloud as marketing, Oracle's tone changed as its business came under fire. Amazon pushed deeper, cheaper database options on its cloud customers. Application rivals like Salesforce promise easier installation and updates. Ellison saw the need to get Oracle's fusion apps, commonly used for finance and resource planning, on the cloud. According to people familiar with his thinking at the time, there were competing efforts through the 2010s within Oracle to build a cloud for internal and customer use. An initial attempt led by Thomas Kurian.

No way. He's the head of Google Cloud now.

Okay.

Yeah, I didn't realize he was at Oracle before.

Yep. So a separate group made up of largely Amazon alumni, led by Don Johnson, pushed and approached called Bare Metal, in which clients wouldn't have to share their servers with other renters, allowing Oracle to target privacy focused customers. The group also focused on building smaller data centers, which let them expand in countries that weren't yet viable for industry leaders. The Bare Metal approach won the blessing of Ellison, who remains a key decision maker despite handing off the CEO title more than a decade ago. Absolutely love that. It's like, hey, somebody else can handle all the stuff I want, I don't want to do. I'll still handle the. I'll still handle the. What was that big ticket?

What was that famous Larry Ellison quote during COVID Larry Ellison. Ellison.

I'll keep reading while you find it. The new product came to be known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. Kurian departed the company in 2018 after his approach was sidelined. He then joined Google to lead its competing cloud service and remains in that position. And there's a chart here if we can pull it up. Oracle Cloud is expected to be majority of business by 2029 and Wall street is projecting breakneck, breakneck growth. You find the quote?

I don't remember exactly what it was, but basically he was just hanging out in Hawaii during all of COVID But he paid all of his workers like the full amount when they were in benefits through May or something. They did some shutdowns of the office, but it was just very fun where he was just like, I will be in Hawaii while this chaos is unfurling. And he was hanging out in Lanai.

Why? Yeah, why have a compound in Hawaii if you're not going to go there during a pandemic?

Yeah, it's like the spot. I mean Everyone was out there during that time.

When offering the new product, Oracle had to overcome a long held reputation for aggressive sales strategies. Major pitches for OCI include cheaper pricing thanks to a simplified set of products and good integration with other clouds. Oracle salespeople often take jabs at AWS's sprawling set of tools, telling customers that paying for Amazon's cloud means subsidizing expensive moonshots like its satellite project.

Interesting. Yeah, I mean there are a lot of tools in aws. You don't necessarily need all of them. Some of them probably higher margin than others. It's just funny to hear the internal strategies of the Oracle salespeople putting the screws.

You really want to subsidize this satellite project with your money?

Yeah.

Do you even care about this? Have you thought about it once? Did you know you were paying for.

It on the battle card? It's just like, do you care about satellites?

Yeah.

Okay.

So during the pandemic they landed Zoom, who needed the capacity.

Interesting.

They also got a $2 billion commitment from, from Uber 2023. And then during that era as well, they got TikTok, of course owned by ByteDance.

And that was the whole narrative of like if TikTok sells, it'll be to Oracle and Oracle will just host all the data and TikTok will be kind of its own company. And there's no antitrust considerations because Oracle doesn't have any consumer facing social media products. It always seemed like a weird fit, but like a decent fit. Like not huge synergy, but certainly solves the, solves like all the security concerns because Oracle's like the most American forever company that's like just built American data centers.

So they landed TikTok. That account quickly surpassed a billion dollars in run rate and it eclipsed the rest of the cloud business.

I remember seeing the cloud bills from what was it Snapchat I think was paying maybe Google Cloud like a billion dollars a year and that's like what, 15 billion of market cap or something. So like a pretty significant investment. I mean storing videos is a lot, a lot heavier than storing text.

And so when they started working with TikTok they actually that's when they started getting familiar with building out these more AI focused.

That makes sense because they need to.

Do the inference for the recommendation algorithm GPUs.

Yeah, it makes sense. Well, they should also get on graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

You can get started for free@graphite.dev Internal accolades have flown, have flowed to McGork. We're probably just butchering this, butchering that name. Gore, where are you? The 39 year old has rapidly climbed company ranks and reports directly to Ellison. He was one of OCI's first employees after stint at Amazon and recently relocated to Nashville where Oracle has pledged to move its headquarters. I didn't know that.

Nashville. Interesting.

In June, he was promoted to president and is seen by company leaders as a potential successor to his 81 year old boss.

Do you think he went there because John FIO is out there?

Probably.

Nashville. Yeah. Isn't. Who else is out there in Nashville? Didn't Ben. Who's the guy from the Daily Wire? I forget.

Anyway, yeah, Nicole Wishoff was. Was sheriff. She just moved to San Francisco though.

But yeah, bit of an odd choice, but, you know. Yeah, no sailing in.

McGorg says sometimes you look back and say, I'm not sure that I was entirely qualified at each step of the way.

That's the best.

Seems to have worked out so far.

That's great. Good for him. Those who have worked with him describe him as highly effective and conflict prone. He once told an executive that his actions were effing stupid in a room full of leadership. Talk about managing up. According to allegations in 2021 lawsuit, Blunt bosses are typical in a company run by Ellison, who once described his leadership style as management by ridicule. We've been going through all the different Larry Ellison books in the group chat, talking about what's the difference between God and Larry Ellison. Like, God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison or something like that. Right. Isn't that one of the quotes? A legendary, legendary. We're having David Senner on the show soon and we'll have to get him to do a deep dive on Larry Ellison for us since there's so much more to the character Larry Ellison and the history. There's that famous book where he gave a writer, you know, the story, right? Larry Ellison gave like biography rights to an author and said, you can write whatever you want, but I get a rebuttal in the footnotes. So the book is the writer, like documenting, like shadowing Larry and following him around and the internal workings of Oracle. And then they'll just be a footnote. And Larry Ellison would be like, I wasn't being too aggressive in that meeting. They were being too aggressive. Like, this is wrong and it's like a debate. It's amazing.

Anyway, Jeremy shared it in something in our group chat earlier. He said with his top guy. This is about Ellison from the difference between God and Larry Ellison. With his top guys running the day to day business, he was free to do the things he enjoyed, brainstorm with his engineers, reread, pose Annabel Lee, visit Japan, entertain women, buy things, give interviews and dream.

Ah, the dream. It's amazing. Yeah, it was Ben Shapiro, Stefan Solisis says and Nate says, move to Nashville for Volta Cafe. That of course is John Fio's latest caffeine.

We'll eventually do a live show from the Volta Cafe.

We need to. The aesthetics are fantastic.

You should do that. We should do that show on a thousand milligrams of caffeine.

I'm down.

The ultimate challenge.

Pump me full of it. Straight into the veins. Oci's importance has grown as the cloud has become a bigger part of the company's business. Today, about 23,000 employees report up through McGork. Over the last two years, more than 600 workers have joined from Amazon, according to analysis run by Workforce AI. Amazon's recent five days a week return to office Real time has made poaching easier as OCI remains largely a hybrid or remote workplace. Interesting. Today, the company's biggest driver of OCA AI is the biggest driver of the growth. Majority of Oracle's backlog or booked deals are tied to customers training or deploying AI models with GPU based servers. We've talked to some founders who have said OCI is deeply underrated. Everyone talks about Azure, GCP, AWS, but OCI, there's some good deals there. OpenAI is slated to become Oracle's largest customer and has marketed work as the work as Stargate, an effort announced in January at the White House. The companies have struck deals for more than 5 gigawatts of computing power. That's a lot of power, an unprecedented sum and enough energy for millions of American homes. Work for OpenAI is happening on an aggressive timeline. The data centers are targeted for completion by early 2027, with many of the servers running as soon as next summer. According to people familiar with the plans. Facilities are being designed for training AI models with the assumption that they could also power the application. So they will do training and inference. They need to, they need to be designed for, for hybrid workloads because they don't think that they will be necessarily training on an ongoing basis forever and that at a certain point the models get good enough and then you just got to get them diffused into the economy. You got to get GDP growing and GDP is not going to grow on Training alone. Providing infrastructure for AI training is generally thought to be a lower margin business than inference because it requires more advanced semiconductors and cooling. Exact timing and design details for the open air could still change. Finding data center developers and power providers to support this project palatable prices has been a challenge. Costs for many goods and services have gone up owing to tariffs and vendors capitalizing on intense demands. If you have some power transformers or tents for Meta is a buyer. Tents is going up though. Yeah, you're going to be gouging them. And so Oracle cash flow has gone negative on the cloud build out but just barely and they and they assume.

Not like some other folks.

The site Oracle plans to power entirely with gas generation is located in Shackelford county near another Oracle server farm in Abilene. So they're expanding outside of Abilene in Texas. It's being developed by Digital Bridge groups Vantage data centers and we'll have a compute capacity of 1.4 gigawatts making it among the largest known sites. We've seen a couple groups pop up with 1 gig 1 gig clusters. This is 40% larger. So you know significance but semi analysis often there's like, there's different ways to measure power like it's and people get kind of funky with it. It's like are you pulling 1.4 from the grid? Is it 1.4 to the chips? And there's like the concept of like compute capacity versus it power. All these things kind of you lose a little bit at every single stage. So we'll see where this, this, this cluster actually nets out and we will let Dylan Patel be the final arbiter of of how, how insane this particular build out is. Part of OCI's popularity with AI farms firms is its longstanding focus on bare metal servers. This has become the standard arrangement for AI work and Oracle was the missed.

Cloud but made a key decision going.

Bare metal early on to go bare metal instead of platform as a service.

It ended up working out.

Yeah yeah for old Larry Users and employees will also point to Oracle's networking quality and willingness to do high levels of customized work. Semianalysis shout out Semianalysis in Bloomberg today. Popular industry analyst listed Oracle Cloud near the top of its rankings for AI infrastructure vendors in March, citing its cost effectiveness, networking quality and strong customer service.

Add a category for how aggressive the sales team is Battle Card right now.

How much trash they talk about the competitors. Another of Oracle's largest customers is Nvidia which uses OCI for internal development and to power its own cloud infrastructure. Service. The chip maker, codenamed Pathfinder, internally rents capacity from Oracle, from an Oracle cluster of H100 chips in Japan and from a data center being built on Indonesia's Batam Island. That's crazy big into islands. Over at Oracle, Oracle is also in talks with Meta Platforms and Xai for further capacity. Of course, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are famous for getting dinner with Jensen Huang.

And island right off the coast of Singapore.

Is it beautiful? I'm sure it is industrial. Should we go? Should we next vacation?

Very industrial.

Okay.

But I'm sure it's still beautiful.

Book a wander.

Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. I don't even need to read it.

We need to get them to put together the data set. The Wander data center.

Yes, yes. I want Wandering Abilene. I want to wander in Batam Island. I want to wander in Japan, wherever that data center is. I want to go on the world tour. Take me to Virginia. Put me next to AWS East. I want to visit us East. Oracle's cloud business is still orders of magnitude smaller than Amazon, Microsoft and the number three provider, Alphabet Inc's Google. But plenty of room for growth exists. Orders of magnitude, it's 100 times smaller. That's shocking to me. I feel like it would be at least within like 100x. I don't know. The market generated almost 100 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter and expanding 25% year over year. The question is how Oracle will fund this development and what it does to the company's profitability. Still, the company hasn't had to borrow money to develop its centers like smaller rivals such as coreweave, who we've interviewed. Founder of we believe margin will rebound and cash flow will be substantial once they get through this investment phase, said an analyst. I think an analyst at Bernstein. Oracle is going through a business model transformation that is even more impactful over a shorter period of time. Yeah, it's hard to imagine that these data centers, I mean, we could be winding up in like the dark fiber world where a lot of these data centers don't get used. If like truly there's a major popping of the AI bubble. But this stuff seems to be extremely valuable for a long period of time. And it's hard to imagine a bunch of huge data centers like not being useful to America in a decade. And so he's Risk on. He's risk on.

But not using leverage.

Yeah, not using leverage. It's all coming out of the free cash flow. They have the cash to pay for it and it seems like he's in a good position anyway. You should get on. Julius, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. You can ask Julius.

Analyze your data business better.

They're loved by 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, Boston Consulting Group, and Zapier.

And tbpn.

And tbpn.

There is a new leak of a memo from Alexander Wang. Kylie. Robin Robinson is reporting that Alexander Wang wrote that superintelligence is coming in order to, quote, unquote, take it seriously. The company is making major changes. So we can get into this a little bit.

Yeah. Do we want to have Tyler break down the whiteboard?

We should.

Or show us what is the structure. What can you tell us about the current structure of Meta's AI efforts, Tyler?

Yeah, so I think that the main thing is that we now know that Alexander Wang is like top dog of AI.

Yeah.

Right. So we have. I don't know if we can show it yet, but you see Zuck at top.

Yep.

And then Alexander Wang reports directly to Zuck. Reports directly to Zuck. And then everyone who works at. On AI at Meta, not just msl, like Fair. Every single org that does AI reports directly to. Well, not everyone, but they all report to Alexander Wang.

Yep.

Then below him, we see. We see three more people. We see Yann Lecun.

Okay. And is Yann Lecun at Fair? Was that his.

I think that is still unclear.

Okay.

We're not super sure. He. So he was chief scientist, but he.

Was not on the LLAMA team?

No, I don't think so.

Okay.

It's also like, maybe he was on the llama team, but then for Llama 4, he wasn't or something like that. But then. So in charge of MSL is Shangjia Zhao. He was at OpenAI. I'm like 90% sure. And then we see Nat Friedman is also there. And then so below them is just. These are like the actual researchers who've been poached from various labs. So you see, like, Jason Way, Lucas Beyer from OpenAI.

I think semianalysis had a funny joke post about this that they wound up taking down. There was something to the effect of, like, you worked at a different AI lab focused on training. They decided that they sold and they said, like, this new organization won't be doing training. And then. So you Go over to Meta and you work under Yann Lecun. And then they're like, you're not going to be doing training either. And so it seems like there's a real fight if you're an AI researcher to actually get onto a team that's working on training super intelligence. Because there's a huge amount of demand for just like, let's productize this now. And there's probably a divide among the researchers on where they want to play in the stack. Do they want to be focused on implementation applications, leveraging the foundation models versus training and coming up with the really novel.

So internally they have TBD Labs, which will also be in charge of exploring new directions, such as building an omni model.

Okay. And TBD Labs is, is. Is. Is a subset of MSL or a side msl. What's the, what's the take?

It's a. It feeds into.

It feeds into MSL. Okay, got it.

And then FAIR will be a quote unquote innovation engine for MSL's training runs by feeding its research directly to TBD lab.

Okay, got it.

And that's a. According to Kylie, that's a more active role for FAIR than before.

Yep.

And then known for publishing their research, giving it to employees.

Yep. And so, so how, how would I comp this to Open AI? It seems like Shenzhou Xiao is sort of the Mark Chen of msl.

I think that's probably head of research to do it.

Head of research, yeah.

And then, and then Zhao has four. At least four, like really key high level researchers.

Yeah, These are mainly just like the like big names.

Yeah, the big names.

Obviously there's like way more, but Yeah, I mean, even at OpenAI, it's like, still, it seems like there's like a lot of teams there that's like, oh, I'm like, I led zero one research, but there was someone else who led reasoning. So it's like unclear how those overlap.

Yep, yep, yep.

So we don't really know like what the exact comp would be to OpenAI or to an anthropic or something like that.

Sure.

But so far the actual like MSL core team seems fairly small, at least of like public people that we've seen.

Seen.

I remember that there was some spreadsheet that leaked maybe like a month ago that had only like maybe 25 names on it.

Okay.

And they were all like kind of superstars.

So. And were they mostly on OpenAI on the various training runs and various research projects, or was this across the entire industry? No.

Yeah.

Was not just OpenAI. There was a bunch of people.

Was this like the list that was. That was leaked?

No, that was more recruiting focus. This was just like the actual team.

Okay, got it.

There's more info in the memo about the goat. Nat Friedman.

Friedman, what's he doing?

Will lead MSL's efforts to integrate AI into Meta's products. So as everyone knows, Meta has been trying to make things like AI glasses and the Quest VR headset go mainstream. These products have garnered good reviews, but have yet to make up a meaningful port.

Nat Friedman. It really feels like he might be the best person in the world to do that because who was the first person to actually make money off of GPT3? It was Nat Friedman with GitHub Copilot. Right. And so if you think about like, how can you actually deliver value that people pay for at a good margin, which in the Meta context it might be it's value that's delivered for free and then monetized via advertising. But in general you need to develop products that pass the hurdle rate of like value capture and not just go around doing science projects, which is what a lot of the research labs are set up to do. And that's fine, but in turn, but like the real, like it feels like Meta has some real horsepower on the training side. They're going to be able to build great models and they're going to need to build those in and vend those into a variety of products. Everything from Meta Ray Bans to Facebook, the Blue app and Instagram and WhatsApp. And how can you do that in a way that is product focused? Well, you hire the person that was the first real like AI application layer builder. Like with GitHub Copilot.

Demigod.

Yeah, I mean I think one thing that's notable.

So when Meta internally announced the creation of MSL in June, it said that Friedman would be its co lead. However, in the email, Wang made it clear that Friedman reports to him, quote, nat will continue to lead this work reporting to me.

I don't think that that's as dramatic as you think it is.

Freeman's just like, yeah, I don't want to. I don't. I've been CEO. Yeah, pretty good at it. I think I'd rather just focus on making AI.

It's such a huge organization. There's so much to do. I think that like you could read that as like, he's reporting to Alex. I think he's close with Alex. I think he's worked with him in the past and I Think there's a bunch of interesting ways to, to actually go and have a better experience within the behemoth that is Meta focused on just implementation of frontier models as opposed to actually having to have the AI researchers roll up to you and then you're a middle manager in between Mark and you're kind of sharp elbows with, with Alex on who's doing what, where the stuff is allocated. It makes sense to just have a rockstar training team and then take the stuff that they trained, go implement it and of course there'll be some feedback there, but it won't be. But if you are an AI implementer, an application layer developer, you don't necessarily need to have the researchers report to you.

Yeah, sure, maybe there's an equivalence to there's like Google DeepMind and there's Google AI Studio, which is like the, the productized version of the models, the project. So maybe it's something like Nat is in charge of the, you know, Google AI Studio where, you know, Shanghai is, is the DeepMind.

Yeah, I don't know. We'll have to, we'll have to dig into how it's sort of.

Where is Daniel Gross?

Yeah, where is Daniel Gross? We got to figure out how he fits in.

Great.

I don't know. I mean, was his, was his transfer, his trade deal ever fully confirmed? I don't think he's put out a post about it yet, but it was.

Confirmed that he left ssi.

Okay, yeah, yeah. Ilya posted about that and said like, we are.

Yes.

So on Daniel Gross's website it just says working on AI products at Meta.

Okay, so sounds like confirmed.

Yeah, he's probably still working with.

But who knows? I would imagine he's working alongside nat. Right.

They merge.

The merge. The merge happened and it's NAT and Daniel hanging out in going around stuff and AI in every Meta product.

We're putting it everywhere.

Putting it everywhere. I mean, it seems like a good strategy compared to like it's got to be. Wrangling that problem at Google has got to be somewhat, even more difficult because there's probably a Sheets team, there's a Gmail team, there's a Google search team.

It's harder at Google because the core search business is threatened by gen AI.

Sure.

And because you can just go on ChatGPT and have it browse Google for you apparently.

Yeah, yeah. Whereas if you're more extra, if you're.

Meta, you're like, this is incremental.

This is going to, you know, we only want to do things that drive higher ARPU or higher user minutes. How do we keep people in the apps for longer? And it should be very additive on the creator side, on the consumer side. But you should like a lot of the usage patterns. I mean, when they rolled out stories, it was very clear that they. I don't know if they actually wound up rolling out stories in WhatsApp, but they definitely rolled it out both in Instagram and in and in Facebook. And so there's a lot of AI features that you could imagine, even just like those Meta AI Studio design, a character that you chat with. There's no reason that chatting with, although it's ridiculous to say out loud, like the Russian girl or whatever the killer app is. I mean, the bull case is that it's chat with a helpful assistant or chat with somebody who's an expert in watches or semiconductors or cars or whatever. You follow a lot of car content on Instagram. You can now chat with a, like the meta AI car expert. Ask it questions. Maybe it makes sense that that would be vended into WhatsApp and it would also be vended into Instagram and it would also be vended into. Into Facebook. Speaking of watches, have you seen the.

Levels this was in certain really important posts?

Yeah, this was Tips for Men. It was almost the current thing in Silicon Valley. Everyone was talking about this.

Yeah, this was flying around, group chats for. And the reason is, you know, Tips for Men was giving their sort of definition here. But to me, this just screams RM at the top. LP Patek, clearly the gp. Ap, clearly principal.

Principal.

Rolex, obviously associate.

Associate. Okay.

And then Cartier, I would say investor relations.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then I don't even know Jaeger to IWC range.

I don't know. Eir.

Yeah, seriously. Eir, that had a moderate, you know, Aqua Hire kind of looking for their next thing.

Exactly, exactly. They. They define the levels of watches as Richard Mille, who of course we've talked about on the show here as filthy rich. Patek is old money king. AP is new money. Rolex is wannabe rich. Depends on the Rolex. You get a Paul Newman. I think you're.

I think you're an old dweller. Old money cake picking up a land dweller from the secondary market.

Wait, are they spiking or.

Yeah, I mean, they're sitting well, well above retail.

Yeah.

Bezel has 1 for 70k.

70K for a land dweller. It is a beautiful watch. I like it a lot. But that is a wild price for a Rolex. Well, yeah, I mean, Make a statement.

It's a nice bracelet.

Yeah, it's a good bracelet.

It's a good bracelet, sir.

If you were running a luxury watch brand and you wanted to get your watch brand mentioned in ChatGPT, what would you do?

I'd go to Try Profound.com.

Try Profound.com so you could get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. You could reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. You'd even get a demo.

I would not be surprised if at least one member of the. The Holy Trinity already uses Profound.

I wouldn't be surprised either would be surprised. Fantastic.

Yeah, I got an investor update from James at Profound last week and it was the single most impressive, really one, you know, month monthly update that I've received across investing in. Yep, 60 or 70 different startups at this point. Very, very impressive.

Shout out to them.

What is Roboy talking about here?

Keith Rabois taken yet another victory lap on calling Miami as an underrated place to live. It was, of course, not in the conversation at all. And then it became the current thing. Delian famously posted, can we just move Silicon Valley to Miami? He somewhat successfully did that. And a lot of companies moved there. Of course, it didn't actually become like a major tech hub, but it's certainly more of a destination for the tech elite than it's ever been in the past. It's a beautiful place. I love visiting it. Great for conferences. Great. My favorite thing about Miami is that if you host a tech conference there, no one will go home after the conference ends because everyone will get a hotel room because almost no one lives there. And yet it's a place where people can justify going to a flight. It's as convenient as Las Vegas as nice weather, lots of activities like Las Vegas. But if you throw a big event in San Francisco, half the audience will be like, oh, well, I'm, you know, I'm not. I mean, I got a babysitter, but I'm going to go home. And if you throw an event in New York, same thing. But if you get everyone to my. If you get everyone to Miami, 90% of those people are going to be from out of town. They're going to book hotels, they're going to be there, they're going to be staying up later. They're going to be having more fun, more networking, more business connections, more value creation. So still bullish on Miami as a, as a place to visit and as text Vegas. Less bullish on it as like, go try and build a foundation model. Company and recruit a bunch of AI engineers. That's going to be a tough lift. But the, the, the office visits in July 2025 change from the first month of 2019 is way up. Denver is down 40%. Louisiana is down 36%. We're trying to shift that trend by being fully in office. Alec McGillis, who Keith is quoting, says really striking. To what degree? New York has become an outlier in recovering from the remote work shift, especially given that it is a city that was first hit hardest by the pandemic.

Huge part of this is that people's apartments and or homes that are actually in New York City are so much smaller. So people often want to go to the office.

That's a good point. Whereas if you're in Denver or even LA or Chicago or Boston, you might live slightly outside the city, you might live in a suburb.

Denver's over here. They're still on a hike.

They're still on a hike. Still hiking, yeah. So nationwide office visits are down over 20% since pre pandemic times. And so July of 2019 is kind of where the benchmark starts before the pandemic hit. And obviously that changed a lot of businesses. It changed a lot of work from home behavior. We were just talking about Oracle. You know, they're building data centers, but they're doing it remotely. Whereas AWS has kind of gone back into the office. Seattle notably missing from this list entirely.

But anyway, this post from Tane is wild. He's charting out annualized ad revenue by platform. Google search at 2.

We need to do some pop quizzes here. How much, Tyler? How much money do you think in revenue Bing brings in every year? 5 billion, 14 billion.

All right, that's not too far.

That's really pretty far. If you, if John had asked you about Snap, you would have been pretty close. They did five and a half billion.

Pinterest is at four billion. Uber at 1.5 billion. This is ad revenue, not platform revenue. DoorDash is making a billion on ad revenue. Instacart's making a billion on ad revenue. But Meta is up at 200 billion or 186 billion. Google search is at 215 billion. And so, yeah, I mean, like the OpenAI we were talking about Brad Gerstner kind of saying that, you know, the, the OpenAI valuation of 500 billion is like way ahead of Google's metrics based on where Google was when they were valued at 500 billion. But when you look at that pool of high margin ad revenue, 215 billion from Google, 186 from Meta, 63 from Amazon and you ask yourself the question of like will ChatGPT be able to grab a piece of that? Is it already? Like it's not really already. It's mostly just people paying for a great tool that they prefer over the other over other options. But if they, if they seriously get in that game with agentic commerce, agentic checkout and taking commissions and cuts from different revenue streams in the ad revenue world, there is just so much money to be made in Internet ads. You can be a company that's not known for advertising like Uber and still be making 1.5 billion in ad revenue. That's extremely high margin. And so can OpenAI suck 50 billion out of this 500 billion pool of ad revenue and traded at a 10x on revenue? Is it possible? It's not that crazy. I don't know.

While getting better and better at serving the models cheaper and cheaper.

Yes, yes. Well, as they build out their ad product, they will need to be using Linear over at OpenAI. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

If you make software and you're not on linear, yeah, you're crazy.

And if we flip over to the Bear take on OpenAI Bone, GPT says GPT5 single handedly destroyed the fast takeoff narrative and killed the stock market. I don't know if that's entirely fair. Killed the stock market. It sells off 2% and it's like.

GPT5 took it up back.

This is the beauty of like the kangaroo market. The faster information is that like every.

Time it's so over, we could just be a day away from being so back.

It's not just that, it's that, is that you, you, you go through the, the, the, the trough of disillusionment so, so fast. Like you can have like all of the think pieces, all of the memes, all of the hot takes about like it's so bad, it's so bad. And then two weeks later you can be like, okay, we've clearly hit the bottom. We've beat this to death. Everyone's talked about how, how we're completely over our skis and like the bubble has popped. Like okay, now it's time to start reinvesting. We got to start buying the dip. And then we start building back up so quickly. And that's what happened. I mean during COVID like it was like a three month drawdown. Even, even, even the interest rate post zerp era was like pretty quickly turned around maybe a year of hard. Of like hard times. It was not the dot com bubble, which took years, years, years. And Tyler Cosgrove has. This is the Doomsday Clock for us. So the Doomsday Clock. Typically, the folks who are worried about the apocalypse are tracking the Doomsday Clock. The amount of time until doomsday we have been tracking. We say it's 90 seconds. Not to AGI. It's 90 seconds to nothing. Tyler, can you give us some more context on what inspired this and how you're feeling?

Okay, so this is apparently. This is like the doomer take on GPT5, right?

Yeah.

Nothing ever happens.

Nothing ever happens.

No fast takeoff. Okay, I disagree. Okay. I think GPT5 was pretty good.

Yeah. But how many seconds until AGI and the singularity? How many days? I mean, Sam Altman put it out a couple thousand days. 3,000 days is a decade. Right. I would put it close.

I remember the merge. His definition for that was just people become really close friends with a chatbot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. Yeah, that's, that's. That's pretty clear. I mean, I guess, like, if there's going to be a fast takeoff, there's going to be some sort of singularity. Something that's like unpredictable. I would peg it more at 7,000 days. I would put it at 2045.

Okay. Maybe I'm like halfway in between you and Sam.

So Sam's 2035. 20. 20, 40.

Okay.

24. Okay. So that's a lot of seconds.

That's a fair amount of seconds.

Buco Capital, which is basically the fourth technology brother, he says this is a drawdown for ants. Momentum names with zero valuation support still up 100 to 700% year to date. Several with no revenue. Many still getting gunned from the lows back to roughly break even. I don't know when the music stops, but the Palantards and the Lemon Apes are still dancing.

Lemon Apes? What are Lemon Apes?

I think Lemonade.

Lemonade is meme stock now.

I mean, it's up couple hundred percent year to date.

Well, there's another story that is over the last year that is developing, but we don't have a full analysis of it. So deep seek version 3.1 is out. The model was released on Hugging Face. Is that correct, Tyler?

Yeah.

So I think there's basically there's no model card.

Okay.

So we don't know like what the benchmarks are really.

Why would that be? Why would they Release the model without releasing the model card. I feel like that's kind of standard issue.

Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, it could just be like, oh, we forgot to add it to the, like, file.

I don't know. Okay.

I mean, I assume that they're gonna add it within a couple days.

Okay, well, people could do it independently too.

Yeah, you can run the benchmarks independently, I guess. But, yeah, so far it seems it's kind of up in the air how good it looks. Some people were like, oh, China's cooked. Like, you know, the chips, like, totally screwed with.

Yeah, yeah. They tried to train on Huawei. They failed. They couldn't get Nvidia.

Like, people were saying, like, oh, it was supposed to be Deep SEQ before.

That's what we were hearing for sure.

Yeah.

And then it turned into 3.1. It was so bad.

So it could be sort of like a 4.5 moment. Yeah, yeah. It's possible that they're going down. They're. They're mimicking the error in the tech tree that was followed at OpenAI and Meta. It seemed like, because GPT 4.5 kind of came out and was underwhelming and then Llama 4 Behemoth couldn't get out and we might be seeing something similar.

I mean, so those were both examples of like, big. Big, yeah. That was like big pre training runs.

Right.

But Deep Sea Guardi has like, good RL because they have R1 that was like. I mean, that was the first using model to come out after OpenAI. So I don't know if it was necessarily that. I mean, it seems reasonable that it's just like a chip thing where they were forced to use Huawei. But I think we'll see, hopefully over this week they'll release some more details about it.

But. Yep. Well, we will be tracking which company has the best AI model at the end of August on polymarket. Of course, Google's running away with it. 93% chance. I don't know if they're already in the lead and that's why. Or maybe we're expecting something new to come out. But DeepMind seems to be on a tear. They've been climbing. Even towards the end of the year, they're up at 59%. Xai has recently eclipsed OpenAI as the second best AI model at the end of 2025. The other news on Deepseek this is still in the rumor mill, but some dude asked the official Deep Sea customer service and they confirmed that version 3.1 is a merge of reasoners and non reasoners. Maybe it's some sort of like model switcher coming soon. Both chat and reasoner Reasoner API now route to the same model but just change if thinking mode is on. So anyway, if you're looking for sales tax AGI, head over to numeralhrdq.com spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance at Numeral HD, you.

Well, Howard Marks just had an interview with Bloomberg. I think it's relevant. He says U.S. stocks are in, quote, in the early days for a bubble. Although the critical point for a correction is yet to come. He says I'm certainly not ringing alarm bells. The point is that things are expensive. Palantir is certainly expensive at 500x.

Yep.

Price to earnings. It's been 16 years since investors last went through a, quote, serious market correction. Yeah, that. The current 16 years.

Oh, he's going back to 2008.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

The current period reminds him of the late 1990s when the market was falling in love with tech stocks, leading to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to warn of irrational exuberance. Still, the market rose for a few more years after that before the tech bubble burst. Yeah, again, like, you know, the debate, debate everybody's been having is, are we in January of 2021 or November of 2021? We might just be in 2019. You know, we just don't know.

This is a Ben Thompson stake. It's very hard to find.

Mark says people get of the habit of thinking about market corrections, noting that a reversion to the mean is very likely. Some technology stocks are, quote, quite highly valued relative to history. No. So no new insight there. This is a time to put a little more defense into your portfolio. And investing in credit as opposed to equities is one way to do it.

Yeah, I saw another post. That was it. Fidelity was recommending a portfolio of 70% bonds, which seems very, very conservative. But do with that what you will. Let's switch gears to a different hedge fund billionaire Jim Simons. His daughter, Elizabeth Simons, has given $250,000 to a super PAC supporting New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani. Of course, this is seen as sort of antithetical to who Jim Simons was and what Renaissance Technologies did as an applied math hedge fund. Gary Tan has a take. He says it's a special form of insanity for private foundations to supercharge the destruction of teaching mathematic to the next generation when that money was earned literally by the merit of pure applied Math, like the money earned by Renaissance Technologies, legalized math. Gary says Jim Simon's mass mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter Liz, who oversees the Hysing Simons foundation and its near billion dollar endowment. What Liz has chosen to do with that inheritance might have surprised her father. Jim Simons devoted much of his charitable giving to basic research in mathematics and science. But his daughter's foundation is moving in a very different direction. The Hysing Simons foundation and similar organizations are supercharging a movement to remake K12 mathematics education according to social justice principles. Interesting that both the left and the right are somewhat attacking math right now. Obviously this is coming from the left, but there's also that attack on usc.

Are numbers real?

Yeah. UCLA mathematician Terrence Tao had his funding cut by the Trump administration. And so it's a bad time to be a shape rotator. Time to pivot into word selling. But we'll see how it, how it shakes out. I'm not. I haven't been following the New York City mayoral election too closely because I live in Los Angeles. Anyway, let's go to this post by Nikhil Krishnan. He says, dude, Mark Bertolini, the ex Aetna CEO, now Oscar CEO, has an insane story here. He talks about how after his skiing injury, he was in so much pain for 17 years that he went to Switzerland to end his life and was then told he could fix his pain. He went through neuroplasticity exercises and got it fixed. So I was getting ready to go to Switzerland to end my life at Dignitas. It's an assisted suicide organization. But I had to prove I had intractable pain and pain that couldn't be cured. And so I was sent to a doctor and the doctor evaluated me. The doctor said I was going to do it on February 15, 2023 was going to be my death day. I wanted to do the 18th, but it was a Sunday. What was the day I had the accident? So I went to this doctor and he sat down with me and they did a few tests and they looked at me and said, you don't have intractable pain. You have neuroplastic pain and we can fix that. I go, here we go again. I mean, I did seven days at the Hahnemann University Hospital ICU, 50 milligrams of ketamine, an hour IV to try and reboot my system. I had a great time and it felt better for the first month afterwards, but then came back in a rush. And so I said, here we go again. And I had worked with Mary to get her through how that was going to work and what the plans were and all that sort of stuff. And so they go, okay, well, let's start. So part of it was cognitive behavioral therapy, and I had to go back to my childhood and my concepts. I was not well treated as a child. And so I was consistently under threat assessment. And threat assessment is the worst thing you can have when you have chronic pain, because you're always waiting for one cell to have pain, and then all of a sudden it goes everywhere. And they said, and also your 42 pain centers in your brain have wired together from all this chronic pain over the years. So any touch feels like pain. So in essence, I was addicted to pain. And they had done MRIs on baseball hitters, and they said, the best baseball hitters, their visual, cognitive and motor cortices light up instantaneously. There's no latency. That's why they see the ball in slow motion. That's how they see it moving. That's how they hit it. So well, you have a baseball hitter's brain on pain. There's no latency in your system. Something touches your arm, you're in pain. So they help me understand the system. Then they put me in transcranial magnetic stimulation and they zap my brain for 30 minutes to disconnect those pain centers. And they put me in a virtual reality lab with a helmet and they re patterned my brain. And he got through it and he's doing well. So very good to hear. What a crazy, crazy turnaround. Anyway, Microsoft Excel adds copilot AI to help fill in spreadsheet cells. This is like a crazy.

The moment you've all been waiting for.

The moment you've all been waiting for. But there's been a lot of folks who have been building Microsoft Excel add ons. We had some of them on the show. There's one that launched on Monday. We didn't have a chance to have the founder on the show, but there was this. The current copilot instantiation, similar to the Gemini integration and just kind of sits in the sidebar, does a little bit. But now they're going to have copilot AI in every single spreadsheet cell, similar to that demo that we saw on Monday.

Yes, but they warn against using the AI function for numerical calculations or in high stakes scenarios with legal regulatory and compliance implications as copilot can give incorrect responses.

Interesting. Do you think this is disruptors innovation or innovators dilemma problem where there's a low end solution that is counter positioned against the status quo because Microsoft can't add a unreliable product to something that is thought of as reliable. This was the take that the legal industry could face disruption from AI because right now AI is maybe 50% as good as a real lawyer. I don't even know. 80%, 10%. It doesn't matter. The point is that it's a thousand times cheaper potentially.

People have gotten used to getting a result from Excel and feeling like they can trust it.

Sure.

Trust their own calculation.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, they don't feel like I need to get a whiteboard out and whiteboard it out and use a calculator and sort of fact check it.

Yep.

But I think you're gonna have to do that with Copilot and various AI tools for some amount of time. But at the end of the day you have tools that humans use to do things but then humans are held responsible for whatever, whatever process they use in order to get a certain result.

Yeah.

So I don't think this is that big of a, of a change.

Yeah, I mean fundamentally Excel is a functional programming language essentially. Like it's a, it's a bunch of functions you can't write. It's not, it's not the type of language where you can create like a class but or object. It's not object oriented programming, but it is functional programming. And what that means is that it's entirely deterministic. Like everyone opens up the Excel the same Excel sheet, they should see the same numbers. There is no stochastic non deterministic and that is kind of antithetical to the way LLMs work. Now to be fair, businesses all over the world have implemented LLMs at various pieces of their tech stacks and been fine with the fact that okay, for this particular function call we get a sort of fuzzy result, we're trying to tag something for fraud and we're giving it a risk score at the end of the day. And we know that there might be some hallucinations that might get something wrong. And the tech industry has completely come to terms with that. And they know that these systems are sometimes reliable, sometimes they're not, but they, they add value. And so the fact that Microsoft's actually rolling this out quickly is pretty bullish for Excel sticking around in my opinion. And the fact that they are warning. As long as the warning doesn't pop up every single time you call the copilot AI and you. And you use an LLM in a cell. I. I don't think it would be a major headwind, but I don't know. We'll see. Yeah, I'm not using a lot is it Lindy Excel these days but you should be using Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on. On G2. We need, we need AI agent world champion. Yeah. And I mean customer service is a good example of like where most of the customer service answers are non deterministic anyway because they come from a human. So if you have an AI agent in the loop, you will still need to escalate and fact check and reality check what's going on. But in general it's the perfect fit for generative AI.

Kyle Chayka has a new essay in the New Yorker. He says, what do all these things have in common? I grapple with the burgeoning Gen Z and younger aesthetic of tacky, oozy, ugly, chemically augmented brain rotted consumer slop. The Labubu Dubai Chocolate Matcha industrial complex. And I'm looking forward to a time when we don't have to use the word slop anymore. I think, I think it'd be fair to at least soon call the top on that.

I was really hoping that I just would never need to learn about Labubu at all. And just like it would just come and go and I would just be forever ignorant of it, much like you're ignorant of every movie ever created.

It's a beautiful experience.

It leaves you with a sense of purity that I long for. And yet today I find myself learning about Labubu. Tyler, do you have a take on Labubu?

No, but I have a fun fact. I'm pretty sure this is true. The first.

This better be legitimately fun. Really hyped it up.

So I think the first use of the term brain rot is Henry David Thoreau in Walden.

No way.

So like 1850s. Wow.

Isn't Walden like literally about touching grass the whole point? If you go to the pond.

Yeah, he lives at the pond for two years.

Yeah, he goes.

He doesn't talk to anyone and he just like.

And he says the word brain rot or rotted brain or something.

Yeah, I think brain rot.

Wow. Okay. Yeah.

Well, is that a fun fact?

That's a very fun fact.

I thought that was fun.

I would give that 10 funds up. On a recent quiet weekday morning in Manhattan, I attempted to obtain a Labubu, the cutesy monster doll that has become the biggest international toy fad since Beanie Babies in the late 90s. This is in the New Yorker. Collected by children as well as by adults, the dolls were created in 2015. I didn't realize it was 10 years old by the Hong Kong born designer Ka Sing Loong when they were brought to the mass market by the Chinese toy company Pop Mart in 2019. The K Pop star Lisa started sharing her collection on social media in 2024, sparking the recent explosion. I didn't realize that that's where this all came from. This K pop star Labubus have pointed teeth, rabbit like ears and wide glaring eyes. Their faces are in extremities are they're demonic. Lots of people have been saying that.

Tye Dye in the chat says Tim Dillon said Labuuos are just Chinese voodoo dolls.

And yes, yes, I like that post. Someone was saying I want to pronounce it like it's a Greek hero. Laboboos.

Bill Bishop in the Sub Sack chat says my dog Tashi wants a Labubu chew toy.

That could be a good.

Let's, let's buy Tashi all of them that are available on the market and have, and have little, little Tashi destroy all of them.

I loved, I love Tashi because Tashi is like a full on character. He's sort of like the Tyler of Sharp China. And Tashi is a recurring character on the Sharp China podcast that you should obviously go listen to.

And Bill, Bill, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're buying a Labubu for Tashi. Nick, Nick, can you figure it out?

Yeah. Get Tashi's address. Send a little boo boo.

Yeah, don't just get an entry level one Tashi deserves.

Get the rarest one possible. The one of one, the most hyped. Take it out of the clutches of the most K pop addicted, brain rotted teen who's ready to spend $10,000 of the parents money and give it to the dog.

So their faces and extremities are bare. The rest of their bulbous bodies are covered in New Yorker.

This is, this is exactly who I want to be covering this story.

Creatures are usually found hanging from phones or handbags. Tiny demons haunting our accessories or in haunting our lives.

See? Demonic. You said it. But the New Yorker said it as well.

Yeah, they come in a menagerie of more than 300 collectible forms. They can be matched to a personal style or mood. Pink fur for when you're feeling flirty. Glowing eye red eyes for a bit of an edge. Dress be belate scarred for a cozy vibe. The high end art fair Art Basel released a limited edition art handler Labubu, a batch of which sold out in 20 minutes. I think that Tashi needs the art for sure.

As a result of their popularity, Labubas is our Labubus are difficult to get a hold of, often out of stock both online and in physical stores. Their scarcity made me want one even more. Perhaps those who own them know something I didn't. So I turned to Partea, a Union Square boba tea cafe with neon lit claw machines that are perennially well stocked with Labubu boxes. I plan to win my own tiny monster by skill. A friend and I picked up refreshments at the counter, sparkling grape yogurt and iced green tea with vanilla mousse. And traded $20 for 20 party tokens which would allow us to scant four attempts at grabbing one of the Labuwus stacked and grinning inside their glass cages. This is the Skinner box. This is fun. I love, I love games. I would probably fall for this though. The cafe had just opened. You know, the last time I.

We need to make a golden retriever that can ward off the demonic Labubu.

Yes, you know, the antithesis of the, of the Antichrist. Like Labubu, it is the Santa Monica Pier, Mickey Mouse or like, you know, I forget exactly what I won, but I was with my son on the Santa Monica Pier and there is a challenge where you have to hold onto a blanket like a pull up bar and then it pulls you up and you have to dangle and you. And the longer you dangle, the bigger the prize you get. And I held on for my life because I was fighting for the love of a four year old and I did quite well. There are a number of tricks. So for the first minute it doesn't rotate and then it releases and then it can rotate freely and so that makes it a lot harder. I of course was not carrying my weightlifting chalk like I should have been. And so my hands were a bit sweaty and I underperformed. But I drew a large crowd. People were cheering. It was a heroic moment, something I'll remember forever. And so if you're trying to, if you're trying to win a toy, stay away from the demonic claw grabber and instead do a feat of strength for your child. That's what I would recommend.

So the author Tries to. Tries to win one of these. He does not. And he says, why did I feel the need to own one of these?

He didn't win.

He didn't win. He just decided to cut his losses and go buy one. Why did I feel the need to own one in the first place? It seemed to be an accessory of lifestyle that I was missing out on and already late to adopt. One constructed of physical goods that have attained. Yeah, it feels very. You're gonna be late to the Labu game if you're, you know, buying it now that we are.

Definitely late to this one.

One constructed of physical goods that have attained intense online fandom status symbols that are both Instagramable and consumable. Why are they. You know, I don't. I don't know that anybody's eating their Labubus except for Tashi, but. And yet this lifestyle seemed demarcated by objects that were ugly, strange and uncanny. There's Dubai Chocolate. A candy bar stuffed with pistachio cream.

Yes.

And dough that oozes pea colored mush. And. And I don't even have the. We're not going to go into the tinfoil haul.

You can look into it if you're interested. The Dubai Chocolate story. Very interesting.

There's a conspiracy theory there that I do think traps.

We don't have a tinfoil hat big enough.

Yeah. For that one.

But you can do your own research.

There's Matcha lattes. Bright green caffeinated beverages that sometimes come out through with a red strawberry syrup resembling blood splashed on a lawn. What is this?

I don't like any of this. Anyway, I think the antidote to Labubu's.

I mean, the main thing is we are far from the Everlane era of consumer goods.

Sure.

Right. Sort of.

Sure. It needs to be garish, minimalist, controversial. It needs to be viral. It needs to be built for the.

Built for the timeline.

Yes, yes, yes. If you're looking for a physical, good. Get an eight. Get a pod five. You don't need to go to a claw machine to pick up an Eight Sleep. You can go to Eight Sleep.com. they got a five year warranty. 39 risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Does Labubu has a. Have a five year warranty? No. Does Labubu have a 30 night risk free trial? No. Does Labubu have free returns, free shipping? No. Get an eight sleep.

One thing we didn't ask Mateo yesterday, CEO was when are they coming out with eight sleeps for dogs? Because.

Yes, yes. And also. And also a third Zone for the small child who demands sleeping in the middle and wants his own temperature control. That was a request that came in during the. During our segment yesterday from the family. Also, timeline was in turmoil yesterday around 8 Sleep Deli and taking shots at Benchmark. I thought about it. I am incredibly bullish on eight sleep selling in China. I'll give you my rationale. So a lot of Americans are saying, oh, China, America, conflict, it's the worst possible thing. The invasion of Taiwan would be disastrous. We need to be, you know, we need to be extremely judicious with the, you know, our frontier technology that we send to China. We need to restrict exports of cutting edge frontier semiconductors. The H20 maybe. Definitely not the GB200, definitely not the H100. We'll see. They're not getting Blackwell, but they will be getting the pod 5. And I think it's incredibly bullish for world peace. And I'll lay out my rationale. So there are studies that show that aggression is deeply tied to lack of sleep. And the Pod five, as you know, makes it impossible to wake up on the wrong side of the bed. So if you get a good night's sleep, you are less likely to sleep to want to engage in geopolitical conflict. And so I think we need to be sending Pod Fives to the Forbidden City, to jong on high, to Beijing, to every CCP official, to every PLA official and making sure they have a good night's sleep. So they wake up refreshed, they wake up feeling good, and they wake up like, I don't want to go to conflict with America.

Maybe Trump should.

We can work together.

Trump should have America take a position.

Yes.

In. In eight sleep.

Absolutely.

And maybe get on the board.

Yes. I think it's a strategically important business for the United States.

Also something that we could take away at some point if we did get into a conflict.

Yes.

And we didn't want them to be sleeping.

Well, if all of China is sleeping.

On a sleep, cut off the supply.

We can remotely turn it off and say, hey, you're not getting a good night.

Or turn it really hot.

Really hot. Oh, you like it cold now it's hot. This is a major geopolitical.

Yeah. So right when they're to take Taiwan.

Yes.

Just crank them up.

Yes, exactly.

Everybody.

No. Cancel the invasion. Cancel the invasion.

The New Yorker says these products feel hallucinatory. They take the social media mandate of self modification to its logical extreme, embracing easy breezy chemical additives and image augmentation, enhancing the self until it spills from its pores. The aesthetic is as much a defense mechanism against the Internet era as it is a self aware and joke. We can see what late hyper digital artificially intelligent capitalism is doing to us. Isn't. Isn't it a laugh? It's very unnatural looking, the cultural critic Dean Kesek told me, describing the dominant visual style of extremely online consumerism. It kind of relishes its own artificiality.

Do you know this song?

I do not. I do not watch that song.

Like the man 1000 wrote a song about Dean Kissick. It's a banger. You should go check it out. Anyway. Cultural critic I love Dean Kissick.

Any pretense of the pure organic is undercut by the kind of willful alchemy. Everything is an admixture. The skin care brand Road put peptides in lip gloss, the Los Angeles based grocery store chain erewhon and like IGF1 in lip gloss.

The Wolverine peptide. I'd be down for that.

What else can I BBC 157.

Oh, BBC 157. That's the one.

Huge muscular face.

Yeah, like that.

Erewhon enhances multicolored smoothies with collagen and sea moss, Touchland makes powder mist scented hand sanitizers and the drug and beauty brand hers produces an Ozempic knockoff that comes in a bottle the color of Matcha. I did not know that.

As if you're injecting yourself with Japanese tea. I can hear the barista now. Would you like a shot of semaglutide with that? These days the memes are to be ingested into the body, not just viewed on screen.

That's a good line.

Yeah, we should move on from this. It's a long article. You can go read it in the New Yorker and have a have a deep dive into IRL brain rot and the trend. I want to read this article by Nadia Asperuhov, Delian's wife, who's been on the show and she is responding to Katherine Boyle's article the Great Tech Family alliance, talking about pronatalism. I thought it was interesting. We didn't get to it when this dropped, but it's in the New Atlantis. And I guess the New Atlantis is doing an essay series of replies to other essays. I thought it was kind of interesting format. Anyway, Nadia kicks it off by saying Kathryn Boyle's speech is a sign of a new song making its way through the tech world, one that trills the importance of investing into our social infrastructure, strengthening our nation, and yes, building families. I agree with all of that, it's a hopeful message. But like tech's early forays into politics, which began as a vague mood board of civic aspirations before coalescing into real policy efforts and wins, the pro family cultural shift still has a long way to go. And so Nadia is laying out a new pathway towards pro family cultural shift in tech. This is not to say there isn't a real movement happening. And as a parent, I'm grateful for it, says Nadia. But I feel the gap between rhetoric and reality as I navigate the tech world as a writer and researcher, particularly when visiting visiting the San Francisco Bay Area.

Never ask a pronatalist founder VC how many children they have.

I mean, you can't do that one in this case because I believe Kathryn Boyle does have kids. But of course. But I have long joked that, yes, bro, I will Definitely read your 5,000 word essay on pronatalism, but I gotta take my son to soccer right now, so I'll get to it later. There were too many incidents of that, for sure. Dinner conversations still tend to circle around whether children are worth having at all or they treat global fertility rates at arm's length. Many in tech embrace a borderless lifestyle that implies constant mobility, hosting events in cities like New York and Austin, which doesn't blend well with family obligations. Children are rarely present at social gatherings. I've had the strange experience of bringing my child to events where I'm praised for this act as some sort of pro family ideological flex, which, while flattering, misses the much less glamorous truth. With no evening childcare available, I didn't have a choice. That's a really, really good point. There's something telling about this disparity. Tech is clearly eager to recast itself as pro family, but it hasn't yet internalized what is required to support families day to day. I mean, I literally just experienced this where I was invited to an event and I was like, like, yeah, I'd love to stop by. I wrapped the show at 2. I might be able to get there, but I got to be home for family dinner. That's at six, like, and the event wound up being really far away. And I was like, there's just no way I can get there an hour and then get back and do anything meaningful there. And that's just the nature of these things. Like the, the same thing.

This morning we saw a friend that he invited us to an event and I said if I go to that, I won't see my fam. My kids for 48 hours because I say goodnight, 8:30. I see them the next day around 5. If I go to something in the evening, I won't see them again until the next day.

Yeah, there is a real trade off between, like we have said in America in tac, we work really hard. We also are saying we take our family life really seriously. Something has to give. It's probably the, the dinner parties and the happy hours for the most part, unless they're the other thing.

I mean, I think, I think people in tech, you sort of grew up hearing that, you know, global warming was going to make the world uninhabitable at some point in the near future. That was the sentiment. If you turned on the television, that's what you saw. And I just remember hearing, you know, even as a teenager, you know, people talking, oh, I don't, I don't know that it'll make sense to have kids, right, if, if the world is so bad and dark and, and growing up.

In coastal California, my take was always like, no, we need way more kids because they're the, the ones that invent the technology that solves the problem. The solution is always like more ingenuity, more people. In my opinion, I'm not Thomas. Thomas Malthus. Pilled. It's crazy to see Malthus coming back. The Malthusian trap. Are you familiar Tyler Thomas Malthus? The Malthusian trap.

Wait, I don't know the trap.

So the Malthusian trap was that Thomas Malthus was an economist 100, 200 years ago or something, and he looked at the growth rate of farming and the growth rate of the population and was projecting exponential growth in population while linear gains in farming. And his conclusion was that we were all going to starve to death because we would never make enough food, we would never create exponential growth in food production to match the exponential growth rate in the populace. Of course we did just that. And the number of farmers went from like 90% of the population to like 2% of the population. And although obviously food prices are important and starvation is still an issue in general, we humanity has survived the lack of food. And so it's called the Malthusian trap. It's Malthusian ideology to be afraid of a linear trend not being able to ever go exponential. And so if you think about like carbon recapture or anything that is a mitigant to waste heat and pollution and carbon emissions, you track this out and you say, well, carbon emissions are growing exponentially, the temperature is growing exponentially, and our progress on solving that is growing linearly. But all it takes is actually finding the correct exponential solution, which might just be like exponentially growing nuclear or exponentially growing solar, and then all of a sudden we're having a very different conversation anyway. Kathryn Boyle, as a parent herself, says Nadia Asperuhoff is right to highlight pragmatic changes as the scaffolding that's required to build a pro family culture. Flexible work, improving and reducing the cost of education, raising the status of parents. Agree with all that. And like Boyle, I believe that tech has the ability and resources to bring this future to fruition if it wants to. Oddly, however, it is tech's unmatched capabilities that might be what's holding it back. Tech is arguably the best place in the world for unchecked personal ambition to flourish, particularly for young, childless people. You grind and get the hundred million dollars out of your laptop. Not a lot of time to raise kids while you're in that process. But this type of environment can delay or disincentivize family formation. My peers in tech who are reluctant to have children often express fear that it will interrupt the arc of the careers they've worked worked so hard to build. That, I think, is the primary tension not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between the individual and collective ambitions. Both the state and the family ask us to make sacrifices for something bigger than ourselves, and this perhaps, is why why they have historically fought each other for mindshare. What tech offers is the opposite, a chance to realize a vision that is entirely one's own. Tech worships individual talent. Look at the talent war and the AI researchers that are getting the absolute bag right now. And it's a unique thrill to live and work among peers who don't shy away from greatness. I agree. But it also means that tech has to work harder than other industries to demonstrate that starting a family doesn't require giving up these ambitions. That case can't be made through vibes alone, as any parent can attest. Who has spent a sleepless night with a sick child before a big meeting, zooming with one hand while playing peekaboo with the other, and or who has missed a deadline because childcare fell through. The answer to this more secondary sales, more tender offers. If you're a venture capitalist, you're talking a big game about being pronatalist. You need to put a couple million dollars into the common in a tender and make sure that child care is paid for. What do you think?

I like it. I like it. My lead vc, my last company, the second that I told him was Having a baby. He said time for a raise. It was very meaningful at that time. And yeah, I mean, that's the. If you're an entrepreneur and you're building a company and you're having a, a child and you aren't going to be able to have access to child care, that is a. Yeah, that is a.

A serious. Leg weights while you're running. Putting an extra 45 on the bench press.

Exactly.

Maybe not necessary.

Maybe a couple plates. Maybe a couple plates on each side.

Unnecessarily. You need one of those shirts that makes it easier to bench press. Are you familiar with those? We got to get those. Have you seen these?

Yeah, that's our new merch shop.

Oh, that is a great merchant. So it's a compression shirt that basically it keeps your arms like this, like tight. And so when you stretch, it's just taking some of the weight off, like 20 pounds. And so people do it to get comfortable. And like, yeah, I can't really do 315, but if I wear the shirt, I can. And then they get comfortable with 315. They do it a bunch and then they can take the shirt off and then they hit 315 and then they can push up. So, yeah, I think that's our next Marsha for sure. For sure. There's some big news coming, coming. This will be for the. For them, for the people in the chat. First, let's continue with Nadia. If tech wants to embody more pro family values, it needs more skin in the game. It's not enough to tweet about population decline or pass around graphs on it in the group chat. Tech will learn much faster what's required by having kids, raising them, and supporting each other through the ups and downs. Pro family culture means figuring out how to meet the family's needs for parental leave, affordable child care, quality education, and social environments that are welcoming to children and family lifestyles. Until then, the rhetoric will feel less like a movement and more like a mood. Tech has a track record of moving quickly once it figures out what it truly wants. If the pro family turn is real, and I hope it is, then what we need next is the. Is to move the discourse from talk to action. Only then will we be able to say it with a straight face that tech is building not just companies, but families too. Fantastic article, Nadia. Thank you for posting that. And if you wouldn't want. If you want to. If you want to invest in the public markets, completely unrelatedly, go to public.com. invest those. Take it seriously.

Tried to find the translation.

Sometimes the anti transition keeps you guessing.

Yeah.

Public.com is investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Oh, you want to transition. Why don't you set up an investment account on public.com for your child. Do your own Gerstner account. Tyler, what you got?

It was an anti transition, just like anti mimetics.

Oh, there we go. There we go.

Whoa.

Yeah. All these other, all these other, all these other live stream hosts, they think they need to have the perfect transition. I keep you guessing with the anti transition.

Well, we have some big, big, big breaking news. Elon has hit the timeline and Ani from XAI has new outfits. You outfits. I know.

So for all the Grok Heavy subscribers, get ready to.

This is big virtual try on Fortnite skins for your companion.

Didn't we just say this? You were saying that's the way that they'll monetize is that there will be a number of outfits and that the outfits will be more expensive.

I want a Birkin.

Yes.

I want a little boo Boo.

I think we just unlocked like the real value of the virtual AI companion economy. And all of a sudden I was previously thinking, this is a single digit billion dollar opportunity. Now the moral stuff is aside, like, I think me and you are both like, we don't love this. And that's the point that Jira Tickets makes here. He says, sir, we need to get to Mars. And I agree with that. I think the efforts would be better spent getting us to Mars and getting us to AGI and solving physics. And I hope that none of that takes a back seat to this stuff.

But you got the new fits, Tyler.

New outfits.

Are they free or do you have to pay?

Are there any upgraded picks?

They're free.

No in app purchases.

They're all free. No, no in app purchases yet.

Okay, well, let's hope that one of the upgrade picks is just a donation to the next Mars mission. Yeah, maybe put on. Instead of being so scantly clad, you could put on a full spacesuit and then all that money would go to the next Mars mission, which I'm in favor of. But I do think that the Aliakta Iocta ya est? I botched that super bad. The die has been cast. The AI companions are on a trajectory to monetize very well, specifically in price discrimination. And so this is the brilliance of OnlyFans. And why OnlyFans is so profitable is that there are both power law creators who generate the vast majority of the revenues and there are power law customers that spend the most money on the individual creators. This is the value of. This is the economic insight. In Fortnite there are power many. The median Fortnite player probably spends zero. But the biggest whale on Fortnite is probably spending thousands of dollars. And so that that price discrimination, there's going to be someone who is on Grok and talking to Annie and spending thousands of dollars on virtual goods, I would predict. I think that's where this goes.

Same thing as the dynamic in mobile gaming.

Mobile gaming is the same.

Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, bringing.

Price discrimination into a category that previously did not have it, where it was one size fits all. All you can eat. Like, you know, Netflix does not have this. Everyone pays the same price for Netflix but. But if there's a version of the product that can ramp up so you're making more money. And this is the beauty of just online advertising. Meta makes probably makes more money from advertising aquanauts to you than someone who has lower. Has lower penchant for luxury watch shopping.

Yes.

Anyway, Dan Nolan says a guy on Reddit built something I've wanted for ages, scraping public data and putting it together. A leaderboard of real estate agents who appear to serially get prices.

Right.

Wrong. And so I guess you could go and find the real estate agent who is underpricing assets and then. And then go and buy a house from them. Maybe this is the solution to the housing crisis. Maybe this is alpha for open door in a bull case for open door. Open Door, of course, buys and sells real estate and houses. And if there is, if there's a market dislocation and inefficiency in the market, you would expect financial institutions to take advantage.

So this real estate's real.

What you got?

Real estats.org real estats. That's a good having a leaderboard of just the people that misprice assets.

And they do it to both directions. They overprice and they underprice. I feel like how responsible is a real estate agent for mispricing a house? I feel like a lot of that's driven by the home buyers. Like the home buyer might say, I know what I'm. I know what I got. I want 3 million for my house. And the real estate agent is like, but you made some really weird decisions in the remodel. You have four movie theaters.

Well, people also will strategically underprice it at listing.

Yeah.

In order to create demand and then dynamic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There aren't that many people in this neighborhood that need car lifts in their garage. You're like. But everyone wants car lifts. Everyone has four GT3 RSS that they need to store in the plastic. Everyone has supercars in this neighborhood. They're like, at 1.5 million. Yeah. People usually spend 50% of their net worth on cars, right?

Yes.

They all should get a 1500 square foot, $1.5 million house in LA and spend. And get four supercars for the next 1.5.

Exactly. Exactly.

And secure it all with an un.

Well, we have another massive announcement. What's that again? I think everybody listening has been, you know, waiting for this.

Yes.

Really? I'm feeling the AGI right now. Feeling the AGI. We got to update our timeline.

Update our timelines.

Jordy Notion has launched offline.

Let's go, let's go, let's go.

Let's give it up for the Notion team. I actually think this, I mean this is cool. I mean I. Chopping wood. I used to use Notion and you know, even if you have a small feature update, make it, make it feel big. Clearly their users are excited about it terminally online engineer says Notion is so funny. Announcing an offline mode for a to do app in 2025.

This is the right thing to do. Don't get distracted. We saw this with figma. Figma launched Figma make vibe coding platform. Super on trend AI stuff. And then simultaneously like yeah, we improved Figma design.

No Figma site.

Oh yeah, sites for sure. But also just like minor iterations on, you know, the opacity layer and how you can implement parallax in your design. Like you can't get lost in the sauce. You have to stay on the trend and be using the latest tools and be on the cusp. But also you can't let the culture of regular iteration fall by the wayside. You can't get distracted by the shiny green tennis ball. Sometimes you have to focus on just scratching your ear.

We got a very low tan post here from Mopar who 2 likes 61 views highlighting the MIT report that we covered yesterday. 95% of gen AI pilots at companies are failing. Mopar says no babe, your zero ROI is perfect. Big one scare me. Yeah, I think this is a real problem. There's a lot of gen AI companies that have sold in pilots to things like healthcare system that are not. These are not going to turn into multi year contracts. Yep, hopefully a lot of them do. Some of them do. There's still a business there, but your ARR is not necessarily real.

Yeah, we'll see. I wonder the methodology of this report. I wonder what a generative AI pilot means, what failing means. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of companies are using tools that have implemented generative AI features under the hood, and they don't even really realize that their software is just getting better. But it's probably deeper in the stack. It's probably a little more, I don't know, obfuscated. And they're just seeing, like. Like, oh, the fraud detection algorithm that my ERP uses is a little more reliable. But I didn't like Pilot that. It's just like the software I use. The tools got better. The graphics in video games got better. Like, there's not a binary moment. People are hoping for the ChatGPT moment of generative AI pilots, and it might not be coming. We might be on a smoother adoption curve there. Anyway, what else?

We have a post here from Julie Chang, very important. Who wants to own Bill Walton's longtime San Diego estate in the Marston Hills Neighborhood, which has two homes sitting on 1.3 acres combined. Both homes sit abutting a trailhead. Seven beds, eight baths. Listed at 5 million. Absolutely given it away. This thing looks beautiful. What else we got here? We have. Is it Vlad or Mark joining? Vlad is joining in just three minutes, so we'll keep.

I'm just posting from my personal account, just letting everyone know.

Alyssa says she's looking for the most performative man in San Francisco.

Yeah. What is this?

Can you explain this, Tyler?

Yeah. Tyler, do you understand this?

A little bit? So there's this concept, like, you're like, performative guy, right? So you can imagine you're going to, like, a matcha. Where do they sell magic matcha? Matcha. You go to, like, a coffee shop.

Okay. He's drinking matcha.

He says you have a book with you.

Oh, yeah. Like you with Infinite Jest on the subway.

What?

Like how you were reading Infinite Jest on the subway. That was like a performative thing that you did.

Well, okay.

And how you. And how you were telling everyone about how you, you know, you're a bit of an intellectual and you read Infinite Jest.

Okay, okay. You know, let's move on from this. But, yeah, there's like. Like intern Michael. He loves matcha.

He's kind of a very good guy. Cool.

Yeah.

Oh, he's performing. You're taking shots. He can't defend himself. He doesn't have a mic. That's not fair.

But then, I don't know. Yeah, you have, like a tote bag. It's like A. Yeah.

Signaling. Signaling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just unclear on what people are signaling. Yeah. Is it more the aesthetics or is it more like the startup swag? Either way, the SF's performative mail contest will be happening at Alamo Square park on August 22nd at 7pm they're putting up posters in San Francisco advertising it. They should get a billboard. They should go to adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy to measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we have our first guest of the show, Vlad Tenev. How you doing, Vlad? Good to meet you.

What's up guys? Good to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for joining. Give us, can you give us a little bit of a state of the union on Robinhood? You've launched so many different products. Like, how do you see the shape? How do you define, are you a financial institution? I remember when I first used the product probably almost a decade ago now. I guess it was an app and now it's a company, now it's a business, now it's an institution. What is the shape of the company today and how has it evolved?

Well, first off, our mission hasn't changed. Our mission has always been to democratize finance for all. And what that means to us is we really see Robinhood as the defender of, of free markets. And we're building a financial super app, a platform where all of our customers can custody and hold any financial asset or conduct any financial transaction. And obviously it started with stocks, but it's expanded across multiple domains. We have a credit card which in my unbiased opinion is the best credit card on the market. Banking, which is a high end private banking inspired offering, is coming out very soon. We offer, I think the best retirement account on the market for the self employed entrepreneur folks that might not have access to a traditional 401k. So really we've been on this journey and we've increasingly been expanding the scope and capabilities of what we offer.

Does that mean something? Like when I think about legacy financial institutions, institutions, they think about like an auto loan, a mortgage, like is that coming down the pipe? I mean, I'm sure you can't comment on specifics, but just like that shape of experience for consumer finance, like what are all the touch points as you kind of plan the next, the next phase of growth?

Yeah, I mean the, the scope is broad. Right. Any financial Asset any transaction. We actually a couple months ago started piloting a mortgage offering and partnership with Sage Home Loans. And surprisingly, you know, I announced that on X and it was probably one of my best performing tweets of the year. I mean people are, people are really interested in these types of offers from Robinhood. The focus is really on daily habits, the financial products and services that you use on a daily basis. But I think serving our customers well with those gives us the opportunity to do these one time offers. And you know, you can imagine if we serve you well with your banking needs, we would be sort of like your first call if you want a mortgage. And I think the wrapper behind all this is our Robinhood Gold program. So at first when I launched, when we launched this, there was skepticism because subscription products never really worked in financial services. But we've seen this interesting thing where someone joins Robinhood usually to buy a stock or a crypto. They sign up for Robinhood Gold very quickly. Our attach rate for day one has gone up quite high. And then once they become a Gold member, they look at what else is offered in the gold bundle and even if they're not ready for that service like a mortgage right away, we usually are top of mind if they ever become interested in something like that in the future.

How do you think about services broadly over the long term? I think our generation oftentimes saw having somebody at your bank, for example, that you could call and talk to as kind of a bug. And then at some point you realize, hey, this is actually a feature. It's actually great to have somebody on the other end that you can call if there's an issue or things like that. Different margin profile, right? Yeah, it's a different, different margin profile. But, but how are you thinking about that side and especially in the context of, of AI and, and giving people that ability to kind of have these like new ways of interacting with platforms. I could, I could imagine a world in the future where somebody can call their, you know, call Robinhood, call effectively call Robinhood and have a conversation with the platform and that person. Not necessarily even being human.

Yeah, I mean we're already basically there. You can have a chat interaction with a Robinhood agent and the majority of our cases are handled by our in house AI. And I think people don't realize this about Robinhood but you know, we've looked at where we are relative to others in our industry and I think we're best in class. Like we're doing very sophisticated things with AI both internally and in the product through Robinhood Cortex, the service model has evolved and I think what it's going to look like in the future is if you're a customer that's high net worth or a little bit older and we serve an increasing number of these customers as time goes on. I mean, I'm talking to customers on a semi regular basis who are thinking about moving hundreds of millions into their Robinhood account. And I wasn't having those types of conversations a year ago, but we have Robinhood concierge that gives you a high touch experience for those types of customers. And the aspiration of the AI team is let's just make sure the baseline level of support that everyone gets is world class with like an increasing amount of sophistication. And I think we've been making a ton of progress. And like I mentioned already, I think best in class in terms of how we use AI.

How do you. Let's talk about IPOs. That's like the number, number one thing I wanted to get your kind of updated thinking on. I'm curious how you expect the IPO process will evolve. Obviously we covered the Figma IPO live at Nice. It was an incredible day. It was. Is unique to our industry because it's a product that many, I'm sure everybody that's listening to this has used at some point or another. But there was certainly a frustration from the retail community and I'm sure even a frustration from your side. Right. People were able to get in at the IPO price, but not necessarily as much allocation as some would have liked. I'm sure you were doing everything, you and the team were doing everything you possibly could to get as much allocation for your users as possible. But how do you think that process is evolving now that we have millions and millions of investors in the United States that are smart enough to know when they want to get in at the ipo.

At the ipo, which is a completely different shift from a decade ago. I mean, we have multiple ways of going public with direct listings, traditional IPOs, SPACs. The landscape's changed a lot in the appetite for these products has changed too.

Yeah. So I'm curious, like what, what kind of change you're personally pushing for and what role Robinhood will play in that.

Yeah. And, but by the way, a lot of my friends were with you guys there. You know, Andrew Reed from Sequoia, Danny, I believe, Index. Yeah. Shout out to those guys. Early Robinhood investors as well. Our, our approach to this. We, you guys probably know, four years ago we rolled out this product, IPO access. We started with some companies that were going public in 2021, and then our own IPO had at the time the biggest, or if not one of the biggest, retail allocations of over 20%. And at first it was kind of a challenge to get companies excited about this. There was skepticism about the value of retail. The companies were concerned that, you know, retail would, would sell and they wouldn't hold. And over time that's shifted to the point where, you know, nowadays the majority of companies that are interested in going public are coming to us and talking to us about retail. And I think that's an awesome shift. And where I'd like to, to take that is even earlier in the life cycle. Now we're helping companies and retail get access to IPOs. But can we go to late stage privates? Can we go early stage privates? Can we go seed rounds where actually Robinhood can offer capital as a service to entrepreneurs? And we can deliver a button where, you know, you press the button, maybe you issue some information and you get capital for your business deposited directly into a Robinhood account for you to operate.

Let's kind of go, could we go through, can we kind of talk through those specific stages and kind of what the product would look like? So on the one hand, late stage privates, you, over the summer you had talked about tokenized products that could involve late stage private. So that's super exciting. How are those conversations going? This is such a hot button issue. Obviously companies and CFOs that are worried about being mark to market, but it's ultimately something that everyday retail investors want so badly. Right. People are smart. They know that, they know they can identify generational companies and CEOs and teams and they want, they want it. So it's going to happen eventually. Right. But at the same time, there's this incredible kind of friction at this moment in time in order to get to that point.

Yeah. So I started making a public stance on this whole thing with an op ed in the Washington Post in January. And I think that op ed was basically universally acclaimed. People got very excited about it. Everyone's on board. But of course, I'm not one to just write op eds. I think a lot of people are doing that. I want to go and do the thing and actually execute on these things. And as it turns out, execution. And whenever you're the first to do something, it can be a little bit messy, it can be a little bit unclear. But going back to our mission, we believe in free markets. We want People to own the means of, of production to, to the greatest extent possible. I can be this massive transformative force and I think it's very, very important to have everyday people aligned with that. Right. If you're worried about AI having disruption on the labor market, you could either fight it, which you're more likely to do if you have no ownership stake or if you have an owner you're, you're kind of rooting for, for that innovation. So I'd like to live in that ladder world and we see a path, we have the technology to do it. We've had a lot of companies actually come to us and they want to be a part of providing access to private markets. And I think at first there will be a little bit of like hesitation, just like for IPO access. But I think five years from now we'll be looking around, retail will have access and we'll all wonder why we were so foolish and having such resistance to being in this world. So I'd like to accelerate that and I'm very motivated to make this happen in a way that addresses everyone's concerns, even the companies with the real time pricing that you mentioned.

Totally. Yeah. Somebody needs to come in and just rock the boat. Right. Like it wasn't, it seemed obvious that it wasn't going to happen totally organically or it has been happening, but in ways that aren't necessarily good for investors. Right. Like the meme from the last week is everybody's being offered these incredibly layered SPVs. And that just shows that capitalism is going to find a way to allow this demand to find supply. But if you have all this friction, it's not going to happen in a way that actually is, is good for, for the demand side.

And I think this is an incidental. I don't think anyone sat around the table and said, you know, we don't want retail investors. 80% of the unaccredit of the market that's unaccredited to not have access to, you know, the leading innovation companies of our era. I think it was incidental. In the past couple of decades it's gotten harder and harder for companies to go public. There's more, you know, process, it's a greater burden and some companies are just avoiding it altogether. And at the same time, the private markets funding environment for startups has gotten much easier to the point where, you know, now companies can raise tens of billions if not more in the private markets. And I think the outcome of that, the collateral damage is that retail is not getting access to the leading company in the space, the emerging space industry and many of the leading companies in the AI industry, which I think is. Yeah. How do you allowed to continue.

How do you, how do you think about offerings? You mentioned potentially at one point having retail be able to access even earlier stage opportunities like you know, maybe seed or series A. How would, how do you kind of, of what's your vision for that kind of product? Given that a lot of Robinhood users are going to be used to making an investment and maybe changing their mind about it and getting out of it. As we all know, if you back a company at seed, you're riding with them for a very long time and maybe you can make, maybe there's features that would allow you to let people get out over time. But I'm curious what your vision for that would look like.

Like.

Yeah, I think the interesting point is that the customer and the market are slightly different between an early stage seed investment and a late stage private. So early stage seed investment, there's primary capital, your market is entrepreneurs that are in need of a capital as a service offer offering. So whether it's on chain or off chain, what I think would be very attractive is pressing a button, putting in some information and getting money into your business bank account as easy as possible. When I was a seed stage entrepreneur, I spent half my time fundraising, if not more. And so the time at which your time is most critical and you need to build your product and make sure your business works, you're spending a ton of time trying to fundraise. So I think it's very, very valuable if you lower the friction to getting capital, you'll get more startups, more entrepreneurship, which is great for the long term. So there's one if it's a late stage private, your market increasingly becomes secondary transactions from early shareholders and employees. And I think that's very, very different. And I think any privates offering has to deal with these realities, that you have to have two slightly different customers and constituents. And I think where they failed in the past is by treating them kind of as one. So we're thinking a lot about this. I think as time goes on I'll get much more specific, but I think what you'll see is various mechanisms. The way, the way it's going to work is Robinhood will get exposure through various means to these assets. We'll hold them in a box, very much like how stable coins work. You know, you get exposure to dollars or Treasuries, hold them in a box and you know, distribution overseas will have tokenization as kind of a delivery mechanism. And in the US it'll be tokenization, hopefully once the regulatory environment matures around that. But. But there's also lots of other means to, to give access to privates.

Is there a risk that companies wind up, like, changing their docs to try and push back against this? I remember forward contracts were pretty popular in the secondary market for a while, and then companies started saying, hey, no forward contracts. Early employees like, like, you got to go to us because we have a rofer and we want to offer that to.

Our beauty of a forward contract is.

Yeah, yeah, but, you know, capitalism finds a way, as always. But I'm just wondering if there's other, like, layers of abstraction that might be more dominant. Like, they don't have nearly the brand with retail traders, but there's a world where you're slicing venture funds and offering those to retail traders. And then the companies might be a little bit more on board because the. Because they don't wind up with a retail army that's upset with their latest product release or monitoring them, but they might still see the economic upside or exposure. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think all of those are right. I mean, some of those vehicles exist already and like you said, I think will find a way. I do think over time, companies will see the value of this. It'll be right now, the companies that are coming to us for IPO access see that when you have an established retail base as a public company, there are certain advantages. Right. Your customers are also active shareholders. In many cases, they, they can defend you, they can give you good feedback, but they're a constituency that, you know, companies are beginning to value more and more. They want to hear from them, they want to encourage retail participation. And I think you'll see that at earlier stages because companies will believe, and I think it's true, that cultivating retail interest early has a compounding effect as, as you go public and even beyond.

I know this story has been like, beaten to death, but we talked to Mickey Malka about the round that came together in the middle of the night during GameStop. But I'm interested to hear just about what has changed technically and then financially and then from a brand perspective in terms of, like, the going through that cycle, making it through, but then just having a lot of folks out there who are like, oh, like, I had a bad experience and I'm still holding the grudge. How do you win them back? What's the strategy, both on the actual, like, business building side and then the messaging, the changes that you made. Like what's the full postmortem?

Yeah, I mean there's this phrase that trust is slowly gained and can be lost in an instant. And I have validated that that's basically true. When January 28, the date that will live in infamy and Robin Hood lore came down, we saw hit to our nps, obviously on social media and across every channel, it was abundantly clear that customers were unhappy. And we've had to climb out of that slowly over time. And I think there have been moments where we've sort of like gained a net promoter score. It's clear that, you know, we've done good things and we've sort of like accelerated earning trust from customers. But there's no magic formula where I snap my fingers and say the right words and, and suddenly, you know, you make up for that. I think that it's, it's done by delivering on our value proposals, opposition and being sort of like a consistent trusted member of the ecosystem for many, many years. And it was probably like a year and a half ago where it became clear like, okay, we've like shaken off and turned the corner. And I think we've been, we've been on a great trajectory since then with some of the highest net promoter scores in the past four years and customers are very, very happy. And you know, I think we just have to keep executing. There's, there's the only ways through. Right?

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

As somebody who runs a platform that actually facilitates stock trading at scale, what gets you excited about the potential of tokenized stocks? I think there's a lot of people that are more crypto native than that are very excited about the potential and they talk about how easy it will be to trade and transition in and out of positions. And somebody might say, well, I can open my brokerage right now and do that today. And so that's maybe a luxury of being in a great market like America. But where are you particularly excited about the intersection of, of traditional finance and crypto? And where do you think there might be unnecessary or hype is overblown?

Well, I think that in the same way that stablecoins have become a great delivery mechanism for US dollars outside the US Tokenized stocks will be a great mechanism, probably the dominant mechanism for US shares being delivered to retail outside the US inside the US there is benefit going from 245 which we offer through Robinhood 24 hour market today to 247 as well as self custody and defi Applications, I think we haven't scratched the surface for what those can be yet. But as the regulatory environment matures, I think there's a lot of really interesting potential. And it's also the cost of operating because more and more of what's traditionally been applications and centralized third parties run by humans, more of that in crypto is being replaced by software. So you have transfer agency, payment processors, clearing houses, all of this is just now in software. And what that allows us to do is lower the cost and eventually if you lower the cost enough, the value gets backpacked to customers. So I view it as the next stage in the technological evolution of financial services. Going from pen and paper filing cabinet to mainframe to cloud and then blockchain infrastructure is the next stage in that.

Yeah, yeah. It feels like there's this like almost barbell emerging within Robinhood where you are going like more individual expression, the ability for a single retail investor to buy a single share in a pre IPO company. That's like an incredibly high agent thing to do. And then simultaneously you recently launched managed investing, which feels like at the opposite end of the scale. And I'm wondering if you see this more as is this like a funnel where people move from one group to the other. Are these distinct groups? And I'd love to just hear more about the managed investing product. How's the business going and how that, how that weaves into the rest of the landscape of the product you're building.

Yeah, I think the end state is going to look less like people graduating from self directed trading and active trading to, you know, retirement and more passive products and more that customers are going to have multiple accounts.

Sure.

So you'll have your discretionary, self directed account on Robinhood, you might have a joint account with your spouse, you'll have your own retirement account and some of those will be passively managed and others will be actively managed by, by, by yourself. And I think that as we've gotten deeper into understanding our customers, we see that it's less two different groups of people, even the active traders are interested in retirement products and sometimes have an even larger bucket of their capital that is managed on their behalf. And so that's why, you know, we've been focusing a lot on the customer experience and the technology front on serving your broad financial needs.

How has your, you know, approach to running the company changed? Having having been in the game for over a decade now, I can imagine in the earlier days when markets were ripping broadly, there's all this activity. I'm sure it was easy to get kind of caught up in the hype a little bit. And I'm sure now I would imagine you've kind of adapted to try to stay as level as you possibly can. When we've been joking around on the show recently, counting up, you certainly need more than 10 fingers to count all the different top signals. So how do you stay even keeled even when markets are euphoric and wild in so many ways?

Yeah. I mean, it's much easier to stay about your wits when things are improving. Right. Even though it can be challenging. I think when markets are going up and everyone's looking at increased stock prices, whether it's our employees or, you know, investors, we just like to tell ourselves we shouldn't get complacent. We've got a huge opportunity in front of us, the job's not finished. And then, you know, at the Same time, in 2022, when interest rates went up and, you know, our Stock traded below $7 a share, it was trading basically at cash value. You have to tell people that. You have to make sure people aren't discouraged and they think that there's a wonderful future worth fighting for, both outside the company and the environment and also here. So you go through enough of these and I think we've been through multiple waves of ups and downs, and I'd like to think I've developed a little bit of a wisdom about it through experience. I started the company writing all the code or a large portion of it myself. And you sort of evolved with the company. And I think I've been fortunate to be part of ups and downs. And I think now I enjoy all of it. Bring it on. And each one is a learning experience and an opportunity to kind of develop some more tools in the toolbox.

Totally. Can you give us an update on.

Harmonic, I was about to ask?

Oh, yeah. So Harmonic is building mathematical superintelligence. And what that means is we want to build something that can solve math problems at a level exceeding the best humans. I don't know if you guys were math people in your, in your school days, but we actually. Recently.

I dropped out of differential equations. Yeah, that's where I topped out.

Differential equations are hard and very useful, but yeah, we'll have machines doing them for us.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Yeah. Essentially we developed a model called Aristotle that has gold medal level performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad, which is a very difficult test. Off the shelf AI models like GPT5, Grok4, all the things that you can use don't do well on this exam at all. So this is one area where humans still do very, very well relative to the AIs. And the reason is when you have a, a very difficult mathematics problem, it's not just like computing big numbers, right. It's, you know, logical, difficult challenges that require a spark of genius and actually require you to take nine or ten correct logical steps. And if you're an AI model that hallucinates, if you get one of those wrong, the result is done. So what you have to do is build a very strong way to verify the output of your AI model, which means that you have to control hallucinations and you have to make sure every line or piece of output follows logically from, from what happens before it. And we think that this is going to be a new paradigm in AI models and it's a little bit different than what everyone else is doing because nobody's really tackling the verification problem. And more and more of our software code is going to be written by AI. And we're in a future already where the job of an advanced software engineer is no longer to write code, but it's to review code that's written by AI. And as that becomes more voluminous, the humans reviewing it is both a very sad existence for our top software engineers. Also impractical. You're not going to review hundreds of pages of stuff. So Harmonic has figured out how to solve this problem and I think the applications are beyond just math, but any domain where accuracy is critical. From computer science.

Yeah.

Well, I'll give you an example. So Copilot, they've added the ability to add Copilot to Excel, but then they had to add, had like a heavy disclaimer that basically said, don't rely on this, don't rely on Copilot for anything important because we make mistakes. And I think that hallucinates.

And now you have to double check all of your spreadsheets and all of the calculations in them. Right. And yeah, I think it's a big problem, not just for spreadsheets, but, you know, think about control systems for autonomous vehicles and all of the safety critical code in order for AI to be used to generate it. We need to solve this hallucination problem.

Did your team find problem 6 on the imo as difficult as everyone else? It was this combinatorics problem. It seemed like everyone was struggling with it. Are there any glimmers of hope for solving that or is it intractable? Is it some sort of wall that we've run into?

Yeah. And what are your Ambitions for next year with the IMO are you guys.

Was going to take for the perfect score.

So we had proofs for five out of the six problems. Formal, formal proofs that didn't require humans to verify. We did not solve number six, even though I was really hoping. But yeah, it turns out that the solution to that problem was a tiling. It was a tiling problem, but the solution was the exact same tiling used at the, at the floor of the Sunshine Coast Airport in Queensland, Australia. Which is where. Which, which is where the IMO was held this year. So the human resistance had an advantage. They all walked through that airport. We were given the answer.

Interesting. That's a fascinating piece of lore. Thank you for sharing that.

All right, so next year have a humanoid taste.

Oh yeah, the humanoid all around the.

City of the location.

Yeah.

Get the photo.

Scan that into the context window. The full IMO contestant experience context window is important.

Oh, next year for sure. Problem 6 and problems like that will definitely be.

The pressure will be on for you guys because it's the main thing. The other labs can be like, well, we do math, but we're really a consumer.

Yeah, no, well, I don't know.

I mean, once you have the gold medal, I guess the perfect score is, is a, is a big accomplishment, but I think our sights are a little bit higher. I think we're interested in kind of two things. One is solving an unsolved problem in science and mathematics and actually contributing to the state of the art in one of these quantitative fields like the Riemann Hypothesis, if you guys are familiar.

Stokes. Same thing.

Yeah. If we could solve that. Navier Stokes is. I'm less excited about because I'm, I'm more of a theorist.

Sure.

But Riemann Hypothesis would be good also. Just delivering this technology to individuals and corporations in a form that they could actually use. So I think there's lots of things coming. But another IMO gold medal, maybe. Maybe isn't top of the list.

Last question. Have you. Did you give Terrence Tao a call?

Oh, yeah. Griffin on this, on the show, we.

Were like, who should give him a maxed out contract? Yeah.

What are your thoughts?

So I don't know if you guys knew this about me, but I was a math PhD student at UCLA and I actually went to UCLA to study under Professor Tao.

I had no idea.

Crazy.

That's amazing.

I know him very, very well.

Yeah, great. Fantastic. That's great outcomes there.

Yeah. I was joking. You're saying.

Seems like he does great stuff.

I had a non traditional Background starting harmonic. I got a math PhD at UCLA.

That is fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Great hanging. Appreciate the updates.

We will talk to you soon. Have a good progress.

Cheers.

And we have Mark Cuban joining the stream. We invited him on after him and Jordy got in a little timeline in turmoil. Friendly desktop AI advertisements. We have a lot more news on the front of AI ads. We have more news on what Meta's doing with AI. We have more news on what OpenAI is likely doing in the world of advertisements. We're going to debate that.

There's the stream.

Mark, how are you doing?

Good guys, how y'? All?

What's happening? Thanks so much for taking the time. Good to meet you. Where should we kick it off, Jordy?

Where should we start?

Dive straight into the debate over artificial intelligence and advertising.

Sure.

Maybe you could set the stage for us. What set off your alarm bells? What triggered your initial worry about this idea of ads in LLMs?

Because this isn't the Internet, right? It's not just a normal digital platform. It's a platform that, depending on how it's trained, depending on what pre prompts you put in, it could be very manipulative. And there's not really age limitations at all. There's not really any limitations whatsoever. And normally I'd be, let's just be laissez faire, right? The market is the market. But you've already heard, you know, of stories of kids going down these rabbit holes and, and other people being told to kill themselves and you just don't know what can happen. So if I build a model and it becomes popular, even if it's only a niche model, right? Just like there's headspace and there's calm. Let's just say I build the calm AI large language model and I have millions and millions of users and I want, and I have an advertiser who sells Xanax or sells, you know, whatever, right? And they're trying to get more sales and I need the money. I can easily, easily train this thing to manipulate people into doing things we typically would not allow people to do. And that's my concern. And so if we just want to put up, you know, just little ad, traditional graphics, JPEG ads, all, you know, put them into the chat list on the left hand side. Great. You can do all the display ads you want, you could do video there all you want, but if it's in the response that comes back from the model, boy, you're going to have lots of problems.

Yeah, I think, I think Sam Altman said something to this effect, saying that artificial intelligence will be superhuman at persuasion before it is truly super intelligent. It will be, be very good at convincing people. So it is reasonable. What do you think of Sam Altman's latest commentary on how OpenAI might get into this world? That the actual LLM interaction, the chat would not be, would not be monetizable. But if you, if it made a recommendation to buy a product and then you said, hey, I want you to go check out for me, it sends out.

It's already doing that, right?

Is that okay?

Yeah, it's already doing it. You know, it's, it's, you know, it's one thing to have the model itself convey and try to manipulate. It's a whole nother thing. When there's a search query. Yeah, right. We get a lot of traffic from OpenAI ChatGPT for costplusdrugs.com in fact, I've used it because sometimes if I want a price for one of our drugs and I don't want to take, take the time to look at the latest price list, I'll just put in what's the price for, you know, dare from whatever it may be. And it's right there. And so yeah, of course they can extend that, but response is a whole. And models are, are smart enough to know what the difference between a response to a query versus influencing and engaging in a chat.

I guess the question, Yeah, I mean.

I think I, I think to double down on what you're saying. An example, if you're going from search, which is people coming in with a specific intent and maybe doing some product research and you have ads and you have, you know, organic listings or web pages, that's one thing. But if various AI models are seen as trusted advisors, if you compare that to a situation. If I ask John what kind of car should I get? And John starts giving me answers and saying like, I think you should, I really think you should get this car. It's really nice. And then I buy it. And then later I find out John was getting a 10 kickback. I'm like, hopefully I like the car, but if I didn't, what are you doing? You know, and this happens in a business context too. You might, you know, people get in hot water all the time because they're taking referral. Yeah.

In this particular case, it's really easy. Just like, you know, there's, you know, emoji for sources or just says sources. You could put a dollar sign just to show they're being Compensated.

Sure, sure, sure. And do you think that needs to happen at like the FTC FCC level or are you, do you think.

I don't know. You know, hopefully it's self enforced but you know, there's idiots and assholes who don't self enforce.

Sure.

And particularly for medical stuff. I mean, does it easier to chatgpt about your own personal medical situation than it is to find a doctor to talk to? Sometimes.

But does that call example you gave matter? Because I imagine that there'll be a power law outcome here and yes, I could set up a search engine that serves ads and doesn't disclose that they're ads, but how am I going to take market share from Google? People are going to go to Google and Google does say when it's an ad. And so as long as the power law winner is a good actor, we kind of.

There's also an interesting, there's also an interesting thing where there's this self, self enforcing sort of positive effect which is if, if people rely on ChatGPT, for example, to help them do product research and buy the right products and you buy a bunch of bad products in a row because they're just pushing the product that they're getting paid the most eventually. I do think that consumers are smart enough to realize I'm not going to use this app anymore.

I wouldn't agree with that, Jordi, because I think people are primed for misinformation these days. You see it in health care continuously. You know, you saw it with COVID vaccines, people on their deathbed saying I wish I had taken the vaccine. You know, and you see it now with, you know, raw milk where now there's more people who have, you know, there's examples of people who have died and people just don't care.

Yeah.

You know, they just go on and maybe they'll say, you know, chatgpt is woke. So I'm using right GPT. And that's because those are the kinds of answers I want. Because you know, there are people who want to be influenced and want to be part of a group when it comes to the product decisions. Just like we saw the anti Bud Light and that kind of builds and you see pro right wing products. I just don't know that it is an efficient market enough where people are going to take responsibility for just making a bad product choice and then going to another source. There's just so much personal identity in how we use technology. That's part of my concern.

How, how worried would, would you say you are about AI broadly. I think over the last few months the industry has woken up to, you know, a year ago people were kind of laughing about AI safety, right. And thinking about these fast takeoff scenarios. Now I think people are kind of waking up and worried about the general well being. If you just give hundreds of millions of people unlimited access to these tools, there is going to be some effect. Some people will be good, some people will be bad. But what's your high level read?

Well, it's changed a lot. We went from fear of the Terminator to fear of being influenced in ways we didn't expect expect because they're such good communicators, right. We can't talk to other people or we feel, you know, shy or not open and communicating with other people, experts or friends or otherwise. But this is our best friend who never gives us a hard time and depending on how it's programmed will compliment. What a great question, Jordy. What a great. That is. That is a really interesting approach. So, so a lot of things to be concerned with there particularly because AI is not smart, right. AI is just statistical right now. And I'm of the mindset that that's not going to change for a long time. One of the reasons that you don't see full self driving cars that are just everybody using no matter what is because it's easy. There's so many adversarial things that can happen to a car. You know, we have Australian, many Australian German shepherd or a million Australian shepherd, right. Tux and about 6 years old. I trust Tux at an intersection to know when to cross before you know that he's never been to before before I trust a car. And that's the whole point with AI because they're, they're just rules and laws and latencies that they, that it can't account for for. It's all text, some graphics, some video, but it's always behind. And then that's part one, part two. We're, I think we're going to see a groundswell in how intellectual property is dealt with. A groundswell change in how IP is dealt with. Because there was. For a long time it's been publisher parish. Get your stuff out there, get it into journals, make it available so that you can present yourself as being an expert. Well, the minute you do that right now it's going to get absorbed into, you know, training data for these models and you've lost everything you've just created.

Well, what if I want to, what if I'm taking the side of big raw milk And I want to, and I want to get people and so I should just write as much as I can. That's what you're going to do too?

Yeah.

Your people are going to use bots to try to influence, to post things to try to influence, like the robots text. For a, you know, for AI, you can, you can structure it in ways so you can set up sites where you can tell it exactly where to go, you know, tell it all. Why raw milk is amazing. Right. But the bigger point is AI doesn't understand death. AI doesn't understand pain, AI doesn't understand context. AI doesn't know what happened two minutes ago. It doesn't know that there was a, a plane crash as it's about to tell you or something happened. Right. I can't tell you why that ball fell off the table unless you tell it, you know, this ball fell off the table, what happened next. Right. It's just not smart. And as long as it's not smart, A, can be influenced and B, you're just not going to know what it's going to do next because it can't, it doesn't have judgment.

So what would you tell the folks at OpenAI and the other foundation model labs on how to structure their business? It feels like a firewall between. There needs to be some sort of truth seeking organization that's focused on delivering the highest quality results. And then on the flip side, you have a monetization team.

No, I mean you can't check for quality.

That's impossible. Yeah, of course you can. You can always like benchmark these things or just like vibe test them with the, with the audience.

You know, Jordy was giving me shit online. I was giving Jordy shit online.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Completely different. Right? What I'm saying is like, is like Google, Google does try and, try and deliver the highest quality search results for a particular query and then separately they have an ad auction function that adds as an ad platform and those two teams are separate. And so like if your age, if your age is showing up as one of those like, like knowledge boxes on Google, you can't just pay to have them change it. Like that's a separate business line and it's a separate team and they are separate products in the ui. Yes, they exist on the same page, but they're separate and that's fine.

Right? I mean, to me the bigger questions are what's the value proposition for AI as we understand it today? Or at least as I understand it today.

Right.

I don't see AI getting Smart. I look at AI and I think it's the world's best library. Let me explain in another way.

Yeah.

We all have that one friend that remembers everything.

Yep.

Everything. Right. Hey, what did we do that one day back in college? Remember when you know our one buddy. Oh, yeah, this is Da, da, da. That's AI, though. It'll remember everything. It'll give you the, you know, if you give it A, B and C, it'll figure out D, E and F. Right. But it doesn't even know X, Y, Z exists, just like you're Right. So it is just like the world's biggest library. It is just like a meeting of the minds of just regurgitation. And so knowing that then you have to. There's going to be so much competition between the models. That is the biggest driver right now in terms of revenue generation.

Right.

Because there's not. There'll be five, six, whatever it is, foundational models before there's consolidation. But beyond that, there's going to be millions of models, millions and millions of models. And every brand is going to need a model. Particularly like in healthcare, like if you are Stanford Medical. Right. If you are Mayo Clinic, if you're MD Anderson, you're not going to just, you know, put out all your IP from the doctors and researchers and scientists you're paying so that chat GPT can absorb it and have the benefit of all that knowledge. So it remembers everything that, that all your doctors and scientists did. You're going to keep that to yourself. And so in terms of the business models, these guys are going to have to start making decisions. Are they start going to start paying a lot of money for content? Because as much as they're investing in the technology, they've reached a lot of limits. Right. You don't, you're not hearing about, wow, these guys are getting to do these new topics that I had no idea that they could cover and pay for.

A ton of content, to be clear. I mean, they're paying Reddit, they pay the New York Times. They pay all sorts of.

Yeah, we had, we had a group reach out wanting to buy our back catalog. I was like, I assumed you already scraped.

But think of it. If you're. I mean, let's talk about from the government perspective.

Sure.

So they just cut all these NIH grants. Right. All this stuff that presumably went and created new drugs, which they have. Right.

Foundational research, basic science. Right.

All this research.

Yep.

If the government really understood AI, they'd be like, okay, we're going to keep on investing in this research and then I'm going to make it available to the biggest bit, the highest bidder, whoever.

Privatize it. I like that. Make some money off.

Right.

It's not even the deal. Privatizing it. Yeah, but monetizing it.

Monetizing it. I like this. This is good. Make some money off of that non profit research.

Are you? That's the way things are working right now. I don't have, honestly I don't have a problem with that at all. If it gets us more solutions but. Or doing our own, you know, the government doing its own model and making that available for a fee.

Yeah.

Those decisions from a business perspective that all these models are going to have to make. Otherwise how do they keep on adding more training data? Because there's no way to synthesize all that. You're not synthesizing, you're not creating synthetic data that all of a sudden is going to, you know, you could tell, you give it all the backstory you want, that you're a doctor, that you invented this, that you did, that it ain't going to invent what the doctor and the scientists are going to invent.

Yeah.

At any point during the AI hype cycle so far, did you think that this time might be different? There was, I would say a year ago the common, a common line was this isn't like the Internet bubble because there's real revenue. You know, these companies are ramping revenue to hundreds or billions of dollars of revenue very quickly. This is different. This time is different. Meanwhile, and I wouldn't lean on this too heavily, but MIT had a report this week saying that, you know, 95% of Gen AI pilots in the enterprise are not turning into, not creating real value. I'm curious what your read has been.

I've been through every single technology, you know, event and evolution and this blows them all away. Now how you implement it in business is a whole different issue. Like literally When I was 24, I was walking into companies who had never seen a PC before in their lives and explaining to them the value and having these guys going, well son, I got this receptionist right there, I got that secretary. I'm never going to need that ever. Right. And, but then, you know, my business then was helping them figure out how to implement it to give them an advantage. They're going to be integrators that particularly young kids. Like when I'm telling my kids who are 15, 18, 21 or 1921 and kids going to school, what should I do? What should I do?

I'D be like AI research.

Learn all you can about AI, but learn more on how to implement them in companies. Right? Because to your point, companies don't understand how to implement all that right now to get a competitive advantage. You got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything's going to be customized to your unique utilization. Right. Or usage. Who's going to do it for them? Particularly small to medium sized businesses. There are 33 million companies in this country. 30 million of them are solopreneurs. Right? Single person enterprises. There are only, you know, there are millions of Companies that have 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 people that aren't going to have AI budgets, aren't going to have AI experts. This is where kids getting hired, coming out of college are really going to have a unique opportunity. If you're spending your senior year in college right now, your senior year in high school, even whatever it is, your excess time, and you're learning the difference between Sora and Veo and you're learning how to do all this video, you're learning how to customize a model so that then you can then walk into a company and say, I understand your business as a shoe company selling shoes at a retail store. We're selling and selling shoes online. Let me show you how to benefit you. That is every single job that's going to be available for kids coming out of school because every single company needs that. There is nothing intuitive for a company to integrate AI. And that's what people don't understand.

Yeah, we, we hired two, we hired two interns this summer at the end of the last school year because they just built products instead of saying, hey, here's what I can do. They just showed us they took a day and just built something. We said they didn't take a day.

Right.

They went to ChatGPT or Perplexity.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the bear case. John was joking about this though. I thought this was interesting. We had one of our interns built this product. It's tbpn.com guest. It's this guest directory transcript tool. And he built it in a day, but then he had to spend the whole summer improving it. So that was a bull case for software engineers still having a job.

But you don't even have to be a software engineer, right? You just have. People are afraid to ask the models the right questions. They're afraid to ask complex questions because they just presume that they can't answer. Kids coming out of school today that are fearless in the questions they ask and the follow ups and their ability to prompt. They have more skill than everybody in every major corporation with under a thousand employees. Right.

So I completely agree with that. That's jobs for everybody. This feels like a. It feels like you're making the argument for putting ads in AI and keeping it free so that kids can have access to frontier models and then go and explore, learn, implement things at businesses. If all of a sudden, sudden you can't get in the game, you can't even interact with a cutting edge.

Well, Mark's saying he's cool with display ads. He's cool with a Labubu showing up in the sidebar.

Yeah, on the side, that's fine. But think of it, okay. There's a death war going on with the frontier models.

Yes.

It's zero sum game in their minds. Not all will make it. Some will get consolidated. Maybe one goes out of business. Right. And so for the next however many years, however long, there used to be a time when Excel cost $499 to buy a spreadsheet. Now, not free, but like basically Google. Yeah. Google Sheets. Right. Google Docs, et cetera. The basic models are always going to.

Be free because of ads. Like the reason Google Sheets is free is because of Google's ads business.

When was the last time?

No, you don't. But the reason that they can subsidize is because they have this amazing ads business over here that throws off so much cash they don't care about.

Yeah, but in the case, I mean, to take Mark's side here, I mean, a subscription product also subsidizes a free product.

Yes, that's exactly right. So you're going to have tiers, right? Free. Your kids version, free. And those versions are going to have more constraints because they know high school kids, 7 year old kids are going to use them.

Them. Yeah.

So there'll be all kinds of limits built in.

Yeah.

But then you get your 20 version and chat. GPT is doing what? $12 billion annualized and growing quickly. That's insane. Love, you know, lovable. All these guys were just crushing it. And like I, I was the first investor in a company called Synthesia, which does, you know, talking avatars. I don't know if you know.

Cool. Yeah.

They're killing it.

That's great.

Killing.

It's just up and to the right.

Yep, yep.

You start them off with, it's just a whole freemium model. Right. That's been around forever. And I think that's going to happen. But as you know, we talked earlier about buying ip, you'll see things go into different directions. So you'll have a chat GPT/healthcare and if you want that, it's an extra five bucks a month. You'll see chat GPT programming or math or foreign language duolingo version. Right. And it might be an extra 50 cents a month or a dollar a month, whatever it may be. And then there'll be, you know, entrepreneur version and it'll have all the integrations into all the the states so that you just, you know, fill in these forms and you're incorporated wherever you want to be incorporated. Because all the agents will do all the work, all that stuff you can upsell.

Yeah.

And so but if they're not using your model in high school, they ain't going to use it in college and if they ain't using it in college when they go for that to that company, they're not going to use you. And I think that is a big deal. But I can't say it enough. All these people, we're in a transition period right now for kids coming out of college whether you have a computer science degree or not. But you're not trying to go to the big companies to get a computer science degree. It's probably not the right way to go. Go into any other company who has no idea about AI but needs it in order to compete. There'll be more jobs than than people for a long, long time because there's only going to. There's going to be two types of companies in this country, in the world. Those who are great at AI and everybody else. And this is not AI is not intuitive. You're not going to take a 40 year old who's worked at a company for 15 years and say go play with chat GPT and figure out how we can improve our productivity and improve our processes. Some people will put in the time to learn it, but it's not intuitive to pull all those pieces together and extend them with agents and have the agents start doing things and then you know, writing software on Lovable or whatever and having all. It's going to be intuitive for digital natives and Gen Z who are going through school and graduating with that. That is going to be jobs left and right for sure.

Totally agree. Wanted to get your. We were just on with Vlad from Robinhood and yep, that's my guy. He's super excited about getting everyday investors access to great private markets. Great companies in the private markets. Wanted to get your general read on that. You've obviously been part of Shark Tank for a long time.

Can you imagine if you were watching and you could be like, I want to invest that. That seems extremely long.

Yeah. And a lot of people have taken crack.

I'm sure people have pitched you this exact thing.

But I'm curious because you obviously, I can see you being. Yeah, it's great when company, if retail can get into the next Figma. But there's, you know, not making a lot of figmas.

I've been anti. Not sweat equity, crowdfunding. Right. Crowd equity programs against it because there's no liquidity. People love a company, the next Figma and they put in their life savings because they know Figma is going to the moon baby. And they can't, they can't get out.

Yeah.

And they gotta wait. That's the problem. And so that's part one to the problem, part two and more of a system systemic problem. There's just not enough IPOs. I mean it's like watching some of these IPOs. They're like meme coins now.

Bam.

They take off and then it's musical chairs to see who can get out the last but first. Right. And if you don't get out first or at near the beginning, you're getting crushed, you know. And so is there a way whether it's tokenization or other approaches to that. Probably, but it's going to have to go back to the future where somebody is going to have to take some risk and be a market maker.

Maker.

Yeah.

If Vlad or whoever is a market maker so that there's always some liquidity within X percentage of the last trade. Great. Then everybody can do it. And everybody's protected to a certain extent as long as they're not doing deals where the people are just out and out lying. Right. Or misrepresenting it. At which point hopefully the CFTC or the sec, whoever happens to end up in charge.

Not enough just to bring access. You also have to bring liquidity. Last question. If Donald Trump runs for a third term, will you run for president?

I mean, it's easy to say yes right now, but it's. That's the probably the only thing that could make me really reconsider because otherwise I'm not. I don't want to do that. Not my dream to be president. I'd rather argue with you guys.

Yeah, it's my dream. Come back on the show. You'll be too busy if you're in the way.

Last, last question for me or are you excited about the American taxpayer potentially taking a position in intel?

Oh, interesting.

You know what, it's a great question, Jordy.

So you're sounding, you're sounding like an AI. You're sounding like an AI.

You know what, that's a great question.

What you don't know is I have ChatGPT listening.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's running clearly. He's running clearly.

It is a progressive's dream. This is the Bernie Sanders. Sanders dream, the AOC dream. Because, and I'm not saying I agree with it, but if you think about it, it's asking for equity and taking value from the billionaires before it even makes them billionaires or goes to the billionaires. So when you take 10% of intel and first let me add the fact that it's a grant that they're converting, I think is awful because it was meant to be a grant and that was the deal the United States of America made. And now we're going back on the paper that we signed as a country. I think that's bad. But generally, if this was okay, we'll put in more money in order to take. And we want 10% of intel. Obviously they can say yes or no. Just like Nvidia and AMD had the option to say yes or no on the H20 chips. Just like material, whatever. MP had the option. Yeah.

Politician politicians have gotten so good at trading stock. Maybe we want, maybe we want them running our federal funds.

No, you don't. But yeah, but if you're going to generate, if I, if I was running, right, and I would say Donald Trump did the same thing. He got this one right. Now the only question is, will he do it at the right time? Because would you. I'd rather take more money from taxpayers, the average person who might need to pay more, or even the billionaires, the oligarchs, according to Bernie, would I jack up their tax rates? The 30 from 39, 37 to 39 or 41. Or can I just take it this way? Right, Take it before it even gets to them. That's a progressive dream. I don't understand why AOC and Bernie aren't shouting to the rooftops. And Elizabeth Warren. Yes, yes, yes. And make, you know, make Donald Trump's head spin around in circles along with every other supporter. Because those guys, well, if they got.

Excited about it, he might reverse course.

Well, of course that's why they're being quiet, because they don't want him to reverse course. This is 40.

Maybe that, maybe you're both sides of.

The aisle, everyone's playing chess.

I mean, but don't you Guys agree. Isn't it just like a progressive dream? Yeah, like, and, you know, so tariffs, which is just like the greatest sales pitch in the history of sales pitches, when you can convince 30 plus percent of people in this country that that tax that they're paying with increased prices isn't a tax somebody else is paying it. Amazing sales job. Right. So now that's $360 billion towards the deficit and everything. And if you can start doing these other deals that aren't piggish. Right. Meaning they're, they're fair to the companies that are involved and they're not across the board, like tariffs and start banging down on the deficit in the way that is the ultimate progressive approach. He's turned into Bernie Sanders.

Yep.

He literally has, you know, only the better salesperson.

You're great at this.

Yeah.

I give him credit though. I'm not knocking them. Right. I am giving Donald Trump all his flowers because he is, he is doing things in a way that the Democrats aren't smart enough to figure out to have done themselves.

Yep. This is great. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for joining. We'll have to do this again soon.

Yeah, we got to do this again soon. We got to find a new topic to argue about, but this is fantastic. Healthcare.

Let's go. Healthcare. I got. Wait till you hear my shit with healthcare.

Okay, yeah, let's do it.

Let's do it tomorrow.

Healthcare debates. Well, we'll email you. I'll see you soon. Have a good night. Thank you so much for joining us later.

Appreciate it.

Talk to you. Take care. Up next, we've been keeping and waiting. We got KSR Yunus from Clyde. Welcome to the studio. Do we have him? I want to ring the gong preemptively. I don't even know if we have news, but I'm just excited for those.

Oh, there he is.

We haven't talked to you since dc. We talked to you at Hillen Valley. How you been? What's new in your world?

Sorry to keep your waiting. We had to my world.

Hill and Valley seems like a lifetime ago.

It really was. There's been like four other iconic DC tech crossover events. I have yet to make the to many of them, but it was a fun time and we appreciate Hillen Valley.

Is the only one that's. That's worth. That's worth it. So. So I think that's fine.

I mean, it used to be a dinner. Now it's an organization that throws like some of the biggest and most impactful events. It's A fantastic crew over there. Shout out to them. But anyway, this isn't about Helen Valley.

This is about you.

Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

I'm doing great. I'm doing great. You know, following up Mark Cuban, I couldn't really watch the thing. I don't know if this is gonna be. This is the, this is the, you know, the slow letdown to the end of the day.

Yeah. We're working on being able to feed back the show to you so you can watch it while you're in the waiting room. But we're sorry to keep you waiting, but give us the update and I mean, maybe for those who are new and maybe hopped on during the Mark Cuban segment, if you could introduce yourself and the company briefly and then go into news, that'd be great.

Yeah. For everybody who's not in the Bay Area ecosystem. My name is Caster Yunus and the company is called Applied Intuition. We are a now is a late stage company. We earlier this year raised a series F F I got my numbers correct. Led by BlackRock and KP at 15 billion. The company is broadly. There's a couple unique things about the company. One is we've been historically profitable, which is super rare. We've preserved 100%. Yeah, yeah, that word, that pro word probably doesn't get thrown around a lot with AI.

Oh no. We talked to a lot of folks. The high revenues, gross margins. Not there yet. Hoping on some very, very low, very low gross margins.

You want. And you know you can never be bragging about any of this stuff because you know, it creates great fodder for when you fall.

But like, you know, every, every bull cycle, I think like maybe I should start playing around with hubris. Maybe this time is different. I think hubris, it might be fun to experiment with, but never, it just never, it never works. It never works.

But the three things that you want in a, in a late stage company is, you know, things like profitability, but you also want high gross margins and you want high growth. And we've been fortunate. We had triple digit growth for basically the history of the company and then high gross margins. But that's the finance side. For all the people who are like engineers or technical people watching. We're AI company that focuses specifically on vehicles. So the broad category we talk about is vehicle intelligence. It would be a subpart of physical AI. If sometimes you might hear Jensen or somebody talk about that. This is I think the most pragmatic and real part of physical AI right now. Humanoids. I think Will come for sure. But in terms of monetization it's cars, trucks, tanks. That's the business that we're in and we bring AI to those systems. So it's in a bunch of different. We have dozens of products and all this stuff. I won't get into it.

But yeah, take me through the market structure because you have Waymo, no consumer product whatsoever. You have Tesla vertically integrated. I mean they had a mobileye deal a while ago. I don't even know if they have mobileye anymore. Pretty much vertically integrated. I drive a Cadillac, a product of Kyle Vogt over at Cruise. They bought Cruise. They were thinking about getting into the self driving taxi market. They kind of pulled back from that. But they have Super Cruise, pretty great system. And then you got George Hotz with comma, the, the bolt on. But what is the shape? All the OEMs they need a play here. How, how is this going to play out in kind of the, the vehicles that most people see. We can go into the defense side later. But just in terms of like what.

The average American summary they're coming from for it. They're coming for it all.

Yeah.

I mean you just said it like, like GMs been a long customer of ours.

Okay.

That, that, that you're using is built on our tools.

So thank you.

Our business, our business is one where we are a supplier to the broad ecosystem.

Sure.

So the of the top 20 global automotive OEMs we say 18 out of the 20 use our tools. But in a really honestly everybody does. And so that's our play. We're like the, you know, I don't want to use the like it's a very, it's a very like risky analogy. But we're the arms dealer in this ecosystem.

Yeah.

Give me a little bit more context and shape of like what the product you're actually vending in is because there are physical cameras that need to go on cars. If you're going to do a self driving system. There's also some sort of foundation model I imagine that gets trained on a lot of data. There's data aggregation, there's all sorts of, you know, some part is going to be in C, the other is going to be in ML. Like are you doing an end to end system? Like, like what's the shape of the product and how much is like solutions versus just like the packaged up software?

Yeah. So historically what we announced yesterday and why we're talking is historically we've been a tools manufacturer as in give engineer. We make tools that engineers use to build these systems, the companies you're talking about. Then we got an operating system that's a huge part of business. But a while ago, we got into autonomy, but we got into autonomy directly, like literally making the autonomous systems. That's in your words. That's the algorithms, the models that run the vehicles. We've been in it for defense, we've been in it for commercial trucking. We do L4 trucking. We're running driverless trucks right now in Japan as an example. So we're already doing that. What we announced Yesterday is an L2 plus system for automotive. Okay. So specifically, it's kind of like, you know, the average person would know Tesla fsd. It's like that, except it's one that you can buy from us. And so where we fit in the ecosystem is work, work. We're like. So I come from the car business, so I went undergrad to the General Motors Institute. I used to work at Cadillac in the Cadillac building as an example.

You're John's hero. You're John's hero.

I love it. I love it.

Yeah, the car business is an awesome business. If you ever want to just nerd out in the car business, we can. It's going through lots of changes. But one thing to understand industry structure of the car business is historically the car business. One is kind of like defense, where you would procure all this technology as an OEM from other parties. What's changed now is those OEMs are like Tesla has shown, you can actually verticalize, do a lot of this stuff yourself. And you kind of need to do it because these systems are way more integrated with each other. It used to be you could bolt on a mobilized system and then that would give you lane keep and adaptive cruise. But when these systems are much more sophisticated and they're working with the other functions within the vehicle, you need like a white box solution. And so our SDS product is a white box solution. And what I mean by that is access the source code agnostic to the silicon. So if you're buying like an Nvidia system or if you're buying a Qualcomm system, you're going to use Nvidia and Qualcomm chips. So we being just a software supplier, we can ride on different silicon. And then on the other end, where you're talking about sensors, each company has a different sensor strategy. But the broad summary of passenger the car business is it's a cost business. And so all of the, all the OEMs basically want to have the cheapest sensor suite they possibly can. Like even more fundamental question, why can't we get all the waymos tech into the passenger vehicle? It's because all the way to the compute that's being used. It's just very expensive. And so other like feature quote unquote of our self driving system is it's embedded which is another way of saying it runs on automotive grade silicon which is cheaper and has all these other things that you need for automotive grade products.

How are the OEMs reacting to the latest version of Apple CarPlay? I saw it roll out in an Aston Martin SUV. From a consumer perspective it seems awesome. The new CarPlay takes over all the dash so so even the volume control will be handled by CarPlay. But it feels like if you're an OEM you're kind of giving away, you're letting the fox in the house potentially. But what's the reaction been and then what does that mean for your business basically?

Yeah, I think so let's kind of gear shift. That's the you know we go from autonomy to now just let's say the in cabin software experience. For us we call that business line vehicle os. It's something that we build and and sell. The, the punchline there is the issue with CarPlay is if you're a Mercedes and you're in in your experience is the same as a Chevy bolt which is the same as let's say Aston Martin. You know OEMs are really good at two things that they're really heart of their business is two things have to get right and if they get it wrong they ultimately end up going bankrupt. The first one is just managing the cost side of the business supply chain, getting all the suppliers wrangled so they put all the parts in a factory to because the factories is big fixed cost and it pops out at a certain rate. The economy actually moves up and down at pretty significant. You know consumer car sales and consumer index are very, very connected. So all the global OEMs are extremely good at forecasting what they need to build, where and when years in advance. The other thing that they have to do very well is brand management. And what it like more fundamental question, what's a brand like? Fundamentally what what's a Mercedes brand? It's the collection of experiences you've had, that's what a brand is. And so if the collection of experiences you've had is with Apple CarPlay that does actually degrade your brand. And so the OEMs are extremely sensitive. I mean I think Maybe a controversial thing to say. I think we've seen peak carplay and Peak Android Auto has already happened. I mean multiple OEMs have gone out and said that they're not going to do CarPlay in the future, they're not going to do Android Auto in the future. And by the way, Tesla doesn't do CarPlay and Android Auto. The emergent emergence, you know, the Lucids, the Rivians, they're all, they're all similarly, they, they build their own user experience. So I think that's a tough business to be in now if you're Google or if you're Apple, your, your consumer brand has to be in that interface. If you're applied intuition, it doesn't. We're, we're a B2B software supplier so we can make same thing that CarPlay and Android Auto do, except we can do it in a again white box.

And I view the self driving system much more like seat belts or airbags where all I care if I'm driving a Mercedes or Cadillac is that I survive and I'm. And I'm safe and, and I, and.

I don't care where I.

People talk a little bit about the driving style of a self driving system in a Bentley might be a little bit different than a Chevy, but in general I feel like it's something where I'm very, I would, I would make the selection based on the Bentley marks. Like what are the incidents per vehicle, miles traveled anyway?

What is, how do you see the autonomous driving landscape evolving over the next few years? A lot of people talk about this like two horse race, Waymo and Tesla. But using the arms dealer analogy, it's like Tesla and Waymo are nuclear war and you come and you're like, hey, I'll give everybody nuclear weapons. Weapons.

Is that.

This is not the time to make jokes about my Pakistani heritage.

Yeah, we'll skip that. But, but is that, is that, is that really your play here is basically leveling the playing field?

Yeah, absolutely. And I, I would take issue with a 2, 2 horse race. I mean you got to remember.

Well, it's more so I'm talking about that in the context of oh, you're going to be able to just like, like, you know, why would I buy a test something other than a Tesla if I could rent out my Tesla when I'm not using it? There's a section of the market that's excited about that.

Yeah.

But I can imagine.

That that future is to be determined. Right. And so let me, let me answer the. There's many. This is such a vast area we spend hours on. But let me tackle each of those individual points first. For the first one is. Is it a two horse race? Absolutely not. I mean you talk about Super Cruise just earlier. Every manufacturer globally is absolutely building some version of an L2 plus system or working with a partner like us. There's without exception the smallest manufacturers that you know are doing that. A good petri dish of you seeing how this will unravel is China. China is this kind of like swallowed off ecosystem separate in the automotive industry. And there is no dynamic that says a winner take all will be effective. And I'll do the 10 second pitch on why I think an STS from us would be better. We're taking data from all geographies from many manufacturers and not only that, for many vehicle types like off road defense, etc. And our models therefore are just will be and already proving to be more performant. So there you could have an, you know, you could have a pretty plausible technical view that actually the two legs are maybe the early entrants but when everything be autonomous it's going to be. And there's just no, there's just a winner take all dynamics there. There's no winner take all dynamics there. And then, and then in terms of like the broader what happens with autonomy next 5 to 10 years, like this is the, this is the autonomy moment. It's happening now and we're see, you know when you're in the Bay Area you kind of live just maybe it used to, you know, Paul Graham used to say six months into the future, maybe we live three months in the future. But you do live a little in the future and you hang around on any street corner on San Francisco you'll see Waymos after Waymo after Waymo and then you'll start using them and you see them eating at Uber's, you know, market share in terms of. Right. So like that's absolutely going to happen. What that's doing is getting the public used to this concept of self driving. We in the tech industry are very comfortable with it. A lot of us are Tesla owners, A lot of us use fsd so we're comfortable with it. You go to Michigan, I'm from Detroit, you go to Detroit, people don't know any of this stuff and forget and Detroit's a car town. You go to Tulsa, you go to, you know, Dallas. It's just not what people are talking about. So I think that the next five to 10 years is the general availability of autonomy and so if you want to use a good analogy, mobile, we're in like 2008, 2009. If you're in the Bay Area, you saw that the iPhone is coming. People talk about, you talk about Waymos, but most people. So when does mobile really hit? Mobile kind of hits and like you could say it hits when WhatsApp or maybe Uber or maybe like Instagram, you can't even think of before mobile and it requires an app store and requires a front facing camera. So like when will that self driving moment happen? It's happening now, but I think, I think the next two to five years. I'm not just saying, I'm not just pitching my book, by the way.

I can't believe this.

Like, I think the next two to five years without driving, it's going to be massive. It's like the a, it's like the area of AI that everyone, I think it's just because it's not, you know, the hype happened 10 years ago. So everyone wants to talk about LLMs and they want to talk about humanoids. But it's like this is the thing where it's, you know, when we started the company, reason we're called Applied Intuition, by the way, is we want to be on the applied side of this technology. You can spend many years on the research side and if we subtle dig in the name like sds, the reason people ask us, especially engineers who are working or interviewing with us, they're like, well, why don't you get into this space like four years ago, number one transformer boom. And the change hadn't the technology just wasn't very good. But also now if you get into it too late, then timing is a really, really important thing. And I think we always wanted to see, hey, when are we exiting the research phase of self driving and when are we entering? And the applied phase is to be very direct for folks who are not is when it becomes an engineering problem. And now the engineering problem is just about cost, cost, cost, cost, cost. Like you guys are not asking me is self driving real? Like that conversation in 2015, that's maybe the first question is like, is this like a real thing?

I know it's real. I want to know when will self driving be available in a Koenigsegg? When will it be in the next Pagani Huayra? When will it be in the next McLaren? Because this is San Francisco lives in the future. Everyone there is already driving P1s Mustang GTBs.

You're talking about for the people who don't know, Koenigseggs are which like by the way, they make like six a year. These cars aren't even crash tested. They're so, they're so infrequent. Ferrari more of a mass, mass car. Well, I think it'll be a while.

But I'm challenging you sell your product to Koenigsegg, get it in a Koenigsegg, I'm throwing down the gauntlet.

We have, you know, we have a large and public relationship with Porsche. They're big shareholders of ours as well. Never, you know, we do it, like I said with all the OEMs, we never want to expose any particular strategy. But if you, if you think about it, if you're from a buyer perspective, if you're looking at a Tesla Model S, what's the other thing you look at? You look at. Take on.

Sure.

And a lot of times. So like I think even the more exotic companies that are focused on driving dynamics, you have to think about this technology of good UX in the cabin and safety systems that prevent, you know, you from getting injured I think will be like table stakes by the way. Aeb, like the rev. Another, like a subtle revolution that's happened in the car business that people don't talk about is the automatic emergency braking.

Oh yeah.

It'S, it's, it's like statistically making an improvement in like passive pedestrian deaths.

Oh yeah.

Things that often get talked about. So I think even the highest end stuff right now everyone talks about EPA and emissions. I think in 2035 and going forward it'll all be just like, hey, why are we still having deaths? Yeah, like, and then, and then that's. The Koenigsegg question will come up is like, hey, it should be aware enough it doesn't have to drive, but it should be aware enough to take over from the driver when something really bad is about to happen.

Well, thank you.

Last question. Just curious.

We're keeping a Series E company waiting just to talk.

Yeah. What was that? I was gonna say when. How do you think about financing the business in the future? It feels like. I'm sure many SPAC sponsors would be begging, but you, I imagine, will take the more traditional path. How do you think about.

Yeah, we've preserved 100% of the capital we've ever raised in the company's almost 10 years.

Hit that gong, John. Hit that gong.

Yeah, yeah.

For the, for the, for the finance folks at home, they know what that actually means. That, that is, that is no easy feat.

Yes.

That's bigger Than the back is not.

I can.

There's many things that I'm speculative about. SPAC is definitely what I can tell you affirmatively we wouldn't do.

Yeah.

You know, we fall into the very. I mean, it's not random that Fidelity and Blackstone.

Yeah.

You know, Franklin Templeton are investors in the company. I think in that way we're very traditional. In the way we're not traditional is we're a very hard tech company. I mean, the stuff we build, there's virtually no other companies that do it. So yeah, the future. I think the future is good. How are we going to spend the money? I mean, or how do we think about capital allocation? All of our values, the company's values can be reduced to radical pragmatism. If we had to raise a billion dollars to get into some specific technical area or fight that we think is worth fighting for, we'd do it like. It's like pretty straightforward.

That's fantastic. Well, congratulations.

Always great to talk. We didn't talk about defense. That was.

I know, I know. Well, just hop on next week. Yeah, we could talk for hours. This is awesome. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. We have been keeping Elise AI waiting, but we will let them in from the restream waiting room. Some big announcements today. Good thing we warmed up the gong because we got a big deal coming into the TVPN ultradome. Big news from the Revolution stream waiting room. Hello. How are you doing?

So sorry to keep you waiting. Sorry to keep you waiting on your big day.

I was learning stuff.

The previous guest was talking about cars and we went down a whole rabbit hole. It happens. But thank you so much for taking the time. Would you mind kicking us off with the introduction on yourself and the company?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm Minna Song and I'm the co found one of the co founders and the CEO of a company called Elysea and Elise AI is built is a company based in New York City. We build AI agents that automate the entire customer journey for two verticals, the housing industry and the healthcare industry. And we just raised our series E today. So give us the news. Yeah, yeah. We raised a 250. $250 million.

There we go.

Congrats.

Congratulations. Can you give us a quick history of the company? We heard from a friend. He gave us a general read on your revenue ramp and it was pretty mind blowing. So I would love to kind of get the quick history of the company.

Since this is the first Time overnight success?

Yeah.

Yes, just started yesterday. Vibe coded too?

No.

We started 2017. Started with my co founder Tony, who's the CTO. We met in college, studied computer science, both software engineering backgrounds. I went to mit, he went to University of Cambridge. But after college, shortly after college, we wanted to build a company, build technology for industries that serve fundamental human needs. And that gave us this idea that we want, we wanted to go into housing and housing is our largest expense as humans. And we thought it seemed like it had limited technology as an industry. We didn't really know too much about it, but felt like a good place for two technologists to start investigating. So when we got started, I took a job working at a real estate firm in Manhattan and that was just sort of a research opportunity. I got to, I worked at the front desk, I answered all the phone calls, I greeted everyone, answered all the emails and was just really listening for what is the biggest bottleneck that exists that we can start chipping away at. And it was very clear that was communication. And so we were actually a conversational AI startup right from the very beginning versus I think a lot of the companies that you know, are adding on AI right now. It's been pretty obvious if you've been doing it for a long time, that there's a lot of value. A couple years ago, how long did.

You last at that job, by the way? Your research, your paid research opportunity?

It was like a good three months. It was quite fun. I enjoyed it a lot.

That is a wild start.

How important is it to the company to be seen as an AI agent? Pure play. It feels like a lot of companies that are really, really successful are really adding a lot of value, are actually not just picking the hottest tools off the shelf, but they also have a lot of traditional Software. And like SaaS, some are bolting on AI tooling, but others are kind of offering elements of both, whether it's traditional dashboarding or just traditional business logic and workflows. Like how has the business grown? What's the shape of it? What's demand? Like, are customers receptive to something that is purely non deterministic?

Yeah, I mean a big part of what we work on is to make sure that it's providing enterprise grade reliability to our customers in housing and healthcare, to highly regulated industries, to just really consequential decisions for if we make mistakes, it's a big deal for our customers. Right. And for their customers, their, the consumers. So we, we focus a lot on making sure it is, you know, it is, it is Stable and it is reliable for, for them. Yeah, but yeah, it's a mix of, I mean, you have to, you know, AI is a really powerful tool. It's a new type of computer really, and, and you can solve problems with that. But also traditional software and other things that you need are also important in solving a problem. I think what's sort of different about what we build, we're a vertical AI company. Right. We're not a horizontal AI. Horizontal being, you can solve one sliver of a problem for a bunch of different industries. But our approach is we sort of go 10 layers deep into every problem and that way we can actually solve that problem end to end. So it's very different. So let's say in, in housing you are, you are saying that you have your broken sink, right? It's very different. When an AI might be able, you know, a large language model might be able to say, hey, thanks for letting me know, I'll submit a ticket for you. And maybe it does that for us. RAI is actually doing a bunch of things. It's understanding how that resolution should, how that issue should be resolved. It's coordinating all the workforce and all the resources, the systems, the compliance to get that ultimate issue resolved. Or there's things that we do that are not just pure sort of conversational AI pieces, but we work in the physical world, so we have to actually unlock these things called doors and allow people to go and get into the building. So we have to do things like hardware integrations. And you can't avoid doing that if you actually want to solve the whole problem.

Yeah. On the integration side, what's working on the marketing side? Are there channel partners or platforms that you can plug into to accelerate growth? Is it just a ton of SDRs? Is there a viral component to this, like what's accelerating the growth other than just the product delivering value?

Yeah, yeah. We work in particularly non technical industries, so it's not really. There's not a great market for people that are just naturally searching for.

There's not like an app store that you can go viral on and then all of a sudden you're the number one enterprise app in, in property management.

Yes, I wish. Blood, Sweat and tears. We have outbound sales.

Sure.

We do have a lot of partners. AI is actually a great vehicle for delivering a lot of the other products that exist in the industry. So historically, if you needed, if you, let's say you were a marketing software for housing providers, or you were, or you have some other tech, you have insurance or something like that you needed to train a human agent, a leasing agent or a property manager to make sure that got that, that marketing content got distributed. And that's another manual step that people had to have. And I think a lot of people in the industry have realized, hey, I can just partner with Elise AI and my now my marketing materials or my, my insurance will be, you know, will be. Yeah communicated to everybody else.

Jordy.

Nothing for me. This is very exciting.

Congratulations on the fundraiser. Thanks for watching.

Let us know when you add podcasting as a vertical. Happily try it out.

We're definitely in the market. Well have a great rest of your day. Congratulations on the raise. We will talk to you soon.

Thanks for joining.

Bye.

Thanks.

I wanted to finish on this post from Lucas Buyer. Nowtaai he says rf r o f rolling on the floor laughing. The solution it draws is amazing. This is from Tomer Ullman. So the question for ChatGPT for GPT5 is, let's go back to this. And it's a picture of what you can go to the next slide. Is this the head of a rabbit or a duck? And the answer that ChatGPT gives is this image shows the duck rabbit illusion. It can be seen in two ways. As the head of a duck with the beak pointing to the left, or the head of a rabbit, the ears pointing to the left. So the answer is it is both a duck or a rabbit. And then it says, would you like me to mark the outlines for each interpretation directly on the image to make the two views clearer? And it does.

That's so clear now.

And it draws it on there, which is a fascinating ability to even trace the outline. This was unthinkable in machine learning just a few years ago.

What is it see that we don't?

Yes. Maybe it's found a deeper truth. It's possible it's found a deeper truth. No, this is hilarious because clearly it's been RLHF to know that people play pranks on LLMs all the time. They hit them with riddles, they hit them with unsolvable questions and trick questions. And that one of the things people demand of their AI chatbots is that they don't mess up when they're hit with. One of the classic examples is a boy is injured, goes to the hospital. The doctor says, I can't operate on this child. And then the question is like, why? And the answer should be because the doctor is the patient's father or something. But you can throw all these subtle changes where it clearly indicates who is who. And it'll still think that it's being hit with the test with the trick question.

Well, one more post from Luke Metro. We haven't covered him today. Yes, there was a young man, very young man, a teenager. Joined SpaceX at 14. At 16, Kyran is joining Citadel Securities.

Let's hear it.

First, Luke says the hard tech team prodigy. Actually, money is cooler. We've seen it before. If he's really good, he'll get poached by a labor within the next maybe, maybe. And then one final post from camp.

You can't pull Jordy Hayes out of the timeline.

Sophie Netcap girl says August is the Sunday of months. So here's to hoping that it does feel like just have the Sunday scaries.

Oh yeah.

September is going to come around and we'll be extremely back. But thank you for thank you for tuning in today.

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