New OpenAI Hardware Device, Google I/O Reactions | Erik Prince, Anthony Pompliano, Scott Wu, David Senra, Joe Wiesenthal, Nikunj Handa

You watch TV. Today is Wednesday, May 21, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. I still have to send the call in post letting everyone know what we're talking about today. And that's why I'm a little bit behind on.

We got a little bit of a lag, but if not, John, we can just all get a bit of a laugh out of you.

No, no, no, no.

You're.

No one's laughing at me. The studio audience is. Does not find this funny. There's nothing funny about what's going on in the news. We got OpenAI. They bought Jony I've's secret AI company, IO for $6.5 billion. We got reactions to Google. I O. I have been calling everyone I know who works at Google to try and get me more VO3 credits because max it out at 6am I maxed it out immediately. It's fantastic. The videos are extremely impressive. Uh, there's still crazy hallucinations. We'll dig into it, but it's a lot of fun. Highly recommend you go and fork over the $500 a month. I think it is at only 40.

You can get it for 50% off right now.

I'm now. Yeah, 50% off. So I think they hit me with 3, 2, 50, but I get 2.5 flash. I'm on Gemini Ultra, but I can't do video because I maxed it out. But the results were fantastic. I posted some earlier this morning. Jordy posted one of him fighting 100 gorillas and winning. And I would be possible with artificial art intelligence.

Yeah. You simply wouldn't be able to find out the answer to that.

Exactly.

Of if you know 100 gorillas versus one tech podcaster, you wouldn't. You would need AI to really simulate that kind of conflict.

Then we're talking about Europe trying to get into the technology game. I think of technology. I think of technology as. As like a uniquely American thing, but apparently they're trying to do it over there. I tend to think of invention as an American invention. And so I've never heard of any technology coming out of Europe, but I guess people are trying to make it happen. So, you know, anything's possible in the. In the future of AI. Abundance is possible.

We love our Nordic. We love our Nordic.

Yes.

Entrepreneurs. They're goaded.

Yes. And we love one Italian entrepreneur in particular, John Fuel Fiorentino. Of course. Of course. Volta of Fiorentino, label of Moon, Pals of Gravity Blanket. You know, he's probably the best Italian entrepreneur in history. Definitely in the conversation, right?

Definitely in the conversation, John.

Anyway, let's kick it off with. Let's also pull up the guest list. Tell you who's calling in. We got Erik Prince, we got David Senra from Founders podcast. We got Scott Wu from Cognition. Breaking down that question that I've been digging into. How does the AI coding market landscape evolve now? We got top down enterprise approaches, bottom up enterprise approaches. Windsurf's been acquired. Cursors on a tear raising at 9 billion. We got Codex and Jules from Google. Now everyone has an AI companion and AI coding bot. A companion for the software you're gonna have.

You're gonna have coding agents that code you your own AI companion. That's the future.

The real, the real test for Jules is can Google's new AI AI coding agent built one shot me Google Reader. Beloved Google product. That was Sunset. I want one prompt. Build me Google.

I was, I was blown away by, by everything that Google announced yesterday and I was kind of laughing a little bit because one of Google's agencies was, was interested in, in partnering with us.

Oh yeah.

And the onboarding just to get in the conversation with them has been so intense that I just haven't done it for, for weeks. And so it'd be cool if they build an agent that could sort of build, you know, an onboarding flow that didn't involve a bunch of Excel sheets.

That'd be great.

That's anyway longer conversation.

Let's go to the breaking news. OpenAI is buying Jony I've secret AI company IO for $6.5 billion although it is in stock and they will develop a slew of devices. I've in his return to hardware and love form will oversee OpenAI design. All the details including interviews with I've Sam Altman and others from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg. I mean what he is assembling the Avengers all over again. It's crazy. Like the early OpenAI team.

It truly is wild. Yeah.

And now he's putting together Fiji. Simo, you got Kevin Wheel, you got Jony. I've now there's just more and more people coming into that building.

Nine minute video. The video basically goes on.

The product is right.

I didn't get to a lot of back and forth. I summarized it with chat. GPT basically said Johnny's amazing, Sam's amazing and they're cooking. That was like the three big takeaways from the video. So if you don't have time, if you have time to watch this three hour podcast but you don't have time to watch that minute video. That's kind of the.

I really did like the cinematography for what is essentially a nine minute podcast clip.

Feels like you're a barista, but it's.

Yeah.

And that kind of makes you think maybe they're signaling that's the last job. Maybe, maybe venture capital and being a.

Barista, it'll be very interesting to see what they actually launch. Anyway, let's dig into the Mark Gurman article. Bill Gurley immediately within minutes of Mark Gurman posting this Cash or stock? What was the deal? I want to know.

I want to know.

And mark Gurman says 5 billion in stock. OpenAI bought an initial 23% in Q4 for about 6.5 billion in total. Patty's in there saying I don't want an open AI phone, I want an OpenAI brain chip. I want the 4O hallucination straight to the brain. Love Patty. Hope he's doing well. Anyway, let's dig into this article and break it all down. So from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg OpenAI to buy AI startup from Apple veteran Johnny I've in $6.5 billion deal they will acquire the AI device startup co founded by Apple Inc. Veteran Johnny I've in a nearly all stock deal for $6.5 billion. The purchase, which is the largest in OpenAI's history, will provide the company with a dedicated unit for devi for developing AI powered devices. And that makes a ton of sense given that they are subject to the platforms. Google obviously is Android, tons and tons of AI products as we saw yesterday. We're going to go into some of the Google I O reactions and what Ben Thompson's saying on Strathery about Google I O um, and then Apple. Apple's obviously a little bit behind the ball with Apple intelligence but they can charge 30% on everything, you know, gate things and they certainly can't let OpenAI have free reign of the OS as they'd certainly like to have. And so not a re not an unreasonable decision. Although many companies have tried and failed to break into hardware Facebook famously with the with the Facebook phone which I believe was a project that was run by Chamath Palhelti.

The interesting thing here is that so OpenAI is not acquiring Love from which is the sort of consulting agency By Johnny But LoveFrom will continue to work on IO internally at OpenAI and sorry, not internally but IO is now part of OpenAI. So the big question for me is six and a half billion dollars is A big number. They must have made some meaningful amount of progress otherwise they could just say to love from can we just pay you $500 million a year to develop device ourselves. And so in the video the thing that was notable to me is that Sam has an early version of whatever their initial device is that he says he's blown away by. And they've gone out and said they're making a family of products as well.

Makes sense. I mean at the same time if you flip it around, what does it take to get Johnny I've to join your startup. Is it close to 2% equity?

Probably couple points. At least.

A couple points, right. I mean that's not unreasonable. And so you run that math and all of a sudden it's like well we're taking, we're paying for this mostly in stock. It's all stock deal. 6.5 billion latest valuations. What? 350. 300.

330.

330. And so it's basically 2% of the company of OpenAI is going to Johnny and his team. He's going to slice that up. Probably owns a bunch of it. And so what would it take to get someone to be. To get Jony, I've the legendary designer to be their head of design. You know if you were any other company you'd be like yeah, 1 2% probably right?

Yeah. Or senior executive.

Yeah, exactly like the numbers, they all have four extra zeros behind them but they all make sense when you rationalize it that way. Anyway, so there's going to be this dedicated Unit for developing AI powered devices. Acquiring the secret startup, secretive startup named IO will also secure the device. The services of I've and other former Apple designers who were behind iconic products such as the iPhone. Here's a quote. I have a growing sense that everything I've learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment. Very poetic I've said in a joint interview with OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman. It's a relationship and a way of working together that I think is going to yield products and products and products. For the British born designer, the move marks a high profile return to a consumer technology industry he helped pioneer. Working for years alongside Steve Jobs, he crafted the look and feel of the modern smartphone. In addition to the ipod, the iPhone, iPad, the Apple watch.

Johnny specifically called out that these are decades old devices. Right. And so his point here is what, what comes next? Right. What is the next platform?

So he left it in 2019. Obviously Apple was working on Vision Pro for more than five years. Right. So he must have seen that project at some point and then been like, I got it, I gotta leave, I gotta quit. Here, here's his resignation letter. No, I don't know. I mean, obviously it has touches on the crazy thing.

There's this picture of the two of them here, which Johnny unfortunately fails the Green Line test.

He did in this case.

Let's pull it up if we can.

Tagged us in it actually.

But, but the crazy thing here would be if, if Johnny is actually wearing the first device. Right. We don't know. We don't know the form factor. Right. It could be glasses, something like a pendant. It could be glasses, it could be something else. I'm just speculating, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's Easter eggs.

But I mean, the Green Line test here makes sense. It's like Sam's the CEO and Johnny works as CEO now.

Yeah. So it's hard to say he fe failed.

Maybe in some way represented the true relationship of the business partnership going forward.

Always, always fail the Green Line test for the boss man.

Yeah, yeah. You don't want to. You don't want to mog your boss in a photo.

Don't mog my boss.

That's a disaster.

Yeah.

I've was once described by Jobs as his spiritual partner. And his new stint designing rival technology products could be seen as a bad omen for Apple, a company already struggling to compete in AI. In the interview, Altman said Jobs would be damn proud of I've's latest move. OpenAI is going to create a product at level of quality that has never happened before in consumer hardware. Altman said AI is such a big leap forward in terms of what people can do that it needs a new kind of computing form factor to get the maximum potential out of it. He said, not saying what form factor that is, but could it be a rectangle of the screen?

The critique of the video? If it was a beautiful conversation that shared almost nothing other than they clearly admire each other and they're excited about what they're building.

It's just two guys hanging out yapping. It's ridiculous. Why would anyone do that? Why would anyone publish multiple minutes of just two guys talking to each other? This is crazy.

I love at the beginning of the video that, you know, they're clearly walking to meet at this coffee shop or bar, whatever they're meeting at. And to me, the idea of the two of them just walking around San Francisco seems probably hard to go that far without.

I was Thinking about that, I was like, if I saw Johnny, I've just crossed. He's jaywalking, right?

Yeah.

Just. You can just do things. Yep, you can just do things.

Johnny walking.

Yeah. So they just walk in and. Yeah, full camera crew. Very cinematic shot. Really, really cool.

John.

I called it, by the way. Ben just broke the news to us in the chat that there was an earthquake in la. I was sitting here at the table a minute before, a minute before we live, and I'm like, built different. I was like, there's an earthquake happening right now. John's like, no, I'm just banging the table.

Oh, quick. I'm scared. I'm terrified. I can't lie.

Your water, your water is shaky. I was, this is showbiz, John. The show is going to go on. We were not going to stop the show, but there I was, a couple earthquakes, imagining things. Anyways, the other thing here, OpenAI had acquired a 23% stake in IO last year. So already pretty major shareholder and separately.

OpenAI startup fund also invested in Ives company. The last at the last at that time, billionaire philanthropist Lauren Powell Jobs.

Do you remember, like, rumors. I feel like it was about a year ago that Sam and Johnny were like in the Middle east pitching this.

Yeah.

Working on device products. So there had been a bunch of rumors, but never a ton of clarity.

I mean, Sam just understands the full implication of the AI stack and is interested in, in having a play in all of them. Like Helion, he's thinking about fusion and energy at the super, super long Tail. He was talking about chip fabrication yesterday. He's obviously doing data center build outs now as well as the product level and the foundation level. It's like, yeah, if the app. Oh, where does the value accrue? The model layer or the application layer? It doesn't matter if the value accrues to the. The foundation model layer, the application layer, the energy layer, the data center layer, the chip fabrication layer, the device layer or the energy level. Like, he wins because he's got, he's got full stack.

He's verticalizing.

Yeah, he's vertical. The deal is expected to complete, to be completed this summer pending regulatory approvals. The takeover IO will.

By the way, if this gets blocked, I'm taking to the streets. Yeah, I'm going to be out there.

Two guys can't even get a coffee and build together anymore.

Yeah, yeah.

It's ridiculous. I do wonder how Elon's going to respond to this. He's probably going to be like, this is ridiculous. I don't like this at all.

It's very annoying. Yeah, it's very annoying for. For Elon.

Why?

Because. Because to be one of the most powerful wealthy people in the world and have it out for somebody and be so publicly aggressive towards them, but not seem to be able to actually, you know, he's consistently trying to. You know, Sam's biking by. Elon's trying to throw like a broom through the, through the wheel, you know, and it's just the wheels breaking the broom.

I feel like maybe Elon needs to pick up somebody, some. Some iconic designer who is. Is Penn and Farina or something.

Yeah. What are they, what are they up to these days?

I mean, we've talked about like Mansory for Tesla, but maybe he needs to get someone to design some, some X hardware. The funny thing is that, like, there have been these fake.

But I would be interested. I would be interested to. It's very possible Elon has a different thesis around hardware and AI. Right. It might not his point of view. Who knows? Could be it's neural link is all that matters. Like, you guys are focused on the wrong form factor. I'm sort of. Yeah, the neural link playing 10, 20 years in the future. You guys can point. You guys can make cute glasses. I'm gonna be in your brain. Yeah, like that, that's Elon's lawn game is like, he's like, he's going to make the best and like Sam is gonna have to at some point be.

Like, okay, yes, the ChatGPT app is available for Neuralink. And there's.

And then Elon's like, gotcha, Gotcha. You let the, you let the fox into the hen house. You let the chip in your brain and it's just like imagine he's like, you know, Sam, Sam has endured, you know, having Elon, you know, comment the like crying emoji. But imagine Elon just piping that into Sam's brain. Why do I hear this in the background every time I talk? It's so distracting.

It's ridiculous. That's funny. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is like, you know, maybe the next AI product is just the humanoid robot and Optimus just sits there. It's like C3PO. I was watching Star wars this weekend and like, you have a question, you just ask C3PO. The other thing you have your humanoid robot and you just ask the robot.

Like the opportunity with the long term opportunity with neuralink and AI is that you have a new sort of artificial internal monologue. Right. That basically is augmenting your Existing thinking.

Yeah.

And so you have to imagine that Johnny and Sam have thought about that potential scenario. And so it's possible. You could imagine Apple's working with that company around sort of brain computer interfaces. They could just buy that company for a billion dollars too.

Yeah. There are a few players. Interesting. The deal is expected to complete this summer.

The takeover ramp card embedded into my finger.

You can actually do that. You can get an NFC chip in your. Under your skin embedded in like a little capsule.

Our people will.

It's pretty.

Pretty talk to ramps people and biohacking. We'll make it happen.

Yeah. No, you can do it. You can do rfid. I know someone who did it and has. Could like open. Open a door with it, basically.

Yeah. Super helpful.

Yeah, super helpful. Way easier than a keyboard.

Gotta have it.

Totally worth it.

Gott.

And the really crazy thing is that the capsule is like metal and so your body rejects that. So they have to coat it in silicon. But if the.

What about just replacing the fingernail with.

Yeah, I think there's probably other ways. I'm not into the body modification stuff. It's not enough for me. What about internal monologue I've spent after.

The height mogging incident went way down the rabbit hole around height surgery. Try to go from 6:1 to 7:1.

Yeah. Oh, wow. That would be hypog you.

But it would mean missing the show.

You have an internal monologue?

Yes.

Can you imagine not having one? Like, I cannot imagine not having an internal monologue to the degree that I think the whole story. No monologue people are like, I think it's fake.

TVPN audience all has an internal monologue.

Is it just like an. Is it just like an IQ test basically, or do you think the no monologue thing is real? I think it's just entirely fake and just made up. I'm very skeptical of it.

We should have. If you don't have an internal monologue. Come on, come on. We'll break it down Anyway. Anyways.

The pair, 55 hardware engineers, software developers and manufacturing experts. A team that will build what I've and Altman expect to be a family of devices. The two executives have already been exploring some early ideas for about two years. They said the pair expects the first device to be a truly novel type of product. People have an appetite for something new, which is a reflection of a sort of unease with where we are currently. I've said the question is just like Apple's really tested every possible screen size down to the watch is super tiny. Then there's the phone. The iPad. The iPad.

You mean the YouTube machine?

The YouTube machine. And then you put on the Vision Pro and the goggles and you can get an imac screen. And so like if the device has a screen, it's gotta be something between 1 inch and 200 inches and quickly you fall in that continuum.

Yeah. I mean the question is are they building for GPT 4 okay. Or are they building for GPT 6 or 5. Right. And how much better do the models get and our screens?

I mean wasn't Sam also an investor in Humane?

I think he was, I think so. I mean I won't list the investors in Humane because some of them are friends and they wouldn't want to be associated necessarily anymore.

But I think Sam's been thinking about hardware in a bunch of different ways and wants to test both. No screen, see if that works. Maybe screen, maybe different opportunities. I don't know. Ivan Altman's first devices are slated to debut in 2026. That's just three months before ASI.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right around the corner. One thing I feel really confident in is that I believe they could sell a million of these devices almost immediately. Right?

Well, it depends, I think. I mean yes, a million is like low enough that like it'll happen no matter what. The question is like if it's additive and complementary to my current tech stack, it's a no brainer. Absolutely everyone will get one. If it's a replacement, it really has to be also a good phone still. And if they don't hit the basics of okay, it works with imessage, then there's a question about like am I really going to drop my phone or am I carrying two phones now? If it's like a phone sized device. Right. Whereas it was very easy to add a chromatic to my tech stack and it's like yeah, I could probably get a Game Boy emulator on my phone, but it's just a cool device and I throw it in my backpack if I'm traveling I have it. Same thing with like even the Vision Pro. It's like very additive. It's not fully replacing your phone. So. So VR headsets could be something like glasses, like the meta Ray Bans. People add those to their stack. It seems like it's easier to get someone to, to add something than to replace something as important as their laptop or their phone, which they have like 10 years, 15 years of like daily driving use and expectations on where the apps are, where how things work. It's going to be a lot Harder to rip out the current flow. Yeah, I don't know when he, when he left Apple six years ago. I've started the firm Love from a Collection, a collective of designers and engineers. Their staff includes veterans of Apple's hardware and software departments as well as friends of I've and other collaborators. He then co founded IO last year with Apple alumni Scott Cannon, Evans Hanke and Tan Tang. Hanke was I've successor at Apple and remained at the company until 2023 while Tan led iPhone and Apple Watch product design until 2024. Absolutely stacked roster. Canon worked at Apple before co creating the once popular email app Mailbox, which was acquired by Dropbox. Oh, I had no idea. Did you ever use Mailbox?

Nope.

Fantastic App 2013 comes out and it invents the swipe to archive, swipe to snooze paradigm and really makes it easy to start doing Inbox Zero. And that's where I learned Inbox Zero. Because when you signed up for Mailbox there was this big long wait list. It took you a long time to get through like it was a hot product at the time and one of the first things they would do is just say, hey, you have 5,000 emails, let's archive them all. Because when you archive an email, it just leaves your inbox. You can still search for it, it still exists, it's not deleting it. So let's archive it all and then from now on you should triage your email by swiping. And it was, it was amazing. It was a great product. And then Mailbox bought it or Dropbox and I think they shut it down.

So it was one of those Jiro Sushi products, right?

Totally. It was like really great design and everyone loved it for like the year that it was viable. And then I don't know what happened with it. At IO, the group set out to to develop, engineer and manufacture a collection of products for an era of of artificial general intelligence. The point at which technology achieves human like cognitive abilities. The team will now continue that mission at OpenAI, becoming a threat to the very devices the designers helped create. That adds to the challenge of Apple, which has fallen behind in Silicon Valley peers in artificial intelligence. The art, the company's AI platform released last year, lacks the capabilities of rival systems and relies in part on open AI's ChatGPT chatbot to fill in the gaps. Still, Ivan Altman don't see the iPhone disappearing anytime soon in the same way that the smartphone didn't make the laptop go away. I don't think Our first thing is going to make the smartphone go away. Okay, getting a little bit more detail here. It's a totally new kind of thing. I'm really excited for this. The phone, as it, as it is. As it currently is, is a remarkable general purpose device. I've said, adding that people will connect with AI in very new ways. We gotta get.

I'm so excited to understand what the interface for this first device is going to look like because one thing stood out. Nikita was posting earlier that if your onboarding flow requires any sound, you just see an immediate massive reduction in usage because a lot of people use their phones.

What's an example of an onboarding flow that requires sound?

Some apps will play a video, but I'm talking about this in the context of a voice interface with the app. The issue is people use their devices.

In public or they don't want to be loud.

Bathroom.

Got it. And they don't want to be loud. So if it's. If, if it were. If the experience requires sound, you're cooked.

Yeah. He. Nikita says the majority of new app installs take place in bed or on the toilet. If your app requires sound on or voice to sign up, you're voluntary. You've voluntarily accepted a 60% tax on your growth. And so that's, you know, if your voice, voice AI has progressed so much. Right. We've seen examples of sesame super low latency. You could imagine a hardware device that's purely allowing you to interact with AI like it's a human. Right.

What if the device is a response to all the fears around AirPods and so it's a set of wired headphones into a Walkman like device and then you can talk to the AI without wireless headphones. That could be really trendy. They could go back to the original ipod video of the silhouettes dancing with the. With the headphones on.

So TJ has a great post here. OpenAI got the best hardware and design team in history for 6 billion. Or framed differently for the same amount Amazon burns annually on Alexa and devices.

Yeah, yeah, no, I really think that this is not a crazy overpriced acquisition. It seems totally reasonable to take 2% of your equity and say, hey, let's take a shot at owning the next computing platform. Because this is such a seismic shift that, that there's totally a world where they go and solve glasses or watches or headphones or some sort of other mobile device that you carry and maybe it's additive. We should get some of the device. The device entrepreneurs on the show.

What Is it?

Look him up. I'm sure he's ripping tweets.

I'm sure he's launching in 71 days.

71 days.

He says he just posted. He just posted a minute ago. Too many cooks.

Too many cooks in the kitchen.

Which is funny because. Is that a play on Tim Cook?

Yeah. You know, also there's that Adult Swim video. Too many cooks. I don't know.

Too many cooks in the kitchen. Avi, I'm very excited for his launch.

Yeah. Yeah. We should give him a call.

And it would be. Even if OpenAI and the IO team just completely come out with their own version of Friend, it's still a cultural victory for Avi for sure. He got the form factor right, but.

And he can probably sell Oracle for a billion dollars or Amazon or something. Yeah, I mean the Alexa. Alexa Friend, that'd be good.

The Alexa friend, yeah.

OpenAI also shook up management ranks this month with the San Francisco based company appointing Instacart chief Fiji Simo as the CEO of applications. She reports directly to Altman, allowing him to focus on the broader strategy. Hankey, who will become an OpenAI employee along with Tan and Canon, said the ChatGPT debut prompted a realization that hardware technology would have to change. A number of us looked at each other and said, this is probably the most incredible technology of our career. So agree. But how will it change? Tell us something.

Just one thing.

Just one thing.

Just a crumb, sir.

Just give us a weight. How much will it weigh? How big will it be?

That would be fun.

Is it bigger than a bread box? Can we do 20 questions with one of these?

20 questions? That's what we'll do with Sam.

Is it made out of metal or plastic? Or is it organic? Can I eat it? Is it a robot? Does it?

This is interesting. So we have a hint. So Sam says we are obviously still in the terminal phase of AI interactions. We have not yet figured out what the equivalent of the graphical user interface is going to to be, but we will that saying that there's a.

What's interesting is like the graphical user.

Interface essentially like a crud app.

Right? The graphical user interface didn't change with mobile. The thing that the iPhone did well was multi touch and so being able to like pinch to zoom and all of that was like.

I mean obviously the breakaway app was when you could just drink the beer.

The beer app was really the win.

I mean that's the iPhone wouldn't.

I mean we've already had that with AI. That's the Harry Potter Balenciaga that is the iPhone beer app of AI.

That's a good take. That's a good take.

Love from has a number of former Apple designers who helped create the look of the Mac and iPhone operating systems that haven't changed in a decade since they did.

Somebody. Somebody go check on John Giandrea.

We never finished that article. I really want to finish it. They could help redesign OpenAI's app for new generations of consumers. Love from will continue its existing relationships like Ferrari and Airbnb, but it won't take on new clients. Their new hardware team within OpenAI will be overseen by Peter Weilander, who will report to Altman as product vice president.

They should just buy Ferrari and Airbnb.

Can you imagine if OpenAI?

Airbnb is Ferrari and they're just like Airbnb.

This is the new device. If you want to interact with ChatGPT, we recommend getting in 297 SF9 GTB. An SF90 ChatGPT integrated.

Yeah.

I mean, you're already paying $2,000 a month for ChatGPT Pro Plus. Why not put it up to 4,000 and get a lease for a SF90?

Yeah. Ferrari will finance it for you.

Exactly, yeah. Totally doable. For the price of a ChatGPT subscription, you could easily be driving a hypercar.

Totally, totally. Yeah. Everybody Talks about the $20,000 a month, you know, ChatGPT subscription.

That should come with a Ferrari.

Infamous. Yeah, it should come with an SP3. Right? It should just be. It's not humanoids, folks. It's AI will be embodied by the legacy of Enzo Ferrari.

Think about how low churn would be if you were like, in order to use AI really effectively, I gotta be revving that V12. I gotta be opening it up on the open road.

The device needs to be vibrating from.

The naturally V12 cutting canyons.

Well, I mean, there was. Didn't Elon say something yesterday that it wasn't off the table that Tesla could merge?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Luke Metro was predicting that a year.

Ago I'd finally buy a Tesla so I could be terminally online behind the wheel.

Yeah, I like this roll in Ferrari for sure. You heard it here first. Breaking News. I've said ChatGPT was initially put on his radar by one of his twin sons, Charlie. Oh, twin dad. Let's hear. So twin dads love that. And he immediately knew he had to meet Altman after using it. The new team at OpenAI will work at IO's existing workspace in Jackson Square, a neighborhood in San Francisco. And OpenAI's current offices so they're not far apart. I have felt that my most important and useful work is ahead, I've said adding that he has been training for this moment. He compares the experience to Apple in the late 90s to early 2000s before the iPod and iPhone. I'm just really, really grateful we all found each other. I've and Altman wouldn't elaborate on what hardware products they are working on, but they will be entering a market in its infancy. Meta platforms the owner of Facebook and Instagram is perhaps the most notable maker of AI devices. It sells the popular Ray Ban smart glasses which Apple, which Google is now competing with. They launched two different devices Nreal these VR glasses that it's, it's not full virtual reality. It just projects a really big screen in front of you. I've been wanting to pick one of these up because my main use case for the Apple Vision Pro is just watch a movie on a plane and these are like cheaper, lighter, easier to use and they just put the big screen in front of you. Very cool. I want to get some of those and we should probably try and get the CEO on the show and then, and then they also launched like the smart sunglasses that don't have a display but you can talk to Gemini which also very cool.

I took shots at Humane and Rabb saying those were very poor products and says they're.

This is a quote brutal.

There is an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.

Is that the problem though? Like those were definitely new ways of thinking expressed in products. They just weren't good new ways of thinking. They were definitely new though.

Not every new way is going to.

Be a good way.

Yeah. I also think that I still feel like the humane AI pin built for.

Children could have been the rabbit R1 specifically too. Like it would be so easy to sell that to your, your, Your, your, your 4 year old, your 5 year old is going to start demanding an iPad instead. Get them this and it's nerfed iPad and it's just educational.

It's a machine for your child's curiosity. They can ask it any questions.

They can ask it any questions.

They can say tell me a story.

You can't play Skinner box games.

Yeah.

And they can't play Candy Crush on it or whatever. Yeah, yeah. No, there's definitely something.

They'll figure out a way to put Candy Crush on there. Some of these whale kids spending 20 grand a day on Candy Crush.

But, but it's, it's a Van Dyke.

Johnny's like this was not my intention.

Yeah, he just creates the most addicting advice device possible. They're calling it the new cigarettes folks. The Ivan Altman wouldn't elaborate on what they're working on. Tan, who was a central. Who is central to developing every version of the iPhone within Apple's hardware engineering department, said the new team isn't tied to a legacy and will have an opportunity to rethink the space. It'll be worth the wait. Altman said. It's crazy. It's a crazy, ambitious thing to make. Not much detail here, but thanks for the post.

I am excited.

I hope it's huge.

I hope it's a hit.

Really, really big. I want it to be as big as a newspaper.

I think part of, part of really loving big tech is wanting more companies to become big tech or high technology. And OpenAI has clear potential to get.

Into that group and maybe they should launch a newspaper. This is kind of hardware. Just print out deep research reports.

Yeah.

People mail it to me, put it, drop it off.

People discount paper as, as a, you know, a potential hardware form factor.

Yeah, it is, it is. Anyway, Google I O reactions. Let's move on. Everyone on the Google team made the exact same hand gesture. Apparently they were all trained.

Tulsi in there.

Tulsi's in there. She's been. She was on the show yesterday.

I guess Logan didn't make that.

No. Maybe he had some wild hand gestures.

Shweta says goo gang sign.

Are you familiar with the Merkle route? This one. Angela Merkel would always hold her hands like this. It was pretty sick.

Similar to Andrew Tate. Is that where you got it from?

Wait, Tate does it. Oh, I didn't know that. That's hilarious.

I think, I think his, his infamous. Oh, he does, he does like this tense.

His fingers. Tenting your fingers is very like pensive and thinking. I'm thinking, oh yes, I'm tenting my fingers.

It's not very golden retriever coated. You never see a golden retriever do that.

No, definitely not. There were some other new founders waking up that. To realize that their startup is now a bullet point in Google's keynote.

Yeah. So a couple, couple of things here. They launched a product to generate product designs. Yep. It was interesting. They launched a doji competitor which is like a try on product. They obviously launched Jules coding agent. They launched the eyewear. You know, basically whether you're Sesame, Doge, Doji.

Yeah.

Even figma. Right. Figma has generative AI.

Yeah.

Tools.

Yeah, I feel like.

But. But again, I don't think that founders, I don't think like the doji founders are seeing that and thinking, oh, I'm suddenly worried. Right. Because the idea that Google is going to dominate in fashion, which is so culture driven, is seems really. I don't, I don't see it happening. I can see them having, yeah. A version of the product in Google, Google shopping that enables try ons. I don't think it's going to be this like social cultural thing that, that doji is clearly tapped into.

Yeah. I wonder how many startups Google has actually killed in history. It doesn't feel like that many. The famous example of course is like Microsoft really did kind of kill off Slack's growth with teams. Yeah, right. And Slack kind of like, you know, reached its peak and kind of flatlined after, after Microsoft Teams took off because Microsoft had such a distribution advantage. I feel like there's two different types of startups.

Teams took off because defense tech got cool and all the defense tech had to be itar.

But seriously, it's like I think that if you saw a Google feature and you were like, I'm going to start a startup on that and you're basically copying Google because you're like Google slow, then yes, this is real to all the companies that were like putting up fake notebook LM apps that weren't really like raising money and kind of just like cash grabbing on top of like wrapping stuff. That's already been created and pioneered by Google. Google drops a notebook LM app and they like wipe you. You can't really be that upset. Like you're always in a cash grab. But if you have built like a massive design tool like Figma and it has so many different customers, so many different things, and then they come out with like, oh, something that allows you to do like a little bit of design work. Like it doesn't feel like as nearly as existential. And so I feel like this narrative is always like, oh, Google just like, you know, completely destroyed this stuff and it really depends on like is, is this, is this truly aligned with Google's mission that they're going to just keep pouring relentlessly at and they're going to make this great and it's, and it's completely on their roadmap and were you always building a feature or were you building something that can, that can grow into its own behemoth? And if you're on, if you're on the right track, you're probably fine. Anyway, what's next?

Well, speaking of behemoth, the US formally accepts Luxury jet from Qatar. Really, Trump?

No way. That is crazy.

And it will possibly be used as Air Force One. And Yahoo is reporting that turns out Trump's Qatar private jet wasn't even a gift.

Hmm.

It wasn't.

Despite the insistence that the plane was a gift.

What was it then, if it's not a gift? Payment for.

A senior White House official told CNN that Trump tasked Steve Witkoff, the President's special envoy to the Middle east, with tracking down a replacement for Air Force One after Trump learned that Boeing would not have new jets ready for another two years. Witkoff ended up leading initial conversations with the Qatari government.

And they have them in stock, right?

Yeah. Boeing provided the Pentagon with a list of other clients who might be able to help with America's search for a new plane. One of those sources says that Qatar was included on that list of clients. And remember, we saw that chart, right?

Yeah.

There was not that many people in the world that actually have these jets set up in this way. There were also discussions about leasing the plane. So again, when we saw the initial headlines, we thought that, we imagined that it was possible that the. The full truth was not. Not really revealed yet. And apparently legal negotiations over the plane's transfer are still ongoing. And it's unclear how the plane went from being a potential purchase to a $400 million gift.

So anyway, where should we go next? Probably ramp time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot all in one place. We already talked about figma, but let's tell you about figma as well. Think bigger, build faster. FIGMA builds, does, helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free.

It is the backbone of tbpn.

Yeah.

If you like some of the merch that you've seen, that's where we're making it.

Oh, yeah. Let's go to this Gary Tan post. This is good, actually. Talking about the cycle never ends. Every month, a new world's most powerful model takes the crown. We applaud, compare, and then wait for the next OpenAI introduces the world most powerful model, then Anthropic, then Gemini, then Grok. There's a little bit of fracturing now in the sense that I haven't played with Gemini's LLM enough to displace my OpenAI workflow. But the generative video like VO3 is truly way, way better than Sora right now.

And so I compared the two I.

Same prompt in both and it was brutal. Not. There was not even a question which one you would go with yeah.

1 the SORA output made me kind of.

It was. It was a lot of hallucinations. Really hard to look at story it didn't have concerning it was definitely like. Like a lot of gyrations and just hallucinations. Now that's not to say that the look like it was 3v03 had a lot of crazy hallucinations but. But they were not as disturbing or more like psychedelic. Like we generated this one video of an Audi R8 with a TBPN livery pulling out of our new studio and it peels out, it's very cool. But then all of a sudden it's driving backwards which is very odd and jarring. I did another one with a Rolls Royce Phantom pulling into the studio. The TBPN GT3 cup car livery. Foresight and that foreshadowing. And that one when it pulled in, did you notice this? It had a wing on the back and it pulls in and then all of a sudden the car morphs and you're looking at the front of the car again. And so it kind of hallucinated and transformed. It did that a couple times where us blasting through the Hollywood sign. It we there's a Hollywood sign in the background. We bust through one Hollywood sign, then there's a third Hollywood sign. Like it is still hallucinating. It doesn't seem, it doesn't seem ground in reality in any way. But just visually the fidelity of the visuals is incredible and the ability to include three or four different concepts and then it weaves all of that into an eight into an eight second clip. It's very, very cool and the sound is obviously amazing. And so I have been begging Google representatives for more VO3 credits because it's a lot of fun. But yeah, we love an AI race.

Well, we have some kind of meta news. Somebody is doing live translation of TBPN in Dutch right now.

Really?

Do you want to try playing it? Ben? Oh, we'll see if this works.

And we have Anthony pompliano joining at 12:30 now. So in the meantime, while we're pulling that up, let's tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance Manage risk, Improve Trust Continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the work out, 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. I need Pomp's email for this invite. Let's also tell you about linear. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern Software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

LINEAR launched their agents product into GA today, which is very cool. And I want to ask Scott about it because they have been working on some serious integrations there, which would be cool.

We. Wow, they're translating. That's pretty.

It's gonna get really. It's gonna get really freaky once they get to this point in the stream. Yeah, they're translating us.

Yeah, it becomes very meta. Oh, wow. They're actually talking about Vantage now. This is incredible. Wow, this is really impressive. Okay, anyway, let's move on. Enjoy that. If you're looking for TVPN in Dutch, Chubby shares. This is freaking insane. The holy grail of personalized AI for daily usage. If this demo turns out to deliver what it promises, we'll be much further ahead in 2025 than I would have thought. So this is a video of a guy who uses a Android phone to troubleshoot a bike that he's trying to fix. And he asks the AI to pull up the actual manual or. Yeah, manual for the bike. And it's scrolling the PDF and then it says, hey, go find a YouTube video. And it opens the YouTube app. So it's very much working at the OS level to use all of the features that are available on any Android phone. And that seems like what we want from Apple Intelligence that we're not getting yet. You can't tell Siri to go open the Notes app and search there or take a new note. Everything has to be puppeteered at like the API level through these specific integrations instead of just using the whole. The whole phone. And so it's very. It's a very cool demo. There are a bunch more pieces of news. Sam from Futuronomics says Waymo does more rides than Lyft. In San Francisco, There are only 300 Waymos. Lyft has 445,000 drivers. Every Waymo is doing more than more rides than 150 human drivers. Now there's a community note on this. I don't know how true it is, but there were some staggering Waymo numbers. I think they crossed 10 million rides or something.

There's this comment right underneath it that I think is probably why it's getting noted, which is that this guy Williams says that number feels implausibly high though. I wonder if that lift number includes surrounding area drivers to occasionally do. Right. There's no way. Yeah, 45. That lift has 45,000 and drivers would be packed.

It's. It's what a city of like 7 million people or something that.

A lot of pink mustaches and.

And reminder, like Uber's what, 100 times bigger than Lyft. And so you have 4 million Uber drivers for 7 million people or something like that. Yeah, it makes no sense. Anyway, Olivia Moore over at Andreessen Horowitz says, although she's interesting, Lyft is flat.

On the last year, on the last 12 months. So it's up, actually up $0.01 over the past year.

So anyway, we need a polymarket on the current best AI model. I want to see where that's trending because Google obviously released a bunch of models and Google was in the, in the, in the leading contender for top model. And I want to see where the polymarket is shaking out.

End of May, Google is sitting at 91. 91%, 40% for December 31st. End of the year.

Yeah. So Olivia Moore here says Google had a bunch of great AI launches today, but they're so hard for consumers to access. I completely agree with this. I get stuck all the time in the wrong flow, in the wrong app. Even accessing VO3, I wound up in Flow, which is their TV product or something, and it was just showing me AI stuff. And then there's like, I can get into the dev studio, but then I have to set up an API key and then I finally have the, the Gemini app. But the Gemini app wasn't, wasn't upgraded and so I had to go through a flow on, on Chrome, on desktop to get that. And I get that I don't have an Android phone, but I feel like I'm being punished too much.

Yeah. In the bull case, there is that. That kind of stuff is actually easier to figure out than being on the technological edge, leading in benchmarks and all these other things and having massive.

Yes, yes, but they should be able to do both. They have. So.

No, I totally agree. Just saying. It's, it's, it's. You know, talking to Tulsi and Logan yesterday, they clearly are credibly locked in, aware of. Aware of the pushback.

Yep. So she goes on to say, it feels like every debut comes with a new subscription, which you need a specific account type to access and have to hunt down the playground for. I know AI products are expensive to run, but with Google's distribution revenue streams, I don't get why they don't offer some of. Some more of this for free. That was my question. Or at least make it easier to find Notebook LM feels like their last big viral launch, which had no paywall. At various times in the last three months, I've been subscribed to Gemini Advanced, Google One AI Pro, and now AI Ultra. The madness needs to end. I agree. Although I'm now an AI Ultra subscriber, so maybe they got me. Maybe it's all part of the plan. 4D chess.

Yeah. I'm interested to track the ramp data on Gemini over the next couple months.

See if it's ramping up anyway. Everyone's gonna have to pay sales tax on this. Get on Numero, go to numeral HQ.com Put your sales tax on autopilot, spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Wes roth says Google IE 2025 was an absolute AI overload and everyone is still picking up their jaws off the floor. Here's the tldr. Gemini gets an agent mode. It's so powerful, it borders on executive assistant. So excited to check that out.

Gemini is the kid that got bullied in high school and is now jacked a millionaire. And practicing is gratitude.

It's very accurate. Yeah. I mean, they just like. I mean, that's the nature of these companies that are on the annual releases is that like, you're like, they're behind for 11 months out of the year and then they're state of the art for the big release. And then of course, everyone else.

Yeah. I'm just like feeling extremely grateful that we own 80% of what, you know, is the Internet and we can leverage this into creating really great AI.

Theo says Google buying DeepMind in 2014 for 400 to $650 million might have been the greatest acquisition of all time. Completely agree. It's definitely up there. Definitely in the conversation.

Definitely in the conversation.

Signal says Google's edge in local data, especially now with LLMs, is absurdly underrated. Nobody touches the depth, historic history and granularity they have on local businesses, landmarks, real time conditions. Every other mapping service is just a sad knockoff because Google's been building this mode for decades. Overnight success. Also, I mean, the YouTube data is super valuable. You have to imagine that their edge and VO is because of the YouTube data, because, I mean, like, it's the biggest repository of video content.

New stream of video constantly, constantly, constantly.

Yeah. And so that's probably why there's so much good stuff coming out of VO3. Ben Hylak showed the first ever ad produced.

Can we play this?

Welcome to the Token Tavern. It's in the tab if you guys want to try and pull that up. Justine Moore, Venture twin, says man singing a song about we should play top of the list.

We should play both of these.

Good. Alexander contextualizes it by saying you can own Google at 17x earnings or short and short Costco at 50x earnings. Long AGI short. Rotisserie chicken is actually value investing. People, people of Costco. And then Archie Sangupta says, got access to Google diffusion. Holy. 909 tokens per second. I made a calendar in three seconds.

Yeah, I mean this is what people are talking about in terms of being able to generate entire applications, right? And this is the risk to existing software. Applications that don't have network effects are really sort of thin wrappers around AWS and you know, these sort of simple applications. I mean, I still think that this will be one of those things, you know, people, people can make their own food. They still order out from restaurants, right?

So here, let's do this with audio if we can. The Token Tavern. It looks so good.

I don't think I'm supposed to be here. Well, partner, that's why I use Raindrop. So I can find bugs like you before they bother my users. Let's get the hell out of my town.

Wow.

Ben cooked. Ben cooked.

Although, Although I know that those graphics came from after effects. That overlay for sure. After effects not generated.

He said ad produced with VO3.

Yeah, yeah. It uses Void. This is the most impressive shot in the whole thing, though. Look at this. Perfect lip sync. The teeth look great. The voice, the texture. But get an alert when your AI product fails. That's motion graphics, baby.

Truth zone.

Truth zone.

Ben Cook.

Congrats to Ben. That's a very cool ad.

Very cool. What about the other one?

Yeah, this one.

I basically watched this and I said I had to watch this. I'm gonna make John watch this. It is pretty rough. Yeah.

Okay, let's lock in, check it out. In the meantime, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields trusted by millions. Public.com.

Public.Com.

Get on there. Also. How'd you sleep?

But you know how I slept, John. I had to come back. You've. You've had a couple good nights. I had to show you who's boss.

I think I did poorly. 90. Not bad.

97.

Oh, I got you.

I'm back in the game. I'm back in the game. Autopilot clinically made 22 different autopilot made 22 adjustments to the temperature of the bed to get my REM sleep up.

8% just last night.

Just last night. 22.

That's actually a lot. Okay. Anyway, let's play this next video.

Thank you. To eight Sleep. I'm a venture capitalist.

Yeah, I'm a capital dude.

All right, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off.

So bad. So bad.

That's wrong. That's just wrong.

Let's just end the stream.

Yeah, just, just turn it off.

Let's just turn it off.

That's enough. That's enough for today, honestly. Let's take the rest of the week off too.

Just hang it up.

That's so bad.

Yeah, I was looking at that viral, that viral VO video of. And the prompt was just like, stand up comic telling a joke. And everyone was like, hey, this is actually funny. It's like, I went to, I went to the zoo. They only had a dog. It was a shit zoo. Funny. But like, that joke is not created from AI. It's literally on Reddit. It's literally at the top of like Reddit slash R jokes. It's like we'd still, we're still training on the same data.

Okay, somebody, somebody repurposed that video of somebody take that video of the, the VC singing that song posted on Blue sky and said. And just say like, hey, I know you guys haven't been on X in a while and but like, here's what's going on. And given that they're generally decelerationists, I think they might actually. Yeah, they're not going to be happy with that.

Bad.

They hate to see a young venture capitalist singing very bad.

Just, just go to adquick.com, buy a billboard out of home advertising. Made it easy and 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. Thank you. That was rough.

Yeah.

Anyway, we have three minutes. Let's just do a little quick timeline. We'll get to the Ben Thompson later, but I wanted to cover this article in the Wall Street Journal. Europe's firms fall far behind in the race to create big tech. Lack of innovation holds economies back, weighing on the Continent's future. Berlin. The world's technology revolution is leaving Europe behind. Europe lacks any homegrown alternatives to likes of Google, Amazon or Meta. Apple's market value is bigger than the entire German stock market. The Continent's inability to create more big technology firms is seen as one of its biggest challenges and is a major reason why the economies are stagnating. And so if you look at their chart and they're looking at number of unicorns by region. In the United states there are 90 unicorns with a combined value of 2.35 trillion. SpaceX and OpenAI, of course, the biggest in the EU there's 107 unicorns. So actually more companies, but their combined value is 330 billion, basically an order of magnitude less value. And they include Stripe in Europe, which is not fair in my opinion because Stripe is a YC company that's very San Francisco coded.

They have their conference.

They do in San Francisco. In San Francisco. But I've been thinking more about European venture capital because a lot of people have been hating on it, thinking that it's impossible to make money there. This is kind of consensus. All the smartest venture capitalists think that it's just impossible. But there is something amazing about that type of radical risk taking in such a challenging environment. Like. And if you just think about like the act of launching a VC fund in Europe, it goes back to the early spirit of Silicon Valley.

Totally.

It's totally like a huge idea of.

Giving money to a company. Giving millions of dollars to a company that has no cash flows. That's maybe entering a market that doesn't even exist yet.

Yeah.

And it's a million to one investing in European.

It's a million to one that you even make a dollar of revenue.

Totally.

Potentially a billion to one. You know people talk about like one miracle, one miracle companies, two miracle companies.

Yeah.

In Europe you need to be a 10 miracle company totally to do anything. And so if a VC can go there and even return even just a 1x on their fund, I think that they should be at the top of the Midas list because it is such a remarkable achievement.

It's so running the Midas list these days.

I don't know post Conrad.

Conrad.

But it truly like given the, given the expectations, if you can, if you can even get out of there with returning 50% of your fund.

Yeah.

You should be, you should be. You should be remembered as one of the greatest venture capitalists to ever do. Would be a remarkable accomplishment. You need a reality distortion field.

Yeah.

To just, to just go and deploy in Europe. It's remarkable.

Some level of hubris.

Yeah, massive.

Anyway, anyways, we have Erik Prince in the studio. Why don't we bring him in?

Eric, how you doing?

There he is. What's happening?

Welcome to the Stream.

How are you?

We're great. How are you?

Great to have you. Thank you. I don't know if you need any introduction, but why don't you give an introduction for those that may be unfamiliar.

Born in Michigan, served in the Navy for a while and built a business called Blackwater, which was a defense services firm, a private military contractor if you will. I sold that in 210 and have done some things in resource investing upstream in mining and exploration. And I still, I help governments from time to time with large intractable problems and started a company just over three years ago called Unplugged, which is a standalone independent phone outside of the Google and Apple universe. It's really kind of an answer to surveillance capitalism.

What was the first dollar of revenue for Blackwater? Like, how do you get that business off the ground?

So SEAL teams, special operations units, because of the gun culture in America have gone to private facilities really since the 70s. Some, you know, some champion shooter that's running a shooting school somewhere and no one had done that on an industrial scale. And so I knew coming out of the SEAL teams, I knew what the teams needed and I built the largest facility of its kind in the world within an hour drive of Norfolk Naval Base and all the SEAL teams and military concentration that's there. And actually our first customer was from the west coast, a west coast SEAL team. But yeah, we, we built ourselves into becoming a indispensable part of the train up of military units. And then when Columbine High School happened, that terrible high school shooting, you had dozens of police departments that respond and didn't do very well because it took them hours to clear the building and people bled out that should have been cared for. And so we ended up building a big mock up called are you ready high school? Where we could train thousands of SWAT officers how to respond to those kind of disasters in process with all the sounds and lights and role players and screaming and, and that was very effective. And then with the USS Cole, Navy ship was blown up in Yemen by a suicide boat. The Navy realized that, well, the sailors that were guarding that ship were holding largely unloaded weapons that they never fired before because the Navy thought it was too dangerous to train with live guns. And so we ended up training 100,000 sailors. That was really our first big defense contract.

Interesting.

And then, and then when 911 happens, obviously the demand signal for security and training and aviation and you know, operating in difficult places was our specialty.

How do those contracts actually work? We're familiar with the defense tech pipeline, a lot of defense tech startups right now maybe they drilled, they're building counter UAS drone systems and the typical path is they get some sbir money Then they move to program of record, they start scaling up manufacturing. But for what you're doing, I imagine that the contracts are structured differently. How do you project revenue? How do you think about ongoing relationships with, with the DoD and making sure that the customer is satisfied for a long time?

It's a much shorter flash to bang in terms of demand signal. A customer would come and say, I need this kind of airlift in this part of the world, move this many tons, need to be able to fly on night vision goggles and operate under this level of, of FAA or not scrutiny. And we would bid it. About 98 of our revenue was competitively bid. And look, at the same time I was building Blackwater, I took over my dad's original business, which made diecast machines a big, you know, heavy machine tool business. And I took that through a lean transformation process really based on the Toyota production system and, you know, lowering the cycle time of large quantities of steel and other work in process. And so as I'm laying out Blackwater, I kind of thought about it like a, like a factory. And what does the military do? It recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys and supports people to do a job at a difficult place. That's what we did. And because we were a training facility to start with, we could back into the recruiting and the vetting. We had our own in house doctors and psychologists for all the psych screening tests. Our own supply, obviously an enormous, an impressive armory.

What do you think the PMC of the future looks like? Right, you have. Warfare's changing. We have autonomous systems now. A lot of the new capabilities being brought online are drone based. I imagine your sort of vision of how you counter that probably ends up looking like a mirror to some degree. But, but I'm curious, I'm sure you've thought about it more than anyone else.

Yeah.

Well, when you look back in history, the contractors on the battlefield have always been there. And if you were laying siege to a city in Europe a thousand years ago, the people you contracted for the PMCs would have been the guys building the trebuchets or the battering rams, which was at that point the most sophisticated system, mechanical system on the battlefield. Now those that cutting edge, bleeding edge technology is obviously in the drone and autonomous space. And yes, you're right, the private sector can adapt and operate so much faster, including in the cyberspace as well, that that is how you deliver significant punch above your weight by having a few people that do those systems very, very well. That's something that we're still the US DoD procurement swamp is still truly not learning from fast enough is you go from idea to prototype to field testing in combat in Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks and you get a buy decision from a customer that needs it. That same process in the US takes years. And so the obsolescence of ideas is so quick that we are missing and so that that speed of advancement is obsolescing. I would say hundreds of billions of dollars of past procurement decisions now and we're diluting ourselves if we think we're fat, dumb and happy just because we've spent trillions of dollars over the last 25 years in stuff. Buying stuff does not equate to buying capacity.

Yeah, that makes sense. Have you been happy to see the Army's recent modernization efforts? They actually came on our show and talked about it for 30 minutes a couple weeks ago. It seems like they are extremely motivated. But I imagine, yeah, and I imagine on your side these are maybe things that you've been pushing for, for coming up on a couple decades now. But what was your read on it?

Yeah, I'm sorry I didn't see their specific comments, but I know there's certainly trying to be a refocus on merit and lethality and not all the other distractions. I would go as extreme as it would sound. I would push the purchase decisions of a lot of the next generation equipment down to the division or even brigade commanders instead of effectively what we have now is a socialist monolith buying apparatus of these peos through a few verticals back in Washington with enormous headquarter staffs. And I laud the guys that are trying to reform the Pentagon. But the fact is you have 800,000 Pentagon civilians. If they cut that number to 200,000 now we're getting somewhere. Because you have so much dead wood that it literally blocks any kind of the speed or innovation. And when I say devolve purchasing decisions. Yes, that will come with supply chain chaos. You're right. I want that. I want the 25th Infantry Division based in Hawaii, which is probably never going to go to war, alongside the 1st Armored Division based in Texas. I want them to buy and adapt current drone tech, that's that to their unique needs of the theaters they're operating in and let the best ideas float to the top. So then the Pentagon buys makes a much, much bigger buy across it. If they bought 10 or 15 systems that are okay, but they don't really like the speed of advancement of obsolescence as we were talking about, almost necessitates that kind of trial and error.

Have you been happy that the startup world is firmly pro defense tech investing these days? Is there enough new investment happening or is it, is it already too much? What's your read on, on, on just how much investment activity there's been in defense tech?

I am, I am happy to see defense tech money flowing into those spaces. I think there's a lot of great ideas. My worry is that for the Silicon Valley crowd, which is used to spending and investing at a pretty high burn.

Rate.

Of overhead because they're used to finding somebody that will buy their stuff because they have thousands or millions of early adopters, you don't have that in the Pentagon. You have basically four buying verticals. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and maybe a little bit from SOCOM and a little bit from CIA, but that's it. And so that however optimistic or aggressive their acceleration of purchasing timelines, it's not near what those defense tech investors are going to be used for. Used to. And so the, the amount of overhead burn time they have to plan for is probably three to four times what they're thinking it is. And so I worry that there's a lot of great ideas that are going to wither on the vine. Almost like planting a, planting a seed in really shallow soil until you get roots to where they can get to water. You're screwed.

Yeah. What's been your experience with the capital markets generally throughout your career? Have you ever worked with vent Capital? Has private equity played a role? Is there, can debt be used to finance some of these problems that we're trying to solve? Like how have you interfaced with the capital markets and where has it kind of fallen short in your mind?

Well, I had a, I had the luxury because of my father's success, I was able to self finance Blackwater.

Sure.

And after the initial tranche of capital, I think it was 6 million to start the whole thing, buy the land, build a facility. We didn't have a huge capex load until the aircraft purchases started, but we went from one leased aircraft to 73 aircraft that we owned in six years. All self financed, no other equity. We got a, a working line, a revolver and, and that worked. I really don't like partners. I don't like pe, I don't like boards. I, I don't like any of it. I'm kind of a unilateral person that way and dictator. So I'm not, I'm not the, I'm not the right one to ask about that.

Yeah, that's fine. What was your pitch when you were scaling the team and hiring people? I mean, I've heard the narrative that, that the money's better when you transition into private military work. But was there more to it than that or is that narrative kind of overblown talk about building the team throughout your career?

That was, it became a significant vortice, a real center of gravity of being able to pull talent because, yeah, you know, C suite talent. I never gave away equity in the business because it was dangerous, it was volatile. And I paid, I paid extremely well. I paid very competitive bonuses and then would bonus 2, 3 to 5 times base at the end of the year. So it was effectively a big profit share. Again, maybe that's not as tax efficient or whatever, but the people liked it. The guys that you know. Our ideal staffing then was somebody that spent time in a special operations or military unit, not a career, not usually a full career. No colonels, no generals ever, intentionally, because they had spent so much time. This is, take note, DoD or venture capital startups. People that spend 20 and 30 years in the military tend to get stuck in that way of thinking. And so they can't think of just finding a unconventional, different, cheaper, better, faster way to do something, because that's just the way it has always been. The. But our pitch to people was, and especially for the guys deploying was you get to do what you're really good at and we will pay you very well for that. Every day you're in the hot zone, the day you leave, their pay goes to zero. So we really, our pay for deployed guys is really more like playing a roughneck. A guy that's going to a rig, they're busting their ass for 60 to 90 days and they're off the rig, they're relaxing, they're going to the beach in Thailand or managing their family farm or whatever. But they get to do, they get to maximize their martial skills. Whether it's flying a helicopter on night vision goggles at rooftop level at night, or a sniper, a instructor or whatever that might be, they get to maximize that skill set and get paid for it without the nonsense and bullshit and the layers of stupidity that sometimes goes in the military.

In this onboarding process, as you're hiring, was there a story that you found yourself coming back to and telling people that would join the organization to highlight heroism or sacrifice? Like what, what was the defining story that you like to tell to kind of characterize the work?

Well, I guess there's two. One happened to me when I was speaking at the National War College in Washington. So there was 300 colonels that are training to become generals. And they had me come in and talk about what we were doing as a PMC in the battle space. And at the end of it, this colonel came up to me and he had just been in Brigade command, so in command of about 4, 000 people in Baghdad. And he said, I want you to know that, you know, at the top of the dashboards of his people in Baghdad's Humvees were the Blackwater call signs and frequencies, because those guys knew that if they ever got in trouble, the Blackwater guys would come for him. No bureaucracy, no nonsense. And that was, hey, I was happy to hear that. That's exactly the guidance I gave my people, was the Good Samaritan rule applies. If you see a friend in need, go help them out. And. And they did that above and beyond, way too often. And then I remember at the change of command for Admiral Eric Olson, who was the first SEAL four star ever and a friend and a great guy, another SEAL admiral who was in charge of all special operations in Europe and Africa came up to me and he gave me a bear hug and he said, thanks, you guys really saved our bacon last week. And you have. It was some really sporty flying. I said, that's why we have very sporty pilots. And what had happened is. So there was a Army Special Forces team, active duty, training up in Mali. This is before the coup and the jihad. All the rest and their tents were staked down and a big wind, okay, they called a small wind, came through, and it basically picked up the tent and tossed it with guys inside, and it killed one, broke another guy's back, another guy's lip, trashed all their comm gear, and it gave another guy massive internal bleeding. That was the guy who was in danger. It actually picked our aircraft up off of its moorings, damaged the landing gear and the wingtip, and our SATCOM was the only thing that was working in the aircraft. So they called the other aircraft, which was a thousand miles away and we're in the shit and we need medevac. And the Shamal winds were still going, and now it's getting to nightfall. And at that point, the DoD would not let us fly in that area with night vision goggles, even though we'd requested it. But that's okay. Our pilots came anyway, and they landed on a single set of headlights in the desert at night. Now, if you've ever flown over the desert, you see how utterly dark it is. So to land on a single set of headlights is extraordinary and extremely dangerous.

Wow.

And they landed. And our medic, our 18, our former 18 Delta medic was strapped into the back. And he gets all these wounded guys on board and he starts to work on this guy who's now his blood pressure has gone to like 50 over nothing because he's gone through every bit of liquid. And he works him for the next 36 hours keeping him alive. Now, the guy's body was distended because they couldn't figure out where the internal bleed was. And they get him back to Ouagadougou and he goes way beyond protocol to save his life at personal licensing risk to the guys, you know, to himself. He opens him up on an operating table of this lousy Wagadugu, Burkina Faso hospital and sure enough finds that the guy's spleen is ruptured. That's where the leak was. And so he removes it, clamps it off, puts it in a Ziploc bag, puts the guy's organs back in, sews him up. And then finally the high dollar Air Force surgical ward finally arrives. Twelve hours later, too little, too late. But our guys, our guy completely saved his life and he took massive personal risk to do that because his job is to be a medic. It's not to do surgery, but he did it anyway. And so that's in keeping with the attitude of having the right people with the right attitude and the right skill set with, with it. And we try to do intent based leadership, go forward and do good things and support the customer, make sure the good guys win. And that was a good day.

Incredible story. I want to switch gears completely and ask you about a topic that I'm sure you spent some time thinking about, but AI safety, that you might laugh a little bit about that. But I'm curious if you've worked with any groups kind of globally around this idea, you know, just sort of the idea of AI safety as AI systems advance. You know, the labs talk about this quite a lot. The potential dangers of misaligned AI and the dangers of a adversarial government with, with advanced AI. What, what, if anything, have you are your thoughts on, on that sort of very broad question?

Well, I guess the first question comes back to who's. Yes, I agree those are all very concerning topics. And undoubtedly there are hostile, unfriendly governments that have done serious germ and biowarfare research and development that we're not aware about. Not aware of. But I even question our own government when I Think it's legitimate questions to ask of NIH and the rest of those guys for the gain of function testing that they were doing and funding in China which ended up causing apparently the COVID debacle. I'd say almost like the Hippocratic oath, let's first do no harm and let's not spend money on dumb people that should not be doing that kind of research in the first place. But you're right. I am certainly no AI expert. I'm probably more of a. I don't.

Know what I'm an expert in, but a few things.

It's safe to say that if AI can be used for malign purposes and it will be, it's going to be done or it will be done. So whether it's for breaking passwords or for targeting people, I'm sure some entities are well along in that development and one should be careful.

Yeah, that makes sense. I also wanted to ask you about. There was some unfortunate news, or at least it seemed unfortunate, that Taiwan had decommissioned their last remaining nuclear reactor and are now completely dependent on imported natural gas. I'm sure you have some strong opinions around this.

Yeah, I find that extraordinarily stupid of them. And that's a dpp. I mean look, the two political parties are the Komintang and the dpp. The KMT is the one that's really much more pro mainland CCP tilted. The DPP is just kind of a super green and a bit woke as a party that they would carry through on this and turn off a nuclear power that was a nuclear plant that was not dependent on hydrocarbons coming from the Middle east is extraordinarily short sighted. It speaks to their disbelief. Their lack of fully understanding that we are not there to hold their hand to guarantee their safety. I have advocated as loudly as I can that the only answer for deterrence there is an actual Home Guard because that government is corrupted at many levels. Any weapon system of significant or strategic value is already been probably pre registered to be hit with not one but probably five Chinese missiles. So whether it's an airplane, a submarine or whatever, the only thing that can inject uncertainty into an invader is a Home Guard. In the same way that you know, the American Revolution There was only 3% of our population that took up arms to fight if we found and In Taiwan that's 24ish million people, so over 700,000. If we were allowed to recruit and train a Home Guard three to four weeks, their military is largely useless. The reserve forces not so much Their idea of combat training is far from what ours is. But if you find the citizens that are willing, it injects a massive uncertainty into an invader's mind because the terrain itself, either super urban or mountainous jungle, definitely favors the defender. And if Xi Jinping and the CCP are going to go for it, they have to be quick. They, they themselves cannot afford a long multi year fight like you see in Ukraine because they depend on hydrocarbons and even food for imports.

Switching gears a little bit again, I'm curious to get your thoughts on the European defense tech ecosystem broadly. I'm sure you've done a bunch of business out there over the years. There's been some renewed, you know, new kind of spending bills.

Rheinmetall. Rheinmetall has been ripping fantastic stock, but I don't know about the company and I guess there's just this overarching idea that America has Anduril and now every European country wants to kind of own their own defense stack and there's a lot of energy there. But how do you think that the, the landscape around defense in Europe is changing either on the the government side or the private sector?

The only country I see being serious about it at all is Poland. They have invested, they have invested and built some real combat capability. The Baltics have not yet Finland a bit. There's lots of talk about a big European defense extra spend. Germany has been atrocious. I don't know. I think people have bid up Rheinbuth al because I don't know their earnings have been that spectacular. Their stock price has probably done great, but that's a hope of future earnings. But I just see a complete lack of seriousness of European political leaders to address their own defense and it's taking them a long time to wake up from this, this hangover of lethargy. That being said, the, the most capable military in, in Europe right now is the Ukrainian military. The lessons learned that they have are very significant. The drone tech is far and away the best. Their ability to, to fight against and to even conduct electronic warfare and even close air support in this environment is leaps and bounds ahead of even what the US Military is. So that's the military to learn from. Ukraine does have a corruption problem. I hope sincerely that Trump is able to get a ceasefire in place and to stop this killing because it's absolutely pointless. It's just Slavs killing Slavs at this point and nobody's going to advance. And you have a, a blend of old and new. I mean if you look at the pictures of the front there now, it's almost indistinguishable from the Battle of the Somme. Right. Artillery duels, static lines, bunkers, all the rest. Now, the problem is somebody can fly an FPV into your bunker on the other side. But between tens of millions of land mines, which make armored breakthrough very difficult, it slows down any attack so that the FPVs and artillery can get to it. You're not going to see any kind of blitzkrieg, Hans Guderian maneuver warfare there until some significantly different weapon systems come along. So, look, Europe needs to get serious about it. They're far from it at this point.

Yeah. I mean, at home, these conflicts have been raging for years, but they feel very abstract because in America, you just kind of go about your day and go to the grocery store and things feel normal. Even though the global tenor of great power competition and even these more minor conflicts is growing every single day between Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Palestine, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, China. What is the most. Where should the focus be right now? How should people stay up to speed? How do we get even an idea of where these conflicts are going? How should people understand the nature and the risk associated?

Well, they can follow my podcast because I talk about these conflicts almost once a week.

Okay, that's great.

That's a great place to start.

What's the name of the podcast? Let's plug it.

It's. It's Off Leash with Eric Prince.

Fantastic.

Yeah, I got one last. I got one last kind of question for you. The rumors that we've heard around how the whole TikTok debacle is being solved haven't given us a lot of. Hasn't gotten either of us excited. Are we the. You think we're the laughing stock of China, that we can't, you know, ban the Chinese AI brain rot app?

And will you promise us that TikTok will not run on your phone?

I don't think it's capable to run an unplugged phone. Now that you mention it, I will make sure that is the case.

That's great. But. Yeah. Any other color on the TikTok ban or just general relationships between China and the US with regard to technology and business, which is our focus here?

Look, the Trump administration is still in the process of getting its people in the seats and getting those institutions organized? I think. I mean, what. What the president just did today in showing video to Cyril Ramaphosa from. From South Africa about the. The ongoing murder and genocide of white farmers was absolutely fantastic. And it. I Even happier that Senator Secretary Rubio is right there supporting the president.

How about that?

It's. It is a different administration than we've seen in the past, and I am happy to see those kind of issues being addressed. I wouldn't discount the tick tock thing being addressed properly this time since it wasn't the last, you know, the 45 of administration.

Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Well, we're hoping for something good, but thank you so much for joining us. This is a really fascinating conversation and fantastic stories. Really. I mean, just, I was sitting back. I'm listening to the podcast. I'm listening to you. It's great. But thank you so much for stopping by. We'd love to have you back and we'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, cheers, Eric. Thanks for coming.

Have a great rest of your. Bye. Next up, we have surprise guest. Not on the announcement post we put on X, but we got Anthony Popliano. Good friend of mine, hung out with him in Miami a year or two ago. We talked YouTube. We talked all sorts of video essay stuff.

And he's got a spac.

He's got a SPAC now. And he's also launching an asset manager with like a trillion dollars under management already. So he's off to the races left and right.

Big week.

Big week for Pomp. Fantastic show as well. So excited to invite him into the studio and catch up with Anthony Pompliano and get a bunch of great takes. You're here. Welcome, guys.

I love to see the. The suit, but we need some ties going on.

I know.

Yeah.

Slacking.

We're working on a tie. We're working with it on a tie that has ads on it. Yeah, that's our next ad unit.

We'll send you out. Thank you so much for joining. How are things going? What's latest in your world? How are you spending your time? Because you got a lot of. A lot of different things going on. Yeah.

Look, I think that the future is very similar to what you guys are doing, right? You got to be able to operate businesses, you got to be able to invest capital, and you got to be able to content on the Internet. If you think of what a business really is, is you got to build products, you got to be able to invest resources, and then you got to be able to market those things. And so I don't think there's any different than what people used to do in the past. It's just now that you do it more as kind of an individual brand rather than a company. And that's what we've been doing.

Yeah. What was the, the, the kind of the. I feel like you're going through like the V2 of the pop media strategy. There's daily show now and you were building businesses with before. What'd you learn from those? And where is this going with the next iteration?

Yeah, I mean, look, actually we used to have a daily show very similar to what you guys are doing. The best business show, which was hilarious when people would have to cite us breaking news. You'd have to write the best business show credit.

Good.

Nice little troll there. But no, I think you guys are doing it the right way.

Right.

It's like everyone is up, leveling. And the way I describe it is when content started on the Internet, everyone was basically on like their webcam and then they were like in their kitchen in their webcam. And then it was like, oh, I have like an extra camera instead of the webcam now. We pretty much just think you need TV quality with digital distribution. And so everyone is leveling up. You guys have built, I think you guys just got a 4,000 square foot facility. You know all this stuff. Right. We've got obviously studio stuff and it's just the, the cost of the technology is compressing and now with a very small team, you're able to have massive reach. And I think that's just going to be the future of all this content.

Can we just glaze X for a little bit? I know you've built a business on X. We love X. We talked to the team earlier this week. I just think that, like, it's so underrated as a distribution platform. People think YouTube and there are other great platforms, but the current moment with X has been particularly good for us. And I wanted to know what your take on X is, how it's been going and any learnings that you have to share.

Is Linda hiding behind your cameras or something?

Yeah, she's got a gun to her head. No, we're gonna. We just invited Linda on the show.

Yeah, we want to have her on.

Amazing. Amazing. No, look, I think that every platform is very unique in what it provides, both in terms of the type of audience. Obviously, you know, who's on LinkedIn is very different than who's on X. LinkedIn finds out things maybe a week or two after people on X find out about it. But also I think the type of content that lives there is really important, both in the form factor and also the actual substance of it. And so it, it doesn't make a lot of sense to go and talk about, you know, kind of daily news on LinkedIn. It makes a ton of sense to do that on X. Yeah. And so what I think many people, including ourselves have figured out over time is that we were essentially using X as an engine of growth to drive people elsewhere. Go watch on YouTube, go listen to the podcast, go read the email, go to this website, you know, whatever. Why not be able to just bring that content right there in the feed. And I think that that's really what they have leaned into and that's why it's working. And so the daily show that we have with them, I literally sit at my desk, talk direct to camera. We cut it up in this modular format and deliver it right in your feet. You have to go anywhere. You just consume it right there in these bite sized components. And it's no secret that your guys kind of clip strategy and the live streaming, everything you're doing is like very eccentric. And I think that doesn't mean you give up on the other platforms. It just means that you're building for X and everywhere else is kind of the exhaust of that content.

Yeah, yeah, it is crazy. Like there was all this fallout from like oh, they banned links. I can't link to my YouTube videos. And I'm like, but you can just upload those videos here. Like, like they literally have a video product like, like and oh like you, you, you wanted to link to text. Like you could just put the text on X and it'll do way better. And it's not that complicated. And yeah, you might have to change your monetization strategy a little bit. Maybe the rev share is going to be different on YouTube. It's like a per video thing and X, it's monthly but like it all works out. You're just playing for attention and reach and obviously X has this. The thing that I like about the flywheel is like, is like on YouTube I could every once in a while another creator like you would comment on my video or I'd comment on your video and we'd see each other. But we couldn't DM each other on YouTube. But on X it's like if somebody sees a clip and they respond, oh, I think you know, pump's wrong about this. Or I love this. Like we can all hop in a DM group chat immediately and just start talking and then hop on the show, do whatever. And so like I think the water cooler with all the stuff is actually really, really inventive anyway. Jordy.

Yeah, it's been, it's been interesting People, you know, will point out, they're like, I don't understand how TVPN is like, has so much.

People say it's good YouTube channel small.

It's like, yeah, we don't really spend any time on YouTube. Yeah, we were happy to just focus on one platform. As you know, we're a very young.

Of important tech people hang out. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, let's talk about the other news. The SPACs in the news. How do you raise $250 million? Where does that money come from? That's so much money. I mean, Jordi and I both raised money at various times, but, like, it.

Wasn'T six months ago that I think we were on the show talking about how there's nothing intrinsically wrong with spac.

Totally.

It's just been maybe misused or abused in the past.

And also just bad timing. Right.

Because timing, timing, and ultimately what matters is the underlying asset. Right.

Yeah.

Are you, you know, so give us.

The pitch for your spac and then we're going to pitch you spanking tvpn.

All right.

I mean, look, I do think six months is actually an interesting time frame because that's about when I decided, hey, I should go do this. And you know, look, I got the big audience. For years, bankers have been coming to me saying, do a spac, do an rto, do all these things in the public market.

Sure.

And I always joke that we're all about the same age. Pretty much everyone in our generation watched the social network and wanted to be Zuck or invest in Zuckerberg suck. So everyone ran to the private markets. It was like, you know, Wall street and hedge funds, all that stuff is kind of loser stuff. Now the cool stuff is in tech, but we have a world where this undisciplined monetary and fiscal policy is a huge persistent tailwind for liquid assets. Crypto and bitcoin obviously saw a benefit from this. Gold, public stocks, et cetera. And so I think a lot of people, you're starting to see them say, hey, how do I marry technology stuff with liquid assets? Right. And so you're going to see that with the SPAC in particular. I agree with you guys that the vehicle itself is not the problem. It's that people were basically doing public venture capital. Buy a money losing company with a high valuation, you got to try to grow into it. And some people did do that, but a lot didn't. And so it got a bad name. But what I really have talked about is like, look, if you.

The other thing. Sorry to interrupt you there's an adverse, there was an adverse selection issue at the time as well, which was that companies had huge access to capital in the private market. So if they were spacking, it was possible that they had exhausted.

If you couldn't do the stripe thing and just $3 billion tender, you would spack or something.

Yeah, but, but, but there are businesses today that are fundamentally good businesses that have bright futures that maybe should just get public and get.

I remember years ago talking to a public markets investor and he was like, well yeah, like once you're in the public markets, like you shouldn't ever need to raise capital again because you're supposed to just be a going concern. And I was like, wait, what are you talking about? Like businesses lose money. I'm in venture, like this is what you do. And he was like, no, no, no, like, like, like if you're publicly listed, you should not be losing money for a long time because then you just shouldn't be a public company. I was like, oh, I didn't even think about that. But yeah, anyway, sorry to cut you off.

Yeah, well, I think that, you know, I've always looked at this as if you buy a good company that has all the right criteria to be a public company and you do it at the right price, which is an important component. Basically. If you're a disciplined buyer, then it doesn't matter who the sponsor is, it doesn't even matter what the vehicle is. Right. It should do well in the public markets, to your guys point. And people weren't doing that. And so I think that that is kind of one big component. The second thing is a huge part of what we specifically have said publicly and in the filings is we want to buy a profitable company. So we don't want to buy a company and then try to make it profitable. Like that's hard. Let's go buy a company that is already profitable. And the reason why that six month mark was so interesting that you mentioned that is that's about the time I started to get lots of inbound and I frankly don't know why. I think some of it was the political change in D.C. i think a lot in financial services there was like a regulatory shift from a headwind to a tailwind. So people are like, okay, like this may be a better time to go into the public market. And then also like think of all of our friends who have built companies that started sometime between like 2015 and 2020. Those companies are just now becoming big enough to actually be public companies.

Yeah.

And so there's like, that cohort of people are now, like, ready to get into that public market. And so they're looking for the vehicles to be able to do that. And we hope that, you know, we're one of many that they consider to.

To be able to do that.

How does the actual deal work? Once you find a company, are you buying a minority stake in the company or are you buying the whole company? And then, as I remember, it was like, you'd usually see like a couple hundred million dollars in a SPAC, but it'd be trading at 4 billion. And then you take a company public, and then the share price goes from there. Is that roughly correct? I don't know enough about that.

The best way that I know to describe it is like, the SPAC gives you a lot of optionality, which is why I'm attracted to it. So we raised 250 million into the SPAC. You have the ability to buy a lot of a company, or you can buy a very little bit of a company. Right? But you have $250 million of. You do have to go to those investors and say, hey, this is the deal that I found. This is the deal that I negotiated. In terms of the economic terms, they vote. So if you bring them a bad deal, they can also just say, like, ah, screw it, we're gonna take our money back. And like, you know, good luck.

Yeah.

So you have to, you know, do a good deal that they obviously are signing up for. But you also have the ability to use pipes and other kind of capital markets tools so that you can size up in terms of total capital invested in one of these businesses. And then the beautiful thing about this is it's a negotiation with a target company. And so it's two people in the market coming together and saying, this is what we think it's worth. Right? This is what they're willing to take. This is what we're willing to buy. And I think that that tends to, if people are rational and disciplined, actually end up with something better in the public market.

And it's different than a venture fund, where the money is not literally sitting in the venture fund. They need to make a capital call with the spac. Like, the money sits in T bills, right? Is that. Is that correct?

Yeah, correct. It's in the vehicle. Some people have interest, some people don't. You know, there's some nuance there. But basically you can go to someone and be like, I have the money.

I have the money.

Like, I don't have to go raise the money, but LPs can't tell me like, hey, sorry, you know, I'm not gonna send the money. Like, I got the money and he's.

Good for his 250, so.

So, I mean, I'm super fascinated by this whole industry. And so are people pitching you. Do you expect this to be something where you get an introduction from a venture capitalist or an investment banker or just a founder? Is this like a founder led deal? Or are you going to be going outbound, finding some business where they're not even considering selling because they're profitable, they're happy and you kind of come in, give them the pitch and say, hey, this might be the right time to look at something else. Let's, let's do this deal.

Yeah, I mean there's a bunch of rules again in terms of like what you can do. So right now I can't talk to any target companies. That'll be true for another 24, 48 hours. But once the deal is closed, I can actually talk. I've got a ton of people who've been reaching out to me. You know, frankly, some of them are probably interesting, some of them aren't. I don't know, I haven't, you know, talked to them or done the work yet. But also I think that you have an idea of like, hey, it would be interesting to go talk to these types of businesses. Right. And so you want to go and figure that out the whole key.

Yeah. What, what categories are, are you excited about? What is, what is kind of, you know, what are you just going to kind of ignore. Right. I, I don't imagine you're gonna like Defense tech obviously doesn't make sense or I would imagine doesn't make sense. Maybe.

Only in partnership with tvpn. No, we're very focused on financial services. We do have a, like a legal mandate. We could do things outside. But financial services is a focus and the idea there is, I think most people, you know, it's no secret, right. I've got a reputation from all the bitcoin and crypto stuff and so like, are you going to go buy that? And I just look at financial services as it's all becoming one thing. You know, Robin Hood is a traditional exchange business, but they have crypto as a fast growing segment. Kraken is a private crypto exchange, but they're adding U.S. equities. And so we're just seeing the merging of the new and old worlds in finance. And I think that's where you're going to continue to see this Go Similar to, you know, what we're building with Sylvia. That's what we're going to do on the SPAC side is we're just looking for where can you get distribution directly to my audience with financial related type product services and companies. And then that's where we want to play.

Yeah, talk to us about Sylvia. I know you got 18 million sitting in cash. We got some recommendations for hypercars you could pick up if you need, but break it down.

Stable assets. Yeah, we're not making any more P1s.

Well, before I tell you about Sylvia, who's the best sponsor, like maybe we should just talk like, you know, you guys should just, just boast them up a little.

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We're going to clip this. We're both promoted. It's. It's a dream come true.

Thank you for, thank you for participating in that with us.

Yeah, you're.

You guys got it. So Sylvia is. Look, I, I think every single person I know who is in like the business tech finance world, they got the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet is basically the thing that ties together all your accounts in one place. So, you know, just like, what do I own? Yeah, there's not usually a lot of expense related stuff. It's all about, you know, how much cash do I have, what are my investments, what are they worth, all that kind of stuff. And so what we did is we built essentially a box that you go and you attach your brokerage accounts, your cash accounts, your crypto accounts, your private investments, your collectibles. People have added precious metals, guns, cars, houses, all kinds of stuff in that box. It gets encrypted and anonymized. And then what we did is we overlaid a bunch of AI models on top of it so that you can do simple things like you can prompt it and say, you know, what's my debt to equity ratio, or analyze my stock portfolio and tell me where you see risk. But also you can email Sylvia, you can call her on the phone. For those that are wondering, I do not have $18 million in my checking account and 500k in my savings account.

At this very moment.

That was some great, some great dummy data. Yeah. It's interesting because I feel like Mint.com was popular and kind of fell off and maybe even got shut down. I, I was getting an email about that maybe done. And so obviously this is a, this is an opportunity.

But those are very expense related. Right. It's all about like saving money. And there is a huge market, obviously people in America. There's a lot of people focus on saving money. But I do think that there is this very specific cohort. You know, the, the data that we have right now was we just crossed over $2.5 billion connected on the platform. It's been about four weeks. Think about it. It's less than a thousand users that have connected accounts.

Wow.

And so these are people who are multi millionaires who are going onto this platform on average and connecting these accounts. And so to them it's less about, you know, how do I save money and it's more about how do I make more money. And that's what they're really trying to figure out. It's like, where's my money? Where are my assets? And then what can I do to actually grow those assets? And we think that there's something interesting to build there.

We're going to let you go, but finish it out with. Where can people get started with Sylvia?

Well, after they go and they stay at a wander and they sleep on an eight sleep, then they can go to cfosilvia.com and they can check it out there.

Okay, thank you so much for coming on. We'll have to have you back for a deeper dive.

This is excited to follow this back.

We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Next up, we're going over to OpenAI land. We got Nikunj coming in from OpenAI talking about a new release, new tools and features in the responses API, their MCP server. We're going to explain, we're going to have him explain the adoption of mcp, that standard. And welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

Boom.

Yeah, great to be here.

This is exciting.

Thanks for joining.

Welcome to the temple of technology.

Welcome to the temple of technology. Yeah, it happens to be this podcast specifically not open AI also, big, big.

Probably, I mean, big day and OpenAI Slack today.

Probably.

Congratulations on merger.

The acquisition. That's very exciting.

Acquisition.

I'm sure we'll get into design and decision making around design and devices at some point, but let's start with the announcement Today, can you introduce yourself exactly what you do at OpenAI, maybe even how long you've been there and then what you released today?

Yeah, sure. My name is Nikunj. I'm on the product team here working on our API. Been here for almost two years now. I've been working on the API since day one and mostly focused on getting out new models in the API, releasing new tools, just making the API much easier for developers to use to build applications. So yeah, that's me.

And then today, what's the big announcement around tools and features in the Responses API?

Yeah, sure. So about two months ago, we released the Responses API. We used to have an API called Chat Completions. That was the thing that almost all of AI was built on top of. We created a new iteration of that endpoint called the Responses API, which is much more powerful. It supports built in tools, it supports multiple model turns, it's really natively built for models like O3 and O4 mini, which have reasoning built into them. And today what we did is we expanded the suite of tools that developers have access to. So the most exciting thing is support for remote MCP servers. And so now developers can plug in their responsys API integration into any remote MCP server. Across the Internet you have servers like Stripe, Shopify, Asana, Linear, HubSpot, and I think this ecosystem is just going to grow so much more over time. Really excited to see what people build.

On top of it is the benefit of direct MCP support, something about latency, the idea that, because I imagine that I could be interacting with the ChatGPT API or the GPT API and then make a separate call to Stripe's API and I can even have Cursor Windsurf write that integration for me. And that doesn't seem that difficult. So I've always wrestled with MCP being it's great, it's cool, it's a standard, but what's the real value besides saving a couple developer hours writing an API binding library or wrapper?

Yeah, I think there are a couple of angles to this. So firstly, because these organizations and companies are building MCP servers, they're taking an LLM first approach to what the API needs to expose to the agent. So Stripe has a bunch of APIs that can be used to create a subscription or a customer, or a product or a price, but for an LLM, they could just combine that into a single function and instead of returning this massive JSON object, they can return something that's very specific to the task that was being Solved so that the LLM can more easily understand what's happening. So it's an opportunity to rewrite your APIs to be very LLM first. So that's the first thing. The second thing is friction, right? What you said is maybe two hours of work, but why do the two hours of work when you can do it in four lines of code in less than a minute? And so this is just going to make it so much easier for developers to put together multiple tools and whatnot. The other sort of thing that I'm really excited about is responses. API takes multiple turns, so in chat completions, you would have to put it in a for loop and make it keep going until it tells you it's done. The responses API, you give it three or four tools, you give it a task, it'll keep going automatically. Single API call, finish the whole thing and give you the result. So it's truly magical when you get that.

That's amazing. Rune famously wrote text as the universal interface. Is it just standing ovation for him over there today? Because this feels like a victory for the text as the universal interface paradigm. But is there more nuance that you could add to that philosophy of machines communicating with other machines via text? Because that feels like, again, the LLM understands JSON. I understand what you're saying. Probably faster and smoother, but at the same time we could just train an LLM to speak JSON, correct?

Yeah, totally. I think LLMs can understand JSON. I guess the meta point there was if you could optimize your tools and combine them for tasks that you want AI agents and developers to be able to do, that's much better. At the end of the day, a model is not determined. So even if you ask it to call like four tools one by one, it's going to have some instances where it takes the wrong step and then it needs to backtrack and fix it. But if you have these curated functions and tools exposed via an MCP server that you can directly go to, it just makes it so much more reliable for agents to be able to do the thing that they're designed to do. And so there's definitely some benefit to that in terms of text. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, that makes sense to me.

How has your general high level view on MCP evolved over the past few months? Were you skeptical at first or were you always excited about the potential of it? It seems like total MCP victory at this point.

Yeah, initially, I mean, the main goal was how do we get an ecosystem of tools started and OpenAI. I did this thing with plugins back in the day where we built it all on top of open API specs and our plugins integration was a little too early for its time because the models weren't that good at using these third party tools really well and we didn't take a second stab at it. But the MCP folks did. And MCP is great. It supports so much more than just tools and it took off. It was initially local only, so there was some hesitation about how will people easily plug into this thing. But now with the streamable HTTP protocol so that these things can be hosted remotely across the Internet, it's just perfect. I'm so excited about what's going to happen with MCP over the coming months. The hundreds of remote MCP servers that are going to exist, developers are just going to plug into them. It's just going to make things so much better. So really, really excited about the opportunities here.

I mean currently most of these, like when you hit an MCP server, you're kind of expecting a few seconds of latency just because of how long it takes to inference. These models, I've been kind of beating the drum on, hey, some of these models are just good enough. Let's bake them onto silicon and make them respond in like 2 milliseconds. And I don't know if that's happening or not. You don't need to comment on that. But like Mid Journey V5 I was like, like it's good enough. Like just make it instant VO3, I'm like, I'm ready for it just to be like instantaneous. Certainly with deep research and chatgpt generally I'm super satisfied. I'm like, I don't really have any requests for improvements to the models. I just want faster and cheaper and easier. But do you think that if inferencing does go through some sort of massive speed up, whether it's from custom silicon or architectural redesign, does geocaching or edge computing become important to the way MCP servers communicate with each other? For example, like, I don't necessarily, if I'm going to the Portland AWS hosting of some MCP server, I don't actually want to be routed to Virginia by accident. And so do you think that that will require like a new rethink of the spec or is that something that can just be naturally handled by load balancing?

The spec is just like how do you communicate between the MCP client and the MCP server? So it tells you literally the JSON RPC object that needs to go between the two parties. Optimizing the geocaching of it really depends on the service provider. Right. So if I'm going to call mcp.swepe.com or allbirds.com API, MCP, which is, by the way, Allbirds has an MCP server.

How crazy is that?

Shopify has to route it to the right place.

We need an MCP server, help us build one. I don't know what we do, but we want to get in on the action.

We feel a little bit left out.

Create a Shopify store and you'll have one instantly.

Oh, that's good. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, for the merge integrate. Yeah.

So, I mean, OpenAI already does a lot of geo routing based on where the inference request is coming from. So we try to route it to something near and then when the request leaves OpenAI's infrastructure and goes to say stripes or Shopify, they could do that as well based on either like an explicit URL or something more magical on their end where they can detect where it's coming from and route it to the right place.

Makes sense. Any other questions? Trends in pricing. I know that there's pricing and availability updates. Anything to share there? No.

Pricing is like, you know, it's an infrastructure. Play over here. MCP is free to use. You just pay for the tokens. We have code interpreter, which is like the Python tool, by the way. The Python tool is the thing in O3 that can do geoguessr like things when you upload your images. So you can just bring that really into the API.

Yeah.

Why is Python relevant there?

Yeah.

So what's actually happening is when you put an Image in the O3 model, it writes Python code to zoom in, tries to find clues, it crops them, it inverts the images.

Got it.

It then does web searches. So it's like all the image manipulation is based on Python and that is enabled by the code interpreter tool, which is also available in the API today.

That's interesting. I noticed that because I took a picture of a podcast. I wanted to see how tall the table was. I uploaded this images from the Pat McAfee show, and I noticed that when I unpacked the O3 internal reasoning, it was like writing tons and tons of lines of image processing code in Python, all to draw lines and count pixels to see how tall the table was relative to the person. It wrote like 500 lines, 5,000 lines. At Python, we about were talking, joking about it.

403. Yesterday I said, how many white boxes in this picture. And it. And it. And it was coding for, like, almost 14 minutes. It was, like, unfortunately failed.

It was like putting a. Putting a software engineer on the task for a month. But, you know, now you get it in two minutes. But it is incredible. I can see where that goes. It just adds a completely different angle of attack on reasoning, and it needs to be an important tool in the tool chest. So. Yeah.

How are you. How are you leveraging Codex today? I'm sure you guys got early access, but I'm curious if and where it's fitting into your toolbox toolkit today.

I see the engineers using it nonstop. We had to make a couple of changes for the launch. We had to fix error messages. These are such small things. And you can just fire up a Codex task and do it. I've used it for docs changes a bunch of times where I'm just. There's a typo here. Change this heading. And these are tiny things. I just write it. Forget about it. Create a pr. I mean, I don't have to bug people anymore. It's really helpful. And I think engineers are actually doing even more complex tasks on top of it. But I just see everyone in the company using it, which is really cool.

Very cool.

What are you daily driving as a personal smartphone these days? Are you iPhone, Android, Maybe something else.

I don't know.

What do you got?

I know you got early access. Okay, okay.

No leaks. No leaks today. But we've been asking.

Still part of Johnny's legacy.

We try to trick you into leaking the hardware here, but we'll get you back next time.

Yeah, well, I'm sure we'll find out.

Soon, but it's an exciting. It's an exciting acquisition, but thank you so much for stopping by. That's very exciting. We'll talk to you soon.

Yeah. Congrats to you and the team on the launch.

Thank you so much.

Next up, we got David Sandra coming in the temple of technology, the godfather of podcasting himself, Brother behavior. We need a lot of. We need a lot of sound effects for this one. He's been on absolute tear dropping podcast after podcast. But today we want to talk about Jony. I've.

Yeah.

And Apple and Steve Jobs. What would Steve Jobs be doing in this situation? I want to play out that scenario for sure. And then we got Scott Wu coming in from Cognition talking about Devin coding agents. Every company has a coding agent now. Crowded market. I want to know how it plays out. So we're excited to talk to him about that. Then we got Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg. Odd lots coming on the show. We'll get an update on the market. It's been flat for a couple days last week.

For Joe, it's been terrible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's not getting his dopamine fix.

How is he. How is he getting through it? I want to know know.

I'm sure he's finding obscure exchanges where.

He might be going 100x short volatility.

Yeah.

Maybe he's just printing.

Might be shorting Costco at 50 times.

Maybe we'll have to ask him. Anyway, let's do some more ads. In the meantime, let's tell you about bezel. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, Any watch.

Any watch.

And I think we got through our.

Go to Bezel download the app.

Yeah, we can also go through some.

I'm actually shocked at how frequently I use Bezel.

Like I'm a dau.

I was talking to Quaid.

Yeah.

Friend and one of the co founders and he was like. Yeah, a lot of, like a lot of people actually daily are just daus.

Yeah.

Regardless if they're like actually shopping right away.

Well, we got David Senra from Founders podcast coming into the studio. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

What's up, guys? Before we begin, I have to apologize for not wearing a suit, but I think you'll make an obsession an exception because I'm wearing a ramp shirt.

Oh, there we go. Let's hear it. Switch your business to ramp.com. save time and money. How you doing? What's the latest?

There used to be this thing. I mean, it's probably still a thing where David, like, would you would. You'd be happy to meet somebody. But the one requirement was that they listen to founders. Eventually it's going to be you listen to founder and runs on ramp.

I won't take it off.

And if you don't check both boxes. Not happening.

No shot.

That's hilarious.

Anyway, what's the latest? Did you read the Bloomberg article about Jony I've joining OpenAI? Okay.

No, you said it doesn't tell me what's going on. I just got a bunch of text messages about this and I think there's something related to Steve Jobs coming back to Apple we could talk about too. That's interesting, but no, I have no idea what's happening.

Please.

So the article is obviously like, it's amazing in the sense that it's jony. I've a $6 billion acquisition. Huge. Number 2% of OpenAI equity going over to Jony I've and his team. But the. And it's also super interesting because they're going to build a hardware device for ChatGPT for, for AI. An AI first hardware. And, and if there's any team that can break through with a consumer electronics product, it's got to be Sam Altman and Jony I've. Right. Like they are an incredible combination to go after this at the same time, the article basically said nothing and they put out a nine minute video and it's just them saying, oh, he's one of the most thoughtful individuals. He's one of the best people to work with. His family's amazing and they're just talking about like how much they like love working together and it doesn't actually give us any advice on like or any guidelines guidance on like is it a phone, is it a watch, is it gonna fold? Is it big, is it small?

That's very Steve Jobs esque. He'd be very proud. Listen, I guess going into this like I'm an unabashed like Jony, I've fan.

Okay.

There's actually an excellent biography of him that I think everybody should read. I read it like five years ago. If you want to listen to the podcast I did on, it's episode 178 before you get the book. But I'd highly recommend reading the entire book. Yeah, I just, I think if you think about like the conversation we had this morning about taking things very seriously. I FaceTimed you guys at like 6:30 in the morning and you're in your studio like getting ready and preparing.

We're sitting in these exact seats.

Yep.

Yeah, like I think that's one of the things that jumps out in Johnny's biography is just like his intolerance for a lack of effort. So like there's a great story. I just pulled up a bunch of my highlights from the book. But when Johnny was in design, he was studying industrial design, I think it was in England. And there's this great line where a friend of his comes over, they have a project, right? And they're making these like foam product prototypes of product they're designing. And he goes in Johnny's apartment and he found over 100 foam model prototypes where most students would build half a dozen. So the normal expectation is hey, I'm going to make six prototypes of this new design for this product I'm doing. And Johnny's like, yeah, fuck that, I'm doing 100. And I think when you read the book, it makes sense. Like I just tweeted this out where it's actually Steve Jobs. Let me pull it up. Steve Jobs talking about Johnny. And he's talking about Johnny with Walter Isaacson and he's writing the book with Walter Isaacson as he knows he's dying. And he calls, you know, he says that essentially if he had a spiritual partner at Apple, it would be Johnny. He's not just a designer. That's why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me. And there's no one who can tell him what to do besides Steve. So again, I always think of like actions express priority. It's like one of my favorite maxims. And Steve is telling you he had this probably the highest bar of talent out of anybody, maybe anybody's ever existed. And he's saying this is the best guy. This is my number two. I think that speaks volumes about what he thought of in terms of Johnny's talent.

Yeah, I mean it's so interesting because I guess the open question in my mind is does Jony I've need a Tim Cook figure to do what he does? And what I mean by that is that obviously Tim Cook's been the CEO of Apple for over a decade now, but he was a supply chain mastermind. And Jony I've could throw a crazy idea out there like an aluminum milled unibody design for the MacBook Pro and Tim Cook was able to actually go get it done. And in the new era of global competition with China faltering relationships and not a legacy at OpenAI around hardware manufacturing, which is a unique skill set, can Jony I've actually deliver a product that gets into the hands of millions of consumers with the quality that Apple is known for. Without a Tim Cook like figure, will we see another position?

Steve Jobs needed a Tim Cook figure. I think anybody does. So like, yeah, the answer is of course he does. Like I will have. We have no, obviously no idea what they're going to build. What I think is just interesting is which way more applicable to like us and the people that are listening. It's just like the study. I just tweeted this back at Sam Parr from my first million. It's like you don't copy the what, you copy the how. And so I think the important thing of like, yeah, you could hypothesize of like what Johnny's gonna build or just like, hey, how does this guy approach like his life and work? Is there anything that he said in there that I could actually use. And I think that's like much more interesting to me than be like can you predict what's going to happen with this thing that they told no details about and that like who knows? I don't know. Like can they build hardware? Who the fuck knows?

Like we're going to find out.

That's the one part.

Yeah, but yeah, I'm not into like prediction. I'm just like we'll see.

Yeah. So I mean he wasn't a founder at Apple. He became a founder with, by founding IO and his, his love from his agency. Now he's back in the senior executive role. Can you tell me a little bit about his management style, how hardcore he is? Anything that ties to Jony Ives like living like founder mode or any of those kind of ties to other executives, kind of what we might expect or what we might pattern match against. Is it just Steve Jobs or other people?

Yeah, I think he had like, I would argue like you know, equal to sense of like a high threshold for quality that Jobs did. I was just listening to the episode I did five years ago on Johnny's biography and it's like talks about, it's like they, they thought very similar about design and products and they were very much partners. You know, almost like a co founder relationship is that I know that'd be controversial but like that's the way I would think about like how deeply they were working together. But what I say is he's like much more diplomatic where Johnny's like, you know, we could do better than this. And Steve Jobs like this is shit. Get it out of my face. And, and part of I think they hypothesize, his biographer hypothesizes that it's like you know, his, his growing up in England, like his just more reserved and quiet manner. But what I loved is I think the very beginning of the book, the, the, the author is interviewing him and he, he was, and this is even before he was going to write a book on him. He was just covering Apple at the time. I think he was a reporter if I remember correctly. And he just like wanted a sound bite on this new Apple product and he says I just wanted a sound bite. But he launched into a passionate 20 minute soliloquy about his latest work. I could barely get in a word edgewise. He couldn't help himself. Design is his passion and I think that's just, he's just obviously completely obsessed and willing to like work hard. There's another thing that I thought was Interesting. He calls it attention to invisible details. It says I've Johnny cared deeply about the parts users would never see, believing that quote, care was taken even on details hard and soft that people may never discover. And he says that he was fanatical. He provided a fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff. So these just like that's why I'm just a huge fan of anybody like this. I don't care if you're building the iPhone or you're making a pizza. Like just I'm very attracted to and obsessed with people that take whatever they're doing very, very seriously.

It's funny that the opposite is Enzo who's like I don't care if the door panels align. I care if the driver shits its pants.

Yeah.

I would actually argue that they're very similar because Enzo remember like Enzo was building a race car. He wasn't building like he wasn't trying to. It just happened that when they were winning all the races then you have all these consumers say hey I want a Ferrari though too. But I would actually think like what they both share in common is they keep the main thing. The main thing. And in Enzo's cases he's not trying to buy build a luxury product. He's trying to literally make the fastest car that he didn't give a about Ferrari. The actual auto manufacturer. If you read his biography and in fact the longest book I've ever read for founders. Let me see if I can find it real quick. Was a thousand page biography of Enzo Ferrari.

Enzo. No way.

And it's. It was just republished. The same author. This book is excellent. It's Enzo Ferrari by Luca de Monte. So this used to be a thousand pages. No one bought the goddamn book because no one wants to read a thousand pages. So they edited it down to 450 pages. Yeah. So if you, you know Enzo's one of my favorite founders I've ever. I've done like three or four.

Well you know that Jony I've at love from his his design consulting agency. One of their biggest clients is Ferrari today.

I didn't know that.

And so there's probably some linkages here.

Perfect.

So. So can you give us a little bit more about what we can expect? We were joking about maybe OpenAI should just the device. The device integrate with the Ferrari and and, and and you just need to buy a Ferrari. If you want to access the premium tier of chat GPT you can only access.

You should only experience ringing out of saddle leather.

That will only work if they're going to do a collaboration with tpvn. Yeah, I think that's.

I can't do my homework today. My Ferrari's in the shop.

This. This summer, I'm gonna. I'm gonna force you to go to the Ferrari dealer in LA and get one. Because if you're really such an Enzo fan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You should have a Ferrari.

Shouldn't you be honoring his life legacy every time you go to the grocery store?

It's funny, I was. I drove past the. My daughter used to go. My. The do my. The school my daughter used to go to was actually next door to a Ferrari dealership in Miami, which is like the most Miami thing ever, right?

Super Miami.

But there's a great. I tweeted out when I passed by the other day because it says he had this great line where he's like, passion can't be explained. It can only be lived. And I was like, oh, that's like a really good way to think about the way his life. But let me finish that thought. He just, like, his primary thing was just like, I want the fastest race car in the world. And so that's what he meant. He's like, I don't give a. If the doors don't line up. I just. When the. The race car driver hits the gas, I want him to his pants. Which is also hilarious. Quote.

Yeah. I wonder what the AI equivalent of that is. Like, what is the Ferrari of AI models right now? Because they're all kind of completing.

I'm personally. I'm personally very excited about this. I was just talking to our mutual friend Patrick from Invest. Like the best. And we both feel very similarly. It's just like, I don't want to look at screens all day long. So I know you had. You had that guy that's building friend. His name Escape. Avi. Yeah. Just this idea. Like, I'm not saying I want to wear something around my neck or have glasses on my face, whatever, but anything that would kind of get me out off of looking at screens. I'm very like, I would buy it day one just to test it out.

Yeah. John was saying, like maybe a Walkman style device with. With wired headphones, you know, kind of analog, but just piping the AI right into your brain.

Maybe a football player.

I was saying, I mean, something you could pack. It's interesting. I. I was thinking it's like Elon. What is Elon's AI hardware plays One is optimus. Right. But then the other is actually just neuralink he's Like I want to jump, you know, he, he could say I want to jump to like the end state which is like human and computer become one.

Pretty crazy.

Yeah. I want the opposite of that. I did this episode on Christopher Nolan and it was very fascinating because this guy makes some of the most high tech movies of all time. They're very difficult to make and yet he lives a complete analog life. One of the famous anecdotes from his biography is hilarious where he doesn't have an email, doesn't even carry. He carries a normal flip phone, won't use gps, goes to a new city and has to feel his way around and ask for directions and everything. But the funny part was is he would people, you know, send scripts everywhere. So they're like oh yeah, just like I'll read your script, email it to me. He's like, I'm going to fly on a plane tomorrow and I'll be at your house at noon and he'll hand you the script if he wants you to be in the movie. And then he sits there and stares at you while you read it. And then you're done, you talk about it and then he takes the script back and leaves. There's no other copy? Yeah, man. Everybody's got to figure out their own integration for what they want for technology. I want to disappear in the background in many cases. Like if you study this book, book and again I would order the book, I would definitely read it.

It's worth it.

Especially because he's going to play a huge role at one of the most important companies in the world right now.

Totally.

But I, I just like, I want a more like I want technology to disappear. I do. There is some quotes in the book that might be fascinating. That kind of answers your question, John. I didn't mean to like side skirt at all but as far as like what he, how he thinks about design, he says he takes big chances instead of evolutionary approach to design and if they focus grouped any of his designs. This is a description from college. It was also was accurate when he went to Apple and if they had focused his designs they would, they wouldn't have been a success. So he's not looking for like, he really wasn't interested in like any kind of like iterative design. He wants something that looks completely different. And there is a weird story, I think some people might find it odd story from his college days when he was studying design that he talked about that the best physical objects they, they are very inviting to the touch that humans have. This. I forgot what he called it like an obsession. He has a word for it, but essentially obsession with touching things. And so he was asked to, like, design a pen and people are like, okay, I'm gonna write a. You know, create a pen that you can write and it works upside down or it never runs out of ink. He's like, no, but what do people actually do at pens? Like, anybody holding a pen in their hand, they're like clicking it.

They.

They move it around. He's like, they want to. I didn't think he said sword, but they want to finger it, for lack of a better word. So they were like, play with it a lot. And so, yeah, any kind of physical device that he makes, I think isn't going to just be like, oh, this kind of looks like an iPhone. I think it's going to be like, drastically different.

Yeah, it's a big challenge.

And I mean, he's pulled away from Apple a lot of the people that were integral to the magic of the devices, the MacBook, the iPhone, all these things.

I'm really excited to see it. 2026 can't come soon enough. What about Jim Simons? You did a recent show about him. Very different from Johnny I've. But what are the similarities? Because you think about a hedge fund versus a consumer electronics manufacturer, I imagine that there are no similarities. And yet I imagine you found some.

How much would you pay to rip a heater with Jim Simons and Johnny Ive at once? I mean, that's a priceless heater right there. That's potentially a 7 figure.

This is why I think I got so many text messages and they linked me to whatever article today, because OpenAI essentially what bought Johnny's company, Johnny was the founder and it's for like 6 billion or something, I guess, is the thing. And everybody said the same thing in the text messages. Like, how much money did Apple pay to like, buy back Steve Jobs? And this is one of the thing that, that Jim has in common, Rockefeller has in common. Bezos adjusted Bezos shareholder letters, which I think is a really good episode. Michael Dell, over and over again, it's like this idea of, like, you, you absolutely must work with the highest quality people you can. And everybody says that and nobody does it because it is so hard to do it. And one of the reasons I also. Brad Jacobs talks about this like, you have to overpay for talent because it's nearly impossible to overpay for talent. So that obviously the canonical example of that is, is, hey, Apple's going to buy next for 500. Half a billion dollars. They paid essentially half a billion dollars to rehire Steve Jobs. And they got the deal of a century. Nobody's going to look back at what Steve did. Like, oh, you overpaid. It just doesn't happen. So Jim, the crazy thing about Jim, and then actually me and a mutual friend of ours that I can't name just stayed up till like two in the morning talking to this guy that works at Citadel. And it was very fascinating. Like, Ken Griffin was the same exact way. We're just like, I heard some of the competition for his top people and guess what? Like, they would blow. I think it would shock how much money they make. But then you look at their performance. It's like direct. Such a. Ken won't cap their compensation. So like, if you make him more money, you're like unlimited money that you'll, that you'll get because of. He understands the talent. So the thing about Jim that's, that's nuts, right, Is he churns through partners. And you know, people say Jim Simons had a hedge fund I don't think about as a hedge fund. I think he had a magic money machine. Like, it was very different than normal. You know, the, the fund made well over a hundred billion dollars in profit. And it continues to make, from what I understand, you know, many, many billions in cash flow every. Every single year. And there's no outside money. It's just owned. The only money's in there was Jim's family's money. And then you have to work at Renaissance.

Yeah.

And then if you quit, they, they, you. The reason they have such low turnover is because if you quit, you can't invest in the medallion fund anymore. I'm going to quit it.

Go invest your money somewhere else.

But, but the crazy. So what I'll do is like, the fascinating thing is Jim is like churning through partners because it takes him decades of trial and error to, to actually get the system that he wants. But then he would talk about, and he talks about this when he's an older man too. He'd give interviews much older because he wasn't doing that when he was younger. But he's just like, you have to work with the very best people. And when you identify the person, you have to just put all the effort you possibly can to convince him to work for you. Okay. A lot of people understand that. But then you go look up the people he identified, and it's just like he hired nothing but mathematicians and physicists. And you'd be like, yeah, it's not just like some professor in a math department somewhere. It's like this guy has a theorem named after him, and he had. There's a law named after him. It's like literally the top of the top of the top of the top. Because they were, you know, made a hundred billion dollars plus with 300 anywhere, from what I've heard, 250 to, like 400 employees. So a very, very tiny team. Small team relative to the profits produced of just unbelievable a players. And I have to imagine that's what, you know, people at OpenAI are doing. It's like, well, who's the best. Who's the best designer in the world? If we're going to build our own product, who would you go and get? And. Yeah.

Yeah, 2%. It's totally worth it. That's what I was saying. It's a big number, but it's a big company. It's a big opportunity.

And of course, Josh. Josh Kushner was already in IO.

Oh, yeah.

So now he's getting more open. Everything thrive gets more of OpenAI. Yeah, but, but anyway, speaking of mathematicians, we got Scott Wu.

Yeah, we got Scott Wu from COGNITION coming in.

I'm jealous. I love Scott. Big fan of his. Have you guys ever played the video of him at a math competition when he's like 12 on the show?

I mean, it's been viral so many times. We haven't played it on our show, but we probably should.

It still plays in my mind, but it's excellent.

We'll bring him in to the studio. Thank you so much for stopping by.

Yep, of course. See you guys soon. Love you having me.

Talk to you soon.

I love you, too.

And we'll bring Scott in in just a second. Jordy, you want to kick off the intro?

Yeah.

Take a quick break and maybe do some ad reads, talk about his former employer. Ramp.com Switch your business to ramp.com.

John Fuse arrest. Use the restroom. Get out of here. No dead air. We do not stop talking. Scott is in the studio. Let's bring him in. Welcome, Scott. There he is.

How's it going?

What's happening? Good to have you back.

Yeah, good to be back. And by the way, I love David Tenra. It's, it's, it's. It's so fun to be on back to back with him.

I love the.

I. I love the story of, of, of. Of recruiting and truly just fighting for the best people. It's. I've. I've always felt the same way, which is, you know, people always Ask about evaluating talent, which is of course, you know, it's, it's, it's a very deep thing. But, but if anything, I think the much more valuable thing is just you kind of already know who the, the really great people are and the question is like, how, how can you, how can you build your whole, whole organization around, you know, making it the right one for them to join?

Yeah, yeah, the sort of a random story, but was reminded of this, I think we talked about it a couple of days ago, but Steve Jobs apparently called the founder, the original founder of Siri like over 20 times. He called him every single day. He knew that he wanted Siri to be a part of Apple and he just repeatedly called over and over and over and over and over and over. Wouldn't stop until he finally said yes to joining. So, but I think something about it too is like, I think to you, you said something which is like everybody knows who the best people are, but I actually think that's maybe only the case if you're also ultra.

No, it's easy. Hiring is easy. You just look up who's won an IMO gold medal, you hire all of them and then you just raise a bunch of money and then the rest is easy. It's super easy.

No, it's, it's fair. It's fair. Yeah, you have to be, you have to be in the right kind of circles and communities to know the best people. But, but I generally think that people spend, spend relatively too much time, I think on evaluating, you know, people who are at the border versus like really just fighting for the absolute top tier of people.

So yeah, yeah, it's always, it's always a mistake to think like, oh, this is like a B player. I, I can make them into an A player. Like there's just so much sweat there and the math rarely works out. Usually you're better just finding someone who's a great fit for your company. You're too team the skills that they have and you can just turn them loose and let them run, which is always the best anyway. I mean, lots going on, tons of news. Every company seems to have an AI coding agent. I want to know how should I be thinking about the market? I was, I was on X talking to some people. I kind of mapped it out as there is consumer code that is written when I just prompt O3. So I, the example I gave was, was I wanted to know how tall a desk was in an image. I uploaded the photo and O3 without me asking it to write code wound up writing a ton of image processing code in Python. I didn't say write code, it just wrote code for me that's kind of autonomous AI coding. Now there's Codex which feels more prosumer. I have a GitHub repo, I wanted to go fix a bug for me. Then there's something more in the enterprise side like, like hands on the keyboard all day long. I need a super powered IDE that's Windsurf Cursor. And then I'm seeing the top down enterprise deals from companies like Cognition. So how is that the reasonable frame for thinking about the market? Or are there, is it all just winner take all? Is there one market, are there four? How are you thinking about it and what are you seeing in the market these days?

Yeah, for sure. So high level breakdown. Look, I think there's a few different product experiences and by the way it's fun to see so many agents coming out this week but there's a few different products experiences but I think there's primarily two markets is how we kind of think about it. And it's you know, in one line it's basically engineers and engineering teams versus non engineers. I think the thing about it with Devtool, you know, totally agree with your point obviously that there's, there's some differences between enterprise and self serve and so on in practice. I mean, you know, we have both businesses for example, like and a lot of these other players that you mentioned also have both businesses in practice. I think what happens with developer tooling is you know, engineers are engineers, right? And so engineers are talking to the same people, you know, the same people who are building their own projects at home are also going and you know, shipping pull requests and stuff at work. And there's kind of a lot of overlap in that space. And so there's kind of the, I'll call it the like, kind of like the app builder category of like you know, build me a simple app. And that's kind of like targeted towards, you know, non engineers today and giving them the ability to write software, build software like you're kind of saving. And then there's engineers which there are kind of some subcategories within but I think for the most part it's all connected much more.

So my current AGI test, I've moved the goalpost 25 times, I'm moving them again. My current AGI goal is if I can go to Google's new jewels AI agent and if I can with one prompt say build me Google Reader and it does it then AGI has arrived. That's my new goalpost.

Yeah. It's kind of insane if you think about. So one of the things, you know, there was some research that came out and kind of people did some statistical analysis and if you just look at, you know, the length of time that an autonomous coding system can go in between every human intervention, it's, it's kind of insane. It's doubled like every three months.

Yeah.

And so it's like that's like 16x a year, you know, and we've been doing this for a couple years now, so we're like, like, you know, I mean, not that long ago it was like a couple seconds at a time and now you're doing hours of work.

Right.

But, but it's like, I just should mention that because, you know, Google Reader is obviously, it's like a really great product. You have to imagine they put like a million hours into that.

Right.

There will be a point at which it is, you know, that's a million hours of work. But yeah, we'll get there.

We'll get there. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. We had Will Brown on the show and he was saying that we, we, we have AGI, but I call it 15 minute AGI. And so yeah, you can go and do something, but if it's, if it's, if it's a task that would take a human a week, it's not going to be one shotable in the traditional sense.

How do you and the team think about the balance between wanting to create product experiences that somebody could just be like almost like a demo, right. Like somebody was posting yesterday that they like one shot at a calendar app. And like that's like cool and exciting and all that, but maybe not massively valuable. But I'm curious, do you guys have some sort of internal framework for how you decide whether something is really worth spending time on? Is it like a truly important problem or is an opportunity just an opportunity to go viral and get attention, but doesn't create that enduring value?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, I mean, it's, in the long term, our target has always been, you know, let's do real engineering work that is know that teams are actually products that teams are really building out there in the real world. And I think the thing that's kind of interesting is. Yeah, because it is all, you know, one group of people. I think it is the ability to build all these, like cool things out does matter.

It's.

We have a distinction internally where we call it street performer. Devin. Basically, it's the version of Devin, you know, where people are asking Devin to just do really cool stuff, you know, and it's something that we spend some time on, but obviously the core by far is really just like. Like, how do we have Devin solve real issues and real projects for your code base?

Yeah, yeah. Street performer. I like that. I do wonder. So, yeah, it feels like there's still two frames of mind, this consumer and enterprise. Even for stuff that I would call work, there are certain times when, like, I don't want to open an IDE or I don't have time in my day as a live streamer and someone who does most of their work over email and phone. More of like the executive role. I still will want an engineer to intermediate the products that I want to build. And I'm wondering if there's a timeline for when that stops happening or I start instantiating whole software products. This idea of like the. It feels like most of the time when you hear someone say, oh, I used AI and I Vibe coded an app in the weekend, they're still a programmer and they're still running a business and they're still working on that 40 hours a week or something like that, but they're just getting a lot more leverage to this. I feel like the really cool moment that's maybe coming is when I actually say I want Google Reader and just build it for me. And so in terms of shifting that enterprise experience of like real, not street performance, but real software into the consumer space, does that come top down or does that come bottom up from like the chat box that I'm already interacting with?

Yeah, and so I think both forms are going to happen in the sense that big companies are going to. Look, there's obviously always competitive pressures. There's a lot of relative things going on. And I think big companies that already have software products that millions of people use, there's going to be a lot more onus on them to just make really, really great software. I keep track of this every day when I'm doing things and I run into just bugs in software and the stuff that I'm using, it still happens all the time.

Let's be honest.

Try and book a flight.

X is the absolute worst culprit here. I interact with more bugs on X than any other piece of software I use.

I completely disagree. I mean, it's so much worse if you go and try and book a flight on the American Airlines app. The bar is so low.

I don't know.

Go ahead, go ahead. Sorry.

No, go, go.

No, I was gonna say yeah, so that's, you know, their like product quality is gonna have to get way, way better there. I think the other side is also gonna be true which is individuals are going to be, be able to build cooler and cooler apps. But, but yeah, I mean I think the high level kind of general trend is, is as we're saying, you know, as these tools get more and more autonomous, like you want to be able to just use them for longer and longer stretches of time. Which is, I mean which is, which is pretty topical given all the agent launches that we see seen this past week.

So yeah, talk to me about positioning against Google's offering. My experience from. As a consumer, I only interact with Google right now on the AI front. As a consumer obviously I've like run ads on Google from a business perspective but in general I see a Gemini launch and then as a consumer it's very, very hard for me to access that product that. I have five different Google accounts. I can never tell which one is on the Google AI premium tier. I finally got in, I got access to VO3. It was an incredible model. It felt like they were truly a step above and there was kind of a ChatGPT style moment for video. Given that the audio comes through. It's super photorealistic. It's a great experience and it justified me not only paying $500 a month, but going through the UX hurdle. Is the developer experience on the enterprise side dealing with Google similar or are they more dialed in there because it's more important? Because I imagine that one of the advantages that you have as a startup in the enterprise sales space is that you can do founder led sales, you can take the needs of the enterprise into account. Much more different. SLA is more custom solutions. There's so many more things we can iterate. Even if Google is able to come out with something that is like wow, okay, they're really good at research. But. But on the product side maybe it's lacking.

Yeah, yeah.

So.

So it's, you know, Google has Jules now. OpenAI has the codex launch. You know, GitHub is doing, doing more with agents as well. And can I just tell you, I mean it's the. We have always had the view that just like everybody's going to go do this eventually, you know.

No, it'd be really bearish if everyone was like, oh no. Scott's like just kind of crazy. I don't know what he's up to. I don't think it's a good idea. It's like, no, you should inspire a bunch of people to be like, that's a good idea. We're going to do it too. And then you should still beat them.

Yep, yep.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's like parallel asynchronous coding agents, you know, has been. It's been the core bet of our entire company, basically, for the last year and a half. And I think it's. It's really interesting to see. Yeah. And so I think there are a few factors going on. Like, I do think there will be multiple players, you know, in the long term. But to your point, John, I mean, I think there's also just a lot of. There's a lot of meaningful differentiation. I think the thing that's so interesting about the coding agent space is like. Like, it is truly, you can kind of look at most spaces and kind of call it, I'll say, like, this is a capability space, this is a product space. Right. And to just give you a kind of a few examples, I would say, you know, it's like image generation is like, sure, you know, there's a lot of kind of, like, icing you can put on and things like that, but at the end of the day, you know, if you just have a way better image generation model, you know, that is. That is the kind of the core, like, that is the meat of what you're building. Right, right. And like on other spaces, for example, you know, like customer support or something like that, you know, it's. No one would disagree with you that the capabilities are there. And a lot of it is just like, what is the right interface for humans and AI to really work together and get that going with coding agents, it is truly both where it is, you know, on the one hand, obviously, yeah. I mean, every IQ point really matters, you know, in the system that you build and every piece of data that it can use and analyze and works with, it really matters. And then on the other hand, it is, you know, it's. The software is just messy enough and deep enough that it's. It is. It's.

It.

You do want to have a lot more control of what's going on. You want to be able to specify these details. You want to be able to check in and review the work yourself and all these other things. And so there's a lot of deep work with interface. And it's. Yeah. I mean, in short, I think these are. These are the kinds of problems that we've been thinking about for the last. For the last year. You know, and so it's it's fun to see. And you know, the fun thing too, actually is like, like, I mean, we're up 30% week over week, actually, with just the. And it's, And I think there's kind of a funny thing which is like, you know, people, people know how to use chatbots.

Right.

And it's like something that we've all kind of learned over the last couple years. I think the, the, the agent form factor is just really different. Right. And it's something that people have to learn and have to understand and, and now that everybody's talking about agents, it's actually, you know, it's actually been great, great for us.

So do you think deep research is part of that? Like, I feel like deep research for a lot of people is their first, first introduction to agentic AI in the sense that it's like you fire it off and you let it go for 20 minutes and then come back, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I, I think the whole, right, asynchronous kind of action is, is really like a big piece of it. And I think it's, you know, we were talking about this last time, but it's like agents are going to be everywhere, you know, pretty, pretty quickly, and there's no reason you shouldn't have an agent who's, you know, going and buying your flight. So you don't have to go on the website yourself or going and, you know, all of these different things. And I think for a few reasons, code has kind of been the first place where that's really taken off. But, but, but, yeah, yeah, this is.

A total wild card. So feel free to pass if you haven't dug into it. But Ben Thompson was talking about the agentic web. We're talking about agents now, and he was kind of not noodling through the idea that stablecoins could be a relevant tool in the toolkit for the agentic web. As you, you know, ask the. One of the examples was plan a birthday and it's doing a lot of things on online. Maybe it's buying birthday cards. It's also looking up a cake recipe and then printing that out. Well, that cake recipe website is monetizing with advertising right now. Stablecoins. In the future, you could just pay a tenth of a cent for that page. Visit. Are you thinking about stablecoins at all? Does that sound reasonable to you? Just if you noodle on it. How do you think about this stuff?

Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, I think with, you know, building software engineering agents, we're probably you know, on the further end of.

Away from it, but with that crypto pivot.

Yeah, not a lot of. Yeah, I imagine that not a lot of customers are paying one tenth of a cent for Devin right now. It's probably more in the.

It is like an interesting thing, which is like, maybe one way to put it is like a lot of the norms of the Internet are going to have to change. Right. You know, it's. We have captchas, for example, which is kind of how you prevent bots. And it's almost like CAPTCHAs aren't really the right, like, system where you actually now want your agents to be able to go and like, navigate on the Internet and do things for you. And like, a simple example of that for us is like, this is again, totally unrelated to software engineering, but it's like, you know, we give Devin our ramp card and then Devin just goes and orders groceries for us and stuff like that. It's like, yeah, it's great, great. But you can imagine there's a lot of these systems of like, yeah, how should agents interact with money in the real world? How should they. How can products and websites and stuff have the right incentives if it's not humans that are going to them anymore, but agents and humans? And so, yeah, a lot of questions.

Has Devin ever missed a memo on a ramp receipt or is Devin pretty good about that?

I think Devin's got it all down. Yeah, Devin takes screenshots and stuff as well. So it's all.

Yeah.

How are you thinking about the sort of stack? Right. Because I know you guys have a partnership with Linear. Obviously we work with linear. There's this idea that much like a member of a team, an agent can kind of appear in a lot of different places. Right. A teammate can be in the office, they can be in a Zoom call, they can be in Slack, whatever. And how are you thinking about kind of like, like agentic, kind of like orchestration. Right. And sort of managing agents?

Yeah, yeah. LINEAR is. By the way, they just had a launch this week or they had launched this morning actually. So. So, yeah, yeah, shout outs to the LINEAR team. And yeah, it's, it's, it's an interesting one. I mean, speaking of this kind of like product interface question. Right. You know, the, the. A lot of the work that you have to do is. Is really like. I think one of the big difference between chatbots and agents is an agent is truly. It truly needs to be basically an employee in the same way it is really. You as an engineer are using your team of junior buddies who are going to go and implement this stuff for you. And so a lot of what that means is it has to be in all of these same systems in order to work really cleanly and like the standard workflows that we have. I mean we have Slack for example, we have Linear and Jira and so on. But it is a big part of it.

Yeah, last question actually from your post. You asked for questions from people who follow you and Remy Olson asked a great one. What do you see as the primary limiting factor for coding agents between context window reasoning, which I imagine is just the amount of inference you're or delivering to reasoning tokens, managing complex environments or other things?

Yeah, I think of those I would say, I would say managing complex environments is probably the biggest one in the sense that look, if you like speaking of 15 minute AGI, if you give it a very contained coding problem where it's just like, all right, write one file of code that solves this thing, honestly, it's already insanely good. AI is already basically there. I would say on that, I think that the areas where you see these agents or models in general really slip up is kind of stuff where you actually just need outside information to go and do what you're doing. The simple examples are if you're fixing bugs or you're implementing things, you want to be able to go and test the code yourself. This is a big part of why connecting with all these systems is so important. And so plugging into Slack or Linear for example, makes it really easy for you to kick off off your dev and runs or whatever it is. But I think a big part of it too is like if you guys are actually doing your issue tracking in linear or if you guys are, you know, this is how you do front end deploys and this is how you run the linter or something like that. It is obviously you know, the agent is going to be super handicapped if it doesn't have access to the same things. And you know, the next step beyond that obviously is not just accessing those things, but learning how to really intelligently work with these and use them to make decisions.

Any reaction to the llama before Behemoth? I, I, I think I saw 10 million token context window seems bigger than ever. At the same time, kind of been going back and forth on how that project is progressing. There's kind of mixed reactions online. What's been your takeaway from that?

Yeah, there's a lot of cool projects working on longer context windows. I, I would just kind of Give as. As one point, which is, it's interesting, you know, if you think about human, Human thought, which is, which is not always the best parallel, but obviously is the one example that we do have. Humans actually have terribly small context windows. It's like when you get the six digit code, I don't know, it's pretty hard to remember what six digits were.

And type those in Goldfish mode.

Even with coding, once you have to remember the three different files that it takes you a while to spin up the context window. And then. And you don't want to get pulled out of coding. You want to be in the flow. Right.

And so the thing that humans are like, really good at, I would say, is almost more like intelligent retrieval. Right to your point, which is like, you pull up this file and you're looking at it and you're like, oh, yeah, like, I remember why we did this like two months ago. And then you're kind of like, you can kind of like replay it in your head almost. That's kind of the thing that's, that's, that's really interesting. I don't think it's. So I guess long story short is like, I think long context is going to help a ton. It's going to make things a lot better. But, but I think there are some kind of like, fundamental things of like, how do you access all of the information that you need access to to make this decision that's right in front of you right now? Which is like, context alone doesn't solve that problem.

Sure. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is fantastic. Chat soon. This is great. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. And up next, we have Joe Weisenthal.

The Star Wars 30% week over week. Pretty big Wednesday.

It's Wednesday. Well, welcome to the studio, Joe. Bring him in.

Bring him in.

Bring in Joe Eisenhower.

I don't want to wait anymore.

Oh, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

How you doing?

Thank you for having me. I'm really good. I'm thrilled to be back here.

How are you?

What do you do? How are you holding on when the market's.

The market was flat on Monday and we didn't know what to do. Normally we're either depressed and praying for something to change and then and. Or celebrating a big update. We've seen these, like, 5% swings, and it's just been boring.

It's so painful. I thought like, you know, the market stopped moving and I was like, the technology brothers will never have me back. They'll never have a reason to call me again. My, I had, I had, I had one month of relevancy. People listening to my podcast because the lines were moving up and down and then they stopped. And I'm like, okay, well, I enjoyed it while it lasts.

So we're, we were having you on.

To have it back on the show.

We're having you on to move the market.

Yeah, yeah. This will drive the market.

We'll see.

We want to create some volatility just off of.

Yeah, let's do one.

Well, I mean, so, so with the trade war, we. Yeah, yeah, I kind of had this like somewhat controversial take that like the, the trade war was not like Covid or the, or the interest rate crash because the, the person who caused it could immediately undo it and Trump could roll it back, which he did. And I was talking to Jordan Schneider, trying to talk about this. Like he was saying like, no, this time is different. It's not going to be like the trade war from Trump. 1. We're going to look back on this as like the beginning of the end. It's terrible. He was very doom pilled. But it feels like now if we flash forward four years, we could be looking back on this and being like, that was a crazy month, but it wasn't that big of a deal in like the world historical context. What's your read on it now?

It's a really tough call because I was very sympathetic to that. And then as soon as he walks back, you're like, of course he was going to walk it back. You're so stupid for everything.

All that being said, we have a laugh track now. I love that.

It's so professional. All that being said, a 10% baseline tariff on the rest of the world is not nothing. We are now a high tariff country.

Oh yeah.

There is this pause, but a 50% tariff or whatever it's going to be is not nothing. These are not, not complete nothings.

Yeah.

And I do believe that they will change the economy in some ways that they anticipate. Look, when he unveiled that chart on April 2, I thought it's like, well, he's basically unplugging the economy. We can't function with these levels. And he sort of realized that too. He said the bond market got yips. He went back and then he probably heard stories about potential empty shelves of places like Walmart and Home Depot and stuff. Stuff. And then he dialed it back further. We're still in a new era though, of trade. It might be more like Brexit. Where it's like, yeah, if you go to. I was in London a few weeks ago, it's still the same old uk. It's still a pretty, like, rich country. It's doing well, but it's. They haven't grown that much. It hasn't been particularly good. So it might be the kind of thing where we don't notice it dramatically, except maybe it's. We don't grow as much as we could. Who knows though?

Can you.

I don't know. I don't know if it's the weather, but when I'm in, when I'm in the uk, it's something about the slow growth of the economy that's.

You can just feel it, smell it.

You can smell it.

Well, hopefully that doesn't cover America. Can you, can you tie this to the credit downgrade? How serious is that? Should we care about what Moody's thinks?

No, I don't. I don't care about credit ratings. I mean, I'm sort of a strict view that we borrow in currency, we borrow in dollars and print dollars, so we'll never do 5 fault. But there is a, you know, I would say there's two things, which is one that, you know, it looks like we are going to get some sort of inflationary mix, potentially between tariffs and tax cuts. So that tends to not be very good for Treasuries. And to the extent, you know, that, like policy changes in the US are now, everyone understands that they can be unilaterally changed on a whim, probably not great. All things being, all things considered, for the perceived institutional stability. So that's probably also not great at the margin for the international proclivity to invest in the United States. You know, the one thing that's really notable is that a lot of markets clearly have rebounded to an extraordinary degree, most notably the stock market.

Yeah.

The dollar is still very bitcoin. Bitcoin all time high. Amazing the dollar has you and pompom. Well, can I, by the way? Oh, Pomp was on earlier.

Yeah.

Can I just say.

Surprise guess.

Can I just say the, the first time I was on this show, one of the questions the two of you asked me was, will SPACs come back?

Yeah.

And I said, well, in my lifetime, they will definitely come back pumped. It has a new spec. When I said, when I said that SPACs would come back, I was thinking like 5, 10, 15, 20 years.

I did not think they said, pump doesn't have the balls to launch a SPAC in the year 2020, 25. And he proved him wrong. He proved him wrong.

I've never had a prediction come true that fast as that one. So I appreciate Pomp vindicating my last appearance on tvpn.

That's great.

Vindicated.

I want to talk about the Middle east deals. What was your read on all of that? It didn't seem like it was super market moving per se, but it was very big in tax. And it seems like there's this new era of cooperation there. It seemed like, like amid all the, the turmoil of the tariffs, there was like this bright spot of like some really strong new alliances. Obviously there's some controversy there. But what was your read on the, on the Mid east news?

You know, I've been posting about this a lot, you know, since I hit my mid-40s. I've been reading a lot about the Cold War and mid 20th century history because that's what you do at my age and so forth. But one of the things that I've been reading about lately is that one of the, you know, every time the US and the Soviet Union appeared to have some period of detente, so to speak, one of the entities or one of the forces that pushed the countries apart were the sort of like the human rights groups, etc. That really didn't like, you know, various activities going on in the Soviet Union and that often made it difficult to have peace. It's an interesting thing to think about. Well, what if foreign policy just became a little bit more transactional? We sort of accept that like there's like a very different system in this country than, you know, this other country. But you know what, maybe we can have stable relations if we agree to sell them cutting edge GPUs to set up an AI. It's an interesting thought. And I don't have like extreme or strong views on foreign policy. It's not my wheelhouse, but it's an interesting thing to think about. You know, for so long there was this view that, you know, like an important aspect of stable relations was some sort of common ground in governance and values and so forth. And maybe we are entering this era where stable relations are who we agree.

To sell chips to on the other side.

It's an interesting thing to think about.

Jensen. Another 100 billion for Jensen.

Yeah, he's been on a terror.

Jensen keeps winning.

Yeah.

Except in China.

Have you been tracking how many conferences he's been going to? He's. It feels like he's at a different conference every single day. And yet normally that would be very, very distracting for A CEO, but every time he goes to a conference, he leaves with a $100 billion deal. So it seems like it's working.

It's really. It's really remarkable. And, you know, again, I don't know how much, like, I've been trying to think about this, like, because the way people are talking about AGI, and you guys have probably a lot of guests who know way more, and being out there is like, you know, no, the race to achieve AGI is something akin to, like, which country will develop the nuclear bomb first. We must get there. I don't know, it feels a little sci fi to me. I don't know how much to take that seriously. Other people are better equipped to talk about that. But there is this sort of, like, simple business story, which is, like, ecosystem that powers AI, or could it be the Huawei ecosystem, which is coming on strong? And so to the extent, like, just from a business standpoint, Jensen, going around the world making all these sales, potentially boxing out Huawei from the Middle east, just from a business standpoint, seems to be doing very well.

Yeah, we were just talking to Scott Woo, and from Cognition, they have an AI coding agent and this idea that we have AGI, but it's just 15 minute AGI. Like, you can. You can get an agent to go and do 15 minutes worth of research for you and compile a little bit, a little dossier for you. In deep research, you don't have AGI to the extent that you can just say, go create economic value for the rest of your life, like you can with a human. And the economic incentives just lead to a person finding their way in the economy and finding a job and buying things and consuming things.

I still haven't had, like, a great experience yet with any of the agent tools. I was. Someone asked me, they're like, do you have a list of all of the Twitter handles of gift guests that have appeared on odd lots? And I was like, no, but let's see if I could do that. So I went to Manus, the Chinese Manus im, and I said, can you put this together? Oh, yeah, sorry, I know.

And then it's pronounced Manus too, by the way. Manus.

And then it worked for, like, it was like 30 minutes later. I went back and checked and it said, oh, you're out of credits. So I never even got to see if it worked yet. So I don't know. I have yet to experience.

Well, the question for me is, how long do you think it would take? You know, like a. Like an intern to do that job.

Well, it would take a really long time. But, like, I don't even like. But, you know, like, my experience, I think we may have talked about this last time. Like, my experience, like, I'm still not totally convinced that they're, like, reliable yet. I don't know. Like, I just think experimenting.

I think you make a good point. It's just that when I think of 15 Minute AGI, I think that what's a 15 Minute job? It's, look at the most recent odd lot, show notes, and find me the 1 Twitter handle for the guest.

Yeah.

And now if you want to do that, I think it 200 times. That's not 15 minute AGI. That's. That's one week AGI. And you need to spawn all these different processes and orchestrate them and fact check them and build that up. And so, yes, should be able to do that.

I think it's just wildly unreliable right now. And so sometimes you get an output that is 10 times faster and better than your best employee, and then sometimes it just completely fails and we're not really equipped to, like, process. Okay, is the agent good? Okay, well, sometimes the agent is incredible. And then other times it's like yesterday I wanted it to count a bunch of boxes and it, like, worked on it for 14 minutes and failed.

I completely agree. Like, I'm, I'm every day still. And by the way, Suno, the music app.

Oh, yeah.

I'm a songwriter. That's incredible. That actually, of all the AI tools that I've played with, that might actually be the one that's most incredible. I've been doing this thing where I just sing a song into my phone and then I say, now produce this to sound like an 80s country song. And it actually works so that, like, some of these things just, like, absolutely blow me.

I have a thesis for that. Because with music, there's no right answer. Like, there's no. There's no. Oh, you got one character wrong in the, in the Twitter handle. And it's not going to resolve. Right, right. But if you get one note slightly wrong, but it still sounds like music, you can kind of chalk that up to the vibe or slight differences. And so I feel like that's why the image generation. Yeah, yeah, it's less like binary, or you have code where it compiles and it can work against itself and check. Okay. Does the code work or not? Try again, try again, try again. And so you either need to be. When you're in the messy middle of, like, human management Decision making analysis. That's where AI is really struggling right now.

So just going back to the question of like, can, can I compile all of the Twitter handles from every guest? I'm guessing the answer is yes.

Yeah.

On the other hand, if that's what AGI is, I'm not really sure it's existential, whether totally China. The Chinese model is Better than open.

AGI is when you can ask ChatGPT to bring down the long end of the yield curve because it's really getting up there. And right now if I could just go into chat GPT and say, hey.

Let'S do something that we need to, that we need to develop right away.

Yeah, yeah. So let's, let's talk about this.

I know you have a Manhattan Project level urgency.

Yeah, yeah, I know you have a podcast episode coming out tomorrow about bond yields globally. What's happening. Could you give people a little teaser preview on that and then they can go listen to the full thing?

Absolutely. Thank you so much for letting me plug our episode tomorrow. Stephen Englander, Standard Chartered, one of our favorite thinkers. We actually never had him on the show. You know the story. There's a few moving parts, parts to what's going on. But a big thing is this combination of countries around the world are spending more money. They kind of have to, because, you know, like again we talked about US foreign policy. Germany doesn't know if the US is going to be the same type of ally. Trump for years, even going back to his first administration, obviously encouraging the NATO countries to sort of more formally meet their commitments. So you have increased spending. At the same time you have tariffs which are going to make business more costly, less effective, probably less efficient because you're not going to have the most optimally designed global supply chain that would exist in a world of free trade, sort of pure free trade. So you have this combination of every country sort of having to become a little bit more self reliant, at least in some respects. And you certainly see that in a lot of like tech areas, weapons, probably food even as well, energy and so forth, combined with the fact that, you know, you're having sort of less efficient supply chains. That's probably all things consider means, you know, more inflation. And for to hit inflation targets, central banks are going to have to, generally speaking, keep rates up. We might get rate cuts in the US in the short term. That's what Stephen Englander thinks. That's certainly what the market is pricing. But he thinks the window for that will be pretty short and maybe even by next year, we could be talking about rate cuts, hikes again. Yeah, I know, I know. We need that AGI. We need that AGI to bring down rates.

How do you think the big tech companies have been changing their tune around how they talk about AGI? It used to be all about safety, which, you know, I think a lot of people kind of just gotten sick of the safety argument. Now it's all product, and all of a sudden it's, we're not moving fast enough. You know, Siri isn't good.

Yeah, it's confusing. It's a little bit confusing because, I mean, first of all, I agree, the safety story feels very yesterday. This is such a business story, the market, for better or worse. And I don't really have a view on safety, but the market for better or worse seems to be dictating to the companies. It's like, no, you gotta race ahead as fast as you can. You do not have an alternative to this and so forth. And you even see it, you know, Obviously, like when Deepsea came out and it displayed its reasoning, OpenAI had to respond and it started displaying some of its reasoning models. So there's the sheer competitive aspect that, like, you just sort of got to do what you got to do for, like, the product side. On the other hand, there are things that the tech companies are doing that do not sort of seem to me, oh, within a year they're going to build or within a couple of years, you know, they're going to have these brains that are thousands of times more intelligent than the, Than a human. I saw there was something about OpenAI. Think about a social network. They hired a CEO for, like, product and revenue. There was that news today about buying a heart.

I think Johnny Ives, you probably already.

Talked about Johnny Ives going in. Yeah.

This does not. These sound like ventures or these sound like investments that are about making money for a business and do not sound like we are building something insane in a lab that is going to change the world. So it feels like there is this impulse among the biggest big AI companies of various flavors to basically build good businesses and profitable things, rather than this technology that, you know is going to render human existence obsolete in some way or another.

Yeah, yeah.

And it feels like OpenAI as a lab. There could come a time when OpenAI could kind of. What's the right phrase for it? But effectively, like, like, OpenAI will be in a position where they can be like, yeah, we're a consumer Internet company.

Yeah.

And there will be other. There will be other. There'll be other labs that don't have the luxury of saying that. And it'll be interesting if there's like this kind of divergence in, I mean the companies that have to keep the AGI narrative going.

The steel man on the AGI narrative is that like would we have gotten this amazing consumer technology and enterprise technology and all this value you without the crazy AGI that drove nonprofit investment in highly unprofitable research? And it's, it's kind of like I feel like everyone makes the comparison to nuclear, but when I play back the story on nuclear, it's like America did this incredible Oppenheimer Manhattan Project to develop the bomb, which I don't see as really like a good thing like the bomb, obviously it just like it only destroys things and then it immediately becomes this, this arms race. And this equilibrium is just that you have to build a ton of them, but none of them get used. They create no real economic value. Right. But the good ending of nuclear would have been energy too cheap to meter nuclear power everywhere. We didn't get that. And my hope is that we're in this situation where we have the panic scare around AGI as a weapon, but we don't go the nuclear path where oh, you can't possibly have chatgpt. It's too damn dangerous.

No, I agree with you. And I think if you look at like, I mean it is absolutely extraordinary the rate of growth that big tech companies are growing from. I mean this is what's sort of breaking the brains of everyone in the market, which is that everyone's been long big tech forever. They're the biggest companies in the world and they're still putting up some of the biggest earnings growth that you've, that you can find anywhere on the market off of a gigantic base. And I do think part of that story is gotta be that the CEO's really believed to some extent and I don't know exactly what they believe and I don't know exactly what AGI is. And they probably all have different definitions, but they probably all believe it's like, no, like we're not going to slow down our spending on this stuff because we haven't achieved that thing that what that's out there that will be so special if it's achieved.

Well, I gotta ask Joe, would you rather, would you rather own Costco at 59 times earnings? 59. Costco at 59 times earnings or Google at 19 rotisserie chickens?

You'll never get me to know, you'll never get me to give Finance. Why is every. You tell me, why is everyone so negative on Google these days? What's the story? I don't.

I think, I think it's.

Products are hard to access. Like, they're incredible research labs, but they, but they haven't communicated very effectively around the product. So they introduce the product and it's in a research preview. They have a paper, but in order to access it, like Chat GPT, when there's a new feature, you go to chat.com and it just says, use this thing. And, and with Google, it's like there's the Gemini app and then there's Gemini Smart responses.

And then no, it's so.

But that's the product experience. And then there's obviously like the, the threat to the core.

Core business model. Wind up searching in ChatGPT. You stop.

They got a knife. They got a knife on the neck of the golden goose.

Yeah, no, it's true. The Google AI products, some of them are extraordinary. I've played around the coding tools. I've. Notebook LEM is a very useful tool for research. It is true that, like, no one would ever know how to find any of this stuff.

It's really hard. Especially.

Well, it's in the App Store now. Notebook LMS in the App Store.

It's in the.

What kind of name is that? Who would even know what that is? It does seem.

I don't know what kind of name is Joe Weisenthal.

Yeah. But what kind of name. What kind of name is like O3 mini.

Yeah, they're all bad names.

The names. The names won't. The names won't matter.

The names don't matter. I think. But yeah, there's something about, like Google is. If they really, really went full tilt into AI, they would just say, google.com is our AI program product.

Yeah.

Instead of. There's a separate app, Gemini, and like you can go over here and we have an extra thing. Instead of being like, no. Like, we are an AI company.

Could you see that happening?

No, no, I don't. I don't think the company set up for it at all. But I think that on a long enough time, different if it's. If it's Mark Zuckerberg and he owns 100% of the shares and he can just do whatever he wants. It's private company and there's no investors that can sue. Like, there are different structural dynamics at Google than at a small startup.

I. I can just see it being more as a question.

Yeah, yeah, please.

Can I ask another question to you guys? Do you have a clear way to articulate the benefit that Meta is getting from all of its AI spending?

I mean, yes, because the first, like the, the, the, the, the base use of AI at, at, at meta. The number one, like just energy cost in GPUs is ads, delivery of ads.

But is it good old fashioned machine learning algorithm stuff? Like what does it have to do.

With the same thing like the algorithm that decides what ad to serve you when you're scrolling? Instagram is a big transformer now. And so it's a bunch of weights, just like an LLM. But instead of taking text and putting out text, it takes in everything that you've looked at, how long you looked at it, what you liked about it, it, whether.

So it's just getting better and better.

Exactly. And so that's a huge training run. They never talk about this because it's not sexy and it's not the new hot thing. But, but, but you can think about like the, the Meta ADS training run as similar to like a GPT3 GPT4 level training run and then the REELS algorithm for what content to serve you, not just what ads. That's also another huge vertical. And so when Zuck went to build out the REELS algorithm farm, the server farm that would power the REELS algorithm because it's billions and billions of data points, right, he said, I don't want to get caught flat footed again. Like I did against TikTok. Because when TikTok came up and they, and the whole algorithm shifted to I need to rank every piece of content across the entire network and match billions and billions of videos with billions and billions of users. He said, I don't want to get caught flat footed again. Build me two data centers that are the same scale. And then he had, he had extra capacity thinking about, okay, I have two data centers because I just built double. Let's train an LLM. And then the more, and then the more tactical reason is that LLMs are going to get stuffed everywhere in every enterprise.

I've noticed. And sometimes I just accidentally wander into an LLM.

Yeah, but not even from the consumer perspective. Like think about, think about within, within Facebook they have to process payments from their, from their advertisers and they might want to run those through an LLM to say, are we being defrauded? Or there's a consumer, there's customer support that's happening, or any little internal thing even just like, should we censor this comment for a user who's under 18 years old? Right. Like that is an LLM that runs in the background. It's not consumer facing. Why would they have to pay OpenAI for that? Why would they have to pay Google for that?

And they can just train. This makes a lot of sense.

Sense.

Can I say one more thing?

Please?

I. I need to. For anyone who's watching. I have a lot of dear friends, please never send me a reel. I never watch. I like someone's like, oh, they send you a reel. It's like, I'd rather not. So I would like to use your platform carrier pigeon let. Yeah.

What's the best way to get my.

Friends know I love them. Yeah, you send me a dm, whatever. I'm just not going to want watch your reel.

But I'm going to.

I'm going to mail you a DVD of the best.

Yeah, that's fine.

I'm going to mail you a dvd, a Blu ray of just all the best.

Well, what about taking it a step further Vinyl and it's us describing reels to Jeff.

That'd be great.

No, I love it. I would do that. We would do that all day. If someone sends me a DMs me a reel, I'm like, do we really have to do.

Imagine a bunch of colorful marbles falling down the stairs endlessly. Imagine subway surfers in the background while Joe Rogan talks about weightlifting with Elon Musk. That's really high performance stuff. But you'll hear it on vinyl for sure.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Anyway, this was fantastic.

Let's make this.

Let's make this a regular anytime.

I love chatting with you.

We're gonna just put a calendar. Hold on.

Yeah, we'll throw you something.

If you ever just. If you ever. If any part of you ever thinks, man, I'm not excited to talk to John and Jordy today.

No, I'm always excited.

That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'd love to have you back. Thank you so much.

I'll be back.

Thank you for moving the market.

This is great. He moved the market on our stream numbers. We're up at 10.8k today. Good day on X, the live stream, I mean, popping.

Google's up. Google's up 5%, 8% today, 5% yesterday because of us. Joe said, why? Why is everybody bearish? He just had to ask that question and the Stock popped almost 3%.

He's reading tea leaves. Hey, ChatGPT, take this transcript from Joe Weisenthal and turn it into financial advice. Make it, make it ultra opinionated now, obviously no financial advice. On this show, especially for.

Yeah, the question of like, what is. What does Zuck get from Llama? We obviously did our Llama deep dive, but it's like such a history and appreciation for open source and so many different platforms. Right. He just. It would be hard to take Meta seriously as.

Yeah. A hyperscaler.

As a hyperscaler if they didn't have any type of AI play. They also get the benefit of learning from other people building on Llama even if there's not some massive direct revenue benefit.

And I think what Joe is really hitting on, which is correct, is that the LLM chat based Chatbot UI paradigm is not a perfect fit for what Meta's products are right now. But as the UI paradigms mature, you can imagine just. Okay, we know that images are moving from diffusion to token based architectures. So you could imagine that. Maybe I don't want to constantly generate AI slop and throw that up on my story, but I could totally want to take a selfie and say, hey, just with natural language, can you make the sky clearer? It's a little gray today. Can you just make it blue back there?

I'll switch to hedge again against. As AI companions and just people develop relationships with effectively the models. That is a threat to Meta's core business of connecting regular people that have conversations in the app that bring people back to the app so they can serve more ads. Anyways, today was a very fun show.

Very fun show. We gotta go take some photos.

We had range from Erik Prince to Joe Weisenthal.

We really covered everyone. I got some text messages. Someone said, great lineup today. I'll read this up. Where is this great lineup today? Blackwater. Blackwater for software engineers. Cognition. Blackwater for Sam Altman's haters. OpenAI lots of Blackwater folks. The Blackwater of podcasting. Joe Weisenthal.

Yeah.

Or David Senra. I think David Senra is more Blackwater. Coat it when it comes to how.

Root operational efficiency drive HE pods.

Anyway, thank you for listening. This is fantastic. Switch your business to ramp.com check out polymarket. Talking about using Ramp. Ramp, Ramp.

I want to get. I'm gonna.

More soundboard.

Work on getting a polymarket set up on Palm spac. Oh yeah, like does it actually.

Does it happen? When does it happen? When does it go out? Like the IPO markets that we've been having a lot of fun with with.

And then as the rumors start circulating, who's the target?

This is all. This is great stuff.

I'm going to be. We're going to Hit up all our boys, all our group chats. Hey, who's got a profitable financial services company that they want to take publicly?

I want to. I want to highlight one timeline post before we get out of here. Leonard Heim. He's coming on the show next week. Jordan from Chinatalk recommended him. He talks about chips and AI. And I love this because there's a. There's a screenshot that quote tweeting from, I believe, the Financial Times. It says, we still don't know how much energy AI consumes. Companies must give us the chance to understand the environmental impact of the tech we use. And he says, yes, we do. It's 21 gigawatts. You count all the AI chips produced. Factor in that they're running most of the time. Add some overhead and you got your answer. It's a lot and we'll only get more. But you know what? Probably worth it. And I loved. I love that, like, there's so many of these opinion pieces that are like, we could never know. We could never know. And he's like, no, you can just add it up. It's pretty easy to understand how much energy it's producing. So I saw this post after I already invited him. But I'm super excited to talk to him next week because clearly, banger, banger. Anyways, it takes Smith leave us five stars on Apple podcasts.

Spotify has been really explicit about this.

Yes.

If you like watching the show, our jobs are on the line.

They will recast us. They will cast someone else.

Ben is. Is giving us a menacing look right now.

His thumb is over the purchase button on an Audi R8, and he can only do it if you leave us five stars. If you don't leave us five stars, we're never going to get there.

Help.

So thank you.

All right, cheers, folks.

We'll talk to you soon.

We'll see you tomorrow.

Bye.