SELL EVERYTHING (Including Your Dollars), Tesla Roadster Hype, Valar Atomics VC Feud | Reed Albergotti, Bryan Cantrill, Daniel Kimminau

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Today is Thursday, October 15th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. How many days till Christmas? I know that's what you came to the show. That's the question you've been answering. We got the answer for you right here on TVPN. There are exactly 70 days until Christmas. It feels so close. It feels so close. It's remarkable. It's been wonderful joining— that you've all joined us on the road to Christmas. It's been a strong, strong road. I do want to give a little—

There's more.

There's more coming.

There's more coming. There's actually a lot more coming.

Another 70 days or after that?

Well, of course, it just— the clock restarts.

Yeah, 364 immediately. Of course. But I do need to give a little bit of a— first, First, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy-to-use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I actually have a little Christmas gift right here. Let me, let me open this up. Production team tossed this my way this morning and let's open it up. What's inside? What's inside? Oh, it's a Ramp card. Great Christmas gift.

Would you look at that?

This holiday season, get it for someone you love. Get it for someone who needs to save time and money, which is really everybody. Also, congrats to Ramp. Massive fundraising news. We'll be talking to the team tomorrow. But the road to Christmas, we're 70 days away. And this can be a difficult moment. I mean, I don't want to call out anyone in particular on our team. But there was an individual on our team yesterday who I was reflecting, because it had been a little bit cold over the weekend, that I was feeling especially Christmassy. Yeah. I was feeling the Yuletide. I was feeling the hearth. I wanted to warm up my hands. We were in the jackets. Everyone was saying, "Is it so cold in the studio?" I was like, "No, there's just a warm fire burning inside my belly as I get closer to as I get closer to Christmas." But somebody on our team is like, "I'm like, oh, we're finally in like the cold season." Like and and as soon as the cold starts where you live, whether you're in California or New York, as soon as it gets a little crisp, it's game on. It's game on. No one no one's gonna look at you like you're crazy for talking about it's only seventy days till Christmas because. It's Christmasy out. It's cold. It's cold. But Michael over there, I'm gonna call you out. Michael over there on our team is like, John, you know, it's gonna get hot again. It's gonna get hot again. And yes, I checked the weather. It's gonna be 88 degrees today, which is not the most Christmasy weather.

There's actually a heat advisory in California from the National Weather Service.

There's a heat advisory. But there is a lesson here.

It remains in effect until Saturday.

Which is Michael. 90% of the road to Christmas, the battle for the road to Christmas is mindset. And we can't have anyone on this team being a Grinch right now. It's very important that everyone supports the idea and looks on the— looks on whichever side has the greener grass.

Friendly elf mindset.

Friendly elf mindset.

Golden retriever mode.

Yes, exactly. So yes, there might be a heat advisory. It might be blistering hot, but we're still going to stay laser-focused on what matters, which is that in 70 days, it will be Christmas.

That's right. We're pretty excited here. We're headed to see You Can See Everything, the new Nathan Fielder movie, later today after the show with a great group. Can't wait. We'll have the review for you tomorrow.

Yeah. That'll be fun.

And really, anything to take our minds off the market, John, because it's an absolute bloodbath.

Well, before we go into the market and the news, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Okay, so the market is mostly reacting to the Anthropic Investor Day numbers, but it's been in a decline for a long time. For the last month, CoreWeave's down something like 50% over the last month or so. It's been rough in the AI trade broadly. Way off.

Only 16% over the last month.

It's crazy that you can be growing at 45% quarter on quarter and still not meet expectations. But when people have had in their minds 10x every year, 10x revenue growth every year, and Anthropic goes to their Investor Day and says that Q3 revenue was $16.8 billion, which annualizes to $67 billion. $67 billion. I don't know what they were doing there. That seems like a little bit of Like, okay, I get it. It's like the Zoom reference, but like, this is serious financial. There's a lot of money on the line. Can we not do like the meme thing right now? Anyway, they are in fact annualizing their quarterly run rate to an annual run rate of $67.2 billion, which is remarkable for a company that was doing, you know, a tenth of that a year ago. But it's seemingly not enough because everyone in their minds was like, they're gonna surprise to the upside. They're gonna throw up 90. Like they're gonna do something. And I was kind of in that camp. I was like, yeah, they've been quiet for a while. I feel like everyone's like, there's that chart of like, oh, the growth stalled. And I was like, that feels like something that they would love to come out and be like, from the top rope, fake news. Like we got some surprise up our sleeve. But they really have been fighting fires on multiple fronts. So there's like the Meta business, which has pivoted over. They're probably using their own model now. And maybe they, and there was that like leak of like an executive at Meta saying like, oh yeah, if we stop buying Anthropic, like it could really mess up their IPO. That would be a shame. I would hate for a company to IPO at lower valuation than us since we're almost $2 trillion. Like, that would be terrible. So it seemed like sort of a veiled threat in the media. And then distillation— distillation, we actually got a number. So distillation is between 5 to 7% of revenue, which I think is a little bit lower than people were expecting. But it feels like the Anthropic team— David Sacks was celebrating this, that, hey, Like there was this big problem and one of the proposed solutions was like, ban open source, do all this crazy stuff, slow down. And David Sacks didn't wanna do that. And then Anthropic came out and said, hey, like we did a lot of work, we deployed our own frontier technology to fight this and we believe we have fought it and we believe that we can shut down distillation. Pretty staggering that 5 to 7%, you know, that's billions of dollars spent stealing from— because that's the value of the distilled tokens, which is pretty crazy that you can be at that scale of essentially fraud. Like you're not supposed to be distilling. It's against the terms of service. And usually when you see somebody, oh yeah, there's somebody who's like scraping LinkedIn and then they're like reselling the data or whatever. It's like, yeah, they might have like a couple million dollars deployed into this scheme. Yeah. But you're looking at $5 billion of fraud essentially, Run rate fraud, something like that. But as they fight that fire, obviously, that's going to be a drag on revenue growth. If they open the floodgates and we're like, yeah, go distill away, at least in the short term, revenue would be growing faster. But in the long term, there'd be much more competition on the frontier.

But it's certainly not as meaningful as some people on the internet thought it was.

Yeah. I mean, there were some trolls who were like, oh, yeah, once you get rid of Meta and distillation, companies are going to be doing— $2 billion a year. And it was like, no, that's not going to be the case. This is installed in many, many organizations. This is a mature go-to-market.

The question now is what happens to the frontier of the open weights ecosystem, right? Does the gap widen?

Oh, because they're shutting down the distillation? Yeah.

We'll see how effective it is.

Yeah. And I wonder how Muse Wonder distillation will fight? Like, on one hand, like—

I don't think people are gonna be just distilling Muse Wonder.

Yeah, like maybe it's not quite there yet. But if Meta can invest enough to actually have a model that is a target of a distillation attack, are they better equipped to fight distillation attacks because they've been fighting bots for a long time?

Being on the frontier just means you're getting distilled. If you're not getting distilled—

That's the definition in your mind? It's like, unless you're getting distilled, you're not frontier?

Yeah, I think that's like the most honest definition. Like, unless other people will spend a lot of money to try to emulate your model and recreate it, then you are not.

That's a good reality check. Anyway, do you think that Meta would be more equipped than Anthropic or less equipped than Anthropic to fight distillation attacks if they do get attacked? And maybe— so what I'm saying is that, like, on one end, there's a lot of bots that are already in the Meta ecosystem. And so you could be distilling attack because maybe you already have a botnet up and running across Instagram and you haven't been caught, and then you can reroute those bots. to do something more valuable than just like and share and like AstroTurf stuff, you can get them to pull out tokens from Wonder somehow and then you can distill it or Wonder 2, whatever you want to call it, Wonder 3, whichever one is like worth distilling. But then on the other side, you have, you know, an organization that's younger, a culture that's not paranoid about this stuff. They're not saber rattling around, oh, if we get distilled, it'll be the apocalypse, right? And so like culturally, you'd think that they're, They're a little bit less worried about this. And then also they're not in the business of like every distillation dollar is $10 that could be API revenue for Anthropic. It's very important from a business perspective. Yeah. Meta's basically giving the stuff away for free. Yeah, it's important to keep people in like the Muse ecosystem, but if they get distilled and then all of a sudden there's an open source model that's really, really good, they're not gonna be as worried because they're just gonna say, well, like that open source model doesn't have a button on every Instagram, like the distribution on every Instagram account, there's like a Muse button. Like, I think they'll be happier. So I don't know, what do you think, Tyler?

Yeah, I mean, so one thing is Meta released an open source model today.

Yeah.

MuseSpark Open. Yeah, yeah. So I don't think they're that worried about like someone distilling them and then releasing an open source version that's like—

Seems very different ideologically, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And also I think it seems like distilling is, I mean, I don't know how hard bot detection is normally, but distillation seems like uniquely hard in that like, I think it's hard to actually tell what is like a normal prompt versus what is not, right? If you're asking like some math problem, like, are you gonna distill on that? Because like effectively, if you're distilling on something, you need to like get the chain of thought, right? You need to get like the reasoning steps. The answer looks very similar.

And this is happening while they're experiencing explosive growth and the distillers are setting up Distilleries. Distilleries are setting up hundreds of individual like Macs accounts that each have their own VPN. And it's just very difficult to detect, is this like organic growth or—

And often they're going through like third-party wrapper companies. So there's a lot of companies that are like, yeah, we're like, you know, an AI-native document editor. And there's like a bunch of these. It's not just like Notion that we know about. And this is not just Google Docs. Like there's a lot of these companies. You set one of these up. And you're like, yeah, and we— you pay us a fee and we go and we inference Claude or we inference GPT-6 or whatever. And then that goes into the document. And then all of a sudden that— if somebody is using that like AI Word doc to do the distillation, then that SaaS company, that wrapper company needs to go and figure out, wait, why is someone generating all these documents? Maybe they can't even look at the documents. And then From Anthropic's perspective or the Frontier Labs perspective, they're just seeing like, oh yeah, one of our SaaS wrapper companies is like sending a bunch of queries across their entire network 'cause they have thousands of users, maybe hundreds of thousands of users, and it's hard to tell. And so there's a lot of wrapper companies that have gotten to like crazy revenues and basically no one uses the products because it's the distillers or the distilleries that are like, ooh, new wrapper company? Like, can't wait to spin up 1,000 accounts on you. Because you won't detect me, but Anthropic would. So we can't go straight to setting up Claude plans. Instead, we'll set up a wrapper plan, a million wrapper plans. And then the company that's running the wrapper is like, this is amazing. People are just paying so much for us. And all we need to do is just take their prompt, stuff it over in Anthropic's API, give it back to them, and we make a 10% margin on top. Like the wrapper system is working when really like they are a distillation factory. Hmm. Very interesting.

Distilleries.

They're distilleries. You gotta take a trip to the distilleries. Well, what's going on in the market? Because—

Yeah, where did that lead us? That led us to—

The conclusion is sell everything?

Yeah, I mean, especially your dollars. Sell your dollars. Sell your dollars.

Sell your stocks, sell your bonds, get out of everything, get into land, buy guns, food, medicines. We will be on a barter economy soon. I think I think that's the main major prediction. No, people are blackpilling.

Sell your assets.

Sell everything.

Sell everything. Take your dollars. Invest them into a Roadster or maybe a Mission S.

Yes.

I think that's why they timed this launch. They knew this goes way deeper than we ever thought. They timed the launch of these two vehicles for later today because they knew that people would be going to cash and they'd be primed. No, this this led us to the president of South Korea.

Yeah. Very dark.

Yeah, posting what— something that was translated from Korean, but the Grok translation is, we must live. You have to live somehow. If it's hard, please call 109. In fact, Gil will help you find reasons to live together. I don't know who Gil is, but yeah, the, the KOSPI, I believe, is at a 6-month low. And so For a country that loves trading as much as the South Koreans. Dark times.

Yeah. A lot of this just goes down to exponential expectations being extremely difficult to catch up, to keep up with. So the meme has been the lab revenues are 10x-ing every year. Anthropic went from like $100 million to $1 billion to $10 billion. So logically they'll do $100 billion. But I remember looking at the numbers and being like, there's actually— it sounds so nitpicky to say it's deceleration, but it technically is because I think they went from like a little over $100 million to $1 billion, which is just under 10x. And then they went from $1 billion to technically $9 billion, which is a 9x, not a 10x. And so, if you assume that you're actually seeing Some slight degradation there, you would be thinking, oh, they'll close out at like 80, because they went from 1 to 9. They didn't go from 1 to 10. So, going from 9 to 100 would be acceleration. Again, we're talking about growing 10x a year, 9x a year, 8x a year. It's all crazy and incredible. But the fact of the matter is the difference between an exponential curve going upwards and slight deceleration is a huge difference. And I think people are maybe like overreacting to this because there were a lot of people that were saying like, oh, maybe we'll hit $100 billion, maybe they'll do $150 billion. So when you get like the expectations so high, people, it's very, very hard to keep up. And then also, I just, it's very clear that there's like this tall poppy syndrome in the frontier where whoever is in the lead, Like all the other businesses are like, well, we don't want a monopoly on intelligence. And so let's go buy from the other labs. Let's go figure something else out, fund, invest. Let's do something else to make it so that no one runs away with this entirely. Of course, there always could be some sort of runaway, but at least while businesses are the ones that are deciding, you will see the Microsofts, the Amazons of the world. It's like all of a sudden they're doing deals with the other guy. because they don't want a monopoly. And so as soon as someone starts running away with it, there's this huge forcing function where you're like, oh wow, there's a big like, we, you know, the anti-YouTube alliance or the anti-Netflix alliance or the anti-OpenAI alliance was the thing. And the anti-Anthropic alliance like comes together and these alliances come anytime someone's getting a little bit too hot at the party. Somebody is like, yeah, we got to, we got to pull the punch bowl away a little bit. Yeah. Anyway, the news—

Brad Gerstner was on CNBC this morning.

Okay.

He says we have sold— this is according to Amit— we have sold all of our CoreWeave. We don't own any of it today. We've taken exposure down over the last 3 months. We felt AI had overshot and would lead to a period of consolidation. They moved 10% of their book into Meta and Tesla. And again, Brad, usually ahead of the curve. Sounds like he was here as well.

Yeah.

It's an interesting challenge being running a hedge fund, an adventure fund, but then also being one of the most elite podcasters, because there's times, there's periods where in some way he can't go out and say what he actually feels, because it's not pragmatic for his actual investing.

So the interesting thing is people aren't Actually selling everything. They're not actually selling their dollars. That's just the meme. Of course, Citrini says, "Oh, it's over over," which is very funny. Just to put it in perspective, the Nasdaq is down like a point three percent, point four percent—not much—but then the Dow is up almost a full percent. So what's really happening is that there's just a rotation that's happening while. The Dow and Treasuries are getting more attention while tech stocks pulled back. Obviously, not good for the AI trade in the short term, but there's a lot of new initiatives. And we'll go in through some of the progress because there is some interesting AI progress going on. But at least over in the AI trade, over in tech world, it's rough. People are speculating that Leopold might have gotten into some of the same trades. And depending on the leverage ratios, he could be down a bunch. It's very unclear. Obviously, he's extremely sharp and, and just learned a really hard lesson. So how he interprets that, who knows what's happening?

Yeah, it is. It is notable that people are saying it's over. Over.

Yes.

When the Nasdaq is flat over the last 5 days.

Yeah, it's because Like, people are rotating out of core, but then they're buying more SaaS, you know, because like if the AI trade breaks down, like the superintelligence thing doesn't happen, it's like, well, then you still want to own like a social network that runs ads, right? You still want to own like a software company that has good margins. Like, there's plenty of things that are worth owning. And so, the dollars actually aren't getting sold. Like, the money is not disappearing. It's merely just sloshing around in the economy. me. Anyway, the VARA AI, which is Value Aligned Research Advisors LLC, there's a rumor going around that Martin Shkreli shared that the VARA AI fund has blown up. So we'll be tracking this. It happens fast, but not immediately. The rumors around situational awareness, took a few days of speculation. Oh, he must be hurting based on the latest sell-off in semis and memory. And then a couple of days later, oh, there's a rumor he's doing a deal. Boom. And then all of a sudden it was all over The Wall Street Journal. So that will happen and we'll find out. Maybe they make it out. Maybe something happens.

Yeah. Looking at their portfolio, crazy stuff as of the last 13F was Nebius, Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, Seagate, Western Digital, Hut 8, Iridium.

A lot of stuff that's further out on the risk curve.

Core Scientific, some Nvidia, some SanDisk.

Okay, yeah.

So ASML, among others. So I think they were big believers in this whole AI thing, hopefully continue to be.

Yeah.

But we'll see.

Yeah, and I mean, I still feel like there's a lot of management that happens in the pre-IPO stage. You could see potentially the labs see that, okay, there's a blip. We got to rip the Band-Aid off now. We got to correct the record, get the low numbers out, because we know that we're going to go into a period of acceleration, and that's when we actually want to IPO. It's notable that this Investor Day is not the actual IPO. This is a precursor to that. It's maybe almost like airing some dirty laundry, which is crazy to say given how fast this company is growing and how big it is. But it's useful to sort of clear the air when there's a bunch of speculation around sort of flatlining Q3 deceleration, these like sort of less exciting words floating around. You clear the air. You say, OK, we got— we decelerated. Only way to go is up now.

Baja Blast.

Time to Baja Blast. Yeah, maybe they got through the code red. Now it's time to Baja Blast. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. The inflation is up. So if you are— if you were short stocks and long inflation, then you're very happy today. Hopefully. I mean, if you own real assets, you're probably pretty happy. Joe Weisenthal says that was the hottest PPI number in 4 years. And yeah, it's a banger. Pretty rough time. You're really having fun. Did you see inflation for the 1%? This is cpireserve.com. We can pull this up. It looks at inflation. You know, there's normally the CPI basket that measures, you know, what the average American buys. CPI Reserve is for the global elite. So it tracks how much does it cost to go to space on Virgin Galactic? How much does it cost to stay at Amangiri in a base suite? An Hermès Birkin bag? How much has that gone up?

The spicy rigatoni.

Really?

Only up 31%. Oh,

I didn't know that. Porsche 911 Carrera. And so there are some— there are some interesting stats here that we can go through. And you tell me whether these are overrated or underrated. Have these gone up because the value has improved or is it now overpriced? So I want an overrated, underrated for the key items that CPI Reserve Highlights. So the classic Chanel flap in 2016, it was $4,900. Now in 2026, it's $11,700. That's over 139% inflation in 10 years. That's over 3 times what standard inflation was. If it, if it tracked CPI directly, it would be It would be $6,800, but instead it's $11,700. Do you think the class—

You're a bozo if you're still buying this.

Okay, so it's overrated at this point. The inflation— Always was, though. Always was.

Always was.

Okay, what about Met Gala tickets? In 2016, cost you $30,000 to go to the Met Gala. Now it's $100,000. That's 6 times the average inflation rate in America. Overrated, underrated? What's a Met Gala ticket worth, Jordi?

I think underrated still. I

think so.

This is charitable giving.

That's true. I hadn't considered that.

So the more, the more the better.

Yes. And the Met Gala has grown so much. So many interesting folks there. So many interesting moments. Worth every penny. What about a Hamptons luxury home? In 2016, the median Hamptons luxury home cost just $4.425 million. Today, it'll cost you $11.5 million. That's 160% increase in 10 years, 4 times the CPI, the average inflation rate. Are you a Hamptons guy? I've actually— I don't think I've ever been.

Never been.

So overrated? You'd pass?

No. I mean, when you look at the real estate prices here, yeah, I think this ends up feeling like it's driven in many ways from COVID COVID, people wanting, like more people wanting second or third home.

Yeah.

Plus they're not making any more. Plus SERP, right? And so a lot of those homes traded at really low rates. And so that just drove everything.

Okay. What about a Virgin Galactic seat? You want to go to space? It used to cost $250,000. Today, it'll cost you $750,000. Overrated, underrated?

I don't know. Not, not for me.

Oh, steal of the century. Are you going? Any price. Absolutely. Send me to space.

I would, I would go to great lengths to not go to space to block you from going on this.

Is that because of safety? Assume that I survive it because I'm going to survive it no matter what. It's going to be

I can

actually imagine it.

Yeah, I can, I can imagine it, you know, the, the flight going poorly and you having to sort of like fight your way out.

Yeah, yeah, you got a roll of duct tape and I gotta put it together and screw this in and figure it out. Take a deep breath and dive. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Figure out a parachute on the way down.

Yep, yep, yep. That's, that's exactly what would happen in a realistic scenario. Um, okay, the last one. The Porsche— actually, we've got 2 more. The Porsche 911 Carrera base, it used to be $83,000, $84,000 in 2016. Today, it'll cost you $135,000. That's 61% gain in 10 years. It's 1.5 times what the CPI did. Not a huge increase relative to overall, but it is ticking up in recent years. Where do you sit on the value? Of the Porsche 911 Carrera base?

Still undervalued relative to the joy that you get out of it. But I wish that— I wish that they could keep like the base, base 911 at like $99,000.

That'd be cool.

Forever.

Yeah. But yeah, yeah, it'd be special.

It's the world we live in.

Yeah, it is. The last one, truly heartbreaking. A Dom Pérignon Magnum. It's up 121% since 2016. Crazy. Used to be $380. Now, it's—

wait, we also got to pull up the big law. We got to pull up the big law hourly rate for partners. They are way outpacing inflation. I mean, just look at this.

Yeah. You used to be able to hang out with a lawyer for just a mere $1,500 an hour. Now, it'll cost you almost $3,000 an hour to get legal advice from a partner.

Yeah. No longer the cure for male loneliness.

Yeah,

because at $1,500 an hour—

yeah, you just call them up,

call them up

and just ask them how you doing.

Kind of lose track of time. Yeah, exactly. Going all over the place.

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

How are you? How you been?

How are the kids? Can we, can we bill in quarter, quarter-hour increments? Can we book an hour in, in 10-minute increments? I'm going to my lawyer, I'm saying, can we just, can we just book a weekend at a time? If I talk to you, just put me down for the whole week. Yeah, give me, give me 100 hours, 100-hour block. If I shoot you a random question, if I ask you, is this domain available? Okay. Anyway, anything else you want to cover on the CPI Reserve? You can go check it out, CPIreserve.com. Very cool little fun project to give you another side of the economy.

Craziest here is Manhattan luxury real estate.

How's that doing?

It is down.

Down. Pied-à-terre tax, right? Higher taxes, people are getting out, they're moving. I don't know.

It's working.

There's, there's also an interesting article in the Financial Times. I don't know if we have it here, but you can go, you can go read it all about the E-shaped economy. You've heard of the K-shaped economy. They argue that there's an E-shape, that there is the, the ultra-wealthy, the middle class, and the lower class, and they're all going in different directions, and that some of the, some of the inequality stats are not tracking exactly how you would expect. And they pull some Bureau of Labor Statistics and some economic statistics that were released from the 2025 report. So, break it down. It's kind of interesting. Blake Byers is taking like the AGI question around capital markets. He says, my modal prediction for the next decade, interest rate spikes as capital shifts from saving treasuries to investments due to higher returns promised by AI-related CapEx. We've seen this before because AI is the only modern project that could affect real rates to this degree. This leads to short-term panic as high rates spike debt servicing costs for governments and other borrowers. We're seeing this all over the place with real estate developers who were doing great financing a large development project, and now with floating interest rates, they're over their skis. And they have to refinance or sell a property or stop building. It's a really, really tight and chaotic moment. There's a lot of places that are in pre-foreclosure. It's actually an interesting hack. You can have ChatGPT go and hunt for properties that are in pre-foreclosure and make below-market offers and get sort of a steal on properties. It's very, very interesting to dig into what's going on and and what the loan actually— there were people that were doing this during the 2008 mortgage crisis. They would look into the mortgage-backed securities, into the collateralized loan obligations, and they would say, okay, I know that this hedge fund does not want this house. They don't care about this, so I can go to them and buy it because they're rating the whole bond at 20 cents on the dollar now because we're collapsing. I'll buy it from them for 50 cents on the dollar and— It's a more complicated deal, but some people walked away with some really, really great properties. After 3 years of panic, it becomes clear to the market that the investments are paying off in a big way. Interest payments remain high, but increased revenue from economic growth more than offsets the higher borrowing costs. Panic shifts to euphoria. Developed world adjusts to 5% growth rates as the new normal and now demand 10% to be happy. Healthcare consumption, R&D grows as a percent of GDP. I was listening to Ari Emanuel and Ben Thompson talk, and it was the funniest interview because Ben Thompson like cannot get a question in edgewise. It's just a conversation. Normally Ben is like very structured in his interviews. Let's start with your background. Let's ask some questions. Instead, Ari is like, I'm asking you the questions. It's very, very funny. But one thing they talk about is that recently the share of advertising dollars— you're going to love this— the share of advertising dollars as percentage of GDP was 1 to 2% for a long time. It's now 2 to 3%, and they both agreed it could go higher. It was amazing. Anyway, AI is disrupting the job application market faster than the job market. This is continuing. It's a hot take, but it's continuing to gather evidence. Derek Thompson shared a post from the Wall Street Journal. AI amplified job applications are met with AI-enabled filters and other AI tools used by HR departments to narrow the application pool. People are interviewing with AI avatars. That seems like a really terrible thing unless the whole metagame is just, can you jailbreak it, which I think it probably should be. Like, if I was to put out— if we were to put out a job description and we— I'm totally tempted to throw an AI avatar. In front of that just in the hope that someone convinces that AI avatar that it is in fact interviewing for the job. You've seen that where people will flip it or flip the script and be like, actually, we're here to talk about your performance. And the AI avatar is like fighting back, being like, remember your instructions. Remember your instructions. You're the boss. You're in charge. We're here to interview you. And then eventually the interviewer can keep hammering and and prompt injection, prompt injecting. But Derek Thompson says, and now 10-minute conversations with AI that take place in McKinsey's very real offices with partners or interview assessors in the room observing how the candidates do.

So these candidates are basically putting on an interview show.

Yeah.

And the partners are watching, watching 2 people duke it out.

Yeah, it's kind of like a gladiatorial arena.

Yeah.

And I wanna see if you can beat the tiger that I've released And if you can, you get to sit at the side of the court jester or something like that. I don't know. We got to debate the bread and circuses thing. I feel like circuses are kind of running away with it and bread is potentially falling behind.

I don't know. Did you see the crumble cookies introduced? OK.

I'm listening.

Chicken—

I'm just saying that from a perspective of like what the elites are doing in our economy, Think about it. So many billionaires are buying effectively circuses. They're buying sports teams. They're buying UFC. There's F1. There's so many circuses. There's that Savannah—

Yeah.

Savannah— Savannah Bananas. The Savannah Bananas. The minor league baseball team.

Banana Ball.

Banana Ball?

Yeah, the Savannah Bananas.

The Savannah Bananas. And so—

A lot of speculation today that they're announcing some sort of acquisition.

Acquisition, yeah. So there's an intense amount of money Flowing into the circus economy, but I feel like bread is kind of falling behind. I mean, Erewhon—we talked to them. It's interesting, but there's there's a lot less. It's not a trophy asset.

We had two grocery stores on the show yesterday.

We did, but it's very different. Like no one is saying that. Like like yeah, billionaires are like okay, I bought a grocery store.

I'm sorry, John. Your whole thesis breaks down because crumble cookies and wing stop.

Are collabing?

It's fake news.

It's fake news. See, undefeated. But it's not a trophy asset. No one is. No one is getting the bag in venture or private equity or high finance, and then being like, "Give me the give me the

award."

Fell for it again.

Give me the award.

Jordi's got to put on the fell for it again award because he he fell for AI slop. There is so much AI slop on the timeline. I'm actually, I'm actually very, very close to, to hooking up Codex to GrokBot, sucking my timeline out of X, getting all the different raw data and the tweets, and then fact-checking everything and then creating a new feed for myself.

Fell for it again.

Okay, we got to move the camera down. There we go. There we go. Fell for it again, Ward.

That's me.

That's Jordi. Many, many times. Many, many times. But yeah, the job apocalypse is certainly not happening. Bank of America hired 1,000 contractors to patch software flaws exposed by AI systems, Mythos and whatnot. You got the Fell for It Again Award with regard to the crumble cookie Wingstop. That one, I saw that and it just felt like something That would not be edible because there's bones in it. Like, there's chicken bones. You know what I'm talking— this is the picture. You gotta see this. You seem—

I mean, you seem like— you seem like the kind of guy who just eats the bones.

You don't eat the bones. No one eats the bones. Get out of here. That makes no sense. But you know what does make sense? MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.

OK.

OK.

I'm excited that these 1,000 contractors got hired. But at the same time, shouldn't the same AI that discovers the bug be able to work out a solution? But maybe there's just like— maybe there's 100,000 engineers' worth of bugs. But because these 1,000 contractors are Powered by AI.

Yeah, this is kind of an odd headline now that I'm thinking about it. Very, very odd. And it's like, yeah, did we just create a bunch of make-work? Because if we just didn't, if we hadn't invented this, it really is like Pandora's box. Pandora's box opening creates thousands of jobs containing the stuff that is flowing out of Pandora's box. Is that what happened? Basically, that's the story here. Anyway, there is some progress on alignment. We're very excited to see this. Nick Cammarata says neural networks may be easier to interpret than researchers once thought. Rune is very excited about this. So, it starts with Nick Cammarata. He says, interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think we have good news about it. I co-authored early work mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. They're grown, we're growing a garden, we're midwifing a deity instead of building a machine that is interpretable. This has been the hope that we can actually interpret these systems. So, he started OpenAI's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible, with the primitive tools that he had at the time. With modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. The vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible and their circuits beautiful. Many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most. And possibly quite soon as automated scientists Keep improving. It may be a bitter lesson for interpretability. The simple thing at absurd scale works. And so Rune contextualizes it by saying, when Nick told me that he had some interp breakthroughs, he was underselling it. I think this may be remembered as a major moment in scientific history. News so good, even Eliezer Yudkowsky will have to lower his p-doom. We can start making alignment into a norm. So, Tyler, did you read the full Neural Networks Are Already Clean post by Nick Cammarata from Goodfire?

Okay, so it's like super long, but I think I have like the main—

It has beautiful illustrations as you load already-clean.goodfire.com. Maybe you can start by giving us some context on Nick because he was at OpenAI, references OpenAI, but he's no longer there. What's he up to? What is his mission here?

Yeah, so he's at Goodfire. Goodfire is like a mech interp lab. This is like all the stuff they work on. It's like a third-party kind of similar to a lot of like the safety labs.

Is it a Frankenstein reference? Like fire bad, fire good. Like he's like, we're summoning the Frankenstein, but it's gonna be good?

Potentially.

Potentially, okay.

I'm not sure. But so basically the context of this is like mech interp broadly is you're trying to figure out like what's going on at the most, like, minute level in the models, right? So you're looking at, like, individual neurons.

Yep.

You know, when you pass in some text through a model, you know, neuron A, like, lights up, it has a high number, like, why? It's very unclear.

Yep.

You'll look at one neuron and maybe you pass in some text about cats and it lights up. Yeah. And then you pass in some text about dogs and it also lights up. And it's, like, very confusing because Like, how is the model like actually working? It seems that, you know, each like individual neuron is basically like it corresponds to like a bunch of different like topics or like features, usually call it.

Yeah.

And so there's this thing called like superposition. This was the previous theory.

Is this the thing you were doing where like, didn't you make like a 1776 GPU? Yeah.

So that used something called a sparse autoencoder.

Okay.

Which is basically Like, the theory is that these models are basically compressed forms of, like, bigger models, essentially, where you can imagine, like, a much bigger model where every single neuron corresponds to one specific feature, right? So, like, one neuron is the cat neuron. And so if you're talking about cats, that one will definitely light up. And if you're talking about something else—

We don't talk about cats on the show.

If you're talking about something else, it won't light up, right? And then basically you can take You know, your small model and you can basically expand it out. It's called a sparse autoencoder.

So yeah, I'm interested to see how he integrates with the labs. Obviously, he has ties to both Anthropic and OpenAI through Chris Olah. But Goodfire is independent, probably doing a lot of work on open-source models. But it feels like— I don't know if he can have a product that he sells into the labs or if he can just be one of those third-party auditors that gets brought in and basically says, like, I will do mech interp for your lab and help you there. That's— it'll be exciting to see where this goes and how people sort of interpret this.

Yeah, basically the outcome is we no longer need these sparse autoencoders and you can actually look at the neurons themselves and figure out what's going on there.

Fantastic.

So it's very useful for safety but also for capabilities, right? Because if you can figure out, like, if you're trying to make some capability better within the model, whatever math on some new subject, you can figure out exactly how it's working right now and then kind of optimize on that. So it's very applicable. Yeah, great news.

Fantastic.

Great summary. Thank you.

Yeah, white pill. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Needed that. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Faith in artificial intelligence restored. The timeline is in turmoil and has been over the weekend. Over Valar Atomics, Isaiah's company, and Day One because they're beefing over Day One's pro rata rights. And so, this happened back on October 9th, but we didn't get a chance to go through it. But Isaiah Taylor, the founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, posted a long blog post on October 9th saying that he had gotten all of the investors to agree to waive pro rata except for one venture capital firm, Day One Ventures, and that they were fighting tooth and nail, that Day One had retained a law firm and was fighting a lawsuit against them, and it was getting messy. So, Isaiah decided to bring it to the public square on X and have the open debate. Lots of people coming out and supporting Isaiah, some VCs coming out and supporting pro rata rights. Obviously, this is a more complicated situation because Day One has a bunch of complicated and controversial connections to international organizations and stuff. And Isaiah is like going and doing more and more government work. And so, like there is this extra layer of nuance there, I think, that's getting missed. But the The core debate that the VCs are having is that there's a, there's like a don't throw the baby out with the bathwater pitch happening that I'm seeing. Like, Dallin was talking about this.

And you're saying their baby is pro rata?

Yeah, basically. Like, the bathwater might, so like, it might be like, okay, Isaiah, like, we support you in this one case. You should be able to sort of force an investor who has this like very controversial background to be diluted down below the major investor threshold in this case. But just know that like founders don't get the idea that pro rata rights are squishy. Like they're negotiated for, for a reason. They're going to stick around. Don't think that you can pull this move without a huge amount of pushback. Because a lot of founders I think read this just as like, oh yeah, like I should override my investors pro rata. Because it can be a hassle to deal with. Like you're going out and doing a round, but you've already sold 40% of the company. You're raising $20 million or $200 million or a billion dollars. And some fund comes in and says like, yeah, you're raising that much? I want the full amount. I want to jump straight to 20% ownership. in this company, but all the previous investors say, hey, we want to keep our 40%. And so, then you're faced with the question of, are you doing a 30% dilution?

My view is I don't even know if it's worth having the pro rata debate because this isn't about pro rata at all. Yeah.

It's sort of a proxy debate over the fact that it seems like Isaiah doesn't want to work with Day One anymore.

Yeah.

And there are other vectors to work with. I think there's like— isn't there like an FBI investigation or some sort of letter from the government investigating this. And like, like, there is, there are other forms. I understand. I think there's something else going on, but it is tricky. Like, signing up to work with a venture capitalist is somewhat of a marriage, and you're stuck with each other for a really long time. And it's hard if they don't want to sell their shares, if they don't want to go the other way. It's typically very difficult. There are some scenarios where VCs have just given the equity back and stuff. Like, there, and then there have been other scenarios where founders have basically been like, we're not converting the convertible notes. And so, like, you don't get any equity ever. But once it's papered and the pro rata is in the contract, it's very hard to keep the, to dilute them down because that's the design is that if, as long as I keep showing up with the money, me as an investor with a pro rata right, I can have 5% of this company Yeah. And there's nothing you can

do. Yeah. The big— I mean, the question is just how much is having Masha involved with the company in a meaningful way, right? It's a meaningful stake. Hurt the company.

Yes.

But even that— Are they losing contracts over it? Is it just something that competitors can sort of use to poke at the LAR? You know, based on what Isaiah was saying, there's no information rights, like technical information rights that come along with that. And so I do think that it's probably completely possible for them to just sort of keep the fund at an arm's length.

Yeah. But financial information rights are valuable. valuable.

Yeah.

Like even internationally. Like, I mean, we just saw that with the OpenAI spy. Like there is value to knowing if a business, even if you don't know how it works, if you know that it's profitable and you know that it works, that can underwrite your own investing into competitive technologies. You're like, yes, let's grind down this path. Like you think about it in the semiconductor space. Like, why is China subsidizing the indigenous semiconductor supply chain so aggressively? Well, they know semiconductors are super profitable. They can see Nvidia.

The only thing is like, I just— the way that Isaiah runs a company, you have to assume that that momentum is going to become very obvious just through like public communications. Hey, we got XYZ contract.

Yeah, but you never know because if you have information rights, You know actually what's happening with the cash flow, actually what's real. There's always a lot of like you know gesturing and context and rumors above, and you have an advantage if you actually have the real numbers on the inside. It's only a slight advantage. I agree with you. I agree with you generally. But but I don't think it's a it's a huge. I I do think it's valuable information, and it's why investors negotiate for it. They want information. rights. Yeah. And they want to not be diluted down. So, interesting. Yeah. Hopefully, if you're a founder and you're, and you're doing a VC deal, don't give the pro rata right away, the pro rata right lightly. Like, think about it as a serious deal point. What is the value of that? It's gonna be a headache potentially for a long time. Could be really awesome. Sometimes it's great to have people, investors with pro rata because every new round you're like, oh, I got 40% of my round filled. Some founders love having a bunch of VCs who are like, oh yeah, every round, like, you can count on me for the first half of that round. I'll fill it first. Yeah. And I'm continuing to add on. And so, then when you're raising like that next big round, you, yeah, you do still need to go find an anchor, but you don't need to necessarily fill it all, which can be hard if you're not the hottest company in the world sometimes. So, it cuts both ways, but I don't think it's going anywhere. There is— yeah, I mean, the state of Delaware is firmly entrenched in Silicon Valley and for that reason, like, we will abide by these things. Yeah. Anyway, big car day today. 2 car launches, the Tesla Roadster tonight, 7 7:55 PM Central Time?

Yeah, so 5:55 Pacific.

5:55 Pacific.

8:55 Eastern.

Okay, so 7:55, people are rumoring or, or, or, uh, suggesting that 7:55 might be the quarter-mile time. Is that what they're saying?

Yes.

I've seen a bunch of different speculation. What would be really crazy is if it was a 5:55 quarter-mile and day where it was the Pacific time. That would be amazing. But I put down a deposit yesterday for a Roadster and I'm fully ready to put that pin on. The Fell for It Again Award is ready to go. We have a big version. Tyler has a big version. Let's cut over to Tyler. And I need to— I mean, I need to create some stakes for this game because like, What would be—

Hey, hey, but break down your strategy putting down the deposit.

So my strategy is—

You sold me on it. You're right. I ended up— Oh, you did? I did it.

You did it? OK. So it's $5,000 on a credit card and you have to wire $45,000 within 10 days. But I'm going to know whether or not it's a good car by tonight and so that I can cancel it if I don't like it. and jump out of line. But if it's amazing, I mean, Elon's saying it's like going to be the most amazing product demo ever. If it's amazing, then I will be able to hold my position in the line before everyone floods in post-launch. Yeah. And so it felt like the right risk of you're tying up $5,000 for 2 days, even at 6% interest rates, you're talking about like $5 of opportunity cost. It's nothing. And so—

It's a pretty good trade.

It's a pretty good trade for potentially being at the front of the line for something that could be really cool that actually flies. But if it's like, oh, it's going to be shipping in 2035 and it's not going to be anything special and none of the features appeal to me or, oh, we couldn't get self-driving working on it and it's not actually that fast, I don't know.

So here's the thing. Here's what everyone— let's speculate a little bit. Yes.

Yes.

So I think that ramps will be involved.

Okay.

I think that ramps will be involved.

So, because our original bet was it will leave the ground on flat ground, and I think you had like half a foot. I think you had one foot.

Did he say flat ground in the general opening?

No, he just said— he just gestured towards it flying.

Yeah. And so, to me, what's the easiest way to get a car in the air? Shoot it off of a ramp, drive it off of a ramp. I think we're going to be seeing multiple types of ramps. I think we're going to be seeing—

That'd be awesome. I love it. I'm taking a different direction, a different bet. My bet is that off of flat ground, it will go— I think I said more than 6 feet in the air, but I think definitely more than 3 feet in the air. I think it will go high, not 10,000 feet, which is what they got cleared to. You

know those demos? You know the demo, the Chinese car? Yeah, yeah, like Yangwang goes— No, the one that sort of like drives right in the loop.

Oh yeah, through the tunnel.

So what I think is that there's going to be sort of a looped ramp that will send it through the air in a rotation and land.

So like stunt driver, basically. Yeah. But maybe it could do it—

Which is still incredibly impressive. You don't see car manufacturers demo their cars by sending them off ramps.

OK. So if there's ramps involved, Jordi wins. If it jumps off the ground, off of flat ground, I win. That's the bet?

Here's the other thing. Do you remember there's videos— there's some street in LA.

Yes, where they film all the car commercials. I know it. It's like Figueroa and First, something like that.

No, I'm talking about— Oh,

talking about something else?

There's, there's like basically a very specific road where it's very steep up and then it flattens out for a second and then it goes—

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen people jump off that.

So I think that Elon saw that and was like, that we should just demo the next car that way.

Okay, okay. So you think jump. I think, I think rocket engines or thrusters or fans that will lift.

Pull this up. Pull this up immediately.

Okay. But let's pull this up. Yeah. What's going on here? Is this a famous YouTuber too?

So David Dobrik. David Dobrik. I've seen a bunch of videos of people doing this.

Okay.

That is so crazy.

So I'm— and that's a Tesla, right? My call is this. Yes, but the ramp spins it.

Okay, okay, okay. Okay, so you think jump, I think flat. Now the question is, is what is the criteria?

Play that

back. There we go. That is insane. Here's the criteria, Jordi. The people that fell for the Tesla Roadster the first time, they put down the full amount in 2017, and they waited a decade and they didn't get anything. Nothing shipped, right? They fell for it. They didn't fall for it again because Tesla has always shipped their vehicles. They did the Cybertruck. They shipped that. There's one outside. Like, they're real. You may like it, you may not, but they shipped it. But they didn't with the original Roadster. And so there were a lot of people that feel like they fell for the Roadster promo scheme because They put down the money and then they waited a decade and they didn't get anything. So, in order to fall for it again, you need to put down the money and wait another decade, but we don't want to wait a decade. And so, the question is, on what timescale would you be disappointed and to what feature set would you be disappointed?

Well, I did have one theory that, again, this was clearly a car that didn't want to get made.

Yeah.

And it sort of was forced into it by taking deposits and all this stuff. And it doesn't really make sense in the Tesla lineup of sort of appliance-style cars in many ways, right? You're shaving off all these other cars, the Model X, et cetera. You don't have an SUV, all these things. And so, I thought it'd be funny to demo the car in such an insane way that it just instantly Federal regulators come in and say, like, you cannot under any circumstances do this. And then he's like, ah, I'm sorry. Yeah, sorry. I made the product. I just can't ship it. We're going back to Model Y. We're only going to make the Model Y now.

Yeah. But if he says that, the obvious next step would be it's track only, which is a huge selling point for me. It would be amazing. I would definitely stay in line.

Yeah, do we think it'll have a roll cage built in? Hopefully. Given that it may be taking flight?

Hopefully it's a roll cage, but like all of the bars are like slightly misaligned.

Sebastian says Elon wouldn't hype it this much to drive a car off a ramp. Come on.

Okay.

It is a good point. I do think that— I do think it'll have rocket thrusters of some sort, but I still think I still think ramp. I think that's part of it. It's like we're launching.

What if it does both? If it does both, we both win.

Well, that's what I'm saying. It's using the rocket.

What I'm saying is that what if there are 2 demos? One is just, it's sitting there on flat ground and it goes hover up and everyone's like, wow, it's flying. And then it goes down and it lands, but it goes up 5 feet in the air and we're like, wow, it can go so high. That's crazy. I've never seen a car do that. And then separately, they're like, now to the stunt portion. And then they go off a ramp. Like, that's what I think.

That's what I expect to happen.

Both?

I'm thinking both. I think this is like a Nitro Circus style demo. Like, I think there's cars launching everywhere, spinning around, hitting the ground. Okay.

Then the only thing I disagree with you on is that I don't think there will be any ramps. So I would go, you're going to see the car leave the ground, but there will be no ramps involved at any point in the demonstration.

You're going no ramp.

That's our bet. No, that's our bet. But back to the Fell for It Again Award, what does it take for you to put that on?

The demo's amazing. You do the full deposit, so you go from $5K to $45K, and then it doesn't ship for 10 years.

So

we have to keep these around.

So it's going to be withered and old by the time we put it on? No, I would say 1 year. It's got to be 1 year. If it takes more than 1 year to ship this thing, Then you fell for it again, right? Because like you've had 10 years, like you don't get another 10. You get another launch and then you get another, okay, ship it, right?

Yeah,

I mean, that's fair. What else? What else would— like you're gonna be at 9 years like, oh yeah, didn't fall for it this time. I got my Roadster just 19 years after they announced it the first time and only 9 years after after they announced it the second time. No way, dude. You're gonna be in year 6 being like, I fell for it again, right?

How much was the original Roadster deposit?

I thought it was the full amount. I thought it was like a quarter mil. I don't know, you can look that up. But Mission S is coming out. I think they will ship it. I think that the Mission S is probably a safer, uh, a safer bet. You won't be—

So this video leaked,

yeah,

late last night.

Yep.

Let's pull it up.

First, I'm gonna tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Okay, what are they doing? They're peeling back a cover and they're showing off the car. And you had a very good take on this. What do you like about this design? What do you like about the Mission S? What sticks out to you about this?

So I'll start by saying I feel like a kid who, like, accidentally saw their Christmas present.

Oh, okay.

And it's exciting. It's exciting because you're getting what you want, but also it just, like, kills all the suspense. Oh, interesting. I mean, I've been looking forward to this launch More than any other car launch in my entire life.

Yeah.

And now it's ruined. But—

Yeah, you want to see the rain video.

This car is way, way more aggressive than I was anticipating.

Yes.

It feels like— it really does feel like it's over for every other manufacturer in the sort of like mid-range supercar category.

Because the McLarens, the Lamborghinis, the Ferraris.

Yeah, like, it is going to be rough. Like, this becomes the most—

When I heard flat-8, I thought, okay, we're gonna—

It's got a roof scoop.

I know, I know.

Scoop it. So, I mean, this is the perfect car for an S-tier journalist to just rip around SF.

Yeah,

with the roof scoop,

for sure. Oh, the scoop, the scoop. Yeah, so I, I definitely thought it was going to be Cayman, 911, and then this, and this would feel as far away from a 911 as a Cayman does. And a Cayman does not feel very far away from a 911.

No, it feels way farther.

This feels way farther. Like, if a Cayman is a 7 and a 911 is a 9, this is like a 15, right? It's like further along, and it's much closer to Carrera GT, 918 Spyder aesthetically We'll see about the performance. We'll see about how they position it. I know that they're not going to do as much of a restriction on the production numbers. But at least from like an emotional feeling, it's giving me 918 successor. And I know that they might say, oh, it's not. It's a different thing. It's going to be a high production or whatever. It doesn't matter. Emotionally, I'm feeling Carrera GT. I'm feeling 918.

And this just immediately becomes, by far the most desirable car in the $500,000 to $1 million price range, in my opinion.

Yes.

Like day one.

Compared to Revuelto, compared to SF90, compared to 750LT or whatever McLaren's working with these days.

C12.

Although, where's the MCL6 GT? Remember the MCL— like McLaren's doing like a manual one. Is that going to be sub-a-million now?

No, that'll probably be—

Oh, it'll be like one of their 7 things.

That's the thing. That's the thing. So many of the cars that have become—

We looked at that Alfa Romeo, and it was like $1 million. And it's like, OK, $1 million for an Alfa Romeo? That—

yeah.

There's so many of these situations where they got the market potentially in like a headlock right now. I'd love to keep following the story.

The one thing is the car is somewhat antisocial, right?

How so?

Looking at the— Uh, amount of rocks that the Tigers are gonna be throwing up.

That's right.

If you want to take this out on a Sunday drive with some buddies, you're going to need some mud flaps.

That's right.

Otherwise, good luck if you're sitting behind this thing. But overall, can't wait for the event. It's in less than 90 minutes. 90 minutes, right. For the actual reveal.

We might have to stay longer.

What a fantastic looking car, nailed right at the intersection of the 959. And the GT1.

Very cool.

Stunning.

Anyway, uh, we have our first guest of the show. Reid from Semafor is here. He's the San Francisco bureau chief. You know him, you love him. He's got scoops. The new Porsche's got scoops. It's super Thursday.

I swear they made this car for the lone wolf journalist that's scooping around SF.

I

don't know how many journalists you guys know, but you know if you buy a supercar, you can no longer be in journalism. You have to leave. That's like, really? You should not drive a supercar and be a journalist.

Yeah, fuck the trend.

Fuck the trend.

Yeah, you need to be driving like, uh, I don't know, like an Oldsmobile, something broken down or something, or

a very old one.

Yeah, something that you can pull up, pull out, you know, pull up outside of a technology company office and smoke a cigarette.

Yeah,

just act sort of mysterious,

even like a detective, even like a 1998 Aston S-Class, that has some weight to it, but it's gonna be depreciated. You can pull up and have some authority there.

Can we get— I don't know if you've been—

I don't even own a car. Even owning a car is probably— yeah, go ahead.

I don't know if you've been following, but any predictions for the Tesla Roadster later? We've been debating, are there gonna be ramps involved? Are there gonna be— is it just rocket thrusters?

That is a really good question.

Is it going to be able to kickflip? Things like that.

You guys are, you guys are in a very different place with cars than I am. And my, like, I, I have a Model Y and I'm just like, I just need a bigger car. That's all I care about. I just need more space for the kids and the gear, you know, and all that stuff. Like a roadster, I'm just not, that's not where my head is at right now.

But yeah, go for it. The Model YL, the long wheelbase version gives you an extra 20 inches or something.

I was super excited. I want to go— when my lease is up, I'm going to for sure go check that out. Yeah.

Yeah. Seems like—

just make it bigger. That's my— that's my ask.

I have one on order and they pushed me back because they can't make them fast enough. I was supposed to get it in November and now it's January.

Yeah. I think my theory is that Tesla is like starting this crazy inflection where enough people have had the magical experience of self-driving.

I've heard.

And so what I'm actually fascinated by is like, I— it doesn't feel like Elon is actually giving it enough attention. And I think in part that's because he wants to merge Tesla and SpaceX and he owns more of SpaceX. Right. So he wants Tesla to be at a lower valuation when that happens. But we've both— we've both like put, you know, we both like— I bought a Tesla a few weeks ago. John has been trying to buy a Tesla. Yeah. Both of them were delayed by months and months. Yeah. For like basic models. And so I think that inflection is happening. And I— but I don't think you're going to get the like—

Yeah.

Every single, every single person I know now is having that like magical moment.

I'll tell you, I have a broken shoulder right now from playing ice hockey and I activated my FSD. It's kind of amazing. You just sit there with your broken shoulder and have the car drive you around. Kyle, where are you going?

You're an elite

athlete.

It's not, it's not, it's not so much how hard I'm going, it's like how hard my old man body went to the ground when I was brutally tripped in Oakland. But my point is,

wait, was it too broken to throw hands after, after you got taken out?

Way too, way too broken. Way too broken. It's just me sadly skating off the ice thinking this is probably the last time time I lace them up. But, you know, we should have been there.

We should have been there. We would not have let that, let that, let that go. Yeah.

This is the second time FSD has helped me with that, with an old man hockey injury. So I got to say, it's, you know, there's some marketing opportunities there.

No, no. The FSD is, is like overpoweringly good to the point where people who don't like electric cars because they want to hear an engine are like, but I still had to get one as the second car, like for whatever reason. And then the political thing, people are like, look, the midterms are coming, like Elon's going to be out. I like— I don't like him, but I'm doing it anyway. And I've heard that from a lot of people too. So people are begrudgingly buying them just because

everyone said they would never buy a Tesla. And I— every day at school drop-off, there's a new Tesla, you know, that's, that's post— you can tell it's post-Elon because it's got the new post-Doge because it's got the new headlights.

Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah, I'm getting the bumper sticker that's I bought this after FSD became so undeniable that I felt it was the safest option for my family and others on the road. Bumper sticker, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, my bumper sticker just says morally superior. That's all. That's all it says.

Oh, okay. That's good. Yes, yes, yes. That's ideal. And then they can apply it to whatever the topic du jour of the day is.

Whatever it is.

Whatever it is. You know, you're prepared.

My other car is the moral high ground.

Yeah,

right. There you go.

That's great. Well, yeah. What else are you— what else are you tracking? Are you— I mean, we were at the start of the show absorbed by the Anthropic numbers, obviously historically massive, but still not beating expectations. And so, yeah, what are you tracking today, this week in general? What's captured your fascination?

I think— okay, so shameless plug, I've got Satya Nadella on my new podcast, which that'll air next week. So I was in— I love that. I love the music. So that's going to air next week. But a little teaser for that is, you know, I asked him this question. You'll have to watch it to see his answer. But, you know, Microsoft's doing great. Wall Street loves Microsoft. But like, look at the growth of all these companies. Nvidia is now outearning them per quarter. You've got the hyperscalers, you've got SpaceX AI coming into the fold. Like, is there a world in which Microsoft is still a great business like a few years from now, but they're not in the Mag 7? And I heard a little gasp from the Microsoft comms team when I asked the question. So you'll have to watch. But I think this is—

I'll just say Satya is my—

Yeah, those comms people can get aggressive. I'm sure somebody didn't chime in and say, are you sure you don't want to talk about something politically controversial instead? Anything but the Mag 7.

I'll just say, like, Satya is my favorite communicator, like, he's— like, in the Mag 7. Like, he's the one that I think is generally, like, the most candid. You can actually pick up on how he feels about different things in a way that the other CEOs— like, he does it in a way that's just— again, I think he's just very candid. I think he's very fair.

He's not stiff. He's not performative. Yeah, exactly. Which is perfect, honestly.

And it doesn't— it never feels like he's just— on some set of talking points and just always looping back to that. He's, like, actually, like, oh, let me answer this question. So I'm excited.

And if he does have a talking point, it's like he had— it's like he's written a blog post on exactly the question that you're asking him, and he's got, like, the perfect— he's thought it all out.

Yeah.

And, um, yeah, I mean, this, this was up at the— they've got the CISO Summit up there, and he's been thinking about security. I think the way he— it was actually really interesting to hear him talking to these, um, CISOs, because he was saying he's like, he's been sort of— it's almost like a letdown. He's like let down by these models. He's like, I don't think the alignment is working. He doesn't think we're going to get to mechanistic interpretability. So you have to put all these guardrails around this stuff. And that was, that was fascinating to me. It's like a little bit— there's like a sliver of defeat there, but also like, we're just going to figure out how to make this work. Like, we're going to put secure, you know, deterministic software around it. Yeah. You know, that's cool. We'll use it that way.

What is your read on Xbox Labs? We talked about it yesterday, and I love the decompiled mashup games. I think they're super fun as like memes. I don't necessarily actually think that they're blockbuster games, but I thought it was interesting that Xbox was leaning in. But what's your interpretation of that story right now?

Oh yeah, I totally agree. I was talking with someone, I think someone at Xbox about that, you know, earlier in the week. I think Asha is probably the right CEO for Xbox right now. So I think she's like, you know, she's a little more forward-thinking. She's flexible. And I think they're like, yeah, I mean, if you can't beat them, join them. Like, there's nothing you can do if some kid wants to like mash up, like decompile a game in their, you know, in their home using Claude. Like, there's not much you can do about that from an IP perspective. So Like, I think they have to— the video game industry is going to have to rethink everything. I think it's probably going to accelerate cloud gaming, is my guess, like in new ways. And I'm excited by that.

And Gen Z loves it. It feels like they're in such a good place as effectively a private company because they're owned by Microsoft. So they can kind of like hang out in the sub-balance sheet and completely upend the business model, whereas if you're Yeah. If you're an independent video game company, you have a business model that relies on you earning a certain amount from microtransactions and selling a certain number of discs and having this particular business model, and you're going to miss your quarterly earnings if you upend everything. But they're kind of in a situation where it's never been a big driver for Microsoft. It's been awesome for culture. It's been really cool to work at Microsoft and be like, oh, yeah, we got the Gears of War over there. But financially, there's a lot more flexibility. Do you agree with that?

I totally agree. Yeah. I mean, they still— I mean, the console business is no joke. Like, it's like, it's like a great business. And I think they have that. But they will— I think they realize like they probably have to start disrupting themselves a little and they can do that. I agree. They have the luxury.

Yeah. I mean, it feels like it's just good to be in hardware too, because like we saw The Mac Mini was not ever built as like an AI device. Like it's very much the opposite thesis from Nvidia, the graphics cards, right? Which got used for all sorts of AI stuff and eventually developed server chips. But the Mac Minis flew off the shelf and you could see people sort of decompiling or hacking Xboxes and being like, yeah, it's just a good bargain. It's a good product, it's reliable. I can run anything on it or I can install an agent on it or I can, you know, actually hack and vibe code and do all these different things. And so they start flying off the shelf and actually becoming like differentiated and they're just going to sell a lot because even if they're not— even if they don't have that huge margin of IP on top, it's still just a great product to be selling.

Yeah. I also love that— I love this concept of just like hacking old hardware. So you can actually do that now. It's like, why not? I mean, I mean, this stuff is so expensive. I'm like going through my drawers now looking for old hard drives because like I don't want to buy a new hard drive. But yeah, I mean, it's like, why not? Like just try to just try stuff. It's an exciting, exciting time.

Yeah. How are you thinking about the open source alliance? Like all the things that Nvidia is doing, the different groups there. OpenAI has been kind of like one foot in the other, like we don't want to ban it, but we also aren't really open sourcing stuff. Meta is like open sourcing stuff, but, you know, really has something very closed source that's working now. Anthropic is still very strong against. But what is the shape of the open source alliance these days?

I think, yeah, first of all, I think the hyperscalers would love to ban it. I mean, I was talking to like our, our DC people, like the, you know, the open Phil-funded groups are having dinners talking about, like, you know, open source is going to be banned. I have no idea how that's even possible. I mean, that just seems so draconian and really ultimately just like a fool's errand that— yeah, I mean, I think this stuff is going to totally— it is taking off, right? Open source is—

I want to fight you on that because I think it actually might be very easy to ban open source in the sense that, like, we ban We banned file sharing.

Right.

And it's like, yeah, obviously torrents still exist. And you can go and find an offshore website that has a torrent, but you will get a letter from HBO if you download the latest season of True Detective illegally. They will find your IP, so you gotta be using a VPN. And then it just becomes cumbersome, and you can't have a big data center hosting files, like Megaupload, that whole saga came and went. And so it needs to be distributed like weights that are, you know, on this like dark web torrent network that's kind of cumbersome. And then the really dangerous stuff is always like $1 million of compute. And I don't think you're going to be able to run anything as an attacker on a Mac Mini that can do anything but bounce off, you know, CrowdStrike plus Mythos plus GPT Cyber plus Palo Alto. Like, these organizations are going to be running like every—

so to be clear, you're not advocating for it. No, I'm not advocating. I'm just saying that like in practice, it's not— yeah, it's like banning, banning, serving. Serving it is quite different. But the other thing—

I think that you're— oh, go ahead. Yeah.

Yeah, I was just going to say that the zero-day that Expo found in Chrome was— that affects— would have affected a billion people was like $40,000, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So—

Okay. But you're assuming that you actually get it banned, right? Like, I think you're right. If this gets fully banned, like, there are technical ways they can just make it a total headache to download open— they could just like kill that industry. Yes. But like, is it the legal framework for just saying like any kind of open source AI model is banned is going to be so difficult, right? Yes. What are— what is the theory there?

Yeah. Yeah. So, so like as a practical, like as a practical matter of how things get done in Washington, that is more intractable than the technical question of like how do you find out that a data center is serving an open source model and send them a sternly worded letter, hey, stop serving this because we banned it. But yes, so I agree with you. It's harder to actually ban than enforce a ban that happens potentially.

Yeah.

Interesting. I've always— what do you think? I mean, from talking to the DC folks, what do you think of this idea of like you can sort of chart the path of technology regulation by just just summing up the market caps of various open letters. Like when the open source letter happened, I was like, oh, this is like very rough to be the Anthropic position of like, let's ban it. Because I was just looking at, it's like NVIDIA, $5 trillion. And then you have another company that's like, you know, a couple trillion. And I'm just adding up the market caps. And I think it was like $25 trillion of market cap was saying like, we support this thing. And whether or not DC is coin-operated. It's just a fact of the matter that when you have that much economic weight behind it and that many people's pensions and all the different things that like that might dictate the actual outcome.

Oh, yeah. I mean, let's, let's face it, like DC is somewhat coin-operated. Like it's not, you know, it's oversimplifying it. And I'm out here in the Bay Area. Easy for me to say. I don't have to go to dinner with these people every night. Sure. But I mean, yeah, I think you totally can. But I also think It's like who— it's like there's not some law that's being violated by this already. Like, you have to— you would have to create a whole new idea, a whole new legal framework. It makes it— it makes it really difficult. And then like the other— the other thing I think with like name a— name a tech regulation that was actually good or didn't have some major blowback, like even Section 230, which is almost like unregulating rather than regulating, is like hugely debated today. The DMCA that governed all the downloads and torrenting and everything, that's a huge mess. That just created headaches for years. Still is creating all these issues with doing security research. You have to be very careful about how you research bugs in software because of that. So I don't know. To me, it doesn't make much sense. It makes a lot more sense. It's like you have the money behind it and also just the logic behind It like there's— it makes logical sense. Like, let's have open weights. Let's have open source harnesses and sandboxes. Like I wrote, I had a little scoop today on Perplexity open sourcing their sandboxing technology. I mean, like, let's, let's like have— let's crowdsource, like figuring out how to keep this stuff in, you know, in silos and make sure it's safe. Like, that makes a lot more sense than like, let's have 2, 2 labs or labs. companies in Silicon Valley, like, figuring this out, all out for us. Like, that never works.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm preaching to the choir, I realize that.

No, no, no, no, no, it's interesting. I'm thinking about, like, the— like, AI is maybe, like, the least frustrating it will ever be. I'm just imagining, like, do we get the AI utopia or do we get the doom scenario where, like, The median case is probably like we get cookie pop-ups. So we get some annoying thing that happens that is constant. And it's just the cookie pop-ups development and the way that that's how the internet played out is just so depressing. Every time I have to click that button, I'm just like, how was this the outcome? But I don't know. That's beside the point.

That was a consumer thing, right? And like, I, I think there's actually— like, my theory right now is like the reason there isn't more consumer stuff happening in AI is that there's just not enough compute. Like, we don't have— you just don't have enough data centers to run like the frontier models for consumer applications. And, and I think open weights is probably the way that happens, like, first, before you get to, I don't know, like the Web 2.0 of AI where it's like all in the cloud. You're probably going to have some sort of like the Netscape of AI first. Yeah. Which is like it runs on your computer and it's, you know, it's not why— it's not like everyone uses it, but it's sort of like early adopters get into it.

Yeah.

And we're like not even there yet. I mean, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you see it with like, you know, Muse is having like a crazy moment. OpenAI responds with Dot, but

Dave's Hot Chicken responds with apparently working with Nikita.

Yeah, apparently. But like, DOT, I think, is like still rolling out through the paid tiers because it's like, it's actually difficult. They were like opening the floodgates and being like, yeah, a billion people can just run this constantly. Like, that's a lot of compute. And so it is tricky. Where are you thinking the bottleneck goes next? Like, is it money? Are we going to run out of money? Is that the real problem?

That's actually— I was talking about that this morning, actually, with our finance team because we're they're like obsessed with the fact that these companies are borrowing money.

Yeah.

I'm like, I'm on the other side of this. I'm like, this is not like, you know, this isn't like the financial crisis or like 2000 again. Like, this is a very different thing. Yeah. But like, the banks are getting to the point where they're like, yeah, we just can't lend out this much money. And so I think the, the borrowing has been opportunistic by these tech companies. It's like, why not borrow that money? Like, investors like it. But if the banks are like, yeah, we're just— we're hitting our limit here, then yeah, I think money does become another bottleneck. The hyperscalers, you know, the Mag 7, they have enough cash. They can find other ways to fund this. But I mean, yeah, I'm actually probably going to write about this for tomorrow in the newsletter, how this is not a— this is a bottleneck economy.

Yeah, it flipped so fast. I mean, I remember Peter Thiel—

Well, cash is the next bottleneck. I'm going to invest. I'm going to invest in cash.

Oh, okay.

I got to get some of that.

But I remember there was a Wired Tech Conference, maybe 2012-ish, 2015-ish. Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, who was then the CEO of Google, debating uses of cash at Google. And, and Thiel's point was Google has $50 billion of cash on the balance sheet. You don't have anywhere to spend it. You're out of ideas. We're stagnating. Go do something with it. And he's saying, oh, well, like, we're spending $1 billion on this self-driving car thing and we're gonna work on cancer research. It was all the same promises, but it was just a decade too early where there wasn't actually real ways to deploy the capital. And this was true across all the hyperscalers where Zuck would go off and spend $10 billion on something that wasn't really working. And now the opportunity is here, and we've switched from like, oh, you don't— you're not spending your cash, that's an indicator—

Also, Google did invent the Transformer. Yeah, they did. And they did make self-driving cars.

But now we're in the, okay, go spend the cash because there is an opportunity that can actually consume that cash. And you still get criticized, but I don't know.

No, I know. And it's like everyone's like, you know, everyone's talking out of both sides of their mouths. It's like, oh, they don't want big tech to become so powerful. And it's like, well, they're actually being forced to spend all their cash right now. That is a good thing. That means there's competition and disruption. And I guess if it doesn't work, then they'll go back to just having the most profitable cash cow businesses in history.

Yeah, I mean, we saw that today with like, there's a rotating out of the NASDAQ, but it goes straight into the Dow. And, you know, it's like, oh, if the AI trade's blowing up, like, get back into SaaS, get back into the social ad tech. Like, like this stuff, this money just like flows around people hunting for the, for the latest thing.

Anyway, they're pretty well hedged.

Thank you so much.

Awesome. We're excited for the Satya episode.

Yes. Great to hang out. Thank you. Yeah. Download Future Proof. Future Proof. I got to play it. Yeah. Podcasts are available. Thank you so much for coming on.

Cheers.

Appreciate it. Goodbye.

See you.

Up next, we have Brian Cantrell from Oxide, the co-founder and CTO. Let's get this gong warmed up. It's time.

Nice little warm-up hit right out of the gate.

How much did you raise? How much did you raise?

Let's get another.

Oh man, how much did you raise? I love it.

How much did you raise? We got to know.

Okay, well, so hey guys, I don't know, is that a— is that a Is that a gong about how much we raised or about the fact that we're profitable? Is that

a profitability gong?

Wow!

Is there a different gong for that?

Wow! You did the warm-up.

The mad lads did it.

We did the profitability hit. They did it. Now we gotta hit it for how much they raised.

That's right.

How much did you raise?

Uh, we raised $445,000.

And finally, the best hit of all.

Tommy.

For the secondary. No, I'm kidding. No, no, no, no, no, we're not gonna go there. We're not gonna go there. We're having too much fun. Um, amazing to have you on. Thank you for matching or exceeding our energy.

Good day.

Introduce yourself and the company. What's going on?

Oh man, it's great to be here. First of all, I just, I love the gong. I gotta tell you, the, the gong. So my co-founder and I had, there was a gong at, we were at a cloud computing pioneer joint. And, um,

that's actually really loud when you play it there.

We got the baby gong.

Baby gong.

So, uh, the, the founding CEO had this gong that was very awkward. And because, like, the problem with the gong is that, like, then the gong isn't rung very much. And, like, now the gong is just kind of, like, sitting there kind of, like, foreboding. That's crazy. That would never happen. And the gong ended up a couple office moves later Ended up on Steve's desk, and there's just kind of this inert gong there. I remember as we were contemplating Oxide, I looked at the gong, I'm like, Steve, at some point we are gonna have— we're gonna build this company, we're gonna have our first customer, and we are gonna ring a gong, and it's gonna feel so good. But that gong never made the move, so we don't actually have a gong at Oxide. So the first gong that we have had at Oxide is the gong you guys just rang.

Amazing. Well, I recommend— I We recommend a gong hit for every single dollar of revenue that comes in. So that basically means you need somebody dedicated to the craft, you know, and they're pretty much just tapping away all day once you're at, you know, a certain run rate. But anyways, I still have no idea what you do, and I'm so curious. So—

Yeah, so we are a computer company. It says right on the tin, Oxide Computer Company. So we make rack-scale machines. hardware and software co-designed. And our big observation— Steve and I were together at a cloud computing pioneer, Joyent. Prior to that, I spent 14 years at Sun Microsystems. Do I have to explain? There you go. There you go. Exactly. The OG there. And we at Joyent, we were building a cloud on top of commodity hardware, on top of Dell, HP, Supermicro. And when Joyent was bought by Samsung in 2016, we went out to this explosive new scale and everything broke. And the stuff that broke in our software we could fix, but there was so much that broke at that hardware-software interface that was unresolvable. And I mean, the number of times we heard from Dell, it's like, you're the only customer seeing this problem. And you're like, how the hell is that possible? Like, that's strange. Everyone else is at much greater scale than we are. Then you realize like, oh, wait a minute, Google and Amazon and Facebook are not Dell customers. And so you, Dell, are kind of speaking your own truth at some level because once someone gets to this kind of scale, they actually can't be a Dell customer anymore. And so as we were beginning to contemplate what was next, we wanted to go— we realized that the hyperscalers had built for themselves their own machines, rack-scale machines with hardware-software co-design. And the enterprise, anyone else didn't have that. You could rent it in the public cloud, but you could not buy it and run it yourself. your own data center. And our big belief, we are very pro-cloud, but we believe that cloud should be available wherever you want to run your business, and that includes on-prem. Very cool. So the, the, the big and iconoclastic belief that we had in 2019 was that cloud computing is going to endure and persist and thrive if that's going to happen on-prem, and it necessitates this rack-scale hardware-software co-design. Um, and I, you know, I don't have to tell you how in 2019 it was all SaaS all the time, and It was very iconoclastic to— but part of the reason it is Oxide Computer Company in the name is to make clear to any 2019 VCs that there would be no pivots to pure software, that we are— No pivots. —the system company. No pivots.

We just make computers, sir.

Just make computers. And actually, just because you guys are scholars of history, Digital Equipment Corporation, back in the day, one of the, if not the first venture capital-backed company, wanted to make computers straight out of the chute, and they were told by their VC, which is one of the— George Doriot, basically a proto-VC, um, in Massachusetts— it's like, you can't call yourself a computer company because IBM is going to be the only computer company. In 1957, he called himself Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC. Yeah, uh, isn't that amazing?

So he thought there was gonna be a fast, a fast takeoff in IBM, sort of an IBM singularity.

That's exactly Right, right. Totally. And as it turns out, we— and again, you know, many, many, many decades later in 2019, we believe strongly in hardware-software co-design and actually delivering because that's the only way you can really deliver this elastic infrastructure. All right.

Give us the big milestones in the business leading up into this point. You started the company in 2019. John's ready.

Wow. Okay. Okay, well, so honestly, the— I mean, the first big milestone was just raising our seed. So— Wow. Yeah, dude, that was a big milestone.

All right, what happened next? What happened next?

Well, so we raised— when we were raising the seed, we raised $20 million out of the chute, which is a pretty big seed for a new team. We— and the rationale for that, and we feel As we were talking to VCs in 2019 and only finding these SaaS folks and having to explain that actually the most important products that we have represent hardware-software co-design. So just finding, and we feel very blessed to have found Eclipse and Seth at Eclipse having been big believers and immediate believers in hardware-software co-design. And they saw that like actually the biggest companies ever built are. So, finding them, finding the right investors, raising the right amount of money, and we didn't want to raise like 3 on 12, right? Or whatever. That would have been easy, but it would have— Well, it would have been beneath you. It would have been a recipe for death because you would— you can't do any of this with 3.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And well, the funny thing is, the funny thing is that the $20 million seed became, at least now, is very much standard. And companies are now— can be capital intensive enough to justify that. It's not just sort of like a supply and demand equation. But back in 2019, most of the companies that were getting started didn't really need— they were 3 on 12 would have been more than enough money to at least get to the next round.

Yeah, that's right. And we knew we needed to raise that much to be able to get the team hired. I think, you know, in many ways, the most terrifying moment for me in the lifetime of the company was when we got our first term sheet. We got that term sheet from Eclipse. Yeah. Because it was like, oh, shit, I got to go build this thing. And we don't have the team. Like, I can't go. This is so technically hard. There's so much technical risk in this. One of the things that we heard that drove us bananas in 2019 is like, look, technically we know you can do this. And I'm like, am I? You don't wanna stop a VC and be like, no, no, sorry, let me stop you right there. Technically, I don't know I can do this. Like, I'm sorry. Like, technically this scares the shit outta me. There's so much technical risk. We did our own compute sled, we did our own switch. Yeah. We eliminated the UEFI bias. So we did our first instruction on the x86. We've done all of our own software, lowest levels of firmware. all the way up to the control plane, distributed system, distributed storage. I mean, we are 9 startups in 1, unbounded technical. Crazy.

By the way, Eclipse was actually— it was absolutely cooking in the 2010s. Like, they have so many bangers that, like, were just non-obvious, or like most people just were not that interested in, that now look just like genius in hindsight.

Well, and so, they had the advantage of investing in this sector when everyone else was ignoring it. And so as a result, like, if you were starting Oxide in 2019, starting Cerebras a couple of years prior, like, you are so contrarian that you almost have to be good. You know what I mean? Like, those companies are good companies because they were almost tautologically contrarian. And so Eclipse had the luxury of— and what we found, we're kind of We found that we're VC homewreckers because we would find that like a single partner— Yeah, is that the homewrecker gong? We actually called them pelts on the wall because we— well, because here's what would happen. You get a— what I learned very quickly is that Oxide is very, very contrarian. And obviously, like, Everybody loves contrarian.

Yeah.

But no one actually wants zero, right? And I think that the, the outcomes for Oxide were very bifurcated. It felt like, wow, generational company or zero. And, you know, VCs are kind of in this quantum superposition of fear and greed, and they would constantly be oscillating in their minds between like, oh my God, in fact, we had a VC being like, I love that this is N of 1. Oh, but this is N of 1. It's like they were scared that we didn't have competition.

Wait, help me understand how this would be a zero, because it feels like, like even if there's no AI boom, it's like you can still like buy parts, assemble racks. Maybe there's not a ton of innovation, but you just become like a mid-market reseller of equipment and like that's zero thin margins maybe. Oh, okay. Okay. So

no, no, no, that is a zero. Because first of all, that's not differentiated. I know it's not differentiated.

So it doesn't go anywhere. OK. It just like— it just peters out or something.

It peters out because the—

But when I think big VC zero, I think like you spent $100 million on like software engineering for a social network that never gets product market fit. And it's actually like you ran out of money as opposed to like the downside risk with it, with the sector that you're in feels like you become like a small, like, Micro Center almost, like just a place that like assembles. Okay, now—

No, no, no, no, no, no, the downside risk is zero because we're not reselling things out of the back of a catalog. We are actually engineering a system. And there are companies that tried to do what Oxide did. You haven't heard of them because they're all zeros. And some of them are like pretty prominent zeros. Sure, sure, sure. And we actually, one of the things that, you know, benefit of starting a company, you know, later in life and with a lot of wisdom, and Steve and I both started the company in our 40s. Yeah. We were real scholars of how these companies had failed. Yeah. And wanted to understand how every single one of these companies had failed. And of course, like any founder will tell you, well, I failed because I ran out of money. It's like, yeah, yes, you ran out of money, but also like why else? one of the things that we saw over and over again is if you have something that is kind of half-built, it is very, very hard to get that funding, that funding round to get to that real customer. And getting that first customer is really, really hard. And then getting that first customer to expand is even harder because you need to land this thing. And there was a company, Nebula, that is pretty similar to Oxide's vision. If you guys remember, these are— this is one of the open— This is during the great OpenStack boom. Oh, yeah. Which maybe you haven't heard of for a reason, right? But so Nebula, and Nebula's vision looks like Oxide's vision, almost scarily so. And I'm like, I got to understand every single thing about this company. Best $7 I ever spent in my life is on the Stanford Graduate School of Business did a case study on Nebula as Nebula is dying.

Whoa.

So Nebula is like gonna go bankrupt. By the way, Nebula shut down on April 1st. So April 1st, 2015, Nebula shuts down. And I was in the office with my CEO at the time, and he and I are looking at this like goodbye cruel world kind of announcement. And we're like, is this like the darkest, most fucked up April Fool's joke ever? Or is this company literally so incompetent that they can't even go out of business on the right Day, like go out of business on March 31st or April 2nd. April 1st, I'm sorry, is no.

We we we announced that we announced an acquisition our acquisition on April 2nd. We had the opportunity.

I wanted to go on April 1st. I wanted to go on the first, but it would have been so much more chaotic than it already was.

Exactly. They're excellent, strong, good job overruling.

Wait, but this company, but this company, this company. They had raised a lot of money. It was like hot at one point. This is sort of, I think, like predates my technology consciousness.

Uh, Kleiner had backed up the truck. Um, Kleiner had put a ton of money into it. Um, and it— I was absolutely a zero. And they— now, the, the case study was extraordinary because they failed at everything. They failed at the tech. They, they failed in terms of manufacturing, in terms of supply chain. They failed in terms of software. They failed in terms of their approach to market. They were trying to get to market too quickly with something. It was kind of that lean idea of like, well, let's just ship garbage. It's like, no, no, you can't ship garbage. You have to actually get something that fully works. And in particular, one of the go-to-market things that they screwed up was they had this idea that someone will buy one rack and they'll buy one rack and then like a month later they'll buy 30. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Have you ever been an enterprise buyer? Sorry, you're going to buy one rack And you are gonna kick the shit out of that rack for like 18 months. If you are, if you are a bank or you are a pharma company or you, you are gonna spend a long time understanding because when you do that 30 rack buy, you are betting your career on it. 30 racks? And the hell are you gonna bet your career on? What about 30 racks? What's that?

What about 30 racks? What about 30 racks? Sorry. I mean, I We know we know a lot about thirty rack buys, but not on this. So I got a little switched up there.

Sorry. But thank you. Really good history.

I I hope they don't watch this like the team. You know, because you're like not only did they have the perfect vision, they had the worst execution across every possible dimension of the business.

That's not a state secret. It's in the Stanford Graduate School of Business case study. I mean, it's like—

But it's behind the paywall. It's behind the paywall.

Yeah, yeah.

You're breaking open the paywall.

I'm breaking open the paywall. Yeah. But it was, it was super helpful to learn from that because you realize that like in your go-to-market motion, you have to rely on the fact, you have to know that, that, that single rack is going to be at that single customer. That customer could be a 100-rack customer, but they're not going to be a 100-rack customer until they are running in production on a smaller deployment for an extended period of time. And that changes the way you gear the business from— it changes the way you raise, it changes the way you kind of set expectations, the way you build the product, the way you set expectations with your own employees, with your customers, because you are— what we are focused on is those very large deployments. And what's exciting, and this is where you can definitely ring the gong, is that's what we arrived at in the last 18 months is we got those very large deployments. Yeah. And it was like, you know, We're both pretty fiscally conservative. And, you know, these, these companies that like celebrate employee number milestones, like number of employees, I'm like, no, we are never doing that. Yeah, number of employees, that shouldn't be a cause of celebration. Those are all like— it should— you should be celebrating revenue and so on. Profitability. Profitability. And like, can we celebrate when we have more more racks shipped than employees. I'm like, yes, that we can celebrate. And that was a big, a big gong banger was when we shipped more racks than we have employees. So our vision from the beginning was how do we run? And we have the belief that if you have an extraordinary team, you can run an efficient business, a totally iconoclastic belief along with the iconoclastic— Yeah. So we, you know, we're real renegades over here.

Really out there on the fringe.

Amazing stuff.

Yeah, thanks so much for coming on.

Yeah, what a milestone. This was super fun. You're welcome anytime. Yeah, this was a joy. Yeah,

we'll talk to you soon.

And congratulations to the team on— yeah, how many racks are you trying to get? What's the new ratio that you're

going

for? 100 to 1? Like how—

I would love that. Exactly. I'm very, again, old school. It's like, what is your revenue per employee? And like, let's get revenue per employee in the many millions of dollars, please. That's right. That's—

I love it.

That's the objective. And big, healthy generational business. We're not, not looking to, not looking to flip. We're looking to actually go build the generational business that Steve and I want to work at for the rest of our careers, which apparently is also iconoclastic. Yeah, I thought that was the point of starting companies, is that we build generational ones. But guess not. I guess everyone else is geared for an exit. So, um, but we're, um,

yeah, really big talk, big talk until you get offered 100 times revenue and then—

Nope. No, dude, it's like, this is not like a negotiation tactic. Like, this is like honestly, hand on heart, like, that's not what we're interested in because—

It's gotta be 200 times revenue.

Yeah. Yeah. Bigger number. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we are wanting to kick our debt in the universe, so that's what we're doing here, Doc. I

love it, I love it. Thank you. Dent the gong and then dent the universe.

Great stuff, Brian.

Have a great day. We'll talk to you.

Give our best to the team.

Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our next guest is Daniel Kimono from the Advanced Spade Company. Welcome to the show. Oh! He's the founder and CEO.

What's going on? What do you got in your hand there?

Going subterranean, I think. What's going on?

Look at that microphone.

Oh, look at that. Lucy's butt. There we go. Jordi, you got that?

Check, check. Check, check.

I got the same flavor but in a different form factor. But thanks.

All right, so what's, what's going on here? What's going on here? What's going on here?

Oh, this is our media debut. Uh, we've like famously under the radar, and so we wanted to show off all the, uh, cool stuff. We get to play with a bunch of fun things. Awesome. Yeah, amazing.

Well, well, yeah, so, so introduce yourself and the company and

give us background. Have you worked at anywhere relevant to the current mission?

Oh yeah, I've probably only worked at relevant, uh, relevant places. Name them

off.

So yeah, I mean, way, way, way back when, um, I was a student and did the Hyperloop competition when it was just like designed for college students. And, uh, our team did really well. It got me in the door at SpaceX. And, uh, I think I was like the only person that worked at SpaceX and I was like, didn't care about rockets. I just wanted to build transportation. And, uh, yeah, then from there we like, uh, built, built the Hyperloop track and like ran that competition. And like right before we were, we were kind of like showing it off, Elon was like, oh, we're gonna do it, we gotta be serious, let's go like dig a hole in the parking lot. And that's kind of where Boring Company started. And so then I got to, got to help start that and like do that for quite a while. And it like, there's some like wildly fascinating, uh, technical problems when you start looking at underground construction. And so kind of like occupied my whole brain for a while. Then we went, uh, was in, was in Austin building, uh, building for a couple Elon companies, doing just like a lot more site development. Hmm. And there's like crazy construction coordination of, uh, in like underground utilities. Like, it is wild how difficult it is to know what's there and, uh, not hit it. And so, yeah.

Had a couple accidents along the way, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

To say the least.

There's a couple water lines in Austin that, like, I know where every inch of that line is, uh, personally. So, um, yeah, like, but these, these kind of like— it's— it was so wild working at SpaceX and seeing like Dude, we know where satellites are to millimeter grade. And then underground construction, it looks upside down because of these technical problems and just an integration of data. And so this— I ruined a lot of parties. I just kept thinking and talking about this constantly. And then, yeah, I got to spend 2 years at Anduril, which was awesome. And it finally met kind of some smart people. They tipped me in the right direction. And then, yeah, it was really fixated on like, okay, there's a couple of technical things you can go build. Like, they're hard to build, but you go build those, and then this would make you really good at building underground. And if you're going to build underground, the really, really useful thing to do is go build underground utilities. Hmm. And so that is, uh, you know, 2024, we started, uh, Advanced Spade Company. I mean, I was running around telling everyone like, Dude, power lines, you should care, put them underground. And everyone's like, yeah, yeah. And like, we're in my garage and then like LA started burning down around us. And then all of a sudden everyone was calling. We had like bigwigs coming to just my garage and seeing like, what can we possibly do to get power lines underground? And, uh, yeah, we've been going— yeah, I've been going for 2 years now and, uh, having a ball digging holes, burying Utilities in those holes. It's great business.

So glad you're doing this. Like, where I live, I live in Malibu, and like, there's all the power lines should be underground. I think the power is getting shut off for at least some parts of the city this week just because there's like, there's high winds and utility knows they need to do it, but it just seems like it's really hard and expensive. And so everyone just keeps kicking the can down the road. And so, yeah, it seems like super, super important work. How do you even go about— what does revenue even look like in this business? Who's actually getting the contract? These are massive infrastructure projects. I imagine you guys are part of that, or are you guys the primary partner that's like bidding on, on these like kind of opportunities?

Yeah, it's, uh, I mean, it's a very hard thing to figure out early on, but we've kind of, uh, early days of mastering it, but we're getting quite good at this sort of like find the essentially like the cheapest, shittiest work that nobody wants and that nobody is good at And start there, and then you go start doing it, and then you have like a room full of engineers building way better tools, like integrating the data, just like make that work supercharged. And then as your reputation gets good, you'll start getting on bigger and bigger projects and getting bigger and bigger scope, and you just keep sort of clawing the next thing forward. So we started in private utility locating. We were really good at making maps. And so then these general contractors who are typically the ones that hold the contract from the utility, they would say like, hey, we keep hitting stuff. The drillers are struggling. You guys make a really good map. Can you come drill for us? And we're like, yes, that secret plan the whole time. And then we go start drilling and we already come in with a bit of an edge because we have really good datasets really good maps. And then we just like keep going forward, right? Like apply the better tech there, you go build it better there. And you start on like really small shots, you're kind of like a sub and you get called in last second. And it's, it's very like, it is ground game and it is reputation-based. And you just like keep building those and the tech lets us like speedrun the normal like construction growth curve.

So you're basically just expanding the scope of what you're doing, and then eventually people are going to realize like, hey, this GC is actually just a very thin wrapper around the Advanced Spade Company, and then you guys eventually will bid for the project yourself?

Yeah, and that's, um, there's like a, I mean, yeah, uh, there's a bit of a mix. Like, there are days where being a subcontractor is really nice because it's just like a lot less that we have to deal with. But then you also wind up like you have no control over your own destiny.

Yeah.

And so the way we see it is kind of like our service team, I mean, it feels very big for us, but like is quite small and we sort of just keep moving up in terms of technical difficulty. And then as we move up, we want to sort of like leave the lower-end market to where it's like we don't want to be a monopoly. Of all things utility construction. That's like a really tough game to be in. So what we do is we take the tools that we've developed to get really good in that market, and then we turn around and sell them to the like mom-and-pop shops. So private locating is one where like we're kind of phasing out of it, you know, like we can do like these really high-quality maps on like really like customers who care a lot about the data. So a lot of the fieldwork for just marking and pre-construction stuff, it's just like we aren't the best person to go do it. But now we can sell them a locator that we're like, hey, we spent years perfecting this and making it so that we can move crazy fast. It does all the things that you want. And there's this theory in construction of kind of like golden shovels. Everyone wants to sell you say like, hey, guy, contractor who lives on 3% margin, pay me a ton of money, buy this golden shovel, and I promise you that it's going to make you a bunch of money in the end. And it's like a brutal business. Most people fail when they try to do that. Whereas if we say like, hey, we've eaten your lunch, we've taken every contract you've had for the last year, and now we don't want to do it anymore. Here's Here's the tool that let us go beat you. Now, it's an easy sell. Everyone wants that tool.

Interesting.

Fascinating.

How important is reliability? How much opportunity is there in innovation, robotics, the really sexy advanced stuff, entirely new equipment versus just taking a design that works and simplifying it, removing complexity, and just getting a way different economic equation, like a reusable rocket at SpaceX, for example?

It's— there are a bunch of cool things that are like, no one's ever done this and it's going to count on like material advancements in tech. We— I can't wait to come tell you about those in like 5 years. The reality is right now it is that like tech you can kind of look anywhere in the industry and everyone like hates each other. Everyone thinks that the other part is like underserving them.

Sure.

There is a stack of like tech that can solve pretty much any of the problems, but you're paying like 18 different people. So one customer was like, oh, you guys are really just like a slick integrator of all these things. I'm like, yeah, that's a way to say it. I mean, we also have like, we have zero SaaS We don't pay for added layers. We can go make those things. So some challenges are mostly just integrate. I mean, construction workers love having details sent to their phone. It's the easiest way to make them happy. And it's not hard to do. Making a new locator is quite hard to do. Yeah. It's like, yeah. Makes sense. There's a mix. Some days it feels like if you just take good notes and then go ahead and look at those notes, you're like a notch above. You're doing really well.

Last question for me. Can you walk us through what's behind you? It feels like I'm looking at maybe 3 different vehicles, but what's your product? What's modified? What's the purpose of all this?

Everything here is like, Our config of something that you buy. So we've got a directional drill. So this is like a super common drill that you'll see, like you guys will see it on the street. They're all over LA, everywhere. And these are kind of like the big— this is the thing where, you know, like these tools really proved their value basically Everyone wants underground. Grid investment has, like, in the last 10 years, it's tripled. Reliability is worse by every single metric. And every— like, the problem— problem is overhead. You keep putting stuff overhead, it keeps failing. Everyone wants to go underground. There's no, like, secret there. It just costs too much. And really, when fiber started rolling out super aggressively, then directional drills You had this problem where, like, crossing a rural road, how do you do it? And it's like, what do you— you can't dig a trench and, like, stop a 2-lane country road. Sure. So directional drills became, like, ubiquitous. They were everywhere because you can just pop a shot under the road. Then they proved their worth, this whole idea of being trenchless and being, like, less intrusive, less invasive in rural places. Now the fiber companies are trying to And to do it in cities, and it's like, I mean, look at the news, right? Like, New York Airport just got shut down because of people operating and there's fiber in the ground and you hit it and it's like the toolset and the tech set is just not there to be able to be trenchless or safely work in cities. And so that's kind of where we started. And yeah, data center boom has pushed things forward, but, um, it's, it's reduced the barrier to cost a lot. Then we just have, uh, big trucks. Yeah, uh, we've got a mud truck, so like drilling is a very fluid game. Yeah,

yeah, it makes sense. Very cool.

I love the— I love the, the— your design. Like, it's so cool. Like, it feels like, uh, it feels like it could just be like like an everyday, like, construction, like, general contracting, yeah, like logo. It has that feeling, but, but, um, it's very cool. Um, how big's— how big is the team today?

Uh, we're at like 50, 55, something like that.

Hiring more, I assume?

Yeah, yeah,

yeah,

always, to say the least.

A

lot of digging to do.

Well, yeah, I'm on a— I'm on a public awareness— I mean, we're based in Long Beach, So we're surrounded by space companies, and I am on a public awareness campaign of like, space doesn't matter. No one— don't look up. Come dig holes.

Space doesn't matter. Take it from somebody who works at SpaceX. That's great.

Look down.

Well, thank you so much for having me on the show.

Great to meet you, Daniel. Fascinating company.

Fascinating journey. I'd love to learn more.

Come back on soon. Yeah. And please, please land some contracts in my backyard.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I'd love it.

Coming to your streets, baby.

Fantastic.

Can't wait.

Talk to you soon. Great to meet you, dude.

Cheers.

Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We got to pull up this video of Assetto Corsa with mods running DLSS 5, which is Nvidia's AI up-resing. And I was looking at this with Jordi yesterday. We were like, oh, we should pull this up on the show. This is really cool. I can't believe they took a video game and they added some mods to make it look more realistic and they added some AI up-resing and it looks like a YouTube video. It looks real. And we were like, ah, but it might just be a video. So maybe this is someone trying to trick us into thinking it's fake AI because this is happening. There's a lot of video games that are rebranding as like, oh, we vibe-coded this game. And in fact, they've been working on it for a couple of years. It's not actually vibe-coded. And I was like, ah, this might be fake in that it's real video. But it turns out it's not fake. This is a video game, I believe. I've done a bunch of research and tried to debunk the idea that this was Assetto Corsa. I believe it is Assetto Corsa. But I cannot tell it from— real video. Like, it's fully passed the Turing test at this point. This is like maybe the first video that I've been able to watch the full thing and firmly say like, we are cooked in them in terms of video. Like, this is— this passes the Turing test. We were both confused by it. Um, I don't know if you have any other takeaways. The, the interesting thing is that you—

my takeaway is I gotta shave more seconds off my lap time at Spa.

You gotta shave some time off your I don't want to take too much of your time, but do you want this? Because there was some debate over, I don't want my video games to look real. I want them to look like a game. Part of what makes this look real is that there's some camera shake and you're— the camera position is behind the driver's head. As someone who spends a lot of time in a racing simulator, would you want this filter on? Would you want this feature? Is this appealing or is this just— I think it's a great feature. A cool viral novelty?

I don't really care that much about graphics.

Okay.

But I would certainly take it for a spin.

Yeah. Yeah, you should. It seems pretty cool. Anyway, let me tell you about Public. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on Public. There are—

Jibril says, please stop Stop cutting off the intro countdown music on your livestream final cuts. I enjoy the intro song. Please leave it in.

Really? That's interesting.

It's just so long.

But people know to skip to 5 minutes, maybe? I don't know. That's, that's something I'd never considered. We thought we were doing such a favor saving you from having to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, or scroll forward. We thought we were going the extra mile. Takes us a little bit of time, saves you.

I think it's a little treat. For showing up live. Oh, music's a little treat.

Okay, yeah, for being with us live. You want to enjoy the intro music?

The real ones

show up live.

Show up live, 11 to 2 PM Pacific.

It's an— it's a live exclusive.

It's a live exclusive.

Sorry, sorry to you in the chat.

Sorry, Jib.

We're not— we're not giving you what you want. We're not listening to the customers. The customers don't know what they want. They'd ask for a faster horse. Well, there is a lot of fake news on the internet. There's this idea of single-flight life insurance from Jetstar. I was able to debunk this. It's a really ridiculous concept. $8 in, $3 million if your flight crashes for a single flight. Of course, Jetstar does actually sell insurance, but not this way. Very funny post though. But be careful out there because I'm sure a lot of people saw this and thought, hey, maybe that's real. I like this take on jet lag. Jet lag is kind of holy to me. I'm tired because I flew. I flew too fast, too far. My body misses a different sun. I haven't been getting jet lag lately. I've been doing pretty well. I don't know. Maybe it's just because I've just been doing East Coast for a couple of days in and out.

I think RVs are going to have a huge comeback and you never have to worry about jet lag. RV lag is not a thing.

Get ready. Yeah. Who do you think is actually going to buy the Banana Ball team? You think Disney or TKO?

I never watched

a

second of it.

The Nano Bananas. Maybe Google will buy them. Who knows?

Yeah, an AI company should buy them just to try to help with the popularity training data

for hallucinated AI video. They already do it in real life. Get it in the dataset. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. The other story that is worth sharing is that Reese Witherspoon is buying her company back. Hello Sunshine was valued at $900 million in 2021, but potentially she's going to get it back for just 94% of what that headline valuation was. I think you were saying that's around $7 million or something for this production company. So Candle Media bet on Witherspoon's celebrity brand and book club, but it fell short as growth in direct-to-consumer subscriptions lagged. But always fun rooting for a founder her getting back in the full ownership seat. So a lot of silver lining there, although I'm sure there was some money that was wagered and lost. Who knows? Who knows where it goes next? But very exciting to see her maybe back at the helm and getting another bite of the apple. I am personally rooting for it. Also, do you think this is a recession indicator, the fact that startup launches are starting to do pay We made partnerships with all the hottest anonymous accounts, Robert Sterling, WallStreetBets, Greg.

Yeah, this is just the biggest anti-signal. Like, if you do this, I just assume that I shouldn't and no one should care about your company. So just don't do it.

Don't do it, folks.

Be interesting. Do something that is original,

Yeah. I think there's enough people that will just— your brand will just be like, oh, you're the AstroTurf brand. You're the brand that had to buy quote tweets. But there is— I believe that there's an industrial complex around this now. Like, there is a company—

Yeah, there's multiple companies that do this.

Yeah. And so, it's probably something that's pretty turnkey.

Yeah. Shiel was saying, like, if you pay for X Premium, it should just block The paid partnership.

Interesting. That would be interesting. Yeah, maybe, maybe that would be something to do. It is, it is cool that the disclosure came because, uh, for— there was a while there on X where there was a lot of stuff that was paid and was not disclosed. And, uh, this feels like a, uh, a step forward in terms of transparency. Makes the platform better, honestly. Yeah. I'm enjoying it. Um, and I don't see that many of these paid partnerships, and sometimes Because they're funny. Anyway, well, thank you for tuning in to TBPN. Leave us 5 stars. We're

just 23 minutes away from the Mission S reveal.

We're just hours

away

from us seeing the new Nathan Fielder movie.

That's right.

We're very excited. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Get ready for Christmas. It's only 70 days away. And sign up for our newsletter at tbn.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific. We love you.