Windsurf Chaos Aftermath, NVIDIA Back in China, Richard Mille Deep Dive, Apple Buying $500M in Rare Earth Magnets | Zak Kukoff, Brian Venturo, Tyler Cowen, Austin Hughes, Kris Fredrickson, Dick Lucas

You're watching TVPN today is Tuesday, July 15, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today folks. Lots of guests, lots of news. The big one is we are doing a postmortem on the Windsurf chaos. I was saying that I liked this post from Pavel Asperuhov. I think he sort of nailed the postmortem. But we can debate this it. I mean if you leave someone for dead but someone else calls in a helicopter, that doesn't really change your moral positioning in the situation. And delian says this 100%. The wind surf founders and Google thought they could pull a fast one and that the broader community Windsurf employees are somehow r worded enough to not catch on that their leave the Shellco with cash plan was totally morally bankrupt. Everyone will remember. And so I don't know, I'm perhaps ready to put on the steel man hat and not go quite as far as Delian. I think you might agree with the Delian and Pavel take a little bit more.

I still think it's important to debate because we want to avoid this kind of situation in the future. There's probably going to be more of these deals. John Ludig had some good commentary on this. Basically saying if you are a big tech company it is much easier and faster to do something like this. It's not just the FTC sort of like climate around antitrust, it's just that it's much easier, it's much faster and oftentimes these companies are just buying the team and the talent. So if they can license the tech and get the team it is that's just capitalism doing capitalism. In this case the answer to capitalism doing capitalism was more capitalism.

But it got kind of wild.

It was Scott Woo coming in hot working over the weekend to get a deal done. So anyways, fantastic outcome.

Scott Wood looks like a hero.

Scott Wood looks like a hero. I think cognition is going to be stronger for it. They got a world class GTM sales marketing engine.

What John Ludig said here was big tech's AI talent shortage means these M and A choices. A you get the talent only but you get it today or B you get the talent plus the business plus the product but but months after regulatory scrutiny and he says they will pick every time. Thankfully for Windsurf the product lives on But A as the default is existentially dark for startups and so I think what's interesting is like we were debating how much of the blame goes to Lina Kahn. And I don't actually know that there's all that much on linacon specifically. It's.

But it's fun.

It's fun. It's fun.

Fun to point the finger.

It is. But I think Boogeyman, I think in general, like the FTC has always had some sort of approval around big public company buying a small company. They're going to review it. Even if they would have approved it, Google would not have gotten the talent actually in the door actually working at Google for six months, months after regulatory scrutiny. And so that time and the other.

Comp here, the other comp here that we have is Figma, who was slated to get acquired by Adobe, took forever. Adobe had to pay $1 billion breakup fee. Now Figma is going to IPO and I would be shocked if they end the first trading day below the price that Adobe was going to pay. And the company is doing better than ever. Has launched a bunch of new products.

Not financial advice, but I will give you product advice. Go to figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams. Great products together. Can't say anything about the stock, but great product. We do love it. Anyway, Varunam Ganesh had a good take here Windsurf employees over the weekend. And it's the is the we're so back, it's so over. We're so back, it's so over. And I think the underrated take on this, like, yes, it's funny and it's a good point. But this has a real economic cost, like losing sleep. We're sponsored by eight Sleep. As we put out a video today, we did. Sleep is valuable. And if you make me lose sleep, that does have an economic cost. That does have a moral cost. You shouldn't do that. And so you should as a founder, try and land the plane. Not just save everyone's life, but actually not have a super rough landing. Yeah, make it a win for everyone. But make it smooth for everyone.

Make it smooth for everyone. There was a good post. Pavel was on a tear for the last few days. Defender of the founding engineers. But he said, I hope these guys smoke Google. At AI coding, imagine the chip on your shoulder after this if you're a Windsurf employee. And Sandeep Shah over at Windsurf, he's a vice president there, said, it's bigger than a chip. We are coming for it, for it. And so love the energy.

He was left behind in the remain co. Is that correct?

Yeah.

He did not go over.

And the ghost ship ready.

He's on the ghost. Yeah, the ghost ship. The ghost ship. And Augustus says go off the king and will depuse his LFG. Lots of. Lots of support for Sandeep in the AI coding in the AI IDE's war. That's continuing. Anyway, Signal has a post here. Startup comp used to be confusing because it was complex. Now it's confusing because it might be worthless. Even with a large exit, the founders can dip anytime. Last chopper out of Saigon Vibes. Except they're flying private while you're holding the bag. Good. Fast. Yeah. My. My take here was that Scott Wu looks like the hero, not Varun Mohan, the founder and CEO of Windsurf who should have gotten an amazing outcome for his team. In any other situation. Like in any other situation, I say, hey, join this fast growing company. We're just post pivot. We're second in the market. We are doing some cool stuff. I'm raising some money and we're growing, but we're only doing 40, 80 million ARR. And I get you liquidity at 2.4 billion. You should be like, I am ride or die for this guy forever.

Yeah.

And I think that a lot of these employees aren't gonna feel that way in five years. Even after all the dust settles, they're gonna remember that this was not. Not handled as well as it should have been. And so they're gonna be like, man, I don't want to work with him.

Yeah.

Which is.

Right.

I'm sure when. When the muzzle is removed, he'll be able to.

Yeah.

Hopefully call every employee one by one.

That would be good.

Yeah.

Sorry.

And make up.

And so I still put some of the blame on FTC stuff. Just FTC stuff. Broadly. Some of the blame on Google comms, some of the blame on Lina Khan and how she changed the ftc.

And the other thing is this was happening.

Really.

Remember the sort of exclusivity period that OpenAI had on the deal expired and I think this got announced the very next day. So I'm sure it was in the works, but they definitely were moving quickly. And again, it would have been a good outcome if they all ended up at OpenAI. But I also think this is a good fit going forward as well. So I'm excited to see what each.

Branch of the team rune here has some pushback on Signal. He says this has always been true. The idea that startup comp is confusing and complex investors and Founders screwing over early employees during an M and A is a time honored tradition in Silicon Valley. I don't know how true that is. There's a lot of examples where that didn't happen, but of course it has happened. If anything, the abundance of capital has made things better for early employees. And so, you know, kind of, you know, people, people taking both sides. We didn't get to this post, but it was funny. Connor saying Windsurf is the Soham perique of startup acquisitions. They got acquired by OpenAI, Google and now Cognition Labs all in one month. You'll love to see it.

Zwicks has a six way parlay. He said, I want Mistral founders to Apple, Mistral team to meta character remain code of perplexity. Core to Perplexity Ideogram to Figma, Gamma to notion. Read it back. There was rumors that Apple was interested in picking up Mistral.

Oh really?

Taking a look at it. The funny thing though is that if you're France, do you want your national champion?

Yeah.

To the luxury AI Mr. All should.

Go to LVMH for sure.

Should be home with the Arnaults.

Didn't we post, didn't we post a joke post around that? I think we did.

I think we did.

Yeah.

I think I want fine luxury language models of the Arnaud family.

I think some of the Mistral folks were like, this is hilarious, but also like complete misinformation. Anyway, Sandeep says it's bigger than Chip, we're coming for it. And Rob says, let's talk about a reboot for hbo Silicon Valley. Valley. And it's funny because when you see the Windsurf tag right in the name, you're like, oh, okay, this is hilarious. You think this is ridiculous and at least you're having some fun with it.

Can we talk about our upcoming guest?

Yeah, yeah. We're going to have one of the co creators of HBO Silicon Valley on the show. He has been working on Barry for a couple of years. Kind of out of the Silicon Valley parody world. But we're going to drive.

We're going to explain to him what's going on line by line, what's been going on. And I think once he really processes it, he'll be interested in making a reboot.

Yeah, well, you can reboot your finances with the ramp. Time is money, save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. I like this post.

Yeah. Through this and kind July Brand Ambassador says the business, the business I stood on was operating at a loss.

40K likes you love it. So good.

Perfect. Perfect intersection of fintwit and business and Justin Bieber.

Yeah. I remember we put up that when we talked about the Justin Bieber launch, you were like, you're so offline, John. And it's like I'm extremely online, but just in one narrow bubble of the Internet. And so I somehow missed the entire Justin Bieber saga. The meltdown.

Number one album in the world.

It's the new number one album in the world. See this? I'm learning this again.

I think so.

Wow. We listened to some of it. We should do some. I don't know if we're in the movie.

We actually listened. We were saying we should listen to.

This on the drive home as research.

And we made it two songs.

It wasn't really hitting for us, but so. But congrats on the comeback. I mean it seems like a great launch. Do you think the. Do you think the viral moment was staged or do you think it was organic and then he just leveraged it later.

Seemed like a legitimate crash out.

I mean it seems like, you know, but it.

But it was extremely well played.

Even the best of us in technology have gotten frustrated with a journalist from time to time. So.

Yeah.

Who amongst us are above that?

Yeah, yeah. If the misinformation caught me outside of Nobu like that.

Yeah, you might crash out.

I might crash out and then drop.

An album at number one. A new. A number one live stream. And so Kyle Zhang, I think from the browser company or browser base has kind of a hot take. One of the browser companies kind of a hot take.

Joy Boy vs. Gigachad Varun Mohan left his company for big tech, screwed over employee equity. And then of course Scott Wu can solve any math problem imaginable. Giving Windsurf and employees accelerated vesting and Cliff's weight.

I like that it's math problems. It was just like a math.

Not basically. Scott basically came in and was able to run the playbook that a lot of CEOs have run. Who was it from? From Matrix? Ilya.

Ilya Sukar From Parse. Yeah.

He did the same exact thing with his employees.

Yep.

Back in the day when he with.

Facebook, he sold Facebook and he revested which is pretty common. And I would believe that the team that went over to Google is revesting to get that multi billion dollar for sure. I don't think it's just a cash and you can just quit immediately because the whole point is a talent acquisition. So it's got a vest Right. But yeah, I mean, crazy situation. And I do wonder, I do wonder, like what, what the price would have been to say, hey, Google, I'm. It's all or nothing. What price will you pay now? Because there's a price to wait for Google. Google would have to pay a price to wait to actually bring over the whole Windserve company. Right. They need FTC approval for that. Let's call it six months. What is Google's cost?

Sundar Pitch AI doesn't maybe feel like he has six months.

He would miss six months.

If you want a real shot at meaningful traction in CodeGen, another six months feels like a long time.

So what billion dollar cost? 2 billion. Is it a zero?

Well, it could be the difference would you notice between winning or having a horse in the race? Because plenty of people are leveraging Gemini broadly across their companies. Haven't heard it a ton from engineers on the show talking about using Gemini in their coding stack. Yep. Scene was a big fan, but it doesn't come up a ton. And they know that there's billions of dollars being printed in CodeGen. And I'm sure that Google wants a piece of it. Very few business lines that I imagine they can see a through line of. We can get this to a billion dollar run rate. And that's kind of the bar at Google.

Yeah. Well, if you need to review some code, head over to graphite.dev Code review for the age of AI graphite on GitHub. Ship higher quality software faster. And speaking of artificial intelligence, I want to go to Tyler and get the update on the new GWERN piece. He read it on the treadmill this morning. Is that right?

This morning on the treadmill. Yeah. I realized that there's Google on the treadmill, so I was like, oh, I'll read the new.

Wait, what? The treadmill has a browser.

Yeah.

So usually. Wow.

That's the real browser wars.

That's the real browser wars. Wait, there's Comet available.

Just Google, but yeah, that's actually good.

Wow.

Break it up. Break up the treadmill market.

Ridiculous monopoly.

Yeah.

Okay, so Google's Chrome is probably paying to be on all the Equinox treadmills.

Probably. Okay, so you. So Guern wrote this piece and it kicks off with Dwarkesh Patel. What was the. What was the actual inciting tweet that I saw. I saw Dwarkesh posting about it and he was saying. He was saying really interesting new Gorn essay. LLM daydreaming. It's a proposal of how default Mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty. By the way, I know it's a big cringe, It's a big cringe to delight in, but if you had told 19 year old me that a Goren essay would open like this, I would have found it hard to believe. And it is a huge milestone for Dwarkesh. So congratulations to Dwarkesh. He deserves it. So Dwarkesh Patel asks why no LLM has apparently ever made a major breakthrough or unexpected insight. You would expect this, given the incredible IQ that is on display for 15 minutes as you use an LLM, no matter how vast their knowledge or how high their benchmark scores. While those are by definition extremely rare, contemporary chatbot style LLMs have now been used seriously by tens of millions of people since ChatGPT November in 2022. And it does seem like there ought to be at least some examples at this point. This is a genuine puzzle. When prompted with the right hints, these models can synthesize information in ways that feel tantalizingly close to true insight. The raw components of intelligence seem to be present, but they don't. What's missing? It's hard to say because there are so many differences between LLMs and human researchers. So, Tyler, take me through the piece. What did Guern have to say?

Yeah, so basically the question is like, okay, why have they not produced new research?

Yep.

He basically gives two reasons. So the first is like they don't have continual learning, which is like you train an LLM, you put it to inference. It's like the weights are fixed, they don't change. Sure, there's like test time inference, but it's not really learning between your chats, right?

Yeah, unless it's in the context window.

Yeah, but there's some kind of like privative ways to do memory you're starting to see, but it's really like not super great so far. Yeah, so he kind of. There's analogy. It's like, does a person who has like permanent amnesia have. Have they ever like produced novel research? Like, probably not.

Right. Interesting. Yeah. This is the PhD amnesiac. Like we bring them in, they're genius, but every time they go home, they forget everything that they've learned about running our business. And could they even figure out how the printer works? They would have to start from first principles every single time just to print, you know, a stack of tweets for us. And all of a sudden we'd have a genius who couldn't really add value at our company.

If you can't print tweets, you're going to have a test.

You got to operate the brother printer under this roof at this company. Anyway. Continue.

Yeah.

Okay. So there's continual learning and then there's continual thinking.

Right.

Which is kind of like the model is only producing tokens when you prompt it.

Right.

So it's not like like an average person is like daydreaming or they're like normally dreaming. You kind of are always like passively thinking about stuff. So it's like sometimes you wake up in the morning, you just have this like new solution to a problem that you're working on. It's like, oh, how did that happen? I wasn't like thinking while I was.

Yeah. How many great ideas have been shower thoughts.

Yeah, exactly.

It's really true.

So basically the solution is he has this like system where you basically just draw like two totally random concepts ideas and then you just prompt the model. You say draw a connection between these two things and then for like almost everything, it's going to be like total nonsense, right? It's like two random things. There's not going to be anything. But if you do it enough times, you'll eventually get like, oh, this is actually like an interesting connection between these two things. It's like a new concept, it's like a novel idea. You can use it for research. Stuff like this.

Yeah. So you're just randomly drawing almost words cow Ethernet cable, like no connection there. But if you iterate, you might wind up with like cow and Fitbit. And then you come up with the idea for that company halter that's making like a trillion dollars and is doing really well. And I never would have thought of that. But if I just like iterated enough to be like, wait, does a cow need a Fitbit?

Maybe.

Okay, is there a business here and you can kind of trace through that.

Yeah, basically. And then so you have this like, you have like two sides, right? You have this thing that kind of tries to make some non obvious connection. Then you have this other half of the model that basically says, is this an interesting idea then basically. So if it is an interesting idea, it saves it to this kind of memory bank. And then you use that memory bank to keep pulling new ideas from that and from everything else. So you're building on top of these ideas and then eventually you're going to slowly, very slowly build like these really interesting ideas that are totally novel that you'd only get from basically passing in like millions and billions of totally random concepts.

Yeah, I feel like, yeah, One of the things he highlights is like this would be incredibly compute intensive. Right? Like you're talking about like running all the data centers all the time to kind of think about this. And it feels like it puts me back on Kurzweil timelines of like 20. I think he says singularity in 2045. And so it's like, this is an interesting idea. What if it takes a thousand times as much compute as we have now?

Yeah, I mean you're basically like brute forcing research, which like, it kind of doesn't make sense in a way. But if you have these models that are like small enough, you can kind of distill them down.

Maybe there's, I don't know, think about a scenario where a founder exits their company, they do their earn out, they want to start something new instead of spending two years lost in the woods, you know, think trying to come up with a decent idea. They just spend $5 million, five minutes and just like generates like a bunch of different ideas. You still then have to like pick an idea and it might seem good on the surface. And then you talk to people in the industry and they say, well, well like here's, here's kind of the issue with how you're thinking and then maybe you got to do another run.

But I think the, I think the interesting question is like 5 million feels like the point at which we would say like if someone built this system and they actually said, hey, we've, we've designed the algorithms such that you can, you know, tell it to go and it will come back with a good idea. But every time you hit go, you get a $5 million open AI bill. Like people would push that button for sure and it would be venture backed and stuff. But what if it's 5 billion? Or what if it's 5 trillion? Like there is a point where it just won't, no one will push that button.

Ideas guys would be so thrilled if it costs like $5 billion to come up with a good idea.

I think it actually does right now. I think it might cost more. I think the current paradigm is that even if you, even if you ran this algorithm and you ran this strategy, like the current models are so like, what's the word? Like they're, they're not great at like compressing and they're not efficient. And so you might be able to brute force it. You're brute forcing research. But the level of brute forcing might, might like when you math it out might be like in the billions of dollars to get an insight I don't know.

I think it also, like, it doesn't maybe make sense if you're like a random person. You're going to pay $5 million for an idea, but it maybe makes sense. If you're a big lab and you need like you're hitting a data wall, you need new data, I think then it kind of makes sense.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And then also he also brings up this thing which is like, if you kind of distill the model, even if you open source it, you're not really giving away the new ideas. Right. Because say that you have some weird concept that you find it's baked into the model, but the only way to access that is to specifically query for it. You're not actually giving away these new ideas, even if you're giving out the model. That's another kind of interesting.

So you actually have to inference it enough to pull the insight out of the model, even if it's literally there's $100 million in your laptop and your job is to pull it out. There's a billion dollars in the weights of GPT 5 or 4.5, but you know, to get the insight out of it might cost another billion dollars.

Yeah, it's basically like the monkeys typing on the keyboard until they get Shakespeare.

Yep.

It's like the same thing, but for like research.

Do we have a monkey sound effect yet? No, no, we got to get one of those.

Get on it.

What's your reaction to Chris Best, founder of Substack, friend of the show you. He said he's quoting this contemporary chatbot style. LLMs have now been used seriously by tens of millions of people since ChatGPT November 2022. And it does not seem like there. It does seem like there ought to be at least some examples of novelty at this point. And Chris says, potential answer there have been, but the human users hogged the credit. So maybe these chatbots are spitting out novel ideas, but people are just like, I'm not telling anyone that I got my idea from ChatGPT, because that's like a bad signal.

Yeah, I think that could be plausible. I think it's also just like.

The.

Way the LLMs work is like you're querying for a specific thing. So if you have. It's more of like, you have a hunch of like, this could be an idea, and then the LLM really gives it to you. But you never really see LLM just like, here's a cool idea.

Right.

Which is what this is kind of.

And this is the Other.

The other thing is, a lot of. A lot of business ideas, like good business ideas, end up being simple. And they don't. They don't always feel like, oh, look at this novel insight. It's just obvious. Like, other people will see the idea and they'll actually be. If they're this kind of founder type or maybe they're looking for their next thing, they will legitimately be annoyed because they think, oh, I could have thought of that.

Yeah. And so dip it for cows. I could have thought.

And for dogs.

I love that business.

No, so that's. The other thing is, at least in our world, in the private markets, a lot of ideas that end up being worth a lot. It's not necessarily the idea that's worth a lot, but it's having the idea at the right time and then the execution against that idea for a very long time.

And I think that kind of gets to, you know, my silly Coogan's eval, which is tell me a joke that requires novel insight. Because if you just tell me a joke that's already been out there that I've heard, it's not funny. So it requires novelty, it requires insight. It's actually really hard to come up with a new joke that's never been told before because it requires putting multiple things together, realizing something. And so I think that even though I'm not going to chatgpt regularly and asking for, like, make a scientific discovery or like, give me a genius business idea, I think the tell me a joke is in the same vein of, like, hard problem for LLM. And I think that if they get to the point where you can ask it for a novel, new, humorous insight, like joke with insight that's actually new, it should be able to do the other things. And I think that is some sort of fundamental restraint. And it's what we're talking about when we talk about spiky intelligence. It's like, very good at certain things, but it's missing this one. Human capability. Is there anything else from the post that you think we should highlight? Tyler?

I think that was mostly it.

Quern is on an absolute terror. We love him.

He's back in the bay.

Yeah, he's back in the bay. That's great. Well, we have four minutes until our first guest of the show.

Yeah. So let's cover a little bit of the story.

Let's cover some ads. First, let's tell you about Vanta.

Good idea.

Automate compliance. Manage risk. Improve trust. Continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. And then, should we kick off with some Nvidia background? So when we have Zach on, I.

Just want to say congratulations, Avanta, for picking up Scott Holden.

Oh, for sure.

He entered the trade portal. They picked him up.

We love some personal news.

Brex over to Vanta to lead marketing efforts at Vanta.

And wait, do we have the. Do we have the post?

The traded post?

Yeah. No, Christina's post, which was hilarious.

Let's pull it up.

I didn't know she had this in her. It's great, Christine.

I got it. She says, big day at Vanta. After a couple of days in the transfer portal, Scott Holden commits to the purple purple. Looking forward to working with you, Scott. So we'd love to see it.

That's a great photo of him too. Wow. I wonder what the context was for that photo.

It's looking like a chad.

Yeah. But like, you know, you see a lot of, like, LinkedIn, like, just like headshots. This is like the full body shot. Really nice, soft lighting, teeth looking extremely white. Fantastic.

Just nice full breakdown.

Full breakdown looking diced.

Anyways, let's get into the story before Zach Kukoff joins. So news today out of the Journal. Nvidia can sell AI chip to China again after CEO meets Trump. Jensen's Huang's case proves persuasive as the US agrees to grant licenses for the H20 chip. Nvidia said it has received assurances from the Trump administration that it can sell its H20 artificial intelligence intelligence chip in China, days after Chief Executive Jensen Huang met President Trump. The administration's move marks a turnabout after the Commerce Department restricted sales of the chip in April. Cost and costing Nvidia billions of dollars. The news came during a visit by Huang to Beijing, where he met. He was meeting senior officials. I'm very happy. He told reporters. Shares in Nvidia rose more than 4% in early trading on Tuesday. So big turn of events. Also coincides with Gurley's in China right now. We got to have them on to give us a breakdown of what's happening on the ground there. But, yeah, a bit of a surprise. This also feels like something that Sachs would have been headed heavily involved with as the AI czar. So it's good. Whatever people, A lot of people have their feelings about Sachs, but I do believe he is a patriot and would have had a lot of different people around the table working on this decision.

So obviously China hawks in shambles, very upset about this. I imagine not all of them have commented on it, but I imagine that with people who take the vanilla view of sort of like zero sum competition between the US and China, they're going to be upset because they say, hey, just restrict the Nvidia chips. They won't be able to train AI. And for a variety of reasons, AI is dangerous. It's going to be super intelligence. We need a democratic, a capitalist superintelligence. We don't want a communist authoritarian super intelligence that's controlled by a single person. We want it to be controlled by humanity or controlled by the American voters, something like that. On the flip side, we want it.

To be freedom pilled for sure.

And I agree with that to some degree. The question is, does this, is there a, is there a potential world where selling Nvidia H20s into China actually hurts Huawei more than it hurts America? And so it's somehow advantageous for us to get the entire world standardized on the Cuda stack and the Nvidia stack and then, and then we are able to have like more leverage over the Chinese AI ecosystem and that gives us more control to basically shift the overall amount of America pilledness in AGI generally. I don't know, there are multiple sides, but we're going to talk to Zach Kukoff, our first guest of the show. He's been on multiple times now. You know him, you love him. Zach Kukoff.

I was almost the first guest to do a three peat, three days in a row. You made it to. But we got bored. Depending on how now we do. We got bored of the swap, we.

Got bored with the swamp. Sorry it happened.

That's all right.

But, but we want to talk about trade deals today gets a little bit, you know, if this gets more chaotic on this topic, maybe we'll run the. Yeah, you'll get the.

It's a really perverse incentive, like I'm really hoping for horrible things to happen so I can come back and complete the three feet here.

Yeah, yeah. Take us from the swamp to the TSMC clean. The swamp meets clean room segment of the show. So kick us off. What, how, how would you characterize the news? Exactly what's happening and then we'll go into some analysis.

Yeah, So I think Everybody knows the H20 chip was specifically designed by Nvidia to meet Biden era restrictions on what chips could be exported to China. Right. So if you zoom out, you go back to April, the beginning of Trump, to what you have is basically A little bit of regulatory uncertainty for Nvidia spent a lot of money producing chips that are specifically designed to go China. And the admin comes back in April at the last minute and says, sorry, you can't export the chips we're putting in export controls for have a licensure requirements. Nvidia takes a huge like $8 billion revenue impairment basically on the cost of producing and not selling this huge swath of chips, by the way, at the same time, huge domestic market for H20s, lot of demand, even though they're weaker, a lot of demand from startups domestically for the same chips. Last night, basically between April and last night, you've seen a full court press by Nvidia for the last X number of months where Jensen has been doing a winning campaign, a successful campaign of influence in Washington trying to make two points exceptionally clear. The first point is we need to export these chips because same reasons John just said, the stock, American dominance. We want everyone to standardize, so on and so forth. We're losing the biggest market besides America. And, and also he's made the point of, look, we can also comply in a more regulatory aggressive way. Right? So there's the Chip Security act was introduced in Congress in May. It's working its way through the House, it's moving through the Senate right now. Basically, Nvidia has helped shape that act aggressively and it says, look, we have to make sure that there are ways to track the diversion of these chips, track where they're going. And, and this is still up in the air. Is there going to be a kill switch built into these chips? This is all to say last night, huge win for Nvidia. Admin comes out and says, okay, or really Nvidia comes out and says admin has told us we are going to be allowed to export these chips to China for the first time with some checks on them, but almost an unfettered way. Markets are up, obviously, Asian markets are up quite a bit. Nvidia is up quite a bit on this news. Huge economic win for Nvidia. Huge question mark from the national security folks who say, look, there are some real risks with these ships going out.

Is there a horse trade going on? Is this part of a larger bargaining discussion where we, even if it's not explicitly Nvidia chips for rare earth minerals, something else might be happening behind the scenes and this just looks like a little bit of a give from the United States and we might be expecting something or maybe we already got something. Talk to me about kind of the, the trade Imbalance and just the overall deal making that might be happening.

It's a really good point. This is the backdrop of all of this is the trade war between the US and China. And as much as it is to you and to me and probably to most of the TVPN folks, the most important question is AI. It is one of many questions the admin has to work through. Rare earths, by the way, is a huge one. Obviously, tariffs on a number of American products are a second one. Right. So the big question is, look, in April, the reason we stopped and we actually put in the admin, put in these export controls on Nvidia chips to begin with is in large part because of the ratcheting tension with the United States and China. And now part of the reason they're reducing some of these is because the Chinese market is opening up. We're having great progress. Ironically, Japan has been difficult to negotiate with. China has been a good negotiator on trade. And China really wants these chips to come in because even though they want to wean off Nvidia and go to Huawei as quickly as possible, the 20s are a bridge to get to Huawei's ascend architecture.

Right.

To get to a meme. Is the meme that we're going to get China dependent on US chips? Is it really just a meme? Like the idea that. The idea that, that they would just play, basically, Jensen makes a good point, which is like we want them to be dependent on our infrastructure, but the Chinese government and industry will likely just say, okay, great, we're happy to depend on these for another few years while we ramp up our own.

Did they promise not to reverse engineer them this time? Yeah, that's the question.

This time. Not this time. You know, we've done it thousands of times now. But this time we'll be different.

That's right. This time Charlie Brown can hit the football for once.

That's right.

So I guess some of the pushback was somebody yesterday when this news broke. Walter Bloomberg, prominent journalist who always follows journalistic standards, says Nvidia CEO Wong expects Chinese military won't use AI chips, which is good thing to expect, but probably unlikely. And then somebody quoted it and said the increasing willingness of Jensen Huang to boldly play both sides makes Nvidia one of the most serious threats to US national security and global technological dominance currently running. So very dramatic but valid point of view for this person to have. How do you think, have you been surprised at how Jensen can effectively go? I mean, I wouldn't necessarily play Both sides. But you know, the first thing he did when the chip, when the initial H20 ban happened is he flew over there and he started working on a new R and D center in Shanghai. So he is definitely a capitalist. But it's been interesting to see the other factor here is like, you're running the most valuable company in the world. You do have quite a bit of leverage. And he almost, in some ways, he's sort of like holding up the, you know, the entire global economy. Right. A couple bad quarters and everything.

It does feel like the good ending that I'm hoping for is like, this is a stabilizing force for the world in general. And it's not. It's not escalatory. And even if it's like, okay, we're going to be competing more on chatbots and tech companies and stuff, it's like this moves like the potential for a Taiwan invasion down and like, I care a lot more about that than did. Did Huawei ship a lot?

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know.

What's your take?

I don't know if I agree with that. Well, I'll say a few things. You guys had the Apple in China author on, right?

Yeah.

So a big part of Apple in China was the whole shtick of Apple comes in, says, we're going to teach the Chinese how to do what we do domestically in America. And then they do it. They get better at it. They no longer need Apple, and they have a domestic market that can produce in the same way.

Yeah.

That's the risk of this export. Right. Which is that there's no dependents. Think Jensen's a really talented operator. And by the way, the evidence for that is there was a big letter that went out critiquing his trip to Beijing. Only two senators signed it. Right. It was banks on the right and Warren on the left. And if you think that they didn't try to get other people in Congress to sign that letter to, you would be shocked at how few people were willing to go on the record on the anti Nvidia side of this. Right.

Interesting.

The other thing I would say to you is if you think these chips aren't going to get diverted to CCP use. Right. To military use, to play use. I think that's a little bit of a naive perspective. Right. It's impossible to prevent them.

Yes. But my question is Apple not use.

Them for the thing that's most critical to national security.

Yeah.

It's like, would be great if. It'd be great if they could set up a local instead of of Xai's new really ramp that up in China.

But okay, so if the slight difference that I'm kind of steel manning here is if Apple goes into China and teaches a bunch of CNC engineers how to mill aluminum to make iPhones and they explicitly demand that those manufacturers have other clients like Huawei for smartphones, like they are building up an internal capacity. If you're just selling in GPUs that are fully assembled, yes, you could tear them down and rebuild. But maybe there is enough lock in in the Cuda ecosystem that you can't just swap out and shift off.

John is here's another headline from the Journal just a couple months ago. Nvidia to set up research center in Shanghai. So they are setting up and investing in R D locally, all of that, whatever they know how to do there, whatever they learn how to do there, it will all disseminate broadly into the Chinese economy. And that's just a fact. And if somebody disagrees with that, I think it's and I guess we are.

Seeing like cracks in the Cuda ecosystem lock in right now with AMD and ROCM and ROCM and so people and the TPU and Trainium and Amazon and I'm sure Meta's thinking about custom silicon and on device inference at Apple. So it's like yeah, if you can go and train a frontier model on these H20s and then distill it down and run it on Huawei ascends that does pull their capabilities forward.

Correct.

How? What is the mood in D.C. around the idea of like AI as being a really impactful military technology right now? Because for most people it's knowledge retrieval with ChatGPT and code gen with cursor cloud code, Windsurf, Devin and beyond that it's like okay, my B2B SaaS company is a little bit more efficient and I have some AI agents stuff in there. But like people aren't really saying like you know, oh it's transforming everything yet they're not showing those examples even though that's kind of the narrative concretely besides like yeah, you know, prompt defeat America, you know, like get me from where we are here to there and walk me through the mood in Washington around AI as a military technology.

Specific I think people on the military side are probably some of the earliest to realize the value of AI for a couple of reasons. One, there are already real battlefields today there are theaters of war where automated decisions are being made that are life and death decisions and putting Aside perspective, in any of these wars, whether you're looking at Russia, Ukraine or whether you're looking at Israel in the Middle east, there are already real instances today of AI deployed on Frontier Live to operate things like drones to operate things like targeting infrastructure. Like that's, that's happening today. It's not happening in America, but that is happening today. The military is very good at keeping abreast of what our compatriots are doing overseas. That's the first thing. Second thing I would say to you is the big unlock for a lot of this is the decreasing influence of humans in warfare. Right. Like in 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, if you were an Air Force pilot, that meant you were actually sitting in a plane doing Top Gun shit. Today if you're an Air Force pilot, pilot. Pilot means you're in Arizona in a cooled warehouse piloting a drone. That's like remotely dropping bombs on things that unlock. There's no reason that should just be the case. We take them out of the cockpit, put them into the warehouse. The next step on that is why have the human piloting at all? Right. Why not have the autonomous pilot of the drone making those decisions effectively and actually fighting the frontier of war for us. So there's no risk at all domestically to our people going into war. So there's a lot of enthusiasm. Maybe enthusiasm, not the right word. There's a lot of awareness of the value of AI in warfare. I think the double edged sword of that is if you're looking at, if you're concerned about an invasion of Taiwan, it's far more concerning thinking about a China, the PLA army is a cup. Is not an up to date army in many respects it's far more concerning thinking about a PLA army that has access to supercomputer clusters built by H20s or other kinds of American ships and being H20, that is able to more effectively fight in Taiwan rather than a PLA army still fighting conventional warfare where it's never been able to excel.

Yeah, I guess my pushback or question is just around, I hear you, that AI is being used on the battlefield. When I think of AI on the battlefield, I think basic image recognition, look at a satellite image, pick out the missile silos, or if you're a drone, it's a very, very small neural network. I haven't heard a lot of concrete examples of like yeah, we're running a large transformer based AI system to make wartime decisions, but at the same time like that feels like a year away.

Yeah, but who's gonna please. You know what, what government is that? Is that good PR for any military or government in the world? Hey, by the way, we're big. We're building the biggest supercluster ever. And it's for killing. It's a killing machine. Yeah, like who, who wants to go out and say that? One question I have is, is the MO is part of why Nvidia has been so effective on lobbying? You mentioned not being only being able to get. If you can only get Elizabeth Warren to sign your doc, you're in a against, you're in a rough spot. But I saw. So in 2023 they spent about half a million on total on lobbying. 2024 they spent.

This is Nvidia.

Yeah, they spent 640,000. But then in Q1 of this year they spent nearly a million. So they've clearly ramped it up. But how much do you think they benefit from just being the largest company in the world and everybody being Nvidia bag holder some way or another? Right?

I mean success, success. You know, if you, if you're the largest company in the world, people want to be a part of that also. Look, the number of dollars you spend is not always the proxy for lobbying. Right? Like the hard thing to understand is Jensen is spending more time than probably any other of his peer CEOs. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah. His travel budget is probably bigger than his lobbying budget. Right?

That's exactly correct. Why would you need to have 30 registered lobbyists running around when your CEO has a personal relationship? This is the new thing. This is the sort of unique aspect of this admin relative to other admins, which is there is a retail politics relationship based components of a lot of this work that did not exist before. And if you're Jensen and you can have the great relationship with POTUS yourself, you don't need 30 lobbyists running around. You can fly to Mar a Lago.

He's in founder mode. And let's not forget Donald Trump. Vacheron Historiques owner, watch guy.

Yep.

Jensen recently spotted with a $1 million Richard Mille. So.

God, I've never felt more poor in my life.

If you go to shake a hand in Washington and you got a bare wrist, you might be getting booted. But if you pull up with a hitter, you're going to the moon.

What do you guys. What are you boys rocking today?

What's the wash? I actually forgot to put on my watch.

Bare wrist today.

But I typically wear Vacheron Constantin Patrimony.

Oh Very nice.

There you go. And Jordi wears the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak.

Anyways, anything else we should be looking out for this week?

Only other thing I would say to you, look just John, to your point on who's using actually sophisticated AI, it's not going to be today. At least what's declassified today is not going to be hey, we blew up this thing. It's a lot of cyber warfare. Right? Like and as more and more things are about hey, I want to disrupt the infrastructure of my opponents. Their water infrastructure, their electrical infrastructure, their banking and financial infrastructure. That's where I are increasingly being used. What you should look for is look, do the chips get exported? Does it actually happen? Does it get flipped again? Right? What are the gunks in the works? The requirements on licensure that enter and then also what happens on Ship Security Act. Does it make it through? Does it actually get through House? Great momentum. Senate tbd Too early to say.

Okay, that's a great take because I feel like right now today I would be more worried about a CCP controlled large language model, transformer based large model just spamming the United States Internet and social networks with a bunch of AI slop that's slightly anti capitalist then which is happening then Xi Jinping querying please invade Taiwan. I don't think that the, I don't.

Think that the win Xi Jinping is in is in.

Don't make any mistakes.

Please invade Taiwan. Don't make any, don't lose any troops.

Yeah, make it better.

Make it better. But yeah, I think that that's maybe even it's more of a clear and present danger today.

That's right. That's right. And by the way that's tick tock. That's tick tock today if you're opening up TikTok, it's not AI but that's the soft power component of China's influence over America.

Yes. And being able to, and being able to train that model which is large and is probably the next version does require a lot of Nvidia chips was probably trained on a lot of Nvidia chips doesn't have the same quantifiable, you know, oh, this many parameters, this many gigawatts, this, this many tokens went in but if it gets 1% better and you have control over it, it is, it is a risk and it should and it should be considered.

Last question, any, any chatter on the ground in D.C. about the windsurf Google deal or are they going to find out next week on LinkedIn so funny.

I had a conversation over the weekend with somebody who's part of this like neo grandeisian movement, which is to say very sort of Lina Khan orientation. And I asked her, I said, are people waking up to this, like, what's going on? Why is nobody talking about it? And her only answer to me was stay tuned. So my only answer to you is stay tuned.

Mm.

Ominous.

Last question on the TikTok sale. Polymarket has TikTok sale announced in 2025 at a 35% chance right now. And TikTok banned in 2025. I guess it was already banned, but it's just like been limbo. But, but have you been hearing anything on or do you have any, any interesting takes or insight about what might happen to TikTok since we just landed on this topic randomly? I don't know. Yeah, prep this.

I mean there's no political demand for it. There's no constituency who's making the argument of. Because if you were a pro TikTok ban, you got what you wanted in theory, non forceable, but you got what you wanted in theory and you've now taken the wind and you've gone home. And if you're anti tick tock ban.

What about, what about my American toting mag 7 CEO Mark Zuckerberg? Is he not a constituent that wants TikTok banned?

I think it's. If he comes out to publicly pushing for that, it's like an antitrust nightmare.

That's exactly right.

I mean like the whole TikTok story proves that you potentially can build a new social app if you're willing to spend, or at least you could in the rise of vertical video, you could in that moment create a meta competitor. If you were willing to spend $20 billion, you know, incinerate, you know, incinerate $20 billion or whatever they did to just spend money to acquire all the users and build your own network.

That's exactly right. And there is nobody on the ground in D.C. who's using their limited lobbying dollars for the TikTok ban. What Zuck wants is better data construction. Better data center construction. Right. Fix the energy policy in this country. And if it's. By the way, it's a, it's a zero negative sum system. You can only work on so many things during every congressional term, every admin term.

So not zero sum.

It's even worse. It's even worse than zero sub. It's everybody's got to lose.

It's even worse zero sum system. Whoever loses the least wins.

That Is unfortunately true in politics.

Welcome to the swamp. Zucks says he's building a one gigawatt cluster, aiming for a five gigawatt cluster.

I love. This should count as a three peat because we've told you.

Yeah, I know.

Three times now. The last, last question.

Last question. This is fun. I know.

I appreciate it. I'll take the 3ft.

He said, he said 5 gigawatt cluster in a few years. In several years. That feels further out than most of the AI hyper accelerationists. Is that an energy policy thing? What are his clear asks like what, what would, what, what would. What would he want to change in Washington around energy policy?

This is a huge energy policy problem. Energy policy is, is annoying because it happens both at the federal level, but also at the state level and even at the local level.

Right?

You get things like zoning. If you guys read the abundance book, you get things like zoning that impact you at the very local level. And the critique on the left right now for a lot of these questions. Hard, it's a hard one for these folks to work on is, gosh, look at all the environmental problems of building the data centers near communities and so on and so forth. And I would expect that in an Ocasio Cortez administration or a Buttigieg administration to be a big problem in four years. What Zuck wants today is make it easier for me to build. Right. Reduce regulation at the state and local level for me to actually construct data centers. Let me bring new nuclear reactors online. Right? Bring new sources of energy online faster in this country and, and set one federal standard to regulate many of the rules such that you don't have different states and different localities who all have patchwork systems. Because if you need multiple people to coordinate all at once, that's where you get these long timelines and complexity.

It's going to be the delta smelt versus superintelligence that is really the battle to watch.

That's wild.

Great having you on, Zach.

Thanks for having me to have you.

On again very soon.

We'll talk to you soon. Thanks.

Have a great day.

Take care.

Well, if you're looking to pick up a hitter and you're heading to Washington, go to getbezel.com do not bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. You can go to your bezel concierge and say, I'm heading to Washington D.C. i'm talking to the big dog, talking to the big man. I'm going to mar a lago and I need a hitter and they Will hook you up.

Go to getbezels.com don't if you get a meeting with Jensen, show respect and wear an rm.

We're an RM where an rm. I want to talk about the history of Richard Mill. It's fascinating. There's a. I found a good thread. I also did a ChatGPT deep research report. I found an interesting.

And that by the way, little, little note in there. I forget what the line was but we said it's the cold emails, the warm intros, the deep research. The deep research and the deep research for the show in some instances is literally deep research.

So the watch business here says Richard Mille has no history, no tradition and looks like a Happy Meal toy. So how did it become a $1.7 billion brand in 20 years selling watches that cost more than a Ferrari? Here's the wild story and so very, very interesting story. Most the thing that popped out to me was that there is a.

So that does not look like a Happy Meal toy.

I think it looks fantastic. So global juggernaut of ultra luxurious watchmaking. They call it the billionaire's handshake in elite circles. And so he was born in the south of France in 1951. Richard Mille is the name of both the founder and the company. He became obsessed with precision machinery and fast cars at an early age. As a teenager he was such a motorsport enthusiast that he would take the train to Monaco for Grand Prix weekends, even sleeping trackside to snag a prime view of racing legends like Jackie Stewart.

That's probably not possible anymore. If you try to sleep, yeah you'll.

Immediately they're like, you can't be homeless in Monaco.

Where's your $50,000 wristband that you.

Yeah, but I mean back in the 50s, I mean racing and even F1 was a total like it was just like a bunch of dudes being guys basically. It was not, it was not, it was not like heavily sponsored, heavily organized. Like I don't even know if the FIA existed at the time anyway. So Jackie Stewart called the Nurburgring the green hell because it was so demanding and it stands to this day. It's a great quote. And so in 1967, he is 16 years old and he is. Richard Mille is there and he witnesses this famous crash. Ferrari driver Lorenzo Bandini's car bursts into flames right in front of him. And the incident left a vivid impression of the extremes of engineering and danger in racing. So he winds up Joining the in 1974 he joins a small watchmaker, Finhore and then in the 90s he'd become the head of watchmaking at the Parisian jeweler Maubousant, where he successfully launched a watch line for the firm. And so he had extensive experience handling luxury jewelry and fine chronographs. But he was dissatisfied. In Mill's own words, working with others meant he was often held back from creating timepieces that could break boundaries. He felt the watch world was too conservative, too boring and too self centered, as he later put it. And he longed to push design and engineering far beyond the status quo. By the late 1990s, with decades of industry know how under his belt, he was nearing 50 and facing a now or never moment. He decided to create his own watch brand as a sort of 50th birthday present to himself. One that would realize his wildest ideas without compromise. So in 1999 he co founds his company, he has a trusted friend, they established this new firm and Audemars Piguet, they partner with the high, with the R and D firm, the R and D arm of ap, which is Renaud Papi, AR, R P. And they get this legendary engineer, Giulio Papi and Fabrice Deschanel to help turn sketches into reality. So AP got a small stake in the venture, but otherwise they own about 10%. Yeah, they own about 10%. So they own like pretty much everything. So the whole idea was to apply, apply the cutting edge materials from Formula one, aerospace and other advanced fields to high horology.

And to be clear, this is the opposite of a outsider story. This is an extreme insider leveraging every possible advantage that he has, but then winning on massive scale and effectively doing the impossible. Yeah, because for most people today, if you said I want to start a luxury watch brand, you could raise a billion dollars and it would be very difficult to do it. And that's why Rolex and Patek and RM and these brands actually end up being very valuable is the amount of money that you would need to incinerate to try to recreate a brand with legacy like that. A brand that could be 200 years old. The other thing is time. Right. So you can create a luxury brand, but it's not that appealing as an investor or founder if it's going to take you 100 years because you won't be around to see. Yeah, to see your, you know, really achieve your goal.

I was texting with Sean Frank from the Ridge Wallet as the CEO of Ridge Wallet today, this morning and, and I was kind of explaining to him in this piece that Richard Mille is considered like an, like an overnight success like the startup, like the massive quick winner in watches. And he's like only in, only in fine watchmaking is grinding for 20 years to become something successful like an overnight success. Because every other firm is hundreds of years old basically. And so they struggled a ton to actually build the first watch because they wanted to build a three dimensional object showcasing this extreme technology and they wanted to create a racing machine on the wrist.

And they did.

And they did. And so there were blood and tears in the startup phase. Innovations that took a long time to become reliable, resulting in years delay for the launch of the first model. It took them two years from the company's founding to perfect their inaugural watch.

Which is not even actually that much time.

It's a lot of time if you think about I raised money and, and the seed investor is like so when you guys launching you got 12 to 18 months of Runway and you're like it's going to be two years.

Yeah. But I think true R and D, true product development can take easily take even if you're moving really really quickly.

Open AI figma. Plenty of other companies.

Sigma was like four years to build a piece of software.

Plenty of great companies took a long time to build like and actually deploy the thing. But it's certainly a narrative violation around like the like. Okay, I got into yc, I'm launching my company in three months. Launch early, get feedback.

You know, it's just like RORA was a similar story.

Yeah. How long was it?

It probably was 18 months and it took you know, an incredible amount of back and forth with the design firm that we work with and Charlie who really led the product development and. Yeah, and then you have a certification process and. And again I think good things take time. So 18 months doesn't, doesn't really sound crazy at all.

24 bro.

24.

Two years. But he was prepared for this. He had plunged into the project knowing it would be exhilarating, exciting, challenging, fun and a lot of hard work. Finally, in 2001, the Richard Mille brand unveiled its first creation, the RM001 Tourbillon. And immediately sent shock waves through the conservative Swiss watch industry. Only 17 examples were made, but that was enough to make history. It wasn't just the bold tonneau shaped case. I was looking for the word of the shape. It's the tonneau shaped and the skeletonized dial exposing futuristic guts that grabbed attention. It was the audacity of the whole package. It was high complication, had a manual tourbillon which is the little spinning thing that keeps the time more accurate when your wrist is moving around. Packed with technical innovations. A base plate of reinforced carbon fiber, a torque indicator and a dynamometer to monitor the movement's performance. Dynamometer sounds like some American dynamism. I love it.

How American dynamism impelled are you? I don't know. Dynamometer.

Dynamometer, yeah. If you don't have a dynamometer on your wrist and you call yourself an American dynamometer.

Interesting things. I just did the math. They've averaged making 2,500 watches a year since their founding.

Wow.

So low volume. But it's like 53,000 watches of all time.

Yeah. Crazy. And also they, you know, the engineering stuff really comes through. Most watches have 48 hour power reserve. RM went with 72 power reserve. And there are some crazy, crazy stories here. So this is where the conspiracy theory comes in. So the price tag.

John, I gotta tell you.

Yeah, please.

One of our dear friends, who I will not name, who is a size lord and capital allocator in real time, just sent me a picture of his RM on his wrist while a helicopter is taking off in the background. So anyway, beautiful, beautiful piece.

It's a fantastic piece. Okay, so anyway, so RM launched and it was $135,000 for the first watch this guy will ever Launch is in 2001. $135,000. This is twice as expensive as the next most expensive tourbillon. So just take the tourbillon. Watches are already really expensive. It's incredibly complicated. Take the most expensive one and just double it. And so there is a. So people are Patek fans. They're shocked. They're bluntly asked Richard Mille why he thought anyone would pay such a sum for his newcomer watch. And Richard Mille said, very easy. Because we are not competing with Patek Philippe nor anyone else. In other words, he's playing in the league of his own.

So, so that that line doesn't typically work on a pitch call. At least in the software business.

We're not competing.

So you're charging, you're building this database company, you're charging twice as much as a full enterprise snowflake deployment. And you're going to win because you say you're not competing with them.

Yes, yes. And so orders came in as soon as the first watches went out the door. But there is this interesting conspiracy theory which is that there was a mistake stake and the reason that they are so expensive is because the someone, he.

Was doing a print ad.

Yes. And so. Okay, so A rumor has floated around that Richard Mill's first advertisement, which was in the Financial Times, baby, you know it. You love it in the pink sheets in the. So he buys an advertisement in the Financial Times and the advertising department misprints the price. They added a zero. He wanted to sell the RM001 for $13,500. They printed in the ad $135,000, 10 times the price. And what's interesting is that. So the ad goes out according to legend. The RM team is like, you guys botched it. Like, who's gonna buy this? It's only a $13,000. What, you're trying to sell it for 135. This is crazy. But then they start getting calls. I got to have it. I got to have it. $135. I've been, I have $135,000 burning a hole in my pocket right now. And I would love this on my wrist. I want it on my wrist. And so Mille received so many inquiries at that price, he decided to stick with the higher number. And so this is why it's conspiracy theory is because Richard Mille, as a brand denies that this ever happened. But the legend obviously, terrible, terrible.

If it came out that, yeah, they wanted to make a $13,000 watch and then they accidentally charged 1:35. And then they look around, the orders are coming in, they're like, wait, we just, you know, a thousand acts are, you know.

Yeah, but this is a classic example of what's called a Veblen Good. So in economics, typically as price increases, demand decreases if supply is constrained. So if you raise the price, people buy less. With a Veblen good, a higher price actually increases demand. And it's reserved for perfect examples of this, like luxury goods where it is a status symbol. And now when you see the billionaire's handshake going on, you know, that's $100,000 watch at least. Potentially much more.

Pricing is intimately tied with the way in which people feel about a product. Right?

100%.

A good example of this is the GT4RS. It's incredible to drive, but people want it. Maybe. I know very few people that can honestly say, if price was. No, wasn't part of the equation, would you want a GT3RS or a GT4RS? And there's like an aesthetic component as well. But even though many people, if they just drive both cars, find that the mid engine version is fantastic and enjoyable.

They'Ll still decide GT3 for the status. An even stronger example in the car world, is probably like the Lamborghini Revitin or the Lamborghini Veneno. Are you familiar with these? So these are extremely limited Lamborghini releases and they're built on the existing platforms. So they take a Huracan and then they restyle it and it looks way more extreme, way more. And they tune it and they improve it as much as they can. But these limited Lamborghinis sell for millions of dollars. And really like you're buying it because it's signaling that you have that much money. I mean, and to some extent a Lamborghini is a, is a Veblen good to begin with, but this is like the most extreme. And of course a Veblen good is not purely binary. You can be more Veblen than the other and more, more of the, more of the decision making can be driven by the higher price than others anyway. Richard Mill's conviction proved infectious. Despite industry skepticism, the RM001 found buyers almost immediately. Orders came in and a GQ later observed. Richard Mille's very existence knocked some of the stuffiness out of luxury watchmaking by showing that expensive watches don't have to be staid or classical.

And so, yeah, they've always been controversial, but for what? For what RM does, they do it extremely well. Yes, it is. They, they own their category. They truly don't have competition. Any other watch that I've seen that tries to emulate what they do, it does look like a cheap knockoff.

100%.

And yep, it is true. You know, they basically anytime you have a situation where insiders come into an industry and have every possible advantage, but then absolutely hit like such a grand slam, you just got to appreciate greatness totally.

And I think that what matters with the story of the actual watches like the RMS is that it's not just a knockoff Nautilus with twice the price. It's differentiated on price. Yes, but it's also differentiated on shape. There's no other major watch that looks exactly the Tonneau shape. In my opinion, the putting skeletonized so forward doesn't exist anywhere. So that's like the fourth, the third or fourth point. And then the last point that's interesting is that every luxury watch brand, they're not telling you this is a rugged watch. And Richard Mille was all about ruggedness. So there's an interesting point in here. He says one of his breakthrough strategies in establishing credibility was to demonstrate the ruggedness of his high tech creations in a way that bordered on outrageous. Outrageousness at watch fairs and presentations. He would literally take a prototype and throw it on the ground to prove it wouldn't break. This stunt wasn't just for shock value. It was making a point that a Richard Mille wasn't a delicate museum piece, but a luxury watch that could withstand anything. The company engineered every component for durability. Cases were curved for strength and comfort. Movements were torture tested with massive G forces and stocks. As one company monograph described, prototypes were subjected to simply brutal trials, including a device nicknamed the Goat's Foot, a heavy pendulum hammer that smacks the watch from all angles. If a part failed, Mill's team iterated until it survived. The result was that these extravagant watches could truly be worn during.

Which is why. Yeah, yeah, this is why. People see somebody playing tennis in an RM and they're like, oh, I can't believe they would be playing, doing some sport with a watch like this. And it's like, no, it actually was designed to do this. And it does it very well.

Yes, the tennis thing is a very interesting example. The first athletic ambassador was F1 driver Philippe Massa, who joined the Richard mille family in 2004.

Related to Massa?

Yeah. The last name has two S's.

He flipped it. It was so powerful. He flipped.

And so in practice sessions and races, he wore a prototype RM chronograph to see how it held up under high G forces and vibration. So even if it's not going to destroy the watch, it still might throw off the time. And actually having a watch that could hold up, maybe it's not in, maybe it's not, you know, remarkably important for a watch, but it's a cool, cool stat. It's novel, it makes it special, it makes it different than everything else. But this partnership paid off dramatically. During a violent crash at the 2004 Hungarian Grand Prix, Matt Moss car was wrecked, but both the driver and his Richard Mille RM006 tourbillon walked away unscathed. The watch's carbon nanofiber movement proving its toughness in extreme conditions. And then the other tennis example that I wanted to get to was in 2010. After years of experimentation, the brand introduced one of its most famous collaborations, the RM027 Tourbillon. With tennis icon Rafael Nadal, this watch became legendary for its absurdly low weight, under 20 grams. With the strap achieved through lithium alloy movement and skeletonized design, Nadal, a fierce baseline player, put it through its paces in Grand Slam matches. In fact, Nadal reportedly broke five Parrot 5 different prototypes of the RM027. So that's probably like $2 million worth of sale.

It's not like the prototypes actually cost the retail price, but yeah, remember these.

Things are 99% margin apparently, if the rumors to be believed, but. And so this allowed them to test it and the engineers perfected it to withstand his powerful swings. The finalized watch accompanied Nadal to victory at the 2010 US Open. Visibly strapped to his wrist as he hoisted the trophy. The sight was astonishing. A $525,000 tourbillon on a sweat soaked wristband, surviving every smash, every serve. It sent a clear message that wearing a Richard Mille was compatible with even the most intense athletic pursuits. A perfect melding of luxury and performance.

Per another perfect example. Our friend who sent us this video is actively heli skiing. Really putting, putting it through its paces, actually not at this very moment in time, but.

That'S hilarious. Okay. And then of course once, once Richard Mille became kind of dominant in sports, they wound up, you know, breaking out slowly. So in, in 2011, this is over a decade after into the build up of the business. They partner with Hollywood actress Michelle Yeoh and co design the RM051 tourbillon that featured a diamond set phoenix motif. They did a collab with Natalie portman on the RM19 01 with a dramatic spider design. And they're just doing all these like anything they can do to create something that's extremely unique, identify with like equestrian polo players, yachtsman, extreme skiers. So just really focused on this brand and willing to do anything, even if it means building something from scratch. Like a piece unique, uncompromising functionality under real world stress, which is just, it's a promise that no other brand is even trying to make.

Yeah, they own their category.

They found a new category and then they dominated it.

It's absolutely beautiful. I'm pissed. There's no Harvard case study, Harvard Business School case study on the business yet.

There are some GQ articles, there are some Hodinkee interviews.

I need, I need a proper SWOT analysis.

For sure. For sure.

Guess we should go to Grok4 heavy and say write a Harvard Business School case study on Richard Mill. Yeah, please include a SWOT analysis. Be good, don't make any mistakes.

That's kind of what I did with Deep Research. I basically asked for that.

But no, it's just such an incredible story because it's effectively. It was incredible execution all the way from founding until today, but still doing something that most people would have said was completely impossible.

Yeah. No discounts ever. 5,000 watches per year only sold in elite Boutiques, Dubai, Monaco, Beverly Hills. Partners with athletes in rich sports. F1, tennis, golf.

Yeah, there's a certain podcaster that we really want to get. I want him to start, you know, because he gets really into his shows. Having, having, you know, an that one.

Would just make sense because of the.

Weight and the performance.

Performance. Yeah.

He's putting up five, six, seven hours in the studio.

But it gets toy, it gets hate. They call it a Happy Meal toy. They call it the rich man's Invicta. They say it looks like plastic and say it has a lack of heritage. It's only 24 years old, but it doesn't matter. RM is here to stay. It's redefining luxury in real time. Anyway, fun story. If you're planning to build a new watch brand, get on Linear. Linear App Linear is purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Start building at Linear App Linear really.

Is the Richard Mill of product management. You know, platforms.

People have been saying it, we've been.

Saying it, we've been saying about 10.

Seconds ago and when you go to sell a watch online, got to use Numeral HQ Sales Tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance@numeralhq.com Anyway, David Protein, crazy stuff happening there. I have, I still don't know what's going on. I don't really know what's. I have some people texting me with their theses. I want to hear yours. But let me kick it off with some basic background. So, David Protein announced yesterday our commitment to protein has led us to a strange place. Boiled cod, we're selling it now and a week ago it seems like Peter Rahal, the CEO friend of the show was teasing this by saying, what should we make next? We will make what wins. And he said cookies and cream, salted calmer, caramel, key lime pie, frozen cod. And cod lost by a huge margin but they made that. And Ryan Harmon says cod lime pie. So maybe he's in on this stunt. I'm sniffing a stunt here. We'll figure it out. We'll get to the bottom of this. So Andy Rosenberg says David teased the boiled cod product on its website months ago because 75% of the calories from David come from protein. And the only thing that's higher is boiled cod, which has 85% of its calories coming from protein. The built bar is at 52%, the quest bar is at 47% and the bear Bells, which is delicious, but it's more like a candy bar is something like 40%.

And so that's your dirty little secret?

Oh, yeah. If I'm picking between David and Bear Bells, it's like, you know, how hard am I going today?

Well, let's be real. You've been known to have three in a day. So you might do two Davids and then a Bear Bell as a little treat.

Also the Bare Bells, there's some that, like, they get you down the funnel of like, this one's like actually a protein bar. And then you get like, well, like, I tried them all. And like the one that's just like pure caramel tastes the best. So I'll stick with that. And then you read the back of the label for the Bear Bells caramel one and you're like, wait, this is actually just a candy bar. But it's delicious and it does have some protein and they have a great product. I think Bare Bells is fantastic. But there's a time and a place for everything. Sometimes you got to eat boiled cod, apparently. But there's a big question. So they put up an out of home ad campaign. Hopefully they did that on adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I don't know if they went with Ad Quick. They should have, but the ad says boiled cod. It has a picture of the. Of the cod, and it appears to be in New York with a gray. Is that a Boxster driving by? That's some.

So I think they're actually selling cod.

You can just buy it. Are they actually selling Just buy it. Okay, so first off, my reaction, this sounds gross. I don't like this. I don't care how high protein it is. I'm not into it. So what's going on? They bought a billboard. Hopefully Mad Quick. And it feels like maybe a stunt of some sort. But they are such a young company. This might actually confuse people because people are still just learning about David. But I was talking to a friend of the show and he was saying to me that, you know, at a certain point, a little inside scoop on boiled cod. View from perspective of an earned media earned discussion as opposed to paid media ads. A segment of TBPN like this one proves that if people are talking about a company, that's usually a win. Especially when the convo is about cod having the highest Protein to calorie ratio of any food. David bars are second only to boiled cod. Can't beat them, join them. And so that's an interesting take is that, hey, all earned media is good media. But if this gets out of control and all of a sudden people think of David bars is cod flavored. And when they go to grab the next David bar, they're like, that could be a risk. But it seems like it's going well.

If I order a pack of these, will you.

I will. I will eat one on the show. I will test it.

Okay, we'll work on it. And then holding you to that.

And then the other question is like, it seems like they're in a battle with some other brands over their supplier. David Barr. It seems like they acquired their. Their supplier. The key ingredient supplier makes EPG or esterfied propoxylated glycol, a fat alternative developed by Epogee and made from modified plant based oil. It's a controversial ingredient choice because it's less natural than raw meat like boiled cod. Boiled cod seems like the other end of the barbell. But I need to know more and I'm curious to know how this played out, how this is working and are they seeing results from this campaign because it's exciting stuff. That's cool. Anyway, if you. If they do wind up buying that EPG supplier and they need to get some new clients, they got to get.

Oh, they already did.

Okay, well then they got to get on Adio Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company the next level and get started for free. In other news, what else we got? We got a bunch of stuff. We got Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service.

You were on a number one performance.

Benchmark, number one in competitive bake offs. Number one ranking on G2. Fin AI high yield. Harry says this is going to end in tears. He's quote tweeting Jim Cramer a new acronym for the meme stocks that just won't quit. Park park. Your money tier.

Applovin, Robinhood and Coinbase, the four wolves of this bull market.

They are the four wolves of this. Of this bull market.

How's Applovin doing? I haven't. You haven't seen people post charts, but.

Well, there was all that conspiracy theory that like, they weren't making any money. But we talked to Sean Frank and he was like, I'm using Applovin. It's like, it's maybe not the best, but it's pretty good. And I'm actually paying them. So it is real.

Year to date, they're flat, but they're still $118 billion business.

Okay, okay. Well, that's pretty good. Interesting. In other News.

Yeah, their 2024 revenue is 4.7 billion. We'll see what they put up this year. There was an interesting post here. So this founder that has been beefing with Sean McGuire, Sean McGuire, creating a bunch of websites about him, emailing his Boss, emailing his LPs, things like that, has been going around claiming that he's a portfolio, a Sequoia portfolio founder, when in reality he got a 10k scout check and then his company shut down. So kind of throwing stones from a bit of a glass house there. But, yeah, if you get a scout check from a venture scout from a fund, that does not qualify as getting an investment from that company.

Yeah, that's true. This is a violation of the social contract in Silicon Valley. And Sean clearly looked this up and was like, wait, did we invested this guy? A long time ago. Dug through it.

And so, I mean, the whole thing with, the whole thing with Sequoia is like, at this point, they have a lot of companies in the portfolio, but I think if you, if you actually look at the stats, it's like, like 99 of companies that are like, still operating. And so he would know, he would know if they had done the deal.

So Sean, really roast him. How much does Sequoia invest in your company? What partner led the investment? And what happened to your company? Can you please enlighten me? The answer is Sequoia invested 0. Sequoia Scout invested 10k and the company failed. Rough. Well, don't get in the mud pit if you don't want to get muddy.

If you hate mud wrestling, if you.

Go in the mud pit of x.com with Sean McGuire, you're gonna get muddy.

That's right.

He's gonna. He's gonna roast you.

Brian Singerman has a new fund. Yes, PT is a big backer. The TechCrunch is reporting.

Interesting strategy. Did you read this over?

Yeah, I was going to get into it. So, former founders fund GP Brian Singerman and co founder managing partner of Quiet Capital, Lee Linden are seeking over 500 million for a new fund called GPX. Love the name. Three people familiar with their strategy told TechCrunch. So sounds like TechCrunch is scooping them, which I'm sure they're not happy with, but it makes sense that these kind of things get out. So GPX uses a two pronged strategy. The firm will invest approximately 20% of the capital into funds managed by emerging VCs who are targeting pre seed and seed stage startups. And the remaining capital will go towards partnering with emerging managers, the same emerging managers you would imagine on leading later stage investments most most likely at series B of their breakout companies. So oftentimes, let's say precede focus or early stage fund does a pre seed round for a company, they end up growing really quickly. GPX can come in and basically provide the capital in order to help that manager actually lead later rounds versus that manager going having to raise an SPV from 50 people. It's harder to actually win the deal because it can take a lot of time. The capital is not actually fully ready to deploy.

I've been in that situation where the early stage seed fund seed fund is like, you know, yeah, we'd love to lead this next round. Just give me six months to like, you know, actually close all the money. I'm going to go around and you have this weird like I got to talk to this person, then I got to talk to you and then I got to talk to this person, I got to talk to you and I got talked about this person and it's just so much back and forth. So if you have this fund of funds backer who just lets you stretch one round further, really, really cool concept and I think it could work out really well. Yeah, Brian Singerman, great, great investor, great person. I always had a fun chat with him when I was at Founders Fund. So excited to see him launch this fund and kind of get it going with a new strategy because it seems really cool. Anyway, we should talk about eight Sleep. We launched a new ad today.

Let's play.

Want to play? Our are advertising for Eat Sleep.

This is the big challenge for our production team is just playing videos on the show. They can do everything else. It's pretty complicated but it's not easy. It's no joke.

We got this. So let's play the ad and then we will tell you more about Eat Sleep. People see the three hour streams, the hundreds of guests, the thousands of clips.

For us, it's the work that happens.

Off mic, the cold emails, the warm info, the deep research sleep. Whether it's tracking down a viral poster.

Or interviewing a Fortune 500 CEO, staying.

Sharp is non negotiable.

Podcasters sleep on eight sleep.

It's so funny that we did the white suits that day because it was just complete chance that we were in white suits that day.

Complete chance. It's Funny. So some backstory on this. Andrea was on X saying this is what you get when you're allowed to have creative freedom with advertising. Can't wait to see more of these. Well, more are coming so you can look out for that. But the cool thing here with the eight Sleep team, we didn't tell them the concepts for the shoot. We didn't get them notes on the shoot. All we did was actually send them this final cut that we posted and they were like, this is awesome.

Rip it.

And that's part of what we're doing. We make these for fun and it's a good creative process for the team. But it was cool.

Yeah. It's also like an homage to the other eight Sleep partnership announcement between Charlotte Claire and eight Sleep that they clearly spent a lot of time concepting and shooting and we were just like, let's match that one for one. And it'll be a lot of. It'll be cool and it'll also be funny. And so we had a lot of fun shooting that. So you can go to 8sleep.com to get started. 5 year warranty, 30 night risk free.

Trial free returns, free shipping code tvpn.com.

In other news, reindustrialize. Is this happening tomorrow? Happening tomorrow, yes. And they have been on an absolute tear posting interesting things. They said we exist to reverse pull this chart up the top employer in each state back in 1990 you can see the map is almost entirely green because almost every state, the top employer in each state was manufacturing in 2024. The top employer is health care. And there's a few states that are holding on to manufacturing. A couple that are Utah's in retail. Nevada has been in hospitality the entire time. Surprise, surprise. Staying strong. Hawaii is the top employer. Is hospitality. That makes sense. Is a tourist destination. But you know, for a long time America was manufacturing powering powerhouse. And this is a really striking chart or visualization of what can happen in 34 years of neglect, essentially. So if you're headed to re industrialize, let us know how it goes. We couldn't be there because of travel schedules and whatnot, but I hope it's a fantastic event and we'll get the recap for everyone who's over there. Well, our next guest is ready to join us. This is Brian from coreweave. We will be talking about the Neo Clouds and AI training and what it's.

Like being a public company.

Yeah. So good to meet you, Brian. How are you doing?

What's going on?

Pretty good.

Welcome.

Thanks for having me.

Congratulations on all the success. Can you just take us through, like a brief introduction and kind of maybe a little bit of history on the company, but then kind of where you are today? Because I imagine we can jump into a bunch of stuff. Most people are probably familiar, but yeah, sure.

So first off, my name is Brian Ventura. I'm one of the founders. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer of Core Weave. I started out as cto until they found me out. I've been demoted to Chief Strategy Officer.

So promoted. It's got to be more fun. More fun.

It's demoted, dude.

Definitely demoted.

Well, well, I'm just saying, like, you know, day to day, I imagine you're, you know, you still have the stress of, you know, running the, the business and all that, but, but, but maybe you're not on call, which would be nice.

Nothing's, nothing's changed. They just don't let me write code anymore, which is probably better for everybody. But, you know, I'm the Chief Strategy Officer. I run a lot of product strategy, infrastructure strategy. I work with clients on big, big deals. You know, probably half the company indirectly reports to me. So I'm on the board of directors, et cetera, et cetera. So I've been involved in pretty much every aspect of the business. But I'm happy to talk about whatever you guys would like.

Today I want to talk about naming every strategy. I want to talk about the overarching strategy. Walk me through how you would think about defining the current strategy. What is the highest priority relationship with hyperscalers? New companies creating a fluid compute layer, all the different, like, government incentives. Like what. What is top of mind for you on a day to day basis in terms of positioning Core Weave against competitors or just broadly solving a problem in the market. Like, how do you actually break down these problems?

So it's two things, right? The first is serving the customers and partners that got us here, right? That's the big AI labs, It's the hyperscalers. It's the people that have an insatiable need for compute infrastructure. They're the ones that are blocked from delivering to their next customer, from growing their user base because they don't have any GPUs. That has been, it's been insane to be a part of, right? It's because every time it increases an order of magnitude, you're like, it can't go again. And then it goes again six months later. And I was listening to the show before, you're talking about, you know, Meta's 5 gigawatt data center campuses, etc. You know, it's like, we're headed there, right? And I think that right now it's a question of, you know, everybody's in a race and how quickly you can build that, like, that large. But it's also understanding what are the local constraints, what are the actual grid constraints, what are the supply constraints to be able to get there, you know, you run into things like labor constraints. You know, there's not enough electricians in the world to go out and build these things in the timelines these people need. How do you modularize the data center construction? You know, everybody's kind of solving this as the plane's in the air already. Yeah, right. And, you know, it's. It's a race. You know, I always say internally, like, I can always. I can solve any problem with enough time or capital. Right. And a lot of the times you don't get both. So it's choosing, you know, what's the right path to go, you know, how are we going to solve this for them? So that's kind of one side, right? It's like, okay, how do we build to everything that they need? How do we understand what their demand's going to be? And when you look at the thing that I think the world misses is that everybody on the hyperscale side and in our seat as well, we're looking at it going, we need to build X number of gigawatts of data center capacity. We know the demand signals are there, but the capital and the speculative capital isn't there to do it.

Interesting.

I can go out and I can build X gigawatts of capacity for the next two or three years from my balance sheet, but any more than that and the demand doesn't show up and I put my entire company at risk. We're basically having to haircut the demand signals that we get and only build to a certain extent of it. And then by the time we get out there, we're in the same constrained position we're in today.

Got it. Talk to me about how do you.

Real quick, how do you think? So it was 2019 that you guys decided to focus more on AI and cloud and for broadly, is that correct?

Roughly, yeah.

The reason I asked this is because I saw a company as there's been a bunch of companies that were effectively came to the conclusion that you guys did, but maybe six, five, six years later, in terms of, hey, we're going to sort of pivot away from bitcoin mining into AI because that's where the real growth is. And it feels like a lot of those companies, from an outside looking in, it feels like those companies are going to be at a massive disadvantage. But I don't know if I have the right read there.

Yeah. So when we started out in 2017, we made the decision that we were never going to be as good as the ASIC producer in mining Bitcoin. And the idea there was there's always going to be something they don't release. It actually wound up being true. They had released like their low power mode, I forget what it was called in 2018. And everybody found out that they were hashing 30% better power efficiency. The world lost their mind about it. And it was kind of like the. Okay, we were actually right. We kind of were paranoid about it. We never actually knew until then. So, you know, we said, we're not going to do it as good as them. Where is there a level playing field? And we thought there was a level playing field in GPUs. And we also thought, okay, if crypto goes to zero, the GPUs are repurposable. They're used for gaming, they're used for graphics rendering. Like we can either sell them on the open market or we can build another service with them. What we were most surprised by is when we first launched our, you know, let's say first non Crypto product in 2018, 2019. It was a rendering service for an open source 3D graphics platform called Blender.

Blender.

Like a thousand, a thousand people sign up in the first day.

Wow.

Wow.

And I was just like, oh boy. Like there's a market here, people need this stuff. And like, we had never expected it to be that large. And people would come to us and they'd be sending us like support tickets saying, hey, just want to tell you, it's so awesome. I was able to do so much more work because I got access to GPUs I've never had before. Yeah, right. And that was like signal number one. And we're like, okay, we convinced our early investors, like, we're going to go all in on this thing. We're going to use crypto to pay for it as we're building out more compute. And we set it up so that as we didn't have actual cloud or compute workloads, it would turn back to mining and the mining would cover all of our fixed and variable expenses. And all of the cloud stuff was just upside. So we were able to show over time this constant penetration or constant growth of our Margin, which was really easy to grow. We were able to lever the cryptocurrency into a massive resource base. So the timing played a lot into our success there and that we had that permissionless crypto revenue to lean back on.

Yeah. But also just having, I think, incredible foresight to some degree, which you're being a little bit more modest about it, but the fact that companies even I saw a company that was getting pumped on X last week that is still in the process of transitioning from bitcoin mining to something that will look like a NEO cloud, and the idea that you're going to come into this market six years late and really be a key player feels like a long shot.

I think it's even worse than that. It's even worse than that because the talent pool is so small and to be successful as the technology has gotten more sophisticated and harder to run, you have to be the best in the world. Right. And you know, we have some of our low level hardware engineers. They're amazing. Like, I've seen them, you know, solve problems that nobody even knew existed. They identify the problem, they're able to say, okay, this is what, this is what the problem is. They go back to Nvidia and they jointly develop a solution for it. Right. That's really important as you're building at scale. Right. You know, Anybody can run 100 or 500 or 1000 GPUs, but if you're running hundreds of thousands of these things, like, it's really, really hard to do, especially at high quality. Right. So people think that there's folks that are 12 to 18 to 24 months behind us. Good luck.

Really quick question I have to ask. What's the story with the wheels behind you?

All right, so there are F1 wind tunnel tires.

Yeah.

And we just did a. So we're, we just did a sponsorship with Aston Martin and we also executed a compute agreement with them. I'm so excited about this one. When I talked before about the way that we think about our first cohort of clients, it's the AI labs. The second is the Enterprises. And I feel that if we can walk into Aston Martin and help them modernize their AI and ML stack in the most hyper competitive sport in the world, with so much data and so many eyeballs already on it, we can do it for anybody.

Yeah. So being more concrete, there you have an F1 car. You need to simulate how air flows over it. That's a particle simulation and that's perfect for accelerated parallelized computing. GPUs they're probably doing it on premise at some point. They're going to take it to the cloud. They're going to take it to your cloud.

It's so much. Yes, but it's so much more than that. It's not just the CFD workloads. It's also things like taking radio data from other teams and trying to decipher what their strategies are real time. I mean, it's running tire degradation simulations like how does track temperature change with cloud cover, how does weather come in and actually impact this stuff? It's helping them make better decisions on track in real time.

Wow.

It's the coolest confluence of the technologies that I can imagine. And I'm like, I'm totally into it.

That's amazing. Yeah. Translate all of Ferrari's comms from Italian into English.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, good luck with Ferrari strategy.

Talk about sort of data center build out timelines. I think Colossus and the XAI team were getting a lot of credit for bringing a lot of compute online very quickly, a lot of energy online. How much was that an outlier or are they just really good at marketing?

I think it's both. Right. You know, one of the things that I admire about Elon is, you know, he sent an email a couple years ago on Thanksgiving and it was like, the biggest problem that we have right now, now is there's nobody to turn a screwdriver on the line. I'm gonna go turn a screwdriver in a line. Right. And he is so good at identifying what the bottleneck is and breaking through it. And if you're the richest guy in the world and you don't really care about the consequences, you can do that a lot more than you can as a director of a public company is what I've learned is, you know, they're able to go. And I think some of what they've done is a bit of the. You told me I can't build it, but I already built it. It's already there. And they're like, no, you can't build it. No, no, it's there. Right. And when you're in a race like this, that bravado matters.

Yep.

Right. I don't know. I don't think anybody knows the truth of what's actually there, but they've definitely been incredible in how they've been able to execute.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that data center seems like it's performing very well. But what I learned from Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis with the clustermax ranking is that not all clouds are created equal and 100,000 H1 hundreds is not perfectly substitutable for another hundred thousand H1 hundreds over here. And Core Weave did extremely well on Clustermax. And I'm interested in peeling back a layer deeper into understanding. First, how do you think you did so well? Like, what concretely makes Core Weave stand out as a neo cloud on the features level from a customer perspective and then internally, what's the secret sauce? Like, is it just great employees, are they aligned? Are they working harder? Is there key insight? Are you like, how do you actually deliver that product at a higher level than, you know, competitors that Dylan Patel reviewed?

Yeah. So let's not get off the XAI thing yet. I'm going to transfer into that. You know, if they have 100,000 GPUs and they get 60,000 of them running and they don't care about the other 40,000 of them, it's kind of enough.

Got it.

Right. And if they're looking at it saying, I don't care how much this costs, I have to win, and they're in the position to do that. And if you're Elon Musk, you are right. That's a powerful position to be in.

Sure.

Now, the clients that we serve are typically going to be more cost conscious and are going to look to optimize, you know, their spend and make sure they get whatever they need out of their investment. And what we found is that, you know, these jobs and this infrastructure, it breaks all the time. Right. And when you accept that something's going to break all the time and you design for it, your solution is going to be very different than if you're just kind of, you know, square pegging around hole after the fact saying, I have to go deal with these failures. So what we did initially is we built with a incredibly high level of observability at the bare metal layer. Right. And the bare metal visibility is really important because things do fail. And, you know, you have memory failures, you have thermal failures, you have all these things that impact your jobs. But if we're able to help our customers identify what's happening, triage it for them and explain to them why something failed. They don't have to go back and say, oh, was it my code or was it one of the 700,000 connections in my cluster, they can immediately point to our software stack that says, oh, it was this link flap over here. We took it out of service. You restart your job, you'll be totally fine. That's been very, very Very powerful. And it's not just that visibility layer, it's also the storage and networking and the quality control that we put around those things. I have to give credit to our new, our now cto Peter Solanke, who used to work for me until they found me out. He is incredibly focused on the low level visibility and quality and drives a lot of that culture throughout the company. Right. Of like if one of 500,000 things is going to break, I need to know immediately so I can go in and fix it to make sure my customers are back up and running like three minutes later. So it's building from that low base and understanding what the problems are going to be. And then culturally, you know, we have people that are here that take so much pride in being first and being best. Right. And you know, if we're not first to market with a new release, like they're like they're going to cry for a week kind of thing. So when we did GB300 a couple weeks ago, or maybe it was just a week ago, like people went out to one of our data centers, like all of our low level engineers went out there and they lived there for like two weeks to get it done. Right. Like they go and they work from 8am to 4am every day and they love it. And it's a cultural thing and I think we're really lucky to have that.

Bit of a tangent, were you an H20 buyer at all over the last few months or not needed?

No.

And there was H20 sales happening in the United States from what we heard. Who are the kind of players that were making use of that?

I don't know if that did happen, I don't know who it is. But for us, if we had any power available, we're going to buy the best in, you know, the best accelerator we can. You know, there's no reason for us to buy the cut down accelerator if we have power available.

Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned that one of the key things is like the insight into what's happening in the data center. What if a specific chip is failing? You want your customer to be able to know you want to be able to. I mean, we talked to Dylan Patel. He was saying like sometimes you just need to turn it off, turn it back on or like there's a whole bunch of different things that, that can happen that feel very abstract when you're looking at it from the outside, but are very concrete when you're on the inside. And that's actually what separates great data center performance. Is just like the hand to hand combat that happens on an inside day. My question is like, we've talked to some people who are like, we're gonna put data centers in space or we're gonna put data centers like on the.

Moon or that doesn't seem to align with it. With your framework of being like we need to build it in a way knowing that it's going to break. Often we need to fix it. And hard to do that if it's.

Yeah. I don't think space is the right place for a data center.

Okay.

But you know, to the point there, sometimes you have to turn it off and turn it back on to solve the problem. We don't find that to be true.

Okay.

Is if you, if something needs to be turned off, there's a reason why it needs to be turned off.

Sure.

And that like that one comment may be what separates us is our engineering team. If they're like, I'm not going to reboot the system that doesn't solve problems. I want to know exactly what happened there. Because we have to go solve it. Because if it happens one time, it's going to happen another time. The scale that we run at, these skeletons come out and making sure that the data center is on Earth and is accessible by human technicians is really important because sometimes you have to make judgment calls on what's actually causing this. How do you fix it?

Yeah. So the one kind of, I mean there's a few things that the space data center folks will tell you about like you know, free energy or free cooling or something like that. We don't need to go too deep into that. But I guess the question that I'm more interested in is how are the recent results from different training runs. We saw this with Grok4 that the reinforcement learning post training was 50% of the overall cost. That's kind of the rumor. And there's been kind of mutterings about, hey, maybe in the future you'll need a whole bunch of distributed compute all over the place, generating reinforcement data and doing rollouts and bringing those back. And you won't need as much of this hyper concentrated compute in one place. And so maybe having 101 gigawatt data centers is better than 1.5Gw data center. It's just power and compute all over the place. How do you think the shape of distribution of compute clusters will evolve over the next few years? If you have any insight there?

Yeah, so great question. Let's put it into perspective because you said 15 gigawatt or 101 gigawatts.

Those are insane.

By the way, even building a gigawatt data center and its impact on the local grid, that's we'll see.

I mean you talk to people and they're like, and they're like, there's going to be 100 gigawatts data centers in three years. Like the crazy AI people get crazy. And so maybe I'm a little bit on, you know, like out in space here literally. But, but bringing back down to earth.

Yeah. So people definitely want to build at that scale. Right. When you think about 100 gigawatt data center or a 10 gigawatt data center, the capital required to build these things and to install the compute inside them, like that's country level capital. Right. And you know, I don't think that the broader market understands the investment required yet to do this. Right. But you know, back to the question of is it going to be more distributed, is it going to be more centralized? I think that right now, while the ability to centralize it exists, people would prefer to do that because the optionality of having it all together is, you know, is worth more than having it distributed. I think that as you have workloads that become more latency driven. Right. So, you know, we're starting to see customers that say, hey, I need something that's actually local to a metropolitan area because I'm running, you know, agentic AI for one of my customers or for a banking customer, I need to make sure it's there. That's a very different story than 12 months ago where people didn't care. Where inference was. Because your first response wasn't for like two or three seconds.

Yeah. You actually want it on the other side of the world, ideally where it's low load.

Yeah. Then you're managing to optimize for cost.

Yep.

Right. But there's a group of people that are going to optimize for cost. There's a group of people that are going to optimize for performance. You know, for us, one of the products that we're really excited to develop is, you know, almost like a global load balancer product that helps people choose what they're optimizing for. Right. And you know, we've been thinking about that for a long time now because like you said, you have to have that compute distributed and it may not be because you're trying, like if you could choose, you'd always have it in one place. Right. But when you build it distributed, then you have to have the software services that can intelligently Say, okay, where am I going to run this? What am I optimizing for? Where's the data that I need? Right. And that's where we've been investing in. We've built a massive global network backbone. We have a ton of our own dark fiber to be able to move workloads around and have our.

What does that exactly mean, your own?

So we've leased dark fiber between a bunch of our data centers across the United States and in Europe. That allows us to install our own optical gear so that we can, you know, flex up bandwidth as we need to. You know, we have some customers that need things like 64 terabits per second between sites, like crazy amounts of bandwidth. And the idea there is that they're moving synchronization data. They're synchronizing models between sites. So that's where we have to make these big capital investments, knowing what's coming. So when our customers start asking for it was like, oh, yes, we already have it there. So some of that is just the focus that we have and the specialization to know, hey, we better start investing in this, because a year down the road, we're going to be screwed if we don't.

Yeah. How has it been? What are some of the differences been in building out data centers in Europe? I know you guys have Norway, Sweden, Spain and the uk Is that correct? What's it been like developing new data centers there versus what you've done in the United States?

Not so different, actually. Right. Everybody was initially saying, oh, it's going to be so hard to work in Europe. You know, are people going to show up and work as hard? And the. One of the things that we've done, I think that we've done really well in our onboarding process for employees is we've actually brought all the European teams over to work with our tiger teams inside of our data centers, and you.

Just blare the Star Spangled Banner just loudly.

If you blast music continuously all of a sudden, like they have. Yeah, well. And, you know, the. The culture is infectious. And what's one of the best things about the company is that all of our, like, the company's so young that there's been no real attrition. Right. Nobody's left.

Yeah.

So the people that are running the data center start as they started as data center techs a couple of years ago. Like, everybody's still fired up. They still have, like the same drive. They want to be first, they want to be best. And when you have new employees that walk into that environment and those people are genuinely happy to teach them. It transfers pretty well. Right. So I think our European investments have gone a lot better than I thought they were going to, which I attribute largely to our people.

A couple of years ago, I feel like everyone in tech had to learn about Nvidia and then everyone in tech had to learn about tsmc and then everyone in tech had to learn about asml. And now people are kind of getting familiar with sk, Hynix. What do you think the next big company in the semiconductor stack or data center stack or even networking, like what is the next big theme or subcategory of important foundational technology? People are starting to dig into the rare earth materials and what's going on. What is on the horizon in terms of under explored or misunderstood as important as having a role. As we try and build out these 1 GW 10 GW data centers, what are we going to be hearing about?

That's such a, such a good question and the kind of question, man, I don't even know. I'm not sure I have an answer for you.

Maybe it's networking gear. I mean you mentioned you're putting optical gear at and just hearing, what was it? 42 terabits a second. That seems like something that could be become very important. Not that you have to call out a single company. Just like the overall industry is interesting to be like, oh, you know, everyone's gonna be thinking about this industry.

Yeah. You know, that's definitely one of them. Fiber capacity between metros is going to be an issue. I don't know that it's an issue that's insurmountable. Yeah, there are definitely some gotchas that I can see coming down the, the line at people. I don't want to say it because then I'll give them, I'll give them warning. And since we've already identified what they are, I feel like I'm in a better position.

Sorry. Yeah, I don't mean to put you on the spot too much. What about electrical, what about electrical transformers? I've heard a little bit about like there. Sometimes there's a shortage. They're very complicated. Like is this, is this like big technical thing that's big piece of hardware. Is that like an important thing for people to be aware of going forward or like an important industry to understand? So.

A bit of a tangent off of the.

That.

Everybody talks about how there's no power left in America.

Yeah.

And if you actually look at the data, there's a tremendous amount of power Available from baseload and load follow generation.

That's great to hear. Thank you.

And the problem exists on peak days. Right. And like, what solves peak load problems is solar. Like solar and batteries will solve peak load problems. Like you're worried about, you know, five o' clock on the hottest July day when everybody gets home to turn their air conditioning on.

Sure.

That's the thing. And everybody wants to talk about how they want to use demand response as a way to bring supply back to the power grid from data centers. This stuff is really hard to bring up and bring down. It's not really intermittent load. I think that a lot of this shortage narrative from a power perspective is coming from the fact that everybody and their brother has become a data center developer in the past year. And there's a lot of people out there squatting on power. Right. Squatting on power rates. And I don't think that the local regulatory commissions understood what they were signing up for when they started doing load studies for free and giving power allocations. But it goes back to my point earlier that the biggest constraint is speculative capital to build out to meet demand that we expect.

Interesting.

Right? So, yeah, transformers are a problem, but they're not outside the lead time window. UPS is everything's a problem if you need it tomorrow, sure. But if you're able to plan and make the investments in a reasonable period of time and you trust your demand forecasts and the market is there and believes in it, this is all fine.

Yeah, right.

I feel like the chart that people have been tracking is like China bringing on, you know, you know, basically like copy and pasting nuclear reactors. Do you think that the US should be seriously, you know, there seems to be enough people now from tech to Washington that care about nuclear.

So it used to be very contrarian. It was very, very edgy to say, oh yeah, nuclear, it's like it's, it's safe and we should do it. And people.

It's still scary, but yeah. In your view, would you like to see more focus on, more attention on nuclear or more attention on solar? If you had to pick.

I mean, so nuclear, they solve two different problems. Right. Nuclear builds your baseline. And like, it's not. Nuclear is not load following. It's really hard to bring those things up and down. They have long outage cycles. It's a baseline solution. Right. So as your data center demand is going to increase so much and you're shifting your baseline requirements up, that's the solution. Particularly if you want to retire old coal or you want to retire some of the baseline natural gas. Nuclear, I believe, is the solution there. But as you're dealing with peak loads, Right. You're looking to match that load profile. And solar is a great one to do it. Wind doesn't necessarily solve that problem during peaking. Like wind doesn't peak during the afternoon, it peaks overnight.

Sure.

So you just have to match what's the load profile you're trying to match and which part of the curve are you trying to solve for?

Is the load profile for AI not perfectly matched with nuclear? And is that because of inference demand from actual customers? Like, I've heard people use ChatGPT during the workweek, but they don't use it when they're sleeping. So there's actually maybe it follows more of like the solar load profile. Because when I think of training, I think of we're going to run this entire data center for months. I don't know how far off I am on that, but like, that feels like perfect. Build a nuclear power plant right next to the big data center, Run it continuously, Just keep training. And then when you get done with one model, train the next one and just keep it running perfectly matched forever. But how are we actually like the actual AI workloads? How do they match to different load profiles? Yeah.

So if you're in a global constrained environment, you're serving as much load as you can around the clock from anywhere.

Yeah.

Right. So I don't think that you have any load shape right now. I think it's just flat load and it's like it's pinned to 100%.

Got it.

As bullish.

Yeah.

Yes. It's insane.

It's stressful. Stop talking.

It's incredibly stressful. But it's a good problem to have.

Yeah.

I have people yelling at me every day like, where's my stuff? Where's my stuff? Where's my stuff? And I promise I'm doing everything I can. But I think that as that like as you have the investments where things are more latency sensitive, you'll see that the load curve may not change. It may still be pinned at 100. Right. But the types of workloads may be more, maybe more shaped. I'm not sure how it plays out. I think that the problem that you're trying to solve there is not necessarily data center load shape. It's residential and commercial load shape. Right. Because you're not running. Your big commercial buildings in New York aren't running at 3am, they're running at 3pm that's the problem.

Makes A ton of sense. Well, this was really fun. I hope that we see you at the track soon. One of our other. One of our sponsors is also an Aston F1 sponsor. Hopefully we run into you on the paddock.

I'll be there soon actually.

Fantastic.

Great having you on. Let's make this a regular thing when you guys have news. It was awesome to get all your insights.

Yeah, this is great.

Thanks guys so much.

Cheers. Bye.

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Okay, I got an update from a friend, friend of a friend which says that his friend. No, no, no, sorry. Our friend says that he has a buddy that owns some RM boutiques and has not heard of the conspiracy.

Really?

Interesting.

Maybe it was hallucinating. It might have been conspiracy. I don't know. I need to find the source for that. Where, where was that? Actually in here. I will figure it out and we will get to the bottom of the conspiracy theory. But we will do that later because our next guest is here. It's Tyler Cowen. How are you doing, Tyler?

Which conspiracy theory?

So this conspiracy theory is that you'll.

Actually like this one.

Okay. So are you familiar with the high. The ultra luxury watch brand Richard Mille?

Only by name.

Okay, don't have one.

You may have seen it on a. On a sailboat or something like that.

Yes. So Richard Mille is famous for selling watches at 10 times the price of other luxury watch brands. So a Richard Mille. The first one was $135,000 for a single watch. And at the time, $13,000 would have been more appropriate for that kind of tier of watch. And the conspiracy theory is that when Richard Mille went to promote their new watch, they took out an advertisement in the Financial Times. They sent over the copy for the advertisement saying, please, please promote Richard Mille. Our new watch is available for purchase and the price is $13,500. And there was a mistake in the newsroom and they added an extra zero and they printed $135,000. And what happened was instead of getting no offers, they got flooded with offers because people had to have it. A classic example of A Veblen. Good. And the rest is history. And to this day, the brand denies it. But what do you think?

Well, it sounds like the opposite of a conspiracy. Just an innocent mistake and then it worked out well for the company and bad for the buyers. Yes, I believe it.

The conspiracy is that the brand now obviously denies it because it would not be a good look for them now to be like, well, we actually wanted to price it at 13,000. And then we actually, you know, now that you're willing to pay 135, well, good deal. Let's do it.

There'll be a deathbed confession on that one.

One way or the other, maybe.

Well, it's great to have you here. It's great to have you on video. Super Intelligence.

Yes. Yes. Yeah, yeah. We had some technical difficulties last time, but I'm glad. You look great. How are you overall? Let me take your temperature on the last time we Talked, you said AGI was around the corner. Later, two days later, O3 released. We now have O3 Pro. How are you feeling on artificial intelligence progress overall? Do you feel like we're accelerating, decelerating? Are you happy with the products? How are you using them? Take me through kind of the State of the Union.

Everyone has a different definition of AGI, but the definition I grew up with, which is that it can pass a Turing Test and do at least as well as expert humans on most endeavors, intellectual endeavors, it clearly passes. So if you want to call it AGI, you can. I don't insist on the term. Maybe it's more misleading than useful, but O3. O3 Pro. I use them every day. I ask them questions about history or music or travel. My wife and I did a trip through Europe, France and Spain. We asked it about our hotels, our restaurants, the churches. We saw everything. It just keeps on working. It's amazing. Much better than having, you know, a historian guide with you. So to me, it's like AGI. It's better, in fact.

Are you. What is your prior for hallucination at this point? Because that. That Richard Mill conspiracy theory that I just relayed to you, that comes from an. From a chat. GPT03Pro deep research report. And. And we're getting text messages that many people hadn't heard of it. I haven't checked the sourcing yet, so I'm not sure if it's real. I haven't gone down and done all the fact checking. But just in terms of your prior, how likely would you believe that it's. That it's a hallucination well, just ask it, right?

If it's something important, you double check with another AI and. Or you ask and you find out. So hallucinations should not be a practical problem. They end up one because people are silly. Or they'll ask it questions where there may not be any answer at all. And that is by far when it's most likely to hallucinate. They'll just make something up to please you. But if you know in advance, that's when it's most likely to hallucinate. Again, you take countermeasures. So it's a way overrated problem.

I agree, I agree. And I just fact checked this and it does come from a 2021 GQ report, which again might be wrong.

Hallucinated by the GQ never hallucinates.

Right.

Take it up until men do not hallucinate. No, gentlemen, do not. Do not hallucinate. What do you think of Dwarkesh Patel's new formulation that there's sort of a two axis diagram between you and him. AGI is here. AGI is not here. The impact of AGI economically will be massive in his mind and the impact of AGI will be more muted in his assessment of your assessment and I.

Think your general stance, which is we should hold ourselves accountable to the definition that we set out to achieve, you know, to achieve, you know, decades ago when this work started and not constantly just be, you know, pushing out the sort of requirements, the goal, moving the goalposts is important.

And then there's this new definition, super intelligence. I'm waiting for super duper intelligence. Right?

Giga intelligence.

We're already past it, everyone. Folks like us, we know what super intelligence is. We already have it. We're waiting for the next one.

Maybe the best measure is how much of people's time are they spending with this thing? And that's rising steadily. Right? So that to me is quite impressive. Dwarkesh understands my views perfectly well. He and I use the term AGI in different ways, so it all ends up being confusing. I just think the human bottlenecks are so significant that it's not going to be fast progress anytime soon. That's my core view. It's not based on any kind of bearishness about AI. It's that I've spent my whole life working in human institutions. And there are plenty of much simpler developments like don't be a jerk. That would boost productivity immensely, but we still haven't gotten around to really implementing.

Yeah, but I mean, on the, on the topic of superintelligence I think what people are kind of getting at is that it feels like we have 15 minute AGI. It feels like we have spiky intelligence. It feels like we have intelligence that can, you know, memorize every book in the English language and yet not tell you a funny joke or put a novel connection together between two disparate disciplines.

Well, and potentially more important is this idea of intelligence with amnesia. Right. It's like we've been talking about this on the show and Dwarkesh talked about it last week, which is this idea of PhD level intelligence that can't remember what you told it yesterday. And so it's difficult to sort of build real momentum and real agencies.

I think it can do all those things. Now. It might require a little smidgen of work from you, like you might need. For one thing, you can turn on memory. That's maybe not as much memory as you'd like, but you can just reinsert the dialogue you had with it and tell it to start from there. So, okay, it's a slight inconvenience, but my goodness, people, they're so unhappy. Like, it's incredible what we have. And with modest effort from you, it does all these things.

So I completely agree. I love these systems. I enjoy spending time with them, even if they're not directly providing economic value. I find them entertaining. I find them just interesting. I learn things. It's fantastic. I guess the question is, yes, you can stuff the context window, but increasingly folks are saying that there's some sort of fundamental limitation with the size of the context window. That yes, you can do needle in the haystack analysis with a big context window, but even if you have pages and pages of all your best practices, the current systems are more likely to forget some hard won lesson early in working with you than just an average employee. And that feels uniquely unhuman.

I don't know. I've worked with a lot of employees. One generous way I would put it, the things are not perfect. If you compare them to smart humans on intellectual tasks, they're basically ahead. They can't dribble a basketball. They cannot do most jobs. That's for sure. It's a big reason why progress will be slow. If nothing else, those jobs intersect with the physical world. Robots are far away, and there you go. I think it's a pretty clear prognosis. I don't really get why anyone disagrees with it.

Well, if you need to raise a billion dollars, it's not super convenient. Truth. If robots are far away, for example.

And specifically Economic growth is far away. This is the Satya Nadella position, which I think he agrees with you on the economic impact that we're currently seeing and potentially the economic impact for the next few years. And so he is underwriting a very different investment strategy in artificial intelligence. Intelligence.

Yeah. It says a lot in our view that everywhere you look there's just blaring top signals in the market. Both like literal all time highs but then just other more indirect signals. And at the same time Satya is like, you know, doing layoffs, being seemingly, you know, very pragmatic. And I read that as more aligned with your view, which is transformative, impactful, incredible, wonderful, magic, but also potentially incremental and you know, going to be transformative in the fullness of time, but not next quarter.

Forgive me for not sounding like a complete capitalist, but this is all so important. People should just be doing it and to some extent they are. The labs are working very hard to make progress. You can debate how much the motive is profit, but look, these are driven people. They get how important it is and they're doing their best. I think that's amazing.

Yeah.

Are they all going to get rich? I'm not predicting that. I don't know.

Yeah. I think the trade off that people are debating broadly in the market is if the next training run, that's a little bit of a stretch for the market. We were just talking to the co founder of Core Weave and he was saying that like the capital markets just aren't really ready to absorb what it means to 10x data center construction. And at the same time, if AI researchers are saying that by 10xing data center construction we will lift ourself off of the GDP baseline and we will see breakout economic growth and we will get through some of the problems that you've identified about actually restructuring the economy and speeding up economic growth. All of a sudden like that question and how much should humanity as a whole invest as a portion of gdp? That becomes a very important question for the overall market to solve.

Well, let's go talk to United Arab Emirates. They can either buy some more parts of sports teams or do this. I think they're going to do this. The growth rate I think will go up. I've offered the very speculative estimate of half a percentage point per capita quarter. But that's an enormous sum of money.

That's massive now you know.

Is it captured by the capital markets, the shareholders and so on? No, just the free time liberated by chat, GPT and the other services already is enormous money. So remember Satya had that challenge. When will it earn $100 million? Well, it has many times over. It just hasn't earned it for him. So people get their work done more quickly. You add up those valuations of time. I'd love to see a study in the number, but it's way, way above 100 million right now.

Well, on that point, there was a study last week about does AI code generation tools, do these tools actually improve developer productivity? And they did a, I believe a double blinded trial with, or maybe just like a split up trial based on talented software engineers working on open source projects, kind of trying to work on some of the harder problems in software engineering, not just build me a new web page actually advancing open source projects. And they gave half of the developers access to tools like Cursor and Windsurf and Claude code. And then the other half didn't have these AI driven development environments. And they said that the AI enabled engineers expected a 20% speed up, but they in fact experienced a 20% decrease or 19% decrease in productivity. What is your take on that? Do you think that there's a world where we're fooling ourselves into believing that we're actually sped up by these tools or do you think that that's completely ridiculous? It's obvious that these tools speed us up.

That's BS that paper. First, only 16 data points. Second, only one of those people had experience working with AI already and that person's productivity went up. It's the other fools who are just trying to get a handle on it at all where the productivity went down. So we need to throw that out, get it out of our minds. It's obvious from Marketplace tests that AI speeds up developer productivity. Of course you have to do it right, you need to learn some things, but it's working. Overwhelming real world evidence to that effect.

Do you think that there are particular tasks maybe that you've encountered where you've gone to AI and then afterwards realized like, well, for this particular task, not just planning a vacation or trip or something, I was actually slowed down.

Sometimes I like giving stupid dogmatic answers. I'll just say no. I think it's a correct stupid dogmatic answer. No, it's never happened to me.

I love that because it's definitely happened to me when I've said like generate a two by two chart and I'm like seven prompts deep and I'm like, I could have done this in Excel or I could have done this and just taken a screenshot or he could have done this in Photoshop faster. It does happen to me, but I agree on net I feel sped up and I feel very happy to use the tools and I'm enjoying them.

I use it to prepare for podcasts.

Sure.

It cuts my prep time in half.

Sure.

No real doubt there. I don't use it for charts. I just tell a human. Maybe the human uses it. I don't even know. I get the chart back. It's great. I love the world.

I love it. What is the what does the labor economist and you think about the AI talent wars? Have AI researchers been historically underpaid? Are we in some sort of odd intellectual property theft ring where we're paying for trade secrets to change hands? What is your read on kind of all the talent moves that we've seen at staggering numbers by comparison in what's historically happened in the yeah.

And then specifically, do you think that an AI researcher in the year 2030 will be getting a $100 million signing bonus? Or do you believe that things will maybe normalize and researchers will go back to being paid well, but maybe not more than Fortune or Mag7 CEOs probably normalized now.

I'm an NBA basketball fan and what I observe is the top teams need some time to gel. So you look at the Miami heat, they got LeBron, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosch. The first year they lost. You look at, you know, Chicago Bulls, Jordan and Pippin. It took them a few years. You look at the Lakers, what they had Karl Malone, Gary Payton, was it Shaq and Kobe Bryant. They didn't win a title. So it's not as easy as you think. Not that those aren't great, great players. But there's something about how it gels and the process and what part of people's trajectories you get them at that all has to fit together. I think it's a fascinating experiment. I'm dying to find out how it's going to work.

What do you think of the missionary versus Mercenary debate? A prior guest on the show highlighted Tom Brady in the sports world taking a lower salary in order to build a better team around him. A bit of an economic sacrifice for greater performance, longer legacy, ultimately reap the rewards economically. But a lot of people have been saying, you know, you can't buy great missionary talent that will stick with you during the hard times and really advance the frontier of artificial intelligence.

In the case of Brady, you know, he has these contracts for shoes, jerseys, footballs, other things. He probably made a lot of money from that pay cut by Staying more vocal. So maybe for some of these AI companies, you know, we need more endorsements, a line of tennis balls or something, and then it'll be cheaper to hire talent because the outside market will pay them. We're not at that point yet. Maybe we'll get there, I think.

Yeah, I want a game worn jersey.

Here's what Ilya wore when he built the key parts of GPT4.

Exactly. I mean, we've been putting out these little trading cards. Sports. You know when any AI research, whenever an AI researcher moves from one firm to the other and I mean, it seems like an insider joke, but these posts are getting millions and millions of views. Like it really is turning into sports. In terms of the attention of the entire tech industry on these trade deals, maybe it's just the big numbers, but I think it's also the fact that this is an important technology and people are excited about the developments and they want to know who will win. What product will I be using in five years? Will it be OpenAI? Will it be meta? Who knows?

All of the above, I hope, probably.

How would you try to value the Dutch East India company? And the reason I bring that up is Nvidia crossed a $4 trillion market cap. Everybody's calling it one of the most valuable companies ever. But I think a lot of the people that run the kind of valuation analysis and inflation calculations and things like that believe that the Dutch East India company was worth somewhere around 2x of that. Have you spent much time thinking about that business?

I look at all the numbers in general, I don't feel I can outguess the markets. So the market is a better estimator there than I am. But look, markets are always wrong. That's why the price changes all the time. So the fact that Nvidia is priced so high shows the market is paying attention to AI, which is good. But the fact that everything else is priced more or less normally I think is evidence for my thesis of slow takeoff, that it will matter a lot over time, but not that much right away.

Yeah, that makes sense.

It is interesting. Something we just had one of the founders of Core, W.E. vaughan, which is now a $70 billion public company. And I was thinking about the advantage that he has as a public company where he doesn't have to raise capital from the private markets and tell the story, this like 10 year story. He can kind of focus on the next quarter and just say like, how do we deliver more compute to our customers? And it's like this interesting change where a lot of the companies today, let's say you're a lab with a $10 billion valuation and you need to raise billions of dollars. You kind of need to tell the story around superintelligence. Meanwhile, if you can just get out in the public markets and have billions of dollars of revenue, you can kind of go back to telling the story of. Yeah, we're hoping to bring more compute online, more data centers online, and just actually focus on the business.

Yeah, that can cut either way. But look, if you're selling socks today, public market is fine. But as you well know, fewer and fewer companies want to go that route. So that does suggest to me the public markets are somewhat broken, over regulated, too much disclosure required, too much bureaucratization. Shareholders themselves can be kind of nutty. So, you know, it's good to have the two compete. But I'd like to see us make the public markets easier to be in.

What about Delaware? We saw Andreessen Horowitz moving to Nevada. We've seen some other high profile exits. Do you think Delaware will try to turn it around? I know about a pretty meaningful amount of their budget comes from franchise taxes, things like that.

I say get out, send them a message they're not feeling enough pain yet. Let's make it really tough for poor little Delaware. What do they call it? Small wonder. Well, small wonder that they haven't gotten their regulatory apparatus into better order.

Great. What about in this? I want to talk more about the public market distortions versus private market. It feels like Elon has kind of run an AB test with Tesla and SpaceX. They're like within an order of magnitude of each other. Maybe within like 2x in terms of valuation. And now Elon seems to be building some sort of a Japanese style Caretsu between all of his private market and sometimes the public market companies as well. Like, would a hallmark of a well functioning public market be that there is just one ticker for Elon Inc. And all the companies are under one umbrella? Or is there value in the public markets to having like pure plays? I hear some public markets, hedge fund investors are like, I just want a pure play on the Robo Taxi. I just want a pure play on Humanoids. And I don't know if that's actually like an economically valuable thing for our society to have or what would be best for Elon or the shareholders. I'm just kind of struggling with all the different stakeholders.

I suspect the pure play idea is useful. So you get a market price signal what's working, what's not. So Elon Obviously has become less popular. So the value of Tesla goes down. You see that quite directly. If they're all bundled, the signal is far more muddled. So I think it's better separate.

So ideally, if it was easy to operate in the public markets, we would just see SpaceX and companies would be going public once they hit like 5 billion or 10 billion, something like that.

I'm not sure if something like neuralink would be. That's just weird to begin with. Non legible. Who are the customers? What are the products? Yes, they're disabled, but after that, that I would think should be in private markets.

Are you sure about that? Because I feel like it's also in many ways like a classic biotech drug. You know, FDA approvals, once it's approved, it goes out to everyone. It feels like that's one place that the public markets are particularly functioning as they always have. Where new drug comes, goes through phase one, phase two trials, but goes public very early. We're not seeing the stripe of biotech hang out in the private markets for two decades.

What am I ever going to buy from neurotech? No insult intended, by the way, but it's not transparent to me. I think it's amazing. I'm all for it. Yeah, maybe it has to be not so legible to public shareholders and Elon wants to do it. That's great.

You might not buy a particular cancer drug. I would hope that you'd never have to buy any of them. But that particular drug for some certain indication, some certain illness could be taken through FDA trials. They could go public, their stock price could trade on the basis of the FDA results. And then when they, when they, when they get approved, they start selling that drug. Maybe they get acquired by a bigger drug company, but then they live or die by the market size of that particular illness.

Well, if it was a cancer drug, sure, I'd buy that. But a brain computer interface, I don't know, I don't want one. I'm happy with it being there. And again, it seems to me that's probably not a good matter for public shareholders.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm more. Just think. I mean, yeah, I guess if you're thinking about valuing it as like brain computer interface for the masses, that's a different story than it is a, it is a treatment for the, for the illness of being a paraplegic or if you are blind, it can cure blindness. And that is a medical diagnosis and it is a medical product. But obviously Elon's telling a much broader story about that so that's a different thing.

Were you surprised to see Uncle Sam put up a surplus in June or were you expecting that?

I wouldn't say I expected it. But you know, month to month fluctuations can be so severe. Nothing like that should surprise us. The debt and deficit, they're still out of control.

It's like a startup. It's a startup that's like, yeah, we're profitable because they had one month, one month of free cash flow or one day annual. Yeah, that makes sense. How about stablecoins? There's been new regulation. We have a issuer that's now public. There's a massive amount of excitement. It seems like a lot of the use cases outside of being as a value transfer to facilitate investing in the US but then the potentially more interesting use cases internationally. But how are you thinking about adoption and do you believe that the US and specifically the traditional dollar will be a major beneficiary of the tech?

It's been great. The rest of the world wants access to dollar based systems. Our government makes it hard for them. Stablecoins are a workaround. I'm not sure what their long run fate will be because keep in mind and regulations can change and other payments methods can innovate as well. But they're going to pass the Genius act, it looks like. I'm all for it. It's not perfect legislation but it will give people a chance to experiment with these things on a legal transparent basis and let it rip.

Right. Why do you say that our government makes it hard? I always thought it was an authoritarian government or just a foreign government that wants the ability to inflate away their own debt. And so they're keeping dollars out of their economy. They're trying to avoid dollarization.

They don't always avoid it successfully. But you look at the US government, know your customer laws, for instance. It's a pain in the neck to deal with an American say who wants to open a bank account in Germany. I've tried to do this. That's because of the US government putting reporting requirements on the German bank. They don't want your money. So a lot of the problem is usg, not, you know, Argentina, Russia, whatever, it's both. But in fact if people just hold dollars, that is usually tolerated and it's a workaround for both.

I want to talk about Google's acquisition of Windsurf. Google paid a licensing agreement. They acquired 50 or so engineers from windsurf. The CEO and the preferred shareholders got paid out by Google, roughly 400 or something employees were left in a ghost ship. In the remain co, they also had $150 million roughly on the balance sheet. And so they were scooped up by cognition. I'm not sure how closely you follow the drama, but my question was, is this a Pareto improvement or a Caldor Hicks improvement? For Windsurf stakeholders as a whole, it.

Raises the cost of capital. And we're going to need more covenants to limit this happening. Like say I start a company, raise money and then just pay myself a huge dividend for all the money. Well, that's typically against the law because there's a covenant in the contract saying I can't do that. So we need new covenants to cover these cases. Those will be harder to write, but the market will respond. In the meantime, it's a problem.

Do you believe that the problem should be solved by employees demanding a new covenant? Employees demanding more strict employment contracts? Where will this solution sit?

It depends how you're doing the financing, but very often in other settings it's done by the bondholders. The bondholders want a covenant that you can't just drain all the resources out of the firm. The more the firm is based on human capital, the easier it becomes to do that. Because human capital leaving is not monitorable in the same way that a big cash dividend is monitorable. But we'll figure out ways of doing it. Maybe it will require arbitration, but this absolutely needs addressing. Otherwise you just keep on starting up companies, ship the talent out somewhere else. In essence, sell it twice. Bunch of different people are screwed over. For the next person who tries it with no intent of doing that, the cost of capital is too high and that's the longer run problem. But again, markets are very good at solving problems like that with covenants.

So this is. This will be solved by the market. This is not an FTC issue.

I would not involve the ftc. I don't like them, I don't trust them. Their previous boss, their current boss, they're both bad news. Neither knows any economics. My goodness, they're a nightmare. Why would you call them on the phone? They're going to make it worse.

Well, thank you for the solid breakdown and being very clear about your opinion. This is fantastic. Tyler, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you for the update.

Pleasure.

And your wisdom.

Good luck with the rest of the day.

We appreciate it.

You're as well.

Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Always a great segment and we have our next guest already ready to join the show. Austin welcome to the stream. Let's play that. I want to play that intro song a little bit. I like that intro song. Oh, maybe he's already here. Maybe you just get the Ashton Hall.

We got an issue with the soundboard, but we're going to make a sound for you. A handcrafted sound.

Kick us off with the news and an introduction on yourself.

Thanks for having me, guys. Honored to be here, everybody. I'm Austin co founder and CEO here at Unifying. Today we just announced a $40 million Series B LED by Battery Master.

Wow.

Led by who?

Who?

Doesn't matter. Couldn't hear. It does matter. Congratulations, awesome firms, awesome firm. Leading awesome firms along for the ride.

Awesome. A bunch of questions, but give us a quick history on yourself. You said earlier was it the proudest day of your father's life was when you signed an offer to work at Ramp? And then the second proudest is today it was, yes.

It's been a big couple years for me with me and my dad. Took a lot of years going through college to get to that point. But quick background story. So originally joined ramp back in 2020 on the growth product team. Really attracted to just the talent density that existed even back in that period of time. Spent a couple years there working on the growth product team with a bunch of incredible folks I know you all know, including Sam Buck, folks like Pavel you had on the show, the Crosby guys, et cetera. So a ton of great folks. Spent a couple years there and spent a lot of time thinking about distribution from an engineering led perspective and so saw everything that was happening with OpenAI in 2022 and it felt like the nexus of go to market and AI was starting to happen. Didn't know the ChatGPT and things like that were about to drop, but ended up starting unify beginning of 2023.

Pretty quickly.

Raised a seed round from a combination of OpenAI, Thrive, Emergence, and we're off to the races. Fast forward two and a half years. We're a 50 person team today serving a bunch of incredible companies like Cursor, Perplexity, you name it. And so just grateful to be here.

Okay, explain the product like I'm a new grad sdr.

So if you're a new grad sdr, the pitch of the product is you used to have to push a million buttons just to get to the place where you could actually do something that was valuable to talk to a prospect. We take care of all that on your behalf. So, example is you might show up in the morning, you're Going to make your list of the 25 people that you want to reach out to based off of, okay, this person started a new job. I reached out to John in the past and he's now at this new thing. He started a new job or he got a new promotion. We'll make that list for you. We'll automate all that research. We'll also deploy agents to go get 50 other data points for you. So you can start from the 90 yard line and then you can just be polishing the messaging and the actual work that we've done for you. But you don't have to start by just like manually combing through LinkedIn or manually combing through a database like Crunchbase. So we'll do all that work for you.

That makes sense. What is the sentiment like among sales leaders all the way through kind of the entry level roles, SDRs, BDRs, et cetera, just around AI broadly. I think there's been a lot of dialogue recently around the core challenge with a lot of AI tooling right now is this amnesia. So the model is really smart, but it can't remember sort of lessons from at any point in history. There's some memory but. But not the sort of hard won lessons that you get from going out and doing 100 phone calls with customers, things like that.

Yeah, that's a really great question. So the evolution of the sentiment has changed over the years. So 2023, we started the company, there was a lot of aversion to using AI to do the end to end job because it just wasn't there, wasn't remotely there. Agents could sort of, you could see them coming, but we weren't in a place where it felt like that value was tangible. And so it was really in early 24 where it started to feel like the world started to believe that even as a seller. The best thing for me to do was to adopt a, to try to automate a bunch of, a bunch of what I'm doing. But to your point exactly 24, it's been this like version 1.0 of AI where products are dumb. They can do basic research tasks for you, they can do them over and over again, but they have no context that they've done that task four times in the past. One of the things that we're really excited about that we launched a couple of months ago is something we call our observation model, which is actually this underlying primitive that looks very different than anything else that's existed. Basically looks like you have a memory associated with every person you've ever talked to. And that memory is not a database, it's actually a flexible set of contexts. Just a big tech stock basically. That is every interaction and every piece of notable information between you and that prospect. And so as an example, let's say we're talking about perplexity. Perplexity has maybe reached out to, I don't know, Ford Automotive in the past and they've got some record of all the sellers that they have and they've contacted them, they've gone back and forth, they may like maybe exchange a few ads. All this sort of data has usually existed in a bunch of different silos. But, but we actually built this observation model to join all that together so you actually have one clear set of contexts. And then when Unify wants to understand, hey, what should I do next? It can ask that set of contexts, what do I know? What's the most relevant thing that I can surface right now? And let me go ahead and hit on that. And so we really see that as being the evolution of where these AI products are going to go to just make them that much smarter and more powerful.

It feels like one of the really just layup use cases for artificial intelligence in a sales context is just data hydration, cleaning up the CRM. But I'm interested to hear about how high the walled gardens are in a business context. We've heard stories about Glean getting pushback from different big tech companies and it's one of those weird things where every company says yeah, it's your data until I want to give it to their competitor. Potentially that's overlapping. So, so what data sources are particularly like AI friendly these days and what is the shape of the garden and the walls of that garden these days?

It really depends on I think the overall data strategy for the company and just like what their strategy is built on. And so to give you one example, Salesforce, historically their advantage is built on being a fairly open ecosystem. So Salesforce, the app Exchange launched like 10, 20 years ago at this point. It's been building moats around Salesforce as people have connected ends of applications into the product and that sort of built the stickiness. You'd have 25 different products that all integrate through Salesforce. That happens through this open ecosystem of connectivity. My gut says that the platforms that are built much more on open endedness, like something like a Salesforce are going to continue to remain open as that's the core value prop of the product and that's the reason why they have a mode itself. But I think Products that have historically been a little bit more walled off and so, you know, Slack is an example of that, will probably continue to stay that way and trend even more in that direction. Generally speaking, people haven't been super privy to give out Slack information. They wanted to keep that in, especially within an organization. And so I imagine we're going to see those things clamp down even further. And case in point is that is the glean example you brought up.

Do you have a thesis around sales copilot type products? You can imagine this is a sales call and you're running an LLM in real time to give you the next answer. I don't think you guys have one of those in your suite of products, but I'm curious how you think about that category.

It's definitely super powerful. I mean, you see what's happening with Clue right now, right? And what's going on?

That's a great question.

Let me just real quick.

It's wild though, and I think we're only at the beginning of that period of time and I think the way in which people absorb information is going to dramatically change over the course of the next couple of years as we get more and more used to these products today, the closest that we get to that in our product is that we've got a composer for emails and for anything you want to do in Unify. And next to that, you've got all these AI, all these AI nuggets and AI research tidbits that we've done for you alongside that. But we're generally speaking believers that the faster your product is, the more real time it is, the more addictive it is to users, the more helpful it is to users in that context, especially in a work context. And so we're going to keep pushing the product in that direction. Something like a Clue is like the far flung example of that. We're not quite there yet, but I imagine the world is going to keep moving in that direction.

That makes sense.

I want to talk about, I mean your website, its tagline is scale your revenue team's creativity. And I'm wondering if there's any sort of like just like really creative sales solutions. Like I was talking to Sam Blond a while back. He was working with Parker Conrad for a long time and said like one of the best campaigns he ever did as a sales guy, he's like a SDR for a long time was. And head of sales was like sending bottles of champagne to people because like they just open it, then they have a phone call, they have this nice.

Thing because it becomes incredibly rude not to respond to the email.

Exactly. And so I'm wondering about these like weird squishy, like the handwritten note. And in many ways I feel like these creative, these creative deal closers, like the unexpected text message from a friend who's already using the product, is the thing that gets you to actually go and say, yep, I'm ready to onboard full. I get my company on this new product, but are there any, like, world? I feel like a lot of the creativity in sales is specifically showing the client that I'm not using software for this. I handwritten that note, I got your address, I sent you a bottle of champagne. And so is the goal to more just like remove all the barriers to less, let the humans do the creative things, or do you think there's a world where we can use AI tools to speed up those creative out of the box solutions that might be uniquely tailored to just this one company strategy? They're the only one that does this weird thing, but it's working. And they found this alpha and they stick with it for a long time.

Yeah.

Big fan of Sam's and he's done a bunch of incredible outbound campaigns over the years. My thinking is that what will happen is the thought behind all these things and the reason why it matters. This all comes back to taste. Right. I think people and more and more are talking about taste in the world of AI and it's all about knowing what's relevant at the time, knowing what's going to resonate with someone personally and being able to do something that feels really delightful. So it's an example, like one thing that we did as part of our fundraiser announcement today, we put out about 25 cameos that we had custom built for everyone. We've got one for you guys on the way right now, so we'll have it to you later. But like, things like that that are based off of someone's personal experience and show that you thought about it doesn't really matter if you use ChatGPT in the brainstorming process. Right. What matters is that you got the idea that originated from something special and then the actual end delivery is the same quality you put out as a.

Human, what the person feels.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. But I think ultimately today AI doesn't feel. And so it can't really use that judgment. There's a reason why, like in the world of content and in the world of the stuff that we do here, it's like you just can't AI that it Just feels bland and generic. And I think that's going to continue to be true in a sales context. What you need is a human behind the scenes who's providing that little touch of what it means to be a person, what it means to be a friend. And so we'll continue to lean into experiences that make it easier to stay on top of those friendly experiences, but just get easier over time to actually execute.

That's great, Jordy. Anything else?

I got a bunch more questions, but we'll save it for another time. Thank you for joining.

Congratulations.

Congratulations on the new race.

Get back to work.

I'm sure you guys have a bunch of people to hire to deploy that capital.

We'll talk to you later.

Thanks for having us, guys.

Thanks for coming on. Cheers, Austin.

In other news, Apple is reportedly planning to invest $500 million in a rare earth magnet startup. This is MP Materials. They're going to build a new recycling facility in Mountain Pass, California. Currently, they recycle rare earth, they take recycled materials and they make rare earth magnets. In Texas, there's a huge Wall Street Journal profile on MP Materials. And now there's news that they're working with Apple. My takeaway is that this, it shows that Tim Cook is actually thinking about long term supply chain strategy. And it's this funny thing.

How much do you think MP Materials is up in the past five days?

I have no idea.

85%.

Let's go. Ring the gong. 500 million. Do it.

Hit that gong. I'm gonna warm up the gong proper.

Oh, yes, yes, yes. We've gotten some notes that you must warm up a gong before you hit it. Also hit the gold part, not the center.

Really?

Yes. That's what, that's what somebody said in the comments. Is that better? It's about the same. I don't know. I'm not, I don't know enough about gong. I'm sure I'm gonna be an expert in 20 years when we're still doing the show. But I thought that this was interesting because, you know, Apple's a huge company, Tim Cook's a legendary operator and there's just something about being a big company that even if you're seeing, oh, the current thing on X today, everyone's talking about supply chain in China being a risk. It's going to take years to actually build up another supply chain. So this kind of tied to the re industrialization story, there's like you can start a new company. You can actually build something like before Apple can really turn the massive cruise Ship, that is the. Or the battleship or the aircraft carrier that the company is. But it seems like it's happening and this seemed like a huge white pill. So I was excited to talk about it. And we should dig into MP materials more deeply soon. They're up 22%. I guess just the day that this profile came out and seems like a very, very exciting company. And honestly, when we were talking to the co founder of Core Weave, there's this. We all learned about chips and then ASML and then SK Hynix and memory and I feel like rare earth minerals and rare earth magnets are going to be the next thing where everyone's learning about it at the same time. And a lot of people already have and they've done pieces on it, but I want to learn more.

I could see AP doing a rare earth royal oak.

That would be incredible. Yeah, like, instead of the. What was meteorite dial? Yeah, the meteorite dial. You get the rare earth, the rare.

Go through some timeline. I'll be right back.

Well, we have our next guest.

Welcome Chris, into the studio.

Okay, yeah, yeah, I'll. I'll go through some stuff. I'll. I'll just welcome Chris in and. And get the intro from him. So. Welcome to the studio, Chris. Good to see you. It's been far too long. What has it been? Over a week.

Over a week, I think that sounds right. I'm excited to be here.

I'm glad to have you kick us off with an intro and a little bit of an overview of the news today.

Well, look, before I get started, I should say that if at any point during this interview Windsurf gets acquired for a fourth time, cut it off and I will. There will be no hard feelings. Quick intro on me, though. I've been in the Valley for 15 years working with tech companies the whole time and kind of every stage and variation and just about any role that you could think of. So I. Most of my career was as an investor. I worked at Benchmark, working with early stage companies, CO2, focused on some later stage companies. Before then, I founded a healthcare company called Curology. And before that I was an investment banker, working with big tech companies and helping them taking them public and do M and A transactions and all that kind of stuff.

Okay, we'll get into the news in a bit, maybe when Jordi gets back. But the. The question I have is, like, as an investor, as a board member, there is generally a. You mentioned Windsurf. There's generally a duty to be, like, founder friendly. But what do you do when the founders and the employees are misaligned? Like, are you as a board member, are you supposed to vote in favor of what's best for the whole group of founders plus employees as a class, are you supposed to back the founder if they want to do something that's less employee, employee friendly, vice versa? Like this feels like the modern debate that we're having in Silicon Valley is like the social contract is re evaluated. How have you processed the Windsurf news? How do you think this changes going forward? What are the next questions that you think venture capitalists and founders need to be talking about to make sure that, that when amazing deal happens, everyone's happy about it?

Yeah, well, I think your first goal as an investor, we rarely have a lot of power. We have sort of in the best case, influence. But I think your first duty is to try to help the founder understand that what's good for the employees and what's good for everybody is sort of the right thing for everybody over the long term. And the ecosystem and your reputation, all that stuff is really critical. And so I was delighted to see that everybody got to a very good outcome on this one. And I think that's, that's where it should have landed. This feels like a one plus one equals three kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, it seems like, I mean, when the cognition news broke, we had been talking about like, oh, where could the remain co wind up? Maybe it lands at like a more legacy tech company. Like the Humane team wound up at HP and people were kind of memeing about like AI printers and stuff. And that seemed like, you know, it probably would have been a fine outcome financially, but it would have been like, okay, a lot of those people kind of need to restart their careers and kind of get back into the high aggressive Silicon Valley, high growth startup world that they probably fell in love with. And that's why they wound up at windsurf six months ago or 10 months ago or 15 months ago. But with cognition, it's just a complete continuation of that aggressive take over the world, build something new mindset. So yeah, I agree with you. Amazing outcome for everyone involved. Obviously a tumultuous weekend, but we're glad that the plane landed, even if it.

Was a little bit bumpy. Some better news, we got to talk about the new vehicle. It broke in Forbes this morning, but we're happy to have you on here today to talk about it. Give us, give us a story, Give us the number and I'm going to stand up and get ready to do something back here.

So it's $175 million debut fund.

Let's go. Congratulations, you guys.

Is the gong, like, individually mic'd? Because that sounds incredible.

I don't know about Mike.

It's got its own camera.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, good.

But, yeah, we're always working on the fidelity of the gong.

Yes.

Really important to. To the. To the.

Congratulations. 175 million.

175 million. Stage agnostic. Sector agnostic is the idea. I'll make a very small number of investments, so sort of 8 to 10 core positions. A normal venture fund might have 30 or 40 positions or something like that. And the idea behind that was my favorite part of my career was when I was just making my first few investments that were going to matter a lot for me because it felt like there was sort of a symmetry between what I cared about and what the founder cared about. Like, for the founder, this company is their whole life. It is everything. They live and die with it. And I think one of the problems, as you get more senior as an investor, you naturally have more companies that you've invested in. Every individual company is going to matter a little bit less. And so with this vehicle, the idea was create a vehicle where structurally everything will matter. To me, it's eight to 10 core investments. Every one of them is going to matter, and I'm going to work really hard on each of them.

Stage agnostic. Sector agnostic. Still, I imagine not an ria, not playing in the public markets, not. Not putting more than 20% of the fund into secondaries. Is that roughly correct? It's crazy I even have to ask that question, but we are in crazy times. Is it even possible to start an RIA at this scale? Or is that something that only the mega funds are thinking about?

No, it's definitely possible. It just. It eats into some of your management fees and it requires some various compliance obligations that you have to get used to. You probably have a second phone and some things that are like, you hire some compliance consultants and all that kind of stuff. I had looked at it because I do like buying secondary from time to time and just decided against doing it. There's also some additional rules around how you can market, get the fund and stuff like that. You have to be a little bit more careful when you're in ria. And so I decided to go the ERA route. It's a flexible vehicle. So I'll do things just kind of at any stage. I will often not be leading rounds. I'm willing to lead rounds. The idea was because I'll be so selective on the company quality. I think I have to be flexible about everything else and so I'll try to just show up in a way that is useful and easy to work with.

How is the concentrated strategy resonating to founders so far? I imagine it's. It's a very real differentiator of just saying, hey, you can be one of 40 bets or you can be one of 10 and I'm going to do everything in my power to help you win. Can see how that would resonate. But what's it been like on the ground?

I think so far it's working well. You know, I have founders who text me 10 or 20 times a day. I also have founders who want to be left alone for the most part. And I'm happy to do that also. But I think so far it resonates. I tell every founder when I make an investment, I just want to be along for the ride and things will be good, things will be bad. A lot of the time they'll be difficult. Building companies is mostly pain and I will just try to be someone who eases that along the way and helps you navigate the difficult moments and all that kind of stuff.

Is there an alternate world where you launch this fund prior to curology and. And I think it's sort of funny because if you were in that situation, you would have said I had a non traditional background for venture capital and it's HBS and go to and benchmark and sort of a traditional background. But you went and did the hard thing and built a big company. But did you have it in mind that I'm going to go be a founder, do this and then come back around to venture? Or. Or was it all just kind of an accident?

I think I was always built to be an investor. I enjoy it and there's a lot of sort of features of investing that are well suited to me, but I just think it's kind of a rite of passage if you haven't operated inside of a company, if you don't know what it's like when things are difficult and bad. I think it's kind of difficult to give good advice to a founder. And so I think it was an important thing for me to develop some empathy. Like I try to understand that this is, it's one of the hardest and loneliest jobs in the world. You'll have weeks where everything is going wrong and there's sort of, you know, playbooks for navigating each of these things that go wrong. But I think you have to have been through them before to understand how to do it and who to call and what the foot faults are and that kind of stuff. And, and that's sort of how I thought about it.

What was the fundraise process like? 175 million for First Fund. It's a big number, but I heard from a little birdie that you got some pretty insane LPs in this one. So it sounds like you were doing something right.

Well, I think that's. Well, thank you for that. And I think it's right. It went relatively quickly. I was real lucky because I had a few LPs who were just fast and early believers and everything else sort of ended up forming around that. And so I ended up sort of many times oversubscribed and ended up with a group that I'm very, very happy about. I think most of them, I'm not allowed to say their name, but the ones that I can say are Adam Street, Common Fund, Northwestern University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a bunch of causes that I'm very excited to be working for here.

That's really cool.

It's exciting. What do you think? How do you think about investment, kind of time horizon if you have such a concentrated fund? Very possible that you'll meet five companies in the next six months that you'll invest in, but it feels maybe unlikely. Maybe it's more like one a quarter, but it's hard to plan these things.

Yeah. When I was raising, everybody says they're going to deploy the fund in three years and then they end up going a lot faster than that. And so maybe this ends up being two years or something like that, but I just don't have that many amazing ideas every year. And so part of the reason for the way the fund is structured is it's kind of how I like to work, that I develop a lot of conviction around something over a period of time. But then I like to have a bet that matters. I think the single most painful thing for me, me is if I find a company and I sort of am able to persuade the founder, I'm able to win the right to invest and it ends up working and it still doesn't matter in a material way for my limited partners, that's something that I think is something I don't want to deal with. And so that's the reason for the sort of bigger bets, the concentrated strategy. And that requires, I think, going a little bit slower also because there just aren't that many companies that will meet.

The that makes sense.

I have a question about venture markets generally, loosely, in the context of Windsurf. But I'm wondering if it feels like right now the labs are on a buying spree. Not just OpenAI and anthropic, but DeepMind. And you could see acquisitions happening all over the place. And one framework to think about it is that they're all just buying call options. Anyone who's got a unique technical direction or unique technical talent, the labs are just happy to pay any price, because maybe it's 1% of infinity if you solve superintelligence, or maybe it's, hey, we already have. You know, Mark Zuckerberg has a massive business in, you know, delivering ads. If you make that 1% better, you've added $10 billion to the market cap. So what's a couple billion in acquisitions going out the door? Totally makes economic sense. But my question is, is, does this change venture capital underwriting at any particular stage? Like, it feels like you really want to be backing, I guess, teams that could be, you know, aqua hire talent, because it gives you this, like, liquidity option. But then maybe the real alpha is finding the.

But at the same time, very founders.

Who are on missions.

If you look the capital deployed into Windsurf, obviously the majority of the capital didn't get a tremendous return, despite it being a big headline number.

Is that just because a lot of. I mean, this was the seed and they.

Well, I'm just saying, like, the majority of the capital came later. And then I think it was probably at somewhere around a billion.

Okay. Yeah. I don't know.

But, yeah, I mean, I think on the underwriting question, I think in the history of our industry, there was always, like, a hardened fast rule that you always backed one company in a space. There was always going to be one winner. And then I think as the markets have gotten progressively bigger and, you know, there's. There's like one winner in search for a long time and one winner in operating systems. As the markets got bigger and bigger, you started to have, like, two player markets. Like you have iOS and you have Android. And then they got bigger, and you have three player markets, and you have, you know, the cloud, AWS and GCP and Azure. And I think AI is going to be the biggest market of all of these. And I think one of the ways that it changes underwriting is that there's probably going to be more winners in each space than we expect. And I think you see this a little bit with Cursor and with Windsurf, and you see Some really high quality companies. I also think it changes underwriting because it feels like M and A is coming back a little bit. And I think there's sort of some a cause for optimism around that.

It's great. Anything else?

No. Join any boards recently? I don't know if you. You can talk about that kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah. Joined the board of Perplexity recently.

Congratulations. There we go.

I wanted to give you an off ramp there in case you weren't ready to talk about it.

The product I use 20 times a day and a half since it came out for investment research and everything else, and one of the best executing teams I've ever been around. So I'm very excited to be a part of the effort.

Fantastic. We love Arvind.

Yeah. Yeah. I find myself using it every time we record.

You guys got to try the browser. If you haven't.

We demoed it live on the stream. Tyler, our intern, used the Perplexity Comet browser. Had some good feedback for it. It was good.

Amazing.

Awesome. Well, congratulations, I would say, to the full partnership. But you are the full partnership, is that correct? Are you going to be adding anybody to the team?

Just me and head of operations.

Very cool.

Amazing. Bet on yourself. Love it. Awesome. Chris. Well, congratulations. Thanks for coming on. I'm sure we'll have you back.

We'll see you guys.

Good seeing you.

Cheers.

Talk to you soon. And we have our next guest already here in the waiting room, Dick Lucas. Do you want to get some backgrounds?

Video going viral today. There he is.

Look at that background. How you doing?

I'm good, I'm good. How are you guys doing?

Looking sharp in the suit.

You look like you changed since the viral video.

I know, I know. Actually, I. My shirts are. My shirts are dirty. This one's not. So this is the same outfit, same pin as well. So congrats on the success of the show. It's been awesome to watch you guys cook. So thank you for fitting me in today. Appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for hopping on. I saw your name for the first time this morning when you started going viral. Great silhouette on the video. You look like you're in the Palisades somewhere. Where are you? Just give us the full history on yourself. And maybe what inspired you to get involved in politics or mud wrestling, as we call it.

Awesome. Well, I think it really starts in. It starts in high school when I got my first computer in the dig.com days. That's when I got really into technology and got really into software and saw this whole boom taking off I was like, this stuff's really cool. I didn't think computer science. I thought that was only for smart people. So I didn't declare my major for CS until sophomore year of college. Like, it was. I was a history of mine. I was like, you know, I'm just do the CS thing. It kicked my ass, but. But I, but I got through. It was, you can get a bachelor art of arts in computer science, if you could believe that. And that's what I got. So I have a long belief in technology. And then from there started doing software stuff. I was an Android developer for several years. So I was in the code mines. Started an agency with a homie, with Sawyer. And now we're. Yeah, we're cooking on that. And what inspired this really is, is I was creating voter guides. I was like, okay, California's obviously run, run horribly. If, maybe if I just read all what the candidates are saying and go deep on like, you know, who's running for Waterboard, who's running for this, who's running for that. And actually no one even knows what a state assembly person is. I'm running for state Assembly. Most people don't even know what that means. So I'm like, okay, if I go and like, look at these candidates, there's got to be people that are out there that are good. And I'm going through these campaign websites and they don't even, they barely even say what they believe. There's no competition. There's not even debates at these local levels. And I'm just like, there is a huge opportunity here for someone that is willing to just get themselves in the game, put a couple videos out there, say some common sense stuff and shake things up. So that was really the inspiration. And so what.

Tell us what running for State assembly means. What. What is the role that you would like, what does that look like? And then what are the. What's the process to get there?

Okay, so the primary is in June. It's in June of June of 26. Excuse me, June of this year. And. Excuse me. So there's 80 assembly members, right? In California. Each state has something different, but it's basically like a mini Senate and a mini House of Representatives, just like the federal government. So you have 80 assembly people and you have 40 state senators. And unlike, you know, in California, there's 80 districts. I'm in the 51st District, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Westwood, other parts of Hollywood, Beverly Hills. And each district has assemblymen. And then each. And then there's also state senators as well. So same thing, federal government. There's stuff that comes out of the senate, state senate, there's stuff that comes out of the state assembly. And that's how legislation gets passed. That's how the machine works. And right now what we've seen is, is it's basically one party state. Now I'm not. I think the left has good ideas. I think the right has good ideas. I think that there's opportunities on both sides. The problem is when you lack competition, a system, which is what we have in California, it becomes sick, it becomes ill. I mean, we see this in every single institution or system since the dawn of time. You need to compete, there needs to be pressure on the system or it collapses from within. And that's what we're seeing in California. We're starting to see a small shift, I'd say. But you know what really broke the camel's back for me was fires happened and people wouldn't even hear about the wildfires in the Palisades, the Eaton fire out where I grew up. People wouldn't even hear. They wouldn't even want to listen if you said, yo, maybe we could have done some things better. Like the Santa Ynez reservoir that went dry in the Palisades was down for eight months. I talked to a state senator, I went to a meet up with him. I was like, bro, what happened there? He said, well, it's unclear how much that would have actually helped. It's like, dude, if it helped 5%, if it helped 10%, if it helped 15%, like, like you couldn't even really have a discussion about it. And I said, okay, this is. The system itself is completely sick. Where we had a whole bunch of stuff burned down. Our mayor in Los Angeles was gone on a trip. We had fire hydrants go dry and people in my network, people didn't even want to talk about it. So I guess the only way to talk about it, you got to run.

Yeah, no, I love it. Taking action. We covered the fires. John and I are both here in la. Uniquely John. John lives in Pasadena, I live in Malibu. We both had to get out of town for a while. I missed a show. John was covering one day. It was really the only show I missed this year. But. Yeah, but my reaction to the fire is it seemed like there was a lot of excitement around clearing PCH because that was the thing that was most obviously a reminder of the competency of the government. And so. But that's only a very small percentage of the, of what the over overall response should, should look like I'm curious, do you know who your real competition is?

Yes, yes I do. Yeah, Democrat. He's been in the machine for several years. And that's the other thing. Looking at these people, what they've done a lot of these people with. I'll have this audience. If you are considering running, you should run for office. You should look at who your local person is and you should run because not YouTube, all your listeners, but YouTube as well because you look at their website, you look at their cv, you look what they've done. A lot of these guys are community organizers. I still don't know what that means. And also people either lawyers or they're people that haven't built anything or created any jobs. So it's like this. All my smartest friends. No one even thinks and I'm sure, same with you guys, no one even thinks about going into politics. So it's like if, if you, if all the people that are smart or driven in your network aren't going in to politics, who is going into politics? Well, we see players, basically.

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

What's at the top of the stack in terms of low hanging fruit? You get in. What do you want to push on? What do you want to change? What are the most exciting or like tractable problems that you think you.

I think the biggest thing that is resonating right now is the cost of housing. You know, there's the phrase it's the economy, stupid. And obviously we need to work on that too. But housing In California is 100% the national average. Same with our, same with our gas prices, our gas utility prices. Gasoline is the highest in the country, as you know, which is not a.

Which is, is not partially due to the market but also due to just massive taxes that the government has voted to apply to every gallon.

Oh, for gasoline.

So you drive across the border. It's, it's not like a supply demand thing as much as it is or.

Top eight oil producing state. It had the highest, highest gas price in the country. Doesn't make any sense. There's obviously there's also some good things that we want. Clean gas. So California puts a lot of, you know, restrictions on refinery refiners. You know, they want to pay for the top quality clean gas. So we don't have, we don't have, you know, smoky valleys and it doesn't look horrible like it did in the 60s. So I get all that, but it's completely out of whack.

Yeah.

So the other. But housing, we need to, we need to make. We need to make it easier to build. They did just pass. The Dems did just pass something. And I tried to understand. You can go read the, you know, legend, you can read these bills, and like, they. They talked about it as a big win, but it's. It's difficult to even understand what's going on, like, in terms of what they got done. You know, they're making it easier to build now recently, as of like, July 3rd, near transit areas. And you go read the bill and it's like 30 pages of. Is like, is this making it easier? Why isn't it just say, like, you can build here. If you own the land, you can build here. Like, this is. It's completely out of whack. So we have a supply problem here. We need to just make it a whole lot easier to build. And, you know, there's people talking about freezing the rents. We can do better than. The funny thing is the people that lie to you will say, oh, we're going to freeze the rents for everyone. That's not even that good. We can do better than freeze the rents. We can actually lower if you add supply. We've seen this in Austin, we've seen this in other cities. And my view is there's 50 different experiments going on everywhere in our country, every state.

Right.

You just look at what works, where price is coming down, where our business is going, and you just fall. Yeah. So it's like we have the tools right here. I. I don't. I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I know that. I have a lot of respect for people in technology because I think they're epic. I think they're smart. I think they. They raise the standard living for everyone. And I'm not going to, you know, invent the next nuclear reactor or whatever. So I'm looking at this. I'm like, this is an opportunity that I can actually, you know, I'm smart enough. And it's like, we have 50 experiments. Let's follow what works and let's just do it.

How can people support you? How do people like who. Who are your constituents who will actually be voting for you? It doesn't sound like it's just everyone.

Are you going to be covering the Gundo, or is that out of range?

No, it's out of reach. It's out of reach. Unfortunately, you know how to represent those guys. But dicklucas.com, my biggest following is on X. Damn, you got me sweating, boys. I'm fired up.

Let's go.

On that, yeah, I'm not taking any money right now. We're just going to see what noise we can make. The people that will vote for me are the people, like I said, in my district.

Yeah.

And I don't. I think very few of those people have seen this viral video. So I want to do two things. I want to get the word out with you guys and with technology people and the people in my network. And the second thing is ground game. I got to knock on doors. I gotta, I gotta talk to people. Now that I have a website, my video up, I'm gonna just go door to door and be like, yo, let's talk, let's. I, I actually want to hear what, what, what people, obviously, what's their biggest concern?

Do you mean literally knock on doors?

Yes, yes. Door knocking is very effective in these local races. You just have to, you just have to do it like.

Yeah, yeah, how many?

So I'm gonna.

Yeah, do you have to, you have to quantify how many doors it is? Break it down, I guess. But you do have a long time.

100. There's a. I think my district's 490, 000 people, something like that, or eligible voters, something like that.

A couple hundred thousand. You do, you know. Yeah. I mean, you got what, what, 300 a day? Okay. You can, you can look through a bunch of those.

I mean, it's, I mean, it's huge. And I'm going to be working while I'm doing this, so it's like I'm going to do. And I have a kid coming in November, so I'm like, let's just see what kind of noise we can make. And yeah, I'm excited to, to start knocking on doors and let's just see.

What we can do.

Technology is the only. Technology is the only way. You get more for less. There is nothing else. Yeah, you can make processes better, but fundamentally that's the only thing that you would get more for less. The only thing that raises standard of living for everyone. So I don't know why people have such an aversion to it. I'm just trying to be like, this isn't left or right. Let's just, let's implement things that make our life better, make everyone more rich and prosperous.

I love it.

I love it. Yeah. California, despite, you know, shooting ourself in the foot over and over and over for decades, is still amazing place to live. Still amazing. Let's just, you know, stop shooting ourselves in the foot. Get some common sense.

I think we can, I Think we can have a bigger economy than China? I mean, straight up. We can be. Let's go second, everyone. Newsom fourth. We're top four. We're top five. And yeah, we are not because of you. I think we can. Let's just. Let's do this. It's possible. Let's do it.

Have you met Gavin Newsom?

You gotta get on the.

No, I have. I have not. I have not.

Yeah, you gotta reach out to him, get him, get on his podcast, because he's had all sorts of people, so I know.

I don't think I'm big time enough for him yet. But I think now that I've done this, I'll send you. I'll send him this link and he'll say, okay, I know it. I know what Jordan John are doing. Okay. Yeah, come on.

That would be awesome. It's time. Well, thank you for doing this. It is truly a sacrifice. It is. It is going to be an absolute slog, but it's worth doing and somebody's got to step up and do it. And it can start in your district and we'll have to have you back on as the campaign gets closer.

Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you gentlemen so much for having me on. Really, really do appreciate it. Thank you so much.

We'll talk to you soon. Good luck. Bye.

What a sign of respect joining with a suit with the flag. I mean, he checked both boxes. A lot of people bring the suit, they don't bring the flag. And he should get a California flag up there too, though.

That'd be great. Yeah, the bear, we love the California flag.

What else we got? We got some time.

So Michael Truell, the founder of Cursor, released a very cinematic, kind of like a podcast conversation with Patrick Collison, the founder of Strike. And it's very cool for a few reasons, but it has the aesthetics of the Jony Ives Sam Altman video.

So you just immediately assumed.

Immediately I was like, oh, there's a deal, they're acquiring Cursor. And I don't. That's not the news. I don't even think there's a rumor, but there's something about when you film two CEOs walking into a coffee shop with cinema cameras. I just permanently think acquisition now thanks to Sam Altman. But I didn't get a chance to listen to this whole thing. I'm definitely going to. It's going to be. It's like a full hour, 45 minutes or something. Seems very cool. I love these kind of conversations and I think this is like an interesting untapped media product where it's not cursor starting a podcast. It's just a one off, really cool thing between two CEOs. And they're.

Yeah, they're not making a commitment of putting out a video like this once a week. No, it's just like a couple times a month.

Yeah, they're just like both technical CEOs. And so you look at the list of topics, it's like writing your first startup in Smalltalk, Lisp Chatbots, Brett Victor and Dynamic Land, Coinbase's Code base's Big bang moment and MongoDB rewriting Stripe. How do you, Patrick Collison, use AI? Changes to GDP, total factor productivity, unexpected beneficiaries of AI. So they're just having like the conversation that they probably have when they just hang out and get dinner together, but they're just recording it with cinema cameras and great audio in a coffee shop and then just putting it on the Internet. I think this is a very interesting new, new form of like going direct. It's like, it really helps me understand who Patrick is and who Michael is. And it's. And it's in this, like they're both insiders, they can just have the conversation they want to have. I feel like this is great for both of them for recruiting. I don't know, I was just like, I haven't watched the full thing, but it just felt like a cool new modality of like content in the startup world. So aside from the confusion about potential acquisition announcement, it seemed really, really cool and I was excited to see it go out. So go give it a watch. If you're, if you're looking to spend 45 minutes hanging out with two absolute, absolute amazing CEOs talking about AI and coding. In other news, Andreessen Horowitz, managing partner Scott Kapoor has been traded to the U.S. office of Personal Management.

Potentially poached.

Potentially poached.

No, of course not. This, I'm sure had been in the works for a while. This was officially sworn in.

I think it was announced. I think he passed confirmation or something. But very excited for Scott. Congratulations.

Going to the government is not very sexy. It's not high status, but like Dick just said, it's important for people to step up and make sacrifices to serve their city, county, county, state, country, etc.

Yeah, we applaud him. The AI war has an opened a new front on Wall Street. We've talked to a number of founders that are building AI tools for Wall street. And today, Anthropic giant AI giant Anthropic announced the launch of Claude for financial services. Finance is a natural fit for AI given the reams of structured data, says Nick. The industry processes, the big platforms are focusing more and more more on fintech products. Anthropic already signed Bridgewater and S and P Global is here for Anthropic. And we saw earlier that Devin got hired at Goldman Sachs. You love to see that city.

Was it Citi both and Goldman both.

And yes. So Kaplan, the president of Cognition, I believe that's his title, he said like this was the news that we were hoping to launch on Monday. We had this all queued up that we did this big deal with Citi. We're very excited about this, but no one saw it because we were, you know, acquiring the current thing and that became the story. But that was very exciting. So all the big AI companies are figuring out how they can plug in to the big Wall street companies.

And there's some more. There's going to be some big launches and announcements this week from some of these labs and we will be covering them as soon as they're ready to share more. TBPN was in the ringer this morning talking to Katie Bakes, talking about the AI trade wars and tying them into sports, which we know nothing about. But it was cool to see Katie break that down. And then in other news, Shane Copeland over at polymarket says eight months ago, on election night, we were on On Top of the world after Polymarket called the election. Eight days later, the FBI broke down my door at 6am and took all of my computers and phones, looking for anything that could imply foul play. While traumatic, it etched the story of polymarket's accuracy and the ensuing resistance into the history of American politics. And today I'm happy to announce that this chapter of the story is over. After cooperating and engaging, we've been cleared of any wrongdoing. Justice prevailed. God bless America. And of course, Poly market probe ended by Department of Justice and win for crypto bets under Trump. So very cool. For Shane, I think we were live recording when the news broke that he had been raided. But we, it was, we were not live yet. Like, we weren't actually live. So we were recording.

Interesting.

And we got off the show and we looked and we were like, wow, that's insane.

Well, I have one last post. Do you have anything else you want to go through, Jordy, or can I please it out? A councilman has been charged with petty theft after allegedly removing a Palantir advertisement from the baggage claim area at Friedman Memorial Airport. Trip Hutchinson pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he will face up to one year in county jail and a thousand dollar fine.

So did he take this because he wanted it for his garage?

Game worn It's a game worn out of home ad and he must be an out of home ad fan. Maxi it must be a huge Palantir fan and I I think it's probably just an honest mistake but I think all these great out of home ads they should find a resting place with they should be auctioned off and you should be able to get the shoes. We should put them on our walls. On our walls. So if you run a great out of home ad, put it up in the airport, you're taking it down, send it to us.

We'll throw it up here in the Ultra dome.

In the Ultra Dome. And we will see you tomorrow in the Ultra Dome.

I cannot wait.

At 11am Pacific sharp. Five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. And thank you for watching today. We love you soon. Bye.