100 Billion Bezos, SMCI Fully Sends GPUs (To China), Reddit CEO Joins | R.F. Kenmore, Mitch Lee, Bucky Moore, Steve Huffman, Quaid Walker, Ankur Jain, Michael Kratsios

27:38Like that's a big, big, that's a big push. He built thousands of fake dummy servers to fool US compliance auditors, caught on surveillance camera using a hairdryer to swap serial number stickers. And so OXGigi says, this man is a billionaire and was removing labels with a hairdryer personally. You're simply not grinding hard enough. There's always a grind set lesson in any story like this. Let's take this over to LinkedIn. It's also notable because there's the export tax or tip that you're trying to bring chips out of the country. The U.S. government kind of flips over the square terminal and they say, tip, please.

28:20It's 25%. So you're looking at hundreds of millions of dollars even if these were chips that were able to be exported. We were debating the flipping the iPad around asking for a tip earlier today. And I think our joint stance was if the iPad is turned around, you got a tip. Yeah. It's just the etiquette is that you got a tip. But is there anywhere where that line crosses and you say, I can't, I can't possibly push something. Funny thing is Air One asks for tips. Really? On online orders. Online orders. Wait, but there will be a human delivering it or? No, there's two separate tips. Okay. There's the person in the store who puts the things in the bag.

29:06And then there's the delivery person. Yeah. And they flip it over twice. Yeah. The game theory of this stuff is always hard because I feel like, I don't know, there's regulations on like taxes on tips, but it's very unclear if companies actually funnel, how they distribute the tips. Like, are you tipping the person? Are the tips grouped together? Were your tips pooled when you were a valet? Yeah. They were pooled. So even if you did a great job. Yeah, I had two jobs at the hotel. The valets, they pool. Yeah. Val staff, the people that, like, take you down to your room do not pool. And that was just the rules.

29:44Oh, it's because I might be the one who parks the car. You might be the one who gets it. Well, in a dynamic where you have a bunch of valets that are waiting for cars, it would be a bad experience for the guests if the valets are like, they see a nice car pull in and they're like fighting over themselves to deliver a service. It should just be like whoever's available should deliver the best possible service. Whereas Bell work is much more one-on-one. It's like, I'm kind of your guide on the property. I'm going to like, you know, you might have the person's cell phone. They might be texting you, et cetera.

30:18Interesting. And so it makes more sense to not pool. Well, tip your export control. Tip your federal government. I did have a funny story where there was a guy, a beaner, who used to come to the property, and everyone knew that every single thing. That's not a word.

30:38We haven't successfully kind of willed it into existence. Not at all. I think we're the only people. We didn't come up with this term. It was delivered to us. And then we appropriated it. Anyway. There was a guy who would come to the property. Any single thing he got help with on the property. He would tip? He would tip 100. And so it did cause chaos. Okay, because then people would just be like. Oh, I'd love to refill your diet code. It'd be like waiting around, like trying to be in the right spot to open a door. Because they knew it got a bit out of hand. I saw a piece of alpha on Instagram reels that suggested that you tip the front desk person when you're checking in.

31:18before you check in. Yeah, that always feels like a bribe, but it is the right move. This is a big thing in Vegas, right? You're supposed to put it in between when you give them the card. Oh, I saw this. Yeah, you stack the credit card and the ID and you put the$100 bill in there. That's even more like a bribe. And when you deliver that, then they have plausible liability and they can be like, oh, like, here you go. Or they can be like, okay, thank you, and I'm upgrading you. And I think if, at least this person on Instagram was making the case that if you average out, you're tipping$100 for every room and you're buying like a$400 room, but you get a$1 ,000 room upgrade every five times.

31:54The only durable alpha is like you want to tip before the service occurs. Yes. If you tip the valet when they bring you your car, how do they know what kind of service? So if you're ordering at Starbucks and you want to make sure that they're going to enter your order correctly and get your name right, you got to tip up front and then say what your order is. Walk up to the counter, say flip it over. Flip it over. I'm tipping you first. Now let's start the transaction. Anyway, when a broker who had bought NVIDIA-powered servers from the Southeast Asian company... Now walk up to the counter and say, what's your tempo address?

32:35Oh, yes, yes. Send him a machine payment. Yes, automatically. When a broker who had bought Nvidia-powered servers from the Southeast Asian company sent Sunny a text message containing a link to an announcement about Chinese nationals being arrested for smuggling AI chips into China, Sunny allegedly responded with sobbing emotions. Scroll up so people can see. Morning Brew says, hey man, you're probably going to jail. Super Mocha co-founder crying emoji. And scroll down and you'll see Nick Carter. Literally this. Your son has passed away. It's the warthog explosion. Oh, okay. I guess we can't find it.

33:16It's weird. My ex is different. Jordan Schneider apparently was all over this back in August of last year. He said a super micro ad in the middle of a Reuters piece talking about how tracking devices and AI servers is just priceless. Whoa. What did Jordan know? What did Jordan know? Steve Alpha in China Talk. Head over to China Talk and subscribe. He's got some amazing content, some amazing interviews, and is a good friend of the show. And so there's clearly secrets to be unveiled through the China Talk archive. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.

33:55CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also talk to you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. unlock seamless real-time experience is a new value with cisco thank you to the cisco team for sending us these mini mclaren helmets they're a sponsor of mclaren very cool and uh we are honored yeah we love f1 uh i'm sorry but the super micro thing is awful but parts of it are genuinely hilarious they literally used a hair driver to move serial numbers from real servers to dummy servers to throw in a warehouse and got caught on camera and the pictures have actually leaked Literally caught red-handed.

34:33Yes, it's a red hair dryer. That is remarkable. Trungfan says, do things that don't scale. Classic founder energy. Yeah, definitely, definitely that. What else is going on? Let's pull up this video. I don't know if Bone, the legend Bone, is... Chinese entrepreneur boasts receipt of 200 NVIDIA H200 GPUs in Beijing, despite the U.S. export ban and then explains how he circumvents the export ban. Wow. In January of 2017? Posted by Beijing-based entrepreneur, Sudi on the Chinese social media platform, Dao Yin, has sparked significant discussion. Wait, it's literally, you can see, watch this, watch this.

35:13Look at that. Rewind for a second. You can see a super micro logo. No way. Sudi on the Chinese social media platform, Dao Yin, has sparked significant discussion. In the video, Sudi boasts a... Oh my God! that's like the biggest logo for super micro ever well bone bone is bone is absolutely from january no i i'm telling you like a lot of i i mean i'm sure the the justice department were working on this like wow and this but a lot of times like legal action will happen like downstream of like youtube drama videos like there will be some like, you know, fake guru who's out there like running a Ponzi scheme and people dunking on it on social media and then it will get picked up by the so almost a year and a quarter ago, somebody responded to bone and says it's SMIC packaged.

36:08And bone says, do you think SMIC is smuggling chips? Wow. And the, the family owned business in Taiwan, I won't be surprised if there There are some family members who want to make this money by setting up fake shell entities and smuggling chips for business partners in China. Wow. It's good money. Wow. Wild. This is crazy. Wild. Kevin Kwok has a good meme that everyone enjoyed. They expect one of us in the wreckage brother. And it's not Jensen. The Bain meme. It's very, very funny. And, yeah, the SMIC founder, I believe, was at GTC just a few days ago. Oh, really? Hanging out. No way. I saw a picture of him with Jensen.

36:51Yeah, until the music stops playing, I suppose. Let me tell you about LabelBox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about public. Investing for those who take it to stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Speaking of going insanely hard, says Joe Weitenthal, I'm obsessed with the name of the rocket that will take the first Chinese astronauts to the moon. It's called a Long March 10, the next generation crewed launch vehicle. Long March is a great, great name for just locking in, the lock-in rocket.

37:26Lock-in rocket. And it's time. What are we talking about? For Kimmygate. Kimmygate. What's going on here? Thin was. So Cursor, yesterday announced Composer 2, which apparently was composed of other models. Did very well on Cursor Bench. A little bit odd with the charts on the higher cost, lower cost. But it seemed like it did well for Cursor's use case. Cursor fans were satisfied, I suppose. Finn says that he was messing around with the OpenAI base URL in Cursor and caught this. Account slash any sphere slash model slash Kimi K2 P5 RL and then some other numbers. So Composer 2 is just Kimi K2 with RL.

38:08At least rename the model ID. Well, the co-founder, I believe, or someone from Cursor chimed in and said, it is, in fact, RL'd Kimi K2, and this is why open weight rules. We the consumers get new improved models with minimal cost. And it's Lee Robinson who is teaching developers at Cursor. Lee Robinson says, yep, Composer 2 started from an open source base. We will do full pre-training in the future. That's an interesting claim. I'm wondering if they even need to. I don't know that there's any problem with using an open source model here. He says only one quarter of the compute spent on the final model came from the base.

38:52The rest is from our training. So they took whatever compute went into K2 and then they 4X that or 3X'd it and drop that into RL. This is why evals are very different. And yes, we are following the license through our inference partner terms. So I don't know. They're staking out their claim. They're making their strategy known. Jack Morris says, people are taking this the wrong way. Look at it like this. Composer 1, Deep Seek, probably. Composer 2, Kimmy, certainly. Composer 3, likely will be the first frontier base model pre-trained from scratch for a single domain. Coding, it's a scary thought, isn't it?

39:29And so people are taking both sides. Tyler, do you have a take on this? Yeah, I mean, I think it's like very reasonable to do RL on like some open source pre-chain. Like that makes a lot of sense, right? Because like you can kind of imagine that there's this dynamic where there's a post about this we can talk about. But I'm like, so there's all this stuff about how, okay, Claude, Anthropic Trains model, and then Chinese open source labs kind of distill on it. You know, the actual implementation of how they distill it maybe doesn't matter that much. But you're kind of getting some form of like Claude a little bit that's open source.

40:01Yeah, and then you take that and then you can do RL to do like a specific hill climb on some tasks like just coding And then that's like a very good way to make good model right so prime intellect their most recent release Was I think it was GLM like 4.5. Yeah, and then so they take that base model And then you do our own that and you get this really great model because like RL is like where you can get a lot of these like small small games On specific task which which can build up over time. Yeah, I think it like makes a lot of sense It's not like a big dunk to be like, oh my gosh, they were just doing RRL on this open source model.

40:32It's a very logical strategy. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think the criticism of, I think they probably should have come out and said they did it and not tried to position it as like we did a, they said what, this was our first continual pre-trained. Yeah, continual pre-trained. So they kind of like using that word, it would have been easy to be like, we took world-class open source models and improved them in order to create a frontier coding model. Yeah, and I think people would have been totally fine with that. I mean, a lot of American labs have done this and said it, and everyone's like, wow, this is great.

41:10This is a great model. I'm excited to use it. Yeah, didn't perplex it at one point create like DeepSeek 1776 or something like that where they were like, we specifically made it more American. I will say after I actually did that. Oh, after you did that? Okay, yeah. It's so funny that you did that. Zephyrus says, Cursor Pros are treating Kimmy like Voldemort. I don't want to say the name. He did, in fact, put it in a post. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Accelerate Harder says, The funny bit is training from scratch impresses investors and Twitter, but it makes little sense for most teams while strong open source options exist.

41:46So Cursor actually did the smart thing, but pretended they did the dumb thing, and it nearly worked. So more of maybe a comms issue than a business strategy issue. But we'll see. Yeah, I think there are some concerns maybe about the actual license of the model. Because technically you are supposed to say that it is like Kimmy. Yeah, usually you have to pass through these things. Like Android is built on Linux and that's in the release notes. There is likely to be some deal behind the scenes that actually means it's fine. Yeah. Also, I would not be surprised if people have just not read the Composer 2 license doc yet or something.

42:21And it's actually just fully disclosed there. And the people are like, I found in the URL. It was also in the terms of service. It was just in plain text somewhere that you just didn't find. Who knows? Let's see. So 3x, Ellie is giving some comps on this. So 3x, the training compute, gets you a 1 % improvement on SWE bench multilingual and 21 % on terminal bench 2.0. But K2.5 is in non-thinking mode. If those benchmarks are useless, it's weird that they're the ones reported in the cursor blog, then something is wrong. So people are going back and forth. But ultimately, I think this, you know, where the rubber meets the road is ARR.

42:59Like cursor has been growing. Cursor continues to grow. Even while they've, you know, been like steamrolled and the vibes have shifted. If people love this and people are using the product and it's a growing business and the market is growing so fast that they have a great business. that seems like business continues as usual. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Let me also tell you about Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.

43:33So should we move on? Delvegate. Another gate. Another gate. Delvegate. So what happened here? Where should we start? Anonymous Substack. Okay. pops up. Yeah, these anonymous sub stacks are interesting. Deep Delver clearly created just to share this particular story. No idea who's behind it. Yeah, incredible, incredibly professional in their presentation. Right, they're putting backups of the article. Yeah, on day one. They're saying reporters who want to get in touch. Whistleblower. They're sharing a Proton. And so, yeah, they make an argument that Delve has had a bunch of kind of nefarious activity, kind of duplicating reports, not basically just like a lot of their value prop, I think was on the fact that they were using AI and speed.

44:28And yeah, it doesn't look good at all. I don't believe we've had Delve on the show, but I searched the calendar and I got one hit for Delve And it's in a summary of Bill Gurley's book that says, it's a page turner that delves deep into the surprising, often zigzagging career paths of exceptional performers. There's something inspiring on every page is a quote from the New York Times bestselling author that he gave to Bill Gurley's book and just sort of wound up in our notes. Anyway, so what actually happened? What is Delve? Let's start there. Delve does SOC2 compliance and HIPAA compliance. They've worked for a number of companies like Lovable, Clue Lee, et cetera, et cetera.

45:18And yeah, you can kind of, I mean, the article is like very, very, very long and detailed, but it just goes into. Erin Griffith shares like the key claim. Erin Griffith, of course, is over at the New York Times. And she quotes this. Delve built a machine designed to make clients complicit without their knowledge to manufacture plausible deniability while producing exactly the opposite. And a lot of people are having fun with the fact that the Delve founders were in the 30 under 30, which, of course, has surfaced a lot of people. I think there's, are there really 1 ,800 30 under 30 every year? That's true?

45:58Or is that like DocuSign has 20 ,000 more users? I thought you were saying all in. Oh, maybe overall. I know that there's multiple categories. So there's more than 30. I think it used to be that there was actually 30. Yeah. And then Forbes realized, like, what if we scaled this? Yeah. This is the plan. Scale the Midas list. 100 Midas lists. So you get 10 ,000 VCs paying you top dollar to rank. It should be an auction. So Austin Petersmith says, not going to lie, as we've been going through a grueling SOC 2 process with Vanta, one of our sponsors, I have felt a lot of FOMO reading about Delve customers getting it done in three weeks.

46:36If all this is true, then no more FOMO. So he's... Milo... There are some things that you just can't short. Milo pulled up a post from the CEO from April of last year that says, the CEO says, when you step into the office and you're founding AI engineers on his third all-nighter, his team never stopped shipping, Milo says, third all-nighter of what? Compliance? I don't want my security company shipping 3AM code. So very unfortunate situation. Not going to make any real assumptions, but this story is definitely not over. Well, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market?

47:23Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. and let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference the scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Okay, so the snake's post We're not doing the snake post No, I hate snakes. We're not doing it. I refuse to pull up a snake post. We're skipping straight to Bruce Lee We're skipping way down I'm not going to make John watch a snake video even though you want to close your eyes I saw it This video is definitely terrible to watch It's also fake.

47:59It doesn't exist. I'm Irish. No snakes in Ireland. No snakes on TVPN. Snakes are banned. We've got to do that bit where somebody attaches like a rucker snake. No, no, you will not do that to me. Under no circumstances will you do this. We will be watching Bruce Lee fight Chuck Norris in the way of the dragon because this is the way that we pay our respects to Chuck Norris, who of course passed away at the age of, I think, 86. Norris.

48:30he was 86 and this is one of the most iconic fight scenes in movie history have you seen the way of the dragon of course this scene was unique it was set inside rome's coliseum and it was often cited as a turning point for how martial arts were portrayed on screen, particularly because they didn't use actors. So both Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris were legitimately high-level fighters. Norris was world karate champion at the time. They cast him in part because of that. And it has a much more grounded, credible feel as opposed to previously more stylized kung fu films. And you can see this with the...

49:20Bruce Lee actually directed and choreographed this himself. So Lee had full control so the director didn't say anything. And they do these cool like punch-in shots. Look at this. So you're seeing nice wide. You can see exactly where he is. There's no body double. And then we're gonna zoom in. And then what are we gonna do again? We're gonna zoom in again! And so we see his face and he's just sitting there waiting. Brilliant shot. So much time to breathe and understand and feel what he's feeling. The music, footsteps, breathing, clothing movement. The cat, of course. Any snakes? Yeah. No snakes, I don't think.

49:55I haven't watched the whole thing. The camera often stays wide. This stands in contrast to something like the Bourne Identity. Very fast cuts, close-ups. Much easier to get something that feels intense when you're cutting and chopping. It's much harder to make something like this where you see the full body. Now we're in slow-mo. They're shotting back and forth. The empty arena gives a gladiatorial vibe. a sense of ritual combat. Visually frames the fight as mythic, not just physical. Bruce Lee is learning mid-fight. Norris has the edge with his rigid karate form, but Lee adapts. He loosens his stance, increases his mobility, switches his rhythm.

50:38We got to talk over it or else we get demonetized and banned. So I got to figure it out. Anyway, Anyway, we're very sad that he is no longer with us, but he leaves behind a massive legacy in a portfolio of films, including the TV shows as well, Walker, Texas Ranger, which was constantly on TV when I was a kid. Well, rest in peace to a legend. Let me tell you about Apple 11. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon Data. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast.

51:16That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Bernie Sanders had a conversation with Claude. He did. The video was posted yesterday. Justine Moore says he did the meme. He did the meme. Bernie says, pretend to be a scary robot. I'm a scary robot. Yeah, yeah. Taylor Lorenz chimed on this too. This reminds me of that tweet that was like typing, I'm evil, into a Google Doc and getting scared. Yeah, there's a little bit of that. Will Manitis had another take. He said a trillion dollars was spent on AI risk teams and no one thought to hard code into the model to not tell Bernie Sanders that you do crimes.

51:53Very funny. But this is the correct way to disclose that you're talking to an AI model. Yeah. Do you think he was inspired by the Vanity Fair piece and then immediately shipped this? The Vanity Fair piece like buried the lead and like it was surfaced in a bunch of screenshots later that made it look like the entire article was AI generated, which it wasn't. Like that Vanity Fair article did have access to a bunch of people and there are some interesting vignettes in there. But this is very clear from day one what's happening. Like he's talking to Claude and he's investigating and, you know, sharing his fears.

52:23And I think this is a great way to actually share what you're doing and make it very clear. And so people are mixed on this. Miles Brundage says, worst part of the Bernie video is using sonnet. Not sure why folks are so mad about the others. That's very funny. And then delicious tacos. Delicious tacos. I also smoked a grok. It's burning like this. No, no, don't click that. But you can imagine what happens there. And then, yeah, hopes, revenge. Made the card for us. Thank you. Signed. It's great. Anyway, let's move over to Montana. One and only Moonlight Basin. There's a property that made it into the timeline.

53:07Ooh, indoor pool. New. Okay. This is a new hotel. Got to visit the property a few weekends ago. I saw some promotional material for this. It is absolutely stunning. I want to have Sam, the founder of Cross Harbor, who's the developer on the show, because he's basically, in my view, felt like he was the mayor of Big Sky. He's developed all these incredible properties. Donated a hospital to Big Sky, too. just said here's a hospital that's cool for the local community which is amazing does it have zebras not no zebras does it have tortoises for 5.1 million this safari like estate comes with zebras oh you got a solution to my problem i need zebras animals roam free at california's 137 oak hill preserve which has a five-bedroom lodge and a helipad i'm loving this is this is crazy okay I can't believe the value here.

54:07I feel like anything that has zebras and tortoises should be up in the double ditch. Each zebra, I don't know how much it costs to get a zebra, but you should get like a 10x multiplier on it. Yeah, for sure. So Ryan Craft visited Africa for the first time in the 80s, he said, but his heart never left. He proposed to his now wife, Bernadette Craft, in a hot air balloon, that's elite, above the Serengeti National Park. The couple got married in Nairobi, Kenya in 1988 and two decades ago after taking their three sons to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Brian started wondering how he could bring some of the African experience closer to home.

54:46Can I recreate a mini Africa that's a short distance away from our house? Thus began a years-long process of developing a roughly 137-acre safari-like sanctuary in Ione, California. Is that Ione or Ione? I don't know. with a helipad and a collection of animals, including tortoises, alpacas, East African plains, zebras, and cattle. Aoni. Aoni, okay. So now approaching the age of 70, Kraft, who is a commercial real estate broker, entrepreneur, and aspiring screenwriter, is listing the vacation property for$5.1 million. Approximately 15 animals are included in the offering. That's only less than a 10x multiple per animal.

55:29known as Oak Hill Preserve the estate is about 40 miles from Sacramento where the Crafts live the animals roam freely on the property with access to plenty of water and grass Craft likes to drive around the estate in an old pickup truck he outfitted with benches in the back and lights in the front and rear the idea is to go looking for animals like you would on a safari Craft assembled the property by buying three separate parcels over a five year stretch starting in 2007 it had the right amount of open space like a savannah and the right amount of trees like you're in a thicket Kraft improved the land, a former cattle ranch, bit by bit, starting with no-climb fences, roads, and underground power lines.

56:04Throughout the property, Kraft said he tried to evoke Africa with curved roads and buildings with rounded edges. One of the first structures he built was a bunkhouse for a group of friends. I've got a group of knuckleheads, he said. I did it with them in mind. It was a guy thing. The wives put up with all of us. If someone says knuckleheads, and you don't immediately think of a specific group. This is amazing that this is in California. Just driving around this California state and just seeing zebras roaming is amazing. Incredible. Ostriches. This is a treat. This is a treat. A few years ago, Kraft said his friends chipped in to buy him a Jeep with animal print paint.

56:43We were all having breakfast all of a sudden. I hear the theme of Out of Africa. He recalled, then one of the guys pulled up in the Jeep. It was quite a surprise. He completed the main lodge on the property around 2018, spanning around 4 ,200 square feet. It has five bedrooms. There's a cafe for dining near a creek in the property, as well as entertaining space that Kraft calls the Cigar Bar. John, you have to get this place. This is extremely me. This is so you. This is extremely me. Kraft said that he is at the estate every week. It's basically just a family getaway. His children and their friends spend time there too, and his oldest son got married there.

57:23Wow. Why is he selling? Why is he selling? What's wrong? This has got to be some Jurassic Park style thing where he's been doing some rare zebra crossbreeds that are about to take over. He's like, yeah, the electric fence works well. It's no climb. You're like, but they've learned to fly. I'm not exactly sure. The property has many outdoor amenities, including a basketball court. That's going to be big. basketball's making a comeback Kraft said selling has been a sweet but he promised his wife to list the property when he turns 70 that's when you should be selling your primary home moving to the to your ranch how far is it?

58:03Ione in Amador County is home to wineries and equestrian properties and it has become a second home market for people from the Sacramento area the local luxury market is strong yeah it's really far but it has a helipad Yeah, six and a half hours straight shot, maybe seven hours straight shot in a car. But if my plan to ban speed limits happens and you can drive there 200 miles an hour instead of 65, you'll get there in two hours. It's a flat two hours right now from San Francisco. But get this, by train, it'll only take you six hours.

58:40Wait, did you guys miss this line? It says one of his friends discovered what he believes to be a century-old gold mine. Wait, really? Okay, he's just pranking everyone right now. This is crazy. I think he just wanted to show off his ranch. So he's like, yeah, I'm selling. I'm selling. He's not selling this thing. There's no way. He just wanted the journal feature. We do need to get this guy on the show, though. He seems like he's just had a great life and a great time. Seems like a good person to learn the ins and outs of commercial real estate from. Quickly, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

59:19And somebody who is selling is Orlando Bloom. He put his longtime Malibu home on the market for$12 million. He spent millions redoing the four-bedroom house. Now it's for sale. It can be you. It is above El Matador State Beach. You're going to have to tell me if that's a good beach. Is this a good location? It is a fantastic beach. Okay. It was the actor's primary home for a full decade. A lot of tourists there. A lot of tourists. Yes, okay. Which is somewhat of a downside. Somewhat of a downside. Okay, so it's in a gated community. It's stunning. It's in a gated community. Only Jordy can tell us if it's a goaded community, though.

59:54The Malibu house has interiors by the artist and furniture designer Roy McMacken. Bloom did an extensive renovation that cost more than twice what he paid for the house. He bought the house in... Where? He bought it in... He sold its separate Malibu house in 2024 for$4.1 million. How much did he actually buy the house for? I forget. 2.5. 2.5. And then I guess he spent more than five renovating it, and now he's looking for 12. So he said he's reluctant to let go of the Malibu house, but he rented it out last year and realized that he likely was not going back there. It felt like it might be the right time to let it go, he said.

1:00:33And he's somebody that picks up the phone when the journal's calling, which we love to hear. Listing agent is Chris Cortazzo. No way. Again, Cortazzo. Basically, Chris has almost half of all the high-end listings in Alibu. Do you know how he described the ground floor when Orlando Bloom bought this house? He described the ground floor as a bit higglety-pigglety, which is a great line. It was a bit higglety-pigglety. But I needed it for my knuckleheads. Even for my knuckleheads. He said he's got the most amazing drives through the Malibu Canyons. He's very excited. That is true. It has a pool, a jacuzzi, and a sauna, I believe.

1:01:17And so you can go check that out. There are some other amazing properties in the mansion section, but we will have to get to those later. First, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, let's bring in our first guest of the show. RF Kenmore is in the restroom waiting room. We'll bring him to the TBPN Ultra Dome. He's a menswear insider. And we can give him a couple minutes because there is a tequila billionaire who is selling a Balianese-style Hawaii home for$32.5 million.

1:01:57It's designed to look like a temple. The house on Kiholo Bay was built in Indonesia, disassembled, and then rebuilt in Hawaii. That is crazy. Billionaire John Paul DeGiorgio's Hawaii home has traveled almost as much as he has. I like this home. Just take the home and bring it to another island. That's pretty remarkable. So in the 80s, he had the Balianese style, from Bali, that home designed and constructed by artisans in Indonesia, then disassembled and shipped to Hawaii's big island where it was rebuilt on a waterfront lot. The process cost a couple million He's a co-founder of the tequila brand Patron and the hair care products company, John Paul Mitchell Systems.

1:02:41Now the property with a shingled roof designed to resemble dragon skin is coming on the market for$32.5 million. What a remarkable property. You really haven't lived until you've gotten food poisoning in Bali. I've never been. Have you been to Bali? A couple times. Surfing? Yes. A couple times. Isn't it a really, really long flight? It's a terrible flight. It's a terrible flight, right? It's very inconvenient. It's, uh, especially when you're a college kid and you're broke and you're just like, I used to, with surf trips, I'd go and I would just search the rough dates that I'd want. Yeah. And then I would just buy the cheapest possible flight, which would usually involve like a 17 hour layover and like the worst place on earth.

1:03:21Amazing. But I would do it because my time was basically worth nothing and, uh, it was worth it. but shouldn't you have just gone to an island that's has similar like features closer like we have the caribbean is there not good surfing in the caribbean no no that's actually yeah you can't surf in the caribbean question great no no it's not to say there isn't good surfing in the caribbean but the caribbean all areas are seasonal right so different times of year it's going to be better conditions but the caribbean you have situations where like it's really good for six hours okay and then it's flat okay whereas bali you're gonna have like more consistent surf and it's an island so you can like go around it depending on the conditions and whatever swells okay well i believe we have our next guest in the rich room writing room so let's bring in rfk more into the tbp how are you doing good to meet you thank you for taking the time how are you what's going on boys how's it going it's fantastic uh and looking sharp of the weekend you are looking sharp uh we love having anonymous commentators on the show what can you tell us by way of an introduction what is your focus how would you introduce yourself without doxing yourself Yeah, big fan of menswear, big fan of the clothing industry, brands, apparel, products.

1:04:47Worked in men's brands in the industry for over 10 years now. Overnight success. It also says here you're a hotel bar evangelist. Explain that. That's right, yeah. What's so special about a hotel bar versus just a normal bar? It's an elevated experience. Why? It doesn't necessarily need to be an elevated experience. Keeps the riffraff out. why you can go into a hotel bar they don't know about it follow rf kenmore yet okay okay it's uh it's a bit of a it's a bit of a filter you know you don't always have uh you don't always have people wandering in off the street sometimes the bar you have to go through the lobby to a room to a room and just kind of filters people out you know uh i wanted to get the update on the menswear industry broadly where the like what's happening in clothing who's the biggest winner right now yeah who's a bit yeah who's who's the biggest winner yeah who's on an absolute uh like generational run uh i mean on on the on the the largest level uh i don't really i don't really know in terms of luxury or those like major players, but on the more like specialty sort of scale, probably Buck Mason, you know, kind of big in the conversation.

1:06:10They're opening tons of stores. I think they're up to like 50 or 60 stores now. And men's, from what I last heard, men's still drives a pretty sizable portion of the business, which you don't really see usually women's overtakes as soon as you introduce it. Oh, interesting. Probably them. Even so. So would you expect at some point women's to overtake men's at Buck Mason or is it just the name is like so. It's just incredibly masculine, but maybe there's still an opportunity. I would probably I would probably expect it to. From what I hear, it's doing really well. They have sort of a good like foundational business going with T-shirts and sweats and sort of like coastal, you know, linen and good fabrications.

1:06:57well i would say a large part of their success is that they put a vintage porsche in their stores right yeah have you guys ever seen their porsches they have in the stores did they actually we went to that suit fitting with uh yeah user it was at a buck oh that was that's a buck and they did have a vintage portion yeah yeah yeah yeah where did that trend come from is there like a clear lineage or is it just like a broad trend we need we need you guys know know your meme yeah where it like traces the origins of every meme we need to know your Porsche yeah um I don't know I I I know that ALD had the the Porsche in their little Soho pop-up that they did for their Porsche collaboration and that might have predated any any Buck Mason yeah yeah I I think you know it it makes total I mean I it's funny because I've always appreciated I I really love your post when when you're just kind of joking around and be like, no, they couldn't possibly put a, put a car in their, in their retail store because it is so cliche now, but I think it, I think it's a way for, it's just a way for a brand to signal like who they are because cars are extremely personal.

1:08:05It says, uh, if you're a car person and you choose to invest your money in cars, your car does say something about you, whether you like it. Yeah. I would love to walk into a menswear store that had like a Dodge Viper sitting there, like a srt or yeah maybe uh like a dodge durango srt

1:08:27what the three-wheeler what's that one that they always play the loud music oh is that the aerial atom no i i slingshot or something i forget yeah who's gonna be the first who's gonna stand up and be the first that would be good i like it uh what is what is actually going into how does a brand thrives today. Everyone knows that apparel brands, you know, you're having to spend so much money on inventory, you don't necessarily know what's going to be hot. But what are the brands that are doing the best in menswear doing from a supply chain standpoint? Are they, you know, leaning into U.S. manufacturing?

1:09:03Are they still, like, dependent on Asia or Latin America? what's the approach that's working? Yeah, I mean, there's no one, in terms of supply chain or sort of like the operational side of the business, I don't think that there's one model that you have to adhere to. I know that COVID really scared a lot of brands into diversifying their supply chains. There were some brands that were just super, super heavily concentrated in China, even with just one vendor base. and so that's really forced people to look into latin america india um different areas like that but um as far as like what drives success i think community is is more important than it's ever been um you know you look at the what does that actually what does that actually mean though because usually when people like for example like i've bought a bunch of stuff from buck mason over the years but i've never been like identifying as like i'm in the buck mason community to me would mean like you walk in and there's you know you got your your dodge viper there and then they they hand you a white monster and there's like a mosh pit that you can like go and like thrash to like limb biscuit with in and like you're going to be fighting guys in the mosh pit but you're going to be building community through that got it that's what it means to me okay but maybe you have a future in men's work i think so it's possible you look like it you're looking you're looking dialed you're kind of mog and jordy right now yeah casual friday over here has crept in to every day but you almost wore jeans i was very close to wearing jeans but i did throw on the dress pants uh walk me through the guide to visiting new york we we head to new york every once in a while we're usually at the new york stock exchange downtown i believe it's in downtown great apparel there uh where's the best place to live where's the best place to hang out what's the guide for the the the west coast fellow who's visiting or or planning to move to new york yeah um everyone's got different that's kind of the cool thing about about manhattan that there's kind of different flavors depending on which neighborhood you go to um i think the upper East Side is coming back.

1:11:22People are rediscovering the Upper East Side, like kind of like they're the first ones to do it, which is funny. But my favorite neighborhood still is like the Nomad Flatiron sort of area. It's central, but it's not in the middle of anything, if that makes kind of sense. Does the city feel like it's back? Because there was a lot of like doom and gloom over like mom donnie everyone's gonna move to florida everyone's gonna leave and but what's the actual vibe on the ground been i yeah i think it's the same as it's always been i think you know you walk around anywhere anywhere busy uh you know you go to any of like the shopping areas whether it's fifth avenue on flat iron or you go to a nice a nice restaurant somewhere that's popular there's they're slammed and they're impossible to get into so i don't i don't think What is your pitch for tech people who want to dress more, want to elevate their wardrobes in New York specifically?

1:12:29I feel like the finance guy has some sort of shape to them that's been established going back. There's lots of great reference points. You can say I'm a Garden Gecko guy or a Patrick Bateman guy. There's plenty of iconic cinematic portrayals of the Wall Street guy. less so in the New York tech scene. The New York tech scene is certainly growing and it feels like it has an opportunity to distinguish itself from the Silicon Valley scene. I don't know. I think you can just establish like a tribal council of tech leaders to really hone in on the personal aesthetic. But if you're an individual, I mean, I think a uniform is always a great place to start.

1:13:10Just pick a couple of good things, a top, a bottom, and then buy really good versions of those things that are obviously well made and that fit you really well. You need to take them to a tailor or whatever to make that happen. That's good too. And then just buy multiples. And then from there, you can kind of introduce maybe a stylish piece that you found really interesting that just happened to be kind of like a one and done. What's going on with various lifestyle brands in different kind of subcultures, whether that's running or golf? Are they all going to converge on a long enough time horizon because they need to scale?

1:13:52What are you seeing there? Well, I don't know if you saw my tweet about Malvin. I guess they're converging. They're just grabbing at whatever hype they can find transitioning from golf into run clubs. But I don't know. I mean, it's hard. Like if you look at the hardcore running brands that are kind of driving the culture right now, Bandit, Satisfy, there's a couple smaller ones like Uvu or I don't even know how to say it in the UK. Or Soar. Could you imagine a world in which they pivot into golf or they expand, I guess, better phrased, into golf? I don't know. I think that would feel kind of disingenuous and you would end up with this like disparate feeling brand identity and assortment.

1:14:43So I don't know. I think lifestyle is probably the more the more natural. Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic where it's easier to break out and establish a foothold as a brand by really focusing on like a subculture like running. But then can you is is running, you know, what are you running from? Right. Is it somewhat of a, is it an Instagram kind of, you know, fad, right? Are people, can running support 10 different, you know, micro brands over time? Probably. But at the same time, like, it feels like very, like, on trend right now too. And, yeah, we'll see. We'll see how durable it is. So outside of following you, what's a good way for folks to get into menswear?

1:15:33If I'm talking to somebody that's interested in cars, I might recommend Doug DeMuro, go down that rabbit hole. There's a whole, you can pick up a copy of Car and Driver, you could start watching Drive to Survivor, just watch F1, you'll learn about cars broadly. What are the different entry points, what are the great either creators or publications that you think help people get up to speed on menswear? Yeah, that's kind of why I started tweeting, honestly. It's hard. I don't know that there is one. And I think the offering in terms of voices and publications and more of the institutional side of it, I don't know, I feel like kind of aimed a little high.

1:16:21like they're looking at temporary brands they're looking at runway they're looking at things that may not be super useful to most people and so I found out a really hard time trying to find relatable digestible content or advice sure sure yeah for normal people who you got Jeremy Kirkland blammo okay he's a buddy cool but he's had a great podcast forever that kind of goes through and interviews a lot of the great kind of founders and creative leaders in the industry yeah he's cool there's um there's that dude uh now i'm blanking on his name i don't know um well last question do you think uh do you think surf brands can ever make a comeback do you think that any people will be like i gotta get the new billabong drop i gotta get the new quicksilver is there a chance they've they've fallen off so incredibly hard what else were you like tour yeah the fall off is just insane i like people just like young teenagers they want to wear chrome hearts and you know and and streetwear they that last they don't want to be caught dead in billabong but everything all these things come back around eventually yeah it's kind of funny i was just talking to uh a buddy in the industry about this how bill bomb quicksilver whatever kind of you know they were tapped into culture they were kind of running things um for a little bit but now that i mean that vibe is probably running brands or golf brands maybe a little bit um there is the one brand uh florence marine x which john john florence is the face of yeah which is backed by the hurley family and he's having a go at this sort of like modern uh take on on a surf brand you have outer known as well uh kelly slater's outer known brand that he co-founded it's definitely more of like a lifestyle yeah the the question though is can any of these brands like break back into culture and billabong or quicksilver break back specifically no no i'm just saying like even outer known and and Florence Marine X, like you don't see like Instagram kids in a GT3 RS, you know, rocking like outer, you know, outer known.

1:18:43And my question is like, could you ever see one of those people, one of those archetypes, you know, rocking a surf brand? It seems, it seems like a stretch, but it's, it's hard. Yeah. It's, it's hard to imagine, but I don't know. I mean, crazy things happen. Billabong's got to sign ASAP Rocky as creative director. Most of the GT3 RS owners seem like the type to put the surfboard on the roof, which is ridiculous. Obviously, no one would ever do that.

1:19:13John's a ball now. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. Great to meet you. Thank you for all of your commentary. And we'll chat with you soon. Have a good one. Go find a port to store somewhere. We will. You're the man. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Serverless Vector and Full-Tex Search. Built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper. and extremely scalable. Before we bring in our, oh, is our next guest available? Yep. Fantastic. Let's bring in Mitch Lee from Arc Boats. That's the sound of the boat going. You need to play that constantly. Let's bring in Mitch Lee from Arc Boats.

1:19:49How you doing, Mitch? What's going on, Mitch? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Thanks for hopping on. I'm super familiar with you. I think we talked on the phone a couple of years ago, but since folks out there might not be, please introduce yourself and the company. Yeah, my name is Mitch Lee, co-founder and CEO of ARK. ARK is on a mission to electrify the marine industry, rebuild this very outdated industry around more modern electric powertrains. This is similar to what happened in rail many decades ago. Every train today is electrically powered. They're diesel electric, hydrogen electric, battery electric, but they're all electric.

1:20:29Marine industry is going to do the same thing, and we're out to a big lead there. Yeah, we were talking to Travis Kalanick about how he, I think he had like a tour of Sironics factory and was like, I want to water ski behind that. But I think you can technically water ski behind an ARC boat. He's so addicted to water skiing. He wants a drone to help him water ski because he's like, well, if I can't get anybody to drive a boat. Yeah, so talk to us about what can you do on an ARC boat, fish and wakeboard and water skis, everything on the table. And then, yeah, is there an autonomous vision in the future?

1:21:01Yeah. So briefly on the business, where we started was we had this core thesis. The entire industry is going to go electric over the next decade or so. We started by hardening that technology in the consumer space. So our first boats to market were consumer boats, a speedboat that you could water ski behind. Now we're ramping production of a wake sport boat. So something that you wakeboard behind. John's a late guy. I like lakes. I'm more of an ocean guy. I'm more of a guy. It's lake boats. It's lake boats. That's what I grew up with. I love it. So we're ramping production of that. What's the goal?

1:21:38Is there anything you can do on the electric side to make like the biggest wake ever? Or is it more just kind of like, hey, we want kind of something. Like the Plaid was like for the price, like the fastest zero to 60 at a time. Is there an equivalent like, oh, electric unlocks this? Because obviously everyone knows about the environmental benefits, the cost benefits. Maintenance. But the maintenance, but like, is there going to be like a killer feature from electrification? There is. I mean, there are multiple killer features. One of the biggest ones is actually sound. Okay. It's quiet when you're on the boat and like operating.

1:22:13So you can just talk. That's amazing. That's amazing. You don't smell the fumes of it. The torque on it. Well, that's a downside for John. He loves the smell of, you know, fumes in the morning. Yeah, seeing the oil pool as I jump into the water. Just the exhausting down into the water and cancer that you're – that's great. Yeah, exactly. No, but the torque at low speeds is very high. So you can – when you punch the throttle, it's immediate acceleration. The way you corner, it handles like a jet boat. So you could whip this – it's electronic steering, electronic throttle. So you could whip this boat around with a – like steering with one finger and throw people off the boat because it's so powerful.

1:22:56And then it's software-defined. So every part of this is, yeah, powered by software. You've got in-house firmware, in-house software, in-house telemetry system, over there updates. You hit one button, the wake is perfectly configured for whether you're wakeboarding or wake surfing on the left or right side of the boat. We can set that all up in software and it's just a punch of a button. That's amazing. So talk to us about where you're going next, how much money you've raised, what the plan is going forward. because obviously you found this beachhead metaphorically and you're expanding. Yeah. We just closed a$50 million Series C.

1:23:34That brings our total amount fundraised.

1:23:40That's great. Love the energy of the show. Play the boat sound. I want to hear the boat sound again.

1:23:50I guess we fired up in the morning. I love it. That should be your alarm clock. So$50 million. Anytime somebody calls me, that's the sound that it makes. That's great. We just closed that.

1:24:07Sorry, it's Friday. We're having fun. It's hard to keep it together. Don't worry. I'm hyped up on Celsius. We're good to go. Good, good. So we just closed that round. It brings our total funding up to$160 million. And again, we hardened this technology on the consumer side. We're now at a$40 million run rate on deliveries of those boats. Every month it's going up. Every month our margin is expanding. We are now expanding that core technology, the platform that we built, to commercial applications and defense applications. We signed a$160 million deal for ship-assist tugboats, so giant tugboats out on the water that push and pull cargo ships.

1:24:49Oh, wow. So that rapid acceleration and that turning capability that you mentioned, I imagine, is huge for if it makes a tugboat potentially a lot more accurate. You definitely get a lot of torque benefits from it. But a big part of it is they care about profit. They care about tugboat operators want to make more money. And the way that you make more money is you cut your OPEX in half by reducing the fuel costs, by reducing the maintenance costs, by keeping that vessel, which is a$20 million vessel, online and running more like a greater percent of the time. And then you also avoid a bunch of compliance burdens.

1:25:28These things are cancer spewing machines. So by going electric, you avoid a lot of the compliance burdens for like, hey, how do you more cleanly burn bunker fuel? instead it's like this thing doesn't even have fuel tanks on board you can put a diesel generator on the back of it but it's a it's a much cleaner what about what about autonomy the in the commercial space that's not as big of a deal today uh on the consumer side i mean we we have a fair amount of autonomy you can hit a button and the boat will just hold its position in the water sure um we'll allow you without without an anchor you're saying yeah yeah anchorless anchoring that's awesome so So if you're out in Lake Tahoe, it's pretty deep there.

1:26:10You can't drop an anchor, but you can just hit a button and say, I'm going to jump into the water because my boat stays there. And the boat just stays there. That's amazing. That's really cool. I mean, we, as kind of a little side project on a weekend, took the boat out and made it remote controllable. So you could just kind of remote control and$300 ,000 export. So if you want to, I mean, I don't think this is legal in maybe any state but Texas, but you can like hop out. That's where Travis lives. I think you got to give him a call. Yeah. You can get one of our boats and just remote control it.

1:26:43What about the elephant in the room? Jet skis. When are we going to see jet skis? Where are we going with this? I don't. Jet skis are a tough problem. It's kind of like motorcycles. There's a reason that they haven't gone mainstream electric yet. I think we might see that one day. But the cost. I mean, they're low-margin vehicles, and so getting the cost down to be competitive and stuff. What about the power? Oh, you're saying so it's hard and low margins? You don't care about me having fun? Love of the game. What about the charging infrastructure at different marinas? You want to jet ski really badly?

1:27:25I mean, the SAS? Well, you just want this because it'll tow you into the big waves, right? I just, jet skiing is euphoric. Yeah. If you're at Nazare, you need an electric jet ski that's autonomous. But the environmental, you know, it's hard with a jet ski. You're thinking about, you know, the dolphins are not having a good time. Or they don't like them? You need to do it for the dolphins. Okay. Okay. For the dolphins. That's our motto at ARC. Mark Van Niel is a huge dolphin fan. Talk to me about the charging infrastructure at Marines. Is this something that you partner with docks to get up to speed?

1:27:59Is there infrastructure that's pretty easy to just plug into? How has that been? The way I describe this is electric boats make way more sense than electric cars. That's not to say electric cars don't make sense. They just have hard problems to solve. You have to solve for road trips. Gas cars are really good at what they do. Going electric on the water is a no-brainer. Charging infrastructure is a good example of this. Marinos are already wired for power because big boats use shore power to power refrigerators or bilge pumps. The entire boat. Charge up batteries. Yeah, because you're going to have batteries for a long time, so you need a lot of charging infrastructure.

1:28:36And if you have a dock, then your dock is usually wired for power for lighting, or if you have a boat lift, that boat lift already runs 240. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Charging is a pretty tractable problem. It's not perfectly solved, but we're out to a huge head start there. When you get into commercial and defense applications, we just design the vessels so that they don't need charging. We're installing charging, but you don't need it. So everything is hybrid electric. It's diesel electric or hydrogen electric or nuclear electric. Like aircraft carriers today are nuclear electric, for example.

1:29:10They have an electric propulsion system, but then where the power source is coming from is nuclear energy. Interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the round. And we'll see you. We've got to get out on the water. We've got to do it. There's nothing like this boat. Come demo it. Sign up for a demo. I mean, to anyone that's watching this, too, come out for a demo. It will shift your perspective on the industry. Amazing. Amazing. Great to have you on the show, Mitch. Enjoy the weekend. Super fun. And we'll talk to you soon.

1:29:39All right. Cheers. Nice to meet you. Our next guest is here in person. We have Bucky Moore from Lightspeed. Let me first tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado, Bucky Moore. How are you doing? It's great to be in the temple today, guys. First time in person. It is great to have you. Yeah, I think the last time we did this, I think we were both kind of just getting started on our journeys, right? It was early last year.

1:30:04And so you guys have just ascended. More sponsors, bigger studio. Better hair. I didn't know you were jacked. Yeah, yeah. It's a great day today. We had leg day today. Beautiful day in LA. What's the split? Leg day once a week or twice a week? Monday, Friday. Monday, Friday. Yeah, yeah. What about you guys? Serious business. We maybe need to adopt that. because we're five days a week in the gym with the team, but we do like, we've been doing a, a, a technology brother split, which is a more traditional upper body. So it's like, you know, leg day would be Wednesday, but then you don't get the second leg day.

1:30:43It's like, Oh, I missed it again. Recovery though. Uh, how has, uh, how has Lightspeed been? It has been fantastic. I mean, I think we're all just lucky to be in the center of the industry right now, given all the amazing stuff that's happening. I think since we last spoke, we closed$9 billion in new funds. And we have been— Go hit the gong for us. All right. Smash that thing. Congratulations. There you go. Very good. So$9 billion in funding. And that's across venture and growth? That is correct, yeah. So Lightspeed is a generalist firm. And I think something that's very unique about us is we have produced, like, really meaningful returns in just about every sector, from healthcare and life sciences to enterprise to consumer to hard tech and financial services.

1:31:26It actually is, though. And I think it took me a while to realize that it's the secret, I think, of the platform is that we're willing to take deep, deep technical risk and very high conviction bets early. And I think that's the secret. Yeah. So what have you been focused on? More on the venture side? Absolutely. So I've spent all my time kind of in and around AI on the early stage side. Obviously, we've been spending a lot of time kind of looking for these like really, really transformative opportunities in the infrastructure layer. So new inference platforms, new model providers, and then in the application layer, I mean, I just feel like I'm seeing the future every day.

1:31:58There are companies that are just bringing this intelligence to bear in unique ways with these industries that I think is really going to be the tip of the spear in how the world adopts this technology. So when we talk about the SaaS apocalypse, I think a lot of that is somewhat overblown. Like I would agree with what Pat and Carl said yesterday in the sense that people do business with people. And ultimately, I think it is so much harder than a lot of these blog posts make it out to be to actually get this technology into these industries, into these end users' hands in a way that actually makes it actionable.

1:32:29And so we've been very actively investing in both layers. And I think there are places where the model providers are going to do a good job of that, but they are still going to have to shoulder the responsibility of that last mile. And then I think there's going to be places where app providers are going to be really prolific and build very valuable companies. Yeah. Let's work through the supply chain a little bit of the stack because AI means so many things right now. Starting with like, it feels like the ship has sailed a little bit on like training new models for the most part. The big labs are really big now, huge, maybe going IPO this year.

1:32:59But Neo labs are popular. What? I mean, there's enough. There are a lot of new labs. We get a new Neo lab at least. Is that interesting to you? So I would say as a firm, we have been very active in investing in a lot of these neolabs. So we're an investor in Mistral, SSI, thinking machines. I would also concede that I think the bar to reach the frontier today is higher than it's ever been. And so I think for us, it's really just a question of whether - Yeah, we've now seen like you can have unlimited, effectively unlimited resources and not get to the frontier. And so as an investor, there really, you have to see that the team actually has like some, like capital is not enough.

1:33:39I think there's an argument to be made that there are just no secrets in this industry anymore and scale is all you have. And I think there are really three, maybe four labs that are able to really play that game. I'm more asking like, yeah, you've made bets on Neolabs. Those make sense, great teams. Are you expecting to make a whole bunch more Neolab bets that are like truly, we're not on top of any open source model. We're gonna do the full thing in 2026, 2027. Or has that ship sailed more or less? Yeah, I wanna be careful with what I say here, obviously to remind myself that this is all about exceptions, but I think what we're seeing is the bar is way, way higher.

1:34:14Yeah, yeah. And so everyone talking about sample efficiency, everyone talking about continual learning. I mean, these are things that the large labs are very, very focused on as well. Yep. But I also think that there's a pretty valid argument to be made that the bureaucracy of these large labs is real. Like in the same way that OpenAI was able to exploit Google's bureaucracy by scaling a transformer before they could. I think you can argue that such opportunities will exist in the future for OpenAI and Anthropic being distracted by making the products that earn them all this money better. Sure, sure.

1:34:40Yeah, that makes sense. What about like much deeper in the supply chain? There was this article in The Information a few days ago about a company called Giga that has raised no venture funding. It's a small team that got into like building electrical infrastructure. And it's in the AI narrative. They were initially selling, you know, transformer equipment, like physical transformers, not the transformer architecture, to Bitcoin miners. Then they pivoted into the AI data center boom. They are seeing a lot of success. Would you ever dip down that deep? or is that sort of out of your purview? Obviously exceptions to everything, but - Oh, absolutely.

1:35:15I mean, I think a few of my partners have been spending a lot of time on just the power problem. And I think from my perspective as someone who tends to invest more in the software layer, what I'm seeing is that a lot of these neoclouds are actually blocked by their ability to raise the credit they need to actually bring this power online by the quality of the counterparties. And so if your counterparty is OpenAI, for example, the debt providers are going to be very, very aggressive and open to flowing you the funds that you need to bring all this online. But on the other hand, these neolabs who aren't generating revenue, may not have a near-term path to revenue, they're looked at very differently as counterparties.

1:35:47And so that's, I think, a big blocker for these neoclouds to bring a lot of the capacity that they have online. And so how do you unblock that? Obviously, we need new and more efficient means to generate electricity. And so we've been very actively investing in nuclear. We're investors in a company called Base Power that's doing some very interesting work, right? Go, Zach. And I think we will continue to be very active in that area. And my partners on the hard tech side are very busy trying to figure that out. Then on the other side of the stack, the application layer, what advice do you give to founders?

1:36:17What are the green flags for, okay, you're building in the application layer. You're never going to compete in training a foundation model. Maybe you do some fine tuning, but there's other secrets in the business. There's other sources of modes and strengths that you will see compounding. And you don't think you're you're gonna get steamrolled by an open AI or an anthropic anytime soon. What's interesting? Right in this moment, I mean, this week it's been top of mind over the last couple of weeks is like, I expect that the dynamic we're seeing right now between cursor and the labs is what we'll see for pretty much every other vertical, right?

1:36:50I expect to see that in legal. Like, you know, Plot has come out with like plugins for legal. But you can imagine them just saying like, yeah, we now have 100 people working on just the legal application of our technology. And so I think that every across that doesn't mean, you know, doesn't mean these companies can't still do well. Yeah. But I'm trying to think through like the timing where where OpenAI and Anthropic just like just like basically go all in on some of these bigger categories. Yeah. So I'm glad you brought up Cursor and like the software engineering space because it's obviously the most mature.

1:37:25So I think it's very illustrative as is legal. And interestingly, today, you guys I'm not sure if you guys covered this in the beginning of the show, but like the model that Cursor launched. So first off, it's very obvious now that these companies are going to be training their own models. And it's also the case that they're going to be starting with one of these open weight models, which today are Chinese, which as an American citizen doesn't sit super well with me. We are investors in a company called Reflection AI that aims to change that. But on the other hand, I do think what Cursor is out to prove is that the user data that they're capturing is going to allow them to set up this reinforcement learning loop that does allow them to build something that is like frontier quality.

1:38:00at the same time it appears as though these companies are still sending a lot of their most complex queries to codex to uh or rather gpt into into clod and there's obviously a margin problem there that is pretty hard to compete with when you think about the competitive products that open ai and anthropic have and then when you shift gears to legal my assumption would be that like harvey and lagora will have to do the same thing that cursor's doing and so i think this is kind of an elephant in the room right now as to whether doing that whether post-training open models allows you to combine with like unique user feedback that you get from being an application provider is defensible enough.

1:38:34And so when I think about like the companies that we're looking to invest in, I would actually say that I think that is just going to be an inevitable challenge for any of these industries that hit a maturation point of AI adoption like legal and software engineering have. But on the other hand, I think there's some industries where they're very large, they're far enough afield from where the model providers are today and probably will continue to be. And the context engineering to actually get the customer data into the model is just so messy. It requires going across different business functions.

1:38:59It requires a lot of like hands-on forward deployed engineering. I think those are the kind of companies that we get really excited about because I think just being really good at that is not only defensible, but it also allows you to start to generate this like feedback loop with your customers where you hear a lot of their secrets. And those secrets allow you to feed that back into how you make your product better at the expense of anyone else playing in the space. Because if you're serving the customer, they're only telling you those secrets, right? And I think Palantir is like a good example of this in sort of the pre-AI era.

1:39:26And I think we're going to see many companies ascend in that same way. And so the companies that were investing in the application layer, I think, have a really clear story around how that is hard and defensible enough that they can make it a core competency. Let me throw out a analogy at you that sort of riffs off of that. And you can tell me if it seems like a fit. Like Amazon, obviously, the goal was to be the everything store, but there were certain categories, regulated medical products, HIMSS, Roman, those companies were able to break through because it was out of the core competency. Is that a reasonable thought where it's not just about the flywheel of what's happening with those customer secrets, but it's also just such a sticky, messy problem that the big one size fits all solutions can't necessarily attack them?

1:40:09I think there's sort of a B2C version of this analogy. And then there's like the B2B one. So the B2C one is where you started. What you've seen with Amazon is they've obviously like kind of done what Costco does, which is when they see a category that's sort of commodity enough. They can create a generic version of it and they can have sort of margin, you know, advantages there that allow them to make a lot more money and compete. But I think that the B2B analogy is the one that I think of a little bit more, which is to say, like, if you look at Amazon Web Services, they've let companies like Snowflake and Databricks build really, really large businesses on top of them because it's driving consumption of their underlying infrastructure.

1:40:40Oh, interesting. Right. That's a good one. And while AWS still has data warehouse and data infrastructure products, they're, you know, they're probably 80 % as good. So if you're in the business of just kind of simplicity and you just want to kind of buy everything from Costco or buy everything from Amazon Web Services in this case, like you're going to go that way. And many large enterprises do. But on the other hand, Databricks and Snowflake have built really, really healthy businesses. And the health of those businesses accretes to the success of Amazon Web Services. I think you're going to see something very similar with the model providers, which is they're perfectly happy letting 75 % of the large industries out there just kind of sit on top of them.

1:41:13And then I think the 25 % of those industries that they're going to play in, those are the ones that I think you want to be very mindful of and avoid. And I think what the sort of hysteria around the SaaS apocalypse is right now is that we're starting to see the aperture of that 25 % rear its head. And I think what that means is you naturally take a step back and say, wait, it's not just going to be software illegal. And so I think that's the conversation that we're having every day is like, what's next? and I think Claude Cowork is sort of an example of where you could also just imagine that there's sort of this new class of AI app company that essentially connects to something like Claude Cowork via MCP and actually is in a really interesting position.

1:41:49So like we're seeing companies emerge where for example in the coding paradigm there may be places where you want to jump out of the code and jump to a design canvas for example, right? And so there's a company for example that's trying to just be called Paper that we think is really interesting that is trying to provide a canvas that literally just allows you to go from like the code you generate in Claude to the canvas and back, right? And today, that's something that Figma hasn't focused on as much, but I'm sure will. Granola, which is a company in our portfolio, like they've launched an MCP server and people are using it very aggressively in Claude.

1:42:17And I think what you're going to start to see happening is that the monetization model of a lot of software companies is going to shift actually monitoring, or sorry, metering the rate at which the MCP server is consumed. So for example, every time I call Granola's MCP, Granola should make a little bit of money, right? And I think that's actually going to be a very healthy business model and one that's probably durable. Jordy, sorry. How do you think about opportunities at the super early stage where you, where a lab could do it, but wouldn't because it's only in the near term, like a$300 million,$500 billion revenue opportunity?

1:42:52Because I think there's like lots of, you know, you look at companies like Open Evidence or Suno that have built like, you know, pretty big businesses. and like I think like Suno seems to be a beneficiary of like the battle between Anthropic and OpenAI right now specifically because OpenAI is like well we could put a bunch of resources into a you know you know a music product but like that's not the most important like if we just even if we knock it out of the park it's not gonna like necessarily change the dynamic at the frontier are you thinking about are you seeing opportunities at the early stage where you're like yes the labs could do this they would be in a good position to win, but it's just not even a big enough opportunity.

1:43:31And so a small focus team can like get to a five,$10 billion valuation and then have the opportunity to like, you know, scale from there. Yeah. So I'll start with Suno. So, um, we're also a, one of the largest investors in Suno love Mikey. I was honestly very skeptical of the company as a music aficionado. Like it was just difficult for me to conceive that, uh, music could be generated by AI that I'd actually want to listen to. And I've been proven wrong and really changed my mind on the company. And so I I think the sky is the limit for them. And like, what's interesting about Suno and more broadly audio models is they're just not as big as language models, meaning like you don't need as much compute to build really good audio models.

1:44:05And so I think the scale advantage that the labs have is, is, is just a little bit less of a thing in that area. Interesting. That's right. That's right. But, but I think coming back to this, like, Hey, there's going to be 75 % of the industries that they sort of rule out as like just immaterial, given how big they get. And obviously they're growing so nonlinearly that like what's material for them changes by the week. Yeah. And so I think there is going to be a pocket of really, really venture scale industries that the labs just do not service adequately. And I think that's what we spend every day thinking about is like, what are those spaces and how do we find the best teams working on them?

1:44:37And so I think that's, that's again why I sort of take the other side of this, like, you know, B2B app businesses is sort of over. What's an overlooked category right now?

1:44:51I mean, I wouldn't say it's underrated, but I think like power is still overlooked. It's just so important. It's such a bottleneck. So big and such a bottleneck. And the fact that you can name some nuclear companies, you can name, you know, we've had base power on a bunch of times, but you know, you would think there would be a bunch of like base power style opportunities. I think we're probably rate limited by capital going into that industry right now. That's just my intuition. The other area that I think is like more core to where I spend my time that I still think is underrated is inference, right?

1:45:22So like the GPU supply crunch that we're seeing right now is largely in part, as Dylan has said on the show before, like due to the fact that not only these consumer products, but the B2B products like Cloud Code and Codex are just really taking off and creating like insane demand for inference. I actually think that in the end, inference, if you look at it as a market, will be much, much bigger than cloud computing was pre-ChatGPT. And if you think about like, I mean, we're talking like hundreds and hundreds of billions of spend every year. And if that's true, like I think there will be very, very large inference platforms built in each modality.

1:45:51So there will be an inference platform for real-time video models. There will be an inference platform for, you know, open source and custom language models. There will be an inference platform built specifically for long-running agents. So I think we're just going to see that industry, which today looks like one industry, break up into many because of how big it is and how much room for specialization. Yeah, I mean, there was some leaks around like fall this week, right? Who's just been on, you know, an insane trajectory and like kind of, you know, they've done a bunch of rounds back to back.

1:46:19But going that quickly from a zero to an$8 billion valuation while staying like relatively out of the like 10 years ago, there would have been like a bunch of beat reporters just recovering, you know, just covering fall. And they've like are like kind of just like happily being like, yeah, we're just building a huge business over here. You can sort of imagine like inference specialization, if that's the thesis that plays out, happens both on like the model level, the data level, the taste level, the harness, but also down to the hardware. Like there's certain configurations, certain chips. I mean, we see this through inference acts from semi-analysis, like AMD chips will outperform NVIDIA chips with certain models.

1:46:59So if you're in some particular inference vertical, you might have a very different semiconductor supply chain. Yeah, and I think one interesting thread to pull on there is if you start to relax the latency constraint when it comes to inference. So, for example, like if I'm just telling my software agent to go do work and come back to me in a couple days when it's done, I probably don't care as much about latency. I care about throughput. And if that's true, then you start to look at these chips that Intel and AMD have, and they look really, really good. They're cheaper and really stand up. And you can imagine that for like if I'm doing like blood work or something, and I have to physically mail blood, and there's like no AI that can short circuit that.

1:47:33So I'm going to be waiting a day or two to get the data back. And the model that processes the data or sequences it or something takes an hour instead of a minute. That's not going to be mission critical. You don't need black wells for that type of work. Exactly, exactly. Whereas if I'm doing a Google search or I'm on my computer actively doing work, throwing that on Cerebris or something or Grok is going to speed things up, specifically in the developer workflow too. Yeah, and I think where this starts to get really interesting is if you ask yourself, will there be more of those types of workloads or less?

1:48:01I think it's quite obviously more if we're moving to these long horizon, sort of more autonomous agents. And so I think there's a world in which the sort of latency constraint that drives a lot of the hardware purchase and design decisions today starts to be relaxed. And we see a much more heterogeneous ecosystem there. That makes sense. Fundraising timelines today, faster than ever? For venture or for startups? Early stage. No, no, no. Yeah, I'm talking about startups. Like if you back a company at seed, how long, you know, what is - I think there are eight companies in the current YC batch that are raising over 100 million valuation, which is crazy because demo day is next week.

1:48:38And so how do we even know that this is happening? Usually you wait until after demo day. Not if you have the kind of momentum. And I think the average price is around 40, and clearly deals are getting done very, very quickly. Yeah. And then like any, you know, is the global conflict that we've entered into, is that slowing things down at all yet? Is there any kind of like pullback that you're seeing? So I'm not seeing the geopolitical impact early stage fundraising in any way, but coming back to kind of the velocity question, look, I think right now we, so first of all, what I've learned is that you don't really get to decide how much of the best companies you get to own.

1:49:19And you don't really get to decide the valuation. They decide it. And you have to decide whether you want to be involved with them or not. And right now, I think early stage is in this tricky place where like for a seed round, like you're really generally getting around 10 % ownership, right, for the most competitive rounds. And as a result, if you go back to kind of like what made the early stage model work, it was like owning somewhere between like 15 and 20 percent of companies that become really, really valuable. So the way you kind of have to play this now as a multi-stage firm is you get the 10 percent in the seed and then you effectively have to be in a position to buy up in the next round, the Series A.

1:49:49But at the same time, the Series A's are also ballooning in price. And there's really not a lot of de-risking because the valuation or because the velocity is so fast, right, by comparison to even like a couple of years ago. So right now what you see a lot is like you get 10 % in the seed. The Series A happens somewhere between like, you know, 150 and in some cases like 300 post. And then you end up kind of trying to co-lead that or lead that and you end up in like the low to mid-teens. And so it's just a different time, but like that's what it takes nowadays. And there are obviously exceptions to that.

1:50:15And I'll gladly buy more than 10 % of a company at seed if I'm excited about it and the founders are open to it. But that is the reality that we live in. And I think what that means is you're just – you're building a basket of companies that tend to be kind of in that low to mid-teens ownership more often than not. Are ghost ship zombie acquisitions affecting venture economics at all? Or has it been generally good? So these are like legacy software companies that are slow growers and not going to show up? No, more like licensing. I'm thinking of super fast growth startup with a bunch of venture capitalists that then a bigger company comes along and says, we want to buy you, but we're public.

1:50:48And so we can't just acquire the whole company and go through FTC approval. So instead, we're going to hire the whole team, do a licensing deal, pay a dividend to the cap table. But there's always this moment where you're like, did everyone get comped what they expected? Did the employees get what they deserve? Did the venture investors get what they deserve? Did the founders get what they deserved? And it's sort of this renegotiation moment. And there was a fear, at least last summer, that the Silicon Valley social contract might be violated. and it felt like at the moment maybe that was a like a fear that didn't come true because in every case most people seemed like they wound up with jobs at cool companies at big bigger companies and they did get paid out um but but has that has the fear calmed down or is there still like a low level ambient fear in venture so first of all i would say that the idea that an acquirer will try to structure deals in a way that disproportionately rewards the founders is nothing new right that's been happening.

1:51:45That's a tale as old as time. And there is sort of this term used in the industry called the founder bribe, where to get a deal done, the acquirer may in fact try to route as much of the proceeds toward the founders and the core team as possible. It's also perfectly rational because like, why would they want to give me any money as the investor, right? They'd much rather give money to the people that are actually doing the real work. Yeah, your job is done at that point. And it also depends on, you know, is it an asset sale or a talent acquisition or somewhere in between and everything's sort of a, you know, a blurry line.

1:52:14Yeah. And so with respect to these like creative structures that you're referring to, right, like the scale AI, the windsurfs and so on, like without commenting on specifics, what I would say is this is obviously an artifact of trying to get around a lot of the regulatory environment that makes buying companies difficult for one. Two, the bankers out there today are just pitching these left and right because they're, you know, they're out there trying to transact and they think this is a much more realistic way to transact. And three, I think, I think the jury is still out on whether the acquirer really gets like the return on these that they're looking for, right?

1:52:46Like a lot of these are still in flight and I, you know, I just don't know. So, so, but what I can tell you is that like, it's becoming more common. I told you why it's becoming more common. And the bankers are very, very actively trying to consummate these types of transactions every day. How introspective should a new founder be as they embark on their entrepreneurial journey? Yeah, I, uh, because there's two sides to it. Like I totally get the, the Travis Kalanick was sitting here telling us that he just runs through walls. Everyone was super pumped up about that. I love that attitude. I think that the chopping wood, putting your head down, incredibly valuable at the same time.

1:53:24I love the, the, the founder's fund question, the Peter Thiel question. What do you believe that very few people agree with you on? That's introspection. Like you're, you're actually just reflecting on like, where do I disagree with everyone? Maybe there's opportunity there and boat. Maybe there's a combination, but I'm wondering how you, how you deal with it. Like how much of the time are you just probing founders, market size, progress, revenue versus where do you want to be in a decade? What are you doing with your life? Is this actually the right job or do you really just want to get back to working at Google and this is just a way to get a promotion?

1:53:59So my experience has been, it is very hard to be an effective leader without some form of self-awareness, which requires introspection, right? Let's just get that out of the way. At the same time, I think, you know, this sort of, this position that Mark is taking or the retard maxing, you know, article that has been going around the internet is, like there is absolutely merit to just like moving forward and putting one foot in front of the other. And so I think it's healthy - Avoiding analysis paralysis. Exactly. And so I think it requires a healthy balance of the two. But I would disagree with Mark that I just I have not found it's possible to be an effective leader without some form of self-awareness.

1:54:32But at the same time, in order to inspire people, you also have to demonstrate an ability to move forward through difficult moments. I think that's where the, you know, the I won't say it again. And I think that's actually closer to his real belief. But in the context of that conversation with David Senra, it's better to distill the overall thesis, which is that right now, most people would benefit from just having a little bit more forward motion. So let's collapse that into somewhat more of an exaggerated take that then can fly and it gets exaggerated in many ways. Yeah, exactly. What advice, if any, have you given portfolio founders that may be on the earlier stage side that seem like they're going to need to raise over$100 million in the next 12 to 24 months?

1:55:22Like, how concerned should they be around everything happening in geopolitics right now? How does the conflict in the Middle East kind of like turn off the tap or slow down any LP dynamics for some of these mega funds? Should startups keep their corporate treasury in oil right now? Probably not. No one wants volatility with bank balance. I think what's happening in the new elites right now is a tragedy. And it goes without saying that many of the countries that are most adversely affected by that have been very, very active players as MPs. I think the impact that this could have on the way they behave in that sense is very unclear.

1:56:06But it seems likely that there will be some impact. And so that has a consideration on venture fund. My example was if somebody is doing a lot of angel investing and they're working at Google making$3 million a year in a cushy job and then they like lose their job. Like do they keep, do they keep like ripping a bunch of checks? Yeah, we were debating with Dan Primack, Maxios about this. And he was saying, well, like the LPs that write checks from like Gulf sovereign funds, they live in New York and they operate in New York and they take meetings in New York. But there's just a matter of like, you know, the, that sovereign wealth fund is zero sum.

1:56:40And if it's going towards something else, it can't go into a venture capital firm and work its way through the start of the business. And ultimately, the royals get to decide. Exactly. The priorities. And there's a whole bunch of other political considerations. And priorities could be shifting right now. Totally. So I do not know what's going to happen. I think those are the considerations. And I think when we advise the companies that we're working with that are in a position where they actually can raise that kind of money, we have not yet seen the market indicate that there isn't robust interest for companies that are really scaling rapidly and have earned the right to go out and raise money that way.

1:57:15Yeah, it seems like we're pre some sort of correction where we're like, oh yeah, you can't raise the same round. It's just you might raise 80 instead of 100 and your competitor's in the same boat. So you're probably going to operate very similarly with just a little more. Yeah, I would say that I do think the bar for these NeoLabs to raise that second round of funding is much higher coming back to what we were talking about. And so I think to be able to get one of these off the ground, it's possible to do so as someone who has been a part of doing really novel research at one of the big labs and is someone who can probably build a really outstanding research team.

1:57:49On the other hand, I think to raise that second round of funding where you get to go really big and build out that frontier cluster, I do think it's going to require some mix of, hey, the work we're doing is unlocking new commercial opportunities and the work we're doing is truly, truly novel at the level of the research. And I think absent those things, what I've seen is that it's a lot harder to pull those second financing rounds together. And I think this is kind of a dead zone for these neolabs where if they can't go big with compute, it's really, really hard for them to be on the frontier.

1:58:17Yeah. Did you have a conventional path to venture? I would say I had a pretty unconventional path. So I grew up down here. I started my career in lower middle market private equity. I moved up to the Bay Area to work at CorpDev at Cisco. And then I think that's when things started to get a little bit more, yeah, proud sponsor, right? And it turns out that the founding leader of the CorpDev team at Cisco was actually one of the co-founders of Lightspeed, Barry Eggers. No way. And that team has definitely produced a number of VCs that remain in the industry today. And so that's kind of where I sort of got more conventional.

1:58:50But I think where I started was fairly unconventional. So corp dev at Cisco, were you working on a lot of M &A deals? What was the M &A environment like back then? Yeah, so when I was there in 2011, this was when we were sort of litigating whether there would be cloud computing or on-premise computing and whether cloud computing was something that would be more than like a test and dev environment for the average company. Sure. That definitely taught me that it's very, very easy to underestimate the future when you're one of the incumbents. And the rest is history, obviously, with respect to cloud.

1:59:19So at that time, we were trying to execute on a strategy that would put Cisco in a position to own the right pieces where they could both serve enterprises building their own clouds and the cloud providers themselves. Got it. So we were buying storage companies. We were buying new next-gen networking companies. In fact, like one of the projects I worked on was, you know, trying to acquire unsuccessfully, that is, Martin Casado's company, Nisira Networks, which, you know, ended up going to VMware and, you know, really did transform the industry. So shout out to Martin on that. That's crazy. And so, yeah, we were working on a lot of deals like that.

1:59:48We were working on venture investments as well. So sometimes the companies maybe or an industry is not fit to enter via M &A. So you would invest in the right companies and sort of learn, right? Sometimes you would partner. So, yeah, that's the kind of stuff that we were working on. It was an amazing job, amazing way to get into Silicon Valley. Totally. It helped me gain deep appreciation for how much impact these infrastructure companies can make across every industry at a time where everyone was kind of focused on what the next Uber or Snap was on your phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It actually shows you the breadth of the industry because every day you're looking at some company that is not a household name, is not getting a puff piece in whatever legacy journal is out there.

2:00:25But their business is fantastic. They have an incredible team. And there's a path to just absolutely massive. Also being able to level check with founders that might be exploring M &A and just being like, well, I've actually bought a bunch of companies. That's awesome. And actually helping them qualify themselves. Yeah. Like, are you ready for this? And I carry that with me to this day, and I wouldn't have that experience had it not been for the time I spent over there. Well, Bucky, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a good rest of your show. Have a good rest of the day.

2:00:54I wish we could hang right now. I will tell everyone about wewisconsole.com. Console helps AI agents build. agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And I'm also going to tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And without further ado, we have Steve Huffman, the co-founder and CEO of Reddit. Steve, how are you doing?

2:01:25What's going on? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. you gave a fantastic speech at my YC batch back in 2018. And I really enjoyed that. And yeah, it's just great to catch up with you. I would love for you to sort of just set the table for us for how 2026 is going over at Reddit. What are the biggest initiatives that you're working on? How are you spending your day? Just get us up to speed. Okay, 2026 is going fast, actually. Man, I'm looking at the date now. It's March 20th. It's insane. So right now we have a, I think, single-minded focus on making Reddit more successful for new users.

2:02:13I think that's the part when I when I think about the reddit machine and the reddit business that's the part that I think Has the most potential Or the biggest gap to close. Yeah, so like taking a step back right reddits got Content communities for literally everyone and I think we've proven that reddit can work for anyone You know men women young old nerds normies And so now our task is can we make it work for literally everyone? Yeah and making Reddit successful for those new users in that first session. That's the thing that I spend almost all my time thinking about right now. What are the qualities?

2:02:55What is the experience that someone has when they join Reddit that gets them to stick? What kind of journey are you trying to take them on? Yeah, the classic Facebook one was like, if they add five friends, they'll stick around forever or something like that, right? Yeah, and I'm not even sure that was true for Facebook, although it's like a tale that's told in Silicon Valley. But, I mean, there's probably something through it, and the Reddit equivalent of that would be you find five communities on Reddit that you love. But do you need five? Because, like, you know, I don't know, growing up. Yeah, because for me it was, like, hip-hop heads in high school.

2:03:38like if I typed in like R in my browser, it would immediately just like populate R slash hip hop heads. And I would just go there. I think that's actually the answer. You need to find one of those things that is uniquely Reddit, touches you and provides that experience that you can't get anywhere else online. And then once you do, you find that, then we've got you. Then we've got you. Yeah. So I remember the first time people were starting to use the TikTok algorithm, like the feedback was like, it's creepily good, basically, within like five swipes. If you stopped and paused over a car video or a watch video for just one millisecond longer, your entire feed would be cars or watches or whatever you were into.

2:04:25And I'm wondering, of that customer journey that you're trying to funnel people towards the right content that they'll love, is it more of a user interface design problem or UX design problem? Or is it actually just a compute problem and you want to apply more machine learning, more modern AI tools to bring that content faster, learn what the user's interacting with or observing, and then help them along? I just think it's both. we've seen this over the years. One of the things we can do most consistently to grow is make the product easier. So that would be like the UI. You make it a little bit easier, a little bit faster, easier on the eyes, maybe less chaotic or overwhelming and we just grow.

2:05:12Because we have people trying out Reddit every day and for some of them it just doesn't work. But also the machine learning, the feeds, those early recommendations and insights have almost unlimited upside as well. But actually, Reddit is probably in that era of ML. Once you're a core user and you're in your feed, if you express an interest, yeah, we'll go really heavy on it. Almost too heavy sometimes. And it's a problem because I don't know if this is a normal Reddit user experience. Certainly mine. People send me weird shit all the time. And then if I view it in Reddit, I'm like, oh, okay. Oh, no, my whole feed is going to be this thing.

2:05:56That's my life. There's a lot of finesse required there. Yeah. What has the shift to mobile been like? What is the story that you tell about making Reddit more mobile-focused? Obviously, there's a huge shift in user behavior across all internet platforms. But what was your individual experience? Well, so if you look at Reddit's story, like Arc, the shift to mobile for Reddit was slower because Reddit, like we have so much text. And so that was like a key, we were like a keyboard and screen platform for longer than most. Now, like desktop, desktop is by far our smallest platform. And so we don't really think about the shift to mobile anymore.

2:06:47Like the shift happened. Yeah. Maybe for Reddit it happened despite ourselves in some ways, but it's happened. And so now it's more of the shift to the app. I think our, one of our largest platforms, I think our largest single platform is actually probably mobile web. And then you've got iOS and Android. And so for us, we get so much mobile web traffic because of the search referrers from Google. So if you're just using the internet on your phone, you're probably using Google. If you're probably using Google, you're probably using Reddit. But so helping people kind of cross that chasm between mobile web into the app and doing so in a way that feels good, where we're not coercing a user to download the app, which is annoying.

2:07:39Finding that balance and doing that in the right way, I think that, again, there's many ways to do it. And I think there's a good way somewhere in the middle with a lot of finesse. But that's actually where we spend a lot of time thinking. How does the average Reddit user feel about AI? Well, I think the average Reddit user is basically the average person. Yeah. And I think AI right now is polling less than politicians. Yeah. And last I checked, nobody likes politicians. So, but at the same time. But the difference there that I think is funny is like, people may have a negative experience of politicians.

2:08:26but then, but with AI, like people like say they don't like it, but then they have like all these magical experiences in their life and they use it like crazy and it makes their life better. And even a bunch of different small ways, uh, in ways that they're aware of in ways that they don't, they aren't aware of, right? Like it's happening under the hood. And so I think at some point, I think at some point it will actually flip, right? Just because it's like a very valuable magical tool that anybody can benefit from. We're going through that transition. Yeah, exactly. AI, do you like AI? People overwhelmingly negative.

2:09:01Do you use AI every day? It's like everybody. And you can see this relationship with Reddit as well. AI makes not just Reddit, but the whole internet safer. Things like violence, harassment, bullying, we can use LLMs now to find and and just filter out to moderate out at platform-wide scale in seconds. It's incredibly powerful. The worst job in the Internet used to be looking at the worst content in the Internet. People don't have to do that anymore. So that's really powerful. It also happens kind of behind the scenes. But then AI writing, like on Reddit and elsewhere, is just kind of annoying.

2:09:48And you see this on Reddit. It's not prohibited behavior. like a human being with a human account uses chat gbd to make a post yeah like that's allowed but then you see all the comments just flaming them right thank you bot um thank you bot is like the new okay boomer um and and then of course there's just like the maybe spam and other bad behavior which is definitely not allowed so but but i think like on reddit in emails in school we're going through societal calibration about where AI is helpful and not helpful. How did you process Maltbook? I think I clocked that one within five minutes. I said, this will be a meme for about a week, and the world will move on.

2:10:37And it was. It was like a total insider AI meme fun thing. if the accusation is on the internet, the internet's dead, everything's turning into bots. It's bots pretending to be humans. On Maltbook, it was a bunch of humans pretending to be bots. To me, it was like AI fan fiction. It was so goofy. Funny, but goofy and otherwise insignificant. Yeah. What has been, walk us through the history of bots on Reddit, how you've dealt with the problem, when they've been bugs, when they've been features. Like that's a big, I mean, even on X right now, it very much feels like a bug. There's certain accounts, if you look in the comments, So you can just tell like, you know, every single comment was written by a bot.

2:11:35It doesn't add anything to the conversation at all. And yet five years ago, everyone was tagging those bots, remind me or bookmark this or yeah, I would say that like the ask rock is like 50 % of the time it's annoying. 50 % of the time it like adds relevant context that improves the experience. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the solution to this issue was and always has been through transparency and intentionality. We've always had on Reddit helpful bots, right? The remind me bots and the haiku bot and maybe less helpful but accepted, like the grammar correcting bot. Sure. And then we've had bad bots.

2:12:17But bad bots we just call spammers. Yeah. Right? They're submitting spam or they're otherwise manipulating Reddit. that's always been forbidden and we do our best to remove those. I mean, we do it at an absolutely massive scale. It's like 100 ,000 to a million accounts a day that we ban. And then with AI, it's not a new problem. There's just new technology. And so again, if you're manipulating Reddit, if you're spamming, if you're pretending to be a human but you're not, that's not allowed. You get banned. But we also want to leave room for helpful bots or even agents. but I think they need to be labeled as such.

2:12:55And then there's that gray area, which is what we were talking about before, which is a human being using AI to write. That's not forbidden, but it is kind of annoying. But we'll let that one play out. And right now what we're seeing is people downvote it, they complain about it, communities maybe ban it. Yeah, but at the same time, for every post, when a human with AI was writing something, posting it, and it's getting negative feedback, there has to be a number of them that used AI that people don't even know they used AI, and it is just being additive, right? It's possible. It's possible, in which case it's probably okay.

2:13:42I think the question is, is there a human behind the prompt? Is it a human's idea? I'll give you an example of AI content that's totally acceptable. translated content. Like I'm a non-native speaker. Like help me write better. Like that's just the world we live in now. And so for us, like Reddit is for humans. Like that is our platform. That is our product. It's human connection and community. So we're going to start actually talking about this more. So this is a really apt time to have this conversation. This idea of humanness and human verification and what I call ass in seat. Because they're actually human using Reddit right now, regardless of the tooling that you're using.

2:14:24Yeah. How do you think about delivering on that? I think the most lightweight, I think there's various technologies. The most lightweight way is with something like Face ID. Face ID or Touch ID, broadly, it's in the family of technology called passkeys, which I actually didn't appreciate about these like a year ago. they actually require a human presence. A human has to touch or do or look at something. And so that actually just proves that there's a person there. Or it gets you pretty far. And so I think that's very lightweight and accepted. I think there's heavier versions like the ID checking services, which we have to use for regulations here or there.

2:15:11And I think there's in-between technologies. that the internet really needs. Like third-party, individual, no ID required, decentralized, I don't want to say identity, but information providers that there's a need for on the internet. Because not just Reddit, every platform wants to know, is this a person? Now Reddit's version is, is this a person, but we don't want to know which person this is. Right, because part of our promise to our users is we don't know your name. But we do want to know that you're a person. And so it'll be an evolution for us, I think, for a while. And probably every platform, I think, to find the right kind of middle ground here.

2:16:02Seed stage or Series A startup wants to unlock revenue on Reddit. What advice do you give them outside of giving you ad dollars? Build a great product. Build a great product. That's my advice for every startup. Build something that people love. They shouldn't do a hostile takeover of a subreddit. Because I know that's an ongoing issue. Look, I think that is a very difficult thing to pull off. There's always that startup that they build something really great and the founders are super authentic and they can show up on Reddit and say, hey, we built this, what do you think? And everybody loves it.

2:16:45And then the other 99 % of companies get chased away for self-promotion. Or they're manipulating Reddit in some way and we end up banning them. So it starts with building a great product. And then from there, you've got a lot of options on Reddit. Yeah, of course you can be an advertiser, but you can also talk to your customers, you can provide customer service, you can do AMAs. There's all sorts of things you can do, but I think the only ones who are successful are ones who I think have an earnest desire to contribute to a community and not take advantage of it. Because people are very sensitive to being taken advantage of.

2:17:27What are the unique dynamics on Reddit when it comes to creating ad products? you know meta meta you know and instagram seems to be the ultimate uh state that a that a user can be in just like pure consumption they get shown cool things and and uh they're kind of whatever state of mind they're in there's an openness to like you know immediately just buying something i would say x is maybe the opposite of that i think did ben thompson describe it as like you go on reddit to like a knife fight yeah you go on x you go on x to get in like a night, you know, you're like, you're there to like, when you're on Instagram, you're shopping, you're shopping for everything.

2:18:09I mean, Instagram's products would be better if it was only ads. So, uh, uh, well, in some way, in some way it is. I mean, for me, for me, I like, uh, my, my explore page is just cars and watches. Yeah. Cars, watches, clothes, houses. They're not directly ads, but they're like functionally I'm like being marketed to, but it's just UGC. Yeah. So on Reddit, what's interesting about Reddit is some people talk about their interests and hobbies and passions. What I didn't see coming when we started Reddit is that it turns out within people's interests, hobbies, and passions, it's a lot of commercial conversation.

2:18:48They're basically asking the question of what should I buy. But they don't say what should I buy. They say what should I wear? What should I watch? What's the best gear? Where should I go? And so it turns out that Reddit, which has this kind of anti-commercial vibe, is actually extremely commercial. It's a hub for commercial activity. Because that's what people talk about. Yeah, totally. And so that's why I say for brands, like, you can stick the landing. Yeah. Like, it's there. The conversation is happening. But again, transparency and intentionality, that's what really matters. And so, yeah, ads is the easiest way to do it.

2:19:27But also you can be helpful to your customers, which are definitely on Reddit talking about your product. Yeah. Can you help me understand the shape of the advertising business? Is it the entire revenue stream? I know that there's deals with other companies and there's other pieces of the business throughout history. And then how power law driven is it? A lot of ad platforms have like a super long tail of small advertisers. We've talked to other folks with ad platforms where they're selling really big ticket packages to Fortune 500 brands and it's all shaking hands and kissing babies. They're basically a politician on the road all the day.

2:20:06I think that the story arc of any ad platform is basically the same. You start with big companies and brand advertising because those are the companies that will test new platforms. And then you simultaneously move down market into mid and small businesses and more performance oriented. What's great about Reddit is we do all of this. So our fastest growing segments were mid and small business last year. We have a nice balance between brand and performance. And so we're one of the few platforms that whatever your objective is and whatever the size of your company is, Reddit can work for you. Now, almost all of our work in the ads platform, it comes down to better measurement and better targeting.

2:20:56It's really just a game of inches, just constantly grinding that out and making sure that our ads actually work, actually deliver a return. But Reddit, it's so funny to me because when we started Reddit, I didn't like ads. Now, this was 20 years ago, so the pressures of the real world have made an honest man out of me. but so it's almost surprising to me how good Reddit is for this and so it's a never ending journey but to answer your question before about 95 % of our revenue is ads it's actually a great business model because it just scales yeah it makes perfect sense if an investor came to you looking for alpha what subreddit do you think there's a$10,$100 billion business brewing, business opportunity brewing in.

2:21:46I think like, like Chris Dixon has talked a lot about like, you'd find a subreddit that was, you know, a hive of activity. Yeah, this idea of what people do on the weekend for free, we'll all be doing during the week in a few years. That's an interesting question. There's so, we're in this like funny state that like we're in this like vibe coding takeoff. So I look at kind of the arc of my career over the last 20 years, and I was lucky to catch a couple of waves. The first wave was just the internet. And I think of each of these waves as a lowering of the bar of what it takes to start a business.

2:22:31So first is the internet. Then that was the access to capital. So Y Combinator and the more democratization of investing. And then you got mobile. And then you got cloud. So now, to start a successful company, you can build an app and host it in the cloud. The equivalent version of that 20 years ago or 30 years ago was you had to know enough people to raise$10 million to even get your foot in the door. You had to go to the computer store. Yeah, but you still had to be technical. And now we're in this era with vibe coding. Vibe coding is such a small word, I think, for such a big concept, which is like basically if you have an idea, you can basically bring it to life.

2:23:17And that's becoming more and more true every day. And so one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is like the headlines are all like such and such company lets go of all of their engineers. Like engineers are being replaced by AI. I think that's missing the next step. Like these engineers are builders. What do you think? They're going to lose their jobs and just go home and sit on their hands? No, now they will probably start companies of their own. And so I think there's this transition. I think it's been very, very fun where everybody's a builder and there's likely to be this like Cambrian explosion of creativity and creation.

2:24:02Yeah, what I think about in the context of Reddit. there's like all these subreddits that might only have like 5 ,000 active members. And historically, they maybe had an idea for like a little vertical software product or a mobile app. And like, it would never make sense for a team of five brilliant engineers to like raise millions of dollars and then go and build that product because the TAM is like the 5 ,000 people. But then you actually can do that now because it's just one person that's like, hey if i can even get it like a few hundred of the people in this subreddit to pay me to use this product i can like have a real business and i can create a life so it's like it's more like niche podcasting or having a patreon it's like yeah it's the same same exact thing is what's happened in media right media it's like five bucks a month like yeah this this show wouldn't have been able to exist with cable because like you wouldn't just be like yeah it's just it's too It's too niche.

2:24:59And so, yeah, I think like every subreddit, like there is a software product to be built. And it's not necessarily like a venture scale opportunity, but you just do the math. I'm like, can I get a thousand people to pay me 20 bucks a month? I'm like, great. That replaces the salary that that person may have gotten. It's the whole story of the internet, which is the transition from centralized traditional power to decentralized. And so it's this really enabling and uplifting force. Yeah, podcasts are such a great example of the decentralization of media. and so now I think with AI there's just going to be this a whole new era of creation which I think is the optimistic side of the story I'd love to hear more of because I think the pessimistic side is the the transition and the change but I don't think the outcome is all bad I think it actually could be quite empowering I completely agree give us a guide to watches on Reddit what are the best sub sub communities.

2:26:10I don't know if I can like with a, with a clear conscience recommend anybody get into watches on Reddit. It's like, it's, it's like, I, I've fallen into that for better or for worse. So you can start with watches. Okay. And then maybe you should start with like watch, I forgot what's called like watch hot takes or something, but just to see like people who are coming out on the other side of this. Okay. but yeah I mean like in ruins it's just a gosh it's a it's a pit I don't know where to describe it like valueless consumerism like just it's like telling somebody it's like what's the best subreddit about smoking it's like I don't know that's great is Vacheron underrated by the tech community For sure.

2:27:04That's their whole strategy is to be underrated. I think. Like high quality and unhyped. I think their CEO just had an interview where he basically said that's our strategy. I know, but people are going to figure that out. It's going to be properly hyped. The internet will do its thing and it will hype it properly. Slowly though. I know. Look, it's just a life cycle of hipsters, right? I was there before it was cool. Yeah, yeah, totally. Uh, maybe over 10 years ago, 2012, you taught me Python on Udacity. I took, I took that actual course introduction to backend development. Why did you teach that course?

2:27:45Oh, okay. So the very specific reason is, uh, one of my, um, favorite professors at UVA, uh, what was at the company. And so he invited me and said, Steve, do you want to teach a class? And I did. It was intro to web development. That's right. It ended up being in that era. So it was like 2010, 11, somewhere, 12, I guess. Ended up being one of the more popular classes. It was so fun. It was so fun. You know, it's actually funny. Still, I get recognized in public. From that. From that, much more than Reddit. That's crazy. I was on a plane once. this guy behind me pops over my seat. He's like, Steve Huffman?

2:28:30I was like, yeah. I was like, you know, and he's like, Steve, I heard your voice. I learned a program. I listened to your voice for like 40 hours. It's like in my brain. And honestly, it's the greatest feeling. I would love to do that again. I should make time for it. You should. Because I just meet people for whom it helped make their life better. It's truly, it was the greatest honor. It was so fun. It was fascinating because, I mean, the content was good, but there was something about the fact that it was coming from you, from someone who'd actually built something. And the story of Reddit was so intertwined with Y Combinator at the time and building something sort of without the permission of the big machine that was traditional software development or some megacorp.

2:29:22and yeah, it was just way easier to pay attention, I think, because it was like, oh yeah, like you could imagine yourself building something similar and it was, yeah, it was inspiring. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, great having you on too. Yeah, thanks for sharing that story and guys, thanks so much for having me on. This was a real pleasure. Yeah, this was fantastic. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Have a good one. Take care. Bye. Let me tell you all about Okta.

2:29:48Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. And let me also tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And we have our second in-person guest. We have Quaid Walker from Bezel. How are you doing, Quaid? Doing great. Thanks for having me. Welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for taking the time. Dude, look at this mauger right here. Look at this mauger. Look at this mauger. It's insane. Look at this mauger. It's bodybuilding day on TV.

2:30:21Dude, you need a bigger shirt. I'm just trying to keep up with you guys. It's good. It's good. How's life? It's great. You guys let me hear Steve talk about watches. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was good. He's like, don't get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll let you react to everything you guys say. Vacheron, underrated, overrated? Underrated. Underrated. Why? Explain their strategy. Explain how they fit into the landscape of strategies that are run by other brands. How do they differentiate? Why? I mean, from a history perspective, it's been around for obviously an insanely long period of time. I think they have the hype models.

2:30:55They have the overseas, obviously the 222. You're seeing a lot of celebrities wear it. I think like the famous Brad Pitt wearing it and kind of the pre of the F1 movie made it go crazy. But it was the vintage example of it. They released the new one. But I think still it doesn't feel like it's at the same hype levels as like an Audemars Piguet or Rolex or things like that. So it's in the top three, but I think from a cultural perspective, it's not totally up there yet. So it's super cool to have that mix where it's got the heritage, but not necessarily the hype quite yet, despite being very hyped.

2:31:28He mentioned a Reddit, watch hot takes. I don't know if you've spent time there, but what hot takes do you have about watches? That's a good question. Or what is a popular hot take that you see trotted out that maybe you disagree with, something like that? I think the hot take in the watch world right now is this quest for independent brands. I think we have a lot of clients that are diving into the Jorn market, for example, and it's absolutely going crazy. The Jorn Elegant, for example. Dude, I added that to my Bezel watch list, and at the time when I was adding it, you could get one for$90, and now they're$120.

2:32:07I was talking to two clients yesterday in 2024. We got each of them an Elegant. One paid$42 ,000, one paid$53 ,000 for it. And now they're like$170 ,000. And that's a quartz example. It's very cool. You put it on their wrist and it'll kind of go to the time it is once you put it on. Oh, interesting. It kind of stacks itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And tell the story of FP Journe. Like, why is that company interesting right now? It's just like a scarcity thing right now in the sense that it's like the, there's a few of the brands, Join being one, like a Crivia being one, that there's so much storytelling around the mastery of the watches that they're creating.

2:32:49But then also there's so few of them made. And so they get wiped up in this kind of hype cycle. And then they end up being so heavily demanded by the same type of collector that would have maybe started their collection buying Rolexes and moved to Pateks. And now this is like the upper echelon. One thing that Jorn does really well is whether you buy a Jorn on the secondary market or the primary market, they kind of welcome you into the community. Oh, interesting. Which is super awesome. It feels like a black mark when you go into some of these stores. Yeah. And so they're excited that you have access to it.

2:33:19You should sheepishly admit. Yeah. Can I mentally comp Jorn to Koenigsegg in the sense that Koenigsegg is this very— Well, the watches work. Okay, the watches work. But a lot of people will say, you know, Koenigseggs, they're expensive. Maybe there's downsides. But Christian von Koenigsegg is alive. You can get on the phone with him. You can see him at an event. And you can't do that with Ferrari. You can't do that with the Lamborghini. But you can with a Koenigsegg. And similar to Patek, AP, Vacheron, the founders, the real creators are long gone, but not so with FPJorn. Yeah, I think the community aspect of Jorn is really vibrant in that sense.

2:34:03There's a lot of events that are happening in L.A. In Geneva, there's a Michelin-star Jorn restaurant. Yeah, so there's a lot of access to the brand in ways that I think builds that mystique. But ultimately, it comes down to the watches. If you're a Jorn collector, you know that there's a period of time in the year where everyone gets emails that lets you know if you get an allocation that year or not. It's not as sporadic as collecting other pieces. So everyone knows to check their email around that period of time in the year. and we're in the collector groups, they're talking back and forth.

2:34:29Like college acceptances forever. Exactly, yes. I want a recommendation for you for a tech person getting into watches. In terms of budget, let's assume that they're just like a mid-range AI engineer. They have like$100 million to spend. What would you do? Oh, I was just, we were talking about this backstage with very different budgets than$100 million. No, no, we can ladder it up. Yeah. What's a great watch that's just a good starting mechanical watch to actually get you into the world of horology. Yeah, so that's the most fun part of my job is we sell the vast majority of the kind of whole spectrum.

2:35:04Q4, cheapest off we sold was$750. Most expensive was$1.6 million. Wow. The whole spectrum. There we go. And we just hit a billion in supply two years ago. So a lot of access. Gong, gong, gong. Hell yeah.

2:35:22But yeah, it really depends on price point. Obviously, there's a lot of interest there. I like, you know, I, for the sub$5 ,000, I always go like Tudors and Omegas, things like that. I love the like kind of Tudor Black Bay offerings. That's a great one. So fun. Yeah. It's really grown on me. I wasn't super into the hand design, but over time. I think the Black Bay 54 is like one of the best kind of vintage reissues that's happened in kind of modern era. Yeah. Love that watch. Sub 10, I think vintage Rolex or like, you know, neo vintage, like 90s Submariners, It's like a 16610. And what's reliability like with a 90s Rolex?

2:35:59Is that something you're going to be able to daily drive? So I have a couple of watches. My daily is a 16610 90s Submariner. It's probably the most vintage you can go while you're still trusting that it's like pressure tested and everything's working the way you should. I surfed in it this morning. No way. I work out in it. I run in it. I love it. That's awesome. I think I'm a big fan of using your watches. Yeah, yeah. As you scale up from 10 to... Working out with a watch on, what are the downsides? I think maybe curling is a little bit inhibited. Yeah, sure. Overhead press, maybe, on the wrist.

2:36:36Yeah, I don't know. I think it's very James Bond-ified for watches, where you put the watch on in the morning, and then you go work out in it, and then you go have your day in it, and then you go to dinner in it, and then you throw in a tux, and you're wearing it. I think there's something so cool about Sean Connery-era black Submariners. Yeah. that I think growing up seeing that, I want to recreate that. And James Bond only wore a Rolex in the books and maybe one movie, and then Omega got the? I think it switched to Omega in the Pierce Brosnan era. Prior to that, it was. Did a deal or something.

2:37:08Yeah, I think Acquired podcast did a whole deal about Omega winning that deal. That's right. What are you wearing today? I'm wearing a Rolex Daytona in platinum. Heavy hitter. Platinum, it's a heavier material, right? Quite heavy. Quite heavy. Because afterwards, you should try it out. But it's very heavy. It's a good workout. Oh, the watch salesman comes by. It's like, you can take it off my wrist. Take it for a spin. Take it for a spin. No, no. Jordy? How is the watch industry navigating tariffs at this point? There's a lot of confusion. There's new tariffs. What is the approach from the manufacturer side?

2:37:46I know on the secondary side, if you owned a bunch of watches, it was great. because they just are going up in value even though there's not necessarily like more demand. There's just like kind of a leveling. It's funny to talk about it with you guys because the last time I was here, I think I had just gotten back from Geneva in like April when they announced it. Yeah. And so it's been - Oh yeah, that was, what was that? What event were you? Watch the one-based. Yeah, yeah. So the initial, I think it was like 10 % or 15 % where the initial tariff was announced while I was in Geneva. and then I came back and chatted with you all about the overall experience.

2:38:21And then it shot all the way up to high 30%, 39%, and then came back down to 15%. And so throughout that cycle, the first thing that happened is exactly what you were describing, where folks who had watches in the U.S. immediately shot up in value, and there was much more demand because two things happened. One, the pricing goes up, but also the access goes down. If you're a dealer in the U.S. that gets a portion of your supply from Europe, now it's way more expensive to get the watches in. And so the first order of fact is pricing, like you were mentioning. The second is our authentication reports, like the number of watches that we reject.

2:38:57In H1 of last year, we rejected 27 % of the watches. In H2, we rejected 38 % of the watches. And my thesis on that is just if you were a dealer in the U.S. and you had less access to inventory and all of a sudden it became more expensive, you were incentivized to get creative and try to pass things through the system. So maybe you're swapping dials. maybe a watch that's been pre-owned is polished and you're marking it as unworn. You're doing what you can to get the throughput through that you would expect, given the fact that the inventory is limited. And so that's been kind of a second order effect.

2:39:27Where we are now, I feel like prices are still increasing. There's less tariff talk than there was. I think people are starting to accept the reality. Brands increased prices pretty broadly. Some brands then pulled back the price increases. Shareholders. But like Patek, for example, pulled back the pricing increase. Some brands have not pulled back the pricing increase. And so it's kind of a per-brand thing. The reality is a lot of these brands can charge twice as what they charge right now, and everyone's going to still buy their watches. And so I think brands have different opinions on that.

2:40:01The price increase from Patek doesn't affect that many people. But you'd be surprised that collectors and groups felt slighted if they, you know, they just felt opportunistic if the tariffs went down. And so I think a lot of these brands are optimizing for building a relationship for hundreds of years with their clients, not just doing better in the short game. I want to talk Oscar's reactions. Kevin O 'Leary was spotted wearing two watches, a Cartier Crash skeleton and a Ruby set Rolex Daytona, potentially doubling the market size for watches. Are you behind this? Are you pushing this two watches, one watch on each agenda?

2:40:35You got the whoop on. Yeah, I'm wearing a whoop on my other side, which I think I even feel like I'm kind of a clown for doing that in some capacity. I'm a one-wrist man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, it's good for our business if everyone wants to wear it on two wrists. And I think if you are passionate about watch collecting, if you're doing it for that reason, they're amazing. I've been seeing a lot of jump hours. Those seem to be popular at the Oscars this year. Is there a broader trend there that you're picking up on? I think as people dive deeper into watches, the symptom of that is that I think people are more interested in, like, higher horology pieces, more complications.

2:41:11and so it's kind of that initial sweep that I was talking about with folks getting into independent pieces where it's no longer just like to talk to myself like I want to wear the platinum Daytona it's now you know I want something that is particularly independent brand that other collectors will raise their eyebrow about and get interested about and so jump hour being a really fun complication it's also just a cool thing to look at on the dial but I saw I saw a guy on Instagram who basically just does 3d renters of ideas that he has for watches and he had one the whole thesis was the the watches are often photographed at uh 10 10.

2:41:46So uh the hour hand this way and the and the minute hand this way because that's the most aesthetic presentation yeah and so he designed a set of watches that where the the hands would be fixed at 10 10 yeah and then you would have a jump hour over here and a minute yeah wheel over here and there'd be a whole variety one was like a flyback where you push a button and then it goes to the actual time, but mostly it's a 10-10. But a lot of fun ideas. Predictions for AP? Rolex? Yeah, I mean, so Rolex came out with the Land Dweller. Oh, yeah. A bunch of different watches that people love. AP, you know, a lot of the watches are, for better or worse, not super desirable outside of the Royal Oak.

2:42:31Yeah. I'm assuming they want to change that. I think they're doing a lot to make the code 1159 as interesting as possible. So the Star Wheel is a great example, or it's a really awesome application. It's the most exciting 1159 right now. I think I'm hoping we get something in not a 41 would excite me. Smaller? But what about an entirely new silhouette? I think it would be awesome. I just think it's less likely. When did the code come out? I don't know. And do they have a reason for that? Like, they're just like, we don't need another one. Well, I think it's quite hard to replicate the heritage and the excitement associated with the Royal Oak, right?

2:43:15It's like, you know, it's the Genta Designs, 39-millimeter size, you know, kind of the silhouette of the current 16202. There's only four watches, you know, that kind of feel like they have that degree of a mystique in history around them and it's probably like you know the nautilus the overseas maybe um the royal oak and then like maybe the daytona i think are like the steel sports examples that fall into that category of like hype cycle and i think it's very very hard to recreate that and you think rolex is more like rolex being like we're going to create the land dweller yeah and just like take a risk or well that's if you think about it it's like rolex cubitus like i'm saying like you have like Land Dweller, you have Cubitus.

2:44:01Like, why not take the risk? Rolex doing the Cubitus was, like, a crazy thing. You made from the tech, yeah. Rolex doing the Land Dweller was, like, a crazy thing. Like, these companies move really slow and intentional. And typically a new model is, like, the same reference, but, you know, upgraded by one number, new caliber, slight, you know, different perspectives on it, but ultimately the same model. so maybe we're moving into a world where watchmakers are starting to be more ambitious but I think it would be like a kind of change and so I would expect Rolex to not come out with a new model I would expect AP to do the same but we'll maybe get some interesting dial variations interesting metal variations, things like that I'm hoping for as I was saying we both wear the 15300 I like the 39 size I think if we got more access to that I think that would be really exciting.

2:44:56Patek, it's the anniversary for the Nautilus. So there's some conversation around what that's going to be and what's going to come out there. If it's going to be a steel reissue, if it's going to be another precious metal example, certainly we'll get something in the Nautilus side. There's a lot of rumors around the Rolex Pepsi. And we've had those rumors for a number of years. But, you know, there's some speculation on what's going to happen with that, if it's going to get discontinued and things like that. Are there less leaks in the watch world? Because in the car world, do you have to actually like go and road test the car?

2:45:24Like people are posted up in Marinello, like, you know, like just, it doesn't matter that the car is camouflaged. They're going to get a picture and be able to clock it if they pay enough attention. Whereas in watchmaking, it's like you might have like a hand, like only like three people that actually have knowledge and that are working on it. I can't profess to know the car example, but I would imagine that logic makes sense. The way the leak cycle typically works is like everything builds up to Watches and Wonders in April. And we're in the stage right now where you get like all the fake leaks and AI has just made that even crazier because anyone now has the ability to Photoshop whatever they think is and it looks legitimate.

2:45:58It might look like a render, but they'll use a render. Yeah, exactly. But it's like I could go and cook on any of these models and build out what I think is going to be cool and it looks convincing enough. It's like five years ago that was challenging. Yeah, totally. But then as you get closer, you'll get real leaks and those are typically like they're uploading something on the website for a new banner and they miss something or there's a production video that's made and someone has the wrong file somewhere and they leak it. And so as you get closer, sometimes historically those leaks have been correct.

2:46:27And then Rolex will start teasing it themselves. And so for the Land Dweller, they teased a hint of the integrated bracelet. And everyone was like, oh, my God, it's the Oster Quartz or what is that? I don't know. And so that's when they start to stoke it. And then Federer was seen wearing the Land Dweller a week before they announced it somewhere. And everyone was zooming in his wrist like, is that a Datejust? What is that? And so they play into it, but it's typically how it goes. You launched a partnership with CalShe Watch Price Prediction Markets. I saw some funny criticism, people being like, this is dumb.

2:47:04Just buy the watch, which I thought was a really dumb criticism because obviously not everyone wants to invest$20,$30,$50,$60, whatever it is. and there's a lot of other dynamics that make it pretty interesting. How does that product actually work under the hood? What does the partnership look like? I'm assuming you guys have all of the real-time pricing data, but tell us about it. Yeah, so we built the price engine internally. Very nerdy, true machine learning model, mathematical consensus. Our thesis was you can scrape public data. So we'll go out and we'll scrape the entire market. but there's only a few players that are at our scale that have enough actual data.

2:47:51And what I mean by that is like, you know, a watch might be listed for$10 ,000 publicly, and that'll be what everyone scrapes. But then it might actually be offered back and forth and sell for$8 ,700. And that is data that is only private to like us and other marketplaces that have our scale. Yeah, because that data does need to be public. Exactly. It's certainly not public. And so our thinking was, you know, we can build what we feel is the most accurate data available and built out that model and it's designed to be predictive. So it uses different inputs and values different inputs based on different models and it's truly predictive.

2:48:24And so the thought was to use that internally for us to like badge listings as good price, for us to offer like some price guide rails for retail sellers, whatever it is. And then saw CalShe was kind of moving into the collectibles. And so we connected and we were jamming on building some, markets. And so for us, we're just the data kind of provider there. We have no economics from it. For us, it's like just an exciting thing for the watch world. The watch world loves it. We're going to double down on it. If the watch world hates it, like we're going to learn from that. So far, the response has been largely very positive.

2:48:57And we have two types of markets. We have the qualitative one. So that's like, is the Rolex Pepsi going to be discontinued? And the source data for that is like really Rolex, if they're going to roll it out. And then we have quantitative markets. So we're like, you can bet on the Rolex index, or it can be model specific like you know will the starbucks be above this price threshold by the end of march or like that that's cool uh last question will will ai ever be able to catch fake watches like could you have a process when somebody's trying to list a watch to just be like yeah just don't even send this to us like we don't you know we don't we don't want it uh the blankets large or like quick answer is no um we believe in in every watch getting in the hands of like the artisans on on our authentication team.

2:49:42They're smelling the papers, they're feeling the weight, they're looking at all aspects of it, they're opening up all aspects. However, we use AI and computer vision at the listing process. So if you wanted to list the watches on your wrist, it would need to get approved by our team, it needs to go through our model to make sure that there's no obvious problems with it. And then once it gets sold, it ships to us and then we use AI to optimize their flow. And so I don't want my team wasting any time doing anything they shouldn't do. I want the product to be really optimized for them. But ultimately, you have a watchmaker and an authentication specialist in their hands, and they're feeling the watches.

2:50:15And I believe that is forever how they will be authenticated, at least for the medium term. I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks, guys. Great to see you. And we will move on to our next guest. But first, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And I will also tell you about Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And our next guest is Ankur Jain, and this is part of our Lambda Lightning round.

2:50:46Let's kick off the Lambda Lightning round. Ankur Jain is the founder of Built, and we will let him in to the TV pin ultra in just a minute. Let's bring in Ankur. How are you doing? What's going on? Good to see you again. What's up, man? It's been like a decade. I was about to say, I saw your name, and I was just trying to make sure I get to the dot. It has been a long time. It has been a long time. I think the last time we hung out was maybe in Silicon Valley, maybe in New York. Lots of good times. You've been on absolute terror. Get me back up to speed. Where's the business? What's life like now?

2:51:17How's your 2026 going? 2026 has been a crazy year so far. I can't believe it's already the end of March. Well, first of all, we're based in New York now. We've got to get you guys out to the city. That's number one. Today, this morning, I don't know if you saw, we just announced Built Hospitality for a restaurant. So we, we look, we spent the last five years taking housing, which is the biggest expense for people in this, in this country. And how do we bring hospitality to the housing market? How do you make your 2000,$3 ,000 a month rent expense feel the same as when you stay at a luxury hotel?

2:51:57So you get rewarded. Your experience is seamless. They know who you are. When you sign a lease, you're not sending in paperwork, all these types of things. we're now bringing that to neighborhood merchants. So today we announced with Chef Thomas Keller, Daniel Ballud, Major Food Group, Tao Group, Boca Group, a bunch of these major restaurant groups across the country, a way for them to design guest experiences end-to-end in the same way we did for housing and allow you to do things like, John, you go out to a restaurant and you can say, charge it to my apartment just like you would at a hotel.

2:52:33And everything now becomes seamless. Amazing. Um, is the business entirely, uh, consumer focused right now in the sense that, uh, I, I think people think of built as a fintech company, but also a credit card company with rewards, uh, component. Um, is there, is there anything else to the business? And then I want to know, like, why have previous attempts struggled? Because it feels like there's been needed innovation in this space for so long. No, for sure. So, no. So our business is actually primarily B2B. We are a consumer brand. Yeah, that's right. We provide the hospitality software for apartment managers across the United States.

2:53:10One in four apartment buildings run unbuilt. Okay. And that's our primary business. We then have a marketplace with now over 45 ,000 merchants who are looking to connect with people who live in these apartment buildings. And we facilitate that connectivity. Yeah. So that's our core business. Today, I think people often misunderstand this. it's about 11 % of the cards linked to your built wallet. So when you move into an apartment building, you can link your Amex card, Visa card, get a built co-brand card, and use that to pay your rent, get rewards, use it at your local merchants. About 11 % of the cards linked to built members accounts are our built co-brand card.

2:53:53But 89 % of the business still comes from the broader ecosystem beyond the card. Okay. And what's the difference in the flow? Are people coming in for the built co-brand card and then expanding out? Or are you selling customers who are already in the ecosystem through other touch points the co-brand card downstream? I mean, look, to your last question, it is so hard to break into housing. It is this crazy fragmented world that people have been happy to take paper checks up until six, seven years ago, which is crazy for your biggest expense. And so we started this company trying to pitch property owners, fell flat on our face, and then pivoted to say, what if we went direct to consumers to build some momentum?

2:54:41That's how we launched the credit card. The card then got us momentum, which then allowed us to go back to property managers and say, look, we have hundreds of thousands of people at the time that are now using this card to pay their rent. Why aren't you using our software for all of your renters? And then we kind of went back and then grew the business. So today, almost all of our growth comes from our housing partners and people who move into the building that want extra rewards get the card. So it looked more like a traditional like Gap or, you know, Sephora. Yeah, but just to be clear, so you could be living in a building that runs on or with a landlord that runs on built.

2:55:22You can still get rewards just through built, but then you can add the card. And so it's like B2B2C. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, and again, most of our revenues come from the housing platform and the merchant platform. Sure. So if you think of it, property managers and merchants, our business model is similar to Shopify, if you're familiar with. Sure. We provide the infrastructure. What's Shopify? They're a sponsor. No, no, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. So property managers and merchants, we want to connect neighborhoods like a hotel. Yeah. So they run on our experience platform. They pay us for the software.

2:56:01They pay us for the transactions or the customer pays for the transactions depending on the model. and then we get paid when we send customers to local businesses. And that's how we're able to fund these rewards across the ecosystem. Yeah. What were people getting wrong during that era where there was a whole bunch of skepticism around like, is it ever going to be economically rational to give points for something as big as a rent purchase? It felt like there must be some sort of narrative violation there because you have Ken from Amex on the board or it seems like you're a close investor. It didn't seem like you went into that blindly.

2:56:38There was clearly a strategy. So what were people getting wrong? I think people were just missing what the business was. The reality is, as you know, it's not sexy and fun to talk about B2B software. We think it is. We love B2B software. But yes, I completely understand that. People talk about the program, Carbacute Love. Sound effects are great. It's like, this is fun. So a lot of people talk about the card. And the reality, they're right. Having a card in isolation would never make sense in this business. But when the card is part of facilitating an ecosystem, which for us, we believe every other major commerce platform started with how do you sell car service rides?

2:57:19How do you sell books online? How do you sell restaurants, food delivery? We said if you start with where you live, which is the home, it's the biggest expense for consumers. So right away, if you can monetize$2 trillion a year of spend on housing by being the go-to platform and the brand for housing, you have Uber for ride share. You have DoorDash for food delivery. There was no brand in housing. That's where we started. And then you start to think about every major decision you make when you move in. You pick your new restaurants that are your go-to. You pick your go-to bar. You pick your new pharmacy.

2:57:54You pick your new gym. You pick your school district. All of that starts where you live. And we are just piece by piece looking to connect that for customers. So you saw we just launched our concierge service and our buildings now like a hotel. You move into a building, you sign your lease through built, you pay your rent through built, you get rewarded. And then you can ask the concierge, hey, I need a reservation for three tonight or four tonight in our neighborhood. Book me a dinner, schedule me a car and use my rewards to pay for it all. and it's all seamlessly done through the built app experience.

2:58:29Yeah. Last question for me. How are you thinking about stable coins and the future of transferring money? It feels like that's a very interesting place if you're moving a lot of money that is potentially on top of Visa rails. You're potentially paying a fee. How are you seeing that play out? So look, today, just to give you some sense, we'll do over$100 billion of housing payments to the built platform. And that's now we just added mortgage. So that's going to grow quite significantly too. I would say our general perspective is we're agnostic on how people want to pay. We just launched a partner with Venmo recently where people can pay with their Venmo on their rent payments or at the restaurant.

2:59:12We obviously work closely with the big banks. We work with the American Express Network, Visa Network, MasterCard Network. As stable coins develop, we'll do the same with them. If merchants want to pay through Stablecoin, we'll support that. If customers want to pay their rent through Stablecoin, we'll support that. I think for us, we look at ourselves as a layer above the payments infrastructure. Really focused on orchestrating a seamless experience between where you live and all the books around it. Yeah, so just picking the right tool for the job. Has a user ever given you a feature request to be able to tip their landlord?

2:59:49so so they've never come from there we haven't gotten it like as a core user request but what we have gotten is a lot of property owners saying hey can we simplify the annual holiday tip process rather than having to track a bunch of envelopes downstairs so that's actually something that's coming out this holiday season you're going to be able to tip your building staff sure that's very cool that is cool that is cool that is very cool thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us great to catch up new york next time yeah we'll meet us at uh meet us at nicey yeah that'd be great we'll talk to you soon have a good one thank you goodbye let me tell you about gemini 3.1 pro with a more capable baseline it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts synthesizing data into a single view or bringing creative projects to life and let me also tell you about 11 labs build intelligent real-time conversational agents and reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs.

3:00:44We have our next guest joining in just a few minutes, Michael Kratzios. He is the White House's science and technology advisor. They launched a new national AI framework for child safety and to standardize regulation and balance innovation with protection. We're very excited that he is joining today to help us understand where the conversation around AI might go on Capitol Hill and within the government. interesting information out of some obesity drug test trials. This is crazy. Cremieux says, this is not good. People have learned that GLP-1s are really effective. So if they're not losing weight, they know they're in the placebo group.

3:01:23So these people getting placebos are mad and just leaving. And they drop out. And the effect size is so big that they can tell. So it's getting to be harder to do placebo-controlled trials, which is what we need the most in the peptide conversation. But I'm sure that they will figure it out. But anyway, we have Michael Kratzios in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV panel. Great to see you again, Michael. How are you doing? I am great. How are you guys? Happy Friday. We are fantastic. Congratulations on the progress. I would love for you to take us through what was actually announced today.

3:01:54And then I have a whole bunch of questions about where we go from here. Absolutely. Well, thank you guys so much for having me. I think today was a big day for the White House. As you know, last July that we've talked about before, we put out a big AI strategy for the country, but a big piece of it and something that we've been working on for some time is what is the actual national level legislation that we need? What actually needs to be done by Congress to pass sort of the actual law of the land for AI? And we were tasked by the president to do this in December, and we unveiled that today. So broadly speaking, the main issue we were trying to tackle was figuring out a way to get past this patchwork of AI regulation.

3:02:33As you guys probably, I think, have talked about on your program pretty often, there's lots of states doing all sorts of stuff. While big companies can find a way to kind of navigate all the legal issues associated with this patchwork, a lot of small startups have a really hard time doing that. And we wanted to find a way to get past that and create one national standard for the country. And that's what we put out today. And in order to do that, we also included lots of other stuff on what we'd like to see on child safety, on the way that we protect American rate payers that may be affected by electricity prices, stuff on American workers and also on education.

3:03:08So it's kind of the first comprehensive plan I think ever presented to Congress from the White House on what we should do on AI. Yeah, we've been seeing a lot of polling about how AI is deeply unpopular. Are you looking at polling to understand where the American population wants AI to go? What are your sources of inputs to then make recommendations through? Absolutely. We look at polling. We talk to industry. We talk to civil society. We talk to all sorts of folks about where we should be going. But the numbers are what they are when it comes to the way that Americans think about data centers, for example.

3:03:44And that's something that we tackled a couple weeks ago. You may have seen the president brought all the executives from the top AI companies around the country to the White House and got them to commit something called the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. And this was them committing to build, bring, or buy their own power for any data center that they build. This is a big step forward, essentially a commitment to every American that if you are going to build a data center in their backyard, they will not pay more for electricity. I think that's the type of thing that Americans want to see. And it was great the president was able to push that.

3:04:15I've been seeing rumblings of that with various hyperscalers sort of putting out small press releases saying that they were sort of going to do it independently. It was great to see it come together as like a unified, everyone's holding hands and, you know, jumping off the chasm together, working together. Do you think that this would eventually become a law or is there some sort of framework that should be carried forward? or is the ratepayer protection program enough of an effort because the companies are public and they can be held account by their shareholders and their constituents? So in the framework that we released today, we urged Congress to codify the Ratepayer Protection Pledge.

3:04:57And I think one of the key pieces of it that would be great to put in law is the ability to legally build behind-the-meter power. This is something that needs exceptions that the Trump administration has allowed via executive action, but it would be good to get that into law. And I think it unlocks a whole new range of possibilities around how you can actually put power online that can support these data centers. Because now before, actually, an action by the Biden administration was to ban behind the meter power generation. And this is something that makes it really hard for some of these hyperscalers and other data center builders to get the power that they need.

3:05:32Jordy? Timelines with Congress, what is your optimistic outlook in actually getting this into law? Well, look, our hope is that we can do it in this calendar year. I think a lot of the provisions that were in the plan, particularly the ones around child safety, are ones that have had sort of bipartisan agreement for some time now. And we hope that, you know, bringing Congress together and back to your polling question, a lot of the issues that are covered in this framework are 80-20 issues. If we think about what are the types of bipartisan things that we potentially could drive forward, we think we'd make progress on things like child safety and also bring along the other issues that we bring in the framework.

3:06:12How do you envision the child safety processes going out? I mean, when I grew up, you know, movies had R ratings. I couldn't really go to the theater. It makes sense to adopt some of that. People are aware of that stuff. There's also, you know, issues with depression and how the people interact with AI. Like, where do you think the conversation around child safety will go as we move towards more regulation around keeping children safe in America? Where we're trying to take the conversation is putting parents back in control over what their children experience online. And for us in the framework, we urge Congress to move forward with legislation that puts that control back in the parents' hands.

3:06:57They should have the tools and platforms to provide the tools to parents so they have an understanding of what their kids are seeing, what they're experiencing, what they're interacting with, who's interacting with them. And they should also have the right features in place to allow parents to make decisions for what their kids will be seeing going forward. And I think those are just common sense, basic solutions that almost all parents around the world would want to have for their children. Yeah, yeah. As a parent, I feel like that's something I would definitely want. What's the reaction been like from industry?

3:07:27It feels like there's always the fear that, oh, they want to get them hooked young on whatever social media platform. At the same time, I feel like if everyone, you know, has to, you know, YouTube's had YouTube kids for a long time. They've segmented off different content there. The movie theaters obviously have G-rated films. It's not like the movie industry has been hurt by the ratings and the fact that kids can't go to R-rated movies. Has there been positive reception from the leaders of technology companies that you've spoken to about that concept? I think technology companies want to see a viable path forward.

3:08:05I mean, they see the polls just like anyone else does. And they understand that parents want to have control over what their children experience online. And, I mean, to their credit, to some degree, they've put and installed a bunch of features, as you mentioned, some on YouTube. You've seen parental controls on Instagram for a while. There's things growing on Facebook and many other of these platforms. And I think they're already doing that. But I think for real certainty, what parents deserve is an actual national law that enshrines this forever. And I think it's something that I think could be a bipartisan push.

3:08:35Jordy? Any insights into the pressure that various industries are putting on states to try to get these sort of like state level regulation and bans? I was seeing something out of New York that was trying to make it so that AI couldn't give legal advice, which to me is insane. We live in America. the rule of law matters, we're a very litigious country, if you can give anybody in the world access to legal super intelligence in an app, in an ad supported way totally free. Everyone should be able to sue each other. No, no, I'm just saying you should be able to drop a contract into an LLM. To actually understand the law and understand what you're signing up for understand have transparency there's a lot of people that aren't in a position to be able to hire a lawyer for$300 to$1 ,000 plus an hour, understand contracts, and everybody deals with this.

3:09:31So that's one example where I'm like, okay, where is this coming from? Maybe coming from some lobbying group for lawyers, which I understand their point of view, but it needs to be some middle ground. No, you're exactly right. I think laws like that that we are very against are the primary reason why we're trying to push forward this framework. There needs to be a national standard that essentially says that, look, this is the law of the United States that the federal government has set, and in so states then can't make laws in those particular areas. And the ones that you mentioned, sort of specific laws banning particular verticals, things like law, I mean, that's something that we want to make sure doesn't happen.

3:10:12And I think that's the power of having one national framework, And that's why we're hoping to work with Congress. What is the conversation like in D.C. right now around just the craziest Terminator AI doom scenario? The idea that we need maybe some, you know, big button that we can push to turn it all off. There's been a lot of fear mongering around that. Someone in D.C. creates a report around the issue. Okay. Someone else with AI, then someone else summarizes it with AI. And then they create a response with AI and then it gets summarized with AI. Yeah. And it just ping pongs back and forth. Potentially, potentially.

3:10:47But is there anything to address like runaway AGI superintelligence, like the doom scenario that there are at least a few Americans who do think is a serious issue? Yeah, in the framework, we talk about that a little bit. I think generally speaking, our view and what we put in the framework is that we want the relevant national security agencies in the U.S. government to have the expertise and the skills to be able to do the evaluations necessary to ensure our own national security in the United States. So, you know, it's great that there are a lot of people out there that have concerns about the future, and everyone has a right to that, and they can, you know, wave their papers or everything that you mentioned there.

3:11:26But the key thing, as governments, we need to have the capacity as an independent arbiter to do our own evaluations and think about it ourselves. And I think that's very, very, very different and distinct from it as a regulatory body. I think in the last administration, where a lot of this type of stuff was being thought at was at places that were essentially regulatory bodies and saying, like, we're going to do these tests. And if we don't like the answer to this test, then we may ban you or nationalize you or something. I think in our case, we think it purely from a kind of a national security standpoint, where we want our experts that are thinking about the way that these models work to support our warfighters and ensure our own cybersecurity have the tools they need to do the testing to see where these models are ultimately going.

3:12:06And I think that's probably a very natural and appropriate role for the government to play. How are you thinking about the government's role in reskilling, upskilling? We here on the show talk a lot about the economic opportunity that we see coming downstream of AI that might be some disruptive innovation. People might have new roles. I talk about how the job that I have now didn't exist when I was a kid because live streaming hadn't been invented. Or the other side of it, when, you know, Bezos, there was some news around Bezos' new project, you know,$100 billion fund focused on AI manufacturing.

3:12:42Our reaction was like, this is probably going to create a lot of jobs. A lot of jobs. We're going to make more things in America. But a lot of people, you know, maybe outside of tech responded by being like, oh, this is going to lead to a reduction in jobs. But how are you thinking about reskilling, upskilling, just helping shape and help the American workforce over the next decade as we go through this amazing transition? At our most basic level, we have a large set of programs at our Labor Department and our Education Department or Small Business Administration that are all geared towards this re-skilling and up-skilling category of activity.

3:13:17And what we try to pull it out in the framework we've been advocating for for over a year is those programs should be geared towards preparing American workers for an AI economy. We should be creating programs and spending the resources that Congress is appropriating to the executive branch to be able to go out there and actually prepare Americans for the next generation jobs. And we talk about that in the framework, and it's something that we're going to continue to do. We've done a lot of work on how AI is affecting small business. I don't know if you guys had an opportunity to ever talk with Kelly Loeffler, who's our small business administrator.

3:13:50Something that she talks about all the time, everywhere she travels, is what the uplift that AI is able to provide to America's small businesses. The vast, vast majority of Americans are employed by small business, not by all these big corporations that are signing all these mega deals with all the hyperscalers. It's about all of these five - to 50-person shops that power the American economy. And it's really these AI breakthroughs that have happened over the last couple of years that provide a whole new set of tool sets for these guys. in a way that we've never seen before. So I think it'd be really, really important for them.

3:14:23Yeah, still so underappreciated. It's just how transformative this is going to be for small business owners. A person that's a one to 10 person company, they're bit, you know, if you're an electrician, you're busy on a job, somebody calls, you don't pick up the phone because you're in the middle of something. Well, great. AI can pick it up, qualify the client, schedule it. Like that is going to be transformative. Every extra challenge used to be a consultant or hiring a new person, and you're going to have so many different opportunities to expand your business. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us, Michael.

3:14:57We really appreciate it. Yeah, I love how pragmatic it is. Very pragmatic. It's addressing the concerns that everyday people have and I think moving the conversation forward in a great way. Yeah. Thank you. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you guys for having us. We appreciate it. Talk soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen. and spend with the Phantom Card. Is there any other news, Jordy, that we should go through today? There is a call sheet here. Which companies will officially announce an IPO this year? Jersey Mike's is running away with it at 73%.

3:15:34OpenAI is at 48%. Anthropics at 42%. SpaceX is at 88%. Jersey Mike's. Cerebris is at 91%. We got to do the Jersey Mike's IPO. Jersey Mike's IPO. If they don't get on the New York Stock Exchange, We're not doing our job. We've got to have the founder on the show. Skims at 31%. Deal at 23%. Skims IPO is interesting. Databricks, 22%. Shein, 21%. Beast Industries at 14%. Anderle at 13%. This is interesting. I'm really into this market. Anyway, thank you for watching. I have to get out of here. Big weekend. I will see you all on Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Is there anything else we gotta do?

3:16:19No. We love you. Have a great day.