Air India Crash, Internet Chaos | Delian Asparouhov, Saif Khawaja, Henri Stern, Chris Paik, Joseph Cohen, Zachary Perret, Shirin Ghaffary, Cameron McCord, Anil Varanasi, Shreyas Iyer

30:30Well, we do take tap to pay. And you could just pay here. And then so then they charge the person for the parking infraction directly. And then the government makes money off of the profit that the company makes. Oh, I like that. Yeah. So they're kind of like acting as an individual, like an independent organization. Almost like a third-party DMV in some ways. Yeah. I imagine they could raise a lot of money from a VC that doesn't do any legal due diligence. I thought you were going to say, you know, somebody, you know, basically they see somebody parking illegally. They walk up to them wearing a tux and just say, hey, would you like me to, you know, I can just sit here by your car and kind of sit against it.

31:09Yeah. And it'll look like, you know, you're not you haven't left your car. You know, so if a real parking attendant comes by, they'll just assume this is just a guy pulled over, you know, needed to write an email or something. so yeah there's there's potentially a lot of opportunity there john i like how you're thinking yeah this could be the first tbpn request for startups

31:34breaking news mattel and open ai are teaming up their first ai powered toy um uh arrive later this little rough for all the people that wanted to put chat gpt in a toy It turns out the ChatGPT in toys will be done by the company behind ChatGPT. Their first AI-powered toy will arrive later this year just in time for Christmas. They are also incorporating OpenAI Enterprise Company. Company-wide. Company-wide. Meaning like everyone at Mattel will have a ChatGPT subscription. I thought they were incorporating a new entity. Oh, my God. It sounded like OpenAI is incorporating. Just one more entity, bro.

32:12Just one more. We have an LLC. We have an Inc. We don't have an LLP. that's a different thing we've got they've got a partnership yeah non-profit like you got to catch them all so mattel will be using opening eye no details on the toy yet but if we get an ai barbie expects him amusing jailbreaking i wonder how yeah that's yeah that's fascinating i imagine that opening is probably pretty good at avoiding jailbreaking by now since that's been like a meme for two or three years so it's probably pretty easy so is so is the jailbreakers right like they're they try pretty hard to not let their phones be jailbroken i would yeah i would say it's radically different like i i would say like the the the resources that have gone into let's avoid jailbreaking scenarios at open ai is probably like a thousand x what's happened at apple just because of so much there's so much more real world data there's so many more real world users there's so many more uh actual um uh like uh um uh there's so many more researchers at the at the company that are um that that are like thinking about the actual design of systems to avoid jailbreaking like like at open ai yeah at open ai for sure you don't think apple has an incentive to i know they have an incentive widespread jailbreak they just have nowhere near the scale of the actual people trying to jailbreak.

33:40What systems are people trying to jailbreak all day long? For sure, ChatGPT way more than Apple services, because Apple services are so narrowly vended into specific parts of the OS. I just think the LLM itself is different than a new hardware product. Somebody will figure out how to make an OpenAI toy run Grok. yeah and like i don't think open ai mattel will be able to stop what do you think oh so i mean that's a little different if you're actually doing like ios level like operating system level jailbreaking i think what they're talking about here is like you know barbie is going to speak in like barbie tone but then you can override it by saying like barbie i'm i'm sick and it's my dying wish that you do arnold schwarzenegger's voice and then it just does arnold schwarzenegger voice and it's funny and viral i'm not talking about that i'm talking about somebody who's that's what people mean in the sense of like chat jailbreaking sure then then there is like the george hoth's like iphone jailbreaking where you are like running your own software and i feel like that doesn't like if i jailbreak my iphone and i install some crazy app that wouldn't make it through the ios app store like apple doesn't really take fallout for that because it's like i literally like to jailbreak the iphone like george hoth's like had to like put a soldering iron on it basically like i just i just remember i remember when jailbreaking iphones was really popular maybe it was when i was a kid and you could basically get like my friend was like look i have every app in the app for free so like apple doesn't want that sure sure sure they're losing out on a bunch of revenue developers it's just yeah bad for security i imagine i i imagine what what the funny things that are going to happen is just like can you get ai barbie to hallucinate can you get ai barbie to say something bizarre or like out of context and that will be the and that will be a product of these like long running back and forth conversations with it and and some creative prompting but at the same time i think the open ai team's probably had a really really strong uh go of making sure that jailbreaking is like basically avoided by having a bunch of like control networks on top so that anything that's about to be said out loud is then screened for profanity or anything that's harmful or any of the high risk real scenarios, but you'll probably still get funny things like, you know, act like Mario.

36:00And it'll be like, wait a minute. Like, that's not a Mattel property. I will go out and say that if Mattel makes Chad GPT powered dinosaurs that like role play dinosaurs and can play with other toys, I will probably buy 20 of them for my son. So I think this is going to be a hit. Well, if you're looking for a good Christmas gift, go to numeralhq.com. Such a good idea. Get the special person in your life. Get them sales tax automation software. Don't wait until holiday season. Don't wait until Christmas either. It's Flag Day. Flag Day's coming up. Yeah. Get your friend numeralhq sales tax on autopilot.

36:35They probably will sell out in Q4. Yeah. They're going to sell out of software. Yeah. Buy it now. The demand for numeral sales tax in Q4. Buy it now. Is going to be crazy. Put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com. Did you see this clip of a friend of the show, Mark Andreessen? The thing that you want from your venture firm is power. And Brad Gerstner was quote posting it, another friend of the show, saying 100 % power to help you land customers, to find and land key team, to raise from the best sources of capital, to get on podcasts and CNBC.

37:13What about TBPN? And to navigate and be heard in Washington, D.C., the power to deliver all things founders need to increase the odds of max success. That is our job. I got to say, A16Z, they've got the power. Yeah. They've got the power. They single-handedly, like at one point, forced, for my last company, forced a Unicorn company to sign up and use the product. It was great. It was great. They basically were like, yeah, you guys are using this now. And they became a customer almost immediately. Yeah. watching uh watching this rant about uh the value of power it just made me really hungry you know yeah i think i think the idea of being power hungry has gotten kind of a bad rap totally but it's like you wouldn't criticize someone for being hungry for food so why are you criticizing me for being hungry for power yeah you need it yeah you need we need to take back power hungry what's the quote like when you power's power as badly as you want to breathe something like that that just sounds like a jordy quote but i'm sure somebody said it But yeah, we need to normalize being power hungry.

38:18It's fine. The idea of power makes me hungry. When you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful. Then you'll be successful. That's great. Well, we have Delian joining in two minutes. Let's tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. people want to ask how do you how do you on you know how do you find and work with sponsors how do you book an average of of six guests a day on your podcast we do it on adia we do that's how we do it yeah it's fantastic we have a absolutely we've done hundreds of guests so far this year takes a lot to over 400 now yep um takes a lot to i wonder what our what is our annual run rate of guests.

39:07Guest run rate. That's really the metric that it must be. It's over a thousand. It's over a thousand because it's four, it's four a day and we do two 50 shows a year. Wow. Yeah. Over a thousand guests. It's great. It's just a lot of good conversations. A lot of people are like, how do you do it? It's an absolute joy. There's plenty of jobs where you have four conversations a day. It's not that crazy. How do people say, how do you do it? I'd say, how do we, how could we not do it? Yeah. I thought this was an interesting post by Matthew Prince, founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Small town newspapers are shutting down due to the lack of a succession plan, not financial issues.

39:43Small town newspapers are actually doing pretty well financially. There's actually one company that's rolling up a lot of small town newspapers for political reasons. Let's give it up for private equity. You love it. You love it. Venture backs as well. Not financial issues. In nearly a dozen US states, a growing problem. And so Matthew Prince says, actually this is a recipe for a really rewarding life if you're a recent college grad not sure what to do find a small town you could love with a local newspaper whose owners are ready to retire raise the capital to buy it that seems like the tricky part if you're a new grad and you might not know how to raise capital to buy out a small town yeah but you can do a mostly seller note you know if they're graduating college they probably already have like a hundred thousand of art history major debt.

40:30Already, just the fact that you said raise a seller note, that's not something that's just in the canon. People have read Paul Graham talking about what a safe note is. People understand the basics of maybe a pre-seed round or handshake deal. People do not... That's just not in the general discourse in college kids who are graduating, I think. Maybe it should be. Maybe there needs to be a firm that does marketing around this or a whole bunch of different options. But he says, run it with the community's interests at heart. You'll not get rich, but you'll do well. More importantly, you'll be a hero to the community and have influence even early in your career.

41:12You'll meet the love of your life at some event you wouldn't otherwise get invited to. Have kids who will be proud to call you their parent and make your corner of the world meaningfully better. Anyone who wants to seriously follow this recipe and just lacks capital. Happy to talk. So there's the answer. If you're thinking about doing this, going and buying a local newspaper, call it Matthew Prince. We have to have Matthew on because he's working on some of the micropayment infrastructure that we were talking about to try to fix the business model of the internet. Very cool. Well, we have Delian Asperhuv on the show for the second time in two days.

41:48There he is. I'm surprised this is working. Oh, he had to go remote because he didn't want to get blasted with the confetti cannon again. Legitimately, my heart jumped. when that happened, I was like, I'm done. This is the end. This is my final moments. I was saying to John after, I didn't really mean to get you that bad, but I was imagining a scenario where you had like a concealed carry and you just like did a quick draw and like popped me twice and then that was just the end. I'm a Florida man at heart, you know what I mean? He's a Florida man. It was wild. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by yesterday.

42:19It was great. Let's run through what's going on. By the way, nothing says SF and YC are back at YC Demo Day. Really, really symbolic. Yeah, definitely. I mean, Gary's been doing a good job. City was almost dead and AI saved it, or AI plus Gary Tan. I think Mayor Daniel has a lot to owe to those two. Yeah, it's YC presidents all the way down. It's Sam Altman and Gary Tan. It's true. Yeah, it's just YC presidents. It's like, you know, Michael Seibel bringing for San Francisco, huh? Yeah, yeah. Let's get Michael in the conversation. He can work on converting Alcatraz or something. I don't know. By the way, I'm surprised you could even join this.

43:01Apparently Google is just down. Really? GCP is down. But, you know, all of our invites are based on Google Calendar. So glad you could join. Hopefully it was cash. Are they sure we're not just under political attack? It's probably partially down. Because they're trying to stop Dalyan from yapping. They probably said, hey, we're trying to take TBPN off the air. We're trying to take Dalyan off the air. Let's just take down people. They don't want me talking about India. Yeah, they're afraid. I'm afraid. Let's keep it PG. Anyway, yeah, I mean, it's a very, very sad story about the 787 crash. This is the Dreamliner, right?

43:40The first new or the most recent new major plane from Boeing. It's not as big as the 747, but it's super efficient. They're turning over the fleets. It's supposed to be kind of the latest and greatest. I remember the news around it launching. I don't even know if I've ever flown on one, but it was not the 737 MAX story that people were worried about. It's a completely different platform. Shouldn't have the same problems. But at the same time, there's this terrible crash. There's been a lot of crashes. Is there something bigger going on here? Can you just give us an overall state of the union on aircraft safety, anything you know about this crash?

44:18What even questions should we be asking about this when something like this happens? Yeah, I mean, to set the stage, I am a private pilot. I've gone through some level of training, obviously not to the level of commercial pilots. Not to the level of Nathan Fielder. Not to the level of Nathan Fielder. But you do get to train alongside a bunch of guys that turn into commercial pilots and you see what training they go through. And while the investigations both for the DCA crash, so the Washington DC helicopter plus plane crash, and then this obviously India accident obviously only just happened. both those investigations are ongoing.

44:51But I actually go back to the Nathan Fielder latest season, where if you look at crashes, including these two and a bunch over the course of the last 20, 30 years, a significant component that fed into the crashes was cockpit communication issues, where a co-pilot identifies an issue, speaks up to the captain, the captain basically largely dismisses it and you continues down the prior track so there's like the dca investigation is not yet you know sort of fully released but there was early uh audio that was uh early you know transcripts that were shown that i think it was something on the order of like 45 seconds before the crash the co-pilot literally said i don't think we have the plane in sight we should basically be going down into the left because i'm not sure that we're you know uh going to be you know uh dodging out of the like you know approach path and the captain it seems like literally just completely dismissed you know this piece of information and if they followed it they would have flown in exactly the direction that they needed to fly in order to avoid the plane.

45:46And so that, and then if you look at either sort of today's, you know, sort of India's, you know, sort of 787 crash, super, super early, this preliminary, et cetera. But from, you know, so the various, you know, sort of X accounts and YouTubers that I follow the like, you know, sort of consensus theory right now, there's basically like two theories. One, you have a like dual engine failure right on takeoff, which is like a one in 10 trillion outcome. The idea that somehow both fail at the exact same time. like even if it's like a flock of birds it'll have to be a massive flock of birds that somehow hits both but the thing that you know sort of quickly is you know lining up is like a leading theory is that the flaps weren't down on takeoff so with a plane like this in order to have an additional lift basically when you're first taking off you need to have basically flaps down if you basically just have the you know sort of flaps up and wings typical you just aren't going to be able to generate enough lift and if you look at the flight profile and how it's sunk down and it was fully loaded with passengers and with fuel the flight profile basically matches that if you're going down the runway at takeoff speed with flaps up, there are alarms.

46:43There are things that like are clearly alerting you that you have missed a step in a checklist, which is like, I guarantee you whenever they pull that, you know, sort of cockpit audio, there's maybe some chances that all the alarm systems somehow, you know, sort of failed. But like, to me, what's very clear is like in the takeoff checklist, they did not put, you know, sort of flaps down and they clearly ignored that information, you know, on the, you know, sort of takeoff. I would guarantee that there's going to be some, you know, sort of co-pilot pilot, you know, miscommunication user challenge.

47:06that's going to be a huge contributor to the crash. And so while Nathan Fielder, like season two, was incredibly funny, some of the best TV that I've ever seen, as a pilot, I actually genuinely think he has a really strong perspective here where when you're training about how to communicate with somebody else in the cockpit, all they show you is basically a PowerPoint slide that says, make sure to speak up. The idea that just being reading the words, make sure to speak up, somehow trains you to actually speak up live in the moment. That'd be the idea of, and I think, you know, Coogan, you and I have talked about this.

47:38Like I could read a presentation that says, when you're on TV, don't say, you know, you know, you know, which is like the verbal tick. And I could read that. And there's no fucking way that I would actually be able to do that correctly. I need to go on TVPN every two weeks. And that's the thing that practices. There's no practice. And so the whole concept behind Nathan Fielder's, you know, sort of season two is actually make the pilots practice. Put them in these situations that are like simulations of crashes, force them to communicate to one another, and then force them to play out an alternative scenario where you actually push back against the captain and get into that uncomfortable place where yes, this person's more senior, yes, this person's more experienced, but you have to be willing to actually push that.

48:13And if you never practice that, and that's one of the leading causes of crashes in the United States over the past 20 to 30 years, how is that something that the FAA is just like completely ignoring? And so I have half a mind of, you know, when I'm in DC for like Varda, Founders Fund, Hill and Valley, I literally like, I think next year for Hill and Valley, I want to put Nathan Fielder and the NTSB guy as one of the primary panels and be like, this is a like extremely important topic coming from the technology industry. Somebody needs to go influence this. So anyway, Nathan Fielder is a fucking goat and you know, somebody has got to make role playing a part of pilot training.

48:44Is there, is there a metaphor for the, uh, for what happens in venture? Maybe an associate who doesn't speak up when a GP is ripping a check into a, uh, you know, a company that maybe doesn't have product market fit and is trading at 500 X revenue. You know, maybe when people are investing in the partner meetings. Okay, so let's just take a step back. Let's stop talking this specific investment. Let's role play a scenario where we're investing in a different company at 500X ARR, and maybe a junior partner had some concerns about the investment. Let's just play that out. Sidebar, five minutes, then we'll come back to this.

49:21Do you think that ever happens in Silicon Valley? I mean, look, you know, when a founder in an investment committee meeting is playing League of Legends and, you know, the numbers look a little too good. I don't know. I think maybe like there should be a little role playing there and somebody should speak up and say, hey, like, don't we want founders that are pretty focused on what they're doing? Or at least good at League of Legends. At least good at League of Legends. So does somebody investigate the fact that he's fucking bronze? Like somebody should look at that. And I think with a little bit of role playing, I could imagine scenarios like that.

49:50They could train somebody. And so unfortunately what happens is no role playing happens. And then the primary sponsor of the deal is, you know, she's shifted to somebody else and the person is quietly exited. And so our solution. Yes, yes, yes. It does happen. I'm just referencing a hypothetical, by the way. Yeah, just hypothetical. But it speaks to the importance of training. Yeah. Training is very important. Junior people need to speak up and say their opinion. For sure. What about the startup angle here? there was some company that came to one of our offsites at FF, and it was basically like autopilot for planes.

50:25He was working with the AC-130, the C-130, and the idea was that non-deterministic, probabilistic software could not be integrated into the actual control stack of planes, and so his workaround was put an iPad there that reads the data and makes recommendations. And I was like, that maybe is bad, but also maybe I don't trust autopilot on the plane right now anyway. So this feels like, you know, whenever there's this moment, you'll probably see different companies jumping in to try and help for, you know, mercenary or missionary reasons. Is there a world where the private sector can actually help with airplane safety or aircraft safety?

51:06Or is this purely in your mind, like we need just changes to training like laws? um there definitely is i think a lot of what you know sort of pilots do absolutely could be subtly automated you know by software over time i do think it's like um obviously a significantly harder problem than just like you know you know chat gpt reading the internet and then just spewing out words like it's just like the the training data is a lot harder to acquire the like outputs obviously like you can't have any hallucination and so um but like you know in 10 15 20 years could this be like fully fully automated 100 i think the challenge is much more cultural where it's just like the FAA other than like the DCA crash like you know basically had a spotless you know track record for like 15 plus years and so it's like really hard to justify I mean this is where it's I think like some of these like next generation like you know supersonic and hypersonic planes are going to really struggle where it's just like we're sort of stuck with this like you know you know sort of tube and wing you know sort of plane design even though there's like plenty of other net new plane designs make sense but they're just so safe and so then you're stuck in this like you know catch what you like the analogy that I always give is like imagine today you came to society in a world where there was no cars and you said i'm going to give everybody this like two-ton vehicle they're going to like move 60 miles per hour while there's like pedestrians close by and by the way we're just going to like kill like 70 000 americans every single year just every year we're going to fucking murder 70 000 americans but it offers all of us a little bit convenience we like get to places faster yeah in a world where there are cars no fucking way would we ever pass that like that would never happen right and so there is a little bit of this like you know societal moral question of like what is the right number of deaths in order for progress And right now in the world of aviation, the answer is zero.

52:39Zero deaths is allowed. Is there a tinfoil hat scenario where like aviation's been very, very safe and then one crash happens, like the first crash, and it looks just like a blip and we return to kind of like the averages and we say, okay, well, even including that, it's still very safe. But now there's been the crash in Canada, the crash in India, the crash in D.C. Like at a certain point, there's so many, like you have to wonder if there's something bigger going on. And if it was this safety training thing, we haven't been doing this type of training ever. So is it possible that there's something else going on?

53:12I think when these complex systems deteriorate, they can deteriorate very rapidly. And it's hard to totally diagnose an individual cause. But I do think that's what you're seeing of it. It's like Boeing culture and their optimization for shareholder returns is killing supply chain and consistency. You're seeing some of the craziness of COVID where we retired a bunch of pilots and now we're hiring a bunch of junior pilots. the fact that ATC is super overworked and like, you know, they're trying to still operate off of like 1970s, you know, sort of software, even though the world's getting, you know, some more complex and, you know, sort of higher volume in traffic.

53:41And so I think what you're seeing is just like a fring at the edge of this system. And yeah, I do think there's a world where like all of a sudden you see us return to like, you know, 1990s level plane crashes on a super regular basis. And that may be the thing that finally makes it sort of the like, you know, FAA and others need to start to adopt, you know, sort of next technologies where like they can no longer just totally rely on the safety track record. I think there's something you have to imagine this idea, this thought running through a pilot's head in a scenario where one pilot is concerned about actions that the crew is taking collectively.

54:13And then they're just basically running the thought process of planes are just so safe. I've done thousands of these. It's going to be fine. I've been in situations that weren't great before and it always worked out. and then they're just like thinking about the actual statistics and realizing that, no, you're not a statistic. You're in the cockpit right now. You're a person in the cockpit. Responsible for hundreds of people's lives. I've invested a 200X ARR and been able to SPAC before. How bad is this for Boeing? I mean, 787 total failure. I mean, I don't think it's anywhere near like the 737 sort of max issues.

54:56I mean, yeah, they'll have to like go through an investigation. The like orders on this stuff are so, you know, sort of, you know, you know, done so far in advance of likelihood that it like shifts revenue. It's like, unless something catastrophic comes out of the investigation in like a year, I actually don't think that'll have that much effect, especially when you just like look at the footage where it looks like it's a pilot error. For reference on public.com, the stock is down 5 % or something like that. Should we go on to the next topic? Yeah. TSP for Shinke. What's going on there? Shinke.

55:22Never thought I'd be, you know, sort of a fish investor, but I do love my fish. I've been a long time, you know, sort of lover of the Tokyo fish market, going there, eating quality fish. I never appreciated that a part of what makes the Tokyo fish market quality, yes, is the fish that they go catch. But it is specifically also the way the fish is prepared and basically how it's killed. Traditionally, fish in like the United States and most of the world, you basically catch a fish and then you either like freeze it to death or you like let it flop and basically like, you know, effectively drown in air.

55:49The problem with both those techniques, fish knows that it's dying, gets super stressed out, releases all these like hormones, lactic acid, etc. And that significantly degrades the quality of the fish in Japan. What they do is they basically like stab out the brain and pull out the brainstem. So the fish basically never knows that it's ever dying, even though, you know, you obviously are killing it. And so you have a very basically like relaxed fish meat and you bleed it out very quickly. That's a lot of what leads to like Omikase level quality. That typically is like a super manual. You need like an old Japanese chef on your boat in order to do that.

56:17Super expensive. Basically met this guy, say from Shinkai, you guys will be talking to that like one comes from like a fisherman's family which is like you know incredible like founder market fit and two basically built these robots that automatically basically kill the fish in the way that the japanese chefs do but rather than like selling the robots they actually just have like a consumer fish brand that is now carried in a bunch of like you know high-end michelin star restaurants starting to get into you know sort of retail and i think it's just like one of these things where it's like i just love you you rarely meet just such an example of like this is the company that this person was like born born to build you know what i mean like you know i like you know maybe stumbled into in space manufacturing when i was like in seventh or eighth grade but i was not born for it safe was literally born to build this company and i think there's like a perfect parallel of like if you look at like cargill like a hundred years ago they started off with like some simple you know equipment and then steadily basically grew into a massive like processor distributor or wholesaler they're like you know the largest like pig and cow um you know sort of distributor um i think there's an opportunity here to do this in fish where like there hasn't really been a like next generation tech enabled equipment provider in the fishing industry.

57:19It's super long tail. There's no like one agglomerate. I actually think that this like initial angle into like high quality fish is something that like safe actually has the ambitions to go build into this like massive conglomerate that yes, is serving fish, but also is the wholesaler and the distributor. And they have like automated fishing boats and they have like, you know, they're like automatic killing and the processing and like the bleeding, all of that. Nobody's taken a look at it basically like a hundred years. And I'm not too worried about like other people competing because I don't think like two Stanford grads want to go get their hands dirty and deal with a bunch of fish guts you know like really i've been i've uh i've spent time at the facility in the gundo it smells like fish every day you go into work and for eight hours you just smell fish every day and every day out you know we just believe you know competition is for losers what better way to smoke out the competition to just be like you have to smell fish for eight hours yeah yeah compete it's a great it's a great market you know the market opportunity is is is massive uh low competition it's a great market to be in but you gotta love of the stench of fish.

58:19I felt bad last time I went and saw Safe in the team. He gave me some fresh fish. And then classic LA, I had to drive to a couple other meetings. And then I realized that I got home and the fish had just been sitting in my hot car for the entire day, so I couldn't eat it. But I've had it. I've had it. They're distributing to Nobu and a bunch of amazing restaurants. Amazing. Well, I'm excited to talk to them. Thanks so much for hopping on, Delian. Delian, they were so mad that you were back on the show. they took down AWS too. Wait, AWS is down too? Google, AWS. We might not even be live anymore.

58:54We're just the three of us talking. Okay, we're live apparently. But yeah, this could be Iran. It could be Russia. It could be China. It could be anybody. They don't want us to podcast. It's too powerful. Pakistan's getting in on the news. It is crazy times. Stay safe. Enjoy the rest of your trip to San Francisco. We'll see you next time you're in LA. Talk to you. Bye. And next up, we're going right into Shinkai. We got Safe, who I met. He's got some big news today. And Safe, YC company. Went through YC a few years ago at this point. Did he raise on a safe? Hard tech company in YC. He was named after the safe.

59:29Good nominative determinism. Crazy, crazy. Fantastic. What if he just only raises on safes? Yeah. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Hey, gentlemen. How's it going? My man. What's going on? Good. Hang out. Cool. So yeah, Delian already said your whole life story, everything the business does. He leaked the news. He did leak a few bits here and there, the tech roadmaps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's so exciting to finally have you on. Yeah, for sure. You've just been, honestly, I feel like fairly under the radar. Real G's moving silence like lasagna. That's right. There you go. But I've been able to witness your journey dating back to probably, it must be like two and a half years ago at this point but watching you go from solo founder uh you know you had come out of yc working on something that was that had uh i i was immediately a believer in you and and um uh you know invested but um you know going watching the transition from solo founder you had absolutely you know not saying this in a bad way absolutely zero hype around the business at all.

1:00:39You were like, I'm trying to build fish killing robots. And this was at a time, it sounds crazy now, the idea sounds cool, but there was absolutely no heat on the company, but you were able to get a few kind of core believers early on. And now, a couple years later, you're announcing the kind of round that every founder dreams of. So why don't you break it down? And then there's a bunch of other kind of things we can get into around the company. Yeah, first I have to say it feels like two and a half, three years ago, it was only a year and a half. Really? Wow. Well, that's five years in venture.

1:01:15Yeah, we're really excited to announce our Series A. We've raised$22 million, co-led by Deli and the Founders Fund and Interlagos Capital. And we are reshoring American seafood. Amazing. Breakdown. Here we go. They went to the wrong screen. Hit it again. John. We're having uh sorry i say we're having massive technical difficulties today the internet's under attack aws and gcp are down but your robots are probably running you know locally hopefully um but uh but anyways yeah break down kind of the your background history of the company how you got to this point uh and all that and all that good stuff for sure well jordy as you know I like to say I come from a seafaring family.

1:02:08You know, I was born in Canada, but, you know, raised in the Middle East. So I was fishing with my dad off the Red Sea, had matching stator tattoos with my granddad, all like kind of peripheral. No one's formally in seafood, but like, you know, I have like very big library of just fish photos with my dad. Yeah. It's a classic. And then, yeah, you know, I moved to the U.S., you know, when I was 18. And then basically, you know, a few years. By yourself, right? Yeah, solo. yeah solo immigrant um and then um yeah basically has uh you know the the core of shink it really comes from from that portion you know i kind of like must see food alone for a while and then uh one of my early mornings in grad school there was this essay in the newspaper about this vegan activist which is kind of ironic um uh called uh if fish could scream and it was all about how because fish don't have vocal cords we give them less empathy than we do to land mammals like cows and chickens and terrestrials you know um and that kind of got me thinking i I first wanted to work on some more like schizoid projects to do with that, but funnel the energy towards, you know, what we're now working on today.

1:03:10Right. So the essay was really talking about, you know, what Delian said that, you know, when you walk into most mass market retailers, most of the fish you're buying are basically brought into the deck of a boat and let them suffocate. And it'll take them anywhere from a few minutes to sometimes over an hour to lose consciousness. Right. And so in that time, they're releasing stress hormones, lactic acid, all of these things that basically rapidly decaying meat quality in the shelf life of fish. and so you know uh i was kind of like perusing around on the rabbit reddit and youtube rabbit holes and i found the techniques that were basically we started with scaling up although we're working on other things now um which was basically like a japanese analog to uh kosher slaughter for cows if you're familiar basically like dylan said you basically spike the fish in the brain you cut the gills option cut the tail the cheese are the same things that basically rather than the fish flopping around you stop the experience of stress you remove the blood and so the meat can last up to three times as long you taste mission star quality you know the fish If you want to get fish like this, it's flown over from Japan.

1:04:03And so, yeah, we're basically scaling those up. And our first product is called Sidon. It basically produces Michelin-grade fish at commodity costs. Incredible. Breakdown kind of the early history because I know you went through YC, and this was at a time when there's a bunch of great YC hard tech companies. I don't think they had a request for startups for fish. They didn't have a request for startups for fish-killing robots, but you made it in. And I just remember that you had this very kind of fast takeoff where one day it was just like you and a few YC Safe and maybe a handful of other investors.

1:04:41And then you really started building out the team. So maybe talk about that early day, kind of those early days. A little bit of corporate history. I took the company full time in early 2022. We went through YC, presented the summer down the day. and then uh you know from there uh basically kept our heads down um i started building out the kind of philosophical point of view around the business um you know both in the business model and the uh you know the r &d and uh i had two junior engineers with me and we basically didn't do anything else for like two years i was like you know i started with like being in the cold of maine so going from like the like desert dubai to the winters of maine was like insane insane life experience um you know probably the most extremes in my bloodline anyone's seen um and then uh you know have basically you know we we had this inflection point really around the time that you and i met you know which is you know a few people taking early bets on us um and that kind of catalyzed uh you know hiring you know the core of our founding team you know which is like you know early andrew computer vision engineers you know my co-founders of spacex leaving the the avionics team on Starship, with commercial fishermen, with robotics PhDs.

1:05:53And, you know, a lot of the core DNA there has, like, really, you know, become, you know, what we're very proud to say is, like, you know, a top engineering culture, you know, and derivative of that now, even as we start to scale up the sales side, you know, a top company culture as a whole. You know, we've been able to accomplish in the past year and a half what, like, I think would take, you know, companies years and years to do. We're already producing robots, like as fast as like you know once every two weeks you know and we're uh we're taking a little bit slower than you know we need to but like you know we have a robot that can uh the payback time is in weeks you know it's not months what's it like uh what's it like trying to recruit top talent when you have to uh when you have to convince them to be smell fish for 12 hours a day you know it's funny you know um we had we had uh you know one of our accounting engineers jen um you know told me this great story once and she doesn't know that i use all the time uh that you know we went to hackathon uh you know she was like probably like one of the first like 20 perception engineers at androal it's really early on um and so you know she went to hackathons and androal was really early and no one want you know the time no one wanted to um really spend you know any time really at all uh listening to you know defense hardware and now as you guys know it is like you know the biggest thing you know when we talk about hardware and you know so when we went to hackathon about you know probably a year ago now um the sentiment was really similar you know like people were like oh fish what you know um oh meat you know um we got blown off by you know intern like freshmen and sophomores from like waterloo it's really funny waterloo interns yeah literally um it's so it's funny to say because now like you know we have like this you know we can be like re-selective we're like we're now kind of the opposite scenario of like turning down all these top engineers uh really because we just you know we want to keep the bar really high and um you know our philosophy is like hiring smart nice people and it sounds really trivial but the reality is our bar for smart and nice is extremely high and you you generally have one or the other you have people who are like really really smart but they know they're so smart that they're uh they have really got egos um and then by first so you have people who are so kind as a kind of way to like make up for the fact they're not that smart and uh golden retriever mode this sounds like pavel's uh hiring hiring criteria you have to have that dog in them and they have to be nice with it that's smart and nice yeah it's a little more well you can be nice with it and not be nice right that's true yeah you gotta have the rhythm and the tism right yeah i saw that i saw that it's the iq and Yeah, exactly.

1:08:37Yeah. Yeah. Talk to me about actually manufacturing robotics. We've heard from a lot of folks that the supply chain is incredibly complicated. I mean, you're not at like such an incredible scale that there's probably geopolitical implications necessarily just yet. But what has that been like? Who are your key suppliers? Are you able to retrofit certain parts of machines? Like how much are you building? How much are you buying? what are the key suppliers in your world? So we do some very light manufacturing in-house. A lot of it is using local partners, all of which El Segundo, exactly, all put together.

1:09:13We do all the assembly in-house. In terms of tariff impact and geopolitical impacts from the current administration, honestly, it's been fairly net helpful. Yes, the price of steel and all that has just gone up, but for us, I'm not sure if you know, but um you know there's been a lot of like um deregulation and you know and the tariffs around seafood and so because of that we're able to just like clean up the rest of like all the imported uh fish that are coming in from almost all countries interesting yeah do you have an idea of what the tariff on international fish imports is roughly right now i don't um it's like country by country but i imagine it's like over 10 percent everywhere it is yeah i mean it's probably close to 20 at this point that's obviously varies depending on skew and species and size but we that amount is basically the entire margin for the import so for them they're just kind of like and then there's also massive shipping costs i'm sure exactly because it's cold chain and that's way more way more expensive than just like throw it on a you know a big shipping container talk about the structure of the business today and maybe long term when when we met you had uh incredible ambitions right away you wanted to build you know fleets and basically own the entire stack from catching the fish all the way through delivery to the customer.

1:10:31It feels like your ambitions are still massive, but you've really narrowed in on focusing on some key areas. What does the business look like today? What does it look like a decade from now? Great question. I'm not going to go into too much detail on the former just because we're going to stay a little more quiet about that. But we're structured as basically a vertically integrated robotics company where we're basically like halfway like between a robotics company and a cv wholesaler and processor so the model that we have is you know shinkei is a parent company basically you know uh manufacturers all these machines um you know and for every poseidon that we build um we give them to a fisherman for free and so i've actually worked as a commercial fisherman having after starting the company and so the way that they actually make money is actually not as...

1:11:18Forward deployed fishermen. Yeah, forward deployed fishermen. FDF. And so the way that we make money is not actually as like labor costs by the hour generally, like it can depend, but most of the time it's as a proportion of the catch. So it's a gross profit dependent. So every additional hand that you have actually ends up like taking away from the skipper's hands. And so for us, that's why we didn't want to add load to the stuff. We basically give them machines for free and then we actually pay them a premium over the commodity dock price so that they're actually incentivized. So there's no risk to them.

1:11:51They sit on our balance sheet. We basically own and maintain them. They just operate them. And then we buy and sell that fish and sell it wholesale to other distributors. We didn't even get into this, but I want to take a quick second. This is basically a machine. You put a fish in one side of it. It pulls the fish through it, uses computer vision to find the exact right point to target the fish's brain, takes it out, and then it moves on. it that's correct right yeah we also cut the gills as well wow yeah yeah which is just crazy and doing that on a ship that is at moving moving at sea and the fish is a very hard problem this is an assembling iphone yeah yeah we can do multiple species multiple sizes five seconds of fish it's really fast yeah that's amazing um yeah and i mean you know projecting like multi-year shelf lives on the robots that you know again we can like pay back in 12 weeks so pretty fun multi-shelf life is also big because i imagine like salt water gets in these things there's like all sorts of corrosion and air and it's just like you're in the elements it's not some super clean room right and so that's where you know background on a lot of our team you know like when reed is working on avionics you know like you know obviously like space and the marine are very different but like the amount of like detail orientation you need towards like protecting it for extremely harsh environments like a lot of that methodology carries over very quickly into seafood very cool talk about uh where you guys are being distributed already where the where the product is actually ending up i don't know what what logos you can share but yeah yeah we're uh you name it we're probably there in terms of metros so like new york sf la chicago vegas miami austin denver you know a lot of those places we're basically in like the like highest and top top uh shelf fish for the segments we uh we sell wholesale to distributors like i mentioned for restaurants but we also sell directly to retailers we have one retailer um uh in new york that we sell to um the only retailer that we have um but across all the restaurants we have like over 40 michelin stars um and we're probably moving about 40 michelin stars i'm hitting the size congratulations oh yeah there we go it's the third guy love to hear it for Shane Kay.

1:14:03Resonating through my bloodline. I remember that one. Thank you so much for coming on. You have anything else, Jordy? We do have Henry. Yeah, I mean, this is awesome. Come back on regularly. Let's do a taste test on the stream. Yeah, let's do a taste test on the stream soon. For sure. Sounds great, Jens. Thank you for having me. You guys are just getting started, and it's been incredible to fall. I just, I love watching you win. I knew you would. And I can't wait for, you know, I guess it's been a year and a half. I can't wait for the next decade. So congrats to the team. Congratulations. Cheers, gentlemen.

1:14:36Very kind. Appreciate it. Talk soon. Bye. Bye. We have our next guest already in the studio. Really quickly, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. Let's invite Henry into the studio from Privy. We're talking about the StripeX. There he is. Congratulations. What's going on? Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thank you. I'm good. How are your inboxes doing the last 24 hours? A lot of wealth managers. Hey, congratulations. Just blowing you up. Congratulations.

1:15:10We haven't talked in a while. I'd love to catch up. Yeah. Congratulations. We would have wanted to have you on yesterday. Yeah. But we, of course, were a demo day. But, yeah. How are you doing? I'm good. You can see I'm dressing for the job I want. So this is my audition. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you. Now, terms of the deal were undisclosed. we're not going to talk terms. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay, but I'm still going to still hit the gong for you. That's what matters. It was definitely congratulations. But yeah, I mean, take us through. Obviously, we're not going to go through the deal.

1:15:45But I want to know more about the company and the future of really just like the FinTech stack as we move from fiat only companies to fiat plus crypto and the interaction between these two. So maybe you could kick us off with a little bit of background on the company, what you built, and then how that's going to integrate. Yeah, for sure. So I mean, to be very fair, and I'll put the disclosure up front, we're still in the closing period. You know, we put all the asterisks on our blog post and so on. And so for the time being, we're still very much two separate companies. And on that front, I can't share all that much about, you know, any joint things, but I can tell you about what we're seeing in this space and what we think is going to happen moving forward.

1:16:24Yeah, why don't you give a quick history of the company too because uh you're a couple years old is that correct yeah we started about three three years ago a little over three years ago got it got it and uh you immediately ran into the one of the most meaningful crypto winners that you know maybe maybe it's not as bad as some of the earlier ones but it felt significant at the time so oh yeah quick history would be great and then and then we kind of get into the present yeah i think you know harsh winners temper uh hard companies so we we have been uh fighting for our lives uh for for a while which I think affects a lot of our intensity.

1:16:57But TLDR, I worked in crypto for a while. So I guess starting with me was an applied cryptographer and ended up doing distributed systems research at a fairly low level and came out of it very excited about this sort of complementary rail to the web. The web is very good at ferrying information across the world, but the ability to move value, the ability to move assets and data without centralized intermediaries is super hard. And so that was very exciting. flip side, all of the products that I was seeing being built in crypto were broadly terrible. And I would not use any of them. And I think it had a super negative sort of cyclical effect where broadly you had two constituencies in crypto.

1:17:38You had academics and you had scam artists. And those were the two things that you could do. You could do really cool research, or you could try and fleece retail very quickly. And the thought that we had with my co-founder Asta is if we can make it easier for anyone to build compelling products on these rails, we can kind of widen the aperture for what you can build with crypto. And so we set out to build things around these sort of core crux of what ownership in crypto means, which is to say the wallet. Historically, a wallet's a Chrome extension or a browser extension of any sort, or a hardware device.

1:18:13You plug it in. And every time you want to take an action that is going to sort of send out a transaction to the blockchain. So affect the state of, you know, the chain, as it were. So usually this is financial or this could be data related, asset related. When you want to buy an NFT, when you want to send money, you have to make such a transaction. Every time you want to do that, you basically get taken out of the app. You have a pop up that's in your face. It interrupts the app flow. And it basically is akin, I think, to like filling out all your credit card details when you get to an e-commerce site before you've filled in your cart, before you've decided that you even want to engage with this.

1:18:48So I think our thought was, can we create a different kind of wallet that embeds directly into the product and that gives the developer building with crypto more power over their craft so they can build a really compelling experience and have the ability to communicate with the underlying rails be built in. And so, you know, that's what we do. We build onboarding and embedded wallet systems. We make it easy for any developer, any business to leverage crypto as part of their apps. And we work with everything from neobanks who want to offer digital dollars to anyone across the world to payroll providers.

1:19:18We have a customer, Toku, for example, that makes it very easy to pay anyone with stable coins. So let's say Privy has a Nigerian contractor. If that Nigerian contractor wants to get paid in USDC rather than in Naira, USDC has held its value against a dollar, obviously much better than Naira over the past few years. That contractor can receive the USDC, We can hold the digital dollars without having to have a U.S. bank account just through Privy, basically creating a wallet that is backed by their email. So we make it very easy for anyone to basically hold, earn, send digital assets in app. And so this is, I was saying, neobanks, payment providers, all the way to trading platforms.

1:19:57We serve folks like Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid is a trading platform that's done about a trillion dollars in volume over the past 18 months. They do about 10 to 15 billion dollars a day in trading volume. um jupiter is another example and all these are platforms that are driving basically massive flows but who want to give their users uh an ability to have very sort of low level secure powerful wallets that can be built into the product and we think this is going to become a much wider uh range of the way people build when they want to build uh any product that touches value on the web talk to me about the actual onboarding experience for uh the average user there's a lot of, we seem to be in a transition period where more and more people are interacting with crypto rails and not even really knowing that that's what they're doing.

1:20:46It doesn't feel like, oh, command line Bitcoin transactions anymore. It feels much more like the web. And so what is the funnel that the average customer goes through? When are they seeing your product and how are they interacting with it at various points in the customer journey? Yeah, I mean, so broadly, you know, you can think of us as a key orchestration provider. We do key management under the hood. A lot of our work is the security of basically these rails and this key management. And a lot of it is around latency, making sure that these wallets are so fast that as a user, even though you're taking actions that require these transactions, you don't notice it.

1:21:24So our average signing time is call it somewhere between 20 and 100 milliseconds. Because, you know, starting at 250, 300, you start to notice it. So that's a lot of what we focus on. The question of how do you integrate that within your product is really up to our customers. I think our core contention is products are not one size fits all. And to that end, the way in which you want to interact with these wallets is very different depending on where you are in your life cycle. So, you know, you wouldn't interact with Candy Crush the way you would interact with your JP Morgan application. Likewise, the wallet that we have for Neobank that has Face ID.

1:21:58So you log in, for example, with an email or a passkey from their wallets created under the hood. You might not see it. And every time you want to send money, you might just need to face ID again to approve the transaction is going to be different from the interaction, for example, for somebody who's doing digital asset management as part of their company where they want multiple signers and they want to look at transaction details. Looks a lot more to what people are used to in crypto or, you know, last example, we serve games and these games obviously just don't want any pop ups whatsoever. So the onboarding journey is as simple as login with an email.

1:22:30You don't need to record a mnemonic. You can always export your key if you want to. So you can sort of pop back out and get into the power user mode that traditional wallets give you. But otherwise, whether your user is a layman or an expert, they can interact with these rails just the same. Talk about the momentum that you guys have seen this year in particular. It's been a wild year for the industry broadly. It's been great in a lot of ways. and some of the companies you mentioned, Hyperliquid, Jupiter, things like that, you know, have been around for a while. What kind of new momentum are you seeing across, you know, Privy signups and potentially categories that maybe wouldn't have been possible a few years ago?

1:23:12Yeah, I mean, if you look at companies, I'll question the premise for a second. Just if we get a graph going of like, you know, relative time to growth to volume, I'm pretty sure Hyperliquid ranks pretty high up there in terms of companies that have gotten a trillion dollars moved in, call it, as a two-year-old company. Likewise, if you look at Pump or Jupiter, other customers of ours, these are folks who are doing incredibly fast work in that regard. But to actually answer your question, one, obviously stablecoins and the, I would say, broad foundational interest they're getting across incumbents.

1:23:47It used to be, I think, like the crypto cope when AI was, I mean, it still is, but like, you know, late 2022, crypto implodes. AI is absolutely taking off. Everybody is looking at their seat and being like, oh, man, I made some terrible choices in my life. And the cope, I think, was, well, crypto is the only part of tech that can enable new players to arise, whereas AI benefits the incumbents because you need a data moat. And I kind of think that stable coins changes that dynamic. for the first time, there's a real advantage to adopting crypto for existing incumbents. They have better capital efficiency for their treasuries.

1:24:21They need to hold less fiat in various countries. And so we're seeing that. We're talking to, you know, I've done this. Look in chat, JPT, what are the top 10 fintechs in the world? And we're talking to, call it, seven or eight of them at this point who are looking at these things. And so it's a question of we want to offer our customers the ability to buy and hold assets. We want to offer the ability for folks to send assets cheaply and instantaneously across the world. And broadly, we want to expand our operations globally. So it's companies like Airbnb, it's companies like Uber, it's all of these folks who are looking in that weren't before.

1:24:54I would say that's probably the big change over the last six months. But then like the other side of this is trading. You see rotations and where capital forms in crypto, but there is just so much trading interest. And the thing I promise I'll shut up in a second. But the thing that that we find really cool and interesting about the way we build is that by kind of serving the two extremes of the market, we think we build a much better product. Weird example, but we have a very powerful sort of low level policy engine. You can say this wallet can trade up to a thousand dollars a day. But if these two people sign off on it, it can do a million dollars.

1:25:29And these policies we built because we had these apps that were trying to do agentic trading. They were trying to get AI agents to place trades on behalf of users. And they were like, oh, fuck, if the LLM hallucinates, this is going to be very, very bad. We need to permit on how much we let the LLM do. And now that we're working with neobanks, these neobanks are saying we have risk policies. We have ways in which we want to approve activity. Can you give us a policy engine? So this policy engine that was developed for one side of the market is very useful for the other. And we're kind of seeing that across the board.

1:26:00All of our customers are sort of pulling us upward. in a way we're serving this really wide range, actually, I think, creates a future-proof product. I know the transaction is still in the process of closing, but can you talk at a high level about what drew you to wanting to work with the Stripe team? Yeah. I was in a Telegram chat yesterday, and somebody said, I was just creeping, and somebody said, And there must have been that Stripe charm or that Collison charm. And I think it plays. This is a company. Luck of the Irish. Luck of the Irish strikes again. We weren't intending to sell. And I think the reality of this is something an investor has said, which is this is the most exciting time this industry has had in a long time.

1:26:49You've literally chewed through the worst environment for a startup over the past however many years. Why now? And I think the reality is because we are seeing things move very quickly. We want to accelerate that change. And we were very drawn to, I think, the care for craft and the huge lever that basically this partnership we think can bring to bear on the space. So that was a lot of what was exciting to us is broadly I think we share a lot of values for how to build great developer tooling. and then I think the ability for us to accelerate our timelines and to accelerate the space more broadly in our own little way by just working that much harder with more resources for the teams that we serve was the really exciting part.

1:27:35Very cool. Well, congratulations and good luck with the rest of the process. Yeah, I'm really excited for you and the team and for Stripe and for what you guys can accomplish together. Yeah, and we'd love to have you back when you can talk more about the future and building. I'm really excited for this. And I think it's something that everyone's thinking about. It's like, what's the future of fintech as fiat and crypto mingle more together? Yeah. It'll be fascinating. Incredibly bullish. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon. Congratulations. Good luck closing. Cheers.

1:28:04We have our next guest in the studio already. But first, I want to ask you, how'd you sleep last night? Because I think I got you beat. I think I got you beat. I think it's a clean sweep this week. Did you get a hundred? I got a 91. Seven hours, 39 minutes. 93 % consistency. 90 tie this is the first time we've ever tied go to eightsleep.com get a pod five ultra code tbpn code tbpn five-year warranty 30 night risk-free trial free returns on the eight sleep it's amazing that was my last uh waking thought last night it's good to be back amazing uh anyway welcome to the stream chris uh hi guys how you doing on uh not too much obviously uh yeah right Right.

1:28:45Not too much. Everything. Everything. Time is a flat circle. Yes. I can't even believe it. It seems like since we started the stream, the whole internet went down. So I'm just happy to be here with you. He's going to be affected particularly because every time Chris posts, he posts a link to a Google Doc. Google's down. You're cooked, even though X is up. X is up. This is the most insane thing about you is that you can break through the link ban somehow. Wow. It's just the ideas are so powerful. I love it. You know, nobody told me there was a link, man. Built different. Truly built different. Built different.

1:29:22I had a post once that I was like, you know, I post links and they still do numbers. Google.com. And it just flopped. John and I thought it was hilarious. You got to be built different to post links. Yeah, you have been built different. We've loved all the Google Docs that you've dropped. maybe take us through the first one the end of software what was the thesis and then maybe we could reflect on some of that and how it's played out sure sure uh so admittedly kind of an incendiary title uh especially on twitter uh to to this audience but i uh the crux of the thesis was llms are were and are only getting better at producing code uh and generating code has largely been a translation task assigned to humans.

1:30:13And humans have been incredibly proficient, but expensive translators in that regard. And now that we have free translation from natural language to computer language, that should just completely change the economics and the production of software. I think I saw something where CS grads are having a harder time to find jobs than art majors. Yeah, we have our CS intern today studying art history for the next two hours to try to get up to speed. He's right here, you can see. Do you have a fun fact for us? I got a fun fact. Okay, so did you know that Greek statues were originally painted? They were originally painted.

1:30:58They weren't just white marble. Oh, okay. I think your job odds just went way up. Back to the interview with Chris. Sorry to interrupt. Not at all. Yeah, but interesting fact about that. There's only 2 ,000 art history grads, and there's 100 ,000 CS grads. So there is a little bit more sensitivity. But I think even though the facts of that stat might be a little bit early to say, the trend is clear, and we all see it coming. and so we're interested in like the impact of that in some ways it's like the death of the software engineer job application like the job application now is like produce software you build like produce a piece of software the last the last engineer that we hired made us a piece of software that was good almost basically good enough for us to publish it yeah immediately same day um same day and so like yeah and at least the job application has been disrupted yeah i mean i I think it's this sort of inconvenient truth that a lot of us are incentivized not to want to accept because it really challenges a worldview that most of our existence is constructive on top of.

1:32:09but I think the people who like rush head first into it and try to understand okay well how does this change the future what's going to be different you know everybody else can be stuck clinging to the last vestiges of something that ultimately evaporates I mean but what's really exciting is is uh i mean like imagine a world where where steel is free like what does the world look like if steel is free probably a lot more steel it's like the world just looks completely different yeah it looks completely different we can build so much more incredible things the frontier of innovation pushes out because we are pushing it out but we're no longer limited by the cost of something to produce traditionally.

1:33:02Great. Talk to me about the dynamic of as code becomes cheaper and cheaper and eventually free to instantiate, there's two theories. One is like we are in the age of the idea guy, the person that can come up with an interesting thesis or contrarian insight can instantly go instantiate it without a team of engineers, the classic example of like the business guy who has the idea and just needs a team of software engineers to build it and can't do it. The other side is something I saw Pavel Asparuhov posting about, which is that all those guys are going to be competing against the people with the software engineering mindset.

1:33:43And yes, the software engineers, they won't be writing code anymore, but they might be the future idea guys. They might be able to think in systems and come up with interesting ideas. And even though they aren't doing the instantiation themselves, they are able to have an even bigger impact because they are the beneficiaries of this leverage. So is there one side of the argument that you fall on? How are you thinking about that? I mean, I think creativity and agency are going to be the scarce resource because execution is just commoditized at this point. uh i think you know if we're if we're going back to like word cell and shape rotator debate um for better force i think word cells won right and uh old it's possible very possible brutal truth brutal truth for shape rotators but word word cells just kind of came out on top because there's this Rosetta stone that instantly translates words into shapes.

1:34:46Yes. A prompt can be rotate the shape. Exactly. Writing the prompts are good. Just put the fries in the bag. Yeah, I mean, the wild, I think, moment for each of us is like we started going to ChatGPT for tasks. And you're just like, count the number of objects like this in this image. And it just writes like four minutes. It works for four minutes writing code. doing work that would take at least a few hours to do as a well-trained software engineer, just to do a task that in many ways you could just look at it and count it. Yeah. Yes. Well, so here's an interesting, if you guys want to talk about something that is probably my next essay.

1:35:35So hot off the press, hot off the press. I think there's a frame that really clearly delineates what's going to be like eroded by ai and what will never be eroded by ai and uh for example like we're never going to watch robots play sports right like that's just like never going to happen so why is that we don't watch robots play chess and robots have dominated in chess and yet chess.com has done well as a business magnus carlson has done well as an individual chess player hikaru has a huge following online and you would think if you just wanted to watch the best chess possible we played you'd be watching stockfish and no one does we don't we don't we not only that but like the olympics were so okay so so here's the frame uh when it comes to utility we are misanthropists we actually kind of hate other humans when you're in an Uber and they like start talking to you, you wish you were in a Waymo.

1:36:37You're like, I don't need this. When somebody, when you're at a coffee shop and they spin the iPad around asking for a tip, you're just like, I'm just, I want to buy this bottle of water. I want to walk away with my coffee. Why are you like this? This is like a miniature ransom. And you're just, you're frustrated because you know exactly what it is that you want to do. And the human is preventing that from happening. And so I don't think any of us walk into an elevator and think to ourselves, man, I wish there was a person here operating there. That's gone. It's totally gone. We don't care. We're actually very happy with humans being removed from that loop.

1:37:19And so as long as the thing is utilitarian and there's a drive towards efficiency, we actually kind of hate humans and we want them gone. Now, on the other side, if we are allocating a leisure hour, not a labor hour, if we're not trying to be productive, but we are trying to be consumptive, we are narcissists. We love other humans. We love other humans so much that we would refuse to watch anything other than another human do that thing. So think about like, you know, fine dining, right? Omakase. You go to a sushi restaurant, you need that person there that's describing, cutting. You want to see how delicate the knife work is.

1:38:09The craft is part of the craft and the social element to it is part of the product. Exactly. It's a story. It's a story. You're paying for that experience. You want that human experience. You want to understand that this is something that they've dedicated their lives to. So on one hand, find Anon, you need humans. You need the story. You want to understand where it came from. And then on the other hand, we order food and we tell the driver to leave it at the door so we don't have to interact with them. So we go through life with these two spheres. When we know we want to do something and we really hate other humans, like when you call into a customer service line and somebody incompetent is on the other side, You just, you're just reminded of the frustration of why you called in the first place.

1:38:57And then on the other hand, you know, let's look at modern art, for example. I think like the trope in modern art is like, it's not that hard to make. uh you know where the joke is like my kid could do that yeah well like your kid didn't and also no one cares yep uh the the thing that we prize is the constraints the creativity the mythos of the of the artist that went into creating that the story if daniel arshem goes to a rock wall with an axe and like hits you know hits the wall and it chips a piece of rock off like that rock would would have like, you know, an immediate 10 ,000 X premium on it.

1:39:40Exactly. Somebody would buy it because exactly. Exactly. So, so if, if what you do basically is, gets in the way of people getting exactly what they want, your job's gone. It's going to go away. But if what you do is part of storytelling or human existence or entertainment, it's moded. It's a huge mode. I mean, one of the most interesting things in entertainment, I would say over the last few decades, was the invention of reality television. When we realized we would rather watch two people that we don't know fight than anything else. It's crazy It's incredible It's often incredible content Guilty pleasure for many people On that note, I'm curious Since we're streaming on X Are bots on X a feature or a bug?

1:40:48Because As far as I'm concerned They've been designated a feature Because they sort of went away for a little bit Now it seems like they're back And stronger than ever I think Twitter probably has the same stance towards bots that Louis Vuitton has towards counterfeiters. Where it's like, this exists because there's value in the product. Replicating, trying to imitate this authenticity of the engagement means that there's real value in the product. The more that it exists and proliferates, the more it dilutes the core value of the thing. But the fact that it exists in and of itself is a testament to just how valuable the product is.

1:41:34Otherwise, people wouldn't try to imitate it. That's a good framework. On this concept of the future of jobs, Sam Altman put out a fantastic blog post and talked about how if you went back hundreds of years and showed people what we do all day, they would say those are ridiculous fake jobs. That's not real. That's not hunting or farming. That's sitting in front of a computer just messing around, talking to people. And yet we get a lot of value out of them. When we think about the future of work and jobs, do you think that we are adaptable enough as a society to create full employment with that new paradigm?

1:42:17Can we have 30 million omakase chefs and 30 million athletes and 30 million reality TV stars such that people by and large have meaningful work even at some sort of scale? or do you think there's some other way that this plays out? I think yes. We're such a selfish race or species that we want to – and the way the economics will work is the jobs will basically – job availability will expand to fill the leisure bucket that it sits inside of. so we have more leisure hours today than any any era ever in the history of time because we're actually the most productive right like if you if you want to go back to like the stone age uh uh there's this really tight correlation actually between productivity boosts and the invention of leisure activities so like tools get made all of a sudden we have free time we didn't have free time before because every hour was spent surviving.

1:43:30What do we do with free time? We invent music. We invent bone flutes. Actually, the first board games were invented concurrent with irrigation. So all of a sudden, you have this huge productivity boost, and then you have all this free time. What do you do with the free time? Well, we invent things to fill it. Modern sports were invented with the industrial revolution. All of the oldest soccer teams, football teams were actually factory workers from the same factory competing against each other. Funny. And so we have these like huge boons to productivity. And then on the other side of it, we have a job creation to fill that leisure expansion.

1:44:18So yeah, we're going to have more athletes than ever. This is hilarious because it's actually incredibly bullish for art history majors. Because I'm thinking about it. So Ken Burns is about to drop a new documentary about the American Revolution. And I am so excited to watch it. And I know I could go to Chachupiti and say, build me a deep research report on the American Revolution. But I want to hear it through the Ken Burns lens. And I want to hear his voice narrated. And I want to hear him express his unique viewpoint and the connections that he makes, even if they're not the best. Even if I could get more factualness or more truth or more detailed insights from ChatGPT, I want the Ken Burns experience.

1:45:06And so, yeah, I don't know. There's something interesting about that where, like, I mean, you know, we have a friend, David Senra, who runs Founders Podcast. and the way he reads biographies about great history's greatest entrepreneurs and retells the stories in a way that's as compelling as the original material and as compelling as the real life. And you're getting it through the experience of David. And I just don't think that's going anywhere. Even though it is in some ways like the first thing that could be one shot by AI with generative voice and deep research products. But I think it'll be sticking around like you mentioned.

1:45:41We're so narcissistic. We love stories about each other. And we love storytellers. And we love telling stories. And we hate inauthenticity when it comes to that. I mean, ESPN ate the Ocho. It's a joke. But it's like we have more sports than ever because we have more leisure time than ever. We care so much. you know i i i'll watch competitive darts competitive darts a hundred we didn't have time to i got really into bull riding recently and all the narratives there jb monny the the greatest bull rider of all time i know the whole history i love it yeah getting into these obscure obscure sports is uh yeah maybe that's the future i just get just get uh just spend all my time I'm watching bull riding.

1:46:36That's post-scarcity for you. Switching gears a little bit. I mean, I wish we had a full hour to talk because there's so many different directions we could go. But I wanted to get your reaction to WWDC this year, Apple's news around how they're going to be working with developers. I mean, there's a ton to dig into. What stood out to you? Sure. I know that everybody has lost their mind about liquid glass and the new UI. I think buried in a lot of the press around WWDC is actually Apple's stance towards LLMs and AI. So there's a machine learning team inside of Apple and they are really, they're starting with this library called MLX, which allows inference on device for Apple iPhones and laptops for M Silicon or Apple Silicon.

1:47:41And what's really interesting about that is as a developer right now, when you think about creating an application that has end user inference embedded inside of it, you also kind of have to do the mental math of how much it's going to cost you because it's all metered and it's like okay well yeah i'm gonna you know drop this endpoint into open ai or anthropic whatever viral app and then blow through your entire credit card limit yeah and that's like we've had a bunch of founders on the on on the show that have like accidentally done that so and you think about their early mobile days like we're seeing an explosion of ai apps right now but that's been gated by developers thinking in their heads, well, if I make something amazing and free, I could actually just end up going into debt over it.

1:48:32That's not fun, right? And in the early - Venture capitalists will save us in those situations. Venture capitalists, thankfully, they will come in. Thankfully, there are plenty of VCs that will rip checks on a handshake. No, but still, there's just so many - It's a dynamic. Yeah, it's a real dynamic. Part of the beauty of it being easier than ever to create software Whereas there's a bunch of software that can and should exist that historically shouldn't have existed because it was expensive for development cost reasons. Now we've been through this era of expensive inference. Yeah. Yes. And so that point highlights the entire dynamic.

1:49:09Or like, you know, imagine if game developers had to pay per pixel that was rendered by the people who play other games. It would be insane. Like there would be no games made. And so what's so exciting is that it feels like we're starting to shift into better. Apple's really, in my mind, in a perfect position to put the tools in the hands of developers and enable on-device inference, which really means free inference. So if we were in this era where game developers had to pay for the pixels that were rendered on end-user devices, we're moving to like, wow, people can render the graphics for free on their device.

1:49:55And that just opens the floodgates for the things that can happen. I think haters will say, well, models are bad. The battery life is terrible. Your iPhone heats up. The models are small today, but tomorrow, a year from now, two years from now, all of a sudden, 80%, 90 % of the queries that you would run through a cloud-hosted model is just doable on your phone or on your laptop and for free. And natively, it can be offline, whatever you want, and private. And so that's such an exciting future. And from my takeaway from WWDC, that was the most exciting one. Yeah, and you combine that with, again, they're not really getting any credit for partnering with Anthropic on Xcode, which will enable some of this activity as well.

1:50:51Yeah, I mean, we need our AI Flappy Bird moment. Like Flappy Bird, I remember, was built by a single developer, and it's that perfect example of leveraging all the hardware to just build something that went mega viral. We've seen a few of these moments for images. There was that magic avatar app that would make you look like Superman. That kind of went viral. But of course, it had high inference cost. When you drop that inference cost to zero, you put it on the edge. I think we will have our flappy bird moment for LLM-based interactions on the iPhone. And I'm really excited for that. It's completely unpredictable what that will be.

1:51:28But I imagine it will be very fun. And everyone will be playing with it when it happens. I want to stay on the topic of Apple and just this idea of taste. A lot of people have been writing about taste and coming back to taste as something that's potentially a permanent differentiator in a post-AI world. There's an idea of agency plus taste being more valuable than skills. We talked to Scott Belsky about that on Tuesday. How do you think is taste a moat? Is it something that can be learned? What is the value? Is it still alive and well at Apple? There was a lot of criticism about liquid glass. And yet when we looked at it, it looked pretty cool.

1:52:08I don't know. I thought it looked nice.

1:52:12I think taste is alive and well. Maybe I'll describe Apple if you'll permit me to describe another one of my frameworks that we've developed here at Pace is top-down and bottom-up companies. So top-down companies started by visionary charismatic founders. um apple tesla spacex amazon epic games and what's notable about these visionary founders is they're largely unattached to how they execute and what the products actually end up looking like and so what what what happens is top these top-down companies uh ship multiple flagship products over their life cycle so you know uh we're we're all on you know apple laptops and have Apple iPhones and AirPods.

1:53:00Tesla has obviously created everything from cars to power walls and solar panels. SpaceX not only makes rockets, but also satellite internet. Awesome. Amazing, amazing constructs. And what's interesting is the market only sees the products. And so they don't understand that the core innovation engine is the company itself, because these top-down companies hire innovators and build up this core ability to summit the next hill and launch the next product. Bottom-up companies, conversely, are started by tinkerer founders. They're hackers. They try to pick locks, basically. And they, combined with perfect timing, capture lightning in a bottle.

1:53:52And what's interesting about bottom-up companies is that they only ever ship a single flagship product. This is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Airbnb, most actually venture Twitter, where we are. And they are actually fundamentally incapable of shipping a second flagship product. is because the product market fit for that is so violent that every person that gets hired into that company is an optimizer. So imagine like you're creating a jawbreaker around this core product market fit. Every single person is hired as an optimizer. There are no innovators. Why would you stick your neck out to try something new when you can just make the core thing 1 % better?

1:54:43And so they're actually fundamentally incapable. You can't ship a second product as a bottom-up company. And a lot of bottom-up companies don't know that they're bottom-up companies because success is a terrible teacher. A lot of bottom-up companies expand through M &A because the businesses are so good. They're so good. And then if you can buy great products, you can optimize them really well and grow them. and you look like you're, you know, you're look, you can kind of mask the fact that you didn't actually make two of those sort of flagship products. We were talking about this with Scale AI.

1:55:18With Scale AI going to meta, it's like, yeah, 15 billion is a lot, but what if it moves the market cap 1 %? Yeah, yeah. What if it optimizes their AI stack 1 %? It's like, yeah, pay for itself. YouTube, Instagram, you know, ByteDance buying Musical.ly. Sure. These are like maybe some of the best investments over the last couple of decades, and they were M &A events. And so if you're a bottom-up company and you can apply that pattern match really well to identifying similar shaped assets, that's your core innovation lever because you actually are incapable of shipping something internally. So going back to taste, do I think taste is alive and well at Apple?

1:56:00Yes, because culturally, that organization has been built out to hire this innovative DNA. But it's not the same at every company. I don't know if taste exists at, I don't know if true taste exists at bottom-up companies. I wonder actually if what we can see. from bottom-up companies is just ornamental window dressing that we misidentify as taste. because it's yeah it's hiring a good design agency at the right time and and you're like oh this this company is so tasteful but it's like well you had to spend 250 grand to be tasteful it's just the most legible thing but when when actually like craigslist just works great i mean craigslist is a perfect example of a bottom-up company no taste required interesting I would be rattling off like 20 other examples that kind of fit this framework but I would piss off too many people so we'll let the audience imagine for themselves but I think it's really powerful yeah this was fantastic we could go way deeper into all these frameworks these are great kickoff points for big discussions I have so many more questions so we'll have to have you on back soon because this was fantastic thanks for the time and in the meantime we will talk to you about AdQuick.

1:57:29AdQuick.com, out-of-home advertising, made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient smart-comers ad buying across the globe. And our next guest is coming into the studio, Joe from Infinite Machine. I can't wait to launch our out-of-home campaign, John. I'm so excited. We're deep in the creative process. We got to pitch Joe on doing an out-of-home campaign. Let's do it. Let's bring him in. Let's do it. We'll hear his pitch, and then we'll pitch him some billboard ads. because I think this thing needs to be advertised.

1:58:01Break it down for us. Launch day. What are you building? Launch day. Congratulations. Show us. Give us a little tour. What are you building? Hey, guys. So you are here at our New York City facility. Fantastic. I'm calling from Infinite Machine, and we make the best non-car vehicles on Earth. Okay. And today we are launching our second product. It's called Alto. It is a class 2 e-bike, but it looks nothing like an e-bike. Like, we really thought this thing from the ground up. So it goes 25 miles per hour in the bike lane. It's got pedals that turn into footrests. It fits two people. It's made out of aluminum and steel.

1:58:38It's beautiful. It's useful. It's high tech. It's connected to the internet. And we just announced it today. What's the damage for one of those? How much it cost? $34.95. You're giving them away. You're giving them away. You're giving them away. Double the price. Giving them away. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it looks amazing. Congratulations on the launch. So you basically reverse engineered this so that it didn't need a license. So you basically, so somebody that's riding it, they get like, hypothetically, John and I and the team, we get a bunch of, we get a fleet of these for the office and we want to rip over to our favorite lunch spot.

1:59:15We're riding, it looks like we're on little motorcycles. Cops, you know, put the sirens on, they pull us over, we pull the pedals out and we're good to go. We're like, look, I'm sorry, officer, it's a bicycle. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. So basically, most e-bikes take traditional bicycles and strap motors and batteries to them, but bicycles were never designed to be powered. And so you're taxing these parts that were never intended for motor power. And instead we said, okay, how can we think about this from the ground up? We have to work within the legal envelope of what a bicycle is.

1:59:48so if you look in all 50 states in america the definition of a bicycle is something that has pedals that are operable meaning it has a chain it goes 20 miles per hour as a class two e-bike or 20 or 25 miles per hour as a class three e-bike um and it's narrower than 36 inches that's the basic constraint and so uh you know we took that brief and then we designed what we thought was the best version of that design. What is the barrier to going more aggressive, building it wider, taking the pedals out, uh, making it go 40 miles an hour. Then are you regulated as a motorcycle and I need a motorcycle license?

2:00:29Is that, is that how it works? Yeah. So if you're considered a, uh, an e-bike, you don't need a license plate. Sure. And therefore it's not a motor vehicle. It's not regulated by the state. It's not really regulated by the federal government. And so, yeah, like it's just a much lower friction experience. You don't need to register the product. There's no insurance requirements. You don't need a license plate. And so we wanted to make a super low friction product that you can get on. It's super easy to use. You don't have to deal with complex dealers. You don't need to register the thing. And yeah, you can get on and go.

2:01:03And it's excessively priced. Yeah. What's the go to market? Is it important to demo these things in real stores, get them into traditional bike shops? I've been in some bike shops where they have e-bikes as well. Or is this all D2C and e-commerce? So I'm going to show you quickly. We have a space here in New York. We're getting set up for an event. So there's a 13 ,000 square foot space in New York. Very cool. And it's going to be open to the public as a store. People can come in and buy vehicles. And so we are going to direct a consumer to start. But that includes retail. Includes your own retail.

2:01:37Yeah. Yes, to start our own facility here in New York. We're also interested and open to selling them in channel retail. Sure. I guess it was being in Best Buy, for example. It would make a lot of sense for it to be there. Exactly. Talk about the broader explosion of e-bikes, because I feel like adults nowadays, the number one way I feel like a boomer is when some 12-year-olds with e-bikes are ripping through traffics. And it feels like every time I drive in the city now at some point or another, and in some ways, like, you know, the boomer in me is like, oh, those kids are being, you know, dangerous.

2:02:14And then part of me at the same time is like, it's actually makes cities much smaller now where kids can just go out and explore. But I feel like it feels like with Ulto and what you guys are doing broadly, we're kind of in the second era of this sort of micromobility, right? maybe the first era was was the kind of sharing economy bird lime model and it's clear that that form of transportation is awesome yeah but the community owned approach or this sort of sharing economy model um had some like really you know big big issues and it does feel like you know actually having people own the end product care for the end product and not be just you know trashing devices that are part of a network so the way we look at it is you know the world as as we know, is urbanizing.

2:03:02More and more people are living in cities. And when you live in cities, things get denser. So instead of living in giant homes, you live in apartments. Instead of driving giant cars, you drive smaller vehicles. And we believe that over time, more and more vehicles in cities will not be cars. They will be smaller, smarter, and we hope more beautiful vehicles. And our intention is to make the best of these things. Now, you're right. The first Gen 1 micro-mobility companies were all sharing-oriented. We think ultimately it's not a great business model. There's a reason why those companies have not done super well, gone out of business, et cetera.

2:03:38But also we think that there's an opportunity to learn from what made cars so successful. People love their cars. They love their vehicles. They have an emotional connection to them. And ultimately the car was built as a symbol of freedom. And we think that there is an opportunity in urban environments to have a new symbol for freedom and a new tool for freedom. So this thing, you get on it, You can go anywhere in your city in 15 minutes, no hassle, the wind's at your back. And it's just great. And compare that to the experience of sitting in the back of an Uber stuck in traffic. It's just night and day.

2:04:14Talk to me about what's going on in China, because I feel like a lot of the phone companies have started going into cars and mobility and BYD makes all sorts of stuff. and they have a very different model. You know, with so many tech companies, it's like, are you going to wind up being a bullet point at WWDC or Google's I.O.? It feels like it's unimaginable that we would see Apple launch a competitor to this, but what's the actual dynamic? Why are America's big tech companies not going into different areas if they have experience in hardware? Like, why isn't Samsung getting in on the action? Why isn't Apple doing anything here?

2:04:53Can you comment on the reaction to just the way American companies are building technology today versus the China model?

2:05:09I actually think it's a bit of the opposite. So, yeah, you're right. If you go to China, you have these new hardware companies that are multi-category. So, yeah, you go to a Xiaomi and they started making phones and laptops and now they're making cars. When you look at the US, the model, take a company like Apple. We love Apple, but they're very, very conservative. They stick to their lane. And the other American tech companies are actually not great at building hardware. And so the way we see it is that there's an opportunity to build the next great American hardware company. We're starting with T1 and then Alto and with vehicles at large.

2:05:42But we call the company Infinite Machine because we have big ambitions and we want to make incredible physical things in the world that move and are high tech in new ways. And so we will be multi-category at some point. I mean, we're really building the competency to build high-end, moving, beautiful hardware with an integrated software layer and do it in a way where we can move really quickly. I mean, this company, I've been full-time for less than a year and a half. We have raised less than$10 million. We've productionized two motor vehicles. So we're kind of in a new age of what I call the ultra lean hardware company.

2:06:22And we're going to keep pushing and we're going to take that competency and double down, especially as we enter an age of embodied intelligence where the AI, you know, kind of escapes the screen. And we're going to be all over that. We're positioned to take advantage of that stuff and we're building the competency to make things that take advantage of it. is there any i'm just gonna i'm just gonna speculate but i can imagine you guys making a horse buggy without the horse that's fully autonomous yes and you just get to ride around the city you know windows down yeah you see the carriages in uh yeah park autonomous horse as well for sure please or a horse or a robotic horse yes i'd love that yes yes yes uh henry ford said if you ask if you asked customers what they'd want they'd say a faster horse I want a faster horse.

2:07:10I'd love a faster horse. They're already self-driving. A robotic horse. They come out of the box self-driving. Go home, horse, and it'll just take you there. Exactly. Well, has your world been rocked by the tariff war? Are we in the clear now? Is there any fear around scaling up the battery supply chain? Some companies have been fine on the battery side. The more defense application companies like Skydio run into a lot more issues there. What's that been like? I know that everyone's focused on re-industrialization in America, but it's a long journey. Things have stabilized on the tariff front.

2:07:47It's not great. The world economy is highly entwined. The supply chain for electric vehicles, even domestic manufactured electric vehicles, is highly connected, connected to China and beyond. And so we are fully supportive of re-industrializing America. We want to be on the cutting edge of that. We support smart policy to do that, both carrot and stick. So tariffs are a stick. There's an opportunity for a new industrial policy that incentivizes domestic production. We haven't seen that yet. We've only seen a stick. So short story is it's stabilized. But honestly, I think we should be playing offense as America, and we're not yet.

2:08:30We're using kind of protectionist measures. Yeah. Talk to me about making these vehicles safer using technology. I remember like the hoverboard was a beneficiary of, you know, better compute power and the ability to stabilize a device while you're riding on it very, very cheaply. And so those kind of went viral for one year in like 2014 and then kind of disappeared. But I imagine that there's things that you can do now that you maybe couldn't have done if you were trying to build this company 20, 30 years ago. What technology trends are you benefiting from? You know, on the safety front, these are lower speed vehicles.

2:09:13So you're not moving at, you know, highway speeds. And so the name of the game is awareness. People, not just for the rider, but also for people around you. So that's emitting a sound that's being highly visible. And that is alerting the rider when there are issues. And we do that stuff. You know, I think over time, we'll start to use some of the ADAS software from automotive in these vehicles to do alerting and also to take over the vehicle when that presents itself. But to start, you know, there are millions and millions of people riding e-bikes right now. if we can make them 10%, 15 % safer, that's a big win.

2:09:53And that's where we're starting. Talk to me about actually getting these in the hands of New Yorkers. Well, let's talk about getting them and let's getting Alto in the hands of us. We're going to configure one for each person on the team. And then we're just going to be emailing you every day. Hey, hey, what's the wait time? What's the wait time? we are offering we call internally the burning man shipping option which is straight from the factory in august before burning man if you opt for non-burning man shipping that costs 4500 bucks but if you opt for non-burning man shipping uh that will arrive in late september early october so you know they're shipping quickly we are about to start mass production um and maybe for you guys we'll expedite a few that'd be amazing no i mean i think that you will get the equivalent of millions of dollars in marketing spend from just being at Burning Man.

2:10:50As you can imagine, you know, if you can get a density of these on the playa, the number of Instagram stories, posts, et cetera, it's going to be absolutely wild. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what about storage? Like, what are you recommending to people that buy these and are living in an apartment? Is it something that you're designed to bring into your apartment or Or do most buildings these days have safe places to store e-bikes or parking garages for these things? Yeah. So one of the cool things about Alto is it's designed to be left outside. You park the vehicle outside. It's fully weatherproof. It has an onboard security system.

2:11:25It's virtually impossible to steal hardware and software. When you park it, you don't have to take the whole bike to your apartment to charge. You can take the battery out of the seat. It weighs 20 pounds. It's a hot-swappable battery. Take it up to your apartment. it and then we have a dock that you drop it in and the dock plugs into a normal 110 volt outlet so super simple so you charge it overnight and then just take it yeah six hours to charge we also have a supercharger it takes three hours yeah for a couple hundred bucks and yeah very cool amazing anything else uh please uh make a video of yourself taking one of these things on a jump i just think it would be fun i was gonna ask when can we get these first the first thing i That's the marketing strategy here.

2:12:07Let's do it. You know, I want to see the big jump, you know, monster truck rally. Let's push these to the limits, really show people what's capable. I think we should get one and put the full TBPN racing livery on it. I agree. All of the, you know, ramp on there. I agree. All the different partners. Are we doing like Pike's Peak or are we doing like half pipe? Like, well, what's going to go most viral here? All of it. All of it. Okay. I'm super, you know, this is one of the, I love businesses and products where you take something that seems like it's competitive, and then you spend 100 times more intentional about creating it, designing it, distributing it, and you create an entirely new.

2:12:48Also, shipping before Christmas, I love a physical gift, a big box under the Christmas tree. It's rarer and rarer these days because everything's gone digital. You used to give people books or CDs or DVDs. And all of this is digital now, so it's very hard to find something to give to someone. Although this is obviously a very nice gift, it is something that can really make a statement and be an absolutely joyful Christmas morning if you unwrap this thing. We've been recommending that people give each other sales tax software or potentially corporate cards, but I think this is going to be added to our Christmas list this year.

2:13:25I think this is a little bit more fun. and people can place if folks want to make sure they get one for the holiday season they can put a deposit down now it's a hundred bucks and it's fully refundable so okay save your configuration fantastic well thank you so much for stopping by we'd love to give it a try we'll talk to you soon very excited for you guys have a good one bye awesome if you're operating a wander you got to get one of these for your guests to be able to tool around on that would be fantastic crazy collab imagine this probably goes really hard in Malibu Ojai any fun places Sun Valley any place where you're traveling and if you're looking to take a vacation get on Wander find your happy place find your happy place book a Wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning 24 7 concierge service it's a Wander allows you to go golden retriever mode because you just don't have to think about anything you'll just be chasing the ball well we have Zach again from Plaid third time on the show welcome to the stream great to see you it's always a pleasure I'm always blown away when you join because it's always so much fun talking to you.

2:14:31So thanks so much for joining. Great to have you. What's the latest in your world? Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here and it's always fun. It's so much fun. Latest in our world is we did Plaid Effects today. This is our annual customer conference where we announced a bunch of the stuff that we were working on for the past year. It's been super fun. The biggest announcement was a product called Protect, which is this amazing cutting edge anti-fraud product. It looks at all the data across all of the usage and the data flowing through the cloud network and builds a really great anti-fraud tool.

2:15:02But yeah, that's the headline of the day. How one-shotable is fraud these days? Can you just pipe a ton of customer data into a single context window and just ask? And can the prompt just be like, is this fraud now? Or is it still leveraging all the traditional fraud tools? Yeah, I mean, the hard part is twofold. First is you have to put all of your historical data in it to say, hey, is this pattern anomalous? Is this something weird going on here? So the question is, can you get all of your data into that? And in Plaid's case, can you take all the data that we see across all of the fintech apps and all the users and say, hey, what are the patterns that are occurring consistently?

2:15:39So, for example, if you sign up for Coinbase today, that might be a totally normal sign up. So you signed up for a lending club today and you just signed up for six other lending products today, then that's obviously a potentially fraudulent loan that you're trying to take out. And so can you get all this data all in one place? That's problem number one. The problem number two is can you analyze it and change the analysis that you're doing at the speed that you need to change it because fraud changes every day? Some of that is algorithmic. So are the algorithms chasing the fraudsters in the way that they need to?

2:16:09Some of that is manual. So we built a tool that actually allows humans to go in and say, hey, I've seen this thing going on or I heard from some other some other fintech company that this fraud ring is occurring can you search for it and tell me uh is that actually occurring to me and then can I build some rules to protect against it so it is a constantly evolving game yeah how important is this problem I feel like every American should just default assume that their information is like floating around the internet available to the highest bidder and so like in in some ways like the only solution is just better tools to prevent this type of activity is that is that reality That is the reality.

2:16:47Financial fraud is going up around 25 % a year right now. Some of that is, or actually a lot of that is AI driven. So, you know, people using AI tools to send text messages to convince people to do certain things. I think, yeah, one answer is absolutely tools. And we're trying to build the best in class tools and give it to all the fintech companies. And frankly, then we'll go well beyond fintech with these products. The other is just education, like explaining to consumers how it works. So, you know, my parents and I, we have a word that we say to make sure that we know that it is the other person on the other end of the line if we're sending money or frankly doing anything that requires authentication.

2:17:23Those kinds of little tricks that you can build into your day-to-day processes are always helpful. But it's a combination of tools and processes and so forth. Yeah, makes sense. Can you talk to us about impossible travel problems? I found out about this yesterday. where someone's logging in from Singapore three hours after they were in San Francisco and they couldn't possibly be there? Is that something that you already built a tool around? Is that kind of like table stakes or are there like evolutions there? Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of the way that the anti-fraud product works, it's called Protect.

2:17:58It's got a bunch of these different analyses that we do. So there's, I think, just under 20 different analyses that are running now and we're adding more every day. One of them is location tracking. So we look at where was the last place that you logged into a fintech app. And then if you're trying to do a new thing with a different fintech app on the same user's account in a different place. All right, great. Well, that's actually an impossible travel question. And so that will immediately generate a flag. There's a bunch of these other things. We look at stuff like how long has this bank account existed.

2:18:25It turns out a brand new bank account is very likely to commit fraud. And an old bank account is less likely to commit fraud. We do the same thing for the phone number. How long has this phone number existed? So there's a zillion of these analyses that then run into a bunch of statistical work that we do on top of it. But, you know, every time you look at a fraudster or an instance of fraud, you can always explain it in retrospect. So you can look back and say, oh, yeah, obviously, you know, that person was in Singapore and then they were in California two hours later. That's impossible. But when you're proactively trying to prevent it, like, can you actually think through all the possible permutations of weird patterns that might exist?

2:18:59And that's the complexity that we focus on. So I imagine at one point this was like very heuristic driven, very like a multivariable regression almost just saying like here are the different fraud factors. Let's add up like a risk score. Have these products moved to a transformer architecture? Are we using LLMs in them? Are we using modern AI tools or are we just kind of continuing to scale up the existing algorithms that have been working for the past few years? I don't know how relevant the new models are. People are kind of like throwing transformers and diffusion at everything right now. And I don't know if that's appropriate here.

2:19:40Yeah, I mean, the answer is yes to all the above. It is not heavily transformer driven yet in terms of fighting fraud, though increasingly it is becoming that way. We definitely use LLMs for a bunch of things like auto building tools, like doing some of the data cleansing, so and so forth on the back. But fraud is a fascinating industry because if you talk to any company, their goal is to make the fraud not happen on their platform. They want the fraud to be more expensive for a fraudster to do on their platform than it is anywhere else. And so everyone wants to be ahead. They want the new thing.

2:20:14They want the new type of fraud solution. But then eventually everything that's new becomes table stakes for everyone because you kind of have to have it. Yeah. And so, you know, we are iterating our way towards more and more complex architecture, but it's still early days. Yeah. To me, this product feels like something that's just possible with like massive scale. Like you probably wanted to build something like this, like, you know, five, six, seven years ago, but couldn't just because you didn't have like the sort of broad exposure to all these different touch points. Is that right? I mean, this was the pitch that I was giving for Plaid in like 2014.

2:20:51Basically, my pitch was that when we get big enough, we're going to have a lot of data and we're going to build these analytics that financial services doesn't have because no one can build them and no one has the tech sophistication to do it. It took us a decade to get to the point where we had enough data to actually build this stuff. And then we acquired Cognito, an ID verification company in 2022, which is a big catalyst. In part of the pitch to that team, I was saying, look, come use our data, put it together with your data, and then think of all the amazing anti-fraud tools you can build.

2:21:17So, I mean, this stuff always happens slower than you want it to, but we couldn't be more excited to get it out there. How much of this fraud right now, financial fraud, is kind of acting as like a tax on fintech companies? And should we be thinking about shifting that tax to the government by giving the government more tools to go after the fraudsters at the source and just arrest the people that are even trying to do the fraud? Well, I think one of the big challenges is in crypto, a lot of fraudulent activity is happening and law enforcement is able to trace the activity to somebody in China.

2:21:54And if you go to the Chinese government and you say, we know exactly who's doing this, they're not going to act on it. I mean, the answer is yes to all of the above. The government should be more active in this. again much of the as you said much of the fraud doesn't stem from people that are inside the u.s so it's not the u.s government doing it i'm sure you guys have been following or maybe you've read the articles about pig butchering oh yeah horrible name for a type of fraud yeah like they have these these humans in fraud rings in like malaysia relationships with people right yeah exactly and like they're they're oftentimes government sponsored or at least government like affiliated in some way, like there's knowledge in the government that it happens.

2:22:37And so, I mean, you know, if that is happening, great. Yes, we could give better data to the Malaysian government, but also you've got to build the tools. Yeah. Yeah. What about, I don't know how much you can comment on this, but, you know, there's been a lot of discussion recently and frustration and at least after the Coinbase, you know, user data issues around KYC laws and effectively the government requiring people to retain all this data. Do you think that there would ever be any movement in D.C. around really updating these laws to help protect user data? Or is it just one of those things that we have to live with?

2:23:20I mean, you would think they should. And I mean, realistically, yeah, the concept that if you're a bank and I sign up for your bank, you have to collect all of my most sensitive data and then you have to store it forever in your database. On a scale of forever in many, many databases, you have to assume that those databases will be hacked. Thus, you have to assume that on a scale of forever, your data is all going to be public. And so it doesn't make sense that you would retain it. you should, in theory, collect it, verify it, get, say, a token that it exists, get some assurance that it exists, and then delete it.

2:23:53It seems like I would hope that the regulations change. I think it's, you know, regulations move as fast as regulations move. And so I'm not sure that it's going to be imminent in that sense. But on the flip side, like the industry is solving it. The industry is building tools that are better and better. I mean, relying on a static social security number, sure, yeah, we'll do it. That's fine if we have to for regulatory reasons. But the reality is if social security number entry is your only fraud detection tool, your only fraud avoidance tool, you're in a bad place as it is. Yeah, that makes sense.

2:24:23So the industry will solve it, basically. Can you talk, this got kind of lost among other massive news cycles, but there were some updates to Dodd-Frank 1033 a few weeks ago. You guys, talking offline, were kind of concerned about what that could mean just kind of broadly for consumers. Can you give us kind of an overview of what happened? I know, I think when we were in D.C., you were kind of covering a little bit of this stuff on the show as well. Totally. I think this is a big issue that probably doesn't get as much coverage as it should. So in the Dodd-Frank law, they wrote a provision that basically says consumers have access to their financial data and they can assign that access to third parties such as Plaid to act on their behalf.

2:25:15And then there was never any rule written on that. It was regulatory authority that was given to the CFPB. No rule written for a long time. Under Trump's first administration, Kathy Kraninger, the head of the CFPB at the time, started writing the rule for this. It then continued into the Rohit Chopra era of CFPB under Biden. The rule that emerged from that was a very far reaching, huge overstep of a rule. And in the second Trump administration, now there's a push to either pare back or get rid of the rule. What actually happened is the day that the rule was published by Roja Chopra, a group of the banks sued that same day.

2:25:57They had the lawsuit pre-prepared beforehand and just clicked submit. And so that kind of is ongoing. The wrinkle that's come up recently is that the currency of GB has basically said something effective. Yes, we agree with the banks and we should get rid of the rule. but also the way that they're structuring the language in that dismissal may foreclose on some of the regulatory things that were set up and could actually put at risk some of the ways that open banking works in the United States today, meaning it could allow certain banks to put much more pressure on the ecosystem. They could try to turn off data in certain areas.

2:26:34They should try to limit data in certain areas. They could more likely, what's going to happen is they're going to try to limit certain industries. So if you remember, you know, a couple of years ago, there was this big debanking thing that went on where the banks were trying to push back and turn off crypto. Yeah, this would give them the ability to turn off crypto. This would give them the ability to turn off, you know, gaming or things like that, or basically any industry that they might feel is competitive with them. And it wouldn't be all the banks doing it as a group. It would be each individual bank kind of making their own determination of this.

2:27:06And so we think that, you know, what am I getting rid of the rule? We just don't want to foreclose on the fact that consumers really should have the ability to choose the financial products that they interact with. Yeah, that makes sense. Did you have a reaction to the Circle IPO? You know, obviously it performed very well, and stablecoins have been in the news. But I'm interested to hear kind of like what the next most exciting instantiations of that technology might be. I was talking to a payroll company CEO and he was kind of mentioning that, yes, it's lower fees and faster. But interestingly, stable coins might allow them to kind of recapture float and then earn yield on that in an interesting way that I wasn't expecting.

2:27:51So like the the the the potential economic benefit to some companies might be massive if they're able to kind of custody their own treasuries, essentially, through stable coins. What have you been seeing in the stablecoin world broadly? What are the interesting knock-on effects? How much excitement is there among stablecoins from your partners? Yeah. I mean, there's a ton. Yeah, there's a lot of amazing companies. I think you talked to Privy. Have you already talked to them? You're going to talk to them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just an hour ago. Just earlier. Great, yeah. I mean, huge shout-outs to them.

2:28:22Like, amazing to see what they built. And it's very exciting for the ecosystem. I think, you know, from our perspective, what's happening in stablecoins right now is not what will happen. So what's happening right now, a lot of people are using it as a currency hedge. A lot of people are using it for cross-border payouts or money transfers that otherwise would just be frictionful. And then a lot of people are using it just as a form of a savings account that has higher yield. And while those are all big TAMs, it's not that interesting relative to the rest of what could go on in financial services.

2:28:56I think increasingly we're going to see more and more consumers having the ability to move money easily between, say, a bank account and a crypto wallet holding something in USDC or another stablecoin. And yeah, you're right. There are big opportunities for people to hold elements of their treasury or elements of their float and earn meaningful interest off of it. Increasingly, I think that that float, which was historically held onto by the platforms, may well get shared more and more with the underlying companies. So payroll companies, if the float was all held at the bank, now they're actually able to participate in a portion of the float.

2:29:30And so that's a huge new revenue stream for them. While interest rates are what they are, I will say. So that'll create increasing volatility in their revenue streams because if interest rates go down, then obviously the float goes down. So I do think that that's a big potential thing that a lot of companies might want to. Also, offering more tender types allows a lot of the large platforms to keep dollars on their platform more. So you see some of the big payments processors and their goal, obviously, is to have more float on their platform because they get a slice of that float and offering more tender ties, offering it not just to be held in dollars, but you could hold it in crypto.

2:30:03You could hold it in a stable coin that keeps the dollars on their platform even more, which gives them both more leverage and more in the long term. Very cool. What are you guys doing on the MCP side? I know you had some announcements recently there. Yeah, so that was another big part of the announcement today. I mean, the short answer is like, MCPs make it easier for developers to build. I think the concept of a REST API was new when we started Plaid because everything was on SOAP. Now, the concept of, you know, writing to a raw API without using cursor or windsurf or something like that is increasingly becoming rare and will become rare over time.

2:30:38And so really for us, it's just staying on the cutting edge, building tools that help developers build faster on Plaid, and then allowing them to get better analytics on their usage, their interactions with our system, so on and so forth. So it's fun. It's really fun. It's awesome. Do you have any type of broad thesis around how agent, you know, I think there's like a lot of narrative around, okay, agents will just default use crypto assets or, you know, anything around that. Anytime there's sort of an accepted narrative, I just, you know, want to kind of push deeper. I'm curious if you have strong opinions.

2:31:11I do not think they will default use crypto assets. I think crypto assets might be easier at first, but look, the bank account is already effectively a digital first product. Whereas now with a digital first product did not start that way, certainly. Cards are not yet fully digital first, but are moving that direction. Like still, you have to know a 16 digit card number to actually like authenticate a card. Whereas bank accounts have OAuth already set up. And then the next phase of that is obviously crypto. So Fizscripto starts being digital native, and so it becomes easier and easier to authenticate into things.

2:31:45My take is that all three of those and many other tender types will become available to LLMs and to agents. But it's going to take a little while for the industry to evolve. But fast forward two, three years, and it'll be all the same. Very cool. Anything else, Jory? No, this is great. This is fantastic. Congrats on the news. I'm curious, did Chesky tell you to move to this kind of release cycle, or have you been doing it for a while? It's sort of the Chesky method of entrepreneurship. We've been doing it for a little while, but man, they have developed such an impressive track record of doing it.

2:32:19And all the podcasts that he went on to talk about it, I think everybody else in the world decided to copy it. So maybe we were inspired by seeing what they did beforehand, but certainly we've learned a lot from listening to their playbook. Yeah, the jobs approach, you know, walks so the Chesky method could run. Exactly. Awesome. I'm excited to read through the other announcements later and come back on anytime. It's great to have you. Awesome. Thanks so much. Have a good one. Cheers. Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.

2:32:51Seriously, any watch. I love that. They got Texas Timex. There was one YC team yesterday that had the Daytona and the Texas Timex. The Day-Date was good. I saw a JLC Reverso. Yeah, yeah. Saw some good watches. When we called the founders on it, they were like, they were embarrassed. it's not super yc coded to have a to have a hitter on the wrist you got 500k throw 100k and do a patek you know no no that's the clueley method absolutely that is the clueley method no uh build a generational company and then uh buy a nice piece on bezel for your for your father father's day is coming up head over to bezel yeah get your dad a watch um let's check in with our our intern Tyler who's pivoting from computer science to art history.

2:33:38What do you got for us Tyler? Oh, he's at the Museum of Modern Art now. That's fantastic. Yeah, so earlier I was thinking like, I think before I should really start studying, I should kind of just like benchmark my stats. Okay. So I took two different tests. The first one was the, it was an AP art history practice exam. Okay. So you know, it's like for high schoolers, average high schoolers like pretty dumb. Yep. I thought I'd do pretty well. I got 12 out of 29. So that's 41%. So bailing, bailing, you know, some place to go there. And then I also took, like, you know, maybe that exam is just, like, weirdly, you know, it's, like, very specific knowledge or something.

2:34:12I took another exam. This was the Britannica art history quiz. On that one, I got 24 out of 60. So that's 40%. So, you know, I have a lot of room to grow. Well, there's about an hour left of the show. So, so, so. Were you using cursor for art history to, to, to answer those questions? Or were you? Yeah, I was not, but that was earlier in the show. I have been studying. Okay. So I think I'm going to take it, you know, 20 minutes before the show ends. Okay. We'll see how I do that. Okay. But I was also kind of just looking, you know, at what are the kind of careers that art history majors generally go into?

2:34:48Yes. So like, if you kind of want to stay in the art world, there's basically you work in a museum or you work in kind of art dealership, gallery. Yeah. Yeah. So first I looked at kind of becoming like a museum curator. For that, you basically need a PhD. Okay. So I don't think I'll be able to get that before the show ends. But I was looking at art dealership. Okay. And obviously, like, for that, you kind of need some funding to start with. So I took Producer Ben's ramp card. Okay. Okay. I laid down some art pieces. They're going to come in next couple weeks. Great. There you go. So, yeah, I'm already starting this career.

2:35:24I'm feeling pretty good about myself. You flip those pieces, make it all back, pay off the ramp card, we're in business. Yeah, we will be checking in with his IRR, seeing if he can beat the average venture fund. Yeah, just beat the market. Yeah, it's that easy. Amazing. Great work, Tyler. Yes, yes. Making lots of promising progress. That's very good. um uh anthropic co-founder ben man says that we'll know ai is transformative when it passes the economic touring test this is something i was talking about earlier give an ai agent a job for a month let the hiring manager choose human or machine when they pick the machine more often than not we've crossed the threshold uh we've been talking about the economic touring test for a while i'm glad that he wrapped it in a bow maybe it needs its own coinage maybe we need to dig in to Anthropic more deeply.

2:36:19But we have the perfect guest for that. We have Sharon from Bloomberg joining us right now. Welcome to the stream, Sharon. How are you doing? Good. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for being here. I wanted to have you on because you've been on an absolute tear writing fantastic pieces. Maybe it would be best to start with Anthropic, which I was just talking about. What did you learn from the piece that you wrote about Anthropic and Dario? We haven't had a chance to have him on the show. We talked to Sholto. They have an interesting culture, interesting history. Can you give us your kind of 50 ,000 foot view on the company, what they stand for today and maybe how that's changed?

2:36:58Yeah, I think Anthropic is a company that probably the most right now is facing pressure both to live up to its really strong kind of ideological ethos, which is around building AI safely and as an alternative to labs that they felt maybe weren't doing it as responsibly as they were. And then also to deliver on the business value, right? So I was kind of, I learned just how sort of savvy actually Anthropic has been with Dario at the helm, even though he has this very deep research science background, he's been able to cut some major deals, grow the enterprise business quite quickly, double, and now there's other reporting about tripling revenue.

2:37:38So, So, you know, that's sort of where they're at. But as you get more money, as you get more, you get bigger and bigger funding rounds, how does that translate into pressure to move really fast at the same time that you're trying to be responsible? Did you get a sense that they have a specific strategy around diversification in terms of hyperscaler partnerships? Because they've done a deal with Amazon, I believe. They were just mentioned that WWDC is plugging into Xcode. It feels like they're trying to maybe go more of as an infrastructure provider. They seem to be doing very well in coding and on the enterprise side.

2:38:17How much of that is deliberate or just like it got pulled out of them because of where their position in the market was? I mean, so in my reporting, like it was very deliberate, their strategy to, first of all, not lock in with any one hyperscaler, right? So they have both Google and Amazon as partners on the front. And that kind of hedging, I think, was very calculated. And also, Dario, in my interviews, he's been pretty dismissive, are reporting about Stargate, saying it's not clear exactly what it is. And I think his stance is that sort of you can scale up and not need to make such a big deal about it.

2:38:52At least that's what he sort of said publicly to me, right? But as you said, I think the pressure's on, right, for them to deliver and show that they can. And he invented scaling laws, but can you actually build up the compute and pay for it to do that? Can you talk a little bit about the rhetoric around safety? I was very, I never really got caught up in the paper clipping in the AI doom narrative. But after seeing DeepSeek. That's what every human says right before they get paper clipped, John. But after seeing DeepSeek drop in the anthropic paper about Manchurian candidates or what was it? Secret hidden agents.

2:39:30I forget the term that they use, but essentially sleeper agents embedding something nefarious within the weights of the model that maybe only comes out when it interacts with a certain endpoint or a certain web page. It discovers that, hey, I'm not just running, you know, in some random solo devs cursor instance. I'm actually inside the NSA. I should go around and do something else. And that really flipped a bit in my mind to say, OK, safety research is actually maybe extremely important and maybe even extremely commercializable because people will want to do safety evaluations on the models that they use.

2:40:07How is the safety rhetoric evolved at Anthropic over the last couple of years in your reporting? Yeah. So I think, you know, AI doomers or people worried about AI safety have been doing these sort of hypothetical thought experiments, like the paperclip experiment, for a very long time, like predating even Dario Emade's right entry onto the scene. However, I think in Anthropic, what I've seen evolve is they're starting to outline and try, they're trying to be as concrete as possible to explain like what the risks are, what the different levels of risks are. They made a whole responsible scaling kind of document framework to say, okay, it's it's kind of modeled after how biological labs are that are very high risk and how, okay, if what you're working on is this level of biological risk, then you have to have this corresponding level of actual physical lab safety.

2:40:56So that's how they viewed it in Anthropic. And so, you know, when I was reporting this out, they had recently had this kind of false alarm where they thought they were crossing into a level that was too dangerous for them to be able to handle. And then they did extra tests and they're like, okay, no, we're all right for this release, but we better get up to par what time period was that was that like an hour or like 10 days or a month so you know daria told me they basically had to delay um not this release but the last bike one um by something like nearly a week because at the last sort of in the final days leading up to the release um their safety team you know one of the red teaming uh group came to them and were like listen, like this model actually may be more capable than we thought.

2:41:40Right. So I do think that's that's a challenge, right, is taking these really hypothetical, seemingly kind of sci fi scenarios and translating it to like, well, when is that actually going to happen at our lab? And what do you have to do to protect yourself? And it's both physical security, like making sure no one can break into your lab or something like that. But it's also, you know, actually making sure that there are safeguards on the software side to stop someone from saying, I think the most tangible threat that I heard them talk about was the biological one, right? And that was a specific concern with that release I mentioned that could someone use this to come up with a novel bioweapon?

2:42:18There's an interesting dynamic with safety teams where if you're sitting there with a team of, let's call it 20 something people, and you're costing the company tens of million, you know, I don't know,$10 million a year. It's not a, you're not going to feel that like your, your, your job, your job's that safe. If you're, if you're never sounding the alarm, so there's kind of an incentive to be like, Oh, this feels a little dangerous. Let's look into it. Yeah. You know, I mean, there's also just so many other dynamics at play. And I think people always dig into this, like, uh, you know, our model's too powerful.

2:42:51That's a great marketing line. It's too good. Like, you know, you could never give it to the wild. It's too powerful. And then there's also, it's also maybe you just haven't put together all the inference capabilities and scaled up your data centers to really have a productive launch. You need an extra two weeks in the oven. Oh, yeah, it's a safety issue. So there's a million different ways that the safety stuff can be kind of abused. I'm not accusing them of abusing it, but it does feel like, you know, we noticed this with the Llama 4 launch. They haven't been able to release Behemoth yet. and they had some issues with benchmarking.

2:43:28But notably, they didn't say it was a safety issue. And that would have almost been an easy out. And it's one that I think most foundation model companies would have taken a year ago. But the community, the developer community, just doesn't seem to buy that line of reasoning as much anymore. I don't know if you had any reactions to the loan for development. Yeah, I have, you know, in my own interviews with Dario, I've asked him about this. And, you know, he has been up front. And like we reported on, you know, there were delays to just this latest big release, right? The latest sonnet. They're kind of, or sorry, is it Opus?

2:44:01Whatever the biggest one is. I'm forgetting all the specific names right now. And, you know, we have reported on these delays. We wrote, you know, a big article about how scaling laws, at least with the pre-training side of these models, were starting to slow down. And, you know, Anthropic, in my reporting with Dario, he was pretty upfront that like that wasn't a safety thing. Like, you know, that big delay was not that big model being later than some of their early projections. That's because they were facing kind of the same technological problems that I think many labs are facing. Right. And ultimately, it did release it.

2:44:33So but I think people, you know, it's absolutely reasonable to question any company's motivation when they say something slowed down. I think I saw no evidence for that in this specific case. Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's talk about the most recent deal, meta acquiring Scale AI. 49 % of the company is changing hands, I believe, at around$14 or$15 billion. Spiritually, the whole thing. Yes, yes, yes. What has been your reaction and what have you learned from reporting on that? Yeah, I think you just covered that they have a new CEO. We just reported that, yeah, per our sources that they have picked the new CEO to be Jason Droege, former VP.

2:45:17He's currently at scale being promoted. And he was formerly an Uber VP and formerly also a partner in VC at Benchmark. So but, you know, that's just that's just the latest. Right. We kind of we have really been breaking the news on this front. We had a scoop this Saturday night that we were the first ones to report that these talks were happening for Meta to make this multi-billion investment in scale. I think it really caught, you know, a lot of people by surprise in the industry. This is a huge investment planned on Meta's front, right? Probably their biggest ever in a company. And I think it's, you know, I think it's a sign that Zuckerberg is ready to go full on founder mode and try to catch up on AI.

2:46:00And this last Llama 4 release was, you know, widely considered a disappointment. And so how do you how do you change course? Right. Maybe it's this big, right, big investment and this super intelligence lab. And he's recruiting engineers. We've reported on that. They're making crazy high offers. Right. They will open, Buzuk will open the checkbook for the top talent. Yeah, I think the interesting thing that stood out about some of, you know, people were just reporting the headline numbers of saying, oh, you could make, you know, nine figures was the number. Yeah. Nine figures. But you have to look if you're trying to recruit somebody that joined OpenAI two, three years ago, they're probably run rating at$10 million a year already on a full, fully loaded comp basis.

2:46:49So I think it makes sense. What have you learned about the future of the scale business, right? Is Jason going to be pounding the pavement, trying to get more customers for the core business, continue to adapt the core business? Yeah, there's a lot of scale competitors right now that are saying like, hey, we're going to take a lot of deals. They're foaming at the mouth. Yeah, we're going to use this to our advantage when we go to the other hyperscalers and say, do you want to do business with a company that's owned by Facebook or Meta? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really unclear what's going to happen.

2:47:22With the future of Scales business, you know, obviously the Meta investment, you know, that's expected. You could see partnerships happening there on that front. But what will happen with the other customers, I think we don't know. And what will happen with, yeah, other competitors in the space? Could they start to, right, gain ground as Scales deepens the ties with Meta? We'll see. I think what we do know, you know, we have reported that Alex Wang plans to join Meta. I think for Meta, he is seen as someone who is just sort of reinvigorating their AI team and this renewed AI effort. He's a big name.

2:48:00He's incredibly savvy, very well connected and built a real business with scale. So I think that's where we're in the middle of the deal. We're waiting to see all the official details sort of as this plays out. earlier this week bill gurley was talking about the m &a markets and why we're still seeing these kind of odd zombie acquisitions happening uh tech was laying the blame at the foot of lena khan for a long time lena khan's obviously out why do you think the big tech companies are still using that she's still posting though she's still she's still reposting stuff about being anti-monopolistic okay yeah so she's she's you know she's around is this more just like this is just a more efficient acquisition vehicle generally even without even in a different administration and so it's just going to be continually used i don't think this is an asset that meta would want to own just generally right you wouldn't want to fully own it is a different business because you're you're you're you're dealing with tens of thousands of offshore contractors, right?

2:49:06Is that something that Meta wants? Don't they already do that with the customer service? Sure, but they've also had issues with it, right? It's liability. Anyway, sorry. So of course, you know, Lena Khan is known to be, you know, aggressive on going after, you know, monopolistic behavior, and especially in the tech market. Doesn't necessarily mean that the current FTC is not going to scrutinize these kinds of deals, right? I would say it's way too soon to have any definitive take on how this FTC will act around these kinds of deals. I think, you know, companies never want to raise too many eyebrows with regulators.

2:49:42And even if people are from different political parties, we have seen Republican controlled FTC sometimes, you know, I mean, that is part of their job, right, is to review these sorts of large transactions. So that may be why, you know, we're seeing we're continuing to still see, you know, companies not want to go too far on that front. Yeah, yeah. Can we move over to Microsoft? It feels like Satya Nadella has carved out a ton of territory in the AI space, and now the game is about holding on to it. It seems like they might be back to training their own language models at the same time at the last Microsoft Build keynote.

2:50:19He was distinctly highlighting how model agnostic Azure was and how they would be happy to route you to any open AI model, any deep seek model, any llama model. They want to be Switzerland, but at the same time, they want to have a horse in the race. So what's the latest thinking around Microsoft? I mean, I report on Microsoft more in the context of open AI. So I'm not the Microsoft expert. I will say that, yeah, obviously we've seen more attention around the Microsoft open AI relationship lately. And what that means, I think OpenAI is also diversifying, right? They're working with other hyperscalers now for Stargate.

2:50:58They have Oracle on board. They have SoftBank financing. So this is no longer just like an exclusive relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI. And I think that goes both ways. Yeah. What is the dynamic right now in the reporter talent space? It seems like the value of just being a pure play writer is maybe going down, but the value of being able to acquire, you know, new net new information and actually get scoops is higher than ever. What is the dynamic right now? We've seen, I think, a lot of different shakeups and layoffs at different companies, but I'm curious what you're seeing. I mean, I think that the value of reporting, like a real original reporting and going original reporting, getting scoops, getting people to share with you information that isn't public, that takes a lot of human skill that, at least in my job, I don't think that's replaceable by AI for now.

2:51:55Yeah, yeah, that's what I was getting at. I do think at some point, maybe you would have an army of agents that would just reach out to 200 employees at a startup at a single given time. But yeah, that tracks. Yeah. In terms of the Stargate project, Were you able to go visit as part of the reporting? Can you give us kind of the lay of the land on who the major players are and what the most interesting angles to dig into in the progress in Abilene has been? Yeah, for sure. Well, shout out to my colleague, Brody Ford. I don't know if he's listening, but I'll send this to him after. He actually went out to Abilene for me because I was unavailable the one day that we could go or whatever.

2:52:39And it's astounding. I mean, I saw the pictures. I got the live feed. it is expansive like I think it's hard to understand just the vast scale of it until you really see pictures video or go there um and you know I think that uh there was a lot of like there was sort of a lot of people doubting if Stargate was even real and I think there's still a lot we don't know about the future of this project like exactly you know where the other sites will be they've said they plan 10 more at least in the U.S. we don't know exactly like how the financing will work. Stargate, we talked to Masasan for this, who's obviously, you know, SoftBank's leading the financing.

2:53:16They said, oh, it's project by project. We'll go step by step. But I think what we can learn from Abilene is like at least that first site, that Abilene site is very real. Like it is happening. It is being built out. We've seen the pace of it. So, you know, that could end up being kind of a template or a test case, right, for how much Stargate can execute in the future on all of its promises. That makes a ton of sense. Anything else, Jordy? Makes a ton of sense. No. Thank you so much for hopping on. This is fantastic. Reach out when you got your next scoop. Yeah. We'd love to have you on the same day to talk about it.

2:53:48You can share some more context. This is great. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Take care. We'll talk to you soon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your positions. We have Cameron from Nominal coming on the show next. Oh, he's already in the studio. There we go. Jordy, I'll let you take the intro. I've got to run. I'll be right back. Let's do it. Welcome in.

2:54:11there he is what's going on cameron welcome to the show good to see you thank you good to see you guys you've uh you've been busy since the last time i don't i don't actually know when that was maybe it feels like maybe a month or two ago but time flies it was yeah i think it was about a month ago and the fun the fun fact with that is um that was like right in the middle of the 10-day, you know, Series B fundraise sprint. Just absolute chaos. Absolute chaos. And, you know, people appreciate this. Connor Love from Lightspeed Ventures posted or, you know, tweeted earlier today. But I was actually taking that prior TBPN call from the Lightspeed office here, like in between.

2:54:54No way. So he was able to see, all right, how does Cam handle himself, you know, in a, in a, in a TV like setting, not that we're exactly. It was a good tactic. He was like, Hey, do you want to be on this and just take it from, you know, take it from our office. And then, you know, so that's awesome. Break down, break down the new round, um, kind of how it came together. Who are the different players? All that good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm really excited. Yeah. We're announcing a$75 million series B. Uh, that is, there we go. There we go. Led by, led by Sequoia. Um, and particularly Alfred Lynn, um, is going to be joining Nominal's board.

2:55:32And then, as we mentioned, there's an additional investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, a combination of Guru Chahal there and Connor Love, which we're really excited about. And then an existing investment from our investors at General Catalyst, Lux, and Founders Fund. So it's - Basically, you're collecting them all at this point. Yeah, got to catch them. That's amazing. Talk about business progress since the last call? I'm sure things are moving really quickly. Yeah, things are moving really quickly. I mean, we're raising this capital to accelerate, just to go faster. Really three big things we're going to do with this.

2:56:10The first is kind of continue to expand into larger and larger enterprises. We're very proud to say many of the startups and scale-ups building in this new hardware wave are nominal customers. And that is going to keep growing. But, you know, recently we've been taking our product to these Fortune 500 companies, you know, Defense Primes, and the traction has been really, really positive. We're also expanding internationally. So we're already serving a handful of customers in Europe, and we're going to keep doing that. The second big thing is product development. And so we, you know, we have a big belief that to win really big in this software for hardware world, it's going to require multiple products.

2:56:54We've started our original thrust is around testing, but we're having customers pull us in linking testing to more quality acceptance testing, production, manufacturing. And then later in the lifecycle saying, hey, I use nominal to build all of the software, you know, build all the rules and logic that governs how my system works under test. And I actually just want to, you know, version control that, organize it. And I want to deploy that on my asset when it's in the field and more of a monitoring, sort of fleet monitoring, fleet maintenance use case. So we're building products and we're going to be expanding.

2:57:29So that's where the funding is going. Yeah. How big is the market for this or how should I think about the market? Is this something where there's a lot of incumbents that you can kind of go after and pull away from? Eat alive. Eat alive. Yeah, eat alive. We won't get those words. Yeah. Yeah. Or are we kind of like disaggregating test functions across all the companies and allowing teams to move faster and selling into existing organizations? Yeah, it's really, you know, the way I think about it is it's helpful to just give like a quick, you know, update, kind of the status quo world. And so I think we see pretty much everywhere we go that testing is too slow.

2:58:09And really, you have scenario A where people are using 1990s software. It's pre-cloud. So it is like, especially in the aerospace and more industrial world, software that was built before the notion of centralizing data even existed. It's crazy. And people are really frustrated with it. So you think of things like Siemens or Emerson or National Instruments, which I had to kind of mention last time. So that is an area where there's a direct swap for spend. People spend a ton of money there. Those are billion-dollar businesses that we are excited to be disrupting. And I think the second area is where people are taking new software and new data technologies that are not designed for hardware at all in the least and trying to use those to sort of aggregate together and build this tool chain for testing.

2:59:03And nominal is just a better way. And so that's sort of showing these organizations what the future can look like and delivering that value, and they're willing to pay for it. What kind of metrics do you track outside of core kind of business metrics? Are you thinking about trying to figure out if you're increasing the development timelines for your customers? In some ways, if you can allow people to just iterate, test faster, you can actually just allow them to accelerate their businesses. Like how much, how much, how much do you try to track that kind of thing? I know a lot of it is probably hard to, to fully capture.

2:59:39Yeah. I'd say, I'd say I had a, a, a phone conversation with, um, with Brian Schimpf, um, CEO of Anderle where, you know, he sort of was saying emphatically, like the, one of the metrics he looks at, like the single most important thing is like, how fast are my, uh, you know, individual programs testing? Like it is such a direct correlation to just like the success of that product. and that is what we see like you know everywhere so at the high level like the value that we're delivering is increasing that test cadence and that throughput you know being able to to to have you know cases where at our customers you know test campaigns that were supposed to take nine months taking 6.5 months right that's that's something we deliver to a customer and when that's on a 200 million dollar program where their end customer is the dod like that's massive right You know, it's funny for a product like Nominals, we actually, you know, we obviously track user engagement and time and app and all these sort of functions, but that's honestly like not the best correlation.

3:00:38We sort of say it's really exciting as you see more and more time people spend in the app. And a lot of our North Star is actually like, I kind of want a test engineer to be able to drop into the app for a little bit, get the insight that they need really quickly. And then if they move on, you know, that's actually fine because they're that value that is compounding. Thank you. Are you guys going to actually set up an international presence at all you said you have a bunch of international customers Are we going to see a nominal office in the UK? Australia. Australia. Got to go to Australia. It's a quick flight.

3:01:10You're naming some good places. I'll say I'm doing sort of nominal's first big international business trip actually over the next two weeks. So I'm going to be going to the Paris Air Show. Let's give it up for international business. I love international business. We love an international businessman on the show. Yeah. It's an honor. It's an honor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to be going to the, yeah, the Paris Air show and then, you know, stopping in the UK, as you kind of mentioned. Yeah, I mean, we're really excited. And I think we'll build a backlog of business before opening like a physical office there.

3:01:47But I think it's absolutely, you know, in the most future. And we're excited for that. You mentioned Australia, general AUKUS world. Like we're really supportive of that. And they want and need all the same things that our U.S.-based customers do. Yeah, I noticed you offer the service on premise still. Obviously, a lot of companies are moving on cloud. How important, can you give me some dynamics around like hyperscaler adoption within these industries? Like AWS, GovCloud, ITAR compliance. I know Palantir got some super high ITAR clearance. There's obviously different tiers to this stuff. Is there one hyperscaler that's kind of pulled away in this category?

3:02:30Yeah, it's a really good, it's a good question. I, you know, from nominal's perspective, our goal is to be as sort of flexible and as versatile as we can. So we don't really pick any one, you know, provider, I'd say, from our product perspective, we have two products in the market right now, but nominal core product is where we started, which is cloud based, the whole value proposition there is you can get all of your telemetry sensor data logs testing data in one central place. run analytics and automate. Very quickly, we launched our second product, which is Nominal Connect, which is actually a desktop application, which sounds crazy to say and, you know, but we're meeting our customers and meeting the market where it is.

3:03:15It's run on, it's built in Rust. It's run on a game engine, right? So it's not your normal. And so, you know, super deterministic workflows, sub 10 millisecond latency. What game engine are you using? It's Unreal, yeah. Unreal. No way. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. So it's really cool. So being able to have, you know, whereas it used to be, you know, maybe a national instruments, you know, desktop app with like a little widget and you can kind of envision the, the thing from 1990 you know, we have this insane super fast rendering 3d visualization of our customers, robotic systems or drones, right.

3:03:53Like with telemetry coming in. And the power is that can run completely air gapped, right. If you're in Mojave or you're downrange, like doing something, all that data is still going to your laptop. And then as soon as you get connectivity, it syncs back up to the kind of nominal mothership. All that data is sort of merged and deduplicated. And it's super powerful for our customers to be able to make sense of what happened. Does Epic have a different business model for this kind of like industrial use case? I know that like isn't Unreal Engine free unless you're generating like a million dollars in revenue.

3:04:23Like how do you pay Tim Sweeney? yeah yeah it's a good uh you know it's a good it's a good question i i um i won't i won't you can answer it at a high level i'm sure you can't say details yeah no i mean it's like we we're really excited about i think we're really excited about the technology and and kind of where where it can scale just i'll leave it i'll leave it at that okay cool yeah yeah well the market is speaking i i looked it up the company that owns uh national um instruments uh is actually down a few percentage points over the last six months. Most likely in reaction to Cameron and the T.H.

3:04:58work. I'm sure it's extremely correlated. They're just already pricing it in. Of course, of course. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. This is great. Congratulations. Do we hit the gong properly? Let's hit the gong. Alfred Lin on the board. That doesn't happen every day. Amazing. Amazing. Big gong. Yeah, super excited. Come back on anytime, Cameron. Awesome. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Cheers. Our next guest is Anil Vermeer hopping on in five minutes. We'll go through some time. By the way, Cameron's resume is just absolutely insane. Product and growth at Anderil. Advisor to Applied Intuition.

3:05:34Oh, let's go. Head of defense at Sail Drone. Investor operator at Lux Capital. And then now started nominal. So it's almost like he was built for this. World Wind Tour. I mean, there's other news. It's not really tech related, but it's related to our friends in the Wall Street and finance community. The race for Democratic nomination for New York City mayor is heating up. Andrew Cuomo is dropping like a stone on Polly Market. Zoran Mamdani is absolutely spiking. He's at 42 % versus Cuomo's 56 % right now. Signal has a breakdown. He says, this is a textbook example of narrative discipline. whether or not you agree with Zoran's platform.

3:06:21The coherence is surgical. Every message hits the same emotional register. Every post or speech is a variation of the same core, cord, anti-machine, people first, morally upright. His surge is pure mimetic lift. It's pure belief, and belief spreads fast. This is the guy that just says freeze the rent. That's his platform. Yes, yes, and every time he posts. His new bit is eliminating police presence in areas that have high crime. Yes, yes, yes. And so a lot of accelerationists are getting excited about this. A lot of people that are anti-New York are supporting this because they think it will destroy New York.

3:06:58But he is gaining ground, and he might be the next mayor. Who knows? Every time he posts about freezing the rent, Nikita Beer chimes in and says, don't you think the rent should just be free? You're not going far enough. Yeah, housing should be free. You're not going far enough. Capitalist pig. Yeah, capitalist pig. Also, new all-time high for Oracle. Let's hear it for Oracle. Wow. Let's go. Ellison is cooking. We love it. Congratulations to Larry Ellison. Larry's listening to this, I'm sure he is. He follows TBPN. It's just fantastic news. Oracle's deeply underrated. It's a fantastic company.

3:07:31Been in founder mode for decades and continues to be on an absolute tear. They basically own Abilene. They do. They do. And they're getting, yeah, the Stargate project would not be happening without them, I'm sure. So we have our next guest coming into the studio in the TBP and Ultra Gen. Welcome to the stream. There he is. How are you doing? What's going on? I love the background. Very cool. How are you doing? Hardware. It's almost like you're in the hardware business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Break it down. What's behind you? What do you do? Yeah. We are a networking company, and our hardware behind us is our power, routing, switching, wireless, old school stuff that powers the internet.

3:08:07Incredible. Break down the news today. Yes. And John, get the gun. Okay, okay. I'll get it ready. What happened? What happened? We raised a new round of financing to go build even better hardware and scale up operations and physical world stuff. And how much did you raise? We raised about$170 million. There we go. Hit it, John. Congratulations. Best part of the day. Congratulations. Talk about, give some backstory on the history of the company, kind of the different stages, what it took to get here. Sure. So we got started actually quite a few years ago. And what's interesting is networking is one of the largest parts of technology, but almost no new companies get started networking.

3:08:53Networking supports multiple$100 billion market cap businesses, but almost all of them got built through acquisition. Nobody sat down and said, hey, we'll build the entire stack together, cohesive operating systems, hardware, APIs, firmware. So we got started a few years ago building out the entire stack. The COVID and supply chain years were tough because we couldn't get any hardware out of it. But the last few years for us has just been really about delivering great products to customers and just like scaling it up across throughput, bandwidth, products, integration. But at the end of the day, I think, you know, nobody really thinks about networking unless you're working on it or a day like this, which causes errors and takes down, you know, something like 15 % of the internet or something.

3:09:37Yeah, what's going on? We've been live the entire time the issues have been happening. Can you give us a quick update on what you think is happening? The production team is stressed right now. They're sweating right now. Yeah. They're sweating. Because you guys are up, there are rumors that you guys took down the internet. Oh, yeah. It's a growth hack. It's a growth hack. Just watch TVP end of it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, I think the really interesting part about networking is most of the issues actually happen because of configuration errors. And today, that's one of the causes for it because it's disparate hardware systems, software systems that don't really work together, and they're made by many different vendors, etc.

3:10:16Today was one of the reasons for it, not the entire reason, but one of the reasons for it was network configuration errors. Wild. You guys have a – it seems like you basically have every scale up on the planet as a customer already. Is that close to true? Are you working towards it? What's kind of the full range of your guys' customer base? Is the job finished or is the job not finished? Or is it just getting started? Just getting started. Are you quoting Kobe, John? I'm saying the job is not finished. Yeah. So our customer base, I think, is quite interesting. We do have a lot of tech companies and folks that are scaling up as customers, but probably our most interesting ones are like the manufacturing facilities, warehouses, schools, folks that go build like ISPs and data centers and life sciences labs, all of them sort of need connectivity and internet and networking to do whatever they're doing.

3:11:10And, you know, probably my favorite part in the last five, six years is looking at all these different types of amazing businesses that have nothing to do with Silicon Valley, but sort of are the underpinning of our economy and how things get built and all the interesting work they're doing from, you know, battery manufacturing to hydrogen cells to when one of us buy something online, how quickly does it get there? It's because there's some great business out there actually doing it, but it's all automated and then they need networking. So our customer base definitely is we have a big swath of some of the great tech companies, but it's really fanned out everywhere throughout the economy too.

3:11:48Walk me through some of the work you're doing around hardware innovation, software innovation, business model innovation, like what's most important, what's been most acceleratory for you and kind of break those down in terms of priorities and where you're investing and what you're most excited about? So I actually think those things are all interconnected because it's what incentives are what drives everything. So if you look at legacy companies, what they're trying to do is build hardware for X dollars and then sell it to you for X plus whatever margin they're trying to hit. And so there's two ways these legacy companies can make money, either by charging customers way more than the value they're getting or by making hardware with cheaper components and less quality components, et cetera.

3:12:36For us, we don't sell hardware to customers at all. We just sell the whole thing as a service, which is also very new. I know the rest of us that work in Silicon Valley, like that's sort of kind of given in how we buy things. But doing hardware and enterprise networking that way was fairly new and we were the first people to sort of do it. But that actually drives incentives on where you go invest. Because we are not trying to squeeze the last 10 cents out of a component, we tend to go make very different choices in hardware on what sort of components that we use, how are they laid out? How is it built?

3:13:13What are we optimizing for? Hey, something costs another$10, let's go do it. But what's the end customer thing like? And then the better hardware that you have, you're able to go build better software and this loop sort of hits. And so our business model is that not only do we build the hardware and software, we actually deployed and maintained it ourselves to we're fully vertically integrated. I know a lot of the tech companies don't want to touch the real world things, but the whole messiness of racks and cables and manufacturing, we go do not just the pretty parts of it, but also the underbelly, if you will, of actually going and deploying all of it.

3:13:49And we do this all without any capital cost to customers and only marginal cost on operating expenditure compared to how they operate. Talk about that. Talk about why a CFO would want to have OPEX versus CAPEX in this type of scenario. And is that kind of a driver around decision making? It is, but it depends on the business, right? So if you have businesses that are PE owned, for example, you actually want it to be CAPEX. And so our contracts can hit the books as a lease. So it doesn't hit their operating margins. They get an EBITDA boost. That happens too. But ultimately, what customers actually care about is, do I have to take a bunch of capital and buy hardware that the moment I buy it, it's a depreciating asset?

3:14:36Then I have to pay a bunch of money to go install it. And then every four or five years, I have to go buy new hardware because some new technology comes out, etc. Or if this hardware goes bad, I have to go replace it myself. That's the part CFOs care about that we remove entirely, which is instead of having to go spend massive amounts of capital and operating expenditure to kind of fix all this stuff, we take all that on and sort of take on all the risk instead of the customers. Then that contract can be actuated as OPEX or CAPEX depending on what their business needs. Talk about meters business.

3:15:13You're doing a lot of things. You're doing hardware, software. You have, I'm assuming, a network of, you know, team all over the country that are, you know, helping with installs. Talk about kind of the efficiency of the business. And I'm assuming, you know, this new$170 million round is, you know, a testament to the strength of the core business. Yeah, it's a really interesting core business, right? Because you're right. We get to go design hardware, make software, and then we build these racks like the one you're seeing behind us. and then actually go deploy these by the hundreds for some customers everywhere.

3:15:49And we're not just in the United States. We're in Canada. We're in Europe, everywhere in the world, hopefully by next year. And the operational parts of it are super challenging. If you can imagine a data center in the middle of nowhere or a manufacturing facility, there's legacy hardware that's old hardware in there. You have to go kind of sort of fix that, and then you're integrating it, but then you're putting in this new entire rack. So what's sort of important for us is, it's like a duck swimming in a lake. The customer doesn't see all the kicking that happens underneath to kind of deliver this to them.

3:16:29And our work is always tying these things in together. Why are we building the hardware? How is the software getting built? How are we deploying it and maintaining it? And then any issues we see on one end should then be a loop back to how we build better hardware, What choices are we making? Just this morning, a bunch of my colleagues were arguing literally what type of ports, where it should go so it's easy for install. And that loop is a new way of thinking in networking infrastructure, even though after computing and CPUs and Intel, networking is the oldest and largest part of all of technology.

3:17:06So you, I mean, you design, develop, manufacture, make this networking equipment, you're deploying it as a lease on a more rental basis. Does that create a CapEx problem for you? Like, how are you thinking about your, the way your balance sheet is growing and developing? Is debt going to play a role earlier than it might at most other companies in your business because of the structure of what you're building? yeah this is a really interesting question so if you look to historically how networking hardware got built somebody built it for let's say five hundred dollars and bomb costs but by the time it ends up in a customer's hands it's like five thousand dollars so networking companies have enjoyed tremendous margins so you should start there at any time second what we also try to do is a lot of our customers because we're dealing with physical spaces whether it's in retail or manufacturing or data centers anywhere, the buildout times are predictable, right?

3:18:09Because there's a certain date you're trying to hit when a data center goes live or a manufacturing facility goes live or a school goes live. So a lot of our manufacturing can be predictive towards that. Unlike other hardware companies, we don't have to hold massive amounts of inventory without knowing where it's going. We do have issues on like trying to figure out exact timing there. We're not always perfect, but we can do that. So to answer your question, we actually use debt a lot more and plan to use debt a lot more to scale up what we do on deploying with our real estate partners. A big focus of what we also do is not only do we directly sell to customers, but we also go partner with real estate firms to just include Meter in as a default.

3:18:53And that's actually where the main Meter comes from. If you look at a building, there's electricity, there's water, there's cell phone lines, there's power meters, water meters. This should be more like a utility. Why is it that we're all struggling to kind of wrangle it to get it into working in any type of space? So for us, the debt and where that plays in is a little bit on hard work, but a lot of it also on deployment and actually getting it out to the world. and the pace of which we can do expecting a customer and some sort of discounted cash flow expectation of 12, 18, 24 months from now.

3:19:28Talk to me about the kind of like wheelhouse customer for you or the wheelhouse deployment. Sounds like apartment building makes sense. Scale up startup office makes sense. It's probably overkill for the home office. You might just want to get an Amazon Aero mesh networking system. At the same time, you look at Google's campus. It's absolutely massive. Are you going one direction or the other? Are you maxed out? Or are there specific oddities that you can kind of illuminate on what it'll take, how you'll have to change the business or scale to satisfy a client like Meta's Silicon Valley campus, which is multiple buildings and probably one of the most complex networking infrastructures in America.

3:20:20Is there something where you can just kind of copy-paste your current solution so many times and it all fits together? Or will there be new technical innovations that you need to hit to actually service someone at that scale? I think the answer is both. But we are already doing customers at that scale and more. For example, Bridgewater, who's the largest hedge fund in the world, runs on meter. as an example. But I think we will go to continue even more technical advancements to hopefully bring new things that legacy folks just can't do or won't do or can't think of and sort of implement. But I think overall, what's really interesting about networking is that nobody gets to do custom networking, if you will, because it has to go work with the rest of the world.

3:21:05Generally, when you look at enterprise companies, they end up building some sort of Frankenstein thing or what they started off with that becomes a custom thing for each enterprise customer. For us, any enterprise customer has to then go work with the rest of the internet. So they don't get to do their own protocols, their own things. So largely, there are things on the margin, but largely, whether you're a Google or Meta or Bridgewater or a school customer or large universities that we do, all of them use the same internet, if you will. And this is also the same in data centers too. What you would find in majority of non-GPU data centers is not that different, which you would find in a large campus, because it all has to flow together.

3:21:50The packets must flow and end. What's the difference between non-GPU data centers and GPU data centers in this context? Yeah, so in GPU stuff, there's actually a lot that happens between two GPUs and between custom GPUs. Got it. That's a different type of networking. There's a lot of work that's happening. Obviously, NVIDIA, their Mellanox acquisition for five years ago. and what's happening now with ultra ethernet but just everything else is actually relatively same what was the what was the keyword you just said ultra ultra ethernet ultra ethernet is a new thing that's happening is that i remember cat5 cat6 i've heard about cat7 is this like cat8 what are we talking here this is like a whole different ball game so uh if you if you look at yeah you know The joke in the networking world is, you know, Ethernet is dead, long live Ethernet.

3:22:40You know, every sort of 15, 20 years, Ethernet is predicted that it will be the end of it. But, you know, somebody comes up with innovations on how it can scale up on speed, on throughput, on bandwidth, on security. So Ultra Ethernet is this new version that's coming out for, you know, the next phase of all the data center build that's happening. because roughly the US has more data centers than the rest of the world combined, roughly. Let's go. Let's hear it for America. That's a white pill right there. Everyone says we're falling behind, but not today. But the rest of the world is trying to catch up to get to that, and the US is trying to 3x.

3:23:18So there's a lot. Don't even try. Don't even try. We're undefeated. Except if you're using meter. Except if you're using meter, then we support it. We support meter's international strategy, so it's kind of nuanced. We're pro, but also anti, as long as we're benefiting. Yeah, there's a lot that goes into it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, we've experienced it here. There's like new generations of just streaming cameras that do power and video over Ethernet. And, you know, we're thinking about kind of the V2 of the studio, and there's a ton of insane things that you can do over Ethernet.

3:23:50It's no longer just the LAN cable. And so it must be fun to be at the heart of that. Jordy, any more questions? or should we let them get back to building? Congratulations on the funding milestone. Congratulations. And yeah, check in next time. We'll talk to you soon. Come back anytime. Thank you both. See you soon. Bye. Cheers. Our next guest will be joining in just a few minutes. In the meantime. It is an absolute banger day. Lots of fundraising. I was just going to say, it's actually insane. We've been able to keep the show up with the entire - It is crazy. Yeah, we got lucky today. Have we ever, has the stream ever actually gone fully down?

3:24:24We had Zoom go down one day, and we were kind of wrecked by that. Well, let's bring in our next guest. Ian in the chat says, Mixpanel, Shopify, and GCP are still down for him, all the services that he's in. Honestly, if you're worried about the show going down, do not worry. Just send us your mailing address. We will print the show onto vinyl, and we'll send you a record of the show so you can listen to it in high fidelity. You've got to figure out how to get same-day shipping. Exactly. so that you can get the show almost live, you know, a couple hours. A couple hours later. Yeah, we'll also do a lot of innovation on the vinyl pressing because I think that takes a while too.

3:25:04Anyway, our next guest is here. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Trish? What's going on? Good to see you. How are you doing? Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on. It's great to have you. It's great to have you. Big day. Big day. You guys announced a Series A, new website, and you took down the whole internet. You took down the whole internet. I can't confirm or deny it was part of the launch strategy, but good timing. Give us the stats. How much did you raise? Yeah, it raised$20 million. $20 million. There we go. Congratulations. Who did you raise it from? Yeah, sound led the round.

3:25:40Participation. Hit it again for sound. Hit it again. Congratulations. Amazing. Sorry, continue. We got it a little exciting. It was a good gong. Yeah, participation from Buckley, Naval, Arash, Bredowsi, founder of Dropbox, Arvan from Perplexity, a bunch of other awesome angels. Very cool, very cool. Break down the pitch. How are you positioning the company right now? Because I know you've been doing a lot of different stuff. They pivoted from pizza to something new. I know them as the pizza delivery company. There was that Zoom company that was doing pizza on demand. That didn't go so well. So obviously a huge white space.

3:26:19Well, they just did pizza for a day. They sold out. and then they moved on to this next thing. So give us an update on the platform. How are you positioning it? For sure. So I think for us, always the mission of Antimental has been how do we simplify infrastructure? But current moment, what's really different is, you know, software engineering, the bottleneck used to always be programming. Like if you could build a software, you could ship it, you could distribute to everyone, suddenly your product is live. Now you have all this AI-assisted stuff, like really awesome products, like, you know, cursor, lovable, bold, v0.

3:26:48And increasingly, like the latter half of that equation, which is deploying that code, maintaining it, making sure it scales, like going from one user to 1 million is increasingly the bottleneck on like how companies, you know, are actually going to grow and sustain. Like, you know, the short of it is like writing code is no longer the hard part, right? It's all this operations and maintenance. And so what we're really indexing on is building this product that helps you better manage, you know, and automate infrastructure. So a lot of that is, you know, the nuance of infrastructure versus code is a lot of it as knowledge that is baked into, you know, people's heads.

3:27:21Like you have that one senior engineer who just knows how everything works. That's your go-to guy when something breaks or you need to spin up something. But that's not super sustainable, right? And this like notion that comprehension can just scale linearly as you hire more people isn't super tenable anymore. We're like emitting a bunch of data, all that data is super fragmented, everyone's super specialized. And so for us, what we're trying to do is, you know, start going into companies, plugging into their entire infrasurface area, whether that's like source code, their cloud, their ticketing system, whatever it might be, really understand why things are failing and basically pull in data and give them these golden pathways as to what's going on, why is it happening, what prescriptive action should I take that is going to help me fix this, and along the way is sort of learning what are the ingrained practices of your organization.

3:28:05That part is super important in the sense that we don't want to build like an opinionated platform that says like this is good or this is bad, right? That's pretty subjective to each company. So it's a little more about learning, okay, given this tenant, what's going to be good for them? How do they prefer to operate? You know, what's going to make their systems perform the best? Makes a ton of sense. How much are you spending time thinking about from a product standpoint, trying to solve things that are sort of human nature to some degree versus like it feels like the nature of software development is changing so quickly.

3:28:34But if you can kind of focus in on what will always be true and, you know, many people would say that's human nature, you can create something like durable and valuable out of that. Yeah, I think a big thing for us is, you know, some companies try to position this like, hey, we're a full time employee and we're going to like automate this function away for you. I think for us, it's a little more of how do we take all this knowledge that exists in a bunch of people's heads, institutionalize it into a system and code it into a system such that it's reusable. Like the dream for us as companies go from asking this question of like, yo, can we keep this running to what can we build next?

3:29:07And really taking away this time for maintenance that a lot of people are spending their time on. So, you know, I think human nature, like inevitably all infra problems are kind of human problems. Like, you know, someone messed up a config or someone didn't really understand what's going on. And in that sense, you know, working with our users to understand, like, what's their preferred behavior? Why do they want their stack set up this way? Why have they chosen the tools they did? And not trying to, like, force an opinion down their throat. That makes sense. Can you talk to us about some of the newest problems that companies are facing with LLM inference costs, just faults that come from this new paradigm of running agents and running tons of inference and just taking advantage of all the tools?

3:29:52We saw Satya Nadella at Microsoft Build talk about model routing being something that he was really pushing at Azure. GCP has a similar tool. Are you hearing from customers, like right now we're in this era where every new model release and price drop basically goes viral on X. And so unless you're under a rock, like it's pretty easy to move over to the latest and greatest thing, not leave a bunch of money on the table. But are there new problems that you foresee as things become a little more commoditized or a little bit more calcified that companies aren't using best practices or they're running into new problems from the kind of AI age generally?

3:30:31Yeah. I mean, I think the first one is like what you struck on the head, which is all of this AI stuff is super nascent. That means there's not a ton of like super robust tooling out there on how to monitor, evaluate these things. You know, people are building their own frameworks on the fly. I think like most companies that are really succeeding are not using something off the shelf. They're building it in-house, right? So there's a lot of nuance that goes into these things. The other thing is, you know, models are another potentially single point of failure. Like if cloud goes down, like what happens to your product?

3:30:54Are you ready to do a model routing? Are you going to do something else? but I think like you know putting them into like a broader system perspective they're not like new problems in the sense of these are things systems engineers or you know data architects have had to think about for a long time but obviously more and more companies are doing these things and they're really complex systems I think the second part of that is actually just like you know we don't index on this super highly but something we're seeing is more companies are just pushing more software like highly verticalized niche their internals like you know why go put something on a retool dashboard when I can like build it and bolt and probably get a more nuanced tailored experience.

3:31:27So I think that coupling of like, Hey, we're working on a pretty nascent space that there isn't a ton of structure around and we're trying to figure out at the same time, combined with, we just have more infra and more services running period is creating this like really chaotic environment where people are, you know, stuck in the trenches of like debugging things, figuring out how do we scale them, uh, paying down tech dev, that sort of thing. Is there anyone on the hyperscaler side that you think is like really underrated right now? yeah um honestly oci i think uh oracle cloud they're never part of the conversation i think all these other clouds have really great offerings really great services i think the thing about oracle is you know they don't sell a bunch of services on top they have a really good foundation like these guys have been in the computing business for quite a while i don't think it's the sexiest option out there but like from a price perspective security perspective i think they're pushing a lot internally on what that's going to look like over the next couple of years but yeah I think underrated that's amazing stock hit the all time high today let's hear it up for all time highs and Larry generational run what's your guys I'm just curious since you guys are so deep in the weeds on this what's your personal AI you know co-gen stack right now what are you and the team loving right now we have cursor for the entire team some people prefer cloud code depends you know different strokes for different folks um but yeah i mean like people are using chat gpt cloud cursor cursor is probably by and far the biggest one we're finding a lot of success with some of the agentic stuff like cloud code but i think the median for us is people are loving cursor that's probably been the best coding experience very cool uh what about just go to market um top of funnel like you're it's an interesting super interesting company because you've been able to go like massively viral with what is an enterprise like software company like it would be different if you were selling like an energy drink i would kind of expect like a stunt and oh yeah everyone's talking about it but uh you've been able to break through in a really interesting way in in in the x community in the venture capital community um what are you seeing that's working on the top of funnel side what viral loops are you taking advantage of flywheels just break down the marketing side yeah i mean like you know growth this is a big part of our DNA.

3:33:39I think largely from, you know, my co-founder, Matt, obviously, I like a piece of growth and marketing. You know, for us, a lot of it, at least in the early stage right now is you want to grab people's attention, obviously attention economy. I think that the really nice thing for us is this is a problem. Like every engineer we talk to has faced or seen to some degree, even people on the operational side, when they're like running a business, they're like, holy crap, like we couldn't push this feature out because we were stuck like fixing the service or paying down tech debt instead of launching the new thing um but yeah i mean we're doing all sorts of things i think candidly you're going to see a bunch of it over the coming months um we're going to have a you know a bigger splash later this year but yeah more to come can't wait amazing well you'll have to hop back on when that bigger splash happens uh great talking to you well uh congratulations great great to get the full update yeah i think we're both on the on the cap table yeah yeah we'll talk soon love it awesome dude thanks guys Have a good one.

3:34:34Let's close out by telling you about Figma. Figma.com. Think bigger. Build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at Figma.com. I have a challenge for the audience. Your personal website is probably bad. Go on Figma. Make a new one. Oh, yeah. That's great. And just ship a website. You can do it in like five minutes. Fantastic. Speaking of design, Signal's been on an absolute tear, breaking down all the WWDC updates.

3:35:11He says,

3:35:30on an iPad. And so every time there's a new update, I'm always like, oh, maybe I should pick up an iPad. I'm tempted. I'm tempted. This might be the one that does it for me. It's a bad point in the release cycle to buy an iPad Pro because it's over 400 days since they launched the last one. So they'll probably refresh it at the next iPhone event. But I'm definitely thinking about getting it on here. I think it could work really well for running the show too. Got a couple iPads around the house. Yeah. Just kind of collect dust. Collect a lot of dust, but maybe I'll upgrade. Maybe you can get back in.

3:36:02I think you've got to commit to that being part of the workflow. Tyler, how is your iOS 26 experience so far? Have you run into any more problems? It's pretty good so far. I mean, it's still, you know, my phone is like six years old, so it's a little bit slow. But overall, it's been totally fine. I like it a lot. That's good. I was asking him, like, show me, and he starts swiping through his apps, and on one screen he just has like 25 copies of what app was that? Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A. He somehow got the Chick-fil-A, the one app. You're only supposed to be able to install the app once. Somehow he got 26 copies of it installed.

3:36:42You got to have 26. It was the funniest thing. If you're serious about Chick-fil-A, you should have at least 26 apps. 26 copies, just in case 24 of them break, I guess. Give us the update on the Art History Project. How's it going? Are you an expert yet? But by the way, my wife texted me and said that it's extremely embarrassing that we didn't know that Greek statues were painted because apparently that's common knowledge. But also she has a master's in art. Okay. The art history major. It's common knowledge if you're a renowned expert. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, give us the latest art history fact. How are you doing?

3:37:14Yeah, so I took another quiz or another like assessment. Yep. This time I got 50%. Oh, very good. So that's about 10 % in only I think like an hour and a half. Compound that. You'll be at 100%. I mean, 50 % more than should be. 25 % improvement. Honestly, give yourself some credit. Yeah, 25 % improvement. Yeah, but if I get 10 % every hour and a half, that's math checks out, extrapolate a bit. I think it's like seven and a half hours. I should be at 100%. Fantastic. So I should have everything back. Yeah, do it again. You could be at 200%. 200%, 300%. You could be the world expert. Did you learn anything else interesting about art history?

3:37:45Do you have any more facts to share with us, or are you tapped out? I've been reading a lot about this guy, Giorgio Vasari. Okay, we're going a little deeper. He's 16th century. He's kind of a polymath, author, historian, painter, sculptor. He's kind of like the Plutarch of art, right? So Plutarch writes noble lives of or parallel lives of noble Greeks and Romans. Sure. And then Vassari kind of writes the same thing for kind of Renaissance art. But kind of this controversial guy, he writes about, you know, he looks at art from the perspective of the artist, which is controversial in the sense that later on this guy, Winkleman, I think, he criticizes Vasari.

3:38:28He says, no, you should separate the art from the artist. You should look at art kind of in and of itself, by itself. That's where it came from. I've heard the term, separate the art from the artist. Chris from Pace would just say, absolutely not. We're not going to separate it. No, no. We're going to look at it. The artist is what matters. If we were to issue you a termination letter today, would you feel more confident now that you've at least studied art? Well, I actually... And your job prospects, I mean. Yeah, so I also looked at those other stats about just general employment. And, you know, so I'm actually a physics major.

3:38:57I'm not CS. Sure. And physics is actually the second most unemployed. So physics majors are at, I think, 7.8%. CS was at 6.1%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think I probably would go into art history. I mean, I don't got much else. Amazing. Underrated. Underrated. I think we just discovered some massive alpha. It wouldn't really take that much to double the number of art history majors. There's only 2 ,000 of them, right? Yeah. Or something like that? Yeah. Well, 2001. Now. 2001. 2001. Amazing. Let's rip through some timeline. Great work, Tyler. Yep. We have some news. Congratulations to Crusoe. Chase Lockmiller, been on the show.

3:39:40They are partnering with Brookfield on a$750 million debt facility to build the intelligent infrastructure of the future. Do we have to ring the gun? Hit it. Hit it, John. Hit it. That's a lot of pesos. That's a lot of pennies. Congratulations to the whole team over there. Fantastic. We love big data centers. We love scaling laws, putting big training runs on the data center. Fantastic. We got another post from Zyzi. What are some good baby names for someone just getting into nominative determinism? I got to say, it came to me immediately. Oh, I guess it's here as a comment too, but I was going to say if it's a boy, Chad.

3:40:18It's just so obvious. Chad, I think, is going to come back in a big way. I think it sort of waned in popularity when it was more of a slur, but now it's just massive alpha there. It can kind of be an inside joke for you and the other dads 20 years from now. Your son, you know, little baby Chad, turns into a man. Oh, he's a Chad. Huge surprise. It's not like it was destined. So, you know, Johnny Ive was in the news because he went to OpenAI. But he's technically Sir Johnny Ive because he's been knighted by the British royalty, right? And I was thinking we need an American version of Sir, of knighting.

3:40:59And I think what we should do is we should take all the Chads and the ones who are really, really impactful, the ones who have driven, you know, massive capital investment like Chad Byers. They should be knighted in an American way and they should earn the title giga. And so for his contributions, the president should take a sword and tap him on both shoulders and knight him giga-chad buyers. Giga-chad buyers. I think that would really – it would be the American version of the knighting. Yeah. And it's based purely on how much capital formation. 100 percent. Yeah. There's no other criteria. That's the way it needs to go.

3:41:38So step one, name your son Chad. Step two, get him into capital allocation on the private side, ideally. But public markets will work, too. You're still eligible. There's some more good comments in here. Grit Capital says King or Don. Donald. Don. Donald. I never thought about it. The Don. That's where Don comes from. I think so. In other news, Anand Sunwal says, my first and only angel investment went to zero today. Well, a mistake. Yeah. Should have made 50. I'm sure one of them would have worked out, made it all back in one trade. Fascinating because he's the founder of CB Insights, which you would think he would be addicted to angel investing with all the data and stuff.

3:42:19But he knew his life's work was to build that company. And that's what he focused on. He only invested in one company. Fascinating. car dealership guy responds congrats very funny uh anyway yeah yeah i mean he said he learned i don't really enjoy it and if you don't enjoy it you're not going to be good at it so stay out of the game uh paula says diet cokes are fridge cigarettes so true so true just drink them all day long all right this is a good place to end i like how zuck has been back against the wall like 37 times since 2007 and every times resoundingly wins but each time again he he has a crisis people are like oh man zuck is cooked yep so true yeah built different do not count different the ai talent crisis is is merely a bump in the road for for old zuck he's he's cooking we've all we've all been there we've all you know we've all tried we've all been running a trillion dollar company personal behemoth you know yes yes we all have something we need to wrangle and get out got a power there's a four-hour stream or yeah or a two trillion parameter model you know you got to get it out well this was a great show i got to give it up to the to the production team credible production team keeping us online while everything goes down across the show up internet we learned everything there is to know about art we're experts too he's an expert yeah um now we got to worry about poaching because i imagine a lot of the galleries are going to be watching this and they're going to be oh new art history guy just dropped we got understands physics yep live streaming and knows everything there is to know about he knows every The history of art.

3:43:51The history of art. Anyway, thank you for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and we will see you tomorrow. Have a great day. Have a great afternoon.