Amazon x OpenAI, Ford's EV Reality Check, Kushner Drops WB Bid | Sarah Guo, David Senra, Doug O'Laughlin, Doug Bernauer, Jacob Effron, Logan Kilpatrick

28:52So then I click through to Amazon. So Amazon is paying Google to appear in search results. AdWords. And AdWords. And then Gemini is routing basically to AdWords to get the click through there. So there's no direct integration at all.

29:14Google has so many odd advantages. It's crazy. Like the fact that the Google bot just sees so much more of the internet feels extremely important. And yet I just don't know if it will be enough, if it will be enough to win in consumer in some meaningful way. What does it mean? Does it mean 50 % of the value of consumer? Does it mean that they can win, come from behind, defeat OpenAI, ChatGPT? Like it feels so important and yet It it also feels extremely hard to actually pass that message through maybe they need like a whole ad campaign around it or something but And and also I haven't even it did did Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare ever published those results He was saying he was asking people like how much of the internet?

30:03Do you think Google sees relative to opening eyes? web scraper, like their bot. Because no one's blocking the Google bot. You have to be insane to be like, I don't want my company showing up on Google. You just never do that. But if you do, then you also show up in Gemini like that, like what you just showed. Now, there are plenty of blogs and plenty of people out there who are saying, I don't want to show up in ChatGPT because my content is valuable. I'm monetizing in a particular way. We're not talking about products. Products, on the other side, they're on Profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT.

30:42You reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. No, but seriously, if you're a brand and you want to be mentioned everywhere, but if you're a newsletter writer or you write reviews about best Amazon products, you might not want those reviews just to get sucked into ChatGPT and anonymized, right? So you might turn that off, but no one's turning off Google. So Google should have an advantage there. The product should be better, but it all matters on like how much does the consumer feel the betterness of it? Because even you can see it, even with the image releases, it's like we're into one's 99 % of the way there.

31:18The other one's 99.1 % of the way there. There's a benchmark that says this one's better, but people aren't really shifting. This one is really good at doing ornaments. Which one? Like, that was a big... That's the first value prop I've heard where I would switch immediately. Well, that was, like, something they were pushing. That was something OpenAI was pushing yesterday was basically, like, you can turn yourself into an ornament. Oh, yeah, Christmas. Christmas. Trying to kick off a new meme super cycle. Near is not loving this line. The Amazon investment would help OpenAI afford commitments, including from AWS.

31:52That's very funny. um well liquidity is showing the gang standing around all right jeff you're up next to invest in open ai oh yeah literally almost all of them well i guess to be clear i don't think elon is i don't think sundar is i don't think zuck is okay and i don't know you know tim cook's partner with gemini so this meme is actually slop i'm sorry liquidity i love you but well it hits it was It was funny, but then as I dug in deeper, I mean, 10K likes, but it is not accurate. It's not accurate. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. AI that powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk.

32:39Amazon,$10 billion investment in OpenAI in the form of AWS credits. You got Satya Nadella pointing. I couldn't find where. 2 % for Amazon, maybe less if it's at above a$500 billion valuation. So Andy Jassy's getting 1.5 % of OpenAI. It's not just sitting there with over 20. He's pretty happy, pretty happy looking at the screen. This is a Gemini meme. Very funny. Well, Jared Kushner is pulling out of the Paramount bid hours after his father-in-law took aim at the Ellison clan, apparently. Yeah, to be clear, I don't know where Nick pulled the credits line. I haven't seen that. Which credits line?

33:24Sorry. Nick, this post before Amazon$10 billion investment in OpenAI in the form of AWS credits. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't seen that confirmed anywhere. Yeah, yeah, it's actually not in the form of AWS credits. It's just cash and then, but it's just, it feels like credits because they do have obligations with AWS to buy stuff. They're basically going to spend all of it. Well, no, it's like it all goes into a bank account. Yeah, yeah. But it fits the narrative to be like it's in the form of AWS credits. That is a good correction. Thank you, Jordy. Anyway, the latest news in the paramount bid for Warner Brothers, the story that just keeps on giving, is from Semaphore here.

34:08Let's see what this says. in the news. In back-to-back salvos Tuesday, the president and his family distanced themselves from Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Brothers discovery. I think we know what's going on there. It's about Foghorn Leghorn. It's about Tweety Bird. Is that it? Porky Pig? It's Porky Pig. It's a rebuke to owner David Ellison's attempt to leverage relationships with the White House to close the$108 billion takeover effort. President Trump Tuesday afternoon said he had been treated far worse by the Ellison-owned CBS since the family closed a deal for CBS parent Paramount. Which is so interesting because I've seen a bunch of people have been riled up about Barry Weiss running CBS.

34:59The reason that you maybe would say that she's doing an effective job as a manager of that asset is because people are talking about CBS content in a way that I have not seen in ever, right? Do you ever remember, like maybe a couple times here you'd see something and she's clipping CBS content. It's like she's doing stories that – It feels like it's working. Yeah, if their goal is – We were joking about this. I mean, no shade to the people that were writing CBS before, but like what content was on that network? Yeah, we just don't know what they were doing before. It's like it didn't exist. And now it exists.

35:39And you can like it or you hate it, depending on your political persuasion. But you can't deny that it exists now. And I always looked at this as like – It's a thing. The Ellisons were like, hey, we can get a truth engine. And we can help. Sure. We can help. Like we can basically – Yeah, I mean there's definitely like the brand is still great. Like CBS feels like a solid news source. So I agree with that. But the distribution was so far behind that people weren't talking about what was going on there. And I would say the reason, one way to think about the value of CBS is what would it cost and how long would it take to recreate a brand like CBS?

36:17Probably cost, it would take you decades. I don't think you can buy it. I actually don't think, I think you could be Sam Altman and Marshall a$50 billion fundraising round. Yeah, you can't just snap your fingers and get a CBS brand. And it would still take 50 years to get there. And that's the thing is that it's not, it's not like if you get 50 billion, what do you have to do? You have to go buy the legacy IP because there's only, you can't just, you can't snap your fingers and create a brand overnight. Like it just takes time. Yeah. So Warner Brothers sent a letter to shareholders this morning, basically saying that they're riding, they want to, the board of directors still wants to go with Netflix.

36:58They believe it's superior in a number of different ways. One thing that stood out to me is that Paramount has consistently, they said Paramount has consistently led WBD shareholders that its proposed transaction has a full backstop from the Ellison family. It does not and never has. Paramount's most recent proposal includes a$40 billion equity commitment for which there is no Ellison family commitment of any kind. Instead, they propose that you rely on an unknown and opaque revocable trust for the certainty of the crucial deal funding, despite having been told repeatedly by WBD how important a full and unconditional financing commitment from the Ellison family was, and despite their own ample resources, as well as multiple assurances from Paramount Skydance during our strategic review process that such a commitment was forthcoming, the Ellison family has chosen not to backstop the Paramount Skydance offer.

37:52And a revocable trust is no replacement for a secured commitment by a controlling stockholder. the assets and liabilities of the trust are not publicly disclosed and are subject to change. So they're basically like have this entity being like, yeah, we're guaranteeing it, but it's not actually them saying like, you know, they could move assets out of that trust and, you know, yeah, yeah. Got it. So anyways, so I just, not as strong potentially as Netflix, you know, Netflix is good for it. It's a huge company. They've already signed a deal with a massive termination clause and they've, I believe they've raised debt for this.

38:28Like, they're ready to rock. So bird in the hand is worth not two in the bush. Yeah, the other thing is Paramount has not offered to reimburse the breakup, the termination fee. It's a$2.8 billion fee. There's also financing costs that Warner Brothers would have to take on if they don't complete the debt exchange. So, yeah, at the end of the day, what do the Ellisons do at this point, right? They've been doing deals, right? They've got CBS now. They've got the UFC. They're trying to build this streaming platform. And, again, going back to some of the conversations that we've had, the entire strategy to date has been predicated on getting this Warner Brothers asset.

39:17Yeah, yeah. And it seems like it might not happen. But the game's not over. I anticipate it. Announce the$1 trillion backlog.

39:30think bigger build faster figma helps design and development teams build great products together um also obvi shiffman got back to us he answered the question is he leveraged up is he levering up to buy billboards he says every out-of-home agent i've ever talked to has offered 50 reductions in price when doing a large scale campaign. Most of the inventory is actually pretty cheap if you don't focus on the most premium assets. So where haven't you seen a friend.com billboard? The 101. You haven't seen it in the iconic places. He hasn't done the Times Square buyout. He's in the subway, right? When we saw him, you always make fun of this one.

40:16There's one that's up against a wall. I saw one just on a random bus in my hometown. It's like, there's just There's just like random places, but there's so many of them. Some of the alpha and out of home in LA is there's so much traffic that you're kind of moving slowly by some areas. And you'll just see random stuff. And so, yeah, I was kind of fighting you on this. Like, was this truly one of the greatest campaigns of the year? And hearing his extra context, it's incredible. He might have unlocked some entirely new strategy of just like the go big massive billboard campaign. And I wouldn't be surprised if next year is the year of the copy-paste the strategy for a company that has a million dollars to spend on a big campaign.

41:03Let's do an interesting billboard campaign. Maybe they have a million dollars in revenue, too. Ideally, yes. I mean, he clearly, he's risk-on, exploring, testing new things, learning. but just the core the core arb of like a big billboard campaign paying off I think you gotta credit him you gotta check in with Avi Schiffman did you see his other post he said SF is over still a beautiful place to live hype around LLMs has subsided it's not an interesting place to be anymore why go to a hackathon it's not like GPT-4 just came out there's nothing too interesting to discuss at a party anymore all the big companies are too mature now.

41:47Most of what is new is just YC slop startups. If you're still in pre-seed exploring stage, it's mostly too late. The directions have been positioned in. It's just a performative scene left. There are always a cycle to these things, and this is fine. I've enjoyed 2022 to 2025. I hereby declare New York the new bastion of what matters in the near future could not disagree more with every single pretty much every single word in here um it is uh uh i think this is this is uh i think avi has shown you know brilliance in in some ways even though many uh don't but uh this this was i put this up as one of the worst takes of the year it's just like it's literally like saying like back in in 2000 like it's like saying in the early days of the internet or in the early days of the iphone like hey like yeah it's over just don't build anything yeah obvi underrated reason to stay in san francisco first fin.ai the company's headquartered up there it's the number one ai agent for customer service and i know you love AI agents, Avi, automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel.

43:01Also, you should get in, if you're bored with the hackathon, you're bored with the YC Demo Day, get into shark diving. Go dive in the bay. Put on the seven mil wetsuit. Swim out to Alcatraz. Take on a shark head to head and emerge victorious. I think that will really give you the sort of the glory, you'll be excited again, you will have survived a shark attack. That will energize you in a way that GPT 5.2 might not be energizing you. Totally. Fighting head on with a great white shark in the San Francisco Bay. That's something you can only do in the Bay Area. Or who's making friend.com for sharks, right?

43:43Like a wearable pendant that a shark could use to, you know, better navigate. Maybe they're lonely out in the high seas, right? It's cold. It's dark. Maybe in between hunts, they're just kind of hanging out. Maybe just having a digital companion. Why reserve digital companions for... Why reserve those just for humans? All life matters. Think bigger. The other thing I was thinking, I was saying this yesterday, why has no one made a telemedicine for anabolic steroids for your pets? Somebody has, right? Isn't that a real thing? I think Tyler was saying loyal. I was saying loyal, but I guess it's not really.

44:26I want to see a golden retriever as a mass monster. I think that's just a Rottweiler. Like, I think you just get the Rottweiler. No, but nobody, nobody. A jacked golden retriever would be. I mean, you can make your, like, cattle really jacked, right? That's like what SARMs are. Metformists. So you could just, couldn't you just give it to your dogs? You know way too much about performance enhancing drugs. Anyway. Yeah, just saying. Saying the word SARMs is like, just say that you've been deep in bodybuilding forums, Tyler. Just say you're a day one, more plates, more dates. Well, speaking of...

45:01Restream.com, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Before our first live in-person guest gets to the TBP and Ultra Dump, we got to open a Christmas present. But if you have breaking news, break it down. No, I wanted to talk about this Christmas present. Okay, okay. We got a Christmas present from a friend of the show. So Sahil Bloom, let's open it up. It's on WCM. Also, I got a belt on today. I'm looking much more Santa. Belt it up. Okay, so this is from Sahil Bloom himself. Look at this. Look at this. New brand alert. I love this. So he said, I got sick of putting things on my skin that I never put on my body.

45:41So I spent 18 months creating the perfect solution. The perfect solution, Wild Roman. I can smell it. Everyone says the TBP and Ultram smells bad now. Smells great. This actually smells fantastic. So Wild Roman is 100 % natural skin care for men made with grass-fed tallow, cold-pressed oils, and wild botanicals. You can order today at wildroman.com. I just want to give them a shout out. So this is good stuff. You've been using this? I've been using this for about like two weeks. Wow. I think it's working so far. Two weeks on Wild Roman and you look like that. Yeah. I mean, I think it's helped with beard growth and just general skin clarity.

46:20You look fantastic. Yeah, you're glowing. You're really glowing. Glowing from the inside out. It must be the grass-fed tallow and the cold-pressed oils. Or maybe it's the wild botanicals. But it's clearly good. I just want to say never stop, really, truly never stop using this product. Yeah. Because I do not want you to go back. Never churn. I don't want you to go back. Never churn. I think you're a customer for life. Never churn. Never churn from this. anyway back to the show what do you think it takes to win in this category Sahil's obviously an influencer, an author he has a massive newsletter he has 1.1 million followers on X and has an audience but something we keep coming back to is like an audience might not be enough to truly win in a category I think he's got to go hard on Target Target.

47:12This feels like a good brand to introduce Tallo to the Target audience. This feels, again, like going for the set, a bunch of products out the gates. This screams end cap to me. I was talking to a friend, and they have a brand that does over$100 million a year only in Target. They don't sell anywhere else. And so it's just such a massive channel. And so I think Sahel can probably leverage his brand to just go really hard into Target early. But I'm sure he can at least get some initial traction DTC. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The DTC thing is great just because it gets the business up and running. Kind of like, you know, iron out any of the kinks, get the supply chain going, you know, learn the obvious customer service questions.

48:08Yeah, the main thing that people miss with personality-led influencer brands like this is that no matter how big your audience is, you can be Kim Kardashian. And in order to build a truly big business, you get this initial boost from your audience. But the nature of any audience is that the longer that you just advertise against it, you can saturate it. So like Kim K can post like five times in the first week, but then eventually you have to go find new net new people that aren't necessarily getting exposure. Well, it's a fascinating it's a fascinating question. Anyway, liquidity is having some fun with Databricks.

48:51He says you're laughing. Startups are raising series L's instead of going public and you're laughing. Yeah, it is. It is crazy. I was thinking about the product that Databricks is offering, like the financial product that Databricks is offering. So funny. The deal director who's often in the chat here replied to this and said, don't be salty. VCs need to get paid too. That's it. Couldn't agree more. There is something to the fact of like if you have a growth fund with billions and billions of dollars under management and you need to park a couple hundred mil in a safe place that's going to grow, So it's not some like, Databricks is not like a, oh, it started a year ago AI company that might be gone or there's going to be some different competitive pressure.

49:39It's a real company. It's really going. The Databricks Series L looks pretty good. Anyway. Trey in the chat says, wait, according to Reuters, trying to reverse engineer to ASML's EUV machine with the help of former ASML engineers and its undergoing testing. That's crazy. Well, they've never done this before. That's another good question for Doug. We can get into that. I don't know. It does feel like there's a bit of a boom in lithography machines right now. We had one founder on the show talking about it. And it feels like that was for a long time thought of as unassailable. You could not build a business that was that deep in the chip supply chain.

50:17It was just too difficult. And now people are at least trying. I don't know. Maybe they're seeing a lot. This is what I've always said on the China NVIDIA or just the China AI debate. It's like no matter how many chips you give China, they will never say, oh, yeah, we actually want to be dependent on foreign suppliers for this technology that's so critical to the future. We'd love to just remain dependent. It's like, no, they'll take the chips and they'll continue to innovate and copy and invest to get to parity. I can't believe we got a crossover between good skincare and Databricks, but he's here on the timeline.

50:57Fahd says the real reason Brian is trying to live forever is because he was an early investor in Databricks and is waiting for the liquidity event. Of course, there's probably plenty of times to tender your shares if you want to. I got to say, Brian is looking fantastic in this new image. 2025 is the best he's looked. This is a great version. This is a good take. He went to 2023. This is the trough of disillusionment. Yeah. Trough of a disillusionment. Everyone's like, he looks like he's dying. This can't be good. Look at him now. I think the lighting's also doing a little bit of work there. Yeah, but just the general skin tone.

51:29He just feels more balanced. Yeah. That's good. Well, we mentioned Netflix before. Obviously, they're trying to go for Warner Brothers. Yeah, this is crazy. But they're going for Barstool Sports as well. Before we take you into this story, let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Let's actually pull up the Portnoy video of him announcing. I want to pull up the Portnoy video. So Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool, says, Breaking, I am proud to announce in our continuing 20-plus year evolution, we are now partnering with Netflix for exclusive video podcasts.

52:08And the way he frames this in the video is remarkable, so let's play it. Emergency press conference time. If you haven't heard the news, I'm proud to announce that Barstool is partnered with Netflix for three of our top podcasts. Exclusive video only on Netflix starting next year. I'm talking you want to watch a video of part of my take? Netflix. You want to watch a video of spit and chicklets? Netflix. I actually spit there. That's just my brain. You want to watch a video of Ryan Rosillo's show? Where? Netflix. Netflix. Exclusive video. Audio. Stay the same. Video. Where? Netflix. Netflix. Netflix, Netflix.

52:45We're proud to partner in one of the best and breed companies. That's what we do at Barstool. Evolve, rotate, evolve. Video next year. PMT, Chicklets, Ryan Rissello, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. Yeah. 13 Netflix. So pause, pause, pause. In a 47-second video, 13 mentions of Netflix. Founders out there. Out there. Founders. Technology founders. Next time you think, oh, I need to film this crazy cinematic video. Yeah, that's amazing. I need to film this crazy cinema. I need a studio shot of me sitting down on a couch, looking all put together. Dave is sitting there with a bunch of windows behind it that are reflecting.

53:25Actively spitting. One shot of this video, and it's way more engaging than him just being, you know, trying to be all professional. This is good. I mean, to be fair, like, in order to do that, 20 years. 20 years of experience. Like, most people cannot just one shot that on day one of their career. on camera. It is hard. Anyway, Turbo Puffer, Turbo Puffer, Turbo Puffer. If you want serverless vector and full tech search, Turbo Puffer. If you want something built from first principles and object storage, Turbo Puffer. If you want something fast, Turbo Puffer. If you want something 10x cheaper, Turbo Puffer.

54:00If you want something extremely scalable, Turbo Puffer. It really does work. It just worms its way into your brain. The other big get for I guess the modern tech companies is the Oscars are moving to YouTube, which is a bombshell. Okay, so explain the Oscars. Okay, so it's like, you know how we did the award shows for random obscure achievements? Journalist of the year. Yes, absolute hitter of the year. It's like that, but for movies. Of course, the Oscars are - Very cool. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and they said they reached a deal with YouTube for exclusive rights to the show starting in 2029.

54:44So, I mean, really feels like forever, but I'm sure it'll be upon us in no time, but probably the right time. But it hits particularly hard because it's like the whole show is about the theater. It's about the movie industry. And the movie industry is saying like, yep, YouTube beat us. It's over. It's over. we're so back but also it's over anyway i'll tell you about numeral compliance handled numeral worries about sales tax and vat compliance so you can focus on growth um okay let's pull up this video of uh vlad and then we'll bring in our first what is he holding is he holding an auction paddle earlier i showed one of the many weather contracts we offer on the platform here's another one some people have already started to realize that using prediction markets can be cheaper than conventional fire, flood, and hurricane insurance.

55:39You can just place a trade on your phone without having to deal with a traditional broker. Earlier, I showed one of the many weather contracts. Give your take. I have a take. Let's break it down. So on one hand... Give the funny take first. The funny take is instead of buying insurance, you just... Well, yes, yeah. So the funny thing here is like instead of, you know, insurance is like a pretty cool product. It gives you a lot of peace of mind. You pay for it once a year. Just pulls it out of your bank account. It's kind of automatic. You've got a policy, whatever. You don't have to think about it.

56:12In this scenario, it would be like, okay, you're heading into the next month, and you're like, all right, I'm pulling up the weather charts. I'm trading effectively. Will my house burn down? Will my house burn down from a fire? The other problem here is if you're betting on a fire happening in a certain area, and depending on the odds, and if there's a lot of volume on it, it could very well incentivize somebody to start a fire in your neighborhood. So I think, obviously, I think prediction markets are very cool in a lot of ways. But the CEOs that have been integrating prediction markets have been coming out and giving some pretty wild examples of their value when I think that the value is that consumers want.

56:58They want these product experiences. Yeah. I think that there is a world where, uh, you do wind up building a, like an actual financial product on top of all of this that feels a lot more normal instead of like the DIY version. Uh, but obviously it's very funny. Anyway, we have our next guest, Sarah welcome to the show. And thank you for joining us. Good to see you. Welcome. Uh, you look fantastic. Feeling the Christmas spirit I'm gonna move this out of the way The big snack What's up guys? How you doing? I'm feeling good I'm feeling the spirit I have to take my ear off So I can get the monitor Those look very natural on you Yes, I know They really do I said earlier Before the show started John's more Santa-coated I'm more elf-coated I don't know It's just Anyways, you're looking Like a lot more A lot more polished I like the nails They're like frosted nails.

57:54Yes. There you go. We don't have skin care, but we've got nail art. Okay, cool. Amazing. How did you process the storytelling cycle, news cycle yesterday? We asked pretty much everyone about storytelling. I mean, I'm sure you saw the viral announcement that there's a lot of companies that are hiring people. Storytellers, is this just a rebranding? Is this a valuable thing? If a founder came to you and said, my second hire is going to be a storyteller, what would you say? I'd say that's your job. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So then the question becomes, is it a skill set that you're kind of born with? You maybe start at an 80 % and you can get to 100%.

58:32But if you start at like a 10 % capability-wise, like you should probably just focus on other things, right? You're maybe never going to be great at that. I was classifying it as like it feels like there's like Joe Rogan CEOs, which are CEOs that could go on a three-hour podcast and deliver an amazing performance, some of which would be about the business a lot of which would just be about you know random stuff but it feels like have you seen founders in your portfolio go from just okay to like truly excellent uh i think so i'm an extreme growth mentality person right i'm like if you are smart and you are a high work ethic like most skills are accessible to you yeah not everybody can you know bt bpn right but you can go from like a d to a b plus and that does a lot for your company but I don't think you can outsource it.

59:21And so if you take this like storytelling idea and you just kind of disaggregate it a little bit, you have like channels that have changed, right? This matters and like traditional media, you know, it's having a time of it. It's struggling, right? And so if you think about the job, like does anybody want to like start off as a junior PR consultant today? It's a hard job, right? I'm not saying there's not room for that, but the traditional like low grade version of that, that was, I'm going to call a bunch of journalists. I'm going to repeat the pitch from the company. I have no point of view. I don't really have storytelling or taste, and I'm a C.

59:56I think there's not a lot of room for that, right? Because if you think about it from the reporter's perspective, even if you think about where the attention actually is, you could be like a mid-sized AI influencer and have as much followership as a large media publication that's relevant today, right? And weirdly, the hardest job on our team is Nick, who's somewhere around here, and that is actually just, like, getting inundated with pitches from various PR teams, companies, agencies, et cetera, and he has, like, functionally, he has to say no to 95 % of them just because we don't have, there's no time in the show to do as many as are coming in, so.

1:00:36Yeah, I think there are a lot of people now where they, like, why do they call it storyteller instead of, like, content person or PR or whatever else? Or just advertising specialists. Or advertising specialists. Like the meta has changed, right? It's saying like we need people with taste. We're chasing the moment. There's a lot of noise and we have to like create some signal, even if we want the traditional channels. And so some of it is skill set. Some of it is the story about like what the job is. But I do think a lot of it is hard to outsource and you can get better. We run a grant program, which is like an uncapped note for 10 companies twice a year called Embed.

1:01:12and the highest rated session for the program is a storytelling session. Interesting. Right? So you come and you pitch your company and it goes from like a D minus to an A plus in terms of where people start. But like people get a lot better in the span of a week before they do demo day. And so I definitely think it moves. It is relatively structured, right? It's not like if you're making a film, it's not like, hey, I need to reinvent the hero's journey. Like the structure works. And I think there's the same type of approach you can apply to storytelling about your company. I would have this, I would get sent a deck, and I'm like, your idea is cool and you're great, your deck is terrible, and I would just send a Figma file that is like, here's the deck template, here's like an example for each, like six examples for each slide, just like completely redo it, and then it's automatically like a few times better.

1:02:00But you have amazing intuition for this now, did you start great at it? No, I made so many, no, no, no, no, yeah, it's definitely, yeah, I don't know, I think I started... I've been sort of naturally, I've studied advertising since I was a kid. not directly, but just like understanding like, why do I want this product so much more than this product? Right. And that started with like skateboarding and snowboarding stuff. Right. And so I like fully understood, okay, this, this brand, it's like their event athlete strategy, the design, this collaboration that they did, how, you know, but, uh, but again, like it was very, very refined to get to that ultimate structure that I have in Figma that I can just be like, this is the structure that that has worked for me and it's worked for a bunch of other companies it's like tried and true this structure even just my personal one which i haven't shared broadly has like directly contributed to raising like hundreds of millions of dollars right um just across the years so um i don't know i think you can systematize it yeah there's art and there's alpha in it but it's certainly something you can practice totally um and i think people have discovered that like you need to be good at this now yeah i think that's do you think people well the other thing I've noticed with like company storytelling is like, if it is truly.

1:03:17And people take you more seriously if you do it in an elf costume. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. No, but the thing that I've always found is like, if it's really difficult to get the story out in a cohesive way, then your whole strategy is just effed. Like it's just bad. Right. And if it comes out very naturally, it means that like there's alignment, the strategy makes sense. But if you're like, if making the deck takes, you know, 50 hours, it's like you probably just don't have that great of a story in the first place. Like the actual facts of the situation are not that great. Yeah, this is so true for me.

1:03:50So the version of it is at some point I actually thought I wanted to be a writer. Like, thank God I'm not. I find writing incredibly painful, but I still have to write every week for my work as an investor. Like memos, LP updates. Yeah, yeah. Mostly memos. And And the problem is writing is thinking, right? Storytelling is thinking, right? How do I actually communicate the strategy of the business and do I believe in it? And the difference between like, I'm procrastinating, I'm avoiding writing this memo for six days in a row because I got to talk to my partners about it is I actually understand the strategy of the company or I don't.

1:04:24And sometimes it's because like, I just don't know enough, right? We make our first defense investment and I'm like, well, I need to call like 45 people to understand what I don't understand about this yet in terms of the procurement process or whatever else. How important is electronic warfare? How quickly is this cycle going to go? But some part isn't knowledge. It's just like, does it make sense at all? And I have learned to trust that signal of like, well, if I'm not missing information and it's still not super cohesive, it's not because I'm an idiot. Because I have to go tell this story to recruits and to the media and to the next investor.

1:05:00And if it's hard, they're not going to get it either. Right. And so I think there's substance in that. Yeah. I think, I think part of the, at least backlash or virality around the idea. Still so funny too. To be in Santa. We almost did Santa. We almost did Santa for, for, for Evan from Snap on, on Monday. He's too tasteful for it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not. There you go. It's like the first time, it's the first time you're meeting someone. Like, can you really go full Santa mode? But yeah, I mean, part of the reason there was like some backlash is I think people are worried about startups leaning in, like over-rotating to all style and their substance, all storytelling, no plot.

1:05:37You have to forget that without some plot points, you can't tell a story around it. If you haven't built anything, you didn't raise a funding round. A lot of the stories get told around, we built this thing, we satisfied this customer, we hired these people. You also need tension. You need some adversity, right? So we'll have founders come on and we're like, aren't, is this not like the most hyper competitive category? And they'll be like, no, it's not. And then like, not give like the followup as to why. And it's like, it's okay if it's competitive, if you're going to win, uh, and you might be the one to win, but you, it's better to just admit like it's competitive and like, here's what, here's what the market is like missing.

1:06:17Yeah. Uh, sometimes people don't want to share whatever their alpha is, but yeah. So I, um, I've like learned a little bit more about, I'm just going to go ahead and say marketing, advertising storytelling but like that category of things that has existed for a little while over time but i'm still like i taught marketing at warren but i'm i'm like at my core wow she didn't just study she wrote the book i studied storytelling i studied a little bit i was a ta um but uh but like i'm a product absolutist yeah to your point of i actually had just this like pretty full contact debate with a founder in our portfolio very recently about um how much of like the success of a company is its ability to raise money, get to momentum, look like it's winning to customers, look like it's winning to hires and go faster than others.

1:07:06Yeah. And I'm like, well, you know, there's some, it depends on the space, right? And if you're in, take an example, like late 2010 SaaS, the degree of freedom you have for like what you're going to go build in any given category not to denigrate the product work. It's just like you can only do so much without fundamental technology change if you have certain integration points and certain workflows. Totally. And you can have amazing execution there. But I'm like, you know what you probably want to do? Invest in people who understand the workflow, have amazing execution, and are total animals about like storytelling and momentum and all of that, right?

1:07:45And that doesn't mean there's no substance. It's just like, well, there's not as much creativity. That doesn't sound like 2010 advice though. That sounds like advice today. No, no, no. Okay, so today, I would argue, actually, like... Is it different? Yes, okay. There's more white... I mean, late 2010 SaaS, there was no... It was struggling to find white space, I think. Like, if you look at... The things you couldn't build were not that different. Well, yeah, the 2021 era, you saw this, like, it was crypto and fintech. Sure, there was a lot of SaaS, but, like, even with fintech, there wasn't...

1:08:17There was some new infrastructure with fintech that made it easier, but yet that you were still competing with companies that started five, six years ago. And so that was, that was just really rough. And so I think the difference today is like, we have super powerful LLMs, we have machines that can think. And so maybe there's like a little bit more like kind of random white space and categories that you can find and go digging in. I was talking to an investor friend yesterday about this and he, like we were discussing whether or not you just want to invest in the smartest people you could within some constraints of like they can convince other people to come to their cause and such.

1:08:53And I'm like, I actually think there's a much better strategy now than it was in the late 2010s, 2020 period. Because you're like, well, the variance on what you can build is really wide, right? And that's both information and like ability, creativity. People are trying to, you know, they're trying to build very different products even in software. And it depends on like what you think you can do with models or robots or hardware, whatever it is, right? And I think it's just like broader. And if you can do more different things with product, it matters more. So substance matters more than ever.

1:09:24Yeah. Yeah. But storytelling too. If you believe in the midwit meme, then you should invest in the smartest founders, but also the dumbest founders. Because who knows they might lock into the same thing. No, I don't think that works. I think that works. I think that works in CPG, actually. I think it works in CPG. I've seen some people on both sides do very, very well. And in the middle, it's like innovating on four to five different dimensions. It's like way too complicated and tends to. Anyway, tell me, what is a Neolab? OK, so there's this category of company that has been, you know, a handful of these things have been funded this year that are quite controversial in the investing community, which is essentially like we're going to raise a solid amount of money.

1:10:08Let's say, you know, 50, 100 million dollars plus. And we are going to invest in large scale AI research and training up front. Yeah. So not a wrapper company. Not a wrapper company, though. We can come back to that. And I think this is like one of the reasons it's so interesting is because you had this dominant narrative for a lot of the last couple years of just like how could you compete with Google and OpenAI. And maybe people threw Anthropic in there. Yeah, but that was the first. And it's notable because if you're trying to build like a new LLM or maybe have some new ideas around that type of product, and people are already saying like, oh, OpenAI can't compete with Google because Google has all this cash flow.

1:10:51And even though they have like almost a billion weekly actives, like they're burning so much money. And then you get a new company, a NeoLab, that's like, oh yeah, we're also going to compete and we don't have any users and we have a fraction of the money. And so that's why I think it's been like almost a narrative violation if you're going to like, or at least like contrarian to say like, no, we actually are going to bet even more into this category. So point of clarification, thinking machines, SSI, Anthropic, are those Neo Labs or are the Neo Labs post those labs? I think the definition would be post those labs.

1:11:25But that was the first generation of this because they also fought that narrative. And opening I did before then. Totally. And so I think this is like this big open question in venture investing. Like it opens a can of worms of like, well, how much money do you need to go do venture investing? at conviction. I got to say like 14 times, like we would argue not that much necessarily if you're very early, but, um, no, it changes the economics completely to like growth fund. You need to be able to build a position because it used to be, you could take a flyer for two percent, you know, get, get 10 % of the company for a couple million bucks.

1:12:01And if that's just not going to happen on day one, it's just the economics just don't work. So is that changing your fund or have you figured out of the way? It's not for us. We have supported some new research lab efforts, but I think that's also a tactical thing of how early you are. But I think the broader thing that is really interesting is this narrative violation or question of, is scale the only thing that matters? And if you're going to spend the GDP of a medium sized country on training, can anybody keep up with you? Or... Yeah, even if, so Greg had a video that came out yesterday or this morning at OpenAI, and he was just saying, we've tried everything but scale, and scale is the thing that works, right?

1:12:48And so, again, it's very contrarian to be like, well, no, we actually can come up with, if you're raising$100 million to compete with these other labs, you're saying, like, we don't need scale just because you're never going to be able to compete on scale when these anthropic and open AI are running away in the capital markets. You know, I think one of the more nuanced arguments about these things has been, let's a bunch of people can go raise hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to, you know, $100 billion plus, which is a wild claim to begin with. Even so, like where you spend that money matters, not just size, right?

1:13:26And so like one of the things that's happened with open source is there are large pre-trained models, some Chinese, some European, now hopefully more and more American ones that people work with and are really powerful. Like the big joke that Silicon Valley runs on Quen. And they're like distilling them. They're distilling them. And, and they're also, I think if you're a research lab, you tend to be post-training or just trying entirely different architectures. And, and like, so people are, the argument I think goes something along the lines of, you know, more is better eventually, right? Like I do need the GDP of Japan in compute.

1:14:02But on day one, Ilya Satsukovar basically said this, like in the age of research, We need some amount of money to just validate our ideas. Yeah. But it's not a trillion dollars. Yeah. I mean, his interview I took away, he's like kind of like we're going to do a couple million here, a couple million here, a couple million here. I think it's a little bigger than that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. But the idea is like he's not just like we're one-shotting. We're going to try to one-shot this with 60 % of the dollars that we've raised. Sure. It's much more, again, experimental research driven. Yeah. And then I think the second part of the argument of like, you know, we're doing actually new things versus fighting symmetric warfare with Ant or OpenAI, which is like seemingly a bad idea in Google, you know, money machine, is that if you have these pre-trained models, like we can just focus.

1:14:52If you have the GDP of Japan and you have the GDP of Germany and, you know, I have some other equivalent country, California, right? Let's give it up for California. Let's go, California. We love you. Total failure of governance, an accident of history. We're still cooking. Still cooking. Still cooking. Thank you, semiconductors. But if everybody has some huge amount of money, and I put it all toward post-training or self-improvement or diffusion or SSMs or some other bet, and you're serving inference and also doing pre-training and whatever else, then my effort on the thing that matters might be bigger than your effort, even if you have more money overall.

1:15:34That's the story. Let me pitch you on a fund thesis and I want you to push back on it potentially or agree with it. So I have a growth fund. Wait, tell me now and then let me do it. Okay, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Let's say I have like a billion dollar fund. I'm gonna put a hundred million dollars in 10 of these Neo labs, one hundred million dollars each. They're all gonna go and try different ideas. And my thinking is 10 % chance one of them goes really, really big. Um, but, but, but I'm also underwriting these on talent acquisitions. Yeah. And I say that, Hey, for, you know, I'm not going to lose money on basically any of these, even though I'm paying crazy prices at seed for just a couple of people with barely an idea.

1:16:17Um, I'm going to get a lot of money out because the, because the big hyperscalers are going to continue to acquire. Yeah. Are you telling me, I think that party's over or do you think, no, there's going to be an endless stream of billion dollar acquisitions coming out of the hyperscalers? Yeah, it's like shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land in Satya's arms. Yes. Is that true? I do think that is part of the calculus that's happening here, where the distribution of outcomes is like, without naming names, but how many people want to hire Ilya or Miramirati or Barrett or any of these folks that have started new labs, It's like a lot of people that could have that think that winning an AI race is very valuable to them.

1:17:01Yeah. So you think that the hyperscalers definitely aren't like exhausted of these like lab tuck-ins, lab tuck-ins. Okay. So the actual. Well, and I think my point of view is like as long as you have a bunch of people spending something in the range of$100 billion a year, and they believe that by spending a billion dollars to acquire a team that they can make that money go further, there's a good chance that they will. It's always been easy to do. And if there's, again, if there's like a pullback and new information, then you start to run the calculus of like, well, we're actually cutting spend and we've figured out what we need to figure out.

1:17:38And just adding five new smart people to the team is not going to give us that much of an edge in this market. Yeah, I think this is exactly right where one of the craziest reframings of this to me made by somebody at a large lab with a lot of money to spend is like, just imagine Jordy is a researcher and like his GPU budget for experimentation is$100 million personally. Right. And I have to give that to him all the time. So he works here for four years. He gets$400 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Otherwise, you start looking around. You say, look at... You're going somewhere else. Well, and the question is, like, well, then, how much am I willing to pay for Jordy?

1:18:21Sure. Or the talent that is 1 % better, 10 % more likely to, like, make the thing work? Actually, a lot of money, right? Because, like, the way... I'm not saying that you should start your growth fund with this risk calculus. It takes a certain strength of gut, right? Right. But it's not irrational to be like these players have already committed to spend X billion dollars of compute over the next years. And they will look at the people as leverage on that compute. Totally. And so like I don't I mean, lots of things can happen in the macro and people can change their minds. And some of these contracts are on performance.

1:19:02They're not like fully solid. But the way it looks now, I'd be like, I think people are going to keep spending money here. So you're probably safe with your fund. Amazing. No financial advice. If the fund pans out, I'm going big on Christmas. What should I give to all of the founders in my portfolio who have made me so much money? How do you think about gifting? Is there a top gift recommendation for this Christmas season? Is there anything that you can share about top gifts? Yes. Is there anything you can think about? Yeah, look at the Christmas theme on this too. We got Santa Claus. Yeah, this is a gift to advertising.

1:19:40I learned recently that Coke made the modern. We fact-checked this. It's not true. They solidified it. No, they solidified it. They solidified it. They popularized it. They basically like. They didn't create the meta, but they owned it. They owned it. They story told around it. Yeah. They story told around it. Over substance. So gift guide or maybe like a book recommendation that you could put under the tree. I always like giving books. What do you have? No, I'm a big books person. I want people to give me time and books, and nobody seems to be able to give me time. Oh, no, no, no. That's deep.

1:20:12Whoa. That's crazy. Yeah, my husband hates this. He's like, what do you want for Christmas? Do you want, like, stuff? Do you want jewelry? I'm like, no, I want time. And he's like, you suck. That's a terrible answer. Make it easy, man. Maybe he should get you a luxury watch on GetBezil.com or sponsor. What's better? The only way you can get time is if you get a watch on GetBezil.com, of course. Nice, nice. He said that. How are you processing the current moment and what are you looking out for in the next 12 months? It feels like it's hard to think that we could go, things could get crazier. I disagree.

1:20:48Can I give one book recommendation and then we'll talk about 26? Okay, only one. No, I'm going to give you three. So I think Dan Wang's book, Breakneck, on China and the U.S. was really good. It's worth reading. it's like a little stylized but I think like really substantive actually just good storytelling I suppose there's a book on Imbruvica like I think a lot of people are suddenly like interested in biotech I'm not saying that's bad I think biotech is amazing and it will get a lot more impactful and it's like more efficient but the book is called I think it's called For Blood and Money but it's about great title I'm interested it's sexy it doesn't sound like a textbook As hot as and interesting as a book can be about a non-technical founder of like a breakout leukemia drug Like this is worth reading.

1:21:38Okay, very cool. Very cool. Um, and then If anybody okay, I mean this is a lot of tech nerds in this audience So if anybody hasn't read masters of doom, okay, this is a story of like the like the Carmack Best era of the video game industry Carmack worth reading. All right. These are great Masters of Doom is great. Okay, actually I have one more niche one. There's also the Prince of Persia book by Stripe Press. That's a good one in that Masters of Doom. No, I haven't read it. Now I'm excited. That's sort of like a similar theme. Okay, I'm going to screw up this title because it's... Speaking of storytelling, I mean, the story of an individual video game is particularly great because it's a tech company, but it's always hard to tell the story of a full tech company that just keeps going and going and going.

1:22:18And the video game companies, they do, but you can also tell just the story of that one game. Yeah, it's this multi-year project. Exactly. Whereas no one's like, oh yeah, we needed to talk about like, you know, the story of Figma in 2018 specifically. Like it's like this whole, it's such a broader arc. Yeah. Anyway, other book recommendations or are we going 26? Predictions. Okay. Maybe last niche one. Yeah. Though we could do the rest of the episode this way. The, there's a book, I'm really interested in like what environments make for good ideas. Right. Oh yeah. And like consistently good ideas because part of like extreme growth mentalities, you think environment matters.

1:22:52How do we like help people create the environment where they're doing their best work? There is a book called Apprentice to Genius. And it's about a series of researchers at NIH and Johns Hopkins that had like just huge contributions to biology, chemistry, science for a while. Like way more than you should have in just a small lab over like decades. Was it the feng shui of the building or something? What about the environment? with obviously like the academic environment. Yeah, I think it's a... Even a couple key people that were kind of like around during that period. It is definitely about a couple key people.

1:23:32But the question is like, how come their students also are like Nobel Prize winners, right? Because it's hard to imbue the next person with like magical creativity. Just go win a Nobel Prize. Here's the playbook. Yeah, but like three times in a row, man. And so I think... Just look at this deck. Study this deck. study this figma file for an hour and you'll be actually an online course now yeah nobel available for a thousand dollars for a grand with with uh clarno payments attached so how did i get this lambo i won a nobel prize and then they sold a course on how to win a nobel prize the course is 9.99 yeah yeah how are you what are you looking forward to this next year what What are you kind of wary of?

1:24:17I think all the other investors should go away and leave AI alone. Oh, okay. It's over, everyone. It's over, guys. It's over. I'm sorry. The demand was not real. Just look at the Oracle stock price. That's what's happening here. You picked clean. If I can't move the markets that way. No, I'd. Okay, here. I have really high conviction that, like, you know, 26 is going to be a year of a bunch of new applications of AI. And that doesn't mean that there won't be, like, market panic or some bumps. Of course, people, like, claim it's winter. But I think there is now so much proof that the models are powerful in a bunch of different domains.

1:24:59Yeah. And it starts with ones that maybe are not, like, so obviously commercial. you know, rent tech aside, people are like, what can you do with math? Right. I feel like, oh, here's my prediction for 26 that you can like come back to me on is I think somebody out there is going to make a lot of money, like hundreds of millions of dollars on AI trading. Like it's not happening at that scale yet, but people are certainly going to try. And I see no reason that way. But do you think that would happen on wall street? Will there just be like a pod that is like training models or is that like a startup in Silicon Valley?

1:25:34Because they're very different cultures. I would love to see it be a startup. It would be fun if it was our team, but I think it's going to be, who knows? I think people are already trying it in lots of different environments. I have talked to some high-froquency traders who are just like, yeah, I worked at Meta and like Meta is better at machine learning than we are. I don't know if that's like holds across the entire industry, but I do think that like the ad tech industry might be better, even though the high-frequency trading industry is a little sexier and a little bit more discreet. Well, yeah, one reason you might see a startup do it is just because the labs have been, and just the West Coast has been recruiting from some of these trading firms on the East Coast.

1:26:14And so they already have the experience, and then they're like, hey, we made something that's pretty smart. And we're seeing, I think, NASDAQ announced 24-hour trading, and there is a lot of volatility just in general. Last question for me. do you uh we've been wrestling with this debate over whether uh some of these ai tools become like video games we talked to the founder of suno and it's like and mid-journey similar where there's a lot of people that are using mid-journey as a prosumer tool there's other people that are using mid-journey just as like a game like they have an idea for a funny image they make it and then they're satisfied when they get that image that they created i think there's a lot of people that are creating songs on suno and then just enjoying them themselves and they're not actually sharing them anywhere.

1:27:00How are you thinking about the nature of gen AI interfacing with prosumer, maybe new consumer flows, this gamification? Is any of that resonating from you or any of the portfolio companies? Yeah. Okay. So one thing I have, I think it's inspiring as an idea, is that most people are much more creative than they get to express in daily life, right? If you are a creative of any type, like people have more ideas and points of view than they have tools and skills to go execute. And so if AI allows people in images and music and video, I don't know if it's a good thing in writing with slop, but, or code even, right?

1:27:40Like if you can make things at a much higher level, then you're like, you're going to enjoy making things and making more things, right? Like, you know, what's the like saying inside every adult is an artist, because who doesn't draw when you're a kid? I feel like some people just don't know what the process, like people that get viewed as like creative people are often people that just take two very different ideas and put them into one idea. Yeah. Take something that's working and make it different. And I think once people, I've seen people in their head kind of like unlock that concept and then they realize like, oh, I can be creative because like here's a product that I like.

1:28:15What if I made it healthy? But did they make Santa? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What if we made a soda and then marketed it by creating Santa Claus? And we're back to storytelling. I guess one question, maybe fun prediction. How many dollars do you think will be spent on ads within LLMs next year? I think it's a little early. That's my feeling. I can see it ramping in the back half of the year. Because I think the ads are going to be extremely effective. people are saying like oh a lot of these queries are not that high intent it's just research but i think that a lot more of them i think a meaningful amount are product research and once you're driving these sort of like high intent clicks i think it will scale pretty quickly but i think it will take i think it will i think this will be like a second half of the year 2026 story as it starts to scale but we've had founders on the show that have said like when somebody lands on my site from chat gbt they can convert at seven percent and my average conversion rate is like three percent yeah so it's like i think people don't quite um i think when it happens it's gonna happen really fast and the question is just like how quickly can the companies with a bunch of traffic build any kind of product because the inventory is going to be so good and i think it's useful to look at um open evidence as a like precursor here so it has been reported that the company went from like two to 150 million of ad run rate already oh yeah it's fully ad supported this is llm for doctors it's the biggest ad business in ai today right i forgot about that and like what happened they made a product that was free that was so useful to doctors because you're literally answering the question of like well i don't know what's happening in this area of like personalized medicine for this domain of oncology for this type of patient right i'm from Wisconsin.

1:30:09So we'll use Wisconsin as an example. Like, uh, I am a doctor in rural Wisconsin. That's never seen this type of leukemia. Right. Um, so I'm going to ask open evidence for help. Guess what? Like, that's a really high intent query to go serve ads. Here's a treatment. Yeah. Um, and, and so I think when you compare that to the ad inventory that exists in the world, which is just like, I'm looking at a bunch of random stuff. My average query is two words or whatever. Like I think that it's going to be amazing when it happens. And there's some amount of, there's, there's a level of trust that I think someone will have with open evidence that they maybe don't have with Google search.

1:30:45Totally. Yeah. They understand what the sources are. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, research, trials, et cetera. It's generated data from other doctors. So I think, I think that if you can make the right products here, it's going to be very big. My only question is like how, how quickly they make those ad products. Last, last question. Are you long or short forward deployed engineer? Like the model? I think it is a symptom of how quickly AI is happening. And so like if the long is people are going to pay for a lot of FTE next year, huge bull, right? So maybe more like 2027, 2028. 2028, I think like in the long run, like you should deliver that as a product and people are going to.

1:31:29I don't think, I think FTE happens when people don't have, a transition happens too quickly or they don't have the talent or the ability organizationally to do like change management, the corporate term. But it's real, right? It's really hard to like completely transform an asset manager or a big public company. And so like that's what you're paying for in 26 and 27 and maybe 28. But I think eventually it's going to be product. Yep. Well, thank you so much for coming by. I wish we had more time. This was fantastic. Thank you for having me, guys. Thank you. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Hit the gong.

1:32:04Hit the gong for conviction. Hit the gong for conviction, all the progress you've made. And we will bring in Doug O 'Loughlin. Woo! The president of Semi Analysis is coming on. Great hanging. TBPN. While we bring him in from the Restream Waiting Room, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. and we've been keeping Doug waiting, but let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra Dome. Doug, how are you doing? Whoa, look at that. Outer galactic Doug. I'm so glad that the shirt was delivered. It looks fantastic on you.

1:32:42Dude, it's great. I've been telling, we're going to make some analysis. Like we're going to try to do this for us. It's so good. You have to. I got it yesterday. I actually didn't realize I was on today. I just wore it today for work. I'm like, I'm not, I'm not joking. and then I was like, oh my God, my schedule, my calendar, I'm doing this. I was like, dude, this is perfect. Yeah, I mean, we were talking and Tyler was like, oh, did you book Doug specifically because you knew that Amazon was going to do this deal with OpenAI? He's the perfect person to talk to. Yeah, we booked Doug because we love Doug.

1:33:14I said, no, they did the deal because they knew Doug was going on TBPN on Wednesday, December 17th. They were like, we got to give him something to talk about. let's do a deal. And so Sam and Andy, they got together and they were like, this is good content for TBPN and semi-analysis. Anyway, take us through your reaction to the deal. And if you could actually just start with like setting the table on where are we on the Tranium narrative? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it like, what do we know? How is it changing? What's the updated thinking around just Amazon's chip efforts? So I think it's pretty good.

1:33:55We wrote an article about Tranium 3. We think it's going to be a lot better than Tranium 2, mostly because there's a lot of interaction and help from the labs themselves. And let's not forget, oh my God, it's beautiful. Let's not forget, one of my favorite parts of this whole story is, everyone's like, okay, we wrote about the TP article and people hated it because we said, oh, it's a Ruben clickbait. Where did all the TPU engineers go? A lot of them went to training. So this is too, this brain rots to Nvidia focused. I botched it. Um, but I like, we wanted to give you some brain rot. We wanted to put the brain rot directly in the show.

1:34:31Cause we've been, we've been enjoying the brain rot edits and we thought, what if we did it live? But, uh, my prompting was maybe below, below standard, but I like the, is it a cake or not? That's pretty good. I honestly forgot about basically. Anyway, sorry. Just resetting on training. You wrote the article, obviously. There was a bunch of back and forth, but how are you thinking about it currently? So, look, I think we actually, in the semi-analysis premium product that I've managed, we definitely made a call that we thought there would be some kind of announcement open at reInvent. Mostly because, and first principles, here's what it is.

1:35:08Data center execution is starting to become a real issue. Oracle's delayed, Fairwater's delayed, and Core's and Query is delayed. And you know who is not delayed? Amazon. Amazon has, like, their execution is flawless when it comes to data center and power. And I think they're going to put, like, five, six gigawatts online next year. It's a big number, like a huge number. And so OpenAI is always trying to secure more compute at every single point in time. And who has the most power available to them and has a project that they, you know, obviously are very interested in getting more customers for.

1:35:42I think OpenAI's power constraint is going to, like, that's one of the reasons why the deal. And then also, you know, OpenAI is always down for fresh money. At this point in time, they're like, they're hitting up Disney, they're hitting up SoftBank, everyone who has money, they're trying to get money on investment from. So that's kind of like, you know, a win-win for them. Okay. So the question that I was kicking around was there's a, there's, there's this$10 billion investment into OpenAI from Amazon. Simultaneously, OpenAI has around 38,$37 billion of commitments with AWS over a series of years.

1:36:20And my, my question is like, how, how do we see, how do you think about the way, the way OpenAI will be working with AWS and Tranium chips broadly, is it something where they can basically make all of their models multi-platform and run them and kind of create one fluid compute resource, a pool of compute that can fluidly shift across Tranium and GPU from NVIDIA? or are they going to sort of take the Tranium chips and have a specific model, like maybe they'll do their video generation over there or their image generation or they have old 4.0 workloads that are sticking around longer than they expected.

1:37:07Let's replatform that model to Tranium and have it run really cheaply on Tranium or something like that. Like, is it a per-use partnership or is it something that cuts across the entire org? Do you have any visibility into that?

1:37:25Did we lose audio? I'm not hearing Doug. Lost him. How about now? Now we're good. Sorry about that. Okay, we're back. We're so back. I don't think we have perfect visibility, first and foremost, but you can look at someone who's already doing that, which is Anthropic. Anthropic uses TPUs. They use GPUs and they use Tranium. Okay. And so there's a certain level that you can abstract it at. And I think TPUs, for example, is trying to do it on Torch TPU, right? So at PyTorch. And I think having the multiple compute, like elastic pools of compute is good for negotiating power. And that's probably in OpenAI's interest, but it's like a pain in the ass to get this to work.

1:38:05So there's like two brains. One, if you're really focused, you just buy more of one and be the best at it. Two, at the same time, you get to pay less gross margins if you can kind of diversify your suppliers instead of just one. It's possible. Anthropic has shown you that people can do it. They already have. And that's probably what we – yeah, so that's kind of my brain. I think it really comes down to the power constraint, dude. That's what Amazon has that no one else has. And that's like – that's the art of the deal, if that makes sense. And also, I think it's the – Is that a – is that – like does that tell me that Amazon was more excited about the AI buildout a year or two ago?

1:38:45they didn't pause when Satya Nadella went through that pause? Or is it just Amazon's been building sort of linearly, growing, growing, growing for a decade, two decades? And so this is just more of the same what we should have predicted from Amazon. Do you have an idea of like, is this them catching up? Is this them just maintaining their level of excitement? Well, I mean, part of it, if you look at Oracle's like backlog announcement, they were basically saying we're going to build AWS in like a couple of years. Meanwhile, AWS has, you know, multi-decade head start. And it's like, yeah, we're also that, like, imagine they're thinking, like, we're going to build that capacity, too.

1:39:25And you're welcome to, like, you know, have your deal with Oracle. But it makes sense that Amazon can kind of, like, beat them to the punch. Yeah, I think that that's, I think what Jordy said is probably more down the more realistic of what's happened. So like last year, we had the pause from Microsoft. Obviously, it's a big deal. But even before the pause, Microsoft at the infrastructure level was never as sophisticated from Azure versus AWS. AWS is the OG all-in-house, did everything themselves, and has like a very reactive and like battle-tested infrastructure. And like, hey, they're the largest logistics company in the United States.

1:40:06They're one of the largest logistic companies in the entire world. before all this AI stuff, they had the biggest amount of compute and the biggest, you know, the biggest infrastructure show and all like the whole pipeline and platform and all of this. And I think that that's the like, pretty much they finally got everything turned in the right direction with a focus on more AI. And then you're seeing the results of that about a year and a half later, like, right. But you're, you're, while Microsoft pulled back, they pushed ahead. And then now all of their long-term investments are going to start to bear fruit meaningfully in 26 and 27.

1:40:37So that's the, I think that that's the simplistic way to think about it. When I work, when I talk to, and I work with people who have worked with, let's say, and this is like from the before times, you know, before GPUs, the difference between AWS and Azure is like, you know, junior varsity, varsity, like they're a totally different league. And I think that that's, that's that, and you don't bet against AWS's infrastructure, like execution there. We've seen almost like, like Oracle is a perfect example, dude. It's been delay after delay after delay. Like these timelines are starting to be pushed out.

1:41:09And we think that that's going to become like, you know, more than just like trying to find power. It's just like converting that power into a power shell seems to have a real execution risk. And I think Amazon is more money good from that perspective. How did you process the AWS like direct pipe to GCP news? It seems like they're maybe trying to get into more like cross data center training. I know Google has some experience there. is AWS, is that something that the big labs are demanding at this point? Because they're all so multi-cloud. Are there any special offerings other than, or is it really just like, hey, we just have capacity and no one else does and that's enough?

1:41:51I mean, I think the labs probably demand it. And historically, the biggest rake that everyone got paid or had to pay in the multi-cloud world was egress and ingress. I don't know, you remember maybe 2019, everyone was like, oh, these freaking egress fees are too high. And that's kind of how what they did is they forced all the data to stay inside their data centers, and they charged you crazy to open the door. I think that's just kind of breaking because they're seeing that the customer's absolute size is so large and they need so much demand that you have to pay. How do you win these customers?

1:42:29Well, you need to build a pipeline, a door to your data center, especially if your data center isn't where they started at. Their data lives in Azure and not in AWS. You want to have a door to AWS because up until now, it was everything lived in AWS. So I think that's kind of the story there. Yeah, I definitely think the multi-data center training and inference probably to a certain extent is like, maybe not inference, but that's part of the story too. I also think maybe even rolling back to the previous question in terms of like there was a paper or article where maybe it was like a conversation that Anthropic had where there are different models that have different TCOs and different values on different hardware.

1:43:10So like certain types of hardware I think is much more profitable on certain types of memory bound and or like flops bound. And so I do think having all those different options is going to have a better cost per use per model per hardware. And so I think that that's going to be a strategically valuable thing going forward in terms of lowering the cost of AI. Do you expect to see any announcements on the commerce side between OpenAI and Amazon? We were talking earlier, it feels like this could be a scenario where Disney invested in OpenAI. And in exchange, as part of that, Disney is giving them a one-year exclusive on all that IP, which is an insane, I think, underrated advantage.

1:43:53with Amazon, you can imagine ChatGPT, OpenAI has been working since inception to be able to monetize some of the product like some of the purchasing that they are driving across the internet and could be but at the same time, Amazon is a $60 billion ad business and they want to protect that and that's based on people landing on Amazon and searching for products there My impulse is not no way, man that's like the you know that's like the unassailable that's the golden goose so yeah it's the golden goose why would you let why would you let the fox into the into the henhouse like just no way no way yeah so so the weaker weaker companies have the etsy's of the world have said like yeah we'll do it because if we they have more to win yeah your background makes it look like you're in space are you developing a thesis around data centers in space or is that coming.

1:44:50I know you probably don't want to leak too much alpha on this particular show, but how are you thinking about it? What's the timeline? Is there going to be a space data center model for sale anytime soon? So you're talking, I'm from the space data center team, research team at SemiAnalysis right now on the ISS. And I'm... Santa Tracker online. Santa Tracker online. And I'm going to be honest with you, I'm a space data center hater you're a huge space data i'm a i'm a giant hater i'm sorry i know i know gavin talked about it gavin's really intelligent and like a very well-spoken smart individual in the space but like guys it is hard to train a model on earth today it's hard enough to train a model it's hard to it's hard to build a box and put some chips in it and plug it in and on earth yeah it's it's dude we're telling me that we have power delays on earth yes wait what's gonna like we you know it's hard to square those things um and so and so and so hater hater i mean the pushback there would obviously be like there's a lot of energy in space solar energy but but again it it uh i just felt like there was like a very organized uh effectively narrative pump tied to this.

1:46:12I mean, do you want to know why? Come on. I can tell you the answer. I can tell you the answer. It's because SpaceX is racing. Yeah. You got to remember what bag is being pumped at any given time, and the fact that you heard the SpaceX round come out maybe a few weeks later is not... It's that... It was within the same week that the$800 billion round details came out. I could see them raising more now because they've announced the like target one and a half trillion. So like that just creates space for like the pre IPO round, which could land at easily a trillion or north of a trillion. Now that all these people realize like, hey, it's going to go out.

1:46:58I'm going to have like a shorter liquidity timeline. And so, yeah, I would expect, you know, more. I think that's part of it. But also, you know, if we're talking about data centers in space, there's only one service provider, right? The whole, so like, you know, one of the reasons why I'm like a hater of data centers in space is like, hey, like, you know, a 3200 pounds, or whatever, a one ton GB200 on Earth costs a lot of money, 10x the cost to get it into space, right? But if a space data center was to ever happen, there's only one company that has really lowered the cost of moving something from on Earth into space.

1:47:34And so if that was to even be part of the TAM, all of that TAM would belong to SpaceX. So that's my belief, at least, is that when these large narratives come around, a very large funding round, it isn't a coincidence. Maybe that's what they were talking about in the SpaceX round. And that's where you're starting to hear all this stuff. hey, this is something in their long-term planning. And then, you know, investors who are very excited about it, talk about it. That's very possible. And if there are data centers in space, I promise you SpaceX will be doing it. Let's put it that way. However you feel about it, I promise you SpaceX will be doing it.

1:48:09It's sort of the same thing as like the Mars narrative, which is still years and years away and, you know, maybe decades away. But you still have this like call option on it because if we get to Mars, is probably going to be a space. Something I've been thinking about is, I mean, it seems like, I mean, so far Paramount's Skydance effort to acquire Warner Brothers seems to be falling apart a little bit. Warner Brothers board doesn't want to do it. They're happy with Netflix. It seems like Netflix very clearly is like good for the deal and there's less certainty on the Paramount side or at least that's how Warner Brothers board is positioning it.

1:48:50and I have to imagine that there's a handful of people that are looking at that money that was like soft circled by the Gulf. And they're like, I want, I want those tens of billions of dollars. So like if you're SpaceX or you're open AI and you're like seeing an opportunity of like, Hey, this, this kind of money was soft circled for a deal that might not be going through. Everybody should be going after that. Yeah. You should be raising, always be closing, bro. Always be closing. Always be closing. I wanted to ask you about storytelling, but in a very specific context. Obviously, everybody on the timeline was talking about storytelling this week, if you should hire a storyteller.

1:49:30But I wanted to ask you about Meta, specifically their storytelling, because they came out this year with this story around personal super intelligence. And then there was some reporting recently, I forget by who, that was saying some of the execs apparently were just like, like, hey, we should just work on ads, basically. Like, let's just make the core business better. And I feel like I personally, as a user in the meta ecosystem, I have no idea what, like, personal superintelligence, like, really means, right? Is it a better, like, are you trying to deliver a better version of ChatGPT and get into the search business as a meta shareholder?

1:50:12I'm like, I don't know. I also don't totally know what it means. And so my question is, do you think that meta needs to kind of dial that in, or do we just let them cook and we can form an opinion once they ship? Look, so okay. I think forming an opinion when they ship is the most reasonable way to live your life instead of speculating, but I'm going to put my Zuck hat on, okay? Zuck hat on. Let's think about how I would do this. 3 billion people use our products every single day and it's an important part of your day-to-day thing. I would argue the ChatGPT universe is actually – don't even include us.

1:50:54Include the United States actually. We are high RPRU users who pay for Macs or Pro or whatever and can amortize, know how to use these things. The adoption in the United States is pretty high. The long tail of meta users is pretty astounding. you know, in some places in Southeast Asia, like, hey, meta or like WhatsApp, which is owned by meta is like the primary mean for people to do business on, right, for people to talk to other businesses. Hey, all of a sudden, like, I'm sure have you ever done like a random like tour in like Southeast Asia or like Japan or like wherever the hell you go on? And you like, you know, you sign up for it and they send all these things.

1:51:33There's clearly like a whole business flow behind it. WhatsApp actually does have a ginormous, you know, billion user moat that I think can like kind of, you know, kind of become the super app. That but the other thing, they have to be feeling pretty confident with the experience with Threads where they have effectively ported their user base to an entirely new app. Like, I believe they could at some point, once they're confident in the product experience, get the meta AI app to half a billion users in the way that they, I don't think Threads is at that yet, but it's at hundreds of millions of active users.

1:52:10And that distribution advantage does give them the potential to, like, come from behind, especially in some of these sort of more international markets. I mean, have you guys ever seen the really sloppy, I think they're app-loving app advertisements, actually, for the games. It's like the guy, and he's shooting a gun, and you press one. It's like the pure brain rot video game ad that gets you to click through. Meta has the ability, in my opinion, to serve that kind of crap in your feed that is so gamified it makes you press a button. When I am doom-scrolling on Reels or something like that, occasionally there would be a thread where they have like such a debated ridiculous title where I'm like I just have to see that and of course it ends like the word before the hook that you want to know the answer and so you click it and then you go through and then like that's how you can like juice our poo so yeah you're I think you're right there no one else has quite the on-ramp I think in terms of engaging active users asap if they wanted to but I think you have to have like Like, you know, you have to have the Galaxy Brain addictive perfect use case done first.

1:53:19Because I think they have the on-ramp and they can spend enough GPUs to tell you, here's how you convert a random user to try our experience for 30 seconds. And we could probably mechanically show it to enough people to get, you know, to easily boot up 10, 20, 30 million people to try the app very quickly. but the real execution that I think it's going to be on them is to get those 10, 20, 30 million people to become addicted users who share with other people and make that personalized super intelligence part of your day-to-day. Yeah, remember to the WhatsApp point, they did boot ChatGPT out of the WhatsApp ecosystem not too long ago, remember, which had a ton of users.

1:53:58I think it was at least... When did they boot this out? This was, I think, a couple months ago. That's actually really interesting. I might have to follow up on that idea, actually. That's pretty interesting. It might kind of coincide with something. That tells you how they'll integrate their own models. Yeah, 100%. Anyways, we're way over. I wish we had more time. Yeah, always. But thank you for being a part of this this year. Some of our most enjoyable conversations. Thank you so much for everything you've done to help. Dude, thank you guys. I love TPP. Like, seriously, I love TBBN, like straight up.

1:54:37We're on the moon, I guess, or we're in outer space. You guys are in L.A. I would love to do it. I got to do it in person sometime. Please, come down. I'm like never out. No, I would love to. Anytime. It'd be great. Merry Christmas. Have a great holiday season, and we'll see you in 2026. You're the man. Goodbye. Cheers. Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, and they're trusted by millions. Our next guest is Doug Bernauer from Radiant. He's right across town over in El Segundo. He's one of the original El Segundo hard tech companies. I have been a huge fan.

1:55:18Look at that Bow Truss. Look at this building. It's a beautiful world. We're looking for a building. I didn't know that terminology until this year, and now I only want to spend time. If I'm not at home, I want to be in Bow Truss buildings. They're iconic. You can come on by. I think it's a double boat trust because we've got the two. No way! They got double boat trust. I don't know if there's a name for that. That might be a name for that. Anyway, we're not here to talk about architecture. We're here to talk about nuclear reactors. So please kick us off with a get us up to speed on what's happened in the last year.

1:55:51How are you describing the shape of the business? Where's the progress? What are you building and how do you frame it for everyone? Thanks, John. Great to be here. We are actively building our first nuclear reactor, which would be the first new design going critical at Idaho National Laboratory since 1977. So before any of us were born. So it's extremely exciting. I think last time we had talked, a year ago, we were still working on the design. Now all components are ordered. There are parts here. There are technicians assembling it. We're on qualified supplier list. And just this morning we announced we were— Wait, you said the first.

1:56:28That's right. Is there some competition to really be the first? A lot of people want to say they're the first. Absolutely. There's always competition, and I welcome all the competition. Let's all build a huge amount of reactors and make American nuclear energy reach as many people as it can. So the design is still the same, one megawatt, roughly the size of a shipping container. Have you thought about who the buyer is? I know we've talked in the past about you throw it on a military base or you throw it on an oil and gas exploration zone, stranded area where diesel might be really expensive. Are you still thinking about those types of customers or have the AI folks come calling?

1:57:14We're absolutely thinking about those types of customers. But really, nuclear energy is for prosperity, driving prosperity. That means letting humans put power wherever they want to put it. It just so happens if you make a compact reactor, you can put years of megawatt scale power wherever you want. We have made progress with a data center customer, Equinix, who has put down an order for 20 units. So AI is definitely driving that. Congratulations. That's a lot. And then more progress with the military customer as well. We have a contract now with the Air Force through Defense Innovation Unit for several units there as well.

1:57:53Very cool. So we're working on the same stuff. The design has not needed to change. We submitted a regulatory document over 500 pages to the Department of Energy. One-shotted with ChatGPT. It's not a good thing to do. You definitely can use AI to learn fast, but not to do fast. Yeah, that makes sense. So take us through the news today. Massive new funding round. What exactly happened? And then I want to talk about some of the uses of that funding. Yep. Yeah, so we have raised over$300 million in new funding through Boosts and Draper Associates.

1:58:39Massive. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, that's a huge number. Is that because you're expecting to order lots of parts at this point because you're actually fulfilling orders? Is this hiring more R &D scientists? How much of this goes into R &D? How much of this goes into OPEX, CAPEX? How are you thinking about the uses of the funds? All D, no R. Okay. All D, no R. We're building. We're building right now. The research is done. That's right. But it does accelerate our ability to go and build and get some more trained operators to run. Idaho National Lab will be running 24-7 with the reactor up and functioning.

1:59:18But a lot of this funding will go towards actually our facility that we announced in Tennessee, you know, an over 80-acre site where we're putting down new construction on Department of Energy land. And that's fueling facility, what will become the mass production of reactors coming out of that facility. Yeah. So the next INL milestone, do you have a specific date locked in? Are you working against a particular timeline? And has any of this shifted since there's been sort of a flurry of efforts to speed up the development of nuclear specifically? Has anything been able to be pulled forward? I know that there's a lot of excitement around nuclear just over the past year.

2:00:07Has anything changed from your initial plan? I think that things are accelerated across the board. So we got access to fuel in May. We know that's been transported now. It's at the fabricator. Fuel is being made for the reactor. That's very new. Probably the most important thing to know that we'll hit schedule. But nothing's really changed in the long run. We had a goal of going critical of the reactor full scale. One that's designed, built by, and then operated by Radiant along with the National Lab. And that'll happen before summer, which is pretty exciting. So it's very, very soon that's coming up.

2:00:47Your greater question, there's a whole bunch of executive orders and there's a lot of impetus from the current administration to make things move, make them go quickly. And the national labs and the NRC are both looking at their processes and going, well, we've got new reactors coming and so let's plan for it. Yeah. And so there are new processes that have already been released as part of the effort. So it is not an open call to action, but we're seeing a lot of real action. That's great. Switching topics, I wanted to, we had the tragic news yesterday that the MIT professor passed. I know he was studying and focusing on fusion.

2:01:31Can you talk about maybe the significance of his work and kind of the more industry reaction? because a lot of people on the timeline were just kind of reacting to that. And obviously, it's incredibly tragic and just concerned around the work that he was doing. Yeah, I am actually not a fusion expert. So I think that probably that story is best told by someone else. Of course, energy is critical. and we're all building off of those marvels of the past and the technology that's developed, even just the ideas and those people who are willing to make their life and their life's work about something so important as clean, safe energy and access that energy for all of humanity.

2:02:26So I applaud that. One of your unique experiences experience has been at SpaceX watching development of early rockets and then the transition from making one that works to making dozens and eventually hundreds that work of these massive machines. How are you thinking about setting the company up for success in the transition to the point where you're churning out dozens of reactors? Can you already feel that Radiant is a different company because you're thinking about scale down the road? Yeah, that's absolutely the case.

2:03:12so pretty much everything with nuclear does not have a thing you can go and just carbon copy and say we're going to make somehow make reactors a thousand times smaller but yet follow like all the rules and use all the same suppliers who are used to making those types of parts and things and i think at my core is that spacex kind of derived first principles approach and you know it's absolutely the case if and we usually point folks to talk to the national labs or other entities who are not us to talk about us and go, you know, what's different about those guys? And we really, we feel strongly that you must really own every aspect of the design down to and including the printed circuit boards and the software that goes on them.

2:03:51And that is not at all dissimilar to, right? That's a thing SpaceX also did. So it wasn't just, hey, make rocket engines, only make that. There's also, it's really required that you think through integration and go put everything you can get from the modern world into something. so they end up with something that's not outdated or slowed down by lack of integrating that new technology. How big is the team at this point? And are you going to need to set up a second facility at some point? Because it feels like SpaceX started and El Segundo eventually sort of outgrew that and now has an entire city.

2:04:24Is there going to be a radiant base city somewhere in Texas or something at some point? Yeah. So Tennessee is our factory site. Construction will start really soon on that. I think we will have a functioning building able to handle fueling reactors before the end of next year, which is a wild timeline, only supported by the NRC being able to move fast today, which is very exciting. But we already actually have two buildings in El Segundo. We just got our second building last month. Congrats. That's amazing. So we have ES1, ES2. Yeah, very cool. Gabe in the chat said, the Koreans are making major moves in nuclear, he thinks.

2:05:05Are there any countries that are kind of like rebooting their nuclear energy efforts that you're looking to? Who else is drafting off of America right now? That's interesting. Or, yeah, inspiration or people that have been inspired by your efforts and other companies in the space? Yeah, so nuclear spans this wide range of power levels. So very true. Korea's, they're building a whole fleet of reactors that are, I think, 1 ,400, even up to 1 ,600 megawatts. So some of the biggest that there are. And they're able to do it on really short timelines, five to six years to construct a giant facility like that, which is grid power.

2:05:42But it's so different from what we're doing. And I don't know if it seems like America might be ahead and might be first in the area we're in, which is these one megawatt systems, the real tiny and portable stuff. But because the U.S. is so innovative, There are startups that are working on this as well and some established U.S. nuclear companies. But there's handfuls of them. There are even more federal dollars being pointed at this problem. So the Army actually have a really big program called Janus that's been announced that we're really excited about. So that could provide even faster motion to the tip of the spear, right?

2:06:22And go make it so that nuclear can go in a box and can go anywhere you want, which isn't the case for those big reactors. in other countries. How much of what's happening in the admin is just a different level of energy, a different perception versus like there's, oh, that one law changed, that one rule changed. And because it felt like, we've talked about this in the past, there wasn't necessarily just like one line in the legal code that was holding you back. It was more like this sclerotic system of, you know, like a large organization, a lot of people trying to do their best, but just not really pushing things forward.

2:07:02So is it more of like a cultural shift or has there been particular regulatory changes that have been helpful? Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's always a, it's kind of a combination of things, but I would say that, you know, we have Department of Energy, we have the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. These organizations have been around a very long time. There are people who've been there. Oh, did we lose audio and video? We lost both. We lost both. You're back. You're back. Oh, sorry about that. Yeah. Re-answering. Um, so the, um, NRC, right. The department of energy, there are people there who've been there for decades and it's, it's not like there's a real cultural shift, but there's a, there's a culture within them that just needed to be unleashed.

2:07:48and so a lot of folks it's the same people yeah but they're just answering a different call yeah right and they're they're excited by and they're they're deploying fuel yeah you know there's a reinvestment in rich enrichment assets in this country as well which since 2013 there there had been nothing so i think we're just really out of a dry spell and yep that's fantastic well uh thank you a lot of belief thank you so much for coming on the show on such a busy day and congratulations on the massive Series D. It's$1.8 billion valuation. You're officially a unicorn. Congratulations. Unicorn mode.

2:08:24Congrats to the whole team. I'm sure you guys are not going to have very relaxed end of the year. I can't imagine you resting on your laurels. That's what we do over here. We've got timelines to hit. We'll handle the laurel resting. That's right. The build plan includes weekends and holidays. Okay, that's great. Locked in. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great holiday season. Cheers. Cheers. Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. And our next guest is already in the Restream waiting room.

2:09:03We have Jacob Efren from Redpoint. There he is. There he is. Hey, how you doing, guys? Great to be on. Great to finally have you on. Got it in before the end of the year. Welcome to the show. It's an honor to be here. Very, very happy holidays to you guys. Thank you. Thank you. What's going on in your world? Maybe first time on the show, quick introduction for the folks watching. Yeah. I'm Jacob. I'm a managing director over at Redpoint. We're a$6 billion fund, and I co-run our early growth fund, which sounds like an oxymoron, but basically means series B and C. so that's where I spend all my time and do a lot of RAI investing across a bunch of companies what's your favorite?

2:09:46you know you can't answer that question I think you can answer it I have a friend who does A's and B's and he has a very clear preference around one of I'm not going to share his alpha but he has a lot of reasons about liking one versus the other. And I think, I think they track, but I'm curious how you think of that B to C range. If there's like, what you're most excited about. I will say that the first, the first investment I ever worked on at Redpoint was a, was show sponsor ramp, which is sitting nicely up there in the, in the top, right. And so I feel like that, that set the bar pretty high for, for team velocity.

2:10:27Was that the, was that the B or the C that you guys did? That was the B. Yeah. That was the B. Yeah. Yeah. Now I, I, I remember those days, you guys were had a lot of conviction and it, uh, it certainly panned out. Um, what, uh, yeah, what, like, how are you kind of reflecting on this year? Yeah, it's been, uh, it's, it's been, been quite the year, right? I think we've, uh, you know, on the application side, I feel like there's been a tremendous amount of stuff that's really started to work. I feel like, you know, obviously coding being the, uh, the killer use case, but there's been a ton in customer support, healthcare, legal.

2:11:04And I think the big question going into next year is, what's the next set of dominoes to fall on the application side? You know, are we in a time period where models are relatively plateauing and it's going to be this set of applications for a bit, or are we going to see some improvements and then get a whole next wave of application areas unlocked? At the same time, there's been a ton of interesting stuff on the model side, you know, outside of core LLMs. Obviously, you guys have talked at length about some of the cool stuff happening in the image and video world, but even in robotics, biology, material sciences, it's been fascinating to see.

2:11:38And then next year, I'm really fired up about infrastructure, actually. I think with the models slowing down a bit, I actually think it's a great opportunity. There's finally a stable set of things to build infrastructure for. And so I think it'll be really interesting in 26. Do you think that there's any chance that we'll get a new consumer AI company out of a company that didn't start as a consumer AI company? I'm just fascinated by this. Like OpenAI part two? Oh, I mean, that is one of my hottest takes is that maybe the OpenAI nonprofit spawns another for-profit because perhaps there's something just innately, you know, like just there's no better place to just do unstructured research and start a company than a massively funded nonprofit.

2:12:22It happened once in history. Maybe it happens again. But I mean, to be clear, I was talking more about like, there's these like Suno, Mid Journey. There's this interesting wave of companies where they have a model and they turn it loose. And it seems like people are kind of playing with it themselves. And everyone reads on immediately as a job displacement. That's a prosumer tool. That's an enterprise product. And maybe that's right. Maybe there is a big enterprise opportunity or big prosumer opportunity or B2B opportunity. But I'm more interested in these new patterns of consumer behavior right now and trying to find areas where consumers just might land.

2:13:03But I don't know if you've even looked at any of that. Yeah, no, we've looked at all these. And I think there's obviously a ton of interesting new consumer behavior around remixing these models, playing around with them. I think Suno especially, I mean, we play around with that tool all the time. And so I do think that the key will be, and you're starting to see this with OpenAI and Disney and even Suno, which had an arrangement with Universal recently. It's like bringing IP onto these platforms I think will just be fascinating, right? Because it's fun to remix something that is maybe a friend or somewhat abstract.

2:13:37It's a lot more fun to remix something that involves Taylor Swift or Darth Vader or some form of IP. How do you look at that category evolving? Because I was debating somebody Monday night who has managed some of the biggest global superstars. And we were talking about music creation as a category and consumer AI and this kind of prosumer category. and I was taking the side that like I like you have to assume that every lab or not every lab but a lot of the big players get into you can imagine Gemini letting you make music open AI every I think a lot of people will get into this because it's just like a it's a great hook and it's something consumers clearly want I was much more on the side of like I think music is like nuanced enough and like there's a lot of depth to it and I think it deserves a standalone app and I think that there's a lot of people that will just pay for the suno experience for a long time even if they have some of these other subscriptions meanwhile like clearly like you don't need like the average person is not going to necessarily have like an image gen app and then also like their normal lm so i'm curious you've got you guys are obviously quite uh biased here given your position in suno but like how you see that structure evolving uh we're not investors in Suno, just a fan.

2:14:55Oh, really? Sorry. I'm from Boston. And so anytime there's like an epic Boston-based company, I get very excited. And so Suno being from there is awesome. But I think that to your question, I agree with you. It probably doesn't live within a larger consumer app. I think if anything, what you're going to see is there's a whole set of experiences to be built around how artists interact with their fans through these platforms. And I think that when someone captures a lot of the volume of folks that are interested in this, that's where the artist will go. It's not like an artist is going to go to 10 different, you know, to Gemini, to Claude, to ChatGPT, where music's embedded, and like, you know, have back and forth with fans that are, you know, remixing their songs and interacting with it.

2:15:37I think that the, you know, the IP holders here will go to the consumer landing page that aggregates as many people as possible. And so I actually think it makes a ton of sense as a space for a standalone category, because it's not really just about the quality of a model, right? Yeah, totally. I wanted to, chat was asking about pricing and I was curious too, how you guys handle some of these companies that are being formed are getting off the ground basically with like Series A pricing out the gates. How do you guys handle that at Redpoint when you have an early stage team and then you're doing early growth and you're like, where do these even fall in?

2:16:15You incorporate the company and you say, I don't want to talk to the Redpoint seed investors. I want to do a growth round on day one. I want to talk to Jacob. Exactly. Because that would happen from day one. They want to go straight to Logan. I don't have an idea, but I need a growth round right now. Put$100 million in my account. Yeah. I mean, this is where I think it's just one of the really fun parts of working at a small firm, right? There's eight of us that just work super closely together on all this stuff. And a company can be a seed one day and five days later be a Series B. And so I think it involves us just working super closely together.

2:16:50But it's an interesting time, right? It's both a crazy valuation environment and also these markets that folks are going after is just absolutely massive. And so I think you have to hold both of those truths simultaneously. Okay. On the valuations broadly, just in the last half of this year, we've seen Oracle sell off post a big excitement around the backlog and the RPO. We've seen CoreWeave sell off. We've seen Rich Sutton and Andre Karpathy and Ilya Sutskiver on the Dworkesh Patel podcast talking about how maybe the models are slowing down. Is any of that reverberating? Yeah, though I love that Andre's take was taken as bearish.

2:17:32He was like, I think this stuff will automate all enterprise work, but it will take a decade. And everyone's like, oh, it's over. Like, if it takes a decade, I don't want it. Well, there's the question. I need it now. Is that how is the venture community? How are all of those different data points? some of them bullish, some of them bearish, potentially, many of them up for interpretation. How are they being interpreted in series A, B, C prices? Yeah. I mean, I think what's very clear is there's both going to be massive new companies created in this wave. And I think even with just the capabilities of models, even if you believe that models aren't going to get that much better without some algorithmic breakthrough, and you believe that we're overbuilding on the data center side, it doesn't change the fact that this current generation of models works really well in a bunch of different application areas.

2:18:20And so I do think on the app side, there's going to be massive businesses built. They'll require a bunch of infrastructure behind them. I think you were talking earlier with Sarah about some of the NeoLabs. I think that's the most interesting question of what is the form of model progress going to be in the next five, 10 years? And is that something that occurs within the labs or outside of them? But I don't think that anyone's questioning whether really large companies will be rated today. Yeah. What about the overall venture, the venture, like the amount of dollars flowing into venture funds right now?

2:18:53I'm sure you have a view and you have a couple of data points. There's this chart that looks incredibly bearish. It looks like it's completely over for venture capital. And yet that doesn't match with anything I was feeling because there's huge rounds happening. I mean, I guess it doesn't count as venture capital, but OpenAI is raising 10 billion from Amazon. There's big deals getting done, but for some reason, there's a chart that shows venture dollars going down. How did you process? Did you see that chart? Did you process that the same way I did? Walk me through your interpretation of that.

2:19:24What's going on? Yeah, I think you're spot on on the vibes. It didn't totally match what it feels like the game on the field is. I do think there's probably, it's definitely harder for emerging managers or first-time funds. And so it doesn't surprise me that the overall count of funds was down a bit. But a lot of that data can be skewed by some pretty outlier large funds that were raised in kind of 2021, as well as the fact that those funds in 2021 were deployed in like 6, 12 months or something, right? And so I think actually maybe we're back to slightly more normal fund deployment paces. Yeah.

2:19:57And then do you think there's also a shift over the last few years to more SPV usage amongst fund managers so that maybe the dollar value that's flowing through is high or is growing right now? This year certainly isn't up here. Look at rate we just had dug on from Radiant. The two funds that led are not, to my knowledge, multi-billion dollar funds, and yet he raised$300 million that had to come from, assuming that came almost entirely from SPVs. Sure. So, yeah, are you seeing an uptick broadly? Does your firm have a view on SPVs? Yeah, I mean, I think there definitely seems to be both SPV activity as well as NVIDIA, like, you know, large, the hyperscalers, a lot more investment coming in from all sorts of other places.

2:20:48I think for us, you know, we keep our fund size focused where, you know, we want to be, you know, direct investors and long-term partners for the companies we work with. But I do think, you know, I do think that's probably part of the story here too. Yeah. Do you think there's any, are funds losing, like losing rounds to hyperscalers? Like, oh yeah, I put it in a term sheet and they went with NVIDIA instead of me. I think usually these rounds are kind of a combination of traditional venture firms and some of the other folks. But obviously, people have different incentives in those arrangements.

2:21:22And so it can change the pricing sometimes. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What are you expecting out of robotics broadly next year or maybe the next two years? Did you guys see the news from physical intelligence today? It's actually pretty nuts. I didn't see it. Sorry, break it down for the audience. Yeah. So for those that didn't see, and I am not a robotics AI researcher to be clear, but I'll do my best to play one. But you guys are investors in physical intelligence. So you're basically an expert. Let's ring the gun for that. Exactly, exactly. I love that. What they basically showed is there's been this question for a long time of, can you use egocentric human video data to improve robotics models?

2:22:08Because, God, we have a lot of human video. What we don't have a lot of is teleoperated data and other data that's more difficult to gather for robotics. And so what they were able to show is that basically they built these models already on, you know, they had this model Pi.5 that they built using a bunch of teleoperated data. And once the model got to a certain ability, they then threw a bunch of egocentric human video data at it, and it actually made the model way better. And this was what's called an emergent capability. This capability didn't happen when the model was way worse. And what's exciting about it is it kind of parallels actually a lot of what's happening in reinforcement learning right now.

2:22:45After AlphaGo, there was this huge push to do reinforcement learning for everything. And it didn't really work because the base models weren't powerful enough. But then fast forward, we did this massive pre-training. We got these much more powerful base models. And then reinforcement learning started working really well. And so it seems like as we're starting to scale some of these robotics models, We're starting to see some pretty cool effects of the ability to apply video data, which we have a lot more of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. It's awesome. Yeah. Those guys, every month, I feel like they have some awesome research.

2:23:15Any predictions around just like, I feel like for people, you see stuff coming out of labs. It's really exciting. But for people to really start to actually believe that robotics are going to transform our entire world, right you have to like get zipline delivered to your house and have that like moment right you have to be you have to be in a waymo uh yeah everyone seems to be waiting for like the touring test of robotics is like do my dishes and and it's like it's unclear that that's going to be the first really big business in robotics like it could be something else that comes out but we already have the robot in the house it's a vacuum cleaner um you know a variety of companies have duked it out there, but we have some robotics that deliver some value, but we want something that's like the full humanoid.

2:24:06We'll probably accept the dishwasher robot in the interim with one arm. I'll definitely accept the dishwasher robot. I'm here for that. The laundry robot, dishwasher. The dishwasher robot, I'll sell you a dishwasher. It's an AI dishwasher. It's 20 grand. You want it? Yeah. Under my Christmas tree, I'll take it. But no, I do think that basically as these models get better, we'll start to see some pretty interesting, probably to start in some of the enterprise use cases where you control the environments a bit more and it's less on the home side. But I think there's going to be a ton of really interesting stuff people build on top of the models.

2:24:43To be clear, there still needs to be improvement in the underlying models until we get there. But I think it's so clear everyone from the government to the largest companies in our economy are quite focused on robotics right now, and rightly so. Have you looked at other AI hardware stuff. There's this weird phenomenon happening where there's a lot of AI hardware companies that go viral, get tons of press, and then it doesn't seem like there's massive sales in the short term at least. And then we wound up finding some company that was just doing basically AI device for note taking. It just records and gives you the notes.

2:25:17It's a very simple, like, you know, you very, I can explain you, you already know exactly what I'm talking about in terms of the product value prop. And they're making like$100 million in sales, maybe$250 or something already. Have you looked at that? Have you thought about how the future AI hardware plays out? Or is it scary because the big device companies like Apple might want to just go after that and just eat that at some point? Well, I think all big markets, the big companies will want to go after, right? And so I think that's the price of it being really interesting. We're investors in a company called Sesame that is going after both kind of better voice models, but also like the AI glasses world.

2:25:55And I think that it's interesting to see so many people coalesce on that as like the form factor for a bunch of these products going forward. And so I think that like that is hugely exciting. And I would be really surprised in the next few years if there wasn't much more prolific usage of hardware that has a bunch of these AI capabilities built into it. Yeah, no, that's exciting stuff. Jordy, anything else? The amount of glasses that are going to be available in a few years is wild. probably gonna eat where it's sesame snap i mean apple that's less than you walk into a sunglass hut there's 25 brands why not 25 brands of electronic products yeah no no i i just think it's exciting it's gonna be very cool yeah it's gonna be pretty sweet yeah yeah yeah we got the demo uh monday of the new uh the snap spectacles uh specs that are coming out next year that are dev only right now and uh we were running around everywhere here having having a lot of fun i mean the AR.

2:26:53Are you guys going to rock them on the show next year? The augmented reality is remarkable. They're very chunky. They're big. And I've actually thought about this. Well, no, the developer version is not what they're releasing this next year. But wearing augmented reality glasses, I mean, I guess I could have a screen. I could kind of use it as a teleprompter. Sometimes I will text with the team on my laptop here, oh, is the next guest on time or do I need to hang out in this interview longer? Not to break the fourth wall here, but I could imagine glasses. I hope you're not texting that directly right now.

2:27:31I'm not, but Logan from Google is actually a few minutes late, so we can hang out here and chat. And then maybe it would be fun to have a camera on there that you could feed into the show so you could be like, let's go to the John cam. Because sometimes we go to the gong cam and imagine if you could watch me hit the gong in first person as Santa Claus. That sounds like entertainment. Of course, I'm sort of a niche user,

2:27:59but I don't know. I just came up with two pretty cool use cases. I think it's going to be a fun future. Yeah, I think the fun part about this stuff, I mean, it reminds me of the models. It's like you put it out in the world and you can't begin to imagine the way that people are going to use it, right? And I think that once you have a product that meets the aesthetic bar of something you'd actually wear, people are going to use it in all sorts of ways that I'm sure anyone making these things couldn't possibly predict. In the same way that I love, whenever the model companies release a model, it's like they have some idea, but they're always day one shocked at all these things that work about it or ways people use it.

2:28:29They had no idea. Yeah. Last question. With all the competition in the foundation model space, it does seem like there's a lot of startups that you've probably invested in that are spending a lot of money with the foundation labs. Have you seen that manifest in gross profits, there was a data point from Notion in the Wall Street Journal that their gross profits went from like 95 % to 85 % or something. It was a very slight gross margin compression, certainly not cause for concern. But do you feel like you have a view on what the impact of high usage LLM inference might be for growth stage software companies on gross margins?

2:29:13Yeah, I mean, I think for the thing that makes it challenging to know where it all shakes out is just the price of these models changes so much every two, three months. It just keeps going down. And so if we stay on this treadmill of capability improvement, then maybe you're always paying for the most cutting-edge thing. But I do think that for anything that one of our companies was doing six months ago, it's gotten ten times cheaper. Now, they may be doing a whole new set of things as well, but take any set of capabilities. I think the gross margin for that set of capabilities will end up being pretty good just given the competition that exists in the foundation model space and just the insane rate at which this stuff keeps getting cheaper.

2:29:53And we're going to see the same stuff happen in video, in other spaces, and I think that will be incredibly exciting too for folks building on top. That's good to hear. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Have fun with Logan. He's the best. Have a great rest of your day. Yeah, we're going to have a great time. Well, have a great rest of your day, and we will talk to you soon. Yeah, great. Great hanging, Jacob. Sounds good. Good. Talk soon. Bye. Let me tell you about 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized.

2:30:23I had kind of a brutal night. Do you have a rough night? That's too bad. I'm sorry. Well, maybe you'll need to. 63, four hours. Maybe you'll need to book a wander in the meantime. Book a wander with inspiring views. Hotel great amenities. Dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. I forgot to ask Jacob what he felt is an appropriate tip. Founders, end of year, a little holiday tip. We didn't ask Sarah either. I got an 89, so let's go. Wow. I have some breaking news. Breaking news. Jared Isaacman confirmed. Let's go.

2:31:00You ready to be on? Friendly reindeer. I'm very excited. You know, whether the data centers go to space or not, there's obviously a lot of interesting and important things to be done in space. And I'm very, very excited to have leadership in the position, in the seat. He's that guy. Hopefully doing some cool stuff. You know who else is that guy? Logan Kilpatrick from Google. Of course. He's in the restroom waiting room. And now he's in the TBV and Ultradom. Welcome to the show. Logan, how are you doing? He's that guy, pal. Hey, guys. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. I love the background. The UAV online is incredible.

2:31:37Well, we have Christmas-themed ones now, so play the drummer boy one. Hostile drummer boy on your six. Hostile drummer boy on your six. That's a good one. The team had fun with that. Anyway, thank you so much for joining. Please, everyone knows who you are around here, but take us through the news today. Gemini 3 Flash, what are the highlights? How are you positioning the communication around that particular launch? Yeah, no, it's a great question. Thank you again for having me on. I'm an I3 flash is the most capable model, I think, along a bunch of dimensions that we've shipped before. And it's also just this model that is going to bring intelligence to everyone, which is the exciting thing.

2:32:22So I feel like.

2:32:30I feel like we need to do this for Gemini launches. I'm going to get a gong for the office. We'll help you out. We know all the suppliers, and we get bulk pricing. We're going to help you guys out. We should have etched gong for the office when we launch would be perfect. No, but I think the model is incredible, and I think it builds on the momentum from 3 Pro, which is really exciting. And the crazy thing is it's actually better than 3 Pro at some dimensions, I was looking at this. I'm looking at the model card. It outperforms on Arc AGI 2, which is like my personal favorite benchmark. We love the team over at Arc AGI.

2:33:09And somehow the Flash model outperforms the Pro model. I would be very interested what the thesis on that. Is it like Gemini 3 Pro was overthinking it? Is that what's going on? We also did our own bench, Shrimp Bench. Oh, yeah. Shrimp Bench went very well. It came up with... You're supposed to think of jokes that have the same format as, you're telling me a shrimp fried this rice. So for ginger snap, it said, you're telling me a ginger snap this cookie. It's pretty good. Pretty good. It's funny. We're loving it. Some of the models absolutely bomb these that are quite smart. So it's a good benchmark, sir.

2:33:52Yeah. Really quick, though. like the reason flash is so much better like there's a very pointed answer on this and actually not that it's so much better it's better in certain places some places it's a little bit better and this is because the model is a little bit smaller so the like iterate like we're able to do a little bit more iteration and it has like a slightly updated um like post-training recipe versus the pro model and this is just because of the timing so like we finished pro and finished some of the training like probably a little bit more than a month ago so like just within the last month have like made a bunch of innovation on the research side it makes it into the smaller model just because of like the timing and the release process yeah um but so you'll you'll see some of that so there's no like special you know silver bullet behind the scenes of making this possible it's just like literally time and with enough time we can keep making uh even better and better models which is exciting yeah how are you thinking about the like i i feel like the gemini It seems very good about offering different models along the Pareto frontier, not over fixating on a particular benchmark, but delivering a high quality product at each incremental price or the best product for a given price.

2:35:05Do you envision the left and right bound expanding further? Is there like a nano coming, something even cheaper, even smaller, even more compressed? How do you think about offering a product from the same sort of API structure, but at an even cheaper price? Is that something that's coming? Yeah, yeah. So we're working hard on this. So the flash or the sort of three model family historically or 3.5 model family historically has been pro, flash, flashlight, which is the smallest model. And then I think, I don't know if we still call it nano or not, but nano is our on-device model, just like the smallest model.

2:35:48So we will hopefully have a flashlight model early next year. It takes time to sort of trickle the innovation through, and the holidays are busy. I was joking with Jordi because nano banana, the code name sort of leaked into like the public consciousness just because it was exciting, it was a great model. And so people figured it out, nano banana. but it implies the existence of just a normal banana or banana pro or a mega banana or giga banana and so we want the giga banana we want the full image uh the the even bigger model the biggest the biggest possible model but of course banana pro is your giga banana we actually thought about calling it giga giga banana it wasn't as catchy as nano banana so nano banana already has its own brand so you kind of gotta just run with that like you got the bird in the hand just run with it uh maybe getting a little bit more specific how have conversations been going with with startups that are leveraging kind of the suite of models like what where's where's where are people most excited in terms of actually implementing them yeah i think the cool thing and this is um hasn't been unique to this launch but i think the cool thing is that for 2.5 pro customers who are paying, I think it's like between$1.25 and$2.50 per million input tokens, and then like$10 to$12 per million output tokens.

2:37:11This model is actually almost across the board completely, three flashes better than 2.5 Pro. So like if you're a startup and you're like 2.5 Pro was the model that, which for Mint like literally tens to hundreds of thousands of customers in production right now, this is the case for them. They're able to sort of migrate over to this new model and like out of the box cost saving their product just gets faster and i was talking to someone earlier today and like the fact that two years ago this like narrative of being a model wrapper was like a sort of like bad idea and then now i think about this for our team actually like we have apis for developers to build with but we're also building a vibe coding product in ai studio and like the vibe coding product we ran the like silent test behind the scenes and it It was like just with three flash, actually, because of how much faster it was.

2:38:00And it was like reasonably the same quality as three pro retention went up. The number of things people were building went up. Engagement went up and it was like free. We didn't have to do anything. We literally just changed the model in the dropdown. It's actually cheaper for us to run that. And like as a product builder, I don't think there's been a time in like human history of building startups where like you just get to show up one morning. somebody made your product 40 % better and saved you 50%. The analogy is - Usually if you make something 40 % better, you're like, get ready to pay 50 % more.

2:38:36Exactly. So it's crazy. I think that continues to get me in the fiber of my being, so excited about what startups are able to go after. And yeah, it's a great moment. So hopefully folks get a chance to adopt. And then I think the next thing that I'm excited about is like taking these two models, Flash and Pro, now become like the default models to build on top of for our other like custom variants. And like the image generation is one example of this, but also we have text-to-speech models and live audio models and a bunch of other stuff in the works, computer use models, and they all sort of rebase onto this new thing.

2:39:12And then again, by default, just like get better out of the box, which is really, really cool. So I think you'll see the, not just, you know, coding and all these other agentic capabilities, multimodal that we've showed with this specific three flash base model but you'll see this across pretty much every other dimension as all those more bespoke checkpoints rebased to these new three flash and three pro variants what's going on with the agent builder that uh that that you did you roll it out last week i'm losing i'm losing track of time but uh uh yeah yeah i know it's outside of your kind of like key territory, but I would love to kind of hear why, what's exciting about it to you.

2:39:56Yeah, I think, and so what, I mean, truthfully, and I'll give you my very candid take, which is I've been, I was trying the version of that product for probably, and I tweeted this out probably like three months before it came out. And the part that was most, the reason I loved it so much is because inside of Google, like, you know, we can't just use random startup products. Like there's like a very rigorous process in order of like what software are we actually using as Google employees. And so this like homegrown solution for me to be able to like have an agent builder and like connect all my stuff up and build workflows and all these things, like really is the AI product that I get to use on a daily basis.

2:40:35So like I, it is exceptionally important that it's world-class and that it like pushes the frontier and that it's actually good because I don't get the sort of free market of options. I can't just go and choose between any one of a hundred AI startups who are providing something similar to this. Um, and for what it's worth, I, I get those in my personal life, which is awesome, but I don't get those in my work life. I feel like it's like sort of hit the mark of where I wanted it to be. Like I really do get genuine product utility. Um, and as somebody who my email is out on the internet, you can email me, lkelpatrick at google.com.

2:41:08I get many, many emails. It is helpful to like have a system. I still respond to all of them manually, humanly, but it is nice to have some sort of like filtering mechanisms and then sort of separate my external stuff from my internal stuff. And it's been, and also hook up to the rest of my Google information. It's awesome. So I'm a huge fan. And it's also just chapter one of this like AI native workspace story. And I think you'll see this across other Google product services. I don't know if y 'all have had Robbie Stein on who leads AI product for search. Um, I think we did. I think we did. That's right.

2:41:42Robbie's the man. I love Robbie. He, he, we talked probably six months ago about he was telling me this story and it was a story at the time of like how search was becoming this frontier AI product. And I, um, sort of had to extend disbelief a little bit. And I think now you sort of see this with AI mode. AI mode is crushing it. It really is just as competitive Frontier AI product as a lot of the other ones that are out in the market. And it's at search scale, which is crazy. So they're doing a great job. And I think Workspace is going to go through that same arc where it's like they're going to become a Frontier AI product, which is great for the billion plus users who are using Workspace.

2:42:20Anything? Any shipping again this year? Are you going to give everyone a break? Let people let the other labs rest? offline starting next Monday. So we've got a couple more things in the pipeline the rest of this week, which I'm excited about. And then people really will be offline. It is the blissful last part of the year where people actually take time off and relax. And then the roadmap for January is going to be ridiculous. You should try and get a massive company-wide secret Santa going. It's like thousands of people. One more quick pitch for both of you. I've been pushing for the blimp. So don't worry.

2:42:56I'm having a conversation behind the scenes it's time to blimp maybe going to be a blimp coming it's in Google's DNA I'm not going to say who's involved but we've got some people involved so we'll see what happens we would be 2026 TVPN live from the air that'd be incredible what a year you and the team should be incredibly proud and we've loved every conversation so thank you for being a part of this and I'm glad we'll be off when you guys are off so we can all I expect someone out there to be like we're launching something on Christmas Eve because everybody's but we'll cover it when we're back in January but thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show have a great rest cheers Logan happy holidays goodbye buy.

2:43:56One last. If you don't have access to a blimp and you want to run a billboard ad, you go to adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure. We need some David Senra buy David Senra billboards. Yeah, when's the billboard coming? We need the $1 million ad buy. We have David Senra in the studio in the TVP on UltraDome. We're going to bring him down. We'll talk to him about podcasting. Maybe we'll touch on podcasting. Maybe we'll touch on media. No, you know what I want to talk to you about first? We've beat this story to death. But a few days ago, this Wall Street Journal article went viral on how all tech companies are trying to hire storytellers.

2:44:39And I want your unfiltered thoughts on storytellers and entrepreneurship and whether storytellers can be bought or they merely exist. I think the read just to set the table was that so basically there are a number of jobs that have popped up in Silicon Valley $250 ,000 for someone whose job title is just storyteller and that feels very broad because is that a copywriter is that someone who buys ads what are they doing? Do you think it's important for a founder to be good at telling stories? Yeah of course. I'm just kidding I'm just kidding Well take us through My take was like the best storytellers are just not for hire because they're running companies.

2:45:23I mean, who do you think is the best storyteller or salesman alive today? Probably Elon. Yeah. And before him. Big jobs. There you go. Yeah. It's very important. There's a great quote from Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia, who talked about this. And I actually put it into my ads for one of my partners. And he's like, the art of storytelling is critically important. Most entrepreneurs that come to us can't tell a story. and that learning to tell a story is really important because money flows as a function of the stories. So yeah, I don't know. I didn't read the article. I don't read any of that shit.

2:45:56But I do listen to you guys and I heard you go over it. And I think Vanta was one of them trying to hire. Yeah. Yeah, so I think they were one of my big partners. They pay a lot more than$250 ,000 and I think I'm just the person that needs to tell that story. Telling that story. Yeah, I think, like, obviously, Christina's really good from a founder level. But even if you don't have, like, very few people have the Elon or the Steve Jobs skill set. And so I think, like, we've talked about this over and over again. And, like, you just partner with the people that are able to tell that story. Yes.

2:46:30Like, let me give an example. Mr. Beast texted me, like, two days ago. He's like, look up my Spotify rap. And number one was Founders Podcast. I want to talk about the new show, not Founders. So we'll get to that in a minute. But we're in a group chat. it's me him and all the founders of ramp and his whole thing was like he didn't know what ramp was he texted us to kareem and eric and he's like now we've switched over my company to ramp because like i feel like i know every single thing that's going on inside ramp because i get a minute or two minute update every week from david yeah and if you listen to my ramp ads it's not like this is you know it's just corporate cards it's like same every time it's how you're digging into different pieces it's not that it's not the same every time because i think actually repetition is persuasive.

2:47:12So I have three or four versions and I repeat them over and over again. But Ramp and I, as you guys know, have a multi-year partnership. So, but his point was just like, well, like there, it's more than a partnership. So you should see the shirt I have underneath this hoodie. It's Ramp. So the point that he was telling them, it's like, he now knows how Eric, the CEO thinks. He knows how Kareem, the co-founder and CTO thinks. He knows their hiring practices. It's like, my ads are just stories about ramp. And if you pay attention to them, then you're like, oh, I want to work with a company that takes this that seriously, that does 300 different updates to their product on a yearly basis, that's nearly impossible to get hired as an engineer, that is trying to lead from the very front in AI.

2:47:55And these are very effective storytellers to the point that those ads converted the biggest creator in the world to use your product. So I think that's what companies should be doing. Paying somebody$250 ,000, maybe, I don't know. How structural do you think storytelling should be? Because I really like systems thinking. I like systems and processes. So when I think about telling a story, I actually do think about a three-act structure. I think about who's the protagonist, what's the antagonist. I can map it out on a piece of paper. I know. This is from your YouTube days. Yes, exactly. No, I literally think about it.

2:48:28This is how we met. I studied the books on it and I created structure on it. There are other people that are much less structural. But when you are trying to, like, when I tell the story of a founder on a YouTube video essay, I would literally map their journey to a beginning, middle, and end, Act 1 and Act 2 and Act 3. What happens at the end of Act 1? You're crossing into the unknown. What happens to... You're describing the oldest story there is. Of course. The hero's journey. Yes, the hero's journey. I would try and map it to the hero's journey. Do you think about that when you are constructing an interview for David Senra, your new show?

2:49:11Are you trying to start with, let's do the early life, and then at one third or 20 minutes into the interview, I'm going to try and get you into, tell me about the crossing into the unknown. Okay, then how are you structuring the episodes if not following a hero's journey? I am just like, the way I think about my work is very simple. And I think it's really important because there's this great line from Munger where he's like, you know, the rarest of all things is to keep things simple and remember what you set out to do. Right. The value in what I do is that I'm going to be doing very similar things now.

2:49:39I was doing it 10 years ago. I'm going to be doing it 10 years from now. Yes. That is the value. It's in the compounding nature of it. So the way I try to keep, remember to keep things simple is Founders is the books that I'm intensely interested in reading. And the new show is who am I intensely interested in speaking to. And talking to. Yeah. There have been multi-billionaire public company CEOs that asked to be on the show. And I started doing research about them. I was like, I don't want to spend any time with this guy. Like, I'm just not interested in talking to him at all. And me and Rob, my partner, some partners are Andrew Heurman and Rob Moore on the new show.

2:50:12And, you know, Rob kind of pushes back sometimes and is just like, I just don't want to talk to him. What do you want me to tell you? And, you know, he's like, this is actually good that you would say no to somebody like that. I don't think of things in, like, obviously the hero's journey. If you listen to founders, is like that is essentially that is what I'm doing over and over again. I think that comes naturally to me. But I don't think of things in structure. I'm just very – almost everything for me is like I'm intensely interested in what I'm working on. I consume – I try to consume more information about that subject matter than anybody else in the world.

2:50:41And then I just go straight off intuition. I just wonder if over time intuition will develop a structure. I don't know. I think that might sound like that. I don't know. You listen to the podcast. I mean do you see a structure there? Well, you're how many episodes in? Six. Six. I would assume that in a decade I will be able to somewhat predict a structure. And you won't need to ever sit down and map out, I'm going to ask this question before this question. It'll just come to you naturally. But that intuition will happen and it will make sense. But you will know the rules and also know when to break them.

2:51:17So there are stories that are told in four acts. There are stories that are told in five acts. There are stories that don't map perfectly onto the hero's journey because it's actually a love story or it's actually, you know, some other structure of story. I think storytelling is downstream from interest. So I heard Jordy said something that I think is dead, right? It's like you guys are using the term storyteller when it's really like you're talking about like copywriter, right? And what I would do is I'd go back and study this guy named Claude Hopkins. Can one of the guys check? I think it's episode 170 of Founders.

2:51:48And he wrote this book called Scientific Advertising. and I found him because I read not only you know it is 170 a life in advertising when did I do that how how long ago was that March 8 uh 2021 okay so 2021 so this is my point it's just like intensely interested in what you're doing and then um and then just try to collect as much information as possible so essentially the I found this guy named David Ogilvie then he would write about every single person that you're interested in will tell you who influenced them. And this guy wrote, this is Claude Hopkins, probably the greatest copywriter to ever to live.

2:52:25And he wrote this book called Scientific Advertising. I'm pretty sure if you buy his autobiography on Kindle, you get My Life in Advertising, and then in the end, you get Scientific Advertising for free. But I think every single person on the planet should read Scientific Advertising because Claude Hopkins worked for this guy named Albert Lasker. Albert Lasker made more money as an advertising agency founder than anybody else in history. And all he did essentially cut away all the fat. He didn't have an art department, didn't have a research department. He had two of the best copywriters and their words made the cash register ring.

2:52:57And in scientific advertising, it's like, it's such an elite skillset, like using, using only your words, you can, you can get the work, you can ban the world. But you have, this is, it's the amount of, you have to one, be intensely interested in the subject. And two, you have to be willing to do an insane amount of work. And in, well, that was why, that was why it started, sorry to interrupt you. But when, when the point you brought up earlier, like if I'm trying to hire a storyteller, I want to hire the best writer. I don't want somebody that wants to be the chief storyteller of a business. I want them to be obsessed with writing and actually understand how important it is.

2:53:32I don't want them to like best communicator. Not right. It just happens at that time, writing was the form of communication. So let me just finish the story real quick. Albert, he wrote scientific advertising, Albert Lasker reads it. He's like, this is our trade secrets. This is why I'm so rich. Like it's going in the safe. He literally locked the manuscript in a safe for 20 years. Then when he retired, he let Claude Hopkins publish it and wind up selling eight or 10 or 12 million copies. And so, but when you go into there, like Claude Hopkins, let me give you an example. And this is something I think I do really good on the podcast ads is like talking about the story behind how the product is made.

2:54:05And so there was this beer at the time, it was like Schlitz beer or something like that. It was like fifth market share. And so they hire Claude Hopkins. He goes and visits them. He visits their distillery. He interviews all the top founders, the founders of the company, the executives. He spends an insane amount of time with it. And then he goes, hey, you have this like remarkable brewing process that is like fascinating with all these machines and this technology. And like, I drank your beer, but I didn't know what was going on. Why don't you tell that story? And their whole point was, but our process isn't different from any other beer company.

2:54:36He's like, yeah, but no other beer company is telling the story. And all he did was tell in text of like a thousand, two thousand, three thousand words, the story behind how the product is made. This, when you, when you hear a Founders episode or the new show, like the James Dyson episode just came out. It was one of the best days of my entire life to be able to spend several hours with him. The amount of fucking people, am I going to get you in trouble on the stream cursing? No, no, it's fine. It's fine. There's one, there's one listener. Who? That takes issue with it. yeah tell me doesn't like tell me doesn't like the swearing okay well i apologize david has a potty mouth but it's it's you it's you i appreciate it so the that's funny the um i know i lost oh the amount of people that sent me messages after that podcast or other podcasts have been uh made on him that now because i understand who the person is and what went into building the product like i went and bought his hair dryer or his vacuum cleaner works for everything um yes it's interesting we every that that the style of advertisement which was like you had a page of a magazine and you had a basically an opportunity to put a picture and then a block of text it kind of like comes back in fact it's constantly like coming back in fashion and i think the reason for it even though it's not like the most native format for the internet is it's because when companies sit down and they're like how do we sell our product in a short paragraph oftentimes Sometimes companies never do that, right?

2:55:59The modern ad, the modern way that you communicate is like you have a big website. Somebody has to scroll all over the website to really be sold on something. Or you have an ad that's like targeting different things or different value props. But when you just sit down and write one paragraph of exactly why somebody should care about your product and why they should purchase it, it's just extremely effective. Ramp's doing this with Harry Dry. Have you ever paid attention to Harry Dry's Twitter feed? Do you know who that is? No. Fantastic copywriter out of Europe. I think he's might be in England.

2:56:26and he's worked with Eric hand in hand and they've done a couple, and it's posted, if I'm not mistaken, on Eric's Twitter feed. It's like, that is still a very effective ad unit. So to answer your question, I don't know. Yes, telling your story is a good idea. The founder should do as much as possible. Then the founder should be really teaching how they think about their business. I always like Jim Senegal, the founder of Costco, has this great quote where he's like, if you're not spending 90 % of your time teaching, you're not doing your job. And his whole point is like, the direction's coming from you.

2:56:56You talk about this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. This is how we do it. And you repeat, repeat, repeat over and over again. And people are like, oh, yeah, but Jim Senegal, he's running Costco. It's not a tech company. Well, go watch the episode he did, How Elon Works. And in that, I just break down. I super-royate everything that has nothing to do with other than how Elon works. And this four-step algorithm. He got to the point where he says in the book, I repeated it so much that the executives that are sitting in the meeting would mouth the next word that's coming out of my mouth.

2:57:25Repeat, repeat, repeat. um dave portnoy did this today he had this announcement video and and uh it looks like very unprofessional in the way that it's shot it's clearly shot in an iphone he's standing in front of glass and he's just kind of like rambling but he's just going netflix he said it like 15 times because they were announcing a deal a bunch of barstool podcasts are going on netflix uh he's just like netflix netflix netflix and like you just immediately like it doesn't look You want to watch part of my take? Netflix. You want to watch Spitting Chicklets? Netflix. He just keeps saying Netflix.

2:57:59It was very, very effective. On repetition, something that I've appreciated about our relationship is I feel like when we all get together, it's almost the same conversation every single time. And you'd think you'd get bored of it, but because we're extremely obsessed and focused, it's actually helpful in that we're remembering why we do this, why we make the decisions that we make, and almost just kind of like constantly reminding ourselves. And I think that's very helpful. We talked about how we're thinking about next. Somebody asked us what our - Is this the Emily Sundberg? Yeah, she asked us - Can you read that exact quote?

2:58:33I thought it was really good. Oh, we were supposed to - It's in the show notes, I think today or yesterday, but - I'll pull it up. Our 2026 resolution is to lock in. We had a great 2025 and it opened up a lot of amazing and fun opportunities, but the most contrarian thing we think we can do the next year is simply double down on the core show itself. That means having to say no to anything that doesn't improve the show directly. No fun, no products, no world tour. Just three hours of talking about tech and business at 11 a.m. every weekday. The world tour was my little sneaky joke. Because, you know, what is a world tour?

2:59:06Isn't there that whole meme of, like, it's going to ruin the world tour? Well, we did. I mean, we had an opportunity to go to Switzerland. And we turned that down. Yeah, I mean, I guess we've had a couple, like, world tour. not full tour, but like trip, international trip. But if we were to go to Europe, it'd turn into a tour. Maybe, yeah, it's possible. If we went to the Middle East, it'd turn into a tour. Sure, sure. You know, you're going all the way over there. Maybe that happens, but not next year. We're locking in next year. The interesting thing is that a friend of the show, Bryce, said that he was sort of like framing it as like, these guys have realized that like media can be a better business.

2:59:42Bryce Roberts? Yeah, yeah. He texted me yesterday. Yeah. and asked for advice on this format of a new podcast. And I was like, I'm not watching that. I won't say what it is though. I don't even think it's not that it's a better business. It's just a better business for us. Exactly, exactly, exactly. So obviously like no shade here, but it is just like, you know, the founder market fit. Like it is ridiculous to say that media is a better business than asset management. Like that's just not true. Look at the Ford 400. there it's it's it's all industrialists or asset managers there are very very few media figures that actually are in the hundred billion plus club it just doesn't happen but can you be hugely successful absolutely can you be very happy absolutely is it a better fit for us absolutely and so um i would yeah i could i could have a i could leave and pivot i i considered i i enjoy investing in startups i always have i've invested in probably every every few months i got to add another 10 uh but uh yeah some something's over over 60 companies and so i last year wandering in the wilderness you know trying to figure out how i wanted to spend my life i considered that but there's zero yeah that or join a fund you know it's i think like being a solo gp is maybe overrated in a bunch of ways, but I would be 10 % as happy or fulfilled doing that, even though there's a career to be built.

3:01:15Cheers. I wanted to ask you about... Question one second. I want to go back to what you just said about the conversations being very similar and repeatable. I just did this episode on Bruce Springsteen, which I was very unsure if I was going to put it out. I recorded for like three hours. I edited it down to like one hour and like 15 minutes. It's the most unusual episode of Founders that I've probably ever done. The amount of people that have now text or sent me messages that they're crying during it has been like shocking. It wasn't, it turned out, I thought I was making a podcast on, you know, somebody had one of the most extreme work ethics that I've ever heard of.

3:01:50That's, that was my introduction to him. I didn't know, I wasn't like a Bruce Greenstein fan. I'm a huge Jimmy Iovine fan who's really like almost like best friends of Bruce. And, you know, he says one of the hardest working, like most extreme people ever. And it wind up, you know, taking a very, the second half of the book is pretty crazy where you have this guy that like essentially gets everything that he thought he wanted and try almost kills himself. And like, what happened there? Why is he doing that? And then how did he, he was 34 when that's happening. He's almost 80 now. He looks phenomenal, by the way.

3:02:23It's like, what happened there? And how did he actually get what he, he had a mistake. He was mistaken on what he thought he wanted. Once he got what he wanted, it's not what he wanted. He realized what he actually wanted. It was a sports car. No, but he was incapable of getting that, and then he figured out a way. I think the episode title is like Bruce Schroesing prepares himself. He thought he wanted a GT3 RS, but he really wanted a Rennsport. Is that the one that you said I should drive? I always tell you to get the most insane cars. But this is the point. It's so funny. David, you were you were like, oh, if I wanted to if I wanted to buy a Ferrari, it would be this one.

3:03:02It was an 812 comp. For like a car to keep in California. And I was like, that's so you to just pick like the most elite car. History's greatest cars. The spin-off. What are we getting car reviews out of here? There's a line in Bruce's autobiography that I don't even think I put in the episode that I thought was interesting. He's like, people don't come to my shows to learn something new. They come to be reminded about what they already know is true. Ooh, that is great. I love that. Wow. And I think if you look at, again, I think of founders as like church for entrepreneurs. I think a lot of that is like, dude, I grew up in the church.

3:03:37Many people don't think about it. Yeah. Like what they do, like the rhythm and the repetition as like that, that's very interesting. Yeah. So I do think, I think again, my natural instincts is fewer, deeper. So it's like, I talk to the same people over and over again. I don't like, there's another line in the autobiography he's like uh i'm fairly insular by nature i don't let new people into my life casually i feel the exact same way and so i do feel the best the best things in life all of them are come from compounding whether it's relationships money knowledge everything comes from compounding so my instinct is to just go and have the same conversations with you know the fewer deeper people that i actually trust and then you meet remarkable people and you add very slowly uh yeah i think about that the opportunity cost of having a dinner with somebody that we've never met versus is just hanging out and having my favorite conversation, which is the same one we always have.

3:04:27The other thing about, I would say the difference, like the quote you just gave around going to a show to remember what you already know. Think about when I discovered founders, one of the most powerful things was learning that certain elements of myself were okay. Like I'm not the most organized person, right? And so to hear that other people that have gone on to do great things, Like some of them are hyper organized, like, you know, like incredibly dialed and others are just like chaotic. And it's actually learning like what's actually okay is I feel like extremely powerful. We may be like a small percentage of the overall human population, but we are not unique.

3:05:09There have been people that have our same experiences, think the same way that we are, have our same natural intelligence, talent, everything else. And she's like, it's foolish not to utilize like their experience and knowledge for your own benefit on how to build a life, not a fucking business, a life. That was one of the craziest things, realizations that Bruce Springsteen has in this episode where he's like, I thought I was building like work. I want to be a rock star. I want to do all this other stuff. He's just like, I got that and I have a shitty life. How do I fix my life? And for him to go through that was, you know, a pretty intense like experience.

3:05:42and I think that's why, and then his dad, I don't want to talk too much about this, but like, you know, he had one of the worst dads that you could possibly have. His dad was a misanthrope, had no friends, alcoholic, beat the shit out of Bruce. I think he said in his entire childhood, his dad said less than a thousand words to him. Wow. And then later on he gets diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and the amount of messages there was just like, the part about his dad is like, that hits way too close to home. It's exactly like, why? Because there's people out there that have had that same experience too.

3:06:14Yeah. What is your favorite book that is not a biography?

3:06:23Really hard, right? Favorite book that's not a biography? So examples would be like, you know, 1929 doesn't really have a breakneck by Dan Wang. I'm not reading anything new. No, I'm just giving examples. Like I'm just looking through like what I've, what I've read recently. And there's a lot of books that are, that, that, that it would, I would imagine that it would be very hard to make a founders episode about a, you know, I mean, I certainly a work of fiction. I think I can make a great founders episode about any book that I really enjoyed. Like I did a last year, I did Haruki Mirakami's what I think about when I think about running.

3:06:59Oh, okay. And I remember I was in Malibu. This is why I spent so much time out here. Cause I really do believe I do my best work out here. There is something very, very special about this place. About Hollywood or Malibu? No, not Malibu. Hollywood, I come because I love you guys. I was whipping through the mountains just now, by the way. That's great. I was like, I got to slow down. That's not a good idea. So I started reading that. I got this idea from Elon. And he's like, you know, he wants to read more books. And he realizes like carrying books with him is difficult. So sometimes he would just read entire books on the Kindle app on his iPhone.

3:07:31And I started reading. I forgot even how I discovered this. because I didn't know who Riki Murakami was before this, start reading it. And I think I've read the whole entire book on my phone in like a day and a half. And then I was like, this isn't really a Founders episode. This is kind of weird. And I'm like, no, the fact that you couldn't put this down means that it is a Founders episode. You are going to make an episode about it. And then the response, because you're so intentionally interested and you can transfer your interest to, you know, podcasting a straight energy transmission for some of us, you're able to transfer that enthusiasm, that passion for this guy's ideas and life to the audience.

3:08:03So I think I can make it on any book that I'm intensely interested in. Like I've been rereading Freedom's Forge, right? I mean, I could make the episode on just Bill Knudsen. Yeah, Bill Knudsen. But I think telling the whole story of the fact that in the 1940s, the United States, they took what was this hugely sophisticated manufacturing base that was just applied to consumer products and on a dime turned it and started producing the most war material than any other country in the world. like how they did that is a very fascinating story. But to answer your question, favorite book that is not a biography?

3:08:38That's so interesting because I would never put Freedom's Forge in the pipeline of Founders episodes. And yet I would 100 % listen to a Founders episode on Freedom's Forge, which is like unmet demand or unknown demand. I don't want to talk too much about podcasting because you know, like I will not shut up about this, but like I think one of the most important parts of like, if you're going to do this for a long term, long term. And like, this is another thing that Bruce Green saying, I think was very smart. He noticed, he just like observed his industry. He's like, this industry is very transient.

3:09:12There's a person that has a hit song, maybe a hit album, maybe two hit albums, but like then they either get on drugs, they die. I think there's, what is it? Like the 27 club, all these young musicians die. And he's like, I was built for durability and longevity. And so he worked backwards from like, what are these people doing? Yeah. And how do I just avoid, it's very Munger-esque, Charlie Munger-esque, invert always invert. And so with podcasting, you think about that a lot. I can't say who this was. And Rob, I shouldn't even say this. Rob put me across from like a, I would consider him like a legacy podcaster.

3:09:48And he did this at dinner. I think he did this on purpose because he knows like what's going to happen. And I just start asking him questions about like his show. And he came up in podcasting when like it could be your second, third, fourth, fifth thing that you were doing, which is like those days are done. and I remember I didn't even eat that night I don't think I was like pounding my chopsticks on the table because his answers were like you're not going to make it man like you're already dead like this isn't going to work so the point of being here is like if you're going to do this long term I think you have to be like show the audience who you truly are and therefore they will over time I think people came to founders because it was the books and the biographies and over time they're just like whatever this guy thinks is interesting to read I just want to hear like his insight or his takeaways from that.

3:10:34You guys are doing a good job with all the personality you have. You're fucking dressed as an elf right now. Like you have this giant, you know, horse behind. Like the million little things that you guys do. Even now, I was here probably a month ago and like even the stuff you have hanging up on your walls, I'm like, oh, they're just becoming more and more natural and authentic to who they are. So I want to answer your question. Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant. It's not technically a biography. I would say it's a hundred page biography of the human species. And because I think if you have one skill set that's going to help you throughout your life, it's like really understanding that history doesn't repeat, human nature does.

3:11:08And you really should study how humans react in very predictable ways when they're exposed to specific stimuli. And I think understanding that is one of the most useful tools you can have as you go through life. what what patterns do you see in the founders that have appeared on founders and the new show in terms of how they landed on uh the thing that defined their life and their work someone v in the chat says how does one find their purpose obsession but i feel like it's very very different across uh but i'm curious if you see any patterns somebody came up to me at that party with that party we were all together at a few days ago and they asked me that question they're like uh i forgot the exact way this guy said it but it was just like you know it's obvious that you found your thing like and like how do i find my thing and the the story i told him was just like obviously it's internal like no one can answer that question i gave that story from a mozart where you know this 21 year old kid comes up to mozart it's like how do i write a symphony and mozart's like you're too young and mozart's like and the guy goes you were writing symphonies younger than I am now.

3:12:20And he's like, yeah, but I wasn't going around asking people how to do it. And I just think like, all you have to do is like, just look how you spend your time. Actions express priority. Like actions express priority. I don't give a shit what you say. Just like, I see how you spend your time and I will know what is actually important to you. And so if you're looking for that thing, you know, just like, where are you naturally drawn to? Like this morning, I spent like six hours. But at the same time, when you were, I feel like there needs to be an openness to, like an openness to not like you can't just, if you're trying to find your life's work, it's not the something you can just decide.

3:12:55I'm going to find my life's work this week. I'm going to sit down with you. No, no, no. Because when you were 20, it's not like you were like, I'm going to be a... Not everyone can be a pro basketball player their entire life. And more specifically, like when you were 20, it's not like you were thinking, well, when I'm in my 40s, I want to have a business podcast. So what I would say, if that kid is 20, find out how old this guy is in the chat. I would say read Paul Graham's how to do great work that essay i think it's three four episode 314 of founders can you check for me real quick um and like it's gonna one shot it again it might not um like i think one shot it paul graham how to do great work episode 314 so so so hold on real quick and i think it came down to like you're he's just like how to do great you're just following what you're intensely curious about yeah and so like like this morning uh i woke up and essentially i just like read for I don't know, four or five straight hours.

3:13:47And then I was like, oh shit, I forgot. I have to go to TPPN today. And that's why I was driving so fast. And like, no one told me like, no one's like, David, you should read for self-development. It's just like, I like reading. I feel good when I read. It's way better than looking at my goddamn phone. It's outside of like spending time with people I love, like there's not another activity I like to do. I would put like our relationships, spending time with people I truly care about above that. But in terms of like, if I'm by myself, like there's not another thing that I'd rather want to do. And that's just me listening to my curiosity.

3:14:18Yeah. I'm going to go. Okay. No, no, no. I was just, yeah. If you could interview anyone that is dead, who would it be? Was there, was there any, like, is there anyone you've studied that you feel like there's this open question where no, no text captured it or no interview that they did? Yeah. It's like particularly lost. I mean, that has got to be the case. I've had a weird experience last week, and weird in a great way. A ghost? No. The ghost of Rockefeller? The ghost of Diego. So, yeah, the answer would probably be – I mean, the simplest thing would be, like, Rockefeller. Maybe Steve Jobs.

3:15:01Maybe Sam's Murray because Sam's Murray is just, like, you know, such a savage. And I think I have definitely, like, a wild side to me that – you know Lulu. Yeah. Like she's, she's constantly like, you cannot travel anywhere without a crisis comms person next to you. Like you're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble. And so I think there's like a wildness to Sam's Murray that that's very attractive to me if I'm being honest about this. But I, in terms of like, it does not come across in the text. So what I'm trying to do is like, obviously with the new show, I want to be differentiated, right?

3:15:32I wouldn't be doing it, you know, if, if just to be the same as anybody else, like I find being the same as anybody else, disgusting. It makes me want to vomit. and um so i i'm working on some people that like have literally never done podcasts before yeah and i skew to like older killers like yeah i'm not interested in the in the in general i do try to spend time like i do feel i'm in like the middle child where like you get access to all these crazy people have done things for decades and i'm really successful and they're willing to like spend a lot of time with you most of them listen to the podcast and then i get a lot of information out of these relationships and conversations these dinners and then you know every once in a while identify like a younger founder maybe to spend time with that if you think you can help them you should but in general ask you way older way like you know somebody that can actually point to a body of work to prove that they are actually like somebody you want to spend time with and i had um i spent time with a 71 year old guy last week in new york and he sold his company for$60 billion recently.

3:16:31And he's never done a podcast. And I did an episode on his, episode of Founders on him and his family. And the reason he wanted to meet me and the reason that he's now going to do the new show and he trusts me is because there's only one book written about this. And he listened to the podcast. He couldn't believe the insights that were in it. he asked his son, asked David who he interviewed in the family to get this information. And the answer was nobody. I read the book and then I tied it together because like, you're the same person that there's been a hundred of you, 200, a thousand of you the past few hundred years.

3:17:10Like we're not, I know we like to feel we're special. Like we are, there's just, we're not as unique as we think we are. And so I don't think, you know, obviously if you can have conversations with these people, you should do that. One of the reasons that is because like in an hour, we talked for an hour, the amount of information that guy transferred to me in an hour would be literally impossible. You could give a 25-year-old founder, 30-year-old founder weeks, and he just could not convey that much knowledge and information that this guy was able to do in an hour. So yeah, if you can have conversations with him, you should, but I don't feel like I'm ever like missing out, like the text wasn't enough.

3:17:47Well, it's been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. More swearing, please. Chat's fans of it. Well, that concludes this episode. Thanks for having me again, guys. Are you tired, John? Back at 11. No, I do have to go. Oh, you actually have to go. I have to go. I'm sorry. But, I mean, you two can hang out here if you want. Where are you going? This has been a great show. We're in the fourth hour. We're almost halfway through the fourth hour. And we'll be back tomorrow. Yeah. We've got two more. 11 a.m. sharp. Every day this week has felt like Friday. Thank you. But thank you for hanging out with us.

3:18:19Thank you for being here. Of course. We love you, David. And add David Senra, a two-year podcast player. Thank you. Thank you. See you tomorrow. Goodbye.