Charting The Media Landscape, WSJ Mansion Section, Emily Sundberg LIVE in The Ultradome | Jordan Schneider, Saagar Enjeti, Justine Moore, Glenn Solomon, Dion Harris & More

25:37Don't say that. If someone was like from first principles, let's just make the Hamptons better, they would come up with Del Mar. But look how brutal the view is from the pool. I don't think this was the best photo they could have ran. You can see the beach. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I can see the beach behind the staircase and like through this little sliver. Oh, so are you an infinity pool guy? You want the pool straight out to the ocean? Okay. Okay. Well, the seller is a limited liability company tied to Sandra Nafsker, whose family has been major cattle ranchers over a century in Arizona, California, and Oregon.

26:12Land family. Land maxing. Land is the most underrated asset. Completed last year, the oceanfront compound first came on the market for$75 million. But the price has been reduced. It finally sold for$50 million. the listing agent said it's a remarkable sale for San Diego coastal real estate agent the property includes a 4 ,500 square foot main house I agree somebody would have to pay you quite a lot to live there it is crazy to that's not my kind of beach and that's not my kind of house it's crazy to get to get half the space and you're in Del Mar which is cool but you're not in Manhattan you would think that Manhattan would just be more expensive and you're paying twice as much for half the space yeah I say take Icon's property that makes no sense to me what about what about about Hawaii.

26:58What's your take on Hawaii? It's the Hamptons of the Pacific. Do you agree? The only thing I'm curious about with Hawaii is I really want to visit a Zuck's ranch and meet those cows. Okay. Meet those cows. You want to meet those cows specifically? Yes. You don't just want to see how big the property is, the cow specifically? I'm curious about what he's sort of doing there with the, he's obsessed with like breeding the perfect cow. Yeah. We missed, we, They had Zuck Burgers at the Meta Connect event that we were live from. You didn't have one? We just got really busy podcasting. It's basically impossible to eat while you're streaming because you have to eat talk on the microphone.

27:35But none of them could have put one aside. Did you guys have any? Yeah. No. No one had any. Wow. Missed opportunity. Missed opportunity. So, Catherine Conrad spent a decade perfecting the gardens at her Honolulu home overlooking the ocean. The estate has granite pathways that wind around a Carrera marble fountain. I don't know what that is, actually. An antique pergola cost about$40 ,000. Her favorite view of the garden is at night when the cypress monkey pod and flowering Tacoma trees are illuminated. She's trying to pitch the monkey pod as a feature. It sounds like a bug. You have a monkey pod.

28:13I guess that's like a cat tree for a monkey. I want to get people to visit you in Hawaii, too. like you have the time the time zone is so brutal yeah or you have neighbors you love maybe or you meet new friends but if you're if you're buying in california or new york someone's always going to be in town totally i also feel like as for the celebrities out there it really puts a target on your back when anytime there's every time there's been like a natural disaster it's like oh the you know the rock because you took all our water yeah well well that but there was the tsunami warning last year and they were getting really canceled for that and then canceled for the tsunami?

28:47No, because apparently they had private roads that everyday citizens were backed up in traffic trying to escape the tsunami, and they were not inclined to open their private roads. Yeah, it's always going to be more controversial to buy in Hawaii. Yeah. Okay. So 0.8 of an acre. The first lot was bought for 7.55 million, then 4 million for the adjacent parcel. So you put two properties together around 11 million in land value, then 12 million in renovation. They're asking 34. It's a four bedroom, 5 ,200 square foot house, ocean views. It also has a Pilates studio. Is that a feature for you? I like to leave my house for Pilates.

29:32You want to leave your house for Pilates. So at 34 million, are you buying or are you selling? No. you're not buying you're passing passing what about this house in uh puerto rico i haven't been to puerto rico in a very long time um before we move on we got to do another ad do you have the ads list i don't have it today let me pull it up here we go uh sorry privy wallet infrastructure for every bank privy helps it helps uh 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. So, yes, Puerto Rico was very much a thing during 2020.

30:15Whoa, that is crazy. They're saying, come hang out. Yes, they want people to come visit. I have a friend who would refer to that as a gulag. Because you get all your boys to come and visit and hang out, and they all sleep in bunk beds. But you really could sleep with 12 people there or something. So this, this mansion has a 17 ,000 square feet, eight bedrooms, a basketball court, a pool. Um, it is, uh, for sale for$65 million. Is it in that zone? I think, I don't know if it's the four seasons or there's another, uh, there's another hotel company that has effectively set up a mini city in Puerto Rico.

30:53You know about this? Uh, there is information about the Ritz Carlton in here. Oh, it's the Ritz. Let me read it. Uh, Simon said he and his wife had little intention to buy in Puerto Rico before stopping by the Ritz Carlton sales office in 2015. They quickly became enamored with the idea of building a house there, buying a one acre parcel of land on one of the community's golf courses. The parcel overlooks the ocean. It was completely impulsive. Uh, there were a few false starts. The Phallics got the keys to the new home in 2017, just before hurricane Maria hit, closing down the resort community and resulting in minor damage, water damage to the home.

31:29Soon after the community recovered, COVID hit. In recent years, the phallics have spent long weekends and holidays at the property, as well as several weeks in the summer. They are selling because their grandchildren are older and don't spend as much time on the property. Puerto Rico's luxury housing market has boomed in recent years, thanks to tax incentives and the rise of remote work. It's become very attractive. They undid a lot of those incentives or they, they, you, there's some people that are grandfathered in, but now they're just sort of trapped in, in the Caribbean. Yeah. And so this is a lot in the Dorado beach, which is a Ritz Carlton reserve resort.

32:0865 million buy or pass. Um, pass, but maybe try to get, I don't know if those Disney posters are coming with the house, but I feel like the posters in the film room, you could flip those. Yeah, split them off. Or something, you know? Break it up. Break up big Puerto Rico. Sell it for parts. We got to talk about J.P. Morgan's new headquarters. Michael Dell shared it. I have a post pulled up here. Oh, yes, this is a peak performance. And I wanted to get your reaction to this setup. Can we pull up this post in the timeline? It would be great to be able to pull up posts, both in the timeline and there.

32:46That's the future. Well, that's what... Can we not pull it up there? While we're pulling that up, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devon is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. All right, pull up this post from Litquidity. And we'll put it on there. We don't need to put it on the back screen. We can actually just pull it on the... Yep. And while we're doing that, let me tell you about Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free.

33:20Did you see the... What else is going on here? Would you guys buy anywhere besides California? No. New York, eventually. California has so much. I feel like I just want to grow the map of places I go that are driving distance. We're both excited about... Santa Barbara. Yeah, the Montecito to LA. Montecito, LA. Marin. But even Big Bear. So you just want to buy houses close to each other. Houses that are less than an hour away from each other. In California, in LA specifically, you can get in a car and in two hours be in a completely different biome. You can be in the desert or you can be in the ocean or you can be on an island.

34:02So they got video footage of the JPM analysts going to their new workstation. This is a post from Liquidity. But pull up the post from Michael Dell that shows the actual setup here. and we need to rate my office. Did you guys hear that employees have to pay for the gym? What? At JPM? Why? There was a story about it. I mean, I guess that's just some insight. Does that inspire them to grow? I mean, employees were not happy about it. They were like, why do we have to pay to go to this? I guess it's just such a big organization that if you don't put some sort of limit, people will kind of all flood right on January 1st or something.

34:38And I'm sure that they have. It's just kind of like a flow limit. they have like a health account or something towards it yeah um so this is what peak performance looks like for sure this is beautiful i actually i love i saw this setup and i was and i thought i want to recreate this here 100 i'm down to be in the trenches yes this is what the trenches look like i like that they have the thing that new hotels have now where you just you have the outlets right there. Yeah. And the desks. That's nice. We're not seeing chairs. Imagine having chat QBT add up numbers for you while sitting in that setup.

35:15So what I'm interested is like, when was this taken? Because I thought they worked hard. I don't think that's a real photo. That doesn't really look like a real person. Michael Dell just posted this and said, congratulations, JP Morgan, on opening your new headquarters. He sold them all the monitors because the monitors are Dell monitors. I think this is a rendering. I don't think so. No way. This is real. I think this is real. You don't think that jawline is possible? That's pure JPM power. I don't know. I don't know. I have to see it for myself. I emailed their team. Even Michael Dell replied to his own post and said we're monitoring the situation.

35:48Yeah, you don't do that on some slop. I think they finished building out the office. Michael Dell was excited. The office looks like slop. Look at those beautiful Dell monitors. I will fight you on this. I need those. Maybe that's where my shit is. that is where you're shooting this is the spot uh we're a hop skip and a jump yeah people that will actually i need to go i need to see i need to see it for myself yes yes yes okay um okay last thing you seen it last thing we have to know it's beautiful it's a whole new building and and it has like crazy led at the top right it has a crazy light show there's like uh rock there's like a big story about like the rocks that they brought into dwayne the rock johnson I should bring him in, have him do it.

36:34I feel like when you, when you set up a new, a new fortress of finance, you should have like an inaugural, an inaugural lock-in and you should bring in like a, like a Warren Buffett should come and like lock in and, and, and type the first row in a spreadsheet and be like, yes, like we've opened the office. Jamie Dimon himself has come and, and, and done and written the first cell of the spreadsheet. And now the office is open for business. It's like smashing a bottle of wine across a boat. I like that. You need to christen a new office. Let's pull up this post from none other than the New York Post, which I don't think they made it on the media landscape, but mobsters ran rigged poker games at Kylie Jenner's Lux NYC pad while she still owned it.

37:20Apparently Travis Scott also was on the owned a piece of it too. what's going on here? You think this all ties back into the holes? Isn't this part of the story that came out yesterday about... I just got an email from you 19 minutes ago. You're sitting right here. It's crazy, right? It's crazy. Isn't this part of the story with the NBA gambling? I haven't been following this too closely. The headline yesterday on the Times about the NBA coach gambling, in the headline it also mentioned mafia. So unless there's two mafia poker rings going on, which is totally possible in a city like New York, I think they're connected.

38:04And I wrote about it yesterday, and one of my readers emailed me. I'm not going to say who it was. But he was like, if you want to talk about this, I was there. The game was held at gunpoint. What? If you want to talk about it. And I said, sure. And he said, be the neighborhood. What is game held at gunpoint? Like someone's forcing you to play poker? Well, you guys don't play poker. Sometimes that happens. What do you mean that happens? Guns, drugs. But in what scenario? Mafia. But under what conditions am I like, I'm really enjoying playing poker with you, so you will die if you don't continue playing?

38:37Oh, I think it's more like. They're just having so much fun? Yeah, you do a little, you have a little too much fun and somebody like pulls something out that they're not supposed to pull out. And yeah. I've never had a gun at a poker game, but I've heard. This is why I'm not leaving California. This New Yorker in you seems crazy to me. There's none of this here, yeah. This is not... There's a post here on the sports gambling arrest. Mike over on X with 2 million views on this post. The NBA is very concerned about the multiple arrests made as a result of the FBI's sports gambling raid. Use code MULTIPLEARESTS for a 30 % profit boost on a three-leg parlay with DraftKings, the official gambling partner of the NBA.

39:16I love it. I am glad that people are still playing poker in person as opposed to just only playing online. That's good. That's kind of a white pill for sure. Um, touching grass. Yeah. Touching chips. I used to have a poker podcast. Really? Yeah. It was called chips and dip and it was about poker and chips, like potato chips. Potato chips. Yeah. Were you, were you like a good poker player? I am, I was, uh, my ex was like a good poker player and then our friend, the third guy is also very good and he's borderline addict. Hmm. He was a gambling addict. Cool. Good luck to him. He's doing okay. He might start writing about poker.

39:51He should go work at a hedge fund or something. Yeah. Put it to work. For sure. Uh, he should go lock in. He should be, he should do the inaugural gamble. The first gamble at the new, the new Morgan Stanley HQ. It's Morgan Stanley, right? Uh, no, it's JPM. It's JPM. Okay. JPM. Yes. Yes. Yes. The, the, the first, the first fat finger trade. Uh, this is important. Uh, anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. We know we have to get you, you have to get out of here. Really fun. Got to go to the hammer museum. Breaking. She will be the hammer museum. I didn't know this is live. You can go by and say, don't say that.

40:28Be careful. Okay. Bye guys. Bye. Great hanging. Great. Cheers.

40:34Well, we rearranged the seats. Let me tell you about Vanta.com automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the security and compliance process, manual work out of a security compliance process and replace it with continuous automation. Alex Heath says, As Snap is in talks to raise at least$1 billion for AR Glasses, multiple investors involved, including Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Wealth Fund. Plan is to move Spex into a new independent subsidiary. Spinning it out. And structure similarly to Waymo and Alphabet. I want to get Evan on the show so badly.

41:11I think it would be a very fascinating conversation. We're working on it. It will happen soon. Samsung just launched a Vision Pro competitor, right? Samsung Galaxy XR, the headset. So they're, and Google's announcing it today. This is 16 minutes ago. The Samsung Galaxy XR is powered by Android XR, and it's supposed to be basically at the Apple Vision Pro level in terms of fidelity, I think. but they obviously have a YouTube app because it's a Google partnership. And so on day one, they have a lot more partners because Android's been kind of a better steward to the developer community than Apple.

42:02And I think a lot of the obvious developer partners that would go and build apps for the Apple Vision Pro are taking a wait and see approach because they want to have more leverage over Apple instead of just showing up and being like, okay, I'm going to be paying the Apple tax on day one. They're saying, hey, why don't you go get the audience first, Apple? Make sure that there's actually 100 million DAUs of this thing, like the iPhone, before I build an app for this. Speaking of smart devices, Kohler, the toilet manufacturer, is making a new toilet camera that provides health insights based on your bathroom breaks, which is insane because Throne, you know, the startup Throne, is doing this.

42:51I really thought nobody would... Touch it? No, nobody would go and compete. I thought it was like an insane idea. Yeah. But at least no one else would go and compete. And then Kohler, you know, obviously a major manufacturer, decided, I'm sure they were somewhat inspired by Throne to go get into the game of toilet cameras, health tracking. So we'll see how this plays out. It's very funny. Let me tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams like GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. Gabriel is posting. This is a wild one. There was an article from the Times that said, female spies are waging sex warfare to steal Silicon Valley secrets.

43:38this is a funny story from the times is this the times of india i i think it's the times of india but um the this has been the meme of like the the ccp spy girlfriend and and we sort of the times of london okay so we we had a whole there are a lot of different timeses um there are a whole bunch of different uh like iterations of that of that viral concept of like is is the girlfriend a spy and then the backlash to like, well, you shouldn't judge the girlfriend because she might be a spy and going back and forth, back and forth on that. Uh, so it's interesting that the times of London, is this just something where Europe takes two months to get to the current thing on X?

44:21Because this, this is a, this is an article that literally just says what X was talking about four months ago, right? Yeah. I think that, I mean, this, or is there new information It's been an ongoing thing. I think maybe what they've discovered, and we're not factual media, so we don't need to get into kind of the truth here, but they're saying some of the spies are even marrying and having children with their targets, which is really insane. You know what a good, have you seen The Americans? That's a great TV show. The Americans is great. Atlas says, geez, I would sure hate for a beautiful Chinese spy to wage sex warfare.

45:01against me for my production secrets. My production secrets are super important. I would hate for this to happen. Did he go mega viral for this? Yeah, 15 ,000 likes. He got the Elon response. That's great. Nier has been going on its hair highlighting Andreessen-backed companies. And there's definitely some that are - Specifically Speedrun, right? These are A16Z Speedrun companies, which is under Andrew Chen. And it's more of an incubator or accelerator? It's an accelerator. It doesn't have the same weight as like a David George came in with the growth team and like actually like did some analysis.

45:36It's like they're ripping checks. But it's out, you know, it's out of their speed run run by Andrew Chen. Sure. And yeah, so this one is Cheddar. It's the TikTok of sports wagering. Okay. Unlike other platforms, they allow players under 21 and in 46 days. Is this from a deck or from their website or something? I think this is from the speed run. How did Nier find this? I think this is from the speed run website. This is ridiculous. Okay, wait, there's another one. I need to talk about double speed. I need you to explain this to me. The founders in the chat going back and forth in the replies. So Nir says, A16Z back double speed lets you control thousands of social media accounts with AI, ensuring they look as human as possible.

46:22Quote, never pay a human again. Control is all you need. I can imagine some, I was about to steal this, but it's really hard. I can imagine that puppeteering a thousand devices might be useful for something or other in a data generation. So DoubleSpeed, I think they're trying to position it as this is an alternative to influencer marketing, but it does look and feel more like an influence operation. so I would be this is the kind of thing that nation states typically take this kind of thing on where they build a phone farm this feels like bot farming it feels very much against the terms and conditions hold on, but Nier went through this whole flow where Nier is just quoting them which is interesting because Nier is not really dunking here, like Nier is just saying A16Z back double speed lets you control thousands of social media accounts with AI.

47:24It's basically just the same as what's on their website copy. One of the founders or the employees automating attention at double speed, Zuhair Lakhani, chimes in and says, let me know when you sign up. We can help you grow your company, Orin. And Nir says, it wants to charge me 5K before I try it, it seems. Zuhair says, sorry, we don't do free trials. Let me know if you have budget to allocate and we'll get you onboarded. Day says you can do 2 ,000. Zuhair says, yes, join our Discord. But the founder, I believe, wait, is this, is this, this is a founder of Speedrun cohort five. I don't know if it's the founder.

48:04Bessert Coppa says, people are calling this like morally lame and impoverished. And Bessert Coppa says, how so? There are already a million bot farms around the world. they wreaked havoc on our elections not so long ago shouldn't the best ones be built in america and pioneer the latest tech and rules to govern it wait so he's saying they have wreaked havoc yes on the world but so we should build it in america yes yes it's basically like oh yeah you know i would like this i would like we should make it in america i think double speeds should pivot to being a defense tech company and just work with our government to run foreign operations Yes, this is good.

48:44America has such a long history of running various influence operations in far-off regions of the world. Spam from first principles. Here's another one. Edgar is bringing real money engagement into free-to-play sweepstakes, America's number one social casino for slot lovers. These are insane. I can't believe this is real. I had to go check the speed. It is wild comparing these to the Nat Friedman cohort that he did, which Julius was a part of, Julius.ai. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert-level insights. What was that? So the last one we have to cover is Covered, which is bet on your bills, OnlyFans.

49:30This is so dark. I can't even. What is that? Bet on your bills with Covered. OnlyFans, child support, and last night's Uber. Wipe them from your credit card by playing your favorite casino games all from the comfort of our app. No VPN, no crypto deposits. And so my reaction here, I mean, John, you're going to be impressed by this. Six million views on this post and only 292 likes.

49:58So bad. It means that someone nuclear ratioed them. but i i mean such an insane missed opportunity to say bet on your debt right like they say bet on your bills yeah like bet on your own debt well it's not debt this is potentially the most american because you've already paid it or maybe you're in debt no but you're you can wipe them if you if you bet right you get them wiped from your statement so bad it's so funny that just a Just a quote tweet from Hero Thousand Faces that just says societal breakdown gets more likes with 30 ,000 views. The like ratio is insane on this. Trey says, this is incredible.

50:44Double your bills or nothing. What's funny is there was a guy who was a really cool, kind of funny designer who was designing stuff like this, little modals. And one of them was Apple Pay with a double or nothing button. And people were like, oh, that's really funny. but to see it actually productized is like, oh, we were joking about that. Yeah, the interesting thing is a lot of these kinds of ideas, kinds of apps end up being massive businesses, but you don't typically see venture funds backing them. They typically boot you up. Stick to the more useful. This is one of the challenges of scaling a venture platform, right?

51:23Sure. It's like there's tons of partners at Andreessen that probably would have passed on these deals. But individual partners have autonomy and they can do what they want. Well, stick to the infrastructure, baby. Go to Turbo Puffer. Search every byte. Serverless Vector and Full-Tex Search. Built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, extremely scalable. Did you see this? A gummy bear, Basil, says a gummy bear company casually dropping revolutionary battery technology for$25 on it. on Amazon the lightest ever of this capacity and pretending nothing happened is one of the funniest things of all time.

52:04This is Haribo. Yeah. I don't actually think this is Haribo. I think this is a... Someone's stealing the Haribo brand? Well, hopefully it's less. The gummy bear company. So, yeah, people are immediately wondering, is this real? Is this actually the best power storage per dollar possible or per weight? And so Michael went ahead and bought one, and here's his findings. He says its weight is 286 grams, just a little bit over what they claim. The capacity is 83 watt-hours. Printed on the battery, it says capacity 20 ,000 milliamp-hours or 77 watt-hours. So I'm measuring in excess of what is claimed.

52:50I think they're stating the voltage piece is what makes the battery capacity measurements nebulous, but Watt Iris don't have that issue and I'm getting better than claimed. Minimum charging current of 0.5 of an amp, less than this battery pack turns itself off. Not able to recharge the battery via the built-in cable. That's weird. So overall, my conclusion is this battery is the real deal. It meets the claimed capacity and pretty much hits the weight spec. Wow. So maybe you got to go pick one of these up. Very, very funny post. Oracle just secured a$38 billion debt deal to finance two new data centers.

53:23They said they couldn't lever up anymore. They shouldn't, but they are not listening. $23 billion will go toward a Texas site and nearly$15 billion towards one in Wisconsin. Ted Jang says, here we go. The debt finance deals are coming. We got Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe coming on the show in about an hour to break down his Series E. The godfather of Stargate. Yes, Star Lord. The Star Lord. Himself. So Citrini put this out a bit ago, according to Ted. Something that has been a relative comfort in being able to stay long despite calls for an AI bubble so far has been the fact that most of the capex has come from cash cash flow.

54:01You don't have a bubble really until the majority of the expansion is done on debt. We have yet to see significant financing, but that absolutely should be something to watch. On one hand, that leaves another leg of the trade, leveraging up still results and more money being spent. On the other, it sets the stage for consequences of not realizing ROI that we haven't really had to contend with in the existing paradigm. With Microsoft 10-year bonds trading at a G spread of three basis points, there's still a lot of room for the hyperscalers to issue debt or tap private credit to fund continued spending on AI.

54:32However, this also induces a lot more fragility. Going forward, monitoring the share of AI capex that is financed rather than funded from cash flow is probably the most important aspect of determining exactly where we are in the cycle. again there's there's been a number of players using debt x xai has been using debt metas already tapped the debt markets uh i feel like satya just generally is a lot less inclined to uh to to lean in and lever up too much um but uh there's a post here from junk bond investor says just offloaded some data center construction debt to his school teachers or a 1k um my father is a uh retired school teacher so hopefully he didn't get burned here i have to be he's gonna be a little frustrated with me if that ends up being the case but i'm sure that's happening um with uh nexperia there's been a little uh a little chaos on that front, NXperia, the semiconductor company out of the Netherlands.

55:39They notified its Japanese automotive customers that it may no longer be able to guarantee supply, triggering renewed concern about upheaval at the chip maker. Some chaos over on the European front. Before we do the next post, let me tell you about Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt production with Gemini. Chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage. Do you think I think everyone's talking about the AI bubble. They never talk about the podcasting bubble. Maybe we should be getting some more attention. Everyone's saying like, wow, TBPN is feed me these businesses. If they don't work out, if they don't deliver, the entire global economy will collapse.

56:19Well, no, on a more serious note, we did hear of a podcast raising it at a half a billion dollar valuation that is burning money. So that could be a sign. There might be. Paki has a post here, never change, Masa. This guy rocks. And it's a post that says, SoftBank hunts for humanoid robot startups. SoftBank's Masayoshi Sun has long predicted a future where robots would outnumber people and take over many jobs from humans. But some of SoftBank's bets in robotics over the past 10 years, such as robot company Pepper, have not panned out. Now the company is renewing its robot ambitions, particularly in robots that resemble humans.

57:01Can you imagine Brad Adcock reading this? He's got to be just like, oh, let's go. Like, I want to be the one. SoftBank up 172 % year to date. Does it feel like actually a bad time to invest in humanoid robots? I don't think it feels like a bad time at all. I think it's probably true that Masa and SoftBank were too early in some of their robotics bets, right? They bet really heavily, you know, a decade ago. This feels like a great time to be building in humanoid robots or robots generally. There's a ton of interesting startups, 1X, and there's smaller companies, and there's supply chain stuff. And it's one of those things where it's like, are you more worried about being too early or being too late?

57:49Probably too early on the humanoid robot side because they're not quite getting deployed profitably. they're very much like research tools they get bought by researchers you know one-off stunts here and there there isn't really um so there there's no customer that's just like oh yeah they're buying these like every month they're buying more and more and more because like they're actually you know seeing increasing returns to scale there was that story last week about out. Tesla buying actuators from Chinese firm, right? Yeah, it was like a 675 million dollar order which to me signaled that's the kind of move you make if you're actually trying to get things into production like in real time.

58:36Or at least have a product that people can order. My theory was that if they felt like they had more time, they might have done them themselves, right? Well, our first guest of the show is in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Be like MongoDB, Indeed, DocuSign, RAM. Yeah. We have Sagar and Jenny from Breaking Points. Sagar, how are you? Oh, it's great to see you guys. Thank you for having me. Great to see you. Finally. Only after a million text messages every morning, back and forth on the AI apocalypse and political crises, have we actually just put it together that we should just hang out on the stream.

59:19I really appreciate you taking the time. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Give everyone a quick shape of the actual flow of the content, the proper funnel of your business. We've got to give Sagar some credit. He kind of created NeoTrad Media. That's true. Which is a new framework we're working on, which is new media that sort of embodies or kind of looks and feels like the traditional media. Yes. So your show looks like a proper TV show. You wear a suit. And so we call that NeoTraditionalist Media, NeoTrad Media. And we're firmly trying to do that as well. I love it. And I will say, one of the only reasons I am here is because both of you are bringing suits back to the bums of Silicon Valley.

59:59And I know many of you are watching right now in your Lululemon, your Viore, and you don't look cool. You don't look better than John or Jordy or myself. You all are billionaires. Buy a suit. Stop. Just stop it. Stop it. That's great. I couldn't agree more. I think we're starting to have a small effect, but it's taking hold. A lot of people that visit the Ultradome wear suits. Well, I mean, pretty much there are going to be tons of AI folks, tons of tech people who are going to be dragged in front of Congress over this data center buildout. I think you've clocked this correctly. But walk me through, is this a thesis that came from you see this coming or you're seeing smoke signals already?

1:00:43Walk me through your thesis of how tech and the AI buildout runs on a collision course with the average American. Yeah, the thing is, guys, and I really want to hammer this home for people who are watching because I, you know, shocker, I think many people in Silicon Valley do live in a bubble. One of the best parts of my job is I do genuinely, is I interact, and we'll return to bubble conversation, by the way. But what I get to do is not only interact with a lot of people who are normal in politics. And I mean that at the very base level, not people who live in Northern Virginia. The vast majority of my audience don't live in Washington, DC.

1:01:21Many are Uber drivers, hotel clerks, et cetera. And I start to see bubbling stuff over the last five years over cost of living. At the same time, I'm tracking the electricity story and it doesn't take a genius to pair that with data center build out. So one of the things that I really want to flag, I think here on the show is that the coming data center collision at the heart of that is about electricity. It doesn't have to be this way. One of my favorite notes is there's an analyst I follow who was in China. He had a very different view of this in China, even though, of course, they don't have democratic politics, but of course they do have some little democratic input.

1:01:56is they said nobody's concerned here because electricity is considered a solved problem. We don't have a solved problem of electricity here in the United States. And in fact, worse, you know, our grid is aging and actually things are getting worse. So with all of this capital expenditure in data centers, you are seeing a literal finite resource competition, especially in rural areas. So Virginia, the state where I live, 40 percent of all of our power is consumed by data centers. Oregon, for example, is some 33 percent. To be fair to many of the AI people who are watching, it's not all AI. We are the hotbed, right, of servers and Amazon and much of the federal government.

1:02:35But the point is, is that this is bubbling up at a very organic township level. So from Arizona to Virginia, data centers actually had a mention in our more recent gubernatorial debate. Both the Republican and the Democratic candidate said that they wanted to do something about it. There's Prince William County here in Virginia where this is an active live issue, and the public is overwhelmingly against it. The city of Tucson is moving. And so if we see this continued capital expenditure go up, and especially in more rural areas, we see headlines like 267 percent power increases for power bills in rural areas which are built near data centers, not to mention environmental concerns, et cetera.

1:03:15Then's when you're going to see people start to get dragged before Congress. So, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I'm just curious what, obviously, every area, you know, people are not going to just watch a data center get built, you know, in their backyard and not, you know, talk to their mayor or talk to the governor and actually start a conversation and a debate and ultimately create policy around this. Is there not some type of solution that would effectively allow data centers to pay a higher rate than everyday citizens and kind of make up the difference? I think it's a great idea. Unfortunately, that's not how our power system works.

1:03:53The foundation of the United States is basically built on the fact that we're going to build this grid, this infrastructure, and we can all kind of consume the social benefits of it. There are pieces of legislation, Jordy, of what you're talking about on the table, I think, in Oregon and a few other states. but these are few and far between. I also think we've got to take everybody through the story of the last 25 years. Again, with great respect to the audience I'm speaking to, you can't be Amazon and be the second largest employer in the United States, and then in your shareholder meeting, come out and say that we want to fire 600 ,000 people, or at the very least, not hire 600 ,000 fewer people.

1:04:29These are people who watch their towns get decimated. Then they watch Amazon. I mean, Nomadland, it's an Oscar-winning film about this population of people who move around. What's so challenging about this issue is that you have these massive infrastructure projects with massive spend and almost zero job creation. Exactly, exactly. Like the plumbers and the electricians are going to get paid, and that's great, but we've even heard stories of the plumbers and electricians being flown around on private jets because their skill set is so... I heard the same. And so that's not going to get people.

1:05:06But yes, if you're living in a little town and you're watching the mega project get spun up and you're getting not only no real benefit, maybe you get more slop in your trough every day. Can you maybe take me a click forward? That's the point. Go ahead. Can you maybe take me a click forward into, let's assume the trend lines kind of continue. electricity prices go up. It's more clearly attributable to data centers, et cetera, et cetera. How do the different political coalitions reframe themselves around this issue? I imagine that there's a right-wing version of tech backlash that looks one way.

1:05:51There's the abundance lib direction. There's going to be the actual socialist left, and maybe they just say, no AI at all. How do you see the different coalitions grappling with what the V2 of the messaging might be here? There's going to be a horseshoe element here. I think that the socialist left and much of the right is going to actually come in the same place enough. A lot of the socialists left is actually Bernie Sanders. I don't know if you guys saw this right before I came on the show, just called for a breakup of open AI. This is huge news. He's the first US politician actually to do so.

1:06:26What is there to break up? They have ChatGPT and then they have a bunch of other things that are subscale. How about the non-profit profit arm or whatever the hell you guys can explain that to me. I think Sam's like, I would love to break it up. I'm actually trying to break it up. I would love to just have a C Corp again. Break me up, Bernie. Is this some sort of like 4D chess and Sam's gotten to Bernie and told Bernie, hey, we need to break it up. That's really popular messaging. And he's like, yeah. Bernie's probably, he's picking from an old tool book, so we shouldn't fault him too much. He's basically just saying, let's pressure them.

1:06:59Let's make sure we have more regulation. Exactly, more regulation. On the right, much of this is going to be about distrust of Sam and many of the tech guys themselves. When you have these people outwardly bragging about mass job loss, mass societal creation, there's a lot of us who are like yeah do i want this guy who's introducing ai porn to be the most powerful person in the world i mean the challenge the challenge is that the the job loss like uh like vision is so good for fundraising because i know if if you know people are are like yeah maybe i don't have a job in 10 years it's like well i want i want i want my money going into these companies so at least i'll i'll have a chance at escaping the the permanent underclass question for you social media went through you know and continues to go is like a perpetual backlash at this point people say they hate it they don't like it they say it's bad many of those people still use it how uh do you think this this ai um development is different than that in that a generation will just log off and or do you think it's it will be the same type a dynamic where people say they hate it.

1:08:14They're frustrated with the potential impacts of it, but they still line up. That's a very astute observation. And I think it's going to be somewhere in between. And so actually, Jordy, this kind of gets to the point of what I reacted to. You put out a tweet about AGI and pornography. And what I reacted to that is I was like, yeah, AGI is not coming, guys. What's coming is porn. And what that means is the internet is just coming again. And so, you know, I downloaded the chat GPT browser. It's, it's fine. You know, it's fine. Uh, it's, it's a browser. And so it's a browser that's going to serve me.

1:08:49I mean, literally the ad read before I came in was about putting ads into chat GPT. Wow. What a business model. Somebody should have invented it already. They did. It's called AdWords in 2003. So are we just competing for the exact same, uh, type of unit economics of screen time of use of pornography of the very same things, which as you said, Jordy are making us miserable because that doesn't seem very cool to me. And it also doesn't necessarily justify, let's say 80 % gain of the entire S and P 500 over the last 2025. This is the stuff actually that I text John about literally every day when I'm like a bubble is coming.

1:09:23A bubble is coming. Yeah. A bubble is coming. I think, I think the steel man of like the, the, like the, the mid, the medium case or I don't know how to put it, but it's like, if I told you, it's just like, well, yes, like AI is not AGI. You're not going to lose your job over it. It's not going to kill anyone, but it will help you do research better. It's better autocomplete. It's this nice tool that'll help clean things up, better spell check, better grammar check, you know, better gambling odds. And if you're like, you're going to be, you're going to be a little bit more, more knowledgeable, a little bit more performant, a little bit more efficient, and it's going to cost, we're going to need to build some data centers, but we're not going to build, you know, so many data centers that we all lose our light and heating and AC.

1:10:07That's a reasonable abundance. I think that's where we're going to end up. That's where we should though. The moment we are right now is that when somebody sees an AI video of the one that went super viral a while back was like people on the roof of an apartment building and it's a pool and the glass breaks and people flow off. It's like that video and videos like it are not worth for the average American an extra$100 a month, an extra$1 ,000 a year added to their electrical bill. right and so you're exactly right and that's the political dynamic and that's why john i go hey all of that sounds great yeah uh it's a little worrying to put my entire retirement portfolio based upon you know a very different message and when that's the reality of where we're going to end up a little bit better microsoft teams is just really not the anthropic vision which is being sold to me okay about i mean i talked to a guy who works at accenture i said how do you use ai he's like yeah it's great it does auto uh meeting summaries for me and i was like wow you know i mean listen definitely great i mean it means you don't have to hire some entry-level guy although maybe that's not great and what really ended up happening is that you end up using it for these extraordinarily mundane tasks i i have no issue with that as long as the attendant social fallout government policy power bills and all of that is tied up into it not to mention i i really can't belie the social costs because what you said, Jordy, is a central thing.

1:11:32There is a mass elite revolution right now against social media. I think Jonathan Haidt might be one of the most important public intellectuals in a long time, leading what I think is going to be at least a top middle discussion with all of these different school districts, states, and others, which are banning phones. The recognition is that they are controlling us and we need to reach and take control of our life. AI is kind of supercharging that message. And if you talk to the vastly rich, which you do, and I've spoken to a few of them, how many of them really let unlimited screen time for their phones in the way that the income of let's say people making less than 100 ,000 do for their children?

1:12:14It's just completely different. They're very aware of that dynamic and that is permeating social culture at a way that I don't think people in tech are quite realizing. Do you think it always takes a generation of guinea pigs to understand where technology winds up? Because I grew up with the panic around video games and the idea that if you played Counter-Strike competitively at a very high level and became one of the greatest Counter-Strike players of 2003, you were definitely going to be crazy. Well, I did it. I was great at Counter-Strike. I wasn't maybe one of the best ever, but I was pretty good.

1:12:51and I don't have any violent impulses whatsoever. I was fine. I was not one shot by 360 no scoping people. I became a productive member of society and I feel like we came up with the ESRB, E, you know, R, like teen rated games, M rated games. And we kind of figured out like where the line is, parents adapted, kids adapted. And we got through that. Social media, it feels like we're towards the tail end of getting through it where most parents know, hey, the young kids should not be on Instagram constantly or TikTok constantly. And with AI, we're just starting to understand. But it feels like we'll kind of wind up in the same place, which is like, they're okay?

1:13:31You might be right. But let me challenge you a little bit on the video game front. Please. Because I think that video, John, you also know my crusade against sports gambling. Yes, yes, yes. So Robin Hood, if you're listening, please don't allow sports betting. But one of the important things around gambling, you also know my crusade against marijuana, is here's the issue with video games with all of these vices and things that you're talking about it's fine sometimes yeah but there is an attendant part of society which actually does lose it when immersed in this culture so you know i've pointed unfortunately part of my job i cover a lot of mass shootings we had two or actually three very recently we had minnesota we had the also the charlie kirk killer and then we also had the ice shooter all three were deep in these weird discord gamers.

1:14:16The ice guy has spent 20 hours a day gaming. But Discord is a social media thing. Discord, the platform. I don't think it's like a video game. It's the Discord platform. Yeah, but you guys can locate his Steam data. He was logging, I don't exactly remember the number off the top of my head, but an absurd number of hours playing video games. This is somebody who's 31-year-old male. This is kind of a contrarian take. I feel like most people close the book on the video games as causing violence. You're back. Brother, I never left, okay? I love it. Actually, no, I never left. I love it. And that's part of what I think is important to say is that people say it worked out.

1:14:46I just dispute that. I mean, we have millions of people now who are addicted to gambling, who are addicted to marijuana, who have gone psychotic, people who are wasting their lives in front of these screens. And it's like, did it work out? I mean, yeah, it worked out for the S &P 500. Did it work out for the United States of America? I would say no. I mean, if you put all those things together. Yeah, it was interesting. Ryan Cohen from GameStop came on the show on Monday. This was crazy. He didn't say this explicitly, but he seemed generally in favor of just stopping all AI research. I thought you were going to talk about his take on Call of Duty.

1:15:24He was like, I don't want... Oh, what did he say? He was basically like, I don't want people playing Call of Duty. I don't want kids playing Call of Duty, which is crazy from the GameStop guy. He's the CEO of the company. But he had sort of a similar anti-video game take. Like maybe it's not as safe as people think it is. Well, I mean, if you guys talk to teenagers and you're like, how do you guys hang out? A lot of them will be like, oh, we don't hang out very much, but we play a lot of video games together. Sorry. That's bad. All right. I mean, it's just, it's weird. It's weird. Wait, but what about all the dudes?

1:15:50I'm sure you know some of the guys who have been like one shot by golf, where they're just golf is their whole personality. They just are all they do all day is think about golf. And then on the weekend they go golfing. It's similar. Is it not? No, it's not similar because, well, okay. When I said video games, what I said is they're at home playing online with their friends. Now, you guys, we're all relatively the same age. Online play was not around that time. So what you would do is you would gather at a friend's house. It was still pro-social. It was a thing when I was a kid, but I lived somewhat in the country.

1:16:26And so before anybody could drive, it was like your parent wasn't necessarily... it was tough to get around basically. And so video games were a way that you could hang out with your friends and otherwise it would have just been hanging by yourself or whatever. Maybe that's better. Maybe, I mean, I don't know. What did they do in the 80s? What would get, is there any, can you imagine any scenario that would get you to change your mind on AI? Because I'm with you of right now, it feels like AI is an expand, like the current state of AI in terms of products that people use and are an everyday part of their life is just an extension of big technology, right?

1:17:08Open AI has the aesthetics now of a big tech company. They launch products like they're a big tech company. They have a user base like they're a big tech company. They're very young, but that's what they look and feel like. They still have their nonprofit and they still have a research arm that is working on AGI, but it's hard for people to spend too much time thinking about AGI research when all the launches and the announcements are social media and new web browsers and erotica and things like that. And so, but I'm curious, you know, and this is something we are always trying to tease out on the show is people that come on the show to talk about AI typically have some AI to sell you or some startup equity to sell you that's sort of predicated on these sort of more utopian visions of AI.

1:18:02And it's hard to parcel out, right? And so you had the Carpathia interview recently, which was kind of throwing... Fantastic interview. Yeah. And that didn't necessarily update my worldview a lot. I think you put a lot of these ideas really well, right? This idea of, you know, agents are not, you know, are not, the agents that we were promised maybe this year are not here yet. And I think that's okay. But I'm curious, what would update your worldview? Because it's hard. It's like, if we get massive job loss, if we get like an Ozempic level drug success that was designed from AI, that probably makes it all worth it right i think what john is correct is just show me like actually show it to me stop telling me because it's creeping me out to watch talk about ubi and you know oh we're everyone's going to be uh you know extremely happy even though i run the entire world i mean listen this i got to put my own cynicism and bias on the table like i'm literally an anti-establishmentarian podcaster when these guys open their mouths i'm just like you're lying and uh most of the time And that turns out to be true.

1:19:09So I would take the other side of this argument and say that it is possible that we never get some sort of big binary moment where we're like, oh my God, yes. Like it did the thing that we wanted to do, but it's still like net good. I think about it like, you know, the invention of the credit card. it's like it just like speeds up the economy every little it takes a little bit of friction out so that the the corner store can sell a couple more muffins and then the person can pay with the digital you know the digital cash it's stored in their bank account and they don't need to do the check writing and it sort of puts a couple check writers out of business but people have new jobs because digital currency will track your your co2 consumption no no no but there are but there are tons of there are tons of examples of not to put on the tinfoil hat but do you do you think it's do you think it's funny how for basically decades people were so against central bank digital currencies and now they're like let me now now now everybody's like i present to you stable stable coins uh they're a little bit different they're sure they're different, but the potential risks associated with digital money are still there.

1:20:29Yeah. I want to pick up on what John said. I think it's such an important point, which is, I think you are exactly correct, but this is why I react so negatively to the rhetoric. And guys, I mean, sure you have as well. One of my favorite books,.com by Cassidy, I could go through the list. Michael Lewis has a book on.com. I've read through. I even, I watched a few documentaries. CNN, and you'll never hear me say this, actually has some decent documentaries about the decades. And they have a decent documentary about the 1990s. Yes. Shout out to the old CNN. Shout out to the old CNN. They had a great documentary about the 90s, which I watched.

1:21:05And the same level of enthusiasm, they were talking about the information super highway is quite literally matches much of the rhetoric of today. I'm too young to actually have experienced much of it on the airwaves but the same way and the fervor which was fueling so much of dot com just seems i mean same thing like ironically i used chat gpt uh just before i came on here because i knew we were going to talk about this and that's what i was saying that's what i was saying though it's it's one of those things like people like social media they hate it but they use it yeah well i i don't hate chat gpt i just don't yeah my finding was that we are mirroring almost exactly the same levels of tech stock growth from the year 1999 of the entire S &P 500 of stock gains and similar ones in terms of our GDP.

1:21:52If anything, the GDP number is higher today. So the systemic risk, which matches the rhetoric and that the risk itself of the fact is, you know, John, what I've probably been texting you the most about is these round tripping vendor finance deals. And you made a great point to me privately about ASML and how vendor finance itself is not necessarily a negative term in and of itself, but it's really hard not to go and read the story of Cisco and to say, hey, you know, if we have very similar type of downturn and reduction of expected revenue, I'm not saying OpenAI itself will go bankrupt, but that itself is fueling the entire retirement portfolio of the whole country, not to mention GDP, interest rates, everything is banking on this one sector i think that's really dangerous and especially that background article you guys are going to know a lot more than me but sam's story about uh you know going back to masayoshi-san which look no offense to the viewers um you know i read the we work book i i'm just saying i'm not saying credit credit on masa uh with we work masa never really got a markup right or maybe he got one or two but not not not a lot on the real dollar no he was buying the top he top ticked it top last the dialogue earlier this year was moss was his masa top blasting opening eye and then of course you know opening eyes up you know another one or something listen his deal worked out but it was more just the to the extent of it's very similar kind of adam newman-esque to me about like oh sam you need to go bigger and that's exactly what encourages him to start doing so many of these deals i don't begrudge them necessarily to do it but you know i really took to heart the too big to fail element of this because i'm thinking about this from a society just say you're not an investor in soft bank group corp up a hundred up a hundred and seventy three percent year to date uh we so we so we have jordan schneider from china talk joining in just a minute but the last question i want is uh the update on you know obviously you know you believe there's an ai bubble uh is there a media bubble is david ellison trying to build one like what's going on in the media landscape.

1:24:00We were trying to map it out earlier, taking you through new media, neo-media, traditional media, the legacy media, the mainstream media. There's so many different phrases. What's the most interesting story in media in 2025? Because we've already had the story about we're leaving the mainstream and going independent. Here's my countertake, which I really came home with the gambling story recently at NBA. There is a new media bubble and And it's in sports. And it's entirely because FanDuel and DraftKings have propped up way too many people with opinions. And when there is even a modest pushback on prop bets and the rest of the bullshit that these sportsbooks are allowed to send you, pardon my take, and maybe two or three others are going to make it.

1:24:43Everybody else is going to get wiped out. There are way too many sports podcasts if you're out there. And in my opinion, the biggest bubble is in sports media right now, entirely inflated by the gambling industry. Do you have any sense what percentage of advertising revenues in sports podcasting is gambling? But it has to be like 70, 80%. I would venture to say 80 to 90%. I would say 80 to 90%. I think the Pat McAfee deal was maybe 50 % paid for by sports betting. Well, I have a startup to pitch you. There's a new startup that launched that allows you to bet on your bills, OnlyFans, child support, and last night Ubers.

1:25:19Wipe them from your credit card by playing your favorite casino games all from the comfort of their app. Are you? So if you have a big OnlyFans bill, you can gamble it away. You can gamble it away. You know, the investor in me wants to, the investor in me wants to buy that company. You need a vice clause on your own investments. Yeah, you're right. I mean, I've said as much as I preach against this stuff, if I actually had to open a business, it would be called game day loans, like instead of payday loans, and it would float sports bettors who are out there. who need like an 18 to 25 % interest.

1:25:55So that's a free idea out there. Game day loans. I'm telling you, it'd be a billion dollar company. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. If you want to sell it to FanDuel, you're ready. What's your last thing? What's your kind of like timeline on this sort of tension bubbling up around data centers and slop and the build out overall? I have a very clear idea of how bubbles build in the private market is. It can get a lot more intense from here. It'll go national in 2026. The Democrats are going to win a decent amount of elections. Anti-tech is already a small-D Democratic issue. They are going to start hearing a ton of it at town halls.

1:26:33It's already happening. And 2026, 2027 is when it's going to happen. And on the right, you're tracking Marjorie Taylor Greene or Josh Hawley. Who's going to be leading the front there on the right? It'll probably be Tucker Carlson at the top. and from that point it will flow to the marjorie taylor greens the josh hollies i'd be very curious to see where uh where jd lands on this actually where david uh david i mean is a central figure in sacks right now yes david sacks sacks sacks's point i think from earlier this week was that without ai you have basically zero gdp growth so i think he's taking the side of that's the problem yeah that's uh well and listen that's not his fault he's the ai advisor he should be making that point but if i want to lead our country that's not the sell i'm making because what we have learned over the last we need to prop up the economy so you can lose your job yeah exactly there you go that is the that is the end all of this entire conversation okay uh this is this is the this is the final boss of the of the anti-tech wave it really is the is the potentially the final battle.

1:27:42Yeah. And it's going to be crazy, and I'm excited to have many more conversations. The singularity will be... Oh, I would love to. Yeah, yeah. We'd love to have you back. This is so much fun. Thank you guys for having me. I really appreciate it. Always welcome. And congratulations on all your success, obviously. Well, I've been doing this shit for seven years. Nobody gave me a Sunday New York Times profile. I don't know what's going on here. We know a guy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we got to make it happen. Well, thank you so much. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Sagar. You too. Before we bring in Jordan Schneider from China Talk, let me tell you about Linear.

1:28:15Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building projects and products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Let's bring in Jordan Schneider from China Talk. Jordan, how are you doing? I'm doing all right. You should have kept me on with that last guest. That was great. I know. Yeah, we started doing a little bit of that earlier this week. we had like brian armstrong and brian chesky kind of next to each other for a little bit call him back in because the answer is we will all be so distracted by our ai boyfriends and girlfriends that we won't be stressed out about losing our jobs i i think i i actually maybe that's the very it's very dark but i think that the world is so entertained now that almost nothing matters and it's sad, but no matter how dark certain futures could be, it's expected that everyone will have infinite entertainment constantly.

1:29:13And it's so much harder for people to stand up and protest and try to create change if you can go back to your phone and, oh, here's another funny video yeah i just saw stephen hawking's at the x games and it was awesome and i'm gonna send it to a friend and it it actually is awesome it is sick it's really sick it's totally worth paying a lot for that i totally worth the extra two thousand dollar duality of tvpn i haven't even seen my dog just wait once i see my dog at the x games no i think i think it's important i I think like you can't, you know, I've, I continue to be a firm believer that the technology is a, you know, massive net positive for the world, but it has a dark side and it's important to talk about it and it's, will be important to continue to talk about it.

1:30:06And, um, it's, it's numbing. There's like a, there's like a taking antidepressants lens to it, right. Where you just kind of feel less if you get these dopamine hits and we've, you know, we have not evolved. evolved to have the dopamine hits within literally five seconds. Anytime you feel bad about yourself or bad about the world or something that happened around you or someone disappointed you in your life, it's like, oh, okay. Instead of addressing that or going to protest to Jordi's point, we can be consoled by these things that live in our pockets. And they're only going to get better at it, which is the sort of, um, I guess, awesome.

1:30:50This is the worst. This is the worst. The, the dopamine feedback loop will ever be. This is the worst. The infinite jest will ever be. Uh, do you think China is less, uh, dopamine addled, like probably brain rotted because no, no, no brain rot. Tick tock. Yeah. Their tick tock is just science video. It's just Absolutely not. Yeah, right? Absolutely not. I mean, look, who needs opiates for the masses more? Like a country with 20 % youth unemployment or a country that has like, what, 3.5 % unemployment? I think the party has successfully kind of like numbed out. Wait, which country has 20 % unemployment?

1:31:35China. Youth unemployment? Yeah, which country are you talking about? well yeah give us get let i run for an extra year or two i guess but over those are rookie numbers like if you told me that was america i'm not that far off i mean i've heard that the numbers are going up they might have spiked um obviously no i think i think there is i think this or you know it's fun you guys should have jasmine and son and i asked her like we have um uh because she just came back from a trip to china i was like who walks around looking down at their phone more people in the bay or china um and she couldn't really distinguish between the two um identical i don't uh just like like just like equally sort of like zoned in while like walking down the street you are like simultaneously swiping um ben sand in our chat says ios liquid glass is the best line of defense against phone addiction i totally agree it's like the worst software Apple's released in so long.

1:32:33And it just makes using your phone worse. I'm sure. I hope my screen time is going down. Don't worry. Johnny Ive will come in to save the day, Jordy. We won't be safe. That won't save us for long. Yeah. Okay. Wait, zoom out. The original reason we wanted to chat was because of the, it's always fun to have you on the show, but obviously about the rare earth, like just give us the high level update on like the trade war. This has been what since the entire time since your very first appearance. Is it real? It's a year. Is it real? Is it even worth like thinking about like what the high level summary is of the status of the debate?

1:33:08Sure. I mean, I think like, like, look, we've seen this administration swing from side to side on lots of different things. You know, we were yelling at Zelensky in the Oval Office, and now we're finally doing the sanctions that Biden couldn't bring himself to do around oil. You know, we had Trump trying to, you know, doing Liberation Day, taking it off, you know, giving them H-20s. They don't want them. Now they sort of tried to tighten the grip with the 50 % rule from BIS, so sort of Huawei subsidiaries can't buy equipment, and China came back with rare arts. I think the fundamental fact is that both countries have the ability to do significant economic harm to each other.

1:34:02And it's a bit of, there's an aspect of playing chicken. And there's this kind of question of escalation dominance, like which side can take more pain and which side really cares more. and on which dimensions. Both of them have basically a ranked list of tools in the tool chest, chips on the poker table, and something like, we're not going to sell you rare earth is extremely painful to America, maybe not that painful to China. And then we're going to text Happy Meal Toys or whatever is maybe something in the American tool chest and the NVIDIA thing. And is the process that we should think about the lens of this year more thinking about just every both sides are trying to actually understand the shape of how painful each tool in the tool chest is because it feels like we're very much like turning these things on turning them off to understand okay if rare earths are plus 60 points uh nvidia chips we thought it was plus 20 points for the u.s it's actually plus five It feels like we're just trying to map all these out, and then we will go to the meeting and actually say, okay, what's equal?

1:35:17Is that what's happening? Well, the problem is I think Xi has had a longstanding goal, which he's repeated in speeches numerous times, that he wants to make China more self-reliant, and he wants to make the rest of the world more reliant on China. And the problem with what you're seeing out of the Trump administration's policy towards this is what they're optimizing for changes literally week to week. So tariffs are for revenue. Tariffs are for – this trade war is to bring manufacturing back. This trade war is to actually help NVIDIA gain market share in China. The trade war is to crush the Chinese semiconductor companies.

1:36:02And the problem is it's like it would be easier to sort of get to some sort of equilibrium where each side is just going to run as fast as they can at their things. Like if this administration had a sort of grand vision that it was working towards consistently for. But I think the dance that we've seen now play out over, they've met each other like 15 times, is it seems like the negotiators, every time they go, are actually operating under kind of like different, a different incentive structure. So and I think this just plays to China's benefit, because the fact of the matter is America has an enormous amount of power and leverage that it could bring to bear.

1:36:47But the first time that China bit back in the case of rare earths, that kind of really freaked out the Trump administration. And it showed and sort of the. So what will be interesting? Sorry. Yeah, please. Yeah, to make this more tangible, like how is this netting out for China's AI industry? The messaging has been, obviously, you're not going to buy NVIDIA chips. Maybe we'll look the other way on Malaysia and Singapore data centers. We're going to invest as much as possible in catching up to the leading edge in our own domestic semi-industry. we're going to dominate in power. And in five to 10 years, like we're going to be, you know, relatively, you know, in their view, hopefully, you know, relatively equal in terms of like overall computing power.

1:37:41And then I want to get a sense of like, on the rare earth side, how solvable that is for the US in your view. Well, Chris Miller on China Talk had a good line, We're about to see what's easier to do, build an EUV machine or build rare earth mines and refining facilities. So from the Chinese AI perspective, I do think that their decision to sort of say, we don't even want your H20s is fascinating. On the one hand, it may just be a ploy to get Blackwell to be like, oh, OK, we don't want this. We'll sell you even harder drugs, to use Lutnick's addiction phrase. But there also may be some sort of information mismatch because there obviously are lots and lots of sort of Chinese AI labs and hyperscalers who would love to buy NVIDIA chips.

1:38:39But Huawei may have gotten into the ear of the state council saying, yo, like, we got this. Don't worry. Like, you know, but isn't there also haven't haven't, you know, hasn't like Singapore and Malaysia, like spiked quite a bit? Like, can that demand not just flow there? Yeah, so it turns into a bit of a bridge. And this is something that the administration seems to be, well, look, if you're fine selling the chips into China, yeah, why not just sell them into Malaysia and Singapore? I mean, I, for one, am more comfortable with that as a kind of intermediate step. But the problem with that is, like, what you're doing is providing this bridge for all these competitors of the U.S.

1:39:23AI stack to kind of, like, keep developing and stay on the frontier such that when Huawei really is able to scale, you know, potentially is able to scale to a level to compete with NVIDIA, you have these firms still running. And the question I really want to know is, look, if we want to sell the AI stack to the world, why aren't we selling all of it? Why is it cool that we're just doing the NVIDIA stack and then we're allowing NVIDIA to do partnerships with Alibaba Cloud abroad and sell that into Malaysia? I mean, it would not be that hard to say, okay, like you want NVIDIA chips. You should also be working with American hyperscalers and you should be buying from AI and buying Western models.

1:40:08That seems to me to be like there aren't too many alternatives on the table. The U.S. does have the leverage there. And I think it's a shame that that's not the line we're pushing. where instead just sort of like ending the monopoly of the AI stack at the chip layer and letting the clouds and models just, you know, go whichever way they will. Do you think America needs a deep seek for energy? An American deep seek for energy, right? So what that would mean is like what did deep seek do? Like they got – they jumped to our frontier. Yeah, so Jordan Schneider is the Dwarkesh of the cheap state. Yeah, really cheap, really fast.

1:40:45But they stole like our fundamental thing. We need to steal how fast they can build energy over there and make it an American company. So however they build stuff. Or just like invent nuclear fusion. Yes, John. It's not nuclear fusion. I have a feeling. It's something that they're doing, right? Aren't they? They're growing way more energy. So what is the company that's doing that over there? What's the organization over there? What do they have that's special? Let's copy that. Is that possible? I mean, the answer is like, the reason I went to nuclear fusion is like, it would be really nice to have a shortcut because the answer is like really boring and frustrating.

1:41:24But don't you think America will just get lucky? Like we always do discover some novel method of energy. But anytime we need a resource, we just find some of it. I feel like we'll have it. I've been hearing about this, yeah. This is the whole Tyler Cowen thing. Do not underestimate the elasticity of supply. It's not just finding it, right? It's like all of these, you know, global capitalism is now scared of their dependence on Chinese rare earths. And they kind of got a taste of that in April. You know, they should have learned their lesson in 2014 when China did this to Japan. But now it's really real.

1:42:03And now, you know, all your VC friends that come on the show are going to understand that this is a much more investable, you know, finding like the solution to ytterbium and like, you know, manufacturing like lab-grown diamonds. Like people are going to be willing to pay a premium for that stuff in a way that they maybe weren't even six months ago. Why are lab-grown diamonds important? There is actually a cyan banister company, Long Journey, is in something called Diamond Age. Amazing. But is that important in the rare earth context? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an input to, I think, China. The UV machines?

1:42:38This is actually one of the ones that the world is doing okay on. China has like 70 % of the market. But yeah, it's part of the sort of, you know, it's used in fabs as part of the sort of manufacturing process. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How are you tracking the backlash to data center build out? We were just talking to Sagar and Jetty about this. He thinks that there's going to be a serious backlash. What's the deep state saying, Jordan? So here's the answer. You may have seen these articles come out with the secretary of the army talking to PE firms about how they're going to lease out land.

1:43:19It's like, all right, well, let's just build this stuff on military bases. He's been on our show. No one's going to complain if it's just in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, you think so. And you can pollute all you want on those. There are all these sort of regulatory exemptions for these places. I think the money is going to find a way. The problem with this is like, sure, the NIMBY stuff is useful when it's like you're going – when it's like one neighborhood or two neighborhoods. But like you can put this stuff almost anywhere and it is like 97 % as useful as if you get to build it in Virginia, right?

1:44:00So I'm not all that pessimistic. I think, okay, maybe a few localities will be loud enough to kick it out. But America's pretty big. There's a lot of places. I like that. What do you think is going to happen on the humanoid front? We saw this really insane demo of a Unitree robot that was transitioning from walking to crawling like an insect. And now Unitree is selling in Walmart. and it just feels like we're going to repeat the DJI thing where we let every American have a humanoid in their home, a Chinese humanoid in their home. And I'm sort of surprised that we're running this back. It's interesting.

1:44:43I mean, there aren't real competitors at scale for the consumer market in the US yet. I mean, there are very straightforward regulatory things that the Trump administration could do to ban them. There's also a handful of kind of dependencies that the Chinese robotics ecosystem still has on the U.S., still has connected to the U.S. So, you know, a lot of those chips come from TSMC. Like, there's a sort of, like, NVIDIA software layer. Maybe this is something that the Trump administration is thinking about when they're saying, oh, we're going to, like, ban critical software. So, there are things that the U.S.

1:45:20can do to kind of slow down the um the yeah i just i just like them if they really want to humanoids are not you know even in uni uni trees robots current form it's not like they're delivering incredible value to americans and by banning them you're like you know reducing you know the productivity of businesses or anything like that and so it feels like maybe in two years they're actually providing some value across the economy it'll be much harder to go out and say we're going to ban the cheap ones and you have to buy American and it just feels, you know, I don't know. Sure. Well, what's really interesting is like in Ukraine, UGVs are a real thing now.

1:45:59So, you know, a lot of the like sort of resupplying infantry that's on the front line is an incredibly dangerous thing. And now they just have these little track robots that go back and forth. You've even seen videos of like CASEVAC, so people who are injured that they can't, you know, carry out in any other way being sort of like uh rolling themselves onto some like bed um and and having a drone drive them out so um i'm i'm with you jordy this stuff like they're kind of cute and fun for now but we'll get like we'll get there pretty soon it's not going it's it's not impossible yeah they're they're cute they're cute but at the same time when it when the humanoid starts crawling across your floor and you realize and your human alarm, you have like a biological alarm bell going off that says like this thing like looks like it, like from all the sci-fi movies I've seen, this thing looks like it wants to kill me.

1:46:54Yeah, it feels way more tractable to me like self-driving cars, like, you know, OCRing text in an image. It feels like something that we can just like chip away at versus like the novel scientific discovery thing. that feels like very uniquely human, very complex, like much further out. This is just like, make the motors work the right ways. It feels very simple. Like we're not trying to make someone superhuman at moving. Like it's just do the thing that any human can do. And we have tons of training data for stuff. What's happening in Chinese markets right now? I don't know, man. I'm just the tech guy.

1:47:36I'm going to pass on that. Let me go back You should spin up a small venture fund on the side. Then you'd be able to answer that question. Well, the thing that I am spinning up that I want your blessing from, actually, is so I've started a new series about war. I think it is actually just SportsCenter for War. We've been doing it once a week. The current name is Second Breakfast, but I think WBPN would probably be a better thing. So I don't know what the licensing arrangement is here. Maybe this is a conversation for offline. I love the second breakfast concept. I love the topic selection. I would not recommend SportsCenter for war because there are just going to be episodes that are sensitive and it's hard to bring humor and levity to something that's really dark.

1:48:29Yeah, SportsCenter is about providing an entertainment layer over existing entertainment. And I'm sure it's been a little dark this week with all of the gambling ring action. But in general, most of the time... I don't think you want your face across the New York Times being like, Jordan Schneider, the SportsCenter for War guy. Yeah, it is tricky. I mean, people have pitched us like, oh, are you going to do a trading card for the hostages being released or something in geopolitics and stuff? And it's like, it just feels like that's not our space. And when you recontextualize it, even if it's a positive story, it still feels like, oh, there's real lives at stake versus just money at stake, which is what we talk about.

1:49:18Or just points in the imaginary sports world. In the literal sports world. Like it is just a game. Yes, it's extremely high stakes for at the Super Bowl, but it is just a game. And so you can have a lot of fun with that. And you can also have fun with just some VCs who are writing checks. But the war thing is a little bit, it requires a little bit more sensitivity, I think. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because like this community is just chock full of dark humor. So, you know, I've told this to a few people and they just like think it's the funniest thing in the world. yeah even like going back and forth with like the conversational element of of talking about the the hit war history that makes so much sense like for sure um um i don't know but all right point point point where can people where can people check it out i know it's in the china talk rss feed do you have to hit sub stack how are people getting into the ecosystem yeah it's just uh it's just on the china talk uh podcast feed for now maybe it'll go check it out metastasizing but yes second breakfast If you need more Venezuela content in your life.

1:50:26I've been out of the loop on what do you think happens with Venezuela over the next month while we're here? You can give a little taster of your new show. Well, there's two paths. I guess there's three paths that are on. One, he's just bluffing and we're going to move on to something else in a month. But like having this many boats in the Caribbean, sending a carrier makes me feel like it's a little more than that. So then there's path number two where America fights like a covert war with a cartel. And then there's path number three where we sort of like kill, exfiltrate, end up intimidating out of the country sort of Maduro and his like leadership team.

1:51:10And I don't think this administration is necessarily going to be the if you break it, you buy it mindset. So, you know, then I guess the cartel takes over the country. I don't know. It is not clear to me that this has been entirely thought out. It just seems a lot like a Sicario cosplay at like a giant horrific on a giant and like really horrific scale. Maybe there's a better idea out there behind all of this. But the sort of head of Southcom, for whom this operation would have been like the crowning achievement, decided, like said, he was going to retire one year into his three year tour of duty, which has basically like never happened in the past 40 years or so.

1:51:59So I don't know. It's going to be really messy. the US actually does have like a kind of nice case study in what in Columbia and what we were able to do to sort of like get the you know bring the like talk and fight the fark out of existence over the course of the 2010s so that's the happy story that might manifest but the thing there is like you were working with the central government there were only 50 Americans on the ground doing the thing. And like, now we're trying to get rid of a cartel that apparently the president is saying is like one in the same with the government itself. So I don't know, big mess, very far from like pivoting to China.

1:52:44But we'll get there eventually, you know, it's only a matter of time. I know, I think you got to maybe start with updating China talk. Maybe it's just, maybe it's just globe talk world talk world just world talk globe world globe radio i think just jordan schneider i don't know uh i mean all these somebody in the chat said saturday night live for human rights violations so that's what you want to that's what you want to avoid with your whole sports center for war thing although maybe if you just own it i mean like you listen to tim dylan he's like extremely candid uh anyway we we do have a guest waiting so thank you so much for coming on the show always good always good let's do it again soon we'll talk to you later and have a great weekend good to see you guys cheers uh before we bring in chase from crusoe let me tell you about numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance we have chase lock miller from crusoe in the restroom waiting room now he's in the team up ultra dumb welcome to the show you're looking fantastic how are you chase congratulations are in order.

1:53:48Give us the breakdown. What's the news today? You know, today we are announcing the closing of our Series E round of funding, valuing the company at$10.4 billion. Gong. Gong. Another one. Another one. Another one. $10.4 billion. Two gong hits. I don't know. Fantastic. Fantastic. How are you describing where the company, what you do? It's such a fascinating... What exactly do you do? Because, yeah, I mean, you've been doing somewhat of the same thing for a very long time, and yet there's been multiple eras in terms of what the end customer has done. There's been where you sit in the stack, the type of size of project, scale of project.

1:54:34So how are you describing the wheelhouse that, or the, yeah, where Crusoe fits? I think putting it simply, Crusoe is an AI factory company. What that means is we're building these factories that produce intelligence. This is both a hardware problem and a software problem. We focus on all of the things ranging from cultivating the energy and helping develop the energy resources needed to power AI infrastructure. We're building out the data centers themselves and redesigning them to fit these large-scale accelerated computing clusters. And then we also built out this whole software platform that operates these large-scale AI factories so that they can actually be effective in producing intelligence and really enable our generation's greatest minds and entrepreneurs to do their life's work and help build and scale their AI applications to impact people around the world.

1:55:32Is there a superlative that you're chasing in the neocloud market? Do you want to be the firm that can build bigger than anyone else or faster than anyone else or more reliable? I mean, obviously, you want to win on everything. But is there something that you're chasing that you think is like the true differentiator? I think right now speed is the biggest focus for the business in terms of being able to move very, very quickly. It's a very dynamic market. But certainly reliability, scale, cost all these things really come into play. And ultimately we want to deliver for our customers what they need, what adds value to them.

1:56:16Being able to deliver to our cloud customers the best price performance trade-off for their infrastructure solutions alongside a reliable, well-managed platform, I think is ultimately our goal. But I think being able to do that very, very quickly right now is a major, major advantage. And it's something that's very difficult to replicate when you look at kind of what we did in Abilene, Texas, in terms of starting from nothing into a large-scale AI factory that's operating tens of thousands of GPUs at this point is a very important aspect to bringing this infrastructure to life. So Abilene is up and running.

1:57:03Yes. We announced recently the first phases of the 1.2 gigawatt campus are up and operational today. Operational. that's incredible because i feel like there was like this whole press cycle about like and oh it's off track and it's like this thing was announced like months ago i expect these things to take years i don't know i was i was i feel like people aren't taking enough of victory lap there yeah no and i think there's been um Um, Stargate's been this very overloaded term in terms of it's a company, it's a site, it's a concept, what is Stargate? I'm still not entirely sure. But, uh, you know, there's, uh, uh, I think we got wrapped up a little bit in the, uh, you know, rumors swirling that this thing's behind or, you know, that, uh, the company is behind, but you know, the, the project has, has, uh, uh, done extremely well.

1:58:01People took the most expensive, the most, the most ambitious vision and the shortest possible timeline. And that became what you were measured against basically. And so it was like, unless, unless a trillion dollars is in the ground working in six months, It's over. It's like, wait, we never said that. Well, it rightfully had a lot of pressure because the project got announced via the president. That's not very standard for a launch. That's a good tip for startups. If you want a spokesperson, the president would be a great one. Tyler Cowen has a quote that's been going around quite a bit recently, which is like, don't underestimate the elasticity of supply in the context of, and it's been going around in the context of energy.

1:58:42It feels like Crusoe was started on this idea of like there actually is a lot of energy out there and there's real demand for it. You just got to go out and find it. How much is that ringing true as you kind of evaluate new sites and opportunities for your business? No, that's absolutely the case. And I think that's one of the things that set us apart and enabled us to move quickly and build at scale is having this energy first approach to developing the infrastructure. Part of our announcement today was announcing our energy pipeline, which is in excess of 45 gigawatts at this point. And putting into context, the Abilene campus is 1.2 gigawatts.

1:59:25So it's orders of magnitude larger or an order and a half of magnitude and larger in terms of overall capacity there. I'm in New York City today. It's something on the order of eight New York City's worth of power. So it's a very substantial amount of power that's going to be required fundamentally for AI to scale and to really, really reach the ambitions and hopes of the industry. Last question, we'll let you go. Last time you were on, we kind of walked through a little bit of a debunk of the we're going to run out of water for data centers. uh what's your current thinking on the story that's emerging around like data centers are going to drive up my energy prices is that solvable on the short term is this going to be some short-term pain for long-term gain uh is it something that you know you need you need to rethink regulation or or just speed up building of new energy how are you thinking about that question because it seems like it's going to get bigger and bigger yeah so um i actually found it fascinating.

2:00:32There was a report that came out recently that showed actually in markets with substantial data center investment, the overall cost to ratepayers actually came down compared to other markets where there was less digital infrastructure being built where prices actually went up substantially. I really see this trend playing out as a whole because what ends up happening is the digital infrastructure players, the folks building the data centers, at this point, a lot of the energy market is saturated. There isn't just a bunch of free power laying around, underutilized, not doing much. There's some of that, but it's becoming more and more scarce, which means that in order to realize all of these ambitions that are taking place in AI, we actually have to build out a lot of net new power.

2:01:24We need to build new power plants. We need to build new creative energy solutions to effectively energize this infrastructure. When data centers are doing that, they're having to build out power capacity that meets their overall peak demands of the facility. As a result, it ends up with some incremental power that is being underutilized and can become an asset to other participants in those energy markets and really actually bring down their overall cost of power because there's more abundant power. And that really goes in line with the Crusoe mission, which is accelerating the abundance of energy and intelligence.

2:02:02We really view those two things as the key pillars of progress in this chapter for humanity. Yeah, I love it. I think it's definitely – I mean there's a bunch of different political frameworks where you could use to understand where this is going. But it feels very solvable. One last question that probably would take 10 minutes to properly answer, but how much are you banking on nuclear on a shorter time horizon, if at all, talking five-year timeline? Yeah. So we're really excited with a lot of the advancements happening in the nuclear space. we have a number of partnerships across the SMR ecosystem, including a plan to energize the first SMR-powered AI factory in 2027.

2:02:52So that's going to be sort of a smaller-scale deployment, but we think will be a great template for us to hopefully scale and bring new nuclear-powered AI infrastructure to life. This has been a huge priority for Chris Wright in terms of helping create a regulatory framework for nuclear and re-evaluating the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in terms of how do we actually enable the private sector to build the energy necessary to power demands of society, data centers being a big component of that. So, you know, very excited. And I think it's gonna be a huge win. And then, you know, there's also the big nuclear plants that, you know, I'm excited to see come to life again as well.

2:03:42You know, Westinghouse, you know, is announcing, you know, a number of very big APW 1000 campuses that, you know, we think will play another big part in terms of getting the power we need for intelligence. I'm very excited about that. I hope that we get all those campuses online as fast as possible. Well, thank you so much for coming by the show. Sorry to keep you late. We will talk to you soon. Congratulations on the message. Congrats to the whole team. Awesome. Always great to see you. Fantastic progress. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great weekend. Cheers. Up next, we have Tucker from Orion Technologies.

2:04:16We are running a little bit behind. Let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2. And let's bring in Tucker for a quick hit of the gong. Give us the news. Tell us what you're building. Welcome to the show. We would love to ring the gong for you. How are you doing? I'm doing well. I can't hear you, really. It sounds like you're speaking in slow motion. Oh, odd. Check, check, check. Check, check, check. One, two. Orion Technologies, you're coming out of stealth. Would love to hear about the Rays.

2:04:54If you can take us through just the high level, we can ring the gong. And maybe we can try and have you back on later.

2:05:03Do we have Tucker? Let's see. We might need to move on if we have technical difficulties. We can always have you back on the show another day. Can you guys hear me? We can hear you. We can hear you great. We can hear you great. Let's see. I can hear you guys, but it sounds very slow for some reason. Okay, we'll let you do one question. I'm the CEO of Orient Technologies, and we're coming out of stealth after a$3.5 million pre-pied. Let's go. Jordy, ring that dong. Thank you very much. Take us one level deeper about the problem, the solution, what you're building, and then we do have to move on.

2:05:50but please give us a little bit more on the progress of the company, some of the decisions that you've made, how you're thinking about building the company. Yeah. So we are building essentially the interoperability layer for manned and unmanned aircraft. So what does that actually mean? We enable manned and unmanned aircraft to communicate, coordinate and de-conflict. And we're starting with heterogeneous assets. So drones built from different vendors within cities and around airports today. Congratulations. We're going to have to have you back on later. We'll do a technical check next time. But have a great rest of your day.

2:06:24Have a good weekend. And congrats on the race. Congrats on the race. We'll talk to you soon. While we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. New technical difficulty unlocked. We haven't seen that before. We have Catherine from Valthos coming into the TBPN Ultra Dome. She, I believe, is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Kathleen. Welcome back to the show. We had you on the show, and it was a very fun conversation. And there were some things that we could talk about.

2:07:00There were some things that we couldn't talk about. I'm glad that we're here today, and we have plenty to talk about. But please kick us off with an introduction on a little bit more on yourself and the company and what you're announcing today. Yeah. Last time I was here, I was so stealthy. but now very excited to announce what we've been working on. I'm Kathleen. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Valthos, which is the next generation biodefense company. So we are trying to build infrastructure for American biodefense. Amazing. And when we had you on, there was some great, wasn't it? There was some story in the news about like some, some like Chinese like scientists that, that were bringing some type of bioweapon around or at least working on it.

2:07:42So good to have you back. with some more happy news. Yeah, I'd love to know the state of like, what are the case studies that you're latching on to? You know, in the early days of Anderle, there was this narrative around the rising power of China and our decrepit military systems. People would talk about the failure of the, or not the delays with the F-35 program. Do you have particular case studies and stories that you like to ground the story of your company with? Yeah, absolutely. So when we're talking about biodefense broadly, the big problem is asymmetry. So it is just so much easier, cheaper, and faster to make a pathogen than it is to make any kind of cure.

2:08:23And that's just like at the heart of everything we're talking about. It was true before AI, but what's really changed is how some of these new AI capabilities are magnifying that type of asymmetry. It's two big ways that we're focused on in terms of the case studies you were saying. The first is more about uplift. So it's how many people, how much technical skillset does it take to actually engineer a pathogen. And that's just dropping week over week. So we used to be worried about these sophisticated state-sponsored programs. You can read what our folks in defense are focused on in Russia and North Korea.

2:08:56Now we can talk about like a couple students, maybe at the grad level, who have access to a lab. And like, that's probably going down to one or two as these capabilities expand. So like massive, massively different landscape. The second side is just like how potentially lethal can these threats be? So we're getting.

2:09:17I think we have more technical difficulties. It's a technical difficulty day. Oh, no. It's Friday. The internet is slow, but you're back. I'm back. Please. Maybe I can reframe the conversation, not to kind of just cut you off and restart. But people have been saying we need an andrel for bio for a while. Is that an appropriate moniker? And maybe we could use the Anduril example as understanding a little bit deeper on what you want to build. Because I think of Anduril as very much separate from Palantir. They're building hardware. They're building specific programs of record for the DoD, competing against the primes.

2:09:54Are there companies that you're going to be competing with out of the gate? How do you think about the shape of the business as it grows?

2:10:05Is this on our side? Are we having technical difficulties on our side today? It might be a Zoom thing. Is there a major attack? Let's flip over to the production team. What do you guys have to say for yourselves? What's going on? I don't know. Is it AWS 2.0? It could easily be us. I seem to be back now. Okay. Yeah, I think we have – I have one more chance at talking about the Android comparison. Please. I would say probably much closer to Palantir than Andrew. I mean, one of the obvious ones is like, what does our product look like? And we're talking about software and how we bring the best frontier capabilities to both understand what a threat is and then very quickly design a countermeasure to it.

2:10:52How do we take those things that are largely in academic labs emerging really quickly and put it into something that's operational? It could actually react in the time as real-time data flows in and you actually need to design a countermeasure. But in terms of the overall, do we need private sector innovation in this space? Absolutely. Like the people in defense and health that are absolutely at the front lines of this, keeping us safe now. The pace of biotech innovation is so massively outpacing our ability to react to it that we have to start bringing these types of tools to really augment the defenses that we have today.

2:11:25A question from the chat. Trey asks, Moderna designed the C19 vaccine in two days in a clinical dev today. The slow part is often validation trials, manufacturing, and access distribution. Is Valtho solving for that for biodefense? Thanks, Trey. Yes, I think a huge part of it is how accurate you can make predictions that are coming from computational models. How did those translate into clinical development, translational? Can you actually have a really precise understanding of what these therapeutics look like as soon as you start designing them in silico? So that's a huge part of our focus is as more and more generative methods for countermeasure design come online, how can we help the people that are designing those drugs really quickly understand whether it will be effective against whatever kind of evolution we're seeing in terms of the pathogen landscape?

2:12:21I think on the manufacturing and supply chain side, another massive problem we think about overall biosecurity for America. It's not the first challenge we're taking on, but it's certainly something we'll partner on in the future. How do you think about, I don't know, there's like, like ISR versus like actual bombs or something in the Anduril context, like, like Palantir might make a map of like where all the bad guys are, and then Anduril might be the one that builds the missile. How do you think about, like, does America have the ability to pull up a dashboard of every different strain of flu that is at LAX right now?

2:13:00Because I know LAX is like a famous Petri dish of, you know, just like different flus and colds because everyone's traveling from all over. do we have the ability as a country to actually understand what's going on biologically across the country? Largely, no. It's getting better. I think there's two dimensions to it. So a lot of the innovation we've seen in the last couple of years is focused on, do we even have the lens? Is the data even flowing in of what's circulating in LAX? I'm closer to JFK, so that's the one that really hits home that I get worried about. The part that we're focused on and what I think has to be the next step is how do you take those data inputs and make them actionable so you can do something with it?

2:13:44So pathogens aren't static. It's not like there is something today and that's what we need to worry about. It's how is this changing, which means that in two weeks, what is the shape of this that we're going to have to hit? So a big part of what we're focused on is trying to understand these are the things that are emerging today. How quickly do we know that their threats? And then what do we need to change in terms of the countermeasures that we have to be ready for what's ever coming? So really focused. And I think that's where a lot of the Palantir analogy comes in. It's not data for data's sake.

2:14:13It's how do you actually pull that data into the decision-making process so that you can start seeing changes in operations. And that's what we're excited to do. That makes a ton of sense. Give us the fundraising news. What happened? What's coming out of stealth? Well, we are very proud to announce the re-raised 30 million.

2:14:33Congratulations. Incredible. Who are the backers? Bunch of no-names, right? You really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. You had to put together a ragtag group of, you could barely call these guys venture capitalists. Everyone wants to prevent bioweapons. What can I say? You got a bunch of great firms in. FF. We do. We have Founders Fund and Lux. They've been with us from the beginning. And then we just had OpenAI, their startup friend, join in to help lead around. They have been ringing the alarm on what the risk of some of these new frontier methods are for bio way before anyone. And we're super excited to partner with them to try to stop it.

2:15:17Well, congratulations. We'd love to have you back on the show whenever the next announcement is, whenever the next progress point comes. Hopefully we don't have to be giving you a call when bad stuff happens. We can just talk about product releases. Celebrate these wins. You'll be like a good cornerback in the NFL. We won't hear about you because you will be defending us, and we won't be calling out something bad happens. Perfect. We'll prevent the headline. Exactly. All right. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks so much. Great to have you. Have a great rest of your day. Congrats to the team. Let me tell you about 8sleep.com.

2:15:48I put up a generational run last night, 98. I slept for like 10 hours. It was fantastic. Jordy, how'd you do? 91. 91. How many hours did you actually sleep? Let's pull it up while we bring in our next guest. I slept eight hours and 42 minutes. Let's go. And I got to the gym. Get a pod five. I got to the gym at least 30 minutes before you. My drive is twice as long. This whole week has been a mess for me. I was slacking. But our next guest is from NVIDIA. Dion Harris is here. Welcome to the show. To break it down for us. How are you doing? And looking incredibly sharp. You look fantastic. Thanks for having me.

2:16:24I didn't want to make you guys look bad, so I even threw on the jacket. Oh, yeah, yeah. You're a fan of the show, by the way. Thanks so much. So great to have you on. Great to meet. Would love to get a little bit of an introduction on yourself and where you sit in NVIDIA. It's not the smallest company in the world. It is, in fact, the largest company in the world. But how do you position yourself within the firm? What's top of mind for you today? Sure. Thanks for having me again. So, I'm Dion Harris. I'm the Senior Director of our HPC AI and Cloud Solutions Group. So, not a very imaginative marketing name, which means I run a lot of our HPC, Scientific Computing National Labs.

2:17:04Obviously, we're here in D.C., so lots of engagement supporting a lot of our national labs, both here in the U.S. and across the world. And, of course, AI and Cloud speaks for itself in terms of a lot of our hyperscale clients, as well as the cloud providers who are building and delivering our platform. So engaging with a lot of those folks, partners, customers, and internally, obviously, to bring those solutions to market. Yeah. How big – do you have like a headline number that you're thinking about broadly for just AI infrastructure? It's the hottest topic these days, but how do you think about forecasting AI infrastructure and where we'll be in a few years?

2:17:43Well, I think Jensen has been on record, and I think it's a pretty sound sort of estimate. We expect it to be about$3 to$4 trillion in AI infrastructure. Yeah, yeah, that's a big number. It's with a T. And I think what's really driving that, and I've been listening to the show and hearing, you know, there's a ton of demand for how and where AI can be put to use. Of course, we're familiar with the chatbots that we use to speed up our email communications and to review and spellcheck. Those are great use cases. But what's really exciting is when you see it being used to detect new drugs. And so there's new use cases that are happening in drug discovery all the time.

2:18:22I do a ton of work with national labs and seeing how it's being applied to climate and weather, being able to replace a lot of our old numerical based approaches. And so using AI to go and tackle really big problems that we all care about, even if we don't see and use those applications every day, we're impacted by them. And so what's really driving that number is, like I said, also looking at how AI is being brought to industries. You're going to hear a lot about next week when we announce at GTC how we're helping industry adopt AI. And this is really important, not just in terms of the bottom line of U.S.

2:18:58companies, but really making the U.S. competitive in a global scale. Making sure that we can deploy and run and build and manufacture at an efficiency that makes us competitive on a global scale. And so that's really going to be a lot of what we talk about here at GTC next week. Do you have one of the easier jobs in tech? Just because if I'm a data center operator, I have to answer questions about, well, am I using natural gas or clean energy? And if I'm an inference model creator, I have to answer questions about, are the answers truthful or are they fair? Or am I generating something that's valuable or am I generating stuff?

2:19:38But NVIDIA, I feel like, has the perfect, it's just the perfect business because you're already optimizing for the most efficiency. So no one can say, oh, well, you're not taking energy efficiency seriously. Like, that's the entire point of business. And no one can say you're unprofitable. And no one can say you're unprofitable. So, like, are you feeling good right now? Are you feeling happy? I don't know. What's the energy like even internally at NVIDIA? I'm curious. It's got to be such a wild environment. It's great. it's you know definitely you know incredibly crazy right now but what i would say is just because there's so much interest and excitement around um not just ai but accelerated computing a lot of what we do you know we're an accelerated computing company at heart and there's you know over a trillion dollars of infrastructure and still moving from cpu to gpus in fact oracle just last week announced that they're going to be accelerating their their um classic database no way now that's Most people don't think about databases.

2:20:35That's crazy on G.U. And they're back-ending every major application. And so when we think about NVIDIA, obviously accelerated computing is how we really got started. And now that we're in this era of AI, we're really looking to help power every application across multiple industries. But to answer your question, we wake up thinking about how can we make our platform better? Sure. And how can we make it more efficient? Because that's really at the core of the value for our customers. But we're actually doing a ton of work beyond just our core platforms. In fact, our solutions are shaping and redefining how the data center overall is built.

2:21:10And so a lot of the work that we're doing is building solutions and blueprints and reference architectures that help the entire ecosystem get ready for what we're building, which delivers more efficiency at the end state. So, again, I think our position is unique in the marketplace in that we totally see and understand all the new models that are being developed and coming to market. We obviously understand what our products are going to be able to do today and going forward. And we, therefore, are giving lots of insight into all the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing infrastructure providers, the power generation folks, the grid providers.

2:21:45We're giving lots of feedback all the way up and down the supply chain. Yeah, that Oracle database on GPU thing, it feels massive to me. It feels like very significant, like immediately, very tangible performance benefits, I can imagine. I haven't seen the actual stats, but I imagine it's going to be more efficient or faster. But how do you balance marketing, like sort of stories like that, stories about the AI build out with stuff that's more futuristic, more further out? There was a lot of debate on the timeline this week about how fast GPUs will be in space. And everyone's saying, look, we love this founder.

2:22:27We're having him on the show, actually, next week. It's a really exciting project. But I think everyone kind of agrees that this is not going to happen tomorrow. And the rendering, the sci-fi, it's more of a sci-fi movie than they put out. It shows whole truckloads of GPUs moving around in space. How do you think about balancing that from the NVIDIA brand perspective? Well, from our perspective, we recognize that, like I said, there's a lot of interest and investment. Like we talked about that$3 to$4 trillion that's going to be invested in AI infrastructure. And of course, that infrastructure is going to be deployed in lots of different areas.

2:23:03Obviously, as we've talked about how a lot of the concentration historically has been around highly populated dense areas. But now we recognize AI factories can exist anywhere. They can exist anywhere where there's cheap, clean power. And so obviously space is someplace where there's lots of renewable energy. So I suspect that will certainly be a place where data centers will land eventually. But right now, we're really focused on how can we help build the infrastructure that's right in front of us and help really deploy that in the most efficient, performant way as possible. and of course, along the way, make sure that we're adding value because that's really what we're here to do for not just ourselves, but the broader ecosystem.

2:23:44You would laugh. We are running the numbers on building a hearth or a wood-powered data center. Our server here at the studio. We think they're - It's surprisingly doable. Out of a normal fireplace, we believe you could potentially power eight H100s and fine-tune GPT OSS, however you want it, over the course of a day, basically. That's right. We want to be the first NVIDIA customer to be focused on the wood-powered data center. The wood-powered, yes. It's our own part of the market map. It's very cozy to chop firewood and boil water as they did hundreds of years ago. That's right. Well, I'm super excited for GTC next week.

2:24:29Yeah, this is great. Yeah. Thank you so much for giving us a little preview. Thank you for giving us a preview. And have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Great hanging. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. We have multi-ass investing industry that yields and are trusted by millions. Soon billions. I think we might actually have a one-minute break before our next guest comes in. There's no one in the Restream waiting room. Or is there? No, not yet. So give us a post, Jordy Hayes. If someone's smart, if someone is smart but has bad aesthetics, Normies will not take them seriously.

2:25:06This is good. Aesthetic contains real information. This post is from Defender of Basic. That this category of smart people can't read, and if they gain power, these blind spots will lead to their undoing. I completely botched this reading. This is a mess. Here's another one. Alex Danko. Sundar Pichai said yesterday, or a couple days ago, new breakthrough quantum algorithm published in Nature Today, our Willow chip has achieved the first ever verifiable quantum advantage. Willow ran the algorithm, which we've named Quantum Echoes, 13 ,000 times faster than the best classical algorithm on one of the world's fastest supercomputers.

2:25:47This new algo can explain interactions between atoms in a molecule using nuclear magnetic resonance, paving a path toward potential future uses in drug discovery and material science. The result is verifiable, meaning its outcome can be repeated by other quantum computers or confirmed by experiments. This breakthrough is a significant step toward the first real-world application of quantum computing, and we're excited to see where it leads. Again, see this positioning, right? It's positioned as an internal science project. Of course, he's saying it's a step toward the first real-world application of quantum.

2:26:23Did you see what Martin Scully said? What did he say? Contrived results, still not faster slash advantaged. He's so bearish. Alex Danko, though, says, okay, I'm sorry if this is a dumb question. Elon said congrats. And I think when I see this and I see the algorithm and I see how they're talking about it, it really does feel like, yes, over the next decade, there could be some really, really powerful niche use cases that are extremely valuable here. It's a good quantum computer, sir. I agree. One more post before we go to our next. Did you want to explain why quantum computers look like that? Because that's what Alex Danko is asking.

2:26:59And there is an answer. it's because they need to be cooled. They need to be really cold. And so you have to hang it instead of attaching it to the floor. Each layer of the chandelier is colder down to the last one where the quantum computation is taking place. And so you see this chandelier funneling smaller and smaller and colder and colder until you get to the very, very tip. I don't know. Interesting. Well, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBP on UltraDome. How are you doing, Burke? Burke, welcome. Good to see you. Hello, guys. What's happening?

2:27:38Huge, huge day. Huge day in the fall ecosystem. Thank you, thank you. So today we are doing our inaugural Generative Media Conference. I'm in the Ferry Building. Very cool. You can probably tell. Beautiful venue. yeah it's a big milestone for us it's you know we thought that generative media really needs its space and we need to talk about it because it's an extremely big deal and we thought we would honor this industry by throwing a big event where foundational models are coming here, people from the industry Jeffrey Katzenberg actually. Legend. That was pretty awesome. Yeah. So what are attendees trying to understand or advance?

2:28:35Yeah, what are people talking about? Yeah. Yeah. There is, like, I mean, this is becoming a full industry, right? So there's many kinds of people here. So there's people from foundational model labs. So they're trying to build these models, compete against the big giants. And it's a very diverse space. So unlike the language model market where you have a few big winners, here we're seeing hundreds of companies building models, customizing models and using their customers are using in production. So there's foundational models. There's people from the industry. So media, we had a talk from an architecture firm that's using generative media in production.

2:29:20And yeah, like early stage founders and even like some big Hollywood names, like big production studios. Yeah. Are people focused now on benchmarks, evals, certain niche capabilities? Like we're starting to see this like kind of refragmentation, I feel like, where Sora can do cameos and VO3 could do audio and certain CREA can do lip syncing. well. And there's all these different sub applications where it feels like if you're a buyer of generative media of tokens or I don't need frames, I guess, you are really looking for the right tool for the job. And you might have to kind of go through the haystack to find the needle that fits your use case specifically.

2:30:10Is that the general vibe? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's definitely alignment on how these models are getting more specialized. On one hand, there's general models. I think VIO is pretty general, right? It can do many things. But on another hand, you need more. And what we're hearing from people is you need more and more specific workflows. So workflows is a very big topic. And we are now in the usefulness, utility phase of this whole space where like there we go let's give it up for utility and usefulness love it so so so we're what we're seeing is you know people are building these uh building this tooling right so they're building the application layer such that you know these downstream uh users from marketing you know architecture gaming uh movies every so that like creatives can start using this technology yeah how how's uh what's your view on how hollywood has most recently been kind of navigating gen ai we've heard from folks in the industry that people are experimenting with it but they're hesitant to even talk about it too much because they get so much blowback from uh you know we're here down in la there's a lot of people that aren't excited about gen ai for a number of reasons but how do you see hollywood navigating this current moment yeah i mean we're definitely feeling like a shift in the vibes so they're definitely they're definitely turning towards the side of like experimentation i know that there's like a few good projects in the pipeline that are going to come out i think we're going to see this shift happening uh towards the end of the year early next year and yeah we see we see very big players actually embracing this tech and yeah, it's going to be the same year next year.

2:32:02Somebody in the chat just said you guys should get Hollywood on as a guest. We'll work on that. Another question I had is, I don't know how much you can share, but what's Sora 2 adoption been like so far? How quickly are a number of different application layer companies kind of turning it on and burning up the GPUs? Yeah. It's been, we don't have like full visibility into Soros adoption, but from what we know is it is a very good model for like a very certain aesthetic, right? Like you can probably tell that it is extremely fine-tuned on, you know, social content. So, yeah, it is getting amazing adoption, but, you know, this space is virtually infinite.

2:32:52Like there's literally all sorts of things you can do. So that's why we believe we're just in the beginning. And yeah, it's just a form factor, right? And it's just one kind of model. We think there's going to be many, many versions. Totally. Can you walk me through? My immediate reaction to Soar is I could see this being used for very specific. If you wanted to generate UGC style ads, it could probably do a decent job at that. but that same application would also want to generate ads in a bunch of different styles, right? Cinematic styles, things like that. Exactly. And yeah, don't get me wrong.

2:33:29I think that model, it's the pre-training versus post-training. I would speculate that it is really fine-tuned on this social use case, but that doesn't mean that there is no amazing model in the back of it. So technically, they can crank out different things for different use cases. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could go so much deeper on all this and all the comparisons of all the models. We'll have to have you back because I know you're at your conference and obviously need to go back and meet customers and whatnot. But thank you so much for taking the time to stop by. Thanks for having me.

2:34:06Excited to have a bunch more folks on in the next 30 minutes or so. Yeah, this will be great. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great weekend. Peace, guys. Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. We'll say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only Adquip combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Glenn Solomon from Notable. We'll bring him in to the TV can. What's going on? Can you hear me? I cannot hear you. We don't have audio yet. No audio. I'm sure the production team is working on it.

2:34:45I will tell you when I can hear you. So just, I guess, keep chatting, I guess. Still nothing. How are we doing, folks? We got nothing. We got nothing coming through. AGI is just days away, and we need AGI to put some resources towards technical difficulties for podcast live streamers. anyways we will I'll kill time here's a here's a post yesterday sounds good okay I think we got some we got something coming here I can hear you ah Jordy great this is Glenn it's so great to see you Glenn an amazing amazing setup here are you did you already give a talk are you are you going to give a talk or are you just I've been in the I've been I've been enjoying the the amazing talks so far, and I'm excited to talk to you about them.

2:35:43Amazing. Why don't you give a quick intro on yourself and your firm, and then we can get into reactions from the event. Sure. Yeah. So I'm Glenn Solomon, managing partner at Notable Capital. We've been in business for 25 years. We're a global venture capital firm focused on software infrastructure. And one of the key personas we focus on as a software developer, we backed companies over the years, like Vercel recently, HashiCorp, some great businesses that we've been very fortunate to work with. What was the exact moment that you founded the firm? 25 years ago, 2000. No, I know. But what was it?

2:36:26Was it March? Was it during the crash? Do you remember the month specifically? It was February, so early in the year. So you basically went on a roller coaster. You started up here and then just... That's actually crazy. A little known fact, though, it's actually good to found a firm right about then because you don't get... Yeah. You can deploy in the Valley of Despair. Wow. Exactly. Exactly. That is great timing. Great timing. Amazing. So yeah, walk us through some reactions to the event so far. So it's been really cool to be here. It's the first general media conference that FALS put on, really their first user conference.

2:37:08And there's about 300 people here. And you can just feel the energy amongst the developers who are building all kinds of amazing applications using general media. It kind of reminds me, I was lucky enough to invest early in HashiCorp in 2016. I was at their first user conference up in Portland. And there was 150 people in the room. Basically, anybody who wanted to attend could. and it was a bunch of very intrepid DevOps professionals who saw the future somewhat similar to HashiCorp. And the reason I mention it is because four or five years later at their user conference in San Francisco, there was 5 ,000 people.

2:37:45And I think this is the start of something very similar. We're going to see this industry grow dramatically over the next several years and it would not surprise me if Dreamforce Lookout, uh this this generative media conferences could be really big over the next several years i believe it what uh uh burke was saying there's a an architecture firm uh talking at the event on on how they're using what what are some of the other maybe more like edge cases niche use cases that you're seeing well definitely advertising marketing uh you know your feed on social media entertainment, education, all of these things are, people spend dramatic amounts of money today, hundreds of billions of dollars on content production for traditional media.

2:38:33I think that's all going to shift over time. And we're just starting to see the early days of that. But clearly there's going to be a shift because using generative media, you can move much quicker, it's less expensive, you can be much more targeted in what you do. So I think all those industries are in experimentation mode, maybe first, second inning, but it's early. But one of the things I heard about today that I thought was really interesting is really the net new applications that I think are going to come as well, things that don't exist yet today. A good maybe harbinger of that would be like if you've ever been to the sphere in Las Vegas, you look at the geometry there and the just sheer size of the place.

2:39:14Traditional media couldn't really solve that problem and create an immersive experience. And so that's a great area where generative media is doing something that couldn't be done in the past. So I think you're going to see both replacement and over time net new. And I think that's why people are so excited about what's going on here today. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by the show. We'd love to talk to you more. But yeah, the first guest appearance from a podium. Yeah. I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller. This has been awesome. Thank you, guys.

2:39:49Amazing. Well, come back on again soon and have fun out there. Give our best to everybody at the event. We will. We'll do. Thanks. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about bezel. You got to go to get bezel.com. Just do it. Get a hitter. They're available now to source you any watch on the planet. it uh i'm i'm really pushing john to get the cubitus i think it's time green dial well uh i wish i wish i had more time to give you the full my full uh case for it but we will move on to our next guest we have diego rodriguez from crea in the restroom waiting room welcome to the show diego how are you doing welcome what's happening uh talk to me about about the ai suite for creatives.

2:40:36I'm particularly interested in this debate between like chopping wood and creating new workflows for specific video generation or AI use versus like trying to instantiate some things on the fly. I always see these like, I made this amazing AI video, here's how I did it. And it's piecing together like three different steps where they fine-tuned on their face and they did a special model that had a beginning and an ending frame. And then they did some sort of control net on top of it and then they up-res it and how are you thinking about actually piecing all the different tools together in a way that someone it's like a the final ui effectively i mean like i mean i'm here like at the fall conference and i talk actually exactly about that it's like perfect i um i don't know it's kind of frustrating to see people being like this is the i generated this is not dude it's a new medium yeah like it's just a new medium so like whenever I see a frame by say now Hollywood is starting to toy around with these tools, like the best people tell you like, like you, you don't ask them like, is the use Photoshop or After Effects or Houdini or AI is like, do it all.

2:41:47Like this was even a dialogue when we were discussing about a certain idea. That's also part of the process of making things. I think we're far from automating like true storytelling, which is why we need tools. Where's the pencil for the latent space? That's what we need. Yeah. How do you think about what the actual product looks like that people want at each level of scale? Like enterprise is fine with APIs and they will have a team of software engineers like build the tools exactly that they need. Then the prosumer might be fine with a node-based workflow or something that's a little bit more, you know, fine-tuning parameters under the hood.

2:42:31But then they want something that's maybe repeatable that they can jump in and out of. And then the final consumer wants, like, you know how you see those, like, dedicated app? It's, like, just the face swapping app. And, like, face swapping is obviously a feature that should exist in the node-based workflow in CREA, in a prosumer, in a professional tool. So how do you think about checking the box on all the features out of the gate versus leaving enough flexibility that your users might get lost because you don't handhold as much? I think that these barriers are, let's call them vestigial concepts from our culture.

2:43:15I think like we think those barriers are there because of where we come from, which is like, okay, we used to have their professional who goes to Photoshop and everyone that is maybe doesn't need as much control goes to something like Canva. And then if you're just a random person that is toying around with making stuff, then you use a certain iOS app or whatever. But the reality is that a lot of these barriers used to just be APIs, like a certain plugin or a certain API call or whatever. and with Vive coding, they are blurring out now. So I actually see consumers who ask me, can you get an API?

2:43:50Because I've coded some things. And then I actually get enterprises being like, oh, your UI is actually one of the best ones and that's why we are doing these things. So I think that this is a time full of uncertainty and when you have uncertainty, the only thing that can ground you is first principle. So you have to go back to the beginning, like think about what is truly true and what is your marketing fluff. So the way I'm thinking it's - Do you think images and video are two separate products long-term? Like Premiere Pro is a different product than Photoshop. They are different. And even Lightroom is another product in the Adobe ecosystem.

2:44:28I can imagine you can, I mean, it's just pixels. You can clearly put all the tools in one bucket, one app, Adobe didn't. Is that vestigial or will we see another separation? I think separation will be here in the short term and midterm because you can argue that as we advance, there's actually even more separation. At first, books were only in a certain way, and now there's a myriad of formats and images. Can you even do books for kids where they even have things inside, animations even? so I feel like as we push the medium and by medium I mean the latent space forward we will actually realize that we need way more tools than we thought we needed and that's why we're starting like we're seeking like this cambian explosion of like okay we have control net we have comfy UI we have CRIA but in CRIA you can like jump in between tools and then you can use say an image model within many tools and that's the key part which is you said it's just pixels and it's like yeah but guess what but a song can be represented as pixels if you have a certain frequency diagram.

2:45:42It's just pixels too. So at the end of the day... Sheet music. When you scan sheet music, that's pixels. Yeah. So what we have at the end of the day is a technology that can understand information in almost its more distilled form. Yep. That technology can move around products, but the product will be different. However, they will all use that same technology. And that's what we're seeing. Node-based tool, image tool, iOS app, all connect to our image model, for instance, with CREA 1 or Flux Context or whatever, but it's different applications. Yeah. Yeah, fascinating. We like to hit the gong for guests.

2:46:16Oh, yes. How many users does CREA have? What's the latest number that we're sharing there? Give us some numbers. What'd you got? Big numbers. Last time I checked signups, it was like over 30 million. Oh. Oh. Congratulations. That's wild. Yeah. And then I'm actually more interested in participating in the enterprise because I'm starting to see true business adoption. And that's where it starts to be a fad. Very auspicious gong ringing. I don't know if you can hear it, but the gong is still ringing for you. Yeah. Something about how I hit it. It's very good. That was a bullish hit. It was a very good omen for your company.

2:46:57$30 million. I just want to take a second because we get lost in the AI boom or whatever that 30 million is so many. That is such a huge impact to have on a product that you've built. So sincerely, massive congratulations. That's very, very big. And I feel like Sam Allman's out there throwing around trillions and stuff and we lose track of the fact that 30 million is a lot of users. And congratulations. That's very great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have fun at the event. Yep. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Up next, we have Justine Moore from A16Z. Is it her second time on the show?

2:47:36Third time on the show? Dylan in the chat says I felt that gong hit in my soul. That gong hit was wild. Justine Moore, can you hear us? We're back on the podium. Hopefully we have audio. Fantastic. Here we go. Loud and clear. I'm here. It's great to be back, guys. Fantastic. What is new from you? Wait, wait, wait. Open screen time. I want to know how much Sora. This is a good question. Let's see it. Let's see it. We know she loves Slop. Well, actually, guys, this is not going to be super impressive because I mostly use Sora on desktop. Oh, okay, okay. Your desktop user. I would guess, if I had to guess, it's probably like 15 minutes a day.

2:48:1815 minutes a day on my phone. Okay, in the feed or making? Making stuff, right? I like the phone. Okay, when I do it on the phone, I like to scroll through the feed and see what other people are making. on desktop, there's a lot more controllability with like the storyboard and stuff like that. And you can do landscape as well. Do you feel like you've, you've given Sora the app enough data that you're actually getting fine tuned recommendations or are you just seeing the cream of the crop because there isn't enough to give you specific things that you like? What's the temperature? What take the temperature on the feed?

2:48:54You know what I'm talking about, right? I think it is not yet enough content to be able to have a very personalized feed for everyone. But I'm not sure because I haven't seen anyone else's feed. So they might be super different. Yeah. Because if I go on TikTok and I say I like car videos and you go on TikTok and you say you like boat videos, pretty quickly, we're both going to just get unlimited cars and no boats and vice versa. Interesting. How are you thinking about, we were just talking to Cray about this, winning in the application layer for creativity. Like Sora is a creative tool you can create on desktop with the storyboard.

2:49:31There's this world where we wind up with one app that instantiates UI on the fly, lets you do everything. There's another one where we see even more bifurcation, just like we have Lightroom and Photoshop and Premiere and After Effects. We could wind up with 20 apps for individual little fine-tune-a-face upres over here. How do you think it's going to play out? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, honestly, at the beginning of the wave, we thought maybe there'd be a little bit more concentration than there has been. The market just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and we keep seeing more specialized apps.

2:50:06I think because these creative AI tools are enabling all of these people who couldn't create content before to make content for the first time. And so that unlocks a bunch of different verticals who weren't using creative tools much before. So my guess is there'll be some kind of horizontal tooling layers, whether they're for developers, like what the folks at Fall are doing, which is awesome, or for consumers, prosumers. And then I think we're also going to start seeing more vertical specific applications, just like we've seen with LLMs, honestly. We've seen a lot of, for accounting, for law, for finance, different industries and different personas have different use cases and workflows.

2:50:49Yeah, it's interesting. I haven't thought about it that way because when I think of like an AI law firm, I don't think about them as like fine-tuning tokens or like running a specific, but it is very much the same. How are you thinking about the mobile versus desktop divide? You're obviously experiencing it on Sora, but are you seeing a bifurcation where you might actually back a company that's saying, we're going after mobile gen AI in this particular niche, or we're going desktop. And is that a meaningful designation? Or are companies with vibe coding able to kind of go multi-platform on day one?

2:51:31Obviously, OpenAI was, but they have a lot of resources. I think sort of the mobile versus desktop speaks a lot to sort of the user persona and use case. What we've seen so far is that stuff that blows up on mobile tends to be consumer products where you don't have to put a ton of work into editing the output, into having super long prompts. Things like Sora 2 or like Lenza, if you guys remember, which blew up a couple of years ago now to make these AI profile pictures of you. I think true creative workflows and really detailed editing tend to require bigger screens. We've actually seen more companies start looking at iPad apps too, which is crazy to say.

2:52:13It's not just like four-year-olds on iPads. It's like real creative professionals because people love to kind of draw on them. And it's a larger screen that enables kind of more knobs and dials. Yeah. What are you seeing on the monetization side for pure AI content creators? I know you track a lot of these accounts. I'm interested to see if some of these, again, not just a content creator that might use AI here or there, but a new content creator that only makes AI content. Will they monetize via influencer-style marketing? Will they go straight to doing deals with the Netflixes or other streaming platforms?

2:52:54But I'm curious what you think there. Yeah, it's so early. It's hard to say. I think how it started was people started growing these AI-only accounts and monetizing in the traditional ways, which was like ad revenue or some share of the views you got on your video, things like that on platforms like X and TikTok and Instagram. I've also seen, honestly, a ton of the ways that AI creators monetize is by selling prompts or courses or teaching other people how to make the same things just because there's so much demand and most people are not experts at these tools. I think it's going to be really interesting to see when we start to see more AI native IP or characters that can appear in a Netflix show or have a song that they release on Spotify and they kind of get a cut of the streaming revenue.

2:53:45We've already started to see some of that, like that AI actress. And we've seen some in music too, especially in Asia. But I think we're just at the very early stages of that. Yeah. Yeah. Are you losing the ability to actually define a particular AI virality moment? Like the Lenza era was definitely a thing. Everyone had the magic avatars. The Studio Ghibli moment was a moment. Then maybe it was like the Sam Altman stealing GPUs era with Sora, but I feel like we're just now in like the Sora moment and maybe it just becomes an era. But in the Italian brain rot. Like, are we accelerating? Are you feeling acceleration where you can't start, you can't even track all the memes because it just happened so fast?

2:54:32Yes. I used to keep basically the spreadsheet where I tracked like the number of impressions as far as I could guess from like certain trends or launches or announcements or things that would happen. And I gave up on it probably like six or so months ago because there were so many things happening at once. It was like Nano Banana and VO3 and Sora and like two new Chinese models that were amazing. And like the world labs launch, like there were just 20 things happening like every day. Um, and, and I think the interesting thing about that too, is like different people are excited by different things.

2:55:05Like sometimes I talk to people who are really deep in AI creativity, but they're really into one part of it. And so they don't even know about the other, the other launches because it's so hard to keep up with everything right now. What was the nano banana? They're using the MetaVibes app too much. I'm sorry. I don't have time for it. What was the, what was the nano banana like viral, like moment or driver? Like what was the, the canonical like thing that you would prompt that nano banana did so well that made it really popular? I mean, the, the interesting thing about nano banana was I think it wasn't just one prompt.

2:55:38It was a series of them. There was like the Polaroids putting yourself in a different era and then there was making yourself an action figure. And then one I've been following this week on TikTok is like college kids are making videos of them like hugging their younger selves from an image that they create. Yeah. Like with them and their younger self on Nano Banana. What do you think of that? I'm not a fan. I think it's not. I mean, don't we all want to hug our younger selves? No, not at all. I'd say toughen up. Toughen up. Pull up the bootstrap. Pick yourself up by your bootstrap. I would make an AI video of my younger me picking myself up by my bootstraps.

2:56:20There you go. Okay. So, you know, we're close there. We will be participating in, like, the next slight iteration of the viral sensation. But, no, I won't be hugging myself. That feels very odd to me. You can do a new one of you yelling at your younger self if you want. This is a free idea. Or boxing. But, yeah, I mean, a lot of these are odd. Stephen Hawking at the X Games is odd. A cat steamrolling its way through a house is odd. But I love most of those. But it's important. It is important. Humanity needs these videos. I think we do. I think we do. I think we do. Laughing is important. Creativity.

2:56:59It is creativity. Whoever prompted it was creative. I would not have thought to put Stephen Hawking at the X Games. And someone did. Me neither. What else are people talking about? What are the key stress points? Are people worried about AI bubble generally? Is it all just about, let me find the most efficient inference arbitrage or inference provider, the best AI factory? What are the current discussions? I imagine it's not Doom anymore. That one's kind of moved on. What are people talking about at this particular conference? Yeah, we actually had an investor panel earlier with a bunch of great folks kind of talking about those sorts of things.

2:57:40I think the bubble question is an interesting one. I personally don't think we're in a bubble. I think just the true demand for the products is massive, and we're seeing companies grow faster than ever before and also retain users higher than ever before. A lot of folks, like I'm sure you guys do, have questions about gross margin. I think we find that margins tend to improve over time, as you've seen in many eras of consumer software, like Amazon and Uber and DoorDash. A lot of these companies were gross margin negative or neutral at the beginning and then become more efficient over time as they scale and unlock various network effects.

2:58:22I think where I would be worried we were in a bubble is if the margins were all negative and the retention sucked. Because then you're not actually building products that people want and you're raising a lot of money for it. Or if there was only like... 100 ,000 real users or something like that. Totally. Exactly. Which we've seen before in different tech trends. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. Totally. I mean, yeah, we just talked to Korea, like 30 million users is like very significant, like, and ChatGPT, close to a billion users. Like it's just, it's just accelerating much faster and the distribution is there.

2:58:55And it's a lot because like Stripe exists, like you can just actually get 20 bucks a month out of someone pretty easily. And you couldn't do that in 1999. It was just no way. And so you had to say, well, we'll monetize the eyeballs later and we'll do ads and people will pay. And it became this kind of weird circular economy. But now you can just be like, how much value am I delivering to your business? Put down your card and we'll pay for it or churn, which is great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by during a busy conference. Always a fun time chatting with you. I'm honored.

2:59:29Thanks guys. Have fun at the event and give our best to everybody there. Yes. Thanks for coming on. And just so you know, we're coming for your lunch. We dropped our first market map. I don't know if you saw. I love that. I'm going to have to check it out. We dropped a media market map. So now we're in direct competition. It's not schizo at all. It's not schizo at all. You know, the competition fuels me. So I'm excited. Yeah, fire back. Fire back with your own market map. This is like a rap battle for people. It's a map battle. It's a map battle. A rap battle that like five people are interested in.

3:00:01Yes. A rap battle for people who know how to read a term sheet or something. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon. Great to see you. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks, guys. Goodbye. We've got to go over to this post from Marvin Von Hagen, which is one of the most royal names ever. That's a sick name. This man is destined for greatness. He quoted the essay that I published yesterday, and just with two excerpts from my piece, he said, the Interaction Company of California has managed to really break through the noise and deliver a truly novel consumer AI product experience.

3:00:38Dot, dot, dot. Nothing important. Don't worry about it. Poke.com itself is a fantastic domain and a name for their business and audience. I just skipped over, of course, the part where I - Oh, there's like a little bit of criticism in there? No, yeah. I was criticizing the general sort of name convention, but this was an absolutely perfect response. And I really want to have Marvin on the show. So Marvin, let's get you on the schedule next week. Yeah, yeah. This is the nature of working with media. This was like chef's kiss, a perfect response. What's going on here? Austin says you should never use an M - in your writing anymore.

3:01:14You will 100 % be accused of using AI, especially if it's on social. That is true. I actually recently, like today in the newsletter, I used just a minus sign instead of an M dash. And Brandon was like, certainly we can use the M dash here. Like you intended to use an M dash. And I was like, no, we're using the minus sign. We're using the wrong thing because I don't want to deal with it's an M dash. You used AI or whatever. So I have completely sacrificed it. But what does Alyssa Pumpkin Queen say? She says, that's what the, dropping the M dash, that's what the clankers want you to do. surrender the M-dash, but by the grace of God, we will outmaneuver the clanker, sink our hands into their motherboards and remind them what mankind can do.

3:01:59Let the clanker hold their position. We won't. We won't. So good. By the way, the chat wants us to do a conference. Yes. And Ben Sand says, I'd go to the conference, but we needed a TBPN cruise. I'm not joking. We've talked about getting a yacht to park in the San Francisco Bay and do a conference there. So I would like to pull that off at some point. And the chat will be the first to know. Ohio has a new bill that goes far beyond banning human AI marriage. The measure would define AI systems as non-sentient entities. strip them of any claim to legal personhood, forbid them from owning property, holding financial accounts, controlling IP or acting as company directors.

3:02:52So it's basically game on if we get a humanoid. Like we can it has no rights in Ohio. So if we take it to Ohio, like the unitary is going to be sitting there being like, hey, guys, why are we going to Ohio? you know I'd love to stay in a different state because I would hate for you to destroy me and then face no legal consequences because I have no rights in Ohio yeah this Ohio clearly hasn't read less wrong it's not familiar with Rocco's Basilisk Ohio might be the first place that the Clankers descend on and Skynet goes on yeah they really put themselves in the crosshair, the clanker crosshair.

3:03:35On the aggressiveness. Daniel Tenrero has finally... Before we read this, let me tell you about Wanderer.com. Find your happy place. Book a Wanderer with inspiring news. Hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. What did Daniel say? He says, finally some good news, which is that hedge fund assets hit$5 trillion with most inflows since before the financial crisis. Great hit, John. Assets in the global hedge fund industry have surged to a record$5 trillion as investors poured money into alternatives and funds posted solid gains.

3:04:07Our gong is gifted today. You hear this, right? It's still going. It's still going. It's still going. Is it me or is it gong? Hedge funds saw net inflows of nearly$34 billion in the first three months through September with total returns across all strategies averaging 5.4 % over the quarter. So underperforming the average terminally online Zoomer that is just massively levered into the MAG7. Yeah. But still, still not so bad as a whole. Cryptocurrency hedge funds posted solid double-digit gains in the third quarter, recovering from sharp losses in early 2025 to bring year-to-date performance to 6.7%.

3:04:43Can we play this clip of, it's probably too long to react to. Bucco Capital, the legend says, I'm always so confused when Tesla goes down on earnings as the business performance is completely irrelevant to the price of the stock. they put up uh over 1.4 billion i think of uh free cash flow as a trillion dollar company so that's good they beat earnings yes uh stock went down is that no no no no i think they missed earnings and the stock went up i don't know i agree no he's saying they they missed but he's and the stock traded down and he's like why is it it shouldn't even matter it shouldn't even matter let's skip the Dorsey reaction we got to get out of here it's Friday we got to start our weekend apparently the sale of TikTok was a pawn sacrifice to open up the diplomatic chess board and Rune says it's pretty bad that Xi Jinping models TikTok as spiritual opium and feels okay selling it to the west in a revenge opium war set up For Trump, facing the sale of the high-profile app was a populist victory framed around national security.

3:05:57For Xi Jinping, however, the app was a low-cost bargaining chip. He had privately dismissed it as spiritual opium, according to the people close to Beijing, and viewed it as easy sacrifice to secure the continued dialogue on China that China needed. That makes a ton of sense. In more important geopolitical news, Justin Bieber is on Twitch. which Michael Siebel says almost 19 years after we got started, we finally got Bieber. So never give up. And this was, I think, my favorite post of the week. It's now been deleted. I won't read the user's name, but I think it's funny. It was a post that said, I honestly don't care if I get fired.

3:06:38I was part of the illegal gambling ring with Chauncey Billups and Terry Rose here. My name is Andy Jassy and I work at Amazon. so these these like fake framing someone who did something is so shareholders shareholders are i didn't realize that like the there was a retail army for for andy jassy that cared about andy jassy and and uh and amazon yeah it's tough when your stock goes up 20 year to date and people are still like calling for uh you to to to be fired yeah but uh i think that's a good place to call it uh we've had a fantastic you know where we're gonna call it show where we're gonna call it uh we're gonna call it with with gabe over at sora uh sora was dethroned in the app store by dave's hot chicken play the went way and uh eagle sound effect for dave because uh something their team i think is just really cracked because i don't think this is the first time they've like charted number one?

3:07:42I think most people think that the Dave's Hot Chicken team is like one notch above the OpenAI team. In terms of just, you know, product design, growth. Yeah, just IQ and strategy. AI research. Research. Yeah, these types of things. I think most people think it's sort of like, you know, a hotbed of the best talent in the world. Absolutely. So I'm unsurprised. No, seriously, the Dave's Hot Chicken team must be cooking because something crazy happened in their marketing because to go to the top of the charts even if it's momentum based that means that they had some campaign that just hit and it's not like it's the super bowl right now like they must have had some crazy call to action to get that app to the top of the store but congratulations to everyone at dave's hot chicken i'm a huge fan i order dave's hot chicken all the time maybe i should have the app i usually use door just never ordered it to the ultra dim no i haven't but more of a weekend thing more of a weekend thing more of a weekend thing but dave's Hot chicken is awesome.

3:08:38Highly recommend. It is almost a weekend for our East Coast audience. If you're on the West Coast, we're going to continue to lock in. Please stay locked in at least until 5. Hopefully you're not leaving the office at 5 because it just looks bad. It's like you just were hanging out trying to get the optics in. But we had a really fun week. Next week is going to be wild as well. I think it's going to be a magnificent week. I think so, too. It's going to be absolutely magnificent. I think it will be magnificent. And I can't wait to be back. So have a wonderful Friday. Have a wonderful Saturday. Have a wonderful Sunday.

3:09:13We'll be counting down the hours until we are going live again on Monday. And thank you for tuning in. Goodbye. Cheers.