David Senra LIVE in The Ultradome | Chase Lochmiller & Alon Yariv, Filip Aronshtein, Gorkem Yurtseven, Sudheesh Nair, Julie Zhuo, Jakob Diepenbrock, Gabe Whaley

27:10On the front page, this is front page Wall Street Journal news. I leaned back in my nosebleed seat. Seven empty cans of Coors Light littered around me and eight hot dogs marinating in my stomach. I tried to remember how I ended up in this place. so sick and yet so determined to keep going. I'm not a big drinker, nor can I remember ever craving a hot dog. Oh, right. I was attempting the 999.

27:38Now, a ballpark tradition, the challenge entails eating nine hot dogs and drinking nine beers in the course of a baseball game. I had found a group of friends who planned to take it on during a game between the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves and asked if I could tag along. Against the advice of every cardiologist ever, I decided to try it myself. Joining me in attempting the challenge were Tim, a 29-year-old software engineer. Let's hear it for the software engineers, folks. And William Lee, a 38-year-old analyst. Sharona Lynn, a 31-year-old writer. If things went wrong, we could share the janitorial duties.

28:14Wild, wild story in the journal just about this. Just the important stuff. Just the important stuff. And he truly wrote this piece fully. It's great. Does it kind of trail off towards the end? He's clearly feeling the effects. Yeah. I was thinking about, this reminds me of the 999 that a lot of people in Silicon Valley do. Nine glasses of Screaming Eagle, nine servings of Beluga Caviar, nine different horses competing in dressage. Yes. And so when I heard he was doing the 999, I thought that's what he was doing. Venture capitalists heard about the 996, and they decided to adapt it for their lifestyle.

28:52Yes, the 999. Our fears, our first beers had been a respite from a sticky New York afternoon. Those Nathan's hot dogs had surprised me with their juicy snap. It's now or never, I recalled Lee saying when the game began, and we naively clanked our 12-ounce cans together in celebration of gluttony. But now, with time running out and my body at war against itself, doubt was creeping in. I'm limping, but I'm getting there, said Deigle. I was feeling worse. The 999 has existed for at least a decade, though for much of that time, it was largely the domain of frat bros and competitive gorgers. Recent social media attention and spinoffs have given it new popularity.

29:31NFL great J.J. Watt completed the challenge last month. Barstool Sports this year debuted a 99-99 challenge with a nine-member team that included competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut. Skateboarders gather each year in Brooklyn Park to consume nine hot dogs, nine beers, while completing nine specialized kickflips. That sounds extremely difficult. Specialized kickflips? Probably like a kickflip, a heel flip, a pop shove it, right? That's not a kickflip. I think he's using kickflip as an abstraction on top of just flip tricks generally. Yeah. Well, he should respect my culture. He should respect your culture.

30:17How advanced can you do? Can you do a double kickflip? Can you do a triple kickflip? I probably couldn't right now in loafers, but I could land a kickflip in five minutes if I was required. But at your peak, could you do a 540? Could you do a 720? All of them. You could do a 900. At a skateboard company. You could do a 900? 900, no. Okay. So there's a limit. Those are talking about half pipe. Yeah, okay. I'm just, I'm trying to understand. I had a mini ramp. My dad built me a mini ramp with scraps. My dad and my uncle built a mini ramp with scraps in our front yard. It was probably the worst thing ever.

30:54What about a varial? Varials, yeah. What about a switch, nollie, quad heel flip? Quad heel flip. That's a special trick from Tony Hawk's Pro Skate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. XXX. What were the snowboarding? SSX. SSX was the snowboarding one. Great game. You know what else is great? Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast, and we don't stop there. Our AI and automation power everything, from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling. Oh, guess what, John? A little bit different.

31:29What's up? Investment alert. Investment alert. The White House, at White House, has just posted, investment alert. Adrian is investing$200 million to build an advanced manufacturing. facility in Arizona. I said it before. America is cultivating Chris Power. They really are cultivating Chris Power. The new startup meta launch videos are done. Don't do launch videos. You've got to get the White House to post your announcements from their main handle. Or you can get Patrick O'Shaughnessy to post and do a whole profile on you. So there are a bit of dueling articles today because the Wall Street Journal is talking about a school that embraces AI learning.

32:17We'll run through this. Then we'll do the Patrick O'Shaughnessy Colossus profile. Billionaire Bell Ackman has a new fascination, a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity, inclusion, and uses artificial intelligence to speed teach children in two hours. Alpha School is launching a New York location in September, and the investor and social media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution. On Friday, Ackman is set to appear with Alpha's co-founder, its principal, and others on a panel discussion in his Hamptons home. The panel on K-12 education will be moderated by former financier Michael Milken as part of Milken Institute's Hamptons Dialogues.

33:02Alpha School, which calls its teachers guides, says it uses AI-enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools, despite condensed days. The schedule allows students to do hands-on activity in the afternoon, which the school says help them build real-life skills. These include five-mile bike rides without stopping for kindergartners. No stops? No stops. Five-mile bike ride without stopping for kindergartners. that's pretty sick and exploring personal hobbies through ai generated plans uh they should learn some here's learn the 900 i would send my children for alpha school i was guaranteed a 900 kids to do a bike ride and not stop if you could actually pull that off i don't know i don't know how your little guy does but my little guy stops constantly stops constantly yeah it's a stop machine he's not a kindergartner yet though so anything's possible maybe alpha school maybe ai will make it possible.

34:00The school also strives to keep the hot button social issues that have divided grade schools and colleges across the country out of its classrooms entirely. Co-founder Mackenzie Price said in an interview, we don't let anything political social issues come in the way. We stay very much out of that. Alpha's guides come from a variety of backgrounds and don't typically have teaching degrees. I wonder if there will be a backlash to this or like a response to this, like a hyper-political school that teaches your child how to navigate the modern political landscape for maximum power. So you go there, you learn how to really pour the fire on the culture war and create a movement around yourself and get into the White House.

34:45Could be some interesting alpha there. Something there. Do they not, is this, why do they call it alpha school? Are they trying to like develop alphas? Is that the idea? Yeah. It's like no betas. Well, John, if they wanted to develop betas, imagine what they would call it. I would be interested. So we need to start a competitor to this Sigma school. Sigma Sigma school alone. It's a school for lone wolves. Lone wolves. Yeah. And it just plays. It just plays literally me songs on repeat. It's like, yeah, classes in session. You're going today. You will become Ryan Gosling from drive. You're going to be operating outside of social hierarchy.

35:22Yes. If you develop any friends, we live in a society, and you will be the Joker today. Here's how to become Joker-fied. We're training you up to join the Manosphere one day. Yeah, join the Manosphere. You'll be studying the blade. Yeah, when you enter the first grade, you have to choose between Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman, Chris Williams. You get sorted into the houses. The houses of the Manosphere at Sigma School. we're on to something here yeah we need you to study the blade we're sure purely so that in two decades time you can say so you come to me in your time of need yes the new school aims to launch with 30 or so founding families you're still on Sigma School Sigma School so imagine you have a five year old they join Sigma School so these are our principles individualism right so sigma operates independently it doesn't seek to be at the top or even a part of a social hierarchy yes yes like an alpha male yes solitude yes so you need to teach the five-year-old find strength and solitude so yes uh you know you'll be taken to like the base of a mountain yes you say like okay class five mile bike ride with all your friends with no stops yeah how about five mile bike ride by yourself some at this peak yes you have eight hours to get to the top of this Tyler?

36:47It's just like a monastery. Yes, yes. You're describing a monastery, yeah. Monastery is a monastery. Okay, no, not yet. Not yet. So the other aspect of the Sigma archetype, mystery. Mystery. Teaching a five-year-old. It's definitely got to be mystery. Teaching a five-year-old to be mysterious. Good morning, Mark. Raghav says Alpha School replaced teachers with clankers. The backlash. I think the clankers are responsible to the teachers. I think there are plenty of teachers in the loop. You should test the hormone profile of the human teachers to make sure that they're really at alpha level. Yes, yes.

37:26So anyway, let's continue on this. They talk about Ackman. Ackman, who regularly weighs in on everything from fine dining to the war in Casa Anax, had uncharacteristically not said a word about Alpha School on the social media platform until the Wall Street Journal revealed his involvement. I don't know why this is such a revealing thing. This is just like a startup that people are doing. I don't know. These parents. I guess it's because schooling is important. It's like culture war issues and stuff. No, it really comes down to these parents want their children to get a good education. Yeah. On Wednesday, he wrote a fawning post that ran like an ad.

38:04A person close to the school said Ackman is now poised to become a de facto ambassador. He is already enmeshed in the New York's education scene. sits on the board of trustees of Horace Mann, the school's most storied, one of the city's most storied private schools. Ackman first learned about Alpha School this year at this year's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting after speaking to Sahil Bloom, author of The Five Types of Wealth. Some of the people familiar with the matter. What are the five types of wealth again, John? Cars, watches, horses, mansions, boats. Arch, real estate. Oh, yeah. And boats.

38:39Yeah. I think we kind of have it to like 10 sources of wealth.

38:45Anyway, he has since been hyping up Alpha School to parents in his social circle. Ackman has been a spoken critic of DEI programs. He will appear on a panel Friday alongside Price and Joe Lamont, a Texas-based billionaire who Alpha says has served as its school principal for the past two years. Lamont is the founder of Trilogy Software, which became part of his private equity firm, ESW Capital. Do you know what ESW Capital stands for? Tyler, Pop Quiz? Pop Quiz. ESW stands for Enterprise Software. Group? No, ESW Capital, Enterprise Software Capital. Nothing better than that. That is a fantastic name.

39:27Yeah. He has developed software. Can we jump over to the Colossus story? We should, we should. So Patrick and Jeremy Stern have a new profile in Colossus today. It is available online. You can also subscribe to the print edition. but the profile is all about Joe Lamont and Alpha School. Yes. And I guess his co-founder in Alpha School, Mackenzie Price. Crazy lore in here. It's an insane lore. Deeply underrated. We've heard a lot of people have known about Trilogy and known about Joe Lamont for a long time, but to get this level of lore dropped. And if you don't know about Joe, and it wasn't because you were living under a data center, is because he's pretty much been completely silent for the last 25 years.

40:13So he's an alpha, but then he was an alpha transition to more of a sigma. More of a sigma. Sort of mysterious, outside, traditional, higher. Extremely sigma. Extremely sigma. So anyways, I'll give you some background here. So this is from the profile. Even after agreeing to break his silence after 25 years, Joe Lamont is still reluctant to talk about himself. It's hard to get him to relive Trilogy, the enterprise software company, Let's just give it up for Enterprise Software real quick. The Enterprise Software company he founded in 1989, which by age 27 put him on the cover of Forbes twice as America's youngest self-made Senti.

40:49So if you've been going through a period of silence and mystery and you've been a Sigma and you're trying to become an alpha, trying to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, go to Profound. Reach millions of customers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Continue, Jordy. so he isn't keen to expound on sales builder which is an amazing name for software company trilogy's flagship expert system from the 1990s and the world's first billion dollar artificial intelligence product in all but name ditto esw the investment arm of trilogy that's acquired hundreds of software companies since 2000 and helped make him a deca billionaire wow yet the mention of which makes the otherwise inexhaustible lamont who always seems to be straining it at some invisible leash seem drowsy and bored nor is he interested in dwelling on his reputation as a tech pioneer in everything from expert systems to manufacturing configuration college recruitment corporate boot camps tech bro culture remote work monitoring employees with surveillance software and replacing American employees with overseas contractors whether his reticence can be described to an inhibition about the things that made him rich or because he's refreshingly adverse to gilding them with hypocritical virtue signaling or because he simply doesn't give an s-h-i-t anymore is hard to tell the one thing lamont will talk about for hours on end is alpha school the teacher list homework list k-12 private school in austin texas where students have been testing in the top 0.1 percent nationally by self-directing coursework with clankers for two hours of course with ai tutoring apps for two hours a day alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to quote unquote mastery level scoring over 90 % in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in quote unquote workshops, learning things like how to run an Airbnb or a food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production or build a business or drone.

42:51And you know why you have to go to, uh, uh, uh, and actually, um, subscribe to Colossus magazine because, uh, you can get this beautiful picture of this horse with uh mackenzie price yes uh the co-founder of alpha school and flair but it's so when you think about you know thinking about the these courses that they're taking uh you know the these k through 12 students through how to run an airbnb i wonder if they found any course bros online that are that and and trained in ai on on their programs of how to build a nine-figure Airbnb empire. First trick there would be to just get those assets on Wander.

43:32Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views. Hotel-grade amenities. Dreamy-beds. Top-tier cleaning. And 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And we have our first guest of the show. No way. Chris Lockmiller is here. Welcome to the stream. Chase, how you doing? Calling in from a log cabin set. That's a beautiful background. Where are you? Great. Yeah, I'm in... Broadly. I'm in, I'm in Jackson hole right now. I have a, an event that I'm attending out here. So amazing. Found a, found a corner of the log cabin to call in to, to, to hang out with you guys.

44:04I love it. Give us the update. What's the news? Break it down for us. You know, we are excited and thrilled to share that, you know, Crusoe made an acquisition today. Let's go. Let's go. Get the gong ready. What'd you buy? What'd you buy? Crusoe acquired a business called Atero.

44:33Sorry. Sorry to keep interrupting. What did they do? I got a little excited. So Crusoe acquired a business called Atero. Yeah. And we're really thrilled to welcome the entire Atero team to Crusoe. You know, Atero has been a company that's mostly been operating in stealth. but they have been focused on optimizing the very low level pieces of the high performance computing infrastructure stack, particularly around memory optimization. So, you know, there's a lot of investment being made today for these very large clusters, these large scale AI factories that are bringing, you know, intelligence to the masses and embedding intelligence in the economy.

45:16But, you know, a lot of that infrastructure is not used nearly as efficiently as it could be. And a lot of that has to do with, like, getting the data into the right place at the right time so that your GPU utilization rate can go way, way up. And, you know, sort of our commitment in this Atero acquisition is, you know, building both very, very large AI, large-scale AI factories, and then building the operating systems and the software systems to basically operate those AI factories with an incredible degree of efficiency and scale. Amazing. I want to go into trends about inference cost and kind of what's going on in the broader market.

46:02There was this amazing Google paper today by Jeff Dean about saving water and energy. It seems like there's a lot of progress. But first, let's hear from Elon about the actual journey. When did you start the company? What made sense about teaming up with Crusoe here? Okay, we started the company last July, so about a year ago now, with the understanding that inference is going to be the next huge frontier in this space. Training was all the rage for the last few years. people all of a sudden realize that they need to make money off of AI and inference is the only place that you actually make any money building a model.

46:46What we realized in addition, one of our members of the founding team, Ben Chess, he came out of OpenAI, he led the infrastructure in OpenAI for about five years. This guy knew what it means to run inference at scale, he knew what are the challenges, he knew the challenges of scaling, he knew the challenges of orchestrating different workloads on the GPU clusters. And our realization was that it is not enough to run models at a really high efficiency when you're running a single model on a single GPU, but the challenge comes when you actually have a real world workload that breathes and changes size, like changes the amount of resources as it consumes, changes what models are being served, what type of prompts are being asked of it to do.

47:35And what we realized is that memory is the main bottleneck for this infrastructure for inference. Like, first, you need to shift the model into a GPU. Models are huge. They're about a thousand times larger than standard containerized applications. Just how much time it takes to put it into a GPU. Secondly, user assets are also huge. Typically, when you have a user session in a standard consumer application, you have a few photos, a few text assets. Those weigh a few kilobytes, megabytes. KV cache volumes, which are the equivalent of user sessions in inference, those weigh gigabytes. So it's another increase of three orders of magnitude of how much memory you need into a process.

48:25So that's what we have solved with our technology. We have the Athero UM technology, the unified memory layer. This allows you to utilize the GPU cluster to its fullest, shift memory assets fluidly and in the highest possible speed throughout the cluster. And this allows you enormous performance improvements in everything related to inference. What layer of abstraction are you operating at? There's obviously a host of different large language models, some open source, some closed source. There's a variety of different chips and you have stuff from Amazon and Google. Are you sitting above CUDA in the NVIDIA ecosystem?

49:09Are you agnostic to any particular piece of the stack? Just help me kind of understand when an AI company would pull this particular product off the shelf. So we have built for the last year a few different ways of structuring this offer. And this also relates to your question. But the way I like to look at it, I have two analogs in mind when I think about our tech.

49:41you can think about us as an in-memory high throughput cache so it's kind of like a database a redis for your AI application that gives you the assets as fast as possible into the process and so I like to think about it as something that is sort of orthogonal or in parallel with the with the CUDA stack and the VLLM so we integrate on the side and allow you to shift and out assets from the existing stack very rapidly. This actually allows us to very easily integrate to everything, like we can integrate to VLM, but we can integrate to any inference runtime. And while we currently only support NVIDIA officially or NVIDIA hardware officially, we are by no mean shape or form constrained to NVIDIA hardware.

50:31Yeah, that makes sense. That's one way I want to look at it, but the other way that I find more inspirational and kind of like tell us about this partnership with Crusoe is I like to think about as the sort of native virtualization for this new world. So it's virtualizing the memory, which is the main asset. So I think about it as the equivalent of VMware for the wave of AI. That makes sense. Chase, when I think of Crusoe's business, I think of like the big projects that get cinematically filmed in Bloomberg documentaries. And then I also think about Crusoe Cloud. and the reports from Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis around ClusterMax.

51:13What does this allow you to say to customers that you couldn't before? Is this purely going to help with pricing in some sort of commodity offering? Is this a differentiator? Is this something that will increase reliability and uptime? I think a lot of people are maybe underpricing what it takes to actually not just, Yes, I have a chip and I'm selling it at a cheap price, but if it's offline all the time, people aren't going to be happy. So what's the shape of how you're sharing this with customers and where you hope this goes from like a sales position? Yep. Well, you know, we feel like a lot of the technology that Alon and his team have built at Atero is incredibly complementary to our infrastructure software stack at Crusoe Cloud.

52:04And a lot of this is really about accelerating performance and enhancing performance across everything from, you know, how do you actually get the most out of the GPUs that you're paying for? And how do we do that through things like, you know, more optimizing? or how do we do that by things like, you know, investing in the storage layer so that you're basically able to use multiple different layers of storage very cohesively to, you know, have your data in the right place at the right time to utilize your GPUs more effectively. So I think from an efficiency standpoint, it's a major investment.

52:45From a reliability standpoint, point, it's a major investment. And then, you know, leveraging the scale that Crusoe has, and being able to operate that infrastructure at, you know, gigawatt scale, I think is like a very important aspect to, you know, this, this investment we're making. You know, when I think about like benchmarks and metrics, I think like, you know, one of the things that people are frankly looking at is like dollar per token, right? And if you, you actually, you know, if you double your utilization rate of your GPU simply by, you know, optimizing how you manage your KV cache, how you, you know, manage your, you know, how the model actually gets managed, then you can actually drive down the cost per token by half, right?

53:36So when we think about it, it's like, what is the cost of intelligence running on Grusso Cloud and like the intelligent result that folks are actually coming to us for at the end of the day? And how do we actually drive massive efficiencies for all sorts of different high performance workloads? It goes from cost per token for the end customer and then profit per token. Exactly. Yeah, I want to hear about... Yeah, I mean, people get very focused on the dollar per GPU hour, but if your GPU isn't stable, it's not reliable, you know, you can't move data into it effectively, you don't actually know how to utilize it effectively for your own, you know, hosted inference workload, you're not going to be able to create that much value for ourselves.

54:19So, you know, our goal here is to, you know, invest in the platform and to drive massive performance gains that will ultimately enable our customers to drive more value for themselves by using Crusoe Cloud. There was a post we covered earlier on the show from an account called Bubble. They said, AI inference is the new high-frequency trading and the companies that serve models and don't realize that will struggle. What's your reaction to that? Is that what it kind of feels like right now internally in terms of just like, it feels like speed, performance, cost? Yeah, you hear all these crazy stories about high-frequency traders like, you know, Jane Street maintains OCaml, like a special language just for high-frequency trading.

55:00They'll build their own backbones if they need to just to move data more quickly. It feels like there's potential that we're going in that direction. Yeah. Speaking as someone who spent 10 years working in the high-frequency trading sector, I don't know if you guys knew that. I did not. That's lore. That's lore. That's great. I do think that there are elements of this that rhyme with kind of what's happening in high-frequency trading. You know, they're, you know, we, I view it very much as a massively expanding pie, though, as opposed to kind of a fixed pie that, you know, the high frequency traders are competing for.

55:40And, you know, as performance gains increase, utility of, you know, this infrastructure will go up and demand will go up with it. So it has kind of this like reflexivity that, you know, if we can actually as an industry help drive better performance, we can actually grow the pie and make, you know, make, make, make the impact of what we're doing way, way larger. So I think it has like a, you know, positive force that, you know, high frequency trading doesn't in that regard. That being said, you know, I do see like hosting of. you know, hosting of more widely used open source models to be something that will commoditize over the course of time.

56:22And, you know, things like speed, cost and, you know, a bunch of different tricks to optimize performance are definitely going to be instrumental in, you know, providing a great product to the marketplace. Yeah, I mean, on that note of like tricks, do you feel like we're on a Moore's Law type curve for cost per million tokens where not necessarily that it mirrors Moore's Law in getting half the price every 18 months, but just that it's somewhat predictable versus the progress on the usefulness of LLMs felt extremely spiky. and you get these crazy branches in the tech tree and research paths that just all of a sudden produce a ton of value.

57:06And it kind of goes from zero to 100. But on the cost side, do you think that we're going to be chipping away at this, making solid gains on a predictable cadence? Or do you think there might be like one weird trick that every AI lab will love? look i think it's both uh is the answer uh you know we're definitely like riding the you know nvidia roadmap curve to like you know better more performant you know chips that we're able to drag down our you know dollar per flop uh by just kind of you know continuing to grow and build on you know a lot of the innovations that are taking place in the silicon companies um but certainly there's a lot of low-level software optimizations in terms and as a lawn And like, frankly put it, you know, I think there's this massive opportunity to kind of have this, you know, VMware for memory where, you know, that ultimately is this critical piece of the stack to produce valuable results from these chips.

58:08Amazing. Well, congrats on the announcement. Thanks so much for hopping on. Enjoy the rest of your trip and safe travels. We'll talk to you soon. Appreciate it, guys. Great chatting. Have a great time. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about graphite.dev, the AI developer platform, the AI developer productivity platform. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster, get started for free. I'm very much enjoying the soundboard today. Missed dearly on Monday. It's back in action. The thing about a new sound effect too, it's like discovering a new favorite song. You play it like a hundred times and you got to find a new favorite song because it doesn't hit quite the same.

58:48I mean, I once did, but for now, I'm pulling. We have an alert noise. I'm pulling for that to come out during this next interview with Phil from Dirac. He is in the studio. He's in the restream waiting room. Now he's in the TVP on Ultradome. Welcome. There he is. I like that you're tenting your fingers in anticipation of a big announcement. What you got for us, Phil? What's new in your world? Gentlemen, it's a pleasure to be on. Good to see you all. I'm calling in live, currently forward deployed on site with a customer. We are a small burgeoning defense prime in Costa Mesa, having a great time over here.

59:26As you can see from the phone booth that I'm in, great lighting. Fantastic. We have some pretty exciting stuff that we're talking about today. Two big announcements. One of them is a spectacular technology partnership with our favorite great giant Siemens. So that means a team center integration for the uninitiated. One second, I've got to hit the gong for Siemens. Let's go! We love Siemens. They've been in business for a while. We won't take the team slander. Siemens, overnight success. Totally. What else you got? We're helping. We're helping. So with the Siemens partnership, this means they're bringing us into their customers.

1:00:05It's been great. They walked us into some pretty great automotive giants lately and some defense companies. So we're rock and rolling. Great partnership. Love the Siemens team. Secondly, we are announcing our primary financing. Brought to us by Founders Fund & Co2, our favorite Trey and Thomas LaFont. There we go. How much? How much? How much? How much? What is the number? The number. The number, sir. Oh, sorry. 10.7 million. 10.7 million. There we go. What's up right now? Congratulations. Congratulations. There we go. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. I thought, what better place can I tell the world than my favorite technology podcast and news network, the TBBN.

1:00:45I appreciate it. We still have to do the live episode from the Empire State Building. Yeah, we do. Walk us through the most concrete example of what could be better about automotive manufacturing. Are there patterns from Tesla that you think could be ported back to the legacy OEMs? Are there entirely new things? Are there particularly broken processes in automotive manufacturing that you've discovered? Any anecdotes? You can share them anonymously, but whatever's interesting. It's actually kind of interesting. A lot of our insights are not specific to industry. So it's actually this realization that you end up having a very bad context problem.

1:01:30So this paradigm that we're trying to push through is what we call context-aware production planning. This means us basically taking every piece of information in a manufacturing facility as one node in a very, very large and deeply interconnected graph. And what Bill of the West is today is basically a point solution for a manufacturing engineer, one person in that whole process who is helping with the beginning of the production planning process and a good chunk of the production planning process. And what we find at an automotive facility, at an aerospace and defense facility, at an ag, like a tractor manufacturer facility, is that they have contacts that might live on the shop floor.

1:02:06They have contacts that might live in the design world. And they often aren't connected. They often leave the facility once somebody retires with all that tribal knowledge. And so a lot of what we found is there exists this interesting, like, spectrum of volume versus mix. So an aerospace and defense manufacturer does everything very manually. And so that might look like a very, very high mix. They have a high, a lot of variability in their production and very low volume. So they call that high mix, low volume. On the other side of the spectrum, you end up having like consumer electronics manufacturing a little bit before that you end up having automotive where it's pretty low mix.

1:02:41So like, you know, they're having like one line for one type of car, but it's very high volume. And because of that, you know, because of that predictability, you end up having the ability to have a lot of automation. And a lot of what we want to drive as a company is taking those two tradeoffs of high mix, low volume. So you like have a lot of flexibility in your production, but like you can't do a lot of volume really quickly versus the other thing, which is like you can churn out a lot of stuff really fast, but you can't reconfigure your line a ton. we want to basically swap and democratize a lot of that value.

1:03:14And so we want to basically allow an automotive manufacturer to have very, very high reconfigurability and mass produce with a lot of flexibility. And then on the aerospace and defense side, we want to allow them to be able to mass produce that scale while maintaining that flexibility that they have. And so that's a lot of what we've seen. That's kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like Tesla's gone, like, except with the Cybertruck, Like all the cars are kind of like very clearly like, okay, this is the same platform, the Model 3, the Model Y. Like there's a ton of shared parts and that's been what's allowed them to scale volume.

1:03:46You can change the color of the seats. Yeah, exactly. There's like two colors, three colors. Whereas a company like Mercedes that's been in business for so long, they have like everything from like a small sedan to the AMG 1, which is probably hand built. So what is the biggest bottleneck to getting more information out of the heads of the old guard? Is it just bringing on a new system that they are forced to use? Or are there other pieces of data collection? I'm thinking about GitHub, Cursor, Cursor for Bio, the electronic note, the lab notebook. Just this idea of like, if you can have someone use voice notes in medical context, all of a sudden you're starting to get that data into something that can be parsed with AI or software.

1:04:43And it feels like that particularly if someone says, oh, today I realized that this tool needs to be lubricated a little bit more in order to get good yield. That's staying in their head. They're not saying it out loud. They're not writing it down anywhere. Is there a solution to that? Is that a real problem or is that just something that people say when they're marketing? a very very real problem um it's a very real problem i'm not a huge fan of approaches that like take that don't structure that information in a very useful way yeah like i i believe that like context is king and structure is key right like my manufacturing facility can't just be like a dune buggy going off the rails being really crazy you need a manufacturing facility to be extremely uh fast repeatable you need to basically have a high-speed rail system as the manufacturing facility.

1:05:29And so in order to do that, you need to be able to take that tribal knowledge in what might be like in the back of, you know, some dude who is in their 50s and about to retire, might be in back his head a little bit like unstructured, but you need to be able to make sure that you're capturing that information in a really structured and intentional way. And so a lot of the way that we end up serving as a platform for that is allowing folks to like associate, you know, specific like standard notes and different pieces of context with specific components. So like that's one way to do it. But I've seen a lot of really interesting approaches in other places, right?

1:05:59The key is not just the tooling, though. The key is the culture. And a lot of folks on the manufacturing side are actually, like, unfortunately, for the past, like, 15, 20 years, some Silicon Valley folks have been just, like, flying into some facility in Texas or Michigan and saying, you know what? Like, here's this some gobbledygook SaaS. You know, it'll take your manual pen and paper process, and it'll still be manual, but now it's things with the cloud, like, whoa, crazy. Thanks. Yes. so the problem is that like a lot of folks in the manufacturing world like they see a new tool coming in and they're like oh this is bs like this is another one of those and so i've seen this so what you have to do is super intelligent exactly exactly and so it's uh what you end up having to do is build trust and love and affection from like the guys on the shop floor we've been very very fortunate to be able to do that like we have really great relationships with the folks who are actually like doing the work.

1:06:54And so if you were a company trying to change the way the West builds, you can't just go top down, you know, go golfing with the COO or the CEO and like force the top down adoption. You need buy-in from the guys doing the work. Otherwise, they're not going to use the thing. Tool's going to sit on the shelf collecting dust. Yeah, and that's very common. I mean, that's like the, that actually is like the adoption pattern for like cursor, you know, it doesn't come as an enterprise sale mandate. It comes by just one developer picking it up and then it grows internally and you have an internal champion.

1:07:24Well, I'm very glad everything's going well. Congrats on the new round. So bullish on you, Phil. We will talk to you soon. You're the man. Showing off the guns for us. Thanks, man. Yeah, can we get a quick, can we get a quick, there we go. You know what I want? I want your take on those shirts that allow you to bench press more. Are you familiar with these shirts, the compression shirts? Yeah. Is that cheating? I think it's cheating. It's cheating. It's cheating. It's awful. It's awful. Yeah, but what if it gets you comfortable and gets you to that next level? Yeah, what if you're not ready to bench 315?

1:07:54This is the thing that gets you out of the valley of despair. If you're using a slingshot shirt for 315, you've got other problems. Oh, shots fired! That's crazy. That's crazy. Just take some creatine, get some protein in, take a healthy helping pre-workout and rip it. You got it. You don't need a slingshot shirt. You heard it here first. Thank you for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon, Phil. Have a good one. You're the man. Cheers. If you're looking to design parts, obviously go over to Dirac. If you're looking to design anything else, go to Figma.com. Make anything possible all in Figma. Figma lets you turn big ideas into real products, brainstorm, design, and build with your team at Figma.com.

1:08:36And we have our next guest in the studio. Looking sharp. Looking sharp. How are you doing? We caught up yesterday. He said he was going to come prepared, but you're blowing us away here. You look fantastic. Give us an introduction. Explain the company. Give us any news that you got to share with us. Of course. My name is Giyarkhan. I'm one of the co-founders of FAL. FAL is a generative media platform for developers. We provide fast, ready-to-use APIs for image, video, and audio models. And then application developers in enterprises like Shopify, Canva, Adobe, they use these APIs to build AI-enabled products in their own product.

1:09:24And then I do have some news as well. You have some news. So two weeks ago, we announced our 3C announcement. We raised$125 million. Boom. Let it go. Thank you. Thank you. it's not announced until it's announced on that's right we just broke this we just broke the news i have other news as well so this is great let's keep it rolling yeah what else you got for us hit that soundboard jordy and and this more news coming in okay give it to us 100 million run rates no we have 10 more days but yet we still we still crossed it that's crazy it's been an incredible It was summer for us and the whole industry, to be honest.

1:10:09Congratulations. That is absolutely insane. Amazing. Amazing. What's the key to the high growth? What marketing channels are working? Are you buying an incredible amount of steak dinners? Is there some bottom-up adoption? Is there a self-serve option? Some golf. Are you secretly brothers with a hyperscaler CEO or something? What's going on? How are you selling this thing? Yeah, I would say all of them. You are brothers with Tim Cook. Interesting. Except that one. That's great. We are taking enterprise sales really, really seriously. We work with some of the biggest enterprises, but also like our developer experience, the way to get started is so easy.

1:10:54We are getting a ton of like indie developers. Levels.io, for example, is a big customer. That's awesome. Amazing. So we are getting a lot of enterprises and indie developers. And indie developers, they go work at bigger companies and they bring fun with them. So both of the sides of the go-to-market strategy is working. What trends are you seeing on the cost side for your customers? I'm sure people are saying, oh, yeah, you're making this much money in revenue. What does the gross margin look like? At the same time, we saw amazing news from Google today that they dropped their inference cost by 33 actions.

1:11:32Yeah, and the other thing on the media side, with text-based prompting, you can use a non-frontier model and get a great result if you're just using it in sort of like a Google search function. Totally. I would consider last generation video generation to not be on brand for a lot of use cases. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Some people, they want to use the best newest model and they're willing to pay whatever it takes for that. But we make more money actually on like the cost effective models. People who want to use it for higher volume, but the model is good enough. So that's a very interesting sweet spot that we actually make more revenue.

1:12:16But you're right. For a certain type of customer, they're always looking for the best and the newest. Maybe they are trying something. Maybe they just want to get it out the door. So the cost is not a problem for them. Are you seeing opportunities on distilling models for specific use cases? I could imagine like an image or video generation model that's just good at really, really good at logo animations or text or just product photography or just beverages. And then that being just cheaper to inference. Is that a crazy idea? Is there something there? No, I don't think so. I wouldn't say it's cheaper to inference, but it's maybe better to inference.

1:12:55So for image models, fine tuning is actually a really, really big use case. Not enough people pay attention to it because I don't think it works very well for LLMs, but for image model for the past year, we've done really good work on fine tuning research. And you can basically fine tune on a product and you now can generate better images of that product. It's actually a really big use case for us. And same thing is going to happen for video. We are just getting open source video models that are fine-tunable. So a lot of companies are working on post-training strategies to create different camera angles, different styles, different angles of a certain product or a person.

1:13:40So I expect a lot of developments on the video fine-tuning side going forward as well. What are you seeing out of China? What are the best image, video, audio models coming out of China on the open source side? Video hasn't really had a deep seek moment, have they? I wouldn't say so. Like there is the best open source model is video model is Chinese right now. It's it's coming out of Alibaba. It just came out a couple of weeks ago and people started using it right away. I wouldn't call it the deep seek moment. I don't think the deep seek moment for the whole industry hasn't happened yet. You know, we haven't really hit that inflection point that video generation or image generation is mainstream.

1:14:27It's hidden inside products. If you go to Canva, Adobe, all these products, it's still not the main feature. It's like an additional thing. We still have some time to hit fully mainstream. But yeah, we have great models coming out of China. Yeah. And you have. I mean, this is the classic story of enterprise software. Like there are open source databases and there are still companies that build amazing businesses on top of them, providing enterprise tooling and and support and infrastructure and all the different pieces to actually make a product useful instead of saying, OK, yeah, let's go provision some servers to do this ourselves.

1:15:05Fascinating. George, you have another question right now? Not for now. I'm just blown away. You guys are cooking. Yeah, I do want to talk about hybrid deals or hybrid models. Somebody had me demo an AI image generator that I had to take a picture of me and turn me into a professional bodybuilder. It was the most remarkable thing because typically when you go to Chachapiti and have that do that, it kind of gets the face a little bit wrong. but very clearly and I could tell this from the grain pattern what it had done is it had cut out my face and then only operated on the body and so the face was a pixel to pixel perfect representation and for a certain thing oh you just want to change the logo on the shirt you don't want to change anything else about the shirt it seemed like a good value now I was being gaslit by the founder who's like no we're not doing that it's all in one down work and I was like I don't care.

1:15:59I just want good images. It's cool. But where do you see the different value-added, like maybe less sexy, less pure end-to-end AI, but value creative opportunities in image and video generation? I could imagine a multi-layer diffusion model that has a specific layer just to add text on top of images. So you're not trying to confuse those. I don't know if that's actually how these models work, but what do you see as valuable in terms of merging multiple models to create a better end product like the way O3 Pro has a web browser, a Python shell, and then also the ability to search the web and pull stuff together and reason?

1:16:42Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons why our business has higher margins than some ALM interest providers is because of this fragmentation of different kinds of models, different kinds of use cases. People are trying to chain these models together and create workflows. Both image and video models, they haven't really generalized yet. So you can't write a long prompt and expect the image and video to edit itself. It's still a lot of model chaining and workflow of generation. So like the use case, you just said, like putting your face on something else, it's like chaining couple models. And we have a lot of that behavior on the platform.

1:17:28The models are getting bigger and better. So some of that is actually happening, you know, by the model itself, but still, unlike the LAMS where it's like a single prompt and you expect it to, you know, write a book, but also generate code and like generalize very well. It doesn't it doesn't happen for image and video yet. Yeah. I can imagine that there's tons of interesting enterprise, like features and harnesses on top of the models that will be extremely value creative. So it seems like you're in the good, in a good business, but everyone already knows that from the revenue and the fundraising.

1:18:03So congrats on all the progress, Jordi. And we'll have you back on again soon. We'd love to have you back. This is fantastic. Thank you so much. Legend. Bye. Let me tell you about Julius, the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds. No coding required. Sorry, Tyler. You're out of a job. I'm going to be using Julius. Try Julius for free. They're loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, ECG, and Zapier. And you connect Google, your Google Ads account to Julius now. Run some numbers there. Love that.

1:18:37Love that. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. He's here now in the TBPN UltraDome. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? I am doing well, Jody and John. Thank you so much for having me here. Thanks for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, your company, and any news you got for us? My name is Sudhish. I'm the CEO of Tiny Fish. First of all, I'm very happy to be here. Last time I got to know you was Soham Parikh. By the way, that was a great get. That's amazing. That was a great get. What a wild day on the internet. And how fast it's all gone, too, though.

1:19:10I mean, it's all gone. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, people were, we never got the full postmortem. We'll need to check in, but he said he was going exclusive. There's somebody named Sohan Parikh, exact same spelling, that's been appearing on AI research paper. Really? People are trying to figure out, is it the same guy? I saw that too, yeah. I think DBPN needs to have an investigative arm. Yeah, I actually did talk to someone that was thinking about hiring him after the fact, and it seemed like it was not enough of a red flag, and they said they were going to give it a shot and hope that he's going exclusive.

1:19:43Wait, I thought he was going exclusive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so as far as I know, he is still exclusive, but I haven't done any research recently. Anyway, guys, thank you so much. Tell me about the company. Well, you both have built something in the last 10 months. Entrepreneurs, investors, we appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. So Tiny Fish, we just announced our$47 million funding. Wow. Series A. I was not ready for that. I was not ready for that. Absolutely. I needed a big number warning. Absolutely huge. Congratulations. 47 million is like a seed round, right? Mango seed. It's a seed round for a tiny fish these days.

1:20:21Tiny fish. But congratulations. It's a tiny fish. I'm sure you can do a lot with it. So what are you going to do with it? I think we are going to invent a category, build a category that makes sense, and build a great company. That's basically it. Prior to this, I was at ThoughtSpot and Nutanix. We have done some large enterprise companies. Co-founders, they all came from meta and companies like large. We want to build a large company doing one thing, which is to make web browsing like humans do, but a superhuman scale for solving enterprise problems. We don't want to be a consumer company. I know you both have built companies.

1:20:58There are a lot of AI companies doing things in consumer space, browser agents and all of that. We want to do a massive scale of web browsing and turn the internet into a structured database for enterprise customers to analyze and act on. Do you want to sell this to other software companies that are going to piece it together with other APIs to create maybe even more enterprise SaaS? Like how deep do you see yourself in the stack? Look, I think nowadays there is no difference between enterprise business and developers slash builders, because every enterprise product in the AI world starts as a builder product, somebody trying it out.

1:21:39We 100 % want to be the best way anyone to connect code to Internet. Because, look, these models can solve math problems at international math Olympics level. But when it comes to browsing, it's a mess, because browsing is so complex that our brains make it look easy. like think about going to a movie the seat that you pick is a function of complex reasoning if i'm going by myself i can sit in front and read the movie but if i'm far away with my family i want to make the right place right efficient you know contiguous seats these decisions we make without even thinking not to mention the complexity of the website itself how the pictures are popping how there's like a pop-up here these things need to be solved really well we do that so enterprise customers who want to browse 60 % of all time of knowledge work in enterprises on browsing.

1:22:28And we think we can automate that through what we are calling enterprise web agents. So we heard reports that some of the big labs were building RL environments with verified rewards, basically cloning DoorDash, creating clones of Amazon.com so that they could train an agent on the full Amazon.com web app. And then an agent would be able to check out for you. are you doing something similar? What does data collection look like? What does training look like? What does differentiation look like in the world where these agents might need to be RL'd on a specific website to really get good results?

1:23:06This is why I love talking to you guys. You geeks ask the right question to geeks. There are two models when it comes to these. One is synthetic websites like WebArenas and others have built this. The other is paying money to say, let us go learn DoorDash workflows. Both are good, but both have downsides because both really create significant challenges with respect to scale when they come out of that environment. What we are doing is something very good. We have a proprietary architecture that we have built that freezes and takes a snapshot of a data website in a way that becomes, that exhaust feeds ourselves in a very scalable way.

1:23:46So yes, it is synthetic data that we are generating, but it is out of actual web. And more importantly, most of our use cases, we launched our company with a use case with Google Hotel as a customer. DoorDash is a customer. Great, great. I try to give this advice to early stage founders. If you're gonna get a customer early, just get Google. Start with a Mag7. Start with a Mag7 customer. Why not? Why not, right? They built this AI technology. I mean, it all started with all you need is attention, right? So these customers are giving us access. There's a customer who has 22 million web SKUs in the product.

1:24:23There's another customer, the 40 ,000 sub shops as part of them, ClassPass, we announced them, right? So these sort of things, while we are solving for them, it's giving us a lot of data. And that exhaust is mined by our products for annotation and creating labeling that makes RL. The second thing I will tell you though, models are good at a lot of things, but they usually perform really well when the goal is straight and the reinforcement can be built on something where the context doesn't change. Web is exactly the opposite. Everything is context that is constantly changing. The goals are changing, the websites are changing, and the context is changing.

1:24:59So what we have done is we use reinforced learning and models for understanding and like sort of see what the heck we are trying to do here. Then we separate that and execute that code in CPU at massive scale. And then we use Alpha Evolve, a version of that, to make the code better. So separating exploration and execution is another fundamental thing that we've invented that is going to make this browser agents, you know, perplexity, comet, and operator and others. That is like forcing and feeding us. But this is where the execution framework. So that's an infrastructure problem. Think about the amount of browsers we have to spin up, the fingerprinting, the anti-bot.

1:25:38All of that infrastructure needs to be solved. Interesting. How do you think the competitive landscape will evolve? Amazon's launching a bunch of stuff. I'm sure all the clouds have something that looks like a browser agent on the shelf somewhere. But we've seen, you know, Silicon Valley has, you know, probably hundreds of stories about companies that have built things that have been competitive with the big hyperscalers and been wildly successful. But what's your specific plan? You know, there is a quote that often attributed to Chesty Puller, a marine, that we are surrounded from the north, southeast, west.

1:26:20I better watch out. This is one of those things where it is so amazing because there are three groups of companies that we will be competing with from a tech space. I mean, obviously, there's share shifting of dollars. One of the browser agents who are doing one thing, like Jody going on vacation, 20 minutes, he'll book a hotel for you. We want to sell to Expedia, not to Jody, because Expedia now want to simulate 100 ,000 Jody transactions from 50 states or 50 countries. How do we do that? So browser agents to a certain extent will be trying to expand to that space. I think we want to compete.

1:26:53The other is the infrastructure. So the browser base and others who have been building things, we want to build something enterprise-grade with the surveillance, the governance, the control. So that's the second. Third is going to be another interesting area where the code gen and the developers who build us who just want to connect their code to Internet so it can do amazing things. There again, there are parallel. you guys interviewed Parag. I do think that we will compete with them some level, not because today we compete, but all of these will converge because there will be a few massive companies built on how browser access, how internet can be turned into a structured database.

1:27:33So exciting time. We've raised enough only because we want to make sure that we build it in a way that is where we can control our destiny. I have a lot of respect for all of these companies. But to me, you know, if you're not surrounded by competitors, you're not in the right place. I love it. Yep, you're not going after a big prize. Congratulations. Fantastic answer. Great to meet you. Good luck out there. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. I hope so. This was such a short conversation. I enjoyed it. I'll keep watching. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon.

1:28:01Bye. Bye. 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. We have our next guest already in the Restream waiting room. who will bring her in now. How are you? Welcome. Hi. Nice to be here. Great to have you. Great to meet you, Julie. What's happening? Great to be here. Yeah. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, your company, and maybe some of your background as well? Sure. So I am one of the founders of Sundial. We are trying to build the cursor for data analysis.

1:28:35So we're trying to automate a lot of what data scientists will do so that we can help companies make better decisions with data. We work with great companies like OpenAI, Character, Captions. Before that, I led design and research for the Facebook product. I grew up at Meta. It's called Facebook. Could you explain for the audience what Facebook is? They've been living under a data center? No, I'm kidding. Sorry. So, you know, if you guys become friends and your relationship gets to a certain level and you want to let the world know. can broadcast it online. Well, I think it feels like the absolute perfect background to build Sundial because when I think people think about optimizing digital products and making decisions with massive amounts of data, people think meta and they think Facebook, right?

1:29:33I mean, you say that because you probably know more than most people, but I do think what makes meta so good is that it was so freaking operationally rigorous it was so good at actually capturing and modeling what made it a great business um and and being like you know just so on top of every little thing so that we could optimize iterate experiment test and eventually you know get to that scale and did you guys i imagine had to rely on a bunch of internal tooling that you built in order to do that that was proprietary or what did that absolutely yeah everything was just homegrown because like actually the whole concept i would say that meta probably introduced this idea of growth i mean now everybody got growth teams but back then that was like a new thing and it was only created you know with people like chamath and alex schultz and naomi because facebook was growing like crazy and then one day growth kind of stalled and you know every i think this happens to every successful company right in the beginning you're like we're great, our intuition is on, we're solid, like everything hits.

1:30:37And then one day it stops hitting and then everyone's like, oh my God, what happened? And there's a lot of questions, you know, board members are calling and then it becomes like, well, we have to figure it out. And the only way you can do that is with good observability. Yeah. Can you take us through like a concrete example of like one of the, like a case study of like design at Meta and how how, like some of the decision making link to some of the data analysis you did, like, do you have anything that you can share? I know it's been a while, but some of the stuff's probably private, but some of it you can probably share.

1:31:10Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what's an example I can pull out. Well, I will say that like a lot of the process. So I think we kind of segment things into two worlds, right? The first is like, look, in order to build something new, you do need that spark of inspiration. And it usually comes from intuition, like you need to kind of have like a vision. And so often that would be like the spark of the idea. But then as soon as you realize that you have like a hypothesis, you know, like I think what people want is, you know, better ways. Like if we give people more custom ways of sharing on Facebook, for example, they will share more.

1:31:44That's an example of like a particular hypothesis that somebody would have. And usually that comes with like an idea. You're like, if I build a really awesome text editor, or I give them a way to record video, or I make it super easy to pull in a quote, then people will go and share more. But the thing that you then need to do is to figure out, well, how quickly can you test whether that hypothesis is true? What's the kind of smallest thing that you can build that gives you either more or less assurance that this thing is the thing to bet on? And so we would try and figure out what's like the smallest framing of that experiment.

1:32:21And then if it seems like, you know, okay, it's inclusive or we actually think it might be promising, then you just double down, right? Then you like add more, you know, you keep building. And I think that that's been like, you know, this is like a super early example, but I think like hackathon project, like video is like a hackathon project that somebody did. and then very early on, video came out after the hackathon and just very quickly you can see what people are actually using. In fact, maybe a better example that I'm thinking about is actually Feed. So Feed is one of those very early examples where people hated it.

1:33:00So News Feed came out. Before that, the way that people went to profiles is like, I would go to your profile, John. I'd go to your profile, Jordi. I'd see if anything changed. but there was no system that automatically told me if you updated something and so we in launched feed this was like back in 2006 and there were like huge protests in fact like a million people within a week joined this facebook group called i effing hate facebook newsfeed because people thought it was like it was creepy it was like you know um there's too much surveillance but the reason i think mark and the team like we kept on it is the fact that like through the numbers like through the data, you could see that people are spending a lot of time on Newsfeed.

1:33:42And in fact, the reason they knew to join this group, I effing hate Newsfeed, it's because of Newsfeed. Like it was, they were like, you know, so it just was like very obvious to us that this was working despite what people are saying about it. Yeah. Can you talk about preference falsification more broadly? Was that like a hard one lesson that carried through? It feels like Meta has really absorbed that lesson and it continues to inform the company culture? Have you carried that idea of preference falsification forward into your career? How do you think about that disconnect between what people say and then what they actually do?

1:34:20I think you have to gather the data. You just have to look at it. You can say, okay, look, this is what I see. I see data. Their data is that people tell us they don't like it or they tell us they're feeling one way or another. So I think about qualitative feedback as data, customer surveys or data. Anything is data, but also behavior. What do people actually do? What do they click on? Where are they spending their time and attention? And the more we can have all of that in one place, the better, more realistic and accurate view of reality we have. When should a company sign up for Sundial? because I think there's almost a meme in Silicon Valley.

1:35:02If you launch a product early and you're obsessing maybe too much over the data, you could end up actually going down the wrong path. And there's points in which maybe you disagree with this where the actual just like founder's intuition is what's going to get you to that sort of takeoff with the product. But what's your read? I agree with that. I do think that there's such a thing as like obsessing too early. like when you don't have product market fit you probably have to take bigger swings you're probably not in the business of trying to optimize but i think if you feel like you have product market fit you're clearly scaling your team like you're like okay i probably need a growth person i probably need a data like the reason you want to grow through data person is you want to form more fuel on the fire like you want to understand what works and what doesn't and so what all of these roles are trying to do is start a series of experimentation and just like again get to better visibility, better observability.

1:35:57What we all want to do is just build a mental model. This is how the business works. And if you tweak this thing, more money goes up. And if you tweak this, more users. We want to build a very real and influenceable model. And that is what all of that work of trying to build and do analysis is there to help us do. Did you overlap with Laura Dana at Meta? Can you tell me a little bit about her? She was in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. What's made her, you know, what's the secret to her impact? So Laura Dotta joined as a design lead. And I think she took over a messenger, so Facebook messenger.

1:36:38And I think the team was pretty small then, maybe about eight designers. And she helped scale that up to like 200 designers. And eventually she actually become the product group lead. So the product group lead is kind of like the GM role. And in fact, there's not that many examples of design leaders who become GMs, you know, like engineers can become GMs. Like I think Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram is one. I think Laura Donna is probably the other that I can recall. So she ended up actually leading all of Messenger. I think recently she went to go work on AI. And I just saw the news that she is joining as Figma's new chief design officer, which is fantastic news.

1:37:15I absolutely adore Laura Donna. I think she is fabulous. Yeah, we'll have to get her on the show. That'd be, it'd be, it'd be fun to dig into. Anyway, Jordi, anything else? I have a bunch more questions, but I don't think we have time. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me on. And yeah, congrats on, on all the progress so far. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Talk to you guys soon. Bye. Bye. Cheers. Gabe in the chat says, whoa, she has a headset on. How can I long this company? I love it. Totally agree. That's great. Let me tell you about Numeral HQ. Sales tax on autopilot.

1:37:45Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. You can get started for free. Benchmark Series A. Let's go. Let's go. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We will bring them into the PBPN Ultra Dome. Jacob, welcome to the show, finally. Finally. We've been waiting for this moment. It took us a bit long. We're pretty good. How are you guys? We're doing great. Give us the breakdown. What did you launch today? Co-Hort 3 applications are live. Boom. Hit it. The best part here is the video. I assume you guys may have watched it, but it's, I think, the best Gundo hype video.

1:38:26Wait, can we pull it up? That's a tall order. Can we pull it up? Yeah, production team. Ben, can you pull up the latest Discipulus Ventures post? Maybe we can put it in the chat. Can you send it to them? I'm trying to find it right now. It's probably on Jacob's Axe. Throw it in the chat. We will pull this up. We might need to watch this after you hop off. But give us the update on the previous cohorts. Who's in those? What companies are you in? What's the general thesis? What's the why now for this particular organization? Break it back to me. Yeah. So cohort one was in BrainMaker and Valor at the time.

1:39:05Their office, they were sharing it. They were both pre-seed stage. I think it was still very much like, is this going to work or is this not going to work? I think now we're at the point where like, okay, something's working here really well. And I think the big kind of thesis and point here is like, we want to be like that entry point to what's going on in El Segundo. The culture is very attractive to mostly young people want to build companies that really do matter a lot for the country. And it's kind of been pushed away from other ecosystems that don't really care about that. And then too practically, like if you want to build a hardware or aerospace defense, you should be in El Segundo.

1:39:35So SpaceX started down the street from where I'm based. And the best talent, the supply chain, the whole supply chain, and a lot of the customers are in the El Segundo area. So it's like if you want to build an El Segundo, if you're building an aerospace defense and hardware and want to be part of the ecosystem, we want to be that way to do that. Augustus said earlier Rockefeller built El Segundo. I never knew that. What's the lore there? The oil company. Yeah. It's Chevron. Like there is a massive oil and gas extraction oil refinery there. When you're in El Segundo, you see it. The whole town was built out to service.

1:40:09Yeah, I mean, you can tell the story. I'll give the rundown. So El Segundo means the second Chevron refinery in the state of California. So that's the reason why. So it's very cool. But on the call, we got the video if you guys want it. Yeah, let's play the video. Let's play it. We're going to switch over to the video. This is the fall cohort applications are live now. Yeah, hit the soundboard. Why not just add an extra layer on top? Are we going to get taken down for this? Is this an open source song, hopefully? We'll see. This is good. It is necessary. Fire me up. That every young being in the United States.

1:40:54It's a lot of facts. That's a trap. The adults, I can hop them just by their shoulders.

1:41:05That's a cool presentation.

1:41:12Let's go. Holy bass.

1:41:22Good sound editing. there's isaiah there's augustus we got cameos on cameos

1:41:35there we go with the with the yes yes we're definitely getting demonetized thank you for demonetizing us it was worth it it was worth it it was worth it uh take me through the economics. So, so, so how much money do you raise for each cohort? How much money are you putting in? Well, what's the deal structure? Like how does, what, what are the, what are the companies actually get out of going through the cohort? Yeah. Yeah. So I guess just top big picture fund one that being right around the$9 million mark, we're basically doing five cohorts out of this. So three next year, one end of year in October, the basic kind of structure, each cohort we do 10 to 12 founders so a 100k check um per company that's sizable around 1.2 mil per cohort and then that'll go across the rest a little bit for follow-on for kind of pro rata um but yeah so the kind of standard deal cohort itself is like main thing again you want to be an else kind of weird way to do that you have all the big name people everybody knows like we can give you access to them just like that we think that's very valuable early on um to kind of become like i guess a consensus bet in a way um just to have those behind you is very helpful and then we have a demo day we bring out like 120 i think we had 120 partners last time from top firms like just like that access to all of them so um that's kind of the breakdown we have a house it's very fun we have a chef we have a gym everything you need to build are you are you officially taking over from augustus's job as also going to a tour guide because every single there was like a solid six month period where every single vc and founder would hit up augustus and be like okay time for the tour let me go around he doesn't have time i don't think he has time for it anymore he's on the road a lot yeah yeah it's funny yeah i i'm getting i have too many texts from from bc saying hey i want to see elson come around so i i think i've taken i i think it's more of a job for me than him but what one actually cool cool here's the wire details and then i'll take you on the tour exactly exactly but also on that point we had the most recent bonfire which a couple of you guys were at last week, last Friday.

1:43:39Oh, Tyler. Gus was like, okay, you're taking this over. And we had like, I think close to 200 people come out, which is pretty awesome, which is like, I think a record hopefully for one of the bonfires. Wow, a venture capital firm absorbing an iconic networking series. Where have we seen this before? It's interesting. I'll be like completely honest. When I saw Disciples launch, I wasn't, I like I've backed a bunch of, you know, I've backed Rainmaker. I've backed Shinkei, a bunch of the Gundo companies, but it didn't immediately click for me. But hearing you, hearing you talk about it, it's just like, and obviously we're super close with, with Gary and the whole YC team.

1:44:20And they've backed a bunch of hard tech companies. And so my immediate thought was like, do we need something like this? Do we need a new institution? And hearing you talk about it and seeing, you know, the progress from the port coast so far, just makes a ton of sense to have like an institution in El Segundo because we can't just rely on the city to give tour guides to people that want to set up. I mean, a couple of years ago, I went and did the tour of El Segundo. You created a couple. You helped facilitate the meme. There were a bunch of folks that were highlighting it. And the energy was very similar to like, you know, Mountain View in 2009 or 2012, in my opinion.

1:44:59Like it had that like university av feel, like it's sort of, it's just boring enough. Like you're in LA, but it's not like this hot town that you're gonna get distracted by. Like it's really just like a lot of cool companies building. And then you walk across the street, there's another founder, they have some tool. Like it actually makes sense to have people sharing stuff and moving stuff around. Yeah, it's a very, very, very cool community. It makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on the launch of the new application window. I haven't run this by John, but hopefully he agrees we'll sponsor the next bonfire let's do it count us in come to the purple orchid as well afterwards i've been to the purple orchid it's a lot of fun it's a good spot awesome they do the the dragon bowls there that you drink out of dragon bowls dragon bowls they light them on fire yeah yeah yeah yeah anyway well congrats jacob thanks so much for hopping on we will talk to you soon have a great rest of your day awesome thank you guys in the meantime let me tell you about linear linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

1:45:59Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Cursor, remote, runway, perplexity, retool, mercury, breakouts, ramp. They all use it. We have another three hours of content to go through. I like this post from Growing Daniel. The opposite of FOMO is when you skip an event and then everyone who went says it sucked. Vindication of missing out. And Tyler Cowen says, VOMO. I think VOMO is a good one. Vindication. It's simply the best. It is the best. It simply is the best. It is the best. I'm trying to think of the last time I had VOMO. I don't want to put anyone on blast, but I have certainly said no to things.

1:46:41Well, let's keep going through the timeline. Please. John, can you text Gabe? Yes. And see if he is still coming on. He confirmed one. We moved him up 10 minutes. We might need to do some timeline. I'm happy to hang out. Yeah, we can hang out. So Sophie, Netcap Girl, is showing a post saying, there must be some mistake. I thought I'd be working on digital super intelligence. And it is an angry man in military uniform saying, build the goon bot. And so there's a lot of that going on right now. Luke Leisher has another post in response to the UK Independent Space Agency. is entirely scrapped to cut costs.

1:47:29And we have Matthew McConaughey here saying, we used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we look down and worry about our place in the dirt. KPMG wrote a 100-page prompt to build a Gentic tax bot. Produces advice in a single day instead of two weeks without job losses. And X Nihilio says 100-page prompt is crazy. You ever ripped a 100-page prompt, John? I've gotten close. I've used a lot of those repurposed prompts that people have online. Oh, this is the super prompt. Never got in the habit of daily driving one of those. Dwarkesh Patel had a good prompt in Gemini that would take a transcript and clean it up.

1:48:13And it gave a really, like the 100 pages is really like 100 pages of examples. basically like here's what a messy transcript looks like out of a uh out of just like a transcription service where the speakers aren't labeled and there aren't necessarily paragraph breaks you give it a ton of extra um you give it a ton of extra context a ton of extra examples and then that makes it perform a lot better because it knows it understands the job yeah but yeah 100 page prompt is pretty wild so kafka esquire says uh just one more model bro Just one more funding round, bro, please. And this post from Walter Bloomberg, esteemed journalist.

1:48:55Where did this come from? So this was from some interview. Okay. And to be clear, yeah, taken out of context, the headline was Open AI CEO Sam Alton concedes GPT-5 was a misfire bets on GPT-6. And this has been going pretty viral. People are poking a little fun. And I think in some ways, you know, the Death Star kind of set them up for this. Double Bird Capital says just one more trillion, bro, I'll say, I swear. I mean, my take on this is that, like, the numbered releases should just go. When Facebook introduced the feed, they stopped saying we're changing things. It's a good take, sir. Because when you say people— It's a good take, sir.

1:49:35Yeah. When you tell everyone, we're changing everything, people are like, I don't like change. But if instead you just say like, yeah, like every day Facebook gets a slightly different update and the algorithm slightly different And then some days people are like ah the algos not really for me right now And then they complain enough and then you get the feedback and then they tweak and they make it better and better and better Like I feel like we should just be in the era of GPT is what powers chat.com And it's constantly getting better and stop focusing on the size of the pre-training bubble Stop trying stop focusing on the parameters if you're a consumer stop Stop focusing on the numbers.

1:50:11Start focusing on your sleep number, your sleep score. Go to 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. You can discover pod5 at 8sleep.com. And I believe we have our next guest, Gabe from Mischief. How you doing, Gabe? There he is. Welcome to the stream. What's going on? You are live at the TBPN Ultra Dome. What's new with you? How you doing? I think everyone knows you. maybe just launch into the announcement this week about the private military corporation that you're starting? Oh, you saw the Twitter. I didn't think anybody looked at that.

1:50:50Interesting. Everyone saw that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. What do we do this week? Well, we launched an agency called Applied Mischief. Yep. The agency, honestly, like to rewind, And where does that even come from? And a lot of people don't actually understand this about mischief because probably what you see is like videos of people wearing boots or like press head or whatever. But the way we're actually organized is we are essentially a holding company of different creative enterprises based on categories. So there's like a handbag division, there's a footwear division, there's a fine art division.

1:51:29There are other divisions I can't really talk about yet, but with like more bigger permanent structures. Well, you talked about a division you can't talk about. So I hit the... Oh, nice, nice. So we've been operating like that for a second now. And to make that efficient, there's been an internal back office that's like normal, right? Like finance, legal, manufacturing, customer support, but also like design and marketing. And that's a group that not only does design, but also applies that sort of like mischief magic, like viral juice or whatever. So the thinking here was we might as well open up that to external clients.

1:52:12It can become a profit center, which is great. But the other part is like maybe it can make our world a little bit bigger too because we're hungry for more formats. We've made so much stuff over the last like six years. What have we not touched yet? And like maybe we won't get sued this time around. Maybe there's just stuff that we can do that's like, cool, we can make this. What seems obviously exciting to me is partnering with global companies. I mean, sure, I'm sure you'll partner with startups and scale-ups and things like that. But what gets exciting at a certain point has to be scale. There's so much money.

1:52:49Hey, instead of selling like a thousand of this thing, can we figure out, can we partner with a company itself? It's like when Spike Jonze does an Apple ad. It's like, that's just not, there's just special, there's something special about that, about just like giving it. It's almost like patronage in some ways it's marketing, but it's just like, it's still art and it's cool. And it's like unbridled. unbridled. No, totally, totally. Right. Like the way that we look at these is like, it's not a service that we're providing necessarily. Like there are brands and entities and culture that we perceive as cultural material.

1:53:18The same way artists looks at their material is like paint or sculpture or marble or whatever. Like for us, Coca-Cola is material. Give us that and we'll make something new with it instead of fabricating a marketing story to sell more units that people through now anyways, right? The opportunity is like, there's just so much cultural material being left on the table to make new things with. So talk to me about inbound versus outbound. I feel like in that vein of like, there's cultural material. If you come up with just like, I have a great idea. It would only work for this particular brand because the nature of the idea is tied deeply to the lore of that brand.

1:53:59They're never going to think about this, but I need to, I could, the only value I could get out of this is selling it to them. Are you going outbound and pitching big companies and saying, I have a, I have the idea for you, or is it more like there is an actual process where you can sit down and do ideas? I'm going outbound, outbound right now. This is a message for Gabe Newell from Valve. We want to design your submarine. Yeah, so let's go. I love that. That would be an amazing project. That's the outbound. That's what I want to do. Or extraterrestrial space research organizations. We want to design the bit that you're putting into space.

1:54:37I love it. We were, look, we were Fast Company's number one design in the world in 2023. People don't think about that because they think about viral. But if you actually get like what we do, it is unparalleled. So let us, let's like put some stuff. We got a, we got a space play for you with, with a company that we're very close with. Oh yeah. I won't say any more. Okay. Yeah. Well, we'll talk after the stream. I have a bunch of questions. One, quickly on the business model of the new agency, is there a world where you would, you know, the standard agency model would be like, hey, let's do this project and we'll charge you like a million bucks or a couple million bucks.

1:55:13But there's some scenarios where you could actually, I imagine if it was a one-off more like drop style, you could take a percentage of the sales even. Is that something you would ever explore to get to really bet on yourselves and say like, hey, we think we could sell like a$10 million of this and we'll only price based on success. Is that something you would consider doing? It's totally on the table. And that's not even uncommon from like the collaboration route. Like some of the collaborations that we've done in the past have been that kind of model where it's like you make a bunch of product together.

1:55:46We both invest on our own ends and then you split the cut afterwards. I think what's more interesting, though, is because of Mischief's position as like this artistic entity, like in a way, like we have a personality, we have an audience. And so we're actually like building a pipeline of joint ventures. Yeah, that's what I was getting at. It's not even about 10 ,000 units. We're talking about millions of units. Yeah, over forever, basically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like I want a mischief-themed line of kids' toys, right? Like I would happily buy those. I would buy a bunch of those, right? And so that's like if you partner with the right company, that should be in the, you know, my personal lifetime value would be in the hundreds of dollars.

1:56:33And I would even pay a premium because I know it's you guys behind it. But another question I have, you know, I've leveraged the drops kind of model to do marketing. I was inspired by you guys to do marketing for my last company, Party Round. And something that I've noticed recently, a lot of companies in tech say they want to do drops. And it's because they're inspired by mischief. And they just see, like, drops get attention. I want attention. One drop, please, sir. One drop, please. One drop, please. The usual, sir. Sign me up. The thing I usually push back on and the thing I'm curious to get your opinion on is like, I think when companies think they want to do drops, what they really want to do is true advertising.

1:57:17And they don't even know the difference. And so like, where, where's that line for you? And how often are you know, would you talk to a company? And it's like, what you really want is to do advertising. Just like a consistent message delivered via every channel forever might be the right thing. Not even forever or like a few months or a quarter. Yeah. I would take it even further. And it's like that is the final goal, which is like get a message out into the people, get them talking, whatever. But like the focus on the drop is misplaced. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new. what these guys are actually looking for like what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise and right now you can either just make more content which honestly the roi i think is going down on that there's too much content and not enough demand sorry that's just how it is but the opportunity is you can make new things that fit within your brand parameters that use your brand as cultural material that are actually interesting that are tactile that have a story to them and if they happen to be ephemeral then it's a drop but don't get hung up on the drop just make something interesting that's our our ideas valuable and and and and if you had to you know what kind of think about like a making something new how much is it is it the idea versus the execution do you hire idea guys and then like operational excellent people and they're like a dividing line yeah and to me in this i i john and i will sit down with companies that we're friends with and we'll generate like 20 ideas it ends up being super frustrating because you're like we're get we're feeding you this like incredible idea it doesn't even cost a lot to do and if you do it right like it could be like a million dollars of like you know uh brand value however you want to measure that but it feels like you can give people these things that in your hands, they might be million dollar ideas, but poorly executed, they're a negative value.

1:59:26Totally. I think it's like squeezing a balloon on two ends. There's the conceptual power and then there's the execution. There are things where the concept is really high and the execution doesn't have to be crazy. You don't need a huge budget. It's just a good idea and it's going to work. What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. So they lean more on the execution and you see like large budgets and like huge bloated teams and production. So it's sort of like now if you can dial in both, that's the magic, right?

2:00:02But that's really hard to do because more money, more risk, you want to de-risk on the concept side. John, to your question, I don't hire idea people. Everyone here is an idea person. We did. I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we made handbags, right? They're very expensive. The smaller they get, the more expensive they become. So we made a microscopic handbag that sold at auction for $63 ,000 at Paris Fashion Week at Pharrell's whatever coronation of Louis Vuitton. That idea came from a summer intern. Anyone here can have an idea, right? The lawyer, our general counsel joints brainstorms our ops lead once brainstorms because being creative doesn't mean you have good ideas being creative just means you're human you have insights and you have reactions to things that are going around you that's it and then also like being creative means you're not afraid to like look stupid and i think that's like a big defining trait here because anybody can look stupid here including myself Thank you.

2:01:03What have you ever seen highly complex ideas work well as marketing, advertising stunts? This is something that we end up talking with. I think David Ogilvie said, like, simple ideas are powerful ideas. That's certainly something I've seen in mischief's work throughout your entire career. But is there some sort of contrarian or nuance to that concept? I think there could be. The line that we use here is a good idea should slap in one sentence and then slap even harder in three. And that just means there are layers, right? Like you appreciate it for the headline, but if you like really dig into it, you're like, wait up, is this thing making fun of me?

2:01:49And do I still like it? And am I going to buy it? And if I buy it, am I a chump or am I a patron of the arts? Right. It's like the layers are good. The ambiguity is good. But at the end of the day, like from a marketing perspective, just being practical right now, like people's attention spans are so low. and honestly like people are just we're all like very distracted so you don't have a lot of window to like nail it so you do got to have that one liner like pretty dialed in yeah how uh how dialed in is your crystal ball when it comes to releasing new things on the internet like do you have a do you feel like you usually have like a pretty accurate sense of how much attention something will get you get surprised or do you still get surprised often totally still get surprised like you always get surprised i think um it's easy for us to fall in a comfort zone where we're like oh yeah like this will work because what that ends up doing is you start coming up with ideas based on a framework of what has worked we actually put in a lot of effort to come up with formats and mechanisms that don't really fit into our existing framework that we're like, oh, I don't know if this is going to work.

2:03:05And is this offensive? I don't know. Are people going to buy slices of this giant foam baby that we're cutting up in Brooklyn? I don't know. They did. But no, you know, like. Is there a project that you think is like criminally underrated? People are obviously familiar with the boots. They're familiar with the the shoes and the footwear stuff and some of the other projects. But what's your example of a project? You're like, ah, that's still like one of my favorites. Good question. And the reason it didn't really get seen as much is because to be honest, we were a little bit scared. Okay. And so we buried it in an art show that we did.

2:03:46But are you guys familiar with the paradox of the ship of Theseus? Yes. But explain it for the listener. Totally. So it's like, It's this old paradox where imagine you have this large wooden ship, and every day over seven years, you're coming up with a new piece of wood identical to a piece of wood on the ship, and you are swapping it out. The question is, after seven years, is it the same ship or is it a different ship? But we found that a very interesting question. And so we decided to apply that in our own way to a sink located in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As one does.

2:04:27As one does. Yeah, explain. And so we found the sink. We did recon. Not me. I'm not. It wasn't me personally. It was somebody here. I don't know any names. But we found, you know, we tracked down the serial numbers, the parts, ordered exact like replica. We ordered the exact same parts, built it here, tied off the dimensions of the bathroom here so that we could practice swapping things out. And then over many months, we would walk into the Met and do a quick swap and leave. And then the next day, do it again and do it again, bolt by bolt, screw by screw. Just an art enthusiast. I just like art and I go to the bathroom.

2:05:11That's why I'm here. How did you get the big piece through? Isn't there like one piece that's big? So that we decided to leave. Okay. That we did not swap out. although we had a plan we we we we fabricated a wheelchair that could have hit it in the seat but not i'm telling you we got we got a little bit we were honestly scared you got a little carried away we still we still did it we got everything else and uh so yeah they they they have our sink and we have their sink and ours is now um part of like our art gallery so that's amazing although although i believe they figured it out and they've replaced it because as soon as we announced the art show even though the sink was sort of like hidden in all the other pieces people definitely found out and there was a line in the met for that bathroom they should have they should have sectioned it off turned it into an installation if any of your if any of your viewers are on the board of the met uh the coolest thing you could do right now is acquire that sync from us and put it back let's make it happen let's make it happen army how how many millions of dollars do you think you've left on the table by not doing crypto projects the painful question is it like it has to be like 100 million like yeah probably Honestly, probably.

2:06:37Probably. And is there, like, I'm sure at some point there will actually be a way to do this. Like, there has to be something that makes sense. Like, we did something back in the day with Party Round where we did, it was called Helpful VCs, where we made CryptoPunks for every VC. And then we put them on a website. And we said, you have four hours to retweet these. Otherwise, we're going to auction them off. And it was, like, for, like, charity, right? We weren't, like, trying to make money. and that was like one of the ways that we broke through and like shortly after um uh i think there might be something to do with crypto and like stable coins where there's not as much gambling involved but there might be something with crypto i don't know yeah yeah you have to remove you have to make it not like a speculation you know because as soon as you leave the like like the the people who get the joke are and then the people who don't get the joke show up and then and then they're losing their life savings that doesn't feel good uh yeah whereas whereas like if somebody you know is is bidding on that handbag um like they probably know what they're doing they understand that it's yeah they understand that look i think i think that crypto route for us is um we've often plotted our own death and i think there's like a chaotic evil way to go out where you just pull that rug yeah i shouldn't even say that because now everybody's gonna know Well, I think switching gears to another topic that I'm sure you guys.

2:08:03So one, I don't think AI is going to take your guys' jobs anytime soon, despite it being able to maybe piece together random ideas. It's so much about taste and things like that. But how excited are you to leverage that technology for some of these various plays? Honestly, TBD. And I think it's, I do, I will say like, unlike the whole like crypto craziness of the last couple of years, we didn't get into that because we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet. That's like the truth. Like when you see the herd run so fast, it usually means they're running towards the end of a cliff. there's a little bit of a similar sentiment right now that said i it is rooted in something real but we're not in a rush to like use it necessarily right if it's going to be here forever we've got time like it's mischief doesn't win as a first mover if you look at all of our work it was never about being the first to react to something or the first to like make use of a format.

2:09:13So we'll see. We just have to see. How do you think about, are there any projects, like time is an interesting variable that you can play with, right? Like part of the thing with the sync stunt that you guys did is just the narrative and the story of like, you guys were conducting this in secret for a long time. It was like a very, and that's part of what makes it so entertaining is kind of like the lore of what went into it. But have you thought about even longer term plays like things that you could do over a decade or 50 years that in hindsight would just be absolutely hilarious and uh but but again take this sort of incredible planning yeah yeah honestly we are at that stage of just like our lives and as a company now to be thinking like that right because like if you think about it we were in yeah if you if you I know you guys have a few investors.

2:10:11Have you told your investors, first thing we're working on is a 50-year stunt. And you're going to tell you, like, all right, buddy, why don't you put some points on the board first? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you guys feel like you've earned it now. Like, you know, something like a decade. No, yeah, because, like, we've spent, basically, like, we've only been around for the pandemic and post-pandemic, like, a little bit post-pandemic, right? And all of that was just, like, you don't know what's coming. like live day by day, like just survive, like banks are shutting down. Okay. Get through to tomorrow.

2:10:43Right. Now we've been around for a second. We're more well known. We have our existing infrastructure. And now we really are asking the questions of like, okay, what is that legacy look like in 10 years? Or should we, should we disappear for 20 years and then come back? That would, that would actually be the coolest thing we could do is go dark for two decades and then come back it's worked for it's worked for other it's worked for other artists yeah um i i uh could you do something so so we both loved uh nathan fielder's latest sort of like aviation stunt television show i've heard a lot about it i haven't watched it i mean you you should it's one of the few people in the world that i think is executing on your guys's level in the sense of his next level uh yeah like one sentence you know pitch that's hilarious but then the more you get into it, like the funnier it is.

2:11:38But could you do something like that for like the cost of housing? Like sort of a decade long stunt, like mischief, like mischief figures out a way to like reduce, you know, the cost of housing in the United States. Like we, if there are any like pricey neighborhoods that would love to commission us as an artist to install a sculpture, we have a really good uh trailer park trailer that we would love to erect in a public square i can just see like the like the right rv like there's this rv outside of our gym yeah yeah kind of yellow from the sun like the windows open aluminum on the outside yeah winnebago it can be a stunt for Winnebago what do you how do you feel about the state of social media like broadly it feels like we've gotten to a point where in many ways the platforms look so similar but they also have their own characters some of them are becoming Lindy even thinking about how durable Twitter and X have been despite all this change but what's your and do you even do you feel like you need to use social media or are you better off not using it and then just releasing you know stuff on the platforms yeah yeah it's um definitely a love-hate relationship with the with the platforms right because like platforms if you if you really think about it they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting and now they are mostly ways to share uh photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting it's kind of become like less novelty based and more vanity based just fine that's like a fundamental human instinct so i get it um i would continue to love to find a way to not use the platforms to disseminate information and that's kind of how we started our first audience portal was venmo um we had a huge audience on venmo and we like had this huge phone bank uh like a chinese phone click farm and we every time we had a new project we would venmo our audience a penny and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in your phone The cha-ching.

2:14:08Right? I am now banned from Venmo for life.

2:14:15Well, PayPal. If you want to work with a financial, let me know. PayPal. We'll have the CEO of PayPal on. I think the last company that came on works with Venmo. We'll work on it. We should get this reversed. This is important. We were reading an article in The New Yorker yesterday about this concept of IRL brain rot. the examples were the viral La Boo Boo's. La Boo Boo's, Dubai Chocolate, the viral Italian sandwich. We saw a few of these. Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg was also writing about the these kind of like viral as being something that you stamp on your product as a product feature almost.

2:14:55And I was wondering if if you're worried about the spillover from internet slop culture into the real world, just kind of how you're tussling with this idea of brain rot coming into the real world. I don't even know if you read the article or you have thoughts there, but I think I saw it on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. You probably did a front facing video talking about it or you saw someone do a front facing video talking about action video yeah i mean look it would i i don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing but like what mischief has put out historically is kind of in that brain rot category yeah i mean the boots the boots right like it's like absurd absurd aesthetic and maybe maybe even i could be so conceited as to say we were part of creating that the meta responsible no you guys definitely that that it was an era of minimalism and it was like the everlane era quite much boots the boots are like it you know an incredible reaction to that being like absurd absurd aesthetic uh just like popping imagery off of your screen but then the challenge the challenge with this this trend right is if you go back to minimalism it's it actually becomes I mean, maybe as like for me, right, I became part of the mischief audience and mischief customer in my early 20s.

2:16:23I'm in my late 20s now. Eventually, maybe I'd want some ultra minimalist, you know, mischief item for my home. But at the same time, like once you get on the maximalist track, like you're kind of on this maximalism treadmill where you just got to keep like going crazier and crazier. and maybe in the internet era, there's no turning back. It's totally possible, right? We might have built a machine so effective that it's now our master. And how do you break free from that, right? But I'm not too worried. We actually don't think so hard about it. We just kind of make the things that we like and then if it ever stops working, then figure it out.

2:17:07Do something else. Yeah, exactly. Well, I have an idea to put out in the ether. I think next time an A-list celebrity is going through a massive comms crisis, PR crisis, or a scandal, they should hire you guys to create something more viral than the scandal. They just need to do another crisis to compete with that. All they got to do is go to Twitter and be like, send a Bitcoin to this address and I'll send you two Bitcoin. And then they actually do it. They actually do it. They actually do it. That's genius. Yeah, that is a one-time get-out-of-jail-free card. You heard it here first. It's just payoffs.

2:17:43If you're a celebrity and you're in trouble, you're caught at a Coldplay concert. That's the only way you can reverse the tide. You'll be good. For sure. Go for it. Awesome. This is great. Yeah, thank you. It's really great to get the update and just hear so much clarity on all these different areas that we talk about all the time. Yeah, we could talk for hours. Yeah, we'd love to have you back whenever it makes sense. Yeah, Gabe and I kicked around an idea that we won't share now. We'll leverage that for your next appearance. I can't wait for it. 100%. Let's do it. Awesome. Awesome. Great to catch up.

2:18:23See you. Cheers. Bye. Absolute legend. One of the best to ever do it. What if we found out that Dubai chocolate was a mischief stunt? It's possible. It's possible. Anything's possible. Well, if you want to do a stunt, you want to promote a stunt, you want to have some fun with billboards, head over to adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. You should also get a hitter. Go over to Bezel. Getbezel.com.

2:19:00Shop over 26 ,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. What you got for me on the timeline, Jordy Hayes? Wow. Timelines and turmoil. Are you seeing this Francois Cholet post or do you want to go somewhere else? I was saying our next guest has a 133 ETA coming into the studio. David Senrois says a fire broke out on my route to the studio. Oh, no. We'll have to read more posts. No, he said, little do they know, nothing, nothing will stop extreme podcasting. Let's go. We'll see you in a little bit, David. Very excited for our in-person guest today. Yeah, let's dive into this post.

2:19:35If you want to read through it. Yes. So there is a debate. Francois Cholet and someone named Oyvend on the timeline. So there's this debate around how will AI impact worker productivity? It's very clear that when you use AI, it feels like you're getting a speed up. When you use a coding agent, it feels like you're getting a speed up. Meter did a study and found that maybe some AI tools are making you less performant. But so there's this debate. And for a long time, there was this idea that AI will supercharge workers and labor and anyone who's using AI will be more productive than someone who's not.

2:20:22And the advice that was given by pretty much everyone in the industry was like, you need to learn how to use AI effectively, because if you don't, you'll be left behind. And so Oyven shares that LLM adoption rose to 45.9 % among US workers, 18 plus, as of June, July, 2025. According to a Stanford World Bank survey, inference demand will continue to surge, not just as more usage per user, but as newer, more advanced gen AI models require far more compute. And so obviously no one was using LLMs just a few years ago. Now almost half of the American workforce over age 18 are using AI tools in their daily work.

2:21:09Francois Chalet, of course, is asking the question about when is this going to show up in the economic statistics? He says, LLM adoption among U.S. workers is closing in on 50%. Meanwhile, labor productivity growth is lower than in 2020. Many counter arguments can be made here, like they don't know yet how to be productive with it. They've only been using it for one to two years. 50 % is still too low to see impact. Models next year will be unbelievably better, et cetera. But I think we now have enough evidence to say that the 2023 talking point that LLMs will make workers 10 times more productive, some folks even quoted 100x, is probably not accurate.

2:21:52And so he gets a little bit of a turmoil here, a little dust up with Gnome Brown, polynomial over at OpenAI. Francois continues and explains a little bit more of his reasoning here. He says, by the way, I don't know if people realize this, but the 2020 work from home switch coincided with a major productivity boom and the late 2021 and 2022 back to office reversal coincided with a noticeable productivity drop. It's right there in the statistics, narrative violation. Productivity growth is now back to pre-2020 levels. So for a lot of jobs in the American economy, working from home was actually a benefit.

2:22:29I'm not a huge fan. I felt like maybe I was more productive, but I certainly didn't enjoy it. And so we've been having a good time building in person. it's it's it's interesting you'd have to dive in okay depends on how it work well yeah and you can also be more productive but on the wrong strategy like i found it working from home during that era and having a remote team i found it very difficult to um like change strategy yep quickly even on small things easy to lock in but not you were hard to zoom i felt less yeah adaptable right You'd sometimes waste three weeks working on something where maybe if you were in the same room, you would have not made a different decision.

2:23:10So, Noam Brown over at OpenAI says, get the gunshots ready. I don't recall a lot of people in 2023 saying that within a few years, worker productivity would 10x do to LLMs. I do recall a lot of people in 2023 saying LLMs can't reason, though. Shots fired on the timeline. That is a fantastic one. Brant Swash says, back in 2023, AGI was one to two years away in the form of GPT-5, no less. Productivity was about to increase 10 to 100x, and developers were about to go extinct. People who questioned the narrative were a tiny minority. We were proven right. He was the John Brown standing up. I believe that AI will not 10x productivity.

2:23:53Tyler, do you have any takes on this? Yes. Will AI be able to get Tyler a shirt? an AI agent might but he might be able to do it faster himself who knows still unclear on that but I think the idea that people don't know like aren't using them efficiently yet makes sense right because so if you look at that meter study yeah um it was about how like open source developers are actually slower when they use AI tools but like if you actually read it it was open source developers who it was their first time ever using AI tools oh interesting so it's like obviously like small sample size you know some learning curve to using like cloud code or whatever like you're not going to instantly become way better yep so i think it's it's kind of a similar thing there yeah i mean we heard that for time there's a yeah there's an interesting phenomenon where some companies are getting more value out of having um uh having designers go from zero x engineers to one x engineers and they're not seeing as much of like the 10x engineer becomes 100x engineer because the problems are still like intractable in some ways.

2:24:56No Brown says, I was on the AI job market in 2023. I spoke with a lot of researchers, a lot of frontier labs. Some thought scaling pre-training was sufficient. Some thought additional paradigms were needed, but regardless, almost none of them thought AGI was one to two years away. Yeah, that was something that was maybe more parroted on the podcast circuit and from those who were raising the mega rounds who needed to kind of justify underwriting AGI at, you know, a thousand X revenue multiple. It's interesting. I don't know. It is interesting that to look at the economic statistics to keep going back to what's happening in the labor market, what's happening with unemployment.

2:25:36Like it would be, it would be weird to have a unemployment tick up without productivity tick up because that would just mean lower GDP. And that seems like an impossible scenario. I'm somewhat receptive to the idea that maybe AI is substitutive for a different type of work and maybe it's not driving major productivity booms just yet. But I have trouble believing both narratives that AI is driving massive unemployment and also it's not driving increased productivity because companies would just be doing less than, and we're seeing earnings growth. We're seeing growth in the economy. We're seeing high GDP growth.

2:26:18So one of those has to be right. They can't both be right. Well, breaking news. President Trump was on Newsmax, not our internal software that we use to create the show, but the TV show. So President Trump tells Todd Stearns he's going out on patrol tonight with D.C. law enforcement and the military. They're really taking D.C. seriously, aren't they? Yeah. If you're in D.C., keep an eye out. Nate Eliason says, going to have to block Elon Musk soon for all the AI goon spam. Feels like I can't open X in public. I think a lot of people are feeling that way. Skill issue. I've still fine-tuned my algorithm so much towards tech and AI content that I don't see any of the Elon Musk.

2:27:07You don't? I don't see it. I get it because people that I follow reply to him and tell him to stop. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, I follow Elon, but I still don't see it. I see high-yield Harry saying Tom Brady was so ready back in the day to be a finance bro, and they share Thomas E. Brady Jr.'s resume. He was at University of Michigan. then he went to Merrill Lynch, the University of Michigan golf course. Summer intern. Polo Fields Golf and Country Club. He was a sales rep. High Yildare says, this guy could have had a successful career working at Merrill Lynch instead of pursuing football. Now no one on Wall Street will remember his name.

2:27:47Andrew Reid. Juwan had said, what the heck is a Series K? That was Databricks. During Databricks. They were the gong of the day. I know quite a few people in SF with a Series K problem. Yes. Stay away from the Series K. Enjoy the Series C, the caffeine, the yerba mate, the macadamina. Next time you have an urge to do hard drugs, why not try a fridge cigarette? Rune says the demand for anti-AI takes is enormous and will take anything and run with it. Meta consolidating and doubling down on MSL is being misrepresented as bearish on AI, for example. yeah yeah to keep in mind yeah the the they they conducted a reorg because they added a bunch of people to the team yeah it makes sense this and had a few weeks together and kind of updated um certainly and and they it got positioned as like like layoffs almost kind of what i was reading into yeah it was very odd um for obvious reasons it's not that popular when we're like this technology will bring about a turning of the age and reshape the thought the thought world of man and even a miraculous year in AI progress can be spun into a disappointment.

2:28:56Careful observers will note that revenue growth of the consumer AI industry has outstripped the most bullish expectations. We maxed out the metacalculus predictions, and nobody is mea-culping on this. You're not going to get an apology from Maroon. No way. He's absolutely printing in consumer AI adoption. People love it. Anyway, what else is going on? uh elon musk we were talking about the the potential spam he is unpacking his ideas around the birth rate people saw this as incongruent how can you possibly be worried about the birth rate when you are creating romantic companions that by definition cannot reproduce with their companions elon musk says on the yvonne was was you know kind of getting into this with his interview with uh A little bit with Sam.

2:29:50Yeah, it was it was a very funny interaction where he asks Theo Vaughn asks Sam Altman. What do you think about test tube babies? The idea of having children outside of the womb that you can visit on the weekend specifically? Yes, yes, yes. And and so Sam is kind of like that. It sounds maybe like that's futuristic and that might happen. And there are some scientific reasons, but it feels unnatural to me. I'm not that into it, says Sam. And Theo just goes, oh, like I thought you'd be into that. And it's very revealing that Theo clearly sees Sam as this techno... Dystopian. Yeah, or just this crazy, crazy tech futurist guy from the future.

2:30:25And so they kind of worked through it on the conversation, but it's a very funny clip because they're both playing the game of, who are we? How do we perceive each other? Elon says, AI is obviously going to one-shot the human limbic system. That said, I predict counterintuitively that it will increase the birth rate. Mark my words. Also, we're going to program it that way. But what I find interesting is what Nikita Beer says. He says, Grok Companions, Duolingo for dating. So the idea that you could go to a Grok Companion, learn amazing pickup lines, like are you a NVIDIA GB200 because I'm getting hot hanging out next to you.

2:31:10And then take that pickup line on the road and meet someone real. The more interesting thing I think is if two people are talking to companions and they're a perfect match, just introduce themselves. Introduce them to each other and say, hey, we are foregoing the future revenue here and we are introducing you in IRL. But we'll see. The proof is in the pudding. He's got to put his AI where his mouth is and actually deliver a product that increases the value. Hopefully he doesn't put his AI where his mouth is. Who knows? In a literal sense. Who knows? China is pushing for a total ban on the use of foreign chips for inference.

2:31:50They are not a fan of NVIDIA. In financial time, some Beijing policymakers are pushing to ban foreign chips altogether for inference, which accounts for most AI demand, according to a person recently summoned for a meeting with them. That is unlikely to happen soon due to a shortage of domestic chip supplies, which Beijing hopes— Who do you think is going to sort it out? The juggler. The juggler. Jensen the Juggler. He's able to juggle the interests of America, the interests of China, the interests of Taiwan, the interests of NVIDIA. Jensen the Juggler will get it done. Hopefully he doesn't drop one.

2:32:23But we will talk to Aaron Ginn if there is a dropping of a juggle ball from Jensen the Juggler. Google declares the green versus blue bubbles debate silly and tired. And Signal says precisely what a green bubble would say. I will say my little brother uses an Android. It's gotten quite a lot better to text him. We can now effectively use FaceTime through this weird kind of hangout integration thing. Certainly better. But it's definitely still a real thing. You got something, Tyler? Yeah, this is different, though. No, hit me. Out of the White House, new executive order, they're establishing a national design studio.

2:33:02Okay. So giga bullish for Figma, obviously. Let's go. Let's go. Universal basic Figma. But yeah, like a new design language. announcing America by design. Okay. National initiative to improve experience for Americans. Like UI, UX, or? Yeah, new life into the designs of sites where people interface with their government. I'm getting known in the chat. Stop, stop. The chat is saying you look like Greg from Succession. That's the first time I've ever gotten that. That's weird. Never gotten that before. Anyway, moving on. I've never. You've never said that. I've gotten that a ton, of course. I actually live in the same building as him.

2:33:35Okay, what if Greg from Succession was a Sigma? That's kind of the question that... Well, the actor who plays Greg from Succession is, in fact, a Sigma, sort of lone wolf. He had his own apartment. Dar says, who has a house like this in the bay? I would like to spend some time together, preferably in your house. That is a cool design. Like the soft wood tones, the brown. It feels very comfortable. It actually doesn't feel that comfortable. Like, look at that couch. That couch does not particularly look, like, loungeable. I'm much more... I'm a fan. My ideal living situation is a modern glass box on the outside, but then log cabin on the inside.

2:34:23I want, like, the moose head on the wall of the glass. And then I want overstuffed leather chairs. Brutalist outside. Exactly. The fortress. Exactly. The fortress on the outside, but then super cozy maxing, like thick rugs, warm hearths. These are the things that I want inside. I always hate going inside those glass box houses and being like, okay, everything's uncomfortable. There's so many corners. Look at all these hard corners. Yeah, I can just bang into everything. Look at this glass point. Yeah, I want a wooden coffee table that's just so rounded. There's just no sharp edges whatsoever. That's my ideal thing, but this is a little minimal.

2:35:01Gabriel says, what does he know? He's quoting our post. We broke the story really after Ben Thompson emailed his newsletter subscribers on Stratechery. We broke the news that after 21, I mean, 22 years in Taiwan, I think. Where did he say he's moving again? I think he's. Oh, I don't know if he said, but he's been he spends time in the Midwest. So I think Wisconsin, I think Michigan, that general area. did you see Dylan Abrescato's reply to our breaking news that Ben Thompson has officially relocated to the United States welcome home brother he did the NBA commissioner meeting and said time to learn English buddy of course Ben Thompson does know English but a lot of people were speculating this is about Taiwan tensions I don't think it is and Ben Thompson said that exactly in his email he said yes Taiwan is complicated but that's not why I'm doing this it's that my kids are at an age where we want them to go to school in the United States.

2:35:58And we've been contemplating this for a long time. And we're very happy. We always spend, he already spends summer in the United States and spends time. So going back and forth. So, but here it was not, it was not like the last, the last helicopter out of Saigon situation. One thing is for sure, if there is ever a conflict in Taiwan, Gabe will repost his, this book. Yes, yes, definitely. Jira Tickets just said, my boss just told me, quote unquote, don't make mistakes like I'm a clanker. Oh, that's brutal. Yeah. Honestly, Clanker is still getting more juice. I'm still laughing when I hear it. It has not completely died out.

2:36:36It's actually gotten better. I think it's gotten better. It's gotten better. It's building some lore. I'm having fun with it. Plus, it is turning into a bit of a culture war issue. Mike Solano was talking about this, where there were a couple posts that went out that were saying, like, you should not use this. It's a slur. It's bad. Like, don't use the word Clanker. And I like that we're already being language police on it. So that gives it a little extra juice. It makes it more fun to use. Yeah. Anyway, should we go to this post from BoneGPT? Back on the show. Back on the show. Thank you for posting our reaction to your post a few days ago.

2:37:09Bone says, Apple has no chance of catching up to Google with AI features that will become increasingly useful. OpenAI thinks they can do hardware from scratch because they bought Johnny Ive, which is a level of delusion that's hard to describe. Shots fired. Meadows playing catch up desperately, distorting the whole market with their hire so they can ship stepmom. Google won. Shots fired. This is what I was kind of getting at earlier. They look really great during the AI wars right now. I think it's like, you know, if this is mobile, if this is cloud, like, yeah, AWS was the first mover in cloud.

2:37:47Azure, GCP, these are great businesses. You know, did Apple kind of win mobile and get the vast majority of device revenues? Yes. Was it still extremely valuable for Google to develop Android? Did every company eventually need to have a mobile strategy and a mobile app and a mobile design? Like, yes. And so it's a little dramatized, but that's why we love your posts, Bone. Keep things spicy on the timeline. Keep us hitting that soundboard. Anyway, timeline and turmoil again. Malo Burgon from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Miri is getting in a fight with Rune on the timeline. Rune says, Miri is an incredible name, maybe the best in AI.

2:38:33It's a shame they don't research machine intelligence and Malo fires back. Open AI is a pretty good name. It's a shame they don't, dot, dot, dot. He said, yes, I know they published a couple open models recently and he has to kind of walk it back because he got hit with a community note. But I think Rune also got hit with community note. Maybe Miri does research machine intelligence. Oh, I think Rune is getting community note. Yeah, because I think Machine Intelligence Research Institute does, in fact, research machine intelligence. Maybe they just don't ship models or products. Maybe they ship other types of research.

2:39:08Anyway. Anyways, opening eyes, CFO, Sarah Fryer, who we've had on the show, absolute dog, was on Bloomberg TV doing an interview. She's a real CFO, CFO, if I say it to myself. Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. If you know, you know. Yes. But she was asked about selling infraservices in the future. She said, I do think about it as a business. This is why Ben Thompson moved back to America. He's like, I got to end this right now. Ben Thompson famously does not like the fact that OpenAI has an API. He thinks that they should focus entirely, at least for now, on saving every GPU cycle for the consumer product that is absolutely on fire.

2:39:51They should embrace being the accidental consumer company, and they should go as deep as possible. Where do they have an incredible edge in consumer? Yes. Where do they not have an incredible edge in the just vending out intelligence? I mean, they're doing great, and it is a good business. And so from a CFO's perspective and from Sam Altman's perspective, it certainly makes sense. Like, yeah, like why not also be in that game? It is value creative. It is profit generating. And yet Ben Thompson thinks now's the time to focus, focus, focus, focus. At the same time, I kind of take the other side of this a little bit and say OpenAI is in a fortunate situation.

2:40:29They have a lot of data, a ton of customers. They're going to have a very great consumer business that will probably throw off a ton of cash, especially once they start monetizing more heavily. and what that means is they might be the next Google in the best sense possible. What I mean by that is that they might be able to go and do 20 % projects. They might be able to go spend a couple billion dollars trying to build a new device and maybe it doesn't work, but when you add up all the Google 20 % time projects and Google side projects, it's easy to laugh at all the things that they've shut down, like 10 different chat bots or chat products.

2:41:07Yeah, or businesses that have 100 million of revenue. Yeah, they launched Wave and they've launched Google Glass and they've missed on so many things. But when they hit, it's great. You know, they hit on Gmail, they hit on Docs, they hit on Cloud, they hit on Waymo. And so I love that you get sort of this like humanity or America gets like somewhat of a subsidized R &D org at Google and it all pencils out and it all makes sense. And so maybe the infrastructure services group is not that at OpenAI, but I'm excited for these other less focused efforts from OpenAI. And I think we'll see some cool stuff.

2:41:45This is a good post from Stever, if we can pull it up. Read it out. You're finally awake. That fall looked real bad. SWE, LLMs, B2B SaaS, what are you talking about? You're an electrical engineer. Let's go build some chips. I love it. So good. This post, really going to be relatable for a lot of you. Yes. Nine figure hell is real. Sure, you don't have to work and have some assets, but you can't really afford a decent yacht, let alone a private army or nuclear submarine. It's real. It's real. Get back in the wage cage. Yeah, get back in the cage, buddy. Get ready to send some emails, buddy. Captain Nemo.

2:42:26Oh, they're doing an open AI movie. and they're basing it on a book. I think there might be two competing scripts, but they are finalizing the cast. I believe Andrew Garfield, who is also in the social network, it will be playing Sam. But Will Brown, friend of the show, has a recast. He has, can you name these actors?

2:42:49Jason Statham. Okay, you got Jason Statham and who will he be playing? He'll be playing too. The joke here is that he's playing both Greg and Ilya. When I saw Jason Statham as Ilya, I was laughing out loud. And then the guy on the left, he was in a bunch of stuff. What stuff? What have you seen? I don't even know his name. I've seen him a bunch, though. Seen him around. Yeah, yeah. He's in Nightcrawler. Nightcrawler. Wait, actually. Whoa. Is it Toby McGuire? I don't know. I'm all over the place. Tyler, who's the sactor? Oh, yeah. Anode Armas? Yeah, Anode Armas. But who's the guy in the top left?

2:43:32Jake Gyllenhaal. Jake Gyllenhaal. That's right. Not Tobey Maguire. That's a famous guy. Everybody knows that guy. I got so tied up. Anyway, so the real cast of the movie, Artificial, is going to be Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbero, Esmir Maradi, and then a guy named Ike Barinholtz is rumored to be Elon. Yeah. Who's playing Dylan Patel? Yeah, who's playing Rune? Who's playing Rune? Rune is the real question. Yeah, Rune is the real question. Who should play Rune? Who should play Rune? Wait, so I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg is going to make an appearance in the film and they're going to have to cast him again.

2:44:07Should they have the guy who played him in the social network reprise the role? No, but he hates Zuck now. Wait, who? Jesse Eisenberg. Jesse Eisenberg doesn't like Zuck? He has beef with Beck and gentlemen. Why? I don't know. Oh, weird. Okay. Yeah. Why? Very odd. Anyway, it should be fun. Hopefully, we can get a cameo. We can sneak in. If you know someone, introduce us. So this is what we want to do. Chat, thank you for helping us out there. Yeah, John Jelly Hill from Gold Rock. Jay, thanks, guys. That's good. Kylie says, I can't believe this is real. I can. I can't believe this is real. I saw this, and I was like, this is not real.

2:44:42President Trump dialed into Fox and Friends on Tuesday morning. We're a couple days late and revealed his newest and truest motivation for brokering an end to the war in Ukraine. He's worried he might not get into heaven after he dies. I want to try and get to heaven if possible, he explained. I'm here and I'm not doing well. I'm really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons. So whatever your motivation is for peace, do it. It is solid. So there was a debate breaking out. Yes, break this debate down. Craig Weiss says, having kids before 30 is how you stay generationally poor.

2:45:19A real takesmith's take there. Yeah, so surely not going to give any controversy. Perfectly put the timeline in turmoil. And the dude, Richie, the rich, highlighted Warren Buffett net worth$154 billion. He had a kid at 22? Child at 22. Michael Dell, 23. Let's go. Bernard Arnault, 26. Some absolute dogs. Jordy Hayes. Jordy Hayes, 26. I just missed it by a year or two. I think David Sendrom had me in the club, too. I will say kids are much more. When I started making money, I got into cars. And when I started having kids, I realized that they are much more quite, you know, I used to think there was kind of a meme growing up.

2:46:08Yeah, they're pretty close to cars in terms of joy. Well, no, people would say like the average American kid by the time they're 18 is like a quarter of a million dollars. Yep. But it feels like children feel like the carrying cost of like 10 supercars at times. That's true. Well, we have our first in-person guest of the show. We got David Senra. Finally. The TVPN Ultradome. Live. See you. How you doing, man? Good to see you, man. Finally in the Ultradome. Finally in person. Been on the show five times. It's a testament to how much I love you that you got me out of Malibu. It's an hour and a half.

2:46:46Yeah, it's rough. I know. Speeder and I do it every day. No, but it takes you an hour and a half. You go at like 5 in the morning, 5.30 in the morning. This is a different story. Anyway. I love this place, though. You guys have an army back here. We do have an army. You have the crew, the interns, then I met the friends of the interns. Oh, yeah, we got everybody. Oh, yeah, we have intern friends. Intern friends. Lads, lads, lads, lads. This is beautiful. What is this? That's the chat. So if they start saying how handsome you look, you'll see it. People are talking about, yeah. The chat is still talking about this debate over whether you can become generationally wealthy while having a child before age 30?

2:47:26What do you think? Obviously. Yeah. And they gave Michael Dell, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs. Shout out to Michael Dell. Dell Technologies on the... Don't say too much because that'll dox us. No, actually, that might be an interesting place to start. I actually flew to Austin. I spent five hours with Michael Dell. Wow. Like two or three weeks ago. Yeah. What was that like? What'd you learn from him? You know what? What surprised you? Because you've already done a full episode on him. You've dug in. You've probably spent days on his story. You know most of the facts. It's not only that. I listen to...

2:48:00So I highly recommend every entrepreneur listen to his audio book. Because he actually narrates it. And so I listened to it three... Can you hear me? I listened to it three times. I listened to it three times and then read the book and then made the episode. There was like halfway through our conversation, I said something like, I'm having a hard time reconciling this paradox in my mind between your immense accomplishments and just how normal you are. And obviously, he's a superlative and extreme person, but he's unbelievably measured and controlled and kind and generous. It's just one of my favorite people I've ever met.

2:48:37We've got to get him on the Theo Vaughn podcast and see how he does there. I mean, everyone in tech has been making the rounds. I actually have... There's been multiple times when tech people have gone on, Theo and they've had like kind of awkward starts like it took it took a minute to warm up it was like the caffeine thing oh you know I don't I think this is the mistake that people in tech make yeah you're seeing with a bunch of other podcasts they should definitely come here before anywhere else this is not a joke it's like they see a number on a screen and they don't think about what that number represents and who that person is and like you can just read some of the comments on some of these like mainstream podcasts it's like this guy's six years old he's in his fucking underwear in Missouri he's got unemployed like he's not the person you're just optimizing for the number when you should optimize for the quality of the people in the audience.

2:49:21Yeah, that's for sure. It's insane to me. Well, you know who's optimized for the quality of the audience? Colossus Magazine. There's a new profile. I love how you printed it out while we wait for the print edition. No, I don't have the print edition yet, but you can still go subscribe. Patrick O'Shaughnessy has printed a warehouse full this time. Have you had a chance to read through the Joe Lamont profile? Yeah, I get it. Patrick's, you know, obviously like my brother. I talk to him like every day. There's actually an interesting, something we can talk about that I called him about yesterday.

2:49:54I actually think moving forward, and I told him this yesterday and I told him again today, I was like, if you give me more than a day to read it, especially these long form profiles, I should do it. That is good enough if you read the whole thing. It takes like an hour and a half to listen to. So I read it. I was thinking about printing the whole thing. And I was like, there's no way I can read this before the show. It's like 100 pages. I read it and then I threw it into 11 Reader and I listened to it on the way out. Oh, that's good. And so it's like an hour and a half if you listen at 1X. Okay.

2:50:20But I think that source material is so good. Yeah, yeah. I could definitely do an episode of Founders, and it's like, just tell me in advance. Give me like two weeks, two, three weeks, and then we can drop it the same day that you publish it. But what I call it - One of my favorite little stories from that is how, so Joe had sort of a non-traditional entrance into startups and business. He was a Stanford undergrad. So no. More traditional in that sense. But at the time that he was building, what was the software called? Sales Builder or something like that, the initial? The names for his... They're so great.

2:50:57Enterprise software. It's like building a microphone. It's called Microphone. And I mean, you look at some of the companies here, like NewView, GCE, Still Secure, Ignite, Aria, Object Store, Accept, Prologic, Ravenflow. So there's two things that stood out from the story. One is there wasn't a meme yet of VCs being like, I'm going to back the Stanford dropout. They wanted to back executives that had experience and crazy access to talent. And there were some early kind of garage success stories. So he was kind of following that. But the other thing is bigger companies, Fortune 500 companies, refused to buy from startups.

2:51:39But then his pricing. Did you see what he did with his pricing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a hundred grand and they're like, no, we don't buy from startups. They come back. Okay, we need it. No one else can do this. It's 300. And then it goes for like, now it's a million. Now it's seven and a half million. Now it's$25 million. And everybody kept saying yes, because you're the best. But the other thing is the why now for the business, the initial why now and why it worked, not like the business catalyst was that they started sending, this was at a time where they would just send you a letter and said, you're pre-approved for this credit card.

2:52:07You just have to fill this out. Credit card roulette. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he signed up. He racked up half a million dollars of credit card debt and was finally, before he got his first customer, still no VC would fund him at all. He was basically evaluating bankruptcy. He had played it out in his head. It's going to be seven years. It's going to be really annoying. But it doesn't matter if you have. His calculus was like how much debt you have going into bankruptcy. So you actually like it doesn't going from 100 ,000 to 500K. It's not that much worse to go through. You might as well do it the real way.

2:52:43So he just went full send. Absolutely. And then and then basically made it all back from like his basically first couple customers. So I we have a mutual friend that we can't name that has been close. And it's basically Joe's been like a mentor of his for a long time. And actually like a funder of a lot of projects that he does behind the scenes. So I've heard a lot about this guy. Yeah. And what I like about people is just like the people that chart their own path and intentionally go in the opposite direction. So everybody heard Buffett and Munger and they're like, you should buy phenomenal businesses, even if you have to pay more.

2:53:18And so then everybody in the VMS roll-ups, they're like, I'm going to buy the great businesses. And what he realized, and I heard the story like probably two years ago, it's like, well, OK, so I have a lot more competition for the, everyone's the great ones. What about these shitty ones over here? And he turned it into a math problem. He's like, okay, this is your ARR. This is your rate of attrition. I know exactly how much I'm going to get out of this in the next six years. They talk about it in the, they use different words that they talk about in the article. He's like, okay, so I can easily buy this thing for two because I'm going to rip, I'm going to pull out 15 over the next five years.

2:53:47He just does it over and over and over again. And then I heard, I don't know if they said it, but he bought out his shareholders, he went 100 % of the company. And what I heard is he's been taking billions a year in dividends, his fucking paycheck at the end of the year. is like, how much money did you make there? I don't know, like$1.5 billion. That's crazy. And no one knew who he was. Yeah, he's built a machine. Yeah. A machine behind the scenes. Yeah, the other thing that Wilder's going dark for 25 years and basically until the - Well, this is, you know, this is like one of my fetishes. This is like these very silent family-owned businesses where they own 100 % of them.

2:54:24You'll never hear about them. I've been lucky enough to have dinner with some of these people. And they're just, again - Yeah, I know. You've talked to people that have written books about their family business. Yes. And haven't released them. And you're like, please let me, let me. And they're just like, no. Okay, so I'll just tell the story. So there's this guy. He's 76 years old, okay? This is like one of my favorite dinners I've ever had. And I need to be really careful here. So he started working in the family business when he was six, okay? He's the second generation of this family dynasty.

2:54:54They own, the original source of their wealth was one of the largest privately held shipping companies in the world. And when I mean privately held, owned by his dad and now owned by him and his brother. Like, it's just like there is no shareholders, no board of directors. It's just a family. I've now become closer to the third generation. And I get insight on how they run their, the family is a business and the business is a family. And the way they go about things is just really, really intelligent. And so we have this phenomenal dinner. You look up his reported net worth. And it's like, it's still in the tens of billions.

2:55:22And it's like underreported by a factor like four. Because then he tells you about like, oh, yeah, I put money into this. And I never sold. And it's worth this. There's just crazy stories. And he's also like super charismatic. One of the best rock and tours I've ever like been around and just super. And he's still on it 24 seven, like works all the time. And, uh, so there's two things that were funny that this has happened a few times where families will commission real writers, right? They, they commission a actual biography and I have a copy of a separate family. It looks like the book. It looks like a book you'd buy in a bookstore.

2:55:55The only difference is there's no ISBN number on the back. So like some of the books I have, No one else in the world has these books besides the family and the author and everything. OpenAI would give you a lot of money for that. So there's two funny things that he told me. One, that they commissioned one for his father and then one for him. And I was like, dude, give me those books. I would do such a good job on them. And without hesitation, he's like, absolutely not. That's out of the question. I go, why not? And he said something like, I have no desire to educate my competitors. And just real fast.

2:56:28and then um he leave it to me in the will no and then no i i think so i there's another founder next generation no but there's another founder who's 78 and i spent four days with her her the ceo and the top 40 executives uh they were going through um how do they wanted advice on like how to transition from a founder-led company she's one of my favorite founders i've ever come across in my life and like to the next generation and so after talking to all the executives spending time with them they're like hey so what do you think and after four days i go when she's dead you're fucked. He's just like, there's not like, you're not replacing her.

2:57:00She's a singular individual. You should like either sell the company or go do something else. Cause like there's no transition there. It's like, what do you do when Michael Jordan retires? Like, I don't know. Start rebuilding. Um, but he said something funny because they're obviously in shipping. They now have real estate and they have finance and everything else. And he's got also one of the biggest boats in the world. And he had mentioned, no, but no, he mentioned earlier though. So early in the conversation, he's like, yeah, uh, when you read a lot of these biographies, He had read all the same biographies I'd read, like Daniel Ludwig, Aristotle, Nasus, all these like shipping guys.

2:57:31He knew all of them. They would also run their company headquarters from their private like giant boats, right? Giant yachts. And so he had mentioned earlier, he's like, yeah, I spent, you know, part of the year, I lived part of the year on, he said, I thought he said boat. He said ship. So I was like, yeah, so like when, like what month? There's a difference. He's gonna tell us. I go, so what, what, like when are you gonna go back on your boat? Like how long are you gonna be on your boat for? He goes, what are you talking about? I go you said like earlier you live on your boat he goes I don't have a boat I'm like is this some kind of joke he goes I have a ship I go what's the difference between a boat and a ship he goes you can put a boat on a ship you can't put a ship on a boat so my favorite conversations are these kind of people and I like I'm obsessed with like older entrepreneurs because they're just so much smarter than like a 25 year old fucking startup founder this is like not even they're not even there's like it might as well be an alien yeah it's just It's like these people are just, they have so much more experience, they have so much more knowledge.

2:58:25I just can talk to them for hours and hours and hours. Makes sense. Have you dug into the Trilogy software Mafia? Are you familiar with this? No. So this was some secondary research I did. Out of Trilogy, this is of course the subject of that Colossus profile on Joe Lamont. In the 90s, Trilogy was on such a tear. They were recruiting out of MIT, Harvard, and a bunch of folks went through Trilogy and then went on to do cool things. Ellie Seidman, the CEO of Tinder, was a Trilogy alum. Cyrus and Nick Ganju, founders of ZocDoc. Henry Ward, the CEO and founder of Carta. Oh, crazy. John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, and now he's an investor at Greylock.

2:59:09And Andy Palmer, the CEO of Tamr, former CEO of Vertica, which was acquired, major angel investor, invested in Carta, in part due to his connection. there are 87 trilogy mafia companies now on crunch base so it's just like this very interesting we've heard that that joe like keeps his team very tight but clearly selects for extremely entrepreneurial people they don't often get poached to like other firms that are doing the same thing if you leave you're probably listening to a company i wouldn't want to make money the way he did you know but put that aside like what i do admire like i'm like i'm the most pro-american person like obviously the son of cuban immigrants like i grew up you know meeting people like literally came to his country fled communism on a raft yeah like so i don't like outsourcing anything i've had tons of people try to advertise on the podcast like i have this outsourcing i was like i want to find a way to pay people more money not less like i want to work with the best people in the world and those people don't work for eight dollars an hour but i do what the thing i respect about joe is like he he doesn't give a shit what other people think and he's willing to have his own thinking and then even if everybody's going in one direction i was listening to your mischief on the way over here.

3:00:17He had this great line where he's like, if everybody's running fast at something, they're probably running off a cliff. I was like, oh, that's a bar. That's a good bar. And so I like that Joe's like, hey, you guys are all doing this. So that means by default, there's an opportunity. I called Patrick yesterday. I was like, it's kind of funny. There's not any other people more obsessed with podcasts than me, you, Patrick. We talk about this stuff all the time. And I was like, everybody even now is still starting podcasts. And Patrick, he has the highest value investing audience in the world. And what I love about what he's doing is he's like, oh yeah, you guys are all going to go to the podcast.

3:00:48I'm going to write, what is that, 15 ,000 word in-depth profiles, but they're so much better. Like the Neil Meadow one. Who's the paradigm guy I read? Matt Wong. Yeah, this one. And they're going to keep doing it. And he'll tell you in the group chat, like some of the ones they're working on now, they're crushing it. I just love this idea. It's a very special product. And I went through when we were doing the show and we didn't have guests or anything and we needed a lot of material. I went through and looked at old New Yorker deep dives profiles. So good. They're so good. Old Bloomberg and old Forbes pieces.

3:01:20And they're just not doing it at that level anymore. There are some profiles. But the one profile that was written in a prestigious magazine about Zuck is all about, like, did he have the right team in place? Like, it's like a diversity, like, referendum on diversity and stuff. Like, Brotopia type take. Which is just not really the story. Like, that's a very minor piece of the Zuck story. in my opinion. I'm glad you said the New Yorker part because every single time I do a deep research report on every single person I'm working on just to get an overview and it's always like I want it written like a New Yorker piece.

3:01:50One of my favorite. Fantastic writers. Jackson Dahl. We read one on Mary Meeker. Yeah, the Mary Meeker. I read that too. Fantastic. I read that too. So Jackson Dahl, you guys should have him on there. He's doing, for the record, we have invited him. He needs to call in today. I don't know what he's doing. Nick, send him an invite. Have him join right now. The reason, no, no, I don't share, like sharing the mics okay you have to come after i'm done send the invitation like send the invitation for tomorrow but but the reason i say that is because he put me on to one of he's like hey you have this this thought that i haven't heard anywhere else because um something that i've talked about is just like i actually think like introspection is one of the worst things like an entrepreneur can have and i say some of the greatest entrepreneurs in history had low to no introspection like sam walton didn't wake up every day wondering like what his purpose of life was.

3:02:41Oh, sure, sure. Even rehashing the past, I wish I did this. Nothing. This is like being a golden retriever. You have to benignically be going after the tennis ball. Golden retriever's never thinking about the last tennis ball. No, always the current tennis ball. Excellent. So, Jackson's like, hey, I heard you say that. Have you heard of this guy named Larry Gagosian? Oh, yeah. I didn't know who that was. And so he sent me this great New Yorker piece. The piece was so good, I made an episode on it. I think it's one of the best episodes I've ever done. It's one of my favorite, like, the guy's a little, obviously, crazy.

3:03:09Every single person I profile on Founders is crazy. But it's better than a book. That New Yorker piece was better than if I read 600 pages on Gagosian. But yeah, I think there's a clear... Again, us three talk about what's the white space all the time. It's like what Patrick and his team are doing, it's like there's a clear white space there. People write profiles, but the profiles suck. There's no craft in them. Yeah, the New Yorker is insane because it's a... And people care about the person writing the profile a lot. Well, did you guys ever cover... You know how Patrick found Jeremy Stern? No.

3:03:38So I think you covered that. I'm pretty sure you read this to me. I love when John reads things to me. I think it's the best profile ever written about Palmer Luckey. Oh, sure, sure, sure. I forgot the title. It had like a very... Yeah, I know the one. You know the one I'm talking about. Yeah. Jeremy wrote that. Oh, no way. That makes sense. American Vulcan. Is that it? Make sure it's by Jeremy Stern. Yeah. Okay, so what did Patrick do? Patrick's like, this is great. Come do this for me. Yep. And then he did something, and then Patrick did something smart. Yep. Choked him with gold. Yeah, yeah.

3:04:08It's just like, name your fucking price. So this is really important. No, this is a really important thing. So there's a line I sent for any founders trying to recruit people. And there's this thing I found in one of the books on Ogilvy where he was looking up letters that the Medici family would write to the artists that they wanted to sponsor. And there was this one sculptor they wanted to essentially become a patron of and then move to Florence. And he said something like, come to Florence. but the last, the way he ended the letter was one of the most gangster things I've ever heard. He's like, come, I will choke you with gold.

3:04:42That's great. Great, great quote. That's a R. But that's exactly what Patrick did. He's just like, name your price. The guy that does my clips. I just like, name your price. I'm not negotiating with you at all. What do you want? That's the number? Fucking send me an invoice. Pay today on my ramp card. Yep. Always. We were covering a bit on Oracle's latest moves. latest moves. Give us the five minute founders of, uh, on Larry Ellison. So I'm actually working on a Larry Ellison, um, episodes. I did three episodes on him. It's like one 24, one 26 and one 27, but that was probably like six years ago.

3:05:17And I reread the billionaire and the mechanic just now. I was like, fuck, I don't think it's good enough to do another episode on. I need like a different angle here. So there's a guy in my audience who I knew was like completely obsessed with Larry Ellison and we've been DMing for years. He had transcripts for every single interview larry ellison has ever done so it's taken me a while as you can imagine but that's the source material yeah that's great highly likely it'll be out in three episodes from now i'm doing elon right now which is fucking killing me that's why i like i look like shit and i'm very tired yeah this outline is destroying me don't go on x right now by the way make you rethink doing that episode why he's in hot water he's basically he's pushing ai companions which people are not a fan of yeah oh is this like the scantily kind of like companions yep okay so here I'll tell you what I'm doing.

3:05:58And this is why it's really important. Because, you know, people, the very first episode of Founders, September 2016, was Ashley Vance's biography of Elon Musk. It was obviously an Elon fanboy. I was looking at Tesla's before they even had the Model S. You know, everybody that's a fan of his obviously goes through, like, these cycles of, like, you have to ride the fucking Elon roller coaster. Well, you can say on the podcast, I made this episode before I went crazy. No, but like the problem is, and so like there's actually, I think the best biography of Elon written is this book called Liftoff because it's the first six years of SpaceX.

3:06:35Yeah. It's very fascinating. Those pictures where he's like standing in the rubble, right? Yes. Like iconic. So what I decided to do is like, listen, man, I don't care about politics, cultural stuff. I don't care about anything. I care about entrepreneurship, taking ideas from great people. Actually building the business. And just throwing it to the next generation to hopefully help people do that, right? Do that better. So no disrespect to Walter Isaacson. I've read all of his biographies. The Elon biography is like written like it's a newspaper now When you take an asset like or you take a liability you try to flip it into an asset.

3:07:04So I was like, okay, the problem is No disrespect. There's no craft here. I like soul. I like craft in because I read for fun Like this is what I want to do. This is like a news update But the good news of that is it's in chronological order So the reason this is killing me is because the readings been done for like five days It's just been outline, outline, outline, outline, outline, nonstop. So what I did is like, I'm going to rip out every single thing about Elon. I'm not going to talk about his family, his wives, his kids, his politics, culture war. This guy's got brilliant ideas. So this is literally just what are the most enduring principles that Elon used across three decades and seven different companies.

3:07:44And I really think I'm crafting something that's going to be really valuable. and I think you're going to have to be some level of like intelligent to listen to it because I'm not I'm going to like jump from idea to idea to idea rapidly and like you have to put the shit together yourself and it's just like hey this guy's been repeating the same principle for decades and it worked in Tesla it worked at SpaceX it worked in Neuralink why is this working might work in your work you should fucking know this you should have a tool where you can listen to this hopefully listen to it today or whenever it's out and then you listen to it a year ago two years ago okay I have a take on craft so anyways let me finish one thing so when you get to the end of this you're completely back on the elon train you're like this is a singular person well i think to people's credit in the ship people a lot of the people posting these recent comments are on his team and want and and it's this this uh i think they're struggling with like wanting him to focus on what what rockets and the things that the rockets in orbit sir is like the take yeah he says that himself yeah in the book it was really interesting because he was talking about what do I have to do that if I don't do it, it doesn't get done.

3:08:50And he's like, listen, somebody else, electric cars were inevitable. This is a direct quote from the book, I'm paraphrasing. He's like, electric cars were inevitable. They were gonna happen with or without me, but the rockets were not. And so therefore I should focus on that. But that was like 2022. I think people that wanna go to Mars are concerned that what takes down great men, it's - Ladies, liquor, and leverage. Yeah, in this case, liquor, leverage, and goon bots. My problem is I would gladly give up the Mars ambitions if we could get a Tesla with a V12 in it. And I feel like every moment he spends working on rockets is another moment that I don't have a thousand horsepower naturally aspirated screaming straight piped Tesla.

3:09:33That's my goal. Anyway, on the topic of craft, I was trying to think about, you mentioned Joe Lamont. His business has been buying companies that are not generational products. They're not the iPhone. They're not these amazing monuments to craft. They're businesses that deliver a little bit of value for a bunch of customers. And he has figured out a pattern of offshoring some of the software engineering, running the business more efficiently. He is like the private equity buyout. He's not trying to completely transform and build a generational product. The product is not a product of craft. He is not a craftsman.

3:10:13And then I was trying to think about - I think he's trying to be now the new one. So on the flip side, when I was talking to Delian early on, Delian Asperov at Founders Fund, about how did he underwrite the investment in Ramp? He was talking about software can be like art, and that the team there has this attention to craft, and they see, that's why they hire the IMO gold medalist. It's like, why do you need someone that good? It's because they see the product as like so, so important, even though it's in this highly competitive, like particular like corporate card space. It's something that they take really seriously.

3:10:54And I think that there's this, it's not that there's necessarily one pattern that's correct. It's more of like this barbell and you can be on either side, but you need to know what camp you're in. And so when I see Joe Lamont, I see him as software as widgets. He is crafting a machine that produces software and it produces it at the lowest possible cost. And it all kind of looks the same. And then I see on the other side, like Ramp and folks like that who take software development more as art and more as craft. And both can produce outsized returns. Both are big. Well, it's also where you apply the craft.

3:11:27I would say that Joe from my read brings craft to the organization. The organization of Trilogy. He has Trilogy University. Yes. And and you can you I think you're going to struggle to build an iconic and during company if you're not bringing craft somewhere. Right. Like totally. Ferrari is bringing craft to racing. You don't necessarily care about certain other. They're not bringing craft. They're mechanical. Mechanical. OK. So the reliability. You said something like other than the spectrum. Sure. I think like what I'm trying to drive home with founders and why I'm like complete. So this is like, there is no right way based on who you are and what you're into.

3:12:06So I just came, I just flew from New York, and I spent, I always spent a ton of time with Kareem and Eric, founders of Ramp. And I specifically, this last time, spent two hours with them. And I would like to talk about some of the stuff I've learned because I spent a lot of time with them. But there's an example of this. It's like, this is where people fail, is they're like, this, Steve Jobs did it this way, so I should just copy that. It's like, yes. It's inauthentic. Yes, natural. So I was saying for a long time, this is Michael Dell again. So I was saying for a long time, you need to build a business.

3:12:37It's very obvious when you read biographies to people, you have to build a business that's authentic to you. And then I read Michael Dell's autobiography, and I talked to him about this when I saw him in Austin a few weeks ago. I read Michael Dell's autobiography. And again, IBM is the largest company in the world. It's the first company to reach$100 billion market cap. And this guy's like, I'm going to compete with them with$1 ,000 out of my University of Texas dorm room. That's not an exaggeration. And so he then brings in this older guy, I think his name's, I forgot his name, it's in the episode.

3:13:07But the guy had a couple successful businesses, and he works with Michael, I think, for four years. And when he's 80, he's now looking back, I think he's 25 years older than Michael, something like that. And he's like, listen, he's like, four years of this, like, I lost all my hair, my back hurt, I couldn't sleep, I had, like, intestinal issues, I had to stop. And Mike, because like the competition was so intense and we had no money, we were undercapitalized and we were just like going 24-7. I'm dying and Michael is full of energy because he's like, he built a business. This is his line. He built a business that was natural to him.

3:13:41So I was telling Michael when I saw him in Austin, I was just like, nothing we're doing with podcasting is like new. I was like, think about like if you ever read Robert Caro's biographies of LBJ, one of my favorite stories in there is W. Leo Daniels, right? And it's this guy, Texas Hill Country. This is like, there's no internet. There's barely any electricity. So this guy has like 90 % market share with the wives of farmers in the Texas Hill Country. And so he has this daily news show that's on for a few hours a day. We invented that. You're telling me that somebody was doing this before us?

3:14:17Here's the funny part. And let me go back to Kareem and Eric, so don't forget that place. So the crazy thing is, so he winds up getting like 90 % market share in this area, right? So then he's like, okay, well, what should my sponsor be? Well, who's listening? What do the women in these houses need? And he comes like, everybody needs baking flour. They all need baking flour. So I'll find the best manufacturer of baking flour, and they'll be my advertiser. He sells a ton of baking flour. And he's like, wait a minute. I can just like make my own baking flour. So then he starts manufacturing his own baking flour.

3:14:45He makes like$50 million in like the 1940s or something. And then he goes, what am I going to do next? Like, what can I do with this? He's like, I'm going to run for governor. And then people are like, this is Trump before Trump. This is what I'm telling you. There's an element of Trump to this. Trump had vodka. Yeah. But so everybody tells him, everybody tells him, nobody, you're not a professional politician. You can't possibly win. But then he starts hosting these rallies. Remember in 2015, Trump was doing this. And then like the rallies, they'd be like selling, it'd be like a monster truck rally.

3:15:15It'd be like 50 ,000 people there. Of course, that's going to translate from votes. So he wins the governorship of Texas and he moves his radio show into the Texas governor's mansion. And so he's still broadcasting that. The reason he's in LBJ's biography is because he runs. And he's like, what are you going to do next? I'm going to run for Senate. He ends up stealing the election from LBJ, legitimately stole the election. But I was telling Michael about this. And, you know, in Texas, they teach Texas history before they teach American history. Right. If you go to any used bookstore in Texas, my favorite thing to do.

3:15:47There's huge sections on like, you have American history? It's like Texas history. And Michael texts me back the funny saying, he goes, oh, I missed this part of Texas history. I was too busy reading computer magazines. I want to fucking hit the table. Because that's exactly, he picked the business that was perfect. Yeah, that was authentic to him. Natural to him. Natural. Completely natural. It's what he wanted to do. So the Ramp guys, they're not, they're like, whatever the, you guys, I always have to like get, the way people talk on the internet translated to me from you. So I don't know if there's a term for anti-slop, but there's a term for anti-slop.

3:16:26Perfect. Thank you. So there's a very old term for this. So the way I think of this, have you guys ever heard of shokunin? Yes, let's leave it. Explain it for the listeners. So shokunin is this idea in, essentially it's almost like a Japanese word for craftsmanship. And it doesn't matter if you're building, you know, a$22 billion FinTech, or you're sweeping the floor. The Japanese, if you're a shokunin, you take pride in the activity, making it, making your, you take pride in the activity yourself, and pride in making your work as good, even if no one else sees it. And so what I would say about this is, spending a lot of time with Kareem and Eric, is one, from the outside, they have very complimentary skills.

3:17:10And what I would say, especially with Eric, one of the best sales advice and I think it was advice for sales but I actually think it's advice for life and dealing with people that I've ever heard is Mary Kay remember Mary Kay Cosmetics they built this like massive empire like going like door to door sales it might have been like an MLM it's kind of like the proto MLM yeah and they'd dry around like pink Cadillacs MLMs underrated criminally underrated sometimes literally criminally rated the way that she the way that she trained her saleswomen. She says, never forget that every single person goes through life with an invisible sign around their neck that says, make me feel special.

3:17:52And Eric has very understated charisma and he is gifted at salesmanship, at listening. He's a very gifted listener, understanding what's important to you and then translating what's important to you and to how his business can solve your problems. And so what I think I, one of the things I admire about both Eric and Kareem is like, I like people that take what they do very seriously. I don't care what that activity is. And they work like dogs. I'm not into this, like, I'm not into work-life balance. I don't like balance. I'm not a balanced person. I'm either, I completely, I'm at zero or 100 and nothing in between, and they're both like that.

3:18:25Yeah, we're always telling you, you don't have to destroy your life for this next episode. You deliver the product you want. It's possible. You have to push yourself. So there's a couple things I think they do really, really smart. One is, and I think they both have commonalities, is one, they pay attention to every single little detail, which is the point that you were making. So the point where they're running a giant company. They have tens of thousands of customers. They have thousands of employees. Their revenue growth is exploding right now. They have all these features. They did 300 updates to the product in the last year.

3:19:01And yet - It's only 250 work days. Yeah, I think this was yesterday, the day before. I don't even know what day it is today. we sat in there it's not like Eric and Kareem have empty schedules no and it was us three and we sat there and we talked about podcasting yep and like the role it could play what we talked a lot about you guys yeah and what I like about them I'm just gonna like say random stuff you guys jump in wherever you want but like the one example I used for them and I was just like listen I and I like how fast they make decisions and then when they make a fucking decision they don't like oh we'll kind of like test it out they go all in they make big bold bets and they're willing to take a risk even if it will fail where i think a lot of the biggest mistake you can make in a world that's changing constantly the biggest risk is taking no risks and so i i use the example it's like is that an elon quote or sam i don't know all my quotes come from other people i have no original ideas i need to i have no original ideas i think i don't feel bad about i think the original idea that you have that you beat the drum on is podcasting it's a zuck quote the biggest risk is not taking it.

3:20:01So there you go. Shout out to Zuck. Can we get, you have a, what kind of, what should we hit for Zuck? You're not going to be able to hear it. The Glazenator. No, but. Triple Glazen. The Glazenator of 3 ,000. The Glazenator of 3 ,000. So what Eric and Kareem both do, that they, the commonality they have with History of Gets Entrepreneurs is they bet on talent. So they overpay for talent. They're like, they will find the best people in the world, like their head of AI, some of their designers, some of their engineers, the people they partner with. Like, they're like, that's the best person and let's make sure he or she are compensated at a level that makes sense.

3:20:35And so I was talking to him. I was like, I really do think we have, like, John and Jordy are gifted at what they're doing. And we had a long conversation about this. I was like, I'm telling you, man, I talked to a lot of people on a permanent basis. And I've told you guys this, you know, privately, I'll say obviously in public, is like on a permanent basis, I don't know anybody else that comes up with better, more simple, more effective and inexpensive marketing ideas and I go I really think we have this huge opportunity for leverage it's like there should if they have an idea from the idea to execution since we trust them we know they're talented we should there should be no barrier there should just be like here's a fucking pile of money and next time you have come with idea do it and immediately they're like done what else you want it's like there's no like yeah that's obviously a good idea John and Jordy are obviously talented like how can we get more out of the talent do we have around them um i just think that's there's just a million little ideas that they have like this uh i remember i don't even know what the valuation is now but it went like it had like a huge jump i don't think it was this time it was the last time but we were having dinner it's gonna be me kareem and two other people and me and kareem got there first and it was the day that that announcement came out and twitter was going crazy they're like ramps fucking killing it and your side of the world with all these vcs are like fighting over this shit and um and kareem shows up in the first 10 minutes he's just like this feature is not good enough we lost this deal this is an exciting he didn't mention a word and i just sat there smiling and you know it's really hard for me to not talk for 10 minutes and i just started i go that's the reason your perpetual your divine discontent is why you're so good because the the value of your company is just the the collective value of all the problems that you solve for your customers and he doesn't give a shit about taking a victory lap.

3:22:20He cares about solving problems for his customers. And I like the fact that I can call them. I've called Eric at 1am his time. And I'm like, where are you? And he's like, oh, I'm in like Chicago. And I'm like doing like customer meetings. And like, I recruit people and like, I'm closing this deal. He's just like, they work all the time. Working hard, working hard. Work all the time. It's a good, it's a good mantra. It's one thing you can control. Yeah. The Joe Lamont, think about that. I mean, that's excessive, but I think they were having, in that piece they were talking about this conversation he was having with Jack Welch, if I'm not mistaken, where he's just like, well, if you have a product that's working and you're willing to work 20 hours a day, it's really hard to lose at that point.

3:23:01Yeah, no. Yeah, find your life's work. Find something that's, what was the phrase? Not authentic. Natural. And then work constantly. Well, okay, so this is, again, And everybody, I'm so happy to see what's happened to you. I still consider myself your first listener. It's true. You are literally. Literally first listener. I sent you the MP3 on Google Drive. Oh, and that's another thing. So going back, I want to talk about why I think you guys are really special. But it also goes back to. The Glazenators. Hold on. It also goes back to what Eric and Kareem were willing to bet on talent when I was just like, guys, they have a thousand listeners right now.

3:23:44It was crazy. They're gonna fucking blow. I don't know anything. I know about podcasts and I know how history's greatest entrepreneurs think. I don't know anything about anything else. I promise you there's zero chance. They already knew you were talented, but they already knew. It was obviously Kugin's talented. They tried to buy you and recruit you a long time ago and they made a bet and they made a bet on talent, which again is something that Brad Jacobs does, that Elon Musk does, that Steve Jobs did, that all these people did over and over and over again. Again, these are ideas that are timeless.

3:24:12You can use them today. You can use them 100 years ago. They were used 100 years ago. You're going to be able to use them 100 years from now. So get out there and use them. Get out there, folks. We have a 3 p.m. reservation. We do. We've got to get on the road. We've got to get offline. We've got to get off air. It's hard to get this guy off the mic. I wish that we could go for another five hours right now. You in town tomorrow? Let's do it again. Run it back. I've got to finish this episode. I've got to stay in Alibu. It's already Tuesday. And I'm never driving here again. We're getting a helicopter.

3:24:42We're getting a helicopter. No, that's how the Kobe died. It was foreshadowed in our first launch video. We open it with us in a helicopter. We're going to be helicopter guys. So that's what me and Kareem and Eric were talking about, your launch video. It's about the type of helicopter. Yeah, exactly. Not all helicopters are created equally. No, we need to move the studio to Malibu. Anyway. The Center for Extreme Podcast. We will see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching. Of course, thanks, sir. Thank you for hanging out with us. See you tomorrow, Chad. See you tomorrow. Leave us five stars in the podcast.

3:25:09podcast. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.