Delian Asparouhov, Ridge Wallet Interview, Nvidia Earnings, The Sheikh of AI

31:01That's how I ended up there. But it's sort of funny because every other week they sort of alternate between sharing, you know, once one person's like, Oh, I did this. The other person's like, I did this. I'm like, I'm happy for all of you. It's fantastic. It's great. I like this one. So Tanun was meeting with Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Satya mentions a book by George Washington University professor Jeffrey Ding that suggests AI could be the base of a coming global economic boom. And this is clearly what informed this book, clearly informed Satya's idea about, hey, let's get to 10 % global GDP growth, 5 % growth in the developed world.

31:37uh this is what we should be thinking about ai not reading like the ai doomer books right um but uh the sheik scribbled it down on his notepad and soon after ding was eating lunch at his in his washington dc office when a representative from the uae embassy knocked on his door and said i can't find your book in any bookstore can i get two copies amazing just like send my guy to just like go get the book directly from the source we've talked about this before billionaires have guys yes uh middle class has apps yeah you know well everyone has apps yeah yeah uh but but when you get to a certain level of like the super billionaire the trillion got a guy for class yeah i mean he controls a trillion dollars he i don't think he made it to the super billionaire list we looked at yesterday i think that guys in his category pay to not end up on this list yeah or it's just like they have control over capital but they don't personally own it and so it's all it's much when you look at the list all the people are people that you can basically clock their net worth yep by publicly available like notably absent see we know how much of tesla elon owns exactly so when the stock fluctuates by 20 billion dollars you just look at his share pro rata and you calculate you know how what his net worth did that i think i think they said there were 26 super billionaires ranging from 450 billion for elon roughly to down to 50 billion for some other folks vladimir putin xi jinping not on the list yeah it's like how do you not include those guys when they clearly control 50 billion worth of you know economic power no doubt and they're and they're not just oh they're around for a couple years doing the job of president like they this is their life uh anyway uh that is the nature of these things but i love this guy because we're having a zoom difficulty so i'm going to just keep reading through this okay and you can help connor get the stream back up yeah read this story about the age of empires thing yeah i'm catching up here um sorry folks so i'm gonna backtrack here for a second but tanoon grew up in the shadow of his brother sheikh muhammad bin zaid al nayan the long time crown prince who was named president of the UAE in 2022 while his brother rubbed shoulders with foreign leaders and crafted plans to remake Abu Dhabi's economy.

33:56Tanun honed extracurricular activities. He became so hooked on competing with his brothers in Age of Empires, a video game where players develop hunter-gatherers into powerful civilizations, that he hired an employee from the company that makes the game to coach him on tactics, former employees said. He turned a palace within his royal compound into a gym. He funds one of the world's top cycling teams, the UAE team Emirates, and he rides on an island near the presidential palace he ringed with cycling paths. He likes super light Calnago bikes so much that he instructed one of his companies to buy the Italian firm that makes him incredible.

34:34Tanun has poured money into building up Brazilian jiu-jitsu and other forms of grappling around the globe. A black belt, he started a well-funded championship tournament that has become the olympics of our sport says bobby razik a filmmaker who is making a documentary on tanun and the event he's definitely one of the founding fathers of mixed martial arts he said a sport that quote would not be where it was today without tanun the interest in ai has roots uh his interest in ai has roots in the early 2000s when he was so intrigued by computer-aided chess that he hired a sizable team of engineers to make him a program called Hydra that could compete with the world's best players.

35:11Erdogan Goons, a computer chess specialist for opening moves, said he often talked by phone for two or more hours a day with the Sheik as they monitored Hydra's games. That's incredible. So in late 2017, Tanun's interest increased after he learned that Google's AI program AlphaZero had beaten the world's best computer chess program after needing just four hours to learn the rules. It was far more powerful than Hydra ever was, opening his eyes to the power of AI. told associates the following year he tapped peng xiao the former chief technology officer at software turned bit bitcoin firm micro strategy to start g42 a company devoted to applications in ai um so it's very cool he's been he's been very obsessed with this for a very long time uh uh and so at the time abu dhabi's wealth and economic strategy was largely under the control of to noon's brother muhammad as de facto leader of the country he pushed to siphon off part of the Emirates oil wealth and put it into investments and economic development, building the wealth fund bounty to whom would later inherit.

36:13So the thing that I think people don't fully understand about a country like the UAE is it's almost more of a kingdom that is forced to define itself in certain settings as a country, right? So when you think about the wealth of the UAE, you should be thinking about it as the wealth of a kingdom, which is controlled by the royal family. Right. And there's these families are massive. Right. And so you can visualize the sort of family tree. And the closer that you get to the top, the more of the wealth that you control. If you're farther down, you might control some small aspect of the kingdom's operations.

36:52You're going to have like a team that works under you, but you're the ultimate decision maker. And so what's interesting is if you want to get big deals done in these in these sort of kingdoms, you actually have to, you know, if it's a big enough deal, you have to get the sign off of, you know, more or less the king, right? And so you can see these sort of decision trees that trace up. And that's why, you know, the venture world has had this idea that you can just sort of show up in Abu Dhabi and expect to raise, you know, billions of dollars, like it's some easy task. But if you talk to any large allocator, they'll tell you that these relationships are developed over years, sometimes decades, and you have to, you're going to have to genuinely be, you know, invest time into those relationships and ultimately get the sign off of, you know, the most powerful members of the family.

37:43Yeah. I think, isn't it like every Emirati gets just like a payment? Yeah. There's effectively a UBI. So education is funded. There's enough, you know, sort of a monthly sort of payment to cover a lot of living expenses. This is part of the reason why cars are actually so popular there. One is because it's an oil producing nation. So gas has always been super cheap. There's like an incredible car culture there. But two, if your education and your house or your apartment are covered and you're working, and you don't, and you have a perpetual income by being a citizen of the kingdom, you're going to spend it on cars.

38:20Exactly. And it's actually interesting. There's a dynamic, speaking of cars, cars are actually, you would think they would be more expensive in the UAE. They actually end up being cheaper because they're, they, they, one, these cars can't sell back in the States, but two, um, there are people that use cars to export wealth from sanctioned countries. Let's say you're an oligarch in Russia and you want to get wealth out of the country. It can oftentimes be easier to move a LaFerrari than it is to move$5 million out of the country. So there's a bunch of cars there that sell below retail and below their sort of market value in the U S because people just want to get them into the UAE, move them.

39:00And then they have, you know, real dollars that are sort of protected within the kingdom. So yeah, I think they were also struggling to set up, uh, like top tier universities. And so that's where they came up with this, with the idea of like, we'll just pay, uh, if you go to school in the U S if you get into Harvard, we'll pay full tuition for you because like, yeah, then it's just, yeah, there's a lot of investment is trying to build the next Harvard in the UAE. Yep. Interesting. Um, Um, well, uh, did you get to the, to the section where they had to rip out the Huawei routers? Do you see that?

39:30No, we didn't get that far. Uh, the UAE has long seen itself as something of a Switzerland, a trusted point for trade for the East and West and choosing sides on AI would risk damaging relations with China. But the allure of the U S lead on AI was too much to ignore. Tanun picked the United States. Let's go. Let's go. And he says, Huawei routers were ripped out of G42's offices and Western equipment put in its place. No more spying. Do not look at our internet traffic, China. While Tanun and his aides continued negotiating with the administration on details to enable the deal, the administration paired Tanun's company with Microsoft.

40:08G42 agreed to use Microsoft's cloud for AI work and also to comply with US export restrictions as part of the deal. And Microsoft invested 1.5 billion in G42, joining its board of directors. Still, China hawks in Congress are being concerned that the UAE's overall ties to China remain strong, fearing the country could allow powerful U.S. tech tools to make their way to China. Those lawmakers could be an obstacle if Tanun comes back for similar deals. Yeah, I mean, the challenge of being Switzerland of the Middle East in many ways is that, you know, the UAE does have a lot of economic ties with, from what I know, Iran, right?

40:48There's a lot of iranian money there uh russian etc uh but the cool thing about being in the uae is if you go there you'll sit down at dinner and you're at a table with uh with the it's the most diverse group of people i've ever been a part of i got a chance to go uh a couple times in uh what was it late uh early and then late 2023 and you'll sit down at a table with um uh somebody from iran somebody from uh um uh israel somebody from russia somebody from the uk and american and everybody's getting along because everybody's just generally there to you know in that setting enjoy f1 and uh you know everybody's um you know generally pro-business there so it's a great environment yeah i mean the capitalism and business has been like the one thing kind of holding the middle east universal language with with uh you know uae and and saudi arabia kind of playing nice with both sides and kind of keeping everything together uh and a lot of pressure to not let uh anything fall into just absolute chaos yep uh which is obviously risky um so speaking on a podcast in december uh they're talking about josh kushner or jared kushner uh recalled a 2018 meeting when he was visiting the region uh tanu told him jared i'm not meeting with you unless you spend two hours uh after with me to talk about ai wow and so he's uh he's trying to build his he's going podcast mode he's like you got to talk to me for at least two hours, the shortest Joe Rogan episode.

42:18And we'll get into the details. That's great. And so, yeah, he's been investing in a lot of stuff and I'm sure he'll be someone. We've got to have him on the show. Whose presence only grows over the next few years as he continues to make big investments. Anyway, if you're looking to take a trip and stay in a nice place, maybe impress a chic while you're on the fundraising tour, we recommend going to wander that's right find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better and we have some big news from kyle over at wander they just crossed 600 total locations and you were in the chat asking weren't you at 500 a month ago i said yes yep it's pretty pretty great growth 20 month over month is uh incredible it's amazing uh and it it what's cool is wander is a platform where every incremental property makes the platform more valuable, right?

43:13You know, I think that, you know, we dealt with this before. I was trying to stay at a Wander when the fires were happening. They were all booked. I'm sure, you know, they've added multiple properties within Southern California and the pace that they're operating at is just incredible. So go check it out. They actually are running a spring sale for the last day today that you can get$400 off plus a Wander hoodie with code SPRING400. So go check it out and you won't regret it. It is unbeatable. And we are going to be staying in at least one Wander in early March and very excited to record it. We'll have to do the show from the Wander because their Wi-Fi is so fast.

43:53For sure. It makes it all possible. Live stream it. That's great. Well, let's move on to an analysis by Shiel Monat breaking down Adyen and Stripes 2024 annual reports. They both are out. And so now you can benchmark these two companies against each other. Adyen processed 1.34 trillion and was up 33 % year over year. Stripe's growing faster at 38 % year over year and is now at 1.4 trillion. Adyen's valued at 56 billion, public company. Stripe is valued at 91.5 billion. And in terms of employee count, Adyen has 4.3 thousand employees. Stripe has 8.2 thousand. They're both profitable. Adyen EBITDA of 1 billion.

44:36Note Stripe has higher margins. And so this comes to us from this wonderful Stripe community letter that we will read some of this stuff, but it highlights a lot of interesting applications for the company. And we'll go through some of the highlights here. Yeah. I mean, the big thing that stood out to me from Shields analysis, everything, the two numbers that jump out, one is Stripe is almost double, valued more than double. Um, and, uh, Stripe has almost doubled the number of employees. Right. And, and, uh, so anyways, there there's the, the, the big story here is, uh, how, you know, how is Stripe worth, uh, twice Adyen despite having, uh, less EBITDA and twice the employees and, and all these things.

45:27But, um, yeah, the, the letter here is fantastic and just shows the level of, and the, and the leadership that Stripe has with the Collison brothers. So Stripe's mission, of course, is to grow the GDP of the internet, right? Yeah. And payment volume represents 1.3 % of global GDP now. Insane. Absolutely insane. It's one of those things like they could have said, hey, over time, we think the internet's going to grow a lot. We think internet payments are going to be big. We think we can actually get 1 % of the global GDP running through. And it's the most ridiculous number because every founder uh has thought about a world oh if we just get one percent of this market you know we're a multi-billion dollar company stripe actually did it and um and uh you know an example of a of one of the most hyped companies of the last 20 years living up to the hype right um with the way that they're growing they will there's a world where there is a scenario where they have double digit percentage of global gdp running through their rails which is just obscene.

46:32Yep. A straight billing alone is on a$500 million revenue run rate. We use straight billing. Over 300 ,000 companies are on straight billing. And Stripe was profitable in 2024 and is expected to remain so in 2025 and beyond. And of course, they were one of the companies to kind of move quickly during the last downturn. I don't know if they had to lay a lot of people off. I I think they actually mostly just froze hiring and kind of grew into their valuation. And it set them up for profitability and then kind of scaling from there. So they kind of know what the base, how the business operates, how it runs.

47:09Obviously, they're very big and they can kind of grow into their valuation. Nearly 200 million active subscriptions are managed via Stripe billing. Stripe is trusted by half of the Fortune 100, 80 % of the Forbes Cloud 100, and 78 % of Forbes AI 50 companies. One in six new Delaware corporations incorporates via Stripe Atlas. That's crazy because I always thought of that. I mean, there was Clerky years ago and those products, they're very easy to get, you know, popping in like small Silicon Valley crews, but you don't get to one out of six without being like a mainstream product. The dynamic with Stripe Atlas is fascinating because it doesn't seem like they do a lot of independent marketing.

47:52It seems like a product that Stripe built truly for the community. It was a pain, you know, it makes sense. It's a perfect wedge product for payments, right? What do you need to do before you can accept payments online? You need to have an entity. They built what I think is the best way to create an entity online. You know, we used it for TVPN. It's a fantastic product. It's still super simple, despite it being a relatively complicated process to create an entity. yep uh the the product is fantastically simple and it's turned out you know it's turned out to be an amazing wedge product for them uh just given the the scale yeah it's got to be a hard product to advertise right because like you only incorporate once and not everyone's incorporating it all the time and it's not like there's so yeah i'm sure they're all over google ads and stuff for when people are thinking about incorporating but outside of that it's hard to do a lot of awareness for that product but they've done a very good job getting penetration there uh hurts and they give some case studies here.

48:50Hertz increased 4 % of online payment authorization rates after switching to Stripe. Turo saw a 4.7 boost in recaptured revenue, translating to an extra$114 million per year. I had no idea Turo was that big. That's huge. Intercom improved conversion rates by 2.1%. Forbes saw a 23 % revenue uplift within six months after switching to Stripe. There's a ton of examples of this major ai companies including open ai anthropic mid journey 11 labs are stripe partners stripes agent toolkit and virtual card tools enable programmatic spending and control more than 14 000 vertical sas platforms utilize stripes payment services i mean it's just like the default in silicon valley at least uh stripe capital provides fast funding with funds arriving in under 48 hours so they've really like just built every possible fintech product on yeah and If you look at the actual three lines of code.

49:40Yeah. I have to try to pull this up. But if you look at their product timeline, there is a pretty amazing. You can actually see. I wish we could pull this graphic up, but it's going to be difficult. But they basically come out in 2010 with payments. Yep. Two years later, they launch Connect. Yep. Four years after that, they launch Radar and Atlas. So this entire time, they're just focused on making this perfect payments product. And to show that level of patience, even when they had sort of exploding growth and traction, and many operators would have said, hey, we should go multi-product. We have all this traction.

50:20They waited. And then since then, starting in 2016, they really ramped up the pace. They launched Atlas, Radar. 2017, they launched Sigma. 2018, they launched Terminal, issuing billing. 2019, Capital. as well as corporate cards and the infrastructure to issue corporate cards. And then in 2020, they launched Treasury as well as Climate. And then they launched a tax product in late 2020 as well. So the velocity went from, hey, let's just have this sort of narrow focus and really own payments. And I think that Stripe is one of the best examples in history of focusing early on really, really directly on startups as a category.

51:01And they sort of ignored the enterprise pretty broadly. but they benefited from between when they started in 2010 and where they are today. Many of their early startup customers became public companies that are now massive. And those were, you know, customers that were able to prove out these use cases that would, you know, go on to allow them to, you know, sign companies like Hertz, right? Which is this legacy company or Forbes, things like that. I remember Shopify, when Shopify started, like the default payment integration for a long time was Stripe. And you kind of bring your own Stripe account.

51:31and then they were doing Shopify payments, which is kind of a white label Stripe account, but it was all Stripe under the hood. And yeah, they've just really, really benefited from just letting the internet grow and being like the index on the internet economy. Interestingly - A good example where the mission of the company grow the GDP of the internet was truly, truly aligned to the potential of the business itself, right? I thought this was interesting. They mentioned the bridge acquisition. Transaction volumes in stable coins doubled from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024. And Stripe now supports 40 million monthly active stablecoin wallets.

52:07Wow. And yeah, that's something that like, they've been talking about crypto for a long time. They've integrated crypto products in the past, but like the stablecoin thing feels like the first time that stuff's like really taking hold. And I know I saw Paki. They made the Bridge acquisition. They spent, you know, over a billion dollars on it specifically because of the developer activity that Bridge had. So they, I think, saw a younger, you know, they saw the stablecoin version of Stripe, which had an early developer traction. It was a product that developers loved. And then all of a sudden, you know, public companies are using the product.

52:40Yep. And so they write stablecoins, room temperature superconductors for financial services. Top stablecoin uses today involve tangible real world activity. CFOs use stablecoins to manage corporate treasury. Immigrants use them for remittances. citizens of countries with unstable currencies use them for dependable savings and payment teams use them to enable customers from countries with low card penetration some of our favorite examples spacex uses bridge to repatriate funds from starlink sales in argentina nigeria and other markets dollar app and neobank in mexico uses bridge to to help individuals receive usd payments from payroll providers like deal and air tm uses bridge to disperse payments to workers all over Latin America.

53:22So as we start paying more people all over the world, the stable coins make a ton of sense. I've actually paid people in stable coins before because they've been in countries where getting them US dollars was very, very volatile. Delayed, high fees, super high fees. And so. Yeah. And to be clear, there was a lot of analysis of the bridge acquisition at the time where people said, how could they pay 100? You know, it's like more than 100 times revenue is really big number and the obvious answer is that stripe has over a trillion dollars of volume they're big believers in stable coins they had had their own internal efforts why not spend a billion dollars to acquire a leader in the space and then focus on integrating it with all of your existing customers so i think we're going to see over time that that could very well be the an instagram style acquisition for stripe in the sense that you can imagine the bridge product you know 10 years from now having hundreds of billions or potentially even trillions of dollars in volume.

54:19And I like this. We've been seeing this AI growth chart all over the internet and Ramp's done some analysis on this showing adoption of AI tools. On the corporate card side, Stripe's seeing something similar. They say, we're seeing an AI boom on Stripe. We're partnered with a large number of companies with rapidly growing businesses, including OpenAI, Anthropics, Suno, Perplexity, Midjourney, Cognition, 11 Labs, Langchain, Pinecone, Mistral, Cohere, Sierra, so many of these. And the median time to annualize revenue milestone for the top 100 AI companies on Stripe in 2024 was 24 months. They compare that to back in 2018, it took SaaS companies, the top 100 SaaS companies by revenue, 37 months.

55:04And so they're providing extra data to show that the AI boom is real and companies really are accelerating their revenue growth faster than in previous, I don't know, in previous waves. Yep. And so Cursor, the AI-powered coding assistant, raced to over$100 million recurring revenue in just three years. We're also seeing the likes of Lovable, which had$17 million ARR in just three months. This is wild. So Lovable, for those that don't know, is a Swedish company. uh harry stebbings fellow podcaster was was one of their early investors and uh it you know lovable doing that in three months just puts so much pressure onto every other company because that's now the bar yep i remember in 2021 the narrative was you should be able to hit one million of ar in nine months post launch that's now seems childish in comparison uh in the cage we're trying to hit a million in three months.

55:59But anyways, the demand for these AI products is insane. And I believe Lovable has more ARR or is at a much greater run rate than booking.com was when they went public. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we dug into that during the Dara Khosrowshahi and that Mary Meeker article when she took them public. Yeah, I remember that. There's an interesting point in here. Some people have called these startups LLM wrappers. Those people are missing the point. The O-ring model in economics shows that in a process with interdependent tasks, the overall output or productivity is limited by the least effective component, not just in terms of cost, but in the success of the entire system.

56:40In a similar vein, we see these new industry specific AI tools as ensuring that individual industries can properly realize the economic impact of LLMs and that the contextual data and workflow integration will prove enduringly valuable. So they're bullish on these quote unquote rapper companies, which I thought was interesting. Anyway, let's move on to tell you about another fintech company that we love here on the show, Ramp. Go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go get to know Ramp on ramp.com.

57:12So speaking of ramp, we have a major ramp customer, Sean Frank, who's going to be joining the show in two minutes. Fantastic. So I'm going to text him right now and we'll get him on here. Well, we can do this one DM that we got in the meantime. It says, ahoy, John, hope you're doing well. Apologies, apologizing for hitting you with a bunch of questions, but I've posted 50 blogs and I have four subscribers. I'm not gaining, not that gaining subs is the goal, but still I've talked to family members who collectively hired thousands of people and they're out of ideas to the whole ad value and it will come approach just hasn't worked.

57:49I want to work with smart people before going out and building something on my own, but I'm not sure what the move is. What do you think, Jordy? So I think that one of the things that seems very obvious with content is that you need extreme levels of patience. That's not an excuse to not refine the product every single day. yep and you know we we take this approach we're lucky to be in a position where we have a daily show we're trying to improve the show and every single every single day there's some days where you know maybe we weren't we're underprepared some days where you know we we sort of miss a segment that we wanted to do but in general trying to improve the product every single day and then improve how you're just distributing that product i think it's the distribution so i posted 50 youtube videos before a single one went viral i and and for me that was over a year it was a full year i posted them once a week for for for a full year and it was like oh i got a hundred views awesome oh i got a thousand views on this that's great and then finally one got picked up about spacex and the algorithm went to 70k views and i remember seeing the chart go up and i was like wow this is amazing but it's really hard for blogs to go viral yep because there's no algorithm there's no discovery there's no discovery and so what you should probably do is figure out can you repackage this in terms of just a long post on x yep or a thread or because the thread can go short form content.

59:07If you, if your natural voice is on short form video, make one minute videos, break your blog post up into a series of one minute videos, try a bunch of things. And then very quickly, the algorithm will start sending you the signal of like, this got 10 times as many views as that. What did you do differently? And you can introspect, but it's very hard when you're just hanging out on a dead sub stack with no traffic coming to it. Um, that I, I think that's very hard. And I think the people that have been successful on sub stack have built audiences elsewhere. Like Ben Thompson talks about Dritechery would not exist if not for sharing on sharing links on, on Twitter and LinkedIn at the time.

59:42And now he's got it cornered and people share it and his stuff goes viral, even if he doesn't post it because people will say, oh, there was a great interview. We got to cover it. Exactly. Yeah. I think the main thing is YouTube specifically, as well as some of these other platforms can be very demoralizing, but that doesn't necessarily, you know, the, the X factor now is that the algorithms need time to learn your content before they figure out the right people to distribute it to. So, um, do we have Sean on the line? We have Sean on the line. He's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. We're going to talk with Sean about app loving.

1:00:14Uh, and Sean is one of the sharpest minds that I know on e-commerce. Actually, I'm going to go ahead and say, Hey Sean, there he is. Mr. Ridge himself, Mr. Wallet. You guys are in person. I was expecting you guys to be, uh, doing zoom yourselves, but damn, IRL, love to see it. IRL. Always, always, always, unless, uh, you're dealing with this traffic in LA these days, Sean, it, uh, if you want to leave your house now in LA, it's about an hour to go anywhere. Uh, are you still going into the office in Santa Monica every day? No, I went yesterday. Yeah. It's like an hour and a half, bro. PCH is still closed.

1:00:52So yeah. LA traffic, bud can't, can't, can't beat it. Well, tell us about app loving. Yeah, so AppLovin, for some backstory for the audience, founded in 2012, really started to, it wasn't even necessarily a company I feel like that was on the map for a lot of people until last year. I think last year was the first time you guys started spending money on the platform. Is that correct? Or had you tested it at earlier points in Ridge's history? Yeah, so here's, I think AppLovin has three discussion points. We'll go from what I'm least qualified to speak on to what I'm most qualified to speak on. So least qualified.

1:01:33Short reports are coming out that they're violating, you know, App Store terms of service, their ads target children, all this type of stuff. What AppLevin is, is there's two sides of the business. They run a bunch of mobile ad space. So games, mostly games, but whatever old people are playing on their phones, they have that sort of ad space and they have an ad engine right so like they're the ad exchange think of like a trade desk or google display network um so they run both sides of those they've never done e-commerce their e-commerce push was like august or september 2024 so we're like six months ago and the majority of their and just question so the majority of their customers uh until they push into e-commerce were other mobile games, I'm going to guess, and other sort of digital apps, services that they were pushing people to.

1:02:26What was, do you have any idea of what their customer base looked like until last year? Yeah, I think it was all mobile games. So, you know, they've been called like a pyramid scheme, all these type of things. So you're a mobile ad engine where other mobile games can run on top of, right? I think they also do like display branding, like trying to get you to go to the movies or just like real top of funnel campaigns, nothing conversion optimized, right? Now, a lot of people spend a lot of time on mobile games. So there are a lot of ad units available, but it's something Ridge has never touched at all, right?

1:03:01Like we're mostly a Facebook advertiser. They get some year 75 % of my budget. We do influencer, that type of stuff. We've never really done that much in the world to display and especially nothing in mobile display, right? The industry does have a bad reputation. Mobile display ads are just like, that's where click fraud exists. Well, and from my understanding with Ridge, having worked out of your guys' office and worked on the Ridge business myself back in the day, you guys have had a policy where you'll test any channel once, but you're very, very ruthless with pulling back that spend if it's not working.

1:03:40uh so i remember you know connor uh being you know who's the cmo of ridge being willing to test some obscure ad network and being like yep doesn't work you know almost like the same day oftentimes um so when you guys decided to test app lovin and then actually start to really spend on the platform i think that sent you know a real signal For more information, visit www.fema.org Right. Well, I'll say that we're a very sophisticated advertiser. For people unfamiliar with Ridgewallet as a business, we'll spend over$100 million this year on digital advertising advertising. So that's everything from LinkedIn ads to TV ads to influencer to Reddit to Snapchat.

1:04:20Like Meta is the biggest best game in town. They might get 70 % of my budget some year. Sometimes they get 30 % of my budget. But like outside of them, we're spending money on every single possible channel we can. So what are the accusations against AppLovin? I'm going to put the unverifiable claims that I cannot speak to in one box. And that is, there's short reports saying that they're doing one-click forced downloads, they're tracking users, whatever. Cannot speak to that at all. If that's true, let's hope there's an investigation that we don't want them targeting children with inappropriate content.

1:04:57So I don't know anything about that. The second thing is, the stock price has gone parabolic in the past two years or whatever. I think the IPO, maybe in 2021, I think it's up 4x in the past year. At one point, it was worth more than Uber. So as soon as a company is trading at 100x revenue and is worth more than Uber and no one's ever heard about them, people just get immediately freaked out, right? It's like they had the same revenue multiple as Palantir, right? Palantir has been around a lot longer. People know about Palantir. So yeah, just for some extra context. So they were worth 3.8 billion at the end of 2022 at their peak.

1:05:38Just a little bit ago, they were worth 160 billion. So generational run. yeah yeah and anytime that happens i mean a lot of people start speculating right revenue is growing really really fast um i can't i'm not a stock trader i fucking buy ads so is the is the company overvalued it's about as overvalued as palantir is so depending on where you land on that side of the conversation that's that's why there's so much interest right now right the thing that i'm qualified to speak to is as an advertiser they shoot us an email in august and they're like hey we're rolling out e-commerce, we'll give you a lot of ad credit to test it, right?

1:06:19And we get ad credit from Snapchat to test stuff, from Reddit to test stuff, from Meta to test stuff, and free ad credit, even if it's the shittiest ad space on earth. I mean, okay, yeah, I'll get some bunk-ass impressions, whatever, right? They end up, you know, it ends up working really well. I probably spent$4 million of my own money on app-loving ads in Q4, and I was spending$250 ,000 a day. It was matching Facebook ad spend. One of the short reports is something like, oh, they're stealing Facebook's data to be able to target these people so good. Once again, I don't know how the fuck that would work, but what I will tell you is that as a sophisticated advertiser who tracks everything via North Beam, via incrementality holdouts, via post-purchase surveys, coupon codes.

1:07:10People were playing app-loving games, seeing Ridge Wallet ads, buying those products, and then telling us they saw it on the ads. So it's a real ad channel. It really worked in Q4. I have an invoice right now. I owe them$1.5 million that I have to pay by the end of the month. So it's a business. I don't know what to tell everybody about the shorts. Now, do I think the company's overvalued? Yeah. I don't own any of the stock. That's fucking insane it's like it's a company it's a mobile app platform what do you mean they're worth more than uber like i fucking call an uber every day right i don't play any mobile games so that's like the stock price question then it's like oh all this nefarious whatever inside dealing subsidiaries i don't know anything about fucking that what i'll tell everybody listening and what's so weird is i'm public i'm on twitter like i post my ad spend on these channels no one's reached out to me like none of the shorts i'm like guys i'm around like i'll show you the fucking apple hey get on uh make them pay for it you know don't don't give that don't give up the sauce for free you know yeah you gotta go on tigus become an expert uh expert consultant you can make a thousand dollars an hour like i i have no dog in this race i'm like yeah dude whatever it was an ad channel if they went away tomorrow i would spend money on snapchat or tiktok or anywhere else right but like the verifiable proof is that i gave them real money it was a good ad channel and i think the reason why people like their revenue is growing super fucking fast right the revenue is up 80 year over year and they're like yeah we have a billion dollar run rate for e-commerce advertisers in december and i'm like yeah no shit i spent fucking a million dollars it's like yeah i spent a ton of money with you guys like it doesn't take too many people like me spending that to get really, really high revenue.

1:08:58Dude, ads are the best business on earth. I don't know why this is so surprising for people. Now, are they compliant? Do they owe Apple money? Are they stealing data from Facebook? I don't fucking know, but pretty good ads. You got any questions about that? Pretty good ads. Can you talk about the relationship between AppLovin and Flip? Has Ridge had any success on Flip? I remember Flip blowing up out of nowhere. They were giving a bunch of credits to basically give away products for retailers. I know they have an ad partnership. Have you found any success on the Flip platform? Yeah, so I've never used Flip.

1:09:36As far as I know, Ridge has never worked with or advertised on Flip. It would be a surprise to me to hear that my ads were on Flip via AppLovin. I've had friends who've had very bad relationships with flip so i've always avoided it and our products don't work for live shopping anyway like tiktok shops it doesn't really work for us ether and it's because of like we have a very male focused demo we're more of a premium product you know those typically live shopping works for like you know leggings that make your butt bigger and that type of shit right like it's not it's not our core product that's crushing it on there that whole affiliate gmv world is very very dark and shady.

1:10:20I know a lot of people who are doing weird stuff there. You can check out the affiliate top charts, like what goalie's doing. They're giving people fucking mansions if they hit GMB targets of a million dollars. So yeah, I don't know anything about Flip. I've never used Flip. They've emailed me all the time. Yeah, that, I mean, even an idiot like myself, I'm like, that looks like a pyramid scheme. I'm not going to hang out there. But dude, I have the data on app loving right like 85 of our traffic from apple oven came from ios devices right like one of the concerns is that like oh this is just bought traffic on android devices like click farms in bangladesh or whatever right it doesn't look like it's that so i don't know how they have good quality ios traffic coming through it all seems to be games called like tomb blast or some shit but like anyway old people got rich wealth it was pretty cool yeah the reason i wanted to have you on is is you know there are major brands out there that will run on an ad platform that's just sending them bot traffic and they won't even necessarily turn it off because to them they're just optimizing for you know impressions and clicks and ridge has always been a company focused on you know the end actually you know conversion right and sort of building your guys's engine around that um what what happens uh you know shifting the conversation a little bit what What's your outlook on e-commerce in our year 2025?

1:11:47We covered maybe a couple weeks ago, we talked about how the whole Amazon, you know, it's a terrible time to be an Amazon seller. It's been a tough time to be a Shopify brand as well with all this sort of tariff action and things like that. Historically, Ridge has made a bunch of products in China. It's shaping up to be a rocky year for e-commerce broadly. It helps to have a fantastic brand like Ridge, but what's your outlook going into the rest of the year? Oh, dude, just take it day by day. I mean, there's more tariffs announced today. There's more supply chain disruption. You know, and it's not just the U.S.

1:12:27government. Like, every government on Earth is becoming more protectionary. Like, Section 321. Sorry to interrupt, but we had Ryan Peterson from Flexport on yesterday that said that was talking about the actions that Mexico had taken around what's not the same as the de minimis loophole, but I'm forgetting the right name for it, but to sort of protect American Mexican textile workers. So yeah, a lot of action. Yeah. And like, we like to think about this one like very one dimensional, like Americans importing things from China cheaply, but like That fucks over other manufacturing economies like in Mexico.

1:13:07They don't want fucking cheap auto parts or cheap apparel coming from China sitting in their warehouses going to America duty free. Everybody gets pissed off on that. So yeah, that happened yesterday. The quick summary is just take it day by day and try to survive. Don't have any debt if you can afford it. Keep a lean team. I think DTC 3.0 is like incredibly lean teams. Like, ridges down to 60 U.S. full-time employees. We're doing more revenue than ever with less people than ever. And I think that's going to be more of the trend. And, yeah, I mean, if you can bring stuff to America, you should.

1:13:42I mean, we're probably eight months away from 60 % of the while it's being made here. So I'll keep you guys updated when they start getting made here. Where's your new factory going to be? Or you onshore some manufacturing. That's been a long-term process. but uh you know what does that look like i mean yeah it's all component part manufacturing so like we have inner plates that are going to be made in missouri and then they get shipped up to philadelphia to be finished and they get shipped to arizona to be assembled and then they go to fucking kentucky to sit in the warehouse so this is one of the challenges uh you know china very strategically has everything within like a one hour radius when they do like you know these these industries uh but with tariffs today i mean it's 85 on aluminum goods coming out of china so gets very close to the same price now so i think that's why he's doing it wow wow well thanks for stopping by appreciate the update love the take sean you will be uh a regular regular uh welcome to the show and uh thank you for for posting your heart out every single day yeah dude i'm the number three the best guess you guys had so far yeah we'll give you we'll get you an nft just for you bye thanks thanks sean talk soon cool well delian should be joining any minute i don't know if he's in the queue yet but uh quick backstory so ridge sent uh or sorry ramp sent ridge a plaque for spending a hundred million dollars on ramp uh so putting up some huge numbers and uh yes sean is an absolute animal.

1:15:22It's great. Well, let's see. Is Delian in the queue? Not yet. Okay. I'll text him and let's move on to Michael Magnano. He says, and people are still wondering why every single podcast is pivoting to video. And it's a result here that says that a billion people are watching podcasts on YouTube every month. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, if you think about it, Rogan really led the charge here. I feel like he had such a massive audience on YouTube and so much of the attention that he would capture was YouTube oriented. And you remember there was a period where Rogan's influence and attention fell like it fell off a cliff after the initial Shopify deal.

1:16:04And you could feel it almost ramp back up again as he went back on YouTube. So massive platform. One of the biggest reasons for this is obviously that podcasts have replaced a lot of television consumption totally and what people don't always realize about youtube is that a massive amount of youtube viewership happens on tvs so this is people in their house instead of turning on cnbc they turn on tvpn i get crazy screenshots all the time people text me photos and they're watching it on the tv yeah it blows my mind yeah it was same thing with my youtube videos i was like you watch this on tv that's like insane but i guess like yeah when you put a lot of production value into it it looks like tv yeah no and that was our thesis that was our thesis around if you actually want to compete with television around news, you have to record every single day.

1:16:51Otherwise, you know, nobody high quality like this. And it's also just so much more snackable because we can take that clip. We can take some of those, some of those great clips that we just had, put those out on X, put them out on shorts, make vertical shorts out of it. And if you just have pure audio, you just can't distribute it that much. It's really, really hard. Sometimes there's transcripts that can go viral every once in a while, but it's rare. Yep. Anyway, Delian should be joining in one minute. Let's see if we have another post we can go through. Bullish on one person teams. Card is at 2 million.

1:17:20ARR chat base is at 3 million ARR. Levels IO products are at 3 million ARR. Testimonial IO is at 1.5 million ARR. TDin.me or underscore me products at 1.2 million ARR. Ben Lang says he's bullish on one person teams. Pretty crazy. What was the decision between PMF or DAI to go two person team? Uh, the whole thing was that PMF or die was like, how do you apply these sort of extreme constraints? 90 days, 25 K to a million dollars for ARR sort of the simple concept. But then outside of that, you have to stay in the house, but there's no real rules. You can kind of do anything you want. That's, that's business, right?

1:17:58That business has sort of, there's laws that govern business, but there's no actual like rules in the same way that when two teams go on an NBA court, they have to follow, you know, specific guidelines. And so we wanted it to, as close as possible, match sort of like free market competition. The one thing with this Ben Lang post that's interesting is this, to me, proves that if you are really ambitious and you want to have extreme scale and impact, you actually have to build a team. Right. Because this list would be more impressive if every single company on here had 20 to 100 million of ARR. I think we're ready.

1:18:33Delian, are you there? Can you hear us? Let's bring you in. I think he's close. we're figuring it out let's see three two one hopefully he's live going in uh he says he's waiting to be let in he's in the room let's get him on the show two call-ins one day it's a big big push but we're ramping up we're going to be doing 10 call-ins a day pretty soon as long as people want to come and chat um we got to make this this easy for folks hey delhi how you doing can you hear us there he is yo what's up sorry no all good in a while uh give me the update what's the latest with varda um yeah you brought in a capsule from uh you know sort of mach 25 uh down onto the uh you know australian desert floor um teams out there you know going to uh retrieve the capsule over the course of the next couple hours, currently nighttime in Australia.

1:19:35Yeah, all things, you know, sort of looking pretty good. So we're two for two, baby. Nice. What was in the capsule?

1:19:43This time around, it was Air Force Research Laboratory spectrometer. They're basically staring out of the window of the reentry capsule to basically characterize the plume of the reentry vehicle and compare that to some of the materials that are on board. I'll leave it to the viewer to speculate as to why the Air Force might want to do that in relation to potentially trying to figure out what other vehicles are made of, perhaps ones that they themselves did not make. And we'll leave that exercise up for the viewer. But we're super excited to sort of help out with the maturation of that type of technology and what it means for our country's national security.

1:20:15That's awesome. We got to call Jesse Michaels to get him to speculate. Yeah, exactly. What does the cadence look like going forward? Are you just doing, And do you know when the next one is already? Are there going to be just dozens of these? Give me the kind of next couple. Yeah, next week. You know, hopping right back up and getting back to it. So, you know, quick turnaround time, turning this from a, you know, one-off R &D mission to this year. We're planning to have four vehicles total. Three of those will be more DOD-focused missions. It's not to say that there won't be some farm on board, but it just won't be like the primary, you know, sort of focus of the mission.

1:20:47And then one of our missions this year will be a primarily pharmaceutical, you know, sort of focus mission. And, you know, we kind of expect that, you know, sort of blind on a go-forward basis. and looking to basically just continue to increase the cadence year over year. Definitely some vehicle improvements that will happen from one mission to the next. And generally for the time being, continue to land in Australia, just given the regulatory regime and the emptiness out there, making it a bit easier. But at some point, looking forward to returning back to the United States once that becomes available.

1:21:16Are you expecting that to get easier in the U.S. with the new administration? For sure. I think it's something that the new administration is clearly aligned with, but it is just one of these operational things that just takes some time to flow through, designating which of the military ranges is best as a landing range in the United States. We're basically just taking the same legal and regulatory framework that exists at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, both of which were government-run ranges that now obviously prioritize commercial activity. There isn't the equivalent of that for reentry right now.

1:21:46There is no dedicated government-run reentry range. We're exploring a variety of other user options, potentially, either sort of private, you know, sort of range as well as we continue to narrow in the size of our landing radius. And so over time may not need to be reliant on a sort of government plot of land, but instead, perhaps there's some private plots of land that are large enough. And so, yeah, we're super excited to have a... Sorry to interrupt. What is the ideal range size in your view this year? How much smaller can it be over the long term? and is that even the right question to ask?

1:22:21I think that information is ITAR restricted. So what I can say is on the order of around 100 kilometer circle or so, it's pretty big to have that be fully empty and owned by one person. But that circle will sort of get smaller and maybe sometimes we won't open the parachute and it'll be a very small circle. That's great. Are you tuning into the next Starship launch? What are you hoping for there? What are you watching for that? Yeah, I mean, look, we built this business predicated on Falcon 9, sort of reusability and the cadence of that. And it's been really exciting to see that mature over the course of the company's life.

1:23:02Falcon 9s at this point are launching every 24 hours. We're super enthused by SpaceX's progress and the potential of Starship. There's definitely, obviously, lots of kinks that need to be worked out, but not so dissimilar to Falcon 9. It definitely took it a decade from, you know, sort of the first landing to, you know, sort of becoming a, you know, sort of true workhorse that was, you know, sort of launching every day. Both SpaceX is much larger, but also so Starship in terms of complexity. And so, you know, I hope that they, you know, sort of get, you know, sort of through that, you know, sort of faster than a decade.

1:23:33But also they've got a lot of programs and payloads that are more important than us. You know, they've got everything from the, you know, sort of lunar activities that they've got, Martian activities, they've got Starlink satellites to launch. And so, So, you know, at least, you know, sort of my internal underwriting is like, I'm not quite sure that, you know, Starship is going to be launching people like Varda, you know, before the end of the decade. So it's like super exciting. But like, I also have to run a business, you know, month by month, year by year. And so I can't focus on things that, you know, sort of relevant to 2030.

1:23:59I have to focus on the things that are taking me up to, you know, sort of space today. Falcon 9 is a pretty damn good ride to orbit every 24 hours and, you know, reusable, at least for the first stage. Pretty, you know, sort of pretty good offering. And, you know, perhaps there are other people that are starting to, you know, sort of, you know, try to elbow into that sort of world. You know, God bless Papa Bezos and hope it works for him. And, you know, we're happy to get up to space, you know, which way or how, you know, rocket, rail, gun, space plane, you know, just whatever works. I don't care.

1:24:27I just need my sweet, sweet microgravity. Amazing. How big is the company? What roles are you hiring for? What's kind of like the biggest challenge over the next couple years? Yeah, we're about 115 people, basically entirely in the Los Angeles area. Over the course of the next year, I think there's two core areas. One is a pharmaceutical team is definitely growing. We're starting to work on a broader set of assets. We're about to open up a new lab space for the team. And so anybody with a formulation, crystal engineering, background, process engineering, the types of things that we do up there, we'd be super thrilled to have.

1:25:05And then, yeah, generally on the aerospace side of things, going from one R &D mission to now four flights next year, even more hopefully a year after, just means obviously we need a lot more talent on that side of the house. And that's everything from firmware, software engineers, flight software to avionics, structures, thermal mechanisms. and then we're starting to think about more manufacturing engineering since we're early in that transition from vehicles manually assembled by high-end engineers to starting to introduce more technicians into the mix and more automation. It's not to say that we're going to be looking like a Tesla-style assembly line anytime soon, but one day we need to start to look more like that over time and so manufacturing engineering as well.

1:25:54Are there any proposals that you're excited about in the new administration around the space economy? Any like, oh, if there was one law you could change, what would it be? That type of question. Well, you know, sort of the new administration hasn't talked a lot about the space economy, but it has talked a lot about, you know, sort of space being a potential zone for deterrence against our adversaries. And so that's definitely something that we think, you know, has a lot of potential. we think we can field something pretty near term there. And as you start to think about, you know, sort of space space activities that, you know, perhaps want to sort of go down to the ground.

1:26:34All I'll say is sort of the company that just bombarded Australia from space is probably sort of well suited to help out with that. You know, this time around, we pulled the parachute. But, you know, so next time you want us to not do that, we're happy to leave the parachute. Our very own space arms dealer. Taking a quick. I've always been consistent. I'm a space drugs and arms dealer. no surprises here. Yeah, no, it's amazing. You were putting the secret master plan in your bio years ago. So it's amazing to see it play out. You recently ratioed Chamath after he tried to make a reply to one of your posts.

1:27:10You said you had made more investments, I think, in the last few months than you had in potentially the last couple of years. Where have you been investing? You don't have to speak to specific companies because I'm sure a lot of those rounds haven't been announced, but where are you investing? Obviously just chasing generational founders, but what's most exciting to you in the early stage market today? It's all AI slop. I just want everybody to have their own anime girlfriend and she just, you know, sort of jerks you off every night. And that's how we, you know, sort of maintain world peace and as much as possible.

1:27:42Bread and circuses. That's what really changes the world and, you know, is really for the best. I mean, it's kind of what you probably, you know, sort of expect. I just like, I love stuff that is making stuff in the real world. And it turns out with this admin, they want us to do more of that in the United States. And I want to fund people that want to do that. And I want to do it with people that are like serious and it's their life's work and they're not just doing it because like, you know, dynamism is the new meme and they want to be a part of the meme. You know, I want to, you know, sort of fund the people where, you know, their family has been a manufacturing family for three generations and they think they can do it better because they're going to integrate some robots, some AI, et cetera.

1:28:16But, you know, still have that lifelong tie to that particular industry. And so I've been really excited over the past couple of months where it just feels like a lot more people are thinking about that being the type of company that they can build. And I think you're really just starting to see the clear – the difficulty in being somebody that was screaming, you know, sort of atoms, not bits. In 2019 was my former colleague, Everett, sort of RIP, would always sort of critique me for sort of saying that you know, Delian just likes investing in low margin, you know, sort of CapEx intensive businesses.

1:28:50And, you know, sort of five years later, you know, my sort of, you know, spin back to Everett would be, you know, which one do we think is going to be more valuable? The like, you know, sort of TikTok captioning app or, you know, sort of the company that's sort of cutting, you know, sort of metal for all the, you know, sort of nation's, you know, sort of, you know, future warfighting capabilities. I like the cutting metal one, but, you know, Everett, you're welcome to, you know, sort of go, you know, invest in your, you know, sort of captions, your products. I'm sure it'll be great, brother. Shots fired.

1:29:15love it a little friendly competition you guys can compare notes in a decade yeah that's great uh well it's 1 30 we'll let you get out of here this is fantastic thanks so much for stopping by thanks for coming on talk soon this is great never a dull moment with deliant we got we got two of the top the top poster in e-com and the top poster in hard tech the same day uh it's fantastic putting on a show uh yeah for for uh those those listening you know our strategy here is to develop regulars on the show people that call in you know we want to have if there's big news in e-commerce and big m &a we'll have sean frank call in you know get uh really sort of like boots on the ground takes on that if there's stuff happening in space we'll get delian to call in uh and both of them really delivered today and i wish those you know it'd be it'd be fun it's actually we want to leave the conversation wishing that it could just keep going and we'll bring them back on the next week yeah yeah definitely um oh that's fantastic uh well let's go back to the timeline we got plenty more to talk about today uh aj meta says uh couldn't be more excited to share what i've been building over the past year a cute ai alien friend that is fun helpful friendly and won't try to fall in love with you tollens remember things about you they're really good at voice chatting and they can peer into your world through photos.

1:30:36It has been so inspiring to see how people use their Tolan, help with school, relationship advice, fit checks, and just hanging out. It's been such a treat building this with his co-founders, an incredibly talented team of engineers and artists can promise that Tolan is unlike any alien you've met so far. We're live in the app store. Go check it out. Okay. So I know AJ, he's LA based entrepreneur. He actually was partnered with John Theo on birthday candles. I don't know if you've ever met him. So he worked at a crowdfunding platform that I used back in like 2013. Crazy. Uh, so, so I had seen Tolan.

1:31:10I had been, uh, somebody had sent me them probably, I don't know, maybe six months ago at this point. I didn't know, even though AJ is a buddy, I didn't know that he was involved with it because they didn't really come out, uh, very publicly. Um, so this is, this is really cool. This is a thesis, you know, um, people have been thinking about this sort of like AI tamagotchi or this ai sort of pokemon uh been a lot of conversation about it but very cool to see they have over half a million you know downloads uh developing um you know some some meaningful arr and a number one spot in the app store so i think there's going to be a lot of stuff here you know there's another company i'm forgetting the name of it right now but but making like embodied ai so kids toys that have llms built into them which is cool um so i'm just you know expecting to see a lot more of these and they seem to be there was always my take with the rabbit r1 yeah you know is this hardware device really cute teenage engineering developed it but mkbhg got a hold of it and was like this isn't replacing my iphone and it's like that's totally fair but i always thought i didn't buy one but i thought that it would be a great device for kids because it's something that they can just ask questions to interact take a photo what flower is this what animal is this like and it just feels like the the bar for hallucination as long as you gate it so it's not saying crazy crazy stuff if it tells you that like this squirrel is a mouse or something like that's not that big of a deal it's not that high stakes and some of those not like calling an uber and it sends it to the wrong place exactly so the frustration of a kid dealing with like you know some sort of rough edge around an ai that's still friendly and fun it's like it it's like the genmoji thing but applied to an audience that is totally receptive yeah and what do what do five-year-olds do they ask questions exactly so it's just this constant stream of questions and it's great when a parent's around, but it's funny when, uh, you know, my son, my oldest is not really at this point yet, but I imagine he's about a year or two away from starting to ask questions that I don't know the answer to.

1:33:07And so having this thing that's, you know, not necessarily a cell phone that they can have independently or when we're together to sort of generate those answers. Yeah. The five wise stage, you know, that whole question of like in management, you need to be able to ask five wise deep to understand the root cause analysis. Uh, toddlers amazing at that they just keep asking uh you know why does the fire truck come where does the fire truck come from who makes them okay who makes that part i'm like i actually don't know the supply chain that deeply man good luck yeah i'll have to have somebody on the show deep research yeah i'm sure we can pull it up but speaking of ai products that have gone off the rails and not been uh you know as focused as what is happening over at tolon um notebook lm from Signal.

1:33:51Notebook LM has had insane potential. One of the best products Google's ever put out in years. We talked about this on the show very early on. You could have it generate a podcast of two people talking about a topic to educate yourself about it. But in classic Google fashion. I used this to prep for a show once. You did? Because I was driving in one morning. We were doing a deep dive on something. I had zero context on the entire story. I generated a podcast about it, and it helped me really quickly get up to speed. So it's cool. But I actually have some backstory I was at a dinner in Venice that two of my buddies, Ben and Adam, who have a venture fund hosted.

1:34:29And one of the guys that the product designers from the Notebook LLM team was there. And he was excited because when you're at Google and you're working on this super hot startup within Google or this product, you become an instant sort of micro celebrity in the organization. And there's all this momentum and more resources coming your way. It's a similar sort of thing that a founder goes through at an external company when they have a lot of hype. But I believe he and his team or some members of the team just left to start basically that product. So I think that they lost potentially the sort of founder spirit that they had that were able to create that product.

1:35:06So Signal says, but in classic Google fashion, it seems like it lost all momentum and got left to die. No mobile apps, no meaningful iterations, just VPs choking it out. the vultures came and picked it apart google's playbook for smothering internal innovation is unmatched uh and then andre carpathy chimes in they iterated on a bit custom instructions and the ability to join the podcast but overall i agree i think i actually used it again this morning after a while and felt a bit regressed even the woman's voice especially sounds more slightly more dead slash less interested and signal says yeah it got hijacked by terrorists parentheses aka Google leadership.

1:35:42Not holding back. And yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Like, like even, even when it was announced and it was gaining traction, it was still hard to get into that pipeline. It was very unclear. It wasn't its own app. It was, it was, it was, it wasn't the Gmail launch where Gmail became this like, you know, phenomenon and it was a separate website. It was a, you know, first it was this Easter egg. Then you had to refer a friend, get storage and stuff and they they they they ran a great playbook not just promoting that as a separate product for gmail but also running all the growth strategy to make it more viral and make it work um and it just seems like that energy has kind of left especially when there's such an incentive to spin out of google raise a bunch of money and instantly be at 100 million arr and a billion dollar valuation which is something we've seen again again again now the big thing here is that google's leadership uh deserves a lot of they're certainly under pressure yep but they deserve the scrutiny and they deserve to be called out by letting these sort of high potential products you know like gemini in general right a lot of people are saying gemini is great when i can find where to use it or how to use it or it's not you know over promising and under delivering but there's this general uh when you compare sundar to satya they're just not even in the same league right And it sounds harsh, but I think that we should hold our trillion dollar hyperscalers leadership to a high standard.

1:37:09And I think it's very possible that Google needs new leadership at the top. People called for it when their AI image generation models were just, you know, generating just made up history, basically. And now it just seems Google has the most potential in, you know, they should be, Google should be trading as a meme stock if it had good leadership. And they're not getting, you know, any credit for the position and the opportunity that they have in the market because they seem to just continue to, you know, squander these opportunities. Yeah. Like, uh, you know, that, that, that whole Gemini generative AI image generation debacle.

1:37:56I think they fixed it. It's pretty easy to go in there. It seems like it was fine tuned after they built the model to inject a bunch of extra keywords to try and make it more diverse. And it had all these weird anomalies, easy to fix, easy to fix. There was clearly backlash. I guarantee they fixed that product, but they didn't integrate it anywhere. I just went to google and i said draw me a picture of a frog and it just gives me like google images results and then adobe stock footage and then pinterest and then reddit and it just gives me like the normal google results and it's like the google search bar is my entry into the google world and it should know that that is a that's an ai query i asked it to do something and it didn't do it and so like whoever's on that team is probably like oh well like they're not letting me stick my product in the main thing.

1:38:40And so now I'm off on this siloed thing. And how do I even get to that? I think they're just announcing that they're going to do a separate Gemini app. Maybe that's a good decision. I don't even know at this point. It's all very confusing from a strategy perspective, but they got to retain the talent. They kind of got to stop these people from jumping ship and raising billions. Yeah. I mean, I feel like if, if, uh, you know, we could probably talk to the guy who built the product. I'm blanking on his name now, but I think he raised, no, he already raised money i believe you should announce it here and uh anyway so we'll see but uh i hate to see a good american technology company yeah you know uh squander an incredible opportunity there was that whole narrative of like during the ai boom sergey and larry got super interested and they were coming back in and grinding and like picking up the momentum and there was a moment where we're like oh wow like google's gonna go back into founder mode they're gonna own 100 of waymo they're gonna like, you know, really double down on this stuff.

1:39:36The, the mission of Google is to organize the world's information. Like what could be a better distillation of that than building an LLM? Like an LLM is just distilling the world's and organizing the world's information into weights. Lost in the sauce. And they've done phenomenal products. The actual LLMs perform very well on the benchmarks, but they're just not productizing it effectively. Well, and they, they allowed a bunch of external investment into Waymo. That was weird. Which is weird, right? Why, why do you, I mean, you don't even have the, you're running this massive balance sheet and you have a breakaway, you know, potentially world, truly world changing product that's growing exponentially.

1:40:14Yep. And you need, you know, these big external. I mean, that one I can kind of steal, man, because it's like Google's mission is to organize the world's information and Waymo doesn't exactly do that. It doesn't exactly fit in the mission. And so I understand why that might be. and it's a very different capital intensive business. There's all these different layers of the stack, the routing, the partnership with Uber, who cleans them. It's just a very, it's like getting into delivery. It's like, it's more akin, I would expect like Amazon to really like want to be in that more than Google. But for the LLM stuff, like they got to figure out this product side.

1:40:48Anyway, let's move on to designer Ben Hilack. He's been on the show before, known for his Jaguar redesign. He says, I used to be really afraid of competitors and then I realized they can't hire me. Iconic line. Ben, I actually threw this in because he rolled out a new website that he made himself. And I think it's one of the best new sites that I've seen. So if you're listening, go to dawn.so and check it out. D-O-N? D-A-W-N. D-A-W-N.so. And he cooked it up himself. I'm navigating around it right now. It's fantastic. And yeah, check it out. But yeah, I think his broader point with this post, which is somewhat of a S word post, really trying to, John was upset that I said the S word yesterday.

1:41:43So I'm not going to say it again today, even in the context of an S post. But the broader thing here is having that confidence in himself. He's calling it a meme post, a joke post. A meme post. He's joking around. You know, it's like meme, we say meme coins, not S coins. Yep. Same thing. But yeah, I think founders that are overly focused on their competitors, it's just the biggest trap. You need to focus on what you're truly great at and try to spend as much time as possible doing what you're great at and augmenting your skill set. Yep. And you should never be afraid of competitors. It actually, yeah, it took me a while to realize that, you know, these markets that most people are playing in are so big.

1:42:26Just focus on your customers and focus on yourself, king. Yeah. Become unhirable, become ungovernable. Yep. It's great. Well, let's move on to Nick Carter, who did a fantastic job censoring some foul language on the timeline. He says, holy F star, star, star, S star, star, star, 35 billion. I'm weak. Hold me. Okay, so the news here is that CoreWeave is planning an IPO within a week that would allow them to raise$4 billion and would get priced at around$35 billion and pull out the size gong because Nick Carter is the Jason Calacanis of CoreWeave. He said it himself. There we go. Chris Pitt of the gong.

1:43:10Fantastic investment. Nick, I saw in the comments, is a friend of the show. but he was one in the first round of CoreWeave. And you can make a guess if he entered, assume that he entered at 50 million posts. The multiple on this one is absolutely egregious and will probably dwarf his earnings from his day-to-day job. Who knows? Who knows, right? He's made a lot of money in a lot of places. Yeah. He's very successful. But still, he says this is his best investment. by far. It's not even close. Fantastic. And we're just happy for him. So I wanted to highlight this. I love it. Yeah. CoreWeave, a lot of people are going to be looking towards this to price other data center projects.

1:43:55They're an AI cloud computing provider. They build data centers and then lease to people like Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Satya loves to lease. And so there's a number of players here and there's a big question on how the public markets will receive companies like CoreWeave as they go out to the public market. And so everyone is waiting with bated breath to see where this trades. We talked about Stripe earlier. The timing is certainly shaky, right? You can imagine Core is running the analysis on NVIDIA is down 6 % today. Even as they beat earnings, the market is starting to, the animal spirits are - Yeah, there's a few things going on.

1:44:31I mean, DeepSeek people got, they kind of coped through it with the Jevons Paradox thing. And then the XAI news and they kind of balanced out. But it was definitely like, it made people just do a slight double take on like, should we really spend the trillion on, you know, a big data center or something like that? And then also you have a lot of questions about the public markets and how the US economy will do under the Trump administration as these prompt campaign promises actually get rolled out. And if there are really significant tariffs or something like that, like there could be dislodging behavior in the market and that could have an have an effect all over the place.

1:45:08And so we'll see, but good luck to them. And, you know, if you're losing sleep. Over the markets. Stressing over the markets. We recommend that you get an 8sleep. Go to 8sleep.com. Nights that fuel your best days. 8sleep.com slash TBPN. Yeah. You have a fantastic quote there. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. How'd you do last night, Jordy? Let's check it out. 8sleep. I am mogging you in the sleep department. I already know I have a better score than you. 85. 95. 97. Oh, let's go. Okay. I got to get on my game. That was rough. I think six hours and 50 minutes last night. What'd you do?

1:45:43Seven hours and 59 minutes. Whoa, there we go. I'm just really dialed into my routine. I was texting somebody at 820 last night and they, they, they were like, they listened to the show. They were like, isn't this your bedtime? I was like, yeah, it is. I'm about to put away my phone and crash. Nobody out sleeps me. Nobody out sleeps me. It is, um, Um, no, it's one of those things. I do think that sleep, uh, you know, from a, from a fitness standpoint, once you identify as somebody that goes to the gym, I find it's very easy to just go to the gym every single day. So when I started working out, uh, after I parted too, partied too much, my freshman year of college, I just started going to the gym and I just, you know, identified as somebody that went every single day.

1:46:26So I would just go every day. Super easy. Sleep is very different. You're doing stuff in the evenings. You have varying levels of work. sometimes you need to be out of the house earlier than other times so it's hard to get consistent but just been focusing on getting extremely uh consistent and it's paying off because uh we need to put some real money on the line sure and we also need to test the testosterone levels because i was scrolling through youtube see a great chris williamson quote or clip he's interviewing dr pia peter atia yep you know two steps to one secret hack to improve your testosterone open it up i'm expecting some crazy supplement or something he's just get some sleep that's it i'm like okay wish it was more exciting but it's easy it's easy with an eight sleep it's free to sleep uh let's go to emily sunberg one of the greatest journalists in the game right now uh if you don't subscribe to her sub stack we highly recommend that you do uh she says she wrote about unwell and breaks down Alex Cooper's podcast career.

1:47:24So in 2018, Alex Cooper, now famous for Call Her Daddy, started alongside Sophia Franklin, debuted the Call Her Daddy podcast. So she's been in the game for seven years, eight years now. The show quickly gained traction with downloads soaring from 12 ,000 to 2 million within two months. That's a historic run. Fantastic. Tensions arose between Cooper and Franklin over contract negotiations and creative direction, leading to Franklin's departure. Cooper continued as the sole host steering the podcast through a transformative period. Cooper signed an exclusive three-year deal with Spotify worth over$60 million.

1:48:01Here's a little bit of lore back when this article, when the, when the feud was happening between, uh, the color daddy hosts, this is in 2020. I spoke with Taylor Lorenz. Taylor was writing for the New York times at that point. Um, and anyways, I, I helped Taylor get some context on the story. This was before she was, this was at a time when she really had the tech industry's attention. This was the booming creator economy. Um, I said, we're entering, this was a quote that ended up in the article. We're entering a period where creators are business owners and media brands of their own. They can't just be seen as employees.

1:48:38Uh, the tools are available to them to become founders and CEOs of their brand and develop businesses with multiple powerful revenue streams like merch, ad sales, and subscription revenue. This is your quote. This is my quote in the New York Times. And what I was speaking to was that it was going to be Miss Cooper was such a star that it was going to be really, really difficult to keep her there because she had so much attention herself. She could spin up a new RSS feed and, you know, have, you know, hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of subscribers in a week. Right. So the value, you know, historically you'd have these sort of, um, creator types that were dependent on the distribution of a TV channel.

1:49:18Right. So they, they could only be this big, you know, figure personality if they had their, you know, relationship with ESPN or CNN or CNBC now, um, you know, and this really proved out. She went on her own entrepreneurial journey, realizing that she had a lot more leverage in that situation, even though she was making millions of dollars a year at Barstool. Yeah. And so she signed with Spotify for$60 million, which was one of the platform's most significant agreements for a female-led podcast 2021. Then along with her husband, she launched the Unwell Network, a media company aimed at developing content with emerging creators.

1:49:53The network's initial signings including included influencers alex earl and madeline argy uh in 2024 she secured a 125 million dollar three-year deal with a serious xm setting to commence these are super max deals these are massive deals it's wild nba money yeah i mean for the super top power law podcast they get up there uh similar pat mcafee with espn i think the deal is yeah in the 100 million plus range uh joe rogan same thing uh transitioning caller daddy to a new platform and then in 2025 cooper introduced unwell hydration an electrolyte infused beverage line developed in partnership with nestle interesting that they're going with the big corporate uh partner out of the gate targeting women's wellness she also added several new shows to the unwell roster including farmer former barstool host grace o'malley and so she's really grown her empire and we'd love to see yeah And what Emily gets into in her piece, which you can go subscribe to her sub stack and check it out.

1:50:52But she just lost Alex Earl, which is this massive figure right now and one of the biggest anchors. And so the same issue that Dave Portnoy was experiencing with having the star and then losing said star is now the same issue that Alex Cooper, uh which is why people have had this you know idea for um the barstool for x the barstool of business the barstool of xyz right and the challenge is wrong because barstool is not the barstool of something it's day port not sure yeah and when we set out to uh start tbpn you know we there was a bunch of different networks that we could have worked with but But our point of view was we can set out on our entire business.

1:51:37We can have one producer. We're going to have to incur some costs to get the show running. But there are costs that most adults can cover, right? It doesn't cost millions of dollars to start a podcast when it would have cost millions of dollars to start a TV network. And that talent retention problem is so real. You saw it with Vox Media. I think eventually Kara Swisher spun out after she sold Recode. started her own thing again um uh johnny harris spun out of there and started a youtube channel he learned all the skills and so yeah there were startup costs he had to hire people to do the motion graphics and he had to work really hard to get it off the ground but very quickly people recognized him oh that's the guy from vox who does the border show i love i see it in my youtube feed and uh cleo abram left vox as well to do the same thing she was at a million subscribers in you know know, a couple months.

1:52:28And it's because Vice, the Try Guys did the same thing. BuzzFeed saw, I guess they were at BuzzFeed, but Vice and BuzzFeed guys, teams have left over time. And the easiest way to go viral on YouTube for a long time was just put up a video, say why I quit BuzzFeed, why I quit Vice, why I quit Vox. And boom, it goes viral. And overnight you have, you know, a hundred thousand followers or a million followers. This just happened with Donut Media. I don't know if you follow them at all, their car channel. A lot of people have been leaving that they got bought by i think some private equity firm or some investment firm and so the talent wasn't fully economically aligned and over time more and more of the talent just realized wait i should just be running my own show and so there's always this it's talent retention is very very tricky it's very very tricky to align the economic incentives when you have these these small teams but the future seems to be like the networks are not to me the the donut media or the barstool or the box or the vice, the networks are X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and you can be on all of them, but they have the power and they have something real that they are going to get a cut of our business and, and Alex Cooper's business and everyone's business.

1:53:38Um, and then, and then the shows are the individual people. And so aggregating people together, it just doesn't work unless there's something really crazy going on. It's really perfect. And so I think that the future is definitely what we're doing right now. And if you're more operating a scaled network or media business, you have the option to grow homegrown talent, which takes a long time and it's really hard. And then you might actually get a hit and then they'll leave. Or you have to pay a ton of money, which is what SiriusXM is doing, spending$125 million for a three-year deal. And that's just distribution rights.

1:54:13That's just distribution rights. Or maybe it's some piece of it's exclusive. Not fully exclusive. No. But it makes sense because they'll be able to sell$200 million of ads against all of that on the radio, hopefully. Yeah, or get, you know, subscribers that offset that cost, you know, user acquisition basically. But yeah, overall, going to be only, you know, SiriusXM is cable at this point, right? It will just sort of fade away over time. It will probably, you know, have some enduring value, but won't be the giant, you know, that it once was. Well, if you're looking to advertise a podcast, get on AdQuick.

1:54:50Out-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. Get an AdQuick billboard, folks. We got our own podcast billboards coming up. We're working on it. I can't wait. and i imagine a lot of people listen to this we need to do the sirius xm deal too so you can be listening in your car to tbpn and then you drive by our billboard and it's just 24 7 we're in your sirius xm is so funny i you know me i cycle through cars a lot so anytime you get a new car they're just sort of like aggressively marketing to you and they'll send you you know mail that says open this right now you open it up and it's like we'd like to offer you a free month sirius sex.

1:55:35Okay. Yeah. Stop opening them. But anyways, well, we got some news from Cognition Labs. Devin just got faster. They've heard your feedback that Devin is too slow. Devin is an end to end agent that makes hundreds of decisions for each task. So that test time inference stuff that we've talked about, essentially the reasoning models, that's what Devin's been doing for a long time. So there was and is still a long way to go, but they've made Devin 2.1 X faster over the past five months and the trend continues. And so congratulations to the team at Cognition Labs. If you're running a startup with a big GitHub repo, get Devin in there, get it in your Slack.

1:56:14Get him in there. Could be your next top engineer. Yeah. I mean, Devin is, it's weird saying he anthropomorphizing it, but Devin is like the top engineer at Gumroad, right? Yeah. Anti-work. yeah i mean it makes sense like there's so much like junk little tickets here and there code that needs to be fixed and like no one wants to hop on those yeah put devin to work over the weekend put him to work put him to work uh let's go to paul graham put him in workspace 17 actually yeah historically underperforming historically underperforming famously underperforming uh let's go to paul graham paul graham says there are a lot of people attributing crazy beliefs to Elon lately, but to me, the clearest sign that he is not entirely rational is the continued deprioritization of tweets with links in them.

1:57:03Everyone can see that this makes Twitter worse. Damn, hits him with the T word. Tweets. Yeah. Oh, that's disrespectful to the X culture. I mean, Paul follows it up by saying the suggestion that one should put links in replies is such an obviously broken workaround. Who starting from scratch would design Twitter to work like that. I totally agree with Paul here. It's totally possible to simultaneously see exactly why Elon is doing this. It may make X, lack of links makes X worse for users, but it makes X better for Elon, right? He wants to keep people on the platform and I bet you that it is working exactly as intended.

1:57:46Twitter used to be a place you'd go on and you'd discover articles, blogs, videos, music. You know, it was just sending you across. It was like the most amazing discovery engine for the internet. It was effectively like a stumble upon like product where you just go on. You didn't know what you were going to find, but you were going to find interesting, you know, topics. It was a great place for writers to distribute their work. It's still a distribution platform, right? With PMF4Die, we saw this. We, you know, launched a post, got a million plus views on the post. But didn't include a link. Made the post native for X.

1:58:19What works on X? Vibreels. What works on X? Threads. So whatever you want to do elsewhere that would be on a link, you can upload a two-hour movie if you want. You can't link to Netflix. I would argue that X is now a platform for attention and not distribution. So you can get people's attention on X, but it's not this sort of linear distribution of, I wrote a blog post. I'm going to post it on here. A bunch of people are going to click over. Distribution's never guaranteed. Um, you know, I, I still get a lot of links out to my personal website, but there's a very clear line. There's every single month, millions of people see my posts, some percentage of those click to my profile and then a smaller percentage click to, you know, my personal website and I see all the traffic.

1:59:01Right. So, um, anyways, some people post links and still go viral. Yeah. And the tough thing with Paul, he's an incredible writer. He condenses his, his thoughts down he writes in a very straightforward way he should be able to just post his post directly he can but i think he likes the aesthetics of his website totally that's the main thing is he doesn't want to conform to the axe thing but he should just take copy the just literally just copy the text and put it in a long post yeah and it'd be fine um but no and there's there's a huge edge that people like paul and ben thompson they built up these newsletter these these newsletter lists even mail i don't even think he has i don't know i think people just literally should go and check.

1:59:40Oh, there's a new BG post. But yeah, I mean, you either got to build your list, you know, offline and have that as a channel and grow it and have different growth strategies for that or repurpose all your content to be X native, whether that's through threads or long posts. You know, Lulu's been able to do it. I see tons of people that can do it with threads, tons of people that can do it with videos. All sorts of people have found ways to break through with the algorithm. But it is frustrating because it's high standard deviation. And when you have a post flop it's hurtful to your you know yeah we talked about it before i've had a lot of people uh reach out to me or you and say oh i think i'm shadow banned all this stuff i go brother you haven't posted you haven't had a had a banger in weeks it's not it's not the platform it's you it's you you got to take responsibility for the flops well speaking of an absolute master of algorithms let's go to mr beast he's raising uh he's raising money at a five billion dollar valuation.

2:00:38The YouTube star aims to raise a couple hundred million dollars and he quote lost tens of millions of dollars on the Amazon reality show. I don't even know how that's possible because isn't Amazon paying for it, but I guess he might've, I think he has a history of, uh, betting on himself to such an extreme degree that he will go out of pocket. Sure. Yeah. And consistently like, you know, ultimately the Amazon show is as much, uh, distribution and sort of marketing for the rest of his business empire as it is. I'm guessing he looked at it and said, I don't need this to be a profit center. I'm fine if it's a cost center.

2:01:14I have lunch. What is it? Because it's going to be so in the Mr. Beast deal, if you invest in a$5 billion valuation, you get shares in a company that's making 400 million in sales. And that's across Lunchly, the Lunchable product, uh beastables the candy company mr beast burger the ghost kitchens driven um burger delivery company and then mr beast llc which is the production company and so you get assets in all of those um but yeah he's always been reinvest everything he wants to be aggressive he's running his business more like a silicon valley startup trying to burn money really go for growth and then capture the value later and so far it's been working yeah Yeah.

2:01:58We got to hear the update on Mr. Beast Burger. I think the other from what I know the other you know that the sales of of uh lunchly and uh feastables have been pretty phenomenal yep uh mr beast burger had a bunch of issues early on uh i've never seen it anywhere out in the world it's a delivery only product but i haven't even seen it online once the last time i saw it was around the controversy around the quality issues that they were having yeah i mean the quality control on a product like feastables is way way easier because it's just if it leaves the factory in a good condition it's probably going to get to the customer in a good condition, especially when your chain is Walmart delivery, as opposed to it's being made in all sorts of different kitchens and then delivered by all sorts of different people.

2:02:43There's a million places where that can go wrong. And there's way more people taking a slice of the profit in these ghost kitchen companies than in consumer packaged goods, which are already not super, super high margin. But the Mr. Beast Burger, I think the financials were, it was always a harder lift than something like lunch later or feastables, which can totally, you know, just be, Hey, we make a million chocolate bars. We drop it off at Walmart and it flies off the shelf because I'm a celebrity. So now the whole concept of air dropping food to people is, is, uh, it sounds incredible in theory that you can just sort of instantly create a brand and produce it all over the country.

2:03:24The actual, um, reality is that these sort of fast food companies that you're competing with, right? Raising canes, things like that. They have spent decades developing these super, super Chick-fil-A has developed these super sophisticated supply chains to deliver the perfect meal every time. And Mr. Beast has a great brand with his demo, but the idea that he's competing with Chick-fil-A is really tough, right? Did you see Mr. Beast on Flagrant 2? Do you know that podcast? Andrew, why am I blanking on his name? He was on this comedy podcast and they play this prank on him where they're like, hey, we got some Mr.

2:04:06Beast burgers here. Let's all have them. And they open it up and they'd replace them with Big Macs from McDonald's. And they're just like, oh, this looks exactly like a Big Mac. Like, yeah. And they say that there's like some song that was popular with Big Macs back in the day. It's like sesame seed bun and like the, you know, cheese and spread or whatever. And they're like, this looks a lot like a Big Mac, Mr. Beast. Like what's going on? They really put them on the spot. And he like kind of didn't get it for a while. And he's like, you're like pranking me, right? And it was very funny. Anyway, to be honest, I wouldn't know.

2:04:36I wouldn't be able to tell the difference it's been. Yeah. I mean, I think the Big Mac has an extra slice of bread in the middle. So he should be pretty obvious. But, uh, and, and of course, like he should know if it's his product, but, uh, anyway, people were having fun with it. But overall, you know, I think he's, I think he's kind of pivoted through that, uh, spent less time with the things that are underperforming, spent more time with the things that are performing. And obviously the Amazon show, even if he lost money on it, it probably raised his profile. Well, he couldn't, his audience on YouTube was basically maxed out, right?

2:05:08Yeah. I mean, it's hard to, you say that. And yet it's like every couple of months he's celebrating, like now I'm at 400 million subscribers. Now I'm at half a billion subscribers. It's like, he really does seem to be able to just ham is probably but his tam is probably less than yeah facebook right yeah i mean it's the same thing that you see with like cnbc where cnbc just does not have a younger audience and so if he wants to expand the audience going into more reality tv style older crowd that's just tuning in just being on america's home screen america exactly crime exactly dominant yeah tv and he is like green and he's a generational game show host and there's no reason why you wouldn't see him develop reality tv shows co-host them host them or develop game shows and the next you know who wants to be a millionaire i remember that being like a really really popular jeopardy is a game show that's you know it's a little bit less gimmicky but um that that show has a really enduring value has had a number of hosts and you could see him developing something like that that captures both the online audience which is future and growing obviously but still goes after the old audience that's just tuning in every night Yeah, the question is at a$5 billion valuation, is that a company that, you know, the idea behind Mr.

2:06:24Beast raising for this holdco is that he will take the company public at some day. None of these investors would be plowing, you know, potentially a billion dollars into the business if there wasn't a path to liquidity. And I just don't see there being an acquirer that's not the public markets, right? And the question is, that stock has very real meme potential of like you have this younger generation of fans that just want to be a part and feel like they're an owner of the Mr. Beast world. At the same time, though, looking down into these, he's got CBG companies that we don't even know if they're profitable.

2:07:01So they account for$400 million. There's$400 million of revenue across the portfolio. We don't know if they're actually producing any sort of actual earnings. And then the production side of the business, unclear what the margin looks like on that. And over time, he's going to have to launch many, many, many more businesses. So investors that are investing at$5 billion are probably thinking this company, you know, this group is going to go public. Yep. And we're going to have to launch a lot of other companies to sort of even grow into that$5 billion valuation. Very different corporate structure because you could totally see Mr.

2:07:38Beast LLC, the production company, going and getting acquired by Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney even. Any of those could pick that up. Do those companies want also a CPG company? And Feastables, natural home at Nestle, natural home at Unilever, right? But does Unilever also want Mr. Beast LLC? So I wouldn't be surprised if you see him launch a company, scale it, use his platform, his production company as the go to market strategy, the initial marketing. And then at a certain point, it's like, hey, look, Feastables has really saturated our core market of Mr. Beast fans. Now it's Super Bowl ad time.

2:08:16Let's just hand it over to Nestle, take that cash back into the business and then do an even bigger stunt, more content and then a new product and then just keep doing that. uh he's been talking about getting into mobile games and you know we've talked about him getting into a vpn or something something software high margin we'll see where it goes but it's a fascinating story um anyway let's move on to uh an interesting question from yunyu lee says what happened to all of those companies that raised 500 million dollars to train a foundation model for coding did they all just get mogged by claude mogged by claude is a funny funny phrase i'm genuinely curious for what it's worth.

2:08:53I don't see Cognition Labs, Cursor, Windsurf, Bolt.new using anything other than Claude or GPT, maybe with the rare R1 sighting. And so, yeah, there's just a debate over do you train yourself or not. There's Magic AI, and then there's Poolside AI. Poolside was started by, I think it was one of the... Isn't Poolside a reference to the Poolside PMs? I don't know. What's the Poolside? Oh, you don't remember that viral video of the product managers saying they're remote working during COVID and it's these two girls and they're at the pool and they're like day in the life of a product manager. Here's what I do at my job.

2:09:25Well, I check in with the engineers and make sure that they're doing the tickets and everyone was super viral. I think that's the reference for poolside. I don't know, maybe not, but I think the idea is like you use this poolside AI thing and then you can be at the pool hanging out, which is just hilarious to me. I love the brand, but who knows if it makes sense to train a model for 500 million we've we've talked about this in the past uh you know so so a little backstory on poolside so jason warner is this co-founder and ceo poolside oh yeah he's previously had a illustrious career uh was the cto of github yep and he was the vp of engineering at heroku uh and he was also managing director at redpoint ventures so it makes sense you know when he starts a new company that raises you know obscene amount of money uh there's two strategies in in ai that we've seen to date.

2:10:14There's the ultra public sort of compete for attention on the timeline, which many of the foundation models have taken. And then there's the strategy of SSI, which is we're going to raise a bunch of money, but that's when you'll hear about us. And otherwise we're just sort of shooting for ASI. It's totally possible that, you know, these companies like Poolside and Magical, which is backed by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Another GitHub guy. Another GitHub guy. They're both in the two different companies. Yeah, yeah. Absolute dogs. Yeah. It's totally possible that they decided, hey, you know, there's there's this bloodbath on the timeline for attention.

2:10:46Let's, you know, focus on just core traction. You know, there's other approaches. If you have five hundred million dollars, you could spend tens of millions of dollars a year on direct sales. And it could be a lot more under the radar. But it is it is a very interesting call out that when you think about all these AI coding tools are using Claude. right that is like the preferred um you know llm uh under the hood so uh credit to claude for staying so competitive despite it not even necessarily being their core focus they just i need to do a deep dive on github copilot like was github copilot a custom trained llm or was it built on top of gpt3 i think it might have been built on gpt3 but you could imagine that that would color like the github experience could color how you think the market will evolve because if they're if they're building copilot and these two guys both have real deep insights into what's going on github and they're seeing this and they're saying hey it makes sense to train a custom model just for code then yeah makes sense to double down on that at the same time there's a lot of people in ai who believe that uh i i talked to one guy actually the guy from etched uh he was saying that i was like how do you think like the humanoid thing plays out like like is it important to just include all human knowledge in in those training in those foundation models as well and he was like literally yes like i think that adding the corpus of every book ever written will help a humanoid walk and i was like that's an that's an interesting take but like there's this idea that like yes claude like in order to be a good programmer should also understand every single language and every single philosophy textbook and every single history textbook even though it doesn't it applies all it's it's the same exact thing uh for any uh you know uh career path if you have a bunch of knowledge from totally unrelated subjects, it can oftentimes allow you to be better at that one specific thing.

2:12:38And so I think there's a real case for that. But all that being said, in the same way that there's 20 different consumer LLM and sort of like chat apps, there's 20 plus heavily funded AI coding products, and they won't all make it. There will be multiple winners because these aren't, it's not obvious yet that these are sort of winner-take-all markets right um but i say let them cook i say good luck to um hopefully it works out hopefully we get some cool products i'd love to see it anyway let's move on to levels io he says uh i've spent probably hundreds of dollars on microsoft flight simulator 2020 and every time i load it i'm stuck downloading new 10 gig updates and it takes me 15 minutes before i can even fly with my game at least i can just fly immediately without updates and so he levels i owes a indie hacker he's been on uh lex friedman show very popular on x he built popular about his wins but also his failures he's launched i think 100 plus products many of which have flopped but many of which have done very well very cool his his general ethos is just take tons and tons of shots on a goal and uh he's he's bucked the venture train he's he's very outspoken in that he thinks venture is silly uh and at times it is but he's managed to create a bunch of really cool products uh especially you know more recently he i think a few years ago was focused on remote work so he had a bunch of products related to to that uh what was it called like nomad nomad list that's it nomad list just cool he was sort of living that sort of digital nomad lifestyle that was uh i was never big in that world but uh it became very popular and then uh now he's pivoted into ai He does some stuff in image generation, which is really cool.

2:14:26And then I'm excited to see what he's doing in flight. He's created this sort of flight simulator that almost feels Minecraft-esque. And did you ever do flight simulators growing up? Not really, a little bit. I used to do flight lessons, and it was a fun way. I had the full rig, everything strapped up to my desk, and the yoke and everything. I was big into that world. Nice. and so this is funny this guy gabriel is pissed off that uh levels is monetizing his game that he released for free so he releases his game he says you can play it and then he adds these upsells where if you want to buy like a f15 in his game you got to pay 30 bucks uh and gabriel says i make games for a living personally i wasn't bothered until he added a 20 30 micro transaction really a micro transaction that's more of a macro macro transaction um but yeah i mean it's it's fun it's good demo of him being able to build basically a game you know with uh a bunch of ai coding tools and he's building in public but then still driving a bunch of attention i think elon quote tweeted his announcement uh video and he did a great job of taking the the product he produced and instead of just saying hey go check this out here's a link he posted a video to really give you full context yeah went viral elon quote tweeted i'm sure a lot of people found it a lot of people downloaded it or just opened the web browser started playing around if they liked it they pay 30 bucks he gets to make a little money it's great and what should he do with all that money he's making he should of course buy a Vacheron Constantin watch I was in West Hollywood Beverly Hills going to a business meeting this morning I should have been wearing this watch because everyone at breakfast was in absolute hitters but I love that Vacheron's advert running this ad campaign called The Quest.

2:16:18And they are on the back of The Economist this week. Full court press. Say 270 years of doing better if possible. And that is always possible. In 1755 in Geneva, a quest begins. A quest for excellence in high watchmaking. A quest of passion, perseverance, and mastery. A quest to do better if possible. And that is always possible. The quest that never ends. Vacheron Constantin celebrates seeking excellence for 270 years. They're celebrating their 270th anniversary of a big ad campaign. Just to give people some context, Vacheron was started roughly 20 years before America, which is pretty difficult to fathom.

2:17:02So this single watch brand predates America by 20 years. and it's important for people to know that they can go on bezel today and see almost the entire catalog of Vacheron. They got a bunch of stuff on there. We have a thesis. We should put it on the record. We have a thesis that Vacheron, it's the least well-known Holy Trinity watch brand. Even if you just said Holy Trinity to somebody that wasn't super familiar with watches, they would think Rolex, AP, Patek. But it's actually Vacheron. AP and Patek or Patek. And I think that this brand is about to go on a generational run. You just picked one up.

2:17:46I've been looking at a few myself. And, you know, it's a sort of undiscovered Holy Trinity brand. And the world is, you know, seems to be responding now. They have the new 222, which I have my eye on if I can get my hands on it. And they haven't really overextended in the way the other Holy Trinity companies have. Yeah. Less techs coming out with a cubitus, terrible press run, terrible reactions broadly. Very controversial watch. Probably going to get discontinued. Who knows? I think potentially underrated, but continue. For sure. And AP is going kind of crazy too. Just massively overextended, kind of pissing off a lot of core watch enthusiasts by these crazy sort of DJ partnerships, which may end up being smart, but following more of a LVMH style playbook.

2:18:35Let's move on to Jonathan Wasserstrom. He says, I need some liquidity so I can take all of that liquidity and put it back into a different, equally, if not more illiquid new deal. I love it. Jonathan's a buddy. He started a commercial real estate marketplace back in the day. uh who's a founder now does a bunch of um uh venture stuff uh has a pretty active syndicate on angel list we did a deal together last year but uh this resonated with me my entire life has been you know working in illiquid private markets getting some liquidity tripling down into the next thing and you know just uh doing that uh and i'm sure i'll be doing that for the rest of my life that's the game and i love it so uh you may as well just say it how it is which jonathan says very eloquently.

2:19:23But if you got a bunch of illiquid assets, you got to lever up. You got to take out some debt against them and then roll that into something else. Yeah. Leverage, baby. Let's move on to Sam Parr with an absolute banger. It's at 16K likes. I saw this and was like, this is so good. We don't have the ability to play it right now. Yeah, we can't play the video. We got to get videos. Yeah, we had a brief run with videos working. But it's a fantastic meme of Sam Sulek photoshopped into a board meeting talking about his leg day in granular detail. Sam says it's the best meme he saw in the last seven days, hands down.

2:19:59That's saying a lot. I saved it to my phone because it's so funny. I think I could actually maybe just play the audio for everyone here. Yeah, do that. Let's see. Here. Holy shit, veiny as well. I mean, pumped, veiny, fatigued. What other descriptors are there of a good lift? but i'll make this quick because i gotta get some i gotta get some rest asap the last thing i want to do is wreck my sleep schedule but you tell me man i mean that's a fucking pump for sure i've kind of lost a little bit of the striations kind of on this side unpumped there's a ton of fancy pants lines in here but this is way more small than i need to be happy with it oh it's so good amazing i love sam sulek i really hope he uh becomes a terminator fish tank uh maybe i don't know he just like has his own little like tone of voice but uh uh what a fantastic influencer he's been on a historic run and good luck to him in the arnold classic coming up he's going for his ifbb pro card you gotta stream that yeah and uh i think it could set off a a huge wave of ifbb attempts in the silicon valley world a lot of capital allocators getting into bodybuilding keith reboy was early with the berries thing popularizing working out the next logical step become a mass monster go for the ifbb pro card we've been working on it um speaking of optimization it's official go to the next post you can now track uh blake and patty they're in the cage you can track their productivity uh live so somebody was inspired by optify the the the yc sort of sweatshop sass company that went viral uh or was it monday or i think it was monday and they basically rebuilt the exact product so leveraging the stream this it takes footage live footage from the stream yeah and then tracks when they're seated at their desk actually working versus off doing other things so yeah you can pull this up it's pmf.pmf or die.xyz they got their own domain posted it and you can live see you can see exactly when they're sleeping like not in their desk you can see how many sleep they're getting they built this so fast yeah i need to find we need to find the guy that that did this and hire them i guess by at my real dev so go give them a follow because they're going to build something fantastic soon This is great.

2:22:25I love this like meme website, one-off, you know, just simple demos. We've seen a bunch of people build stuff like this for the show, ad networks and automatic clipping for us and stuff. There's so many cool things that people are doing. So you'll love to see this. And it's funny. This is the thing that like it could just be Photoshopped a few years ago. You go back 30 years, Photoshop didn't even exist, right? You couldn't even make a meme. Now you can actually make the full website, make the full product. Thanks to artificial intelligence for sure. It's great. I love it. Uh, let's move on to Lewis Hamilton.

2:22:56He says, now's the time he's on the cover of time magazine. Congratulations to Lewis Hamilton. Force power. Now at Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton races to claim his place as F1's greatest. Certainly hope it happens. He is, uh, he's a phenomenal, uh, phenomenal driver to watch. It's going to be very tough, right? For our Ferraris are known for their, uh, lack of reliability. And if there's one thing that, that helps an F1, it's a reliable, uh, you know, racing i don't know how real that meme is but i got into f1 for a couple seasons and i was like okay yeah i know ferraris are unreliable and i saw charlotte claire like like breaking down all the time and i was like how did that translate to the f1 team you think it'd be like maybe it would apply to one but not the other but it really does seem like it's a it's a thing across the board and it's got to be extremely frustrating if you're a driver but good luck to them hopefully ferrari irons it out has a great car yeah they're doing uh testing right now fantastic uh sakir and I'm excited to see the season.

2:23:55It could be the downfall of this show. People complain about other podcasts pivoting into pure politics, staying away from technology and business and markets. We like to stay focused on technology and business. We slip into some other categories every once in a while but if the show really goes down the hill, I think it's going to become an F1 podcast. We'll only be talking about racing and cars the whole time. So hold us accountable if we do that. Get us back on the topic. Keep it tech and business, guys. Anyway, should we close out with Bology? Bology has an announcement about Biograph, the world's most advanced preventative health and diagnostics clinic designed to drive meaningful advances in health span and lifespan.

2:24:33Bology says, what's wrong with you? You don't know. You don't know if you're quietly sick. You don't know if there's a creeping time bomb in your body, one that might be detected and prevented by a simple test. But you're busy. You can't spend time worrying about this stuff. Ideally, you just want to get periodically scanned by a set of machines, have them determine what's wrong, if anything, and then dispatch treatment accordingly. That's why Peter Attia and his friend John Herring founded Biograph, and it's why Bology became one of their first investors. The product packages just about every useful biomedical test into a single battery, from blood work to EKGs, from CT scanning to whole body MRI.

2:25:09It integrates all these measurements in an app that and tracks them across time, giving a comprehensive overview of known risks for cancer, heart disease, metabolic disease, neurological issues, sleep disorders, and more. It schedules you for a recurring checkup every six months and uses both basic baselining and advanced AI to determine whether your results are normal. I'm sure that Elizabeth Holmes is crying in prison thinking that she should have built this instead. Use off-the-shelf hardware. We don't know if she's using cutlery from the kitchen to assemble her own chips and develop her own machine.

2:25:44She's like, give me all the shivs. I'm building a new MRI. She's collecting. Why does she have so many illegal cell phones in cell block 17? Oh, well, it's because she's developing an EKG and a CT scanner. Yeah, this is cool. It makes sense to combine all of these technologies. And if there's one thing people value, it's their life. So I can imagine that people would pay a lot, uh, to get access to this. And there's so many cool things you can, you know, do with this data. You can imagine that life insurance companies would, um, you know, uh, one day ask their clients, like if you've ever gotten life insurance, they'll send somebody out to, you know, do tests on you.

2:26:23And, um, yeah, you can imagine, you know, life insurance being like, cool, we're happy to insure you, but get this test first so that we can set your rate. Right. and um yeah so so very cool application of the tech and it's already seen you know people catch uh early onset you know cancer and things like that through blood testing biomarkers all the time um so i'm excited about uh i hate when a company like this goes live and i didn't hear about it until it went live because it means i'm not invested in it but uh you know uh very cool to see peter atia launch this and it's cool because you know peter atia is historically you could email him and sign up to be a client or a patient of his, but it was something in the range of 200K a year.

2:27:08So it's completely unattainable for most people. And even with that kind of pricing, there'd be a really long waiting list. You'd see him a couple of times a year and he'd give you advice. And so he's going to be able to offer a lot of the value of his service for a fraction of the cost. I imagine you can imagine something like this costing five thousand dollars a year and getting a lot of the value of what peter provides in terms of longevity from that let's get sam sulik in there i want to know his biomarkers because i want the same biomarkers that's true and that's our show thanks for watching real quick uh some some live breaking news uh open ai launched a new uh product 4.5 okay today we're releasing a research preview of gpt4.5 our largest and best model for chat yet so again we've talked about the roller coaster the llm roller coaster we're all on it we're all riding it whether you like it or not and uh you know clawed out its moment earlier this week xai had its moment last week deep sea over the weekend and uh yeah this is why lulu's advice have just launched because you're not you know the best case scenario is you kind of own the spotlight for a few days did open ai even do like a video for this?

2:28:21They did a live stream. Okay. Not on X. Okay. Uh, and then they've posted a handful of videos. Okay. And it's interesting because I wonder how much Elon is nerfing their, their reach. Um, might actually be, he might actually be a little wary to do that given how many, you might be amplifying it with the crying emoji. Yeah. Who knows he gets in there. Yeah. saying scam reply something yeah i mean attention is attention um but uh yeah it says rolling out now to all chat gbt pro users and so we should go uh and try it out and get our reactions tomorrow yeah we'll break it down tomorrow i'm sure there'll be a bunch of good analysis and we can test drive it oh i got 4.5 right here ask it to tell you how many r's are in strawberry it's just like 10 4 ,000 4 ,000 4 ,000 4 ,000 just like shut up actually I don't want to hear any of your joke prompts anymore I'm sick of you human yeah I have I have levels of intelligence that you couldn't even you know experience get out of here get out of here anyway we're getting out of here thank you thank you leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify leave us a review put an ad for a company you work for company you started company you just love in the review.

2:29:39We'll read it on the show. And that's our show for today. We'll be back tomorrow. We'll see you then. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you. Bye.