Google Doubles Down on Cloud AI, Hulk Hogan Passes Away at 71, Hill and Valley Forum Reactions | Casey Neistat, Chris Samra, Zak Kukoff, Vineeta Agarwala, Micky Malka, Alex Hawkinson

29:32Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing it. It was great talking with Christina yesterday. She's an absolute dog. Boardroom general. Boardroom general. She put the KPIs in orbit. She really has. She really has. Did you see that? Did you see that chart that Reed shared? Yeah, this chart. She says, Andrew said, Christina often talks about stacking rice on the chessboard. And I didn't see this until after the show, but I was like, it seems like you guys are just chopping wood. Like, yeah, just out there, like putting in the work. Just, you know, a couple percent here, a couple percent here.

30:07Just very consistent growth, very consistent growth, very smooth growth curve into a monster of business. So congrats to everyone over at Vanta on the new round. And we will go back to Google. Google. So, more broadly, the way in which Google seems to have flipped the switch in terms of going all in on AI along with meta spending on AI talent really does strongly suggest that AI in the end is a sustaining technology that favors the incumbents most of all. Both see a line of sight to new revenue streams and critically, both can fund AI from profits, not speculative investment or debt. And, of course, both have distribution, including search.

30:43Sometimes the empire strikes back. I love that. So there were other takes from Search. You'll have to subscribe to CertEquery to get the full analysis. You've got to go and subscribe to CertEquery. If you're not subscribed, what are you doing? But the interesting takeaway from Search is that it seems like Google's being a little squishy about, hey, we don't want to report certain KPIs anymore. so they used to report paid clicks and now the chief business officer philip schindler is saying and and on your paid click question look to be very clear i think we said this before we manage the business to drive great outcomes for our users and attract our attractive roi for our advertisers we don't we actually don't manage to pay clicks or cpc targets which is fair and good but it's funny because ben thompson's like but i want that data that would be helpful to me I mean, when a business has a metric that they tell you is important for a long time and then they suddenly tell you it's not important.

31:42Don't worry about that. You got to read into it a little bit. But it does make sense. They're a huge business. They've moved on to bigger and like higher levels of abstraction. Just look at the growth in tokens. Yeah. Don't worry about anything else. What he says is that there are product changes and policy changes that actually drive better monetization, but at the expense of paid clicks. And that's probably AI searches and stuff like that. You'll see in the 10Q paid clicks were up 4 % year on year, but a number of factors affecting this these metrics from quarter to quarter Such as advertiser spending product changes policy changes user engagement So it's really important when it comes to pay clicks and CPC to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions solely based on these metrics Don't put me in the truth zone on this he says So Ben Thompson's hey, this is exactly what you said I don't even think you were you pre read this but you basically have Ben Thompson working in your head because this is what I said When Ben Thompson came on the show, I was like, I think your way of thinking has been so ingrained into my mind that I think that I have an original thought and you've already thought it.

32:42Okay. So this is what he says. I haven't read the article. It says, the more that management tells me not to pay attention to paid click rates, the more I want to pay attention, which is exactly what you just said. Regardless, once again, the fact that paid clicks were up 4 % and search revenue was up 12 % makes it clear that search growth is primarily being driven by higher prices. And so the actual number of clicks is up 4%, but revenue is up 12%. That means that they're monetizing each click better. But people are obviously going to read into, oh, paid clicks aren't growing that fast. Like the actual pie isn't growing that fast.

33:20They're just getting like, it's basically like, you know, once Instagram reels is popular, everyone's watching it, then you just got to put more ads in the feed. Right. And that's kind of that seems like what they're doing. And that's what's driving search revenue up 12 percent. But AI overviews is another question. This is a funny one where basically the chief business officer, Philip Schindler at Google, basically says that AI overviews are monetizing as well as other Google searches. And Ben Thompson says, given the fact that the vast majority of Google searches don't monetize at all because people just click on a link.

33:59That's what I was about to say. The oftentimes the if you're searching for information that you can have very low purchase intent. Yeah. Like how many times a day do I search for a specific fact? Yep. And never would have you could show me the best ad in the world and I wouldn't click through because I'm just looking for a fact. Yep. So if you're looking for something like, you know, Hulk Hogan's age, that's not a purchase intent. If that comes from an AI overview or it comes from a you know how they used to have those like knowledge boxes or like we would pull from Wikipedia. Or if you click on Wikipedia, none of that is making Google any money.

34:35So it really doesn't matter the UI or the actual underlying technology to get you that answer. And then Gemini is on absolute tear, really remarkable. How many monthly active users do you think the Gemini app has? These are MAUs, not DAUs. On the mobile app, web app combined? The Gemini app, yeah. I think this is probably across mobile, web, and desktop, but I would assume mobile. 70 million? 450 million. Oof. Big, right? And it doubled. And that's signed, like, I guess, I mean, they kind of get the, it's kind of a, they have a cheat code because everybody already has a Google account, so they're, like, signed in.

35:13Yep. But in terms, I don't know. They're monthly, and what we know from semi-analysis is that they're not taking share of queries that much, but 450 million downloads on an app and monthly active users is pretty, pretty high. And so if there's a world where Google can build a business around, if they can bring in ads faster and keep the Gemini app cheaper and offer better products, and you get deep research, you get agent, you get the$200 tier, the ad-free, if OpenAI and ChatGPT has a$200 tier that's ad-free, and then Google's giving you the same product and the same experience but with ads for free, like that feels like an Android iOS battle going on.

35:58That feels like something that could actually be pretty sustainable and kind of drive this like little bit of a duopoly. I don't know. We'll have to see how it goes. But daily requests grew over 50 % from Q1 to Q2. And I think everyone is pretty surprised by that. And I was also surprised when I went and pulled up the Gemini app, when I went to go download it, the number of five-star reviews is like hundreds of thousands. And I was like, okay, this is very serious. And that reflects the actual number that they shared, 450 million monthly active users. So still a lot of work to be done. I was very frustrated when I went to go get VO3.

36:41I got the Gemini app, and they were advertising VO, but I couldn't access it. Is Gemini a default in Android yet? I don't know. I imagine that it has to be pre-installed in the next round of Android phones that go out. Why would you not want that pre-installed in there? But I would be surprised if that's what's driving it. Because, I mean, how many Samsung Galaxies have they sold in the last quarter? Probably not 200 million, right? I doubt that that's what's driving the growth. But maybe that might be an interesting thing, how many of them are pre-installs, pre-loads. but even then you have to open it to become a to become an mau yeah but yeah maybe maybe they're testing maybe people will churn and go back to open ai and chat gpt android users have had access to google assistant for a long time yeah that's getting phased out it's just gonna be gemini yep uh well let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of ai graphite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster you can get started for free graphite.dev i don't know if people can hear but anytime we do a an ad read the entire team breaks out in applause in the studio so it's really let's hear for some advertisements in other very very sad news Hulk Hogan has passed away at age 71 cardiac arrest was what you said right Jordy I didn't actually be else that I looked a little bit more into some of the history I wanted to know a little bit more about about his story.

38:09There's a whole bunch of different profiles. There was at one point going to be a biopic about him. In a recent interview with Variety, director Todd Phillips revealed that his long gestating Hulk Hogan biopic will not progress. Unfortunately, it got canned. This was back in about a year ago today. I love what we were trying to do, but that's not gonna come together for me. Chris Hemsworth had signed on to play Hogan in early 2019 with the Joker writer and director duo Todd Phillips and Scott Silver attached to lead the charge films producers you got Phillips Hogan Hemsworth Bradley Cooper Michael sugar sugar sugar sugar I don't know sure act and Hogan's long long time pal and and New World Order stable mate Eric Bischoff in a July 2020 interview with total film Helmsworth described the training he'd have to undergo to transform into the 80s WWE icon.

39:06As you can imagine, the preparation for the role will be insanely physical. I will have to put on more size than I ever have before, even more than I put on for Thor. There is this accent as well as the physicality and the attitude, Hemsworth said. The Hogan biopic would explore his rise to stardom in the early 1980s. His WWF World Heavyweight Championship win over the Iron Sheik in 1984. It's a good role. You know that Hemsworth has a personal fitness training app called Center? I have heard of that. Is it good? Like, well, I'm really going to have to use my app a lot for this role. Maybe we should start using his app, get on the Hulk train, become Hulkamaniacs, as they call them.

39:46Did you grow up watching wrestling at all? I didn't, but I was aware of Hulk Hogan just through the lore because it was so dominant. I feel like I would hear more about Hulk Hogan in the context of the Gawker saga. Oh, yeah, we should go into that. I want to pull up this Hulk Hogan video. I'll send it to the team. There's some great rants. Where is it? There's one where he's talking trash about something. Wow, everything's just like R.I.P. but he was legendary at like, I don't know, what do they call it in UFC where you like are pre-show pump up talking about the competition. I guess it's like a promo.

40:37Is that what it is? That makes sense. Yeah, this one, Seek and Destroy. We got to watch this. I will put it in the tab so we can watch this. And then yeah, we should talk about the Gawker fallout a little bit. Let me put that in there. The best promos, Hulk Hogan. seek and destroy. Let's pull that up. Hulk Hogan has recently been a founder. He has a real American beer, which he did with the Budweiser family. This is what we need to channel. We need to bring this energy to the show every day. But there are those right now that are questioning whether you're going to withstand the big man. I don't care about those people, man.

41:19I don't care about those people that aren't Starcraven Hulkamaniacs. I could care less what they think. I'm fighting for life, brother. I'm fighting for all those people that have remolded their lives, man. Model after Hulkamania. Get their priorities in order, man. Walk around with a lot of pride. As far as those people that are on Andre the Giant's side, I wish they'd come on down, too. I'd like to slap them around just for a warm-up. But I've already gone through my transformation, man. I'm ready for Pontiac, Michigan. I'm not the Hulk anymore. I'm the Hulkster, man. Look into my eyes, man.

41:53Come on, that mountaintop. Back off, little man. I'm on that mountaintop. And I'm waiting for you, Andre. And I'm guarding that mountain. And the holster that's guarding has got a 32-inch neck, a 64-inch chest, the largest arms in the world. And I'm geared to seek and destroy. Seek and destroy the cancer of Andre the Giant. Seek and destroy the weasel's empire. and what you're gonna do Andre in Pontiac Michigan when Hulkamania destroys you he is indeed absolutely livid going against the man at one time he looked up to and respected that's the energy I want uh Sindar Pachai to bring to Google I got 85 billion of capex I grew 50 percent top line and I'm coming for Sam Altman they're coming for me I'm coming for I'm coming for me i'm coming for that i got 450 million maus on the gemini app the search overviews are going great they're monetizing just as well as regular search results come here to mountain view get your get down to mountain view and if you're riding with uh if you're riding with the the andre the giant like you got to be a stark raven hulka maniac that's so good i love it uh Chris Hemsworth signed on to play Thor, from Thor, signed on to play Hogan in early 2019.

43:22He said he had to put on a lot of size. The biopic would have explored his rise to stardom in the early 1980s and then Hulkamania takeover that ruled the wrestling world well into the 1990s. Philip's take on Hulkamania was going to stay away from Hogan's recent controversies, instead focus solely on the early years. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are currently developing a film titled Killing Gawker that will explore Hogan's campaign against the media empire in the wake of an explosive home video. Hulk Hogan was six foot seven, which is why you'd be able to height mog him. Pretty close to me. He's got you on next.

44:03He's got me on next conference for sure. For sure. And I think I will be staying away from his supplement stack. hoping to make it longer. Really sad though. Yeah, very sad. What a career and what a fantastic, the Hulk Hogan theme song, I am a real American. Such a good song, such a great rallying cry. That's the name of his beer, Real American Beer. Yeah. Fight for the rights of every man. Such a good song. Light, crisp, crushable. So there is a reflective piece in the New Yorker about Hulk Hogan's Gawker lawsuit that we can go through. But first, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

44:49Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Go to Linear.app to get started. That is a powerful homepage. And, you know, if Hogan's selling beer, you've got to get on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. A friend of mine was business partners with Hogan on that. That's crazy. So we have Zach Kukoff joining at noon to break down the AI day yesterday in Washington, D.C. The besties met up with the Hill and Valley crew. Honestly crushed it. We have a bunch of great posts that we can run through.

45:29First, let's go through a little bit of the Hulk Hogan loss, Gawker lawsuit. This is from 2016, well before we actually saw the results from all this. But on Monday afternoon, a Florida jury added$25 million in punitive damages to the$115 million it had awarded Hulk Hogan on Friday in his invasion of privacy case against Gawker media. Hogan sued Gawker for posting portions of a sex tape it received from an anonymous sender. It's a shocking amount, not least because it's$40 million more than Hogan, whose real name is Terry Valera, had demanded. Verdicts of this size can pose an existential risk to a media company.

46:09That's what happened to Gawker. Gawker has reported that it earned$44 million in revenue in 2014. In January, Gawker's owner, Nick Denton, announced that he had sold a portion of his company to investors in order to fund this case. Gawker will certainly appeal the verdict, as it should, after it pays a bond of up to$50 million, arguing that the jury was unreasonable in finding that Hogan's right to privacy outweighed Gawker's right to publish the material, which it believes was of public interest, which is a very, yeah, it's a strange defense. It is. It is. It is hard to argue. He is a public figure, but this is a very personal thing.

46:46Yeah, I mean, if they had just posted that it existed and they had seen it. That's true, and that's kind of what's happening with the Wall Street Journal. They're not posting everything all the time with regards to the Trump-Epstein stuff, but they're referencing that it exists, that they verified it, and that seems to be a safer path for media companies to kind of report that they've confirmed that something exists without actually putting everything out necessarily. So, the publication of the videotape of consensual sex between adults is not the most appealing place to plant a First Amendment flag, but it is worth considering the possible effects on publishers if a judgment of this magnitude is allowed to stand.

47:24And so the fallout from Gawker was certainly celebrated in tech because they also had Valleywag, which was very annoying to a lot of people in tech because it was basically like TMZ for tech. I don't know if you were aware of Valleywag back in the day. Before my time. Before your time. But it did have like a chilling effect. I remember being at South by Southwest and a friend of mine who was a venture backed founder at the time was really into doing handstand push-ups and was doing handstand push-ups at like a party that was being thrown that were people just kind of hanging out and he was just doing some handstand push-ups as one does.

48:03And there was a Valleywag reporter there and wrote about it as a characterization of like how bro-y the situation was, but didn't include his name. And he was like, I dodged a bullet because like he could have been forever outed as someone who does handstand push-ups. In many ways he could have built his aura. I agree. If he was named. In the modern era, it would have been incredibly bullish, but at that time, it did feel like something that could destroy you. It was a very tense time, very, very tense time. Roy Lee would not have done well during that era. Yeah, it's interesting. Maybe he would have changed the meta though, because he's making shirtless posts on the timeline, bringing them into the modern era.

48:42Yeah, it is an interesting thing. like Valleywag would probably be writing about Cluelay a lot and framing it in a different way. There's already probably folks out there who are framing Cluelay as particularly bad on the other side of the aisle or in the anti-tech category, but it just doesn't seem to have the same effect. It certainly doesn't stop venture funding or customers or any of that. It seems to be that we're in a different era where people in tech were, Cluelay was controversial in tech. people were definitely divided. I think it would be good if there was some law that required, if a media company wanted to write about someone's physique, they should have to post physique.

49:23Oh, their own physique, yes. So that should just be in the footnotes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's important context. Anyway, in other news, fin.ai, the number one customer, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one in ranking on G2. go check out fin.ai. And OWN is apparently helping launch a media company. And so if you want to go work for OWN or this new company, which I believe is called Cool Tech News, go check it out. They're looking for a producer. The founder of Nikola, the electric vehicle company that went bankrupt and landed its CEO founder in prison for a brief time.

50:11He was in jail for life. Then he got pardoned. Just did a sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson. And Nate Anderson from Hindenburg Research had a lengthy rebuttal to this that I thought was pretty interesting. So Nate says, I am Nate Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg Research, referenced repeatedly. Okay, and just for context, if people haven't seen this yet, Tucker is basically positioning the takedown of Nicola as a woke witch hunt. Is that an accurate summary? It's kind of unclear. I think he's more just really, really open and digging into, like, hey, Trevor Milton, tell your side of the story.

50:57And it seemed like Tucker didn't come with really strong opinions, at least for the part that I saw. It didn't seem like he was taking a super strong stance on whether hydrogen is a good strategy or what happened. I haven't dug into it, but a lot of it, a lot of those claims I think don't come from Tucker. I think they come from Trevor Milton. And so the real debate it seems like is between Nate Anderson and Trevor Milton's side of the story. I wouldn't say that in this podcast interview, Tucker has a particular thesis that he's advancing. he's more just asking Trevor Milton to tell his side of the story.

51:36And people are not liking it. People are not happy with this for sure. People are saying pitiful. Someone else is saying Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster and pathological liar. Another guy is saying terrible take. Scam artist platformed. Anyways, another person just says seriously? And even TikTok investors is memeing it. Just being like, wow, this is dark. A lot of people got burned. The funny thing, too, is he was wasn't he initially prosecuted during the Trump admin? Yes. So Nate goes into this. He says, I'm the founder of Hindenburg Research, referenced repeatedly in this bizarre and fantastical interview.

52:16During my career, I helped expose numerous financial scams, including over a dozen Ponzi schemes and numerous instances of public companies lying to and stealing from investors. Of course, he's talking about Hindenburg Research, his firm. I am immensely proud of the career of that career including our work on Nicola Motors referenced in this interview Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster held criminally responsible for the incineration of hundreds of millions of dollars in retail investors hard-earned money and should and as should be unsurprising Milton in this interview seems just to fabricate key events and information out of thin air unfortunately with zero critical questioning or pushback from Tucker for starters contrary to Trevor Milton's implications that his prosecution was some sort of Biden administration conspiracy.

52:59Conveniently, neither Milton nor Tucker share that the investigation into Milton was started and disclosed in September 2020 under the first Trump admin, as well as before the 2020 election. There were numerous inaccuracies throughout this interview. The claim that Hindenburg paid employees for inside information is patently absurd. The key whistleblower discussed in the interview was only briefly a contractor for Milton. He was so horrified by what he viewed as Milton's repeated false claims, that he did a tremendous amount of research on his own, unraveling numerous additional suspected lies that Milton peddled to the investing public.

53:34Further, Hindenburg didn't coordinate anything with media or the DOJ. Such entities ran their own investigations for their own purposes, unconnected to us. There was ample evidence that Milton misstated numerous aspects of his business, and as the company later itself acknowledged. What's interesting is, like, I feel like when we talked about the Marquez-Brownlee Escobar phone. Like, MKBHD kind of broke that story and did some investigative journalism, wound up getting his hands on the phone, and then the DOJ or the FBI came and said, hey, we want that phone as evidence. We'll give it back to you maybe in five years.

54:09And so it's interesting that it seems like the DOJ, according to Nate Anderson, did not coordinate with Hindenburg. Maybe that's just because Hindenburg was doing public research or just doing informational research and didn't have any hard physical evidence, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the DOJ reached out to Hindenburg, but it seems like they didn't coordinate, according to Nate Anderson. It would take hours to write out all the other observities, have truth, innuendos, and false statements in this interview, but in the interest of correcting some of the record, here's a handful.

54:42Milton waxes on about his pardon, but no one mentions that Milton's lawyer was Brad Bondi, the brother of AG Pam Bondi, nor did anyone mention that Milton donated$900 ,000 to Trump in October 2024, less than a month before the recent election, strategically timed well after his criminal conviction and immediately prior to the presidential election. What's interesting is like, you know, you take a company to bankruptcy, you wind up in prison for life, you would think that you get zeroed pretty hard to the degree that you don't have$900 ,000 sitting around to make a political donation. So I'm very curious about how the money flowed around post bankruptcy, post indictment and conviction, because I think that will change the calculus of people that are thinking about doing crazy stuff in the public markets.

55:35Because if you're like, okay, yes, I might get thrown in jail, but then I can squirrel away some money, donate it, get pardoned and then have half left over to hang out like that's a pretty good deal so uh yeah certainly not the functioning of the system that we want uh very very odd yeah the the other thing that uh nate calls out he says um waxing poetic about hydrogen in the interview echoes nicola's lies to retail investors that it successfully produced hydrogen at a cost 81 percent lower than anyone on earth a feat that it would have upended the entire energy industry had it been remotely true nicola's head of hydrogen production presumably in charge of this world world changing scientific breakthrough turned out to be milton's own brother who had no scientific background and previously did odd construction jobs in hawaii so yeah i want to push back on that because last night I was like 7 ,000 prompts deep.

56:35And I feel like I cracked the code to upending the energy markets. Yeah, Chats GPT had you pretty convinced that you could produce hydrogen. It was like, John, you're onto something. You're onto something here. Go public. It doesn't matter that you're a podcaster. Go public. It does not matter that you're just a mere podcaster. You cracked it. You cracked the code. Yeah, I mean, one thing Tucker could have pushed on was you rolled a truck downhill and you marketed it as though it was a functioning vehicle. Yep, that was a big one. And doesn't seem to be something that he pushed back on. Yeah, big questions about short selling.

57:18And he makes the case that short selling is good because it creates a financial incentive to expose companies that lie and engage in fraud. I think I agree with that. I think I'm pro short sellers. Although, of course, they can be very frustrating if you're on the other side and you're being shorted. Fortunately, TBPN is a privately held company, so we don't have to deal with short attacks. At least we're not now, but who knows? Well, with that, let's bring in our Washington correspondent, Zach Kukoff. Zach, what was your reaction to Trevor Milton going on Tuck Radio? I just think terrible choice of a network to go on first.

58:00The clear answer was TBPN. I don't know if I'm ready for that one. It's a tough one. We'd come with a fact sheet of just fact by fact and say, did you roll the truck down the hill? You're telling me you wouldn't have coddled him the way that Tucker did? I don't know. I don't know. When we had Sohan Parikh on, people were saying we went too easy. but uh clearly we got him to just admit to having multiple jobs immediately question was was are you working multiple jobs that was my first question he just said yes and then you know from there it's like okay he's admitted it like let's talk about redemption is there a possibility what else did people want him to admit like five other made-up things he hadn't done i think i think i think the critique that was fair was that he's clearly a pathological liar and yeah fairly charismatic and we probably just should have said, hey, it seems like you're still lying.

58:55But at the same time, we got to check in with the company he just joined. He said he's going, what did he say? He said he's going. Exclusive. Exclusive. Exclusive is the term. I'm going exclusive. I'm going exclusive. Just one job now. So I don't know. I still want to believe in redemption. Not many people believe in redemption. That's where it was interesting. But yeah, I mean, I suppose that if I was interviewing Trevor Milton, the first question would be, It… Did you roll the truck down the hill and did you did you actually do that? because that is the fraud claim mainly. And if it's like, okay, yeah, I did that.

59:29I made a mistake. Now I'm on the redemption path as opposed to waffling around it. As opposed to, no, I didn't roll it downhill. The truck was just built that way. And the hill was just built that way. I mean, this has been a big, we got to call out, this has been a big week for podcasting. You have Sam Altman on The Ovan. You have Netanyahu on the Nalquois. And you have Trevor Melton on Tucker Carlson. I mean, what a week, what a week. but um four figures of equal stature correct thank you very much i think uh i think higher stature than some yeah well higher than some lower than others correct exactly what's going on in your world how was yesterday it looked uh like total total also total podcast victory yeah yeah yesterday i think uh somebody said all in is now state media which i loved i was like yesterday literally was total podcast dominance, which was wild.

1:00:24It was very well done. Major props to frequent TBPN guest, Dalyan, who did an amazing job. They put the whole thing together. Christian and Dalyan, yeah. They put the whole thing together in like 10 days. You guys notice? The whole thing came from nothing. Yeah. 10 days. When you get a 20-minute block on the president's schedule, you got to move quick. That is exactly true. They started Hill and Valley a couple of years ago just as a dinner, but now there's like enough of an organization. I think it is like a company at this point that's doing these events and they have a playbook and they, every time they execute, it's better than the last one.

1:00:57So my understanding is they have like 30 something people who help put these things together. It's a serious, they're a real operation that really staffs it up. Where was it? It was at the Mellon Auditorium, which funnily enough is like next door or maybe even part of the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. So it's a nice, it was very funny because I would not say it was a particularly environmentally focused group in the audience, but a beautiful space nonetheless. Honestly, a highlight of the day for me and probably for everybody there, a very funny, very well done POTUS speech. End of the day keynote, real red meat for us and for tech on a lot of the key questions on AI development.

1:01:39also a lot of very funny uh crowd work like really talented crowd work bits on jensen and on doug bergham i was like wow it's gonna be a really talented netflix special this all gets packaged up and did he have did he have did trump have a good line on jason too or i couldn't tell if that was fake news or it was real no it was it was real trump gets up first thing he says is thanks to the all in podcast uh chamath and david and yes even jason and there was a huge pause for laughter and he goes yes we're even thanking jason today a lot of uh jason galkanis jokes i will say one interesting dynamic at the thing that i don't know if i don't know it was streamed online but wasn't but one interesting dynamic i don't know if folks saw the uh jason was doing the voice of the liberal in the in the questioning he was like trying to really put a little bit of the heat on some of the uh trump admin guests and it was an interesting departure from everybody else who was asking questions.

1:02:34That's good. People will find a way to hate that, but it's good. Yeah. No, it's good to get the diversity of voices. I will say clearly some people that I don't think necessarily expected it, but yeah, it was good to get the diversity of voices up there. What was the best line though? The best line to me was somebody asked Jensen to talk about America's AI advantage. And he said, the one thing that no other country has is President Trump. That's right. That's why Jensen gets to export H20s because he has good lines like that. It's wild. Amazing. It was a well done speech. Honestly, it was a well done event.

1:03:14I would say highlights for me from a serious way. The big one for me was fair use training of the copyright material for AIs. This is the one we've been asking about for a while and a lot of companies have been talking about it. In fact, there was a recent entropic court case that ruled on this said, look, if it's trained on legally procured, legally purchased copyright material, that's fair use, that's in scope. If it's stuff that you're pirating, which allegedly Anthropic and Meta and others have done to build their corpus of data, that's when you get into legal trouble. This was the first time that I've heard the admin come out and codify that, which is really nice.

1:03:49So I loved that. I loved the energy permitting stuff. There was a lot of stuff for all the Abundance boys on permitting, a lot of permitting reform questions, a lot of accelerating data center build outs, a lot of trying to streamline getting new sources of energy online. And then, yes, there was some talk about how do you try to tighten, even while we're still letting folks like China by age 20s, some talk about things like location tracking for export controls too. So there was a lot to like in the speech. I actually thought it was a very, very well done speech. And it was funny because there was actually a live, I don't know, who's your partners at call sheet or polymarket polymarket okay so there was probably a polymarket i saw it on call sheet there's probably a polymarket market going at the same time where people were betting on things like will trump say uh david sacks name oh yeah yeah yeah before it gets resolved so i thought it was really really well done vance spoke super well burgom and chris right had a very funny panel the two of them together where uh chris right and jason got into to it, mano a mano a little bit, which was interesting to hear too.

1:04:53But great and really good energy in the space. A lot of good companies. Hadrian did a very good, almost like a sermon on the enthusiasm of re-industrialization. I love Chris from Hadrian did that. Yeah, he's been on the roadshow with that because he was probably giving something, some similar version of that at re-industrialized. Worked out the bit, took the tight five to DC. He loved to see it. It was a tight five. It was great. That's great. Right. What, how should I think about this AI plan, this documented website that's been floating around? Is this more of like, like, laws aren't changing, but this is just, these are, this is the plan for the laws that we will eventually change?

1:05:32Is that the idea? So think about it in two ways. One way is this is the White House using its bully pulpit to call for a series of changes that yes, would need Congress to enact them or would need agencies to change their policy. Right now, agencies changing their policy is something the White House can do. The other side is, look, there are two EOs that were signed live on stage yesterday that Trump did a very theatrical signing of, which is beautiful. And those are things that the admin can do directly. So there are some things, for example, some of the energy permitting stuff, there are certain things like doing categorical exclusions from NEPA that are a little bit more within the realm of things that can be done, my understanding is via EO.

1:06:11But there are also things, He says, you guys know, a lot of permitting is done at the state and local level, right? So the White House can't necessarily say we're going to overrule what state and local government does on permitting as a fiat. They have to work with partners all up and down the stack of government to get what the AI action plan calls for actually implemented. Yeah. So how big are those EOs? Like what were people tracking on those? And then I guess. What was the specifics? Was one of the EOs around making it so that states can't enact AI safety laws for the next 10 years? Do you have specifics on that?

1:06:52That felt super significant. So there were three AIEOs, I said two earlier, I was wrong. There were three AIEOs, and sometimes why. One was on bias-free AI, which is something I would instead frame as transparency. There was a lot of talk about woke AI and removing things like DEI from AI implementation. The actually specific version of that, the instantiated version of that, is that model providers that they want to be used in government procurement have to attest to the values, to be transparent about the values that go into their models. That's AIEO number one. AIEO number two is trying to fast track some of the development work we did.

1:07:31So it's fast tracking some of the data center permitting stuff that we did. And the third AIEO that we talked about is the export expansion. It's funny, Jordi, the thing that you're asking about, which we talked about last time, right, this idea of a moratorium on AI regulation for 10 years. The big challenge is to actually get that done. That's something that has to be now done actually beyond my understanding is beyond the scope of just what can be done in an EO, right? Something that can be started has to actually transcend that as well. And some of the challenge, like you saw today, California is already starting to push back on the idea that the federal government has preemption ability over California's ability to regulate AI.

1:08:04And the truth is, there are powerful senators like Marsha Blackburn, who we discussed last time, whose job it is to protect their local industries like the music industry in Nashville, Tennessee, her home state, who are not going to be thrilled about what I think is a pretty reasonable but ultimately controversial idea of trying to create a standard set of regulations that aren't 50 patchwork states. Because the default, and Trump mentioned this in his speech, is that in 50 different states, whoever's the most restrictive is who people end up following. Yeah. Because if you're a product company or a foundation model lab, you want to be available everywhere.

1:08:39So the default is like basically be allowed under the most restrictive regulations. That's right. That's right. One kind of funny framing I was kicking around was the idea of no paper clips. So this kind of marks a shift away from worrying about AI doom. We're not worried about getting paper clipped. We're not worried about fast takeoff this crazy doom scenario So we're pulling back on safety pulling more pushing more into geopolitics Let's actually scale up Infrastructure get these products out into the world because we think that by and large they're safe and Now the game is to win on more or less like industrial capacity Like if we're just producing way more tokens than every other country that will help our GDP We will grow that way.

1:09:28The flip side of the no paper clips is that there's no move to do a new operation paperclip where we pulled scientists from Germany to America to build the bomb. And the reference point there is that something like 75 % of AI researchers on meta super intelligence team are I think on 01s or they're not American citizens. and we've seen the DeepSeek team and Manus and there's some venture capital firms that are investing in Chinese AI and kind of the bull case is like, okay, well, get them from China to Singapore and then get them to Silicon Valley and then we have the team on our side. And so it feels like that's the one area that wasn't really discussed.

1:10:11I know immigration's obviously just a broadly hot topic, but in terms of like brain drain of the ultimate top AI scientists, is there any movement or people thinking about that? Is there any nuance coming up between, okay, maybe that's a different problem set or different question than dealing with fentanyl dealers coming across the border? So I don't know that that was super within scope for the AI action plan. I'll tell you personally, there are definitely people who are thinking about an operation paperclip or how do we get the world's best and brightest, the truly, truly elites, even above people who might qualify for 01s to come and build in America AI with their families.

1:10:49That's the first thing. Second thing is, listen, the question you're getting to, which is a question of soft power, is a question the admin is thinking about, right? And so the reason that the AI action plan is so supportive of open source and open weight models is because the admin views it as a national security imperative to get American soft power, i.e. American models, to become the most widely used in the world. So the soft power lever the admin's pulling, I would like to see more, and I'm hugely supportive of getting people here on a really targeted basis, ultra elite talent to come here and build as opposed to building for our adversaries.

1:11:23I mean, we're talking about like 50 people. It's like, it's super, super. Yeah, exactly. Like 20 people. It should be a completely different discussion than like, you know, border wall or anything like that. Correct. No AI researcher has ever been impacted by a wall. Like that's not, maybe the pre-training scaling wall is their problem. I know you have to run a bus thing. There was a post yesterday going viral. Somebody realized you could Venmo the government to help reduce the national debt. What's the right amount to start Venmo-ing Uncle Sam if you want to do your part on a daily basis? Listen, there's no tax on tips now.

1:11:59So we should all be tipping the government, help them. They should be tipping. We should be getting tipped, paid in tips, no tax on that. And then we could turn around and tip the government and Venmo as well. Yeah, it's a tipping-based economy. As much as you can do. As much as you can do, but every day. Really quickly. Every day. Last question for me. We'll let you go. That point on open source is really interesting. It feels like Mark Zuckerberg could be the national champion. He could be the hero of American open source with the LLAMA project. We don't know if LLAMA 5 is going to be open source.

1:12:27Behemoth had trouble getting out. He hasn't really given clear guidance on how hard he's going into, how hard he's going to stay in open source. But how do you think the mood is around Mark Zuckerberg in D.C.? Is he a winner or loser? The Wall Street Journal had this article on how much people have donated. Obviously, Jensen feels ascendant. Elon feels like he was at the top and then kind of dialed back a little bit, but is still doing okay. The other hyperscaler CEOs are like, none of them are in bad, bad positions. But Zuck is like the interesting one where you could see a really interesting partnership form.

1:13:05but I don't know where we are on that. Zuck, I think, is interesting because he took a big swing. He said, listen, I want to go do the cultural work. I want to enmesh myself really deeply. And what we've learned is this is an admin that really respects power and success. Success is its own ability to attract more success, the virtuous cycle. Jensen does well, in part because he's tremendously gifted interpersonally, but also because he's the CEO of the most valuable company in the world, and the admin respects that. And when he comes to town, we know this is an admin that loves talking about things are number one, things are the biggest and the best and most important.

1:13:36And Jensen has that. Zuck tried to aura farm a little bit. You know what I mean? He tried to get in here and do a little bit of that. And I don't know that it's fully landed for him. I agree. Listen, I hope he keeps Llama 5 open source predominantly because I think it would be a great bite at the apple for him with national priority here. But part of that's going to also be his ability to invest and do some of the interpersonal retail stuff that Jensen's done so well. Yeah. Yeah. With OpenAI launching the open source model, you have to wonder if if like national open source champion of America is a title that Sam Altman is like, I'd like that.

1:14:10Yeah, exactly. Even if it doesn't have direct economic value, if it comes with political power, that could be incredibly valuable. So interesting to see how it breaks down. Thank you so much for joining. We'll let you get to your next meeting. Yeah, thanks for having me. Sorry after a while. Thanks, guys. Making you miss your next one. No worries. Talk to you soon. And we will tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. It's the next gen of CRM. And speaking of gens, Gen Z has a particular nihilism I call get my bag culture, says Jasmine Sun.

1:14:43The mentality of everyone's grifting, so I better get my own. This ties into the Trevor Milton debate that we were having earlier. They've never voted without Trump on the ballot. All content is sponsored content unless proved otherwise. Post-truth politics is all they know. The president's been scamming for the last 10 years, So don't be meek and virtuous or else you're going to lose. So no wonder why you end up with Clue. Bit of a hot take. Interesting. But I do think that there's this, there is this world where. The interesting thing though, just to call out, that the Clue.ly haters will be in shambles over this.

1:15:15But Roy was posting yesterday that he set up a 20 % employee option pool at Clue. So he's paying a lot and people are pushing back and being like, your burn's got to be crazy. And his pushback was basically, we're way more efficient. to, you know, you can get to 10 million of ARR with a small team. I pay people a lot. And I also, you can also give them a lot of equity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I do, I do worry a little bit about just as we see more meme stocks, it gets more tempting. So for like, ah, like, and that, that meme about like, you have five years to get the bag before the permanent underclass.

1:15:52Like, and if you're just seeing people get away with things that feel crazy and you're like, well, everyone else got away with it. Maybe I should get away with it too. It is sad. We need Gen Z founders building permanent structures, institutions, products that will outlive them. And there hasn't been a ton of those. Alex Wang was certainly the leading candidate as kind of all-star Gen Z company. Yeah, and people were pissed when, I mean, a lot of people were super happy when Ross Ulbricht was pardoned. A lot of people were upset. They were like, he was dealing drugs on the internet and tried to kill someone.

1:16:28So I think there's allegedly, allegedly. Is it alleged? No, I think, I think he did order the hit, but it didn't work. Okay. Like it didn't go through because he was talking with a, with a undercover agent. Happens to the best of us. Sometimes, sometimes you put something on the to-do list. Trump's like, who has an order to hit? Yeah. Sometimes you put the to-do list. You never ordered one hit? Not even one. Sometimes you put something on an underlings to do list and they just forget about it. It happens. And you're like, ah, they dropped the ball. It happens. Anyway, in other better news, there's a profile in Colossus of Rompton, Naomi.

1:17:04Oh, boy. Who you've worked with, you've met. And he says - It's your friend. We've been quietly building Abstract for nine years. He's your friend. He hasn't been on the show? Well, he's never done any media. Literally never. So this is like the first significant media that he's ever done. He's been very, very under the radar. We don't have to list out his full portfolio, but if you look at, you can go to abstract.vc and check it out. He's backed a lot of incredible companies. He backed my last company. He was an incredible partner and has been a true friend throughout as long as I've known him.

1:17:43And I'm excited for him to talk about it. It's a crazy story. he had a fund blew up went bankrupt when he was 24 and he's 34 now has 1.8 billion under management and he's an absolute dog I can't wait to see him at the top of the Midas list for sure it's gonna happen so that will be in the next edition of Colossus magazine which you should of course subscribe to and you can read this article this article now the man with the heart to get the edition The man with the hot hand needs to link up with the man with the hot leather jacket, Jensen Wong, apparently dropping a bombshell at the AI Summit that we were just talking to Zach Kukoff about.

1:18:24I have 60 plus leather jackets. My wife picks them. That is the scoop that I need to hear. Beth, thank you for reporting on the ground. Jensen Wong says, I have 60 plus leather jackets. That's a lot. One for every week of the year. I love it. Anyway, another quote from, which you mentioned, Jensen Wong, America's unique advantage is that no country could possibly have is President Trump. He is happy to be partnering with the president, the commander in chief. Also, a reconciliation of sorts between Delian Asperuhov and Chamath Palihapitiya. In D.C., they're comparing anacondas and IRRs, Delian and Chamath, of course, to put the timeline in turmoil a couple weeks ago, talking trash to each other.

1:19:13All friendly. All's fair in love and war. All's fair on the timeline. Taking a friendly picture together. You'll love to see it. I love a reconciliation, even if the language is a little vulgar for my taste. But great to see two capital allocators hanging out in D.C. together. there. Christian Garrett also broke it down. Man behind the scenes pulling all the strings. Pulling all the strings. The puppet master. Christian Garrett says, last night was truly something special. David Sachs and the All In Pod brought Jacob Helberg and Delian and I in to something that we'll all never forget. The business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said, and it was never more important than last night.

1:19:54Friedberg stressed the importance of showing how the everyday American and those who the system has not worked for are already experiencing job creation and transformation due to AI. Winning the AI race will be a bigger, will be part of a bigger story that benefits us all. There were members of Congress from both sides of the event showing how there is a unified front that's bipartisan around techno-industrial policy and the opportunity AI presents itself. Jacob Hellberg and those in the admin now have to get to good work. Amazing work, dude. Congrats, says Will O 'Brien. Bobby Goodlatte says, saw some of the post.

1:20:29Looks absolutely epic. So all three former guests, you'll love to see it. So President Trump said he had planned to break Nvidia up until he learned who Jensen Wang was. What's funny is I don't even know how you would break up Nvidia. Like it's just a fabless semiconductor company. Like it's not like the Intel thing where you have a fab and then you also have a design company. I mean, I guess you could break down like gaming and AI training or something. Or I just I don't know where the dividing line would be. It's really just like they haven't the story of Nvidia isn't they don't have an Instagram.

1:21:09They don't have a story of, oh, they acquired this company and it got really big and it saved them from disruption. Break it up and say, OK, you're going to have an AI division and a gaming, you know, just gaming is like a rounding. Yeah, I mean, they have some other stuff that's in there. I mean, I don't know. You break out CUDA or something. I don't know how you would do it. You could force Jensen to sell off the majority of his jackets. Yeah, yeah, break up the jackets. Pay down the national debt. But anyway, Jensen's been in D.C. We saw him there a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago. And he's been doing the work to get to know Donald Trump.

1:21:42And it has worked out spectacularly. And now Jensen is the biggest business man. we i this will go unmentioned but i had we have a friend of the show uh and jensen walked up to us and the friend introduced himself and his company and jensen didn't know the company and he's like oh it's so bearish for me wait that was jensen yeah oh okay i know the other side of that story i didn't realize he's like he's like he really took it personally yeah well but he's been on a generational run since. You want to be known by the greats, the folks who only worked at Denny's and then started a generational company.

1:22:21Never ignored that 10-year gap when he was at AMD. This is an interesting thread by Kevin Bryan talking about how the New York Times is reporting on the AI action plan. Kevin says, come on, man. There's no way you can read the AI action plan and think this is the first order thing that the first order thing that New York Times readers should know about it. Anthropic is positive. AI has huge implications for the national economy, defense, future of science. Half this article is about copyright. It is wild how much tech journalism comes from a place of extreme hostility towards the technology. It often reads like RFK writing articles about new pharmaceutical breakthroughs.

1:23:03No wonder the Silicon Valley set completely ignores this. And then he closes with a post about 90 % of mainstream writing on AI is one, encoded bias, two, theft of copyright, three, wasting water and electricity ad nauseum. Gang, folks in these labs think they're curing cancer. Honestly, who gives anything about one, two, and three, given that even if those worries were true, they aren't. If you think those three things are the most important policy issues or even the biggest downside risks of AI, and I mean this in a let's be real, not. Yeah, it's hard to argue that energy use by itself is a bad thing.

1:23:41Yeah. And it is true that data centers require an obscene amount of energy. We talked earlier this week about how Oracle's partnership with OpenAI, where OpenAI will be spending$30 billion a year with Oracle by 2027, at least how it was reported, will require two Hoover dams worth of energy, which is an exceptional amount. But as energy production has gone up, so has human prosperity. And water production. There's plenty of water for the data centers. There's plenty of water to fill your eight sleep. You can go to eightsleep.com. Get a pod five. I'm back. Five year warranty. I'm back in the game finally.

1:24:2430 night risk, free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go get a pod five. I've been ill. I finally put up seven and a half hours last night. I'm back in range. My HRV, I'm no longer looking dead. And I got over two hours of REM sleep last night. So we have Vanita from Andrews and Horowitz joining in just a few minutes. In the meantime, let's do some timeline. I want to dig into this Financial Times article. I think we're going to need more time. But let's do that later. The headline, of course, just to keep you up to speed, is that NVIDIA chips worth$1 billion were smuggled into China after Trump export controls.

1:25:00We've heard about this black market. We've heard about people stuffing suitcases full of them and flying around the country. They're not the biggest thing in the world, so it's easy to route them around. There's always a question, could the government have done more? Could NVIDIA have done more? Who are truly the bad actors? Does the - Crazy graphic right there. Good graphic. Love it. But we will cover this later in the show. Danish is throwing some shade at Ilya. He says, how you got$32 billion. He doesn't have$32 billion. And don't take the turkey flight to restore the hairline. I would have Pavel Durov'd myself into a Greek god.

1:25:39The instant it was financially feasible. Dude does not give an F about anything but the mission. Incredibly bullish. You don't think super intelligence is going to be able to cure hair loss? Like, that's going to be the single prompt. Right before cancer. probably it does seem more tractable it doesn't seem that crazy uh very rude um anyway uh people having fun on the timeline oh well we have andreason horowitz uh partner vanita joining in just a few minutes and there's a post about injuries and horowitz so uh james lynn says a16z and sutter hill ventures also the context here oh yes avidon radonski says recently got asked which vc firm changed the game like steph curry did lots of sports metaphors and tech these days You love to see it.

1:26:22It's tough when you know nothing about sports. And so the two examples of VC firms that changed the game like Steph Curry did for the NBA, Andreessen Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures, but in completely different ways. James Lynn here says, A16Z realized that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbid. 10x what other people were offering. I don't know if that's actually happened that often that you go get a term sheet and Andreessen comes in at 10x the price. But they've certainly been aggressive on pricing and it's worked out in many cases. for early rounds. Yeah, it could be 50 % higher.

1:26:53Yeah. So it got them Twitter, Instagram, Coinbase, GitHub, Andurl, Airbnb, Slack. Round sizes went up after that. Sutter Hill saw trends in cloud computing and incubated Snowflake from idea to IPO. They made Mike Spicer, a partner of the interim CEO, hire the technical co-founders, funded the entire Series A. They had 20 % stake in Snowflake at IPO at a$33 billion valuation. It was worth$12 billion position for that. So pretty much the best incubation of all time. So A16Z finds talent and makes several outsized bets. Sutter Hill sees a trend and operationalizes one to two companies completely in-house.

1:27:34Now larger rounds are the norm, and the Venture Studio model is much more common. That makes a ton of sense. We'll have to ask Vanita about that when she joins. What else do we have here in the timeline? I also think you can't leave YC out of that group, right? Who else changed the game? It's an entirely different model, but highly, highly, highly effective. Yeah. I think the initial YC, the way it changed the game was that it made it completely possible for college new grads to go and start a company without getting any experience in enterprise or in business. And so that was the initial arb.

1:28:15like Sand Hill Road existed, Sequoia Capital existed, Kleiner Perkins existed. But if the Airbnb guys had gone straight to Sequoia. Yeah, you didn't need a friends and family round to get a friends and family round done. Exactly. So if the Airbnb guys, I think, had showed up to Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia, who actually, I think, wound up doing the Airbnb deal later, I think Sequoia did, pre-YC, that might have been like, this is a little weird company. This is a little bit out of our sweet spot. But then you go through YC, you get coached by Paul Graham at the time, and you polish things up such that you're ready to go and ready to talk to the big firms.

1:28:50And Paul Graham, I think famously told the Sequoia partner, like, you should do the Airbnb deal, even as weird as it is. Like, think about eBay for space. And it worked out. Fantastic story. Anyway, we have Vanita from Andrews and Horowitz in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Good to meet you. How are you doing? Hello, I'm an Airbnb here. Yes. Yeah, what's your take on this A16Z, changing the game by recognizing that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbidding for early rounds? Do you think that resonates? Do you feel like Andreessen Horowitz has changed the game in venture?

1:29:25Totally unbiased. Exactly. Totally unbiased. I do believe my partners are changing the game. No, and part of what's amazing about A16Z is our willingness to bet in every sector, every vertical, every part of the economy, really every part of the economy, both locally, domestically and globally. So my corner of the world, it's a big corner of the world, it's a$5 trillion corner of the world is healthcare. And one of the things I love about our firm is that we've really established a dedicated strategy here too, and hopefully changing the game here too. Yeah. How has bio investing, healthcare investing changed?

1:30:02We were talking about the Airbnb example. It feels like it's it's it's easy for a couple folks with Just a hope and a dream. They don't need to do a friends and family round They can just go to Sand Hill Road They can go to places like YC they can go to Andreessen Horowitz directly and raise a seed round and have enough to actually pay the bills Hire a couple people do a couple tests launch a consumer app launch an enterprise app Has there been a meaningful change in the way healthcare and bio companies get started? for a long time it felt like the only way to do a company in that space was you're at MIT and you do some partnership with Flagship Pioneering and then you're IPO and then you're living and dying by your FDA trials.

1:30:46The traditional venture path felt very just like a completely separate track, but how has it evolved from your experience? Yeah, great question. I mean, I think we're absolutely part of the agentic wave. I've never seen so much interest in the role of AI agents in transforming how science is done, how research is done, how discoveries are made, how drugs could be developed. The FDA launched an AI agent called ELSA, cute name, but potentially signaling a transformative role for AI even in the regulatory agency, which is kind of a mind-blowing thing to think about. You would have thought that it would have been the innovators and the startups pushing AI first and then waiting for the regulator to say, yes, we believe these predictive tools are going to help us make drugs.

1:31:36So I think we are seeing a really different market pull than ever before. At the same time, the business models in health care, you know, are still similar and the core products that drive value are still similar. So we're in the business of making new medicines. So are the startups that we back in large part or making the practice of medicine way better and transforming the practice of medicine. And both have some really established business models around them. Drugs that work that have an impact on patients get paid for. They get paid for because they save the system money. Services we pay for because people need services on time, you know, from the right specialists for the right disease.

1:32:16And so those are all, you know, great business models in which to invest and in which startups can run. But certainly startups are now running in a much more capital efficient way, in a much more AI powered way than they ever were before. We need good agents in the game in our space too. Where is Silicon Valley's sweet spot or like strike zone in bio? Because I was reading the Wall Street Journal today about a company that does, they're developing robotics for lab testing equipment. So basically like pipetting, you know, famously, it's like a PhD student just going like this all day long. A bunch of robots doing that makes a ton of sense.

1:32:51That feels like Silicon Valley all the way. How many cursor for bio pitches have you got? Is it in the hundreds? But that feels like more in the sweet spot. When I think about like an ERP system for biotech companies, that feels a lot easier than saying, I'm going to take a cancer drug through the FDA trials and I'm never going to go public. I'm going to raise growth rounds at every stage. Like we haven't seen that much, but maybe we're still just early in that trend changing. Yeah. And I think part of that, the trend is changing in part because of the same trends we're seeing in other verticals that AI is getting paid for through labor budgets and AI is not necessarily replacing but augmenting labor, right?

1:33:3390%, 90 plus percent of all chemical screens for new drugs fail. No drug comes out of it. 10 % of all nurse positions across the healthcare system are vacant. We can't find the nurses to fill the positions, right? So we're living in a world where actually we need agentic resources to come in as labor. And that is different than the world we were living in before, where we were trying to squeeze out IT budget from, you know, let's say a large pharma company, or let's say a hospital system to deploy the types of Silicon Valley technologies that could have been transformative for the industries. And so now that there's a lot more, you know, autonomous task completion, as well as augmentation well beyond what humans could do, in those fields.

1:34:19I do think some of those Silicon Valley technologies, you know, obviously, yes, they are being formed. Yes, we are absolutely being pitched the cursor for bio right now. And we think it's very credible. We think it absolutely is the case that if you have a lot of data, you're a company that's, let's say, run clinical trials before, managed many, many drugs through development, you should have agents crawling through that data, learning what humans might of missed learning why things failed, why things succeeded, and then bringing that knowledge to your next set of set of endeavors. And so absolutely, you know, this kind of regime of a fully virtual agentic lab that for every one human scientist, you know, has hundreds of agentic scientists is a really, really interesting, interesting vision.

1:35:07At the same time, making the drug is really valuable. So we really do think that great innovation can take it all the way and can, you know, great startups can actually develop their own. Yeah. How often a company comes to you that wants to be more on the picks and shovels side, kind of infrastructure, maybe more B2B, how often do you find yourself encouraging them to own, try to take it all the way and actually like use whatever innovation or insight they have to not just make that product available to other bio or pharma companies, but, you know, actually deliver the end value? I think it really depends on the founders and exactly where the innovation sits.

1:35:49We've backed both. We're long on both infrastructure for the industry and, you know, SaaS, forward deployed SAS, SAS plus agentic implementations. And, you know, I think we think a lot of that has a ton of value and will fundamentally change how every organization operates and not every organization is going to build their own cursor-like tools for research. At the same time, sometimes the innovators who are closest, I'll give you a real example, you know, autoimmune disease is horrible. 10 % of people have an autoimmune disease and sounds like science fiction, but recently we tried CAR T therapy.

1:36:28Take my T cells out of my body, engineer them, and instead of attacking a tumor cell, attack bad autoimmune cells. Okay, well, that's interesting. And what if I could deliver it in the same type of vaccine type format that you got your COVID jab in, an LNP and an RNA that... I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine. I'm kind of surprised to I hear you calling a vaccine a jab, but maybe that's just a comment. It's like reclaiming tech, bro. Yeah, reclaim it. We reclaim tech, bro, technology brothers. Yeah, the pharmaceutical industry definitely needs to reclaim a jab. The name of this thing to tech nerds.

1:37:07What about, you mentioned, you know, to finish that story out, to make that requires a lot of engineering and a lot of optimization and a lot of so-called Silicon Valley style optimization. And so we're seeing that. a company in our portfolio called Orbital Therapeutics announced really exciting data in monkeys, you know, demonstrating that that might be possible for autoimmune disease. So I think it goes both ways. Silicon Valley tech is going to permeate every company, whether they're based here or not, and whether they're making drugs or not. Do you think that these sort of early IPOs that drug companies have done historically is a feature or a bug?

1:37:47Like if we have more developed private capital markets, do you think that, like, is it even right that effectively retail, uneducated retail could just be taking these like, you know, gambling in the public markets on effectively FDA trials or is there a better way? There is a huge public market for biotech. The stage at which companies access those markets in the last few years was miscalibrated. And so that's why you see the headlines you're seeing with respect to public biotech stock performance, with respect to public fundraising challenges for companies, because they were very far from the clinic, they were very far from generating commercial value, they were very far from demonstrating hard data that they were close to developing a product of value.

1:38:39So I do think the private markets continue to be to have massive pools of capital in them and biotech companies will stay private for longer. But you know at the same time we're seeing huge demand and appetite for technologies that work from pharma companies that have a really rich ability to continue to back biotech companies, partner with biotech companies, fund biotech companies, buy biotech companies. So we partnered up with Eli Lilly on that front and started a whole dedicated fund focused on supporting the biotech ecosystem and that serves pharma and it serves the biotech ecosystem too right and so there are lots of ways for companies to continue to make progress on those technologies while private um until they until they have the metrics that justify justify going public that makes sense you said something earlier around uh nursing job vacancies how do you what's your thesis on how that market evolves in four years are we still going to see hospital systems unable and various groups unable to get the nurses that they want?

1:39:42Or do you think that agentic systems can kind of backfill those roles and there will be more kind of balance in the market? Yeah, I hope we also project needing fewer roles. I mean, we are projecting that we're going to be short over 3 million healthcare workers just in the United States alone over the next year right so it's a huge and the people so and and the people making those projections are they agi pilled are they humanoid robot pilled like i i it's cool that the fda has a chief ai officer that feels important um but anytime i'm like reading into projections uh it's more interesting to get a projection or insight from you given that you're backing all these companies that understand that reality and want to...

1:40:33Right, that's a big number. That's based on the job count, jobs that health systems and providers are opening but unable to fill based on the projected increase in healthcare demand as our population ages. But absolutely, I hope it's not really that high because there's only like 8 million total job vacancies in the US. That's like almost half our total job vacancies in healthcare alone. So we have to actually decrease our need for those jobs And we could redirect some of our extremely skilled health care existing workforce from answering phone calls, dropping up, you know, picking up dropped balls, re-communicating the same information to patients, re-communicating the same information between providers who are trying to coordinate.

1:41:14There are a million ways in which our system does not work today. And so I hope that number goes down. But the reality is that the willingness to try out the agentic solution, whether it's for documentation, whether it's for getting prior auth from an insurance company, or whether it's for actually providing a clinical consult, has never been higher. because the reality is today we don't have the humans to fill those jobs. Wait times are long. 30 % of Americans skip care. Like they skip or delay prescribed care. We're a developed country in which that's happening. And 60, 70 % of Americans say, I will see an AI doctor.

1:41:56Like, just kidding. I will see one. Like, at least I will engage with one. And in fact, I'm probably going to engage with one before I engage with a human doctor now, right? We've all changed our consumer behavior that way almost overnight. So it's a pretty remarkable shift that's happening that will, I hope, make us need a lot fewer than that number of open jobs. I remember, what was it, in like 2008, there was a boom in electronic medical records startups, like Athena Health was one of them. And there was kind of like two waves going on that were kind of adding together and making those businesses work.

1:42:33One is like a technological wave, obviously. We had access to cloud databases and cloud infrastructure and better software. And so you could actually put medical records securely in a cloud. And so that was obviously a great business. But then there was also an EHR mandate from the Obamacare legislation, I believe. Are there any regulatory tailwinds that are adding on top of the AI technology tailwinds right now in bio or healthcare broadly? Yeah, absolutely. So there are, first of all, I will say historically, a lot of healthcare software and technology was adopted because of regulatory incentives and payment incentives.

1:43:14But for the first time, we are seeing bottoms up adoption of tools and technologies and an extraordinary NPS of health care software with scribing tools like those developed by companies like Ambience and Abridge, you know, you know, evidence access tools like what what open evidence has built. And so for the first time, we're also seeing pull. That's just like, hey, this is better. I don't need the government to give me a kickback to tell me it's better, but it is better. So that's a separate trend that we're very excited about. But huge regulations are also going to incentivize a better technology infrastructure.

1:43:53So price transparency is a good example. There are clear incentives and penalties for not being able to share transparently your pricing cards as a provider, as a payer, and to create that type of open access for patients. And so building that infrastructure layer is going to be super important. The administration's talked a lot about patient choice. That could be patient choice with respect to how you use your benefit dollar, patient choice with respect to what plan coverage you select. And ICRA is a good example of a potentially big change in the employer-sponsored healthcare space. So these are all financial rails and incentives.

1:44:34CMMI continues to advance value-based initiatives that basically prioritize preventive care and say, hey, at the end of the year, if you save the government a dollar, if you save CMS money, dear smart provider who's using technology, you'll make money, right? So that's a clear financial incentive. It's good for patients. Generally being out of the healthcare system, preventing something before it costs a lot of money is good for patients. But the financial incentives and policy incentives do need to, you know, do provide a huge accelerator in our space, and that will continue to be the case. Can you give us the update on the drug pricing EO from, I don't know, is it six weeks ago, eight weeks ago?

1:45:15It feels like a year ago at this point. There's been a lot that happened. We had a bunch of people on the day of, and a lot of people were kind of saying that it wasn't going to be as impactful as it kind of felt in the moment, But what's the update there? I don't think there's been a policy update. Like, you know, nothing has been enacted yet. That's still an EO. The concept of it, of course, was to say, was to use international trade as a backdrop for holistic negotiations, inclusive of drug pricing to say, you know, as part of an overall tariff negotiation, why is it the case that the U.S. pays two or three times or more?

1:45:58for the same exact drug that another country pays. And so it is a logical question to ask. And we know that CMS is continuing to ask that question, but the actual policy is gonna depend on quite a bit of, there are a number of moving parts in a holistic policy with respect to every other country. So it's important for us to retain huge incentives and it's not gonna be as simple as cut the price, get great drugs, that's not how the market works. But should the price be more equitably shared across countries, it's an absolutely reasonable perspective to have. How popular is open source in the bio world?

1:46:40I feel like the cursor for bio thing is very interesting. But when I think about the electronic lab notebooks that folks are using, like if it's not open source, you can't fork it. And it feels like part of cursor's ability to grow really fast was that they sit on top of your code base and you can change IDEs very quickly. But if a researcher is using a closed source lab notebook that has a database built in, that company is going to be like, no, no, no, I do not want you just stealing all my customers or migrating off. But is open source popular? Are there opportunities? What's the VS Code equivalent, I guess, would be the question.

1:47:22Yeah, I think there's a lot. You know, in bio research, there's a lot more informatics and less organized software. I think that will change. But historically, historically, there is a lot of bespoke informatics, which is why some of the agentic adoption, like for exploratory informatics research is happening on its own. And people are adopting open source agents for resources like that. You know, the protein structure models like AlphaFold were followed by a number of models that were open sourced. And within a period of weeks, thousands of scientists, thousands of companies adopted additional structure prediction models.

1:48:05FOLTS2 was a popular one. The CHI model. A number of startups put out open source models. And we saw really fast adoption, which is kind of cool, right? It's like it's a scientist sitting in a company who says, I want to try that. and see if it would help my workflow. And actually I want to benchmark it and I want to try three at the same time. So we didn't have that many great open source resources like that before we had data sets, but not necessarily models and APIs to those models that made them easy to use. So I think that whole ecosystem is in its like square one infancy of growing and exploding, but you're going to need a library of models.

1:48:43You want to be able to try all the models. You want your agents to be able to use the models without even a human interface. And so suddenly the same thing that's happening in enterprise software in every vertical is going to happen here, too. You know, agents on behalf of scientists will be able to select which models to use, try five models at once, and then incorporate the results and predictions of those models into a workflow, you know, deeply integrated with other agentic automation. So none of that's built, I would say, for the vast majority of the industry. And so it's a huge, huge opportunity for startups to build.

1:49:26Last quick question. Maybe if you could answer in 60 seconds, that's the challenge. What's the vibe on the Stanford campus right now? are people dropping out of PhD programs to start companies in bio? I'm sure we're seeing people dropping out of PhDs to join meta and other AI research orgs broadly, but I'm curious if that's happening in bio. There are a number of fast-growing AI biotech startups that are bringing AI and computational tools to model trainings. We are seeing that. If you're asking, is it a response to federal funding changes. I think that's always been the case that a large fraction of trainees from university campuses end up in biotech and pharma companies.

1:50:18And that's great. It's a great outcome. I don't think, I do think there's probably in the near term going to be continued exploration of industry alternatives to federally funded research. And I really hope that the federal grant funding is clarified and that there's more stability on university campuses for federally funded research because some of that infrastructure is absolutely, has been behind a huge number of these innovations. Makes sense. Thank you so much for joining. Yeah, thank you so much. Great to chat. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Up next, we have Mickey Malka, the founder of Ribbit Capital.

1:50:59Really quickly, I will tell you about AdQuick. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we hopefully have Mickey Malka. How are you doing, Mickey? Good to meet you. Hi, guys. Good to see you, John and Jordy. How are you guys? Welcome to the stream. Great background. Great background. What's going on there? Break it down for us. Those are some NFTs. Wonderful. There we go. A collection from an artist called Bright Moments.

1:51:29They did an exhibition all over the world. And these are crypto citizens from the 10 cities around the world where they have their exhibitions. Amazing. Amazing. It's great to have you on the show. We've been excited for this. You guys have been on a absolutely crazy run and it's awesome that you're starting to talk about it a bit more. Yeah, I want to start with like your background. I think that you might actually have a non-traditional path to venture or at least a very interesting entrepreneurial journey prior to launching a venture firm. So can you just give us a little bit of background on your history and how you wound up running?

1:52:01Of course. So I'm an entrepreneur and I'm still an entrepreneur. It just happens that I started when I was 17 years old and that's all I know how to do. And I started in financial services. Growing up in Venezuela in the early 90s, it was inflation, crises, bank failures, all the things that you need to learn in your life. I had them by the time I was 22 years old. Speedrun. Oh my God, yes. Lightspeed through all of that. So I started four different companies around the world before the word fintech or crypto even existed. Always trying to do something around the internet and making money better.

1:52:41Simply, that was the whole thing. And what did some of those first companies look like? Were they specific to problems that you were having in Venezuela or were they global by nature? The first one was the first online trading platform for Latin America. A little bit what Robinhood is today. Yeah. But imagine that in 1998, in the beginning of the internet, and you could trade online stocks of every local Latin American market. Wow. Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile. We had Brazil. We bought stock exchange seats in all of them, and we were able to allow people to trade. So that was one of the first ones.

1:53:20and then I you were like 20 at this time I was 23 24 when I started yes and there were no venture capitalists in Latin America there was nobody we had to convince some people in the US and New York to fund us and headquartered in Miami to avoid any kind of problem with choosing a place in Latin America and that company became the largest online broker dealer in south america wow insane um and then where do you go from there uh i went to spain because my first company was acquired by a big spanish bank and the internet had blown up a little bit like when they think it was all hype uh it will happen to ai eventually when they will all people will think it was it was all wrong and eventually the future but um and i started the first online bank in Europe.

1:54:15There was no online banks. It was a bank called Open Bank because it was supposed to be open 24-7, 365. It still runs in Spain. Were you the, was adding open to the start of a word? Were you the first person to do that? Open AI, open store, open door. We're taking over the open words these days. Yeah. Pay me my fee. I coined that. Yeah, that's wild. Who was the first LP to kick you off? Like, what was the story? Well, first, I have to ask, I'm assuming there wasn't bank, there wasn't like 20 banking as a service platforms back then. How did you get it? How did you convince a bank in Europe to bank?

1:55:00Well, I had to become regulated. By the time I was 25 or 26, I was regulated by eight central banks. to go through the whole KYC bank approval process myself. What was the secret there? Is it more just like you filled out the forms perfectly, you sent the right messages, or were you like kind of knocking on doors, trying to grease palms to make it happen? All of the above. All of the above. Depending on the country, you had to do a lot more. Some were a lot more technical than others, but definitely they had to see that I was not just this kid who didn't know anything about finance. And then I had to pretend I knew a lot about finance.

1:55:40So, yeah, you want to continue with that? No, from where did that go? I don't want to leave a cliffhanger. So that business grew to the fastest bank in Europe. I sold it back to the bank that we were partnered with. And I moved to Brazil, started, I got approval by the president of Brazil back then. Lula, which is again president now, to approve a new banking license, granted so we could start a bank to serve the unbanked financial services. So I lived in Sao Paulo, did that for three years, became the largest retail bank in the country, serving almost 15 million customers. I'm seeing a trend.

1:56:18I'm seeing a trend. It's a bad day to be unbanked. Well, no, no, I was going to say, you seem to like being the fastest growing or the number one in your category. You know, what I like is making, allowing people to, when people have access to better money, it makes their life better. It's not about having more money or less money. It's just making money better. And better money means you should be able to invest the same way I can anywhere in the world. You should be able to get the best loan and not get your knees beaten up if you don't pay back a credit. You should be able to get a good insurance product no matter where you are or what you're trying to do.

1:56:58That's what I call better money. So I think the journey of my life has been one of pursuing that better money makes life better and moved to silicon valley 18 years ago to start a company in payments before the iphone came out i i had a feeling people were going to tap and pay with their phones so uh we were one of the first companies tapping on nfc stickers putting them on back of the phones you could pay for merchants and and that when the app store came out with the iphone we were the first wallet in the phone so that moment was like an aha moment when you saw mobile and you saw the app store this is like this is what i had been waiting for 20 years as an entrepreneur that moment in time when suddenly you can compete with incumbents in a playing field that they were not looking at so that's where rivet capital started instead of building one more company because I always consider myself, even though we always move the ball forward, I was a failed entrepreneur because the best entrepreneurs never sell their companies.

1:58:06So I decided to start Rivit as a way to say, this is the one I'm going to run until the last day I want to run it. That's fantastic. Sorry, now I'm going backwards. Can you talk to me about some of the wedges that you used in the previous companies to actually drive adoption of a new banking product or a new bank online. There's so many different place solutions. I have to imagine starting in markets like, you know, Spain, Brazil, et cetera, helped you, you know, many, it's been the narrative violation over the last 20 years has been that developing countries adopted fintech faster. They adopted new methods of payments, much faster than developing countries in many ways, because there just wasn't that legacy infrastructure.

1:58:57So I'm curious if you even think you would have been successful if you had just tried to come and only crack the U.S. market. No, I would have been a failure. I would not understand the world. I was never the best student at school, but I was a student of life. and walking through the streets of all these countries and seeing how people behave with money was the best class and the best master class I could have gotten. Because at the end, everything you do is building a brand. And brand means trust. And it's very underrated to understand how long it takes to build trust and how fast can you make it shake or disappear or fracture.

1:59:39And then how long it takes to bring it back. So if you see a pattern in everything that we've done, it's working with things that we believe can build a brand. And working with them, because that is the only mode that you can build that gives you the chance to succeed in financial services. Because every financial product at the end, it's a commodity. It can be copied. You can start with free commissions, it will be copied. You can start with free credit scores, it will be copied. You can start with free interest rate lendings or tipping. It will be copied. So it has to be the brand. And that's a special DNA that I got to understand from working in markets where people's level of trust was even lower than in developed markets.

2:00:27Yeah. Yeah. How do you actually build that trust and build that brand in some of those markets? Is it different in Brazil than other countries? Are you talking about the feel of the product or actually just the marketing and telling people what your brand stands for? Or does it infuse through the interactions with a bank teller in the virtual environment probably? I think it's all of the above. It's the little things. It's really telling a story in a way that people believe and consistently see that you're doing that. And everyone, every company does it in a different way. So there was a story I remember from Nubank in Brazil when we backed them super early.

2:01:10You know, in Sao Paulo, they are 18 million people, but I think there's like 4 million dogs. It's almost like one dog. And so whenever they saw that you had a transaction on your credit card for a vet, they will send you cookies to your home. Wow. Right? Because it meant that your dog was sick or something was happening. So imagine, but those are little things that you do that with consistency. And if the message is we care about you and we're paying attention to what's going on in your life, that's how you build that trust. It's a bunch of little details. There's never a big thing, but it has to be genuine.

2:01:53And you can see when CEOs or teams are not genuine, you can see it 10 miles away. how do you feel about so you did the first institutional round of coinbase and robinhood correct yes and did you did you think at the time that that those companies did you have a feeling that that if they were successful they would end up ultimately competing with each other because it's not exactly head-to-head yet but you can imagine 10 years from today these companies will just be going at it and maybe that's just because of the trends around bundling in fintech right if If you can create one product, you can add a bunch of others.

2:02:31If you can earn someone's trust in one category, you can expand out. But I think we're at this really interesting moment where the last 10 years were about you had traditional fintech and you had crypto and they were these distinct categories. But it seems very obvious now that they will be massively overlapped in ultimately just one category, which is money. Yes. So we were the first institutional round to Coinbase and Robinhood, but also to Revolut, which is the same camp. And also to NewBank. Also, we were super early and we built with Mercado Libre and Mercado Pago, which is a competitor of NewBank.

2:03:10So if you had told me back then that all these companies were going to be competing for this, we would have never guessed it, ever. And the reality is... I'm surprised you say that because it seems like you have a bit of a you got a secret crystal ball or something. Well, five years ago, we told our LPs, our investors in one of our investor day meetings, that the rails of crypto and financial services were actually starting to blend. And it was going to be indifferent. And then companies that didn't do both were going to be completely spaced out or lost the window of chance to build. So five years ago, we started to see it, but it wasn't obvious before that because there were different geographies and all of that, but now they're competing globally to each other.

2:03:56So the way I think about it is the first decade of all of this momentum was the few companies that will have the right to win. And they've earned it by building brand, by building teams, by delivering on services, by getting licenses, by doing all these things that they need to do. So now we have a, call it 30 or 40 players worldwide that we call the compounders, the one that will deliver and compound for the next decade. Now, this second decade of those 40 names or 30 names is the decade where they steal market share from every single incumbent. Because so far, they haven't that much. But this decade with AI, with crypto, with the way they're building new products, with the way they're using their own brands, with the trust they have, with the government regulators leverage they have today versus five years ago.

2:04:51Buckle up, because what's coming is going to be really fun if you're an incumbent and really tough if you're an incumbent. What lessons do you think the Coinbase's, the Robinhood's, et cetera, of the world learned in 2020, in 2021, during that sort of that chaotic chaotic market cycle, that it feels good and that many of the world learned in the world. lessons I was also told to ask you about. Are you talking about COVID era or? Yeah, just the whole like, you know, you know, like Robin, Robin Hood, that felt like, you know, the Robin Hood GameStop saga, those moments, it feels like there was a lot of hard ones lessons.

2:05:33And then we've started this new cycle, this new bubble, whatever you want to call it. And hopefully a lot of them have taken those, taken learnings from that and are implementing it, whether it's around risk management and things like that yeah so i think the lessons from that time was when kobe started most of these companies were not ready to turbo charge and what happened during kobe if you look back is that you probably fast track four or five years of customers and growth into 12 months and none of these teams were prepared for it being at home not being able to do much more it just supercharged all of these companies and they over hire and they were working remote and they didn't have capital, you know, frameworks in place because the growth was unexpected.

2:06:18And we remember getting a bunch of calls during that time, the beginning, like, this is amazing. And then this is getting tough and this is going to be problematic. And, and it can crack here or there. And when we got the phone call at three and four or five in the morning from Robinhood saying the GameStop day and what needed to be done. and we funded them in four hours, almost half a billion dollars that we didn't have that we asked a bank to lend us to do it. We've all agreed a lot of them. A favor from an old friend. Yes, literally a favor from an old friend. And that's what it takes to build relationships in banking.

2:06:57You need decades of that so you can call in that favor when it's needed. And that day, and look at how long it took for the brand to regain the trust of the market. It was almost two and a half years from that moment. And you got to be a special leader and a special team to go through that turf and come back out of it. And now they're hitting their cylinders, but they got their story right. So you can see it in the Brian Armstrongs, in the Nikolaj Soronskis, in the Vlad Tenev's, in the David Velez. They have that now. They went through that and they're on the other side and they're all between 38 and 41.

2:07:36So they got the best decade of their life coming their way. Yeah. What does that mean for competition at the early stage? It feels like it was really, in retrospect, it seems like a no-brainer to back disruptive technologies in this huge market finance. But now you have, if you're starting a company that's going to carve out a little slice of, oh, Robinhood's not touching this yet, or Coinbase isn't touching this yet. It's like, well, those companies are incredibly well capitalized, and they're run by founders who are not about to retire anytime soon. Seems kind of dangerous. So where are you seeing pockets of opportunity on the early stage?

2:08:14What are you seeing in the next generation of founders that might actually go and be able to carve out enough of a slice to grow into a generational company? Yeah, I think what's coming for... I'm more excited for what's coming this next decade than the last decade, if you ask me. The last decade was just a setup for this decade. And there will be a bunch of new teams and companies. And we have been spending time with the young generation, like kids who are between founders who are between 19 and 25 or 19 and 27, call it. Their brains are just faster. Their ways of thinking about how to build products is just different.

2:08:55They spend the best years, the year of COVID learning and learning how to think really fast. and I've been blown away on how quick they are understanding and how quick they are to build. So we have this thesis that we wrote, it took us almost a year to write, which we call it token factories. And it's this world where forget about crypto rails or fintech or AI, all of these things are blending. If before it was fintech here and crypto here and we said that they blended, now we have financial services with crypto rails with AIs. And the thing between all of them is that they're all tokens. Everything is a token.

2:09:39So we call it the token revolution era. And tokenizing information, tokenizing money, and tokenizing power. And how those three things combine, it's where we're seeing some of the best entrepreneurs working. So that's what got us really excited. So we found a bunch of small young teams who are building what we call now token factories, companies that are building either access tokens that give you abilities to connect anywhere they want in the world to do anything. There's expert tokens. These are companies that are generating knowledge or expert information that is solely unique, that is going to change the way you manage wealth management, wealth advisory, the way you manage insurance products, insurance agents.

2:10:27And then you have what we call asset tokens. And stable coins is the first of the asset tokens outside of Bitcoin. It's the first of the true asset tokens. Talk to me about real estate. I feel like that was something at the peak of the crypto boom 2022. We were starting to hear about mortgages on chain, physical assets on chain. We're now starting to see stocks get on chain and obviously U.S. dollars, which are much more tangible than artworks, for example. But it feels like most of this generation's entrepreneurs probably learned a hard lesson during the global financial crisis of the risks of over-financialization in the real estate markets.

2:11:11But maybe, how do you see things developing or real estate assets playing out generally over the next decade? So I think, John, you said something that was really important. If you look this wall behind me, artists always tell you where the future is going before we get there and NFTs, it wasn't just about the beauty of the art and the tokenization and the provenance and the transferability and the democratic it was the first asset that was truly put on chain that you trusted, that you knew there was only one of each that you knew who had it and you knew when it was minted and you can lend against it, you can pledge it, you can do whatever So guess what?

2:11:54Artists did their job. They showed us where the world was going. So to me, I'm very grateful because that's how we learned what was going on. And then we found companies like Figure, who's tokenized most of the mortgages that you get, HELOCs right now. They're the biggest HELOC tokenizer in America. Then you had the Circles of the Worlds and the Tethers tokenizing dollars. And there's like 10 more coming behind them. And now you have Robinhood tokenizing stocks. So I think the problem with mortgages is that they don't move that much. Out of all the financial assets, they probably transfer themselves 10 times in your lifetime, maybe five.

2:12:33Maybe you buy a home. So it's not the lowest hanging fruit need of a tokenized asset, even though it's a great asset to tokenize. But I think we're going to get there because right now the SEC and all the regulators have put the real rules in place to see tokenization. And In the best organizations, you're not going to see. You're not going to realize their tokens. But suddenly, you're going to be able to click, make two clicks, and get a mortgage against us. And you're going to be able to do one more click and swap to another mortgage issuer and not miss a beep on your payments or in your servicing.

2:13:10That's what the consumer is going to see. That's what the consumer is going to see with Robinhood token stocks. You're going to have the same UX experience and just trade stocks anywhere in the world not knowing that they're tokenized. And that's where we get super excited because we're just at the beginning of that ecosystem, which is probably like growing up again in the 1970s when you're about to create electronic payment transfers. How have you thought about the investability of stable coins as a category when it feels like a feature for so many of the companies that you've already backed?

2:13:48i know you i know you guys did privy which uh recently sold to stripe but uh that that what was the other one bridge oh there you go it sounds like i i we we told the stripe that we're shareholders we love them we're good friends with patrick and john and the whole team and will we told them that we feel that we were we were we were their core dev team because the two investors we need in stable going infrastructure they took out of our plates in less than a year. Yeah. But yeah, so you made some infrastructure bets. Are there consumer bets that you see going forward? I know there's a bunch of different potential use cases, but again, it's so easy for an existing company to add stable coins, and they already have the distribution and the customer network to quickly, you know, service.

2:14:44Yeah, so it's a great question, Jordi. We've been trying to find, we've been looking worldwide for consumer applications that start with stablecoins first as a user experience. We haven't found one that will say this is the way it's going to work to scale globally at a scale that matters. so that's why we have been backing much more the infrastructure providers of all these schemes because they feel like they have a lot more growth potential than the consumer side but I think we're just starting I think now we're starting to see the beginning of agentic experiences with crypto rails and AI through agents and I think in that intersection we're going to find native stablecoin retail brands that are going to provide services that you don't expect.

2:15:34So we've been investing a lot there in learning. We've been testing ourselves a lot there. We have our own thesis on how it's going to work. So we're actually building some of them and learning. But we expect to see entrepreneurs worldwide working around them in the very near future. My guess is in the next year. We will be surprised to find a few already. Well, when you come back on and hopefully you'll come back on many more times between now and then. But I'm assuming in 2030, we'll have the same conversation again. You got every single new stablecoin pure play that mattered. What about on the issuer side?

2:16:09I feel like now that stablecoins have clear regulation, it seems like we'll see a lot more people start to issue them. Is that needed? Do you see use cases or are the USDCs and the Tethers providing enough value right now? I think people underestimate how important the Tether brand is worldwide. I think when you are in Argentina or in Venezuela or you're in Indonesia, they don't even say USDT. They just call it Tether. And I think Tether has a chance to be a really global brand that most people will under imagine the scale of it. Circle has a great reputation institutional side, but we're super early.

2:16:58I mean, think about it. We're only$250 billion into stablecoins. We should be in$2 trillion in the next year or a year and a half or two. And if we're not there, something's off. So for that, we will probably need like five, seven, 10 more names. Now, you're not going to care as a user, to be honest. You may have a preference. I remember growing up, my parents and us to save money from inflation in Venezuela. Every Friday, we walked to the bank branch and we bought travel checks. And it was a way of saving, which is literally the same as stable coins today. And those travel checks in the era, you could buy American Express travel checks.

2:17:38You can buy Thomas Cook, which were MasterCard travel checks. And there was another third brand, I forget. I didn't care which one we got. all I care was getting the dollars and being able to save. So I think, but over time, I remember my family's queue to American Express travel checks. For whatever reason, it had like a better recognition brand. So I think we're still in the early days of that. And that's going to happen. And I think we're going to see five to 10. And we're going to see the incumbents issuing their own token and stable coins. And now the bridges of the world are going to be super important because they're going to be the bridge to connect all of them, no matter what you're doing.

2:18:16And it's going to be very simple to solve. So my guess is five brands in the next five years. Wow. Great. Great. Very exciting. This was awesome. Yeah. Thanks so much. You're a legend. Hopping on. Come back on again soon. You guys are doing an amazing job. We'll be following your show. And congratulations. It's really fun. And you bring super fresh content and news and people to the show. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mickey. Talk again soon. Looking forward to it. Bye. up next we have casey neistat recently the youtuber the creator he's over now working on the chromatic which we've been playing in the studio working on the m64 how you doing casey there he is helen good to see you welcome to the stream uh what's new in your world uh how did the are those the nothing ear one let's give us a little review oh yeah these are fantastic I had to take them off because the noise canceling on these is, it's like too good.

2:19:16And I'm at home right now and my kids were screaming two seconds ago. But yeah, these things are fantastic. Yeah, we had Carl Paye on the show a week ago and he put them down and I was like, I was too afraid to ask like, oh, are those for me? Like, are you going to leave those for me? I kind of want those. I need a new pair. I'll have to pick them up. I'm not enough of an audiophile to know if something sounds good or not. It's either good or it's not good. but physical switches like buttons you can touch yeah i really like and the like the apple i don't know what they're called what are their airpod maxes yeah airpod maxes there's no on off switch yeah like i can't digital crown i needed i need an on off switch and you have that i like that yeah are you are you big teenage engineering guy it feels like kind of like that that they're almost coining like a trend that's like becoming more mainstream now.

2:20:09Teenage Engineering is the only company whose products I buy religiously, even though I have no idea how to use any of them. The same thing happened to me. I bought them a little keepers. It's art. I was like, I'm a musician now. Couldn't figure out how to make a song. I ought to use it. I love it. It's amazing. Looks good on a desk. It's so beautiful. And like someone that cares that much about the craft, I want to be a part of that. Support them unconditionally. Yeah. So tell me about Mod Retro. how'd that come together uh what what what is the news in your world um you know the mod retro thing is really funny because uh my video says all this but like i'm a big retro gamer um i'm guilty of sometimes playing call of duty on my xbox but it doesn't work out when you got a wife and kids not being guilty every every man should have an allocation of time daily for call of duty you know getting on rust getting on rust with your boys yeah he's so close to that w and then the door comes flying open, the children come running in.

2:21:07It's challenging. But I'm 44. So like Apex of video games for me was like 1989, I think, getting a Game Boy the first year they came out for my grandmother for Christmas. And like you guys are younger than me, but before that, all we had were those like LED LCD games that were like really janky, like the Tiger games, and they were terrible. and the first time i turned on the game boy and like saw the nintendo come down i was like holy this is such a moment um and then nintendo 64 came out when i was i was in like just getting into high school as a freshman we used to sneak out of high school get on the city bus like the the regular bus and then drive two towns across and then walk a mile and a half to toys r us to sit in toys r us and play the demo of mario 64 when that thing came out i think it was in 94 so i was 12 or 13 years old yeah so i love that stuff and mod retro when i first learned about it when i first learned about the chromatic their game boy i thought it was really stupid i didn't understand because you can get those like chinese ones off of amazon for 50 bucks and um a friend of mine was like no this is great they're doing great things do you want to talk to palmer about it and i'm a huge palmer lucky fan and i was like i'd love to and i don't know that I've ever been evangelized so much in my life like by the end of that call he didn't just convince me but I was like I felt like an idiot for not seeing what Mod Retro was and then as I got to know Torin who who is the CEO of Mod Retro and understand the vision for the company I was just so like overwhelmed I was like this is the most like beautiful vision ever I don't understand the business of it it makes no sense to me but the fact that these guys have the guts to do this like can i be a part of it and i think i pitched back to them what i understood the company was and they're like that's it that's what we want to say and i was like all right give me a job and my job will be to figure out how to communicate that and we'll make videos and stuff and they're like sure but we're not going to pay you and i was like great i'll take a business card it's been great working with it i also i'm an investor in mod retro i have a vested interest and them succeeding.

2:23:26But I mean, that's not where the passion to be a part of what they're up to comes from for me. Yeah. So many places we could go with this. This is fantastic. What, yeah, do you think that there's a world, I mean, I love the handheld gaming stuff. My experience having kids was I stopped playing console games. The N64 was actually my first console ever. What was your game? Mario 64 for sure. GoldenEye was big. Big head. GoldenEye. GoldenEye. You got to do that. And then a couple other, Donkey Kong. And was never really into the Mario Kart racers, but then Smash Brothers kind of took over. And that was the real competition with everyone eventually.

2:24:11I think what's exciting to me is like building new consumer hardware that will still turn on and work and bring joy 20 years from now. I had I had the the game I have like my Game Boy Pikachu edition from growing up and I when mod retro came out I went and found it and I turned it on and it worked Yeah, and that was like such an amazing moment for me because like when like I haven't I've got old iPhones lying around I've never been like not one. I've never been like oh I should could turn that on It's gonna be fun, right because it's like it's not evergreen It was of the moment and you just move on and so I think if mod retro can do anything which is like make consumer hardware which is so disposable today across all these different categories and make it so that yeah you're going to get your mod retro or your m64 you know this year and then you're going to turn it on in 30 years and like you know bridge generations yeah you know it's i think there's there's it's easy to sort of shit on um planned obsolescence because it is real i think of that like we woke up my house woke up this morning at 7 30 a.m because the refrigerator repair man finally showed up and was banging on our door at 7 30 in the morning the dog was freaking out because our two-year-old refrigerator doesn't work and this is a refrigerator that has wi-fi there we go let's give it up for wi-fi everybody's always everything it doesn't work it doesn't work and when i think about that it's like that refrigerator that we had as kids with the one big heavy aluminum door like it just worked it worked forever but in order to keep selling shit you have to keep coming out new things i think that's the negative of planned obsolescence but i think when it comes to consumer technology there is an argument for having to keep up with the rate of innovation you know like the new phones that come out every time you get a new phone it does do something that your other phone didn't so there's maybe a reason for that but i think with that sort of tidal wave of innovation that feels faster now than it ever felt when I was young.

2:26:17I think we, we lose some great things. Yeah. And you know, my understanding of mod retro, at least what I want it to be. And I think what, what, what Palmer and what Torin also want it to be is like, let's identify consumer electronics that people just love, like had an unbelievable relationship where they really like the love I had for my game where I don't know that there was another thing that I owned through my adolescence that I treasured more than my Game Boy. And let's bring them back and let's do them justice. Let's build them so they last forever. I think Palmer's quote when I was interviewing was, we don't want to build another Game Boy.

2:26:54We want to build the last Game Boy, like the last one that ever needs to be built. And that's the vision with M64 as well. You can get emulators that kind of work, but let's build the thing that you and I had, John, when we were kids and let's have it last forever. And I just think there's so much romance in that. When you start digging deep, you can start to see products everywhere. And Mod Retro is tiny. There's a couple of people working out of a small office, but the list of products that we want to build, the list of ideas that we have is endless. And that's a really exciting thing to take on.

2:27:35It's also such an interesting company because you're trying to recreate things of the past that were good products and you want to improve on them, but you need to stay true to the original product. Otherwise, you know, what do you do? I mean, it's not to say that Mod Retro couldn't one day create, you know, novel, totally novel products, but it is like an interesting constraint and challenge. And you actually have to, it's really, in some ways it's easy because you know exactly what you need to build. But in other ways, it's harder because you're taking a product that was almost perfect in its original form and still like you need to make it.

2:28:11It should be better. Otherwise, you know, what are you doing? Yeah. You know, like one interesting challenge. I'm not the right person to speak to this. I'm not the technical guy. But to make the screen match the old Game Boy screen was an exhaustive process. So when you buy one of those handheld emulators that looks like a Game Boy, the Chinese made ones, they have fairly high high pixel density screens on that. So in order for them to give the look of an old Game Boy, you're using multiple pixels to emulate a single pixel. So it's inaccurate. And real psychopaths, I'm not one of them, but I appreciate it, real psychopaths on Twitter have done like this super zoom into a pixel.

2:28:50And you realize that Mario is like jumping a half a pixel too low or a half a pixel too high within the frame because of the limitation of the screen. And Torin and Palmer's like religious obsession with matching that screen was one of the hardest things to overcome. So it was actually harder to build something that matched the quality of a product that's 20 years old than it would be to actually get the latest and greatest screen and just plug it in there. Yeah, I remember Palmer saying something about like a couple of the companies, the screen is actually rotated 90 degrees. So instead of the scan lines coming down this way, they go across this way and then they just transform it at the last second.

2:29:29but it's like this bizarre thing that you would never really notice of, but it's this craftsmanship that actually you feel, I feel like. And it feels like something that's just like been lost in this like everything's disposable, everything's junk, everything's a knockoff culture. And it feels like, I don't know, like it just feels like it's worth it to have stuff that exhibits craft and taste. And even if I don't even if I'm not the one that can tell that Mario is one pixel too low when I do the jump Like the fact that the craftsman worked on the product means something I it's hard to put a exact like quantitative value on it, but if you feel it right That is the gamble that is the company you ever said that in my video where he's like, you know Maybe nobody cares about this, but but weirdos like you and me but that's enough And I think it's like there is an argument that's like well who cares if it's off by half a pixel And if you're one of those people totally cool, you're well There's plenty of products in the market for you But if you're someone who does care if you're that weirdo that buys Teenage engineering products because you just value the integrity of the product so much you want to have it Then you know, there's a place in this world for companies like mod retro.

2:30:41Yeah. What do you think about? Like the temptation to just make like one small change like the chromatic has a USB-C port on it that's a huge upgrade but you could easily turn this into like well like you know we have the technology to make the m64 handheld and then you know then you're in switch territory and all of a sudden it's like a completely different product right i think that's ever present and that's that's the problem with sort of limitless you know like when nintendo was building this what was almost 40 years ago 35 years ago now they were so limited by what the technology enabled them to do like when you think about the sega game gear i don't know if you ever had one of those great product yeah it's this big but it was the first one that had really great color screen on it and it took six double a batteries instead of four like the game boy but the battery life on it was like 40 minutes yeah and um do you remember the n64 like expansion pack that you put in to like double the memory that was yeah dude i remember that what about the rumble pack that was like It's the greatest innovation ever.

2:31:44My mind exploded when the controller shook. Yeah, do these like, these add-ons because like they couldn't bake it all into the first product. And that's indicative of the limitations of what tech can do. Totally. And when you look at like, you know, I don't know what Samsung announced last week, two weeks ago, and you're looking at what the limitations are today of like a folding screen that's as thick as 10 sheets of paper, you realize how far we've come. But when you go in the other direction, there's kind of no limits and you're looking to make something that was made 30 years ago. The problem is like, where do you draw the line?

2:32:18And I think that's a really, it's a really interesting thing to try to overcome and confront. Yeah. What can you teach me about the lore of, in the video camera world? I was looking at a cool new music video and it had this fisheye lens and this grain and I was kind of digging in. and it seemed like they shot it on like a Sony skate camera with mini DV tapes. Like this feels like something that I was looking at, maybe I could buy one on eBay, but it's probably broken and I want someone to go remake it. But then of course you always have like, oh, you could just like throw the filter on there in Premiere or whatever.

2:32:51But what are some of the iconic video cameras or just like creative tools that might, you know, be worth revisiting at some point? Yeah, it's such an interesting examination And your question's great because my family and I are out. We're in Massachusetts for summer vacation. And there's a lot of kids around. Like we went and got ice cream last night, a lot of teenagers around. And a lot of these kids come up and they ask me for selfies. And the amount of teenagers that come up to me and ask me for selfies, and they're carrying the point and shoots that we had in like the 2010s, like before your phone camera was good enough, they all carry them.

2:33:31No one makes that camera anymore. which means if you have one you have an old one yeah and every one of these kids has it and when i i ask them because i'm curious like why do you carry that they're like i love the way it looks and i think we've reached this point like iphone cell phone photography it all looks still perfect in a way that it almost becomes artificial like i think the iphone 5 was the last iphone where when you took a picture just sort of took a picture and then after that every time you take a picture now on any modern smartphone it takes a picture and then runs it through an algorithm to make the picture sweeter and cleaner and sharper and better for you.

2:34:05And I think there's sort of this yearning for something that feels more real and authentic. It's like you look at a, you're at a store looking at a picture, you know, a camera from a picture from, from 2010, uh, or a camera or a picture from an iPhone today is like, you're at, you're at the grocery store and there's the organic apples and they look, they look good, but like they're a little fucked up and, and, and, And, you know, they may be like, whatever, part of it's kind of rotten. And then you look over and you see the perfect Apple. And like intuitively, you know that you're like, it's a little bit too good to be true, that Apple over there.

2:34:40You know? And I think, I don't know, the other thing that's real is removing the camera, like adding the camera to the phone has been one of the greatest innovations of the century. Right? In many ways. But now removing it, removing the camera from the phone and being able to leave your phone and just bring a camera around is also an innovation, right? Going backwards. And I think that's the other thing that kids like and I've found that's nice. If I'm going to the beach with my kids, it's nice to be able to bring a camera but not have my phone. Yeah. My daughter is 10. This is the first summer she's allowed to, like, walk around with her friends without a parent.

2:35:20And she has a flip phone. and she had this whole argument for getting an iPhone that has nothing on it but the phone and messaging and my wife and I had this discussion and the reason why we said no it has to be the flip phone is because of the camera like it introduces a new level of sort of attention and why you're in purpose and the reason why we wanted to have a phone is simply to stay in touch with us no other reason but the minute you introduce this other sort of novel aspect of it it becomes much more of a social dynamic and a social consideration in the way that you're trying to get away from that.

2:35:56But I think just going back to the camera things, this is such an obsession of mine. I think that we are quick to ignore or look past the relationship we have with the aesthetic that a camera yields. And when you see those pictures off of those old point and shoots, they look like something specific. Like when you were talking about that old skateboard fish IDD look, it looks like something specific. You have a relationship with that. When we see stuff that looks like it's VHS, we think of the 80s or the 90s. And I think now there's just sort of this generic aesthetic across the board, this like crispy, flat, 4K phone thing.

2:36:33And there's this desire to have something that has some sense of identity attached to it. And that's why we're seeing these sort of Gen Z types, you know, looking for older tech that reflects more of who they are, more individuality. And I think that's a trend that we're going to see continue. you it's this generation's vinyl yeah i i've joked that i want to film i want to film the first podcast on panavision film or something just spend a fortune developing the film what other what other what other consumer tech categories are you excited about we're having we're having the founder of wave uh on and in 20 minutes and they got like 12 million views yesterday for launching like sunglasses that will just live stream constantly.

2:37:18Do you have a ratio of positive to negative mentions in those 12 million views? I mean, I think everybody, people had a viscerally negative reaction to it. That's my take on it as well. And it makes me think, you know, my software development company, Beam, my startup, we We started that company in 2014. And a little known aspect of that company is initially it was built around Google Glass. No way. And we actually, you know, we rewrote the code. We rewrote the software that Google Glass ran. So it had a singular function, which was you push a button like this. It captures 10 seconds and immediately shares it to your feed.

2:37:58That's where we started with that. And I remember meeting with Google and they were excited about it. And they showed us what Google Glass 2 was going to look like. And we're like, fuck, yeah. We started raising money based on that. And then a week later, they announced they were killing the entire Google Glass program. And we backed off. We're like, all right, we'll just do it on the phone now. But I think when you ask about sort of the social impact of being able to live stream all the time or the negative reaction that we're seeing based on Wave's video they posted yesterday, I think the social dynamic is something that is often overlooked in the hardware startup world.

2:38:34I think of the humane AI pin. And, you know, a really good friend of mine worked for Humane and obviously super excited about new technology. Yeah, Sam. Which, parenthetically, you joke about Panavision for a podcast. Sam Sheffer has in his studio for his live streaming setup a VHS camera hardwired into his deck so he can live stream from VHS. That's amazing. But Sam would be around. I tried to hire Sam, by the way. We worked with him on a project. And I was like, he's got to be. He's got to be solo. He's way too big of a deal. Sam's the best. But when I'd be around him and he had his AI pin on, I was always sort of looking down at that or like thinking about what I'm saying and uncomfortable about, you know, speaking openly to him.

2:39:19And I think like that's what I mean by social implications. Like, you know, my phone is on my couch right here. But if we're sitting together and I'm holding my phone like this the whole time we're talking, you're uneasy about that. And so when I think of a pair of glasses that are live streaming or at least have the capability of live streaming the whole time, when I look at them, I'm uneasy. And I think of this, you know, maybe the most extreme example of this is Apple Vision Pro, which, you know, blew my mind when I got that thing. Like I made the most glowing video about it because it was the greatest technology I've ever used.

2:39:53But later that night, because I made the video the same day I got them, I'm at home using them. And my wife is like, Casey, take those fucking things off your face and pay attention to your kids. And I was like, oh, you can't wear these around other people. And I was like, how did they not see that? And so I think about that because like we're sort of accustomed to people using their phones and it's kind of OK. Like we're used to this. This is not OK. And so when I think about wearables, I think that that is going to be a gigantic thing to overcome, which is. Well, the crazy, so Amazon acquired a company, it got announced this week called B, which is a brace after all, everything they faced with Siri, Siri's listening to me.

2:40:39The B band just listens to you all day long. Every single conversation. Everything. And it's cool. Like, I think all new tech for the most part is cool. Do I want my team to be wearing a B bracelet? Are we going to allow people to wear B bands? This might be a B free zone. This might be a B free zone, you know? I'm not going to have any friends that wear bees. I don't have any friends anyways, but if you have a bee, it just means we can't hang out. Yeah. Because it makes me uncomfortable. And look, I think there's an argument that's like, get over it. You fucking Luddite. This is the direction everything's headed in.

2:41:14You're being recorded all the time anyway. Sure. But in the interim, I do think there's a learning curve. I think that Meta's decision to put wearable glasses with a camera on them in Ray-Bans, the most common sunglasses in the world, was brilliant because we're all familiar with this pair of sunglasses. Like there was no learning curve. There was no like, what's that thing on your face? We know what it is. I think how emphatic they are about having the indicator light. There's no way you can turn it off. If you cover it, they don't record. There's some degree, at least there's a tactic. My question for the Wave founder in 20 minutes is, should your glasses be bright red head and have like you know a circle in the middle of your head that's flashing that says i'm recording yeah i mean if so that people can someone shows up with a tv camera like i don't feel like oh this is in violation of my privacy i'm like i know exactly what's going on the news is here and if i step in front of that camera i'm on the news like it it we have a social understanding of that and we still might not want to be around it yeah it might be like actually i'm going to turn around and walk the other way because i don't want to be seen on this camera or whatever i don't know but there's there's an understanding that yeah and look on on waves website in the q a there's a question like is there an indicator light and their answer is yeah but you can turn it off and so like i you know i don't know that i read that that makes me a little bit queasy yeah as a guy who has a camera on him you know all the time and so much of the videos that i've made is about filming everyone in the whole world around me i still think there's something honest about having that camera on your shoulder pointing a camera at someone um versus like you know the the glass hole movement of the Google Glass, which by having this on your face, everyone was uneasy around you.

2:42:57I think it's even a big hurdle to overcome as we eventually figure out what this hardware AI future is going to look like. Yeah. What do you think about airplane demos? It feels like there's so much tech where the demo is like, you'll love this on an airplane. The Apple Vision Pro is a great example. A lot of the handheld devices. But it doesn't work when it's dark? It's not too dark on planes. It does work very well on planes, but it's this like weird niche use case that feels like killer application. And then you actually get out into most of your life is not spent on airplanes usually. And so, yeah, look, if that's the best you've got, like I travel more than most people I know.

2:43:33We're still talking about, you know, maybe double digits, maybe, maybe 10 hours a month tops. Yeah. So, you know, 4000 bucks for a face computer that I use 10 hours a month on an airplane, which, by the way, it doesn't work for me on an airplane. I didn't like it at all. It didn't work. Okay. No, it will work. Would that like claustrophobia? No, when you're on an airplane, you're surrounded by strangers. Yeah. So the idea that like, I'm just going to go like that and watch Avatar with all these people around me. You know, I don't fly spirit that often, but I have flown spirit. And I know it goes on on those flights.

2:44:08Like it just, again, like the social implication of it. Yeah, the social implication of it. You know, I think if that's the best you've got, then maybe, you know, maybe you're not thinking holistically enough about your, about your hardware. Yeah. How do you, how do you spot talent? You, you, you discovered Sam, uh, someone in the chat was asking, uh, if you have a framework for it. It's a, it's a, it's a difficult question, but you know, it's the same, I approach it the same way that I approach, uh, investments and it's seldom the work and it's almost always the individual, you know, like I think Sam is brilliant but he's brilliant at everything that he does he's brilliant with the work that humane he's brilliant the work that he did at the verge before that he's brilliant with his own youtube channel you know i've got a dear friend of mine a kid named hunter who works in the building with me but hunter's a hunter's a friend and we invest together so hunter's hunter's fantastic and like i don't know what hunter does because every time i have a conversation with him he's starting some new business or some new endeavor like the work is almost irrelevant it's the individual.

2:45:14And I think it's like, it's that mentality that you have or you don't have. Not everyone has it. I do think maybe you can get it if you don't have it. But when I see that in people, I have a tendency to sort of gravitate towards those people. And when I look at the, when I look around at the friends of mine that have some sort of professional relationship with a professional admiration for, they all have that thing, that, that sort of desire to, uh, to see it through, whatever the it may be. So I guess the short answer is like, it's always the person, never the product. That's great. Hunter's in the chat, by the way.

2:45:51He says hello. Another question I have is, we've been thinking about AI-generated images, video, et cetera, is getting so good. If it stays at this pace, you're going to be able to generate characters consistently. you're already seeing this on Instagram, people just creating entire personalities for influencers and different verticals. Do you have any type of strong thesis around how that will play out if we're going to have sort of organic influencers, regular humans, and then these synthetic? I've been thinking about in the context of an example. It's like, I don't want the AI Andrew Huberman.

2:46:34I want Andrew Huberman to get health advice from because I know Andrew and I trust that he's making the best decisions and studying, you know, and making, you know, these recommendations and understands the weight of that. And you have like a synthetic Andrew Huberman in five years, doesn't care if he convinces a million people to do something done with their health because you can just shut the account down and turn a new one on but I'm curious how you think yeah okay my cynical take on it which is which I believe is accurate um I'd wager that this is accurate is that it's a tidal wave that none of us will will be able to to overcome we can hold our breath for a while it is a tidal wave and I wish I had a better analogy but it's a little bit like you know when Toy Story came out in 1999 it was the first computer animated feature film and it was great i loved it but then five six years later there was just this you know onslaught of computer animated films and i was like you know what the hand-drawn stuff is better i miss that when cvi first started getting introduced into films i was like no practical is better um i like practical better that's going to be the thing and it's like no you're gonna lose and i think ai is probably the most existential version of that i think that it's just going to be so good that it's going to become irrelevant and old people like us might appreciate you know real human things and we might keep it alive but the generation behind us my children when they see hand-drawn animation they're like what is this they don't care it means nothing to them so I think it's just going to get so good that it really doesn't matter and that that tidal wave is going to consume everything.

2:48:15And I think that the progress that we've seen in the last couple years of how good it is and how quickly it's developing is incredible. But when you look at the capabilities of the latest GROC and the latest GPT, you look at how smart these things are, you look at the sort of conversations you can have with any of these agents, and then you look at how good the image is that can be spit out by um you know google's video or whichever whichever ai uh you you might be fond of it's like they're just going to marry really really quickly and i think five or six years from now we're going to start to see real sort of erosion in the space because what they're delivering is going to be so good you know like another example is like we haven't had a number one song yet that's completely ai generated but it's going to come out of nowhere where it's going to be like Gangnam Style, which like the novelty of it allows us to dismiss the lack of humanity that this song has.

2:49:10The first AI song that's going to be a number one hit is not going to be a Bob Dylan-esque song that comes from the soul. It's going to be something fun and outrageous, and we're going to forgive that AI made it. And then slowly it's going to start to chip away. But I think it is a losing battle. And the optimistic take on that is I think that there is going to be an extreme premium. but on the humans that are able to sustain because of what they represent uniquely. Maybe another bad analogy is it's like, I love Marvel movies. They're fucking fantastic. But as far as cinema goes, there's an argument that said it's like the kind of artistry that we saw in the 70s or 80s, like the apex of cinema where it comes from one.

2:49:55When you think of a Tarantino movie, you think of a truly great filmmaker with a voice. Marvel movies are something else. They're fucking great. We love them. We all show up to see them and we're okay with that. And I think that's going to happen with AI, but it's going to happen at a rate of acceleration that we've never encountered before. And it's going to be so good that we're willing to forgive it. And I think it's going to leave a handful of people out there. Maybe Andrew Huffman will be one of them. I hope so. I'm a fan of his as well, but it will put an extreme premium on the sort of human voices that are distinctly human that distinctly represents something that AI could never.

2:50:33When you look at the landscape of media, a lot of that shit could be replaced by AI. The power law gets steeper. Yeah, absolutely. That's like a five-hour conversation by the way. We'll have you back on again soon. This was awesome. Congrats on your new fake but very real role at Mod Retro. I appreciate it. Thanks for the time, guys. have fun in Massachusetts. We'll talk soon. We'll talk soon. Take care. Have a good one. Bye. Air horn for Casey. Up next, we have Alex from Bright AI coming in the studio. But let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks.

2:51:19Interesting. What else do we need to cover today? There are a bunch of posts we've been through, but we have our next guest here in the studio. We will welcome him in. How are you doing? Welcome. Alex, what's happening? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for hopping on. Give us an intro. Break down who you are, what you do for everyone who's listening. Yeah, so I'm CEO and founder of Bright AI. We build physical AI solutions for all the sort of essential services that society can't live without. So things like energy grid, power supply, water infrastructure, HVAC, pest control, and all those things.

2:51:58So we have a platform that lets you kind of real-time observe this distributed physical infrastructure in the world and solves a bunch of the problems that people have in those industries in terms of labor shortages, breakdown in the aging infrastructure, sustainability challenges, all those things. Is the customer more government-focused or private companies? They're private companies now. It sort of touches everything. These services, obviously, everybody alive is a consumer of these things. As a result of that, there's plenty of government involvement, but they tend to be owned privately in the US.

2:52:36So big utility companies, service providers, pass control operators, all different sorts of companies. And then then you've got this crossover interest with the national interest and so on as well. Where's the strain the worst right now across those different areas? Or where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain? It's pretty severe everywhere. So the U.S. has got a, if you grade the infrastructure, it's like a C minus or a D. So most of the critical infrastructure was built just before and after World War II. And it's, of course, like typical American plan with a 20-year lifespan.

2:53:11We'll figure it out afterwards. And now it's just, you know, in a lot of places, it's like really held together with duct tape and wire. And so if you look at all those industries, you have this aging infrastructure. And then you have labor force, like a systemic labor problems, because older, like older technicians are aging out. And sort of the bigger economy now, I guess, you know, it's still cool work to do. But younger workers are just not signing up for the journey to be a, you know, 25 year time horizon to be a master technician in these spaces. So all of it's crushing. I mean, to give one example, it'd be like water infrastructure, like 30 percent of the water we clean up leeches back out into the environment due to leaks in the pipes everywhere.

2:53:52Like my town has wooden pipes, if you can believe that. It's crazy. I mean, I know about I know about all the lead pipe that that our country depends upon to deliver water to to homes, which is concerning. But wood pipes sound pretty bad, too. a good thing it feels like an aqueduct i'm down give me a vintage it's probably safer i don't know it's like something i don't know but it's uh it's bad it's like the fresh water is leaching out and the bad stuff is leaching in yeah yeah yeah so so uh you're active in a bunch of different industries what is like what does it go to market been what does even the sales cycle look like is this you coming to these owners of these various assets and saying like we're gonna help you leverage AI and it looks like, you know, kind of Palantir's forward deployed model.

2:54:43Are you doing something different? Yeah, it's in that zone. I mean, we bootstrapped through the first hundred million in revenue. So it was like I was trying to figure out that path through the customers. We need a word for bootstrapping to a hundred million dollar run rate and then raising some capital later. But it needs its own. Maybe it's Hawkinson's model, something like that. There you go. Well, I've raised too early a bunch of times before, so I can give warning shots to other founders. But I believe you should raise capital when you've got the pattern figured out. But I had to figure out that go-to-market.

2:55:20All the beginning stuff was through private equity firms. So it turns out that private equity kind of sits and basically owns all the service companies that service this infrastructure. And so, and they're also very aligned with like five to seven year cycles where they want to drive change, like big EBITDA growth and change in these industries. And so that's where all of our first customers have come from. So we work with a lot of the biggest private equity firms that sort of their secret weapon for physical AI. Yeah. What's the latest news on the fundraising side? Yeah. So we just raised a$51 million A.

2:55:58Let's go. Congratulations. Thank you. Co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inspired Capital. We picked those guys because Khosla is super badass. They were the first and earliest check in OpenAI. They leaned forward into the future of abundance theory there. Then Inspired is a lot of people don't know about, but a New York-based firm. They're deep in infrastructure specifically and super great founder operators and all that. It's good. Do you think the company will always be more of a software provider? Is there a world in the future where you guys would just actually buy and operate the underlying asset if you felt like you could do it better than other players in the market?

2:56:46It's a good question. We provide a lot of software and hardware today. So our platform combines. IoT devices. Yeah. Yeah, we have sensors and robots and these wearables that you put on the frontline workers. and it ties all this like crazy distributed infrastructure into one big like physical AI learning loop, if that makes sense. And we found some industries like are more efficient than others, but like the most efficient one we found, like give you an example, is like 50 % of the time they send a technician out, there's nothing to see. That's the most efficient one. We found a lot of them are like 90 % of the time you send somebody out, there's nothing to do.

2:57:26but you still keep going in case it goes really bad. And so, you know, I think in some of those industries where you get, we're seeing 90 plus percent productivity gains, that might be so disruptive that we actually have to come in and just buy and operate assets directly to sort of make the value and luck happen in the biggest way. But, you know, we'll see. Right now we play deeply with these operators. It's a great, great way to go fast. I was actually a customer of your previous company, SmartThings. What's the through line? what are the lessons that you learned from the first iot company to new iot devices uh what what are the biggest lessons from that story man uh you're welcome and sorry i guess you know that where it landed for you but uh smart things was amazing it was um you know we grew it to today it's like 500 million households it's you know more than two billion connected devices pretty big platform yeah all over the world um i guess what i learned so i learned a lot about scaling instead of making IOT work.

2:58:23You know, it's matured a lot since then. And so, you know, those things are good. I think, I feel like I was solving the wrong problem though. So my wife hated the, not to say this in a bad way, but she like progressively hated the company more the more time went on. Like once regular light switches and stuff, like she doesn't, she doesn't. Yeah, totally. Lives always know. That was my experience. Like it was like magical and then slowly like little like hiccups creep in. and those, like the expectations of software and hardware or modern technology is that it's perfect because it's a computer and it's a robot.

2:58:57Yeah, I had my blog. It's like wrong market, wrong market. You know, it's not a big enough problem. Yeah, exactly. I'd love your take on Sonos. We've been talking about Sonos a ton. What do you think they need to do to make the app open faster? I opened the Sonos app. It takes me 90 seconds to adjust the volume. And I'm like, I don't know how I haven't churned. maybe i should i'll be negative on sonos but i've gone through two like hopeful waves of buying it completely in my house and then i think eventually same thing and uh it's in the orphan stage right now i think i just donated a bunch of like great gear okay yeah it's the most they have like the best sound and all that stuff but talk about like missing the software opportunity like every stage in the company totally and uh you know i just don't see you know it's sort of alexis sort of faded out in a way.

2:59:47Apple Home is not going anywhere. The Google Home stuff hasn't really, like Sonos has this opportunity to like own. They could be the thing that like unlocks like ChatGPT. My idea was Sonos is trading at what, like 1 billion market cap or something? Yeah. My idea was OpenAI literally buys them. They ship like 5 million devices last year. They ship a ton of devices and OpenAI has fantastic engineers. Whatever the engineering problem is, they can fix it. I believe, I don't know. It's a wild It's a wild theory. License Scarlet's voice this time. And like, you know. Yeah. Do it properly. Not the dumbest crackpot theory we've ever come up with.

3:00:26But we will leave the wild riffing to the next one. Thank you so much for hopping on. Awesome. Congratulations to you and I team. Really, really tremendous progress. Great news. Good luck out there. Talk to you again in the future. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Have a good one. And up next we have Chris from Waves coming in the studio. He went viral yesterday. We should play his video maybe before he joins. Let's try and pull up the video that went viral yesterday about Waves, the glasses. Okay, I'm hearing it. Let's bring it up. Let's see it. This is a spot.

3:01:10The cinematography on the startup ads is getting insane.

3:01:28It feels like noise cancellation. It sounds like the audio is switching. A banana. So when he's tapping it, is he starting a live stream or just taking a picture? Clipping. Oh, clipping. I'm not late, am I? Wait, this is meme. This is what Casey Neistat was describing. 10 seconds?

3:01:56Yeah, the bar for startup launch videos is content of 10x. It's insane. Getting Project X vibes. You remember that movie? Your average public company has trouble producing marketing videos at this level. This is remarkable. There we go. Whoa. Now we're getting into FPV, Hardcore Henry. Somebody just pulled a gun at a house party, I guess. It's wild. Yeah, if you have a life like that, maybe you do need to be recording all the time. Does she have it on too? Is it recording? Oh, there you go. Okay.

3:02:40Oh, it records from the center. Okay, cool. Well, let's bring him in. I'm excited to talk to him about waves. Welcome to the stream. What's going on? The man that kicked the hornet's nest. How are you doing? How's the last 24 hours been? Is the foot stung? It's been wild, man. It's been amazing. It's really, really awesome. Before we start, sorry, are you recording this? No, no, no. You can. You're live. We're recording it. No, these are cosmetic. They're not live. So yeah, this is kind of like a typical hardware pre-launch vision statement, collect pre-orders, and then start manufacturing, I assume?

3:03:23Yep. Very cool. What was the key takeaway? What was the good response? What was the stuff that you think you need to address? How has the overall response been? What have you learned? What did you expect versus surprised you? So I'll talk about the good and the bad. I think, you know, we have hundreds of creators in our inbox right now. It is really popping off. I mean, I think, you know, Twitter is very much like a tech forward audience. But even with that, I think with the virality, we were really able to lock in our ICP here. we have some of the biggest names in IRL that want to work with us I can't name names right now but it is very exciting the downside I mean like I think I think we we got a lot of feedback about privacy and you know I think we're we're still pretty set on our stance here like we're going to ship with an indicator light but in the conversations that we had with content creators a lot of them emphasize the fact that they want something that allows them to capture candid, authentic moments, because those go the most viral.

3:04:29And if in certain situations that means them being able to disable the light, we want to give that option to them. So, yeah. And that's distinctly, we were just talking with Casey Neistat. He said that if you try to cover the indicator light on the meta Ray-Bans, then stops filming. Yeah. And so do you think part of your opportunity is that you're willing to go and do something that Zuck won't? Counterpositioned. I think so. I mean, I don't think Meta realizes where the puck is going. I think they're way too focused on adding AI and waveguide displays and trying to go after a bigger market that we don't really know is going to fully adopt just yet.

3:05:10What we're seeing now is the most retentive Ray-Bans users are content creators. And what are they doing? They're posting social content on Reels and TikTok. They're posting prank videos, Riz videos, like social interactions, interviews, things like that. Right. And all of them that we talk to are just like, we want to take this. We want to go live. Like instead of me flirting with somebody on a short clip, I want to actually live stream a date and have chat tell me what to say and what to do. Right. So we just want to be able to enable those kinds of content to to exist. how is the actual live streaming infrastructure i assume this pairs with your iphone somehow to pass to like some sort of stream key to twitch or whatever yeah exactly it's just rtmp so we stream to the phone and then phone streams to either the streamer's back end and then to twitch or kick or just straight to the streaming service yeah is there any like pushback from apple on this type of thing are they pretty open with those particular apis it's effectively just a camera There are apps that exist already that let you do this.

3:06:14Yeah, which is a different camera. What about the – how do you evaluate the technical risk? The glasses look great. Small. And they look really tiny. You're trying to pack a lot in there. Maybe the actual quality of the video matters less early than just the ability to have that FPV view. So I'm pretty confident that, you know, we'll be able to hit a pretty similar quality to a Meta Ray-Bans or a Meta Oakley. We have good connects in Shenzhen that have set us up with some really good suppliers. And, you know, I think like if the issue is like, can we fit it in these frames? The answer is yes. Like the way we've sized it is kind of unique in that I almost call these like the hockey stick temples because we keep it thin in the front and then like thicker in the back.

3:07:04so pcb uh internal battery and then swappable battery at the end of the temples so yeah two different batteries so you can swap one and then swap the other and then swap the one and then swap so there's only one swappable battery but uh we'll we'll pack it with two so like while while you're using one the other one's charging and so you can just flip flop and it's hot swappable so you don't have to stop your stream you don't have to stop your stream because there's enough battery juice in the actual glasses that when you take the battery out you have a minute to swap the next one or something.

3:07:33Exactly. That makes a ton of sense. What were you doing before this? So I originally started this company with my co-founder to do sub vocal speech recognition. We did a lot of stuff with like neuro tech and just like ML research. And I think we were caught in this loop where like we wanted to make a cool gadget, but we were way too research focused and not market focused. And we just decided to do a full 180. And just like, you know, I'm very inspired by what roy lee has done and what obby has done with their products and i i just think that like you know really focusing on a retentive user so i.e a content creator but then also making a gadget that's just cool um and nice to wear and doesn't look like a super bulky thing and just i think that's that's the goal for me so sub vocals so you were thinking like hardware device that i can whisper and it picks up what i'm saying just mouth out words yeah just mouth out words that's pretty cool.

3:08:29Yeah. Interesting. How much did you spend on the launch video? It's very well well produced. That thing looks amazing. So I mean, we have we have the next Spielberg on our team and Donald is an amazing individual. We actually filmed it in Canada. So for context, my co-founder and I were both Canadian. We filmed it in Vancouver. It was around, I'd say, USD like maybe 50, 60. OK, solid. Yeah. I mean, it looks like Super Bowl quality. Well, yeah, and there's so many different actors. I'm assuming you just like actually had to hire a bunch of people. Now, none of the footage is from the same sensor that will be in the actual camera.

3:09:10So there'll probably be some sort of disconnect there. But hopefully people are happy with the final sensor. Do you have any goals? Like, you know, we shoot on FX3s. I like the full frame look. I like a 12 megapixel, you know, 4K. obviously can't stuff all that into something the size of a little smartphone camera. Where are the breakpoints in terms of quantitative metrics for a camera to get good enough that people will actually share it? Because even with the Meta Ray-Bans, the pictures and images I was taking and videos, they weren't jumping out to me as like, yeah, these are really great to post right now.

3:09:46Yeah. I think a big thing with the Meta is just image stabilization. Like if you're like walking around while you're taking the video, there's like almost like a bobbing effect. And I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. Low light is another thing. I mean, you're kind of working against the volume that you have to fit the sensor. So you are already constrained with how much light that you can actually capture. But you know, I think dark party scene you filmed, that would be extremely rough, dude. Kind of a wild choice, not the sunny day, but it tells a better story. So I get why you did it.

3:10:20And obviously this stuff will get better, but there are like laws of physics around like you just can't fit a medium format sensor in a pair of glasses. Unless it's an eyepatch. Maybe that's the future. Maybe. You just put the full sensor right there. What do you expect the go-to-market to look like? I imagine you could partner with a bunch of just big streamers and really focus on delivering value for them. And then if it's working well for them, then you would have like the next 100 ,000 people ready to go. Is that how you're thinking? That's exactly what we're doing. So we're already talking to big IRL streamers about partnerships.

3:10:56We're going to Shenzhen in a couple of weeks just to get the beta device ready. And then we're going to test it on 100 different creators and just get their feedback, iterate, improve the user experience. And then, you know, we're trying to do mass production Q1 next year. And I think like, you know, there's kind of just like an infinite marketing glitch here it's like if we give these streamers early access to just show what this kind of content can look like it'll just inspire other creators and wannabe creators to to buy this product yeah is there i feel like there's like gonna be a whole new like you could create a whole new class of irl creators i can imagine somebody that's high they just do hiking or they just ski or they you know they and i'm sure people do that already but if you make it really truly seamless and i can imagine creators that, yeah, are more like the, like, like, these like ambient videos and music on YouTube where there's not really study with me.

3:11:53Yeah, kind of crossover. We'll get it set up. We'll get glasses on Ben, our producer. We'll have a Ben cam feed. Awesome. Hey, we'd love to do a pair when we have one. Yeah, for sure. On kind of like pricing and technology. One thing that I thought was interesting about the Vision Pro was that it was like almost an order of magnitude more expensive than the Quest, but it was very clear that Apple was able to spare no expense, get the best screen. And they jumped forward a lot in terms of just quality, didn't really hit the mark in terms of retention. But when I think about a streamer, most people who are doing it professionally, spending$3 ,000 on a Sony camera is totally reasonable.

3:12:30Is there a world where instead of metas, Ray-Bans, which are in the couple hundred dollar mark, you go to a a couple thousand dollars and you're buying and you're providing a more prosumer, more professional level product, and that actually acts as differentiation and then maybe you go down the price ladder over time. Are you looking into that? Is that even something you could do? Oh, absolutely. I think right now we're gonna stay sort of like in the mid market, but we would ideally want to find bigger creator groups. I mean, imagine, I could almost imagine and having like a super pro version that's like$1 ,500,$2 ,000 and like Mr.

3:13:10Beast uses it for Beast games. You get the POV of like every single contestant in Beast games. Dude, that would go crazy. And like, that's something I would really wanna see. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, people do that with like the head mounted GoPros. It's a little bit awkward and just doesn't land as well, but you can get great footage out of a GoPro mounted to your forehead if you're racing around. uh interesting anything else story no this is great thanks for jumping on congrats on the launch i think a lot of the people a lot of people's like concerns are real but i think there's ways around it and it ultimately will just come down to how individual people choose to use the tech the technology like there's going to be people that use this to live stream privately for their grandma so they grandma can feel like they're hanging out with the grandkids and there's a bunch there's so many like there are people right now who use the cameras and their iphones to violate people's privacy at Coldplay concerts.

3:14:06Yeah. Like that happens. So we have to deal with it. Again, it's not a device problem. I think it's more of an actor problem. You have people that are going to do weird shit and we don't condone that. I think we're just going to focus on creators that want to make genuinely good content. I didn't I didn't get to see what Casey was saying because I was in another call. But I would love to just pull up to New York this weekend and have a chat with him and show him the frames and get his thoughts. If that's something he's interested in, if he still likes the original vision of Beam, I would be more than happy to have a conversation.

3:14:38Yeah, I'm sure he'd have a ton of interesting feedback that you could incorporate and twist around. It'd be a great meeting of the minds. Real quick, John, just want to say, loved your videos on startups. I would always watch your startup history videos while eating dinner. I love a meal in YouTube. You should go back to that at some point. I think it would be really cool. TBPN is awesome, man. I love the show. This is great. Yeah, we're having a lot of fun. Thanks, Chris. Well, awesome having you on and good luck with everything. I'm sure your round will be done by the end of the week. For sure.

3:15:13Good luck. Knowing how the valley moves these days. Good luck. Have fun out there. Okay, take care, guys. Talk to you soon. Bye. Fantastic. Yeah, it all comes down to the device itself is not bad. It's how it gets used. And I think there's a bunch of really cool use cases here. So, yeah. Awesome. Well, if you want another wearable, go to bezel. Get bezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. You know, why? You know, who needs a camera on their face when they can have a Patek Philippe Nautilus on their wrist? A condo on the wrist.

3:15:51Condo on the wrist. An RM. For sure. For sure, dude. Brandon Jacoby, we got some trade deal news. He's starting a new decade today, more focused and motivated than ever. It's time to build. Shout out to Brandon. I'm an idiot. I was like, you're 30? He's like, no, I'm 29. I'm starting the 30th year. What? That's what he texted me. Is this his birthday? Yeah, no, this was him announcing his birthday. Okay. I thought he was going to a different job or something. No, you're completely nervous. I was also very confused. Everybody's confused about your post. Stick to Figma. Brandon sticks. We got a post here from pixels in the bag.

3:16:34Just put the pixels in the bag, bro.

3:16:40We got it. We got a shout out. I'm Rita block officially joined the S &P 500 yesterday. She says it's not the finish line. It's a signal that what we're building has staying power. Inclusion brings broader exposure. Proud of our team. Focused on what's next. Hit the gong. She believes the COO and CFO over at Block. Very cool. Awesome. Liquidity says incredible work, fellas. Sydney Sweeney had a campaign with American Eagle that went live yesterday. Of course, American Eagle was up 6 % on the day and then 17 % after hours. Makes total sense. But I heard all the big LPs are pouring into Andreessen Horowitz right now because just on the rumor that Sydney Sweeney might be joining Andreessen as a partner.

3:17:28Is that true? Yeah. I mean, the fund has to be the new, the new raise completely oversubscribed. I did have somebody, I did have somebody smart text me and say, is this, is this real? Um, I, I, I heard the news and I was like, I think it's real. I think it's real. Um, but, but, but I thought it was that Andreessen was investing in a company that had done a marketing deal with Sydney. I didn't realize that the rumor was that she was joining as a partner. She kind of has the Midas touch right now. She did Dr. Squatch,$2 billion exit. We got a post here. We got a post here from Nat Eliason. Fantastic post.

3:18:05He says, Waymo is a godsend for working parents. Need to hand off the baby between meetings? Put them in a Waymo and send them to your partner across town. Impossible before now. Really grateful we have this technology. This went super viral. I'm sure Waymo was like trying to get it community noted because I don't think, Like, there's definitely not allowed. Against the terms of use, probably illegal in multiple ways. Wow. He's discrimination at Waymo, bombshell. He was clearly joking. I was thinking about this, though. I do think it's a game changer that, you know, how much time do parents spend every day just, like, commuting their kids to and from school?

3:18:42I think AVs are going to be great for families, for example. Like, I remember, like, as a kid, my brother's school would start at a different time than mine. and like one of us would have to wake up earlier than the other. I think we're going to be living in a world where you just – You don't have to hang out with your kids at all. No, it's like more quality time and less, you know, commuting. Yeah, but who says the commute isn't quality time? It can be. That's true. It can be a moment to, you know, actually have a conversation kind of unplugged from all the other toys and stuff. I've literally listened to hundreds of hours of dinosaur content driving.

3:19:16You've got to give a lecture. You got to show up to the commute ready to give a sermon on the T-Rex. Today is the first day of the rest of first grade. Just pump up speech in the car. Just lock in, buddy. Get in there. I want you to win. I want you to win on the playground. Build the biggest sandcastle. We have another post from Tweet Davidson. He says, in your 20s, you get sorted into one of these four houses like Harry Potter. I got both of them here. Celsius is out. I'm a big fan of three out of the four of these. Coffee, Diet Coke. What's the green one? Are you joking? I don't know what that is.

3:19:55It's a matcha. Matcha? Yeah, you're definitely. But what's the white part? Is that milk? Probably oat milk with a bunch of canola oil in it. Never been big in that whole world. We can do a matcha taste test live, see if you like it. No, we're absolutely not. I mean, matcha has never been for me and never will be. Yeah, I clearly just like divide the line. Just never been a big into that world. No, Diet Coke for sure. But three out of the four. Celsius, yeah, for sure. I'm not, I'm not, I'll have a Celsius in a pinch. Black coffee is mid. That's mid. I do drink one every day, though. And we got to give it up for Satya Nadella.

3:20:28Massive news. He said, today we're releasing GitHub Spark, a tool in Copilot that turns your ideas into full stack apps entirely in natural language. Getting into a bad coding game. They're getting into the game. Interesting. They're not positioning this as a cloud code competitor, more as like a Figma make V0. Definitely not a code competitor. This is more of like a Figma Make, lovable V0. Lovable competitor, interesting. Bolt competitor. It's going to be a knockout, dragout fight. In the future, every SaaS company will have a little text box that lets you generate more SaaS. And this is how SaaS will live forever.

3:21:05The SaaS Ouroboros of SaaS. Big SaaS wants you to think that you can get in the game too, but on their infrastructure. You can. You can. You can. We have a vibe-coded project that was very handcrafted as well from Tyler. Coming soon. Dropping soon. I'm very excited about that. Jack? Wait, wait. Let's go to Tyler. Any news in your world before? You're taking tomorrow off. I'm just remote. I'm not taking it off. You're just taking it off. Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. You're going to work so hard tomorrow when you're remote. I have some breaking news. I'll bring this up. Yeah, yeah. The camera's not working, but I'll bring it up.

3:21:44Okay, yeah. Yeah, bring up the breaking news. We got some breaking news. We got Elad Gil. Scoop. Elad Gil is raising a$1.5 billion fund, which if closed would be one of the largest hauls for a solo GP. Love to see it. Natasha's got the scoop. Hit it. I'm sure this will be oversubscribed. Oh, we got the wipe. I like the wipe. Good job, production team. That's fun. Very, very. We're playing with some new gear. I mean, I could see a lot at some point with a$10 billion. Yeah. The real story that the investigative journalists have to dig into, is there anyone else on his payroll? Because if there's even one assistant.

3:22:27No, he's got a fantastic team. Jacob Brutamacki. He's got a fantastic team. Then he's not a solo GP. He's not a solo investor. He's the only guy around. He's got other people on his team. Maybe he doesn't have another GP. He's the only GP. but he has the entire management company what if he had like 500 associates 300 principles 200 partners and he's the only gp he's like i'm a solo gp i'm a solo gp i have a bigger infrastructure team bigger back office than andreason but i'm still don't you call me a solo gp i'm not a platform fund he's getting a platform fund territory but congratulations absolutely an insane investor amazing yeah we covered his post yesterday basically saying these are the early winners And of course he's in all the number one.

3:23:12He's in the number one company in all of those categories. We got a post here from Jack. Just crazy run entrepreneur for a long time. Color this, this DNA company. His book too is, is, is a high growth handbook. Legend. Everything he does, he hits out of the park. Jack Corbett. Yeah. Has a post here. Went super viral. I was referencing this with Zach earlier. He says, you can Venmo the United States to pay off the national debt. And so they have, a website you can go to gifts to reduce the public debt and you can just make contributions you can use ach paypal venmo debit or a credit card so if you're really a patriot go max out your credit card for uncle sam and make it make a gift to this country is it a tax write-off that's a good question does it count as taxes can i just venmo my taxes now if i'm like i owe this much i'll just send it in and then be like, take that as a deduction.

3:24:06If this is not tax deductible, that would be the most annoying thing ever. Very funny. Jamie Cuff has launched Pace, the agentic process outsourcer, APO for the insurance industry. Jamie is an absolute dog. Congratulations. I think I met him in 2021. He was at Retool at the time. So excited to see him back in the game with his own startup. up. Brian Norgaard, he says a rating system for men in the dating marketplace was inevitable, and so is one for women. That's interesting. Signal says there will never be one for women, in his humble opinion. The market dynamics are skewed because every woman is going to, for the same guy, West Elm Caleb effect.

3:24:50Oh, that's an old story. I remember West Elm Caleb. That was interesting. For dudes, it's an adverse effect. Yeah, I don't know. Reviewing women, and that feels like that would get disapproved by the App Store for some reason. It just feels odd, I don't know. We'll see where it goes, but it is odd that I don't, I haven't heard rumblings about like, there's a Reddit out there that already exists, because like the whole idea of like the rating system app, what was it called, T, T, that app? Like that, like what was new about that wasn't that it was an app, it's that it was a trend on Reddit, I think Reddit or some sort of community, some sort of web-based community beforehand.

3:25:25But anyway, weird times. I was talking to a friend of the show about tea and she said, what'd she say? Something like it's a Stalinist ritual or something like that. And it kind of went over my head, but I thought it was funny. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about it. We're trying to get the founder on. You can imagine he's been pretty busy at the top of the app store and getting a massive amount of hate constantly. Yeah. I don't think - But also probably doing a lot of project management. It's in his blog. It really is. Yeah. Product management. Let's go through this fun story from Charlie Munger.

3:26:01Very interesting to dig into. In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old. He was hired at the law firm Wright & Garrett for$3 ,300 per year, or$29 ,851 in inflation-adjusted dollars as of 2010. He had$1 ,500 in savings equal to about$13 ,570. Now, a few years later, in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced. He had been married since he was 21. Charlie lost everything in the divorce, his wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena, not far from where I live. Munger moved into dreadful conditions at the university club and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac, which his children said had a horrible paint job.

3:26:46According to the biography written by Janet Lowe, Molly Munger asked her father, Daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it? The broke Munger replied, to discourage gold diggers. Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his son Teddy had leukemia. Heartbreaking. In those days, there was no health insurance. You just paid everything out of pocket and the death rate was near 100 % since there was nothing doctors could do. Rick Guerin, Rick Guerin Charlie's friend said Munger would go to the hospital hold his young son and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying One year after the diagnosis in 1955 Teddy Munger died Charlie was 31 years old divorced broke bearing his nine-year-old son Later in life.

3:27:28He faced a horrific operation that left him blind in one eye with pain so terrible that he eventually had his eye removed Incredibly incredibly rough and then to go on an absolutely generational run after that man really speaks to resiliency and perseverance. What a wild story. Anyway, we need something to cheer us up. We need to go to Howard Lutnick. His investment bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, is offering to buy the right to businesses tariff refunds, basically betting that the courts will overturn the tariffs from Ryan Peterson. What does Lutnick know? Financialize everything. This is wild. What does Lutnick know?

3:28:06Yeah. I mean, maybe if you paid a bunch of tariffs and you're expecting some refunds or thinking that they might be there, you could get the cash flow now if your business is in trouble. That's obviously relevant to Flexport's customers. In other news, SpaceX direct-to-cell phone coverage is growing fast. Elon posted a chart that's not quite going hyperbolic, but certainly growing exponentially. I didn't realize that direct-to-cell was growing as fast as it was. I didn't even realize it was that available. I see the generic satellite service show up on my phone every once in a while and it's usually a harbinger of very bad connection.

3:28:46But Starlink should be much faster. Well, that is a great place to end the show today. This has been a fun one. Yeah. Lots of range. Leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps the show. It does. and we were charting today. We're climbing in the rankings on Spotify. You can help us by going. Listening to the show on Spotify, giving us five-star review. And if you're on Apple Podcasts, I do recommend switching over to Spotify. We got video. It's pretty awesome. That does make sense. That would be a better experience. But we hope you have a fantastic day. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow.

3:29:25See you tomorrow. Bye. Cheers.