Google Gemini Strikes Back, China Hits NVIDIA on Antitrust | Bill Bishop, Pete Shadbolt, Sadi Khan, Lukas Czinger, Kyle Samani

27:35And the model naming convention, it's way overstated to say that OpenAI is the only one with confusing model name architectures, because Google had the exact same thing going on with Palm and Bard and all these different - Even now they have, it's like Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite. Yeah. And then is like, is Flash better than Lite? Or like Pro 1.5 is worse than? It's a rite of passage to have naming. You have to go through it before you actually just release the one good product, which would probably just be Google.com. I remember a decade ago, people used to analyze like the updates to the google.com algorithm.

28:16There was one release that was called like Penguin or something, I forget what it was called, but it changed the way search results ranked. And it was like disastrous for a bunch of companies that had built SEO around the previous architecture. And then when Google shipped this change, it like decimated a whole bunch of businesses. but it goes back and forth. But anyway, Bard was a good name. Maybe they'll bring it back at some point. But I think Gemini's cooking. I think Gemini's gonna be around for a long time. And I do think they'll go model router, and I think we will not be seeing.5s very long.

28:53Realistically, all these products should probably go to an annual release cycle, and it should just be, yeah, I'm using Gemini 2025, 2026, 2027, like a car. Anyway, you wanna continue with this? Shazir finally answers HR's 47th email. It's funny. Again, of course. This is not how it works. Not how it works. Bard, anyways, fine. But I want my own parking spot and unlimited LaCroix. Return, waves hand, Gemini 2 and 2.5 drop. Context window so big it can summarize the Bible in your group chat. Google processing 980 trillion tokens a month equal to 40 % of human SMS traffic. That's crazy if it's real.

29:31That is wild. someone sneezes nano banana into the play store overnight it's number one app turns your so i'm not going to read that last part i'm not going to read that last part folks go find it yourself but um uh this i asked how would gemini the app do in september astrologically from an astrological perspective september is a complex and transformative month for gemini While it may not have seen the same effortless flow as in Gemini season, it presents a significant period of growth learning and necessary recalibration. It's just like the most classic astrological generalization. So Gemini is generating this and then reading it and being like, wow, that's actually...

30:18That's very funny. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Great to see John Exley back in the chat. We were wondering where you were going to work on. World famous now. World famous now. He's been featured in Business Insider. Thank you so much to John Exley. Yes, TBPN was in Business Insider this morning. Yes. John got the quote. I think everyone in this chat is Business Insider. Yeah, a lot of these folks were featured in there, but Julia Hornstein broke down. She, I think, explained and described aura farming and a number of others.

30:58I think that that was an overall great piece. I think she kind of missed the definition of aura farming. We'll get Tyler to put it in the truth zone. That was the one thing where I read, I was like, I don't know if that fully fits Tyler's definition of aura farming, but it was funny to see it printed. in the Business Insider. John's best quote was, John Axley, that is. I look at TBPN as an existence of the proof of heaven. Thank you, John Axley. As existence proof of heaven. Thank you, John Axley. We appreciate you. We appreciate it. Anyway, Ajney Midhusband on Absolute Terror, he posted that AI is eating software across the handful of frontier AI startups, that he's a board member in.

31:49Year-to-date sales have gone from 1.3 billion to 8 billion. Meanwhile, Publix are bleeding. The single most rapid reallocation of value from legacy companies to startups in history. And that's why we're to partner with so many of the startups that are taking it to the Publix. I wonder. I can't see what any of these companies are, so it's hard to get that creative analysis here. One of them is Adobe. Adobe is up 33 % this year. It's$150 billion company. Yeah, I just wonder how much of these are selling off because of the overall narrative that the Gen.AI, the labs are basically going to be able to just generate these companies from scratch.

32:33It's that, but it's also that there really is significant pricing pressure. This is what we were talking to Jim Cramer about with regard to Salesforce. Salesforce is a seat-based model, and they need to shift to an outcomes-based, value-based pricing. And that is something that is hard to do in the short term. Well, here's something. So this morning, Trump jumped on True Social. He said, subject to SEC approval, companies and corporations should no longer be forced to report, to report, he put it in quotes, on a quarterly basis. He's a quote enthusiast, quarterly reporting, but rather to report on a six-month basis.

33:15This will save money and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies. Did you ever hear the statement that, quote, China has 50 to 100-year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis? Not good. They still have quarterly reporting requirements, don't they? I don't know. It's just more of like a... Imagine if companies only had to report every 50 to 100 years, though. Could be pretty good. Can you imagine waiting? He's like, you have your first Google, your first Palantir earnings as a young man. You know? You just spawn. And then retirement.

33:50You're like, maybe earnings. I'm riding with Palantir. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see what, you know, right? It's like, you get that one earnings report decides whether you retire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, at our last earnings, like Google made... Our last earnings before the internet. Google generated$100 billion in net income last year. Imagine going from like the IPO prospectus, yeah, yeah, we generated 20 million in net income to being like, yep, we're ready to update you. It's been 20 years,$100 billion in net income. We've done very well. It's a beat, green candle. Anyway, regardless of what happens with the SEC, you gotta stay compliant.

34:32You gotta get on Vanta, vanta.com. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework. It's so funny to think like, you know, DJT has his public company. He does. Truth Social. He's just like, ah, I'm getting really sick of this. What if I could cut the management teams, you know, sort of. I do, you know, one, you know, I can see there being some, if this actually gets rolled out, There could be some bad side effects.

35:08Maybe companies get sloppier, right? Like the quarterly cycles, like a forcing function for just making continuous progress and running a tight ship and all these things. But if the burden of being public goes down, maybe more companies go public earlier, right? Yeah, maybe. Maybe. That's interesting. And maybe, yeah, CEOs that would just have. But again, I'm not sure that it would be. Since we cover earnings, we should be strongly against this. Because half as much content would be devastating to us. I mean, I don't know. We don't really cover earnings that closely. But it does make for a fun news cycle, getting new data points and new earnings calls.

35:59But maybe the podcast world can fill in for that. Do a quarterly podcast tour and chat about your business. Less quiet periods for sure, right? So be good on that. Anyway, in other news, the Wall Street Journalist is reporting that China has said that Nvidia violated antitrust law. Regulators move against the chip company comes during Washington Beijing trade talks. We're gonna have Bill Bishop join the stream in seven minutes. China said an initial probe found Nvidia violated the country's anti-monopoly law, heightening pressure on Washington during the latest round of U.S.-China trade talks that ended Monday.

36:38Beijing's antitrust regulator cited the violations in connection with NVIDIA's acquisition of an Israeli company that was completed in 2020. The regulator said the investigation was continuing and didn't elaborate. Beijing approved the deal after NVIDIA agreed to conditions including guaranteeing the supply of its chips to China. But since 2020, the U.S. government has blocked NVIDIA and other American chip vendors from selling many of their top flight artificial intelligence chips to China. NVIDIA said it complied with law. We will continue to cooperate with all relevant government agencies as they evaluate the impact of export controls.

37:14Beijing's move came just hours before Treasury Secretary Scott Besant told reporters in Madrid that U.S. and Chinese negotiators had reached a framework deal on TikTok following two days of trade talks. If you're not familiar or you haven't been following it that closely, the TikTok divestiture has been pushed a number of times. We're just reaching the end of the most recent 90-day hold. Wednesday? Yes, I believe it's Wednesday. We have two days left. And so U.S. and Chinese negotiators have been figuring out a framework for that. I believe Polymarket has Oracle and Larry Ellison still in the lead.

37:53I don't know if you want to pull up the latest data there on what will happen to TikTok, but it is funny that we're hearing so much more about Larry Ellison with the OpenAI deal, which we're going to go into tomorrow. You're still sitting at a 43 % chance that a TikTok sale is announced in 2025. Okay. Yeah, might happen. Of course, there's way more to it. What does the sale actually mean? What will so, oh, the chart is spiking with a sale. So yeah, unclear what exactly, what piece of the business would they sell? There's always been this nervousness around what if they sell the cloud infrastructure contract and the inference and they say, yeah, you guys can run the app.

38:37We decide the algorithm. And of course, a lot of people who are nervous about the effect that TikTok is having on the American populace think it's actually the training of the model that matters a lot more. If we were in a Cold War with a country and they owned one of our most popular newspapers, we said, hey, we don't really want you doing this, and they were like, oh, it's fine, you can deliver the newspaper. Yeah, you can take over the printing of it. Yeah, you can print it. We're still gonna decide the words that go in it. We're gonna decide the content, but you can print it. Yeah, we're gonna decide what's on the front page.

39:07We'll let you, we'll let you. Anyone can post to this newspaper, but we're gonna decide the sorting of the articles. What makes it to the front page is important. And so control of the algorithm should be relevant. And I've talked to some AI researchers who have said that it might be possible to run like a secondary algorithm on top of what algorithm gets shipped over, essentially fine tuning it as it comes over. So the TikTok algorithm comes over and it's prioritizing one thing, and then you run a secondary feed on top. And this happens a lot with different, you might have a secondary algorithm that's running for, does this violate the terms of service of the app?

39:50Is this adult content or something? It might still rank very high, but if it triggers the filter, it gets deprioritized after the fact. So there are different ways to go about it. And certainly not having the data immediately exfiltrated seems like a net win, but it is a complex topic. So we'll continue to follow the story as it develops. The two sides, US and China, are running up against It's a Wednesday deadline to do a deal to allow the popular video sharing app to continue operating in the United States. And it's crazy how big of a story this was. What, last year? Maybe the year before? Everyone was beating the drum on ban TikTok.

40:28And it's kind of just melted in the background. People don't really think about it anymore. It's just kind of like become, it's fallen out of the news cycle. Anyway, NVIDIA has become perhaps the highest profile business, a business caught in the crossfire of the trade dispute between the world's two biggest economies. The company sells the most powerful chips. In December, China's antitrust regulator, the state administration for market regulation, opened a probe into Nvidia's$7 billion acquisition of the Israeli networking gear maker Mellanox Technologies, which I believe was a fantastic acquisition.

41:04I think they made a ton of money off that based on what they wound up selling because they bought this company before the AI boom. And then networking gear became incredibly important as they built out these massive data centers with NVIDIA GPUs. And so a week earlier, the Biden administration ratcheted up controls on China's access to high-end chips. Antitrust lawyers familiar with the case said NVIDIA was in a tough spot because it had to halt supply of its most advanced chips to China to comply with the US export controls. But that opened it up to criticism from Beijing. We will talk to Bill Bishop, who is in the Restream waiting room, about everything that's going on in china with regard to nvidia and elsewhere so let's bring in bill bishop from the restream waiting room how you doing bill good how are you i'm fantastic how are you have a good weekend i'm good i had a great weekend and i have to say thank you of course and i have to say tashi's labubu yes and i will i will say that tpn you you top ticked the labubu bubbles Since you said you were sending this, I think Pop Mart stock is down like 20%.

42:07So good job. Go. Those are bashing in secondary markets, so it's awesome. We did say we were buying it so your dog could rip it apart. Yeah. I actually examined it and decided there might be some toxic pieces, so I'm keeping it on track. Oh, that's smart. He did try. Yeah, that's very smart. That's great. Anyway, we were just reading through the latest news on China saying that NVIDIA violated antitrust law. I was wondering if you had any thoughts, and then we can kind of go into just generally give us the update on what you've been talking about on your fantastic blog, Sinicism, and then also Sharp China, which is your podcast, which everyone should go subscribe to.

42:52It's in the Certecary bundle. It's fantastic. But did you see this news? what was your take on the uh on the nvidia antitrust uh debate going on in china so it's interesting timing it relates to this melanox acquisition from a few years ago and that um nvidia had agreed to uh certain terms i think most were public i think at least one term was not disclosed and now um you know the the samar samr which is the the anti-monopoly group is saying that they violated at least one of the provisions. And the timing, of course, is not coincidental, right? It dropped just as the U.S. and China negotiators were meeting in Madrid.

43:32It comes two days or three days after the announcement of investigation to the dumping of analog chips, as well as discrimination in the sort of blocking of sales of certain other chips. And so I think this is, one, I think NVIDIA technically could be in a lot of trouble because if they are found to be violating their agreement, I believe they can be penalized up to 10 % of their global revenue and then have that be multiplied two to five times. So they could be looking at several billions of dollars, several billion dollars of fines from the Chinese government if it proceeds to its conclusion and they're found to be in violation of the agreement.

44:14My guess is that the timing is, again, not coincidental, and it is part of a way to further encourage NVIDIA and the US government to pull back on export controls. Clearly, NVIDIA is already motivated to do that. This may motivate them more. Whether or not the Chinese government uses this as part of this broader discussion around export controls, that's not clear. Now, in the previous segment, you were talking about TikTok. What was interesting in these discussions was from the statement so far from the U.S. side, they said that the Chinese tried to bring in export controls or other things, but the U.S.

44:54side was solely focused on TikTok. And so, you know, but then they're going to keep talking and they're going to extend the deadline for the imposition of additional tariffs and they're just going to keep negotiating. And so I think that this is all part of the positioning on the Chinese side to push back on the U.S. government. The announcement last Friday of this investigation to dumping of analog chips is probably the Chinese getting ahead of what's to be expected of this 232 investigation from the U.S. Trade Representative's Office around legacy chips from China. And so there's just a lot of moving pieces.

45:30I don't think NVIDIA is in any trouble immediately because of this investigation, but it just makes their prospects in China a little murkier. And again, I think one of the sort of waypoints for investors to look at is assuming President Trump approves this modified Blackwell chip, I think it's the B30 that NVIDIA is trying to create to sell to China. It's much better than the H20. It's not as good as Blackwell, but it's much better than anything that the Chinese can make anytime soon. If the Trump administration says, yes, NVIDIA will grant you licenses, does the Chinese side actually start buying?

46:06Or do they do what they did with the H20 and basically say, we're not going to buy, and we still don't know why they don't want to buy the H20s, but it certainly doesn't look good. That wasn't a good outcome for NVIDIA. Yeah, it feels like there's definitely like multi-party interests here with the CCP maybe not wanting a bunch of chips to come in from NVIDIA because they want to spur their domestic homegrown chip manufacturing business. but then the companies, Alibaba and DeepSeek, these companies just want the best chips to actually compete. And so there's a tension there. Is that kind of the correct narrative?

46:43No, that certainly is how I look at it. And I think that ultimately, and that's why I said, if Trump administration approves the B30 and China still says no, then I think the answer will be that the party, the sort of security forces, the party forces have decided that they are going to just rip off the band-aid and move try and move faster towards indigenate indigenization of the of the of chips um if it turns out that actually they start buying b30s in bulk then maybe the h20 rejection was effectively employed said no no we want the better stuff right and so they set up this sort of made it look like there's some confusion or you know but ultimately it it it's a benefit to NVIDIA.

47:28We just don't know at this point. One of the big questions too is, you know, certainly a company that would want NVIDIA to, in Chinese companies, to not buy NVIDIA would be Huawei, right? Because Huawei has the Ascend series. They're the ones who claim they have potentially the best potential ultimate competitor to NVIDIA chips is whether or not Huawei has actually been over-promising what they've been able to make, both in terms of actual capabilities and also in terms of production volume scale and do you think that the Huawei was sort of blowing smoke up towards the top of the system that they're further ahead than they are do you think there are certain members of the CCP that and the party broadly that are extremely AGI pilled and then others that are just thinking like you know this is an extending technology for the internet and it's gonna we're gonna develop you know valuable services and software with it but we're not building machine gods.

48:24So it's okay if we get sort of set back, if we set ourselves back, you know, five or so years because it's not necessarily critical to national security. That's a great and key question. And I think you look at, I think it was last week or the week before the Chinese issued this AI plus action plan, which really is more about how to bring AI into a whole bunch of different sectors, a big focus on industrial applications not at all agi pill that's really basically how to increase business efficiency yeah business efficiency increase governing efficiency make it better for the police right get ai models for the police to do better predictive policing and better social governance improve education improve the healthcare system not at all they don't need the ferrari of of ai models they don't need the ferrari of chips they need good enough and the The question then is, at least on the open source models in China, like Quen, like DeepSeq, are they good enough for what the Chinese need?

49:25And are the chips that they're now starting to make in more capacity and more volume, are they going to be good enough for what they need? And that ultimately, I think, is, you know, if the answer is yes, then NVIDIA is probably screwed in China. If the answer is no, then they still have a bit of runway. Give us the update on TikTok. It feels like everyone was, there was like an odd coalition on the left and the right. Like last year, everyone was like banned TikTok. It felt like it was a fever pitch. It was a rallying cry for tech execs. And it's like everyone had a good reason to want to ban it.

49:59Like the, you know, a lot of the tech leaders compete with TikTok, whether YouTube reels or X or shorts on Instagram. And then there were the security and the China Hawks. there were so many people that were saying like, yes. And then the narrative kind of turned to like, well, Trump kind of liked TikTok and it helped him get elected. And he felt like there was a groundswell of support on TikTok. And so maybe he wasn't worried about it. But now we've like kicked it out a couple. Yeah. And then the new kind of potential emerged of the cloud contracts, which ends. And that felt like the example, I don't know if you heard, but the example we gave is like, if you had a national, you know, rival, geopolitical rival, and they owned a popular newspaper in your country and you didn't like that, and they said, well, it's okay, we'll let you print the newspaper and we'll let you do like physically distribute it.

50:50You'd be like, well, it's not really enough because I want to control. I don't want you controlling what's in the headline and what's on the front page and how, you know, and it feels like if we end up with a scenario where like oracle gets a big uh even bigger cloud contract from from bite dance and that's the end of it that doesn't feel like it's resolved kind of the key issues that the the real hawks were were worried about well so a few months ago i had a conversation with one of the drafters of the of the law that um effectively banned tick tock if they didn't meet certain conditions and this person just said you know the only thing we didn't contemplate was a president who didn't enforce the law and so what's been happening is the extensions that president trump has been giving none of them are legal, right?

51:31That they are completely blatantly in violation of the law. Doesn't matter, right? And so now, though, the question is in this particular, you know, today we got the news that they apparently have some framework deal. Trump and Xi Jinping are going to talk about it on Friday is whether or not the framework deal involves both the ByteDance share going below 20 % of NUCO or whatever they're going to call it and that the Chinese side, the ByteDance, has no input, no connection to the algorithm. And so, because the law is very clear. And actually a few months ago, some of the investors in this mooted sort of consortium that was going to create this new code of buyout TikTok US, they were trying, they were lobbying on Capitol Hill to get a sentence inserted in any bill that would take it that effectively indemnified them against breaking the law because they understood, they're potentially putting billions of dollars at risk.

52:25They are smart enough that they don't want to actually do that in a deal that technically is in violation of a law in the books that survived a Supreme Court challenge, right? Nine to zero. And so, you know, this is, I think, if what we've, and we don't have really any details yet of what the Chinese and the U.S. sides agree to today in Madrid, but if it turns out that the Chinese side, the bite dance is going to go below 20 percent, and for example, the U.S., the new code is going to have to rewrite the algorithm, then it probably, and there's no data connection there's no technical connection to china it's completely it's logically physically separated from anything that touches china then that deal probably works but then what is tick tock who's going to write the new algorithm i mean last i heard machine language engineers are like expensive and hard to find these days well yeah and we have some of the smartest yeah we have some of the smartest engineers in the world at youtube and and instagram like trying to make the algorithm as good as people report TikTok is.

53:25And I think that... Yeah, I wonder how much of an olive branch can be given on the cap table because there's a lot of American investors who invested in ByteDance or TikTok have huge stakes. Jeff Yass at Susquehanna is a good example. 15 % ownership. Bill Ford at General Atlantic. Yeah, General Atlantic. And so there's a very neutral outcome here where you say, oh, well, you have this massive stake. We don't want you to take this huge write down. You can just have an even bigger stake in the US in the US entity And and so that's probably even more valuable and you get your money out of China So you have more liquidity you can IPO the company there's a lot of things that you can do there and it's not it's not I'm one of these it probably does is probably unlocks if this deal gets done It probably helps helps if by Dan wants by dance wants to helps them Sort of clear the path to an IPO in Hong Kong sure right which which and again the US of all the investors I mean, ByteDance, I think, in the last private round was valued at like$500 billion, right?

54:22So there's a lot of money at stake here. You mentioned Oracle. You know, to assuage U.S. regulators' concerns, Oracle and ByteDance had gotten together. They'd done this thing called Project Texas where they were going to segment out all the U.S. user data. They proposed that they would actually review the code, the algorithm code. Even though the algorithm would be updated from China, they would have engineers who could go through the code and make sure it wasn't being manipulated. that didn't satisfy the national security concerns. That's one of the reasons why the law was passed last April in April 2024.

54:55There had been talk over this year of a Project Texas 2.0 to kind of cut a deal. But ultimately, I think there were enough people in the GOP on the Hill who made it clear to the Trump administration that actually that wasn't going to fly because it still was in violation of the law that passed last April. And so really, I think, again. We'll see what has come out of this. What's interesting too is how the US side made TikTok the focus of the negotiations. this time, not soybeans. There's an article in the New York Times today about how soybean farmers are about to go bankrupt because China's not buying soybeans.

55:31That wasn't the focus. The focus was TikTok. And because, you know, think about it, there's only upside for the president, right, and the investors. Because now if TikTok is saved, TikTok is beholden to the president, it's another algorithm that probably, you know, has favorable feelings towards President Trump. He's helped a bunch of big investors, including Oracle. It's an interesting moment when, And like you said, a year and a half ago, people were going nuts across the aisle about how dangerous TikTok was. And now it's like, okay, whatever. As long as it abides by the law, whatever. Give me the broader update on what's happening in Beijing and Xi Jinping's grip on power.

56:11There's been some rumors that maybe he's losing control. There's always rumors. How are things just overall looking there? He was recently caught on a hot mic saying he's going to live to 150, which I think is like a very. Watching a little too much Brian Johnson. So I'm wondering what the next. Honestly, I think those, I mean, those rumors, from what we can see, there's nothing to them. And what we saw at the, you know, the big parade on September 3rd, some other personnel stuff. There's just people every year there are these rumor cycles. They came a little earlier this year, but every year they turn out to be BS.

56:52And so far, they're looking like BS. Oh, well. Trump said this morning that he thinks companies in the U.S. shouldn't have to report quarterly. He referenced Chinese companies thinking on a 50 to 100-year time horizon, yet Chinese public companies do have to report quarterly. Do you know if, I mean, is it common for public company management teams in China to say, like, you know, we just missed on everything this quarter, but let's look at this at 100 years. Let's zoom out a little bit. No, that's one of those true social posts that just, who knows where it came from. Yeah. I was saying it's probably Trump.

57:35Trump has a public company. he realizes how laborious quarterly reporting is for his team, and he wants to free them up to work on product. And now the lobbyists for the accounting firms and the law firms are going to be cycling up in D.C. Like, wait a minute, we make more money on a quarterly basis. No, no, this is importantly. Quarterly reporting is their business. Yeah, there's definitely some people that are indexed to that. We were joking about that. We cover earnings. We want as many earnings reports as possible. We like that. Let's do daily. Daily earnings. Daily earnings. So CEOs can say, take that day's revenue and say, multiply it by 365, and that's your run rate.

58:12Just have a public view of your zero or ramp or whatever your accounting system is. Yeah. There you go. What's the latest? Any updates on the export tip, donation, tax, whatever it was with NVIDIA? 15 %? 15 % for the big man. Yeah. No.

58:36So I think, but again, I think what, you know, a broader perspective there last week, a nominee for an important position at the Department of Commerce is BIS, which oversees export controls. His nomination was withdrawn. He was somebody who's quite hawkish on chip, like high technology exports to China. Right now, the NVIDIA, the chip firms are, I think, feeling like they're in a pretty good position here in D.C. And there's, I think, going to be a lot more pressure to try and roll back a bunch of these export controls. I think that the actions from the Chinese side, maybe potentially NVIDIA today, that announcement, but then the announcements last Friday, also may give ammunition here to the folks who are proponents of rolling back those chip export controls.

59:26to further push the White House to say, this is not working, we need to take a different approach. And so that ultimately would be good for a lot of these chip companies. Again, back to the Nvidia conversation, the question is, will the Chinese still buy the better Nvidia chips? And I mean, I think they'd be crazy not to, but again, this is not necessarily an economic or technical decisions only. Totally. What are you, when will we have clarity or will we have clarity on the conversations in Madrid? So I think the call Friday should, you know, supposedly she and Trump are talking Friday. After that, potentially we'll get more information.

1:00:04So far, there have been, you know, both negotiating teams gave statements and there's been a little bit of leaking to the press. But there's nothing like specifically around TikTok. There's just very, very few, if any, details other than there's some sort of a framework agreement. And you guys, I mean, you guys have been in the tech world for a long time. I mean, what does a framework agreement really mean, and how is it legally binding, and sort of where? It sort of feels like you say framework when you haven't figured out all the details. Yeah, makes sense. Well, we'll be watching. We have concepts of a plan.

1:00:33I don't like these private phone calls between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. I would prefer a podcast. I want them to sit down together. A sub-stack live. Live sub-stack. TBPN, right? Yeah, yeah. Open invitation to Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. If you want to come hash it out live on TBPN, We're happy to host you. You can discuss the plan the concepts of a plan the framework for the plan We'd be happy to have you and we and it has been great having you bill Always a pleasure. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day Bill. Cheers. You too. Thanks. See you. Bye Really quickly let me take that graphite code review for the age of AI graphite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster and Tim cook was on the red carpet flogging iPhones like a guy selling knockoff pocket watches from under his jacket.

1:01:21Let's play this video. Pro-Phone 17, tell me all about it. Oh my god, I'm so excited. I'm so excited that you brought it up. This is the 17 Pro Max and in this beautiful cosmic orange, it's a totally new design. It was re-engineered from the inside out. It's the most Pro-Phone we've ever designed. and so 16 is pretty good good but the 17 you is a must that's why you gotta give him a raise that's give him give him a raise give him a raise he's not taking days off he's not being he's not under selling the market loves it market loves it I love it he's a what is this the Emmys the Emmys which I believe is for, what is the Emmys?

1:02:09It's for TV? Movies? I think it's an award show. You're in the film, yeah. I don't know, I don't follow this stuff. That's a good question for - Oh yeah, it's TV, because we're going for a daytime Emmy. We want - For your consideration. That is Dylan Abrascato's number one KPI, get us a daytime Emmy. I love to see Tim out there selling. I love it. Every single person - I love it. At a company should be selling. Yes. And it starts at the top. Yeah, and you don't soft play it. You're not like, oh yeah, it's just another year. No, it's the best iPhone ever. It's the thinnest, lightest, best, biggest, fastest, awesomest iPhone in history.

1:02:45It's a must. You gotta have it. It's pretty good. The last one, pretty good. But this one is a must. It's good. But he is right, it is re-engineered. There's that whole, you heard about the vapor chamber thing? A single drop of water inside the iPhone. Did you hear this? Oh, it's amazing. So inside the iPhone, there's a single drop of water in a chamber and it heats up, evaporates, and moves to a different part away from the hot internals to cool the phone. And this has been one of the complaints for the last few years. I haven't had any problems with heat on this phone, on the 16, but. That's cool.

1:03:22But yeah. My phone overheats all the time. Do you find that it overheats when you're like using software on the phone? Camera. Camera. Oh, filming or video? Photos. Photos, just taking photos. And you notice it overheating. Wow, that's wild. It doesn't turn off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just heats up a little bit and it feels hot. And well, that should be a thing of the past with your new iPhone 17 Pro Max in orange. I'm excited to - Do you think that the orange color is a nod to YC or Stratechery? What were they going with? Or Bitcoin. Which one do you think they were going for? Probably nod to Ben Thompson over at Stratechery.

1:04:01Probably Ben Thompson. Yeah. So a hat tip. Yeah. Ben Thompson's been covering the stock for, what, almost two decades. He's done a lot of great reporting on Apple. And why not give him a little nod with the Stratechery Orange iPhone? I like it. Or the McLaren Orange. What else is orange? I don't know. There's a lot. Anyway. Andrew Cote says, I propose a technology brother pilgrimage to Starbase to look at rockets, feel better about the world, and maybe throw a giant warehouse party or something. Maybe go over to - I hope you can pull this off. He runs a hard tech conference in San Francisco. I didn't have a chance to go last year, but they, wait, was it in San Francisco?

1:04:42It was on like a, on an aircraft carrier or something. He got, he really pulled out all the tech bro little touches. I believe there were cyber trucks on top of a, on top of a - Aircraft carrier? Aircraft carrier, and there were sponsors and stuff, and everyone's bringing stuff. I would like to have a house party in a nuclear submarine. House party, some flip cup or some beer pong? Yeah. In the nuclear sub. The nuclear sub, it's pretty tight quarters. Have you ever been on a Navy ship? No. But it's not a giant flight. But you could be a really, you light it properly, it could be a really fun vibe.

1:05:19But going to Starbase makes a lot of sense. I'm pretty sure that you can just go. I mean, imagine 24 hour trip, You have Starbase in the morning, Abilene, Texas in the afternoon. Oh, yeah, Stargate. Or some type of house set within a Crusoe data center. Yeah. Something there. It'll be fun. Well, get on Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert-level insights in seconds. Ask Julius to analyze your data. Over 2 million users trusted by individuals. It's got to be 3 million at this point. Yeah, we need to update that for sure. Anyway. Rahul posted yesterday. This is a great post.

1:05:54On a Sunday. Bad day to be a manual workflow. I don't even know what inspired that. I guess he was just automating things. It's a Sunday. He's grinding. He's automating workflows. That's great. What more do you need? Base is beginning to explore a network token. We're in the early phases. This is from the official Base account. That's Coinbase's new product. We're in the early phases of exploration and don't have any specifics to share around on timing, design, or governance. We're committed to bringing the community along with us and building in the open. Brian Armstrong, CEO and founder of Coinbase says, we're exploring a base network token.

1:06:34It could be a great tool for accelerating decentralization and expanding creator and developer growth. BASE is interesting. It's a blockchain without a native token. Yes. And we asked Brian Armstrong about that at the base launch event. And he said, no comments right now, no news to share, but that was a question that everyone was asking us to ask, because it did seem like there might be a logical conclusion of this project, is to eventually decentralize the project. So there's no definitive plans. Stay safe out there. Don't go by the wrong base token. Get too excited, but interesting development from Brian Armstrong over at Coinbase.

1:07:16So congrats to them on the progress. And congrats to Fall Generative Media Platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Bill Gates, someone resurfaced Bill Gates' resume as a freshman at Harvard. The resume and experience is still probably better than 99 % of college students in tech out there. And so it says his objective was to become a systems analyst and systems programmer. On his resume, he puts his height and weight, 5 '10", 130. What a hilarious thing to put on your resume.

1:07:55Interesting. Is that to make you more interesting from a health insurance standpoint? It's like, hey, my carrying cost is not going to be that high. Yeah, free lunches, I'm not going to be doing double protein. I'm just a buck 30 when I'm wet and wearing boots. He says no dependents. He wants a$12 ,000 salary, but he's open to whatever. And he's open to relocating. Needs at least 12 grand. He's open to 120 billion. Look at this resume, his experience. He knows Fortran. He knows COBOL. He knows BASIC. He knows machine languages for most of the above computers. Or he even built a payroll product.

1:08:35Oh yeah. Yeah, traffic flow analysis system, school scheduling, payroll. He's a systems programmer, and in partnership with Paul Allen, of course the co-founder, designed and put together a system for traffic engineers to study traffic flow. The system is built around Intel's MCS8008 microcomputer. The software and hardware setup has been fully tested using a prototype. Demonstrations to customers are planned for May 1974. Wow, information sciences, fun. I wonder how that surfaced, like when did he publish this? Did someone else publish this, leak this? I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting, he was like working with a recruiting services firm.

1:09:20Probably a good client for them, seems like he would have had a lot of options. Indeed. Junk bond analyst, we already covered this, a screenshot of the Truth Social post about subject to SEC approval. This seems, with the SEC, yeah, I mean, we're going to need to see the art, like, why. Report. Report. It's funny to say, like, put it in quotes because, like, it very much is definitely a report. It's a real report on a quarterly basis. And then also in parentheses, it says, subject to the SEC approval, companies and corporations should no longer be forced to report on a quarterly basis. parentheses quarterly reporting exclamation point like why are you putting this in parentheses but rather report on a six month six and then six in parentheses month basis in case you couldn't read SI X I really don't understand the the the texture of this this is definitely not LLM generated this is yeah be interesting ask of the president it ends up being like the exact same amount of work right like the report it's the six month report just like doubles, you know, doubles in terms of how intensive it is.

1:10:32And the function is that the lawyers and the accountants get paid exactly the same amount. This is a wild post. Did you ever hear the statement that, quote, China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis? Question mark, question mark, question mark. Not good, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. And it doesn't close the quote. Like there's no end to that quote. And also, since when have we been looking to China for best practices on anything? I thought we were like near-peer adversaries. Very, very odd. Anyway, Elon Musk has perched over 2.56 million shares of Tesla worth$1 billion.

1:11:10The purchase happened on September 12th with an average price of$389.22. This is Elon's first open market stock purchase since February of 2020. He is squarely in the$1 trillion club. What do you mean? Tesla. Oh, Tesla stock? The market cap is currently 1.28 trillion. Wow. It's crazy that only a little while ago, it feels like Meta was at like one just north of that. But yeah, I feel like there's going to be news here, especially around... RoboTaxi? Yeah, there was also news. XAI terminated like 500 employees over the weekend. which again, I don't wanna like read too much. Put on the tinfoil hat, bro.

1:12:04Go crazy. Give me the theory. He buys the stock, the stock goes up and then use that to merge in XAI. That would be the 3D chess if something crazy happens. I like that. Yeah, I mean, obviously Tesla, fantastic AI team, built self-driving, like one of the best, if not the best self-driving system. The employees that were laid off were doing like data. Data labeling, right? Which can be - So it's probably non-equity comped. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And increasingly there are tons. Yeah, it's interesting because there's been tons of competition in that space between Scale, Mercore, Handshake, what's that other one?

1:12:44It's not Volt, it's like Surge. So there's a few - Turing, Mercore, Surge. So there's a few companies that are outside contractors. Label Box. Label Box, yeah. I just heard a Label Box ad on Dwarkesh. It's fantastic.

1:13:01So like this is a service that you can very much buy from a highly competitive market and effectively outsource that role. A few companies have brought it in-house. It seems like XAI is going from in-house to outsourced. But I think not too much to read into on the XAI side. There was a post in here. Maybe we can pull it up, but let me see. It's deeper, deeper, deeper. The, yeah, so another one of those posts by Zephyr. Zephyr's really been on a tear. 1.4 million views on this post. Be Elon, co-found OpenAI for humanity. Watch Altman flip it into Microsoft's loot box. Quietly.exe, launch XAI, poach the best GPU whisperers from deep-mind open AI.

1:13:47Wait, John, so. So Meta bottomed at$1.23 trillion this year. This year? And now Elon is north of that today. Okay.

1:14:09Considering the revenue and earnings difference between those two companies, it says a lot about Elon's ability to make people believe and give them like optionality on so many different tech trends. Yeah, I mean - He's making transformers, they're making chips. Yeah, it's a very, I feel like the market still very much believes that self-driving cars will be a thing and it'll be big. And Tesla's leading in that market and, or at the top of it. And same thing with robots. with robots like you know we grew up watching sci-fi films or some of us did I know if you did but watching sci-fi films of robots if robots are a thing Elon is going to figure out a way to make money on it so that's always been the story in recent history of Tesla's bull case and certainly Elon's betting on that but the bull the bull case for XAI this is the data that came out from OpenRouter, which I was talking to Tyler about a little bit over the weekend.

1:15:12So Grok Code Fast One is now the number one ranked model on OpenRouter with 1.06 trillion tokens generated. Claude Sonnet Four is at 343 billion tokens. GPT-5 is down at 72 billion tokens. And I sent this to Tyler and was like, I don't believe that Grok is four times bigger than Claude and 10 times bigger than GPT-5. Like this just doesn't seem right. And Tyler kind of broke it down for me, what's actually happening on OpenRouter. So can you explain when people use OpenRouter, what type of data would be included in this particular dataset versus the broader LLM inference market? Yeah, so is my mic on?

1:15:59Yeah, you're good. My thesis is basically like you use open router when you're doing kind of low intelligence but like high volume things when price matters a lot. Because if you look at the top models, a lot of them, there is like Claude, there is Gemini, but then you see a lot of open source models which are like super cheap to inference. So like at least for me, whenever I use, like I do a bunch of inference on different models, whenever I use like OpenAI or Anthropic or Gemini, I'm usually hitting their like actual API. I'm not using OpenRouter. Directly. Yeah, because like maybe there's some sense where like there's different params that aren't actually exposed via the OpenRouter API or something like that.

1:16:45I think that's probably generally true for a lot of people. But if I'm using, if I just need like super cheap intelligence, then I just go in OpenRouter. I see, okay, this is like a pretty good model. It's like super cheap. I'll just hit that. And then sometimes if the inference is super slow, I can really easily switch to a different open source model. Sure. So that's kind of my thesis. So it's also why if you look at the kind of total tokens inferenced, it's like, okay, Claude Sonnet 4 is at 500 billion of the past week. Which if you kind of map out what the actual revenue is from that, it's like a super tiny amount of what their revenue is probably.

1:17:26if you kind of like think there's some numbers leaked. The leaked numbers for Anthropic, it's around$4 billion a year in business, probably more now. So you work backwards and you get to like, they should be making like$250 million a month. And this data only accounts for something like$12 million of that$250. So the actual frame is like 95 % of their business or something like that, 90 % of their business is happening directly on their API, and then 5 % of their business is happening in open router. Yeah, or something like that. I didn't include the input tokens, which is like about, it's like 10x cheaper.

1:18:09So it's like at least in that order of magnitude. But it's significantly less than like what it should be, where like I've used Grok a fair amount via API. I've never used it through Grok's API. I've only used it through open router. Got it. So I think that's probably true. Also, one of the reasons you might see Grok Code Fast 1 being super high is that at least since its release, I think it's still free in Cursor and Climb. And I don't know if they're using OpenRouter. They're using some kind of router in the back, right? Because you can... Cursor is? Yeah, obviously. Because you can select Grok or Anthropic.

1:18:47Well, isn't that just their own router? It could be. But they could be sitting on top of it. Yeah, I mean, it's very easy to use it. So I think those are some of the reasons why you might see GROK performing here. I think this post, this is sort of like, you know, meme incendiary written for virality. The default story it's telling is like, oh yeah, like GROK is 10 times bigger than OpenAI. And that's probably not right, but - Charts are great for marketing. Yes. And whether you're hitting number one globally in the app store here, where you're charting matters a lot, right? And it's natural for companies to share the charts that are good.

1:19:35When they're good. When they're good. Exactly. And they're just snapshots too. And charts, yeah, charts are. And so what is this actually, what is the actual interpretation here? Like they're winning on open router, which means that Grok has successfully delivered a level of intelligence that is affordable and so. Yeah, I would say like, I would almost put this model, comp it to like just open source models, like coin or something, rather than like kind of the, you know. Frontier reasoning models. Frontier reasoning models. Got it. So you could say they're winning kind of in that field, even though it's not open source, it's still in that similar like price range.

1:20:12Yep. There does seem to be value in soaking up some of the demand that's further down the cost curve for maybe more price sensitive users. Yeah, it could also be like, I mean, the model is still good enough where like, even if it's worse on a single shot, compared to like GPT-5, if you just run it 10 times, it still will be a little bit cheaper, and you're like kind of at a similar spot. So where you can just kind of max out on volume, instead of like, your intelligence per token is less, but if you just run way more tokens, then you're at similar intelligence, it'll still be cheaper. So maybe there's some kind of factor there.

1:20:47So like lightly bullish for the XAI team. They've clearly built something that people want at a specific price point. It's definitely good, yeah. I mean, I haven't seen, I don't really use the newest Grok model, like their Frontier one. Is it three? Yeah, three. I almost never use it. Yeah. So this is maybe one of the first examples of Grok models really being used a lot. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what happens with the company. Yeah, the roll-up theory is kind of interesting to toy with. There's a bunch of, imagine X, the everything app, integrated with Tesla. That's a funny outcome if that's what happens.

1:21:26I would be basically forced to buy a Tesla. I would definitely buy a Tesla. I mean, buy one and then take it to the shop and manual swap it and naturally aspirated V12 in there. What if they just came out and said, you can't use X when you're moving fast unless you're inside of a Tesla. Force people to transition out of traditional cars. That's the next catalyst for the next five million. I really hope Tesla ships the Roadster. I saw someone on the timeline maybe a week or two ago talking very sad, like a super Tesla bull, owns multiple Teslas, owns the stock, saying that they canceled their Roadster 2 reservation after maybe eight years of waiting, something like that.

1:22:15And I still feel like - Didn't they have to put down like a hundred bucks? No, no, no, no. The Roadster was like over 10 grand, I'm pretty sure. Okay, so a real deposit. But also you hear this crazy stat where people are like, well, if you'd put it in Tesla stock instead, it would be worth 5 million. And it's like, well, that's not really like a fair comparison. The Cybertruck reservation was like a hundred bucks. but the Roadster 2 was, I mean, it's, you know, I think people knew that it was gonna be several hundred thousand dollars, super car territory, but it just hasn't moved. But I think that they should do it.

1:22:47I think it'd be good. They need a halo car. The Cybertruck's kind of working as a halo car, but the design language is a little bit too disparate from the core portfolio, where if you see an Audi R8, you're like, oh, Audi's cool. maybe I'll get an A4, right? Like, because there's some styling cues that are the same. But if you walk into the Tesla dealership and you see a Cybertruck, you're not like, yeah, Model 3 really like speaks that language, right? It's like, they're wildly different designs. So maybe if over time, the 3 and the S and the X and the Y, they all update to have a little bit more of that Cybertruck language, the Cybertruck would work as a halo car, but right now it feels like a very different car from a very different brand world, essentially.

1:23:35It's cool, but I'll have to see. In other Elon news, Perfrock4 is their smartest, the Boring Company posts, the smartest, fastest, safest tunnel boring machine in the next iterations, five, six, and seven, are already being built at the Boring Company factory in Texas. Goal is continuous mining and zero people in tunnels, Z-PIT. And they're hiring exceptional mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and software engineers. The Boring Company has just not gotten really any attention for the last few years. We've been grinding. It's so funny to think about a world where you look up and you see starships being launched.

1:24:16And if you could look down, there'd just be tunnel boring machines everywhere. But this one's a sleeper. I hope to see more out of them. Yeah. I mean, it's tough. It's heavily regulated to build stuff underground. Not going deep enough. Takes a long time. If you go deep enough, the regulators won't know. Yeah, I heard one interesting thesis that was like, it's just like the underground domain is like, it is a resource. It's essentially real estate if you can build stuff down there, even if it's just a tunnel. And that's extremely valuable because it's effectively free. Like it's a free resource.

1:24:54Yeah. Just like space. Tyler, I'm not going to pretend like you're supposed to know. this but can you try to figure out like who regulates once you get because i would assume like a hundred feet below your property is like probably like there's some probably some traditional property yeah i would think that there's nothing if i could dig a tunnel down there i would just assume that i have some some i can imagine over what happens there but i think if you go deep enough i mean is that not like the play what would you be okay with if if some random person was like, Jordy, hey, I got a tunnel. I'm building a tunnel under your house.

1:25:31Don't worry. It's 500 feet. Would you be like, yeah, cool. Or would you be like, I would prefer not to have that happen? 500 is fair game. As long as if they can prove out safety. I don't want any type of collapse. I like the level in which my home is at and the ultradome. I don't want to suddenly feel a jolt fall through the earth. Yeah, I don't know. I have yet to tour the Boring Company Tunnel. They built one in Las Vegas. It's kind of a demo. There's been a few that have built. But I mean, this is one of those businesses that I think has just been building, building, similar to Neuralink, like working, chopping wood, grinding stone in the earth.

1:26:11And yeah, maybe something happens here. Tyler, did you get any closer to an answer on how unregulated the underground domain, the subterranean domain is? Yes. So this is ChetJPT. It says courts generally say that you own the ground beneath your land only to the extent that you can reasonably use it. There you go. So there was a court case in 1946. The Supreme Court rejected the to the center of the earth doctrine. So you don't just own everything below you. So usually it's like maybe a thousand feet is kind of the extent and then below that is just, I guess it's just free rain. Do you know this - You're not using more than a 10 feet below your - I'm sorry, Tyler.

1:26:52The second you have property, I'm burrowing a tunnel underneath it. I'm gonna be hanging out under there and you're gonna have to prove that you can get down there. I do think that there's a massive market for bat caves. You know, it's very hard to do ADUs. ADUs are booming now in California, but it's still hard to actually just go and add real estate to a house. We have a housing crisis. Why not just have the tunnel company come build and just be like, hey, we built you the perfect man cave underground your house, under your house. If you want us to build a little tunnel up to your bedroom that you can climb down and go enjoy your new movie theater.

1:27:30Can you imagine being like an angry teenager getting in a fight with your parents about, I don't want to eat this for dinner. And then you just go in the tube and you go. And then you're down in the Batcave. Huge, huge untapped market if they can figure it out. They don't understand me above. Do you know the story of the subway that goes out to Harvard University in Cambridge? I do not. This is fascinating. So the MTA, the Massachusetts, MBTA, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, built a subway that goes from Boston out to Cambridge. and when they built it, they wanted it to go through Harvard's territory, Harvard's land.

1:28:12And it would have been a straight shot to get from Boston to Harvard. But when you're on the actual subway, it slows to a crawl at one point and starts the wheel screeching as you're going around this weird curve. And I was very unclear on why the Metro, why the subway needed to take a curve when you can clearly draw a straight line between the logical places to go, from Boston to Cambridge to get off and go to Harvard University. And the reason is that Harvard does own the ground underneath. And the reason that they - They did a deal? And do you know who they did a deal with? Probably some baron?

1:28:54Close, he wasn't a king. It was our first president, George Washington. Whoa. So they got in a legal battle, and the Harvard administration fights the Boston Transportation Authority and the government. The Boston Transport Authority? And the Boston, yeah, the Boston Transportation Authority says, we have eminent domain. We, you know, we own the land. We govern this land. You need to let us build this subway in a straight line. It'll be better for everyone. Harvard says no, and we have proof that we actually control the land all the way down to the bedrock. And our evidence is a letter that is signed by George Washington, who said, I grant you this land.

1:29:36And it held up. And so the subway had to go around. Mogged. Mogged. And honestly, super inconvenient to Harvard students. And I don't know why Harvard wasn't just like, yeah, obviously build it in the convenient way. But there were probably other considerations. Anyway, Turbo Puffer, search every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable uh happy birthday to casey hanmer friend of the show uh it's been 15 years in this incredible country he says it's his american birthday uh on september 14th 15 years ago 2010 he became a u.s citizen he says he feels like he's still getting started incredible addition to the squad thank you to casey hammer for all that you do for america let's play that american eagle sound happy birthday casey uh in other news 150 more yeah 250 more in other news uh debate continues to rage between salesforce ceo mark benio is this account we're we're yeah we're featuring here just calling balls and strikes yeah this is this is media this is journalism not conflicted at all so palantir hotline with the target ceos will do the math and will and would rather pay palantir 10 million to make save 100 million instead of pay crm 5 million to break even or worse value creators greater than value extractor so not conflicted at all not conflicted at all.

1:31:15And this is a post from John, who is excellent at clipping our Alex Karp interview. This is such a great quote. He says, I'm so inspired. So Benioff tried talking smack with Kramer and saying, you know, we're winning deals. Karp fired back on TVPN. And now Benioff is taking the high road. He says, I'm so inspired by that company, not just because they have 100x multiple on revenue, which I would love to have. Dude, are you pulling up the video? I'm pulling up the video. Let's pull it up. Let's go. It's in the chat now. They're going back and forth. I mean, there is a real discussion. We talked about it earlier in the show about how Salesforce positions its revenue model, how the market will treat that in the short term.

1:32:09Benioff and Jim Cramer had a back and forth on Mad Money talking about how Salesforce actually makes money and charges the customer and yeah there is a question about where both these companies go it's a big battle. Anyway let's pull up the clip of Mark Benioff talking to CNBC about Palantir. You know an idea out there you see in the valuation of the company Palantir. This idea that that's the future of software. It's disrupting software and it's doing so without a marketing team. Oh my gosh. I am so inspired by that company. I mean not just because they have a hundred times you know multiple on their revenue which I would love to have that too.

1:32:54Maybe it will have a thousand times on their revenue soon. But the prices that they charge to their customers I mean there has got to be the most expensive enterprise software I've ever seen. I've been like looking at their demos this week saying my gosh how do they get these prices. because I thought I had analytics. I thought I had data management. Maybe I'm not charging enough. And you're competing with them. We compete with them. In fact, we just won a huge deal at the U.S. Army against them. Insane. Benioff's a legend. We're hoping to have him on the show next month. We're working on it. But that is insane levels of cope.

1:33:34You think so? Yeah. I mean, I think this is guy notorious for selling expensive software. Sales force. Is angry that someone else is charging more money. Selling more expensive software. That's a good point, yeah. When, yeah, on a long enough time horizon, this is about the value that you deliver to customers. You need to deliver more value than you capture. Yep. and Palantir's got a fantastic pitch. They have fantastic, you know, I mean, we were at AIP Con. We talked on air and off air with people that are using Palantir's stack. And it's not, I think, you know, they obviously compete in a real way, but there's also plenty of companies on Palantir's stack that are not even in conversations with Salesforce around a bunch of different use cases.

1:34:27Yeah, I was about to say that. It does feel like Palantir's position themselves completely differently from a product perspective in terms of what they do. People think sales, I mean, the ticker is CRM. And so when I hear about like an army deal, I'm like, are they getting a CRM? But I guess that they're just so big at this point that they can do a lot of different stuff. The company C3, you know them? C3.ai. They have the ticker AI. AI. I was gonna say, Mark Benioff should buy them just to get the AI ticker to come into the next era. Yeah, just rebrand your ticker. There's been a lot of ticker-foo.

1:35:05I mean, Mark Zuckerberg with the meta rebrand, getting your core brand on the theme or defining the theme is somewhat of an underrated strategy. It's like a good.com, a good ticker, that people can just go and say, I want exposure to AI. I'm getting C3 AI. I want exposure to CRMs. I'm getting dollar sign CRM. That's a potentially new fund with the strategy of just investing based on the narrative surrounding, the narrative that you construct around the ticker. Yes. I need an AI company. Maybe, maybe. I need a CRM company. Well, whatever you're building, you need to get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT.

1:35:44You need to go to Profound. That's right. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Go to Profound. Should we go through the Wall Street Journal article? We were featured in the Wall Street Journal. If you're just tuning in, Dylan Abrascato says on X, I'm joining TVP and as president, John, Jordy, and team have built something incredibly special. And after starting my career at CNBC, this feels full circle. Dylan also ran partnerships for HQ Trivia during their heyday, which is a crazy, crazy journey. He'll have to jump on the show sometime to talk about.

1:36:17Dylan also knows about sports, which is huge. Yeah, this is a major unlock for us. We're going to learn so much about sports. We now have expertise on sports. He's also very into collectibles, so he's going to be helping us build out the museum. We should sit down with him and ask him, what are all the sports? How do they work? What are the sports? What are the leagues? Yeah, what are the leagues? What are the plays? Yeah, the plays would be interesting. I would love for him to name every play. Get up to speed on the plays. That would be very cool. I don't know that we have to go through this.

1:36:50Maybe we can pull out some of the key quotes. Yeah. What else is here? They call this podcast, but they didn't put us in quotes, at least not in this version. Total victory. Big shout out to the Wall Street Journal. I wanted to highlight one quote in here. Let me find it. But this was my favorite part. Yes. And I hope that that doesn't sound important. Who said this quote that's your favorite quote? It's a quote that I have said when talking with Katie, the journalist over. I said, well, we said, this is Katie's reporting. She said, the duo has a laundry list of moves they have zero interest in making, forming a content studio, creating a network of shows, pivoting to political coverage raising capital setting up a venture fund and selling uh and i said we're perfectly fine with there being somewhat of a ceiling on the size of the business hayes said we're not building for an exit we want to retire on the mics on the air i love it so i told katie that uh you know some at some point decades into the future there will be there will be a final show i hope it i hope it is many decades from now but uh we hope to retire here on the mics uh i hope to see john john exley's name in the chat or one final salute but um anyways absolutely love the journal and um fun to to be in there for the first time very fun uh did you see mike tyson drop mr beast i did i just dropped in the timeline that's uh mike isaac said tyson nearly Houdini'd Mr.

1:38:37Beast on camera. Are you familiar with this story? Didn't Houdini, didn't he Houdini himself? I don't actually know. What is being Houdini? Tyler, what happened with Houdini? I mean, this is like from when I was in like fourth grade, but I was told that basically he got punched in the stomach just like this. He didn't like clench or anything. He was prepared for it. I remember now. So he had a whole bit of letting any guy could just punch him. Whoa. And if you flex in the right way, pretty much you can take a punch. Sure. But a guy, I guess, caught him when he wasn't ready for it. It just took him back.

1:39:08He broke a rib or something, internal bleeding, and Houdini passed away. RIP to a real one. Let's pull this video up. Let's play the video of Mike Tyson. I'm going to take a punch for Mike Tyson. Whenever you're ready, up. Oh! Is that straight to the liver? Oh, that is intense. Whenever you're ready, up. He really can't take it. Whenever you're ready, up. OK, OK, that's enough. That's enough for that. Do you think he was doing a bit of acting there because there was such a viral moment? I don't know. I don't think that was a liver shot. It felt more like rib. There's a longer version I saw, and he's still down there for another 10 seconds.

1:39:43Yeah, but is he just acting? He's an entertainer. He's an entertainer. I think he knows to entertain, but at the same time, I think he knows that he can talk to Tyson and say, hit me hard, but don't actually take me out entirely. And Tyson can dial it into a point where Tyson knows, yeah, I'm not gonna break your rib, but I will knock the wind out of you. The thing seeing the Tyson-Jake Paul fight is watching Tyson all these years later with just like this incredible form and like movement, despite being like long retired, was, it was cool to see. It was literally like riding a bike for him. I pulled up, we were talking about tickers earlier.

1:40:30People that wanted to invest in CRM could buy hashtag CRM. Or they could buy C3 by buying AI. On public.com? Investing for those that take it seriously? Of course. Because they have multi-asset investing. All these tickers are on there. Industry leading yields. Not financial advice. Trusted by millions. Trusted by billions soon. Yep. But I pulled up some tickers here. And I wanted to help you build a portfolio. Oh, you have more funny tickers? Okay. For the start, we can do ticker cake. Cake. For the Cheesecake Factory. No way. Buying cake. That's good, OK. It's hard not to go along with cake.

1:41:05Taco. Taco? This was Del Taco. It used to trade under that before they got acquired. What else you got? Bud, Anheuser-Busch. OK, yeah. Boston Beer Company traded under Sam for Samuel Adams. Yeah, that makes sense. But I would expect the ticker being beer. Like, I want the ticker to be generic. For Budweiser, I would expect the ticker just to be beer. I would expect the ticker. I got it. It needs to be generic, totally generic. What do you got? Okay, next up, hog, guess, H-O-G. Must be a bacon company that makes bacon. Close, Harley Davidson. Ah, that's still a step away. That's good, that's good.

1:41:49You want to invest in hog? That is a very funny ticker. If you want to have broad exposure to hogs. Yes. No, no, no. It doesn't actually give you exposure to hogs. What else? Anything else? There's a few. There's CRZY, Crazy Woman Creek. CRZY? Bancorp. What is that? That's a tiny bank in Wyoming, OTC. Somebody made a cannabis ETF called YOLO. I wonder how that's doing. I don't know. Probably not great. Yeah. There does seem to be some alpha in having a unique ticker. Like a unique.com. Yeah, YOLO is down 87 % all time. Hopefully you didn't actually YOLO into YOLO. Be careful out there. Just absolutely brutal.

1:42:40If it looks like YOLO. You only live once. You only lose once. Go down 87%. You only lose everything once. You're only going to be able to, if you don't lose everything once, you're never going to be able to make it all back. Yep, yep. In one trade. Hey, maybe the thesis for YOLO was, this is a generational opportunity to go short. You could be up 80 % if you went short. Yeah. With size, what you got to? Guess, so I have one, Play. Play? Yeah, Dave & Buster's. That's pretty good. Okay, that's pretty good. Yeah, long playing. It's not as much of a pure play as AI or CRM. There's also Love, which is Love Sack, the beanbag furniture retailer.

1:43:19hmm it's a rival the moon pods don't like it yeah don't like boo

1:43:28good luck to everyone over there anyway there was an incredible exchange between secretary Wright and Jason Calacanis about solar and Elon Musk at the all-in summit so Elon has it completely wrong. Yeah, I have the video pulled up. Let's play this. Let's play the... Elon Musk has it completely wrong. He has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. And if we could make a bet 50 years out, I'll make a bet solar never gets to 10 % of global energy. So Elon Musk has it completely wrong. So this is the US Secretary of Energy. very clearly like long nuclear relative to solar. And it's a hot debate.

1:44:16I still feel like nuclear is growing and there's so much, like how many startups have we talked to in the atomic world? There's something there. Elon, he seems to be a purist about solar and purist about not using LIDAR on the self-driving cars. And Elon likes the purely elegant solutions of just like the most efficient thing. But if energy capacity is like messy and you need it at night, like there's only so much that you can do. What do you think? Yeah, I just want more energy. Just give me more. I think that's what - As much as possible. I think that's what Secretary Chris Wright is saying.

1:44:58It is interesting. Doug from Radiant worked with Elon on a plan to power Mars and ran all the numbers on what it would take to generate enough power to create fuel out of the ice on Mars to bring a rocket back and concluded that nuclear was the best option, left SpaceX, started a nuclear company, and Elon somehow was unconvinced and went and is still super long solar. What's also interesting is that for all of his Elon, for as much of a solar bull as Elon is, he doesn't seem that indexed to the trend, right? Like he owns SolarCity, but he doesn't have like a mega production facility. He feels longer energy storage than he is.

1:45:47Totally. Like solar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Certainly makes a ton of batteries, makes a ton of cars and stuff, and it makes sense that solar is important too as a story of that. But I mean, if you charge your Tesla in 10 years off of a nuclear power plant, he's still a winner. So it's not like he's bet his entire career or his entire business on solar. I don't remember any of him. I'm sure he's spoken about nuclear, but I never remember Elon saying that he was anti-nuclear. Yeah, I think he's just, he's been able to find a bunch of posts that have been basically from like solar maxis. But anyway, if you're planning your build out of a nuclear power plant, do it on Linear.

1:46:31Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Internal tech emails has some Larry Ellison data information from 2002, March 22nd. We cannot remain in denial if we talk with our users every day. Larry Ellison says, our top priority is to get Oracle users delighted with the quality and function of our CRM products. Until that happens, I doubt we will achieve success in the market. The biggest problem is missing features as opposed to showstopper bugs. There are a few of those as well, but they are much easier to fix.

1:47:06Every applications meeting now centers around representatives from our user community who report back on application quality and set priorities for development. We cannot remain in denial if we talk with our users every day. We need to work very hard to achieve a high degree of customer satisfaction for our sales and marketing products as soon as possible. We will have major improvements by June, but we are unlikely to deliver all we need until September. Doing it by September will require unrelenting focus and a Herculean effort. It will be done, but not unless we change our development and testing process and do a better job of listening to our user community.

1:47:43Larry, pretty interesting that they were taking such a run at CRM. I feel like Oracle is not particularly known for that. and has certainly... Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what their revenue for the CRM product is today, but they bundle it into cloud applications. Sure. Which is... Yeah, huge. Which is still significant. You know, 3.8 billion a quarter. They're already reporting their first quarter of fiscal year, 2026. I just hope we get Larry taking some shots at Mark Benioff and putting the timeline in turmoil. That'd be fun. anyway did you see this did you see this app okay do you see this yeah we got to get we should actually get the team on yeah I was I was texting with the founder we should definitely bring him on but Austin all read interacted with their chat it looks like he had he'd signed up given their phone number and wound up texting with their AI support rapper their AI sales rep and Austin and all red just says, WTF is going on.

1:48:47And so, Poke identified that Austin is the founder of Bloom Tech and says, what brings you to my digital doorsteps? Trying to see how the real AI companies do it? And it's like this super sassy fine tune of an LLM and Austin says, yeah. And the Poke bot says, quotes, yeah. That's all the effort you're gonna put in? I expected more from someone who tweets about AI productivity all day. Maybe you should enroll in one of your own courses on how to convince AI bouncers to let you in." And Austin just says, too much sass from AI. Sass is literally what I'm here for, Austin. But fine, let me be more direct.

1:49:26Why should you get Poke access when you're already busy running Bloom Tech, managing angel investments, tweeting about AI productivity? But here's the thing, access to Poke isn't just about follower count. We're looking for people who will actually use it, provide feedback, and help us improve. Your work training devs to leverage AI is interesting. Tell me more about what you'd actually do with Poke if I let you in. And yes, tweeting about it would help your case. I think that's me, depending on how good you are. Depending on how good you are. And so he has this sassy exchange with Poke. I don't know if this is intentional, but making the screenshots of the product marketing for the user's business is pretty smart, if it were intentional.

1:50:11Because he has an incentive to share this because it's saying, look, you built an entire, it's funny, and it's also, look, you built an entire business around teaching devs to use AI effectively. I respect that. Yeah, and so Austin kind of closed it out. Look, let's get one thing straight. I know you're an AI model. You're a bunch of linear algebra running on a machine. If you can give me productivity gains, then show me how. Otherwise, I'll stop using you. I'm not here to impress you. You need to impress me. And so he has this interaction, but it wound up working, right? Like he posted about Poke, he got a bunch of views and likes on the post.

1:50:44It definitely drew our attention to it. So I guess mission accomplished. I still don't fully understand what Poke does. So maybe there's a little bit more to do there. But it is somewhat impressive that during the onboarding flow, the system was able to identify who Austin Allred is. I mean, I guess he's enough of a public figure at this point that if you just hit any LLM and asked who is Austin Allred, it would give you the high-level summary of, he's an angel investor, he's the founder of Bloom Tech, and he tweets about AI productivity. And so maybe that's baked in. But if you could bring this level of personalization, I don't know that I agree with the sassy tone necessarily, but if you could bring this level of personalization to interactions, maybe that's good.

1:51:27I don't know. I saw somebody posting that Apple should acquire Pokeh, I mean, which is the interaction company of California. Oh, really? That's their sub-brand? That's their parent company. No, no, no. Really? Yeah, yeah. And they've been that way for a while. So remember, we gave a cutoff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No more. But then they were the last one through the gate right before the cutoff. Oh, well. Yeah, I would be interested to hear from the founder. This is at least like a teaser for what the product does. Like, clearly, it's a friend.com, sassy, fine-tuned on AI. I think it's more so the difference between this and friend, friend is not trying to be functional at all other than being a friend, and this is trying to be a functional kind of tool, assistant type thing that has more, is for friend code.

1:52:17I just mean that there is a world where you're a company and you want to bring an LLM into your product. And if you're trying to bring in any other tool off the technological shelf, whether it's a UI component, HTML5, the way a link looks, you will express your brand through CSS, right? Like you might have, everyone has a button on their website, but every button looks different. It's an expression of their brand, right? And so if you're going to bring LLMs or chat interfaces to bear, it makes sense to actually try and bring your brand through in some way. and this is a more extreme brand than I think most people would go with.

1:53:01But there is something to the idea that even if you're just a large enterprise company, you might want your LLM voice to actually be an extension of your brand, whether that's just being slightly friendlier or slightly more corporate or slightly use more or less jargon. You might not want to just show up with the default Chachy PT or Gemini or whatever flavor of LLM that people are used to interacting with. You might want something that's a little bit more style. Something tells me that the Pokeh team could help the Apple team figure out how to summarize messages without botching them 90 % of the time.

1:53:41That's a good take. Yeah. Anyway, interesting. 400 episodes of the greatest podcast of all time in history. Future Hall of Famer, Founders podcast. Colossus, warm it up and give it a good hit. Great contact, John. Colossus had the write-up this morning. This week, David Sendra has just released his 400th episode of Founders, a milestone that represents far more than a number. It's a testament to one of the most extraordinary learning projects in podcasting history. Over nine years, David has read and reread 400 biographies and autobiographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, distilling their wisdom into a treasure trove of timeless business principles.

1:54:27From episodes one to episode 400, Founders has become the ultimate masterclass in entrepreneurial thinking. David just doesn't just summarize books. I know what you're thinking. He excavates the core ideas that built empires, the mental models that created fortunes, and the philosophies that turned ordinary people into business legends. A little syntax that's not in bad form. Do you think that... Maybe, who knows? Who knows? It's well written. It is funny how ChatGPT has just ruined that entire stylistical flourish, which was very, very useful for a long period of time. And now it's like, there was a big movement on X, you probably saw where it was like, bring back the M-Dash, like make M-Dash's legal again.

1:55:22Because ChatGPT has so clearly stolen the M-Dash from writing that you can't use one without getting accused. The OpenAI team doesn't seem to be lying off. The M-dashes? No. You see more than ever? I think the same amount. Yeah, I thought that the, it's not this, it's that, using the M-dash, that was going to be like a stylistical flourish that was going to be left behind with 4.0, and that 5.0 would have a different flavor, a different structure. Over the weekend, I kept seeing accounts commenting that were clearly running software to basically like look at the original post and write back a response automatically to it.

1:56:03These are people that are trying to build bot accounts up or maybe it's their own account and they just want to grow. And I kept wanting to just like break, you know, my phone and just slam it on the ground because it's so annoying to start reading something and then halfway through you realize it's... But anyways, this is a very nicely written piece. And a huge congratulations to David Senra. They say, that is 400 episodes down a thousand to go, I would put it more in the range of 400 ,000 episodes to go. That's about right. But if you love David Senra as much as we do, the best thing you can do to make his job, his life and his job better is to become one of history's greatest entrepreneurs.

1:56:47Yes. Go on a generational run. Get a book written about you. Yes. Get multiple books written about you. Maybe die. That helps too. Some of the founders featured are no longer with us. And you'll give him content that he can immortalize. No, he does cover a live entrepreneur. He made three episodes about Larry Ellison in 2020. He was on a serious run, went on a full Larry Ellison kick, read three books, wrote three episodes, made three episodes. David's story, maybe we'll have to do someday, we will make the founders episode on David. We will just fully, we'll study for months. We'll just emulate his entire process.

1:57:31And because his story is truly incredible, right? It's also, yeah. He was toiling away for years. Nobody knew his name. Yeah. when I I discovered the show I knew from like I just knew from 20 minutes listening that he was special talent and I don't know if I was I think I was one of the first few I had to be one of the first three sponsors or something like that you knew this and I said something that was totally in hindsight so offensive I was like would you consider like selling? Ah, that's funny. Because he didn't, he wasn't generating like, you know, a ton of ad revenue at the time. I was like, look, you could probably make more.

1:58:22And he was just like, no, he said very nicely. He was like, no, I'm not, not, not interested, but thank you for the offer. And knowing David now, he was thinking like, I would not sell founder podcasts for a hundred billion dollars. It is funny how, how Sandra's impact and his cache in Silicon Valley and business broadly is massive and he's never written about. If you were to actually try and do a Founders episode about David Sennachery, it would be very hard because he's not someone that people just profile. He's never really done press. Doesn't do a lot of press, doesn't try to do press, and also gets left out of articles because he just exists in this completely insider space where he doesn't really break out all the time.

1:59:08He doesn't cause a lot of controversy doesn't get canceled by random people. He's not out there like duking it out And so I think the mainstream media just doesn't realize how big he is in the podcasting world And so you have this you have this weird Dynamic where it would be extremely hard because he wouldn't just be like oh, yeah Just pull up like one of the many profiles on him like there are profiles about a lot of people There aren't that many about him. I think by this time next year people have I think they'll pick up on it Yeah, woken up anyway and written the proper profile numeral hq.com sales tax on autopilot Let's spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

1:59:43We're getting a little bit of an Eras Tour going on. Andrew Ross Sorkin is on a book tour. This is going to be close to Eras Tour level fervor. And revenue. It's going to be Listomania level. I think people will be shaking, crying if you're big into financial journalism. Fantastic research business histories. You're going to want to attend this. Andrew Ross Sorkin is on tour for his new book, 1929. It's a minute-by-minute account of the Great Depression, how it happened, who was in the room at a very concrete level. I talked to him a little bit about it. Seems like a fantastic book. I'm very excited for this.

2:00:25He's been working on it for years. Yes. And just a completely different take on the story that you've heard many times about. You've heard it at an abstract level of like there was a financial bubble. The person who was shining the shoes was giving stock tips, and there were all these different accounts. And you've heard them at a very high level about the 1929 bubble, but I don't think the story's ever been told at this level of detail. So very excited for this, obviously. It's one for the finance heads more than the Irish. I just think anybody that's in that period will be excited. And if you are in any of these cities on these dates, I highly recommend going and checking it out and joining Andrew Ross Sorkin for a tour of 1929, his latest book.

2:01:14Matt Palmer hit the timeline last week and said, there's insane demand for people who can understand and explain technology in a compelling way. Zephy went viral by saying sales, it's called sales. Kind of a, kind of a - Do you think Matt was getting at that? Like what was Matt, cause Matt is, is, is Gabby Goldberg was also saying, this is another word for comms, like comms in its, in its purest form is not about just connecting you to like media and managing those relationships. It's about like figuring out how to position your, uh, position your product and, uh, generate attention in your market and drive revenue and all these other things.

2:01:57You know, Listomania is a real phenomenon. When Franz Liszt would play, people would shake and cry and be so excited and faint. It was a popular thing. Tyler, are you familiar with Listomania? Oh, you got to get up to date on Franz Liszt. It's great, great music. 2.6 million in the chat asked, when will TBPN go on tour? That's a great question. We have a lot more to build here in the studio, a lot more to do with the show as it is. but live events would be fun. We want to put our own twist on them, of course. So we will be figuring that out in the future. Until then, we will be telling you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2.

2:02:43You've seen their billboards all around. Silicon Valley, go check them out. Trung Fan shares, the r slash iPod subreddit is full of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids recommending which mp3 player to buy and bring to school after majority of u.s states have banned smartphones from the classrooms oh that's interesting people are reselling old ipods for 500 plus on ebay old is new this is interesting we had a viral uh instagram short talking about uh the fact that the ipod might be coming the older ipod might be coming off of patent and so there might be an opportunity to Here's the new version of it. Like the play, if you just wanted to generate return, clearly a play would have been to go back and just buy, if you could go back in time, just buy Apple products.

2:03:34Hold. Hold them, don't box them, et cetera. The question is... Are people going to attach incredible value to the iPhone 15? Yeah, yeah. The 16, the 17, are there gonna be specific generations? I think the original iPhone trades above its value, but I don't think the iPhone 6 does, for example. Even really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure. That's interesting. That most of them lose value. And even something like the original iPhone, I don't think it's outperformed the stock market. So it's very much like the collectible car market where even if you're in, unless you're in the absolutely best performing car, even if you're in a car that held its value and went up in value, like I believe the Carrera GT has not outperformed the stock market, even though it's maybe doubled or tripled in value.

2:04:24It's mid$1.5 million car. Yes, you can buy a brand new iPhone 6, 16 gigabytes, silver, unlocked. How much? Actually, okay, this is interesting. So the first result is just new. You can tell the box is open. Second one is the iPhone 6 factory sealed unopened investment grade going for$5 ,000. $5 ,000. But is it going to sell? I wonder. But$5 ,000, that's a lot. For an iPhone 6, you said? Yeah. Okay, that's a good return, actually. That was a$500 product at the time. Okay, but here's another one selling for that's sealed for$88. Okay, okay. I think the market might - Which one am I going to buy?

2:05:07I mean, yeah, probably. That's been great. Well, is one of them signed by Tim Cook or Steve Jobs? I mean, it's signed iPhone. Signed iPhone. It's a great way. Anyway, Antonio Garcia Martinez has an interesting anecdote here. Hyperliquid is generating more than$1.2 billion in net income, surpassing NASDAQ's 2024 net income of 1.13 billion. Remarkably, it achieves this with a workforce 832 times smaller while directing 98 % of revenue to hype token buybacks. And Antonio says, funny that the proverbial four-person unicorn was achieved faster in crypto than AI. Well, and this has happened before. There was a Y Combinator company called like Axe.

2:05:56I remember you were talking about this. Were they a unicorn? It came out of a batch that we covered. I don't know if they've been valued as a unicorn. Sure, sure, sure. doing like hundreds of millions of revenue. Yeah, yeah. I think comparing Hyperliquid, which is more of like an exchange product to an actual stock exchange, is like that. I mean, it's not the craziest comparison. Yeah, I mean, it still sounds crazy to be like, you know, tiny company generating. No, no, no, no. It is remarkable. I mean, you could go further. Bitcoin, it's a trillion dollar asset. It's a one person unicorn, right?

2:06:31Or maybe a couple contributors. but mostly extremely high revenue per employee. But yeah, wild. I still think we will probably see the four person unicorn in AI eventually, but we'll need to keep tracking it. Can we pull up this video in the timeline tab? And while we do that, let me tell you about Adio, custom relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. They need a stock ticker, CRM2. CRM AI, that could be AI CRM. Five letter stock ticker. I don't think you can do five letter stock ticker yet. We've got people at Nicey. That would be a whole, it's like when the new like.AI domains came out or.xyz domains came out, there's like this flourishing of new domains that flood the market.

2:07:29if one of the exchanges went to five letter tickers, that could be bullish. Anyway, you wanted to pull up a video, what do you got for us? Rune has a post here highlighting this new humanoid demo. Okay, let's play it. Let's pull it up. We can't see it. Here we go. Whoa, that is crazy. So it has some feature that gets it to... It just pops right back up. That's remarkable. Wow, that slow-mo is really insane. gets kicked over trips it slips up that's so fast that's so fast I think I think a use case for humanoids that people are people always talk about humanoid so they're gonna fold fold your laundry yes I just want to be able to box one huge market for shadow boxing right now yeah yeah under monetize when you can just kind of be you know throwing you know haymakers I mean you You can go as hard as you want, I guess.

2:08:27Go as hard as you want. You can train the robot to, all right, you can punch back, but just like, don't take my head off kind of thing. That is wild. Hopefully there's no bugs. That is a wild video. We keep getting those. Do we know what company produced that? Is that Unitary? I think this is pretty cool. Let them go public in the U.S. Kidding. And then in five years, we're like, we have seven delays in the divestiture. There's concepts of a plan to get unitry to divest in the United States, who knows. Anyway, speaking of tech in Washington, Wilmanitis has a little thread for us. The cultures of tech in Washington are fundamentally incompatible, says Wilmanitis.

2:09:15In tech, the foundation of a good career, the foundations are reckless sharing of favors, expecting nothing in return, endorsing young ideas and people and public networks of influence. In Washington, any of these will end you, says Will. In the fullness of time, tech will end up having dramatically less influence on American politics than finance or any other industry that was once a similar size. We are used to infinite positive sum games. Tech came in like a conquering army and we will be run out by the midterms. It will be a record year for lobbying firm profits, It's certainly a record year for state house lobbyists as tech learns their ABCs of government.

2:09:55And you should expect a lot of consolidation and retirements in this space. I love that. But the number of bills will be at an all time low. This too will fade. If I had to make a trade, I would be willing to bet that we will have two vice presidents that spent some of their career as venture capitalists before we have a tech native lobbying firm with over$10 million in durable bookings. and Tay Kim says, I think that this is generally true for small to medium-sized startups growing rapidly, but as companies grow larger, the bureaucracy, empire building, power warfare, gaming of metrics, and internal politics creep in.

2:10:30Tech is not immune. So interesting to see where tech is going in Washington. Will was on a tear talking about - What's your major takeaway from this? I think Will's really like breakaway take this weekend was that, oh, this is an older post It's from August 3rd. I don't know how this resurfaced, but I think it was because Will was saying that the tech industry needs to focus away from the sci-fi stuff, the LEAs. Like tech kind of in AI, technology AI, the foundation model labs, it does feel like they let Eliezer Yudkowsky set the agenda for what was discussed. It was like all paper clipping debunks and fast takeoffs, And Will's discussion of this has centered around this idea that the discussion needs to, if you are engaging in American politics, if you are engaging in Main Street politics, people that actually vote in elections, you have to put it in terms that are relevant to them.

2:11:31Which means what will the impact of AI be on your job, on your community? Will it be positive? Will it be negative? there's a lot of work being done right now on like what AI means for Main Street for the average American and it's definitely an open question like the models are at a level that can displace labor for sure and the impact of that can be positive if it's handled appropriately it could be very negative if it was handled inappropriately and so I think that's where I think the sci-fi concerns have landed on deaf ears broadly in America and they've been written off just as like, yeah, like, of course, I'll put that in the bucket of maybe there's unlimited fusion energy and we'll be on Mars and we'll have faster than light travel and we'll have AI super intelligence and all that sci-fi stuff's cool.

2:12:28Keep it in Hollywood folks. Like talk to me about like, can I get a job tomorrow? And for a lot of technology, there's been a debate about like what has the effect on the labor market been unemployment in america is still really low um but are the jobs as satisfying as they used to be did people prefer being subsistence farmers or are they cool with only three percent of the population doing farming like i think that that's a net gain i think people are happy with that people i think people actually do like their email jobs more than being on the farm but you know i I don't know, some people, you know, it's not that crazy to say like, yeah, it was actually really rewarding to just be a hunter in a cave and go out and hunt a gazelle.

2:13:08I mean, look at the trad movement, right? So people want to return to just going out. This was the, this is a - Off the land? Yeah, this is a transposition of the Unabomber take, that the power process of having the work that you do directly relate to how you survive. So if you go out and you hunt the gazelle and you bring back the gazelle and you eat, that provides for survival. And the further you get away from that, once the point that you're doing an email job to buy food at the grocery store, that is an abstraction that makes it harder to satisfy the fundamental power process that is innate in every human.

2:13:56And so AI could wind up benefiting everyone, but making everyone's job more abstract because it's like, I don't even paint the painting anymore. I just prompt it. And even if I'm making the same amount of money. Did you see two people now, like if you wanted, like the models are actually better at prompt engineering than humans. I saw this, yeah. They used to be like, oh, don't worry, you're gonna be a prompt engineer. You're gonna be fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, actually just saying, asking the model, what's the best way to prompt if I want the model, if I want this kind of output. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:14:28I've done that a lot. I actually go to ChatGPT and say, build me a VO3 prompt that will describe this particular scene and flesh it all out with the level of detail that will get me consistent video output. But there's still obviously a ton of value in creativity and coming up with interesting ideas. There's still a ton of value all over the place that hasn't been eroded. And at the same time, you know, one day we'll be saying, okay well the models are plateauing and the enterprise adoption isn't that high and labor productivity isn't spiking so like the actual rollout like we're looking at like what four billion dollars in anthropic 12 billion dollars at opening like there isn't that much value that's being generated china's ai action plan is we're going to integrate ai into manufacturing workplace we're gonna drive productivity and efficiency across the enterprise.

2:15:21Yeah.

2:15:25Soham, not Soham Parikh, Soham ETW says, my Twitter account has more MRR than most YC startups. And I think that is entirely untrue in itself. It's true in two ways, or it's untrue in two ways. There are two flaws. There are two flaws. First off, the average MRR at YC startups is certainly higher than the X creator payouts. Like the X creator payouts are usually, I would be shocked if it was over a few thousand dollars for some, he's kind of just taking a shot at YC startups for having like low MRRs, but when we talk to these companies, the MRRs are usually in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

2:16:14Oh, so this guy created an open source version of Cluely called Cheating Daddy. A free and open source app that lets you gain an unfair advantage. What you were looking for. What everyone wanted. Well, Casey Flint put SOHAM in the truth zone. He said, one day people will learn what the middle R in MRR and ARR stands for. Not today, though. So Tyler, do you know what the middle R in MRR stands for? Isn't it recurring? It is recurring. Why did you have to take so long? Did you think it was a milli and the reply says R for random, monthly random revenue? Yeah, we had better revenue here, better revenue there.

2:16:59We counted this revenue that was over these four months in this month. No. Yeah, there was someone. No, some people say I am at a hundred million ARR and you can say that can be also seen as annualized run rate. Yes, ARR. But it's somewhat disingenuous if you're trying to market it as like - Annual recurring revenue. Contracted. Yes. But I mean, to be fair, like there is a wild, there is a wild like gap between the quality of ARR. Like there are some companies that have contracts that are so ironclad they would bankrupt the customer to try and get out of them. Like it is written in stone that you're paying that bill every month for the next five years.

2:17:48Yeah, Elon went to war with a bunch of SaaS providers during the Twitter, when he got in there at Twitter and he was like, wait, we're spending how much? How much on this? How much on that? And just said, I'm not paying. And he probably was able to pull out of a lot of those that were booked as ARR, as true annual recurring revenue. At the same time, there are - But again, it's like if there's a degree, even if something is contracted, if they have to sue Elon in order to get the money back or get what they're owed, at a certain point, they'll spend more on the lawsuit than the actual value. And Elon probably ran the numbers.

2:18:27Yes. Don't misstate your MRR. Don't misstate your ARR. just be honest and tell your investors and folks what's really going on with your business. How'd you sleep last night? I slept fantastic. Me too, me too. That must be why we're feeling so good. I only got an 86, but I got... So I spent not the full night in the eight sleep. So I got a 76. It says I only slept six hours, but I got another three in the kid's bed before. so I got like nine hours I'm feeling fantastic I need to get Nate sleep in his room so I can like merge all the data together give it the real the real picture anyway you can go get Nate sleep at eight sleep calm get a pod five five-year warranty 30 net risk-free trial free returns free shipping net cap girl we must go back post from 20 22 yes and this is what started it all we must return to an era of naming companies like American Computing corporation or US semiconductor.

2:19:29The days of cute and silly startup names are over. No longer is it sufficient to just drop a vowel from a word and call it a day. We must build serious companies with serious names. Wow. And again, this was the browser company of New York already existed. Yep. They had kind of done that. It was the start of the trend. It was the start of the trend. Yeah. But then we got the AMCO. But it predated it. But then we got AMCO. American Manufacturing Company of America. No, advanced manufacturing. He doesn't have two Americas. That would be the real final boss, the New York browsing company of New York, the American browsing company of America.

2:20:10People have been having a lot of fun with this. This meta, I think, should be. No, the American Computing Corporation or US semiconductor. I still think this is wide open. No, I think it's over. I think going forward, it's Cougan and Sons. Yeah, last names. Cougan and Sons. and Chris Amadon did this. Oh yeah, he did. He did this, but it's an evergreen meta because no one can say, oh, you named the company. You can take it further. Amadon sounds like the name of a startup a little bit. It kind of works. It's not Amadon and Sons. It's not Amadon and Amadon. That's what I want. I want someone to come in with the Cosgrove, Cosgrove, Cosgrove, and Cosgrove LLC and build an AI ERP solution or something, business process outsourcing, something like that.

2:20:56Anyway, whatever your startup name is, throw it on a billboard. Get on adquick.com, out of home advertising, made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the world. I'm gonna let you run through these legendary Hacker News comments. So, Hacker News is legendary. Tyler, are you a Hacker News user? uh occasionally i'll go on but i never go into the comments anymore yeah i've only i've only gotten one really solid post on hacker news i think i have like 154 karma um but uh i mean when when i was your age hacker news was like the place like it was it was the spot like every single day opening up reading threads that was where news broke where the discussion happened i used to go on there a fair amount i think i've kind of replaced it with um marginal revolution Oh, really?

2:21:50Tyler posts like five or six links every day. Yeah, yeah. Are you in the comment section? Even those, I don't read those. You don't comment? You're just a lurker? Yeah. Okay. Well, Hacker News is legendary for not enough lurking. These people really have some all-time bad takes. These are legendary Hacker News comments that age like milk. So the first one, Dropbox, one of the greatest YC companies to come out of the early batches, posted. This is from Drew Houston, the founder. He posts on Hacker News, my YC application. Dropbox, throw away your USB drive. Of course, Dropbox is the way to sync and share files on the Internet.

2:22:32And Brandon M. chimes in in 2007, right when the company was getting started. I have a few qualms with this app. One, for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curl FTPFS, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted file system. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. Why don't you just do that? Why don't you just build your own Dropbox? It's so obvious. And I love this because obviously the take was wildly incorrect. Dropbox became a multibillion-dollar company. but it's a beautiful bubble to live in where you assume that everyone is comfortable booting up Linux and building a Dropbox competitor on their own.

2:23:20Maybe with Vibe coding it's possible but still I think people are still using Dropbox. The company's actually been doing quite well and has not been really affected. Anyway, second, Hacker News posts that age like milk. Bitcoin, peer-to-peer network based on autonomous, anonymous digital currency. This is from 2009 and the top comment here says, well, this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is gonna have any faith in this currency. That is a wild thing. I mean, it was reasonable at the time. It was a crazy idea and the faith in the distributed system took years to build up.

2:24:01It was seen as a toy and then a joke and then a meme and then a bubble and then a crash and then another bubble, then a crash, and then another bubble. But eventually it became accepted. And now people have lots of faith in Bitcoin. And even with all the turmoil that we've seen in the market and turmoil in international geopolitics, Bitcoin is now at$115 ,000 a coin from what was probably a few cents when this post went live. What was the price of Bitcoin May 8th, 2009? That is an interesting question. I imagine it was very low and now it has appreciated quite significantly. Probably enough to buy a luxury watch on bezel.

2:24:46Go to get bezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Tyler, do you have the price of Bitcoin? Everywhere I go, it just says zero. Yeah, so here's the story. Yes. So it didn't have a market value at the time. I'm sure it was free. Yeah, it was basically free. It was free. The first recorded real world transaction for Bitcoin occurred over a year later on May 22, 2010. No way. When a guy bought two pizzas. That was the pizza transaction? Two pizzas for 10 ,000. Wow. I didn't realize it was that old. That is crazy. Somebody was posting about this on Hacker News in 2009, a year before the pizza transaction.

2:25:27That is crazy. I mean, the pizza transaction is famous, famous. How many Bitcoins was it? 10 ,000. 10 ,000 Bitcoins. I wonder if there'll be another for two pizzas. I wonder if there will ever be another trade. Like that? Where you could just pick up. They should make a whole documentary about that trade, where that Bitcoin went, did the next person hold, did the next person hold, how the value accrued, fantastic. Anyway, in 2023, this is a more recent Hacker News comment that aged like milk, Michael Truel from Cursor, now worth, I think in the secondary market trading almost north of 20 billion, certainly north of 10 billion, a massive company used by probably millions of developers at this point, posts on Hacker News Cursor, a code editor built for programming with AI.

2:26:20And the top comment from Yakaccount4 on March 24th, 2023, There's nothing on the official website or GitHub that indicates what this software is other than a cropped screenshot that looks like VS code with a prompt pop-up over it. And I still can't figure out if this is some sarcastic joke software or something. Wow, Age Like Milk, not great. And the final Y Combinator, Hacker News comment that Age Like Milk, Y Combinator's air bed and breakfast casts a wider net for housing rentals as Airbnb from TechCrunch in 2009. And a Hacker News commenter chimes in and says, Airbnb isn't just casting a wider net, they're changing their entire business model.

2:27:09Hey, this is what, two decades before OpenAI started using, or ChatGPT started using this syntax. Airbnb isn't just casting a wider net, they're changing their entire business model because the original one is severely flawed. Renting a room or bed out of your home like a hotel most likely violates multiple tax and business laws in just about every U.S. city, let alone the severe liability that a guest slips in your shower or breaks their collarbone. I've worked at a resort hotel. Cities have specific bed taxes. Hotels have to be inspected. They have liability insurance. Vacation rental owners pay taxes.

2:27:45Some cities don't even allow short-term rentals. Of course, none of that mattered. Airbnb figured it all out. They paid the taxes, they fought the local governments and created new legal structures to satisfy all parties involved. And now the business is worth tens of millions of dollars. They say, if I wasn't a VC, if I was a VC, I wouldn't touch this site. That's what it says? Yeah. That's hilarious. Well, if you're looking to go upmarket and find a vacation home with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dream events, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service, get on Wander and find your happy place.

2:28:23Good call cutting to Tyler on that one. It's a vacation home but better. Hayden identified exactly the trend that you were feeling. This is who you're arguing online with and it's just a picture of a neural network, of course. And 31 ,000 people enjoyed it. It really is the bots are getting wild, wild, wild, wild. Well, I have some tips for those of you who are using X, the Everything app. I recommend going into the notification filters, and you can turn off notifications from accounts that don't have a verified phone number, don't follow you, you don't follow them. And after you do that, you will basically only see notifications in the notifications tab from people who you're mutuals with, people that you can evaluate their full account to see that it is in fact a real person, maybe someone you know in real life, maybe someone who has enough exhaust on the internet that you can they've established themselves as an interesting poster who's clearly not just a bot and then you will only see those folks in your replies and then you can always see who's replying to your posts if you click on the actual post but for the most part that has dramatically upgraded my experience I don't get I really don't get any notifications from just random accounts I only see I only see stuff from people I'm mutuals with people who I who I actually care about and it feels, the actual experience of being on X feels like being in a very small chat room.

2:29:51Even if I have a post that gets thousands of likes, I'm really only seeing, oh, Tyler liked it. Oh, Jordy liked it, cool. I made them smile, they're my friends. It creates a much tighter, small hometown feel. If I don't like one of your posts, it's gotta be really bad. Yeah, because if, what's the quote? If there's one person liking your post? If there's one like, it's me. It's me, fantastic. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, or second guest of the show, because we already had Bill Bishop on the show in the Restream Waiting Room. We'll bring in Pete from SciQuantum. Pete, how are you doing?

2:30:26What's happening? Hey, guys. How are you doing? Doing fantastic. How are you? I hear you have some big news. Break it down for us. What's new? Introduce yourself at the company, please. Oh, yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot for having us on. Of course. I really appreciate it. I'm Pete. I'm a co-founder of SciQuantum. We are a quantum computing company based in the Bay Area. And yeah, I moved here 10 years ago to build a quantum computer and thought I'd be on the boat back six months later. And we're still here and we're really just like humbled to be now announcing a billion dollar fundraise for us to go ahead and actually build giant quantum computers.

2:31:08Incredible. There you go. It's massive. One billion dollars. Okay, give us the 10 years in two minutes. Well, I'll give you the prior to that 10 years, myself and my co-founder spent about a decade in the university system doing what people think of when they think of quantum computing, which is science experiments in a research lab with single photons and chips and so on and so on. published a ton of papers and then got fed up with that and some of my colleagues made a bunch of breakthroughs in the architecture for optical quantum computing and so we sort of developed a conviction that we could actually build a million qubit system you know google and ibm and others are all in hot pursuit of useful quantum computing everyone today can make systems of tens or hundreds of qubits uh but you need about a million qubits you need a huge system and so we sort of uh convinced ourselves that we could actually build that quickly through leverage of the semiconductor industry and we moved to silicon valley uh basically to build the organization that would do that that meant taking weird devices like single photon sources and single photon detectors uh that you know you can't find in a regular manufacturing process and putting them into a commercial fab.

2:32:33So we spent north of$100 million and many, many years putting superconductors and single photon devices into Global Foundries Fab 8, which is a very big, very mature commercial semiconductor foundry in upstate New York, last remaining bastion of pure play semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. And so yeah, like big emphasis on semiconductors, basically, for many years, we were doing other stuff as well, kind of architecture and algorithms and systems and so on but really spending money on semiconductors now we have these wafers we can make like high volume uh we can manufacture in pretty high volume the devices that we need and so our emphasis is sort of switching towards building data center like machines and so last year we announced about a billion dollar australian deal with the australian government for us to build our first system just outside brisbane a few months later, we announced that we'd be the anchor tenant of a new$500 million quantum computing campus on the south side of Chicago, former US steel site used to make a million tons of steel a year.

2:33:39We are honored to be breaking ground there in a very, very short period of time. And yeah, just thrilled to be at this level of maturity and sort of readiness now to actually realize these systems. How does the Australian government even assess something like this? I feel like the government is not known, I mean at least the US government's not really known for having like tons of technical expertise internally. Famous examples of like the government struggling to build a CRUD app for you know registering your healthcare information. It feels like the technical due diligence to understand how to underwrite that investment and then actually get any sort of value out I mean, you have to rewrite systems to actually write something that's going to run on a quantum computer, correct?

2:34:29Like, what was that deal like? What is Australia optimistic about in having a billion-dollar facility? Yeah, I mean, governments struggle terribly to build CRUD apps, but like the entire might of Silicon Valley also struggles to build a good to-do list app. Like, there is still no good to-do list as far as I'm concerned. I have a sort of provocative thesis that building to-do lists is actually harder than building quantum computers, but that one will get me in trouble. But, you know, governments have excelled, obviously, in Manhattan projects and James Webb Space Telescope and, you know, Space Shuttle and you name it, like semiconductors, the internet.

2:35:10it. And you can also look at companies like SpaceX and Tesla and TSMC and ASML, like the pillars of our economy and our advanced society. Those companies wouldn't be the companies that they are today without literally billions of non-diality of government support in every case. And so I don't think it's unusual that a government supports this. I think governments increasingly understand that hard technology and this kind of frontier technology is sovereign and strategic and dangerous if you don't pay attention to it. We see that very acutely with semiconductors and AI supercomputers. And then you asked about the sort of diligence.

2:35:54So the chief scientist of Australia spent about 18 months together with a pretty big team evaluating what we're doing. They came to our labs and held us by the scruff of the neck and made us reproduce measurements that we were claiming. There was a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed her emails early in that process. And her emails revealed that she was highly skeptical of us when she first met us. And the Australian press wrote about this in the frame of like, you know, chief scientist highly skeptical of psyquantum claims, which I'm like, what do you want her to be? Do you to be like highly courageous.

2:36:33It's her job to be skeptical. Yeah. And we were just like super gratified by the end of that process that obviously after speaking to a lot of different outfits, they chose us. And then in the US. So sorry to cut you off, but what is so the Australian government, you guys are partnering with them. What is the value that they're hoping to get out of this project? Yes. I mean, I think if you look at semiconductor fabs, if you look at the current effort to get TSMC into Arizona, if you look at some of the sort of horse trading that's going on around the location of AI supercomputers, I think nations now understand that it is strategically important where these systems are built.

2:37:22And, you know, when the U.S. incentivizes TSMC to build in Arizona, the U.S. government isn't buying chips from TSMC. You know, they're not owning the fabs. They're just making sure that that infrastructure is built on a piece of land that they care about. And to first order the Australian thing is structured the same way. it's worth saying that Australia as a nation has been historically forward thinking in investing in the academic foundations of quantum computing so a lot of the basic research two of my co-founders a lot of the early work on optical quantum computing and error correction all came out of Australia and so it's pretty poetic and and touching actually that it's heading back to Australia where it all started.

2:38:11What are some of the use cases that you're excited about? People talk about like, oh, you'll be able to break Bitcoin. That'll be like disruptive or cryptography. But is there - Or quite profitable. Yeah, I mean, who knows? If you guys do it. It's the same as like asteroid mining gold. If you bring$10 trillion of gold to America, what happens, but in the context of AI and supercomputing, like actually delivering business value, is there sort of like a near-term scenario where quantum computing can drop the cost of inference or unlock a different scale of training or will the architecture of what we are doing with AI fundamentally change once a million qubit quantum computer comes online?

2:39:02Yeah, so we're not going to replace CPUs. We're not going to replace AI supercomputers. And although there is sort of some papers that talk about quantum machine learning, that stuff is really early at the moment. If someone tells you they know how to do quantum machine learning today, you should be pretty skeptical. Sure. What we're excited about is, you know, the way I think about this is that language models now, I visualize them as this sort of expanding frontier that's just like eating through everything we do with computers. and by the way, everything we do in our lives and so on. There's a known limit to that beyond which we don't expect conventional computers will go.

2:39:40And on the other side of that threshold is chemistry, material science, drug discovery, fuels, catalysts, fertilizers, semiconductors, like the microscopic foundations of our physical world where conventional computers have a really, really hard time doing those simulations and where we don't have the training data in general to train AI models that will reach far into that virgin territory. And that's what we're really excited about with a quantum computer. A quantum computer calculates from first principles rather than making approximations from data. And through that kind of first principles calculation, we think we can reach much, much further into unexplored territory.

2:40:21The other thing that's maybe interesting is that at SciQuantum, we make the highest performing for planets in the world against a whole bunch of figures of merit. And of course, photonics is increasingly being viewed as a potential solution to what is otherwise maybe a difficult situation in the scale-up of AI supercomputers where we run out of power, run out of space, run out of money, et cetera. What were the key unlocks that allowed you guys to put together this billion-dollar round? It's certainly larger than most IPOs. yeah yeah so we i mean it's pretty surreal to be clear right like this is the only job i've ever had uh the only other real job i've had is working in a garden center stacking compost so yeah i should be clear like this isn't this doesn't feel normal it feels pretty crazy to me um i'd put it also in context with other things that have happened in silicon valley where people have spent a way larger amount of money uh before they get to a product on uh things that are debatably more or less valuable than a quantum computer you know um uh but the um the unlock one of the biggest things that we did when we raised our series d with blackrock and tomasek and others um bailey giffords we told them that we were gonna unlock one of the hardest problems for us which is a new material for optical switching we had to build an enormous crazy machine here in the South Bay, biggest molecular beam epitaxy tool in the world.

2:41:57Molten titanium inside, liquid helium inside. Huge risk for us. And without that, there's no way we're building an optical quantum computer. The shipping company dropped that into the Alameda Bay and broke it. So we had some trouble during COVID. But we got it done on time. We delivered. We got it built. And then the other thing that we've done is... Is it still at the bottom of the ocean? Or did you get it back? It just fell and cracked. Okay. We were late on the schedule. Some scuba diving equipment. Go down and get it. Not quite. John Scuba certified. I like scuba diving. I like treasure. You're willing to help out.

2:42:35That's amazing. I mean, there's got to be some amazing stuff down there. Like out on the port at Alameda. It's got to be some beautiful stuff. But then the other thing we did, you know the chandelier? Yeah. Like the golden chandelier that politicians love to take photographs with? We got rid of that. Okay, got it. That's in the trash. What do the energy requirements look like over the next decade if we assume that there's a million qubit quantum computer running? Are we going to see a similar race for just like intense energy production that we're seeing in the AI supercomputer build-out? No, it's like the same story but told backwards is what you should expect with quantum computing.

2:43:15So like, yeah, AI and conventional data center. It's pretty helpful for us given that we're talking about building big machines. Yeah. 10 years ago in Silicon Valley, if you were talking about supercomputers or HPC or like building a big computer, people would like fall asleep in the meeting and throw you out of their office, right? It's nice that we're now surrounded by people who are sort of brave about building big machines. But we are going to build a big machine. And then the good thing is that the three months into building it, it's already going to be out of date, right? Like we're at the beginning of that sort of densification, miniaturization, power efficiency journey.

2:43:55Whereas AI and conventional supercomputers, I think, are coming to the end of a, you know, multi-decade journey of more and more efficiency and so on. So it's actually pretty exciting that we should be able to further miniaturize and densify these systems over time. Yeah. It's fascinating stuff. Thank you for hopping on the stream. I learned a lot. Thanks for having us. This is such a complex industry, but it's been really fun tracking all the progress. I don't think we've had any quantum company on the show. I haven't thrown out a lot of invites because I'm so out of loop on it. But thank you so much for taking us through it and actually explaining it in terms that even I can understand.

2:44:39Really appreciate it. Thanks for having us on. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk soon. Thank you. You're the man. Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. We'll bring them in, and I will let you take the introduction.

2:44:54What's going on? Welcome to the show.

2:44:59Please pronounce your name before I butcher it. Sadi Khan. Sadi, great to meet you. Great to meet you. And welcome to the show. Introduce yourself and the company. Yeah, I'm Sadie. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Avon. Avon is a home equity-backed credit card company. We launched our home equity card about four or five years ago, and it's been on a tier since then. In 15 minutes or less, you can say 50 % or more on your monthly interest rate as a homeowner in America. We just announced our Series E last week, and we're excited to do the job. Thank you. Series E. Hard to get into those numbers across four years.

2:45:43Walk us through, I guess. Yeah, I'd love to. I think our audience will generally understand how if you have a credit card backed by your home equity, it'd be easier to be competitive from a rate standpoint. But break down the actual way that you make this work. Yeah. So as you know, there's about traditionally a home equity credit card, home equity in general, takes about 30 days to originate and costs thousands of dollars. And as you know, a credit card takes a few minutes to get from Capital One or Bank of America, any great bank. And so we started with this mission of how do we make it as fast as a credit card to get HELOC?

2:46:25And so we got it down to as fast as 15 minutes by machining down this process for maximal efficiency. And so whether it be like robot arms that do signatures to automatic income verification, the IRS, to everything in between, we're able to compress this thing down to 15 minutes. So it feels as convenient as a credit card, but you get the rates of a HELOC and the rewards and the convenience of a credit card. And so we offer 2 % unlimited cashback on every single transaction that you do on a HELOC for the first time ever. and you get it in the form factor that you can go to Home Depot and spend$1 ,000 on lumber, or you could go to Whole Foods and spend$5 on a banana.

2:47:04And our customers have been able to do both. That's pretty incredible. I guess what were kind of the key unlocks in the journey? How has the interest rate environment kind of impacted the business as well? I mean, ultimately, there's always going to be a lot of home equity that's just locked up that people aren't able to leverage, regardless of the rate environment. But I'm curious what trends you've seen. Yes, I think at a very high level, our goal is to build a product which has the lowest cost of capital for consumers after your primary mortgage. So regardless of the interest environment, if it's high or if it's low, that's something we don't control.

2:47:49Jeremy Powell controls that. So regardless of what the interest rate does, our goal is to come in and offer every single consumer the lowest cost of capital after your primary mortgage. And we've generally historically done that. And when interest rates go up, there's generally two or three things that happen. And when interest rates go down, roughly the inverse of those two or three things happen. So I think we're all expecting interest rates hopefully to come down a little bit for consumers over the next few months on the next Fed meeting. And the three things that I think will happen are A, we will expect more demand for capital.

2:48:20more people will use more credit, generally speaking, across not just our product, across all products, we become actually more competitive in some ways. Because if you kind of think about it, the interest rates dropping drops to a larger proportion. The drop affects a HELOC or a mortgage by a larger proportion than a traditional credit card, which is also a variable rate product. And then finally, there is some kind of trace effects of how interest rates and mortgages kind of interact with one another, where due to the very low historical interest rates, people are sitting on extremely low mortgage rates.

2:48:53But because of the increase in interest rates, people are not able to refinance their mortgage and get a cash out, which they've done historically. And so they're tapping HELOCs to do home improvement projects, make their home better, because it's getting harder to move to a new home. And it's getting harder to do a cash out refinance. Yeah. You said something about robotic arms doing signatures, anything more to that story? What? Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know if you guys, when you guys bought your home in San Francisco or elsewhere, when you closed your mortgage deed of trust, you had to go to a notary or you had to go to a title closing station and you had to sign a stack of papers, yay thick.

2:49:31And we looked at that. And if you wanted to get this thing down to 15 minutes, there was just zero way we can do it by having a notary show up at your house or you go into a title company. So we went, well, how can we figure out a way to be able to do a remote web signature? And so we invented this robot arm that literally you control from your phone, and you can execute what is something called an original web signature that is acceptable in every single country across the United States. That's amazing. So we can close this thing down in 15 minutes. That's incredible. We do some crazy shit. Is that, did you guys ever get, I don't know if many people, I'm sure.

2:50:08Regulators hate this one weird trick. Well, it feels like potentially a workaround that how different is it for me to move a pen than it is to move an arm that signs a doc, right? Why do I need to be in the room? I love this. This is great. Yeah, we spent months going through every single... I mean, people have tried this before, like trying to build a robot arm to do wet signatures. There's a lot of detail in our patent that goes down to the exact amount of memory buffer we have to keep on the device versus the wire versus your phone to ensure it is always an original signature and not just a remote signature.

2:50:46Well, because my thought was like you could spin this out and it's probably like a billion dollar business by itself. We've been told that before. You've been told that before. There we go. We've been told that before. But we're just very focused on making sure homeowners can get access to the lowest cost of capital today. That's amazing. Well, congratulations on the funding milestone. And yeah, I'm sure you guys are just getting started. John. How much was it? $110 million. Congratulations. It's the week of the Series E. Overnight success. Overnight success. Love to see it. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

2:51:21Great to meet you, Sadi. We will talk to you soon. Awesome. And our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We have Lucas Singer again from Divergent. I wanted him to drive one of his supercars into the ultra. I know, I know. And I've heard unsubstantiated rumors that he might be down for that at some point. Couldn't make it happen today. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Lucas? Good to see you. Great to see you. Doing great today. Kick us off. Did you raise a series what now? Series C? Series E. Series E. There we go. How much? Yeah. Late stage,$290 million. Boom. Congratulations. Triple.

2:52:06It's a hat trick of Series E's today on the show. Congratulations. What does that unlock? What's the next phase of Divergent? Accelerating this platform that we've built. So really taking this into scale manufacturing with a focus on defense work. As you might remember, we started an automotive or deep technology business. We've built this over a decade, but now it's really unlocking additional capacity, capacity to make the most meaningful, frankly, weapon systems primarily in the world and to supply those to our great prime customers and to the U.S. government directly to add over 50 ,000 square feet to this campus in Los Angeles.

2:52:49but then also to fund the build out of our future facilities across the US. How are you thinking about the footprint of that build out across the US? We've heard that famous story about there's an F-35 part that's made in every single congressional district. Maybe it's a coincidence. It does seem like it's important to have a balanced footprint across the US. What's the courtship process like? Is it based on tax incentives or local talent? How do you think about picking a new territory to expand to? Yeah, we think about where we can have the most impact for the nation. So where can we be closest to the customer that's making a product that we can truly be helpful with?

2:53:34And what is the greatest concentration of products and customers? Where is that in the US? And that's where we want to be. And internationally, we think along those same lines, but also strategically, if we're going to be near theater, where does it really make sense to have a facility? And the beauty of these factories is they are digitally defined, right? You've got hardware that can go from making auto parts to defense parts back to back with no downtime in between. So you can be driving a capacity-based model and you can make almost any part, any assembly, one factory, any product, that's our marketing tagline because that quite literally is what this system unlocks.

2:54:14And we're not ready to say exactly what states we're going to. We've got conversations with multiple, but it's really about the government customer and the prime customer. And of course, yes, the economics and the incentive that we can get. I imagine people are competing to win you over in terms of trying to create the best environment for a diversion. Is that correct? Oh, yeah. Yes, absolutely. And the states get competitive. You also see the congressional side of this, you see the various stakeholders get involved and you want to be first as well. You want to show that your state or your exact county is on the forefront of this and they're bringing digital manufacturing.

2:54:56They're bringing the next generation of that to their location. So yes, we're seeing, thankfully, a lot of demand, a lot of interest and a lot of support for these facilities. Fantastic. Talk about the actual integration with the customer. You said you want to be, you want to deliver value to them. Uh, what are the considerations of actually being near a customer? Is that like, they're going to have four deployed engineers in your organization? You're going to have four deployed engineers in their organization. Is it actually beneficial to be like walk across the street or is it drive across the town?

2:55:32Or is it like, I need to be near a big airport that's a hub that everyone can fly in and out of uh i'm not i'm not trying to do 20 questions to figure out where you're going i'm actually just interested in like the business of how you decide where to yeah not yet you made my job easy yeah you gave half the answer there so i appreciate that but um no uh it's really partially logistics as well for our customers so if you think about one of the large times they're going to end up doing the integration say of a missile system. Integration meaning they're going to put the avionics in it, they're going to put the payload in it, they're going to do whatever their end of line testing procedure is, right?

2:56:11And if we as the primary structure supplier that's making that full airframe for them can be right adjacent to their general assembly facility, that's a huge win for that, right? And that's almost obvious in how you want to architect your production process for a complex system like that. So as being adjacent to these primes, right, like walking distance or very easy for a manufacturing process, potentially even being on the campus of these primes is in our minds. And then on the government side, you look at these depot centers and sustainment and maintenance, and can we be right adjacent to these bases?

2:56:50So if you look at Oklahoma, for example, Tinker Air Base, can we be adjacent to that air base, partner with their Air Force Sustainment Organization, and supply parts directly to the base from that factory at the same time that that factory could flex, use some of its capacity to do work for the primes that are, you know, in that locality as well. And that's also the beauty here is no one is burdened with the full cost, because this is a platform and you can share the capacity, you're not asking the government to pay for 100 % of it 100 % of the time. You can actually scale and flex and have elasticity to the capital and the risk associated with that capital.

2:57:33Any updates on Singer, on the automotive side, specifically the supercar that you guys built? Yeah, no, it's been an amazing few weeks for us. We've got more cars on the road now. So we did our 10th delivery as you know we started deliveries this year so there's now multiple cars on the road in la multiple across the us we actually have our first couple cars in the uk as well so we've made our way onto uh greater european uh turf with america's hypercar so i'm very excited to keep building that business out deliver more cars this year and then look into actually developing variants of that hypercar uh won't announce those now and then also our next vehicle, our next model altogether.

2:58:19And that feedback loop, that integration with Divergent remains very, very attractive. And frankly, when the government or a customer comes and they come to this campus and they see the Divergent facility, then they walk right next door and they see the General Assembly of the 21C, the hypercar, that shows them almost the relationship between us as a subcontractor and the prime as the prime integrator, right? We're actually putting our own dollars in front of our statements there on how you can integrate for full product development. What's the shape of the workforce going forward? Obviously new capital comes in, you're probably hiring, you're probably always hiring, but give me some advice for young people that want to get into doing work that might still be around in 30 years.

2:59:08Yeah, yeah. This and that we truly are software and hardware, right? We built our own software design engine, We've got our own manufacturing software, but we also build hardware. We build our 3D printers. We build our assembly cell. We actually engineer those materials. So in terms of scope within one business and amount of vertical depth in each of those pillars is really tremendous here. When you're starting out, we're mostly hiring, or I was mostly looking for talent that could bring a lot to the table day one, both in terms of their connectivity, but also their knowledge and their ability to operate.

2:59:47We're now at a point where we're actually able to hire on some of the brightest and youngest engineers and production staff, which is an amazing position to be in somewhere where I've wanted to be for for a few years. And what we look for in that sort of more entry level role is really how scalable is that person going to become? What are they already showing today that I can tell is going to make them a great learner and eventually a great operator? and then we have the individuals here that can add to their expertise that they're bringing in. And within one, two, three years, I want to see that entry-level engineer have progressed to a lead engineer or have found his management track and pick one of the two.

3:00:30And that's what we're screening for is individuals that are going to scale to that next step. That's fantastic. Well, congratulations on the massive fundraising round. Always good catching up with you. Have a great rest of your day. Good to see you, Lucas. Great to see you both. We'll talk to you soon. And we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room, Kyle Simani. Coming back on the show for the third time, I believe. Talk about creating the world's leading Solana treasury company. Kyle, can you hear us? How are you doing? What's going on, John, man? Good to be here. Hey, Jordan and John.

3:01:03We're back. We're back. It's great to see you. Good to see you. Always great to be here. You've been busy. You have been busy. Oh, dude, have I been busy? It's been crazy. Break it down. What's new? uh well i spent two weeks fundraising and in two weeks we raised 1.65 billion is that good is that good two weeks congratulations uh i'm kidding that's uh it's hard to do it's hard to do wow uh definitely the most hectic fundraise i've ever done in my life um but it's been super super fun were you on the were you on the road or were you holding court just like this did you Oh, Zoom. Zoom in my office.

3:01:41There you go. That's the modern roadshow. It's just Zoom link. Yeah. Zoom out. Give us the pitch that you gave the investors. Yeah. So, you know, we think, look, there's obviously a lot of digital asset treasury companies out there. And we want to be not only the top Solana-based digital asset treasury, we want to be the top digital asset treasury in the world. Our aspirations is that this is a publicly traded permanent capital vehicle. And we have aspirations for this thing to become a$50 billion plus publicly traded company over the next five to 10 years. And we think the key to that is going to be the team.

3:02:21The folks I'm working with at Jump and at Galaxy are incredible. I think we have the absolute all-star dream team, not only of Solana dats, but of all dats out there. We bring together that mix of deep trading and technical experience, that deep experience across capital markets function and being a very large counterparty that trades with almost everyone in crypto and the deep VC experience in Solana core and Solana ecosystem. How do people think about digital asset treasury companies these days? There's one world where you're like, this is a hedge fund and I'm backing a trader who's going to pick good entry and exit prices.

3:02:58And it's almost like investing in hedge fund. Then there's another, which is just because of where my money is locked up for a variety of reasons, maybe it's a 401k, I don't have access to this particular asset class. And wrapping a particular digital asset in a public ticker gives you access to that. Are those reasonable narratives? Are there other narratives that people are talking about? How do people justify underwriting an investment? Yeah, look, I think there's a bunch of reasons you might want to invest in Ford Industries. And by the way, the ticker is Ford, it's F-O-R-D, like the car company, NASDAQ listed.

3:03:39But I think there's a few. The first is like, you have to believe that we as the sponsors of this vehicle can do interesting things to deliver increasing sold per share for our shareholders. And there's a number of things we can do to that effect. I think probably the most interesting is actually M &A. There's probably going to be 30, maybe 40 of these digital asset treasuries out there, not only salon related, but all the other assets too. And I don't think the market's going to sustain 30 or 40 of these things. And so there's going to be a ripe opportunity for M &A. And I think given the caliber of our team and just the knowledge we have with banking across, especially Galaxy, like we're in a prime position to execute on that.

3:04:21The second, I think, really lucrative opportunity is in actually arbitraging capital market structures, meaning we're working on getting loans from banks, hopefully in the 5-ish percent, maybe 6 percent range. And then we can deploy that in the salon of DeFi at today, probably close to 15 percent. Sure. And arbitrage that spread. That's obviously a very sexy story. Shareholders love hearing stuff like that. The particularly cool thing about that is also we can even use that to fund preferred shared issuance. So MicroStrategy or I guess Strategy now pioneered this concept and they're issuing these preferred perpetuals.

3:04:57And you know, the problem Strategy has is they are paying a 9 % coupon, but they have no cash flow off of their Bitcoin. We can actually produce cash flow both in sole terms and in dollar terms by tapping into the native Solana staking and DeFi ecosystems. So it actually makes the vehicle as a whole a lot more financially congruent than something like strategy. So those are like the best reasons why and look in the long term, we're going to be capital allocators across the salon ecosystem and crypto. And in the long term, it's obviously a bet on our ability to do capital allocation. Was there an alternate timeline where the groups that kind of came together into into Ford went and did their own treasury?

3:05:39Like, did you really have to wrangle people and say, like, look, fall in line or let's do this together? Or what did that what did putting the team and the investor group look like? Yeah, the Jump in the Galaxy guys started talking together before Multicoin got involved. And they kind of realized they were like, hey, we really need kind of a third leg of the stool. So they called me and it was a pretty natural fit. I didn't have to spend too much time thinking about it. There were some legal questions that we had to work through in terms of compliance for Multicoin, but we worked through those and we said, all right, guys, let's do this.

3:06:11And they've been absolutely phenomenal partners. Take me through some of the other stories that are happening in the crypto world broadly that might be bullish or bearish or something to keep an eye on from your perspective. Across stablecoins, there's that new Stripe project. There's a few other chains that are launching L1s, L2s. What do you think is worth keeping an eye on and what's your interpretation of the news? Yeah, I think there's a handful. So one is Solana ETFs are coming. I think they're gonna be here in the next few weeks. That's obviously like a watershed moment for the rest of the industry.

3:06:50Bitcoin and ETH have always been kind of like blessed as special assets. And I think Solana is about to get that same treatment. So that's super exciting. The second one, this one's really in the weeds, but the team at Pump.Fun has been, they've had a live stream product for about a year now, maybe. And this past weekend, it really blew up. A handful of creators started making tons and tons of money this past weekend. And a lot of creators from Rumble and Twitch are now publicly experimenting on the pump platform. That could really snowball and gain momentum and really kind of change the dynamics around creator monetization.

3:07:27It's actually funny. This happened over the weekend. I was at the All In Summit last week and I gave a presentation there on internet capital markets. I think that video is going to drop in the next couple of days. and one of the examples I actually highlighted in the presentation was the next generation. I talked about entertainment finance and you know Jim Cramer was entertainment finance 1.0. Yeah. And in my presentation I highlighted Roaring Kitty and Dave Portnoy as being emblematic of entertainment finance 2.0. Yeah. And I think we're about to have this just onslaught of streamers who are going to be entertainment finance 3.0.

3:08:02Interesting. It looks like that's a lot of that's going to happen on Pump and all of Pump is built on Solana. Yeah, play that out for me. I mean, that's fascinating since we're in the live stream world. We don't give financial advice, talk about specific stock prices, but I could imagine someone comes out and does something that's much more price driven. Yeah, we once joked about, somebody was like, how do I invest in TVPN? And we said, well, LVMH, of course, because it's the best proxy. And then somebody immediately, while we were live, created Solana token. We had to kind of disavow it. But I am interested, do you think that there's a near-term world where stocks go on chain, they get wrapped, and then that live stream pump ecosystem, you have a true Jim Cramer type who's talking about public companies, but has some sort of wrapped exposure to the coin that's underlyingly tied to the public company or something like that?

3:08:53Is that something that could happen? Yeah. So it's already a fairly common behavior. You'll see a lot of the crypto traders, they'll just pull up their Binance screen or whatever they're trading on. They'll just live stream and trade and talk with their fans and stuff. There's never been a great way to follow along like with buying a sell button built into the stream kind of a thing. I do think that now exists with Pum for the native token of that stream. So that's already a thing. I think you're going to see more of that kind of streaming products continue to evolve in the pretty near future.

3:09:27As it pertains to tokenized equities, yes, the team, the Galaxy actually announced a deal with Superstate to tokenize Galaxy's equity on Solana. It went live a week or two ago. And this is obviously something relevant for Forward Industries, for us with our Ford ticker. And we're working on that. I hope to talk about it very soon. And once we have this tokenized equity, then you'll be able to kind of do that same configuration that you just described. Great. So what, I'm not sure this is correct. So Ford is already trading. Is that correct? That's correct. And, but what is the, is it, is it, what, like, why, why is it trading at you guys that saying, is this correct?

3:10:17It's saying the current market cap is somewhere it's 67 million. Is that, Is that correct? How does? Yeah. So, so, so we closed on the pipe transaction last week, but it has$1.65 billion. Okay. Yeah. The, the, the SEC has, so the company has issued these shares to all of the investors who came into the pipe, including multi coin jump galaxy and many others. And the SEC has a process by which you have to register new shares that are created. And that process takes roughly 30 days. so the Yahoo finances of the world and the other kind of major stock screeners only show registered shares got it got it awesome what a fascinating world well you're our resident Solana expert thanks so much for hopping on congratulations on putting this together it's got to be up there in maybe top 1000 road shows ever however much you raise in a couple weeks in two weeks, not bad.

3:11:20Definitely top, maybe probably top five pure Zoom road shows. It's pretty great. Anyways, great stuff Kyle, good to catch up. Hey guys, last thing, we are hiring at Ford Industries. You know, we're obviously building out this permanent capital salon of strategy. If you're watching the show and you're looking for a cool new role and opportunity, wanna work with us, please get in touch. We're looking to hire awesome people. Fantastic. Well, good luck. We'll talk to you soon, Kyle. Cheers Kyle. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks guys. We'll talk to you soon. The team they put together is pretty wild.

3:11:52I haven't had a chance to dig into it. We'll have to dig into it. Some heavy hitters. In other news, Kimball Musk, he came on the show a few weeks ago. He posted that he's deeply honored to have been trusted with Vatican as a stage to bring grace to the world with his dear friend, Pharrell Williams, Andreo Bocelli, and Jennifer Hudson. We made a miracle. You probably saw some of these photos. It's a drone show that happened over the Vatican. He says it's grace for the world. And some of the images and videos are, I mean, they look like AI. They look like CGI, but they are actually - I didn't realize he was behind this.

3:12:34Yes, no, this is his project. We - What I was saying, imagine being the tribe in the Amazon, Kimball Musk flies over. that is a euphoric yeah pretty wild and what a fantastic like launch strategy to go to the Vatican like the biggest possible like it's such a striking everyone has seen this building because when the Pope is elected and the Pope comes out and Pope's chosen gives a speech and whenever there is news in the world of the Catholic Church the TV cameras descend upon the Vatican, of course, and to put your product right there is remarkable. And so I'm sure the full video is out there.

3:13:20We'll have to watch the full thing and see. And I'd love to have Kimball and the team on later. I think that there's probably more news. The company's growing and it's fantastic. We should cap off on this post from Barely AI, which is - Stay safe out there, folks. Yeah, but this is Trunk Fan. Yes. This company, this is an AI startup called Inception Point AI. It's flooding podcast apps. Yes. They've launched 5 ,000 podcasts, make 3 ,000 episodes a week. They spend$1 to create an episode and monetize by getting programmatic ads. Breakeven on most episodes if only 20 people listen. Types of podcasts go from lowest effort, like weather reports, simple biographies, to higher effort.

3:14:06It created 50 AI personalities, including food expert Claire Delish, gardener and nature expert Nigel Thistledown, Thistledown, and Ollie Bennett, who covers offbeat sports. The company has billed 184 custom AI agents. Let's give it up for AI agents. Using various LLMs to create the podcast and occasionally spot checks the output. A CEO, a former exec at podcast studio Wondery, says she wants to make thousands more AI personalities, including an AI Oprah. Now, wouldn't you like to create an AI Oprah? Interesting. He closes by saying, so basically an article content farm for podcasts. Well, Trung, it's not an article content farm.

3:14:53It's a radically new AI podcast strategy. It's slop. Put it in GPT's speech. This is actually extremely annoying. I search for biographies on the Apple Podcasts app every once in a while to try and get up to speed on things. And the amount of just AI-generated content is overwhelming. And then I'm like, well, I could just go to Chachapi for that. If I wanted that, that's what I would get. I want something. There was a beautiful time where when you wanted to do some research on something, and you can go and actually - And learn about a topic and know that somebody like painstakingly spent hours trying to handcraft a story.

3:15:31I think that the long-term outcome here is like, institutions get stronger. And so now I've noticed that if I'm searching for the history of an entrepreneur, I just won't search for the name, I search Founders Podcast and then the name. Because I just know that like, if it's not that, it's not worth listening to. Yeah, I wonder where the article content farms, like how they've done, obviously they're getting like, you know, I'm sure some have done quite well, but are actually getting hurt by language models now that are just collecting the information and not actually hitting the site as a human.

3:16:07But yeah, I think the funny thing here is like, they don't have like any sort of like real technical advantage. And so on a long enough time horizon, like consumers might, they might today go, I want to go and get, I'm going to go to Spotify to get the weather report from this Inception Point AI company, or there's a world in the future where they're just, they tell Gemini, make me a podcast every morning about the weather today, tomorrow, and the next day, and just like have it ready for me in the morning. And that just kind of runs. Well, that's kind of a notebook LM. Yeah. No, that's what I'm saying.

3:16:49It's like every consumer AI app will be able to make a podcast. What is crazy is that the CEO gave an interview to the Hollywood Reporter, which is basically just like a massive target. Compete with me. Like how many startups do you think launched after this article went out? Like, oh, it's easy to just drop - Wait, you're turning$1, you're profitable after 20 listens? Great. Okay, I'll do the same thing. It's like - Great. Classic - This is gonna be the new hustle. This is something where anyone with an open source LLM. People on WAP are going to be like, this is the new WAP. For sure. This new dropshipping, new - Which will, of course - Get competed away.

3:17:29Destroy the opportunity. It will. But good luck in the short term. And maybe this grows into something better. Yeah. The funny thing is if out of this they get one true hit. If they were to make an AI personality that goes on an Oprah-like run - That would be fantastic. It would pay for all the slop. Yeah. I would imagine that it's got to be crazy fine-tuned, like what we're seeing with Friend, like what we're seeing with that other LLM, where you're like, oh, this is an AI, but it's not just the default. So you can't get this level of reporting or this level of content out of Notebook LM because it's so...

3:18:05Notebook LM has a very Notebook LM flavor to it, which is good. It's default. It's information. Tyler, you have a take? What you got? You're absolutely right, John. Thank you, Tyler. The chat was asking for more Tyler cutaways and we're working on it. Also, I love that when Lucas Singer came on the show, the chat was just, Siri Z, Siri Z. He did the meme. He did the meme. Thank you, chat. You guys have been fantastic today. Great to see you all. Great to see Raghav and Bobby and Dak and John Exley, of course, So many good folks, so many names we know and love in the chat. And on that note, have a wonderful afternoon.

3:18:47Yeah. We will see you tomorrow. We will see you tomorrow. Thank you for being with us today. Go subscribe to our newsletter. Brandon. TBPN.substack.com. We're very hard on it. Or you can just go to TBPN.com. You can. You can subscribe there wherever you want. We'll be in your inbox. And leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Goes a long way. Remember, we still have our arrangement where if you leave a review on Apple and you put an advertisement for your company in the review, we will read it out on stream. Yeah, free ads. And advertise your business. So thank you to everyone for tuning in, and we'll see you tomorrow.

3:19:26See you all. Goodbye.