Guide to the AI Barnyard, Eli Lilly Hits $1T Valuation, Has AI Ruined the Em Dash? | Julia Steinberg, Bobby Ghoshal

25:47And I'm like, oh, you track this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You track this. Yeah, you're feeling the tires. Oh, I don't know about this. It's not that good. Oh, it only has 2 ,000 miles on it, but they're around the Nürburgring. Exactly, exactly. That would be looking at GT3 RS in the tread. You don't look in the tread because, you know, yes, if I gave you a horse, just be happy that I gave you a horse. You know, don't look in the mouth. Don't assess it. And so what's happening with that? Yeah, it's like you're not expressing gratitude. And so I think these are just the public market investors. We've been given this gift of AI.

26:19Why are they selling their stocks right now? Why are they selling? They've been giving. They need to be buying. This beautiful gift, and they just don't want it. Yeah. They're selling. The video's down. They beat earnings, guys. Why are you not being grateful? They need to be buying the dip. They need to be buying more. They need to be levering up. They need to be going further into the public markets with every dollar they have. Not financial advice at all. Not financial advice. But instead, they were looking at Gift Horse in the mouth saying, oh, can OpenAI afford all the different 1.4 trends?

26:46Is Andy Jassy the guy for the job? Is Google set up to actually take advantage of AI? They're digging in a little bit too much. They should just be happy that they've been given AI the next mega trend. Exactly. So also the horse could be a workhorse. A workhorse. And so I think you could say this is Amazon. Yeah. It's a bit hard to define Amazon's AI strategy. It has been. Part of it is they're building data centers for Anthropoc, but they're definitely not getting overly ambitious. They're not getting over their skis. But they're just doing the hard work. They're building the data centers. They're serving models.

27:21Maybe not fast enough. They might not be building the data centers fast enough. They might not be super aggressive. They're not show jumping. They're just dragging the plow. They're just consistently dragging the plow. All reliable Amazons cooking along. They're staying out of the slop trough. They're not doing a deal. Amazon has not done a deal yet with OpenAI for the agentic commerce thing. Maybe that changes, but for now, they're just plodding along. Who else we got over here? Let's go to the black sheep. The black sheep. So the black sheep, there's also a lot of people that could fit in this.

27:54Yes, of course. But I think maybe Carpathie is one of them. Yeah. Andre Carpathie. Some of these contrarian takes about maybe just the decade of agents. To be clear, we're not calling him a sheep. He's not... It should be more of a black wolf. Black wolf. But the idea is that he's standing out. A lot of people in his class of ultra-respected technologists, some of the most experienced, he's really been at Tesla. He's seen the AI wave. He's been working in it for decades. He's really worked on this. He's printed all of it. Yeah, he's done so much. And yet he's not sitting with the rest of them saying, bah.

28:30He broke, but he broke rank. Even though he's worked at OpenAI, even though he's worked at Tesla, he broke rank. He went on the Dwarkesh Patel show and said, you know what? I think we're more in a decade of agents. I think AGI might not be right around the corner. He took a contrarian stance at a very controversial time. And he, but it was not, yeah. And he popped the bubble with it. He basically popped the bubble with it. Maybe. We'll see. The bubble will keep going. Of course, the elephant in the room was, in my view, really more of the$1.4 trillion, right? Yes. That was the questions. That was a big question.

29:02That was what everybody wanted to talk about or at least understand better. Brad asked the question, and it's been downhill ever since. Yes. And it is, yeah, the elephant in the room is in every conversation, every financing round at this point. Exactly. Is this deal predicated on a continuation of exponential growth in investment, in everything? Like how much more? How risky is this relative to the amount of froth in the market? Never ask a woman her age, a man, his salary, or a lab founder how they're going to spend$1.4 trillion. Or how they're going to pay for it. Yeah. Who else we got on here?

29:48So then in the top right, we have the bird's eye view. Yes. Situational awareness. Yeah, this is situational awareness. This is Leopold. It's the perfect name. Right? He has the situational awareness. He's seeing everything. He's kind of the master of the board. Yes, master of the board. He's taking his bets, and he's been doing pretty well off them. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that was pretty self-explanatory. Yeah, I love it. Okay, so then we go down. We have Lion's Share. The Lion's Share. This is Satya. Satya has taken great position in opening eye. I don't know why he's on the top of a haystack.

30:14I'll take a third of the company, and you can give me$250 billion, and I'll take 20 % off the top. And I'll take all the IP as well. Everything. I'll also take your chip, and I'll make it my chip. your chip is my chip the entire contract is not your chip the entire open ai microsoft deal is basically could just be summarized in one line i get the lion's share i get the lion's share yeah and that's what he did it's fantastic incredible incredible deal maker so let's go down here and we see and we can zoom out a little bit yep we see uh monkey business these are the podcast that's us we're having fun yeah we got props we got all sorts of stuff sound effects We need some monkey sound effects on there.

30:59We have a bunch of animal-themed sound effects we need to have more fun with. Anyway. And then maybe let's go into the pond. We have the sitting duck. Yes, the sitting duck is incredibly cute. So Reddit. Why was Reddit a sitting duck? Yeah, so I think they brought me. It's because whether or not you have a permit, you're getting, like the hunters are going to get you. I think Alexis Ohanian sort of laid this out, saying that when Reddit did the deal to give the data to OpenAI, they didn't realize how valuable that data was going to be. And that relationship has grown, grown, grown. And so they were kind of the sitting duck just sitting there.

31:41They didn't really kind of got caught off guard. Maybe could have trained their own model on their data internally. Maybe could have, you know, maybe had something that was more of a valuable resource where they would have had more leverage if they'd waited a little bit. It is crazy that CoreWeave and Reddit are sitting at roughly the same market cap now. Very interesting. Yeah. Which one is more valuable over the next couple of years? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I feel like Reddit has mostly been, you know, they've kind of already gone out to the slaughter in a sense like every model company has trained.

32:14You'd think so, but look at the market cap. It just keeps going up. Reddit's been, I mean, Reddit was sold for$5 million or something when it launched. Like, it's been. It was 10 to Conde Nast. 10 to Conde Nast. That's a crazy, crazy low valuation. And then eventually spun out. And then for a long time, it was in the hundreds of millions. And no one was thinking this is a tens of billions. For a long time, like, people, the narrative was not, oh, yeah, this will be orders of magnitude more than Snap. Yeah. No way. No way. And then it just sort of finally came together. Who's the headless chicken?

32:47Yeah, let's go down a little bit, and we have the headless chicken. This is perplexity. Perplexity. So I think perplexity, they have a lot of different strategies. Some of them kind of seem opposed to each other, right? Maybe they're doing a browser. Maybe they're doing a Bloomberg terminal. Maybe they're rebuilding Yahoo Finance. Maybe they're building a phone. The browser, to their credit, I do see more positive reviews of their browser. than any of the other AI browsers. From independent folks? Yeah, independent people. We've had a lot of investors come on the show and say, like, I love the browser, but it's hard to take that seriously.

33:24Every investor that's invested in a browser says their browser is the best browser. I don't listen to what they say, but I've just repeatedly seen people saying, like, the perplexity browser is great. So whether or not that means a win, but the headless chicken thing going over and giving, you know,$400 million to Snapchat kind of, you know, I don't know. I think a lot of people, good for Snapchat maybe. There's just a lot of stuff going on. It's the Snapchat deal, the trying to buy TikTok, trying to buy Chrome, launching a venture fund, Bloomberg terminal. It's like, are you competing with all of these?

34:04Really? You're going to be TikTok and Chrome and Bloomberg and the next thing and see the next great company? it is just a lot it's a lot to process yeah like headless chicken is kind of like a fun thing to watch and then people you know love to talk about perplexity they love to say like oh we're all short perplexity that's true yeah it's become consensus yeah but let him cook we'll see what happens yeah be fun so then if we go down a little bit we have the snake in the grass have you guys ever witnessed a headless chicken no no I haven't growing up in the country I have you grew up in the country what are you talking about I thought you grew up with the East Bay Rationalists I was born in Berkeley, but I grew up in wine country.

34:43Oh, okay. And I have fortunately, unfortunately, watched my father take one of the chickens, you know, every now and again. A chicken needs to move on to the next chapter. And as a child. You sound like you're firing the chicken. Very amicable split. I mean. We're wishing the chicken the best. I mean, yes, it happens. It's the next chapter. I will say that it is a real thing. They run for at least 20 seconds or so. And I'll never forget it. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Cognition. The makers of Devin, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

35:29Okay, let's continue. Okay, so next we have the snake in the grass. Snake in the grass. This is the Chinese open source models, right? These are kind of lurking. I still don't really see that much coverage of Chinese open source models. Nobody wants to talk about it. Well, no one has bags, so they can't pump them. It's almost an elephant in the room to some degree. So this is where I sort of disagree with you, because Snake in the Grass feels like it's going to attack. Elephant in the room means we've got to address it. It's totally possible that the entire open source LLM ecosystem is just like, yeah, there's like a$10 billion business there.

36:05it's sort of like a stalking horse, another animal-based analogy, but it's sort of a stalking horse for like, hey, Gemini and Anthropic, if you guys don't lower your prices, we will go to the open source option. And that's sort of how Linux works. It's like that you can kind of bid the closed source models against the open source models. But for all the doomer takes around, like, oh, Chinese open sources, Like one day they're just going to snap their fingers and all the Manchurian candidates are going to activate in America. I think everyone's going to be like, I didn't realize I was using Qued and now I believe that nothing happened on Tiananmen Square.

36:45It's like, I don't believe that's going to happen. It's more of a threat to the, it's a very real threat to the business models of some of the closed source models. Maybe, I don't know. Again, it's putting a, it's certainly a pressure. It's Kimi is hot on everyone's tails. I mean, Brian Chesky, he was talking about open source. The other thing is a soft power thing. Ask a Chinese open source model about Tiananmen Square. I just don't think that's going to be that big of a deal. I don't see... Those are two very different things. One is like Brian Chesky inside of Airbnb. It becomes a big deal if they proliferate all over the world.

37:28and I'm not saying it's the end of the world. No, no, no. What I'm saying is that if you're a business owner, like Airbnb, and you're like Brian Chesky at Airbnb, and you're deciding between Kimmy, some open source model, like deeper in the stack, you're not surfacing something that has cultural relevancy or some sort of where American values come through. You're using it for fraud detection or you're using it to like transform every Airbnb listing into like grammar check every listing that comes through. Like spell check it all. Like you're doing something that's very commoditized and it's not this weird thing where you're going to inject the values of the Chinese people.

38:14I just see that as two separate things. Now, if you had a whole bunch of people using – I just think that LLM will be the new – or effectively globally going to be history books. And if you have some control – So that's true as the application layer. I think at the application layer that matters. So I would be maybe more worried if it was like, oh, it turns out that OpenAI is going to just use DeepSeek now under the hood. Sure. That would be worrisome. I'm even talking globally. A bunch of different application layer companies use these models because they're cheap and good. Yeah. And then they have like a very specific point of view that's not necessarily aligned to the West.

38:50I just think that point of view is irrelevant in many, many automation use cases. For sure. For sure. I'm not worried about Airbnb using Chinese models for business process automation. Yeah. I also think you can probably kind of fine tune a lot of that stuff out. Totally. Because like the, you know. Back to perplexity. They did it. Didn't they do DeepSeek 1776 or something like that? I also did that. You did that. I did that actually before that. So it's whatever. It's whatever. Okay, now we see. It's personal. That's why you put perplexity there. Because you got an axe to grind. I did it before they did it.

39:28But like the Tiananmen Square stuff is probably just a fine tune that they like made it more Chinese. Yeah, yeah. So you can just undo that. Yeah, exactly. I agree. One would assume. Anyway. So we agree it's a snake in the grass, but unclear how poisonous the snake is, unclear the size of that snake. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on. Let's move to... Who's the early bird that got the worm? The early bird that got the worm. There's no sign here. That's kind of an artifact. of the Nano Banana Pro. But early bird that got the worm, this is Josh Kushner. I think so. Right? I like that. He got the worm.

39:57The worm was OpenAI. Yes. He was very early on. He was early investor. Early with size. Early with size. Double down many times. Yeah. He got the worm. He's the early bird. Incredible. Yeah. Unbelievable. Why is anthropic donkey work? Donkey work? What does donkey work mean? I'm not 100 % sure that this is like a real phrase. Apparently, I was asking. This is a Tyler coinage. I asked GPT 4.5 and I asked Gemini 3 Pro. Okay. And they both said it was a real thing. Okay, it's boring or laborious part of a job. It's drudgery, donkey work. Yeah, so I think there's a lot of ways you could do Anthropic.

40:31Yeah, Anthropic's all over the place. So in this case, I think it's kind of that Anthropic has gone very hard on coding and API and enterprise. Oh, okay, okay. The laborious work. It's kind of laborious. Yeah, they're not doing like the really hot, sexy. They're not doing a browser. They're not solving science. Yeah, they're not doing consumer. science stuff. Yeah, they're doing the donkey work. This is good. I think it's some of the more laborious stuff. But there's a lot of ways you can do it. Daria's sitting there being like, who's going to take all the jobs? Who's going to take all the jobs?

41:03But you could do Anthropic as the scapegoat. David Sachs really does not like Anthropic. That's true. They never get invited to the White House. They're the lame duck. Lame duck? Is that a... No, lame duck is when the president is... Oh, wait. That's the second term. I forget about it. Ugly duckling. That's what I was thinking. Ugly duckling a little bit. That's the one I'm thinking of. There's a little bit of chicken little, the sky is falling. Scaredy cat. Scaredy cat. Scaredy cat. Don't worry about safety. There's a few of these. But I like donkey work. That feels the most accurate for what they're doing.

41:34They're going after the entry-level white-collar workers. They're doing the donkey work. Google. I just love this image. I think this is the last one. Google is the fat cat. Google is the fat cat. Before we had Google Snail's Pace, I think this would have been true maybe a year ago. Fat Cat's so much funnier. Look at that cat. It's so fat. I love it. All the cash flow. All the TPUs. All the TPUs. They're GPU rich. They're rich in every sense. They have a ton of researchers. They're releasing. I mean, now they have the best image model, the best text model, depending on what benchmark you look at.

42:09They're on top of the world. Yeah. Okay. Slightly concerned. We have a sign for Golden Goose, but there's no Goose. The Golden Goose was removed. but the sign remains. Who stole the golden goose? Yeah, who killed the golden goose? Or is there just no gold, if there's no golden goose in the AI barnyard, is that bearish? I think one take, maybe the golden goose. Wait, so first establish what the golden goose is. The golden goose is a goose that lays a golden egg one every day. And in the parable, in the story, the farmer kills the golden goose to get all of the gold inside, but it is revealed that by killing the goose, you no longer get the passive income from the golden eggs.

42:53So it's... Jack from the Beanstalk studied. It's being a little bit too greedy, but we couldn't land on who the golden goose was. So maybe one take is the golden goose, they were the neoclouds, and then the market is hurting, it's taking the goose away. Yeah. Core Weave not in the past, what, month? They've been selling off a little bit. We've continues to lay golden eggs, but the market got overheated. And so that sort of killed the gains or something. And the gold is the GPUs, subsidized GPUs. I don't know. In the data center. It's not quite. There's something with the Bitcoin miners that just had a lot of energy that they had, you know, effectively prepaid for that they're unlocking some value from.

43:36Oh, well. Oh, well. But I think that's all of them. I think this is a, yeah, this is a pretty, now it's pretty clear. This helps you understand how AI is playing out. There's no more questions. No more questions. If you can see this infographic, it really makes everything crystal clear. That's great. Well, thank you for taking us through that. Great work, Tyler. And let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Get started. One company that didn't make the cut for our infographic was, of course, AMD. And fortunately, there is a great profile in the Wall Street Journal of Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD.

44:16And let's pull this up because this is a fantastic picture minus a very weird reflection. Very weird reflection in the glass. And so if you zoom in on this, there's something that is right in her nose that looks like a bugger or something. It's a very odd choice of image. Of course, it's just a reflection on the glass. The photo, otherwise, the way she's positioning herself. It's powerful. She did her job. Everything looks great from her perspective. She looks great. But the photographer just didn't quite catch that one reflection. And so it just gives a very odd look. But anyway, let's dig into the article.

44:58The Chips CEO staring down NVIDIA and talk of an AI bubble. At a board meeting in late 2022, two, Lisa Su, chief executive of chip designer AMD, announced that she was radically changing course. Quote, I'm going to pivot the entire company, she told the directors gathered around a boardroom table at the company's Austin campus. The rise of AI was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, she said, and the company had to put AI at the center of its entire product line. Three years later, the Santa Clara, California-based company has nearly quadrupled in size, its market value rising from$90 billion to more than$335 billion.

45:41Despite a recent pullback, AMD's strategy of positioning itself at the center of the global AI race has paid off handsomely, making Sue into a billionaire and her company into one of the only viable designers of powerful chips needed to power advanced AI models. In a market that has recently been completely dominated by NVIDIA, Sue is showing that there may be a place for a strong number two that can compete on price. Insane flow, by the way. Check this out. Yeah, look at that. She's 56 years old. She has a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT and a deep understanding of the physics behind her company's products.

46:16She developed a reputation as a giant slayer by out-competing market leader Intel a decade ago to take the lead in producing central processing units or CPUs. Now she's staring down the ultimate Goliath in NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company and the foremost maker of the chips that power AI data centers. AMD will have to deliver on its promise to produce chips that are comparable to NVIDIA's. Most of the sophisticated - Staring down her own cousin, of course. It is, true. Investors bid up AMD's stock price in October after the company announced a marquee deal with Oracle and OpenAI, which have both agreed to buy tens of thousands of AMD's newest generation of chips known as the MI450.

46:58Mika says the Jensen Sioux Thanksgiving must be wild. I wonder if they're close enough to actually have Thanksgiving together. Their first cousins once removed. Yeah, that feels like it just depends on how hard you go for Thanksgiving. Some people have, you know, how big is your Thanksgiving? Do you go hard? I have a pretty small family. I have a pretty small family too. My in-laws, we're still doing, we're talking 20 people maybe. is like a typical Thanksgiving. But I know there are some people that are like, yeah, let's get 100 people together. Let's turn it into Woodstock, which I'm down for, honestly.

47:33It's fun. Maybe you need, you know what you need to do this Thanksgiving? You need to get everyone who's cooking for your Thanksgiving dinner on linear. It's the system for modern software development. It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. The product you're building this Thanksgiving is a beautiful, bountiful feast. It's a feast, folks, and you need Linear to help you plan who's doing what, who's making the pumpkin pie, who's making the cranberry sauce. Can you assign tickets? Can you close those tickets? Are you using AI agents? Are you using AI agents? I think that there's something here.

48:07Everyone wants to build coding agents. Nobody wants to build Feast agents. Feast agents. And I think that's wrong. Get on Linear. I love it. The OpenAI deal turbocharged the roadmap, said Sue. It represents a huge vote of confidence in the MI450, which of course we've seen from Semi Analysis is performing very well. And AMD has caught up a ton this year. They've just been on a tear, taking feedback from all over the tech industry, integrating it very quickly and actually outperforming NVIDIA with certain models. And all of that's been chronicled by the folks over at Semi Analysis in their Inference Max model.

48:44So the growing AI market is a huge opportunity and we want to make sure that we have deep partnerships that enable to get us a big piece of that. The rest will handle itself. The dealmaking was on display again this week when the company said it would work with Cisco and Saudi Arabian AI venture firm and a Saudi Arabian AI venture firm to build a large cluster of data centers in the kingdom. Sue attended a black tie dinner. Is that with Humane? I think so. Sue attended a black tie dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman alongside other executives at the White House Tuesday. and AMD sent a representative to a U.S.-Saudi Arabia investment forum on Wednesday.

49:19Until now, data centers have mostly been entirely NVIDIA's market. One tech analyst said AMD is in a position to take a more meaningful piece of that. So$1 trillion a year. Let's get into it. At the heart of Sue's strategy is her belief that there is insatiable demand for computing power and that as the market for AI grows, the companies offering the best and most reliable AI infrastructure will thrive. She said she believes AI is not a zero-sum game and that recent concerns about an overheated market for chips and data centers are exaggerated. In recent weeks, the massive spending on data centers have intensified concerns that an AI bubble is building AMD stock, which had jumped nearly 60 % in October, has fallen about 20 % this month.

50:04I'm not concerned about an AI bubble, Sue said in the interview. I do think that those who are thinking that way are a bit too short-sighted. they don't really see the power of the technology. It's actually only down, I don't know exactly when this article was released, but 13 and three quarters in the last month. Better than some others. This is not the time to stay on the sidelines and worry, hey, am I over-investing, she said. It's much more dangerous if you under-invest than if you over-invest, in my opinion. Let's go. I love that. A year ago, she predicted that the market for AI chips would hit$500 billion in sales annually by 2028.

50:49At an investor presentation last week in New York, she was even more optimistic. The market for AI and data center computing, she said, will reach$1 trillion a year by 2030. Yeah, it's interesting that she underpredicted or seemingly underpredicted because Jensen by himself is saying that he's, that NVIDIA has a line of sight to 500 in 2026. Half a trillion. And that's just for them, revenue, full year. Yeah. That is a lot of money. Wow. Very exciting. Well, speaking of NVIDIA, Sue is also helping to capitalize on inflection point in AI. Many executives in the chips industry, including NVIDIA chief, Jensen Wong, expect demand to shift from clusters designed to assist in large training runs to inference.

51:34and inference doesn't require chips with as much computing muscle as training does, according to the Wall Street Journal. As AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini become increasingly integrated into daily life and as companies design thousands of enterprise software tools that rely on AI models, demand for inference functions is about to go up by a billion times, Wong said last month. Swang and Sue and Wong are distant cousins, but they didn't meet until both were established executives. That's interesting. So I don't think they'll be hanging out at Thanksgiving together if they just met recently.

52:07But maybe. Unless that's just a story and both their family lines have been colluding to corner the AI chip market for generations. It does feel like a storyline from Dune or something. AMD has a strong line of inference computing chips, but has struggled to design chips powerful enough to compete with NVIDIA in training. Let's see. They go into a little bit of her backstory. She was Taiwan-born, Queens-raised. She worked for IBM, where she focused on designing products according to the needs of big customers. When she took over as CEO of AMD in 2014, the company had a market value of less than$3 billion.

52:48It's up 100x since then. She did deals with Chinese partners that helped stabilize the company's finances and move the chip designer deeper into the processors that powered PCs and data centers, capitalizing on Intel's weakness. Today, AMD sells an estimated 41 % of data center CPUs up from essentially 0 % five years ago. What a run. It was that success that allowed AMD's board of directors to trust Sue when she proposed in that fateful board meeting in 2022 to pivot the company to go head to head with NVIDIA. One of the board members attended said, told this story. She had a vision around our ability to be AI from endpoint to data center and everything in between, said Tall Walker, one of the board members who attended the meeting.

53:31She had the conviction of the need and the need to move fast. What do you think about vision, Jordy? Is it good that she had vision? I think vision is still underrated. Pro vision. Pro vision. It's a hot take. Some people don't like vision. Some people are anti-vision these days. I think I land on the side of pro vision. I think it's important. So Sue was able to dispense with Intel as a competitor because Intel had self-inflicted wounds, said Daniel Newman, CEO of research firm Futurum Group. That's in sharp contrast to NVIDIA, a company that's expected more than$200 billion in revenue next year that has gotten thousands of AI developers hooked on the proprietary software that NVIDIA chips rely on.

54:11But NVIDIA can't make enough chips to keep up with demand, and the OpenAI deal proved that large AI companies are eager to diversify their supplier base. We got some major update here on Lisa Su as a celebrity. As AMD's become a bigger player, she's begun to embrace the spotlight. Earlier this year at an industry summit in Paris, Su was treated like a celebrity with many young women asking her to take selfies and sign autographs. That's amazing. Jensen Wong was signing autographs a couple months ago. That was this year maybe? It was like five, six months ago. that one image. Well, now she's also signing autographs.

54:55As the industry grows, more and more celebrities are minted. Well, in July, Sue attended an AI summit where Trump rolled out his AI strategy. When she addressed the audience, Sue pulled out one of the company's chips out of her pocket and said it had 185 billion transistors and took nine months to make. Such chip can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Trump later mentioned her in his speech as one of the notable executives in attendance. She was still in the shadow of Wong, however, who Trump asked to stand while the crowd applauded. What a job you've done, the president said to the NVIDIA CEO.

55:30So he's like, thanks for the Lisa Sued for being here, but let's give it up for Jensen. And he's giving it up too much for Jensen. He's not having a balanced approach. Well, I don't think it's necessarily his job to... Well, 10 times the market cap, 10 times the applause, perhaps. That's right. Market cap weighted by applause. Let's see. Over the next decade, AI will transform every industry, every business, every product, every interaction. Our chips are enabling this massive new revolution. Well, very interesting. I would like to learn more about Lisa Su as a celebrity. I want to see more deep dives, more page six style writing is what I'm looking for.

56:18Maybe a New York Post cover. Exactly. A lot of caught on the street. A lot of like, you know, like what type of coffee does she like? That's what we need to know. We need to get her in the mansion section. Should we do some mansion section? We do. We should. There's a big question in the mansion section today. First, let me tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. The question I know everyone has been asking is, is$200 million the new$100 million in luxury real estate? What do you think? Many people have been asking that.

56:51So there's a$200 million house in Indian Creek, a$250 million house in Bel Air, a$300 million house in Aspen, and a$205 million house in Palm Beach. And this is funny because we've reviewed almost all of these houses. Old Rock says Lisa Sue on Hot Ones. That would be great. maybe on Theo Vaughn as well. A surge of ultra-rich buyers has pushed asking prices to new extremes, yet many headline-grabbing mega mansions languish on the market or trade for a fraction of their debut numbers. Just a decade ago, the$100 million price tag was still considered a new frontier for luxury real estate. The first nine-figure home sale occurred in 2011.

57:31Wow. By 2019, there had been about 20 sales recorded at that price point. Now, real estate insiders say a new price. Pricing benchmark is setting. the tone for the high-end market,$200 million. Since 2025, at least five major U.S. properties have listed for$200 million or more, mostly concentrated in South Florida. On Indian Creek, a private island near Miami Beach, Florida, often called the billionaire bunker, cosmetic surgeon Dr. Aaron Rollins and his wife, Maureen Rollins, listed their unfinished waterfront estate for$200 million earlier this month. About 70 miles north in Palm Beach, a circa 2005 mansion, once owned by the late Frank and Maureen Wilkins, is asking$205.

58:12In Aspen, the longtime home of California billionaire Stuart and Linda Resnick listed for$300. The listings raise the question, is this aspirational pricing? Or as the ranks of the global billionaires expand at a rapid clip, is it possible that the top of the market has actually doubled? I would say, yes, it's totally possible. Look at the run-up in the stock price. The assets are more valuable than ever. There's going to be a massive wave of wealth created from the AI boom. I would not want to be in the market for a single-family home within 20 square miles of OpenAI. Yeah. There was some post.

58:53I don't know if it made it in the timeline, but there was some post about there's like 40 people that are looking for houses in the$5 million to$7 million range in north San Francisco. And there's none for sale. because all cash offers i'm sure yeah from the from the liquidity um also porsche allocations are going to be pretty rough out there so i i expect it uh matt in the chat says lisa sue is a car enthusiast no way drives a metallic blue graphite porsche oh i like that um she apparently names them after her uh after her chips so she has uh cars ryzen epic and radeon that's cool That's very fun.

59:35Yeah, this Resnick, this Bel Air house, the 250, I remember digging into him, and he was part of the telecom build-out in 2001. And so even though his company went bankrupt, he still wound up with a fortune that allowed him to buy a huge house. You could think about the same thing happening in the AI room. Well, here's another note. AMD sponsors the Mercedes-AMG F1 team, which has a new co-owner, the CEO of CrowdStrike. So all eyes on George's team this weekend. We'll see how they do with their new co-owner. Before we move on to our next story, let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent, AI that handles your customer support.

1:00:27The number one AI agent for customer service. Silicon Valley Estate sells to mystery buyer. I want you to guess who it is, Jordy. I don't know. I want you to make wild guesses. Wild guesses. In California's Silicon Valley, a roughly 12-acre estate designed in classical Italian style has sold for more than, sold for$56 million. There we go. Known as Via del Prato. The property is located in Portola Valley, one of the country's wealthiest towns. The sellers are venture capital investor Bandel Carano and his wife Paula Carano, who built the estate after buying the land in 2013 for$13.625 million.

1:01:10Property records show. Hmm. Have you looked up Bandel Carano and what deals he did to be able to afford such a wonderful house? I would love to know the story of his venture capital work. The Coronas put the home on the market for$85 million in February. The most recent that was asking price was$65. It went for$56. It's the priciest home to sell in Portola Valley to date. The prior record was$35 million for a 13-acre estate. The buyer, who currently lives in San Jose, searched for several years before purchasing the Portola Valley property. but they didn't want to name the client. The Caranos didn't respond to a request for comment.

1:01:52Massive mess. You got to get this. And Del Carano was an investor in Polycom Inc. Wait, the Polycom? No way. That's amazing. Well deserved. One of the most iconic conference call phones. We used to have one. We used to have one on our desk. It's probably in the studio. It was a prop that we used for a long time. I think it's in the back. You got to bring it back. We never actually used it. We wanted to have it set up. How long until somebody creates an AI Polycom? I don't know. Yeah, that's so crazy. He did the deal in Polycom and made a bag. I love it. Listing agent said, okay, they built, after raising an old home, completing the project in 2021, in addition, the roughly 12 ,300 square foot main house.

1:02:42Property also has a pool, a pool house. And then another unfinished 5 ,000 square foot building has a ballroom and a wine cellar. Wow. There we go. They designed property. He's a general partner at Oak Investment Partners, a venture capital firm with offices in Wilton, Connecticut, Menlo Park. In 2024, the Caranos listed a nearly 2 ,000 acre ranch outside of Bozeman, Montana. Portola Valley had a median sale price of$5.5 million. Interesting. What else is in here that we wanted to look at? So there is some articles on San Francisco. What's going on there? San Francisco is back after pandemic-related struggles and growing up.

1:03:23Affluent young families demanding space have elevated the 94127 zip code, which is anchored by the walkable West Portal Village Center and encompasses desirable residential neighborhoods such as St. Francis Wood, this west side pocket reliably offers a rare San Francisco luxury. Detached single-family homes with yards, the suburbia in the city lifestyle has recently propelled the zip code to rival historically more expensive city enclaves. In October, its$2.5 million median listing price was second only to the$2.7 million median price in Premier Address, Pacific Heights. Interesting. So there are a bunch of shops.

1:04:10People are moving in. The median price per square foot is$952. And the houses are moving. 37 days on the market is all it takes for the median house to find a new buyer. Pretty good. Let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers. who use AI to discover new products and brands. Should we let AI ruin the M-dash? I think the game's over. It's over. I think AI has already ruined the M-dash. I think it's ruined. I think we have to move on from it entirely. But Joel Stein at the Wall Street Journal has another take. Joel says, don't let AI ruin the M-dash and writes a defense of the newly controversial punctuation mark.

1:04:57It's so funny because MDashes are not even the way that I first identify a lot of AI writing. Like it's often the, it's not this, it's that that hits way harder. Totally. Joel says, a few weeks ago, my 16-year-old son, Laszlo, a student journalist, received a tip for a school newspaper. A source had told him that the administration, which had banned all use of AI, had used it to write an email to parents. The email in question was certainly boring enough to be written by ChatGPT, but it was also boring enough to be written by a school administrator. We ran the text through two AI detection tools and both determined that there was a 0 % chance a computer wrote it.

1:05:41I don't know how a computer figures out if it's dealing with another computer, but I'm guessing it asks which of nine photos are motorcycles. So why did this source think AI had written it? Because the email contained MDashes. The MDash, a punctuation mark a bit longer than a hyphen that denotes a long pause, has become the black light on the hotel sheets for AI shamers. A black light on the hotel sheets is a good turn of rays. A sign that an essay, a letter, or any kind of written work was written by a machine and not a human. The MDash is now a GPT-ism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing is an output of an LLM.

1:06:18On Instagram, the beauty influencer Lux Jen warned that if people don't want to be accused of using AI, they should take out the ChatGPT hyphen. They just call it the ChatGPT hyphen. Last week, OpenAI CEO posted on X the following brag. Small but happy win. If you tell ChatGPT not to use emdashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do. It's interesting that they just didn't release an update that eliminates it. Like they seem to think it's a feature, not a bug. and they're asking people to kind of opt out of it by doing custom instructions, which I'm sure like 1 % of the user base actually uses.

1:06:53Yeah, it's weird that they couldn't just have a custom instruction that goes over all of ChatGPT that just says like, you don't need to never use the MDash, just let's turn it down by 90%. Yeah. All this MDash shaming has been upsetting because I, a professional writer, love, love, love an MDash. And he uses a lot of MDashes. In my writing, the ChatGPT tells me I use 11 M-dashes every thousand words. Other professional writers use them a lot too, 4.4 times more than the average person. These numbers upon investigation could be highly inaccurate since I got that from ChatGPT, which explains one reason why my son's schools bans it.

1:07:33But the point is M-dashes are loved by professionals. This is starting to make a lot more sense. What is ChatGPT trained on? A lot of professional writing. They literally have a deal with the Wall Street Journal. And so if it's used 4.4 times more than in everyday writing, it's just going to come up a lot. Yeah. I mean, if you tried to, you have to give it some direction on like where the output's going to sound like. Yeah. And if it just winds up being like, yeah, make it sound like a Reddit comment. It's like, okay, well, that could go all over the place. That could be very, very weirdly worded.

1:08:04And it just would not be very consistent. Yeah. So the point is, MDashes are loved by professionals. Why? Because more than any other punctuation mark, the M-dash is deeply human. It's the breath marks of Emily Dickinson, the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf, the head-clogging maximalism of David Foster Wallace, or the self-aggrandizing asides of Joel Stein. It's also the mark of discretion. When Holden Caulfield tells his writer that he loves it, when his classmates digress during a presentation, he says, I don't like it when somebody sticks to the point all the time. The boys that got the best marks in oral expression Were the ones that stuck to the point all the time I admit it And he admits it naturally with an emdash Large language models consume a lot of the best writing out there Which is why they use emdashes Unlike most people today who think a period is a rude way of screaming AI believes in punctuation If there's anything to take away from the emdash scare It's that we should use more of them Because while most people can't find one on their keyboard And wouldn't know when to use it if they did That's pretty funny the m dash requires more nuance than a thumbs up a heart or an eggplant it's less jarring than parentheses but a bigger interruption than commas it's the length of an m which sets it apart from the boring shorter n dash in the men's locker room for writers we make fun of n dashes interesting most of all we should use m dashes because they are a declaration of humanity in the face of AI's onslaught if only ordinary people would learn how to use them.

1:09:38Do you see this link, shorter N -? For some reason, it linked to N -.in and that website just goes nowhere. N -. I don't know. On an Indian domain. I don't know. That's just like a mistake or something. They should correct that because N -.in doesn't go anywhere. um yeah i i i have never really used m dashes i also i like this take i i mean i agree with this this makes sense he should defend the defend the castle um the maybe the bigger tell to your earlier point is around that uh contrastive parallelism that it's not this it's that that's what it's called and that uh contrastive parallelism parallelism i was wondering about that and I went through a bunch of the old scripts that I'd written for YouTube and I couldn't find a single example of ever using that style, that structure.

1:10:37I'd written a lot about a lot of different tech companies and I'd never said, you know, I've made a whole video about NVIDIA. In my NVIDIA video, I never say, NVIDIA isn't just a GPU company. Google isn't just a search company. I've never said that. It's a holding company of the future. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how that got baked in. I think that's maybe from marketing, from like marketing lingo, because I was trying to run the benchmark of does this contrastive parallelism creep in more when you ask the, let's see, what is it? It's antithetical parallelism or contrastive construction or correlative conjunction pairs.

1:11:22This is the term. I learned this from them. But that antithetical parallelism, it's not this, it's that. We're not writing a story. We're creating a legacy. And it has a sound that sounds like marketing. It sounds like marketing. I feel like you could probably go through the New Yorker or the Wall Street Journal and you'll see a lot of M dashes. But you won't see a lot of antithetical parallelism. And so I feel like the antithetical parallelism is an even bigger tell. And Tyler, what do you think? I also think it's interesting. like you would imagine that a lot of these like GPT-isms would be they would only be like with one model, right?

1:12:03It's like just 4.0 does that work. Totally, totally. But it's like not that at all. It's also not just like open AI models. Yep. Like yesterday I tried the Gemini 3 Pro and I asked, write an ad for a GT3 RS. Yeah. And then so I'll just read the start. Listen to this. There is a moment at 9 ,000 RPM where the world stops. The noise isn't just sound, M-dash. it's frequency the vibration isn't just an engine m dash it's a heartbeat like it's like the exact same it's very similar it's the very similar it's very strange i i wonder um like why this is i like there's a case you could say that models are just like training off each other but it seems that seems like not something that they're doing um yeah i don't know it's just kind of landed in this zone where that is what is seen as good or something.

1:12:53I don't know. And it's just like sort of decided that antithetical parallelism is the greatest thing. So thank you to Joel Stein at the Wall Street Journal for writing this article. I will support you in your fight to keep the M-dash, but I want to hear your take on contrastive construction. Action. Actions speak louder than words, John. Are you going to just rip like 20 M dashes in your next essay? So the problem is that I have never, I'm the guy, I'm the one who doesn't know how to find it on my keyboard. I'm who he's talking about. Just hit dash dash space. Find it on your keyboard and wouldn't know when to use one if they did.

1:13:32I don't know when to use it. I don't know where to find it. It wasn't taught to me in English class. I just never learned. I'll teach it. I'm teaching it to you right now. Go on your keyboard. Yes. dash dash space on iMessage and it will create it for you. Okay, but when do I use it? You can also do shift option dash. Shift option dash. I don't know. I think you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I don't think you can teach an old dog new tricks. I don't know if it's possible to teach me to use an M dash reliably. I think I might just throw them in randomly. What if I start using two M dashes next to each other?

1:14:09Just throw people off. No one would expect that, right? It's completely unexpected. So you'd be like, oh, well, this looks like AI, but it's something weird. It would be a really bad model. Whatever model he used was terrible. He used GPT-2 for this. Anyway, let's move on. Let's do some timeline, and then I think we can come back to this article on solvency if we have more time. But first, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector, and full-text search. Built from first principles on object storage. Used by cursor, notion, linear, anthropic. 10x cheaper. It's extremely scalable. I like when we're talking over each other during the ad reads.

1:14:46That's really the flavor we want to bring through. I love it. Okay, so there's a major shakeup going on at TBD Labs. Augustus Odina is out. And I'm giving him a follow for this. He's going independent. Free agency? Yesterday, I resigned from TBD Labs slash Meta AI. I wasn't there for very long, but I think I got a few useful things done. It's an impressive group of people. and it's especially impressive that it got assembled as quickly as it did with such a high talent bar at a large company. Quote, unquote, founder mode is real and good. I will certainly miss my coworkers there. I think now is an unusually high leverage time to pursue ambitious new projects at the intersection of AI and other technologies.

1:15:30Please reach out to me if you're interested in that sort of thing and I expect I will have something more detailed to share in not too long. Is that the sound of a thousand venture capitalists writing term sheets with blank numbers on them? I messaged him yesterday, and he said, man, the show would be honored to be on the show when he's ready to talk about it. Yeah. So looking forward to that. Bernie Sanders. Okay. What's happening with Bernie? Was firing shots. He's taking shots of the AI oligarchs. He says, here are some of the most powerful AI oligarchs in the world enjoying a private dinner with a dictator who murders his own citizens with a bone saw.

1:16:10Whoa. Does anyone really believe they want to wipe out poverty or improve life for ordinary Americans? I don't. And he's sort of mogging Greg Brockman here because he leaves Greg Brockman's net worth. He doesn't even try and estimate it. He just says, question mark, question mark, question mark. Guess Bernie Sanders' age. 75. Guess again. 78. Guess again. 77. Guess again. 80. Guess again. 82. Guess again. I have no idea. 84. 84. Oh, he's up there. He's up there. Oh, wow. Okay. So grandpa is pissed. He's pissed. He's absolutely pissed. But what does that have to do with him not being able to look up Greg Brockman, the CTO of Stripe, do a back of the envelope, what's Stripe trading for in the private markets, call some secondary brokers, get, if you're Bernie, You just need to call a bunch of secondary brokers, understand where Stripe is trading, then work backwards from what his Stripe stake is, then call Satya Nadella, ask him based on - Yeah, he could have used - Are you marking OpenAI at 500 or do you think you should mark it more at like 400 or maybe 600?

1:17:17Are you bullish on that? All of that goes into the DCF. You should build a spreadsheet and then you would have a fair market valuation for Greg Brockman's net worth and you wouldn't need to use question marks. Chad got pretty close, 83 and 85. Good work. But if he really wanted to stick it to his American AI oligarchs, he could have used Kimmy to do the kind of analysis that you were talking about. He would have gotten a lot closer. I think we probably need to do more to define oligarch in the AI era. Does a billion-dollar network— I thought people would use Plutarch. Plutocracy. Plutocracy? Plutarch is a person.

1:18:01But what's one? Plutocrat. There's one that just means - Technocracy. Technocracy. There's one that specifically means wealth. That's like wealth. The plutocrats. That's it, right? Plutocracy is - I think plutocracy is plutocracy. But also, I mean, does Bernie not realize that Greg Brockman - Yeah, government by the wealthy is plutocracy. Oligarchy is something else. Oligarchy. That's just ruled by a few, I think. ruled by a few interesting, a small people, a small group of people having control of a country, an organization or institutions. Well, um, but you know what, you know what Bernie's got to do?

1:18:39He's got to start a lab, start a foundation model company and, uh, compete in the free market. I like it. I like, I like that. Uh, and then active retirement. Yes. And then start trading on public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Multi-ass investing, trusted by millions. yeah I don't blame Bernie for being a little bit salty at this point because he's never on those charts of the best political traders in history right? That's true he's been having to sit there and watch Nancy Pelosi go on one of the most insane runs and he's just missed out the FOMO must be crazy every day he's opening up and Nancy's up another mill and he's just sitting there like ah I missed it I missed it the trade of the century Sam 3D meta we talked about this a little bit what yeah a tharva yeah is uh hyped on meta's uh new model yeah m3d i i forgot about this so this was purposely released at the perfect time because we were just earlier accusing meta of slopping it up at the slop trough with meta vibes and you know there's a little bit of a narrative that was emerging which is like okay you know Zuck did this whole talent war.

1:19:50He acquired a ton of talent, clearly invested crazy amounts, huge gigawatt, five gigawatt plan, Hyperion, Prometheus. He's going all in and on AI. And then the first thing that he came out with was like meta vibes, this sort of like sloppy TikTok AI clone that didn't really break through and just kind of frustrated everyone in the timeline, did not appreciate it, did not like it. And so at that point, I think everyone was calling for, okay, you got to deliver something that's actually solid. You got to deliver something that's useful, that's valuable. Maybe it's a contribution to open source. Maybe it's even just an API for coding that's really good or a model that does something unique, special.

1:20:32Or just free ASI for everyone. That would also be acceptable. Yes, that would definitely reset the narrative on is meta slopping it up at the trough. But this is an example of them not slopping it up at the trough. This feels elevated. This feels useful. I'm very excited for where this gets implemented all over the place. This feels like a very serious organization, like the work of a serious organization, the work of a group that's taking their work seriously and not just trying to, you know, score points, go viral, just make a couple extra bucks. They're actually doing some real research. So I was excited about this.

1:21:06What was your take? Yeah. I mean, this is really cool. I think people have probably just over-indexed too much on Vibes because like, I don't even really think of Vibes as being like an Alexander Wang project. It's not like they trained a new model. That's not their model. It's just a bunch of project managers who made a new app. So I think there's still a ton of really good researchers. I'm very excited to see what they actually put out because I assume that it's going to be great. And it's hard to know without actually knowing the usage of Meta AI. You can look into it a little bit by just looking at the App Store charts and seeing the kind of traction they have.

1:21:38But I think in hindsight, they would have just been much better off not releasing that or not making it a moment. Dude, you're telling me you don't like meta vibes, dog? What are you doing? That is Trump in an orange and rainbow suit dancing. I thought we had PTZ. I thought we could zoom in on this. Yeah, I mean, there's some golden stuff. You know what I was actually thinking about was, it's kind of a do-nothing-win situation, Because I feel like at least this year, the vast majority of AI slop will be consumed on Instagram. Even if it gets made in the Sora app, it's coming over to Instagram if it's going to do well.

1:22:20And it's going to be distributed on the other platforms. And so I would be very closely watching the actual user minutes, the time on site. But I would imagine that the amount of Sora-generated content, the user minutes, is like 100 times on Instagram than on the actual Sora app, just because it's such a bigger audience. And so even though it's made by Sora, it's distributed elsewhere. Anyway. Yeah, let's check in with the… What's going on? Google's genius. Sora is still number nine in the charts. Not bad. CapCut and Timu, Shop Like a Billionaire, are sitting just ahead alongside GoWish, your digital wish list.

1:23:07Well, let me tell you about Numeral.com. Let Numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. Compliance handled so you can focus on growth. Luxury watch guy is concerned about the Bitcoin sell-off because he says there are going to be so many effing APs on the market, facepalm, flooding the aftermarket. So we'll see how that nets out. But the cryptocurrency industry certainly has been known to enjoy an AP. Yeah. Google's genius. By not selling TPUs, Google allows NVIDIA to maintain high GPU pricing, which in turn props up price of inference. Google then captures that inference price premium by running TPUs for inference on GCP.

1:24:01This is a conspiracy theory by Dave3and30Tepper. I'm not sure how real that is. Yeah, there's also... They are going to sell TPUs. Just because you have two players in the market doesn't mean you can sort of have what happens in the soda industry, right? But effectively... I was thinking about the GLP-1 market. There's just a lot of demand. You don't need to cut prices. And you also understand that there can be reason not to get in a race to the bottom dynamic and effectively have a gentleman's agreement to keep prices in a certain range. Of course, that can go too far. Well, let me tell you about Vanta.

1:24:41Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Do you mind doing some timeline? Of course. A quick break. Pierre from Cal.com says, Shower Thought, why is no one doing outbound for pizza? Hey, this is Gigi from Gigi's Pizza calling. You ordered last week. We have a pepperoni pizza ready and could deliver it in 10 minutes. Are you hungry? Tech Sales Guy says, trillion-dollar idea. And, of course, it goes viral again. Some ideas and bangers are evergreen. Morgan Housel yesterday was saying, I think the majority of societal problems right now are all downstream of housing affordability.

1:25:28Austin asked, how would you fix housing affordability? The current admin has suggested 50-year mortgages. We'll see if those go through and how much of an impact that they have. But Morgan Housel says, build more homes, plenty of demand, plenty of capital, mostly a local zoning issue. And that certainly tracks living here in California. John Palmer, dear friend of the show and somebody that we are actually working on a little project with, says, this might sound crazy, but they should pivot. he's talking about Sunday Robotics which make the cute new robots with fantastic little hats he says this might sound crazy but Sunday should pivot to a consumer app where you just teleoperate your own memo which is the name of the robot and meet up with your buddies and do fun stuff as robots I agree I would love to meet up with the lads in the real world in robot form I think he might be on to something.

1:26:42There was a story coming out earlier this week. An investigation from The Lever found that a PE firm is buying hockey rinks and banning parents from recording and taking photos of their kids' games. Faced. This story broke. Why is it based? Because they tried enforcing the rule on the wrong person, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy. So a little excerpt here. As the$40 billion youth sports industry comes under private equity control.

1:27:17Corporate-owned facilities and leagues from hockey rinks to cheerleading arenas have begun prohibiting parents from recording their own kids' sports games. Instead, parents are forced to subscribe to these companies' exclusive recordings and streaming service, which can cost many times more than the streaming costs for professional sporting events. That's so funny because I was thinking about how I'm such a gear nerd that oftentimes when I'm watching my four-year-old play soccer, I'm like, one of these days I'm going to bring out these PTZ cameras out here and get the most cinematic footage. They're going to have to go up against me.

1:27:58I'm going to be fighting them. Yeah, every kid's sports team should have a dad or a mom that's the CTO, and their job is just to rig the entire field with cameras and then provide crazy edits for each kid. Even if they lose, it's like the one moment that they had. They finessed someone. You still think this is bass, Tyler? You still saying, hello, bass department? I mean, my mind's okay. You appreciate value creation. How else do you expect private equity firms to make money? Yeah, how else do you expect them to make money? Hardworking private equity firms to build, afford their interest payments.

1:28:41In some instances, parents have been threatened that if they chose to defy the rules and record the game, they may end up on a blacklist that punishes their kids. Well, what they need to do is they need to form some sort of union, basically, where they all say, we all are going to film or none of us are going to attend and we're going to take our business elsewhere. Those threats were even reportedly made to a sitting U.S. senator. I was told this past weekend that if I live stream my child's hockey game, my kid's team will be penalized and lose a place in the standings, said Chris Murphy at a public event.

1:29:12Why is that? Because a private equity company has bought up the rinks. So he was trying to live stream himself? Like he was just trying to set up a camera and live stream? Like how does that? At some point, I think the obvious solution here is parents can take as many pictures as they want. If I'm a parent, I'm going to take some pictures, but I would probably still get the recording. I would probably still subscribe so that family members could watch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. Compete in the free market. Let us both film. Whoever gets the better vibe reel, whoever gets the craziest edit out of it is going to be able to sell it.

1:29:50And if I can out-edit you and I bring better gear than your private equity-backed videographer, I'm not paying. I'm not paying for it. Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started. Triple Gleads. Every time OpenAI says anything, it gets turned into a headline these days. The latest one is that the keyword is headwinds. They have to start using sign language. Headwinds, yes. But I guess even that would still potentially get turned into a headline. Yeah, I don't know. Sam is signing something to the TG.

1:30:34Very tricky. I feel like people use – I feel like if you went through a variety of, like, earnings call transcripts from plenty of public companies, CEOs say the word headwinds all the time. They're like, oh, yes, like this particular thing, the tariffs, that's a headwind. Oh, this is a headwind. Interest rates might be a headwind. That might be a headwind. Competition might be a headwind. Like people throw this out all the time. Yeah, if you say as a business that we don't have headwinds, you're not going to be taken seriously. Yeah, yeah. But opening eye has somehow wound up in a situation where they're so priced to perfection that even just admitting that there might be more competition is like a massive news cycle now.

1:31:18It's pretty remarkable. But the actual quote here is that Sam Altman warned of headwinds from resurgent Google. This, of course, is a story that we've all been tracking through. Gemini 3, which is very good. The quote, create some temporary economic headwinds for our company. Economic headwinds is pretty wild. Didn't have to say it. Put that part in. I wonder how that's going to manifest. Are people going to be unsubscribing from ChatGPT, going over to Gemini as an app, or are they going to, is this on the API side? The API side seems a little bit more easy to slide around from one to the other.

1:31:55It feels like OpenAI certainly caught up very quickly with Codex. They were behind for a while, and they caught up. But now Google's sort of out in front, although Anthropik's doing very well. It's all just like a variety of horse races. some of the revenue should be stickier than others. But when the goal is$100 billion in revenue so fast, with this series of competition, it is very, very difficult. He also said, Chad Chibut is AI to most people, and I expect that to continue. So brand is a powerful element, but not enough to eliminate all competitive threats. He added, I don't want this note to be a downer.

1:32:37We are doing remarkably well as a company, and I expect that to continue. Yes, yes. Let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. What is this story of the FBI raising a bounty for a former Olympic snowboarder who turned alleged drug kingpin? We love these stories. We covered this guy on the show before. Okay, his name's Ryan Wedding. Ryan James Wedding. He's married to the game. Is he? What does that mean? No, Ryan Wedding. Oh, Ryan Wedding. Okay, yes. He's married to the drug deal game, I suppose.

1:33:19He's a former Olympic snowboarder from Canada. He represented Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics in men's parallel giant slalom. Whoa. After the Olympics, it is alleged that he became a transnational drug trafficker and orchestrated the murders of various witnesses. Whoa. And he's only 44. Wow. He's kind of just kind of hitting his stride. He was added earlier this year, March 6th, to the FBI 10 Most Wanted. So he's in the top 10. Top 10. They have any idea where he is? I wonder how we'd hunt this guy down. And they're saying he's running one of the largest drug trafficking operation and is believed to be the dominant cocaine distributor in Canada.

1:34:06So from the Canadian Olympic team to the Canadian narcotics trafficking MVP status, Pam Bondi, the hard thing is when they talk about, because drug kingpins have just been the stars of so many different great television TV shows and movies, Pam Bondi said he's the modern day iteration of Pablo Escobar. Somebody was about to turn him in, but they hear that and they're like, oh, he's too cool to turn in. Can't do it. It's not worth it. I just got to be friends with this guy. I'm living through history. Oh, wow. So after the 2002 Winter Olympics, he moved back to Vancouver and attended university.

1:34:53He got into bodybuilding and started working as a bouncer. after two years in university, he dropped out and began to speculate in real estate, which he financed by growing marijuana in a massive warehouse. He eventually expanded his operation and joined up with Iranian and Russian smugglers. And in 2010, he was convicted of attempting to buy drugs from a U.S. government agent, and he went to prison for it. There are so many startups these days that are going after Palantir's market, competing in enterprise software, enterprise AI, forward deployed engineers. It's all a bunch of memes. Everyone's keying off of the Palantir strategy.

1:35:38I think if you're trying to play in that market, you've got to take down a most wanted fugitive. You get the$15 million. That's your seed round. And you use this as marketing. the company that finds this guy, I'm going to believe that your model's pretty good. Whatever you're doing, if you can find this guy, I'm going to be like, yeah, yeah, that's a good, that's enough of an eval for me. You pass the benchmarks. I don't care your MMLU. Tell me how many fugitives have you checked off the FBI top 10 most wanted list. That's what I want to see. Well, there's a documentary series in the making titled Snow King from Olympian to Narco.

1:36:18Okay. Yes. based on a rolling stone investigation. Okay. Jack Altman says, I heard the term forward deployed VC, meaning investor who's helping a company, and now I'm logging off for the rest of the year. What's funny is like there used to actually be forward deployed VCs. What's that Genentech story, right? Who was the VC in Genentech? It was, who was it? I don't remember. Robert Swanson, a venture capitalist, met with biochemist Herbert Boyer in 1976. I think it was either Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins. Bob Swanson, I believe, was at Kleiner Perkins. Okay. Is that right? There was one example of a VC who basically was in the office of the company every Friday and was basically just like their financial back office the entire time because the team was a bunch of scientists who understood the technology but did not really understand how to build the business, and the forward-deployed VC did really go in.

1:37:26That's a lost art because we are in the era of founder-friendly, let the engineer figure out everything, let them hire, kind of hands-off from the venture capital community. So I'm actually okay with the term forward-deployed VC if it's actually forward-deploying. You can't just be helpful. You need to be like actually in the office. We have a friend of the show who's like basically like probably doing like actually 20 hours a week for one of his portfolio companies and has been for years. I would give him the Ford deployed VC. But he would never call himself Ford deployed VC. Yeah, it would be a very bad matter.

1:38:06Matters. How about Ford deployed Privy? Because Privy helps you build on crypto rails. securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Peter Reinhart is in the news. This article might be a little bit too long, so we might tell you to go read it. But Peter Reinhart says, my lobbyists are very nervous about me posting this, but over-regulation is working against us. All the costs are astronomical to us, all but hidden. There's one excerpt that I'll read. Yes, this is the CEO of Charm Industrial, and he has been going viral with a new article about overregulation.

1:38:46And so he's giving an example. So as one example, one state agency asked Revoi to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoi doesn't increase emissions of semi-trucks and that Revoi must do the certification across every single truck engine family. It costs$100 ,000 per certification, and there are more than 270 engine families for the nine engines that our initial partners use. That's$27 million for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by 90%, and which is done so across nearly 100 ,000 miles of testing and operations, is not increasing the emissions of the truck.

1:39:32It is a complete waste of money for everyone. So the Revoi system attaches to the truck and adds as an extra battery pack. It's a way to retrofit a gas-powered truck to include an extra electric engine. There's something where I guess if your claim is that you're reducing emissions, I don't have that much of a problem of you trying to certify that you're not increasing emissions because that's the base level for your claim. like your marketing claim. You're claiming that you're reducing emissions. If you're increasing emissions, then you're doing the opposite of your claim. So there is something about whatever claim you're making, you should be able to back it up.

1:40:16But the main thing is that 27 million - Any type of system that requires you to spend$27 million just to get in the game. Yeah. When you're - You would think that there'd be a better way to understand the actual impact of this. I mean, there's so many maybe more efficient ways to deal with this, whether it's just like, okay, how widely deployed are these? If they're making$100 million a year, take the taxes, do some independent analysis, pay for it yourself, and then decide, okay. Also, the question in this case is, why does it cost$100 ,000 per certification? Is there like a monopoly in the certification market?

1:40:57Absolutely, it's the government. The government's the one that does the certification, but yeah. Well, oh, I thought it was an external partner. Maybe, maybe. But even then, it's hard to imagine that there's like$100 ,000 of services that goes into this. You should be able to cut that cost pretty dramatically. Before we move on, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. Casey Hanmer has a big post here. Should we run through some of this? Oh, you want to skip down to this one. Okay, here we go. Got another one-off cockroach.

1:41:35The private credit cockroaches have been scuttling around. This time, private lenders are swapping debt for equity in distressed 4840. I am logging into Bloomberg so that I can actually read the article. 4840. private credit lenders are poised to take control of pallet company 4840 solutions about a year after providing 1.75 billion dollars of debt to support summit partners acquisition of the business a group of lenders including antarious capital are said to take equity in 4840 under a proposed restructuring other lenders include kkr blackrock carlisle group the deal would shed $1 billion of liabilities from 4840's balance sheet.

1:42:26In cases where borrowers were struggling with their liabilities, private credit firms are more frequently swapping their debt positions for equity stakes to try and prevent losses. While swaps can produce upside, they also offer more unpredictable returns than direct loans. Pretty crazy to be set up to get a payment for the debt and then be like, yep, well, actually, we're just riding with you on the equity side. But it's happening more and more because it's better than the alternative of watching the company go out of business. And so this was originally, the cockroach phrase that this poster is riffing off of is, of course, from Jamie Dimon, who was identifying first brands as the cockroach and was saying, usually when you see one, there are more cockroaches.

1:43:11That was his whole point. And the Blue Owl CEO, co-CEO executive team kind of fired back and said like, Yeah, maybe at J.P. Morgan, we're good. And so they've been kind of duking it out, going back and forth. I had a fairly concerning conversation with a buddy who has a pretty scaled company in the consumer packaged goods manufacturing space. and he was saying that around a number of the people that he competes with in his category have have uh uh taken on so much uh debt from various private credit players over the last like five six years and a lot of that uh you know at least a number of them he thinks are just not going to make it uh out of the next two years without uh without a restructuring so we will see i'll let you read through this post from Will, and then I'll be right back.

1:44:13Will Manitis is on a generational run of long posts. He says, on becoming legible to capital, the most underrated factor in the success of firms is the degree to which they are legible to capital. Defining this precisely is hard, you know, when you see it. But an idea, a firm, or a person is legible to capital, which he spells with a capital C, when by dint of their existence, capital forms behind them in excess. Think of an idea being legible to capital as being magnetically charged to the capital markets. Dollars are just attracted to you. Allocators discuss it at cocktail parties. Funds market it at their AGMs.

1:44:55And Twitter discusses novel financing schemes to get more dollars behind the idea. Becoming legible to capital is the single greatest superpower for a fledgling firm. Look at Ramp. Look at Cognition. Look at Leopold. Look at Tony and Danny. These are all superhumans at being legible to capital. It's worth noticing how ideas and people become legible to capital. First, there's no divide between the CEO management and the idea. The story is not that of an individual successfully and impressive, that of an individual, individually successful and impressive individual bringing their talents to a new platform, you can see these kind of puff piece stories in many companies that are illegible to capital.

1:45:42The company is never about you. For a founder to be legible to capital, there can be no air between them and the expression of the idea. Their lives only matter insofar as they are building with intensity towards the pure form of the idea. Second, the company can be understood fundamentally as an equation slash trade. In the best case, the most legible companies grow as a super linear function of dollars in. The founders are highly verbal and can clearly articulate and understand the inputs to this growth equation, talent, capital, management, et cetera. The companies that are most legible to capital and the management that runs them at their best feel like clockwork toys in the hand because by looking at them, the levers of progress and output become immediately clear.

1:46:25They are immediate smack you in the face expressions of an idea that is both small enough that you can feel the thing click around in your hand, but cosmically large enough that the idea feels true in some sense beyond literal. When the trade is immensely clear, every capital provider across the stack can immediately understand their role today, but more importantly, their ability to scale to putting 10, 100, 1 ,000x, the number of dollars into the thing as it reaches maturity. Finally, a company becomes legible to capital when it is clear the entire firm, from capital to management to talent, is singing from the same song sheet.

1:46:58They are all living their lives in expression of the same exact idea. An idea I've stolen shamelessly from is from Phineas Barnes, Finn Barnes, who was over at First Round, now he's at the GP, is the chocolate cake problem. Many firms have great inputs, eggs, chocolate, flour, some beautiful icing, but management thinks they're cooking a souffle, investors think they're getting cupcakes, and talent thinks they're getting pound cake. The companies that are most legible to capital are obsessive about chasing the tolerances between competing ideas of the firm to zero. By becoming legible to capital, a firm not only can achieve singularity in the private capital markets, i.e.

1:47:38unlimited free capital forever, but more importantly, it can unify the secret that ignites it internally with the world outside. When that secret is shared, there is truly no limit. Jordy, what's your review? uh i think of this in the context of like when you think about el segundo specifically yes and watching companies become more legible to capital over time and the momentum that starts to build where early on at the seed stage there's just like excitement around an idea in a team and then you watch as these companies like basically bifurcate into sometimes you can have a incredibly talented founder that really stops accumulating capital because the sort of potential still remains unclear and they're not building that momentum.

1:48:27Yeah. Whereas another one that has the same quality of founder starts to build that legibility. Yeah. I think they're, yeah, Tyler. I saw there's something kind of interesting. We've been talking about this a little bit where I think Jordi basically said this thing where it's like maybe the role of the CEO is actually to separate like the valuation from like what it like kind of really should be. So it's almost like it's less legible, right? Where like if you're in a sector like quantum or something, and it's kind of very, actually, it's quite hard to understand what the fundamentals are. That's actually where you get like higher multiples.

1:49:00Interesting. So maybe that's like kind of against what Will's saying. I don't know. Yes. How does the meme stock craze fit into that? The meme stock craze is legible to a form of capital. It is legible to retail capital. It is legible in the sense that the retail stock trader, the meme stock trader, understands how the stock will move on the basis of press releases, on the basis of viral moments, CEO comments, enthusiasm. Like if you are in a meme stock army, the legibility is derived from the power of the community. The apes strong together. Well, how many apes are there and how strong are they?

1:49:53If you notice that your apes are growing. Robby says roaches strong together. Roaches strong together. As you grow your ape army and you get stronger and stronger, that's the nature of the legibility. When I think of the examples that he's using, I think of it almost more like just the checklist of questions about a business and the inputs and outputs with regard to the capital. But also, you know, once the TAM is so well established, there's no more questions about it. It's like, well, of course, this is a trillion dollar industry if things execute well. Well, of course, the team is the best one in the market.

1:50:37We've tested every other team. We've tested this idea and we've seen we have full coverage of the team. There's no incumbent that's coming behind them. We know we have the leading team and we know the market's huge. And then also, are we sure that the gross margins are great forever? Are we sure that this is monopolistic or not super competitive? Are we sure that Google won't copy this and successfully compete in that space? So just getting super high confidence about whatever framework you want to use, whether it's all the questions in zero to one or five forces or whatever business, whatever, whatever spreadsheet or slide deck you want to see at your firm when you're making an investment.

1:51:19Once you've checked that off with a company, it's so many times that everyone's like, yes, this is the winner. They're pulling away. They're doing great. They're a compounder. The legibility capital thing is important because you don't have earnings. You don't, you're not in the public markets yet and so you need to become this like foregone conclusion and then run from 1 billion to 50 billion in the private markets and if you're if you're illegible and there's still this question about oh well like when are you shipping or what are you doing like how does this how do i put my money in and get my money out um that and it's more of like a moonshot it gets a lot harder to just stack up even at the early stages it's still underappreciated that people say, like, I have zero faith in this idea, but I'll still back the founder just because they're great.

1:52:10There is one way to become more legible to capital. Go to getbezel.com. Shop over 26 ,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Get a hitter. Put it on your wrist when you walk into that asset management firm. They're going to whip out their checkbook. You know it's going to work. You know it's a secret hack. should we bring in our first guest of the show we have Julia Steinberg a legend welcome to the show from Arena Magazine she's back thank you so much for stopping by thanks so much for coming down it's nice to see that the studio is real and it's not AI generated it is real, it is real, we are here in Hollywood bringing media back to Hollywood we appreciate you are you the only ones left?

1:53:00We really are. We're in a huge complex. And to our knowledge, not a single other firm actually shows up every day. I do have, there is one benefit. There are many benefits to being in Hollywood. One is that it's in between where Jordy and I live. So it splits the commute. The other benefit is that I think it should dramatically increase our chances of winning a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. because if it is a lifetime achievement award, you're truly in incredibly rarefied air. You know, Frank Sinatra is there. Leonardo DiCaprio is a star. You truly have to be at the pinnacle of your craft.

1:53:40But if there is some bonus point for actually being in Hollywood, I think we get, yeah, it increases our chances dramatically. Lifetime achievement award of animal analogies applied to artificial intelligence. Yeah, yeah. I wonder if they'll just start putting influencers on there. Like, where is Alex Earle? Why is she not on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? Because that's what Hollywood is at this point. Portnoy made the most people angry of anyone ever. Yeah, Portnoy is, I mean, as you walk down the Hollywood Walk of Fame, like, yes, there are some absolute legends, but there are some other folks who are, you know, more mid-tier.

1:54:19Yeah, I would say mid. And so I would put influencers there. The weird thing is that the influencers aren't in Hollywood. So the question is like, does the Hollywood Walk of Fame just wind up reflecting what's happening in - Is it geofence? Are the stars geofence? Like when does Mr. Beast become eligible? Because he's in North Carolina. Well, when are they going to do a Saudi Arabia? Oh, yes. Hollywood Walk of Fame. That's what I'm looking for. Don't give them the idea. They will definitely do one over there. They should hire me. I'm open. I bet Hollywood as a, is Hollywood a city? I don't know.

1:54:50I don't think it's an independent city. I think Hollywood, is. I think Hollywood, there's obviously folks here that want to raise money. They should franchise the name. They should sell the rights to the name Hollywood and put a Hollywood in. Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia should just recreate every city in the world in the desert and then use it to incentivize movies to get made there. Bring culture to the desert. That's what L.A. did. Yeah, yeah. No, we've been to New York on the Fox lot here in LA. They have basically a mini New York. Full representation of New York. You can go film whatever you want there.

1:55:28Anyway, give us an update. Since you've been on the show a few months ago, what's latest in your world? You're full-time at Arena Magazine, correct? I am full-time at Arena Magazine. We're getting ready to launch our upcoming issue, 006, an ode to capitalism. And that's all I can say. More will be out next week. So keep your timelines open. I remember I was talking with Max. I was like, oh, it's like Thanksgiving week. Is that a good week to launch? Will more people be online or will fewer people be online because they'll be with their families? And we had this whole debate about how online people were going to be during Thanksgiving week.

1:56:02And the answer that we came down to is actually people are going to be more online during Thanksgiving week. I think so. They don't want to be responsible for getting the turkey in or out of the oven. They don't want to argue with their family about Epstein files or whatever. Yeah, I wonder what the online behavior is because over Christmas, we noticed that that's when that really crazy H-1B dust-up happened. Well, I'm Jewish. I don't celebrate Christmas. So I had plans. I had to go get Chinese food. I had to go to the movies. And I was just totally offline. And all my Christian friends or my friends who celebrate Christmas, they're hyper aware of the H-1B discourse.

1:56:41They could recite. It was very odd timing because a lot of the tech podcasts were off for the holidays and didn't need to comment on it, even though it was this like hot political issue that you would have expected most tech podcasts to touch on. But then by the time everyone got back from New Year's, like the whole the whole like, you know, dust up had sort of moved on. So maybe that's good because the H1B issue is just you shouldn't touch it. It's too controversial if you want to be monetized still. like yes so maybe that was some like very clever like jewish marketing gimmick by putting the h1b discourse on christmas so only the jews could participate maybe i know i know i so i do think everyone participates in in the timeline over holidays i think it's uh but but maybe it's more phone time less computer time like people are milling about they're stepping away from the turkey but they're not necessarily sitting down and writing more good screen less bad screen Wait, which one's the good screen?

1:57:36I feel like I... That's the joke. It's like I close my bad screen. The bad screen is the computer? Yeah, yeah. Oh, I have a new... I think my good screen is the computer. My bad screen is my phone. I would agree with this. On my phone, actually, I have... I mean, you guys are not working an office job that you hate. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. So... Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I think there will be people milling about reading posts, but they won't have time to sit down and really... We were debating this over the stream. Like, will anyone have time to watch like a three-hour stream? on Thanksgiving. Of course, we're taking Thanksgiving off.

1:58:08But not Black Friday. But we are going to be loving Black Friday. Well, that's the most important day of capitalism. We're going to be open for business. We're going to be celebrating commerce. Tell me what deals. Tell me what to buy on Amazon. Yeah, we will. We have some good people lined up. So yeah, what did you write about last magazine? And did the California Forever piece line up with it's going to publish in the next magazine? Yeah, so in the last magazine, I did the review of Dan Wong's Breakneck. That's right. We talked to him too a little bit. What was your takeaway? I think I really liked Dan.

1:58:39I think he's a really smart guy. I've hung out with him a few times. He gave me a huge stack of the London Review of Books. And he's like, this is just like the greatest thing ever. So it was nice bonding over print media with him. That's great. I do think that it's just like, I'm very skeptical that the United States government should get involved in these huge infrastructure projects in its current state. Like I like the idea of engineering, but what makes American engineering so spectacular and so amazing is that we do it in the private market. It's distributed. It's distributed. And if we just said, okay, we're, the United States government is going to do this huge engineering project.

1:59:12It's like, do we, do we trust the United States government to do this huge engineering project? I like, I drove down to LA yesterday from San Francisco and it's like half the roads were terrible. And it's like, you know what? I sort of wish this whole thing was a toll road. Yeah. I'm maybe, I'm not like that, like diehard libertarian where I'm like government shouldn't do roads. At least not yet. Give me like five years. I joke that the G-Wagon is so popular in L.A. because you actually need a four by four to get around some of the crazy. Well, yeah. Well, it was raining like crazy yesterday on the freeway and I was driving down.

1:59:44I was like, thank God that my beautiful, beautiful RAV4 has four wheel drive or else I would die because these roads are terrible. And no one knows how to drive in the rain. Yeah. I was I was reflecting on that. there are so many interesting anecdotes about like, is the government equipped to take on the project that you are interested in? Whatever your pet project is, whether it's healthcare or space exploration or whatever you want. And yeah, I keep, I keep coming back to this part of like, like step one in any of that is like fix the productivity problem in government projects. Yeah. I think the, for the, for the next issue of arena zero zero six, that's coming out December 1st, I wrote about California Forever, which is the project to build a new city in Solana County, which is about an hour northeast of San Francisco.

2:00:33And it's sort of like an interesting concept to me because it's like, oh, it's this privately funded city, you know, all of the, like, the who's who of Silicon Valley, Laureen Powell Jobs, the Collison Brothers, Reed Hoffman, Matt Friedman, Mark Idris, and all these people put money into this. It's a privately funded city. But so much of the struggle with getting California Forever off the ground is just because of government. And I remember I was fact-checking the essay and I was communicating with Julia Blystone, who's the California Forever head of comms. And I said like, okay, well, the next step is there's this like 1 ,200 page environmental review.

2:01:09And she's like, no, it's actually 12 ,000 pages. I don't think I've read 12 ,000 pages in my life. I don't think anyone in this room has read 12 ,000. And I read a lot. Maybe I have in my life, but not at once and definitely not environmental review report. Yeah, especially a report that somebody is just going to drag into ChatGPT and say, turn this into five bullet points, please. Turn this into one image. My favorite memory from college, actually, is this is actually when Peter Thiel was co-teaching a class in my sophomore year, German 266. And it's a class with, like, you know, 60 people. You have to fill out a form to get in.

2:01:45It's supposed to be, like, you know, a good class. And it is a very good class. It's a fascinating topic. but my favorite or one of my favorite memories in the class is the kid next to me who had this startup that was worth like that millions if not tens of millions of dollars put in chat gpt summarize hegel in three bullet points one shot it yes don't make mistakes that would be yeah that's well maybe maybe i mean Stanford whiz kid is startups only worth a couple million bucks maybe he's actually not that not that elite. Yeah, what is the mood in the Stanford alumni world right now? There was this question, I was sending you this post from Delia and this question about like, the age-old question of like, is this next generation cooked?

2:02:33Is AI actually turning off folks' brains to the point where they can't sit down and read Hegel all the way through, that everyone is doing this? Is this a systemic problem? Or is this, you know, just cantankerous old millennials shaking their fist at the younger generation? Well, I will say this. At Stanford, there's a thing called co-terming. It's like a fifth year of master's. You apply. Most of the time people get in and you just sort of stick around for another year, finish up a master's, and you get two degrees at the end in five years. Apparently a third of my class, the class of 2025, co-termed or is co-terming right now.

2:03:07A third. A third. 33%. Yeah, we've seen this a lot. we saw some data that more people are applying to law school. Oh yeah. The law school thing is terrible. I have a few funds who are studying for the LSAT right now and I'm like hitting them in the head with their huge LSAT books. Is that because you think it won't be a, it won't be a career path? There aren't going to be associates. Maybe they're going to be like five associates, but there aren't going to be 50 associates because AI is better. It's interesting because if you genuinely are excited about devoting your life to understanding and finessing the legal system, it's probably as good of a time as ever because you're going to be able to learn a lot faster.

2:03:45You're going to be able to be more productive. Like if you're super high agency, you'll find the right firm and attach your career to that and probably be able to have a wonderful career. But deciding to do law school because you don't know what you want to do and you're trying to buy time and you want to do something that's sort of like high, like on the, on a high status track, uh, and hopefully high earning without, without being necessarily high agency just feels like a train wreck, uh, an inevitable train wreck. Well, how it seems to me, my dad actually, he just retired from a legal career and he was the first person to say like, yeah, all the associates are sort of screwed because they're like, they just can't out, can't outcompete the AI and law, especially how it's structured because there needs to be like a partner on the case as per like this weird agreement that was reached, I think, in the early 2000s, associates can't really be on cases anymore.

2:04:38So there's even less of a need for associates. And this is going to be true in all fields. And I think obviously there are like these in law specifically, there are these, you know, 100, 200 year old firms that really care about legacy. They care about reputation. So they're like, OK, we need to have like some young people to carry the firm on. But it's just a question of like, how are those people going to learn anything? if ChatGPT is just doing all their work or Harvey or anything like that. I think if you're the top 5 % of law students, you're probably going to be fine. We're still going to have judges.

2:05:13Judges are one thing that I'm like, maybe AI should just replace judges. We have a lot of bad judges. That's a crazy idea. Before, of the courtroom, the thing to replace, you would think would be the stenographer. We have dictation. and yet, or I don't know, I use Autor AI all the time it's not that great we can get into the bear thesis for AI in a minute but the illustrator, what are they called? courtroom illustrator we have cameras why don't we just take a picture? the downside of if you actually use Nano Banana or any other image model it would not it would just be good enough to not produce a funny result and I feel like there's so much humor No, it has to be like Studio Ghibli, like murderer or murderer, like defendant.

2:06:02No, no, that would work. But I'm saying like sometimes the illustrators like botch an illustration so badly that it's funny. Like SDF or something. Yeah. That's what you're thinking about. Yeah. Yeah. I was shocked by how resilient that job was to automation since we do have the camera. And we've had the camera for 100 years almost. And it's stuck around as a real. I think I don't like a lot of court or a lot of law is like ritual. Like I think in the UK, the judges still have like the weird head things that they need to wear, the wigs or even like the judges robes. My dad, like he had to wear a tie.

2:06:36This will be around for a really long time. Even if the AI can do so much, it just we will do it out of procedure. We will have these conversations with humans for whatever reason. I don't know. Yeah, procedure is very inelastic. And also, I think just, you know, lawyers, it's a very easy, like, cast of person to demonize. And I think just as, you know, McKinsey will stick around so they can say, oh, sorry about the layoffs. McKinsey made us do it. It's going to be the same with the evil lawyers. Yeah, sure. Yeah, you want the buck to stop with someone and not necessarily an AI. No. Not necessarily.

2:07:08Because if you say, oh, sorry, the AI said this. Well, they'll say, like, well, you used Grok instead of ChatGPT. Can you ask ChatGPT? Because that's my preferred AI model. If it's just McKinsey. Yeah. Yeah. What's the, I feel like there's still probably some alpha in becoming a lawyer, going down the legal path in 2025. If you are basically setting yourself up not to just be associate fodder for high margin billing, but in fact, you are setting yourself up to gain control over an institution that would be harder to build independently. Well, I think with young people, especially law, it's because you have, you know, you make like good money in your late 20s and 30s, but you start to make really good money in your 50s and 60s.

2:07:59And I think for. Sort of like an MLM. Yeah, a little bit. But it's also for people my age who it's like, oh, I could either like work really hard for like 30 years. And maybe if I make partner and I'm one of the really good partners, I can make like a good amount of money. it's like why do that when it's like oh if i learn how to code and after like 10 years i can make this much money four years with vesting yeah with vesting all you need is the four years yes at the right hot company at the right time yeah so it's it's interesting to me because i feel like with the gen z financial incentives it's so oriented around like make money now yeah uh or even like the oh you have x amount of years to make money before agi hits the economy is permanent underclass.

2:08:42I'm still waiting for the gambling on your student loan debt, the double your debt or pay nothing. I've become very skeptical of the permanency of the underclass phenomenon. I feel like there will be the strength of the underclass is growing in number, but the permanency is decreasing because at any moment someone can be plucked from the underclass into the global elite through just one right like parlay or one right actually like building a company joining a thing like distribution on the internet is so so aggressive that you can be languishing in the underclass and then go viral and launch a d2c line and if you just have like a few things go your way you become like the the market just gives you 10 million dollars basically yeah i think it's It's random, too.

2:09:34It's random, yes. Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's like you were on that plane, and you screamed at that person, and then you went viral, and you became a sensation. And then you started a podcast, a meme coin. Exactly. Yeah. Don't give people ideas. I think it usually goes the other way. Screaming at people on. Like the Hawk Tua girl, for example. I don't exactly know how it all played out for her, but Hayley Welch. Well, she was stupid with it. Yeah. I think she launched a coin, and it did not execute well. But that type of opportunity is entirely random. And every once in a while, the market just comes around.

2:10:06It does not feel permanent to be in the underclass. So when I start yelling, so on Wednesday, when I fly to see my family for Thanksgiving, when I start like really aggressively yelling at people on the plane, you know, it's time to buy Julia coin. Yes, yes, yes. You got to get in early on that. Yeah. For sure. You got to get in early before I have my like tantrum on the plane. Yeah, yeah. What else is, has anything updated? you on the get your bag culture are people now self-aware of it uh we were talking to jessica livingston and she was referring to the concept being actually not very new she was saying uh carpetbaggers yeah well yeah that was like a term for the civil war and it was like anti-northerner it's like these people are just exploiting business opportunities which i don't know it's like i i don't like the term like exploitative business opportunities like i think we have enough regulations that it's like our like how true is that in the united states at least But I don't know.

2:10:56Something I've been thinking a lot about is, so we're in L.A. right now. I went to high school a few miles from here. And I think a very core memory for me was the College of Mission Scandal. Core memory. Shout out Ashley Vance. Yes. The College of Mission Scandal, Horsese Blues. Yes. I was a junior in high school when this happened. Okay, so you experienced it. Oh, wow. So my school, actually, the whistleblower's daughter was a senior. And she was going to go to Yale for soccer. And we're all like, oh, it's sort of weird that this girl, I'm going to call her Susie. Sure. Susie is going to go to Yale for soccer, but she's not on the soccer team at her school.

2:11:28And there's not really evidence that she plays soccer. But she's going to go to play soccer at Yale. One of the most elite teams in women's soccer. Sure. I don't know anything about soccer. But this girl was going to go to Yale. And, you know, my high school was very, like, elite. Everyone was concerned with if they got into Yale or not. So it was all sort of like, oh, like, this is important. Like, everyone flagged that Susie's going to Yale. But we all sort of knew that she didn't play soccer. Yep. And I remember my high school was very small and, you know, it was a college prep school. And the day before the news came out, I had a meeting with the head of school to talk about, like, where I should apply to college, what my SAT scores was, blah, blah, blah, privilege, blah, blah, I acknowledge that I had a very elite upbringing.

2:12:09But I remember the principal was late and this never happened. There seemed to be something very wrong. And I was like, I don't know what's happening. And she was late to the meeting and it was fine. And I was told that my SAT scores were fine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The next day, first period, I have a moral philosophy class. I'm the only junior in the class. It's all seniors. I petitioned to say I can take the selective. And we're talking about meritocracy and whether meritocracy is real. Yes, in the class. We have a reading about meritocracy. Is it meritocracy just? Is it something that we should optimize for?

2:12:41Is it something that's unjust because, you know, intelligence is heritable, so it's not earned, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. and we get to the class and, you know, at 7 a.m. that morning or whenever we all woke up, we all saw that this girl's dad was, you know, he was arrested for securities fraud and part of his plea deal was that he was giving up this college admissions scandal where this guy, this college admissions coach, was telling people to put that there were black on their college apps, that they were faking associations with various sports teams at all these elite schools. So we go in and it's like, okay, like, we're talking about meritocracy.

2:13:16What about Susie? What about the college admissions scandal? Because we're all sort of fed up with the whole college admissions process. It's a dog and pony show. My little brother's going through it right now. And I'm like, why are they asking you what three words you are? What could this possibly have to do with how good of a student you will be or anything like this? But I remember going through the college admissions scandal firsthand, just seeing like how corrupt it is. But also in a way, it was sort of like an equalizing form of corruptness. Because like if your family can donate$50 million to Harvard, you will get it.

2:13:46Like you have to be like really, really, really, really bad to not get in if your family donates 50 million. But if your family doesn't have 50 million to donate to Harvard, what if they only have 500 ,000? Well, then you have to make 50 million before you apply. Or you can use a$5 ,000 to buy your spot on the sports team. Oh, yeah. It was only five grand? 500. Oh, 500. But that's a lot less than 50 million. Yeah, yeah. So it's sort of more equalized. So it wasn't like the like 0.1%, but it's still like 1%. Sure, sure, sure. Corruption. So I think that experience... Isn't there a pro-libertarian hot take that says, like, you should just auction off every slot?

2:14:20I've said this before. Like, I, well, my sort of take on this is that college admissions office should just be sold to the highest bidder. Yeah. It would be a lot more honest than what's done now. Because right now it's, they sort of, they give you the spiel about, like, oh, we need to have a super diverse class where we have one cellist and one person who's really good at, like, studying molecular bio and, like... And a sailor. Yeah. You have to have a sailor. A Michael Saylor. We actually don't have enough sailors. They're doing walk-ons in the sailing team at Stanford. My best friend in undergrad did that.

2:14:50But yeah, I think we should just auction off the college admissions office. We don't have enough sailors in this country anymore. We don't have enough sailors in this country. That's so bearish. Yeah. We've got to get back into sailing. That's hilarious. But yeah, I think this is actually something I was talking about with my boyfriend. It's like how much would it cost if you just auctioned off a spot? Maybe if you only auctioned off 10. If you limited that to 10. I would think you would auction off literally every slot, all of them. Like, what is the market-clearing price? Because, you know, in the luxury watch world, like, there will be a certain number of – I mean, this happens with, like, the market – what is the market-clearing price for Taylor Swift tickets?

2:15:26But, like, you know, there are – if Porsche comes out with a new GT3 RS, there might be, you know, 5 ,000 made, and they will try to find the market-clearing price as close as possible to what the market will bear. Sometimes they overprice them. They don't sell them all. Sometimes they underprice them and they immediately trade up on the secondary market. But you could even have a secondary market that, you know, okay, yes, I bought my slot at Harvard for$2 million, but they're going to$3 million now, so I'm going to sell that, go to NYU instead. You could have an entire process just to maximize the price.

2:16:00I just don't know. It's like if that happens, what percent of the Stanford class would be international, which is a good question. It would be hugely international, of course. I mean, it would be across the entire world. and everyone would just pay to go. And I mean, there's already a little bit of that, but it's definitely like there's more design to the system than that. There's certainly, I would imagine - How do you defend that against, you know, just eliminating an entire track for young people that maybe have negative capital within their family systems. And even if you tell them, even if you tell the family at birth, like, you know, expect to be able to purchase, you know, if you want to go to, if you want your child to go to Sanford or the auction range at that point, counting in inflation will probably be, you know, 70 to 80 million to get into the school.

2:16:49And then it ultimately actually destroys, would naturally just destroy, I think some of the, would certainly be valuable for students from elite families to network with other students from elite families. but ultimately would kill a lot of what makes universities great. Yes, I agree that it would kill a lot of that, but probably what would happen is now you have a lot of scholarships. When you apply for college, the Coca-Cola scholarship is a very big one. A lot of these are sort of mostly full rides to college, like the very prestigious scholarships. And so probably what will happen is that instead of having these scholarships to college, it's like, okay, young people of America whose family can't afford the like$50 million sticker price of college admission, apply and we will give you the$50 million to pay your way for this price.

2:17:42But yeah, it's obviously a very flawed system, but it's interesting. It's an interesting like mental model about how much we value college admission, especially because, you know, at a place like Stanford, there are like what, like 1 ,700 to 2 ,000 graduates a year. Not all of them do fascinating things. Yeah. What city are you living in these days? I live in San Francisco What is the mood in San Francisco? Do you think it's getting better? I've only lived there since August So I can't really say There was this narrative in the mansion section today About it cleaning up its act Okay, I have a fun story There's more demand for West Portal Village Center I've never heard of that area I don't know what that is It is now more expensive to live there than in Pack Heights, apparently.

2:18:31$2.5 million median list price. There's also the story about the open AI secondaries driving up real estate prices. But it's always interesting to feel what's actually happening on the ground. So I live in Pack Heights. I live in lower Pack Heights. And a few weeks ago, there was a homeless guy who just really passed out on my doorstep. It was a Saturday morning. I woke up late. It was like 9 or 10. I checked my phone in our apartment WhatsApp. It's like, hello, there is an unhoused person on our doorstep. Please don't disturb him. And then in this group chat, we had this huge debate over whether we should call the cops.

2:19:06And the conclusion is just the cops won't come. You can't really do anything about it. He seems nonviolent. Maybe we should wait for him to leave. So I left my apartment at like, you know, 1030. I was back at three and he was gone. But it's still like a weird thing to account for. You sort of want to call an ambulance for someone who is sick. Well, you just want to call someone. Yeah. And have, in my building, you know, there are probably like 30 people who live in the building. Yeah. So it's like someone could have called someone or maybe if all 30 of us tried. But it was very disconcerting because it's one of those things where it's like, oh, everything's better.

2:19:42Everything's fixed. Was everything noticeably cleaner during Salesforce this year? Salesforce's conference? Because a few years ago, Benioff, like, just completely cleaned up the entire city. And then the other time that they cleaned up the city was when Sieg and Ping was visiting. Yes, when Sieg and Ping – I was in SF that week, and it felt like it was a different place. Really? Mm-hmm. That's funny. I think SF generally or urbanism generally, it's just – it's so hard to justify living in one of these places, I think, for most people. I agree, but it's almost the flip side where it's so easy to justify living in a suburb because, yes, you're in the city, and it feels like, oh, this is like – like, we've got to clean this place up.

2:20:21We've got to clean this place up. But then you sort of work on that. And then you also work on your life and your company and your business and whatever. And then as soon as you have money and a family, it's just so easy to go to a suburb. And there's so many fantastic suburbs. And that's always, it was always the thing that annoyed me about the discourse of like San Francisco has fallen or San Francisco is such a bad place to live. It's like, well, people live in Palo Alto. They live in Atherton. They live in, you know, up north in wine country. They live in Incline Village. They live all over the place and they live in these wonderful, luxurious places that have no crime, no homelessness.

2:20:53Like they have like fantastically managed cities, just a commute distance from San Francisco. Yeah. I think San Francisco, it's always sort of been like a young person city. When I lived there, it was super rough, but I was like, I'm young. That's fine. Yeah. I saw a guy on Twitter who's going to give me a taser. So thank you. But I think. Weapons on the internet. Yeah. Giving away weapons on the internet. You can buy a taser on Amazon. It'll show up this afternoon. But it's like a taser gun, so I think it'll be easier to use. I was going to buy a taser. Yeah, there's a legal thing. You can also just buy those.

2:21:26Yeah. But someone's going to give you a free one. Yeah, someone's going to give you a free one. So SF is sort of, it's, you know, the duality of San Francisco is it's great because some random stranger on the internet will give me a free taser gun, but the sort of negative part is that I need this taser gun to stay safe. Yeah. It's always been so fascinating. I mean, I wonder if the open AI wealth will meaningfully change the budget of the city. It's just so much. And it's actually, the company's actually in San Francisco. It's not a Mountain View company. It's not a Palo Alto company. It's not a Menlo Park company.

2:22:00It is a San Francisco company. And you have$500 billion of wealth loosely with tens of billions in the pockets of employees right there. like that should wind up doing something even if it's just some renovation some private security how good are open AI employees at spending money? I don't know how would they spend it? how would you recommend I have a friend who works at open AI and you're just like you know I don't really know how to spend my money and I was just like do you want like I can yacht? yeah yacht I don't know there is a marina in San Francisco there is yeah it's beautiful I like to go over and walk around there and there are these like cool boats and yachts it doesn't need to be like a super ostentatious one, but I don't know.

2:22:41I think yacht is secondary to cleaning up the streets, you know? Yes, but even buying a yacht would help clean up the streets because it is some simulation of the city's economy. Okay. I don't know. I suppose, yeah. Speaking of boats, it's like waters, high tides, rise all boats. Sure, sure, sure, yeah. So I don't know. I guess it's sort of silly to say, like, raise the economic output of San Francisco because it's one of the most economically intensive regions in the country. But I do very strongly believe that if you let market forces do their thing, things will get better. Well, thank you so much for stopping by the Ultradome.

2:23:18This was fantastic. Yes, thank you for having me. Always great to get the update. Excited for 006. 006. Yeah, and 007 is next after that. Very exciting. Amazing. Where can people get it? People can... Arenamag.com? Arenamag.com. Okay. And at Barnes & Noble's near you. Yes, there's a Barnes & Noble. No way. It will deal now. Yes. There we go. IRL. So if you want to buy any romanticy books, which I think is the new genre. Yeah, there's romantic fantasy? Yes. Okay. That's the new genre that women are supposed to like. That's not my type. I will stick to you. You have to get on that. Well, thank you so much for popping up.

2:23:51Thank you. Great to see you. This is good. Great to see you. Cheers. Let me tell you about 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper. Wake up energized. energized. We have our next guest joining right now. We have Bobby Bruchel from Dupe. This is a very fun company. What's happening? Welcome to the show. What's up? Thank you. We made it, guys. We made it. We made it, finally. Great, great setup here you got. You're just daily driving that for Zoom. That's it. Yeah, I mean, it's comfortable. It's cozy. Introduce the company. I remember when you launched, I remember seeing a whole bunch of posts go viral.

2:24:33But how are you describing the company today? Yeah, so Dupe is used by millions of people to find the products that they want or similar products for less. It's a search engine. It's a generative marketplace. I could throw a whole bunch of buzzwords. It's AI-driven, this and that. But ultimately, it's a shopping companion. It's a shopping app that helps give people a confidence pill, a little bit of a boost to know that what they're buying is at the best price and is the right product. Agentic Commerce, OpenAI is talking a big game about it. Is that a headwind for you? Yeah. You know, it's first of all, nothing's set in stone yet.

2:25:17Don't count us out. We're also talking to them. Sure. we're building an app that would be native to ChatGPT. The thing I like to say about ChatGPT, Google, all these tools, is that they can do everything, and that is the problem. It's like if you're a chef, you can use a Swiss Army knife to cut a tomato, but why would you? I think verticalized AI tools are very powerful because they are single purpose, and they solve a problem in a more precise way. It's odd. I have no doubt that there's people out there that are making tens of millions of dollars on Studio Ghibli apps, right? Or different animation apps, different sub apps that maybe could be done in ChatGPT if you know the right prompt, but because it's lower tier on the prompt ladder, you kind of got to know to go there to get it.

2:26:16it's not coaching you through it. It's not actually giving you all the different harnesses and wrapping that you need to actually do it. How hard has it been to actually build the product experience? Because I'm assuming you're effectively browsing the web on behalf of, if I upload a product or I paste in a link and then you guys are browsing the web or you already you have and you're sorting products to find products that look the same or maybe from a different manufacturer or the same end manufacturer or different brand. But how hard has that product experience been? Because I've been continuously disappointed by computer use and just web browsing from a lot of different LLMs at this point.

2:27:02When you say computer use, you're talking about things like the browsers doing the browsing on your behalf, basically. Yeah. Yeah, go out and find this thing. The example that he gives is - I use it for cars. That's my - Find me a GT3 RS. It's a rarer car. It's a specific trim. What a great car. It's a great car. Classic. But it's not like, find me someone who sells Diet Coke. Like, Diet Coke is a commodity. It's sold everywhere. A GT3 RS, there might not be one for sale right now. Like, it's possible that there's just none for sale. And so - Well, yeah. GT3 RS is quite a bit more common. But there are certain cars you look for and it'll say, I found you this one.

2:27:40And it's like it sold two years ago. And so on that eval of like go hunt around on the internet, find this particular thing that's not particularly fungible, not particularly commoditized. At least agent mode, these agentic commerce products have not been up to Geordi's standards at least. I take it you haven't bought the GT3 RS yet. Not yet. Not yet. And the only reason is just the AI is not good enough. Yeah, of course. Of course. That's the only reason. Come on, guys. So first of all, I think it's, I too have been fairly disappointed with these browsers that browse on your behalf. That is ultimately not what we're trying to do with dupe.

2:28:24AI has some flaws in the shopping universe, and maybe that it speaks to some of the pain points you're finding with finding your perfect car, which is they don't have live inventory. They don't have live price. They don't have product catalogs. They don't have customer preferences. They don't have customer behavior. There's a lot of data that is missing in the shopping journey. So ultimately what you're left with is the best guess. So to answer your question, how hard has it been? It's hard because the way you do it, the way you do it right is you got to do it the old school way. All right. In the shopping world, you got to go press palms, kiss babies, hug people, take them out to a drink, meet them at conferences.

2:29:04You've got to know their names. You've got to know their kids' names. It's like a lot of trust building in person. It's not as simple as just kind of plugging it in. Because when you build that trust, they then trust you with their product catalogs. And they give you a commission for sales because you turn out to be a partner that drives a lot of sales for them. So it has been pretty hard. But the tech that we have is product ingestion from these partnerships but also live scraping. So in a sense, it is browsing, and it's scraping this data for you. We have vectorized millions of products or tens of millions of products at this point.

2:29:38So we can do kind of a live assessment of what products look like each other, what products should go together, stuff like this. Ultimately, the way to solve it, you can't – AI is not sort of a panacea. You have to pick your battles. So Dupe, for example, for the last year and a half has been focused solely on furniture. Why furniture? Well, it turns out, unlike the GT3 RS, a lot of furniture is made in the same few factories, sold back to brands under different names. The brands then upload them to their website under different names, different prices. But it's the same furniture. And I know this because I got scammed with buying furniture online.

2:30:16And it really pissed me off because I found the same product I wanted for about 40 % less. The exact same. Same spec. Same color. Everything. Exactly the same. And so that ultimately is like the lore of what spawned dupe. And I've seen these factories in person. I've visited China. How do you think about incorporating human feedback? That feels like something that would be a really valuable resource. I was thinking about like on Instagram, you see a lot of ads for a bunch of different stuff. Some of the stuff is like it really grabs your attention. People just buy it. But then it's really low quality.

2:30:50And if you could actually have some sort of, you know, okay, feedback. hey, we shipped you this dupe, this product. We think we got you the lowest price, but tell us how the product actually performed because that better informs our decision-making. Do you think that'll be a compounding advantage? Do you think that's valuable over the long term? It's so valuable. And we don't even need to ask the customer. First of all, we have access to all these reviews. We also have access to the checkout data and we have access to the return data Because if someone returns something, we don't get paid. So these brands pay us four months after the sales happens, three months after the sales happen, after that return window is set.

2:31:33So we know which products get returned the most. So absolutely, that's a compounding effect. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Jordy? You get a lot of hate mail from certain brands that kind of realize. Like you're providing a service that consumers love, and then certain brands out there that are sourcing products and setting whatever price they feel like is relevant. And then you're actually in some cases. You're blowing up my spot. I had 99 % margin on this couch. Yeah, we basically killed dropshippers for sure. The dropshipping industry is a total scam, and they hate us. But ultimately, our brands, our partners love us.

2:32:13We drive millions of dollars in sales for them every single month. And so why is that? Well, let's say, like, let's take a partner like Walmart. So some people think Walmart has thousands of products. They don't. They have millions of products, right? Millions of products. They're not always in store because a lot of those products are drop ship. So what we do is, you know, let's say you guys are looking for, we'll take a piece of furniture, for example, that chair right there. I mean, that's not being sold at Walmart, but let's say you want something like that. and you upload an image to dupe or you tell dupe like, hey, that's a Herman Miller.

2:32:47Find me something like that for less. Walmart has 15 versions of that chair. You don't know that. You would probably never even think to look at Walmart for that chair. But Walmart has a great version of that chair. And they love us because we merchandise their products at that exact high intent moment where the customer knows what they want. They just want a great deal on it. we surfaced the partners up. Now, there are some brands, for example, we were sued last year. Yeah, we were sued. I'm not going to name the brand. It's very easy to find. They are the largest furniture brand. Now, the lawsuit essentially, it tried to kill our company.

2:33:26It was a pretty tough lawsuit that we had to fight. We settled it to both parties' content. Like it's fine now. But what was the, what was the claim? The, there are a couple of claims. So copyright infringement, they were pissed that we were using or letting our customers use images from their website to find similar products. They were, they were pissed that like they were part of, we went super viral when we came out. I did all of these like post post-it note ad campaigns and stuff that went super. They were pissed that they were in some of those, some of those social kind of TikTok videos. They weren't even ads.

2:34:03There was literally just social content talking about our website. They were really, really upset about that. And ultimately, they were pissed that we were unfairly competing, essentially. I obviously, you know, we have a public statement on how we felt about all of these claims. And so they basically said we were falsely advertising, you know, that they were white labeling stuff, that we were unfairly competing and also infringing on their copyright. So ultimately, cold water under the bridge. We're here. Dupe is alive. It's well. It's working exactly as we want it to. And it's crushing. And so there are some of those partners.

2:34:43But those are very few and far between. And it tends to be almost the monopoly-type partners that are upset. Everyone else, everyone else, and most of the Fortune 500 that we work with, they are thrilled that Dupe exists. That makes sense. How did you get the domain? It's absolutely fire. So the company was called Carrot before it was called Dupe. We had three months of runway before we pivoted the company to Dupe. We worked with Nikita Beer on it. He was a total goat, helped us find like that. Spent your last 20 grand on intro.co. Well, we had more than 20 grand. We had about three months of runway.

2:35:22But yes, we definitely spent more than 20 grand. No, I know. I'm just picking a number. Just with Nikita. Probably the best money I've ever spent. saved our company. Let's be completely honest. That's actually crazy. I love it. It like total bananas moment for us. But the domain was a very last minute decision. We knew we needed a great name to stand out in the kind of shopping space. I did a bunch of Google research on keywords. One of the words was dupe. And I saw dupe was on Google Trends, 100 rated Google Trend keyword and growing. and I saw that no one was using dupe.com. We reached out to a broker that was sitting on that name.

2:36:02They wanted just the most insane price. We then negotiated a far lower price for dupes.com, went back to the owner of dupe.com and said, if you don't sell this domain to us in like five minutes with this price, which I thought was a fair price, it was all of our money. We gave them all of our money. And we're going to pull the trigger on dupes.com, and they sold it to us on the spot. And Lipinson basically said, okay, fine, go for it. Smart. That's how we negotiated it. I love that. That's great. Thank you. That's a good story. Yeah, but that was like a literal bet the company moment. And then Nikita did the most mensch thing ever.

2:36:39He put out a tweet about us and instantly blew us up. It was crazy. I remember that tweet. He framed it very, very well. And then you can imagine this just works on social. What other categories do you think are most ripe other than furniture? Yeah, so we do fashion now. handbag shoes clothes uh really big one that we don't do very well yet because ai doesn't have a sense of smell you know it's a kind of vision perfumes perfumes are huge yeah it's basically i look at as anything without a logo so like furniture like there's iconic shapes and silhouettes and and uh you know materials that get used along that but ultimately people don't have you know you're not like you don't have a couch that has like a restoration hardware big logo printed on it the challenge with fashion is that people want like the association with a specific like brand and that can come through a logo or a or a silhouette that actually can't be uh implemented without getting um you know uh you're right you're right except we're going through this like bizarre moment in shopping where brandless is a thing and not showing logos is a thing like this, this kind of quiet luxury movement, like people, people want something to feel good.

2:37:57And that buttresses like even the brands that you love, they're white labeling guys. Like they are, they are, none of this stuff is like custom made specifically for a single brand. Maybe if you're going into the couture world, of course that stuff is, is custom made. But ultimately, you know, So when someone sees Skims leggings, like, yeah, they want the look. People shop the look. Like that's what they're shopping ultimately. And it's less about like – people often misconstrue what dupe.com is. Like we're not trying to sell you replicas. We actually ban replicas across the board. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:38:33We ban all those sites. We are trying to get you that look, that garment, that furniture for less. And most people shop for the look now, especially in this market. Yeah, that makes sense.

2:38:49Do you think you'll have enough leverage at some point to get the underlying brands to pay you at the time of sale? Is that even important? It's actually very important. I'll tell you why it's important. If we were growing 100 % month over month and we weren't seeing our cash flow for three months, it stifles our marketing budget. we would have to then either raise credit or go raise a massive round just to pay down the marketing. This is actually like the biggest risk that I think about. So one of the things we're partnering with the largest payment network to do a Gentic checkout, global checkout.

2:39:27And we're not announcing the name yet, but we are working through that tech. And the idea being, most of these brands are really upset with a Gentic checkout because they don't get the customer information, but we do it in a way where the checkout would happen on dupe, but the brand retains the customer information and the customer relationship. And the only reason we want to do that is so that we can go from net 90 payments to net zero, net one, instant payment back to our company. So yeah, this is very top of mind for us. And it's definitely a risk that I think a lot about. How big do you want Dupe to get?

2:40:05I think Dupe, we often talk about a road to a billion shoppers. The way that we're going to do this is we have an MCP. So any LLM can plug us in. The largest LLMs, any long tail LLMs, they can plug us in. Ultimately, we want to be the canonical answer engine for how do I get this for less or find me something similar to this. We want to be that answer engine for these websites. The beauty is because they don't have access to the behavioral data, the shopping data, the product catalogs, the product pricing, the moment they plug us in, it's basically zero effort. It's just a few lines of code. The moment they plug us in, any click going out from our answers that gets monetized, we split that commission back with the LLM.

2:40:49So it's like instantly monetizing their user base in an entirely new way. So that's something that we're very excited about. And when you think about the growth potential of that and the tailwinds for any LLM to really consider partnering with us for our links and for our expertise and the ability to monetize instantly, I think we can get to hundreds of millions of shoppers on our infra. They might not be on dupe.com, but they'll be using our infra. But you're still monetizing them. Yeah. That's right. That's right. That's very exciting. That's right. And the last 18 months, we're right around sub-20 million users.

2:41:28Let's go. Oh, my God. Do I get the gong? Of course. Let's go, dude. I wasn't sure if you were going to give us a number, but we got one. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no, no. I'll give you a few numbers. I mean, we're rounding a corner. We're going to come up on 100 million in GMV sold through dupe.com. Whoa. 18 million shoppers. Fantastic. Between one and two million monthly shoppers. which we just launched our app last week. Went number one in the App Store, by the way. Super stoked about it. Please, everyone listening, go download DUP, D-U-P-E. Look for it in the App Store. Leave us a review and rating.

2:42:00Got to put it in the plug. Went number one in the App Store. And of course, we had a lot of fun with that. We've been putting a lot of fun content out with that, too. How did you go number one? Was it content or some type of viral incentive? We have a lot of users. These people, they want our app. They use our website to shop and have used our website to shop for many months. They wanted our app, and the way the App Store works is on a 24-hour clock. So the number of installs you get in a 24-hour period, if it's more than any other app, you rock it up to the top. I didn't think it would happen on day one.

2:42:34I actually had a whole, I was convinced that we were going to go number one, first of all. I called this shot in August on Twitter. I said, we are going to unseat, dethrone ChatGPT when we launch our app in November. So we shot our shot, and we kind of netted it. But it happened within a couple hours of us going live. I didn't expect that. I expected it to be about 48 hours. So it happened very, very quickly. Wow. Very cool. I mean, we still have a lot of work left. I mean, obviously, we're at the beginning of our journey. Call your shot again. 100 million in GMV. When are you going to hit it?

2:43:11We're a couple months away from that. OK. Well, we got the gong ready for you. Amazing. You're in LA, right? New York. Oh, OK. OK. Wow. We should be able to get to that this shopping season. Let's see how Black Friday goes. Make sure none of our systems go down, but that would be pretty dope. Yeah, that would be awesome. This is your Super Bowl. Very cool. We'll talk to you soon. Great hanging, dude. Congrats on all the progress. Thanks for having me. Great story. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Wanderer.com. Book a Wanderer with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service.

2:43:45It's a vacation home, but better. And that's our show for today. That's this week in TVPN. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Thanks for hanging out in the chat if you've been chatting this week. We love you, and we'll see you on Monday. Have a fantastic weekend. Have a great weekend. Goodbye.