Letter Enthusiasts, Open Source vs. Closed Source, Mega-Startup School | Luke Knight & Ronan Chambers, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jonathan Jacobi, Dean Meyer, Brent Franson, Matej Cernosek, Justin Boitano

28:02The list goes on. If there's one country that must not, that cannot get to AGI, one that would gleefully deploy it in all the worst ways we can imagine today and more, it is China. And that's before we get to the obvious that the companies that develop these models did so illegally by distilling U.S. frontier models. Still brilliant, hardworking researchers who added a lot of other ingredients to the soup, but stolen data was the main one. They are now using this unfair advantage to dump these artificially cheap models on the American market and hurt our AI ecosystem. We announced last month that we switched the core model powering Lindy from Claude to Deep Seek.

28:37That announcement blew up, got featured in Bloomberg, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, and somehow made us the poster child of mass migration to Chinese models. So why make all this noise if I'm going to turn around and announce my unequivocal support for a sweeping ban? First, I can't unilaterally disarm as long as these models are legal. Picking the one that's 10x the price just means my competitors get to run away with the cheaper one. Second, I trust that American open source alternatives will catch up. The impact on my business should be temporary. And that's before we account for the jolt a ban would give American open source development.

29:09third and most importantly my interests as proud american citizens uh supersede whatever incentives i may have as a founder the race for agi is the defining struggle of our generation it is the critical that the great battle of our time the only way for america to remain the shining city on a hill the idea that has lit the world against darkness for the last hundred years good writing um it is yeah i don't know he he's obviously very like distillation pilled it's interesting to sort of map like the Chinese open source models haven't jumped ahead. So if they're really, really good, like should they still be lagging?

29:49Should they like close the gap entirely and just be like on the same day? Basically, if you're like as good of a researcher and you're on the same path, you should be able to do it. As good of a researcher with the same access to compute. Yeah, maybe that's it. It does feel like they're able to produce American quality models for way less. And maybe that's just talent on the efficiency side. But I feel like there's a lot of people at OpenA High Ananthropic that are trying to spend the least amount of compute on a new training run. So who knows? We'll figure it out. I'm sure there'll be more drama on the timeline over the next few days.

30:29We also have Justin Botano from NVIDIA coming on to the show at 1.15 to talk about the Open Secure AI Alliance with more than 35 partners. I'm sure it's more by the time he'll join. And then we also have Dean Meyer from Sequoia Capital who has written about Chinese open models. So we're going to be going all over back and forth on this. And we'll be getting Gary Vaynerchuk's take on the open level. Predict it. I think he's pro-open source. What do you think? Pro-open source. He's got to be pro-op. Because he's a high agency, you know, just grapple the models, just do whatever, go and create something new.

31:07If he was a teenager today, he would be selling weights in his high school locker room. He'd be sending a white label. He'd be flipping weights. Flipping weights. And would he be paying the moonshot bill? He wouldn't be paying. No? No. No way. No way. No, not paying. He'd be rolling that into a supreme sneaker bot. Yeah. Mike Isaac, the rat king, says severity level indicator. NVIDIA CEO creates a Twitter account to do the first ever post stumping for open source software. How did Jensen avoid Twitter this long? Because if it was a political decision, Twitter has been every different political persuasion over various amounts of time.

31:56He's been aligned with different groups that have been in charge of Twitter so many times. It's just fascinating that there's never been a moment before this where Jensen was like, yeah, I should get a Twitter account and talk about the 1080TI, our new gaming graphics card. I should just hop on. Did he never have an NFT profile picture? I don't think he ever did because he never was on here. Crazy. They were doing a lot of stuff in crypto too, but I don't know. Now, commoditize the petaflop, says TinyGrad founder George Hotz. More competition, not monopolies, is the path to cheaper AI-computed AMD's advancing AI event.

32:33What do you say? I'm pretty sad we didn't get George on at AMD on Thursday. Let's play this clip. I want to hear what he says. Commoditize the petaflop. Our company's slogan mission is to commoditize the petaflop. We want all petaflops to be created equal, whether it's an AMD petaflop or an NVIDIA petaflop or a Tense torrent petaflop or a Huawei petaflop. This even crosses country boundaries. We want all petaflops to be unified and commoditized so that we can grind down costs to very minimum so nobody makes high margins and we all live in equality. Do you think NVIDIA is rent-seeking at the moment?

33:10Yes, they kind of deserve it. I mean, there's really undeserved rent-seeking, like government monopoly, and then there's people like NVIDIA who, yeah, they were early. They were early. They invested in this stuff for 20 years. I mean, clearly, the H100 had a profit margin for NVIDIA of 91%. The B200, they've scaled back a little. But they've probably only scaled back a little because of competition with AMD. So I love to see competition. I love to see the free market at work delivering better things to people. Our company's slogan.

33:41OpenAI told Tay Kim that they signed the NVIDIA Microsoft Open Source OpenWeight's AI model letter today. What an amazing turn of events. And Andrew Curran confirmed it. It's on the actual website now. Nobody says no to Jensen. My prediction is that Anthropoc will not sign this. And I think that there won't be a ban. And then I think that they will probably take a victory lap because there will be some open source incident where something happens and everyone has to spring into action and fight back against something where you're like, oh, there's this new thing. like some North Korean hackers who used an open source model or something.

34:21And it'll be like, if you squint, it's somewhat related. Would we have been able to prevent it? I don't know. But I think that would be my rough prediction of what happens here. I don't know what you think. Let's take it even a step further. Do you think the US or its allies will bomb a hostile data center within the next five years? I mean, five years is a long time. Seriously. Shane, it's going to happen. Maybe, I don't know. Five years is really, really hard to handicap. I'd probably say yes over five years. But, like, there's just so many other things that could lead to that, you know. I don't know.

34:59It is, yeah, it is weird. I guess I'm less worried about open source AI in the United States. Like, if you're downloading the weights from Hugging Face, sending them to a NeoCloud, and then you're doing cybersecurity attacks inside the United States, like the police will just kick down your door and like arrest you. Like you will. So there's like a huge, there's a huge like countervailing force. And then you also have like, you know, trillions of dollars of market cap being like, my service is to protect you. And so like, you know, people pay, I pay for one password, right? Like you pay for all sorts of things, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto networks and all these different cybersecurity companies will be going out, making money, pooling resources.

35:45all sorts of different stuff um so julian over at anthropic yeah grinding clearly grinding into the late hours friday night finishes up his his his work week it's almost 2 a.m gets on x sees jensen's letter fires up i'm a dunk goes to bed wakes up the next morning six million views he didn't get ratioed more likes than quote tweets right or more likes than replies so you know Wow, that's powerful. But yeah, he says, I'm so excited that Jensen is a believer in open source now. This shouldn't be a surprise, right? Because I think everyone can see that open models are going to be as good as our current frontier models within the next, call it, year.

36:32And they will present the same risks that Anthropic talks about with their own models, right? And so it would be disingenuous in many ways for them not to be against open source. So anyways, I see their side of it. I think that it is a sort of cohesive view, even if there's plenty of arguments on the other side. Yeah. I don't know. it doesn't seem like that much of a like a hypocrisy to you know have your GPU driver be closed source and still be open source in this particular way I don't know there's like a seed of a seed of a dunk here but I can see why he got so much pushback people love open source yeah the main take is like you can generally support open source without requiring that you open source your own products Yeah.

37:33Yeah. And so anyways, yeah, I wasn't all boiled it down like so well here. He says, I think this word distillation, an obviously legitimate technique, which nonetheless invites weird philosophical questions is distracting people. It would be better to just refer to terms of service violations, which better clarifies the global regulatory arbitrage people are frustrated by. Yeah, it is weird that Meta and Google, with all the CapEx and all the researchers and everything, are not ahead of Kimmy K3 right now, at least in benchmarks, right? That's basically what's going on. And you would think if it was like open game, but maybe they're just better.

38:15I don't know. You got to prove the TOS thing. it's just an allegation right now that's being like leaked out through the admin so it needs to be like definitively proved you have to show the chain of what happened and uh what's going on but uh it is a wild time i mean kimmy kimmy's denied it like at least like employees have gotten on there being like what are you talking about like we're not distilling anything we just we're just all right john yeah what you got time to talk about startup school okay first let me tell you about codex codex is a powerful workforce for getting workspace for getting work done with agents whether you're writing code analyzing data creating content or automating business workflows codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish uh startup school this is insane i cannot believe how massive this event is it's sick yeah i i think it's so almost every take that i saw yeah was negative really i saw a lot of people that were like uh, this is, I think I'll be back.

39:16Really? Yeah. Okay. That's good. That's good. Because, because to me, it's like this hilarious startup school has been something that is free. Yeah. Online. Yeah. And it's just anyone in the world. If you're generally interested in starting a startup, you can just do startup school. It's basically the same years ago. It's basically the same curriculum. It's the same like lessons and learnings. You just don't have the capital that comes from a typical, uh, YC batch and you don't have the one-on-one sort of mentorship through your batch. Yeah. Otherwise, they're basically just open sourcing the YC playbook, which the YC playbook just works.

39:56It's like general, there's not a lot of good general advice, but YC's advice is generally good. Yeah. Maybe we should ban it. It's too powerful. Yeah, they're open sourcing all this good advice that would normally come from venture capitalists. venture capitalists, effectively closed source institutions of venture capital, of startup wisdom. Yeah. And this is an attack on the tier one VCs. Yeah. And all their great advice. Their hard won lessons. Yeah, exactly. From board meetings. Yeah, they had to sit in all those board meetings. Where they were tuned out. And then YC is basically distilling it and giving it away for free.

40:31It's crazy. Shut it down. Shut it down. I think this is awesome. Um, like if you think that startups are good, like why, why hate, why hate on this? I think the take that, uh, says, uh, Scott Stevenson has been on the show over at spellbook legal says, I have great respect for YC, but need to say what many are surely thinking startup school in a stadium feels antithetical to the YC brand and to what makes startups work. I mean, it was a very garage effort when Paul Graham started Y Combinator in Cambridge. It was like, you know, he's cooking for the startups. The YC brand felt like it was designed to filter out status chasers.

41:13The thing is, is like being a founder became cool and something desirable. And now people get into YC and because of the way that the internet evolved, they're like, they'll make a video with like some clickbait. This photo's insane. They'll make a photo with click, like a clickbait, you know, you know, cover art, thumbnail and say, like, I just got into YC. Yeah. And so that's just like. I would never make a founder became high. YC twice. When YC started, when YC started, being a founder was relatively low status. Yeah. Now it's relatively high status. Yeah. And so status chasers are naturally going to go through YC.

41:54now that's going to lead to a lot of failure because you could shouldn't probably start a company in 2012 like everyone that from my like peer group was like oh like that sucks for you dude like you couldn't get a job at like mckinsey or whatever like like like your your your fake startup sounds really exciting dude like good luck you know it was not like oh wow like congrats It's like, yeah, like stay safe in the tenderloin. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. In your house for like four other people. Yeah. I don't know. I get, I get it as, I guess I get that, that criticism, but just in terms of like the content and the aesthetics, electric.

42:37Electric. Like you get Jensen on stage at this key moment and he's talking to a bunch of people. Like it's just, it's just fun if you're learning about startups to go and see these people talk. if you're really, really new. And that's what startup school is for. And is it true that Gary Tan did the little yachty walkout with the microphone? I think he did. Is it true? Because I didn't see a video. Yeah. I did hear that the pyrotechnics budget for this was over a million dollars. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Explosive. Huge, huge. Enough pyrotechnics to level San Francisco if things went wrong. Oh, wow.

43:17It was sort of like a bet the farm type of moment for YC. Yeah. Just constant sparklers and fireworks going on. I don't know. I was into this. But, yeah, I guess people are not into it. I don't know. Oh, hi, Sam. I don't know. I think it's great. I like it. I think it's fun. The great AI psychosis hive mind of San Francisco. Wow, yeah, people are all. Do they all have headphones? What are the headphones for? Interesting. Silent disco? So you could listen to the talks? I don't know. And then they gave update for the 4 ,500 attendees. This can successfully pass through TSA. Thank me later. They gave us a portable battery.

44:04And it looks like a bomb. So people are like, but people got it through TSA apparently. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. In other news, Ilya Satsukov raised more money for SSI. He said... Time to scale that safe superintelligence. Time to save... Time to scale that safe superintelligence. So SSI, we are announcing a long-term strategic partnership with NVIDIA. NVIDIA is making a substantial investment in SSI that will let them 10x their compute over the next 12 months.

44:41we reach the point where our research is worth scaling and this partnership we'll be able to we are honored by nvidia's just another pod guy to guess what he says what do you say you need to do a podcast the podcast guy says you need to do another extremely on brand well we have the perfect guest to talk about podcasting with because we have luke knight and ronan chambers from etn the european technology network welcome to the show how you guys doing what's going on gentlemen Look at this look at this. Look at this. This ever happened before I don't know. Yeah, I love very much. Thank you so much Hit us kick us off with the fundraising news.

45:20I want to smash this gong Well, you've seen we raised 1.6 million dollars

45:329 million post money valuation 9 million dollars Yeah announced today super happy And new studio It's cooking it looks huge you gotta trust there Graphics are on point Everything's coming together Can you rate the studio Look at this Rate the studio This is a 10 out of 10 I don't know You have everything. There's nothing else that you need. It's no ultra dope, but it's a good start. This is good. No, you got everything. This is awesome. No, I love that you guys, you know, this is hard. I think you guys know, we know, but it looks sort of easy when you just see a clip. It's just a podcast, but like to actually stick with it for a long time is hard.

46:15What has the journey been like? What have the hardest moments been? What does it feel like to actually getting here where you have the studio? You're announcing this in July of all months. July in Europe, notoriously slow. A lot of people would have expected you to come back in October and be like, hey, we had a great summer. We're back. I actually emailed about 600 people from the last eight months that we've been doing this. And the amount of out-of-office emails that I got was actually pretty shocking. So it's true. It's a little bit worrying, but we'll be fine. That's the whole point We're ETM We can figure it out We had a checklist To do And I can just I'll wheel it Go and grab it While you're While you're doing that The last The PTZs They got everything Yeah look at us go Figuring out everything Is James Weeks In the studio today Or is he remote No unfortunately not You gotta get him In the studio I mean Can we go wide frame James is the man Can we see that Bring it What's this To do Go on the holiday.

47:22Go on TVPS. There we go. That's amazing. Check it off. Fantastic.

47:34I love that you guys have so thoroughly reclaimed the whole Europeans don't work joke. I don't know. It feels like it's completely diffused the meme, and now I'm just like, okay, well, that's played out. You're grinding. You're going five days a week now. You're grinding. Yeah. You got any advice for us? What about a cheeky long weekend? Ibiza. Ibiza. Ibiza. A little Ibiza weekend. You guys were recently in France, right? How was the trip to Cal? Yeah, hold on. You went to, where was it? The AC was non-functional. I legit, that actually shocked me so much because you hear these jokes about like, oh, Europeans take long holidays or like there's no air conditioning over there.

48:16And I always think that it's the Americans going a little bit too far with the bit. And so I assumed, I was like, oh yeah, the AC thing, that's probably just like in random places there won't be air conditioning. No, like all of France doesn't have air conditioning. It's crazy. It was terrible. Honestly, it doesn't have air conditioning. I mean, London's been brutal. So are you talking to startup founders that are thinking about solving this? We were there being like, is this just the most obvious business ever? Just create an air conditioning company of Europe? Kids in the gundo should start the air conditioning company of Europe.

48:49and just land on the beaches and just start bringing in units. Is anyone welcome? They'd have good merch with that name, to be fair. Well, I know that one of the Collison brothers has put out loads of posts around how people are literally dying from their lack of AC and no one's thought to thought this out. Like when we had the heat wave recently here in Lugan. Maybe we'll have to get one of our interns to get on it. To get on that. Yeah, yeah. So go to a quick website, you know, get an intern, you know, shipping in some AC units from wherever they ship them in from. I like it. Yeah. Talk to, yeah, talk to our own.

49:23Whoa. Okay. Whoa. There we go. Ooh, intern cam. I like it. What's up, lads? Okay. So, I mean, obviously, like, there are a lot of elements. Down to the PTZ cameras, you're clearly standing on the shoulders of us. You have the picture right there. And it's great because, like, we've defined a bunch of different, like, patterns that allow this business to work. Like when I see the logos at the bottom of the ticker, I'm like, that's great. That allows you to pay for the studio and the interns. Where do you see the show going? Where do you want the differentiation to be? Because you're already differentiated just in the fact that Europe is different than the stuff we talk about.

50:06You cover stories that way, way deeper than we do if it's about Europe. But are there other, other, other things that you're, that you're thinking about where you're like, yeah, actually like We want to go a completely different direction with this. Yeah, sure. That's a really good question because we actually didn't think that we would raise any money. We were doing pretty well. As you mentioned, the ad model, what you guys have kind of built in terms of a model is great, right? But then when we figured out how big the opportunity is in Europe specifically, we realized that raising the money had legs.

50:43We were like, okay, this thing can be really big. because it is the live show, but we see that as like the kind of wedge in the door, the foot in the door to kind of to build the network. And then it's a network, right? So think about potentially a summit business or whatever it is like that. The European ecosystem needs that. So and it's not kind of as developed as the ecosystem over there. So it's like if we can kind of, you know, almost kind of piggyback off that model and then build on top of that, I think yeah the sky's the limit we can we can go very big which is exciting I think like long term you can see it like in a way where the show would just become the advertising department for a huge media conglomerate so we could do the summit business you can even open a recruitment model off the back of it you can look at a fund off the back of it I mean you guys have probably gone through all these ideas anyway and you've probably chosen let's just nail this like you guys were first to do this you were first to create the model so I don't think there would be a need for you guys to innovate because you smashed it you don't need to you had first move advantage and you crushed it I was thinking you're encouraging us to rest on our laurels.

51:47We did put laurels on the merch.

51:53Can we do a breaking TBPN resting on laurels? So you guys have been successful with the TBPN for Europe model. There's also TBPN for car dealerships over here. I don't know if you're familiar with this. The car dealership guy has a live show. You guys have talked about this before, right? Yeah, we had him on the show. We've talked about it. And it's great because we never cover car dealership news. It's a great – every once in a while, but not the dealers. And so it's great to take the best practices of what the lighting should look like, what the truss looks like, what the logos and stuff. Learn from the best practices and then take the content in a different direction so that you're offering a differentiated product.

52:36Is there a European car dealership? Are there spinoffs of you yet or more sub markets in Europe for like the European crypto ETN? I think when we first started, I think it was just you guys. And then I think like Ecom Cowboys popped up. I think there were. Oh, here we go. You guys covered. Do you guys have a flashback yet? Do you guys have a flashback yet? You got to get on that. We thought it would come.

53:09Go down to our frame quickly Go down to our frame What tricks do you have up your sleeve? You got some Should I throw some 11 labs out or something? What you got? We can go ad for it Wait, can we go ad for ad? Yeah, what you got? I don't know Let's go Frame up Build better sites faster This is a good stinger this is a really well integrated stinger they're flashbanging it again they're smoking it it's over man you got it you got it you got it you got it how long are your ad reads this stays up on the screen a little too long do you have to click it to come off that's a good question that should just come off I think remember this is our first day my feedback would be a little bit tighter on that a little bit tighter you don't want people getting distracted is someone writing this down yeah we'll get it on Granola there you go are they a sponsor too now they're now this is day or not yeah no no working on it working on it this is the worst it will ever be boys so it's fine and we'll always get better that's right what was the what was the question i forgot the question uh the question was just like uh um what else is there is there demand for a etn for yes in in europe so that so there was demand for tbpn for car dealerships there was also demand for tbpn for crypto because we don't really talk about crypto that much and there's been a few other like spinoffs that have made sense and a lot of them have gone their own ways they don't even look like us anymore there's like all these different things that you can do but they adopted like some of the best practices of like the ad market the ad model and some of the overlays and some of the live but uh what i'm interested is like where what else is going on in europe that might uh demand a live show that's not okay so in so when we when we started the model started etm we were like this could be done in uh you know you mentioned like car dealerships this could be done in fashion i could get two people to go and you know do a live show for fashion especially in europe a cooking show whatever the houses are there like yeah literally yeah yeah so it's like um uh someone could do that get the best designer designers on every day to talk about i don't know how fashion works but like new jeans that they've just like designed or Whatever it is, right?

55:27So I think you could go category specific and verticalize in a category. In Europe specifically, not yet. I mean, we're, what, 10 months in? So we'll see what happens towards the end of the year. You guys were going for, I don't know, at least, I don't know, maybe nine months before we caught on and we were like, look, this needs to be done in Europe. This is a great model. What were you guys doing for the first nine months? Vacation. We know the bit. You guys should do TBPN for Euro summers There we go We go on the road a lot to be fair We did Monaco with A16Z Which is great, we saw Anish who I know I know you Geordi We had Nico on which was awesome So Greece With Panathena We were at the Louvre in Paris I got you started on Vacation destination Now you're I mean, there are summits in Europe.

56:24Monarchs, Nikonos, Ibiza. We only choose the destinations where we actually want to, like, you know, vacate. Yeah, yeah. But it's a good model. Do you think we should do an AI pause so that the AI researchers can go to Ibiza? What do I'm off for a week? I mean, they're all going to be post-money pretty soon anyway. Quick one-week pause. Six-month pause. Six-month pause. Six-week pause, maybe. If you can get all the Frontier Labs to sign off on that, like Jensen did for his global policy. AI Summer. Last question. Do you have an on-camera intern? Our original intern has evolved into a co-host. He's co-hosting now.

57:09We've not got a Tyler yet. We did put a job out of two interns, and we got like 360 applicants. and there's people from based in SF that interned at like Tesla SpaceX pinging us to be like can we work for you again I'm moving to Europe, that's sick which was nuts but I don't think we can make that work they wanted to Euromax with us and we thought you probably are too qualified and we couldn't afford you what's the European version of the gong? we should have done a bell because in America we actually ring the bell we randomly went with a gong which is very Asian. I think a big AC unit that you just spent.

57:50Earlier today we did we did saber a champagne bottle. That's good. We did saber that. We'll send you the video of us sabering it, but as you can see we've got this. Okay. We've got the TVPN. There we go. We get the lights.

58:07That's pretty... The chat is saying confirm. Tyler has not been distilled. I like this one. This is a good sabre. Thank you. Too long though Oh wait actually If you're going to play the whole song for a little bit Then you're good Yeah it's good for intros sometimes Yeah yeah yeah You guys are like Just like AI you guys are like Six Maybe twelve months behind But We had to keep it concurrent With the It's good We used to get the flashbang going there. We're happy for you guys to distill the show. Shots fired! Shots fired! This one's good. I like that one. Hey, don't give them any ideas. They'll take off.

58:55We're going to distill it back. It's like when you ask Claude what model it is in Chinese and it says it's Deep Seek. It goes both ways sometimes. You never know. I think what's the best is that this can be a grind. Five days a week, a lot of stuff. There's just a lot of work. it just seems like you guys are having fun. Are you guys having fun? We're having fun. The most fun we've ever had. It's great. It's great. We get to talk to cool people and we're two mates talking to each other for a living. It's great. That's the best. Amazing. So for you guys. You guys are living the dream, so are we.

59:29Well, congratulations. Before we go, I want to ask, can we get some loosies for the studio? I'd be happy. I'll send you a whole vending machine. Really? Yeah, we'll see how we'll send it to you. I love it. Yeah, it's amazing. Oh, yeah. I'd be happy. Let's do it, bro. We're European. we need this. Yeah, yeah. Send me your address and yeah, we'll chat offline, but we'll send you a bunch of stuff. Maybe you can become a distributor if that's legal. Yeah. Great to see you guys. Congratulations on the new funding and congrats to the whole team. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Appreciate it.

59:55Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. What a great crossover. You'll love to see it. Well, we have Gary Vaynerchuk, creator of VFriends, back on the show third time love catching up with gary v we'll go all over the place creator economy ai open source building stuff how you doing gary what's up there he is men men men men or i think you said you're doing uh what's happening okay i want to i want to start with unless you have something to kick right off with i want to start with something like i've been seeing these these videos of you from like years and years ago with just these like crazy, crazy accurate calls about the future.

1:00:47What, what victory lap do you like to take the most? Like, like what, what's the one call when you think back where you're like, damn, I really nailed that one. Social. Like if I'm being honest, like, like, no, it's like, it's crazy. Too bad. I wasn't making the videos back then. Like just my complete conviction on Facebook and Twitter completely unearthing and changing the world. No, it's ironic timing. I met with someone today. I hadn't talked to like 12, 13 years, you know, retired gentleman. I met him early on. He's like, he's like, it's crazy how much you believed in that stuff and how dismissive we all were.

1:01:29But there's, you know, I mean, Listen, one of the few things I really do well in business is I don't let my audacity or my current financial situation or what I would like to happen financially dictate my observations of the consumer. I don't think I'm smarter than anyone or have a bigger knack. I think you have now let me give some flowers to you boys. You have some of the greatest people on here, right? You guys have crushed. You've also gotten much better at your actual job interviewing because, you know, I'm a day one with you guys. Like I just want to give you some flowers. You guys are getting better and better.

1:02:12All these brilliant people you have. It's not that I know it better. I don't know it better. It's that I'm willing to completely change course of what I think is working for me or I'm willing to lose all my money to be historically correct. I'm not talking about things that I want to happen for my financial interest. I'm talking about what consumers are actually doing. Do you think you were more bullish? Well, and the other thing is that then like the actual platforms, like because it's like when I look back at some of those calls about like the pivot away from the. there's this one where you're like looking at the newspaper and you're like, nobody's going to use the newspaper.

1:02:51They're just going to get their news online from other people. And it's like a very accurate prediction. But, but, but it's like that distinctly wasn't coming from like Mark Zuckerberg in 2008. He was just saying like, I built this cool website. Like it's fun. I'm connecting the world. Yeah. It was connection. When I, you know, I think that I, you know, when you go read crush it, the first book I wrote, I wrote in 2008. also in that time i am fully predicting and you guys know this we've talked off here like i predict like literally there's parts of the book that talk about what you guys are doing right now yeah yeah no i was super early live streaming too yeah and don't forget we just came out of friendster and myspace failing yeah so my thesis wasn't necessarily now look i thought mark was generational because i'd spent some time with him and like i ended up being very right about that And I thought Twitter was incredibly unique.

1:03:45So I was bullish on those platforms, but I was incredibly agnostic to your point. I was, whether it was called Facebook or Twitter or the many things that failed along the way, social cam, peach, vine, you know, like LinkedIn or YouTube or Twitch or TikTok. talk. It didn't matter. Apps that connected people on top of the internet, I knew had to win because of the network effect of scale and no gatekeeper in between. You think you two handsome young bozos would have gotten on CMC? You would have had to wait. Yeah. But I knew that you could just do it. And then it's like sports. We love the term bozo.

1:04:29It's like underrated. It's so good. It's only slightly derogatory, but it's totally not a bad word. I do identify as a bit of a bozo. It's a sweet zing. Yeah, yeah. It's a sweet zing. It's a great word. You know, you guys have become very influential, and definitely the people watching are very influential. Can we all collectively put our hands in the pot and all bring Bozo back? It would be really enjoyable. It's Bozo time. It's time for Bozo time. Golden Retrievers are kind of Bozos. Yeah. They're lovable. No, no, no. We're talking about Golden Retriever mode. Yeah, yeah. Better distillation.

1:04:58Jordy, sorry. I cut you off. Who were you going to ask? Well, yeah. Yeah, I think what was interesting about your call is you were bullish on the platforms, but the take wasn't just you should invest in Facebook. It was like you should just put stuff out every single day, and you've been remarkably consistent with that. Yeah. Yeah, and it was real for three guys like us that could go from zero notoriety to a lot, and literally the most famous people in the world right now, at least a third of them, are either streamers or purely on social. They have no television. They have no, you know, theatrical, they have no other platform.

1:05:35Yeah, TV is now coming to them and saying, hey, could we work something out? You clearly have demand for your content. We want to get it on our platform. I started a company a couple of years ago called VaynerWatt, W-A-T-T. It's a TV production company. And we are bombarded by the distributors for me to get access to the Stephen Bartlett sort of Hermoses or the Cody Sanchez's or the you like it's all here. And what's crazy is like YouTube, for example, right? There's 900 genres that should be doing what you're doing right now. Yeah, we just talked to some folks who are doing this show for Europe specifically.

1:06:12And there's one that's for car dealers and there's one for crypto. And there's a whole bunch of different sort of like, and it's not even like we're the first live streamers. Obviously, we just took them. Still, the funny, you know, the craziest, the craziest thing. No one has done TBPN for the market open. Like you're in New York. Yeah. You're in New York. You start at. I know someone that's working on it. Yeah. We know a couple of people, but the fact that we're 18 months in and no one saw what we're doing. We go live at 11 Pacific. So we're going live at noon. The market has been open. Which is an indication of your laziness.

1:06:52You guys should wake up. We do wake up early, but we do a team workout. And it's more an indication of our fascination with private markets versus public markets and longer term, less quarter by quarter, less day by day market moves and more 12 to 18 month fundraising cycles for private technology companies. And so I think that my natural interest is in the private markets and the earlier stage technology. So if I was trying to cover, you know, the day by day in the market, what oil is doing and how that's affecting, you know, GE and Boeing, I would just be a little bit less sharp than if I'm talking about, you know, private market numbers.

1:07:35And honestly, that's what, you know, back to Crush It, back to you guys, back to all of this, what you're already, like the whole theme of this interview. The fact that people that are watching that are deeply sports, like you, TBPN for sports with talent like you guys is ESPN's biggest nightmare. Well, they sort of have it, right? Isn't Pat? Yeah, they have it. Of course. Of course. I mean. But they have to pay him like 60 million a year. They do. And Pat had to be lucky enough of all the serendipity that led to that. There are 913 Pat McAfee's. And I mean that. Pat's incredibly charismatic and talented.

1:08:12You guys are as well. But the long tail of knowledgeable or charismatic individuals is quite long. Now, everyone has a different upside, right? Like, again, somebody could replicate this exact show. and if they're really just much sharper and more entertaining they will take market share that's just how well the other the other thing about sports versus business that's interesting is like sports there's so many people that played sports whether it's college or professionally and then they stop being able to play at that level and they're like well what's the best thing i should do i should just talk about the game that i love yeah whereas in business you don't get to a point where you're better at talking about it necessarily than doing it there's a lot of people that could...

1:08:56It's so well said. And there's another thing. I just turned 50 and like literally this morning, like no bullshit. I'm like, am I starting to enter my prime? Like as an operating prime? That's such a great philosophy. You're just like, I'm having whatever the inverse of a midlife crisis is, that's me. You know what's funny? Wait, is the generational run just beginning? I love it. And it's funny, and I have a funny feeling, especially given the incredible nature of your audience. I think when that was just delivered a few minutes ago, there's just a lot of people that really understand it. Because my whole life, and probably many others watching, you wish you were an athlete.

1:09:43But if you were an entrepreneur, you kind of realize at 30, you're like, wait a minute. If I was an athlete and I was great, I'd be kind of wrapping it up or thinking about post. And I own a large sports agency. My brother and I own a very large sports agency now called Vayner Sports. You know, I feel for these kids. This is what they were meant to do. They're 35 years old. And they're like, what do I do with my, you know, like just like really intense stuff. I truly, I feel so blessed to have always been obsessed with business. Like I never, I never came close. You know, I got very into surfing, but I never liked surfing as much as business.

1:10:23and having a love for something that you can do for a lifetime. Even more people say, like, oh, you should play tennis because you can play it basically indefinitely. But it's like, well, you can do deals truly for life. That's a good segue. This is what we always bring up. He's got a segue. Sorry, one second. We always bring up Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. It's like the greatest run of that career happened from, like, 50 to 90. It's like that's so long. No, but wasn't it more like 70 to 90 or like 80? It was. It was like 60. That's right. So segue. We just brought up tennis. I've done incredibly well.

1:11:02I think this is important for a lot of people. Again, I'm always thinking about the audience. Alternative sports league investing. I think there's some more fun stuff you guys could be doing about that. It's gone really well for me. Yeah, Alexis. We had Alexis on. He has the running league, which is cool. We had the founder of Enhanced Games on. Yeah, there's some article in the journal today. Is Paddle the next pickleball? Right. So pickle was a huge win for me, right? I bought a team for$500 ,000 pre-COVID. They're trading at$16 million right now in our Major League Pickleball League. Wow. So do people watch pickleball?

1:11:41Yes. That's why I invest. So I have a little bit of a secret of why I think I'm doing well, because I'm doing well with this wiffleball league that is starting to get some juice. We've got some great owners in that. Let's go. I have one little advantage. It's back to this. And we've had some meetings off camera. And you guys know I'm like pretty in the weeds with like how communication and marketing works. The reason I invested in Pickle is Pickle highlights, even seven years ago, massively over indexed on social. Oh, sure. Yeah. Right. Yeah, but the thing is, I do wonder if that's – so Dana White has the slap fighting league.

1:12:20I forget what it's called. And that's something that does incredibly well on social. But I don't know anyone, even hardcore MMA fans, it's like can't wait for the card this weekend. I'm going to watch live. Two things. One, ish on incredibly well on social. you have to you know when when you because i've looked at that as well and a lot of it is driven by the tko machine much more than you know the organic nature of what i'm seeing and and seeing somebody that's about to get hit in the face is like naturally scroll stopping even if it's not a good there's also something that people don't realize about sports that matters if you're going to watch it which is your capacity to participate in it yeah right like like like people a lot when people try to zing pickleball they're like yeah everyone's playing it but is it a business and i always like literally those are the articles that were written about tennis and golf 50 60 70 80 years ago it's like it's funny by the way back to your first question the other thing i do pretty well that i hope other people do so i'm saying it out loud because i really use history along with paying attention to people so for example the biggest sports in america in the twenties and thirties were horse racing, boxing, and baseball.

1:13:37Those sports were very good on radio, but football is not a great radio sport. Oh, interesting. Football exploded with the television. If you look at the explosion of the football, it came along with television. And so back to streaming, what you guys are doing right now, one of the reasons I'm invested in the sailing league, slam ball, you know, pickle ball, wiffle ball. What's slam ball? Slam ball is trampolines. It's insane. You don't know about this? Like dodgeball and trampoline. No, no, no. Basketball with trampolines so everyone can dunk and do like bath lifts and stuff. It's crazy. All right, I got to watch.

1:14:13The reason I did it was I knew I didn't need, just like you guys didn't need CNBC to be like, you're the right on your talent. All these alternative leagues do not need ESPN or Fox Sports to say yes. People can see this stuff through these platforms, and that's going to continue in an AR, VR. We're going into an incredible era of opportunity and meritocracy. Real quick, what was your reaction to the World Cup? Do you think that flopping and flopping culture will forever prevent America from actually getting into – do you think that's a bottleneck to growth? No, that's not a bottleneck. Americans are hypocrites.

1:14:57We love basketball. SGA is the greatest flopper of all time.

1:15:03I don't watch enough. I haven't watched enough basketball to to to have even seen SGA flop. But I feel like the I feel like in Europe they appreciate the drama and it's almost like the acting of it all. But then you watch the replay and it's like, you know, Americans that are used to watching, you know, some corn fed linebacker run through a guy and the guy just gets up instantly. It's hard to then go watch somebody flop and completely fake an injury. I think that soccer players at this point have this incredible 4 % to 7 % Academy Award-like acting capabilities that probably piss people off. But I agree with you.

1:15:45I'll use football because football is a sport that people hate when they first see it, and then they become infatuated with it because it stops and starts, it stops and starts, especially the world. immigrants coming to the U.S. when they're used to soccer, which is flowing. They hate it. And then inevitably, within a decade, they love it because you start falling in love with all the little nuances. And I would say for Americans, the nuance of flopping is annoying, especially with the NBA. It's been a big topic, by the way. So I think, especially this season. So I think some of that energy came to it.

1:16:19But look, I mean, I'm a little older than you guys. Everybody who's over 50 knows this. the strides that America has made in its interest in football, a.k.a. soccer, over the last 30 years is profound. FIFA, the video game, had a huge impact. Being able to watch the Premier League in America on Saturday mornings had a huge impact. And it's a great sport, and I already am excited for the next one. What about the intersection of technology and a game like soccer? I grew up playing soccer, reffing soccer. I've reffed. that was like you know that was i would spend my weekends when i was 12 i'd ref like 20 soccer games because they didn't cap it like there was no like you can only work eight hours it was like you can ref as many games as you want because there was a shortage so i'd ref like insane number of games in a day and and watching the world cup and again i'm a super casual viewer i hadn't been watching soccer prior to the world cup but it was fun to kind of catch up on it like you know there'd be an offside call and or maybe there wasn't a call and then they'd run the tape and they figured out that the guy's hand you know elbow was slightly over the line and they'd call it and they'd take the goal back and that that to me like part of part of the part of like what makes the sport great is there's just players that can finesse the situation and just be right on that line so a ref couldn't possibly call it and then to have a machine being like you know no you can't you could beat the ref but not the machine look i think of this like marketing just i'll make this valuable to the audience who does not like sports this is by the way i thought those were the chinese robots first no these are now we're watching slam ball best hits look at this yeah this oh all right all right i can get behind this i can get behind this it's so insane is this made to look like it was shot on vhs what's going on here oh okay so it's been around for a while a little bit more um so i'll say i'll answer you like this to make it a little business terms hopefully help some people's marketing there's a lot of people watching right now that become two one-dimensional math performance marketers and i lose in fact you boys were one of my favorite executions to watch from afar because you guys played like me you sell more on brand than on math you guys were getting brand deals that were completely inappropriate because you sold on value not on metrics yeah i think that that's how i think about technology and sports if we get all the way to full ai robots and everything's 100 black and white i think the league's going to learn pretty quickly that we as humans need a little romance need a little gray not black and white need a little of a balance and so just like i wish in political terms that everyone was purple instead of this garbage red and blue we're in with the sports and technology and replay if they can find purple i think it's great when they go too red or too blue i think it's a problem yeah even in formula even in formula one there's you know the drivers are having issues right now because there's ai is deciding how much you know energy fuel and how much power to and and they're all just getting angry because they're like am i am i losing because i'm not as fast as my opponent or is my is the ai running on my car just not as dialed it's it's all these analogies it's like is dinner fun without the sky dish and and you know the the amuse-bouche and dessert like when we get so binary it we all want a little romance we need a little romance okay one more potential league.

1:20:05I want you to run, run this down and, and let us know next time you're on what you find. But I have a theory that when every car on the road is, uh, autonomous that, uh, like driving on the track is going to have a, a resurgence in popularity because people are going to be, you know, it's so romantic. It's so romantic. There's so much great history around racing. Every person, everyone, uh, yeah, hit me with the counter, but, but I have a theory that like, like things like net like there's something like a slam slam ball or whatever it is for driving demolition derby oh it's something like rally car i was driving yesterday i was driving a i was driving a dude buggy i i was like on a trampoline my buddy and we were like laughing we were laughing it was so much fun we're drifting around yeah yeah yeah it's a more dynamic calendar is i don't know if you know this but we used to ride horses before the cars oh yeah and i don't know if you know there's something called horse racing yeah that is pretty out there and so the counter would be that we kind of just lived it with horses and horse racing but the counter to my counter is what you said which is i actually think horse racing could be massive in this country if they put a contemporary player on it what ufc showed is like it was an evolution of boxing with oh Oh, interesting.

1:21:27Yeah. You want like rally horse racing. Sort of like UFC meets the Kentucky Derby. Like you can punch the other jockeys. Or what about none of that? And it's more about storytelling. What about... Yes, yes, yes. A drive to survive, that type of thing. Yeah, or even when we're watching an actual horse race on a Saturday that's not the Kentucky Derby. Like if you turned it on and the bottom of the screen was actually a mic version of every jockey and you're learning like we want layers we want layers we want stories we want to get captivated everything is about that in every aspect of life two jockeys getting up in each other's faces and throwing down after that's so good okay here's a here's a hard-hitting question all right do you think big boogie turned it down or was he capping that was a good question Do you think he potentially because we were trying to do that.

1:22:25John did the math and he said that if he was going to dental school for a decade and he had a bunch of dependents, it's possible the total package could have been in the in the 10 million dollar range. But you cover NIL stuff a lot more. True. You'll appreciate this. This is one of the rare moments where I get to do this and I always look for it. So thank you, man. I'm going to clip this. The answer is I don't know. I've just not paid enough attention I've been a little bit of a bubble I'm in a very weird place right now I've been in a 7 to 10 week cocoon around the collectibles industry collecting becoming the next lifestyle genre and so like my consumption of anything happening in pop culture is at an all time low the last two months I've been in the lab on this thesis that I've been on for about 8 years that I think is about to completely blow the roofs off of like for example let me give you a for instance to give you even more color again always try to think about how to bring value to this smart show i'm we've started at vayner media a collectibles marketing division just like there started just like coca-cola started a sports marketing division when the olympics were getting important as a driver to consumption i believe in 10 years every Fortune 500 consumable product, apparel, CPG, will have a collectibles marketing strategy.

1:23:51I don't know if you guys saw lines around the door at Popeye's Chicken for the one-piece collectible, people flooding to a Dodgers game to get the one-piece collectible. I think that differentiation in an AEO, GEO, agentic commerce world, differentiation around collectibles and community to get people to stop their normal pattern of what they're just reordering because they want to buy a deodorant that has a collectible of their favorite. I just see collectibles eating up because of what it means for community and analog and value and investing. Yeah, and AI creates insane, is going to continue to create insane abundance.

1:24:32One example is everyone can have a SaaS product now. You can make it. Everyone will. Everyone will. what's the chain everyone who wants to go ahead what's the chain from people are playing a sport is it watchable then it becomes a sport with teams professional uh you identified some of the translation effects like uh you know is anybody what is anybody going to watch golf sure a lot of people play it but will people watch it obviously the answer was yes and that was true for football before there was a league and there was tv and the super bowl right people were just playing it by the way just for fun because i'm just nerding out please like everyone said there would never be a professional football league that football was always going to be college yep in notre dame the 20s the 30s like yeah like smart people that come on every this one and shit like those people back in the 40s and 50s like there will never be professional football Yes.

1:25:30But at the same time, there are sports that are played by lots of people. I'm thinking of like running and running is not a massive. There's not the Super Bowl of running, even though millions and millions of Americans go jogging and they participate in the sport. There's something special about competitive football that makes it the Super Bowl, right? Right. Super Bowl is very special, but like, you know, the New York City Marathon is a very cultural event with good ratings. Yeah. You know, I think we're in the era where an entrepreneur watching this show right now is like, fuck it, I'm making a running league and it might hit.

1:26:04Yeah. So then talk to me about the translation layer from there. There's a sport that a lot of people are playing. If it's watchable, it becomes a big national sport with professional teams that we're all watching. at what point does it become is there a collectible culture around it because uh we're just in this early stages of like pickleball has been played by a lot of people it's now starting to be watched by people as you mentioned when will people be collecting pickleball cards yeah your production team seems really capable based on what i just saw can the production team before i leave in the next three or four minutes put up ebay type in anna lee waters lee is l-e-i-g-h anna a-n-n-a space lee l-e-i-e-h space waters then enter on ebay and then go to completed and sold items and then sorted by most valuable if the team can do this this is a great challenge for the team are you I'm just trying to move some Anna Lee Waters merch right now.

1:27:10You're like, and then click purchase, and then click check. I'm kidding. She is the star of our team, and we do represent her sports. She's my – for me, she was our Joe Namath. She is our Larry Bird. I'm like, oh, look at this. Can we go – Now, hit on the left side. On the left side, hit completed and sold. Yeah, real eBay ball knowers. They know. Now there's Dylan on our team, big collector. nope no no all the way down i'm very hardcore i'm very in the dirt on collectible culture the completed sold where are we going hunting around for anna lee waters oh show us this show us this log in show us the password no so so dylan on the on our team already got there there we go and he's seeing Share a screenshot.

1:28:03Anna Lee Waters, rookie autograph cards going for$8 ,000,$5 ,000. $5 ,000. And I would argue we've done a very good job with Anna Lee. We've made her famous. She's on Fallon. She's on McAfee. She's the face of the sport. Ryan Harwood at VaynerSports deserves a lot of credit. We've crushed with her. She's the best player in the world. Pickleball is the only sport where a female can be the best. She's the best player in the sport. including the men. Because that's what's interesting about pickleball. 80-year-old grandmas are whipping 19-year-old grandsons in pickleball. It's a different kind of sport.

1:28:41There is another sport where women outperform men. Certain equestrian. In the Olympics. I'm sure there's others, but this is one that people know. You can see 8 ,000 to 5 ,000, and I will tell you 99 % of the audience and everyone on Twitter right now, Hit me up, Gary BEE, and answer this. 99 % of the audience right now has never heard of her in their lives. So it doesn't take a lot to get to collectible because collectibles are niche, are tribals. Look what happened with Comic-Con. 50 guys in a weird hotel in San Diego in 1976 to now this last weekend. Millions of people go into San Diego, and it's a cultural phenomenon.

1:29:27so collectibles is when it flips over to pop culture i would argue that athletes that are the most valuable are more pop culture than people realize they're more superheroes than people realize and when you're building a league whether it's conor mcgregor and ronda rousey whether it's michael jordan larry bird steph curry today like you need a superhero joe namath was the superhero for the nfl early on he became one of the most famous people in the world jets had a huge upset in super bowl three and football was on its way business uh collectibles where do you think it's going we saw jensen jack go for about a million that was for charity for a friend justin mares uh his grants that he does i believe collectibles i believe collectibles have eaten up the pop culture energy of what young 20 year olds would do with public stocks so instead of buying 50 shares of Nike like my generation did.

1:30:26They're going to go buy a collectible. I think it's completely eaten up the oxygen of contemporary art. So you guys, especially after your nice transaction, continue to hang around people of wealth at a young age. Your contemporaries, people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, only 25 years ago, 30 years ago, are buying the hottest contemporary artists to put the art in the house. Much of that money is now going into$100 ,000, million dollar collectibles. Obviously, Michael Rubin sitting on the top of the Topps empire with all his cultural relevance has brought an incredible amount of pop culture energy to it.

1:31:02And kids, people forget trading cards are 100 years of collectability now. This has been a very long term asset class, but the numbers are just out of control. You see O 'Leary wearing you know this even for you guys that are young definitely people in my generation people that collected cards as teenagers in the 80s and 90s were nerdy people collecting cards are now cool and once that's happens it gets really different really fast and we're on that other side and so you'll see collect you know watches i want to know what's on your shirt I wasn't even, I wasn't right. There you go. Are you going to the national?

1:31:45Of course. Leave it tomorrow. Let me just make this so I can clip it in nine years. I am building the next Disney Pokemon marble all in everyone's faces. It's called be friends. And because I have 13 different other jobs, no one sees it. And I don't speak about it that often, but building a business during this AI era is going to end up being one of my savviest moves. Yeah. And the generational run is just beginning. I love it. Clip that. Clip that in a decade. Clip that in five decades. I mean, 99, 100. It's going to happen. Thanks. Great to catch up. Always great to have you. Let me know if I can help you.

1:32:26We'll talk to you soon. Good luck at the national. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about console. Console built AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets up next jonathan jacoby jacoby jacoby coming in hot to the ultradome how you doing hey guys thank you for having me great to have you great to have you uh let's get right into the gong worthy moment of this segment tell us about the news yes so today we launched an email out of stealth um raising 71 million dollars seed round and announcing it had been a while since i saw a 70 plus million dollar seed round and i feel more at ease ribbit capital having having thank you so much so what uh yeah yeah what what does the progress need to look like these days how uh how mature is the product uh how built out is the team to jump straight to that size of seed round?

1:33:32Yeah, so we're a team of 26 people. Actually grown pretty quickly. And today we also launched something pretty unique. We launched the first AI robotic experience online. So people can just browse to a website, to robots.online, and interact with real AI-powered robots by our models and our interfaces. So this is kind of a double milestone for us, both emerging out of stealth and kind of putting our technology out there at the same time. Very cool. I saw the painter, which is a robot that you can control and paint in the real world. I was a little bit frustrated because I had been writing down notes and talking with a few people about somebody should set up a robotic arm that lets you paint on real canvases and then send it to yourself.

1:34:24But you're effectively doing that. So you beat me to the punch. Yeah, so where does the AI start? Where does the teleoperation end? Because I believe there's been demos of, you know, deterministic robot, like remote control, even like a remote controlled camera that you can pan, tilt, and zoom. That's existed for a long time. Where does the AI actually come into the process? Yeah, so basically we have robots, you can talk to them. So basically the idea is we put out different interfaces. One, in some of the interface, again, as you can see here, you can talk to the robot and ask it things and the robot just responds to you.

1:35:05We're going to also, throughout the week, we're going to launch more and more different experiences and we're going to showcase different ways to interact with robots. So our company is a research-heavy, research lab, research-heavy company that focuses on robotic foundation models. but we also think deeply and care deeply about the experience. We think novel user interfaces are going to be a huge enabler for robotics. So we kind of wanted to put out something that is very wide to learn how people want to interact with robots and take that learning and put it back to the research. So in those experiments you're saying, you're saying one robot that you can fight with, like a robotic sword fight.

1:35:43So here it is. So one of them is controlled manually. like a teleoperation which is the user and there is a robot that is an AI robot that responds to the user so it actually fights so this is one way of interaction. Another one is you talk to the robot something and you see what it does so the painter you give it an association it paints it plays like a Pictionary with you and then after the experience you can like ask it to do some pantomimes you can imagine the brush is anything and it can be a wand it can be like leaning the like as a broomstick getting the floor so this is where the AI comes in this is where our models or foundation models comes into play.

1:36:20And we wanted to showcase both interfaces and the models. What's your opinion on robotics sort of, or robotic control coming for free in generalized LLM development? I saw some demos of, I think it was Opus 5, controlling a robotic arm. It seems like a lot of these models, they don't always need to be trained for something specific and then you wind up just getting some particular functionality for free or it's like a quick RL step on top of what the Frontier Labs are already doing. Is that relevant to your roadmap or do you think there's a convergence or do you think you'll go off and carve out a specific niche in robotics?

1:37:08I mean, obviously it's a huge category, but how does that all fit together? It is a huge category, that's true. Yeah. so I see the demo you're talking about, I think it was Enthropic. So we've seen those demos. Actually, we have from GPT 3.5. And before that, we've had robots controlled by LLMs. I think the problem that we're seeing, you know, labs such as ourselves trying to tackle is the fact that this doesn't really either generalize very well or doesn't, you know, fit in with the requirements of like, you know, dexterity or it doesn't. Yeah, it feels like a cool demo, but not necessarily commercially.

1:37:41Yeah, it also might just be like, it's impressive to be like, wow, language model, controlled arm. But if it's like every time it moved, it was$20 in tokens and it was 45 % accurate. And if you just like did an actual model for the robot, it's like two cents and perfect. That would be better. And it's kind of one example, one of my friends told me was, assume you could have had an LLM, like do an ASCII art and like paint as if it's ASCII art, but we still have image models. Yeah, totally. It's like not the nature, language of the way that LLMs work and that's why it's a bit off but I do think that I think initial models for robotics such as what we're building and what some other labs are doing as well, I think it's going to take a huge part of how robotics is going to evolve and we're also very lucky to be in this time of great tailwind, right?

1:38:34There's a great tailwind of research, so most of the team is doing research and we have a lot of table from LLMs research, we take inspiration from that or from video models or from world models. And that's pretty, that's pretty, that's pretty unique. Time to time to revenue. How are you, how are you thinking about like first commercial application? Sounds like you're in the age of research, but when, when do you see opportunity to start commercializing and kind of where? Yeah. So we have partners working on, working with right now across different kind of segments. So from logistics to entertainment, to health as well, some cool things on that that we might talk about on those three categories, and there's more.

1:39:15What we're seeing is we want to be able to get as much value to users and customers as fast as possible, and make sure that when we are scaling it up, it's scaled up in the right kind of directionally right approach, because you don't want to be way off and then be dependent on being in a big tech debt, I would say, and product debt. But I think we're at a point where we're seeing value. We're seeing value from partners, and it's actually showing a sign that we didn't expect to occur that fast. How do you think about vertical integration? It feels like there's robotics companies that are saying, we're going to build the robot and the model.

1:40:04There's others that are like, we're going to build a modular robot and the model. There's other companies that are saying, we'll just build the model and the robot builders will show up. I haven't seen actually that many new startups that are like, we're just building a dumb robotic arm that you can load whatever model you want on. We want nothing to do with the actual AI inside. We're just doing manufacturing. Maybe that's an opportunity. but where do you see your scope growing or staying focused? I think it's a great question because it really is a divergent kind of topic, a lot of opinions.

1:40:39We see ourselves as, so we're a software first company. So we work with our products, our kind of software stack, from the models to the interfaces to talk to them. We work very hard on making it generalized across embodiments. So we want to get to a point that even a new manufacturer comes out and says, all right, here's a new robot. I would want to be able to, within a week, have everything work on that robot as if I had that robot for months. So we're building a lot of infrastructure to be able to cut, like this is part of our research, like how to be able to calibrate all our technology across robots easily.

1:41:16We think, and we see a lot of vendors and we think it doesn't necessarily have to be coupled. And we see a lot of, you know, great companies around the world that sell the hardware. So if we could be a good provider for the brain and for the interface of the brain, we think it's a very viable kind of product offering. And I think it makes sense as well. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, obviously there are a ton of robotic production or supplier companies. There aren't enough startups in that world, I feel like. I feel like we need, like, I'm a direct competitor to KUKA or something, and I'll make a big robotic arm and I'll make it cheaper or whatever.

1:41:52I'm sure there are. What were you doing before you go? What were you doing before this? So I worked at a company acquired by Wiz and then we got acquired by Google. And actually me and Asaf, the CEO of Wiz, we go way back. When I was 17, he was running Microsoft in Israel and he brought me to join Microsoft. And so we have a long history, so I joined Wiz. And yeah, I think the era right now... Long story short, generational run. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down. Congratulations on coming out of stealth. Great demo. Thank you. Massive seed range. Very cool way to launch.

1:42:36Huge. And we'll talk to you soon, hopefully. I'm sure we will. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Up next, we have Dean Meyer from Sequoia Capital here to talk about America's open model paradox. I love a good paradox. Also, fun fact, I heard somebody debunking Jevin's paradox. It's not a paradox. It's just an effect. It's just an economic effect. Is it a real paradox? Break down America's open model paradox. Feel free to give a little bit of an introduction.

1:43:13What's up, guys? How you doing? What's up? I'm good. Can you guys hear me? Oh, yeah. We can hear you. I can't hear you. Let's go. We can hear you. What's up, guys? Great to be on the show. Thanks for having me. Look, myself and my partner, Constantine, at Sequoia, we've been riffing on sovereign AI for a while. And I think we wrote this post that went a little viral, and the core concept was the US is creating this frontier capability that kind of gets leaked into Chinese-agway models. And then you have the entirety of the American builder ecosystem, which is Neolabs, companies that are somewhat dependent on these Chinese models.

1:43:56And so, you know, today there's like, you know, if you're an American lab and you can legally learn from a Chinese model, but you can't learn from a kind of frontier US model, which is what they're doing, then the question is, how do we build kind of the, you know, the legal path almost for this direct route, as opposed to just having this dependence on Chinese subway models. And so we kind of address that and share a few ideas, which I'm happy to talk about, but that's kind of like the overall, the overall thing. Yeah. I mean, there's so much, uh, there's so much news about this particular topic.

1:44:27Uh, the essay was written at the perfect time. Um, just, just before Kimmy K3, man, it was, uh, we had no Intel, we had no Intel. Uh, but I mean, were you, but were you a believer in, uh, in just the fact that, uh, the open source market generally lags the frontier by six months and that's not changing because there was this graph that was going around for a while that was showing that maybe the closed source was scaling on a slightly steeper curve than open source. And this was driving sort of a couple months ago when we were in between open source releases. People were starting to say, oh, maybe they will plateau because the training cost will be so high that you'll have sort of like what happened at Meta.

1:45:12That will just happen in China because China will just say, yeah, like if we're going to spend a billion dollars on this training run it's not worth it to open source it but it feels like they found an economic model that makes sense kimmy's license is out today and they're going to take a portion of revenue if you're really selling a lot of kimmy tokens and so um were you were you was this built on an idea that that the open source and closed source frontiers would always be on basically the same track? Yeah, well, I think, look, that is the question. And so, look, our view is, I mean, first of all, the gap is closed a lot, and so kind of the key conversation online over the past week was is distillation the reason for this, or is there some other kind of mysterious reason?

1:46:03And the truth is, there are two camps, like everything. People are kind of extremists when there's conversation, there's a group that are like, hey, distillation does nothing. And there's a group that's like distillation everything. The truth is from the conversations we've had, it's somewhere in the middle, right? Like whether it's 20%, 30%, 40%, it doesn't really matter as much. It is meaningful that we know. We know from the labs, you know, there's tens of millions of queries through these like large scale proxy distillation accounts. We also know on the other hand, if you speak to anyone who's like leading in synthetic data gen on pre or post training at the labs, they will tell you, even if you do hardcore KYC and then let's say you get access to these kind of, you don't have all the traces, you don't have the chain of thought, there's a lot of RL that happens and you just get the output.

1:46:52Let's assume you just get an output from a query or a prompt. It is still extremely valuable. That is 100 % true. And so we know distillation is real. And then the question becomes, well, if distillation is real, how do we address the asymmetry that exists between if you're a Western US company or just a Western company, you're not going to go and set up 35 ,000 proxy accounts with different IPs around the world and go into Syllentropic for the fear of being sued and being called out and even shutting off access. And so there is the structural asymmetry and I think it's something we have to think about.

1:47:28So you have to create the meme of TokenMax. Yeah, go ahead. You have to create the meme of TokenMax. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Do you think that Anthropic or anyone else, let's just say a closed source frontier lab in America, if they believe that they've been distilled by an international company, should they just sue? Even if there's no way that on any reasonable timescale that they're going to win a settlement or block anything, would it just throw down the gauntlet to say, we're willing to put this into the official record under threat of perjury that we believe this is what happened and there's like a signed affidavit of their belief that there is wrongdoing?

1:48:10I mean, I think they probably would and nothing would happen. Like, you know, I think nothing would happen. And so anyway, like, you know, US companies are kind of deterred from doing this. So I don't think it would change too much, unfortunately. It would be very symbolic. I think it would be, I agree with you. I think, I don't think anything would change from the actual lawsuit. It would cost some amount of money to file this lawsuit, but at least it would, it would have, they would have something to point to of like, Hey, look, we tried to go through the traditional path and you were able to follow along.

1:48:43you were able to look at our evidence, which was entered into the public record. And, oh, yeah, the CEO of the lab that we're accusing of distilling us didn't show up to court or whatever. You know, whatever the process is, the process can begin. Maybe this is like a day away. Maybe the lawsuit drops tomorrow. Who knows? But it seems like that's the next logical step because right now there's a lot of pushback against, like, hey, why do you have a problem with this? And they say, oh, maybe it's distilled. Well, you know, that's the next step. maybe i don't know yeah so so kimmy came out with their their license this morning and they they in the license it says if uh if you're just running that hosting this yourself for your own use cases that's fine yeah it's free but if you're effectively reselling it as a neocloud you have to give us a revenue share i can't imagine that washington is gonna tolerate that just just the idea the idea that like a bunch of us neoclouds are then sending billions of dollars back to to china to support one of their leading labs i just to me that feels like it could provoke a response that felt like it was maybe coming last week when different people in the admin were saying hey we're we're we we believe distillation is happening here we're we're pro open source but we're against how they were positioning it ip theft on the flip side i was very quickly able to find a Bottega Veneta dupe that comes from China and is effectively distilled on that brand.

1:50:16And the government isn't stepping in about that, you know, and that money is flowing straight to it through Amazon and through other platforms. Shein and T. I just. Yeah, but it's not. It doesn't have any geopolitical significance. You're not. You wouldn't go to war. And it's a caring company. Yeah. No, that's true. That's true. Anyway, sorry. No, I think, look, I think, look, I was surprised to read that. But look, the truth is, I think it's not dissimilar from the database market where you had Redis early on. There were a range of these companies released really cool open source and hyperscalers copied them effectively and that was the end.

1:50:53It's impossible to enforce. I don't think that will work for the Chinese. But look, the broader question here is there are two major risks depending on a Chinese open source ecosystem. The first one is the dependency risk. The framing we have is, in some sense, at Sequoia, we always say, we're only as good as our next investment, which we actually believe. And I think in some sense, the analogy is you're only as good as your next model. And so as long as you're dependent on the Chinese to give you the next hit of the thing, you're kind of in a bit of a weird position where you have this dependency.

1:51:35And then the other thing that I don't think people are kind of well calibrated on is just the risk of backdoors. And I'm not saying, like, just to be clear, I'm not saying that all Chinese open-weight labs are backdooring models. But the truth is, we know for sure, and there's like a lot of research on this, both from the labs and outside the labs in academia. It is like an NP-hard problem to know if there is a backdoor in a model. And that we know. So it's impossible to verify. and on top of that there's like a ton of crazy evidence that shows you can like time pull a model which basically you know one way of saying is like a model you could do all the evals you want and suddenly like you know it gets a certain input and the model literally changes behavior we'll start like exfiltrating data and doing some crazy stuff and like this stuff's real like this is not science fiction we know and so kind of the analogy I would give you guys is like I think the state of AI security today is very similar to that of early days of the internet when in 2001, Wi-Fi encryption was effectively broken, publicly broken.

1:52:39And still no one did anything. And I don't even think we're at that moment yet. And it's going to get really bad if we, one, don't better understand how to secure these things, and two, build our own independent ecosystem. And so those would be some thoughts as well. there's so much more we could go into here uh we gotta have you back on the show and talk more because like there's there's so much going on but thank you for writing the essay we'll let the audience go and read the full piece uh great to have you on and uh come back soon i'm looking forward to the next one because it feels like uh the the conversation has already advanced so many different directions uh we didn't even get into the the the the politics of anyone having a cyber weapon in their pocket there's all these different scenarios to play out beyond what you just mentioned, which are a bunch of other considerations.

1:53:27So it's a fun one to noodle on. Guys, thank you so much. This was awesome. Have a good rest of your day. Talk to you later. Bye. Let me tell you about public. Investing for those to take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is Brent Franson from Death Clock. He's the founder and CEO. Welcome to the show, Brent. How are you doing? I'm well. Thanks for having me. Please introduce yourself and the company. Tell us a little bit about Death Clock. Yeah, so we trained in AI on 1 ,200 longevity studies to predict how long you're going to live originally.

1:54:06And then the model was predicting the exact day you would die. And so we started sharing that. And people either love it or hate it. They want to see the exact day they'll die. But more importantly, the model builds a plan to live longer. It's not just about when you're going to die. is this a nod to metalocalypse from adult swim no it's not although that's one of the most the most common questions on the most common responses on social about metalocalypse yeah and then just about like religious you know only god can tell you when you're gonna die yeah uh is this rage bait are you intentionally framing this because you could have called it like like the longevity optimizer but death clock i don't think they would have gotten nearly as many users.

1:54:52I agree. But what are your opinions about, I mean, I've literally like lived this as well. So I'm not, uh, I'm not actually, uh, you know, saying that this is bad or anything, but I'm just wondering about how conscious the decision is to, to use a word like death because liquid death, same thing where it's this aggressive name, it draws an attention. What are your thoughts on, on that as like an attention mechanism? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a stoic component to it. And so I do think that there is, some, I don't know, some good reason to be honest with ourselves about the fact that we're going to die.

1:55:26But the real answer is, I don't know, distribution really matters. It's hard to make noise. And so we wanted to be really provocative. So our goal is very much, you know, I don't know, the Howard Stern ilk of, look, love us or hate us. Just don't be apathetic about what we're doing. No, no, I think it's a good strategy for the modern era. Talk about the new launch. You launched free nationwide blood testing. Sounds good. Too good to be true. What's the catch? Yeah, it's not. You know, people are really concerned about their data and I get it. We don't do anything with the data. We don't share or sell the data.

1:56:02But I think what's happened is we have a lot of these blood testing companies that do all this kitchen sink blood testing and they charge you a lot of money. And the reality is, is blood testing is commoditized. LabCorp and Quest have existed for a long time. These tests are not that expensive. And the set of tests that you really need to understand heart health, metabolic health, inflammation, those are pretty inexpensive tests. And so from an acquisition perspective for us, it made sense to say, look, let's give away a test. You can get a sense of the platform and how good the plan that it generates for you is.

1:56:41And then we think you'll do more testing and you'll go deeper and you'll convert to premium. But, you know, giving away a basic test, it's in the tens of dollars. This stuff is not as expensive as people think. OK. And how many biomarkers does the free test give you? The free test gives you about 50, but this whole number of biomarkers thing, it's the wrong way to think about this kind of testing. And so I think we've gotten into this place where we think, OK, you know, 150 biomarkers is better than 50 biomarkers. And that's not necessarily true. I mean, when you run these blood tests, they've got about a 95 percent accuracy rate.

1:57:17So when you start just testing for everything, even asymptomatically, you're cranking up the odds of a false positive that you've got to go chase down with your doc. And then you're in some diagnostic process that actually carries some risk. And so it's 50. You can do all of that testing with us. But it's more about getting the right tests. I mean, really understanding the right things about your heart health, your metabolic health, making sure you're doing the right cancer screen. So I wouldn't get you caught up. There's like a power law in efficacy of biomarkers. And there's also probably a lot of correlation between some of those longer tail biomarkers.

1:57:52Okay, so someone comes in, technically you're having to fork over tens of dollars to get them a free test, and you're betting that some meaningful percentage of them will be like, this service is cool, I'll stick around and access other services. So it sounds like as close as possible to a free lunch, which I like. Yeah, I mean, it really is free. There's no gotcha in it. I mean, you do have to say, no, I don't want to take an Alzheimer's. I don't want to look for the Alzheimer's gene. I don't want to do more advanced cardiac testing. All of those things require you to upgrade. But I think the future is one in which we're kind of acting as our own personal doctors.

1:58:37We've got an AI that's got all of our health data. And then we order the tests very surgically that we need at the times that we need them. We're not just kitchen sink doing 15 vials every six months. Like, okay, I should go look at my liver health because of a medication I'm taking. And you shouldn't need a doctor to do all of that. And so that's what we're trying to make available mass market. We're not going to be the high-end solution. What legally can only a doctor do these days? Well, medications, cancer screens, but I mean, blood testing. So there is a doctor. I mean, obviously blood testing happens with labs, so those are licensed.

1:59:18But then in terms of the interpretation of the tests, that can sort of be democratized with AI and individual self-serve products? Yeah. I mean, we have to disclaim that we're not a doctor and you need to speak to your doctor about any of these results. But the barriers are coming down in lab testing. I mean, so we every lab order that goes through death clock, it has a doctor's name on it. Like it goes through an approval process. But it's very fast and you don't need to speak directly to the doctor because there's no there's really no risk for most of these tests. What were you doing before this?

1:59:58I was the CEO of a company called Euclid Analytics, a benchmark and NEA back business. It was acquired by WeWork about six months before WeWork imploded. It was a crazy, crazy ride. Wild. Well, I'm so curious what Adam Newman had in store. We Health, maybe? Oh, yeah. I know. He was a crazy charismatic guy. He was one of those guys. He's still alive, by the way. Yeah. He's still alive. You're talking about like he's dead. You would go sit, and he would talk for two hours in these all hands. Wow. And it would feel like it was 15 minutes. But the day he showed up to an all hands in a suit, we all looked around like, oh, we're screwed.

2:00:42Oh, that's good. Question. Biological age. How should consumers read into it? It seems like there's this race to the bottom in biological age where the platforms have an incentive to rate someone as a lower biological age because they're more likely to flex it on social media or to their friends. And then the other question I have is, is that just comparing your labs to the average American? And we know the average American is deeply unhealthy. So is it even if I'm like I'm 30 years old, if my biological age is 25, is that basically just saying like you are healthier than the average American who is deeply unhealthy?

2:01:28I recently did one of those tests and it said I had the mind of a five-year-old biologically. It's like, we've already told this joke about it. It's funny every time. It gets every time. So it is gamed. And I think there are some companies that are pretty reckless with that. They're telling you that you're younger than any real, it's called a phenotypic age is what would be kind of the fancy name for it, would actually tell you. And so I think that's a little concerning that people are doing that. Um, where it comes from, there's a researcher at Yale who produced the most valid calculation of biological age, and it takes nine biomarkers.

2:02:07And it's a little bit more, it's a little bit fancier than just comparing you to average, but I think that's directionally, right? And so I wouldn't put too much stock in biological age. I would take very seriously heart health markers, metabolic markers, inflammatory markers. And these are the basics. It's like know what your LDL is, know what your hemoglobin A1C is, know what your HSCRP is, C-reactive protein is going to give you a sense of inflammation. If you're paying attention to those things, you're going to do way more than caring too much about a biological age. What's your date? Oh, yeah.

2:02:46How long have you got? My date is, yeah. So mine's at 78. It's like February 16th of 2065. I mean, it's weird to get an actual date, but the average user has 10 to 12 years that they can add. So the model's also producing how much longer it thinks you can live. And then anytime your health data is updated, the calculation recalculates. So my date changes every day. But when I started, it was 78. I partied a little too much. Have you pitched a partnership with Nasdaily? Are you familiar with this YouTuber, Facebook creator? he where he's obsessed with this concept he wears a t-shirt that has a percentage loading bar for how far he is through his life based on life expectancy and it's all a message about you know like enjoying every day but he gets like hundreds of billions of views or millions of lots of views very very popular creator uh would be a very logical uh sponsorship maybe one day yeah we should talk to them i mean i think the reality is is like we're all gonna die and we're gonna just Not me, built different, but continue.

2:03:54We are all going to die, no matter what people are going to tell you. And there are things you can do to live longer.

2:04:06Sorry, we're having too much fun. Money never sleeps. You shouldn't either. I hope you're right, actually. I really, really hope you're right. Just say you're not AGI-pilled. Yeah, not AGI-pilled. Just say you're not AGI-pilled. We're going to cure everything. No, I think you're right. And I think just reframing mentally around what it means to be healthy, giving people another visualization on what is typically just a bunch of random nanom liters to deciliters. Like it's a bunch of random stats. Also, people are getting health information constantly. At least I am. Take this. Do this or that.

2:04:43I've always been into experimenting with different protocols and things like that. But sometimes you need to kind of jolt people. Well, I think it's fine if you're experimenting so long as you're getting the basics right. I mean, I think if you're getting a full body scan but not getting colonoscopies, that's wrong. I wish I could throw the X up. But if you've done the colonoscopy and you've done the mammograms and you've done everything, then like, okay, fine. Maybe get the full body scan. And then on the experimenting, you got to be careful. You know, the story of thalidomide, the doctors were prescribing that off label to pregnant women.

2:05:22And then the babies were being born with like hands on their, on their stomachs. Yeah. So you gotta, you know, the experimenting can be a little bit, I think we're a little casual about the experimenting. I'm not saying don't do it, but yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. That's on the progress. Thanks for filling us in company. And yeah, free blood tests out there. Also, death, potentially a skill issue. Don't do it. Anyway, thank you so much. We will agree to disagree on that. Thanks, guys. We'll see if we die or not. I hope you're right. Yeah, see you back here in 70 years. Goodbye.

2:05:58Cheers, Brent. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business. Let's see. Sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And our next guest is Mate from Adrien. How you doing? Welcome back. Hey, good. Thanks for having me on. How are you guys doing? We're doing well. Great to see you. We met at a long journey dinner forever ago at this point. I think you've been on the show. We did. And we also met at the ramp dinner. I think I was the infamous founder that snapped that phone, if you guys remember that.

2:06:34That's right. Oh, I missed that. We told this story. I'm not going to say the guy's name because he's a friend and it's funny and it makes him look really silly. But this guy is sitting there. He's got the new iPhone Air. He's telling everyone in the room, you cannot possibly break this phone. This phone is indestructible. Anybody here, try to break my phone. Try to break my phone. This guy goes, okay, just bends down, just snaps it in his hand. And the guy's standing there just being like, just in shock and disbelief. I thought, I was told, and he was saying, I'm going to email Tim Cook about this.

2:07:15I'm pretty sure that Apple never promised you that it's unbreakable. They never ran an app. It was like, it cannot be broken by a guy from the Gundo. So you are in the Gundo? Tell us what you're building. Yeah, we're in the greater South Bay area. I guess you could consider it the Gundo. So, I mean, we're super excited to announce our Series A. How much did you raise? We raised$18 million. Hey. Hey. Yeah, and Drenum builds scalable sensing infrastructure for undersea domain awareness. So think about, like, Hunt for Red October, finding submarines, unmanned underwater vehicles, semi-submersibles, and so on.

2:07:56So, yeah, distributed. I'm going to maybe put it too plainly, but we don't really know much of what's going on out in the maritime domain. Is that correct? Yeah, I mean, the maritime domain is getting more and more contested like daily, right? I think we have a good understanding of what happens on the surface of the oceans. There's cameras, surface boats, but everything's kind of shifting into the undersea quite quickly. You know, it's one of the most unexploited gaps that we have. And a lot of near peer adversaries and terrorist organizations and so on and so forth are starting to move under the waves.

2:08:29So like this entire push of, you know, the U.S., for example, funding unmanned underwater vehicles, our adversaries are doing the same thing. And so the big question is, like, how do we find those things intelligently, quickly, give ourselves awareness of what happens around various parts of the ocean as well as like our strategic bases and so on? Makes a lot of sense. Talk about traction since the last time we chatted. What kind of progress have you guys made? Obviously, the new funding. I'm sure you have some great momentum, but what's been what have you been actually executing on? Oh, my goodness.

2:09:04So many things. So I think from the hardware and software side, like, I mean, we've gone through three generations of hardware since we last talked. We've been moving at breakneck speeds here at Andronum. We fielded it across like numerous exercises. Most recently, we just got back from a three and a half week deployment with UUV group up in Keyboard, Washington. So they're all the guys that run and like dictate how unmanned underwater vehicles run. So we were up there alongside with a few other folks, no mission ending failures for a three and a half week deployment. Obviously, constantly testing here off the coast of California, building up our repository of sonar signatures.

2:09:42And we do have some things that are going to be coming up quite soon that we're super excited to announce when they hit. So stay tuned. And what does integration with other defense tech companies look like now or in the future? Like, you know, there's been like Anduril has a platform. Palantir has a platform. I'm sure a lot of different units have bespoke systems for command and control and all sorts of different things. Does that come for free? Is that something that people are just like vibe coding integrations? Or do you have to go and do a deal and actually figure out how you integrate? Or do you ultimately want to be your own platform that runs as the operating system?

2:10:27Yeah, I think it vastly depends on the type of technology that you're building, right? But specifically for us, sonar information is so classified and compartmentalized. And it's very tricky to get access on data that has been compartmentalized, such as this, because you have numerous third-party integrators that also own that data itself as well. And so that is really the reason why we went out and built Perl, which is our passive sonar buoy, right, as well as Obsidian, which is kind of like, you could call it a C2, but really it is like the platform that ingests all this information. There's a bunch of like super sophisticated machine learning and effectively putting dots on a map for end users.

2:11:05but the C2 in itself, like there's various abstractions of it. You know, you have the God C2s that kind of live on top. You mentioned those companies' names. We really are trying to own the under C domain and by building the hardware, we're building up this massive repository of sonar signatures and that'll give us the option to then give that data to those other C2 platforms if necessary, right? So it really is like a fine balance of what we have to be doing with regards to C2 But ultimately, like every defense tech company that's out there needs to play well together because we all have to provide an integrated solution to the end user.

2:11:42Right. And we do have those relationships with primes and with other kind of startups as well. You mentioned that the data is hard to get. Generally, you're doing machine learning, which is obviously very data heavy. Is there like a scale AI, like a Mercore for this type of data yet? Are you like buying data from like fishing boats or like, is there some world where there is a scaled data benefit, even not in a, in a military context, but maybe you just want to get a bunch of data on how sonar performs in a swimming pool or a lake or something that's more controlled. And then you can transfer, learn that into like the actual viable domain in the final application.

2:12:26Yeah. Yeah, sonar is super, super challenging in the fact that you can't necessarily translate environmentals to where you are deployed, right? So, like, with radar, for instance, you just have air and it's pretty linear. Like, the ocean does a ton of weird things with regards to performance of sonar. And so you really have to be deployed and you have to understand kind of the environmental factors such that you can perform this highly complex math that goes behind all of it. That's really the reason why we did build Pearl, right? Like, that delivers that information in real time. Like we kind of get this information in sub three seconds worth of latency and we process it and we put dots on a map for end users.

2:13:04We have that environmental feature kind of built into Perl itself. And you can do base level extrapolation kind of across the board with a lot of that, but it's not super, super applicable everywhere. And so, yes, there is data that we have accessed that is more off shell, for instance, like how do whales sound, right? Various different types of whale things. And at least in our, you know, kind of hot dog, no hot dog paradigm, we can say this is a whale. This is not, you know, a submarine or something like that. So it definitely adds a little bit more kind of feature rich environment for the end user.

2:13:40But most of it is really hinged on the hardware that we're developing and building. Right. So in this world of AI, you can't just access a massive repository of data and do a ton of AI on it. You have to build it yourself, which is really like the reason why a low cost, scalable hardware solution is super, super important for us to deliver that data in real time. What does actually deploying a buoy look like? Do you have to call the government before you do that? Because I love the idea of moving fast and doing R &D and just dropping something in the water. And that's probably fine. But at the same time, like you're you could accidentally be spying on like a U.S.

2:14:20submarine and they might not want you to be spying on them, even if you're like a friendly. Right. So like what is the flywheel to get the permission to, you know, do the test that you need to do before you get the contract to prove that you can do it? Like what's the sequence of events? Yeah. I mean, we're working hand in hand with with a lot of these folks at the government. Right. And so I detailed the deployment in Keyport, Washington. That is something that we scheduled prior going up there. You know, we do a lot of verification and validation testing here off the coast of California, but it's kind of just like put it in the water, see if it works, check it out, pull it out, and then ship it to the location with the end user and test alongside them.

2:14:59We've done that kind of across the coast, right? So we were in San Diego at a large fleet exercise at the beginning of this year as well. And so it does require coordinating with end users, right? But that's ultimately what we're looking for anyway. What are the feedbacks that these folks give to us such that we can iterate much more quickly? We could do that in our own engineering vacuum, or we could just be talking to these people directly, and that's what we really want to strive to do. And we've gotten really positive feedback from them. Other people build buoys. They're very large. It takes a lot of effort to put these things out, like gigantic research vessels, barges.

2:15:34It takes a week to pre-deploy. We just kick ours off the side of the boat. right and so when we give these things these buoys to the end operators we say break them test them go deploy them yourself give us the feedback such that we can put that into our loop of iteration and they do that they're super happy to break things right and i think that's the most valuable thing that we can ask for i love it well congratulations and thank you awesome progress show we'll talk to you soon great to see you thank you so much keep snapping on iphone i was gonna say don't snap anymore iphone errors but keep it going keep it going anyone has an ip wants an iPhone snapped.

2:16:07That's your guy. Who wants that? Sometimes I want my iPhone snapped. Diego said, John needs someone to clear his desk of Diet Cokes every 20 minutes. Can I get a recycling bin over here? You're only on your third. This is a typical day for you. It's an important day we have. Justin from NVIDIA is the VP of Enterprise AI here to talk about NVIDIA launching the Open Source AI Alliance. Justin, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us. Yeah, thanks for having us. So can you start by giving, I mean, we discussed the letter. I think a lot of people have read it. But what is your elevator pitch for the Open Secure AI Alliance, the letter, how they interact, like the overall project here, the goals?

2:16:54Yeah, I think, let's just say there's been this moment in the industry, especially with this incident that happened at Hugging Face, where there's just this collective awareness across all the industry leaders that, you know, doing a lot of the work in cybersecurity out in the open, where we can look at open models, open harnesses, open safety evaluations as an industry is going to give basically the broadest collective defense of our organization. So that's why we put the letter out there. That's why all these companies are kind of rushing in to talk about sort of the importance of this initiative?

2:17:30It seems like it's going extremely well. I totaled it up. I think$18 trillion of market cap has signed on across something like 35 companies and more. I'm interested in what you, are there any other outcomes or is this purely just avoiding a bad outcome? Because the whole framing is basically don't ban, don't do something. It's don't take an action here, allow the status quo to continue? Is that the correct formulation of the proposal? Well, I think it's a recognition that you always want to give the defenders of enterprises across really critical industries, financial services, energy, telecommunications, an asymmetric advantage to protect their infrastructure.

2:18:17And the best way to do that is you give them state-of-the-art frontier open systems that they can scan, remediate, patch their infrastructure. Now, they should always have the advantage because they understand the code, the configurations, and how they have their infrastructure running, but they need access to the tools to basically get ahead of any potential security issues. Okay. I guess like the steel man of the other side is that this isn't an asymmetric advantage to the organization that you described, it's actually a perfectly symmetric advantage. The attackers will also have frontier open source, like great open source tools.

2:19:03And if we allow open source to proliferate, at least it will be balanced. But can you explain a little bit more about where the asymmetry on the defender side comes? Because that sounds amazing. We want the defenders to win, but it feels like if everyone's using the same tools, it's actually just a level playing field. And this could just be a battle. Could still win, could be fine, But what's driving the asymmetry? Yeah, you got to remember when you're running a service and you have terms of service, you know who's accessing that service. And there you're putting additional guardrails on there on safe use.

2:19:38You can also, if people start to misuse the service, you can quickly patch guardrails and basically ensure that people are using the service appropriately. So that in and of itself should give the defensive teams the ability to run, I'd say, these better capabilities to clean up their infrastructure, patch their infrastructure, and then service providers that are hosting any of the models should run them with appropriate guardrails. How do you think the equilibrium plays out if sort of, you know, companies get, like big companies get access to advanced open source models? So they're patching their systems.

2:20:23They're doing stuff. But there's still a lot of attackers out there. And there's this weird scenario that people have been talking about where a small business that might have a credit card stored here or some piece of personally identifiable information stored in a less secure system. Now they're responsible for spinning up an open source cybersecurity defense system. Like what's the equilibrium that keeps the long tail of organizations secure? Yeah, you've got to still pair openness with strong safeguards, like rules on malicious use, laws that prevent against malicious use, and then obviously rapid remediation of anything that you know that's going on.

2:21:07And the conversation around open models is no different than the conversation around, I mean, I think open software. And you think of open software, whether it's Linux or Kubernetes or PyTorch, that open software built the foundation of our economy. Eighty percent of our digital economy is powered by open source. And I'll say good stewards of open source software can sort of debate open standards in an open way. They can look at evaluations. They can look at patching and remediation. And they can work collectively for the defense of the U.S. economy. I mean, I think we got to look at, you know, models the same way.

2:21:46You know, as soon as models are out there in the, I'll call the public domain, you can fork them, you can patch them, and you can remediate any issues that, you know, cybersecurity people find in those models. And so, you know, the goal of this organization is to have those conversations out in the public. I think it's, you know, it's an important conversation for all of us to have. But we want to make sure, again, that you have, I'll say, a diverse set of tools at your disposal as a cybersecurity defender so that if a model refuses to do the work that you needed to do, you have other options to continue to defend your organization.

2:22:27Who do you think will step into the role of model evaluator or model tester? because we were just talking with Dean Meyer from Sequoia Capital, and he was illustrating a possible scenario where there's a backdoor in a model or some nefarious thing sort of hidden below the surface. So the model still tests well on benchmarks. You deploy it, and then over time it does something nefarious. It feels like, again, that's another big burden to potentially put on a small business. But if there's some sort of, you know, American company that steps up and validates and tests, maybe there's an even balance there.

2:23:10How do you see that playing out? Well, I think, you know, organizations like Red Hat have done this open source software, right? Where they clear the CVEs, they provide the commercial support to enterprises. I feel like it creates an opportunity for businesses to step in and be able to do the same thing with open models and provide the same commercial patching and support into enterprises. So I think that's a market that will emerge as we go forward. but ultimately I think allowing, I'll call it, cybersecurity professionals to continue to pen test and understand the limits of these models is what's going to allow us to build that lifecycle to do patching and remediation of any vulnerabilities that can exist in these model weights.

2:23:53Now, the fact that they're open means you can test them and understand the limits of them. The challenge is with a lot of the model weights that might be hosted, the terms of service prevent cybersecurity people from researching and looking for any backdoors in those as well. So the problem doesn't go away, whether it's hosted or open. It can exist. And I think the spotlight of having more cybersecurity professionals evaluating these things is just going to lead to better collective defense. I don't know how much you can speak to what the Nemotron team is doing, but broadly, what should organizations expect from Nemotron, the family of models, over the next, let's say, six months?

2:24:38Oh, man. I don't know that I can talk about where we're going. But, you know, generally our approach has been like, let's, again, do it all in the open. Let's basically put the data sets out there that we're training into these models so people can understand the data that blends that went into the models. Let's put the model weights out there. Let's put the training techniques out there and the evaluations out there and basically use that as a foundation for building custom intelligence into enterprises. I mean, that's the other part of the conversation that's lost is these open models are critical for enterprises basically building their own intelligence.

2:25:18and basically maintaining, I'll call it a reinforcement learning wheel or a flywheel on these open models so they can maintain their competitive advantage. And so providing that foundation of data and open weights and data blends gives enterprises that. Now, with Nemotron, they're really language models, but we have a bunch of other domains and models. We have Cosmos, which is World Foundation models. We have Alpamayo for autonomous driving. We have Groot for vision language action models for robots. And so I think across industries, the idea of having these open models to build the startup ecosystem, allow enterprises to domain adapt them and build their own intelligence is really important, really, for the future growth of our industry.

2:26:05How important are we? Can you give us some context on what you're seeing or hearing from other business leaders about the value of open source purely economically? Just we went through this token maxing boom. I think every enterprise leader feels that AI is valuable, but it can be very expensive. How are they thinking about efficiency right now with the current cost to benefit tradeoffs? And how does open source change that? I mean, I can put my NVIDIA hat on here. We are the same way, right? We use all the frontier models. We love the frontier models. They're amazing for driving efficiency and how we do software development and chip design and how we run a competitive business.

2:26:55but the modern way to build applications now are really an ensemble of models where you want to use the frontier for where they're unique and they add differentiated value. So like a really complex agentic plan, you want to run through the frontier model and then you want to use the open model weights for things that are more trivial, like document summarization. And the two can complement each other to drive a lot more cost-efficient applications across the enterprise. Yeah. And then anything that's been fine-tuned on your particular data, that example from thinking machines with Bridgewater's information pipeline, obviously they got incredible performance at very low cost because it was a unique use case that was going to run on a continuous basis.

2:27:39And so they were able to get a lot of value there. It wouldn't make sense to hire you and then have you just be a BDR doing cold emails. So, you know, there wouldn't be a very efficient use of it. It's a great analogy. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. I was just going to say, yeah, I think your point's spot on. I think, you know, there's a bunch of other, you know, model makers like TML is a great company, Reflection, you know, Runway, you know, many different model makers across different domains. And I think you want a rich ecosystem here of startups building the future of what's possible with this industrial revolution going on with AI.

2:28:22So we're just happy to advocate on behalf of the open ecosystem. But really, it complements the closed ecosystem. And all of it sort of has its unique value here. So the alliance is pretty huge at this point. Do you want to grow it a lot bigger or is this a solid enough base to go where you want to go next? Or will this be something that just continues to grow? What do you think? You know, I think the inbound requests around this is kind of blown us away by the appetite and the interest. I think ultimately what we want to do is kind of work as a community and share sort of best practices. We also, with this, we put out a new agent harness that we think is phenomenal at reasoning.

2:29:10It's great at coding. And it's great at cybersecurity tasks. And so if we all sort of share advancements in the open, we can build the best technology together. And I think some of the things that we'll keep working on as an ecosystem is, I mean, to your point, what are the evaluations that we should be building? how do we test, and I'll call it open models, and look for, I'll say, safety issues in those models. How do you start to build, I'll call it, more cyber ranges that you put agents through to understand how truly capable they are? I mean, I think part of the challenge with this cybersecurity discussion is it's been over-indexed on, I'll call it, you know, bench-maxing for, you know, vulnerability discovery.

2:30:03And vulnerability discovery is not the same as, you know, like going through an attack chain. So I think we've just got to have more sane conversation in the open as an ecosystem on what are the right ways to safeguard this stuff and put it to work and to drive the efficiency that it can bring us across every business. Thank you so much for taking the time to come bring it to us. Yeah, great to meet you, Justin. Great to meet you. We hope to talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. That's our show, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow. There's a lot more news, but we can go through it tomorrow.

2:30:41Starship launched, and there's a beautiful video that somehow got taken down, so we can't even share it. But you can go find it. There's some cool stuff there. Anyway, do us a favor. Go have the best afternoon of your life. Go have the best Monday afternoon ever. Thank you to Cooper for always coming in at the market close. Good crew in the chat. Thank you so much for tuning in and chatting. We do read it. It's a lot of fun. leave us five stars on apple podcast and spotify sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. goodbye we love you goodbye goodbye