Logan Bartlett, Kian Sadeghi, Joshua Steinman, Sam Lessin and Seth Rosenberg Debate, Intel's New CEO

31:18Probably, probably not. People aren't taking it to that extreme. But I do think people have really recognized that there's knobs that are a little bit more pullable than they would have appreciated otherwise. And I think, I mean, if you look at the big software private equity folks, the Vistas and the Toma Bravos of the world, like they've been doing this for the last 10, 15 years. I just think it wasn't something that people really tried to do in the public markets. And now we're seeing that actually occur in a more meaningful way. For you as a multi-stage investor, what advice are you giving to the sort of average Series A founder?

31:54In many ways, like we could have massive sort of GDP could go negative. But if you're a high growth software company that's just sort of hitting your stride, you can still thrive. how are you kind of advising, you know, your portfolio companies around sort of downstream capital? Because as Redpoint, you guys are also, you know, a fund that can participate in some of these later stage rounds as well. Yeah. I would say that at least the last, I mean, the last five years has sort of felt like, so I've been doing this now for 11 or 12 years and the last four or five have felt like, twice as long as the first half of my career, just in terms of all the changes that have occurred.

32:41That said, it does seem pretty uncorrelated what's going on at a high-level macro with the early stage funding environment. I think to some extent, what happened after 2000 was the sophisticated LPs really pulled out of the funds that they felt had gotten too bloated or too big. And that's happened this cycle as well. I think if you talk to smart endowments or pension plans or stuff, they've definitely, as fund sizes have gotten to$3,$4,$5,$6 billion, those people have raised eyebrows and maybe voted with their feet to either scale down or walk away from those funds. But there's a lot of other money that has willingly and excitedly run into those big fundraisers.

33:33And so I think you're seeing sovereign wealth and Middle East people come into those funds and give them, you know, what, what, two, three, four or five hundred million dollars. And so it ends up kind of being a rounding error if a smart pension walks away or endowment walks away. So the way that impacts the startups, I think it's just at a very micro level, like continue to execute and the funding will be there. At least that's the way it seemed over the last couple of years. And I guess it's true until it isn't, but all this stuff sort of feels, um, outside of the control of the individual founders.

34:06And so I would encourage people not to worry too, too much about it. Uh, yeah. Related to that. I remember when the, the market crashed kind of around, I don't even know what we have the term for interest rate, like post ZERP era, Yeah, post ZERP. Post ZERP, I think. Post ZERP. You were talking to, maybe it was Emil Michael or someone, but about this idea of like, there's a lot of dry powder and there was a lot of optimism from entrepreneurs being like, well, the VCs have the money, they're going to have to give it to us anyway. And you were kind of explaining to folks, well, like the dry powder isn't necessarily sitting in their bank account.

34:39Like they have to make capital calls. The LPs might put pressure on them. Like funds might get downsized. But it feels like maybe now the dry powder narrative was real. And now all the VCs figured out how to start deploying again and deployment rates are up. But how do you tell the story of the post-ZERP era to where we are now in terms of just the pace of capital deployment? Yeah, it's a great question. I would say I've been surprised at how consistent people have been able to fundraise. And I think there was really a triaging or kind of a hollowing out of the middle that occurred, or maybe the tier B, if you will, a tier two funds where you saw a handful of those folks blow up or really struggle with their fundraisers in some way.

35:27But the names that everyone thinks about or knows, I think there was a concentration and consolidation of capital that came in. And then you couple that with some of our friends with seemingly endless amounts of oil money coming into the sector as well. And it just sort of feels like we're in this new normal state where there's a lot of capital going around. And I don't know exactly what's going to cause that to change. It feels like there wasn't a ton of reckoning for sins that were made in 2020 and 2021. It feels like people were able to get a mulligan and say, hey, you know what? Like, yeah, we got a little crazy, but now we've really doubled down and focused on what it is that we do well.

36:16And people seem, at least on the LP side, seem to be largely forgiving. or if they're not forgiving, there's someone waiting to take their place in one of these name brand funds. I mean, it feels like, yeah, there's gyrations and oscillations in the American early stage technology market, but where are you going to go if you don't invest in American technology? It's sort of like we all read the same books. You look at the founders today and like everyone's read Innovator's Dilemma or everyone's read the case study of Blockbuster and Netflix. And so we're dealing with a far more sophisticated like entrepreneur that's executing or CEO that's executing on AI right now.

36:53And I think similarly, like all the LPs studied what happened after 2000, 2001, like that was actually a great time to lean into the asset class. And so now we're at this prisoner's dilemma where it would be theoretically a great time for everyone to lean in if other people backed out because then prices would depress, but But everyone's staying in. And so it's actually leading to prices staying elevated, which has been interesting. I mean, I think in the last couple of weeks, it feels like I've heard the meme or the refrain that it's like so 2021 or it's got 2021 vibes all over again. This was pre the last seven days.

37:37And so I'm not exactly sure how that's going to play out. But that's definitely been the sentiment in the private markets from the VCs that I'm talking to is just sort of like, gosh, this feels like we're running this back and doing it all over again. Yeah. I've had this feeling multiple times this year where a portfolio company is just raising like a big up round. And depending on the lead, I'm just thinking like, wow, I really wish I could sell into this round. Like, even though I'm a believer in the company, it's just like, you know, getting so far over and the narrative is always there, right?

38:11Like I'm thinking of like one company in particular that we'll go unnamed, like really, really strong narrative, really strong traction. And it's just like setting prices at a point that, you know, basically pricing in the next, you know, potentially decade of growth. And if that's the case as an investor, you ideally would want to get out and then just invest, you know, rotate into another illiquid asset. Because you're done. You got your growth. Yeah, it's such a feature and a bug of the private markets that you're not like beholden to the mania and you sort of get to play a long game in anything you're doing that when I talk to my private or my public market friends, like they're envious that, you know, you can take a morning off and not have your entire world implode versus the public markets.

38:55Like stuff can hit the fan and your entire day could totally change at a moment's notice. The flip side of that is you're really in for a long period of time. And you don't get to say, well, I'll take a few chips off now because I think probabilistically there's a better opportunity that could come down and it feels like this is a good risk-adjusted return. That doesn't really, that's not as accepted in the private markets. I think increasingly, though, we're finding some of the financial products for that. And I've seen more people or at least more opportunities to take a little liquidity. I'm not sure it's totally uh socially acceptable at least for the institutional funds to do it i think it's far easier if you're an angel people are a little bit more understanding of that but it does feel like it just comes down to it comes down to volume right if i if i put 25k into a company and it and it does well that you know and i want to sell the position it's very different than you know you with like you know we have a 400 million dollar position here and we're rotating out it's like There's probably not the demand.

40:01Just one, I don't know if you feel even free to speculate on this, but something I've been confused by was the figure round getting priced around$40 billion. What in your mind do you think is the play there? Brett's last company, SPAC, you could imagine figure. I think a pure play humanoid stock would do well at least a little while. in the public markets, but what do you think is some of these later stage companies that are still a ways out from like true commercial adoption, but, you know, you know, especially now with companies like CoreWeave, you know, the CoreWeave IPO, it seems unclear now if they're going to get out, but like, what's your read?

40:47Are any of these companies going to get out in the next year other than some of the bigger names like, like Chime? I've heard, so a few different things there. I guess I've heard, I don't know if you guys have heard different things with CoreWeave in the last little bit, but it seems like there's a few people that are still kind of all systems go on IPO and are going to plow ahead. And CoreWeave certainly doesn't ask my opinion, but if I were counseling them, it feels like just get out there. And I think having some AI story with probably a a bunch of institutional managers that want exposure to some derivative direct trend of AI.

41:28I would say it's probably as good a time as any, especially when some of these bigger contracts are coming up in 2017, 2018. Like get out when you have a little bit of, you know, certainty of those cash flows coming from the NVIDIAs and the Microsofts and the open AIs of the world. Like I would encourage them to go. On the figure thing specifically, so I looked at Brett's business, Vetterie, which predates the last one. I haven't talked to him in eight years or something, but I really enjoyed that interaction. Now, that was like a job marketplace or something. So very different than now he's sort of become this like hard tech founder, which is interesting from a job marketplace thing.

42:12The thing that I don't totally understand about figure in that round itself, and this is a common phenomenon at the not the end, but at the peak of a lot of cycles is you end up with a lot of these SPVs getting formed in a meaningful way. And you end up with managers trying to get right bigger checks for rounds than their funds can actually hold. And so it's hard to know exactly what the incentives at play for some of those names. So I don't even I wasn't familiar with the names that they're talking about and leading those rounds. But it certainly seems from a fun size standpoint that those people probably can't step up and write those checks themselves.

42:55And so then you wonder, what are the incentives at play for the for whoever is writing those checks? Like, what are they thinking about? And like, what is the executive team? Like what is their incentive to raise at this price? Yeah, I looked at it as if you're going to price it at 10 and say, this is a pre IPO round, we're going to basically we're planning to SPAC the company in the next year. We think it's going to pop. That type of round makes sense. But if you're pricing it at four times that roughly, it just feels like how do you actually get out of this? Who's going to get out of this position?

43:32Do the employees actually benefit? But that's just one example. Skill issues back at 80. It's back. Why not? Why not? I do think there's this retail demand for, I mean, if I were open AI, I would try to get out sooner rather than later. Right. Because I think there's this demand both from institutional and retail to have exposure to some of these things. And if you look, I mean, Palantir's where they're trading. And obviously, there's a bunch of different considerations around that business. But like, I think that if you went out and floated just a small percentage of your, you know, your overall business, I think that there could be a lot of nice liquidity to fund a lot of the capex and you would trade at a really healthy premium.

44:15So it'll be interesting to see who of like the big model companies actually tries to get out first. Speaking of going public, do you want your private market investor competitors to go public? The general catalyst? you're excited you're like yeah i really i want you to go from you know i want to be able to see your fund returns yeah yeah you know it's an interesting thing so uh our structure is not one that we can or ever will try to have the ambitions of doing that i i saw um when when when people uh there's certainly funds that that uh act or either call themselves uh have leaders that are more akin to a CEO than they are an investment partner or something like that.

45:03And so I think from a financial engineering standpoint and institutionalization of the asset class, I'm excited to see people try these things. The cynical side of it, when I compare a venture firm to a private equity firm and think about the incentives at play. So if you're a private equity firm, if you're Apollo or Blackstone or BlackRock or whoever it is, right? You're this big entity. The people within your firm can't really leave and compete with you because there's so much institutional infrastructure around, one, the quantum of dollars that you actually need, but then two, the relationships with the debt providers, the ability to process the deals, the ability to get access through the bankers.

45:44You can't just go hang a shingle or go join another competitor to compete with Blackstone or Apollo or whatever it is, right? In venture, it's so beholden, I think, at least to individuals. And individuals can walk out the door and they can go raise$100,$200,$300,$400 million and effectively compete with you in some way, shape or form. And so there was an information report, I don't know if it's true or not, talking about GC moving from more carry to bonuses. And I don't know if it's true. information tends to do a pretty good job reporting, I think. And like that was reported alongside some people leaving the organization.

46:30And you just wonder, like, as the incentive structure start to change and you start to be more institutional, how do you retain the quality of people? So like at an intellectual level, I'm very interested to see how this plays out. And I respect anyone that's like innovating in some way on a structure that has been stuck in some version for a long, long time. I'm very curious about the practical implications of how it's going to work with like retaining individual talent and all that stuff. Yeah, that's been that's been my big question. If you're somebody that, you know, wants to get into venture and you believe in your picking ability and you think you can be one of the greats, wouldn't you want to get the sort of maximum benefit of that by getting carry and being a part of a partnership versus, you know, oh, I got, you know, I invested in, you know, the next slack and I got, you know, one time little bonus.

47:16yeah exactly who knows who knows how it'll work but you know i can imagine especially since the next option if you can't compete uh then it's fine you're kind of locked in like goldman bankers or morgan stanley bankers or apollo mds or whatever it's it's hard for them to get the scale to go out and really compete and sometimes they do and sometimes they don't but like that rsu structure bonus structure kind of works when you can't really walk out the door and hang a shingle and compete venture you kind of can and so i think it's if you're good you know you can go raise we see a lot of these solo capitalists or whatever like small three four five hundred million dollar funds out there and so i think i i don't know retaining talent is going to be an interesting thing to see have you like last question on this point have you seen solo the sort of solo gps overpaying to win deals?

48:10Because that's something like, sometimes you see these sort of obvious power law companies, like the Anduril's of the world with Elad Gil sort of like leading rounds. And that makes sense. I think there's sort of consensus now that Anduril is going to be a really massive company. But when you see a solo GP come in and write a$100 million plus check, does that ever you know you know what's your what's your read on that because in from my perspective sometimes those marks don't even feel real when uh when you're you know there's something to be said of like okay red point like underwrote this and like you know they're like an organization and a firm and it's not just like you know one or two you know major l you know so so how do you how do you look at those rounds and i'm sure oftentimes you're you're competing to win those rounds.

49:00Yeah, it's so I guess we've I've seen less of that phenomenon than probably 2021. And I would have to rack my brain a little bit to think about like the big institution or institutional institutional solo capitalists are I think those terms are directly at odds with one another. But the big solo capitalists that can write those checks. I mean, a lot can obviously do that. And he's the one that certainly comes to mind. I would say, honestly, there's there's been some firms that have continued to scale where I've probably seen that more than any individual kind of solo capitalists out there. And I think there was this thing where in 2020, 2021, it felt like we rotated to the brand where we lived in this world where everyone was just a Zoom screen away.

49:57And so, you know, Marc Andreessen and Doug Leone and Keith Raboy and whoever was was could be in the room as quickly as I could be in the room because time and space weren't really constraints at all. And so in that world, I think there was a big gravitation to the big institutional funds because it was like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to get Marc Andreessen involved. And that's amazing. Right. it feels like we've rotated a little bit more back to like, who is my individual board member? Who is going to be on the ground with me day to day? Like I'm going to solve for that person rather than the sole, like just the brain past a certain point, right?

50:34Like, obviously you must be this call to ride the ride with some, some things. And so you got to have enough credible brand as an institution, but then it comes down to the individual a little bit more. And so I would say I've probably seen more than the solo capitalist thing. I've probably seen more of, hey, this fund has a bunch of money and you might not be getting their number one person. It could be their, you know, whatever, their reliever out of the bullpen that's coming in to do the round. And those are the ones that they're like really juicing the price a little bit on these things because they, you know, they want the asset in that way.

51:10So I think that's something that I've seen more and more of of late. I want to go back to the innovators dilemma. And And I heard you on a podcast maybe two years ago, right when the chat GPT moment was happening, debating, is AI a sustaining innovation or disruptive innovation? How do you sit with it now? How are you seeing it get adopted in the public markets and what narratives are taking hold there? I still feel like there's an analogy that was made to me about Google. and it was talking about the Americans in World War II that like we got every opportunity to ultimately do the right thing and come into the war and like help determine the outcome.

51:53And I think that was the analogy I had heard about Google with AI that like they have all the things to their advantage be it the distribution of Google SEO, be it YouTube content, be it whatever it is, like the talent, the team, the dollars, all of that stuff. to like figure this out ultimately. We'll see if that actually proves to be the case. But I do think that that is largely true of a lot of the incumbents in different sectors. And so the analogy that I think I used back then, I think it's still true, is like if you go back and look at the Salesforce of mobile, that was still Salesforce.

52:28It was just like a mobile app of Salesforce. And if you go look and kind of go down the line, like how did Netflix or Facebook, there wasn't like a mobile Netflix. I mean, I guess you could say TikTok is mobile Netflix in some ways, but like there wasn't a pure play mobile Netflix, like a Quibi that came out and was actually disruptive in some ways. And there wasn't Facebook, maybe Instagram was the one that like kind of hopped on being that, but still it was like, it wasn't totally net new surface areas that ended up manifesting themselves around that stuff, or at least it wasn't immediately in the fullness of time.

53:02Maybe it could have been if Instagram had stayed independent or what TikTok has been able to do. I think that seems to be the case here today where we're going to see these things that are new and novel within AI. And I draw akin to the Ubers or the WhatsApps or whatever it is where these businesses that couldn't have been possible without AI are going to form a lot of independent equity value. But a lot of it's going to be captured by incumbents in some ways. And I think in mobile, Apple and Google probably captured the lion's share of like equity value that was created by the mobile iPhone or whatever.

53:39Like those were the ones that really through the app store and the actual phones, they captured a lot of it. And I think in large part, maybe with the exception of OpenAI, like the vast majority of the equity value will probably end up accumulating to the Facebooks and the Microsofts and the Googles and I guess OpenAI as well. But I still think we'll end up with hundreds of billions of dollars of equity value created for the derivative companies akin to the Ubers and the WhatsApps and whoever else. Yeah, I had this take I was noodling on yesterday about it feels like Apple's missing the AI moment, but does it matter because Microsoft missed mobile and they still made it work?

54:18How do you feel things are going with Apple intelligence? Obviously, that John Gruber article kind of shook everyone to their core. Do you think they're in trouble or is it overhyped or where's the narrative sitting with you these days? So the Gruber thing, I mean, obviously Gruber is like the goat of Apple coverage. And so you got to take everything he says almost like biblically in some ways. That's like the canonical gospel of Apple takes. But I have always hated Siri. Like I have always hated it. And then the Apple intelligence thing and the summarizations on the text. I mean, I love that.

55:01If only as a meme, like I enjoy screenshotting it. It's funny. Back to my friends. That's the best use case of Apple intelligence I've seen. And so like making fun of your product is like the best instantiation of your product. It's probably not, you know, you're not on a good trajectory there. Culturally, it just seals, and this is probably more John Gruber or Ben Thompson than what I profess to know about, but it just feels antithetical to Apple's culture to execute on AI in the way that I think you need to. they are very like measure 35 times and cut once and let's do this all secretively and let's like try to control the ecosystem and keep everything like insular in some ways.

55:55And that is just so antithetical to AI and AI is about like proliferation and getting it out there and getting the data and taking the feedback loops and moving fast and trying new things and iterating. And like, I just think that's directly at odds with who they are. And so I don't know how you change that. And does, I guess to your question, does it actually matter? I don't know. They have such lock-in, right? Is Apple, what is Apple's market cap today? I mean, is it like a trillion dollar business? Sorry,$3 trillion business? Yeah,$3.2 trillion. It's like, I think they're probably going to mess this up.

56:30And I'm not sure it's going to matter for them as a business. And I think the sooner they realize that they won't be able to execute on it, the sooner we get these things in our product as a partnership. Yeah, just open up the APIs and let the ecosystem flourish and let me change out the button for a different series. They lose that, but it's fine. I still buy the phones. The other thing that nobody really talks about anymore because it just hasn't been possible is M &A. Yeah. Apple has so much cash. If there are breakout, you know, consumer like products that make sense as part of the Apple ecosystem, there's a there's a world in which they could actually just buy those companies.

57:11And everyone quotes the 60 billion on their balance sheet or something. But Apple has returned over a trillion dollars of cash over the last like 14 years. Like it is a cash generating machine at a scale. I don't think we've ever seen their acquisitions. I think that's probably a better use of capital than what they bought to date. They have not been the best suppliers. You know, it's crazy though. I mean, they were, Siri was acquired for them like, I don't know, 13 years ago or something, 14. Like they were early on all of this stuff. And so clearly there's some like broken execution elements, at least within, you know, how they've gone about it to date, which might not matter in the grand scheme of things.

57:49It's a deterministic culture, not a probabilistic culture. And so it's misaligned with AI. I like that. That is very Ben Thompson or Benedict Evans of you. I'm trying to be more pithy. Yeah, I like it. We got really no time left, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about Ramp. When they announced the new fundraise, you kind of were poking a little bit of fun at yourself because you basically... You got found the local top, but not the global top. Well, and I think you invested a couple times during... I did, yeah. we invested in a billion and then like three and a half and then eight or whatever, eight, two or something.

58:28Yeah. It was a long run from there. Funny enough, that round that we ended up investing in at whatever, eight billion or eight and a half or whatever it was, what's a couple hundred million among friends. But that was like December 21 when we were talking about it. And then the round ultimately closed in January or February or something. And so it was really last boat off the island in terms of like internally the zero interest rate kind of mindset. And the thing that I've learned, and this has been the last five years for me, basically since, so I joined Redpoint in December of 19, officially started in March of 20.

59:10And what I've realized is Price very rarely within some zone has mattereded. And when I find myself iterating a little too much on like, oh, I'll do it at this price versus that price, it probably says something about what I think the ultimate outcome for the business can be. And when it's been the investments that have worked the best are the ones in which I'm like, I don't know exactly how this is going to play out or where the ceiling is on how this company can execute. but I just need to be in business with these people. And let's just see where it goes from there. And obviously that's easier when you're talking hundreds of millions than it is low single digits, which is easier than high single digits, which is easier than double digit billion dollars.

59:57But like that mindset is one that I've internalized where it ultimately says something about the quality of the company. If you really think too, too hard about the difference between this price or that price. And so the funny thing about the ramp investment it was the entire time for the last three years, I was like telling our team internally, I said, I don't know when this is going to stop growing or what the ceiling for this can be. And at some point we're going to get to the other side of what that round was a couple of years ago. And so that was the first like public validation that it really felt like we had crossed that chasm a little bit.

1:00:30I think probably nine months ago, a year ago, it sort of felt like an inevitability that we weren't going to get stuck at, you know, some maximum that was beyond that. But yeah, I mean, the team just continues to execute at a level that I've never really seen before. And I know you guys know them well. And so it's been a fun one for me to be a part of and kind of work alongside. Well, this conversation has been presented by Ramp, like every conversation. Go to Ramp.com to sign up. You can use corporate cards. By the way, all my conversations quite literally are presented by Ramp. My ability to do this job at this point is presented by Ramp in some capacity.

1:01:04So you guys have quite literally the ad play for it. but they keep me in business as well. That's great. Thank you so much for coming on. When's your next, are you going to do, is this report, I feel like I see them twice a year or is it quarterly? Yeah, once a year-ish is usually, I mean, this one I think took a lot out of our team internally. There was a lot of late nights and weekends on this one. So I think we're going to give our folks a little bit of time, a little bit of a respite before we run it back. But who knows? I mean, the market keeps up. We get more tariffs. we get things a little crazy.

1:01:37Maybe we'll need to come out of the woodwork. And when the theme music plays, you got to emerge. For sure. Last question for you. We have Sam Lesson and Seth Rosenberg from Greylock. And Slow. And Slow coming on to debate AI in about an hour. Who do you think is going to win? Let me give you guys a little bit of advice. As someone that has moderated a debate with Sam Lesson before, Let me give you guys a little bit of, I would encourage, if you have mute buttons on microphones, I would encourage you to jump in and try to steer the conversation. Don't be a passive participant. I remember this one.

1:02:18People tend to be really mean to you when you do that and you let the filibustering go on between him and let's say, I don't know, Zach Weinberg theoretically. So I would encourage you guys to be active participants in that conversation. We're excited. We got our boxing gloves. We're going to throw them on. We're going to get in the mix. Hey, guys, keep up the great work. I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing. I appreciate it. Anytime you want me, I'm here. Thanks a lot. Always welcome. Yeah, we'll take it. All right, guys. See you. Bye. Yeah. Good fun. Did you? Yeah, we got to get the mute button ready.

1:02:49Have you seen that, what he's referring to with Zach Weinberg? They were debating crypto. It was Sam Lesson versus Zach Weinberg. And Sam was making the case that like every real asset should be on chain and your mortgage should be on chain. and like this is the future everything will be crypto and uh and zach is just like okay like walk me through that at an extreme level of detail like how does this work legally how does how do the taxes on the land work like all these things and they just went at it and sam was just going super super hard talking talking talking and then he kept being like i gotta go because it's kid bedtime like i i really i really gotta go but then but then he wouldn't let zach get the last word so he'd want to like drop another filibuster on him it's like really frustrating for everyone and i guess uh people gave logan some some negative feedback because he wasn't he wasn't aggressive on the moderation enough but i thought it was a great i i i found it very very entertaining to watch so i had a good time uh anyway should we do some good time some posts some ads uh all of the above over the next few uh minutes before kian joins us from nucleus yes uh the shot the chaser from xor swap the shot claude thinking and o1 pro have replaced all university instructors for me i can no longer watch any pre-recorded videos and then the chaser is i bombed my second linear algebra midterm ouch two days later that's so funny uh and word grammar friend of the show says math is best learned from textbooks and practice problems not from claude but also not from lectures so yeah just hit the books yeah i remember i mean this is train up to silicon valley from pasadena took me like 12 hours um but i had a uh a textbook on uh natural language processing like the precursor to llms this was back in like 2012 2013 and i just sat there and just read this whole textbook and taught me a lot I really enjoyed it.

1:04:46Textbooks are underrated when it comes to getting potentially goaded when learning is the vibe. Textbooks are goaded. No, I think the good thing for Sean is that the models are going to get better. And the good thing about the real world is nobody really cares if you're using an LLM for specific answers, as long as you can do a little bit of thinking yourself. Yeah. And you should be able to generate something. I mean, all the textbooks at this point have been scraped into these LLMs. You should be able to get the LLM to essentially just reproduce exactly the text that's in the textbook. Now, maybe that's IP infringement, but you can certainly get the facts.

1:05:23The question is, were you just sitting there chatting and making it feel like you were learning? It seems like you didn't actually get all the information into your brain. But good luck on your next midterm. Let's go to Paki McCormick. He says, today, much of the global GDP is not computer. Soon, everything is computer. This is the opportunity. Funny, because it's true. But I was thinking about the everything is computer, everything is computer thing. And I think I like the phrase more as a possessive than a contraction. So the actual quote is a contraction. He was saying everything is a computer, basically.

1:06:06And then he dropped the A and it was everything is computer. Everything is a computer. but I prefer the everything's computer as like what is the computer of everything it's like this like you know hive mind AI like yes what we're building is everything's computer it belongs to everything and and that just tells you like this this very weird futuristic networked mega computer that controls everything it sounds even more sci-fi at that point let's stay with Yeah, I mean, like one more thing on this. I think this is the opportunity and why so many people that were traditionally software investors are excited about investing in hard tech or the real world as a category.

1:06:47When you look at some of these, some of the biggest recent outcomes, the sort of flock safeties, the andurals are these companies that have our software is critical to the business. Yet there's a major sort of real world component. Yeah. and you know I think that's just going to continue to be where some of the bigger outcomes are yeah Teal had a good riff on this where he he was like I keep investing in companies that aren't the internet and then they make money from the internet like SpaceX it's like a launch business but Starlink is an internet company yeah and it's just like I keep I keep going it's like you know he's co-founder of OpenAI eventually invested in the business it's like it's a it's a consumer internet company now and like maybe that's where the value is and so there's all these weird things where you just keep coming back to the internet is this ultra powerful force and the more you align yourself with it so your capitalism and the economy just kind of naturally pulls every company towards that and you know flock safety it's like yeah we're a camera manufacturer but without the internet our company would be worth way less we originally wanted to be a newspaper and exactly everybody said hey technology why don't you put this on the internet Yeah, that's really the way to get ahead.

1:07:58Should we stay on Packy? Let's stay on Packy. Go to his breakdown. What a week for the optimists. Devastating week for the pessimists. Devastating. He breaks it down in his fantastic newsletter. He says, solar and wind pass coal in the United States. That's a big milestone. The United States continues to mog all in liquid natural gas exports. NASA launches a mission to study the sun. I like that. that's interesting i don't know what they're trying to get out of that i want to know more about what the goal of studying the sun is they're like they come back and they're just like it's bright so basically you know how people started going well over the sun oh yeah yeah the whole austin crowd sure sure i don't think you remember it was like the meme was like wake up get some sunlight it's like get outside get some sunlight people like circadian rhythm stuff the the the sort of startup community in austin sort of staring at the sun directly yep sort of maybe getting some benefit from that.

1:08:53NASA is basically saying, you know, we see some opportunity here. They haven't gone blind quite yet. We should maybe check it out ourselves. We should check it out ourselves. Gavin Newsom launched a podcast and Paki says, hear us out. Yeah. So this was cool. Lulu's analysis of this was fantastic. What's that? Gavin Newsom. The Gavin, my read on Gavin Newsom is he'd maybe start a podcast and he would just have people that agreed with him on. he's taking the opposite of inviting basically his political enemies on the show and it's very humanizing you know he's he's got uh he's always been an incredible uh much better public speaker than he has been um you know uh uh operator i would say sure like he's good with his words yeah and i think the strategy is really smart and uh i think you know you're you were you know when we started this show you you probably said multiple times on the show like the person that does the most hours podcasting will win the election it's all about attention attention is all you need gavin heard you say that probably he got the memo the podcast election no but i think it's always smart you know the joke is like the world doesn't need more podcasts but there still is white space exactly ways to come in and get an edge and no one was doing this which is an actual elected official talking across the aisle to yeah uh some of the characters who have been labeled extreme i I mean, Steve Bannon is a very controversial figure, not normally platformed by even centrist media, mainstream media, but I think Bannon did an interview with the New York Times.

1:10:30The New York Times also had Marc Andreessen, who they've written very negatively about in the past, and they also had on Curtis Yarvin, who in the past has been extremely controversial and someone that was not platformed by the mainstream media, but something is certainly changing. Well, John, do you know what happened around five years ago? uh what uh california governor gavin newsom was photographed wearing a rolex kermit wow uh which very you can get on on bezel shop over 23 500 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezel's team of experts go to get bezel.com shop around and find your next hitter apparently newsom is is a panerai guy oh really uh but uh every now and then i'll step out i think he's he's got a lot of attention right people kind of judge a lot of his uh fashion decisions he he had these it's very sad time but he had this sort of like custom all this custom gear for the fire where he'd like pop up and be on yeah on camera and it's like really like you you got that like like specifically stitched to kind of like larp as like a firefighter um sometimes it works sometimes he's taking risks you know sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't yeah anyway we got Kian from Nucleus coming on the show soon.

1:11:46Let's check in with producer Ben and see if he's on. I think we got a couple more minutes. Let's move on to another post. Project Europe is a joke, says Arnie Ramesh. It's not the Teal Fellowship for Europe. If they take 6.6 % equity for 200K, surprised. So many European founders are on board, maybe for visibility. $10 million fund size, LOL, an average US seed round. Make it non-dilutive, then I'm all for it. and Kari Saarinen. It's a very European mindset to just be like, just give away money. Yeah. Just give away money. Make it non-dilutive. I mean, the Teal Fellowship is non-dilutive because it's a non-profit, but at the same time.

1:12:25But they're trying to... Asking for a handout. Yeah, they're trying to stimulate for-profit, you know, the founding of a for-profit company in Europe. Yeah, it's fine to just do it as a seed fund. It's fine. I don't know. I haven't dug into it too much, but let's read this critique from Kari Saarinen. This is a founder of Linear. Okay. uh i set up a linear account for us to do some project management stuff yet but uh we'll see if we get you on there okay um but uh i'll read through it so carrie or carrie says i think your critique is overly harsh and frankly reflects the kind of attitude that holds europe back initiatives tend to get criticized unless they meet some impossible standard or align with absolute ideals set by someone is this the best deal globally no but by european standards it's probably average i see seed rounds at 20 for one to one and a half million led by reputable vcs personally i'd rather raise less with simpler terms and go through these seed rounds but everyone is their own economic actor and can decide which deals to take or pass on someone has to provide the capital and there isn't the the teals to provide the capital in europe you're also overlooking history in a lot of contexts you're comparing something just starting now to YC, which began 20 years ago.

1:13:39YC's original deal was 6 % for 20K and it stayed that way for a long time. None of the perks you mentioned even existed back then. What you got was PG's chili once a week and some advice. Priceless chili. When I went through YC in 2012, the deal was 7 % for 125K. The whole premise of YC and whether the economics made sense was simply about whether it could make your company at least 7 % more successful. If Project Europe can do the same, then it's worth considering so very interesting i'm in favor of project europe uh we've also been working on our own project europe yes internally at the show uh which is going to europe going to europe three months south of france wine tour doing doing the podcast spending lots of time on boats doing the podcast from the continent yeah you know making europe greater grand one show at a time seven spend six six point six percent of your time in europe that's the real project europe anyway we We got Keon in the waiting room.

1:14:33Let's bring him in. How you doing? Welcome to the temple of technology. What up? What's up, man? The hooligans, the mods of pods. I'm ready, John. I'm ready for you right now. Let's go. Let's go. It's great to talk to you. Great to see you. I don't think I've seen you in person since Miami. But give me the breakdown. Tell the fans who you are and what Nucleus is and then what you announced today. Yeah. So my name is Keon, founder and CEO of a company called Nucleus Genomics. were the world's most advanced DNA health tests, single swap, single test. You can screen for over a thousand conditions.

1:15:04And today, oh my God, it's chaos in the headquarters in the best way. Okay, we have launched genetic matchmaking. Okay, so now you can family plan far more effectively. You can make sure every single couple in this country has healthy children. It is absolutely amazing. It's already blown up on Twitter. John, have you seen the video? I have not seen it yet. This is an Apple-esque video. Can you pull the video up right now? Can you pull the video up right now on Twitter? I will share it then, and hopefully we can pull it up and watch it. Yeah, we'll get up there. Have you been, are you in a relationship?

1:15:33Have you been testing this yourself? Have you been getting on the app? Are you dogfooding this? Are you dogfooding this? I am dogfooding this real time. Let's go. It's funny because we were thinking about like should we block same sex couples or not, you know, because we figured that in the future you should be able to independent of sex, you know, be able to have, you know, children. For now it is sex blocked, so it has to be male to female. Sorry about a lot of tech bros out there. I know that might be hard for some of you guys, but when you find the one, when you find the special someone, you can do Nucleus, and it is going to be amazing.

1:16:01What is the actual flow for Nucleus? Is it a cheek swab? I mail it in? Cheek swab. Yep. You get a DNA kit that looks like this. You open it up. Inside, there's a cheek swab. You take the cheek swab. You go, stick it in a tube, non-invasive. You can do it at home. No doctor's office involved. Goes to a laboratory. Laboratory processes the DNA. Out comes a raw DNA file, which then we run through all our analysis, which is honestly like a like this is people do not appreciate how much of a feat of science and engineering this is there's a couple people i have to thank here first and foremost gregor mendel late 19th century let's go thank you for playing with those peas yes he did not know the day this piece you know you know you know he had like a extraordinary statistical intuition you know he had no idea what dna was he was completely abstracted there's no molecular basis just playing with the peas went all the way to the hersey you know hersey chase experiment shot that experiment watching cricket and find the structure of dna of course the human genome project right a massive government project billions of dollars in investment thousands of scientists this product is now live in anyone's hands it's a short line from gregor mendel in 1866 to uh nucleus being promoted at the jake paul fight so yeah it is a very short line see it now we'd be great uh um ben you're you're live streaming right now let's see if this video works.

1:17:17Yeah, we got the video here. This is a day I've been looking forward to for four and a half years. But really, today's product announcement is the culmination of decades of scientific, medical, and genomic progress spanning thousands of scientists and billions of dollars in investment. Hence today, I'm so excited to show you the next chapter of preventive health, family planning through genetic matching. Imagine knowing every possible outcome for you and your partner's future children, starting with their hereditary risks. Through Nucleus, you have the power to end preventable disease in your future family, long before you even decide to have children.

1:17:59To show you how easy this is, I'm going to sync my results with my good friend, Molly O'Shea. Let's go. Hey, Molly, what's up? Perfect timing. I just opened up my Nucleus to see my results. I've got to say, the UI looks really good. Oh, that's so nice. You know, we really spend as much time as possible to build beautiful products. And by the way, aren't you one of the first people who did Nucleus? I mean, do you think maybe we're going to be a genetic match? Definitely. Let's find out. Seeing if you're a genetic match is almost as easy as seeing if you're a match on a dating app. I'm going to show you exactly how.

1:18:32Here are my Nucleus family results, which just came out. I haven't synced with Molly yet, so you can actually see my kids may be at risk for cystic fibrosis. But the only way to find if Molly and I are actually going to pass down this risk to our kids is by syncing our results. Let me show you how this works. Just click Add Partner and confirm that your partner's done Nucleus. Molly has, of course, so I click Yes. We're about to find out if we're a match. Molly, are you ready? Yep, let's see.

1:19:05Oh my god, we're a match. This is amazing. Molly, are you still there? Shocking! I'm gonna have to break up. Okay, well, we'll come back to Molly later, but let's see what just happened. On the back end, Nucleus scanned our combined genomes for nearly a thousand conditions that we could have unknowingly passed down to our children. From here, Molly and I can dive deeper into the specifics of our results. In reality, nine out of 10 parents have a genetic risk that they could pass down to their children. And one in 25 people have a genetic marker for cystic fibrosis. So what would happen if Molly had a genetic marker for cystic fibrosis?

1:19:43We have good news. We've been hard at work for something that we think will fundamentally change family planning forever. We can't share too much yet, but imagine if you could learn not just about the diseases you could pass down to your children, but also whether they're going to look and act more like mom or dad. More on that soon. At Nucleus, we believe that anyone, anywhere should have the choice to access genetic insights to make more informed decisions about their health. Okay, so the big question, do we have him back? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You there? Oh, I think we got to unmute him. Let's see.

1:20:27We're juggling things. Can we hear you, Kian? I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yep, fantastic. All right, we're back. The big question. How was that video? It goes hard, right? It goes hard. Very clear. Very clear. I really liked how efficiently everything's communicated. The transitions are cool, but it's not all style. There's substance there. Very well executed. Good job. When the big question, John and I are both married, but if somebody, if one of our listeners is dating, you know, somebody, when's the right time to ask? When's the right time to ask? Say, all right, pull out, like, let me see your cheek.

1:20:58We got to do a quick swab. We got to do a swab. Look, look, look, look. There's many ways in doing this, right? If you're dating someone already, it's okay. You do nucleus. You see if you have a genetic risk or not. If you both have a genetic risk for the same thing, you can do IVF. There's other reproductive options. You're going to be good. You know the risk exists, so you can prevent the risk. The whole point of genetics, right? But also, there's a world where, listen, maybe you're a tech writer out there listening to this podcast. You don't have the special someone yet. No worries. You sit down.

1:21:24You say, you know, what college you go to. They tell you, whatever. You say, okay, nice. What do you do? Then you say, have you done a nucleus test? There you go. There you go. I mean, you've got to break it to them. You've got to say, listen, you've got to make sure the genes are aligned. Because why would you get into this business in the first place? You want to get deeper into it if the genetics are not matched, right? I mean, you don't want to be cared for the same thing. Do you see people throwing up their nucleus results on dating apps? Just look at these genes. I think that's the future, maybe.

1:21:50What do you think? I think we believe in kind of individual liberty. I think genetics should be integrated with dating apps. And if someone, you know, opts in and should say, hey, I don't be matched with someone that's also cared for a rare genetic marker. It's actually done in different communities. The Ashkenazi Jewish community, they do this all the time, actually. You don't match people who are the same rare genetic marker. So 100%, I think you should integrate dating apps, do mass preconception testing. DNA is becoming, as you guys know, cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, one of the greatest decrease in costs ever.

1:22:17Combining that with AI, there's going to be magic. Mass integration with different dating apps, I think you're able to save a lot of babies' lives. What about flipping it around. Obviously, the genetic markers for diseases are very, you know, you want to avoid those. But, you know, I already have kids, but I could imagine that my son, when he goes to have his own child, my future grandchildren, might want to optimize for a grandchild who's, you know, going to be a future bodybuilder, let's say. And we want to make sure that, you know, they're just matched up so they can go to the Arnold. The most proud grandpa ever.

1:22:46And just absolutely look diced, massive, put on 300 pounds of pure muscle, and he wants to make sure that his wife is setting their kids up for success. Will Nucleus help with that? Great question. So first thing I'll say is, John, he has a good father because you're like seven foot tall. The genes are good. The genes are good. He already has already inherently. He's good there. But it's funny you actually asked this because at the end of the video there, I left a little teaser in there about something that's coming out. I mean, let's just say, you know, there's something about, you know, maybe, you know, you don't want to just simulate people's disease risk, but also maybe you want to simulate what your baby's going to look and act like.

1:23:25Oh, cool. You know, when you start thinking about whole genome sequencing, you can start maybe thinking about, can you actually simulate procreation? Oh, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And let's just say, you know, John, we're shipping. We're shipping like crazy. It's like, it's like hysteria in the nucleus headquarters. I love it. We're building at the frontier genetics. You know, I hear like sirens going off, gongs being hit. It's complete chaos in here. Yeah. So, so, so, so if, It feels like, you know, I think that the consensus now is that 23andMe walks so you guys could take us to the moon. Like, how far can you take this, right?

1:24:00Because, like, the first step is, like, giving people the data and then you're trying to, like, influence outcomes. Like, how much does this sort of nucleus platform expand? What is the, like,$10 trillion vision for the business? Because I know you're that ambitious. Yeah. So, you know, it's like Blockbuster versus Netflix. It's like, you know, Blackberry iPhone. That's the moment that's happening in genomics right now. And the beauty of the genome, what everyone's starting to appreciate is that the basically more of engineering and science than it is. Because if you think about it, when you actually read someone's entire genome, it's not just disease risk assessments that you can actually think about.

1:24:32It starts to become about family planning, about procreation simulation, about what drugs actually work best for you, what supplements work best for you, and even about the long tail different traits that you can analyze from IQ all the way to muscle strength. You start realizing that the integration of the genome simply has not happened yet in society. If you take a poll of 300 million Americans and look at how many have been sequenced, basically none of them have. And you talk about one of the greatest innovations ever, which is the decrease in cost of sequencing the genome, by far the single highest density, highest consequential piece of health information that exists.

1:25:04Because it's literally your DNA. It's the entire thing. And it's not integrated in medicine, in lifestyle, or in dating. I mean, the opportunity is massive. And this test today costs$400. I'll make a prediction right here on Technology Brothers. Within five years, this test, a couple dollars. A couple dollars, I said. A couple dollars. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Congratulations. Where can people get it? So last question. Are we going to have a way to test if somebody's nice with it or got that dog in them or is cracked? Because you seem like you're definitely nice with it. You definitely have that dog in you.

1:25:36And you seem cracked. This is interesting. So we have found consistently, okay, that founders who do Nucleus tend to be very fine in their schizophrenic disposition. Okay. So personally, I'm in the 99 percentile. I'm rocking it. Maybe I'm seeing shit. I'm telling you right now. Schizo chat. I'm the 99 percentile. That's how it is. I swear. You look at Alexis. Shout out to my man. Alexis, one of our lead investors. Super high schizophrenic. A lot of other founders I know, super high schizophrenics. And that's public, by the way. That's public, by the way. I'm not just exposing Alexis. Alexis' results are public.

1:26:04I would never just expose Alexis. Alexis is very public. Don't look at all his results. Shout out to Alexis there. And so if you want, you've got to look to see what's happening. In fact, one interesting study showed that they ran these different models across every single phenotype, and they compared it across different careers. By far, the highest predictive one was actually schizophrenia, but it was for artists, which is very similar to entrepreneurs, though. So that's what they do. If you're low ADHD, super low ADHD associated with doctors and lawyers. So there's something there. You've got that dog in you.

1:26:29Maybe it's in your DNA. I love it. I love it. Well, where can people go get it? Where can people order a test? mynucleus.com mynucleus.com slash family if you're a couple you want to have healthy children that's where you should go tionsnaggy5 follow me on twitter yeah twitter's gonna be fun today you're amazing you're amazing this was fun I've actually never we've never talked and I'd love to have you back on whenever there's whenever there's genome bio correspondent join this exact link don't even tell us hey there's news you tell us amazing man well congratulations on the launch we'll talk to you soon Talk soon.

1:27:04Have a great day. Thanks, guys. Bye. Have a good weekend, too. Amazing. I think genetics might explain why a single inorganic blueberry would kill you on the spot. And yet I could eat a credit card with a fork and knife and just be unaffected. So I think we got Josh Steinman coming in. Speaking of microplastic haters. Yo. Yo. How you doing? Good. Good. Welcome to the show. We got Josh Steinman in the building in the temple of technology. Give us an update. Is it a good morning and are we going to win? All signs point to yes. Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. How's it going? It's good. It's good. How are you guys?

1:27:48You want to know you on a little show lore? I definitely like put one of your initial good morning. We're going to win posts into the into the stack early days. and then I put another one in about a week later and John was like wait you put this back in I'm like yeah we're still we're still winning it's still a good morning to remember and so we've done those tweets like three times already and I've and I've talked about it on the show before I think there's this you know founders will say something once and and feel like they've said it and you're not realizing that you know a lot of the long the return is in the sort of long tail just drilling this idea and I really feel like it's become uh movement the David Senra thing you're not advertising to a standing army you're advertising to a marching parade yeah yeah it's interesting because you know part of it is self-talk right and this goes into like the deep like how do we program ourselves yeah like human as computer um scott adams talks about this uh the moist robot hypothesis but other people as well and his his school of persuasion is the same school that bill clinton and tony robbins come from like norman vincent peel like there's a lineage here um so it's like how do we talk to ourselves as people how do we talk to ourselves as as agents free agents like in the world so part of it is just like i'm telling myself every day like you have to wake up and you have to like want it every day um and then the other part is just like obviously you know with the with with the public persona that i have you know having come from, you know, both the military, but then also politics, like, man, it was dark for a while, you know, like super dark.

1:29:28And I just wanted something where I just could say to myself every day, like, look, things can turn around. And I actually think they're going to, and certainly they have. But like every day, just wake up and be willing to just like, offer yourself up to the universe. Like, yeah, it's going to happen. Like, we're going to win. Like you're never more than one, one day away from like catastrophic success. Uh, going back to, uh, going back to, uh, going back to your, your dark days. Do you feel like you got a lot of, like, were, were people turning down meetings with your company early on just because of your sort of political leanings?

1:30:06Uh, should we do some backstory on the company? Can you break down what you're building, who you are, little career highlights? I mean, yeah, I'm sure a lot of people know, but give us the basics. Yeah, so I started off my career in like this weird corner of operational counterterrorism in the US military. That sort of branched into high technology and high technology strategy. Again, when I was still in uniform and got a lot of exposure to just how much, you know, the world is a very interconnected place. And there are things that we can do in the digital world that absolutely affect the physical world.

1:30:43People talk about Stuxnet. Stuxnet, they talk about these attacks that have happened against oil facilities. So I get out of the military, I go to Silicon Valley, and then two years later, just like a strange series of coincidences, I get asked to come back to Washington and essentially be like the most senior cybersecurity person in the U.S. government. Not like I'm going to reset your password, but like I'm going to remake our entire practice of running cyber operations for like the DOD and the intelligence community and Homeland Security and all that stuff. So I did that job for four years.

1:31:20And then afterwards, pulled together two buddies of mine, including Brandon Park, who helped stand up Amazon's global what we call operational technology OT cybersecurity program at Amazon. and then Felix Plushinski, who I'd recruited to come join me in the admin, who was a hedge fund trader. And we started looking at this problem. It's a huge problem. We've digitized the industrial world and yet it has created these huge vulnerabilities that have been exploited. And some of that stuff makes its way out into the public. So yeah, we just wanted to start a company to solve that. What percentage actually gets public versus is sort of known among the industry, but not necessarily in headlines.

1:32:03Yeah. Are there foreign agents operating on American soil? Cause I, I hear some people say the number is zero, but I think you had a different point. Right. It's a different meme of mine. Yeah. No, there's absolutely foreign, foreign sabotage teams operating on us soil. A hundred percent. My actual number is somewhere around a hundred teams. My guess is that, um, and the question is like, you could break that down into what types. Anyway, yeah, most of it doesn't get public. And sitting in that chair for four years, I had to get the classified reports every day of like, oh, this thing happened, that thing happened.

1:32:41And it just didn't drive me nuts, but it was like, man, it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Are there any cybersecurity stories in history that are public now that you like to point to as like, that could have been prevented, that's the one we're learning from and here's how my company would prevent that essentially or here's how i would have stopped that yeah too easy so um i think two three years ago uh someone i don't know who i don't know who um literally destroyed the iranian steel industry in like one day really there's video out yeah there's video out there like they literally took over you know the refineries and just started pouring liquid metal all over the floor on a bunch of these, bunch of these facilities.

1:33:27Yeah. There's a bunch of incidents like that that have happened. So walk me through how you would prevent that. I mean, I imagine what you're describing is like remote takeover of a machine that is connected to the internet or maybe air gapped and they didn't have the right security there. How do you actually step in and prevent that for, for our steel industry? Air gapping. I mean, a lot of people will say that stuff because they've heard it on like TV or whatever. That's me. That's me. Yeah, exactly. But these operations take days, weeks, months, sometimes years to sort of like get into a network and then find your way to the systems that you want to take over.

1:34:02And the whole point is like every step of the way of those types of operations leaves breadcrumbs. And so currently the way in which people try and protect these networks is by looking at only one area of technology inside the four walls, the facility and that's like the networking equipment so what we do is we look at everything and so by looking at everything you just have a bigger picture and you can assemble a narrative you can try and understand when malicious things are happening at that super high level because you're seeing what's going on with the engineering workstations you're seeing we are seeing what happens with the network we're seeing what's being done on the applications um we're seeing what's happening, you know, the firewalls.

1:34:44Yeah. So we just take it all in and, you know, it's not, it's not, um, it's not new to like, oh, do something with a much bigger data set. That's really what we're doing. Can you break down, uh, some of the difference between espionage projects and sabotage projects? Are there any differences? Are there any risks, uh, you know, state actors that are prioritizing one over the other right now? Yeah. This is like the thing that most people don't understand. And they'll say like, oh, you know, things that are happening right now, it's just espionage. The thing is like in the course of an operation, like you do the espionage first.

1:35:20It allows you to map the network, map the systems. And then sometimes people will like just leave a little something there. In case they want to do sabotage later. No one can come back whenever they want. Yep. Pop it. Okay. So like there's like lots of espionage happening on critical networks. like gee what's that preparation for sure that makes sense uh what what's been your read on our response to deep seek broadly do you think that u.s companies have been taking it seriously enough there's this you know general lens from some some some of the tech community that says it's you know it's open source you know it's not sort of the the same type of risk as tick tock what's your read on it?

1:36:06Yeah, look, a major frustration that I have is that we get a bunch of these cutting-edge companies and then, you know, almost certainly you have foreign actors, not just the Chinese like many other foreign actors that come in I mean, you can read the papers that came out of like the Twitter buyout, you know, transition to X and they basically are like, yeah, we had foreign foreign intel services foreign governments like operating inside you know x formerly known as twitter um i think that's happening at a bunch of our companies i think it's a huge problem huge counterintelligence problem because the question is like what are they manipulating like are they putting back doors in there are they changing content are they changing um you don't know and a lot of the companies many of which my friends have worked at they don't even have a way to think about this.

1:36:58And also, obviously, like, it's not politically correct to talk about. Hey, maybe we shouldn't hire that foreign national that went to the, like, you know, military college of their respective nation and whose uncle is like the deputy chief of their intel service. Yeah. So so speaking, the new CEO of Intel that got announced today, you know, we covered this earlier on the show, you may not have seen it, has invested over the last, you know, 20 years, hundreds of millions of dollars into, you know, Chinese tech companies. Do you foresee any sort of like pushback into bringing somebody like that on to run?

1:37:38You know, he's not a Chinese national, but - Born in Malaysia, grew up in Singapore, but invested in the Chinese semiconductor company, exited the position in 2022, I believe, and now running Intel. look you know i don't know the situation specifically uh obviously chinese companies are legally required to be dual use like they've architected their entire economy to serve the chinese communist party it just means that i'm super wary whenever you see folks that have been allowed to make profit out of that system i don't know his scenario specifically running intel, I certainly hope that, you know, I certainly hope that everything's on the up and up.

1:38:25I have no reason to think that it's not. But whenever I look at, you know, those types of interactions between, you know, what I think the United States and Western allies would call like the free market and the Chinese Communist Party, I'm just super wary as a whole. Staying on the topic of China, do you think we've learned at all from the sort of DGI just sort of blitzing and taking the entire US drone market, do you think there's a real risk that they're able to run that same playbook back with Unitree in the sort of human aid space? Or are we going to be smart enough to not let them put a robot in every American's home?

1:39:00They are absolutely taking that. They're absolutely taking that playbook and trying to replicate it as broadly as possible. For years, I've been telling, screaming to anyone that'll listen on X or wherever else, like we should ban DJI from doing business in the United States. Full stop. Full stop. Everyone's like, oh, all the alternatives are like more expensive or this, that, and the other. Well, yeah, supply and demand will allow the market to correct over time. But it's a huge problem. Like they exactly know. By the way, like if you don't think that senior CCP Intel officials have the ability to just walk into DJI headquarters and be like, Like, give me everything you know about the topography of the United States.

1:39:44Like, you're smoking crack. They probably have access to it right now. So every time these things fly, anything that gets transmitted into the cloud, whose cloud is it? Where is that cloud located? You know, what access do, you know, the Chinese intel services have to it, military have to it? Like, yeah, all that stuff's like in the wild. What about personal cybersecurity? What do you recommend to the average listener just to kind of beef up your own OPSEC? Yeah, it's tough. So for normal folks, I just say use the big cloud, use the big providers. That's like the Googles, the Microsofts, et cetera.

1:40:25Enable two-factor authentication. I think probably the biggest thing that I don't hear a lot is whenever you get a message, like an email saying like, hey, like your bank says this or that. Delete the email and then go straight to log into the service. Sure, sure, sure. And that's like the mind space that you want to be in because like these guys are social engineers. They know the language to get you to click the link and that's what they're trying to do. They're going to put malicious software onto your laptop, onto your phone, whatever. Tons of phishing attacks at X right now. and those are getting more and more convincing.

1:41:03You've seen some people leak it out, usually just for meme coins launches basically, but you can imagine being much worse. Famed investor Kleiner Perkins launched a meme coin. There's a couple topics I want to get through. One, I'm sure you can only make sort of general predictions here, but do you think this whole TikTok thing gets resolved in the next month? You know, there's sort of there was an initial date for early April that it was supposed to, you know, sort of change hands. But you just we haven't been seeing that much new news about it. At this point, there's plenty of people that want to buy it.

1:41:42You know, Oracle, Microsoft, Alexis Ohanian. Like there's so many different capital groups like chomping at the bit to, you know, be the buy side on this deal. It's just a question of can you twist their arm enough to get the sale done, I think. But what do you think, Josh? Yeah, they absolutely want to retain control of the algorithm because that's like the prize is the ability to like inject ideas into the youth of the United States or elsewhere. in the world. And so I think that's going to be, I hope that's a major sticking point with the way in which it resolves out. At the same time, you have to remember that this deal has the attention of the president of the United States, who is at the same time negotiating with his counterparty, Xi Jinping, over a trade relationship that, you know, there are 12 trillions of dollars in the offing around it.

1:42:31And so I learned this over four years of working for him, like, you just have to trust the boss he's playing a game that like very few humans have ever been able to play which is like the most high risk the most you know impactful game of like one nation in the world and so look i hope he's able to negotiate it in a way in which uh you know preserves cognitive uh sovereignty uh there's a lot going on and i'm sort of taking my foot off the gas on it yeah yeah it's not a focus let's let's kind of uh pivot to a topic that's you know definitely i'm sure top of mind for you guys uh uh re-industrialization uh the vibes are good the work is you know maybe starting feels like it's starting it's certainly ongoing job's not finished are we doing enough it seems like there's a you know sort of top there there obviously is a top-down directive to invest in america but uh you know there's been you know on the topic of china china will give you know companies you know very very low or zero interest rate loans to do development we're not quite there yet deep seek's taken one of those yeah yeah deep seek turned down all their venture capital interest and said oh yeah we're just going to take a zero percent loan from the Bank of China.

1:43:59I love it. So yeah, it's almost like it's not an impossible task, but it's a very difficult one. Are we doing enough? Do we need to do more? What's your take? Yeah. So in my four years at the White House, I ended up taking over this portfolio, not even taking over, but owning this portfolio of technology supply chains. And it's hard. You know, the Chinese are literally just like you guys have said, they're out there giving these zero percent loans to these companies to try and build what they call national champions. And so and so how do we compete? I think the answer is just the market, you know, and I don't mean that in a sort of like lame kind of way, like, oh, the free market will take care of it.

1:44:48but like there is an incredible amount of dynamism in the American system and in the American markets. So like the Chinese can certainly go out and try and drive attention or monopoly towards their chosen, you know, national champions. But we've got a bunch of people that want to make a ton of money here in the United States, a bunch of people from around the world that come here because they want to make a ton of money here in the United States. I think that presents us with different advantages. And so I think that, you know, when it comes to financing, there are lots of tools in the toolbox.

1:45:20There's the Defense Production Act, there's DOD procurement, there's a whole bunch of things. I do know that the team right now is thinking about all of them. Again, having sat in the seat, I'm not going to take shots at anyone, not that I have any shots to take, just that I'm confident that they're thinking about it. I'm confident that they know what's available. And I think we're seeing great stuff already. What do you think about the debate between supply side and demand side stimulus in these projects? Like the Chips Act, obviously,$50 billion. I think$8 billion was going to go to Intel, provided some milestones.

1:45:59But Ben Thompson has been advocating for flipping that around and instead just saying, hey, let's have the U.S. government say, we're buying chips that are made in America. If you show up with chips that are made in America, we are the buyer. and then maybe someone else will buy them. Maybe Google will buy them. Maybe Apple will buy them. But you can guarantee that there's demand, but we don't care about what's happening on the supply side as long as it's happening in America. Do you like that change? Do you like that V2 thinking? Yeah, I love it. I love it. I think, you know, right now, I've heard a lot of strange things about how Chips Act has played out.

1:46:34I haven't followed it as closely as if I was, you know, some analyst covering this stuff for the banks. But I mean, it was one of the approaches that we pushed was this like, look, you just have to have it made in America. That's it. Again, show up and buy. That's one of the things on the table and I hope they do it. That's cool. What's just pivoting back. I don't know if you're in California right now or up at the northern office, but how do we solve the wildfire crisis in California? It's this sort of uh very complicated issue you've worked in government you know you're very in tune with with what's happening in hard tech it feels like yeah there's a public role you know to play there's a private markets role to play there's obviously the whole insurance side uh but you're sticking it out here in california i hope so what what do you what's your position on you know what we need to do as a state i mean we gotta let the forestry guys like actually operate you know it's insane to hear them talk about like what was going on in altadena or like years it took them to file these crazy applications with like 15 different state boards letting them do controlled burns um and brush clearing and they'd get said no to like we just got to let these guys do their job like forestry management is a solved problem right let these guys get out there the europeans laugh at us the president talks about this all the time but it is literally true they don't have these types of catastrophic forest fires because they have good forestry management.

1:48:08There's an amazing account. Man, M-A-N-N, made films on Twitter. You've seen this guy? He did a film. He took a red camera and he became one of these, what are the fire, the smoke jumpers? Oh, wow. Smoke jumper and he he did this amazing film follow him on x um but he talks about it it's like look yeah these places are prone to fire but if you let the forestry management folks do their job like you know you can manage it and the same thing with the water stuff like the solutions are known like there's weird blockages in the way in which water comes into california and the president's trying to deal with some of that stuff stuff like the state of california like people know what the answer is they're just not being allowed to do it because crazy weird bureaucracies that's right the movie was called hot shot i remember seeing a trailer for this and being blown away by the visuals i need to watch this movie this looks fantastic available on amazon prime apple google play go check it out folks uh anything else i think that's all i got thanks for stopping by i'd love to you know we'd love to have you on when you know there's there's a bunch of these topics cybersecurity correspondent.

1:49:25You're our new cybersecurity correspondent or brother, depending on... Or just a morning pump-up speech. Yeah, exactly. Just hop on, just tell us, good morning, we're going to win. Then you can hop off, get to the rest of your day. We've been starting the show by singing a little bit. So if you ever want to create an anthem or anything, we can sing it. We need good mantras. We need good mantras. We have a few. Temple of technology, fortress of finance, capital of capital, but good morning, we're going to win works too. Say yes. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on. that's great cool we have five minutes until let's hit a couple posts let's hit a couple posts what do we have in the queue uh we went so this is a crazy story from this account rob rob wiblin so he says this is a tiny niche story but it may actually be the most catastrophic thing to happen globally yesterday bold start bold start i'm not going to go out uh on that limb with him but he the judge of that we will desperately need politicians okay so the headline here is that um the this media company new scientist has used the freedom of information laws to obtain the chat gpt records of peter kyle the uk's technology secretary and what is believed to be a first world first use of such legislation interesting so uh rob here says we will desperately need politicians to be able to use ai advisors to keep up with the intense pace of events that recursively self-improving ai agents will bring ai advice will improve in scale proportionately to the social impact ai is having given giving governments some shot at keeping up but if any conversation with ai can be extracted using freedom of information laws while advice from humans given verbally cannot politicians and civil servants will be hugely biased towards worse and slower human advice and analysis they'll fear looking stupid for asking clarifying question or outrage if the AI advises some un-PC course of action.

1:51:19Just as we need humans in government to be able to have some private conversations, we need humans to be able to get AI advice without journalists being able to publish the transcript. These conversations must urgently be carved out of FOI legislation. So anyways, interesting point. Yeah, you know, you want politicians have a lot of pressure. They have hard jobs. You want them to be able to like, you know, have their, you know, their little friend companion, like, uh, uh, maybe they're using obvious. It's like, sometimes it might just say, you've got this, you know, but other times they might ask, you know, Hey, uh, Hey, you need to brush up on your linear algebra.

1:51:58Yeah. Like what, what is, uh, when, what's this maximum speed limit? It's like, he didn't know, he didn't know that he should have known that. Yeah. That's interesting. Uh, I wonder, I mean, there are ways to use LLMs in more secure and less foia-able ways. I mean, certainly you can run your own Llama or DeepSeek instance on a computer. George Hoth has a project, TinyBox. But I mean, even if you just have a new generation Mac, it's now big enough that you can run and powerful enough. And the models have been condensed enough that you can run them locally. That obviously makes it harder for them to be seized without your permission.

1:52:37Also, you could see an LLM or an AI service, you know, basically built on top of something like Signal, where there's end-to-end encryption, where, you know, if you're using an unencrypted network, the government can go and ask the tech company to, they have the keys, so they can unlock the servers and pass over the records. But that's not the way it works on Signal and other end-to-end encrypted communication apps. So you could imagine a world where someone is vending an LLM through an end-to-end encrypted service, not saving the records and offering a different service. Feels like a niche but potentially important use case.

1:53:21But it'll be interesting to see where it goes. I mean, this is actually maybe the bull case for Apple because Apple's whole thing has been end-to-end encryption everywhere, including the messages app. If I'm talking to you on iMessage, Apple cannot see those. And even if the FBI shows up and says, we have a warrant, unlock John and Geordi's latest memes. We want to read them. They've been posting bangers back and forth. We want to access them. Apple doesn't have the keys. And Apple, if they're running the LLM locally on your device, it's locked behind your passcode. But is that true for if a government employee has a government phone shouldn't if the government be able to like see that itself yep yeah yeah i mean if you have if you have the passcode to get into the phone you have full access so it needs to be on a personal device that can't be monitored in order to truly but then of course the flip side is that then you know uh bad actors can use the encrypted and this has been the privacy debate forever yeah yeah and And OpenAI has historically just been very careful around anything political.

1:54:25Totally. They don't want to be positioned as, you know, OpenAI influence this election or things like that. But these are some of the big problems that they're going to have to. Let's go to Blake Robbins. He has some random thoughts. We love these posts from Blake. He says, there might be an entirely new generation that now thinks of Nokia as a Drake song. That's funny. uh two sort of insane how much mobile games like candy crush leverage haptics so as you're using the game it's vibrating uh kind of an underrated way to increase engagement and i guess decrease regretted user seconds or just keep people addicted uh and then number three whoever runs stakes clipping strategy slash network is on a different level playing 4d chess i'm sure you've seen those stake ads all over yeah so the thing that that's been relevant to x is they've taken over or they're partnering with these accounts that post these viral videos and or just posts, images, things like that.

1:55:21Slop, news, anything. And if you look at the bottom, it'll say like this post is presented by steak. So it's like very kind of - Just a tiny logo. You're getting a steak logo. And every time one of those goes viral, there's a community note. This is against the terms of service. You can't prove out this. This is an undisclosed ad, but it still goes viral, still gets a ton of impressions. Yeah. I had a fourth random thought. And it's funny. Well, so he's bringing up Steak. Steak has like this massive partnership with Drake. Oh, yeah, they do. They keep doing like stunts for Steak. Steak and Drake.

1:55:51Steak and Drake. Steak and Drake. No, but I mean, the very, the funny thing is in this one post, you have him calling out that a whole new generation doesn't realize Nokia is a Drake song, which implies that, and Drake partnering with Steak means that Drake is just marketing, you know basically gambling products to the youth and uh he should clean it up should look in the mirror clean it up well i have a fourth random thought here uh you should get an eight sleep nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience go to eightsleep.com slash tbpn and get 350 off the pod uh i slept very well last night uh which i'm glad I got a 98 because this debate is about to be tense.

1:56:39It's going to be difficult. It all could come crashing down. I got a 94. You beat me. Good night. But I slept a lot. Good night for you. Nine hours, 21 minutes. How is that even possible? That's a long time. I mean, you... I put up some crazy numbers. You put up some crazy numbers.

1:56:58But you got to be well-rested for these debates. They're hot. They're aggressive. I wouldn't be surprised if... is not in the waiting room yet. I guess Seth is, but, uh, I wouldn't be surprised if Sam was just taking a power nap on his sleep, uh, you know, to, to just sort of get really into that sort of bring in Seth, do some pregame strategy. I want to hear his strategy. I want to hear how he's thinking about, uh, going toe to toe. Let's bring him in, into the temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Hey, good to see you. Welcome guys. How are you doing? Oh, you got the custom background with the billboard there.

1:57:37Yeah. I'm starting with a little psychological warfare. Okay. That's my strategy. Just get them a little uncomfortable. Yeah. What does it say? It says, lesson south, shoot, lesson, a message, not Seth Greenberg. Yeah. It's very AI generated. It says, got a weird meme coin, shoot, lesson, a message, not so. It's cut off. Okay. Okay. It's cut off over here. But yeah, give us the breakdown. How did we wind up here? So, about a year ago, or maybe six months ago, Les and I had a public debate about, is the AI opportunity for startups or incumbents? yep and it got heated um and so yeah we've kind of just been going back and forth and then and then he actually took out a physical billboard on the 101 like with all like amongst all these like advertisements for ai companies that says ai is not your moat like love slow kind of thing yep and then i just kind of tweeted back at him saying i'm gonna like take out a billboard on the other side okay um and then but then they actually did it yeah yeah so then he he lessened threw up a new ad yesterday that says got an ai startup idea shoot seth rosenberg a message not slow so this is basically the drake and kendrick yeah of allocators uh and the tupac biggie of this era exactly um no but it's great it's great to have you on uh sam's sam's a fierce debater we were talking with logan bartlett he's moderated a debate so we're gonna try to keep it i'm gonna try to keep it very uh very tight keep it tight because he's known to filibuster a little bit when you get him that's right yeah so you gotta you guys gotta help me just cut sam off okay yeah yeah yeah uh well i mean he might not even show up and then you win by default yeah exactly that's good it's a corporate yeah what uh yeah why don't why don't like since we have some time give some background on yourself introduce yourself some background uh for the for the listeners sure well so sam actually hired me at facebook in 2013.

1:59:42so we've gone way back crazy yeah exactly so i was like this young analyst at goldman sachs like spending 100 hours a week in spreadsheets and then sam invited me to this backroom dinner in new york talking about the future of the world and this is back when facebook had a little less baggage it was still like a startup energy, like future of the world, giving individuals a voice like Arab spring, all of that. And I was just super inspired by it. Um, and so it was like a four hour of dinner conversation. I'm like, Sam, like, I definitely like, that was the first time I met him, but you know, he's quirky and futuristic.

2:00:18And so I'm like, I need to do this. So I spent like any spare time I had like learning how to code and just like getting up to speed on tech world. And then I've just been in the, in that world ever since. How long were you at Facebook? Yeah. I was there for about four years. I led the separation of Messenger into its own app. And then David Marcus came on to lead it. And Stan came on and built kind of an empire around it. And then I was running. Was that like post-Project Titan? Because it wasn't Titan, like the whole project to like put everything together. And then you kind of. That was after I left.

2:00:50That was after I left. This was the opposite of that. It was the separation. Yeah. This was back when it was like Facebook chat. That's the game at a hyperscaler. you just break it apart, put it back together for employment for PMs in the valley. Yeah, exactly. So I was there for phase one. Okay. And then you went straight to gray lock or what was your next move? No, no. So I was running the, uh, product for the developer platform at Facebook, which was like AI bots, messenger bots. It's like the hottest thing in Silicon Valley for like four months before everyone realized it didn't work because we were seven years away from LLMs actually you know being released yeah there's bots lots of business logic lots of if then statements exactly dressed up with a nice ui every once in a while all right we got your former uh your former boss or at least a guy that hired you is in the waiting room now so we can bring them bring them in and uh bring them into the temple of technology the fortress of finance the capital of capital uh and if they if they get out of hand i'm gonna be ringing this gong telling you hurry it up finish what you're saying no filibustering on this debate you know you almost forfeited by being late i was in the waiting room i'm sitting there i wore my team canada uh your canadian team canada like archterics for yourself yeah thank you i appreciate that i support i support your 51st state yeah hey i'm american now i kind of support it too honestly yeah there you go that's great well welcome to the stream welcome to the debate uh should we do some some opening arguments what what lay down the the general uh the what is the actual point that we're debating here uh sustaining versus disruptive innovation for artificial intelligence is that kind of where you guys are differing most i think the debate is that sam has too much disposable income to waste on billboards oh okay yeah so sam what's the roi been so far are you i don't know seth how How many AI pitches have you gotten from my billboard?

2:02:52Actually, honestly, the inbox is full. There you go. You're welcome. You're welcome. I see no debate here. I'm very happy to send Seth all the AI pitches, and life is good. And to be clear, this debate is presented by AdQuick, the number one way to buy billboards on the 101. Yes, if you're trying to duke it out with a rival, get on AdQuick, get a billboard. It's underrated to take debates from the timeline to the 101. Air it all out. um but yeah so so sam uh you know we had we had lesson on the show i think last friday uh broadly you know talking about opportunities and ai and the whole kind of full spectrum uh maybe yeah i mean i i don't even know necessarily where to start you guys were the ones that well okay here's what i'll i'll bet seth and i have been debating this for years let me let me try to tee it up which is i for several years so i try to be self-consistent have been very pro that ai is going to make the big, big, big platforms a shit ton of money.

2:03:53And it's going to be really good for small businesses, but it is a terrible place to hunt for startups, right? It's a great way to lose a lot of money on startups. Now, my refinement of that, which I will give as a refinement from my, like, I do really believe in what I'll call AI cherry on top businesses, which is businesses that are good, that there's a sweetener because of the efficiency of AI. But Broadly speaking, when people come in and pitch AI, my answer is pass. Please go call Seth. Seth's answer, I think, is please call me. Okay, Seth, what do you want to say? So I think that tees it up well.

2:04:31So I'll give you two examples of where I think massive new businesses can be built that are, let's say, AI native. I think one is like networks and marketplaces based on new democratization of being able to create new types of content. So like the analogy on the phone is you now have a camera in everyone's pocket. The first wave of apps was like camera filter apps. And then Instagram. No, the first wave of apps were fart apps. Fart apps and like drinking a beer app. Beer drinking. Fair, fair. But like the first camera apps were like, you know, just like little fun tools you could do with the camera.

2:05:10But then the real mobile first business were things like Instagram and Snap, right, which basically created networks around democratization of creation of new content. And I think if you think about AI, like what new types of content can now be created by everyone? There's a few examples. One are games, like what's the next Roblox? Two is music, you know, is suno gonna have like a consumption experience so they're gonna be a new type of network there three is software right just generally i don't know if if there's enough out there to build like a you know a web app store around productivity or vertical sass or whatever but there's basically democratization of new content type and i think you could create a marketplace around that i think you could build a big business so i mean so i guess go ahead i guess to like maybe push you a bit further there, like specifically around Suno and I don't have no insight into what they're actually doing, but if I create a great song on Suno, don't I want to share that with like the most amount of, of people?

2:06:09So just like take that to YouTube or, or X. And wouldn't that be an argument that, you know, that, like the, the value just kind of continues to just like anchor around the sort of distribution platform. Yeah, I think that would be, um, you know, a base case or kind of like smaller outcome for suno if it just kind of gets relegated into the creative tool but i think if like the number and quality of things that are actually created on the suno platform starts to exceed or at least like take a meaningful but separate piece of the market then they they could just create a more closed ecosystem where the only way to way to get that content is on suno i just think it's extremely unlikely i mean the thing that i think is like that i would say i buy is i'd say that there in general the medium is the message right and so you have in a lot of places and so when you have a new tech by the way sam sam made me read that book as onboarding for facebook i did i used to control i used to have the distinction of controlling the reading list which i invented for all onboarded pms and i hired seth and then made him read marshall was it it was it was marshall and snow crash snow crash okay um snow crash was well before oculus on the required reading list fantastic others um but look i mean i think here's what i was gonna say is um i do if you think about like a lot of what the internet is people like to think about it as a technology right or a lot of that's what it really is is like an information economy or a content economy and like i think if you start thinking about things on economic terms of like producers, consumers, like what's the what's the holistic picture of that?

2:07:51You do get some really interesting frameworks for talking about AI. So I'll give an example. What is Facebook? Or what is social media? It really is a content pump, right? There are rules, there's an economy established with it, that economy then produces a certain type of content pumping out of humans that otherwise wouldn't have been pumped out, and then recirculates and share and create some economy around it. If you said, hey, AI creates some new affordances that makes it cheaper to pump information, like all of a sudden we can frack humans, right? In a new way. And by fracking them, there's some sort of like new content type that comes out that is super compelling and super different.

2:08:30Sure. Like maybe that there's something there, but I think that the most likely outcome by a mile when you think about products is it just turns out that Like most products and the platforms already exist. It's all about getting laid or getting paid. These AI is one of the greatest extensions of existing platforms you can imagine. It just makes everything better. And just like fracking, you kind of get new content or cheaper content from people because AI makes it easier, but it all flows to the same fucking pipelines, right? And the money is not in the fracking because the fracking itself is commodity.

2:09:02Yeah, I definitely agree that the fracking is commodity, meaning the creation. The question is, can you frack something new that then creates a new network? Right. And I just think it's extremely unlikely because the pipelines exist. Right. Like there's no like what is the new like, you know, it's just oil. Yeah. Does that make it a good VC bet? If even if it's even if there's like a, you know, 5 % chance, but the new network is, you know, I mean, that's what happened with TikTok, right? Like it was first just those lip syncing app and you would repost that content elsewhere. And then they bootstrapped a network on top of it and became a very good outcome for, I guess, the CCP.

2:09:35But, you know, you could imagine an American. But that was a new content type. That was a new content. Like, snap. Doesn't Harry Potter or Balenciaga videos, couldn't that be the lip syncing video of this era? I feel like I'm a Democrat with CNN on my side here. I've got the hosts on my side. But I don't know. We're just guiding the conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're both wrong. No, I'm kidding. the problem the problem with ai in general and i think the entire ai discussion is um i always like the point that's like the the average of infinity and zero is infinity right and so vcs aren't very good at math but they can do that one and so the problem is you say okay this is so disruptive that even though the likely outcome is zero because there's like no math you can do on this and mark it big then you're like well i'll pay anything because maybe it's a thing right and And I think that's actually what's going on in the industry a lot.

2:10:32I think it's quite bad because it leads to this complete lack of thoughtfulness and discipline. It's just the most rudimentary math on what happens. I look a lot. There are actually projects. I'll give you an example of something I actually believe is new content that can exist because of AI. Not only I've invested and I helped start, which is we work on this thing called Merit First with Joe Lonsdale and his team. We have some good announcements that will happen. I like this, Sam. Here's the thing about it. Here's the basic setup for it. And it is an interesting AI-oriented business because you say, look, the way you hire people to date in most worlds is credential-based.

2:11:12You're like, ah, you went to Harvard. You studied this thing. You got this checkbox. Now you're in my pipeline. Hell, I hired Seth because we used to go to New York and say we want to talk to the smartest people from Bain, McKinsey, Goldman, BCG, and Morgan. That was it. That was like the entire thing. like we don't know how to look at everyone. We're just going to like go call those people and we'll like pick some of them. Right. That was how we did hiring. Um, at least in the alternative PM hiring we were doing. Um, what is way better is to do it based on what you can actually do based on tests, based on, you know, forget credentials.

2:11:46I don't care how you got to go to something like what, like show me what you can do. Here's the problem is if you go to a most hiring manager and say, Hey, hire based on tests, you have three problems. One is they're like, well, I don't know how to design a good test, right? Like, what is a good test for this role? It's actually pretty hard to figure that out and make it mean meaningful. Two, how do I know you're not cheating? And three, the biggest, most non-obvious, once you have like 10 ,000 applications for something, you're screwed because you can't possibly actually grade all those tests, right?

2:12:15Unless it's like a multiple choice, which is like not sophisticated. So does AI have leverage on that? Absolutely. Does that mean that there's like a new way to think about a human interaction? Like, how do you hire people because AI exists? Absolutely. Like, that is the type of thing. But it's not, you're not investing in the AI. You're investing in, like, a new way or a new approach to hiring, which happens to leverage AI, right? And I think there is an important distinction there. Well, yeah, I'm glad I already got hired so I don't have to compete. Yeah, you don't have to do it. Yeah, I don't have to compete with 20 ,000 other people.

2:12:48But that's actually kind of the second big bucket, Sam, of AI opportunities that to me are very obvious, which is just AI opening up new markets that were historically owned by labor. Right. And right now you're talking about recruiting, massive industry. It's mostly human led. There's a long list of others, right, where technology is now taking labor spend, whether it's legal, whether it's accounting, compliance. We have a company in our portfolio called Greenlight that's growing super fast. And it's just, you know, these large banks and fintechs have like thousands of compliance analysts that just go through checkboxes and write reports.

2:13:27And so you're competing with BPOs in these cases. Well, kind of. But I think this is something you're really careful about because it goes back to the whole like, what are you actually investing in? And is this an AI company? Like one of the big memes right now in venture capital is, oh, we should like buy accounting firms and make them robots. Yeah. And by the way, I'm not doing it. I'm not doing the roll up. And it's like, I mean, we've actually done a bunch of roll ups that we think do make sense. But like, this is one in particular, I think, is really stupid. Because it people don't understand the point of accountants, right?

2:13:57The point of an accountant is not like you could have a robot, you could have a, you know, some fancy AI that has a 1 % error rate, or even a 0.1 % error rate on your taxes, your accountant might be running a 3 % error rate. Who do you hire? You hire the human, you know why? Because you know, you're really hiring an accountant, you're hiring someone so that when the irs is like you fucked up your taxes you're like i don't know talk to steve right and like you could still do that you can still sell software to big account like 1.6 million accountants right now send them the chat gpt uh dot com link so the basic point is like there's a lot of jobs that people want to like ooh machine can automate and you're like you don't understand like this is a liability shifting thing like most a lot of human jobs are not actually about doing the thing they're about shifting liability and responsibility Right.

2:14:43That's yeah, I agree that the job will change to its essence, which is like trust and sales. Right. But that just means that that individual guy, Steve, who everyone trusts to put a rubber stamp can do 10 times the amount of business with. But the problem is the AI itself is commodity and everyone will have it. And like, that's not where the leverage is. So you're not really investing in the AI business. Right. You're still investing in the accounting business, Steve's business. Right. And everyone has the same level. It's a classic war of attrition. And I just don't think this is a place where you're going to make money on the arms dealing.

2:15:22Because the arms dealing is all commodity. Well, the question is, is the software that Steve's using to leverage himself, is that OpenAI and ChatGPT? Is that Thomson Reuters? Or is that a new company? It just doesn't matter. It's all commodity. Okay. How do you map this to the mobile wave? because we were just talking to Logan Bartlett about this. It's kind of the classic innovator's dilemma, sustaining innovation versus disruptive innovation. And with mobile, it did feel like a sustaining innovation in that the mobile sales force was just sales force. And yet a lot of VCs made a lot of money betting on mobile companies if they got into WhatsApp.

2:15:59You don't think so? They didn't make that much money on it. I mean, I think Silicon Valley has a story that venture capitalists like to tell LPs, which is every X years, the whole thing gets reshuffled and there's all this money to be made. It's bullshit, right? Like the going from shrink rack software to internet, that was a big deal, right? That was a paradigm shifting, broke the machine thing. You know, I would actually argue that the shift to mobile was not disruptive at all, right? Like you have all the same winners, they're just bigger, right? I would argue that the shift to cloud was barely disruptive, right?

2:16:31And it just turns out that like there's a very big difference between things that are so important in paradigm shifting, they break the incumbents and there's huge opportunities for win. Like that's why crypto is really interesting. Think what you will of it. It's crypto is extremely hostile to incumbents, right? As like a concept. We can talk about how it's being now co-opted by incumbents, but like in general, like it fundamentally is. Whereas I could not think of a more classically extending innovation than AI, right? It just makes the rich richer. When's the Sam Lesson Mag 7 ETF coming then?

2:17:04If you're so bullish on the... No, you got to buy Jelly Jelly. Well, first of all, I'd say the mag seven, like I would actually argue, I was, I, cause I like to lick the cookie on these things. Yeah. Uh, is like, I, I was like, I think, you know, if you go back two years, like pitching the, like, these are the five companies that are going to win an AI and it's all the same ones that already exist. I mean, it was, you know, so I'm into the mag seven thing. I also would say like, when people ask me like my AI investing strategy, I'm gonna say like, thank God I held onto some Facebook stock. Sure.

2:17:29Right. Like that's the answer. It's like the best AI bet. Yeah. What about the idea that like Apple's slipping or Google's not shipping fast enough? Like this does create opportunities for entrepreneurs, at least to build a company that gets acquired or something like they're not going to get acquired. They're just going to get copied. Here's what I'd say. Like, I don't think the AI, I think here's maybe some common ground with Sam and I. I don't think AI is going to kill incumbents in favor of startups, but I do think it opens up new markets. And yes, they're outliers, but that's kind of what we're in the business of doing and funding.

2:17:57And like for mobile, yes, like it didn't kill Facebook. It didn't kill Airbnb, but it created Uber. It created DoorDash. It created Instacart. It created TikTok, right? It created Snap. It created Instagram, created WhatsApp. And so these are tens of billions, hundreds of billions of value that were kind of mobile first. And it's a similar thing, which is like, what are the new capabilities, GPS, camera, video? Can you create, can you use that as a hook to then create a sustainable business, whether it's a network? You know, I agree with you, Sam, that like AI by like doing an API called OpenAI is is obviously not defensible, but can you use it as a hook to then build a real business?

2:18:38And I just think the answer is in almost all places, no. Right. Like, I think it's a thing. It's just like, oh, everyone uses it. Everything gets leveled up. You know, like to your thing about incumbents and Apple, look, Apple is comical. We talked about this last week. Like the Apple stuff is like pretty funny. Right. It's so bad. Right. But it's not going to make me buy an Android phone, right? And so you're like, so they have a hell of a lot of time to figure out something. Like, we are a long way away from that being a real issue for them, even if it's pretty funny. What about the more sclerotic industries?

2:19:16I mean, you're thinking about, you know, like management consultants seem to be printing money on AI, just strapping on AI pitches onto legacy businesses. as I see like, oh, I go to IBM or something with, oh, I want to replatform my app and I just need a bunch of programmers to do that. It feels like an AI native company there could potentially scale up and get really big. I don't know. I mean, like, look, Accenture is going to make a lot of money short-term on this stuff, right? Totally. Short-term. The problem is Accenture is mostly in the business of BPO outsourcing. Yeah. And they're going to kind of eat themselves in doing that, right?

2:19:49And so it's going to be a very different world for them in terms of how they navigate this. But anyone who sells business consulting is going to do pretty well in a period where like... IT transformation. For a little bit. It's just like these are not VC-backed businesses. These are consulting firms that will make money for a little bit, right? I mean, it seems like you're just super bearish on VC as an asset class. Should founders just go and build a lifestyle business or something or pick some different capital structure? So go for it, Seth. No, I mean, AI is also great. I think AI is just an accelerant for everything.

2:20:27It makes large companies more profitable. It opens up new markets for startups, whether it's services, businesses, or new networks. And it's also great for lifestyle businesses. There's a long tail of random problems that you can now solve really specifically with a very small team. So the way I would phrase it is related, but a little differently, which is in life, the mineral usually drops out. And I think AI is a great example of dropping out the middle. There's no such thing as being a$10 billion public company anymore. It's just a dumb place to be. No one cares. You either want to be a hyperscaler, which is a great place.

2:21:06Most of the market says, AI interesting. Where put money for AI? And that's the seek. And that's why you've seen like the mag seven in particular things like facebook just crushing it because you're like no liability tons of upside like easy bet like why is everyone buying video they're like we don't know how to invest in this nvidia seems fine or like we don't know how to invest in this let's just buy power right like because we're not sure how this plays out so like the big will keep getting bigger and there'll be like a massive thing and then on the very small interior like thing about lifestyle look i the reason we have a creator fund right the reason that we do a bunch of stuff at the low end is I totally buy the thesis that you're going to see individuals that have a lot of trust and brand and community and deeply understand a niche do things you haven't seen before.

2:21:52Like I buy the one person billion dollar company thing. Like I think that's real with like with the leverage you have. I think the key is you just have to have the right capital for the mission you're on. And having the wrong capital is a really bad place. And by the way, the worst capital you can have, I personally think, is being a subscale company competing with hyperscalers using venture capital, right? That's like a recipe for total disaster, because the hyperscalers have orders of magnitude more money and time, right? And you're just like, you're kind of truly bringing a knife to a gunfight.

2:22:28Isn't it possible that we wind up looking back on this in a few years and think like, Like, oh, we just hadn't thought of what the Uber for AI is. How do you think about the Uber story with mobile to, you know, today? Like Uber, it was hard to predict when the iPhone dropped. I mean, we were already seeing the Uber for AI. What's the Uber for AI? Cursor. Like the next Roblox. No. Those that like, they're fine. They're fine. I think like, it's interesting. Why do you think cursor is interesting? Like it's cursors. I like it. I use it as a product. I don't see it as a good business. I just think it's the classic startups need to get distribution before incumbents innovate.

2:23:09And now, because these tools are so powerful, you're actually able to get distribution as a new company very quickly. So if you're first to market with the best product, then you can start leaning into all the other things that kind of give you defensibility. I don't know. That's true. The thing is, people are applying network thinking to what's fundamentally just a technology. There's no network. There's no lock-in. First is not a network. But there's a lot of SaaS products that become very sticky because they become the default. I don't think so. I think the whole point of AI is the switching cost for almost all this stuff goes to zero, right?

2:23:40And because switching cost is zero, there's just no value. I mean, I use Chorus. Have you guys played with Chorus? No. It's awesome. I actually haven't used it. It's great. It's basically just like a desktop app, and you plug all the LLMs into it, right? You have keys for all of them. And I don't care. Use the best one marginally. when a new one comes out, you know, the only defensible thing it is, is there are so many fucking LLM models at this point. I'm happy to give someone the job of actually researching them all and deciding which one to send a specific query to. Like there's some sort of aggregation value there for a little bit for now, but I don't know, man.

2:24:17One fun thought exercise on the social side is that, you know, we went through this generation, you know, social media was great initially because people were like, oh, it's actually more interesting to see what my friends are kind of talking about and doing versus just like traditional media which is like random people and then it was like the kim kardashian era of you know it's more interesting to like follow a famous person's life and uh it's it's possible to imagine a world where just being in a version of instagram where everyone's a bot and they all like you know are either polarizing or exactly aligned with your views and there's just like this kind of constant stream and you get everybody gets a thousand likes on their posts and they post this is like my line on this has been that the for for 20 years the way you start a social network is you say who do you want to follow and the way to start a social network today is say who do you want to follow you right um is like the the inversion that you could see like i'd actually argue twitter is already doing this like twitter i think is intention my i'm not i have no inside information my sense is it is intentionally full of bots right because people are lonely people want responses it's clearly dopamine yeah we talked about this sam as like a new social network yeah so you're like look it doesn't you clearly there just aren't mathematically enough humans to fulfill people's need for like validation so like sure throw a bunch of machines in the mix so that people have more validation floating this is why i debate sam i just want more billboards yeah i think i think one one example that is way too easy to like or way too early to make a call is you have um um so seth you guys are in uh tome which started out as like the ability to like generate uh slides which like people spend a ton of time all day long making slide decks like there's probably billions of dollars spent just producing slide decks in the u.s for various use cases uh they recently sort of pivoted into a space around um you know automating sales research and outbound you can imagine like you know like a real test will be can tome compete with uh salesforce when salesforce has this sort of just you know army of people like jamming uh comparable products you know uh and actually for you know there were some news in the information i think yesterday that salesforce is basically saying if you don't pay for agent force we're like raising your your your regular you know rates on the crm side like 3x i can already give you the answer so let's say offensive of his company, but I love Keith.

2:26:46I really respect him. He's a great guy. He used to work with me too. Same team. No way can Tom compete on this, but I'll go even a step further, which is this entire industry of outbound goes away. This is where we're talking about the real displacement of what's going on. So first, I mean, I have several portfolio companies that are calling us saying, you know, we have this thing, we tried this thing in AI, but now all the platforms are just bundling it and giving it away and we can't compete because even if we're better. So that's happening all over the place. And you're like, duh, of course, that's going to happen.

2:27:15This is an easy tack on. But then the step two, which is where the really interesting socialist placement comes is everyone's excited about, oh, I can use AI to like customize outbound sales or something. You're like, your inbox is now worthless because once all the sales are customized, you can't tell what's real and what's fake. That entire economy collapses, right? So I'd actually go, the more likely outcome is A, no, Tom can't beat Salesforce. But two, even if they could, that entire emotion goes away because of AI. Yeah, look, I don't think you need to beat Salesforce to be very successful and to find a segment of the market that wants a more modern product that, you know, understands your business, has everything in one place.

2:27:57and can actually make your sales seem a lot more effective with a more modern architecture. So I think Tome is going to be successful. Because again, you can think about this hypothetically, or you can talk to customers, especially in different segments, and just see where the pain is. But one thing I'll agree with Sam on is I think we're in an outlier business. You have to be very selective. I think people who are overpaying for things that are not durable at crazy prices, that's not a game that we're playing and not a game that I believe in either. I think, you know, backing like amazing product builders and technologists going after either existing markets that need to be totally rearchitected using AI or totally new markets that open up, whether it's like a gaming network or replacing services in, you know, a very long tail of really large markets.

2:28:50I still think there's like a massive amount of value to be made. I just think that it's such a different way. I'll give you an example. Like, I think it's, you don't want to back generic Facebook PMs anymore, who know AI and product, right? Because they don't know anything, right? And like, it's just, if anything, the irony is it's all getting, all those things are getting hyper commoditized in terms of, and AI only commoditizes it faster. How do you build and what is a product? It stuff doesn't, like, if you told me, and we look at some of this too, you have a truly unique market insight. You understand a market that no one else gets because you've been a specialist for 20 years in it or whatever.

2:29:24By the way, the tools of building and the paradigms have changed so quickly. There's an opportunity to build something new. Yeah, there's interesting stuff there. We do businesses that are AI, quote unquote, enabled all the time that fit that pattern. But those people are generally not building, quote unquote, AI tools. They're just like, it's kind of like saying they're not building cloud companies or internet companies. They're just building great companies that happen to leverage technology. Yeah, I agree. There was like an AI conference last week. and I'm like, this concept of an AI conference is going to last like six months because eventually it's just...

2:29:58It's like building an internet business. Everything's computer. Everything's computer. Everything's computer, for sure. Everything's computer. We're at 30 minutes. We got to ring the gong. We got to wrap it up. So who won the debate, guys? Closing arguments. We'll let the fans decide. We'll let the market decide. We'll let the bots decide. I'll let the bots decide. It's an economic battle. It's a capital war, capital fight. Whoever deploys more bots to vote wins. No, no. Here's the real way we're going to do it. I will put a calendar invite for like five years from now. Okay. I love that. And we'll just come back.

2:30:35We'll watch the debate and we'll just pause and people can take little victory laps. They can talk about companies that made it. I love that. That's great. I love that. So five years from today, mark your calendars. Mark your calendars. I look forward to it. Thank you guys for jumping on. Have fun on the one-on-one. Enjoy. Have a great week. guys yeah we should uh host the follow-up to that debate at a wander go to wander.com book a wander today they're also doing a giveaway sign up and uh wander.com slash tbpn uh you can also use tbpn to get 300 off your first day uh one thing about wanders the properties are so amazing they do get booked out oh yeah pretty far in advance at times but not five years in advance so we can definitely get something we can get something in the castle yeah sweet castle that's what i'm looking for um inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better folks check it out let's go back to the timeline wrap up let's do it uh we got and that was and just just to summarize that was fun um who do you think won i mean i i do tend to side with sam i think seth has good points I think Seth's an optimist.

2:31:52He's in the outlier business. You know, the entire model of running a fund like Greylock is if we can back, you know, one or two, you know, really impactful companies per fund. They have more AUM. They can, you know, make bigger investments. And I think they're in the sort of optimism business. Sam is much more of a pessimist. Sure. But he has some real points, right? You know, the Tome company specifically, I brought it up. They started, they were very hyped sort of AI slides company. Didn't find a market for what they were doing. Now they are competing with Salesforce. And I can imagine, I mean, anybody in sales is competing with Salesforce.

2:32:34They're an AI assistant for sales. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it is good to kind of like break down like what it means to be bullish on AI generally. Because you could just say, yeah, the AI thing is real. and the way I'm expressing that is in a mag seven ETF and going along hyperscalers. Or it could be I'm building a lifestyle business as a solo developer, vibe coding, pumping it out on X with videos and making money that way. And so there's always a bull market somewhere, but I think Sam is narrowing it down to, hey, maybe$20 million series A's are particularly fraught right now. And I don't know, it's possible.

2:33:13It just depends on if you get into the right business. I still think it's early enough that we could get our WhatsApp, we could get our Uber, and you might see some funds dump$20 million at$200 million a post and still get 100x return. The big thing is it seems like what we now define as AGI is an extending innovation, but it's the sort of looming ASI. Oh, that's the disruptive. The real disruptor is ASI, not AGI, as we're sort of currently defining that. Yeah, my joke with that is that eventually when ASI comes, you say, set up a website or buy me something and it rebuilds Stripe from first person all the way.

2:33:51It writes all the code that's ever existed on the internet in five seconds and builds you everything. And that would be very disruptive. But I think we're a long way away from there, especially on how much it costs to inference these models and how rough the vibe coding thing has been amazing. but then we've heard a lot of accounts of people saying, yeah, it'll get you 80 % of the way there, 90 % of the way there, but there's still a lot of humans in the loop. It's not a working product. And maybe we are seeing not acceleration, but deceleration in the efficacy of these models. But they're still really fun.

2:34:22They're cool. And I want to check out some of those ones that he recommended. I actually did play with Suno last night for the first time. Bedtime song? No. I was trying to make a theme song for TBPN. I was thinking we need our own, you know, NFL.

2:34:40no so what we should do is get uh a symphony yes and we stand in the symphony i think we need to play it and we and we just you know my takeaway was that yeah i would love to get a human to do this because yeah uh the first version that came back i was like uh you know espn style football song intro and i didn't have lyrics turned off and so it generated all these funny lyrics like football game starting now and like all these really ridiculous things. Um, but, uh, lots of promise there. And, uh, I mean just the mid journey of music seems fun. I don't know if it'll replace everything, but certainly like a tool in the tool chest for the artist.

2:35:19Overall, I think having a debate, letting people share their opinion and then circling back to it is really the best solution because you can't win a debate like that in the moment. It's just vibes right now. Yes, definitely. And I think keeping it tight and short is key. Anyway, let's move on to the opposite of tight and short. Larry Ellison's longevity, which is unreal. He's been in the game for decades. Putting up these numbers. Look at this chart. Oracle Corporation is up 210 ,000 % all time, dating back to the 80s. Putting up these numbers for the lifetime of modern tech industry while also being the true Brian Johnson, If you're not familiar with how young Larry Ellison looks, he's looking fantastic.

2:36:07When he was born, for context, we were still in World War II. Wow. Fantastic. Insane. Yeah, Oracle. Not mentioned as much as the other Magnificent Seven companies, the hyperscalers, but clearly doing something right. The stock is up and to the right. Yes. And so we love Oracle here on the show. um big news this really shook the tech industry to the core uh juan over at ramp got a raise there we go he said turns out hit the size gong for juan congratulations uh day one of asking ramp for a raise that happened november 13th of last year now it's march 13th and he got it done based on your accomplishments and results in 2024 we're pleased to provide you with an update to your compensation package.

2:36:54Congrats to Juwan. Let's move on to it. I mean, everybody said, oh, this is never going to work. This is never going to happen. But he did it. He was consistent. He survived and thrived through controversy and he got the raise. This would have been a great debate to have on. We could have had Eric and Kareem come on, debate it. With Juwan. He's got to make a presentation. Yes, yes, yes. Live on the show. This is how raises will be done at RAMP in a few years. Anyway, let's move on to Luke Metro. He's quote tweeting Michael Dempsey. YC used to feel like a window into understanding the areas progressing from what the smartest people know, what the smartest people are doing on weekends to VC-backed startups.

2:37:35Today, it feels like the best window into the current consensus thing. And Luke Metro says, lots of tech feels like this now. Here's my theory. Pre-2020, there were still novel insights in lots of small offline subgroups. VC scout programs existed to capitalize on this. But post-COVID, Silicon Valley moved entirely online. Now the time from outgroup to consensus is minuscule. What's your take? I think this is totally right. It feels like YC now is a reflection of what the internet is interested in, right? What the sort of community is interested in. And I think that that's fine. If ideas are important, we should have a bunch of people attacking them.

2:38:17That's the beauty of the free market. but i think this is totally on point uh the other thing is that you the companies that are truly not like that don't feel relevant at yc or that feel weird are the ones that don't get the hype because they're just tinkering on some weird thing and then six flock safety is a good example right i'm sure the flock safety batch was just a bunch of sass so um and luke also had another good post from today that I've just got pulled up here. He says, the real Project Europe is VC spending three months in the south of France this summer. Were you going to say that?

2:38:53You had the same idea. We had a similar idea. We had a similar idea. I love it. Well, yeah, go enjoy Europe. Book now, book on Wander. Book your trip to Europe. Get out there and spend some time recuperating while you can feel the AGI. You can feel the AGI. The acceleration wash over you under the Tuscan sun. Yep. Albedo has some news. They are launching. I was texting with the founder. We're hopefully gonna have them on early next week. Clarity One will launch as the first commercial satellite to operate in very low Earth orbit, beginning with 10 centimeter resolution imagery, previously only possible with aircraft or billion dollar government satellites.

2:39:33Albedo is redefining what's possible from space. And so we'll have to have them on. I saw a picture of the fuselage of the Falcon 9 that they're riding on. Nice. And good luck to them. There's been a few delays, as there always are with these launches, but it's looking good, and so you can tune into that launch tonight. SpaceX is going back to Leo. What time is it? I think he said like midnight Pacific time or something. He was also like, you guys are live, right? Saturday at midnight? yeah i was like not yet but stay tuned we're getting there we're working on it uh let's move on uh types fast ryan peterson founder of flexport friend of the show been on he is quoting leonard bernstein who says two things are needed to achieve great things a plan and not quite enough time uh civilization five when building the big ben wonder he's been uh pulling quotes out of Silver Station 5.

2:40:31I love it. It's awesome. A bunch of bangers in there. We had Captain Price. Oh, yeah. I've never actually gotten into Civ. I've wanted to, but it's a big investment because I think the time to actually play a full game is more than like a few hours. And so I haven't been able to find the time, but he's spent a lot of time on planes. He's got Starlink locked in. Actually, I think you can play Civ offline. It's not even a multiplayer game necessarily. So good way to spend a few hours in the belly of a 747 ferrying packages around the globe for Flexport. Anyway, do we move on to Augustus D 'Urico?

2:41:07Augustus himself, he says, every 20 to 30 year old man I know who is great or that's aspiring for greatness seems to get mentally and spiritually obliterated daily. They're not without joy, wisdom or purpose, but constantly raw. And Cernovich says, adult men are not supposed to feel happy. It's abnormal. you should question what you're doing you should feel the tinge of fear it means you're pushing yourself the alternative is sitting around waiting to die like some muppet uh and yeah i think i i i put this in the stack just because i think it's important to realize that um you know optimizing for feeling good all the time will be your downfall and yeah part of you know having a great life is not just not optimized, you know, it's not doing the happiness specifically.

2:41:59We talked about this with our, with the Lone Ranger. Uh, the goal of a startup is not to be a happy startup. It's to be a successful startup. The goal of a marriage is not to be a happy marriage necessarily. It's to be a successful marriage and that's a different vector and happiness is derived from that and adjacent to that, but not, not the end all be all goal. Because as soon as you start optimizing purely for happiness, you put a lot of the grind to the side. And rest on your laurels. Should we go to Nikita? He was talking about vibe coding and where some of these apps are going. If you've tried following vibe coding games over the last month and have tried making one yourself, it should be abundantly obvious that we are very close to someone building a creation ecosystem or app store where anyone can be a game developer.

2:42:43And success of the creators within this future ecosystem and will be determined by pure merit of their concepts, not technical execution. The only gap that needs to be closed for this ecosystem to exist is abstracting away the remaining pieces that are too complicated for the layman, authentication, server networking, and deployment. Once that's achieved, the only thing left for a creator to do is to dream up their concept and click publish. And suddenly we will have millions of people making 3D online games with graphics comparable to N64. I love that. We talked to a YC founder who's basically working on this exact problem.

2:43:14One of my friends, Kyle Russell, built something like this, I want to say like five years ago. He was working on it right in 2020. I met him through Andreessen Horowitz. He was like the associate on the deal. And great guy. He built this company called Playbite. And it would let you, it gave you a bunch of primitives. And on your phone, in a browser, you could build like a top-down 2D game. and he was just like maybe a little bit too early with that concept to really get escape velocity because it was easier than Roblox but didn't really have the same like viral breakout moment but you can certainly imagine like what the vision of what he was laying down makes a lot of sense in terms of App Store.

2:43:58Of course, Nikita got a lot of pushback here. Everyone said, he said, stop saying Roblox. I'm talking about something much more customizable. The thing is that I've seen some Roblox games that are incredibly customizable. I've seen people say like, we rebuilt call of duty in uh roblox and it looks like call of duty almost i don't know if it's fake but um well it'll be interesting somebody rebuild the tbpn set in roblox no oh they should we'll record a show there yeah that'd be great in the metaverse um should we go to bo nickel we got some breaking news we got some breaking news from bo um bo has a new fight It's going to be on May 3rd.

2:44:35I'm going to pull up a supporting article here. It's a middleweight bout. Yeah. So Bo is a middleweight. He has been. I assume that has something to do with like the size of the guys. Is that how it works? Yeah. Yeah. This is the joke. John is obsessed with professional bodybuilding. I follow UFC closely. Yeah. But anyway, so Bo, friend of the show and listener. He's also an entrepreneur, has his own business. You can check out. he started in Dana White's contender series we got a couple wins in there and then has gone on a tear he's 7-0 he's 29 for those that don't know which is like kind of the prime years he's got a bunch of wins under his belt and now it's time to make a run at the title and they're allowed to punch and kick is that how it works the last time we covered Bo on the show Bo texted me and he was like I'm always amazed with how little John knows So his, the John's knowledge is actually even like going backwards.

2:45:34The ring isn't square, right? Yeah. It's almost like a, it's like an octagon. It has eight sides. Yeah. Eight side. Yeah. Yeah. I know that. Yeah. Good. Learning this stuff. And so anyways, uh, Bo is one of the top prospects in MMA right now. And he's, uh, his next fight is, um, is against this guy, uh, DeRitter, uh, who, uh, was at one championship. He's been a two weight class champion over there. So this will be a huge test for Bo, but we are very excited for it. He's been training hard and good luck to him. Good luck to him. We'll be watching hopefully live, but we'll see. Good luck to him.

2:46:15I hope he can go all 25 rounds. Is that how many rounds there are? I hope he makes it. Honestly, I hope he gets a gold medal. I really hope he gets a gold medal. I think he's going to make short work to Ritter. Good luck to him. Good luck. Good luck, though. Let's go to another friend of the show, David Senra. He shares some sage advice from Peter Thiel. Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. I love that. And it's funny because it's like MBA advice almost, but it's contrarian in the VC context because for so long, there were these naturally growing Facebook.

2:47:01They didn't need to run billboard ads for Facebook because it was this social network and it just grew. But they really did have better distribution because of the network effect and the model. And then so an example of this, right? So we were just talking about Salesforce versus some of these upstart sales assistant companies. Part of Salesforce's monopoly is they have thousands of people that sell Salesforce and they're going to customers current and new and saying, if you don't buy our AI assistant for sales, we're going to increase the price of the product that you actually want. And for many companies, it's just the default CRM.

2:47:39And so that by itself is like they have the distribution, they have the labor force, and yeah, it's going to be very tough for a lot of those players to get anywhere close to threatening Salesforce's market cap. Should we close out with a fantastic private equity story? Boiler Room is apparently private equity back now. Levels.io shares the financial story of Boiler Room is interesting. Boiler Room started in 2010 by Blaze Belleville with weekly live broadcasts on YouTube, if you're not familiar with their DJ sets, essentially. Over the years, he raised$12.6 million in VC funding in total. Then in 2021, while Boiler Room was heavily struggling financially, he sold it to Dice FM, an event ticketing startup.

2:48:24Dice had raised more than$200 million in VC funding. Then Dice sold Boiler Room a few months to Superstruct, a festival organizer that owns festivals like Mysteryland, Defcons, a bunch of others. Then last year, Providence Equity, a$35 billion private equity fund, sold Superstruct to KKR, which is a$100 billion private equity fund. So a$100 billion private equity fund now owns Boiler Room. Many articles state Boiler Room's founder, Blaze Belleville, exited around 2021, but he's still involved in the company. So more likely he received more stock while working at it. So he's pretty financially fell off.

2:48:58This is just a beautiful story. Yes. And, you know, a celebration of, I mean, I hope that they do private equity night at the Boiler Room. We don't go to events like this. We're just not big into that world. but boiler room celebrate uh celebrate the shareholders yes you know put do a do a big party for kkr yep you know i want to see the champagne bottles popping and the big kkr sign walking out like when you spend ten thousand dollars on this bottle of cheap champagne just know that you're just sort of like supporting big private equity driving ebit down and there's other there's other you know uh we've said on the show before there's other fantastic companies owned by private equity tech crunch veil uh veil um you know this could be the next veil you never know yeah i mean we made the argument earlier this week that tech crunch should merge with veil and just become a ski lifestyle magazine ski lifestyle magazine um anyways uh it's been a fantastic show uh thanks for tuning in go leave us a five-star review put an ad in it uh it helps with Discovery and see on Monday.

2:50:03We hope you have a good weekend. If you, if you're working over the weekend and you're missing TBPN, you can go back. We have some, the back catalogs full folks. We've got many, many, many episodes of this show. And if any of you have listened to every single hour, I would be very impressed, but there's probably an hour in there somewhere that you haven't listened to. So it's okay. And anyways, we will see you on Monday. See you on Monday. Cheers. Bye.