Meta Poaches OpenAI Researchers, Murati's Plans to Take on OpenAI, NATO Takeaways | Mike Gallagher, Pippa Lamb, Dan Shipper, Eliano Younes

27:51Anyways, Peter, another member of the team, they, I guess, tried the product on May 6th. And you can see from Jason's email that there were a bunch of demo fails in terms of like basically wasn't working, still trying to figure out a way to partner. and anyways Peter says the device is about a month ago very orthogonal to ours and doesn't really work yet they offered that we look at the IP but I doubt there's anything there again the device wasn't working reliably it sounds like so anyways more of this will come out in court but at the moment it seems like maybe something there around the name and some real frustration but ultimately won't be probably a big deal.

28:42Well, there's no frustration when you're using Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. I feel bad for people that have never gotten a chance to automate their compliance with Vanta. Joy of using Vanta. That's right. So Turner Novak says, Huge if true after raising an astonishing$2 billion at a$10 billion valuation from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, less than five months after its founding, Miramirati has told investors that Tiny Thinking Machine Labs, TML, is developing custom AI that will enable businesses to make more money.

29:22Thank goodness. This is amazing news. I can't wait to get our paws on this. There's been so much, exactly. There's been so much yapping in AI about, oh, changing the world and exponential takeoff, fast takeoff. It's interesting. They're saying it's the first indication of the startup strategy. You know, the media had been taking this angle. Like Mira just came out and just raised billions without actually talking about what she was doing. And, yes, she could raise billions without really talking. She could get a blank check. Yes. But I have to imagine that she would have had conversations with some of the investors and said, here's generally what we're working on.

29:59And this is a pre-seed, remember? Yes. So it's just about the team. What's interesting here is that there's been this pervasive narrative that OpenAI has been hemorrhaging talent and co-founders, right? Because Dario was at OpenAI. He started Anthropic. Then Elon starts XAI. Ilya starts SSI, Mira starts Thinking Machines. And my question was always like, okay, the narrative has always been like, they don't like Sam and that's why they leave. But my question's like, why don't they all join forces and work together? Like why didn't Mira go to Anthropic? Why didn't Ilya go to Anthropic? Why didn't Elon just work with Anthropic instead of starting another competitor?

30:44Everyone always starts like a new competitor. But this kind of seems like it reveals the idea that Mira Morati and Ilya Sutskiver might be very diverged on like the path of where HGI is going. Mira wants to make money. Mira wants to do RL for businesses. And Ilya is much more of like this true believer thinking that, you know, he wants to go straight shot to super intelligence, no products. So anyway, we will continue to cover this story as we learn more about thinking machines. But we have to bring in our European correspondent, Pippa Lamb from Sweet Capital. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

31:21What's going on? Hey, guys. How's it going? Coming in from Europe. It's great. Is your Starlink connection strong? I know they don't have broadband out there in the old continent. You know what? We're all just trying to get ourselves to The Hague and get some of that defense procurement that we're now going to be spending on. So yeah, hopefully the Starlink will make it here. No. Hopefully it doesn't help me okay. Hopefully. Yeah, give us the breakdown of the latest news from NATO. Yeah, so it's exciting. I mean, I think that pretty much all global press has been focused on this morning. You know, President Trump and the current U.S.

32:00administration has really managed to do, thank you very much, has managed to do the thing that no U.S. leader has actually managed to do before, which is to get Europe and U.S.'s allies here to actually open up their wallets and increase their annual commitment to percentage of GDP on defense spending. So, you know, this is something that dates back to, I think, 2017. I mean, obviously, a lot of American presidents have really pushed for this before. This isn't a new ask from the U.S. side, but certainly this is the first time we've really seen some progress. I mean, to put this in context, the US has really paid about, yeah, has paid about two thirds of, you know, the NATO budget for the recent year.

32:48So it's really been on it upon Europe to really, you know, increase how much they're contributing. And so I think it's certainly a big win for the US, but also a big win for national security across the West and its allies. So, yeah, definitely, definitely good sentiments here on the ground. I think certainly when it comes to if you see how if you see how Trump's mood has changed from when he when he was boarding that helicopter a couple of days ago to some of the comments he was making after Secretary General Rutter's comments. I think that, you know, the U.S. is in a really interesting position now.

33:28And so is NATO. Did we ever figure out what the NATO chief, he claims he didn't call Trump? I don't know. Did you see all this? No, no, no. Break this down. I don't know if you saw anything. I couldn't tell what was fake news. Did you have any insight there? The NATO. So I saw the headlines. There's an ABC News headlines from yesterday. It says NATO Secretary General calls Trump quote unquote daddy. Oh, yeah. And then the White House put out a video about this. I don't know. But then the NATO secretary general, I guess, came out and denies it. Yeah. The White House, this is on the official page, put out a one minute video.

34:09And it just and the comment on Axe is daddy's home. Hey, hey, hey, daddy. President Donald Trump attended the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands. And then the secretary general came out and said daddy referred to U.S. leadership, not Trump. Okay. So, yes. I mean, the official White House social media never disappoints, I have to say. I always have my expectations, and they surpass. It's pretty wild. I did go back and watch the original clip to try and understand the analogy, and effectively Trump was comparing some of the geopolitical conflicts right now to children playing in the playground, And then, of course, Secretary General Rutter then comes and says, and sometimes if people are being children, then he brings in the daddy analogy.

35:03And of course, Trump just jumped on that. He said, yeah, they called me daddy. You know, he it was he just ran with it. And as we saw in the White House account this morning, I think there's reels, there's, you know, there's YouTubes. They really went for it. So so on on the dispense spending, there's actually a graphic that is pretty interesting to pull up. here. The United States is paying more than two-thirds. So in 2023, NATO's budget was 1.3 trillion. 860 billion of that came from the United States. Germany was the next second highest with 68 billion, so less than one-tenth. Then the UK at 65 billion, France at 56 billion, Italy at 31 billion and then a bunch of other countries in the 10 to 5 to 8 billion range.

35:54Canada's 30 billion. And so yeah this is a big change. I guess the the current benchmark is 2 % of GDP and this is I guess it is an agreement to to try and get to 5%. Now that's gonna roll out over the next decade to 2035. And I mean And the real key takeaway is that now Trump is publicly supporting NATO. He's been very against it, but he's in favor. But and then there was also some questions about the shift away from the focus on Russia and Ukraine. Trump wants to end the conflict there. We can talk about that. But then eventually I want to get into what this means for startups. Yeah, I think I think what's also interesting is, is I have the same questions as you, right?

36:35So they put out these headline numbers. It all sounds very good. We all agree that there needed to be more of a balance between the US spending versus the rest of NATO. And I think what was really encouraging to see in terms of how this is going to impact markets is if you look at comments that came out from the UK this morning from Prime Minister Starmer, he actually said, okay, well, we've got this, you know, target by 2035, we are going to dedicate up to, you know, five, well, 5 % of GDP spending on defence. But he actually then gave us further information and said that actually, if you look at where we see the national security needs now, we actually expect to surpass 4 % of spending by 2027 or in 2027.

37:17So that's, to me, that's a great signal to markets that this isn't some sort of lofty target that they're going to try and hit and push out and sort of, you know, relabel things as defence or really kind of be very gradual about how they're deploying and how they're going to procure. I see this and I think, OK, Europe is really serious about this. The UK is currently just for perspective at around 2.3 % of its GDP. So it's slightly above that 2 % benchmark. But the fact to go from, you know, 2.3 % to 4 % by 2027 is really encouraging. And I know certainly on the ground, we're already seeing quite a lot of increased interest in European defence plays.

37:57Some of the existing, I suppose, call them incumbents, but, you know, the andreals of the world are getting really excited about this market. And less so from a change on their side, but the fact that, OK, the, you know, the UK and Europe is potentially finally actually putting its money where its mouth is in terms of how it wants to procure and how it really wants to beef up its national security efforts. Yeah, the question will be, how does that budget actually get distributed between new players like Helsing, which Daniel at Spotify had a nicely timed investment into that. It's almost like he had a crystal ball or something.

38:34and then new kind of the new American players like Anderil. He's kind of like the daddy of the Nordic tech scene. Yeah, I'm sure the NATO chief would probably refer to him that way. And then Anderil all the way down to the Boeings and the Lockheed Mountains. I mean, the four companies that I think are really interesting to study in this, like, as this development plays out are probably Rheinmetall, Helsing, Anderil, and Palantir. and they all kind of represent very different strategies but you could see money flowing to any of them but then there are also decisions with all of those. Obviously, Ryan Mattel, very old company, legacy incumbent in Europe and so easier to get across a deal done because they have all the infrastructure there.

39:22Helsing's kind of the up and comer. Anderl's the hot American company. Palantir's founded by some Germans but ultimately an American company. What are you seeing? And it's interesting, even Ryan Mattel has been on this crazy run. Oh, yeah. It's$432 a share. In 2022, you could have bought it for$30 a share. Wow. And what is it now? And$432. $410X. So, yeah, up tremendously. Even this year is up 250%. Yeah, so what are you thinking about? I mean, this seems like a massive military budget increase in Europe. how serious is the rhetoric around the desire for homegrown defense technology solutions in Europe broadly?

40:08So, I mean, I think, Jordi, as well, on your point on Ryan Mattel, I think you also want to pull up the chart for Saab. That's been rallying, you know, a lot. So you're definitely seeing some allocation from institutions into existing incumbents. But I think for me and other members of the startup and venture community, what we're really asking is how serious is, seriously, is this going to impact the pre-IPO and private markets? And I think what's very interesting here is you also saw Anduril announce a partnership with Ryan Mattel, I think about a week ago. So you're certainly going to see some, you know, there's plenty to go around in terms of the market opportunity.

40:41And I think the sentiment is really beginning to shift now in terms of, you know, both investors and governments opening their wallets. But I do think that, you know, on one hand, I do still tend to agree with this argument that defense primes are really hard businesses. There is always going to be, in my view, a monopolistic or oligopolistic element to how these markets run. It's not that we're going to come out and see, you know, 10 Andriels all spring up. I think ultimately, Defense Prime doesn't spring up overnight. And as you mentioned, you already have Andriel in the US, who, by the way, has been very present in Europe and the UK from the very start.

41:17You also obviously have, you know, our Swedish backed, but German company, Helsing and there's some really interesting companies coming out of the UK right now there's one in stealth at the moment which has been getting a lot of interest both here on the ground but interestingly a lot of the cap table is is American so I think well it's here for America the air horn is always ready it's always ready I think so look on one hand I haven't changed my thesis on defense investing overnight, I still think that there is a monopolistic advantage that companies like Andrew will have here. But I do think at the same time, this does mark a real change in sentiment and opportunity around European and UK defense.

42:03And I think there are a few reasons why. I think number one, if you look at, you know, pure dollar spend, the Europe and the UK is just coming from a much further or earlier starting point. So if you look at the multiples in terms of pure purchasing and procurement, they're going to far outspend the US because they've been so behind. So on a pure kind of procurement dollar basis, you know, Europe has to play catch up. So I think that's obviously going to be, you know, tailwind both for, you know, companies like Andrill, but also some of the local players. And I do think that this is, it's kind of furthering this idea of what's called trusted capital.

42:42So the opportunity for the US and its allies. So certainly, you know, getting in some contracts for Helsing or a local company here in the UK. I think the second piece that's really interesting is that the UK in particular is, you know, behind from a manufacturing standpoint. So there's going to be a huge opportunity for a lot of companies to really onshore here. And that could be, you know, American companies who want to build out manufacturing capabilities here in the UK, or across mainland Europe. And that is also going to result in investment, dollars spent and a huge opportunity for the defence sector.

43:21I think the counter to this, and this goes along with a lot of conversations that I've had with Brian Schimpf from Anderil, who, by the way, was having a lot of these conversations at Bilderberg in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, across the Paris Airshow and with leaders here in the UK and Europe. And that's that the criticism has to be that Europe has had a template for modern warfare on its doorstep for the last several years. Putin first invaded Crimea in 2014. There have been so many blueprints for how modern warfare looks on our doorstep. Yet the governments haven't really got the memo. This is really the first time that we're seeing governments come out with real new blueprints for how modern warfare should be conducted.

44:07so you know the classic example is you know houthi rebels uh sending over drones and you know the us and its allies having these exquisite exquisite weapon systems to to shoot down these these drones so you know europe has really been asleep at the wheel when it comes to to some of these more kind of modern warfare or scrappy warfare strategies and i think that from what it sounds like from conversations here on the ground the government is actually getting the memo now, which does clear that path for startups to enter with a different product spec. I think not to talk up my own book being British, but I do think that the UK is leading the pack here.

44:47Sorry. You know, the UK has just done a strategic military defense review, and they're actually really taking some interesting steps in terms of how they're reshuffling, how they organize the military. And, you know, I think some great work's been done here on the ground with, you know, it was UK Tech Week a week ago. And, you know, Matt Clifford, who is an advisor to the prime minister, talked specifically about how there is going to be an opportunity to have a trillion dollar market cap out of the UK. And he actually mentioned that, you know, defense really could be somewhere that we could see that happen.

45:22So what about what about British dynamism? Is there a groundswell of excitement in on the ground in Europe? You have some great manufacturers, Bentley Rolls-Royce Aston Martin and then you also have ARM so the computing computing history as well so it does feel like there's still some very um you know uh we just got a new we just got a new head of MI6 so the one public facing uh he was a woman actually the first ever chief of MI6 and her role actually at MI6 had previously been Q so I don't know if you follow the the bond but her background was is that's not just hollywood creation i thought that was entirely for the cinema well i mean i think i think that the world is a cinema john it's the greatest cinema of all time that would be the adjacent role that she had before and so but but see uh which is is the name that is given to the bureau chief that is the one front facing for uh uh role of MI6.

46:24But she obviously does have a background in that space. And so I think it is very interesting. And, you know, it would be remiss to say that the UK has got a fantastic R &D sort of heritage, you know, whether it be in, you know, AI, obviously, we've talked about this before, Demis and DeepMinds and a lot of machine learning talent. We've also had, you know, incredible stuff in robotics and synthetic biology. There's some really fantastic R &D centers outside of London, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol. And actually, we also saw some exciting news in the autonomous vehicle space about a week ago with a UK company called Wave, who announced their first public road rollout of autonomous vehicles on public roads, which is going to be in partnership with Uber, which is going to be the first time we have like a Waymo equivalent experience witnessing them on the streets of London.

47:19So, yeah, I think we're going to have it's Alex Kendall from Wave as the CEO. I think we're going to have him on the show soon. I'm excited about. He's great. And also, I think if you look at some of the work that, again, advisor to Downing Street, Matt Clifford, has done, the government came out with his AI opportunities plan at the beginning of the year. And in the spending review last week, the UK committed to spend, I think, $2 billion, or maybe it's 2 billion pounds on AI opportunities and a further 1 billion pounds for ARIA, which is an R &D deep tech body. So I think certainly, you know, defense is one angle, we're also going to see continued interest, you know, in autonomous vehicles and robotics, and some of these really deep tech sectors that actually the UK has got a very deep history in, that, you know, hopefully is going to translate into market opportunities for both local investors, but also U.S.

48:16investors that want to get some exposure to some of these increased dollars that are going to be spent. Interesting. Flipping back a bit to the Ukraine situation, is it possible that we see like a drone company come out of Ukraine? Ukraine has a long heritage of fantastic software developers. There's a lot of companies that have had like offshore Ukrainian engineering teams for a long time. Like the populace has clearly been very technical. But then, you know, the pressure cooker of the war has resulted in just insane industrial capacity. I'm pretty sure they make more drones in Ukraine than I think even China.

48:57Like anywhere in the world, they're making the most of them. Now, a lot of them are like handmade and it's not fully automated. It's not fully productized. But like my hope would be the war dies down, but then there's this residual capability that comes out of that. But have you heard any like rumblings about that? Or do you think that there's any sort of like peace dividend that could come out of Ukraine? I think that what, you know, as I alluded to before, the Ukraine has really been a blueprint for, you know, how modern warfare is conducted. And I think that certainly we've, you know, definitely been following very closely in Europe what's been happening on the front line in the Ukraine.

49:35I think also, you know, the Americans have also been paying close attention. If you look at a lot of the work that Eric Schmidt has been doing, especially since the U.S. announced that, you know, its intention is to pull back some of its commitments to the Ukraine. I think you've had private individuals such as Eric Schmidt, you know, really take the mantle when it comes to how some of these newer sort of more scrappy drone technologies are being built. So I certainly think that that is going to provide an opportunity for, you know, scaling across procurement on, you know, other areas of the continent.

50:09I do think that in some ways, and I was talking to a defence founder this morning about this, there is an opportunity in this middle space. So I think that, you know, traditionally we had these exquisite weapon systems, which are really, you know, the luxury will pick your car of choice, the Aston Martin of defense. The B2 spirit. Yeah. There we go. Okay. And then we had the very kind of scrappy, you know, drones that are being built in the front line. And I think what is the really kind of sweet spot right now is going to be trying to fill out some of that gap in the middle. And certainly, you know, if you look at some of the products that Anduril have been building and some of the incumbents that I'm sorry, I should say new entrants that I'm looking at here in the UK, they're really trying to to try to fill that.

50:58Not not quite the very early entry sort of technology pieces, but that kind of one up which are more affordable and you can still use against, you know, your Houthi rebels or whoever. and it's not going to kind of use up your entire budget. But it's also, you know, modern technology. It's, you know, looking at technologies like autonomy, autonomous vehicles. So I think that that is a really strong entry point for some of the incumbents, as far as the new startups are seeing now. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting wrinkle to the idea of like, when you're ramping up defense budgets as fast as NATO is in this case, it's like the budget itself isn't necessarily as big as America, but there's so much new budget coming online that you're almost better equipped to buy autonomous systems as opposed to the United States and the army modernization effort is reallocating budget.

51:57No one's saying like, oh yeah, let's double it. Like we don't have the money to double it. And so every dollar that we allocate towards an autonomous... We could. But every dollar that we allocate towards an autonomous system, a modern system, has to come away from an exquisite system that has a ton of constituents, a ton of people that build it, a ton of lobbyists. All the parts come from so many different states and regions and different senators that... Yeah, whereas if you're bringing net new budget online, it's a lot easier to go with the newest and best technology that's actually equipped for the modern war.

52:26My question is, will we see, you know, a$5 billion company that just makes drones? for defense, right? Like could a Nero be something like that? Or if you look at history of these contractors, you see that they often are very, the primes are obviously all multi-product, right? And so we will have to see how it develops. Very cool. I think what's most encouraging though is the sentiment has changed. So I think there was this hubris, right? Amongst a lot of the, I mean, US and its allies, but particularly in Europe where they just wanted to create these exquisite weapon systems that were really never designed to be used.

53:07And so I think the biggest shift for me has been kind of like waking up and realizing that this is totally unfit for purpose. And actually, you kind of look silly by having these exquisite systems that are completely, you know, you can't use them. So I think that for me, when I start to see more of a kind of cultural shift in government, which is very rare. That's when I think you can start to see some of these impacts trickling into markets and be it in the later stage or in public markets, but then also really kind of at this, I'd say, Series A stage at the moment where you're seeing a lot of interest from US and European investors.

53:46Very cool. I mean, it's really exciting stuff. We got to track it more. I'm excited to talk to some of these founders, Wave and Helsing. We'll have to get them on. What other situations are you monitoring? There's a lot going on this week. We've been we've been I don't know if you've been following the prediction market space, but with the with the New York City. The primary was interesting. Is that is that is that you pay much attention to that category? Do you think there's potentially opportunities for new prediction markets or are is Polymarket and other players kind of racing away? I mean, I haven't been following it so closely beyond, you know, it's impossible to even sitting here in London, avoid all the memes that are coming out about what's going on in New York.

54:32I think that, you know, I think Shane Cooplin is a fantastic operator. I don't know how much space there is in terms of, you know, post deregulation of some of this space. You know, you would think that there are going to be other entrants. I think that, you know, Shane's created such, you know, in some ways, a head start for himself and how Polymarket is doing that. I haven't been spending active time looking at sort of new entrants in that space. But, you know, look, ultimately, our fund has a heritage of gaming. And so I think certainly whenever there's an interesting consumer trend that is unlocked or there is a regulatory shift that can, I guess, impact how a consumer product is being built, then we do pay attention.

55:17But yeah, I've definitely been spending way more time on some of this geopolitics. What about any you mentioned wave earlier in the autonomous vehicle space with their UK launch? Are you expecting has there been any chatter about what Tesla would do around autonomous vehicles in the UK? I think they sold sort of I think they sold around 25 or 30 ,000 cars in the UK last year. And so depending it could be an interesting dynamic that we'll see with Waymo here in the US and Tesla. where Tesla has a much more efficient way to build a network where they don't have the same CapEx requirements as someone like Waymo.

56:01And I'm interested to see how you see that market unfolding in the UK. It's interesting. I think that Wave has really been the poster child for Autonomous in the UK, especially in recent years and its partnership with Uber. They also have launched NSF. I mean, Alex Kendall, I'm sure he'll tell you about this when he comes on. Fantastic founder, has been spending a lot of time in San Francisco. I think an interesting story for me here with the autonomous vehicle space in the UK is that, you know, much like I was saying earlier, the UK has a really strong heritage of deep tech. And there was actually initially another competitor in autonomous vehicles who was sort of incubated out of Cambridge.

56:44I mean, so was Wave. I think Alex Kendall took his first VC pitch meeting in his Cambridge dormitory or something. You know, the law is perfect. But actually, this is I often use autonomous vehicles as an example for the government, because there was actually a front runner ahead of Wave at the beginning. But because it was incubated out of Cambridge University, I think it was Cambridge Oxford. I think it was Cambridge. I'm ex-Oxford, so not to kind of hate on my confession. But what was interesting is that there was this technology transfer clause, which meant that the cap table got totally messed up by the arrangements in place from, you know, Cambridge University, UK government, which basically said for a product of this nature, the university has to own a certain amount in order to unlock R &D credits or research spending for this company.

57:40And actually, it's a perfect example I use for sort of the old way of building technology in the UK, which was incubated out of these like very old historic universities. Enter then Alex Kendall, who also wants to pursue autonomous vehicles. And instead of going to the university or do the sort of traditional incumbent capital providers, goes out and raises venture capital. And it's able to therefore scale much faster, build up the technology. I mean, again, these are not overnight. Well, you got Masa on board. I'm sure that helps, right? For sure. Yeah, right. And so I think for me, it's maybe just an interesting anecdote which pertains to the sector about, you know, how, you know, maybe mentality in Europe is at somewhat of an inflection point.

58:26And I think that autonomous vehicles, you know, is one of the examples where Alex Kendall was able to go out and raise venture capital and really prove out some of these more kind of hard problem, you know, the teal flying car adjacencies in Europe. So I think, look, going forward, let's see. I think that robotics, you know, hardware, you know, deep tech coming out of the UK is not going to go anywhere. I think it's going to continue to see a lot of interest from US investors. I think that the fact that Wave have partnered with Uber is also significant. So the idea is that it's not simply going to be one company is expected to be able to do everything.

59:09I think that on a distribution and kind of regs perspective, it makes a lot of sense to have been partnered with Uber. And I think Dara was here yesterday. So, yeah. So, look, let's see how the stage four trials go here. I think it's going to be a bit of a culture shock for the Brits here to see the cars driving around. Well, I think you could have a culture shock. You put a Waymo in the streets of London and say it's driving on the wrong side of the road. No one would have a problem with that because Waymo is a Jaguar. That's a British car. Oh, so it might feel at home. But the Wave car is built on the Nissan platform, which is extremely foreign.

59:46I did hear rumors, though, that the Waymo was going to change to a Chinese supplier. Oh, interesting. yeah i was really hoping they went with bentley yes the bentley waymo yes i mean we'll pitch when he comes on from wave we'll tell him hey let's wave let's get let's rip out nissan let's get on the continental gt platform this is logical exactly we need some like james bond approved autonomous bills on the streets yes i'm a big waymo maxi so you know i'm just excited to be able to to translate that to the times that i'm here in london but uh but let's see awesome well so great having you on this is fantastic have a great great guys as always we'll talk soon bye Let's go back to the timeline, talk about investment platform, Republic.

1:00:37Mert Helius.dev, friend of the show, says, Big news, soon you will be able to trade SpaceX on Solana, which will be followed by Cursor, Ramp, XAI, and more internet capital markets. Maybe they'll be able to trade numeral one day. Numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Anyway, we can kind of go through the journal article. Investment platform Republic plans to use blockchain technology to sell investors exposure to SpaceX. SpaceX, another effort in an arms race to give regular traders access to hot startups. And bring in some liquidity.

1:01:15But felt like it had immense regulatory pressure. But they just, I guess they're figuring it out. Yeah. Which is crazy. So we're going to have the CEO of Republic on the show Friday. Very exciting. I'm excited about Ken. He is an animal. But we can break this down. So they are planning to sell digital tokens that mirror the performance of SpaceX's private shares in a move largely untested with regulators and untested with companies. Because, you know, historically illiquidity. CEOs hate this one little trick. Simple trick. One simple trick. No, you know, CEOs. Illiquidity is a feature. Yeah. You don't want your shares to be getting constantly marked to market, right?

1:01:58or imagine what Anduril shares would have been doing. Yeah, it depends. I mean, I remember a story about Enron during the dot-com boom. The shares were absolutely mooning because they were kind of doing some cooking of the books. They were cooking. But everything looked really good. They were cooking. They were cooking the books. The wrong kind of cooking. But, I mean, the stock was truly on like a generational run and they had in the elevator, when you went into the office, you got in the elevator, The share price was right there in the elevator displayed at all times. And so you'd come in and the, oops, stock's up.

1:02:31Like, I'm happy. I'm working hard today. I'm worth more. You multiply it by the number of shares you own. You just know that your net worth just went up. By the time Ken Griffin showed up, it's probably flashing zero. Yeah, they must have ripped that out of the elevator by then. But yeah, I mean. So yeah, so they're going to start with SpaceX. It could be good or bad. And they plan to, and SpaceX, for the most part, only goes up. Sometimes the rockets blow up on the on the lunch pad. But token buyers won't have access to companies financials and won't own actual stakes. The tokens could draw scrutiny from regulators, which, you know, we're in a friendly regulatory environment.

1:03:08Republic says it won't need permission from the companies whose token is selling because the tokens represent securities sold by Republic. Mm hmm. So. So this kind of like a stable coin play where for every token that is sold, they will try and go and buy one share. and so they'll be backed one to one or something like that? Or is it more like a mean token? That's what it seems like. They'll fractionalize it or it'll be tokens that represent ownership in an LLC, an SPV that owns shares. What's weird is that you kind of have this like dual float situation where there could be, like someone could be willing to pay a massive premium for these tokens that they no longer track the underlying price of the secondary shares.

1:03:49So if SpaceX is trading at like a 350 billion dollar market cap, but someone wants to get in and they're willing to pay up to a 500 billion dollar market cap, the token could trade. But that doesn't, I mean, that doesn't happen with stable coins because no one ever says, hey, I'm interested in paying more than a dollar for one stable coin dollar. These are unstable coins, John. These are unstable. It'll be interesting to see where they actually trade. I mean it should be some sort of price signal, but at the same time if the supply is so restricted, I mean they're saying that they, the Republic says it's able to offer the tokens in part because of a provision in the 2012 Jobs Act that lets private US companies issue securities and raise up to five million dollars a year from retail investors.

1:04:32Republic says it would be the issuing company and the tokens are essentially a note that assures token holders They will be paid any increase in the price of SpaceX's common stock if it goes public or is purchased. Now, SpaceX has$350 billion of value, right? And so if you're thinking about we are going to offer a$5 million slug of that, what will demand for that be like? And will that track at all with the broader private market? It could be completely disconnected. Yeah. And important context, Ken, the CEO, was general counsel over at AngelList for in 2014 to 2016. So he's been in this space for over a decade now.

1:05:18And so anyways, the big takeaway here is that one thing is for sure, there will be, I think, an exceptional amount of demand for this product. The question is, will regulators like it? Will companies like it? And it's possible that it'll be no on both fronts, but it's possible that, you know, at the same time, this sort of overwhelming consumer demand. And I think that, you know, in general, you know, retail investors should be and can fairly be frustrated by not having access to companies like SpaceX, Figma, Epic Games, Stripe, Anthropic, Ramp, Cursor, Anduril, Mercury, Canva. So these are all companies that they're planning to launch even linear.

1:06:03This almost looks like a mirror of our partners. That's amazing. Is Adio on there? Custom relationship magic? Not yet. Adio is the AR native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You're too smooth, John. Adio.com. Slash tbpn. Go check it out. Republic has a license. Isn't there a SPAC that bought SpaceX Secondary and trades at a massive premium to the underlying value? It's not a SPAC. Oh, it's not a SPAC. It's destiny.xyz. Yeah. And so, I mean, like there clearly is demand in the public markets for private market shares. And so there have been a number of platforms and a number of strategies attempted.

1:06:44This is the first one that's using crypto. But it'll be extremely exciting to follow what happens with the actual prices of these assets once they go out. and yeah right now the destiny tech 100 is trading at 425 million dollars okay and i'm trying to figure out the book value i think it is a fraction of that based on what investors actually mark yeah and it's because there's such limited demand such limited liquidity no there's limited supply yeah yeah limited supply and so much demand that people are just willing to pay a multiple of what is institutional. So it's funny because in this effort to get retail access to these highly sought after private company shares, retail gets kind of hosed by ending up having to pay a massive premium.

1:07:37Yeah. But if you're an investor who takes it seriously, you got to get on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We have other news from Palantir. Oh, George Savulka, founder of Hebbia AI. He's coming on the show soon. He is thrilled to share his acquisition of FlashDocs, the number one AI company in AI slide deck generation. That's fun. FlashDocs turns prompts into fully branded presentations in seconds. Goodbye PowerPoint. I need this badly. This is very helpful. I'm interested to see how he bakes this in because he's been focused on the Wall Street crowd, the hedge funds and the investment banks.

1:08:21So it could be more of like a B2B product than a generalization product. Feels that way. But we will talk to him and figure it out. And I expect some pushback from Slides Crafts people, people that treat the making of a great deck, something almost more than an art form. And so interested to see the outputs here. and we'll talk with him live. Palantir has some news, which we'll talk about in a little bit. They have signed a$100 million five-year deal with the nuclear company. I had never heard of the nuclear company before. Well, we'll ask Mike Gallagher about it when he hops on the show. And we have Dan Shipper joining in a minute to talk about a new product that he's launching under Every.

1:09:12his parent company and media company. Is he running out of home ads for it yet? Not yet, but he should. He launched a great video. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Mark Andreessen says, the term chat GPT rapper is tired and really, really wrong. Quoting Andre Carpathy. It says plus one for context engineering over prompt engineering. People associate prompts with short tasks, short task descriptions you'd give an LLM in your day-to-day use.

1:09:49When in every industrial strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window. I like Max Meyer chiming in here. Kinetic energy wrapper, gasoline wrapper, aeronautical lift wrapper. Everything's a wrapper. Should we bring in our next guest? Let's do it. Let's do it. Welcome to the stream, Dan. How are you doing? What's going on? Welcome to the show. Good to see you guys. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear. It's great to have you back. You're always calling in from exotic places. Where are you today? Last time it was Anthropic Dev Day.

1:10:24Where are you now? I am currently in a cabin in upstate New York in Hudson Valley with Hirsch Agarwal, CTO co-founder of the browser company, a good friend of mine, and another friend of ours and Hersh's wife and their baby. So it's a really fun time. Amazing. Let's get right into it. What are you launching today? Break it down. We launched publicly Quora, which is, you can think of it like a chief of staff for your email that costs$15 a month instead of$150K. So what Quora does is it sits on your email, connects to your Gmail, it screens your email. So when emails come in, it decides, is this important?

1:11:04Do you need to see it right now? Is it urgent? If it is, it makes it to your inbox. If not, it automatically archives it. For anything that's a common request, Quora will pre-draft a response for you. So you open your email, anything in your inbox has a response. And then twice a day we send you what we call a brief, which is a really beautiful summary of everything that's in your inbox that you need to see, but you don't need to respond to. And so you can basically do three hours of email by just scrolling through in 30 seconds. It's very, very cool. We also have a full-on assistant so you can chat with it, you can email it, you can tell at all about your preferences, all that kind of stuff.

1:11:37It's been in beta for about six months. We have about 2 ,500, between 2 ,500 and 3 ,000 active users on it. And we are launching it publicly today, so anyone can sign up. It's$15 a month. It also is bundled with Every. So if you sign up for Every,$20 a month, you get access to Quora, Spiral, which is our content automation tool, Sparkle, which is our file organizer, and all the writing that we do on Every, all for that price. You guys are cooking. you got to raise prices$100 a month. You got to get those numbers up. I'm thinking about it. But now that you said that, I can blame it on you. So thank you.

1:12:10I appreciate it. You can say Jordy complained that the price was too low. Very cool. The perfect irony of the timing here is right before we got on the show, John was onboarding an EA type person who just joined the team and literally saying all these things. So these kind of emails, like just archive these ones. I want to see it, but it's not important. I'm sending the link right now so he can install it on my, on my inbox. So we'll get it. I mean, I have a bunch of very specific questions because I'm in, I'd like the product you've been asking for. I've been asking for this because yeah, I mean, I paid for like the top tier of Gemini and like there's this Gemini button, but it just, it just gives me bullet points for each individual email.

1:12:54It doesn't do anything at like a higher level abstraction, at least that I can tell. And then when I search, if I search for Dan Shipper, it will search like the JavaScript in some marketing email and find that like there's some token in the URL that has the text SHIP and then it'll surface that. And I'm like, instead of just the email that's obviously from Dan Shipper, like how does it not know to rank like the name of the person higher than like some embedded CSS class or something? It's always super frustrating. I've been very, very upset about the Gmail search functionality for a while. I feel like it's not that it's degraded.

1:13:33It's more like the nature of email has scaled, where I think every person gets about an order of magnitude more email than they did a decade ago. And so the traditional search tools are just completely breaking down. And then also email marketers have adapted. If you're getting a couple hundred a day and you're averaging even 20 seconds in email. It's a lot. It's a lot. And then also the nature of the way people write emails. There's so many of these hacks where people say, they'll do that thing where they'll say, if you're doing outbound for every, for example, you'll be like, introducing Dan and John.

1:14:11And it's like, wait, this is a sales email. Why are you acting like you're making a warm intro? Or people will do re, signing up for every. And it's like, wait, this isn't a re? Like, you're not responding to anything. Like, you just put that in the title. And there's a million of those little hacks that I feel like the traditional Gmail workflow has been exploited by kind of black hat emailers. SDRs. SDR, black hat SDRs. And I feel like it's the perfect thing that you need to hammer with AI. So I'm excited for that. Talk to me about the drafting of responses. is I was talking to the fellow on our team about how, you know, like we get a lot of pitches from people that say, hey, I have news, I wanna come on the show.

1:14:57Sometimes I wanna let people down like softly and say, hey, this isn't a fit right now, but we wanna have you on when there's news or, you know, and I kind of have like a template for that. I'm a little bit hesitant to send something that has like an LLM flavor to it. So I'd almost rather just have a like a pre-written script, but I would also be okay with some fine tuning. Like how are you thinking about making sure that the voice doesn't feel too LLME? So basically what we do is when you onboard, we will look at all like about a thousand of your previous emails and abstract out. Okay, what's your job title?

1:15:36How do you normally talk to people? What do you normally do in these kinds of situations? So for common emails that you get, so like a pitch, what do you normally say? And then we create a set of procedures for ourselves so that when we do the draft, we can refer back to, okay, you have a procedure for a process for here's how I respond to pitches. And that's what we use to fill in the draft. So it's basically we use your historical emails to inform how we write the draft. To your earlier points, though, I think those are really, really important. And one thing that I think connects to something you said earlier in the show is the idea of rappers.

1:16:13So like in a lot of ways, this is a rapper on Claude and Gemini, right? And what's really interesting is I think there was this narrative about like a year ago, two years ago, that all the incumbents were going to win in AI because all they have to do is bolt on AI. And you can see like if you go into Gmail, like their AI features or their search features, like they're still not very good. and that's because it's so hard when you have a scaled huge user base that is used to things working in a particular way and a large organization that's used to building things in a particular way to actually start from a blank slate and get the most out of a new technology and so I think that's one of the things that we and other startups like us can do for email that like a Google can't or it would be much harder for them to do and I think you can see that for example, in some of the filtering things that you're talking about.

1:17:02So one of the problems with the sort of black or gray hat emails that you get is it's a little bit hard to get a specific rule for, okay, this is the kind of email that I don't want to see. It's not going to be from a particular sender. It's not going to have a particular thing in a subject line. It's kind of a vibe. And historical email filtering has to be very rule-based. It has to be from this sender. It It has to have this keyword in the subject line, all that kind of stuff. And language models change that. Now you can filter emails on vibes and that's what Quora does. It also has a rules-based filter too, but it has a vibes filter to be like, anything that looks like this, get rid of it or make sure I see it.

1:17:42And that's much more powerful. The funny thing is people have been training, you know, chief of staff or an EA to detect the vibe of an email, right? Exactly. Like this is the kind of email, like it looks salesy, but it's actually really interesting because it came from this person and it's an opportunity that aligns with with with what we're with with our focus so it's interesting yeah um and and and i think incumbents it's very hard it's going to be harder for them to do that because it's very expensive um to filter on vibes on vibes for like everybody's email account because there's hundreds of millions or billions of people getting like billions and billions of billions of emails a day and so startups because you start from a smaller user base, you can do the expensive LLM inference that is going to get much cheaper in five years.

1:18:34But for now, it's not affordable unless you have a smaller user base that's all paying. And that's something that we can do, which I think is great. How do you think the actual email infrastructure and Rails evolved? It seems like every six months, Google Workspace just sends me an email that's like, we're raising prices. And I always think it's funny because is they could theoretically just continue to raise the price for a very long time without much pushback because what's the alternative, at least as a company? How do you see that evolving? Have you thought about other companies like Hay that actually want to kind of own the underlying, the deeper layer?

1:19:16That's a good question. I mean, I think one of the beauties of email is that it's decentralized and interoperable. And so right now we sit on top of Gmail, but we will eventually add support for Outlook and other third party like POP or IMAP type services. And I think that that's great. And I don't think that you'll see us create our own like, hey, that's very hard and complicated to make sure that you deliver emails and you don't get stuck in spam and all that kind of stuff. And I think we've been focused on building at a layer above that because that's where the new stuff is. There's something completely different about software that doesn't have to operate on ordered lists.

1:19:58So email is just an ordered list of things in the order they came in. And software doesn't have to do that anymore. You can rearrange everything based on priority, based on vibes. And so I think for us, I'd probably rather not get stuck at a layer of ensuring email deliverability for senders and all that kind of stuff and let Google do what Google's good at for now. but who knows I think eventually this will be an email client where you can do all of your email through Quora for now it interoperates with Gmail with superhuman so that we don't have to mess with like all those baseline features even like creating an email sending feature where you're like it's a composed window there's infinite amounts of complexity in there that you can get stuck doing if you're a small startup that we've tried to avoid to like just make something that's so good at one or two things that you'll use it even if it doesn't have everything yeah how are you how are you building the team what what's the ambition with with this product specifically you're wearing yeah i know you wear a lot of hats so i only wear the every hat um yeah um yeah so there's a super talented team building this that and it would not be possible without them so kieran classen is the gm of quora um he's incredibly technical as a rails guy like very agent-pilled like he's running like 15 cloud code instances at any at any one time Um, and, uh, we just, we have our, our most viral YouTube video ever is him like talking about how he uses agents.

1:21:25It has like 50 ,000 views from a week ago. Um, and so he runs Quora. He, he also, uh, used to be like in his past, he was a composer and a pastry chef. So he's got this like crazy resume. Um, and he's amazing. We also have one engineer, his name is Nitesh, who's also amazing. And they're just like, I think they're both iterating on what email can be and iterating on how to actually build software in this new paradigm, because there's a whole new way of building software with agents. Like I think that they're, they use this term that I love called compounding engineering, which is like doing the work so that each successive feature you build is easier than the last.

1:22:04And I think that that has allowed them as a super small team to just move really fast and build this beautiful product that is scaling to thousands and thousands of users. Yeah. We also internally Brandon Gell is our head of studio. So he works a lot with them and then we have a whole creative team so Lucas Crespo is our Creative lead and he did like the video and all the visuals and all that kind of stuff so And I'm helping out with all you know, whatever wherever I'm needed, but I think all those people are Doing an incredible job and I think we want to kill email. I think you should do email very differently.

1:22:37I think generally we all have a very anxious attachment to our inbox and it's quite unhealthy and one of the things that I've noticed using Quora is everything is much quieter and that can be really unsettling because you're like where like what if I missed something but it has turned out at least for me that mostly it's fine and only 10 % of the emails or 20 % of the emails are things I actually need to see. And, um, when I use it, I get to spend much more of my time doing shit that I actually care about and want to do rather than, rather than email. And, um, that's a very exciting mission for, for us and for this product.

1:23:16I feel like I developed email anxiety probably when I was like 10 years old, whenever I first got an email, it was like summer break and everyone was just sending emails around and stuff. And it's stuck with me ever since. So thanks email. Uh, but thank you for, for trying to help fix it. We're, we're excited to try the product and always great to have you on the show check it out thanks for having me have fun in the woods cheers bye up next we have eliano eunice from palantir coming in the studio oh tyler's perking up sitting up straight looking for some palantir merch the palantir merch king himself in the studio head to toe head to toe is this uh dripped out technology brothers what's going on here you know i was you just kind of gave me an idea i should get like you know like those chicago bulls like you know 90s are coming out they got the music and the coach for the bulls is phil jackson and then they start ripping them off that's the next that's like the next stage of the palantir march store so but anyways it's good to see you guys good to see you too uh how many uh how many pull-ups have you done today how many were kipping how many were non-kipping you know it's funny i have that tweet right over here he's got the printout this was this was the beginning of our journey as like you know i remember i was just sitting there one day and i and i get this clip I'm like, who the hell are these guys?

1:24:34And it was like, you guys had just started out and you guys geeking out about it. And it was just really awesome to just see how far you guys have come since that. It's been like really crazy growth. But I actually did go to the - Well, thank you for printing that out. That's a sign of great respect in our culture. It is a sign of great respect in our culture. And I actually went to DC. I did pull-ups with Eliano. I can attest he can do a ton of non-kipping pull-ups. Yeah. So I'll admit I didn't go this morning because we launched the store. And I was pretty, you know, you're making sure everything's working.

1:25:06And so, but I'm, you know, I will be at the gym tomorrow, John, and then I will bring the newspapers into the sauna. Okay. Give us the story of the launch, the store, the URL. Where can people go buy? Well, so first and foremost, the URL is store.palantir.com, but I think we sold everything out. We sold more merch in three hours than we did pretty much in any day, maybe in any week that we did last year so the demand is at all-time highs um and basically this is the third iteration of the store you know when we first launched the store it was well before i started it was um kind of you know as a company was going to dpo they launched the store as a way to sort of uh cultivate um people that were interested in the company and then they took it offline because it kind of became a cost center no one really owned it it was kind of like made in china the process to shipping and everything was kind of weird and so then last year about a year ago i was like hey like we need to do this and uh i eventually did it after a lot of internal lobbying and it ended up being a success but uh around you know really about a month after we launched the the store last year it just something didn't feel right it didn't feel like palantir it didn't feel like the aesthetic the website the merch like it was made in like we were buying hats that were blanks that were made in other countries.

1:26:24And I was just like, Palantir is a special company. We do things a special way. We do things our way. And so I was like, we need to just tear this down and rebuild it. So that's what we did. And today, about seven months later of working on it, we launched a store. Everything's made in the USA. We're buying literally shirts from scratch. We're working with the mills and they're milling the cotton and we're making things all in America. I want a hand-sewn version from you. I want to see you on the ground in the factory, American Dynamism. you know, just, yeah. Give us the stats. How, how, how, how much have you sold?

1:26:58Are we turning it into a profit center? How big is this? How big is the scale of the merch operation? Can we, can we bring the dog? I don't know if I'm allowed to like give out details because then it's like, like it's like during a, like, uh, market hours, people might, I don't want the lawyers to like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. I will say this could, this could cause some major price action. if people realize that it's not just in the ontology business, they're also in the on-shoring apparel, which is hundreds of billions of dollars. Well, we're still going to ring the gong for you because congratulations on the launch.

1:27:35Fantastic. I appreciate it. I will say, the Palantir, as of its last earnings, it does like, what, 80 %? 80-something percent in margins. like a really good high-end you know company that does like you know Hermes or Louis Vuitton they're doing like 60 % margin so Wow until I can get to like 80 % margins I'm not even gonna go to Dave Glazer the CFO and even try to like get this in there but for now the intent of the store really is just to get the stuff out there get good stuff out there and grow the pot that I have to buy and then resell stuff and invest in like really cool like just like really unique like one of 15 items that are going to be four or five figures.

1:28:17I mean, we're going to take this to the next level. Let's go. That's amazing. If you get into bespoke suits, call us. Call us first. We're happy to wear the Palantir monogrammed suit. And I'm saying this. You're not saying this, of course, because I can say this as a newsmaxer. But you move the market. You know, if I was just looking at the stock chart, the stock popped this morning. I'm assuming it's because of the merch store. Yep. And you've moved the market cap is moved by about three billion. So, wow. Fantastic. Fantastic. Congratulations. No comment. No comment from Aliano. Just say no comment.

1:28:55But, you know, it's clear. It's clear what's going on. It's clear. The story is very obvious. You know, you do have a gentleman named Mike Gallagher coming on later, who, by the way, is probably the biggest merch fan at the company. Let's go. Like, nobody likes Palantir merch. like i'll get so if you think i go to the gym early mike goes to the gym at like 5 a.m religiously he will send me messages he'll signal me from the gym and being like like what about an xyz and i'm like bro like stringer and he he really loves merch and uh you'll get a chance to talk to him about maybe some other reasons why the market cap may have moved yes yes yes i i i yeah i saw him name drop you on a uh on a podcast he was on and i was like yes Let's go.

1:29:38He sees the vision. He sees the vision. So, but no, I'm really, I think, I don't know. I've thought a lot about the merch store and just sort of like my role at Palantir and sort of how I engage the community. And I think it really boils down to, you know, the founders and Dr. Karp and all these people and all these tremendous engineers have built this like great company. And we just, you know, we're a company that stands for something. And so we've really built this community organically. I didn't build the community. I just cultivate it. and it just feels really good to serve them and just give them as much gear as possible and so the demand the numbers today, again I can't share them but the numbers today were way above anything I expected to the point where the site almost crashed within four minutes and I mean we're talking about some of the most traffic that we got was from South Korea and so like we have a, that's our third largest market despite you know additional shipping.

1:30:30Let's give it up for the South Koreans Palantirians out in South Korea Yeah. No, I thought it was funny. I looked on the website at all. It's all pre-order right now because I think you guys sold out. And I was like, wait, they can't be doing this because of like, you know, a lot of apparel companies will do pre-order because they don't have the balance sheet to pre-order. Yeah, working capital is a real issue. So the reason for sort of the eight weeks, so it's eight weeks. And the reason for that is actually so when when the whole tariff thing happened all of these people were then looking to do stuff to find um alternatives inside the usa yep and so we were already sort of tracking the whole usa thing so our vendor you know they're working i can't they've they've asked me and we want to just kind of keep it secret because they're very special but basically the the amount of demand that they got for like cotton that was american source and everything like skyrocketed and then we tweaked some designs and stuff so that's the reason for the delay but as we sort of ramp this up and get it like fully, you know, basically like in production.

1:31:35My hope is that we won't sell out of everything, but we'll actually sell out of a few items. Like, sure, we're going to have limited drops of different products that are unique, but you know, hopefully the hats and like some core shirts will be available 24 seven. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Well, it's great to see you. Let's get a workout in soon. Yeah, let's do it. Awesome. Thank you. And up next, we have Mike Gallagher from Palantir Technologies. He's the head of Defense. And he put out some comments about the partnership between Palantir and the nuclear company. Says this partnership marks the first time Palantir software will be used to help power the next generation of nuclear energy infrastructure.

1:32:15So we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show. Mike, how are you doing? Great to have you. What's going on, guys? I'm honored to be with you. You guys are famous. You're famous too. Thank you for joining. I used to be, man. I used to be. Now I'm just, you know i'm a has-been you're a technology brother you're one of us i mean that's actually a great place to start i i want to talk about your career and the transition uh that you went through uh there's there's a you know obviously it's very exciting what you're doing now there's also this story about like i want you in the government too and i want people like you in the government and so is the government uh a place for high performing technologists to flourish is there something that needs to change there?

1:33:00I'm interested in digging into that. But why don't you kick it off with kind of like how you tell the story of how you got here to this moment? Yeah, I think, well, obviously, you know, from Northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay, and I kind of grew up always interested in the world outside of Wisconsin in the United States. When I went to college, I studied Arabic in the Middle East. I became fascinated by what was happening. I was an undergrad when we invaded Iraq. I was a senior in high school during 9-11. And the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that I would regret it if I didn't step up and serve, felt very strongly about service to country, but also on a practical level really wanted to apply the language and regional and cultural skills I was learning in a non-academic context and felt like there was no greater challenge than joining the United States Marine Corps.

1:33:49So even though I didn't come from a military family, didn't know anything about the military, I just felt like this was the hardest crucible that I could throw myself into. I had just really an awesome experience, a couple of great deployments, learned a ton with the counterintelligence, human intelligence officer. And kind of similarly, when I got out of the Marine Corps and I worked on a presidential campaign, I worked in the Senate as a Middle East guy, never thought about running myself. I'd moved back home to work for this energy and supply chain management company when some people reached out to me about running for Congress.

1:34:21I was very young. I was 31. And I, my initial reaction was hell no. I mean, it was just, I was not, I didn't know anything about raising money. You know, I was the guy who like wrote the white paper that someone read before they went on TV. I wasn't, wouldn't be on TV myself. I kind of thought of myself as like a pure national security professional, not a politician. I still don't think of myself that way. But honestly, it was the fact that it scared me that like led me to do it. I felt like anything that forced you outside your comfort zone is good for your development personally. And it was, I felt like it would be an extension of my military service, a way to continue my work of enhancing American deterrence, albeit from a legislative perspective.

1:35:01And and I'll swear I'll wrap up after this. I went into it knowing it was never going to be a career for me. I was the youngest guy in Congress when I got elected. I always conceived of it as a season of service. I think the problem with Congress is that we have too many career politicians. So I kind of always had in my head, I do a decade. And when I decided to leave, you know, Palantir was a was just an obvious way for me to continue that mission. I mean, Palantir was one of the rare companies that was unapologetically pro-American military, committed 100 percent to enhancing deterrence, you know, willing to say that, like, we're the good guys, you know, the commies are the bad guys.

1:35:42And I really felt like it was a continuation of that theme in my career where something really hard that scared the crap out of me, i.e. now being surrounded by genius 20-somethings that make me feel stupid, and then a continuation of the mission. And I've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing World War III, and I'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the warfighter every day in Palantir. So that's the short version, and it's been really exciting. Is that a typical flow for elected politicians? Someone reaches out to them? Is there kind of like a scouting department in our government that's looking for up and coming talent and then giving them the ideas?

1:36:24Because I feel like the story that most people tell is, this guy wants power, wants to, he's on a warpath. Everyone tells him no. And then he runs and gets elected or kind of sheer force of will. But which direction does it go more commonly? was your path uncommon or is it more the norm well to be clear i i don't want to pretend like this was some pure aw shucks mr smith sure goes to washington thing right like clearly i was driven ambitious like kind of always had a drive my whole life yeah um and wanted to like test myself but honestly it was not like i didn't think of like the political domain at that point in my life i more often than not, people are drawn to politics.

1:37:08It used to be the case that you'd go to law school, you'd become a lawyer, you'd run for state or local office, and then that would be a natural farm team that would lead into Congress. Then you'd run for Senate, and then you'd try and be president one day. I actually think that's changing a little bit. One actually healthy thing I saw during my time in Congress is we started to get more young veterans, veterans of the kind of 9-11 wars running for office, which created a cool bipartisan group of legislators that were willing to work together on stuff. I think, you know, I think we're seeing voters like wanting to have more outsiders, whether it's, you know, business people, traditional or tech bros, like, you know, that you guys talk to a lot.

1:37:55I think people are just tired of business as usual. It used to be everyone, every single person was a lawyer. Yeah, being a lawyer seems miserable to me. No offense, lawyers. But I don't know. And I will say finally, I went in with the assumption that the fundamental problem with Congress was the people, right? The people were either purely Machiavellian ambitious or like horribly corrupt and just didn't attract the right people. Now, to be sure, there are plenty of people that like would, you know, could not like they can't leave Congress because they are otherwise unemployable. And like, you know, they're like they're not like the greatest in the world.

1:38:36But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the quality, the talent, as well as the patriotism. And I would say most people run for Congress wanting to serve the country, wanting to make a difference, wanting to do right by, you know, the part of the country that they're from. And they get forced into a system where the incentives really don't reward hard work in the domain that Congress should be focused on, right? Like there's really no reward for doing the boring work of oversight of the executive branch, of caring about the legislative process. The modern Congress has become so structurally weak that people channel their ambition into building a media platform, social media in particular.

1:39:18And that almost becomes their full time job. And that's really a problem because we need Congress to focus on the nuts and bolts of budgeting, of oversight, of reclaiming its authority from the executive branch. I came to believe that kind of the fundamental problem with most things is that we've become so unbalanced in terms of the overall power of the federal government. And then within the federal government, the power is purely concentrated now in the executive branch, which is why our presidential campaigns get so intense every four years, because the stakes are high, right? Everything is done via executive order and has profound consequences for every business.

1:39:56I think a healthier balance would be if Congress, Article 1, which was envisioned by our framers, to be the dominant branch of government. In fact, they were concerned that Congress would grow too powerful. They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs. Congress surrendering its power since the 70s and then in bipartisan fashion continuing that trend has had really perverse and unintended consequences for our politics. And it's why they've become so intense and why people are turned off by it, I think. In our lifetime, do you think we will see term limits in Congress at all? It seems like a lot of smart people, you know, seeing certain actors over the last decade would would feel that that that would be beneficial to the United States.

1:40:37It's this weird distortion where it feels like people are, you know, you know, in in power for a long time, but not even necessarily thinking in decades or super long term. They're thinking in election cycles and kind of creates some distortions. But I'm curious what you think, having been in there. You know, it's funny, man. By the way, can I say you have great flow. I just want to throw that out there. Both of you, in fact. As someone who's losing his hair, I just have to admire it and cherish it, gentlemen. Some people should just be news anchors, I guess. It's destiny.

1:41:14It's funny. When I first came in and I got elected in 2016, and we thought, like our freshman class, Democrats and Republicans, we thought we had serious momentum behind a term limits bill. We had a bipartisan term limits bill. I remember going to the White House. So this was Trump's first year in office. A group of six of us, three Republicans, three Democrats, went to the Oval Office to get Trump's support on our term limits bill. Because our basic theory was unless the president was using the bully pulpit to force congressional leaders to do it, it would never happen. And so if memory serves, Trump actually tweeted about it, endorsing the bill.

1:41:54And I remember I did some selfie video, you know, having just complained about members of Congress focusing on social media. This is probably the apex of my power. You got to dabble. Yeah, exactly. I remember doing some like selfie video coming out of the White House. And I genuinely thought in that moment that we had momentum behind a term limits bill. It's overwhelmingly popular with the American people. The counterarguments, which we can discuss, I don't think are persuasive. What was unique about our bill and the reason we thought it might have a chance of passing? Well, two things. One, we were in that moment to sort of drain the swamp moment, the reason Trump got elected the first time.

1:42:29You know, everyone's disgusted with the status quo, business as usual. He had made a pledge late in the campaign that he was going to support term limits. And then secondly, we kind of phased it in. So what was unique about our bill is we applied it to our class and all subsequent classes. That's what I was going to say. You grandfather in if you're a career politician and you're like, I got another 15 years that I was planning on really running it around here. You let them phase out. And then the new guard, you put some limits on them. Totally. New grandfather and the grandfathers and they just sort of die off over time.

1:43:04And then the new people. um so and then and then we made it equal in the house in the senate 12 years in the house uh so six terms and then 12 years in the senate so theoretically someone could do 24 years i could do 12 in the house run for senate and so that seemed generous to us um but it died it died a slow death and then a sudden death you know the problem is you know nobody in leadership wants to bring a term limits bill to the floor uh because they fear it endangers their own power So I really do think the paradox, it's like the things we need to do to to enhance the power, the functionality of the modern Congress actually require an over empowered president to make them happen.

1:43:45Like otherwise, Congress won't do it on its own. And I was never able to transcend that paradox, if it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I want to kind of wrestle with this idea of, you know, the executive branch having power. There are term limits there. We've also had a wildly back and forth executive branch with Trump for four years, then Biden, then back to Trump, kind of unprecedented. We'd previously been in, you know, eight year stretches for a while. And I want to run a theory by you around Iran. My working theory is that they're not happy with how things are going right now. And part of that is because part of how Iran got into this particular situation is that they potentially saw America as not supporting Israel aggressively during the Biden administration.

1:44:35and more importantly, the idea of a president who would strongly support Israel like Donald Trump would, it was unthinkable that he would get elected again because he was being indicted and he was seen as kind of like a joke almost and was deplatformed from social media. He didn't even have a Pinterest account. He didn't even have a Pinterest account. And so if you're Iran and you're thinking, well, America is backing off and doesn't seem to be coming back on the offensive anytime soon. Now's the time to start ramping up spending with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah. But then surprise, Trump's in, now we have to deal with the consequences of that.

1:45:17And so in this weird way, America feels almost unpredictable geopolitically. And maybe that's an advantage if you take it seriously, but maybe it's a risk. And to your point about wanting to avert World War III, I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing hands every four years. Is that bullish for avoiding World War III or is it a risk? Do we need to just tussle with it more? Like, how do you think about all those different concepts? Yeah, well, first of all, great question. A lot of interesting threads to pull on there. The first I would say I'll go even further back than the Biden administration to when we started to negotiate in earnest with Iran over its nuclear program in the second half of the Obama administration.

1:46:03And really, it was sort of like covert negotiations that then become overt amidst the backdrop of a region that had gone from all this hope around the Arab Spring turned Arab winter, Syrian civil war, coup in Egypt, just chaos everywhere. And then Obama was pursuing this nuclear deal with Iran. Obama had sort of a theory about the region. He talked about creating a new equilibrium in the Middle East, whereby we would sort of distance ourselves from Israel and balance sort of a recognize Iran's enhanced power and role in the region and use Iran to balance against the Sunni Arab Gulf states and Israel.

1:46:42The only problem is that that that new equilibrium created intense disequilibrium and missed the real story, which was the only path to equilibrium in the region is to build off this alignment of interest between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states, which are on paper strange bedfellows, but are united by the shared threat from Iran. The long pole in the tent that links all of our traditional allies together is the threat from Iran. And unless you want an enhanced American military presence in the region, the only way to forge a semblance of stability is to build off of that. And that was kind of the genius of the Abraham Accords that Trump would later put in place.

1:47:20Long story short, the other missed opportunity. So there was an analytical problem with Obama's approach to Iran. There was a constitutional problem, which relates to what we were talking about before, where the Iran deal sure looked a lot like an arms control agreement. But Obama, recognizing, because at that time we still had sort of pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate, recognizing that the deal was unlikely to get congressional support in the Senate in this case, he constructed it purely as an executive agreement, an agreement between himself and the Supreme Leader. There was no congressional buy-in.

1:47:54And so therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to throw it in the trash. Biden comes in, tries to resurrect it. Trump comes back in in his second term. And basically, he gives the Iranians 60 days to negotiate and then took the action that he just saw. So that's a long way of me saying there was a misunderstanding of the region and then a misunderstanding that as hard as it is to bring Congress into the process, it actually makes your executive achievements more durable and I think improves your negotiating position. Now, to get to the last part of your question, I do think the president's recent decision was the right one.

1:48:32I think really going even back before Obama's failed and flawed agreement with Iran, the Iranians have consistently used the cover of diplomacy to covertly advance their program. And at some point, we were either going to have to accept the nuclear run or take kinetic action to set back their program. And this is the first time in a long time, really since the invasion of Iraq, that we've combined maximum economic pressure with a credible military deterrent. And so I do think it gives us a chance to effectively eliminate their nuclear program. That being said, there's a lot of work we need to do in terms of rebuilding our entire defense industrial base so that the munitions we're using in CETCOM don't completely deplete the resources we need in other theaters along the way.

1:49:14And I'll stop there because I could talk about the Middle East for 20 minutes and all of your audience would evaporate. No, this is fascinating. I'm really enjoying this. Do you have a follow up there or I wanted to talk about? I wanted to get a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple months and a couple weeks specifically. Well, I think so that my most like bullish case for what Trump has just accomplished would be not only has he set back, if not eliminated for a decade, Iran's nuclear ambitions, he could have just shattered the emerging axis of chaos, this sort of axis between Iran, Russia and China.

1:49:57Because China sort of views Iran as both a source of hydrocarbons as well as like a gateway to expand its influence in the Middle East and continually poke the Americans and our allies in the eye. This is incredibly problematic for China's view of the region. That being said, the biggest wild card that I just don't know enough about is where Trump is going to go next on China. There was some reporting yesterday that he was going to allow China access to Iranian oil. And so I think it's, you know, in Trump 1.0, there was this tension between some more hawkish members of the administration on China and then more dovish members at Treasury.

1:50:37There's a there's sort of a version of this tension going on right now. And then Trump himself at times wants to make a deal with Xi Jinping and thinks he's uniquely suited to do it. At other times, he's like uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China. I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China. And so I guess there's lingering questions about how we want to approach China. But I really think this is the serious setback for this access of chaos, this anti-American access. Russia, of course, was getting enormous benefits from Iran in terms of drone technology for its ongoing war in Eastern Europe.

1:51:16I can't help but think that that's going to be increasingly difficult, given that Iran is dealing with the aftermath of the attack, as well as increasing internal pressure. And then hats off to the Israelis. I mean, I think this shows how valuable it is to have lethal allies that not only have extraordinary capabilities of their own, but are willing to take a big role in the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on the United States of America. And in fact, what we've seen really in terms of the way that they've gone after Hezbollah, the beeper operation, and then their systematic campaign against the nuclear facility is some of the most daring and imaginative intelligence and military work that I think I've ever seen in my lifetime.

1:52:01And even if one isn't as pro-Israel as I am, I think you'd have to admire just how effective their military and intelligence community is. Yeah, that's undeniable. A bit of a random question, but I'm curious if you have any insight here. There was a lot of... What's the population of Iran? There was some interesting price action in Bitcoin, which is hard to read too much into. But people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining a lot of Bitcoin. Fascinating. Maybe it didn't come up for you, but I saw somebody posting that he was like, I'm not buying Bitcoin right now. It seems obvious that the regime is just like dumping in order to fund, you know, basically the recovery effort.

1:52:46It makes sense. but if you don't have any insight there we can move on i wanted to you know i i'm afraid i don't but i do think and i've said this to like all the smart crypto folks like brian armstrong and others i i think there's um or a wisconsin colleague of mine brian style who's one of the leaders in the house on this issue you guys should have him on he's really smart you know in wisconsin um yeah brian style he's always welcome welcome yeah exactly exactly uh i think there's like a an underexplored aspect or argument about like crypto's role in national security, right? Because the anti-crypto argument is always like, this is just a way of sanctions evasion and money laundering.

1:53:27And I think what people don't appreciate is like how this could be a tool to advance America's and our allies' national security interests. And certainly it was the case when people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan, that crypto was enormously valuable in that regard. It might allow us to do certain things in denied areas and transfer assets that are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community. So I think that's an area where like national security nerds like me should pay increasing attention to the utility of crypto. But I hadn't heard that about. Switching gears to the European continent, wanted to get your reaction to the NATO spending news and maybe kind of the backstory.

1:54:05I'm sure when you were in Congress, you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing. But any reactions there? Well, listen, I think anytime, first of all, this idea that the American president would want our NATO allies to spend more on their own defense is not a new thing. It is not sort of unique to Trump. Eisenhower, the first Supreme Allied commander of NATO, like actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies time. And so this is like, and we've had Democratic senators try to defund NATO because of their frustrations with NATO. So this is like an old argument that is new again.

1:54:52I think the fact that certain European countries are willing to spend more on their defense is a great thing for deterrence in general. I would say, however, I've always been of the view that this obsession with the inputs, i.e. what percent of GDP a NATO member spends on defense is not the right lens of analysis, right? Like every NATO country could be spending 5 % of their GDP on defense, but if they're all buying the wrong crap or buying stuff that isn't interoperable and doesn't actually amount to a coordinated multinational deterrence by denial effort with hard power shifted as far east as possible with the frontline states playing a unique role then you actually have you haven't actually fighting off a common operational picture and shout out to nato for acquiring maven smart system made by palatural technologies no big deal um then you have actually It's like a sports team doesn't wake up one morning and say, let's all give it 100%.

1:55:55And that's the only coordination. It's like, you know. You could easily turn this into a jobs program where you say, yeah, we're going to spend 5 % of our GDP on horseback and cavalry. And it's like, you're going to lose. But yes, you're technically going to be spending 5%. And you're going to have a massive military, but you're going to get rolled if you're not investing in the right programs. So is there any, do you think that the European countries are thinking about it correctly? Because it feels like to me, getting from 2 % to 5 % is the bigger mental hurdle than the allocation of that 5%.

1:56:27And yes, we're right to move the conversation to where you're taking it right now. But that feels like an easier conversation. Or maybe I'm wrong there. I think the closer you are to the threat, the more your thinking is sharp, right? So it is my experience that Poland, the Baltic states tend to have a clearer view of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own military. By the way, we've acquired two new NATO – acquired is the wrong term. We've had two new countries join NATO in recent years that bring phenomenal capabilities to the table. I think traditionally we've struggled convincing the Germans, who are the big elephant in the European room, to make the right investments and to make more investments.

1:57:12My hope is that that conversation is getting better. I guess I worry sometimes that kind of related to what you said earlier, they'll be privileging certain domestic companies, even if they don't actually produce capability. I think it's fair to say, obviously, I'm biased because I work in an American software company, but we are the best in the world by 10 orders of magnitude when it comes to software development in this country. And that's just not something that Europe does well. So there could be opportunity for creative collaboration between the Palantras of the world and European hardware defense manufacturers.

1:57:52I'd love to see more of that going forward. And I've always been a proponent of, you know, we have a ton of troops in countries like Germany and Western Europe, getting them out of garrison, shifting them further on NATO's eastern flank, taking advantage of the invitation that certain frontline states like Poland made, at least in the previous administration, to build new bases and forts that enhance our deterrence posture. I think there's a there's a huge opportunity here. And it may just be the case that Trump's rhetoric, as unpolished as it can be at times, is the thing that's shaking, shaking it loose right now.

1:58:30I mean, obviously, it's a bit overdetermined. I mean, you know, the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And it's a massive wake up call for Europe that they need to need to invest more and buy the right things. some, but I do think we have a moment here. And I think what's critical to our analysis in the U.S., particularly my own party, the Republican Party, is to do a better job. And I didn't quite do this well when I chaired the China Committee in Congress, in teasing out the connection between Russia and China and why what happens in one theater affects another theater and that it isn't just a choice between Europe or the Indo-Pacific.

1:59:03We're a global power. We're a sole superpower. We have an existential challenge in the form of communist China. We have to pay attention everywhere. Yes, we have to make hard decisions and prioritize accordingly. The Indo Pacific is a priority theater, but one of the best ways we can invest more of our own exquisite resources into the Indo Pacific is to get on the same page with our allies in Europe and ensure that they're buying the right things and that the way we fight together is actually leveraging cutting-edge commercial technology, software, or hardware. That's great. Great. Should we talk about the news today?

1:59:35The announcement? The nuclear deal that you guys announced? Yeah, that'd be great. Can you break it down for us? Everything is nuclear. Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear. Yeah, I mean, I want to know the shape of the partnership, anything you can share there. But then I'd love to go into kind of what you're particularly excited about in nuclear or even just energy broadly. We've seen that the United States energy production per capita is kind of flatlined for a while. China's increasing energy production very aggressively. It feels top of mind, especially in the backdrop of the foundation model AI race, that we need to be building more energy infrastructure.

2:00:14And there's different resources coming online. Nuclear's probably the most fascinating one that has the ability to scale, because we've tamed the atom, and yet we can't just seem to copy paste Diablo Canyon 50 times to actually get a massive increase in energy production. There's also stuff happening on the smaller scale. I want your take on nuclear as a whole in addition to the deal. Yeah. By the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this, the nuclear stuff. By the way, it's your fault though, because my understanding is I'm just batting cleanup for Eliana at this point. Oh, yeah. That's true.

2:00:50And he talked too much, but I'm happy to come back at any point. Listen, I mean, we can't, obviously we can't dominate the commanding heights of critical technology and AI if we don't improve our sort of all the above energy policy. There is no workable energy strategy without a nuclear renaissance in this country. The Trump administration has put out some really productive EOs, but now it's incumbent upon the private sector to step up. And the nuclear company is that. I mean, they're going to leverage our software to build reactors, which right now take over a decade to build and collapse that timeline down.

2:01:26And I think we're at the forefront of something really interesting. China is investing billions of dollars in this space, putting their best and brightest on the problem. And we can't fall further behind. And by the way, it affects our military deterrence as well, because our diplomacy is enhanced with foreign countries when we're able to come to them and say, we are a reliable partner for civilian nuclear technology, and we help you build and access that technology safely. When what I don't want to see is a replay of what we saw with China and 5G and Huawei, where China was going all over the world saying, you can have 5G internet steeply.

2:02:01We'll just control the infrastructure. It'll be in a box. You won't even have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about anything. And like in America, we're like, whoa, don't do that. Time out. But if you're a country that doesn't have resources in Africa or in the global South, you're probably not paying as much attention to the CI concerns. And so there's something similar playing out in the nuclear space right now. So I'm very bullish about this partnership. I think this is the custom of something big, both for the nuclear company and for Palantir. And we're going to be able to leverage all the lessons we have from working with Anderol, Ceronic, and non-traditional partners with our Warp Speed manufacturing product and apply it into the nuclear space.

2:02:39That's fantastic. I'm getting pulled. I'm getting pulled. You're getting pulled. We'll see you on another TV. We have to have you back on soon. Come back on soon. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for coming on. I'll come back for Packers commentary. All right, see you guys. Cheers. Yeah, the nuclear, like a lot of people still don't understand fully what Palantir does, but you have to pull the example from Airbus manufacturing. So Palantir, that's one of their partners. If you're making a plane, you need to know how many screws you have, how many wings you have, how many engines you have, and the lead times on all of those, how much they cost, when they depreciate, what the testing regimen is as you integrate them into the plane.

2:03:17exact same process for building something like a 747 as building a nuclear power plant. So very exciting deal. And I'm excited to see it play out. But that was fantastic. Let's run through a couple of timeline posts and then get out of here. We got two ads left, and that's why we're leaving early today because we're going to go film some ads for Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. We're heading to a wander in just a few minutes to film an advertisement.

2:03:54The great city of Malibu, the great town of Malibu, California. That will be airing on TVPN and then go out on the internet. And we're also filming an ad for 8 Sleep. How'd you sleep last night? I got wrecked again. You got wrecked again? I have a systematic issue with the three-year-old. Yeah, it's rough. have you have you tried telling him man up no i mean i would be down for my sleep to be disrupted for a decade if it means he sleeps just a little bit better yeah but it's certainly the thing that really hurts is uh losing to you i got a 78 i got an 86 baby hit me with the ashton hall mugged again it's my this is my favorite soundtrack on the whole we're gonna need a new sound effect i love this sound effect no this is the sound of me winning it's now it's now when there is a john win, I get the Ashton Hall sound effect.

2:04:42That's right. Anyway, go to AIDSleep.com slash TBPN. And if you're building a company like AIDSleep, head over to fin.ai, number one agent, AI agent for customer service. It is number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, and number one ranking on G2, used by Coda, Consensus, Aspire, Lovable, all of your favorite software. companies and more so check it out we got to have own on again you just have Monik yeah yeah once a day once or twice a day and yeah if you're if you're selling to customers if you're a businessman or woman you're going to benefit a lot from Finn well that is pretty much everything there's one more piece of news I want to cover by Jew over at aether flux has a new board member Dan Gallagher.

2:05:40He's worked with him for years. Dan is in a league of his own. He is a man of integrity and has become a close friend over the years. He'll help us engage in Washington, D.C. and support Aetherflux and America to lead in space solar power. If you're not familiar with Aetherflux, they are putting solar panels in space and then beaming down the energy that's captured in space via lasers. Very cool. They're beam maxing. Also, Baiju, absolute hitter on his wrist every time he's spotted. Absolutely criminal because this photo here in the slide deck cuts it out. Cuts it out. We can't see what he's wearing.

2:06:12What was the photographer doing? What was the, this is a, this is a journalistic malpractice. We have another post here from Scott Belsky. Observed among the most successful people I admire who really worked for it. They don't want to network. They want to learn. They are mining you for information constantly. Yep. Sometimes it looks like networking, but they're mining. Yeah, Zach Weinberg says, in fact, the networking part is really just a tax you get comfortable paying in order to do the learning. I like that. It's a good point. We have a post here. It's like, don't, don't ask for money, ask for advice.

2:06:45Like if you're genuinely interested in something, you wind up meeting interesting people because that's the only way to get the real answers that aren't baked into the LLM yet. You got to go to the source. You got to meet people and you got to ask them for the answers to the pressing questions of the day. Yep. Anyway, we have a post here from Woodrow Oates Montague. I'm so done. I'm so done. I can't take this anymore and there's a bloomberg hit a footwear startup is teaming up with two space companies to design a shoe in orbit as part of a mission to make artificial intelligence and blockchain less expensive and more eco-friendly than it is on earth orbits edge a company that supports ai and blockchain applications and copernic space which offers digital marketplaces for space assets plan to send a solar and battery powered satellite to space equipped with a computer that will use AI automation to produce a shoe design for the Sintelay brand.

2:07:37The mission is expected to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in early 2026. We should call Delian and do a wellness check. Yeah, see how he's doing. He's been like, I'm the guy who's manufacturing space. I'm the space manufacturing man. Oh, well, so much for your monopoly thesis, Delian. There's another space manufacturing company in business now. they're using ai and blockchain technology i haven't heard i haven't heard varda talk about ai or blockchain yet at all it's just missing from their thesis entirely wow what a blind spot for it's so funny to feel like you need to send something to space to produce ai slop footwear designs um anyways uh good luck let's end on a let's end on a positive note brad gerstner i I don't think this was a response to the socialist.

2:08:28No, but he said the answer to socialism is more capitalism. And the Invest America Act is more capitalism, Mr. President. It makes every child a capitalist from birth sharing in the upside of America. Worried about what just happened in NYC. Help is on the way. I love this. Let's ring the gong for Brad Gershner.

2:08:51Fantastic. Well, this is the shortest show we've done in a very long time. But fortunately, I'm sure we'll be back with. But we're still recording. We're going to be recording over the next few hours. We're going to be putting up minutes. And then that will hit the timeline later. Anyway, so thank you for tuning in to the show. As always, leave us a five-star review on Spotify or leave us a written review on Apple Podcasts. Yes, please. And we will read that on the show. So have a fantastic afternoon. We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Bye. Thank you.