New OpenAI Hardware Device, Google I/O Reactions | Erik Prince, Anthony Pompliano, Scott Wu, David Senra, Joe Wiesenthal, Nikunj Handa

33:41Yeah, he just creates the most addicting device possible. They're calling it the new cigarettes, folks. Ivan Altman wouldn't elaborate on what they're working on. Tan, who is central to developing every version of the iPhone within Apple's hardware engineering department, said the new team isn't tied to a legacy and will have an opportunity to rethink the space. It'll be worth the wait, Altman said. It's a crazy ambitious thing to make. not much detail here but thanks for the post i am excited i hope it's huge i hope it's a hit really really big i want it to be as big as a newspaper i think part of part of really loving big tech is wanting more companies to become big tech or high technology yeah and open ai has clear potential to get into that group and maybe they should launch a newspaper this is kind of hardware just print out deep research reports yeah people mail it to me put it drop it off people discount paper as as a you know a potential hardware form factor yeah it is it is anyway uh google i o reactions let's move on um everyone on the google team made the exact same hand gesture apparently they were all trained tulsi in there tulsi's in there she's been she was on the show yesterday i guess logan didn't make that no um maybe he had some wild hand gestures sweda says goop gang sign goop gang sign uh are you familiar with the merkle route this one angela merkle would always hold her hands like this it's pretty sick similar to andrew tate is that where he got it from wait tate does it oh i didn't know that that's hilarious i think i think his his infamous oh he does he does like this this tenses fingers tenting your fingers is very like pensive and thinking i'm thinking oh yes i'm tenting my fingers it's not very golden retriever coded You never see a golden retriever do that.

35:34No, definitely not. Charmin Kapoor, founders waking up to realize that their startup is now a bullet point in Google's keynote. Yeah, so a couple things here. They launched a product to generate product designs. It was interesting. They launched a Doji competitor, which is like a try-on product. They obviously launched Jules, Coding Agent. They launched the eyewear. you know basically whether you're sesame doge doge yep uh even figma right figma has generative ai yeah um tools yeah i i feel like but again i don't think that founders i don't think like the doge founders are seeing that and thinking oh i'm suddenly worried right because the idea that google is going to dominate in fashion which is so culture driven it seems really I don't see it happening.

36:29I can see them having a version of the product in Google shopping that enables try-ons. I don't think it's going to be this like social cultural thing that Doji is clearly tapped into. Yeah, I wonder how many startups Google has actually killed in history. It doesn't feel like that many. The famous example, of course, is like Microsoft really did kind of kill off Slack's growth with Teams, right? And Slack kind of like reached its peak and kind of flatlined after Microsoft Teams took off because Microsoft had such a distribution advantage. I feel like there's two different types of startups. I think Teams took off because defense tech got cool and all the defense tech found it.

37:13Had to be ITAR compliant. For sure, for sure. but but seriously it's like I think that if you if you saw a google feature and you were like I'm gonna start a startup on that and you're basically copying google because you're like google slow then yes this is real like to all the companies that were like putting up fake notebook lm apps that weren't really like raising money and kind of just like cash grabbing on top of like wrapping stuff that's already been created and pioneered by google it google drops a notebook LM app and they like wipe you, you can't really be that upset. Like you're always in a cash grab.

37:49But if you have built like a massive design tool like Figma and it has so many different customers, so many different things. And then they come out with like, Oh, something that allows you to do like a little bit of design work. Like it doesn't feel like as nearly as existential. Um, and so I feel like this narrative is always like, Oh, Google just like, you know, completely destroyed this stuff and it really depends on like is is this is this truly aligned with google's mission that they're going to just keep pouring relentlessly at and they're going to make this great and it's and it's completely on their roadmap um and were you always building a feature or were you building something that can that can grow into its own behemoth and if if you're on if you're on the right track you're probably fine um anyway um what's next well speaking of behemoth the U.S.

38:37formally accepts luxury jet from Qatar for Trump. No way. That is crazy. And it will possibly be used as Air Force One. And Yahoo is reporting that, turns out Trump's Qatar private jet wasn't even a gift. Hmm. It wasn't? Despite the insistence that the plane was a gift. What was it then? If it's not a gift? payment for a senior white house official told cnn that trump tasked steve whitkoff the president's special envoy to the middle east with tracking down a replacement for air force one after trump learned that boeing would not have new jets ready for another two years whitkoff ended up leading initial conversations with the qatari government and they have them in stock right yeah boeing provided the pentagon with a list of other clients who might be able to help with america's search for a new plane one of those sources says that qatar was included on that list of clients and remember we saw that chart right yeah uh there was not that many people in the world that actually have these jets set up in this way um there were also discussions about leasing the plane so again uh when we saw the initial uh headlines uh we thought that uh we imagined that it was possible that the the full truth was um not uh not really revealed yet and apparently legal negotiations over the plane's transfer are still ongoing.

40:01And it's unclear how the plane went from being a potential purchase to a$400 million gift.

40:11Anyway, where should we go next? Probably ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We already talked about Figma, but let's tell you about Figma as well. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. get started for free. It is the backbone of TBPN. If you like some of the merch that you've seen, that's where we're making it. Oh yeah. Let's go to this Gary Tan post. This is good actually talking about the cycle never ends. Every month, a new world's most powerful model takes the crown.

40:46We applaud, compare, and then wait for the next. OpenAI introduces the world's most powerful model, then Anthropic, then Gemini, then Grok. There's a little bit of fracturing now in the sense that I haven't played with Gemini's LLM enough to displace my open AI workflow, but the generative video, like VO3 is truly way, way better than Sora right now. And so I - You compared the two. I'd same prompt in both. And it was brutal. It was not even a question which one you would go with. Yeah. one the Sora output made me kind of it was it was a lot of hallucinations it was really hard to look at story it didn't have the movement it was definitely like like a lot of gyrations and just hallucinations now that's not to say that the look like it was three the VO3 had a lot of crazy hallucinations but they were not as disturbing or more like psychedelic like we we generated this one video of uh of an audi r8 with a tbpn livery pulling out of our new studio and it peels out it's very cool but then all of a sudden it's driving backwards which is very odd and jarring uh i did another one with a a rolls royce phantom pulling into the studio with a tbpn gt3 cup car livery foresight and that foreshadowing and that one when it pulled in did you notice this it had a wing on the back and it pulls in and then all of a sudden the car morphs and you're looking at the front of the car again and so it kind of hallucinated and transformed it did that a couple times where us blasting through the hollywood sign it we there's a hollywood sign in the background we bust through one hollywood sign then there's a third hollywood sign like it is still hallucinating it doesn't seem it doesn't seem ground in reality in any way but just visually the the fidelity of of the visuals is incredible.

42:41And the ability to include three or four different concepts and then it weaves all of that into an eight second clip. It's very, very cool. And the sound is obviously amazing. And so I have been begging Google representatives for more VO3 credits because it's a lot of fun. But yeah, we love an AI race. Well, we have some kind of meta news. Somebody is doing live translation of TBPN in Dutch right now. Do you want to try playing it, Ben?

43:14We'll see if this works. And we have Anthony Pompliano joining at 1230 now. So in the meantime, while we're pulling that up, let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. I need Pom's email for this invite. Let's also tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

43:54Linear launched their agent's product into GA today, which is very cool. And I want to ask Scott about it because they have been working on some serious integrations there. which would be cool.

44:12Wow, they're translating us. That's pretty amazing. It's going to get really freaky once they get to this point in the stream and they're translating us. Yeah. It becomes very meta. Oh, wow, they're actually talking about Vanta now. This is incredible. Wow, this is really impressive. Okay, anyway, let's move on. enjoy that if you're looking for tbpn in dutch um chubby shares this is freaking insane the holy grail of personalized ai for daily usage if this demo turns out to deliver what it promises will be much further ahead in 2025 than i would have thought so this is a video of a guy who uses a android phone to troubleshoot a bike that he's trying to fix and he asks the ai to pull up the actual manual or uh yeah manual for the bike and it's scrolling the pdf and then it says hey hey, go find a YouTube video.

45:06And it opens the YouTube app, so it's very much working at the OS level to use all of the features that are available on any Android phone. And that seems like what we want from Apple Intelligence that we're not getting yet. You can't tell Siri to go open the Notes app and search there or take a new note. Everything has to be puppeteered at the API level through these specific integrations instead of just using the whole phone. And so it's a very cool demo. There were a bunch more pieces of news. Sam from Futurnomics says, Waymo does more rides than Lyft in San Francisco. There are only 300 Waymos.

45:46Lyft has 45 ,000 drivers. Every Waymo is doing more rides than 150 human drivers. Now there's a community note on this. I don't know how true it is, but there were some staggering Waymo numbers. I think they crossed 10 million rides or something like that. There's this comment right underneath it that I think is probably why it's getting noted, which is that uh this guy williams says that number feels implausibly high though i wonder if that lift number includes surrounding area drivers who occasionally do ride there's no way yeah 45 that lift has 45 000 drivers in san francisco the streets would be packed it's it's what a city of like seven million people or something like that like a lot of pink mustaches and and reminder like uber's what a hundred times bigger than lyft and so you have four million uber drivers for seven million people or something like that yeah it makes no sense anyway Anyway, Olivia Moore over at Andreessen Horowitz says, although she doesn't have a time.

46:39Lyft is flat on the last 12 months. So it's actually up one cent over the past year. Anyway, we need a polymarket on the current best AI model. I want to see where that's trending because Google obviously released a bunch of models and Google was in the leading contender for top model. And I want to see where the polymarket is shaking out. End of May, Google is sitting at 91%. 91 % for Google. And 40 % for December 31st, end of the year. Yeah. So Olivia Moore here says, Google had a bunch of great AI launches today, but they're so hard for consumers to access. I completely agree with this. I get stuck all the time in the wrong flow, in the wrong app.

47:26Even accessing VO3, I wound up in Flow, which is their TV product or something. It was just showing me AI stuff. And then there's like, I can get into the dev studio, but then I'm have to set up an API key. And then I finally have the Gemini app, but the Gemini app wasn't upgraded. And so I had to go through a flow on Chrome, on desktop to get that. And I get that I don't have an Android phone, but I feel like I'm being punished too much. Yeah. So she says - The bull case there is that that kind of stuff is actually easier to figure out than being on the technological edge and leading in benchmarks and all these other things and having massive...

48:02Yes, yes. But they should be able to do both. They have so many P &Ms No, I totally agree. I'm just saying it's... You know, talking to Tulsi and Logan yesterday, they clearly are incredibly locked in, aware of the pushback. Yep. So she goes on to say, it feels like every debut comes with a new subscription, which you need a specific account type to access and have to hunt down the playground for. I know AI products are expensive to run, but with Google's distribution and revenue streams. I don't get why they don't offer some more of this for free. That was my question. Or at least make it easier to find.

48:34Notebook LM feels like their last big viral launch, which had no paywall. At various times in the last three months, I've been subscribed to Gemini Advanced, Google One AI Pro, and now AI Ultra. The madness needs to end, I agree. Although I'm now an AI Ultra subscriber. So maybe they got me. Maybe it's all part of the plan. 4D chess. Yeah, I'm interested to track the ramp data on Gemini over the next couple months. See if it's ramping up. Anyway, everyone's going to have to pay sales tax on this. Get on Numeral. Go to numeralhq.com. Put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

49:07Wes Roth says Google IO 2025 was an absolute AI overload and everyone is still picking up their jaws off the floor. Here's the TLDR. Gemini gets an agent mode. It's so powerful. It borders on executive assistants. So excited to check that out. This post from Addy. Gemini is the kid that got bullied in high school and is now jacked a millionaire and practices gratitude. It's very accurate. Yeah. I mean, they just like, I mean, that's the nature of these companies that are on the annual releases is that like, you're like, they're behind for 11 months out of the year and then they're state of the art for the big release.

49:40And then of course, everyone else will launch. Yeah. I'm just like feeling extremely grateful that, you know, we own, you know, 80 % of, you know, what you know is the internet and, you know, we can leverage this into of creating really great AI. Yep. Theo says, Google buying DeepMind in 2014 for$400 to$650 million might have been the greatest acquisition of all time. Completely agree. It's definitely up there. Definitely in the conversation. Definitely in the conversation. Signal says, Google's edge in local data, especially now with LLMs, is absurdly underrated. Nobody touches the depth, history, and granularity they have on local businesses, landmarks, real-time conditions.

50:18Every other mapping service is just a sad knockoff because Google's been building this mode for decades. Overnight success. Also, I mean, the YouTube data is super valuable. You have to imagine that their edge in VO is because of the YouTube data. Because, I mean, like, it's the biggest repository of video content. And new stream of video. Constantly. Constantly. Constantly, right? Yeah, and so that's probably why there's so much good stuff coming out of VO3. Ben Hilack showed the first ever ad produced in VO3. Can we play this? Welcome to the Token Tavern. It's in the tab if you guys want to try and pull that up.

50:52Justine Moore, Venture Twins, says, Man singing a song about being a capitalist. We should play both of these. Good Alexander contextualizes it by saying, You can own Google at 17x earnings and short Costco at 50x earnings. Long AGI, short rotisserie chicken is actually value investing. People love Costco. And then Archie Sengupta says, Got access to Google Diffusion. holy 909 tokens per second i made a calendar in three seconds yeah i mean this is this is what people are talking about in terms of being able to generate entire applications right and this is the risk to existing software applications that don't have network effects are really sort of thin wrappers around aws and you know these sort of simple applications i mean i still think that this will be one of those things you know people people can make their own food they still order out from restaurants right so here let's play some of these with audio if we can the token tavern it looks so good I don't think I'm supposed to be here well partner that's why I use raindrop so I can find bugs like you before they bother my users now get the hell out of my town Wow.

52:20Ben cooked. Ben cooked. Although, I know that those graphics came from After Effects. That overlay, for sure, After Effects. Not generated in VO3. He said ad produced with VO3. Yeah, yeah. It uses VO3. This is the most impressive shot in the whole thing, though. Look at this. Perfect lip sync. The teeth look great. The voice. The texture. but get an alert when your ai product fails that's motion graphics baby truth zone truth ben cook congrats to ben that's a very cool ad very cool what about the other one yeah this one i basically watched this and i said i had to watch this i'm gonna make john watch this it is pretty rough on the ears yeah okay let's lock in check it out uh in the meantime let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously they got multi-asset investing industry leading yields trusted by millions public.com public.com get on there also how'd you sleep you know how i slept john i had to come back you've you've had a couple good nights i had to show you who's boss i think i did poorly 90 not bad 97 oh i got you back in the game i'm back in the game uh autopilot made 22 different autopilot made 22 adjustments to the temperature of the bed to get my REM sleep up 8 % just last night 22 let's play this next video thank you to 8 sleep I'm a venture capitalist yeah I'm a capital dude

53:58I'm a venture capitalist turn it off this is so bad

54:07that's wrong that's just wrong let's just end the stream yeah yeah just just turn it off that's enough that's enough for today honestly let's take the rest of the week off too let's just hang it up that's so bad yeah i was looking at that viral that viral vo video and the prompt was just like stand up comic telling a joke and everyone was like, hey, this is actually funny. It's like, I went to the zoo. They only had a dog. It was a shit zoo. Funny. But like that joke is not created from AI. It's literally on Reddit. It's literally at the top of like Reddit slash r slash jokes. It's like, we're still training on the same data.

54:49Okay, somebody take that video of the VC singing that song, post it on Blue Sky and just say like, Like, hey, I know you guys haven't been on X in a while, but here's what's going on. And given that they're generally decelerationist, I think they might actually... That's all I hate it. Yeah, they're not going to be happy with that. Bad. They hate to see a young venture capitalist singing. Very bad. Just go to adquick.com, buy a billboard. Out-of-home advertising made it 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.

55:30Thank you. That was rough. Anyway, we have three minutes. Let's just do a little quick timeline. We'll get to the Ben Thompson later. But I wanted to cover this article in the Wall Street Journal. Europe's firms fall far behind in the race to create big tech. Lack of innovation holds economies back, weighing on the continent's future. Berlin, the world's technology revolution, is leaving Europe behind. Europe lacks any homegrown alternatives to the likes of Google, Amazon, or Meta. Apple's market value is bigger than the entire German stock market. The continent's inability to create more big technology firms is seen as one of its biggest challenges and is a major reason why the economies are stagnating.

56:13And so if you look at their chart, and they're looking at number of unicorns by region. In the United States, there are 90 unicorns with a combined value of$2.35 trillion. SpaceX and OpenAI, of course, the biggest. In the EU, there's 107 unicorns. So actually more companies, but their combined value is$330 billion, basically an order of magnitude less value. And they include Stripe in Europe, which is not fair in my opinion. True so. Stripe is a YC company that's very San Francisco coded. They have their conference. They do. In San Francisco. In San Francisco. go. But I've been thinking more about European venture capital because a lot of people have been hating on it, thinking that it's impossible to make money there.

56:52This is kind of consensus. All the smartest venture capitalists think that it's just impossible. But there is something amazing about that type of radical risk-taking in such a challenging environment. And if you just think about the act of launching a VC fund in Europe, it goes back to the early spirit of Silicon Valley. It's totally like a huge idea of giving money to a company, giving millions of dollars to a company that has no cash flows, that's maybe entering a market that doesn't even exist yet. And, um, it's a million to one investing in, in European companies, it's a million to one that you even make a dollar revenue, totally potentially a billion to one.

57:28You know, people talk about like one miracle, one miracle companies, two miracle companies in Europe, you need to be a 10 miracle company to do anything. And so if a VC can go there and even return even just a 1x on their fund, I think that they should be at the top of the minus list because it is such a remarkable achievement. It's so bold. Who's running the minus list these days? I don't know. Post Conrad? It's not Conrad. Post Conrad. But it truly, given the expectations, if you can even get out of there with returning 50 % of your fund, you should be remembered as one of the greatest venture capitalists to ever do it.

58:03It would be a remarkable accomplishment. You need a reality distortion field to just go and deploy in Europe. It's remarkable. Some level of hubris. Yeah. Massive. Anyways, we have Eric Prince in the studio. Why don't we bring him in? Eric. How are you doing? There he is. It's happening. Welcome to the stream. Gentlemen, how are you? We're great. How are you? Great to have you. Thank you. I don't know if you need any introduction, but why don't you give an introduction for those that may be unfamiliar.

58:41uh born in michigan uh served in the navy for a while and built a business called blackwater which was a a defense services firm, a private military contractor, if you will. I sold that in 2010 and have done some things in resource investing, upstream in mining and exploration. And I still help governments from time to time with large intractable problems and started a company just over three years ago called Unplugged, which is a standalone independent phone outside of the Google and Apple universe. It's really kind of an answer to surveillance capitalism. What was the first dollar of revenue for Blackwater?

59:25Like, how do you get that business off the ground? So SEAL teams, special operations units, because of the gun culture in America, have gone to private facilities really since the 70s. some you know some champion shooter that's running a shooting school somewhere and no one had done that on an industrial scale and so i knew coming out of the seal teams i knew what the teams needed and i built the largest facility of its kind in the world within an hour drive of norfolk naval base and all the seal teams and military concentration that's there and actually our first customer was from the west coast a west coast seal team But, yeah, we built ourselves into becoming an indispensable part of the train-up of military units.

1:00:14And then when Columbine High School happened, that terrible high school shooting, you had dozens of police departments that responded and didn't do very well because it took them hours to clear the building and people bled out that should have been cared for. And so we ended up building a big mock-up called Are You Ready High School, where we could train thousands of SWAT officers how to respond to those kind of disasters in process with all the sounds and lights and role players and screaming. And that was very effective. And then with the USS Cole Navy ship was blown up in Yemen by a suicide boat.

1:00:52The Navy realized that, well, the sailors that were guarding that ship were holding largely unloaded weapons that they never fired before because the Navy thought it was too dangerous to train with live guns. And so we ended up training 100 ,000 sailors. That was really our first big defense contract. And then when 9-11 happens, obviously the demand signal for security and training and aviation and operating in difficult places was our specialty. How do those contracts actually work? We're familiar with the defense tech pipeline. A lot of defense tech startups right now, maybe they're building counter UAS drone systems.

1:01:28And the typical path is they get some SBIR money, then they move to program of record. They start scaling up manufacturing. But for what you're doing, I imagine that the contracts are structured differently. How do you project revenue? How do you think about ongoing relationships with the DOD and making sure that the customer is satisfied for a long time? It's a much shorter flash to bang in terms of demand signal. A customer would come and say, I need this kind of airlift in this part of the world, move this many tons, need to be able to fly on night vision goggles and operate under this level of FAA or not scrutiny.

1:02:16and we would bid it. About 98 % of our revenue was competitively bid. And look, at the same time I was building Blackwater, I took over my dad's original business, which made die-cast machines, a big, heavy machine tool business. And I took that through a lean transformation process, really based on the Toyota production system. And lowering the cycle time of large quantities of steel and other work in process. and so as we land out Blackwater I kind of thought about it like a like a factory and what does a military do it recruits vets equips trains deploys and supports people to do a job in a difficult place that's what we did and because we were a training facility to start with we could back into the recruiting and the vetting we had our own in-house doctors and psychologists for all the psych screening tests our own supply obviously an enormous and impressive armory uh what is the what do you think the the pmc of the future looks like right you have warfare is changing we have autonomous systems now a lot of the new capabilities being brought online are you know drone based i imagine your sort of vision of of how you counter that uh probably ends up looking like a mirror to some degree, but, but I'm curious, uh, I'm sure you've thought about it more than anyone else.

1:03:45Uh, yeah, well, you look back in history, the contractors on the battlefield have always been there. And if you were laying siege to a city in Europe, a thousand years ago, the people you contracted for the PMCs would have been the guys building the trebuchets or the battering rams, which was at that point, the most sophisticated system, mechanical system on the battlefield. Now, that cutting edge, bleeding edge technology is obviously in the drone and autonomous space. And yes, you're right. The private sector can adapt and operate so much faster, including in the cyberspace as well, that that is how you deliver significant punch above your weight by having a few people that do those systems very, very well.

1:04:35That's something that we're still, the U.S. DOD procurement swamp is still truly not learning from fast enough, is you go from idea to prototype to field testing in combat in Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks, and you get a buy decision from a customer that needs it. That same process in the US takes years. And so the obsolescence of ideas is so quick that we are missing. And so that speed of advancement is obsolescing, I would say, hundreds of billions of dollars of past procurement decisions now. And we're deluding ourselves if we think we're fat, dumb, and happy just because we've spent trillions of dollars over the last 25 years in stuff.

1:05:24Buying stuff does not equate to buying capacity. Yeah, that makes sense. Have you been happy to see the Army's recent modernization efforts? They actually came on our show and talked about it for 30 minutes a couple weeks ago. It seems like they are extremely motivated. But I imagine, yeah, and I imagine on your side, these are maybe things that you've been pushing for for coming up on a couple decades now. But what was your read on it? Yeah, I didn't see their specific comments, but I know there's certainly trying to be a refocus on merit and lethality and not all the other distractions. I would go as extreme as it would sound.

1:06:04I would push the purchase decisions of a lot of the next generation equipment down to the division or even brigade commanders. Instead of effectively, what we have now is a socialist monolith buying apparatus of these PEOs through a few verticals back in Washington with enormous headquarter staffs. And I laud the guys that are trying to reform the Pentagon. But the fact is, you have 800 ,000 Pentagon civilians. If they cut that number to 200 ,000, now we're getting somewhere. Because you have so much dead wood that it literally blocks any kind of the speed or innovation. And when I say devolve purchasing decisions, yes, that will come with supply chain chaos.

1:06:48You're right. I want that. I want the 25th Infantry Division based in Hawaii, which is probably never going to go to war alongside the 1st Armored Division based in Texas. I want them to buy and adapt current drone tech to their unique needs of the theaters they're operating in and let the best ideas float to the top. So then the Pentagon buys, makes a much, much bigger buy across it. If they bought 10 or 15 systems that are okay, but they don't really like, the speed of advancement of obsolescence, as we were talking about, almost necessitates that kind of trial and error. Have you been happy that the startup world is firmly pro-defense tech investing these days?

1:07:39Is there enough new investment happening or is it already too much? What's your read on just how much investment activity there's been in defense tech? I am happy to see defense tech money flowing into those spaces. I think there's a lot of great ideas. My worry is that for the Silicon Valley crowd, which is used to spending and investing at a pretty high burn rate of overhead because they're used to finding somebody that will buy their stuff because they have thousands or millions of early adopters. You don't have that in the Pentagon. You have basically four buying verticals, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and maybe a little bit from SOCOM and a little bit from CIA.

1:08:21But that's it. And so that, however optimistic or aggressive their acceleration of purchasing timelines, it's not near what those defense tech investors are going to be used to. And so the amount of overhead burn time they have to plan for is probably three to four times what they're thinking it is. And so I worry that there's a lot of great ideas that are going to wither on the vine. almost like planting a seed in really shallow soil until you get roots to where they can get to water, you're screwed. Yeah. What's been your experience with the capital markets generally throughout your career? Have you ever worked with venture capital?

1:09:07Has private equity played a role? Is there, can debt be used to finance some of these problems that we're trying to solve? Like how have you interfaced with the capital markets and where has it kind of fallen short in your mind? Well, I had the luxury. Because of my father's success, I was able to self-finance Blackwater. And after the initial tranche of capital, I think it was$6 million to start the whole thing. Buy the land, build the facility. We didn't have a huge CapEx load until the aircraft purchases started. But we went from one leased aircraft to 73 aircraft that we owned in six years, all self-financed, no other equity.

1:09:57We got a working line, a revolver, and that worked. I really don't like partners. I don't like PE. I don't like boards. I don't like any of it. I'm kind of a unilateral person that way. And so I'm not, I'm not the, I'm not the right one to ask about that. Yeah, that's fine. What was your pitch when you were scaling the team and hiring people? I mean, I've heard the narrative that, that the money's better when you transition into private military work, but was there more to it than that? Or is that narrative kind of overblown? Talk about building the team throughout your career. that was it was it became a significant um vortice a real center of gravity of being able to pull talent because um yeah you know c-suite talent i i never gave away equity in the business because it was dangerous it was volatile and i paid i paid extremely well i paid very competitive bonuses and then would bonus two, three to five times base at the end of the year.

1:11:11So it was effectively a big profit sharing. And maybe that's not as tax efficient or whatever, but the people liked it. The guys that, you know, our ideal staffing then was somebody that spent time in a special operations or a military unit, not a career, not usually a full career, no colonels, no generals ever. intentionally because they had spent so much time. This is take note, DOD or venture capital startups, people that spend 20 and 30 years in the military tend to get stuck in that way of thinking. And so they can't think of just finding a, a unconventional different cheaper, better, faster way to do something.

1:11:57Cause that's just the way it has always been.

1:12:04but our pitch to people was and especially for the guys deploying was you get to do what you're really good at and we will pay you very well for that every day you're in the hot zone the day you leave, their pay goes to zero so we really, our pay for deployed guys is really more like paying a roughneck our guy that's going to a rig they're busting their ass for 60 to 90 days and they're off the rig, they're relaxing They're going to the beach in Thailand or managing their family farm or whatever. But they get to do, they get to maximize their martial skills, whether it's flying a helicopter on night vision goggles at rooftop level at night or a sniper, a instructor or whatever that might be.

1:12:47They get to maximize that skill set and get paid for it without the nonsense and bullshit and the layers of stupidity that sometimes goes in the military. In this onboarding process as you're hiring, was there a story that you found yourself coming back to and telling people that would join the organization to highlight heroism or sacrifice? What was the defining story that you like to tell to kind of characterize the work? Well, I guess there's two. One happened to me when I was speaking at the National War College in Washington. So there's 300 colonels that are training to become generals. And they had me come in and talk about what we were doing as a PMC in the battle space.

1:13:37And at the end of it, this colonel came up to me and he had just been in brigade command. So in command of about 4 ,000 people in Baghdad. And he said, I want you to know that at the top of the dashboards of his people in Baghdad's Humvees were the Blackwater call signs and frequencies. Because those guys knew that if they ever got in trouble, the Blackwater guys would come for him. No bureaucracy, no nonsense. And that was – A, I was happy to hear that. That's exactly the guidance I gave my people was the Good Samaritan rule applies. if you see a friend in need, go help them out. And they did that above and beyond way too often.

1:14:19And then I remember at the change of command for Admiral Eric Olson, who was the first SEAL four-star ever and a friend and a great guy, another SEAL admiral who was in charge of all special operations in Europe and Africa came up to me and he gave me a bear hug. and he said uh thanks you guys really saved our bacon last week and you have um it was some really sporty flying i said that's why we have very sporty pilots and what had happened is a so there was a army special forces team active duty training up in molly this is before the coup and the jihad all the rest and their tents were staked down and a big wind okay they called a small wind came through and it basically picked up the tent and tossed it with guys inside and it killed one broke another guy's back another guy's uh lit trashed all their comm gear and it gave another guy massive internal bleeding that was the guy that was in danger it actually picked our aircraft up off of its moorings damaged the landing gear and the wingtip and uh our satcom was the only thing that was working in the aircraft so they called the other aircraft which was a thousand miles away and we're in the and we need medevac uh and the shemal winds were still going and now it's getting to nightfall and at that point the dod would not let us fly in that area with night vision goggles even though we'd requested it but that's okay our pilots came anyway and they landed on a single set of headlights in the desert at night now if you've ever flown over the desert you see how utterly dark it is and so to land on a single set of headlights is extraordinary and extremely dangerous wow and they landed and our medic our 18 our former 18 delta medic was strapped into the back and he gets all these wounded guys on board and he starts to work on this guy who's now his blood pressure has gone to like 50 over nothing because he's gone through every bit of liquid and he works him for the next 36 hours keeping him alive now the guy's body was distended because they couldn't figure out where the internal bleed was and they get him back to Ouagadougou and he goes way beyond protocol to save his life at at personal licensing risk to the guys you know to himself he opens him up on an operating table of this lousy Ouagadougou Burkina Faso hospital and sure enough finds that the guy's spleen is ruptured.

1:16:55That's where the leak was. And so he removes it, clamps it off, puts it in a Ziploc bag, puts the guy's organs back in, sews him up. And then finally, the high dollar Air Force surgical ward finally arrives 12 hours later. Too little too late. But our guy completely saved his life. And he took massive personal risk to do that because his job is to be a medic. It's not to do surgery, but it did anyway. And so that's in keeping with the attitude of having the right people with the right attitude and the right skillset, uh, with, with it. And we try to do intent based leadership, go forward and do good things and support the customer, make sure the good guys win.

1:17:40And that was a good day. Incredible story. I want to switch gears completely and ask you about a topic, uh, that I'm sure you spent some time thinking about, but AI safety, that you might laugh a little bit about that. But I'm curious if you've worked with any groups kind of globally around this idea, you know, just sort of the idea of AI safety as AI systems advance. You know, the labs talk about this quite a lot, the potential dangers of misaligned AI and the dangers of a adversarial government with advanced AI. What, if anything, are your thoughts on that sort of very broad question? Well, I guess the first question comes back to who's...

1:18:37Yes, I agree. Those are all very concerning topics. And undoubtedly, there are hostile, unfriendly governments that have done serious germ and bio-warfare research and development that we're not aware of. But I even question our own government when I think it's legitimate questions to ask of NIH and the rest of those guys for the gain of function testing that they were doing and funding in China, which ended up causing apparently the COVID debacle. I'd say almost like the Hippocratic Oath, let's first do no harm and let's not spend money on dumb people that should not be doing that kind of research in the first place.

1:19:21But you're right. I am certainly no AI expert. I'm probably more of a, I don't know what I'm an expert in, but I... A few things. it's safe to say that if if ai can be used for malign purposes and it will be it's going to be done or it will be done so whether it's for um breaking passwords or uh or for targeted people i'm sure some some entities are well along in that development and uh and one should be careful Yeah, that makes sense. I also wanted to ask you about, there was some unfortunate news, or at least it seemed unfortunate, that Taiwan had decommissioned their last remaining nuclear reactor and are now completely dependent on imported natural gas.

1:20:14I'm sure you have some strong opinions around this. Yeah, I find that extraordinarily stupid of them. And that's a DPP. I mean, look, the two political parties are the Koming Tong and the DPP. The KMT is the one that's really much more pro mainland CCP tilted. The DPP is just kind of a super green and a bit woke as a party that they would carry through on this and turn off a nuclear power that was a nuclear plant that was not dependent on hydrocarbons coming from the Middle East. is extraordinarily short-sighted uh it speaks to their uh disbelief their lack of fully understanding that that we are not there to hold their hand and to guarantee their safety um i have advocated as loudly as i can that the only answer for deterrence there is an actual home guard because that government is corrupted at many levels.

1:21:14Any weapon system of significant or strategic value has already been probably pre-registered to be hit with not one, but probably five Chinese missiles. So whether it's an airplane, a submarine or whatever, the only thing that can inject uncertainty into an invader is a home guard. In the same way that the American Revolution, there was only 3 % of our population that took up arms to fight. If we found, and in Taiwan, that's 24-ish million people, so over 700 ,000, if we were allowed to recruit and train a home guard three to four weeks, their military is largely useless. Their reserve forces, not so much.

1:21:59Their idea of combat training is far from what ours is. But if you find the citizens that are willing, that injects a massive uncertainty into an invader's mind because the terrain itself, either super urban or mountainous jungle, definitely favors the defender. And if Xi Jinping and the CCP are going to go for it, they have to be quick. They themselves cannot afford a long multi-year fight like you see in Ukraine because they depend on hydrocarbons and even food for imports. switching gears a little bit again i'm curious uh to get your thoughts on the european defense tech ecosystem broadly i'm sure you've done a bunch of business out there over the years there's been some renewed you know new kind of spending bills ryan mattall's been ripping fantastic stock but i don't know about the company and and i guess there's just this overarching idea that America has Anderle and now every European country wants to kind of own their own defense stack and there's a lot of energy there.

1:23:09But how do you think that the landscape around defense in Europe is changing either on the government side or the private sector? The only country I see being serious about it all is Poland. They have invested. They have invested and built some real combat capability. The Baltics have not yet. Finland, a bit. There's lots of talk about a big European defense. Extra spend. Germany has been atrocious. I don't know. I think people have bid up Ryan Battal. I don't know that their earnings have been that spectacular. Their stock price has probably done great. But that's a hope of future earnings. Sure.

1:23:51But I just see a complete lack of seriousness of European political leaders to address their own defense. And it's taken a long time to wake up from this hangover and lethargy. That being said, the most capable military in Europe right now is the Ukrainian military. The lessons learned that they have are very significant. The drone tech is far and away the best. Their ability to fight against and to even conduct electronic warfare and even close air support in this environment is leaps and bounds ahead of even what the U.S. military is. So that's the military to learn from. Ukraine does have a corruption problem.

1:24:46I hope sincerely that Trump is able to get a ceasefire in place and to stop this killing because it's absolutely pointless. It's just slobs killing slobs at this point, and nobody's going to advance. and you have a a blend of old and new if you look at the pictures of the front there now it's almost indistinguishable from the Battle of Assam artillery duels, static lines bunkers all the rest, now the problem is somebody can fly an FPV into your bunker on the other side but between tens of millions of landmines which make armored breakthrough very difficult it slows down any attack so that the FPVs and artillery can get to it, you're not going to see any kind of blitzkrieg, Hans Goderian maneuver warfare there until some significantly different weapon systems come along.

1:25:43So, look, Europe needs to get serious about it. They're far from it at this point. Yeah, at home, these conflicts have been raging for years, but they feel very abstract because in America, you just kind of go about your day and go to the grocery store and things feel normal, even though the global tenor of great power competition and even these more minor conflicts is growing every single day. Between Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Palestine, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, China, what is the most, where should the focus be right now? How should people stay up to speed? how do we get an idea, even an idea of, of where these conflicts are going?

1:26:30How should people understand the nature and the risk associated? Well, they can follow my podcast because I talk about these conflicts almost once a week. Okay. That's great. That's a great place to start. What's the name of the podcast? Let's plug it. It's, it's off leash with Eric Prince. Fantastic. Yeah. I got one last, I got one last kind of question for you. The rumors that we've heard around how the whole TikTok debacle is being solved haven't given us a lot of, hasn't gotten either of us excited. Are we the, you think we're the laughingstock of China that we can't, you know, ban the Chinese AI brain rot app?

1:27:18And will you promise us that TikTok will not run on your phone? I don't think it's capable to run on an unplugged phone. Now that you mentioned it, I will make sure that is the case. That's great. But yeah, any other color on the TikTok ban or just general relationships between China and the US with regard to technology and business, which is our focus here? Look, the Trump administration is still in the process of getting its people in the seats. and getting those institutions organized. I think, I mean, what the president just did today in showing video to Cyril Ramaphosa from South Africa about the ongoing murder and genocide of white farmers was absolutely fantastic.

1:28:05And it's even happier that Secretary Rubio is right there supporting the president. How about that? But it is a different administration than we've seen in the past. And I am happy to see those kind of issues being addressed. I wouldn't discount the TikTok thing being addressed properly this time since it wasn't the last, you know, the 45 administration. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, we're hoping for something good. But thank you so much for joining us. This is a really fascinating conversation and fantastic stories, really. I mean, just I was sitting back. I'm listening to the podcast. I'm listening to you.

1:28:46It's great. But thank you so much for stopping by. We'd love to have you back and we'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Cheers, Eric. Thanks for coming on. Have a great rest of your day. Bye. Next up, we have a surprise guest. Not on the announcement post we put on on X, but we got Anthony Poppliano, good friend of mine, hung out with him in Miami a year or two ago. We talked YouTube. We talked all sorts of video essays stuff. And he's got a SPAC. He's got a SPAC now. And he's also launching an asset manager with like a trillion dollars under management already. So he's off to the races left and right.

1:29:19Big week. Big week for Pomp. Fantastic show as well. So excited to invite him into the studio and catch up with Anthony Pompliano and get a bunch of great takes. You're here. Welcome. Guys, I love to see the suit, but we need some ties going on. I know. You caught us lacking. We're working on a tie. We're working on a tie that has ads on it. Yeah. That's our next ad unit. We'll send you one. Thank you so much for joining. How are things going? What's the latest in your world? How are you spending your time? Because you've got a lot of different things going on. Yeah, look, I think that the future is very similar to what you guys are doing, right?

1:29:56You've got to be able to operate businesses. You've got to be able to invest capital. And you've got to be able to create content on the internet. And if you think of what a business really is, is you've got to build products. You've got to be able to invest resources. And then you've got to be able to market those things. And so I don't think there's any different than what people used to do in the past. It's just now that you do it more as kind of an individual brand rather than a company. And that's what we've been doing. Yeah. What was the kind of the – I feel like you're going through like the V2 of the Pomp Media strategy.

1:30:23There's a daily show now. And you were building businesses before. What did you learn from those? And where is this going with the next iteration? Yeah. I mean, look, actually, we used to have a daily show very similar to what you guys are doing. the best business show, which was hilarious. When people would have to cite us breaking news, you'd have to write the best business show. Credit. Good, nice little troll there. But no, look, I think you guys are doing it the right way, right? It's like everyone is up leveling. And the way I describe it is when content started on the internet, everyone was basically on like their webcam.

1:30:54And then they were like in their kitchen in their webcam. And then it was like, oh, I have like an extra camera instead of the webcam. Now we pretty much just think you need TV quality with digital distribution. And so everyone is leveling up. You guys have built, I think you guys just got a 4 ,000 square foot facility, you know, all this stuff, right? We've got obviously studio stuff and it's just the cost of the technology is compressing. And now with a very small team, you're able to have massive reach. And I think that's just going to be the future of all this content. Can we just glaze X for a little bit?

1:31:24I know you've built a business on X. We love X. We've talked to the team earlier this week. I just think that like, it's so underrated as a distribution platform. People think YouTube and there are other great platforms, but the current moment with X has been particularly good for us. And I wanted to know what your take on X is, how it's been going, and any learnings that you have to share. Is Linda hiding behind your camera or something? Yeah, she's got a gun to her head. No, we just invited Linda on the show. Yeah, we want to have her on. Amazing, amazing. No, look, I think that every platform is very unique in what it provides, both in terms of the type of audience.

1:32:03Obviously, who's on LinkedIn is very different than who's on X. LinkedIn finds out things maybe a week or two after people on X find out about it. But also I think the type of content that lives there is really important, both in the form factor and also the actual substance of it. And so it doesn't make a lot of sense to go and talk about kind of daily news on LinkedIn. It makes a ton of sense to do that on X. And so what I think many people, including ourselves, have figured out over time is that we were essentially using X as an engine of growth to drive people elsewhere. Go watch on YouTube.

1:32:33Go listen to the podcast. Go read the email. Go to this website. Whatever. Why not be able to just bring that content right there in the feed? And I think that that's really what they have leaned into, and that's why it's working. And so the daily show that we have with them, I literally sit at my desk, talk direct to camera. We cut it up in this modular format and deliver it right in your feed. You don't have to go anywhere. You just consume it right there in these bite-sized components. And it's no secret that your guys kind of clip strategy and the live streaming and everything you're doing is like very eccentric.

1:33:01And I think that doesn't mean you give up on the other platforms. It just means that you're building for X and everywhere else is kind of the exhaust of that content. Yeah. Yeah. It is crazy. Like there was all this fallout from like, oh, they banned links. I can't link to my YouTube videos. And I'm like, but you can just upload those videos here. Like they literally have a video product. And, oh, you wanted the link to text? You could just put the text on X and it'll do way better. And it's not that complicated. And, yeah, you might have to change your monetization strategy a little bit. Maybe the rev share is going to be different.

1:33:34On YouTube, it's like a per video thing. And X, it's monthly. But it all works out. You're just playing for attention and reach. And, obviously, X has this. The thing that I like about the flywheel is on YouTube, every once in a while, another creator, like you would comment on my video or I'd comment on your video and we'd see each other, but we couldn't DM each other on YouTube. But on X, it's like if somebody sees a clip and they respond, oh, I think, you know, Pomp's wrong about this or I love this. Like we can all hop in a DM group chat immediately and just start talking and then hop on the show, do whatever.

1:34:05And so like, I think the water cooler with all this stuff is actually really, really inventive. Anyway, Jordy, you got anything else? Yeah, it's been interesting. People, you know, will point out, they're like, I don't understand how TBPN is like, has so much attention. People say it's good. The YouTube channel is small. It's like, yeah, we don't really spend any time on YouTube. We were happy to just focus on one platform as, you know, a very young company. A ton of important tech people hang out. Yeah. Anyway, let's talk about the other news. The SPACs in the news. How do you raise$250 million?

1:34:39Where's that money come from? That's so much money. I mean, Jordi and I have both raised money at various times. It wasn't six months ago that I think we were on the show talking about how there's nothing intrinsically wrong with totally back totally it's just been maybe misused or abused in the past and also just bad timing right because timing and ultimately what matters is the underlying asset right yeah are you you know so give us the pitch for your SPAC and then we're gonna pitch you SPAC and TBPN all right uh I mean look I do think six months is actually an interesting time frame because uh that's about when I decided hey I should go do this and you Look, I got the big audience.

1:35:19For years, bankers have been coming to me saying, do a SPAC, do an RTO, do all these things in the public market. And I always joke that we're all about the same age. Pretty much everyone in our generation watched the social network and wanted to be Zuck or invest in Zuck. So everyone ran to the private markets. It was like Wall Street and hedge funds. All that stuff is kind of loser stuff now. The cool stuff is in tech. But we have a world where this undisciplined monetary and fiscal policy is a huge persistent tailwind for liquid assets. Crypto and Bitcoin obviously saw a benefit from this, gold, public stocks, et cetera.

1:35:48And so I think a lot of people, you're starting to see them say, hey, how do I marry technology stuff with liquid assets, right? And so you're going to see that. With the SPAC in particular, I agree with you guys that the vehicle itself is not the problem. It's that people were basically doing public venture capital. Buy a money-losing company with a high valuation, and you got to try to grow into it. And some people did do that, but a lot didn't. And so it got a bad name. But what I really have talked about is like, look, if you buy - Well, the other thing, sorry to interrupt you. there's an adverse there was an adverse selection issue at the time as well which was that the companies had huge access to capital in the private market so if they were spacking it was possible that they had exhausted yep uh now stripe thing and just but i think that there's dollar tender you yeah back or something yeah but but there are businesses today that are fundamentally good businesses that have bright futures that yeah maybe you should just get public and get i remember years ago talking to a public markets investor and he was like well, yeah, like once you're in the public markets, like you shouldn't ever need to raise capital again because you're supposed to just be a going concern.

1:36:48And I was like, wait, what are you talking about? Like businesses lose money. I'm in venture. Like this is what you do. And he was like, no, no, no. Like, like if you're publicly listed, you should not be losing money for a long time because then you just shouldn't be a public company. I was like, oh, I didn't even think about that. But yeah. Anyway, sorry to cut you off. Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, I've always looked at this as if you buy a good company that has all the right criteria to be a public company and you do it at the right price, which is an important component. Basically, if you're a disciplined buyer, then it doesn't matter who the sponsor is.

1:37:17It doesn't even matter what the vehicle is. It should do well in the public markets, to your guys' point. And people weren't doing that. And so I think that that is kind of one big component. The second thing is a huge part of what we specifically have said publicly and in the filings is we want to buy a profitable company. So we don't want to buy a company and then try to make it profitable. That's hard. Let's go buy a company that is already profitable. And the reason why that six-month mark was so interesting that you mentioned that is that's about the time I started to get lots of inbound.

1:37:43And I frankly don't know why. I think some of it was the political change in DC. I think a lot in financial services, there was like a regulatory shift from a headwind to a tailwind. So people are like, okay, like this may be a better time to go into the public market. And then also like, think of all of our friends who have built companies that started sometime between like 2015 and 2020. Those companies are just now becoming big enough to actually be public companies. And so there's like that cohort of people are now like ready to get into that public market. And so they're looking for the vehicles to be able to do that.

1:38:10And we hope that, you know, we're one of many that they consider to be able to do that. How does the actual deal work once you find a company? Are you buying a minority stake in the company or are you buying the whole company? And then as I remember, it was like, you'd usually see like a couple hundred million dollars in a SPAC, but it'd be trading at 4 billion. And then you take a company public and then the share price goes from there. Is that roughly correct? I don't know enough about that. The best way that I know to describe it is like the SPAC gives you a lot of optionality, which is why I'm attracted to it.

1:38:40So we raised$250 million into the SPAC. You have the ability to buy a lot of a company, or you can buy a very little bit of a company, right? But you have$250 million of cash. You do have to go to those investors and say, hey, this is the deal that I found. This is the deal that I negotiated in terms of the economic terms. They vote. So if you bring them a bad deal, they can also just say like, eh, screw it. We're going to take our money back and like, you know, good luck. So you have to do a good deal that they obviously are signing up for, But you also have the ability to use pipes and other kind of capital markets tools so that you can size up in terms of total capital invested in one of these businesses.

1:39:13And then the beautiful thing about this is it's a negotiation with a target company. And so it's two people in the market coming together and saying, this is what we think it's worth, right? This is what they're willing to take. This is what we're willing to buy. And I think that that tends to, if people are rational and disciplined, actually end up with something better in the public market. And it's different than a venture fund where the money is not literally sitting in the venture fund. They need to make a capital call. With the SPAC, the money sits in T-bills, right? Is that correct? Yeah, correct.

1:39:41It's in the vehicle. Some people have interest. Some people don't. There's some nuance there. But basically, you can go to someone and be like, I have the money. I have the money. I don't have to raise the money. But LPs can't tell me like, hey, sorry, I'm not going to send the money. I got the money. He's good for his$250. So I mean, I'm super fascinated by this whole industry. And so are people pitching you? Do you expect this to be something where you get an introduction from a venture capitalist or an investment banker or just a founder? Is this like a founder-led deal? Or are you going to be going outbound finding some business where they're not even considering selling because they're profitable, they're happy, and you kind of come in, give them the pitch and say, hey, this might be the right time to look at something else.

1:40:21Let's do this deal. Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of rules, again, in terms of like what you can do. So right now, I can't talk to any target companies. Got it. That'll be true for another 24, 48 hours. But once the deal is closed, I can actually talk. I've got a ton of people who've been reaching out to me. Frankly, some of them are probably interesting. Some of them aren't. I don't know. I haven't talked to them or done the work yet. But also, I think that you have an idea of like, hey, it would be interesting to go talk to these types of businesses, right? And so you want to go and figure that out.

1:40:46The whole key to this thing. What categories are you excited about? What are you just going to kind of ignore, right? I don't imagine you're going to, like, defense tech obviously doesn't make sense, or I would imagine doesn't make sense. Maybe it could. There's some profitable things. Only in partnership with TVPN. No, we're very focused on financial services. We do have, like, a legal mandate. We could do things outside, but financial services is a focus. And the idea there is, I think most people, you know, it's no secret, right? I've got a reputation from all the Bitcoin and crypto stuff. And so, like, are you going to go buy that?

1:41:19And I just look at financial services as it's all becoming one thing. You know, Robinhood is a traditional exchange business, but they have crypto as a fast-growing segment. Kraken is a private crypto exchange, but they're adding U.S. equities. And so we're just seeing the merging of the new and old worlds in finance, and I think that's where you're going to continue to see this go. Similar to what we're building with Sylvia, that's what we're going to do on the SPAC side is we're just looking for where can you get distribution directly to my audience with financial-related type product services and companies.

1:41:51and then that's where we want to play. Yeah, talk to us about Sylvia. I know you got 18 million sitting in cash. We got some recommendations for hypercars you could pick up if you need one, but break it down. Stable assets. Yeah. They're not making any more P1s. Well, before I tell you about Sylvia, who's the best sponsor? Like maybe we should just talk, like, you know, you guys should just just boast them up a little bit. Well, next up we got Wander so we could talk about finding your happy place. We sing. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views. hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service.

1:42:24It's a vacation home, but better pomp. Do it. Just book a wander today. Do it right now. We're not letting you all eat. You could live in a wander forever. People dream of organic integrations like that right there. We're going to clip this. We'll both promote it. It's a dream come true. Thank you for participating in that with us. Yeah, you guys got it. So Sylvia is – look, I think every single person I know who is in like the business tech finance world, they got the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet is basically the thing that ties together all your accounts in one place so you know just like, what do I own?

1:42:58There's not usually a lot of expense-related stuff. It's all about, you know, how much cash do I have? What are my investments? What are they worth? All that kind of stuff. And so what we did is we built essentially a box that you go and you attach your brokerage accounts, your cash accounts, your crypto accounts, your private investments, your collectibles. People have added precious metals, guns, cars, houses, all kinds of stuff. In that box, it gets encrypted and anonymized. And then what we did is we overlaid a bunch of AI models on top of it so that you can do simple things like you can prompt it and say, what's my debt to equity ratio or analyze my stock portfolio and tell me where you see risk.

1:43:34But also you can email Sylvia. You can call her on the phone. For those that are wondering, I do not have$18 million in my checking account and 500K in my savings account. At this very moment. That was some great dummy data. It's interesting because I feel like Mint.com was popular and kind of fell off and maybe even got shut down. I was getting an email about that. Maybe it's done. And so obviously this is an opportunity. But those are very expense related, right? Totally. It's all about like saving money. And there is a huge market. Obviously, people in America, there's a lot of people focused on saving money.

1:44:07But I do think that there is this very specific cohort. The data that we have right now, we just crossed over$2.5 billion connected on the platform. It's been about four weeks. If you think about it, it's less than 1 ,000 users that have connected accounts. And so these are people who are multimillionaires who are going onto this platform on average and connecting these accounts. And so to them, it's less about how do I save money, and it's more about how do I make more money. And that's what they're really trying to figure out. It's like where's my money, where are my assets, and then what can I do to actually grow those assets?

1:44:38and we think that there's something interesting to build there. We're going to let you go, but finish it out with where can people get started with Sylvia? Well, after they go and they stay at a wander and they sleep on an eight sleep, then they can go to cfosylvia.com and they can check it out there. Okay. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll have to have you back for a deeper dive. This is fantastic. Excited to follow this back. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Next up, we're going over to OpenAI land. uh we got nakunj coming in from open ai talking about a new release new tools and features in the responses api their mcp server we're gonna explain uh we're gonna have him explain uh the the the adoption of mcp that standard and welcome to the stream how are you doing boom well yeah great to be here this is exciting thanks so much for joining the temple of technology Welcome to the Tumblechip, PUBG.

1:45:31Yeah, it happens to be this podcast specifically, not OpenAI. Also, big, big, probably, I mean, big day in OpenAI Slack today. Yeah, congratulations on the merger, the acquisition. That's very exciting. The IO acquisition. I'm sure we'll get into design and decision-making around design and devices at some point. But let's start with the announcement today. Can you introduce yourself, exactly what you do at OpenAI, maybe even how long you've been there, and then what you release today? Yeah, sure. My name is Nikunj. I'm on the product team here working on our API. Been here for almost two years now.

1:46:06I've been working on the API since day one. And mostly focused on getting out new models in the API, releasing new tools, just making the API much easier for developers to use to build applications. So yeah, that's me. And then today, what's the big announcement around tools and features in the Responses API? Yeah, sure. So about two months ago, we released the Responses API. We used to have an API called Chat Completions. That was the thing that almost all of AI was built on top of. We created a new iteration of that endpoint called the Responses API, which is much more powerful. It supports built-in tools.

1:46:47It supports multiple model turns. It's really natively built for models like O3 and O4 Mini, which have reasoning built into them. And today what we did is we expanded the suite of tools that developers have access to. So the most exciting thing is support for remote MCP servers. And so now developers can plug in their responses API integration into any remote MCP server across the Internet. You have servers like Stripe, Shopify, Asana, Linear, HubSpot. And I think this ecosystem is just going to grow so much more over time. Really excited to see what people build on top of it. Is the benefit of direct MCP support something about latency?

1:47:36Because I imagine that I could be interacting with the chat GPT API or the GPT API and then make a separate call to Stripes API. And I could even have Cursor or Windsurf write that integration for me. And that doesn't seem that difficult. So I've always wrestled with MCP being, it's great, it's cool, it's a standard, but what's the real value besides saving a couple developer hours writing an API binding library or wrapper? Yeah, I think there are a couple of angles to this. So firstly, because these organizations and companies are building MCP servers, they're taking an LLM first approach to what the API needs to expose to the agent.

1:48:18So Stripe has a bunch of APIs that can be used to create a subscription or a customer or a product or a price. But for an LLM, they could just sort of combine that into a single function. And instead of returning this massive JSON object, they can return something that's very specific to the task that was being solved so that LLM can more easily understand what's happening. So it's an opportunity to rewrite your APIs to be very LLM first. So that's the first thing. The second thing is like friction, right? Like what you said is like maybe two hours of work, but why do the two hours of work when you can do it in like four lines of code in like less than a minute?

1:49:01And so this is just going to make it so much easier for developers to put together multiple tools and whatnot. The other sort of thing that I'm really excited about is like responses API takes multiple turns. So in chat completions, you would have to like put it in a for loop and like make it keep going until it tells you it's done. Responses API, you give it three or four tools, you give it a task, it'll keep going automatically. Single API call, finish the whole thing and give you the result. So it's truly magical when you get that. That's amazing. Rune famously wrote, text is the universal interface.

1:49:37Is it just standing over ovation for him over there today? because this feels like a victory for the text as the universal interface paradigm. But is there more nuance that you could add to that philosophy of machines communicating with other machines via text? Because that feels like, you know, again, the LLM understands JSON. I understand what you're saying, and probably faster and smoother. But at the same time, we could just train an LLM to speak JSON, correct? Yeah, totally. I think LLMs can understand JSON. I guess the meta point there was if you could optimize your tools and combine them for tasks that you want AI agents and developers to be able to do, that's much better, right?

1:50:22Like at the end of the day, a model is not deterministic. So even if you ask it to call like four tools one by one, it's going to have some instances where it takes the wrong step and then needs to backtrack and like fix it. But if you have these like curated functions and tools exposed via an MCP server that it can directly go to. It just makes it so much more reliable for agents to be able to like do the thing that they're designed to do. And so there's definitely some benefit to that. In terms of text, yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, that makes sense to me. How has your general high level view on MCP evolved over the past few months?

1:51:07Were you skeptical at first? Were you always excited about the potential of it? It seems like a total MCP victory at this point. Yeah, yeah. Initially, I mean, the main goal was how do we get an ecosystem of tools started? And OpenAI did this thing with plugins back in the day where we built it all on top of OpenAPI specs. And our plugins was integration was a little too early for its time because the models weren't that good at using these third party tools. really well. And we didn't take a second stab at it, but the MCP folks did. And MCP is great. It supports so much more than just tools. And it took off.

1:51:51It was initially like local only. So, you know, there was some hesitation about like, how will people easily plug into this thing? But now with the streamable HTTP protocol so that these things can be hosted remotely across the internet uh it's just perfect like i'm so excited about uh what's going to happen with mcp over the coming months um the hundreds of remote mcp servers that are going to exist developers are just going to like plug into them it's it's just going to make things so much better so really really excited about the opportunities here i mean currently most of these uh most of these like when you hit an mcp server you're kind of expecting a few seconds of of latency just because of how long it takes to inference these models.

1:52:35I've been kind of beating the drum on, hey, some of these models are just good enough. Let's bake them into silicon and make them respond in like two milliseconds. And I don't know if that's happening or not. You don't need to comment on that. But I like mid journey V5, I was like, it's good enough. Like just make it instant. VO3, I'm like, I'm ready for it just to be like instantaneous. Certainly with deep research and and ChatGPT generally, I'm super satisfied. I'm like, I don't really have any requests for improvements to the models. I just want faster and cheaper and easier. But do you think that if inferencing does go through some sort of massive speed up, whether it's from custom silicon or architectural redesign, does geocaching or edge computing become important to the way MCP servers communicate with each other?

1:53:29For example, like I don't necessarily, if I'm going to the Portland AWS hosting of some MCP server, I don't actually want to be routed to Virginia by accident. And so do you think that that will require like a new rethink of the spec or is that something that just be naturally handled by load balancing? You know, the spec is just like, how do you communicate between the MCP client and the MCP server? So it tells you like, you know, literally the JSON RPC like object that needs to go between the two parties. Optimizing the geocaching of it really depends on the service provider, right? So if I'm going to call mcp.stripe.com or allbirds.com slash API slash MCP, which is, by the way, Allbirds has an MCP server.

1:54:13How crazy is that? Shopify has to route it to like the right place. We need an MCP server. Help us build one. I don't know what we do, but we want to get in on the action. Yeah, we feel a little bit left out. Create a Shopify store and you'll have one instantly. Oh, that's good. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. For the merch, you can integrate. Yeah. So, I mean, OpenHair already does a lot of geo-routing based on where the inference request is coming from. So we try to like route it to something near. And then when the request leaves OpenAIS infrastructure and goes to say Stripes or Shopify, they could do that as well based on, you know, either like an explicit URL or something more magical on their end where they can detect where it's coming from and route it to the right place.

1:54:59Makes sense. Any other questions, trends in pricing? I know that there's pricing and availability updates. Anything to share there? No, pricing is like, you know, it's an infrastructure play over here. MCP is free to use. You just pay for the tokens. We have code interpreter, which is like the Python tool. By the way, the Python tool is the thing in O3 that can do GeoGuessr-like things when you upload your images. So you can just bring that into the API. Why is Python relevant there? Yeah, so what's actually happening is when you put an image in the O3 model, it writes Python code to zoom in. Sure.

1:55:43It tries to find clues. It crops them. It inverts the images. Got it. It then like does web searches. So it's like all the image manipulation is based on Python and that is enabled by the code interpreter tool, which is also available in the API today. That's interesting. I noticed that because I took a picture of a podcast. I wanted to see how tall the table was. I uploaded this images from the Pat McAfee show. And I noticed that when I unpacked the O3 internal reasoning, it was like writing tons and tons of lines of image processing code in Python. all to draw lines and count pixels to see how tall the table was relative to the person.

1:56:23It wrote like 500 lines, 5 ,000 lines of Python. We were joking about it. I had poor 03 yesterday. I said, how many white boxes in this picture? And it was coding for like almost 14 minutes. And then unfortunately failed. It was like putting a software engineer on the task for a month. But now you get it in two minutes. But it is incredible. I can see where that goes. It just adds a completely different angle of attack on reasoning and it needs to be an important tool in the tool chest so yeah how are you how are you uh leveraging codex today i'm sure you guys got got early access but i'm i'm curious if and where it's fitting into your your toolbox toolkit today i see the engineers using it non-stop like uh we had to make a couple of changes for the launch we had to like fix error messages these are like such small things and you can just fire up a codex task and do it.

1:57:17I've used it for docs changes a bunch of times where I'm just like, there's a typo here, change this heading. And these are tiny things. I just like write it, forget about it, create a PR. I mean, I don't have to bug people anymore. It's really helpful. And I think engineers are actually doing like even more complex tasks on top of it. But I just see everyone in the company using it, which is really cool. Very cool. What are you daily driving as a personal smartphone these days? Are you iPhone, Android, maybe something else? What do you got? You got early access yet? You got something in your pocket?

1:57:55Okay, okay. No leaks today, but we've been asking. Still part of Johnny's legacy. We try to trick you into leaking the hardware here, but we'll get you back next time. Yeah, I'm sure we'll find out soon. But it's an exciting Acquisition. But thank you so much for stopping by. That's very exciting. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats to you and the team on the, on the launch. Thank you so much. See ya. Bye. Next up, we got David Sandler coming in the temple of technology, the godfather of podcasting himself. Brother behavior. We need a lot of, we need a lot of sound effects for this one. He's been on an absolute tear, dropping podcast after podcast.

1:58:34But today we want to talk about Johnny Ive. Yeah. And Apple. And Steve Jobs. What would Steve Jobs be doing in this situation? I want to play out that scenario for sure. And then we've got Scott Wu coming in from Cognition, talking about Devin, coding agents. Every company has a coding agent now. Crowded market. I want to know how it plays out, so we're excited to talk to him about that. Then we've got Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg Oddlots coming on the show. We'll get an update on the market. It's been flat for a couple days. Rough week for Joe. It's been terrible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's not getting his dopamine fixed.

1:59:07How is he getting through it? I want to know. I'm sure he's finding obscure exchanges where things are chaotic. He might be going 100x short volatility. Yeah. Maybe he's just printing. Might be shorting Costco at 50 times earnings. Maybe we'll have to ask him. Anyway, let's do some more ads in the meantime. Let's tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Any watch. And I think we got through our ads here today. Download the app. Yeah. um we can also go through some i'm actually shocked at how frequently i use bezel like i'm a dau i was talking to quaid yeah friend and one of the co-founders and he was like yeah a lot of like a lot of people actually daily are just dau's yeah regardless if they're like actually shopping right away well we got david senra and founders podcast coming into the studio welcome to the show how you doing what's up guys uh before we begin i have to apologize for not wearing a suit but i think you'll make an exception an exception because i'm wearing a ramp shirt oh there we go let's hear it switch your business to ramp.com save time and money um how you doing what's the latest there there used to be this thing i mean it's probably still a thing where david like would you would you'd be happy to meet somebody but the one requirement was that they listen to founders.

2:00:34Eventually, it's going to be you listen to founder and your business runs on ramp. And if you don't check both boxes, not happening. No shot. That's hilarious. Anyway, what's the latest? Did you read the Bloomberg article about Johnny Ive joining OpenAI? No, you have to tell me what's going on. I just got a bunch of text messages about this. And I think there's something related to Steve Jobs coming back to Apple we could talk about too. That's interesting. But no, I have no idea what's happening. So the article is obviously like, it's amazing in the sense that it's Johnny Ive, a$6 billion acquisition, huge number, 2 % of open AI equity going over to Johnny Ive and his team.

2:01:15But the, and it's also super interesting because they're going to build a hardware device for ChatGPT, for AI, an AI first hardware. And if there's any team that can break through with a consumer electronics product, it's got to be Sam Altman and Johnny Ive, right? They are an incredible combination to go after this. At the same time, the article basically said nothing. And they put out a nine-minute video, and it's just them saying, oh, he's one of the most thoughtful individuals. He's one of the best people to work with. His family's amazing. And they're just talking about how much they love working together.

2:01:47And it doesn't actually give us any advice or any guidance on, is it a phone? Is it a watch? Is it going to fold? Is it big? Is it small? That's very Steve Jobs-esque. He'd be very proud. um listen i guess going into this like i'm an unabashed like johnny ive uh fan okay there's actually an excellent uh biography of him that i think everybody should read i read it like five years ago if you want to um listen to the podcast i did on it's episode 178 before you get the book yeah but i'd highly recommend reading the entire book um yeah i just i think uh if you think about like the conversation we had this morning uh about taking things very seriously i facetimed you guys at like 6 30 in the morning and you're in your studio like getting ready and preparing we're sitting in these exact seats yeah like i think that's one of the things that jumps out in johnny's uh biography is just like his intolerance for a lack of effort so like there's a great story um i just pulled up a bunch of my highlights from um the book but when johnny was in design he was studying industrial design um i think it was in england and there's this great line where a friend of his comes over they have a project right and they're making these like foam product prototypes of product they're designing and he goes in johnny's apartment and he found over a hundred foam model prototypes where most students would build half a dozen so the normal expectation is hey i'm gonna make six prototypes of this you know new design for this product i'm doing and johnny's like yeah fuck that i'm doing a hundred and i think when you read the book you it makes sense It's like I just tweeted this out where it's actually Steve Jobs.

2:03:23Let me pull it up. Steve Jobs talking about Johnny. And he's talking about Johnny with Walter Isaacson. And he's writing the book with Walter Isaacson as he knows he's dying. And he calls, you know, he says that essentially if he had a spiritual partner at Apple, it would be Johnny. He's not just a designer. That's why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me. And there's no one who could tell him what to do besides Steve. so again I always think of like actions express priorities like one of my favorite maxims and Steve is telling you you know he had this probably the highest bar of talent out of anybody's ever maybe anybody's ever existed yeah and he's saying this is the best guy this is my number two yeah I think that like speaks volumes about like what he thought of in terms of Johnny's talent yeah I mean it's it's so interesting because I guess the open I guess the open question in my mind is, does Johnny Ive need a Tim Cook figure to do what he does?

2:04:22And what I mean by that is that obviously Tim Cook's been the CEO of Apple for over a decade now, but he was a supply chain mastermind and Johnny Ive could throw a crazy idea out there like an aluminum milled unibody design for the MacBook Pro, and Tim Cook was able to actually go get it done. And in the new era of global competition with China, faltering relationships, and not a legacy at OpenAI around hardware manufacturing, which is a unique skill set, can Johnny Ive actually deliver a product that gets into the hands of millions of consumers with the quality that apple is known for without a tim cook like figure will we see another acquisition steve jobs needed a tim cook figure i think anybody does so like yeah the answer is of course he does like i will have we have no obviously no idea what they're going to build um what i think is just interesting is which way more applicable to like us and the people that are listening it's just like the study i just tweeted this back at sam par from my first million it's like you don't copy the what you copy the how and so i think the important thing of like yeah you could hypothesize of like what johnny's going to build or just like hey how does this guy approach like his life and work is there anything that he said in there that i could actually use and i think that's like much more interesting to me than be like can you predict what's going to happen with this thing that they're told no details about and that like who knows i don't know like can they build hardware who the fuck knows like we're gonna find out that's the fun part yeah uh but yeah i'm not into like prediction i'm just like we'll see yeah so i mean he wasn't a founder at apple uh he became a founder with by founding io and uh his his love from his agency uh now he's back in the senior executive role can you tell me a little bit about his management style how hardcore he is anything that ties to johnny ives like living like founder mode or any of those kind of uh ties to other executives kind of what we might expect or what we might pattern match against is it just steve jobs or other other people yeah i think he had like i would argue like you know equal to um sense of like a high threshold for quality that jobs did i was just listening to the episode i did five years ago on johnny's biography and it's like talks about like they they thought very similar about design and products and they were very much partners you know i almost like a co-founder relationship is that i know that'd be controversial but like that's the way i would think about like how deeply they were working together um but what i say is he's like much more diplomatic where johnny's like you know we could do better than this and steve jobs like this is shit get it out and and part of that they i think they hypothesize his biographer hypothesizes that it's like you know his his growing up in england like he's just more reserved and quiet manner um but what i loved is i think the very beginning of the book uh the the the author is interviewing him and he he was and this is even before he was going to write a book on him he was just covering apple at the time i think he was a reporter if i remember correctly and he just like wanted a soundbite on this new apple product and he says i just wanted a soundbite but he launched into a passionate 20 minute soliloquy about his latest work i could barely get in a word edgewise he couldn't help himself design is his passion um and i think that's just he's just obviously completely obsessed and willing to like work hard there's another thing that um i thought it was interesting he calls it attention to invisible details uh it says i've uh johnny cared deeply about the parts users would never see believing that quote care was taken even on details hard and soft that people may never discover and he says that he was fanatical uh he he provided a fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff um so these just like that's why i'm just a huge fan of anybody like this i don't care if you're building the iphone or you're making a pizza like just i i'm very attracted to and obsessed uh with people that take whatever they're doing very very seriously it's funny that the opposite is is enzo who's like i don't care if the door panels align i care if the driver shits his pants yeah that's i would actually argue that they're very similar because enzo remember like enzo was building a race car he wasn't building like he wasn't trying to it just happened that when they were winning all the races then you have all these consumers say hey i want a ferrari though too but i would actually think like what they both share in common is they keep the main thing the main thing yeah and in enzo's cases he's not trying to buy build a luxury product he's trying to literally make the fastest car that he didn't give a shit about ferrari the actual auto manufacturer if you read his biography and in fact the longest book i've ever read for founders let me see if i can find it real quick uh was a thousand page biography of enzo ferrari no way and it's it was just republished same author uh this book is excellent it's enzo ferrari by luca de monte so this used to be a thousand pages no one bought the goddamn book because no one wants to read a thousand pages so they edited it down to 450 pages um yeah so if you You know, Enzo is one of my favorite founders.

2:09:38I've ever, I've done like three or four. Well, you know that Johnny Ive at Love From, his design consulting agency, one of their biggest clients is Ferrari today. I didn't know that. And so there's probably some linkages here. Perfect. So can you give us a little bit more about what we can expect? We were joking about maybe OpenAI should just integrate with the Ferrari. And you just need to buy a Ferrari if you want to access the premium tier of ChatGPT. You can only access it when you're - experience it on the saddle leather of a Ferrari. That will only work if they're going to do a collaboration with TBBN.

2:10:13I think that's the... Oh, sorry. I can't do my homework today. My Ferrari's in the shop. This summer, I'm going to force you to go to the Ferrari dealer in LA and get one. Because if you're really such an Enzo fan... Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You should have a Ferrari. Shouldn't you be honoring his legacy every time you go to the grocery store? funny i would i drove past the uh my daughter used to go my the dot my the school my daughter used to go to was actually next door to a ferrari dealership in miami which is like the most miami thing ever right super miami yeah but there's a great i tweeted it out when i passed by the other day because it says uh he had this great line where he's like uh passion can't be explained it can only be lived yeah and i was like oh that's like a really good uh way to think about the way he looks like but when we finish that thought it's just like his primary thing was just like i want the fastest race car in the world and so that's what he meant he's like i don't give a shit if the doors don't line up i just when the race car driver hits the gas i want him to shit his pants which is also a fucking hilarious quote yeah i wonder what the ai equivalent of that is like what is the ferrari of ai models right now because they're all kind of completing i'm personally i'm personally very excited about this uh i was just talking to our mutual friend patrick from invest like the best yeah and we both feel very similarly it's just like i don't want to look at screens all day long so i know you had um you had that guy that's building friend his name Yeah, just this idea like I'm not saying I want to wear something around my neck or have glasses on my face, whatever, but anything that would kind of get me out off of looking at screens is like I'm very like I would buy it day one just to test it out.

2:11:45Yeah, John was saying like maybe a Walkman style device with wired headphones, you know, kind of analog, but just piping the AI right into your brain. Maybe a football helmet. I mean, it's interesting. I was thinking it's like, what is Elon's AI hardware plays? One is Optimus, right? But then the other is actually just Neuralink. He's like, I want to jump, he could say, I want to jump to the end state, which is like human and computer become one. Crazy. I want the opposite of that. I did this episode on Christopher Nolan, and it was very fascinating because this guy makes some of the most high-tech movies of all time.

2:12:25They're very difficult to make, and yet he lives a complete like analog life uh one of the famous famous anecdotes from his biography was hilarious where he doesn't have an email doesn't even carry he carries like a normal flip phone won't use gps like goes to a new city and has to like feel his way around and ask for directions and everything but the funny thought was he would people you know send scripts everywhere so they're like oh yeah just like i'll read your script email it to me he's like i'm gonna fly on a plane tomorrow and i'll be at your house at noon and he'll hand you the script if he wants you to be in the movie and then he sits there and stares at you while you read it and then you're John, you talk about it, and then he takes the script back.

2:12:58There's no other copy. That's amazing. Everybody's got to figure out their own integration for what they want for technology. I want it to disappear in the background. In many cases, if you study this book, and again, I would order the book. I would definitely read it. It's worth it, especially because it's going to play a fucking huge role at one of the most important companies in the world right now. Totally. But I just want technology to disappear. There is some quotes in the book that might be fascinating that kind of answers your question, John. I didn't mean to like side skirt at all. But as far as like what he, how he thinks about design, he says he takes big chances instead of evolutionary approach to design.

2:13:32And if they focus grouped any of his designs, this is a description from college. It was also accurate when he went to Apple. And if they had focused his designs, they would, they wouldn't have been a success. So he's not looking for like, really wasn't interested in like any kind of like iterative design. He wants something that looks completely different. And there is a weird story. I think some people might find it odd story from his college days when he was studying design that he talked about that the best physical objects, they are very inviting to the touch that humans have this. I forgot what he called it, like an obsession.

2:14:08He has a word for it, but essentially obsession with touching things. And so he was asked to design a pen and people are like, OK, I'm going to write, you know, create a pen that you can write and it works upside down or it never runs out of ink. He's like, no, but what do people actually do at pens? Like anybody holding a pen in their hand, they're like clicking it. They move it around. He's like, they want to, I didn't think he said this word, but they want to finger it for lack of a better word. So they want to like play with it a lot. And so yeah, any kind of physical device that he makes, I think isn't going to just be like, oh, this kind of looks like an iPhone.

2:14:37I think it's going to be like drastically different. Yeah, it's a big challenge. And I mean, he's pulled away from Apple, a lot of the people that were integral to the magic of the devices, the MacBook, the iPhone, all these things. I'm really excited to see it. 2026 can't come soon enough. What about Jim Simons? You did a recent show about him. Very different from Johnny Ive, but what are the similarities? Because you think about a hedge fund versus a consumer electronics manufacturer. I imagine that there are no similarities, and yet I imagine you found some. How much would you pay to rip a heater with Jim Simons and Johnny Ive at once?

2:15:21I mean, that's a priceless heater right there. That's potentially a seven-figure heater. This is why I think I got so many text messages, and they linked me to whatever article today. Because OpenAI essentially bought Johnny's company. Johnny was the founder, and it's for like$6 billion or something, I guess is the thing. And everybody said the same thing in the text messages. like how much money did apple pay to like buy back steve jobs yeah and this is one of the thing that jim has in common rockefeller has in common bezos suggested bezos to shareholder letters which i think is a really good episode michael dell over and over again it's like this idea of like you you absolutely must work with the highest quality people you can and everybody says that and nobody does it because it is so hard to do it and one of the reasons i also uh brad jacobs talks about this It's like you have to overpay for talent because it's nearly impossible to overpay for talent.

2:16:11So obviously the canonical example of that is, hey, Apple is going to buy next for 500, half a billion dollars. They paid essentially half a billion dollars to rehire Steve Jobs, and they got the deal of a century. Nobody is going to look back at what Steve did and be like, oh, you overpaid it. It just doesn't happen. So Jim, the crazy thing about Jim, and then actually me and a mutual friend of ours that I can't name just stayed up till like 2 in the morning talking to this guy that works at Citadel. and it was very fascinating like ken griffin was the same exact way we just like i heard some of the competition for his top people and guess what like they would blow i think it would shock how much money they make but then you look at their performance it's like direct it's actually ken won't cap their competition so like if you make him more money you're like unlimited money that you'll uh that you'll get because of he understands the talent so the thing about jim is that's that's nuts, right?

2:17:02Is he churns through partners and, you know, people say Jim Simons had a hedge fund. I don't think about as a hedge fund. I think he had a magic money machine. Like it was very different than normal. You know, the fund made well over a hundred billion dollars in profit and it continues to make from what I understand, you know, many, many billions in cashflow every single year. And there's no outside money. It's just owned. The only monies in there was Jim's family's money and then you have to work at renaissance yeah uh and then if you quit they they you the reason they have such low turnover is because if you quit you can't invest in the medallion fund anymore so you're never gonna quit go invest your money somewhere else but but the crazy thing so what i'll do is like the fascinating thing is jim is like churning through partners because it takes him decades of trial and error to actually get the system that he wants but then he would talk about and he talks about this when he's an older man too uh he'd give interviews He was much older because he wasn't doing that when he was younger.

2:17:57But he's just like, you have to work with the very best people. And when you identify the person, you have to just put all the effort you possibly can to convince them to work for you. OK, a lot of people understand that. But then you go look up the people he identified. And it's just like he hired nothing but mathematicians and physicists. And you'd be like, yeah, it's not just like some professor in a math department somewhere. It's like this guy has a theorem named after him. And there's a law named after him. It's like literally the top of the top of the top of the top. because they were, you know, made$100 billion plus with 300, anywhere from what I've heard, 250 to like 400 employees.

2:18:30So a very, very tiny team, small team relative to the profits produced of just unbelievable A players. And I have to imagine that's what, you know, people at OpenAI are doing. It's like, well, who's the best designer in the world? If we're going to build our own product, who would you go and get? And yeah, maybe, yeah. Yeah, 2%. It's totally worth it. That's what I was saying. It's a big number, but it's a big company. it's a big opportunity and of course josh uh josh kushner was already in io oh yeah so now he's getting uh more everything thrive gets more uh of open ai yeah but um but anyways speaking of mathematicians we got scott woo yeah we got scott with cognition coming in i'm jealous i love scott big fan of his have you guys ever played uh the video of him at a math competition when he's like 12 on the show i mean it's been viral so many times we haven't played it on our show but we probably should it still plays in my mind but it's excellent we'll bring him in to the studio thank you so much for stopping by yep of course see you guys soon love you have me talk to you soon i love you too i love you too uh and we'll bring scott in in just a second jordy you want to kick off the intro yeah let's take a quick break and uh maybe do some ad reads talk about his former employer ramp.com switch your business to ramp.com john use the restroom use the restroom get out of here no dead air we do not stop talking scott is in the studio let's bring him in

2:20:02welcome scott there he is how's he gone what's happening good to have you back yeah good to be back and by the way i love david tenra it's uh it's it's it's so fun to be on back to back with I love the story of recruiting and truly just fighting for the best people. I've always felt the same way, which is people always ask about evaluating talent, which is, of course, it's a very deep thing. But if anything, I think the much more valuable thing is just you kind of already know who the really great people are. And the question is, how can you build your whole organization around making it the right one for them to join?

2:20:40Yeah, sort of a random story, but was reminded of this. I think we talked about it a couple of days ago, but Steve Jobs apparently called the original founder of Siri like over 20 times. He called him every single day. He knew that he wanted Siri to be a part of Apple, and he just repeatedly called over and over and over and over and over and over. Wouldn't stop until he finally said yes to joining. But I think something about it, too, is like i think to you you said something which is like everybody knows who the best people are but i actually think that's maybe only the case if you're also ultra no it's easy hiring is easy you just look up who's won an imo gold medal you hire all of them and then uh you just raise a bunch of money and then the rest is easy it's super easy no it's fair it's fair yeah you have to be you have to be in the right kind of circles and communities to know the best people but but i I generally think that people spend relatively too much time, I think, on evaluating, you know, people who are at the border versus like really just fighting for the absolute top tier of people.

2:21:47So, yeah. Yeah. It's always it's always a mistake to think like, oh, this is like a B player. I can make them into an A player. Like there's just so much sweat there. And the math rarely works out. usually you're better just finding someone who's a great fit for your company, your team, the skills that they have, and you can just turn them loose and let them run, which is always the best. Anyway, I mean, tons of news. Every company seems to have an AI coding agent. I want to know how should I be thinking about the market? I was on X talking to some people. I'd kind of mapped it out as there is consumer code that is written when I just prompt O3.

2:22:28So the example I gave was I wanted to know how tall a desk was in an image. I uploaded the photo and O3, without me asking it to write code, wound up writing a ton of image processing code in Python. I didn't say write code. It just wrote code for me. That's kind of autonomous AI coding. Now there's Codex, which feels more prosumer. I have a GitHub repo. I wanted to go fix a bug for me. Then there's something more in the enterprise side, like hands on the keyboard all day long. I need a super powered IDE. That's Windsurf cursor. And then I'm seeing the top down enterprise deals from companies like Cognition.

2:23:07So how is that the reasonable frame for thinking about the market? Or is it all just winner take all? Is there one market? Are there four? How are you thinking about it? and what are you seeing in the market these days? Yeah, for sure. So high little breakdown. I think there's a few different product experiences. And by the way, it's fun to see so many agents coming out this week. But there's a few different product experiences. But I think there's primarily two markets is how we kind of think about it. And it's, you know, in one line, it's basically engineers and engineering teams versus non-engineers.

2:23:41I think the thing about it with DevTool, you know, totally agree with your point, obviously that there's some differences between enterprise and self-serve and so on. In practice, I mean, we have both businesses, for example, and a lot of these other players that you mentioned also have both businesses. In practice, I think what happens with developer tooling is engineers are engineers, right? And so engineers are talking to the same people, the same people who are building their own projects at home are also going and shipping pull requests and stuff at work. and there's kind of a lot of overlap in that space.

2:24:14And so there's kind of the, I'll call it the app builder category of build me a simple app and that's kind of targeted towards non-engineers today and giving them the ability to write software, build software like you're kind of saving. And then there's engineers, which there are kind of some subcategories within, but I think for the most part, it's all connected much more so. My current AGI test, I've moved the goalposts 25 times. I'm moving them again. My current AGI goal is if I can go to Google's new Jules AI agent, and if I can, with one prompt, say, build me Google Reader, and it does it, then AGI has arrived.

2:24:56That's my new goalpost. Yeah. It's kind of insane if you think about it. So one of the things, there was some research that came out, and people did some statistical analysis. And if you just look at the length of time that an autonomous coding system can go in between every human intervention, it's kind of insane. It's doubled like every three months. And so it's like that's like 16x a year. And we've been doing this for a couple of years now. So we're like, I mean, not that long ago is like a couple of seconds at a time. And now you're doing hours of work. Right. But it's like I just mentioned that because, you know, Google Reader is obviously is like a really great product.

2:25:30You have to imagine they put like a million hours into that. There will be a point at which it is a million hours of work. But yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah, exactly. We had Will Brown on the show, and he was saying that we have AGI, but I call it 15-minute AGI. And so, yeah, you can go and do something. But if it's a task that would take a human a week, it's not going to be one-shot-able in the traditional sense of a single product. How do you and the team think about the balance between wanting to create product experiences that somebody could just be like almost like a demo, right?

2:26:03Like somebody was posting yesterday that they like one shot at a calendar app. And like that's like cool and, you know, exciting and all that, but maybe not massively valuable. But I'm curious, do you guys have some sort of like internal framework for how you decide whether something is like really worth spending time on? Is it like a truly important problem or is it just is an opportunity, just an opportunity to go viral and get attention, but doesn't create that enduring value? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, I mean, it's in the long term, our target has always been, you know, let's let's do real engineering work that that is, you know, that that teams are actually products that teams are really building out there in the real world.

2:26:47And I think the thing that's kind of interesting is, yeah, because it is all one group of people, I think it is the ability to build all these cool things out does matter. We have a distinction internally where we call it Street Performer Devon. Basically, it's the version of Devon where people are asking Devon to just do really cool stuff. And it's something that we spend some time on, but obviously the core by far is really just like, how do we have Devon solve real issues and real projects for your code base? Yeah. Yeah, street performer. I like that. I do wonder. So, yeah, it feels like there's still two frames of mind, this consumer and enterprise, even for stuff that I would call it.

2:27:27I would call work. There are certain times when like I don't want to open an IDE or I don't have time in my day as a live streamer and someone who does most of their work over email and phone, more of like the executive role. I still will want an engineer to intermediate the products that I want to build. And I'm wondering if there's a timeline for when that stops happening, or I start instantiating whole software products, this idea of like the, it feels like most of the time when you hear someone say, oh, I used AI and I vibe coded an app in the weekend. They're still a programmer and they're still running a business and they're still working on that 40 hours a week or something like that.

2:28:08but they're just getting a lot more leverage to this. I feel like the really cool moment that's maybe coming is when I, I, I actually say, I want Google reader and just build it for me. And so, so in terms of shifting that enterprise experience of like real, not street performance, but real software into the consumer, into the consumer space, does that come top down or does that come bottom up from like the chat box that I'm already interacting with? Yeah. And so, so I, I think both forms are going to happen in the sense that, you know, big companies are going to look. There's obviously always competitive pressures.

2:28:44There's a lot of relative things going on. And I think, you know, big companies that already have like, you know, software products that millions of people use. There's going to be a lot more onus on them to just make really, really great software. You know, it's I mean, it's I keep track of this every day, you know, when I'm doing things and I run into just bugs in software and the stuff that I'm using. It's it's it still happens all the time. I mean, let's let's be honest. X is the absolute worst culprit here. I interact with more bugs on X than any other piece of software I use. I completely disagree.

2:29:18I mean, it's so much worse if you go and try and book a flight on the American Airlines app. Yeah, I don't know. The bar is so low. I don't know. I guess. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. No, go. No, I was going to say, yeah. So that's, you know, their product quality is going to have to get way, way better there. I think the other side is also going to be true, which is individuals are going to be able to build cooler and cooler apps. But yeah, I mean, I think the high level kind of general trend is, as we're saying, you know, as these tools get more and more autonomous, like you want to be able to just use them for longer and longer stretches of time, which is, I mean, which is pretty topical given all the agent launches that we've seen this past week.

2:29:53Yeah. Talk to me about positioning against Google's offering. My experience as a consumer, I only interact with Google right now on the AI front as a consumer. Obviously, I've run ads on Google from a business perspective. But in general, I see a Gemini launch. And then as a consumer, it's very, very hard for me to access that product. that I have five different Google accounts. I can never tell which one is on the Google AI premium tier. I finally got in. I got access to VO3. It was an incredible model. It felt like they were truly a step above and there was kind of a chat GPT style moment for video that given that the audio comes through, it's super photorealistic.

2:30:37It's a great experience. And it justified me not only paying$500 a month, but going through the UX hurdle. is the developer experience on the enterprise side dealing with Google similar or are they more dialed in there because it's more important? Because I imagine that one of the advantages that you have as a startup in the enterprise sales space is that you can do founder-led sales. You can take the needs of the enterprise into account much more different SLAs, more custom solutions. There's so many more things where you can iterate even if Google is able to come out with something that is like, wow, okay, they're really good at research, but on the product side, maybe it's lacking.

2:31:16Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's, you know, Google has jewels now. OpenAI has the codex launch, you know, GitHub is doing, doing more with agents as well. And can I just tell you, I mean, it's the, we have always had the view that just like, everybody's going to go do this eventually, you know? No, it'd be really bearish if everyone was like, oh no, Scott's like, just kind of crazy. I don't know what he's up to. I don't think it's a good idea. It's like, no you should inspire a bunch of people to be like that's a good idea we're gonna do it too and then you should still beat them yep yep yeah yeah and it's like parallel asynchronous coding agents you know it has been it's been the core bed of our entire company basically for the last year and a half um and i think it's it's really interesting to see yeah and so so i think there are a few factors going on like i i do think there will be multiple players you know in the long term but but to your point john i mean i think there's also just a lot of uh there's a lot of meaningful differentiation.

2:32:07I think the thing that's so interesting about the coding agent space is like, it is truly, you can kind of look at most spaces and kind of call it, I'll say like, this is a capability space. This is a product space, right? And to just give you a kind of a few examples, I would say, you know, it's like image generation is like, sure, you know, there's a lot of kind of like icing you can put on and things like that. But at the end of the day, you know, if you just have a way better image generation model, you know, that is the kind of the core, like that is the meat of what you're building, right?

2:32:36And like on other spaces, for example, you know, like customer support or something like that, you know, it's, no one would disagree with you that the capabilities are there. And a lot of it is just like, what is the right interface for humans and AI to really work together and, and get that going? With coding agents, it is truly both, where it is, you know, on the one hand, obviously, yeah, I mean, every, every IQ point really matters, you know, in the system that you build and every, every piece of data that it can use and analyze and works with, it really matters. And then on the other hand, it is, you know, it's the software is just messy enough and deep enough that it is, it's, it, you do want to have a lot more control of what's going on.

2:33:13You want to be able to specify these details. You want to be able to check in and review the work yourself and all of these other things. And so there's a lot of deep work with interface and it's yeah. I mean, in short, I think these are, these are the kinds of problems that we've been thinking about for the last, for the last year, you know? And so it's, it's fun to see. And, you know, the fun thing, too, actually, is like, I mean, we're up 30 percent week over week, actually, with just that. And I think there's kind of a funny thing, which is like, you know, people people know how to use chatbots.

2:33:41Right. And it's like something that we've all kind of learned over the last couple of years. I think the agent form factor is just really different. Right. And it's something that people have to learn and have to understand. And now that everybody's talking about agents, it's actually, you know, it's actually been great for us. Do you think deep research is part of that? Like, I feel like deep research for a lot of people is their first introduction to agentic AI in the sense that it's like you fire it off and you let it go for 20 minutes and then you come back, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

2:34:11For sure. I think the whole asynchronous kind of action is really like a big piece of it. And I think it's, you know, we were talking about this last time, but it's like agents are going to be everywhere, you know, pretty, pretty quickly. And there's no reason you shouldn't have an agent who's, you know, going and buying your flight so you don't have to go on the website yourself or going and, you know, all of these different things. And I think for a few reasons, code has kind of been the first place where that's really taken off. But but but yeah. Yeah. This is a total wild card. So feel free to pass if you haven't dug into it.

2:34:40But Ben Thompson was talking about the agentic web. We're talking about agents now. And he was kind of noodling through the idea that stable coins could be a relevant tool in the toolkit for the agentic web. as you ask. One of the examples was plan a birthday and it's doing a lot of things online. Maybe it's buying birthday cards. It's also looking up a cake recipe and then printing that out. Well, that cake recipe website is monetizing with advertising right now. Stablecoins in the future, you could just pay a tenth of a cent for that page visit. Are you thinking about stablecoins at all? Does that sound reasonable to you?

2:35:20Just if you noodle on it, how do you think about this stuff. Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, I think with, you know, building software engineering agents, we're probably, you know, on the further end of it away from it. Crypto pivot. Yeah. I imagine that not a lot of customers are paying one 10th of a cent for Devin right now. It's probably more in the hundreds of dollars. It is like an interesting thing, which is like maybe a one way to put it is like a lot of the norms of the internet are going to have to change, right? You know, it's, we have CAPTCHAs, for example, which is kind of how you prevent bots.

2:35:49And it's almost like CAPTCHAs aren't really the right like system where you actually now want your agents to be able to go and like navigate on the internet and do things for you. And like a simple example of that for us is like, this is again, totally unrelated to software engineering, but it's like, you know, we give Devin our rent card and then Devin just goes and orders groceries for us and stuff like that. It's like, yeah, it's great. But you can imagine, you know, there's a lot of these systems of like, yeah, how should agents interact with money in the real world? How should they, you know, how can like products and websites and stuff have the right incentives if it's not humans that are going to them anymore, but agents and humans.

2:36:22And so, yeah, a lot of questions. Has Devin ever missed a memo on a ramp receipt or is Devin pretty good about that? I think Devin's got it all down. Yeah. Devin takes screenshots and stuff as well. So it's all, yeah. How are you thinking about the sort of stack, right? Because I know you guys have a partnership with Linear. Obviously we work with Linear. There's this idea that much like a member of like a team, an agent can kind of appear in a lot of different places, right? A teammate can be in the office, they can be in a, you know, in a Zoom call, they can be in Slack, whatever. And how are you thinking about kind of like a gentic kind of like orchestration, right?

2:37:05And sort of managing agents. Yeah. Yeah. Linear is, by the way, they just had to launch this week. They had launched this morning actually. So, so yeah, yeah. Shout out to the linear team. And yeah, it's an interesting one. I mean, speaking of this kind of like product interface question, right? You know, a lot of the work that you have to do is really like, is, you know, I think one of the big difference between chatbots and agents is an agent is truly, like, it truly needs to be like, basically an employee in the same way. You know, it is really like you as an engineer are using your team of junior buddies who are going to go and like implement this stuff for you, right?

2:37:45And so a lot of what that means is it has to be in all of these same systems in order to work really cleanly. And the standard workflows that we have, I mean, we have Slack, for example, we have Linear and Jira and so on, but it is a big part of it. Last question, actually from your post, you asked for questions from people who follow you, and Remy Olson asked a great one. What do you see as the primary limiting factor for coding agents between context window reasoning, which I imagine is just the amount of inference you're delivering to reasoning tokens, managing complex environments or other things?

2:38:24Yeah, I think of those, I would say managing complex environments is probably the biggest one in the sense that, look, if you like, speaking of 15 minute AGI, you know, if you give it like a very contained coding problem where it's just like, all right, write one file of code that solves this thing. It's honestly, it's already insanely good. AI is already basically there, I would say, on that. I think that the areas where you see these agents or models in general really slip up is it's kind of stuff where you actually just need outside information to go and do what you're doing. The simple examples are if you're fixing bugs or you're implementing things, like you want to be able to go and test the code yourself.

2:39:07This is a big part of why connecting with all these systems is so important. And so, you know, plugging into Slack or linear, for example, makes it really easy for you to kick off your dev and runs or whatever it is. But I think a big part of it too is like, if you guys are actually doing your issue tracking in linear, or if you guys are, you know, this is how you do front end deploys and this is how you run the linter or something like that. It is obviously, you know, the agent is going to be super handicapped if it doesn't have access to the same things. And the next step beyond that, obviously, is not just accessing those things, but learning how to really intelligently work with these and use them to make decisions.

2:39:40Any reaction to the LLAMA4 behemoth? I think I saw 10 million token context window seems bigger than ever at the same time, kind of been going back and forth on how that project is progressing. There's been kind of mixed reactions online. What's been your takeaway from that? Yeah, there's a lot of cool projects working on longer context windows. I would just kind of give as one point, which is, it's interesting, you know, if you think about human thought, which is not always the best parallel, but is obviously is the one example that we do have, you know, humans actually have terribly small context with this, you know, it's like when you get like the six digit code, you know, it's like, I don't know, it's like pretty hard to remember what the six digits were and type those in.

2:40:24Goldfish mode. Even with coding, it's like once you have to remember like the three different files that it takes you a while to spin up the context window and then you don't want to get pulled out of coding you want to be in the flow right and so the thing that humans are like really good at i would say is almost more like intelligent retrieval right to your point which is like you pull up this file and you're looking at it and you're like oh yeah like i remember why we did this like two months ago and then you're kind of like you can kind of like replay it in your head almost that's kind of the thing that's that's that's really interesting i don't think it's so so i guess long story short is like i think long context is going to help the time.

2:40:58It's going to make things a lot better. But I think there are some kind of like fundamental things of like, how do you access all of the information that you need access to, to make this decision that's right in front of you right now, which is like context alone doesn't solve that problem. Sure. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is fantastic chat. Always a pleasure. This is great. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Take care. And up next, we have Joe Weisenthal, the Stahl Lord. Sorry, up 30 % week over week. Pretty big. It's Wednesday. It's Wednesday. Well, welcome to the studio, Joe.

2:41:29bring him in bring him in bring in joe wise i don't want to wait anymore oh welcome to the show thank you how you doing for having me i'm really good i'm thrilled to be back here how are you what do you do what are you holding on the market so market was flat on monday and we didn't know what to do normally we're either depressed and praying for something to change and then or celebrating a big update we've seen these like five percent swings and it's just been boring it's so painful i thought like you know the market stopped moving and i was like the technology brothers will never have me back they'll never have a reason to call me again my i had we i had well i had one month of relevancy people listening to my podcast because the lines were moving up and down and then they stopped and i'm like okay well i enjoyed it while it lasts it's all over obscurity so we're having we were having you on to have me back on the show we're having you on to move the market yeah yeah this will drive the market we'll see we want to create some volatility yeah just off of yeah let's do it let's do it well i mean so so with the trade war uh we r.i.p.

2:42:36yeah yeah i i kind of had this like somewhat controversial take that like the the trade war was not like covid or the or the interest rate crash because the the person who caused it could immediately undo it and trump could roll it back which he did and i was talking to jordan schneider trying to talk about this like he was saying like no this time is different it's not going to be like the trade war from trump one we're going to look back on this as like the beginning of the end it's terrible he was very doom-pilled but it feels like now if we flash forward four years we could be looking back on this and being like that was a crazy month but it wasn't that big of a deal in like the world historical context what's your read on it now It's a really tough call because I was very sympathetic to that.

2:43:17And then as soon as he walks back, you're like, of course he was going to walk it back. You're so stupid for everything. All that being said. We have a laugh track now. I love that. It's so professional. All that being said, a 10 % baseline tariff on the rest of the world is not nothing. We are now a high tariff country. Oh, yeah. There is this pause, but a 50 % tariff for whatever it's going to be is not nothing. These are not complete nothings. And I do believe that they will change the economy in some ways that they anticipate. Look, when he unveiled that chart on April 2nd, I thought it's like, well, he's basically unplugging the economy.

2:43:56We can't function with these levels. And he sort of realized that, too. He said the bond market got yips. He went back. And then he probably heard stories about potential empty shelves of places like Walmart and Home Depot and stuff. And then he dialed it back further. we're still in a new era though of trade it might be more like brexit where it's like yeah if you go to i was in london a few weeks ago it's still the same old uk it's still a pretty like rich country it's doing well but it's they haven't grown that much it hasn't been particularly good so it might be the kind of thing where we don't notice it dramatically except maybe it's we don't grow as much as we could who knows though i don't know i don't know if it's the weather but when i'm in when i'm in the uk it's something about the slow growth of the economy that's you can just you can smell it you can smell it oh well hopefully that doesn't cover can you can you tie this to the credit downgrade uh how serious is that should we care about what moody's thinks no i don't i don't care about credit ratings i mean i'm sort of a strict view that we borrow in currency we borrow in dollars and print dollars so we'll never default but There is a, you know, I would say there's two things, which is one that, you know, it looks like we are going to get some sort of inflationary mix potentially between tariffs and tax cuts.

2:45:13So that tends to not be very good for treasuries. And to the extent, you know, that like policy changes in the U.S. are now everyone understands that they can be unilaterally changed on a whim. Probably not great. All things being all things considered for the perceived institutional stability. So that's probably also not great at the margin for the international proclivity to invest in the United States. You know, the one thing that's really notable is that a lot of markets clearly have rebounded to an extraordinary degree, most notably the stock market. Yeah. The dollar is still very weak. Bitcoin.

2:45:47All-time high. Bitcoin all-time high. Amazing. All-time high. The dollar is still very weak. We had you and Pomp on today. Well, can I, by the way, oh, Pomp was on earlier? Yeah. Can I just say. Surprise guest. Can I just say, the first time I was on this show, one of the questions the two of you asked me was, will SPACs come back? Yeah. And I said, well, in my lifetime, they will definitely come back. Pump has a new SPAC. When I said that SPACs would come back, I was thinking like 5, 10, 15, 20 years. I did not think that we would be getting rebound. They said Pump doesn't have the balls to launch a SPAC in the year 2025.

2:46:23And he proved them wrong. And he did. He proved them wrong. I've never had a prediction come true that fast as that one. So I appreciate Pomp vindicating my last appearance on TBPN. That's great. Vindicated. I want to talk about like the Middle East deals. Yeah. What was your read on all of that? It didn't seem like it was super market moving per se, but it was very big in tech. And it seems like there's this new era of cooperation there. It seemed like amid all the turmoil of the tariffs, there was this bright spot of some really strong new alliances. Obviously, there's some controversy there.

2:47:04But what was your read on the Mideast news? You know, I've been posting about this a lot since I hit my mid-40s. I've been reading a lot about the Cold War and mid-20th century history because that's what you do at my age and so forth. But one of the things that I've been reading about lately is that one of the, you know, every time the U.S. and the Soviet Union appeared to have some period of detente, so to speak, one of the entities or one of the forces that pushed the countries apart were the sort of like the human rights groups, et cetera, that really didn't like, you know, various activities going on in the Soviet Union.

2:47:38And that often made it difficult to have peace. It's an interesting thing to think about. Well, what if foreign policy just became a little bit more transactional? We sort of accept that like there's like a very different system in this country than, you know, this other country. But you know what? Maybe we can have stable relations if we agree to sell them cutting edge GPUs to set up an AI. It's an interesting thought. And I don't have like extreme or strong views on foreign policy. It's not my wheelhouse. But it's an interesting thing to think about. You know, for so long, there was this view that, you know, like an important aspect of stable relations was some sort of common ground in governance and values and so forth.

2:48:24And maybe we're entering this era where stable relations are who we agree to sell chips to. uh on the other side it's an interesting thing to think about jensen another 100 billion for jensen yeah he's been on a tear jensen keeps winning yeah i mean except in china have you been tracking how many conferences he's been going to he's he's it feels like he's at a different conference every single day and yet normally that would be a very very distracting for a ceo but every time he goes to a conference he leaves with a 100 billion dollar deal so it seems like it's working it's really it's really remarkable and you know again i don't know how much like i've been trying to think about this like because the way people are talking about agi and you guys have probably a lot of guests who know way more and being out there is like you know the race to achieve agi is something akin to like which country will develop the nuclear bomb first we must get there i don't know it feels a little sci-fi to me i don't know how much to take that seriously Obviously, other people are better equipped to talk about that.

2:49:25But there is this sort of like simple business story, which is like. Ecosystem that powers AI or could it be the Huawei ecosystem, which is coming on strong? And so to the extent, like just from a business standpoint, Jensen going around the world, making all these sales, potentially boxing out Huawei from the Middle East, just from a business standpoint, seems to be doing very well. Yeah, we were just talking to Scott Wu from Cognition. They have an AI coding agent. And this idea that we have AGI, but it's just 15-minute AGI. Like you can get an agent to go and do 15 minutes worth of research for you and compile a little dossier for you in deep research.

2:50:07You don't have AGI to the extent that you can just say, go create economic value for the rest of your life like you can with a human. And the economic incentives just lead to a person finding their way in the economy and finding a job and buying things and consuming things. I still haven't had like a great experience yet with any of the agent tools. I was someone asked me, they're like, do you have a list of all of the Twitter handles of guests that have appeared on OddLots? And I was like, no, but let's see if I could do that. So I went to Manus, the Chinese Manus.im, and I said, can you put this together?

2:50:40Oh, yeah. Sorry. I know. um and then it's pronounced manis too by the way manis and then it worked like like it was like 30 minutes later i went back and checked and it said oh you're out of credits so i did i never even got to see if it worked yet yeah i don't know i have yet to experience well the question for me is is how long would do you think it would take you know like a like an intern to do that job well it'd take a really long time but like i don't even like but you know like my experience i think we may have talked about this last time like my experience like i'm still not totally convinced that they're like reliable yet i don't know like i just think i think you make a good point it's just that uh when i think of 15 minute agi i think that what's a 15 minute job it's look at the most recent odd lot show notes and find me the one twitter handle for the guest yeah and now if you want to do that 200 times, that's not 15 minute AGI.

2:51:38That's one week AGI. And you need to spawn all these different processes and orchestrate them and fact check them and build that up. And so yes, Manus should be able to do that, but it's not fair yet. I think it's just wildly unreliable right now. And so sometimes you get an output that is 10 times faster and better than your best employee. And then sometimes it just completely fails and we're not really equipped to like process okay is the agent good okay well sometimes the agent is incredible and then other times it's like yesterday i wanted it to count a bunch of boxes and it like worked on it for 14 minutes and failed i completely agree like i'm i'm every day still and by the way uh i've suno the music app oh yeah i'm the songwriter that's incredible that actually of all the ai tools that i've played with that might actually be the one that's most incredible i've been doing this thing where i just sing a song into my phone and then i say now produce this to sound like an 80s country song and it actually works so that like some of these things just like absolutely blow me away thesis for that because with music there's no right answer like there's no there's no oh you got one character wrong in the in the twitter handle and it's not going to resolve right but if you get one note slightly wrong but it still sounds like music, you can kind of chalk that up to the vibe or slight differences.

2:53:01And so I feel like that's why the image generation, it's less like binary. Or you have code where it compiles and it can work against itself and check, okay, does the code work or not? Try again, try again, try again. And so you either need to be, when you're in the messy middle of like human management, decision-making, analysis, that's where AI is really struggling right now. So just going back to the question of like, can AI compile all of the Twitter handles from every guest? I'm guessing the answer is yes. On the other hand, if that's what AGI is, I'm not really sure it's existential, whether the Chinese model is better than OpenAI's model.

2:53:41AGI is when you can ask ChatGPT to bring down the long end of the yield curve. Because it's really getting up there. and right now if I could just go into chat with GPT and say, hey, can you help us out here? Let's do something out here. That we need to develop right away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's talk about this. I know you have a big - Manhattan project level urgency. Yeah, yeah. I know you have a podcast episode coming out tomorrow about bond yields globally, what's happening. Could you give people a little teaser preview on that and then they can go listen to the full thing? Absolutely. Thank you so much for letting me plug our episode tomorrow.

2:54:20Stephen Englander, Standard Chartered, one of our favorite thinkers. We actually never had him on the show. You know, the story, there's a few moving parts to what's going on. But a big thing is this combination of countries around the world are spending more money. They kind of have to because, you know, like, again, we talked about U.S. foreign policy. Germany doesn't know if the U.S. is going to be the same type of ally. Trump for years, even going back to his first administration, obviously encouraging the NATO countries to sort of more formally meet their commitments. So you have increased spending.

2:54:54At the same time, you have tariffs, which are going to make business more costly, less efficient, probably less efficient because you're not going to have the most optimally designed global supply chain that would exist in a world of sort of pure free trade. So you have this combination of every country sort of having to become a little bit more self-reliant, at least in some respects. And you certainly see that in a lot of like tech areas, weapons, probably food even as well, energy and so forth. Combined with the fact that, you know, you're having sort of less efficient supply chains. That's probably all things considered means, you know, more inflation.

2:55:32And for to hit inflation targets, central banks are going to have to, generally speaking, keep rates up. We might get rate cuts in the U.S. in the short term. That's what Stephen Englander thinks. That's certainly what the market is pricing. But he thinks the window for that will be pretty short. And maybe even by next year, we could be talking about rate hikes again. Yeah, I know. I know. We need that AGI. We need that AGI to bring down rates. How do you think the big tech companies have been changing their tune around how they talk about AGI? It used to be all about safety, which I think a lot of people have kind of just gotten sick of the safety argument.

2:56:07Now it's all product and all of a sudden it's we're not moving fast enough. You know, Siri isn't good. Yeah, it's confusing. It's a little bit confusing because, I mean, first of all, I agree. The safety story feels very yesterday. This is such a business story. The market, for better or worse, and I don't really have a view on safety, but the market, for better or worse, seems to be dictating to the companies. It's like, no, you got to race ahead as fast as you can. You do not have an alternative to this and so forth. And you even see it, you know, obviously, like when DeepSea came out and it displayed its reasoning, OpenAI had to respond and it started displaying some of its reasoning models.

2:56:49So there's the sheer competitive aspect that, like, you just sort of got to do what you got to do for, like, the product side. On the other hand, there are things that the tech companies are doing that do not sort of seem to me, oh, within a year they're going to build or within a couple of years, you know, they're going to have these brains that are thousands of times more intelligent than a human. I saw there was something about opening, I think, about a social network. They hired a CEO for like product and revenue. There's that news today about buying a hard. Ad. Did you see that? You've already talked about it on the show.

2:57:22Johnny Ives going in. Yeah. This does not, these sound like ventures or these sound like investments that are about making money for a business, which is great. And do not sound like we are building something insane in a lab that is going to change the world. So it feels like there is this impulse among the big AI companies of various flavors to basically build good businesses and profitable things rather than this technology that, you know, is going to render human existence obsolete in some way or another. yeah yeah and it feels like open ai as a lab there there could come a time when open ai could kind of uh uh what's the right phrase for it but but effectively like open ai will be in a position where they can be like yeah we're a consumer internet company yeah and there will be other there there will be other lat there'll be other labs that don't have the luxury of saying that And it'll be interesting if there's like this kind of divergence in companies that have to keep the AGI narrative going.

2:58:28The steel man on the AGI narrative is that like, would we have gotten this amazing consumer technology and enterprise technology and all this value without the crazy AGI narrative that drove nonprofit investment in highly unprofitable research? and it's it's kind of like i feel like everyone makes the uh the comparison to nuclear but when i play back the story on nuclear it's like america did this incredible oppenheimer manhattan project to develop the bomb which i don't see is really like a good thing like the bomb obviously it's just like it only destroys things and then it immediately becomes this uh this arms race and this equilibrium is just that you have to build a ton of them but none of them get used they create No real economic value, right?

2:59:13But the good ending of nuclear would have been energy too cheap to meter, nuclear power everywhere. We didn't get that. And my hope is that we're in this situation where we have the panic scare around AGI as a weapon, but we don't go the nuclear path where, oh, you can't possibly have chat GPT. It's too dangerous. No, I agree with you. And I think if you look at like, I mean, it is absolutely extraordinary. the rate of growth that big tech companies are growing from. I mean, this is what's sort of breaking the brains of everyone in the market, which is that everyone's been long, big tech forever.

2:59:51They're the biggest companies in the world, and they're still putting up some of the biggest earnings growth that you can find anywhere on the market off of a gigantic base. And I do think part of that story has got to be that the CEOs really believe to some extent. And I don't know exactly what they believe, and I don't know exactly what AGI is, and they probably all have different definitions, but they probably all believe. It's like, no, we're not going to slow down our spending on this stuff because we haven't achieved that thing that's out there that will be so special if it's achieved. Well, I got to ask, Joe, would you rather own Costco at 59 times earnings, 59, Costco at 59 times earnings or Google at 19.

3:00:38Rotisserie chickens. You'll never get me to make, you know, you'll never get me, you'll never get me to get finance. Why is ever, you tell me, why is everyone so negative on Google these days? What's the story? I don't get it. I think it's, I think it's hard to access. Like they're incredible research lab, but they, but they haven't communicated very effectively around the product. So they introduced the product and it's in a research preview. They have a paper, but in order to access it, like chat GPT, when there's a new feature, you go to chat.com and it just says, use this thing. And, and with Google, it's like, there's the Gemini app and then there's Gemini smart responses.

3:01:14And then there's no book. But that's the product experience. And then there's obviously like the, the threat to the core core business model. If you just wind up searching in chat GPT, you stop. They got a knife, They got a knife on the neck of the golden goose. Yeah, no, it's true. The Google AI products, some of them are extraordinary. I've played around with some of the coding tools. Notebook LM is a very useful tool for research. It is true that no one would ever know how to find any of this stuff. It's really hard. Well, it's in the App Store now. Notebook LM is in the App Store. It's charted.

3:01:49Notebook LM, what kind of name is that? Who would even know what that is? It does seem, I don't know. What kind of name is Joe Weisenthal? yeah but what kind of name what kind of name is like oh three mini yeah they're all bad names the names the names won't the names won't matter the names don't matter i think but yeah there there's something about uh like google is if they really really went full tilt into ai they would just say google.com is our ai product yeah instead of being like there's a separate app gemini and like you can go over here and read an extra thing instead of being like no like we are an ai company Could you see that happening?

3:02:25No, no. I don't think the company's set up for it at all. But I think that it might be different if it's Mark Zuckerberg and he owns 100 % of the shares and he can just do whatever he wants. It's a private company and there's no investors that can sue. There are different structural dynamics at Google than at a small startup. I can just see it being more of a spectrum. Yeah, yeah, please. Can I ask another question to you guys? Do you have a clear way to articulate the benefit that Meta is getting from all of its AI spending? I mean, yes, because the base use of AI at Meta, the number one energy cost in GPUs is ads.

3:03:08delivery of ads. I know, but isn't that just go-to-of-fashioned machine learning algorithm stuff? It's the same thing. It's the same thing. Like the algorithm that decides what ad to serve you when you're scrolling Instagram is a big transformer now. And so it's a bunch of weights, just like an LLM, but instead of taking in text and putting out text, it takes in everything that you've looked at, how long you looked at it, what you liked about it, whether you commented. So it's just getting better and better at that targeting. And so that's a huge training run. They never talk about this because it's not sexy and it's not the new hot thing.

3:03:40But you can think about like the meta ads training run as similar to like a GPT-3, GPT-4 level training run. And then the Reels algorithm for what content to serve you, not just what ads. That's also another huge vertical. And so when Zuck went to build out the Reels algorithm farm, the server farm that would power the Reels algorithm. Because it's billions and billions of data points, right? he said I don't want to get caught flat-footed again like I did against TikTok because when TikTok came up and they and the whole algorithm shifted to I need to rank every piece of content across the entire network and match billions and billions of videos with billions and billions of users he said I don't want to get caught flat-footed again build me two data centers that are the same scale and then he had he had extra capacity thinking about okay I have two data centers because I just built double.

3:04:31Let's train an LLM. And then the more tactical reason is that LLMs are going to get stuffed everywhere in every enterprise. I've noticed. And sometimes I just accidentally wander into an LLM. Yeah, but not even from the consumer perspective. Like think about within Facebook, they have to process payments from their advertisers and they might want to run those through an LLM to say, are we being defrauded? Or there's a consumer, there's customer support that's happening or any little internal thing, even just like, should, should we, should we censor this comment for a user who's under 18 years old?

3:05:11Right? Like that, that is an LLM that runs in the background. It's not consumer facing. Why would they have to pay open AI for that? Why would they have to pay Google for that? No, this makes a lot of sense. Can I say one more thing? Please. I need to, for anyone who's watching, I have a lot of dear friends. please never send me a reel i never watch that i really like someone's like oh they send you a reel it's like i'd rather not so i would like to use your platform carrier pigeon let yeah what's the best way to get my friends know i love them yeah you send me a dm whatever i'm just not going to want watch your reel but i'm gonna i'm gonna mail you a dvd of the best yeah that's fine i'm gonna mail you a dvd a blu-ray of just all the best well well what about taking it a step further vinyl and it's us describing reels to joe that'd be great no i love it i would do that we would do that all day if someone sends me a dms me a reel i'm like do we really have to do imagine a bunch of colorful marbles falling down the stairs endlessly or imagine subway surfers in the background while joe rogan talks about weightlifting with elon musk uh that's really high performance stuff but you'll hear it on vinyl for sure thank you i appreciate it anyway this was fantastic uh Anytime.

3:06:22Let's make this a regular thing. This is such a fun conversation. Anytime. I love chatting with you all. We're going to just put a calendar hold on. Yeah, we'll throw you something. And if any part of you ever thinks, man, I'm not excited to talk to John and Jordan today, then we'll cancel. No, I'm always excited to talk to you. That's great. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'd love to have you back. Thank you so much. I'll be back. Thank you for moving the market. This is great. He moved the market on our stream numbers. We're up at 10.8K today. Good day on X. The live stream is popping. Google's up. 5 % today 5 % yesterday that's because Joe said why is everybody bearish he just had to ask that question and the stock popped almost 3 % this is reading tea leaves hey chat GPT take this transcript from Joe Weisenthal and turn it into financial advice make it ultra opinionated no obviously no financial advice on this show especially from the question of like what does Zuck get from Llama we obviously did our Llama deep dive but it's like such a history and an appreciation for open source and so many different platforms right he just uh it would be hard to take meta seriously as yeah a hyperscaler as a hyperscaler if they didn't have any type of ai play they also get the benefit of learning from other people building on llama even if there's not some massive direct revenue benefit and i think i think what is really like heading on, which is correct, is that the LLM chat-based chatbot UI paradigm is not a perfect fit for what Meta's products are right now.

3:07:58But as the UI paradigm is mature, you can imagine just, okay, we know that images are moving from diffusion to token-based architectures. So you could imagine that maybe I don't want to constantly generate AI slop and throw that up on my story. But I could totally want to take a selfie and say, hey, just with natural language, can you make the sky clearer? It's a little gray today. Can you just make it blue back there? Also, it's a hedge against as AI companions and just people develop relationships with effectively the models. That is a threat to Meta's core business of connecting regular people that have conversations in the app that bring people back to the app.

3:08:45so they can serve more ads. So anyways, today was a very fun show. Very fun show. We got to go take some photos. We had range from Eric Prince to Joe Weisenthal. We really covered everyone. I got some text messages. Someone said, great lineup today. I'll read this up. Where is this? Great lineup today. Blackwater. Blackwater for software engineers, cognition. Blackwater for Sam Altman's haters, open AI. Lots of Blackwater folks. The Blackwater of podcasting, Joe Weisenthal. Yeah, he really is. Or David Senra. I think David Senra is more Blackwater-coded when it comes to how ruthlessly he pods.

3:09:22Operational efficiency drives. He pods. Anyway, thank you for listening. This is fantastic. Switch your business to ramp.com. Check out Polymarket. Today we're talking about using ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. I want to get, I'm going to work on getting a Polymarket set up on Palm SPAC. Oh, yeah. Like, does it actually? Does it happen? When does it happen? When does it go out? Like the IPO markets that we've been having a lot of fun with. And then as the rumors start circulating, who's the target? This is great stuff. We're going to hit up all our boys, all our group chats. Hey, who's got a profitable financial services company that they want to take public this year?

3:09:59I want to highlight one timeline post before we get out of here. Leonard Heim, he's coming on the show next week. Jordan from China Talk recommended him. He talks about chips and AI. And I love this because there's a screenshot that he's quote tweeting from, I believe, the Financial Times. It says, we still don't know how much energy AI consumes. Companies must give us the chance to understand the environmental impact of the tech we use. And he says, yes, we do. It's 21 gigawatts. You count all the AI chips produced, factor in that they're running most of the time, add some overhead, and you got your answer.

3:10:32It's a lot. And we'll only get more. But you know what? Probably worth it. and i loved i loved it like there's so many of these opinion pieces that are like we could never know we could never know and he's like no you can just add it up it's pretty easy to understand how much energy it's producing so uh i saw this post after i already invited him but i'm excited i'm super excited to talk to him next week because uh clearly banger banger anyway does it take smith leave us five stars on apple podcast spotify has been really explicit about this yes if you like watching the show our jobs are on the line they will recast us they will cast someone else ben is making menace giving us a menacing look right now his his his thumb is over the purchase button on audi r8 and he can only do it if you leave us five stars if you don't leave us five stars we're never gonna get there so thank you all right cheers folks we'll talk to you see you tomorrow bye